Reading Anew: José Lezama Lima's Rhetorical Investigations 9783954870158

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Juan Pablo Lupi Reading Anew José Lezama Lima’s Rhetorical Investigations

Ediciones de Iberoamericana Serie A: Historia y crítica de la literatura Serie B: Lingüística Serie C: Historia y Sociedad Serie D: Bibliografías Editado por Mechthild Albert, Walther L. Bernecker, Enrique García Santo-Tomás, Frauke Gewecke, Aníbal González, Jürgen M. Meisel, Klaus Meyer-Minnemann, Katharina Niemeyer Emilio Peral Vega A: Historia y crítica de la literatura, 54

A: Historia y crítica de la literatura, 56

Juan Pablo Lupi

Reading Anew José Lezama Lima’s Rhetorical Investigations

Iberoa mer ic a na – Verv uert – 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lupi, Juan Pablo. Reading anew : José Lezama Lima’s rhetorical investigations / Juan Pablo Lupi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1.  Lezama Lima, José--Technique. 2. Lezama Lima, José--Literary style. I. Title. PQ7389.L49Z776 2012 861’.62--dc23 2012018521

© Iberoamericana, 2012 Amor de Dios, 1 - E-28014 Madrid Tel.: +34 91 429 35 22 Fax: +34 91 429 53 97 © Vervuert Verlag, 2012 Elisabethenstr. 3-9 D-60594 Frankfurt am Main Tel.: +49 69 597 46 17 Fax: +49 69 597 87 43 [email protected] www.ibero-americana.net ISBN 978-84-8489-657-9 (Iberoamericana Editorial Vervuert) ISBN 978-1-936353-09-5 (Iberoamericana Vervuert Publishing Corp.) ISBN 978-3-865277-09-1 (Vervuert Verlag) e-ISBN 978-3-95487-015-8 Depósito Legal: Cover design: a.f. diseño y comunicación This book is printed on acid-free paper.

For Jacqueline and Santiago Barbara Johnson in memoriam

Table of Contents

Abbreviations �����������������������������������������������������������������   9 Acknowledgements �������������������������������������������������������  11 Introduction �������������������������������������������������������������������  15 M E TA PH O R 1. Rethinking Metaphors and Concepts ��������������������  35 2. Radical Tropologic: “Dador” ����������������������������������  69

ISLAND 3. T  radition, Death and Poetics: Insular Transits in “X y XX” ������������������������������������ 103

A L L E G O RY 4. The Speculum of Historiography ���������������������������� 159 5. Allegory and Futurity in the Eras Imaginarias ������� 205

Appendix:  Stéphane Mallarmé, “Prose (pour des Esseintes)” ����������������������������������� 243 Bibliography ������������������������������������������������������������������� 245

Abbreviations

EA ............... L  a expresión americana. Ed. Irlemar Chiampi. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993. IP ................ Imagen y posibilidad. Ed. Ciro Bianchi Ross. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1992. LLOC .......... Obras completas. Vol. 2. Mexico City: Aguilar, 1975. P ................. Poesía completa. Ed. César López. Madrid: Alianza, 1999.

Acknowledgments

This book is the latest stage of a long personal and intellectual journey that began when I was a physics student at Universidad Simón Bolívar in my hometown of Caracas, Venezuela. It was back then when Luis Miguel Isava, teacher, mentor and friend, first introduced me to the hechizos of the study of poetry. I thank him for having shared so much of his learning with me since then. The origins of this book come from a conversation I had with him about Lezama and Mallarmé. At Harvard, the late Barbara Johnson taught me how to read anew. She was a model literary critic, and I will always be thankful for her support and for the many things I learned from her. José Antonio Mazzotti and Diana Sorensen, exemplary scholars and teachers, provided invaluable advice, insight and encouragement, both intellectual and personal: I offer them my heartfelt gratitude. Santiago Morales-Rivera was the first reader of this book; I thank him for this and for many other good things. For diverse reasons, I am especially grateful to each one of the persons in this pequeña glorieta de la amistad: Gloria Pastorino, Alberto Ribas, Andrea Bachner, Michelle Durán, Viviane Mahieux, Wanda Rivera, Susan Antebi, Antonio Córdoba, José Falconi, Martín Oyata, Gabriel Linares, Jorge Marturano, and Marta Hernández-Salván. I am deeply indebted to César Salgado, Enrico Mario Santí and Rubén Ríos Ávila for the many inspiring pages they have written and for the dialogues we had while this book was in the making. My first research trip to Cuba was funded with a grant from the David Rockefeller Center of Latin American Studies at Harvard University. In Cuba, I counted on the institutional support of the Biblioteca Nacional José Martí and the Centro Juan Marinello; special thanks are due to its then director, Pablo Pacheco López. To Marta Lesmes and Ismael González I want to convey my gratitude for all their kindness. I am thankful to the patient staff of the Biblioteca Nacional, and especially Araceli García Carranza; much scholarship on Cuban literature would not be possible without her superb work. I am grateful

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also to Víctor Fowler, Enrique Saínz, Jorge Luis Arcos, Carmen Suárez León, and César López for their help and conversation. At the University of California Santa Barbara I profited from the generous support of a Regents’ Junior Faculty Fellowship and a Hellman Family Fellowship. I thank the Department of Spanish and Portuguese for having given me a place to make this book possible. I am especially grateful to Francisco Lomelí, Silvia Bermúdez and Antonio Cortijo for their support. Leo Cabranes-Grant read various versions of the manuscript, and has offered me more encouragement and wisdom than I can acknowledge. I thank Barbara Corbett for her thorough edition of the first version of the manuscript. María Pizarro, David Sharp and Amber Workman offered the necessary help to bring this project to completion. Lastly, some people remain to thank because without them I wouldn’t have made any of this: Robert Spaethling, for his wisdom; Silvia Halperin, for being the person who knows me best; my parents, Óscar (1923-1994) and Marinela, for having given me a life so full of opportunities; and Jacqueline and Santiago, for their infinite patience and love.

… lo bautizarán con el grotesco de Aladino de la filología Paradiso, chapter XIV

Introduction

This is a book about the singular verbal and aesthetic experience present in the work of the Cuban poet, novelist and thinker José Lezama Lima (1910-1976). In the pages that follow, I will argue that this experience constitutes a reflection on the ways in which rhetoric and the imagination shape our conceptions about language, culture and history. Lezama wrote some of the most difficult and labyrinthine poems, novels and essays in modern Latin American literature. Arguably the two most conspicuous aspects of his work are his supremely strange writing and his ambitious theory of culture and poetics. Lezama belongs to that distinctive category of writers like Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Valéry or Stéphane Mallarmé who, besides their works of poetry or fiction, also produced a significant body of theoretical texts. The case of Lezama is all the more significant in view of the scope of these writings, which encompass subjects as diverse as poetics, aesthetics, cultural history, gender, politics and religion. According to his own account, Lezama wanted no less than to conceive what he called a “sistema poético del mundo.” As he puts it in “La dignidad de la poesía” (1956): “el intento nuestro es un sistema poético, partiendo desde las mismas posibilidades de la poesía” (LLOC 788). But how are we to understand the relationship between these two aspects— difficulty and the sistema poético? Critics have placed a strong emphasis on the aspect of Lezama’s cultural theory, often at the expense of engaging more fully with Lezama’s writing. Lo difícil, in itself, has not received the attention it deserves, and subjects like Lezama’s ideas about history and culture are often approached independently of his peculiar use of language, or without taking this into account altogether. Is Lezama’s difficulty just an idiosyncratic “style”? Is Lezama’s theory expressed in the concepts of the sistema poético? These two questions may seem rhetorical or banal but I would argue that they are not. The coexistence, on the one hand, of what appears or presents itself as a conceptual

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system, and on the other hand, of the delirious register of Lezama’s writing, raises the question of what is the nature of his theoretical intervention. My contention is that the singular linguistic experience afforded by Lezama’s texts is in itself an essential component of his theories of poetics, culture and history. Under this view, difficulty is not simply a peculiar style, and a lezamiana theory is not simply the sistema poético. Inquiring into the profound link between language and thought in Lezama Lima has a special significance for two reasons. Firstly, this link involves to an important extent aspects of discourse that do not pertain to the conveying of meaning. One way to characterize Lezama’s writing is that it mobilizes a host of verbal mechanisms—for example, extreme rhetorical density, convoluted syntax, erudite extravagances—that may displace or overshadow the transmission of substantive content. Syntactic play or rhetorical density are aspects of discourse that do not “mean” anything in themselves or convey a substantive content. However, they do produce certain effects, and such effects partake of what I have referred to as a verbal and aesthetic experience. Secondly, note that this inquiry amounts to viewing Lezama’s texts from a perspective that is attentive not only to the meaning they convey, but also to their formal aspects. In particular, this opens the possibility of seeing Lezama’s thought under a different light, insofar as one seeks to approach his works in ways that go beyond usual assumptions about interpretation and hermeneutics. As I will show, the exploration of that verbal and aesthetic experience will disclose hitherto unexamined—and perhaps some unintended— aspects of Lezama’s conceptualization of culture and history. I would like to begin by presenting some contextual background that will help situate not only Lezama’s own ideas but also the direction of my own inquiry. I am referring to the circumstances in which José Lezama Lima became a canonical Latin American—i.e., not just Cuban—writer, and what this meant at that time. Lezama’s entry into the Latin American canon is inseparable from a certain intellectual tradition that played a hegemonic role until the 1970s, and which Alberto Moreiras has characterized as an “aesthetic-historicist project that looked to preserve and reinforce the specificity of Latin American … social power against an invasive and threatening outside” (The Exhaustion 14). The Cuban Revolution and the Latin American Boom are two of the most prominent—and arguably the last—examples of this tradition. Lezama’s canonization at a continental scale coincided with these two pivotal events, but it is significant that his work is not a manifestation or offspring of them. Before the triumph of the Revolution in 1959 Lezama had already produced a substantial

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part of his mature work and was one of Cuba’s most renowned writers, but he was little known outside the island. Lezama’s canonization beyond Cuba’s borders did not take place until the momentous year of 1966, when the UNEAC (the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists) published his novel Paradiso, the anthology Órbita de Lezama Lima (which included a collection of testimonies by literary celebrities such as Wallace Stevens, Luis Cernuda, Alfonso Reyes and Octavio Paz), and Julio Cortázar’s essay “Para llegar a José Lezama Lima” in Unión (UNEAC’s journal). From then on, Lezama began to be read outside of Cuba. In 1967 Cortázar’s essay appeared in his La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos, published in Mexico; in 1968 Paradiso was published in Buenos Aires and Mexico; in 1969 an anthology of Lezama’s writings prepared by José Agustín Goytisolo was published in Spain; and in the following decade Paradiso was translated into French (1971), Italian (1971), English (1974) and German (1979). What is worth noticing is that Lezama’s entry into the Latin American canon took place in the context of the Boom. Although Lezama certainly is not a Boom writer, he became a Latin American writer according to the idea of “Latin American literature” produced by the Boom. The co-optation of Lezama’s essayistic work in this particular historical setting also marks the emergence of Lezama Lima as a “theorist.” The azar concurrente—to use an expression dear to Lezama—of his “internationalization” on the one hand, with the Latin American Boom and the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on the other, produced an image of Lezama as a representative of that Latin Americanist humanism (cf. Moreiras, The Exhaustion 13-4) whose primary concern was to approach the study of Latin American cultural productions in terms of their specificity and exceptionality (other Cuban thinkers like Fernando Ortiz and Alejo Carpentier are major examples of this tradition). Lezama’s theory of the New World Baroque in particular, is regarded as a primary exhibit of this paradigm: the Cuban poet as a theorist of decolonization and americanista thought whose contribution is summarized in his often-quoted dictum “entre nosotros el barroco fue un arte de la contraconquista” (EA 80). For Lezama, the Baroque is a style that was born in Europe but achieved its fullest realization in the New World by means of a transcultural appropriation and transmutation of European, African and indigenous cultural artifacts and practices. From here two closely interrelated images of Lezama emerge. The first is that of Lezama as a humanist and theorist of Latin American exceptionality proper. Perhaps the most revealing example of this approach is Irlemar Chiampi’s exemplary critical edition and introduction (“La historia tejida por la

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imagen”) to La expresión americana (originally a series of lectures Lezama gave in January 1957), in which the Brazilian critic explicitly traces a genealogy that links Lezama’s thought with the work of Octavio Paz, Pedro Henríquez Ureña and Mariano Picón Salas. The second consists in viewing Lezama as an encyclopedic “cannibal” who appropriates and subverts the cultural archive from the periphery. This interpretation was already present in Cortázar’s essay and has its most theoretically elaborated iteration in the widespread characterization of Lezama’s work as Neobaroque.1 The variety and scope of approximations to Lezama’s work has expanded considerably since the 1990s. Besides, or along with, the Neobaroque, other important critical perspectives include: comparatist (Salgado), queer (CruzMalavé, González), hermeneutic (Heller), non-humanist critique (Levinson), or intellectual history (Rojas, Ponte, Duanel Díaz) (the works of Levinson, Salgado and Santí have been especially influential in my own study of Lezama). There are certainly “many Lezamas” and this is a corollary of the incomparable richness of his texts. But it does not follow from this, of course, that Lezama can be “anything.” If one surveys the scholarship about Lezama since its humanist and americanista beginnings until today, and speculates about possible directions in the future, it is possible to identify certain dilemmas and risks. The list is not exhaustive, but it includes: first, what Brett Levinson has called the dogma of “autotheorization” (“Globalizing Paradigms” 82), or the belief that Latin America or its components can only be properly theorized from “within.” Second, and closely related to the previous point, is the consideration of Lezama Lima as a “peripheral” or “national” intellectual: is this something inevitable or even necessary, in order to avoid “colonizing” him, or is it a reductionism that must be surpassed? And last but not least, there is the risk of “postmodernizing” Lezama. The challenge is to pursue an investigation that engages with Lezama’s eccentricity—geographical, cultural, theoretical and textual—in a way that goes beyond reductive “center vs. periphery”-type dichotomies or, as Lezama puts it, In chapter four I will return to the image of Lezama as representative of Latin American exceptionality. Some of the most recent scholarly works produced in the United States that either mention or are about Lezama place special emphasis on the Neobaroque. See for example the “Theories and Methodologies” section of PMLA 124.1 (2009) titled “The Neobaroque and the Americas” (especially Zamora,“Neobaroque, Brut Barroco,” and Greene therein). See also Spitta and Zamora; Kaup and Zamora; and Egginton 69-84. However, it should be pointed out that these recent works do not necessarily engage in viewing Lezama from the standpoint of humanism or americanista exceptionality.

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INTRODUCTION

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“la subordinación de antecedente y derivado” (EA 62), and avoids the risks of the postmodern clichés. One first sign of Lezama’s eccentricity involves the sources of his thought. Lezama produced his work from the late 1930s until the 1970s. In this regard, it is important to keep in mind that, contrary to many of his contemporaries, the European influences on his thought come not from the likes of Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Heidegger or the avant-garde, but rather from the preSocratics, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Vico and Pascal. Lezama’s work is autonomous and distant—culturally and conceptually—from some of the philosophical currents from which mainstream contemporary theoretical thought sprang. This realization should serve as point of departure for any attempt to think about the theoretical import of Lezama’s work. A further aspect of Lezama’s eccentricity concerns the way he (mis)reads those anachronistic sources.2 It is often the case (although not necessarily always) that Lezama does not engage in a “charitable interpretation” of the text he reads and appropriates.3 Whether Lezama’s failure to perform this type of interpretation is deliberate or not, conscious or not, has little relevance for my analysis here. But most importantly, it should not be associated with any negative connotation. On the contrary, Lezama’s misreading of the tradition is a fundamental element of his theoretical intervention. This comprises two complementary aspects. The first consists of how Lezama’s interpretation of other thinkers or ideas effectively amounts to the creation of wholly different and new concepts. In the case of Lezama this process is resolutely paradoxical. On occasions he establishes a relationship of attribution or correspondence between, on the one hand, a certain thinker or idea, and on the other hand, what is effectively a totally novel concept of his own creation and which bears no similarity with the meaning and intention of the original thinker or idea. The new idea Lezama creates—via misinterpretation or misattribution—may be quite suggestive in its own right from a theoretical standpoint, and sometimes allows viewing the original under novel and surprising perspectives. The second aspect corresponds to the formal devices that Lezama deploys as he misreads and rewrites the tradition. As I will show in various examples, Lezama’s idiosyncratic misreadings involve the mediation of a

2 3

On Lezama’s misreadings see for example Santí, “Lezama, Vitier,” and “Párridiso.” I borrow the term “charitable interpretation” from Anglo-American philosophy of language. Here I use the term to refer to an act of interpretation that seeks to optimize rationality and grasp the true meaning of what is being interpreted and the intention behind it.

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host of rhetorical and semantic displacements that metamorphose the original into a distorted simulacrum or an altogether new concept. Ordinarily, when one reads a text and finds an interpretation or reference to a certain thinker, idea or cultural artifact, the common assumption is that the author of such a text charitably (cf. note 3) expresses something truthful, or believed to be truthful, about the referent (unless one assumes beforehand that the author in question is deliberately lying, but this is besides the point here). However, in Lezama’s case, there are occasions in which such ordinary and commonsensical assumptions do not necessarily apply. When one finds a reference to, say, Kant in a text by Lezama (I will study such an example in detail in chapter one) it becomes necessary to question the nature and content of the relationship between the German philosopher and what Lezama calls “Kant” or “Kantian,” for these may actually correspond to something altogether different. There are cases in which what appears to be a reference to some character, idea, thinker, cultural artifact, etc., actually corresponds to a displacement from a proper use or sense to another that is wholly strange. In such cases one cannot even say that Lezama is “misunderstanding” or saying something “wrong” about the referent; rather, he is inventing something altogether new. In these cases what I believe is productive from a critical point of view is not so much to find whether what Lezama is saying is true or false, or whether he is understanding a certain thinker or idea or not, but rather to examine in detail how he is producing novel and surprising concepts, images and ideas out of the cultural archive. This mode of creation, this instance of poiēsis, I would argue, is a fundamental aspect of Lezama Lima’s theoretical intervention. The line of inquiry I have outlined so far entails the necessity to identify the specific bibliographical sources Lezama used. This critical method casts light on two aspects. The first concerns the nature of Lezama’s erudition and the encyclopedic scope of his work. In a strict sense, the materials that Lezama borrows from the cultural archive and which constitute the primary components of his imaginative constructions, come originally from the specific works, editions, translations, anthologies, etc., that were available to him in Havana. This library, however vast—and Lezama’s tremendous erudition proves the extent to which he assimilated it—is nonetheless constrained. In order to make sense of Lezama’s delirious knowledge, certain questions are especially relevant: Where does this or that reference come from? Where could Lezama have read it? What edition or translation—if any—of a certain work or author could have been available to him? Determining the identity of the sources is a necessary condition to analyze

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what Lezama’s (mis)readings are about, as well as the interpretive and rhetorical devices he uses to appropriate and metamorphose elements of the cultural archive into something new. This brings me to the second point. As I will show in various examples, there are some instances in which what is ostensibly a reference to a certain writer, idea, literary or philosophical work can be viewed rather as an appropriation of “pieces” from other texts. In these cases what is important to observe is not so much the substantive “content” of the referent and how it is interpreted, but rather how Lezama appropriates a certain phrase or passage from one of his books, and then creatively manipulates it by means of misquotation, mistranslation, plagiarism, false attribution, paraphrase or rhetorical displacements. In certain cases, what ostensibly appears as Lezama’s “interpretation” of a certain writer or concept, should be viewed instead as Lezama’s formal manipulation of a textual fragment which originally comes from a specific book that was available to Lezama. What is being transformed here is not so much “content” but “form.”4 This mode of transformation allows one to see the sistema poético under a different perspective. As I said earlier Lezama Lima produced an autonomous body of texts about poetics, culture and history that were endowed with a certain theoretical intentionality. One of the most visible indicators of the “systematic” and “theoretical” qualities of these texts lies in the fact that Lezama expressly created a series of (pseudo-) concepts that correspond to his ideas about the poetic craft and how one can imagine and represent the world. These concepts serve to formulate and articulate a theory and a poetics and, at least in principle, they can serve as analytical and interpretive tools. Put in other words, these concepts provide a certain way to think and speak about literature, culture and history (in fact, Lezama uses his concepts in this way, and many of his critics do so as well). However, the postulation of a sistema poético and its hermeneutical potential must be placed and understood in a broader context: the singular linguistic experience afforded by Lezama’s texts—their difficulty, hermetism, and resistance to interpretation. In this regard, there seem to be two conflicting impulses operating within Lezama’s work as a whole: on the one hand, many

4

The lack of correspondence between “form” and “content” I have outlined above may suggest some parallels with Paul de Man’s deconstructive readings and their disclosure of aporias constitutive of literary and philosophical texts. However, there is a substantial difference. My interest here is not to reveal contradictions between the intended truth or message of the text and its form, but to explore the formal operations at work within Lezama’s text and how these operations transform materials from the cultural archive into something else.

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of his texts submit a linguistic experience that forgoes every intuitive and conventional notion about communicating and conveying a message; but on the other hand (paradoxically? contradictorily?) his work is also about his project of devising a sistema poético del mundo—a universalist body of concepts that, however fuzzy or strange they may be, is intended to provide a way to interpret culture and history. How do these two orders of discourse relate to each other? How can they be reconciled (if such a thing is possible)? Sooner or later, whether consciously or not, every reader of Lezama eventually confronts these questions. One possible way to answer them is to take the aforementioned opposition as a point of departure, and then try to solve it by assuming that in the end one can subsume Lezama’s linguistic experience, no matter how opaque or difficult, to some hermeneutical system or procedure. There exists some type of interpretive code that, at least in principle, can be “applied” to Lezama’s texts—including his most opaque verse—and “explain” them in the end. Note that this amounts to disclosing what the substantive “content” of these texts is, what they are about. The sistema poético del mundo, or more precisely, the tacit affirmation of a “transcendental hermeneutics” that would be the condition of possibility of such a sistema, amounts to affirming that in the end one can always elucidate the seemingly intractable opacity of Lezama’s language. In other words, this hermeneutical hypothesis asserts that Lezama’s idiolect can be fully “translated.” According to this, even Lezama’s most outlandish verbal inventions are, in the end, about some substantive content lying beneath a layer of opaque expressions that ought to be disclosed. In this book I approach these questions differently. My attempt here is to take that singular linguistic experience itself—Lezama’s impenetrable verse and convoluted prose, his flamboyant erudition and the uses he makes of it, his outlandish imagery, his errors, anachronisms, plagiarisms and misreadings—as the basic element of a lezamiana theory. This amounts to a whole reformulation of what appears to be a dichotomy between the two contrary impulses of a conceptual system that plays a hermeneutical role versus a body of “resistant” texts. This dichotomy, I would argue, is only apparent insofar as Lezama’s highly idiosyncratic linguistic experience is always already at work. The essays in which Lezama expounds his sistema poético are a case in point. The aim to conceive of a conceptual model, endowed with a hermeneutical or explanatory capacity, is also patently obscured by an intensive deployment of a tropo-logical register. The “prosaic” (cf. Latin prorsus, “straight”) intentionality of these essays is subject to constant twists, deviations, or tropings (cf. Greek

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tropos, “turn”). Lezama’s encyclopedic extravagances and his eccentric mode of appropriating elements of the cultural archive complicate this effect further: an already heterogeneous assortment of cultural and linguistic entities becomes “organized” according to patterns that may have no evident motivation or reason. These arrangements are often resistant interpretation or paraphrase and end up articulating a tropological order of discourse. This transformation operating at the level of form, and in which content ends up being displaced or receding to the background, is a crucial aspect of Lezama’s cultural and textual poiēsis and is one of the topics I study in this book. Note that I am neither claiming that in Lezama’s essays there is no such a thing as “content” nor that it is unimportant. In fact, in various sections of this book I attempt to interpret the meaning of some terms from Lezama’s idiosyncratic idiolect, and this is a necessary condition for analyzing the formal process I have referred to above. What I do argue is that in Lezama’s texts there also exists another mode of reflection in which form itself, and not just concepts, produces a “theory.” “Theory” in Lezama is not merely in the content—ideas, concepts, their substantive meaning—of the sistema poético, but also in how it is written. Any type of hermeneutic analysis of Lezama’s texts, however necessary, remains insufficient insofar as it overlooks this essential feature. So far I have been focusing mostly on the essays about the sistema poético. I have used the sistema poético as a starting point both because it is a body of texts that clearly displays a theoretical intentionality, and because it is where the tension between “content” and “form,” interpretation and its limits, the formulation of a system and the eccentric writing thereof, is most visible. But the sistema poético is one particular instance (and not the most radical) of Lezama’s linguistic experience. There are two other notable instantiations of the singular verbal phenomena Lezama’s writing brings about: his poetry, and his metahistorical speculations, which culminate in the theory of the eras imaginarias. José Lezama Lima wrote some of the most impenetrable verse in the Spanish language. Some of his long poems (for example “Dador,” “Nuncupatoria de entrecruzados” or “Recuerdo de lo semejante”) are a notable example of this. What is significant is not only the exceptional degree of difficulty of these poems, but also what type of difficulty they present. These texts constitute a modality of discourse that I would like to denominate (il)legible logos. The paradoxical nature of the (il)legible logos can be viewed upon contrasting avant-garde poetry with Lezama’s. The avant-gardes provide illustrative cases of poetry that can be considered “illegible”: the last cantos of Huidobro’s Altazor,

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certain poems of César Vallejo’s Trilce, or Marinetti’s parole in libertà are a few examples among many. Illegibility in avant-garde poetry is often an effect of verbal, visual, and auditory experimentation. But experimentation is absent from Lezama’s poems: these are texts composed of grammatical sentences and meaningful discourse; they are firmly anchored within the organicity of logos, understood in an ordinary sense. Illegibility here is of a substantially different kind—it is a paradoxical illegibility within the realm of what is (potentially) legible, not outside of it, as in the case of avant-garde experimentation. Another feature of what I call (il)legible logos is that what it expresses is not exactly a “metaphorical” meaning in the ordinary sense. The tropes that one finds in some of Lezama’s most daring poems are not necessarily “decodable” in the manner of, say, “cuadrado pino” stands for “table,” to borrow an example from another famously “hermetic” work of Spanish poetry (cf. Góngora’s Soledad primera, v. 144). In Lezama there is a deliberate tropological density that reaches a point in which it becomes practically impossible to conceive something like a “transport” from the literal to another “figural” or “metaphorical” meaning. The theoretical import of Lezama’s poetry lies in the paradoxical nature of (il) legible logos: this is an order of discourse that simultaneously creates and thwarts the demands and expectations of interpretation. Therefore, I would like to suggest that Lezama’s “hermetic” poems are verbal artifacts that present a theory of non-hermeneutic reading and of how to perform it. The exploration of the nonhermeneutic features of the literary text and the question of how to approach them are topics that have received substantial attention recently. In his Production of Presence (2003), Hans Gumbrecht uses the term “non-hermeneutic” (vii) as a starting point for his proposal to inquire into that which the text “does” that is not reducible or definable in terms of “meaning.” Mlutu Blasing’s provocative Lyric Poetry (2007) does away with hermeneutics by exploring the primal bodily and infantile aspects of poetics. In his contribution to the 2010 special issue of PMLA on “literary criticism for the twenty-first century,” Simon Jarvis argues that “poetics need not subserve hermeneutics” (932) and advocates a study of verse that does not “rely on the logic of a mimetic relationship to paraphrasable content” (933). In the specific case of Lezama’s poetry, what is notable is that its immediate hermetism and the way it subverts that “logic,” sooner or later prompts the question on how to read beyond or outside the usual interpretive protocols of deducing and paraphrasing the substantive “content” of the text.5 In this regard my own approach contrasts with Ben Heller’s application of Gadamerian hermeneutics to the study of Lezama’s poetry (Assimilation 21-6). When explaining his

5

INTRODUCTION

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The linguistic experience that Lezama’s texts make manifest also plays a fundamental role in his speculations about history and culture. The totality of Lezama’s intellectual career was guided by the belief, inherited from Romanticism, that the poet occupies a privileged position not only with respect to language, but also with respect to history. Lezama’s reflections on history and culture encompass three domains. The first is the New World Baroque, to which I have referred earlier. This is the core of Lezama’s americanista ethos and the main motive behind the influential portrayal of him as a decolonizing thinker. The second concerns the political and cultural project of Cuba as a modern and sovereign Republic.6 Before the triumph of the Revolution in 1959, Lezama shared with many other intellectuals a pessimistic outlook on the national project that began with the independence of Cuba in 1902. In a time when the young Cuban Republic was plagued by the ills of corruption, political violence, instability, and US interventionism, Lezama looked at the history and cultural production of his nation and judged that there was no such a thing as tradition in Cuba. The supposed lack of a tradition in Cuba—i.e., of an organic mode of interpreting and organizing existing cultural artifacts so that they become the expression of a national and historical community—was one of Lezama’s main preoccupations throughout his intellectual career. The Orígenes project in particular was a bold attempt by a group of writers and artists led by Lezama to imagine ways to fill the void for the lack of tradition in Cuba.7



6



7

methodology, Heller rightly underscores Gadamer’s theses on the provisional nature of the interpretive act and the “fictional element” (Assimilation 22) it contains. To be sure, such an acknowledgement is essential as a starting point for any study of Lezama’s work. Heller’s intention is to distill a certain meaning or content—however provisional and open—from Lezama’s poems. Unlike Heller, I seek to explore the immanent phenomenon of resistance to interpretation that the verbal experience of Lezama’s texts submits. Here lies the theoretical import of such an experience—it constitutes a reflection on the non-hermeneutic aspect of poetry and aesthetics. This by no means implies that Lezama’s poems have “no meaning” or invalidates the possibility and pertinence of a hermeneutical approach. The case is rather that many of Lezama’s poetic texts (and even some of his works in prose) display with unparalleled vividness a tension between, on the one hand, the ordinary demands of interpretation and the possible meanings the reader may derive (this would be the focus of any hermeneutic approach), and on the other hand, a mobilization of verbal and aesthetic effects whereby those possibilities are kept at a distance. Studying this phenomenon is one of my purposes here. This topic has been discussed at various points and from different perspectives by authors like Cintio Vitier, Rafael Rojas, and Duanel Díaz among others. For excellent studies on the political and cultural project of Lezama and Orígenes, see Rojas, especially “Orígenes and the Poetics of History,” and Díaz.

26

Reading Anew

Finally, in the third and last domain we move from the realms of the national and the hemispheric towards the universal—the eras imaginarias. This is the topic I analyze at length in the third part of this book. In “Mitos y cansancio clásico,” the first lecture of La expresión americana, and in some of his essays from the late 1950s and 1960s, Lezama forges a fantastic synthesis of history, poetry and myth. He sought to conceive an imaginative mode of understanding universal history according the mythopoetical faculties of peoples and civilizations—both ancient and modern—and their ways of representing the world. Under this view history is not compartmentalized following usual criteria like chronology and national identity but according to the power that each historical community has to create myths and poetic images, and to their transhistorical recurrence. Each era imaginaria is constituted by a collection of different kinds of entities—civilizations, religious beliefs, legends, historical characters, events, etc.—that have in common their being a manifestation of a certain poetic image that recurs across historical time.8 From this perspective history is arranged into different “eras,” each one associated with the same poetic image, yet composed of a heterogeneous assortment of entities that belong to different epochs. In the theory of the eras imaginarias history is not organized according to temporal progression, i.e., as a diachronic sequence of facts, but according to the poetic image, and this corresponds to anachronistic groupings of disparate historical events and cultural artifacts. My specific interest in the theory of the eras imaginarias is based on my contention that they can be read not only as the mythopoetical description of culture and history I have outlined—they can also be viewed as an instance of the eccentric verbal experience of Lezama’s writing. If one follows Lezama’s own exposition of the concept of eras imaginarias in works like La expresión americana (1957), “A partir de la poesía” (1960) and “Paralelos: La pintura y la poesía en Cuba (siglos xviii y xix)” (1966), one can see that they amount, borrowing Rafael Rojas’s expression, to a “poetics of history.” This should be understood in both an etymological (cf. Greek poiēo, to make, to produce) and a radical sense. In “La pintura y la poesía en Cuba” Lezama writes: “La historia está hecha, pero hay que hacerla de nuevo” (LLOC 948, my emphasis), and this

8

In “A partir de la poesía” (1960) Lezama lists the different eras imaginarias (LLOC 835-7): the “era filogeneratriz,” “lo tanático de la cultura egipcia,” “lo órfico y lo etrusco,” “espejo de la identidad en Parménides,” “los reyes como metáfora,” “las fundaciones chinas,” “el culto de la sangre,” “las piedras incaicas,” “los conceptos católicos,” and the era of “la posibilidad infinita,” which comprises José Martí and the Cuban Revolution.

INTRODUCTION

27

remaking—or equivalently, “reading anew”—of history “únicamente podrá ser esgrimido por un verdadero poeta” (LLOC 950). The “historian” of the eras imaginarias is a poet that recreates and rewrites history, and discloses “un nuevo sentido configurativo histórico artístico” (LLOC 950). This activity can be seen in two ways. The poet-historian explores the modes of poetic thought that have appeared in different epochs and identifies how certain poetic images are “repeated” across history. But there is another—and in my view no less interesting—way of seeing the work of the poet-historian: it comes from the realization that what is ostensibly a process of identifying images, patterns and repetitions, is in reality a process of inventing those images and their interrelationships. This is the correlate, now in the realm of culture and history, of the verbal worlds that Lezama creates in his poetry. The eras imaginarias can be seen as highly artificial constructions that violently remove cultural artifacts, ancient civilizations, or historical events and characters from their original or “proper” context, for then rearranging and grouping them according to figural links created by the poet. Under this view, the eras imaginarias are removed both from history, understood in its ordinary sense (an order of discourse based on facticity and chronology), and from the postulation of pre-existent mytho-poetical archetypes that recur across time. The eras imaginarias can also be viewed as a rhetorical construction—a troping of historical discourse. The poet-historian of the eras imaginarias extracts cultural artifacts and historical events from the order of discourse of history proper, and then creatively rearranges them according to an aesthetic and figural “reason.” Lezama’s eccentric use and manipulation of elements that are ordinarily subject to the order of discourse one commonly regards as “history” correspond to an operation that reflects on the very constitution of historiography—i.e., the writing of history. Note, however, that this is very different from regarding the eras imaginarias as an “alternative” history. The eras imaginarias may be regarded as an alternative writing of history but this is something different from history proper. One risk must be avoided: there may surface the temptation to view Lezama as some type of relativist, “postmodern” historian avant la lettre who claims that there is no such a thing as “historical facts” but only rhetorical constructions. This is misplaced for at least two reasons. To begin, while Lezama certainly talks about concepts like “fiction,” “poetry,” and “history,” he does not posit the opposition fact vs. fiction, nor he is interested in inquiring what is the “true” referent of historical discourse or formulating a critique thereof. Second, rhetoric need not imply relativism. Michel de Certeau, following Roland Barthes, aptly

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characterized historical discourse as “performative” (de Certeau 113). In principle, in every historical text there is an implicit address to the reader: “what you are reading actually happened.” Historical discourse necessarily ought to mobilize a host of rhetorical devices in order to fulfill this speech act “felicitously,” to use J. L. Austin’s expression (22). But whereas one acknowledges that rhetoric plays an ineludible role in producing a historical account of a certain event, the hard relativist claim that “facts” are constructed and rhetoric is in the end what determines “facticity” does not follow from this.9 The eras imaginarias are not so much a “peripheral” appropriation of historiography, and are not only about the search for a trans-historical and universal “poetic reason” constitutive of human civilizations—they are also a critical reflection on how history is written.

S In the short essay “Nuevo Mallarmé, II” Lezama wrote: “Si Valéry ha dicho de Mallarmé que para leerlo hay que aprender a leer de nuevo, es innegable que él comenzó por ahí, por aprender a leer de nuevo toda la asombrosa diversidad del saber y del acto poéticos” (LLOC 526).10 For us, more than half a century later, Lezama’s own work and figure is a reverberation of those lines. What is striking about this passage is not so much what it says about Mallarmé, but that it corresponds to an accurate portrait of Lezama himself. For this is precisely what Lezama did—he read anew poetry, culture and history. This idea will guide my argument in the pages that follow. I have divided this book into three parts: Metaphor, Island and Allegory. This sequence represents the transit of the inquiry into Lezama’s thought I develop in this study—from words to culture

Nonetheless, even though it can be misguided to overemphasize the supposed affinities between Lezama and some trends of postmodern thinking about history, it can be productive to inquire further into how Lezama’s thinking can illuminate some of the contemporary debates on fact, fiction and rhetoric in historical writing. For a good—albeit somewhat biased— source on the debates about historiography, postmodernism, and relativism versus realism in history, see Jenkins. 10 This quotation comes from the second of two pieces on Mallarmé that Lezama wrote for his column in Diario de la Marina. The text appeared originally on March 4, 1956, and was later included in Tratados en La Habana (1958). The reference to Valéry comes from “Yo le decía, a veces, a Stéphane Mallarmé…”—the Spanish translation of Valéry’s 1931 essay “Je disais quelquefois à Stéphane Mallarmé…”—included in the anthology of Valéry’s prose writings Política del espíritu (1940), translated by Angel Battistessa: “Aquel que no rechazaba los textos complejos de Mallarmé se encontraba, pues, insensiblemente comprometido a aprender a leer de nuevo” (Política 130) [Celui-là donc qui ne repoussait pas les textes complexes de Mallarmé se trouvait insensiblement engagé à réapprendre à lire (Œuvres 1: 646)]. 9

INTRODUCTION

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and history. Metaphor is the most basic principle of both the sistema poético and the non-hermeneutic dimension of Lezama’s work. The Island is the figure that mediates between the realm of poetry and the realms of nation, tradition, history and culture. Allegory describes how Lezama thinks and represents history and culture. Chapter one examines the foundations of Lezama’s rhetorical investigations in detail: his ideas about metaphor, and the production of concepts in the sistema poético. “La metáfora” and “el sujeto metafórico” are recurring expressions in Lezama’s writings, and one can argue that metaphor is the fundamental block of his distinctive “way of worldmaking,” to borrow philosopher Nelson Goodman’s concept (Ways 7-17). But what is metaphor for Lezama? And more precisely, what aspects of metaphor are relevant for understanding Lezama’s thought and writings? I discuss the critique of Aristotle’s theory of metaphor Lezama advances in the 1954 essay “Introducción a un sistema poético.” For Lezama, contrary to Aristotle, metaphor is not a representation of preexisting and ultimately extra-linguistic relationships among objects in the world. Metaphor is about inventing relationships; we devise or imagine correspondences and then apply them to the world in order to create our picture of it. Then I turn to the 1958 essay “Preludio a las eras imaginarias” in order to inquire into the genealogy of some of the concepts of the sistema poético. The creation of concepts here corresponds to highly unusual forms of production of sense. In multiple modes—lexical, conceptual, semantic, contextual—Lezama violently displaces an expression, a quotation, a literary text, a philosophical concept, or a cultural artifact from its original or proper “place” and then creates an altogether new and unexpected network of significations. In chapter two I continue the exploration of tropes and verbal displacements with a detailed reading of one section of Lezama’s long poem “Dador.” I begin by pointing out some correspondences between certain images and expressions used in this poem and concepts Lezama introduced in the essays on the sistema poético. These connections are revealing insofar as they help us realize the limits of thinking about Lezama’s work in terms of the sistema poético. This brings me to the question of the non-hermeneutic dimension of Lezama’s text. The text of “Dador” sets in motion an operation of production of sense I call the hypertrope: a collective activity of extensive and intensive twisting and turning (cf. Greek trópos) of “sense units”—i.e., words, phrases, their meanings, the themes and images they allude or refer to—in which any referential or conceptual stability is systematically undermined. The overall effect of this operation is the

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impossibility of fixing or ascertaining something like an organic and coherent “theme” or “meaning.” In the last section of the chapter I discuss this breaking down of the literal/ figural and vehicle/ tenor distinctions in light of Donald Davidson’s controversial theory of metaphor and some of the debates around it. As I show, these debates prove very useful for attempting to grasp and describe the non-hermeneutic aspect of the verbal experience of Lezama’s poetry. Chapter three probes into another iteration of Lezama Lima’s verbal experience: the link between language, poetry, tradition and the passing of time. I analyze Lezama’s elaborate reflection on these connections in the hybrid text “X y XX” (1945). Lezama’s theoretical intervention in this text revolves around three ideas: the topos of the island, death and resurrection, and memory. In “X y XX” these ideas are condensed in the peculiar appropriation—via creative quotation, paraphrase and interpretation—of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “Prose (pour des Esseintes).” I begin by discussing the hypothesis of sensibilidad insular Lezama advanced in the Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez (1937), to then show how “X y XX” is the site in which two different insular imaginaries meet: the sensibilidad insular and the island that appears in Mallarmé’s metapoetical text. The overall effect of this confluence is to transcend the nature-culture dyad inscribed in the idea of sensibilidad insular and transform the insular topos into what I call the poetic event: this is a unique and non-repeatable speech act, of which only “remnants” survive in the form of symbolic marks subject to the ever-changing contingencies of historical time. This, in turn, corresponds to the idea of “death and resurrection.” Whereas in Mallarmé’s “Prose” resurrection is a metapoetic figure that expresses the materialization or “event” of the poem, in “X y XX” resurrection conveys how this event is situated and subject to historical change. Lastly, memory is the other idea that both texts share. “X y XX” appropriates the verses on “Prose” that deal with memory in order to intimate that the interpretation of culture—the process whereby individuals and communities creatively “resurrect” what comes from the past—can also be viewed as a mnemonic activity insofar as the remnants of past cultural artifacts can be viewed as “memories” that ought to be “recalled” and then appropriated creatively.11 I explore how Lezama develops further this conception of memory and recollection in his 1950 essay “Exámenes,” a text that has many thematic and formal similarities with “X y XX.” This is an idea that Lezama had already introduced in his essay “Julián del Casal” (1941) through his concept of “crítica de la razón reminiscente.” See Santí, “Lezama, Vitier.”

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INTRODUCTION

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The ideas of resurrection and memory expounded in “X y XX” anticipate some of the ideas behind the conception of the eras imaginarias. In chapter four I put forward the principles that guide my analysis of the eras imaginarias as another instance of Lezama’s verbal experience. The starting point is a reading of “Mitos y cansancio clásico,” the opening lecture of La expresión americana. It is here where Lezama introduces the eras imaginarias by way of what he calls visión histórica: the revelation of surprising relationships among disparate cultural entities belonging to different epochs and civilizations. Better known as a decolonizing theory of the “expression of the Americas” and the New World Baroque, La expresión americana, as I show in this chapter, is also a critical reflection on the writing of history. The remainder of the chapter examines the transit from visión histórica to the eras imaginarias. The eras imaginarias can be viewed as a “theological” modality of visión histórica. This can be intuited from how Lezama employs references to philosophers like Nicholas of Cusa, Vico, and Pascal when he lays out the principles of the concept of eras imaginarias. But all this poses some fundamental questions. How can one understand the postulation, founded upon theological doctrines, of transhistorical archetypes that are manifested in the era imaginarias? And more to the point, how can one understand the existence of such an archetype along with the conspicuous artificiality of the eras imaginarias? In chapter five I propose an answer: allegory. I argue that allegory presents a way to think about what I call the double life of the eras imaginarias—they appear to live simultaneously in a transcendental and in an artificial realm, inside and outside of history. I explore the references in Lezama’s texts to various German Romantic, idealist and post-Romantic thinkers (Novalis, Hegel, Dilthey, Klages) and see how the Cuban poet read this tradition. I establish some key correspondences—and no less fundamental differences—between the early German Romantic view of allegory and the way the eras imaginarias signify and operate. I also discuss how Walter Benjamin’s study of allegory in the German mourning drama or Trauerspiel affords a key insight into the understanding of the eras imaginarias: the signifying components or “moments” of the eras imaginarias can be viewed as ruins. The eras imaginarias can be regarded as a collection of ruins and, consequently, as a staging of the inexorable passing of historical time. But ruins here, I argue, not only refer to the representations of ancient objects or extinct civilizations that compose the eras imaginarias— they also refer to Lezama’s own (mis)readings and (mis)writings of the past, as evinced in his eccentric appropriation, manipulation and reorganization of

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cultural artifacts and historical events. This is the operation of José Lezama Lima’s verbal experience upon culture and history—this experience is both a ruined discourse and a ruining discourse, insofar as it subverts or “ruins” the past and prophetically discloses how the present will also be misread and ruined.

Part I

M E TA PHOR

Chapter 1 Rethinking Metaphors and Concepts Die Metapher ist für den ächten Dichter nicht eine rhetorische Figur, sondern ein stellvertretendes Bild, das ihm wirklich, an Stelle eines Begriffes, vorschwebt. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie. 8

Introduction One can argue that all poetry is metapoetic, or at least, that all poetry can be read in a metapoetic register. Not many poets, however, have embarked upon the project of expressly formulating a theory of poetic language, and composing an autonomous theoretical corpus within their work as a whole. The sistema poético del mundo is Lezama’s own designation of the ambitious and overarching theory of poetry, history and culture that he developed over the course of his literary career. The sistema poético is Lezama’s most visible and deliberate attempt to give a theoretical shape to his ideas. As such, for the purposes of finding an underlying theoretical expression in Lezama’s work as a whole, an analysis of the sistema is indispensable.1 At the same time, however, it is problematic to reduce Lezama’s work—or any theoretical proposition derived from it—to nothing but an exposition or exemplification of the sistema. It is often assumed that the development of the sistema is to be found in Lezama’s prose works and that this development is thematic. Some of Lezama’s essays and parts of his novels Paradiso and Oppiano Licario, for example, are about the sistema poético, its exposition or formulation. Lezama’s poems, on the other hand, are sometimes read as examples or instances of the highly idiosyncratic ideas exposed in the sistema. The coexistence of a body of “hermetic” poetry alongside a theoretical and supposedly “systematic” body of texts in prose motivates the assumption that the sistema is the key to approaching and explaining Lezama’s notoriously opaque verse. While the attribute of “hermetic” suggests that formulating an interpretation of the text may be impossible, the presence of an autonomous 1



The most important book-length studies with a specific focus on the sistema poético include Arcos; Cruz-Malavé, Primitivo implorante; Levinson, Secondary Moderns; Márquez; and RíosÁvila.

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corpus of speculative works on poetics and aesthetics produced by Lezama himself intimates the possibility that his poems may, after all, be “explainable” from within. This possibility corresponds to an autotelic hermeneutics in which the sistema provides the key to the cryptic poetic text. This circular assumption is often present, explicitly or not, in many thematic readings of Lezama Lima’s poetry and has blurred the possibility of inquiring into the theoretical import of Lezama’s texts in themselves. A basic idea that guides what follows is that Lezama’s own theorization on poetry, history and culture is neither reducible nor identical to the sistema poético. The search for a Lezamian theory of tropes comprises an examination of the inner development of Lezama’s own ideas. As I hope to demonstrate, the sistema poético is in part an expression of Lezama’s own interpretation of the Aristotelian paradigms about the literal and the figural and the construction of tropes, and of Lezama’s own attempt to overcome this classical model. Significantly, however, one consequence of this attempt to go beyond Aristotle and to produce that radical aesthetic and linguistic experience that is so characteristic of Lezama’s texts is precisely the eventual collapse of the sistema as a coherent interpretive device and the disclosure of the sistema’s own limits. Lezama’s poetry in particular, corresponds to an order of discourse and a theoretical logic different from the one associated with the essayistic corpus that serves as the exposition of the sistema. I would argue that the alternative theoretical logic afforded by Lezama’s notoriously opaque poetry corresponds to the possibility of a non-hermeneutic reading. Lezama Lima’s hermetic verse presents a very peculiar linguistic experience. In the first place, it demands the necessity for finding and articulating meaning amid an uncontrollable, hyperbolic, tropological density, and simultaneously acknowledges the impossibility of articulating any coherent, organic interpretation of a “whole.” Secondly, this recognition takes place in the realm of logos, understood in the most basic sense of meaningful discourse: unlike the opacity of certain avant-garde poetry (i.e., the use of syntactical and grammatical experimentation, nonsensical expressions, etc.) Lezama’s most hermetic verse is constituted by grammatical sentences endowed with a definite semantic content, even though it is difficult—if not altogether impossible—to determine what is the “referent” or proposition that the expression is attempting to communicate, at least according to our common expectations. The experience of Lezama’s hermetic poetry illustrates how the foregoing of interpretation does not necessarily imply that the text is gibberish. Rather, as I will make clear, the most important

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point is that this experience and its non-hermeneutic dimension offer a theoretical reflection on the constitution of the figural, and on the relationship between meaning and the aesthetic in tropological uses of language. My goal then, is to trace the path of a Lezamian theory of tropes, one that proceeds from Aristotle to the sistema poético and the dimension of hermeneutics, and from there to the experience of Lezama’s hermetic poetry—an opening to the dimension of the non-hermeneutic. An examination of this final stage in the Lezamian model, as I will show, can provide relevant insights into contemporary debates on the distinction between the literal and the figural, and on the question of meaning in metaphorical uses of language. Any theory of the non-hermeneutic necessarily goes beyond the assumption that the sistema poético ought to provide some sort of interpretative device. The supplementary theory of the non-hermeneutic is produced by the very cuerpo resistente of Lezama’s poetic text and by the reader’s own experience of it. Here one does not “apply” some theory alien to the text; rather the poem itself presents a theoretical reflection through the mobilization of a network of perplexing and intricate rhetorical displacements. In this sense, the non-hermeneutic allows one to move beyond considering Lezama’s puzzling texts as a mere medium, subordinate to the expression of a particular content. In a strict sense, the theoretical insights evinced by a non-hermeneutic approximation to Lezama’s poetry do not necessarily depend on or derive from the sistema poético. One apparent reason for this is that Lezama’s essays and poetry are subject to different orders of discourse; to put it in Wittgensteinian terms, each genre constitutes a different language-game. However, the sistema poético is nonetheless a productive starting point for inquiring into the nonhermeneutic dimension of Lezama’s texts. There are various reasons for this. The sistema poético is not only regarded traditionally as the centerpiece of Lezama’s thought; it has also been read as an autonomous component of Lezama’s work, one endowed with a certain theoretical intentionality. In this regard, any investigation on possible theoretical orientations present in Lezama’s work needs to establish a dialogue with the avowed intentionality behind the sistema. Secondly, the sistema poético itself acquires surprising and unexpected significations when one understands that it is not necessarily a hermeneutical key. This becomes clear upon realizing that the formulation of the sistema is always already “contaminated” by the very figural abundance it purportedly claims to “explain” or “interpret.” At the heart of the sistema poético there is a fundamental tension. On the one hand, there is there is the sistema’s own authority: this is made

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manifest through its theoretical intentionality, universality, alleged systematicity, and hermeneutic aspirations, and also through Lezama’s authorship. Put in other terms, the authority of the sistema poético partly rests on the assumption that it can be an explanatory key or justification for Lezama’s obscurity. But the other hand the sistema’s very formulation rests on a highly idiosyncratic use of the figural and of strange modes of discourse—neologisms, bizarre analogies, erudite extravagance, false attributions, anachronisms, etc. This tropological and anomalous—excessive and ultimately asystematic—register inscribed in the sistema effectively undermines its own explanatory capacity: Lezama obscures the very gesture of conceiving of, and articulating, a “system” or “model” through the intensive and no less deliberate deployment of a tropological register. By “intensive,” I mean proliferation; but also and more importantly, I mean that Lezamian tropes seem very often impossible to interpret or paraphrase, at least in any evident way. Keep in mind here also that critics have generally looked to Lezama’s prose works (various essays and two novels) for his formulation of the sistema poético. In this regard, one can also describe the tension at the interior of the sistema as two opposing forces or intentions in discourse: “prosaic” (< Lat. prorsus, “straight”) intentionality is constantly being “deviated” by the intensive use of the tropological (< Greek trópos, “turn”). In sum, revisiting the sistema will be useful for my purposes here insofar as it will underscore the intensive presence of the figural in the sistema’s own expression. I will begin with Lezama’s own reading—and subversion—of the Classical idea of the figural as expressed in Aristotle’s Poetics, arguing that Lezama constructed the sistema poético in part as a means to overcome the Classical tradition. In other words, Lezama situates the sistema within a particular historical context, explicitly tracing the progression from Classical rhetoric to his own modern view of poetic language. As I will argue in this and the following chapter, Lezama’s surpassing of the Aristotelian paradigm, and the consequent development of a highly idiosyncratic, tropological register in his writings, result in a theorization of a linguistic experience which subverts ordinary expectations and assumptions about the possibility of “interpreting the text.” Finally, from this analysis I will show how the hermeneutical impasse instantiated in Lezama’s poetry relates to and illuminates some debates on the nature of metaphor and figural language that have taken place in the Anglo-American philosophy of language.

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Weak Sublation: Lezama Reads Aristotle The pivotal role of Aristotle in the theory of poetics of an “absolutely modern”—to borrow Rimbaud’s expression—poet like Lezama deserves some commentary. In Lezama’s thought, Aristotle often appears as the personification of some of the foundational principles that have guided Western literature, philosophy, and science.2 In his writings, Lezama places special emphasis on the normative character that Aristotelian rhetoric and logic have had in the Western tradition. Aristotle is thus presented as a monumental figure of authority, but for Lezama this means that Aristotle stands for what ought to be overcome in order to establish what the Cuban poet calls the “other causality” of poetry. Lezama’s interest in Classical culture and its influence on his development as a poet and thinker have been the focus of critical study.3 His appropriation of Aristotle in particular, suggests that his interest extended beyond the field of mythology to also embrace problems of rhetoric and philosophy. One finds a fundamental example of this appropriation in a section from the essay “Introducción a un sistema poético” (1954), in which Lezama reflects upon the evolution from Classical to Romantic poetics. The significance of this passage lies in how Lezama anachronistically uses Aristotle’s model of metaphor to frame his own, radically-non-Classical, theory of poetics: [S]i es cierto que la estructura y los temas de la Poética aristotélica permanecen para nosotros subterráneos para no decir indiferentes y rendidos, dos apreciaciones, una, sobre la poesía, y la otra sobre el poeta, yerguen aún su fascinación y su encrucijada. Dentro de ese análogo, es donde es posible señalar las ambivalencias, en ese cosmos de la poesía, y he aquí el gran hallazgo pervivente de la Poética, señalar que es en la región de la poesía donde “éste es aquél”, donde es posible reemplazar el escudo de Aquiles por la copa de vino sin vino, éste árbol por aquella hoguera. El árbol como sombra de la hoguera petrificada; la hoguera, discutiendo con el viento, mueve sus brazos como hojas. Igualado el árbol con la hoguera, el éste con el aquél, desciende la metáfora, para lograr el nuevo reconocible, en la nueva especie que avanza, como en un presunto Origen de las metáforas, desde el helecho hasta la palma, gozosa de su yodada inauguración playera. 2



3



For an analysis of Lezama’s idiosyncratic borrowings from Aristotle’s Physics, see my “La ciencia de Lezama Lima.” See Salgado, “El periplo de la paideia” for an analysis of the influential role of neo-Helenist thinkers like Werner Jaeger and Alfonso Reyes on Lezama.

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Frente a ese análogo de infinitas equivalencias, se habla en la Poética de que “el arte de la poesía es propio o de naturales bien nacidos o de posesos; de aquellos por su multiforme y bella plasticidad; de éstos, por su potencia de éxtasis”. He aquí otro de los pocos señalamientos que aún nos interesan en la Poética. O bien, una gravitación, una armoniosa evidencia regalada por la secularidad, desde Dante hasta Goethe; ya un flujo poético de incesante gobernación, o un golpe de áurea astilla y brusquedad en la masa del análogo, desde Shakespeare a Rimbaud. (LLOC 421-2)

Aristotle’s Poetics, according to Lezama, is an obsolete treatise, except for the insights suggested by two passages. One can surmise the first of these passages of the Poetics from Lezama’s phrase “reemplazar el escudo de Aquiles por la copa de vino sin vino” in the first paragraph. It is a misquotation of the sentence from Aristotle’s well-known section on the definition of metaphor (1457b): “another way of employing metaphor is to call a thing by the strange name and then to deny it some attribute of that name. For instance, suppose you call the shield not ‘Ares’s cup’ but a ‘wineless cup’” (note that Lezama erroneously states “Achilles” instead of “Ares”—I will return to this in a moment).4 The second passage from the Poetics Lezama alludes to is this: “And that is why poetry needs

4

I include here Aristotle’s whole definition of metaphor (Poetics 1457b). For an illuminating discussion of this passage, see Ricœur 13-27:





Metaphor is the application of a strange term either transferred from the genus and applied to the species or from the species and applied to the genus, or from one species to another or else by analogy. An example of a term transferred from genus to species is “Here stands my ship.” Riding at anchor is a species of standing. An example of transference from species to genus is “Indeed ten thousand noble things Odysseus did,” for ten thousand, which is a species of many, is here used instead of the word “many.” An example of transference from one species to another is “Drawing off his life with the bronze” and “Severing with the tireless bronze,” where “drawing off” is used for “severing” and “severing” for “drawing off,” both being species of “removing.” Metaphor by analogy means this: when B is to A as D is to C, then instead of B the poet will say D and B instead of D. And sometimes they add that to which the term supplanted by the metaphor is relative. For instance, a cup is to Dionysus what a shield is to Ares; so he will call the cup “Dionysus’s shield” and the shield “Ares’s cup.” Or old age is to life as evening is to day; so he will call the evening “day’s old-age” or use Empedocles’ phrase; and old age he will call “the evening of life” or “life’s setting sun.” Sometimes there is no word for some of the terms of the analogy but the metaphor can be used all the same. For instance, to scatter seed is to sow, but there is no word for the action of the sun in scattering its fire. Yet this has to the sunshine the same relation as sowing has to the seed, and so you have the phrase “sowing the god-created fire.” Besides this another way of employing metaphor is to call a thing by the strange name and then to deny it some attribute of that name. For instance, suppose you call the shield not “Ares’ cup” but a “wineless cup.”

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either a sympathetic nature [euphuous] or a madman [manikou], the former being impressionable [euplastoi] and the latter inspired [ekstatikoi]” (1455a). Lezama uses each of these two references to Aristotle’s Poetics in distinct ways. In 1455a, Aristotle discusses the composition of tragedies, specifically identifying the qualities a good playwright must have in order to arouse the proper emotions in the audience. Lezama removes the sentence from its original context and transforms it (aided in part by an ornate Spanish translation) into an idiosyncratic description of qualities associated with emblematic names in Western poetry. Dante and Goethe, for example, represent “naturales bien nacidos… armoniosa evidencia regalada por la secularidad”, whereas Rimbaud belongs to the “posesos” and is “una brusquedad en la masa del análogo.” Significantly, Lezama’s dual image of the Western Canon—as a dialectic of “armonía” on the one hand and “golpe” or “brusquedad” on the other—implicitly underscores a dialectic of opposing values, akin to the Nietzschean dichotomy of the Apollonian and the Dionysian: one in which the Classical ideals of order, logic, harmony, imitation, and objectivity clash with fragmentation, rupture, freedom and alternative notions of subjectivity. But the most important insight comes from Lezama’s use of the Aristotelian definition of metaphor. In the Poetics (1457b), Aristotle uses two basic criteria to define metaphor. The first criterion is transference or movement [epiphora] “from the genus and applied to the species or from the species and applied to the genus, or from one species to another.” In The Rule of Metaphor [La métaphore vive], Paul Ricœur (17-8) points out that this criterion is in itself quite broad, encompassing tropological constructions not typically considered metaphor today, and that the term epiphora actually introduces a metaphor into the definition of metaphor. The second criterion is analogy: “when B is to A as D is to C, then instead of B the poet will say D and B instead of D. And sometimes they add that to which the term supplanted by the metaphor is relative. For instance, a cup is to Dionysus what a shield is to Ares; so he will call the cup ‘Dionysus’s shield’ and the shield ‘Ares’s cup.’ ” At the end of this definition, Aristotle presents another example based on the analogy criterion: “[a]nother way of employing metaphor is to call a thing by the strange name and then to deny it some attribute of that name. For instance, suppose you call the shield not ‘Ares’s cup’ but a ‘wineless cup.’ ” For his part, Lezama writes: “he aquí el gran hallazgo pervivente de la Poética, señalar que es en la región de la poesía donde “éste es aquél”, donde es posible reemplazar el escudo de Aquiles por la copa de vino sin vino, éste árbol por aquella hoguera” (again, “Achilles”

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instead of “Ares”). The “éste es aquél” motif will reappear explicitly in the 1968 lecture “Sobre poesía”: “Sobre el fondo de la identidad se verifican las incesantes metamorfosis, es decir, porque A es igual a A, este ciervo es aquél árbol, esta capa [sic] es el escudo de Aquiles” (IP 133). Despite its apparent simplicity, the formula “éste es aquél,” the re-presentation of something by something else, encapsulates an extraordinary host of philosophical, linguistic, and rhetorical questions that continue to fuel critical inquiry and debate. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle states that “[t]he simile, as we have said, is a metaphor differing only by the addition of a word, wherefore it is less pleasant because it is longer; it does not say that ‘this’ is ‘that,’ so that the mind does not even examine this” (III.10 1410b). Aristotle explicitly favors metaphor over simile because the former is more economical than the latter, and because metaphor introduces a relationship of identity (“is”) that is richer than the qualifier “is like.” For Aristotle, the “éste es aquél”-type substitution affords a much broader aesthetic and cognitive potential than ordinary simile.5 To sum up, according to Aristotle’s model, metaphor (i) takes place at the level of the noun; (ii) is based on similarity or “analogy”; (iii) is achieved by substituting one word for another; and (iv) distinguishes between a “proper” and a “deviant” use of the word (this basically corresponds to the distinction between the literal and the figural). This model (or slight variants of it) has prevailed for many centuries, yet it posits certain premises that have historically hindered a comprehensive examination of the trope’s full epistemological and cognitive implications.6 Lezama embarks on his own critique of this model following 5





6

The passage from the Rhetoric summarizes what philosopher Max Black calls the “substitution view” (Models 31) and “comparison view” (35) of metaphor. These are the two most basic characterizations of metaphor, and have become the starting point for most discussions about its nature. For a systematic critique of these two models, see “Metaphor” in Black, Models 25-47. Two excellent discussions of the premises of Aristotle’s view on metaphor, their influence, and limitations can be found in Ricœur 16-21 and Johnson, “Introduction.” One effect of the prevalence of this model until well into the 20th century was that certain intellectual traditions (British empiricism and positivism are two influential examples) considered metaphor a practice alien to philosophical and scientific inquiry, and regarded metaphorical expression either as an anomaly or as mere ornament. The repudiation of the Baroque in certain aesthetic and intellectual traditions is a symptom of this view. Although metaphor and rhetoric played a fundamental role in the philosophical thought of Kant, the early German Romantics, and Nietzsche, critics did not rigorously challenge the basic tenets of the Aristotelian model of metaphor until the first half of the 20th century. Significantly, some of the most important work on the questioning of the Aristotelian paradigm and the revival of metaphor as a field of inquiry in the philosophy of language, came not from the Continental tradition

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an approach that can be described as dialectical: his strategy is to appropriate and overcome the three basic features of metaphor as described by Aristotle: analogy, substitution, and the literal/figural distinction. These elements of the Aristotelian paradigm are precisely the ones that “yerguen aún su fascinación y encrucijada” because in the end they open the way toward a radically different verbal experience. In the passage from “Introducción a un sistema poético” cited above Lezama introduces a “Darwinian” conceit: “la nueva especie que avanza, como en un presunto Origen de las metáforas.” One can read this “evolution” of metaphor as a process of overcoming and preservation. In Aristotle’s model, “analogy” and the distinction between a “proper” and a “deviant” use of words rest on the assumption that, prior to discourse, there exist certain necessary empirical, ontological and categorical structures. These structures are what determine analogical relationships and define what is meaning proper, and what is literal and what is figural. In this Classical model, tropes are a re-presentation or repetition of these preexistent and transcendental foundations. Lezama’s “new species” of metaphor is a withdrawal from this paradigm. This is made possible by fully appropriating and releasing the latent potential within the activities of analogy, substitution, and the figural. The appropriation consists in a shift from identity to alterity; a shift condensed in the formula “éste es aquél.” It corresponds to the release of the “infinite possibility”—to borrow Lezama’s expression—of substitution in alterity, of equivalence in difference. A few lines after the long passage quoted above, Lezama writes: “En ese cosmos de paradojales sustituciones equivalentes, la poesía es hasta ahora la única posibilidad de poder aislar un fragmento, extrayéndole su central contracción o de lograr arañar una hilacha del ser universal” (LLOC 422, my emphasis). Substitutions—“éste es aquél”—configure a “cosmos,” and by merging “paradox” and “equivalence”—that is, by acknowledging the linkage of the dissimilar and not just the similar—Lezama is effectively moving away from the Classical paradigm. He assigns poetry a unique role [“la única posibilidad”] as the means to fully display the network of relationships between but from Anglo-American philosophy and literary criticism. Influential works in this field include those of I. A. Richards, Max Black, John Searle, Nelson Goodman and Donald Davidson. In his treatise The Idea of Metaphor, Paul Ricœur formulates his hermeneutical model of metaphor through a meticulous analysis of various approaches from the Continental and Anglo-American traditions. I will refer to some of these critiques and their relevance to Lezama’s theories in due course. See Johnson, Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor for an excellent collection of essays dealing with contemporary approaches to the study of metaphor.

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the individual entity or “fragmento” and the “ser universal.” On the one hand, Lezama’s emphasis on “paradox” and “poetry” signal a withdrawal from the philosophical, metaphysical, scientific, and empirical discursive orders that, according to Aristotle, determine the relationships of analogy, similitude, species or genus. On the other hand, Lezama grounds this shift away from the “Classical” and “rational” in the hidden possibilities of the very aspects—analogy, substitution, and the figural—that characterize metaphor in the paradigm that ought to be overcome. In this regard—and here I want to emphasize the aspect of paradox and shift away from the “rational”—note that the errors I indicated above: “Achilles” instead of “Ares,” “capa” instead of “copa,” convey the logic of “éste es aquél” most clearly. The actual cause of these errors—bad memory, bad handwriting, bad typography—is immaterial. The errors “Achilles” = “Ares,” “copa” = “capa” are also modalities of Lezama’s “éste es aquél” logic, part of the “cosmos de paradojales sustituciones equivalentes.” Under this logic, the corrupt examples “escudo de Aquiles” = “copa de vino sin vino” or “esta capa [sic] es el escudo de Aquiles” are metaphors as legitimate as Aristotle’s original examples “shield” = “Ares cup” or “shield” = “wineless cup.” The point is that these displacements from a “correct” original are a precise illustration of the shift from identity to alterity that Lezama explains in the passage quoted above; put in other terms, these errors are the writing of Lezama theory of metaphor. I propose to denominate this dialectic of preservation and overcoming in Lezama’s critique of Aristotle as weak sublation. The term “sublation”—along with “lifting,” “rising above,” “sublimation” and “overcoming”—is a common translation of the term Aufhebung that Hegel used as a basic concept in his dialectical method. Here I use “sublation” in a rather loose sense to convey the idea of a process of simultaneous preservation and rising above, or overcoming; a process whereby that which is to be overcome cannot be annulled but must necessarily be recognized and preserved. In part, this is the idea expressed in Hegel’s own use of Aufhebung. In Hegelian dialectics the overcoming of oppositions presupposes the preservation of the respective identities of the opposing entities (Master/Slave, Culture/Nature, etc.), and this process of overcoming is guided by the synthetic goal of the realization of Absolute Spirit or full reunification of subjectivity with itself. My use of the modifier “weak” suggests that, unlike in Hegelian dialectics, there is not necessarily a telos in Lezama’s writings. By “weak sublation” then, I want to express the idea of a process of an overcoming of opposites that recognizes and preserves the individuality of the antithetical entities, but that is not—or at least not necessarily—subject to the realization

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of some final purpose or state of being (like Reason, Freedom, or the Subject as posited by Hegel). While I do argue that many aspects of the historical, cultural and textual dynamics at play in Lezama’s theory of poetry and culture can be conceived in dialectical terms, I also claim that, despite appearances to the contrary, there is no such a thing as a telos or notion of Absolute in Lezama’s dialectic (I will discuss this point the last chapter), and hence it is far removed from the ultimate intention of any Hegelian-type dialectic—hence the necessity of the qualifier “weak.”7 For the moment I want to probe further into the question of sublation itself: the preservation and overcoming of the Classical concepts of metaphor and analogy.8 In The Rule of Metaphor, Paul Ricœur makes two observations especially relevant to this discussion. The first is the need to think in dialectical terms when attempting to formulate a theory of metaphor. In his discussion of what he calls “metaphorical truth,” Ricœur notes that metaphor necessarily conjoins “fiction and redescription,” and that this conflation must be “brought to light” (247). In every metaphorical expression, Ricœur states, there is an inherent “tension” that is manifest at various levels: tenor vs. vehicle, literal vs. figural interpretation, identity vs. difference. He illustrates this tension by quoting one of the most famous “éste es aquél”-type expressions in modern literature: the first verse of Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondances”: “Nature is a temple where living columns…” [La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers…]. Ricœur uses the “Nature is a temple” example to underscore the duplicity inscribed in the verb to be: on the one hand, what he calls the “is” of “determination,” corresponding to the “literal” or “existential” sense of the verb “to be”; and on the other hand, the “is” of “equivalence,” corresponding to the “metaphorical” sense of the verb “to be” (248). Ricœur insists that in order to understand the

Besides, judging from Lezama’s own writings and his sources, Hegel played only a marginal role in the intellectual formation of the Cuban poet. Lezama’s adamant rejection of the theses expressed in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History is well documented (see for example EA 73-4). 8 In his essay “White Mythology” [“La mythologie blanche”; Margins 207-71] Derrida introduces the expression relève de la métaphore, which can be translated variously as the Aufhebung, sublation, raising, lifting, rebuilding, relief, or relay of metaphor (see note 61 in Derrida 258). Derrida’s purpose in “White Mythology” is to uncover and examine closely the profound imbrication between rhetoric and metaphysics. One of the key issues Derrida discusses is the relationship between metaphoricity and the formation of concepts. His use of relève concerns—among other things—the “lifting” of the opposition between metaphor and concept. Although I will touch upon this topic later on, my goal here is more modest. My use of “sublation” is limited to characterizing the dynamics of preservation and overcoming. 7

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idea of “metaphorical truth,” one must consider these two meanings—the “is” of “determination” and the “is” of “equivalence”— “dialectically” (248-9): in the metaphorical formula “this is that” [“éste es aquél”], there exists an implicit “is not” that one must recognize and preserve; and conversely, the “is not” must also affirm and preserve identity—“this is that”—so that the “is not” does not reduce the metaphorical expression to something like “it is as if this is that.” Lezama’s characterization of poetry as “cosmos de paradojales sustituciones equivalentes” or, as he puts it in “Las imágenes posibles,” the attempt to fix “una dualidad imposible” (LLOC 179), corresponds precisely to this insight: i.e., the necessity of conceiving of the “éste es aquél” as a dialectics of the “is not” within the “is” and the “is” within the “is not.” Ricœur’s second observation refers to what he calls the “production of meaning” [travail du sens] (95). According to the French philosopher, metaphor is not the repetition or re-presentation of some fixed, preexisting, transcendental and extra-linguistic set of relationships among entities; rather, the writer and the reader produce meaningful expressions by actively conceiving and speculating about possible contexts and connotations associated with the metaphorical expression. Baroque literary theorists had already intuited this. It has been argued that what distinguished Baroque rhetoricians from their neoclassical detractors was precisely that the former thought that “[resorting] to external criteria” was ultimately “irrelevant” for the purposes of crafting effective metaphors (Van Hook 26). In his treatise Delle acutezze (1639) Matteo Peregrini characterizes acutezza [witty expression or agudeza] as “legamento artificioso di parole con parole” [artificious linkage of words with words] (Peregrini 118): the aesthetic and cognitive effectiveness of the acutezza relies not on its correspondence with empirical reality but on its avowed artificiality, on the imagination’s capacity to link disparate elements in order to coin a statement that is simultaneously insightful and surprising. One of the most notable statements from Emanuele Tesauro’s Il cannocchiale aristotelico (1670) is that wit [l’ingegno] is able to produce entities out of non-entities [“l’ingegno, di non Ente, fa Ente”] when crafting metaphors (Tesauro 82). Again, metaphor here is not conceived as the repetition or re-presentation of pre-existing “reality”: for Tesauro and Peregrini the craft of metaphor consists in discovering and producing meaningful relationships among words.9 An idea similar to Ricœur’s travail du sens— Baroque literary theorists had an awareness of the cognitive and aesthetic implications of “how to do things with words” that anticipate many of our current views on metaphor. Nonethe-

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although somewhat narrower in scope—that comes from the Anglo-American philosophical tradition is Max Black’s “interaction view” of metaphor (Models and Metaphors 44-5). Black argues that in every metaphorical statement one can identify a “principal” and a “subsidiary subject” (roughly equivalent to I. A. Richards’ notions of “tenor” and “vehicle,” respectively). One constructs metaphors by “applying to the principal subject a system of ‘associated implications’ characteristic of the subsidiary subject” (Models and Metaphors 44). Usually these implications are “commonplaces,” but the metaphor creator may also conceive a set of “deviant” implications and thereby effectively create a metaphor ad hoc. In other words, in Black’s “interaction view,” it is possible to produce the connections between words rather than simply transpose these connections from some prior scheme. The important point to underscore here is that Lezama’s theory of poetics is partly informed by two key theoretical insights indicated by Ricœur: the dialectical approach and the dynamics of travail du sens. I would argue that Lezama constructs the (weak) sublation of the Aristotelian model of metaphor as the affirmation of the potential inscribed in substitution (“this is that”—a possibility originally motivated and sanctioned by relationships of “analogy” in the Aristotelian sense); and, as a counterpart of this affirmation, the simultaneous liquidation of the empirical and ontological substratum that, according to Aristotle, necessarily articulates metaphorical expression. Sublating the distinction between the “literal” and the “figural,” and overcoming the need for a substantial, preexistent and non-discursive foundation to sanction what a “valid” analogy is, are two strategies that lead to the disclosure of new, unfamiliar, strange and wondrous connections among things, ideas, and cultural entities. Moreover, this “new species” of substitutions can effectively create new and alternative less, it would be incorrect to say that the innovative and even radical insight of some Baroque literary theorists constituted an explicit or deliberate—as is the case of Lezama—attempt to challenge the basic tenets of the Aristotelian episteme. For example, as Proctor has shown, for Tesauro the concetto is an avowed paralogical argument constructed entirely on the basis of Aristotelian syllogistics. Being a paralogical argument, for Tesauro the concetto “does not discover or perceive truths” and has “no positive status in the order of ‘things’ in reality and truth” (Proctor 74). This effectively keeps the Aristotelian separation between dialectic and rhetoric intact. On the other hand, in retrospect—anachronistically and arguably against the intention and worldview of the Baroque theorists —one can also say that it is precisely in their rhetorical investigations where one can find some of the evidence that supports contemporary, and decidedly non-Aristotelian, thinking on how rhetoric and knowledge are inextricably enmeshed, and on why metaphor actually is inseparable from discovering or perceiving truths.

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relationships among entities. The “evolved” tropes are not the repetition of a necessary and preexistent structure, nor do they necessarily establish a distinction between literal and figurative uses. To elaborate these points further, I now turn to a text in which Lezama presents a “practical” reflection on metaphor.

Causalidad I: Invisible Tropes In some of the most important essays that came after “Introducción a un sistema poético” (1954)—“La dignidad de la poesía” (1956), “Preludio a las eras imaginarias” (1958), and “A partir de la poesía” (1960)—Lezama continued to develop the theoretical insights he initiated with his theory of metaphor while at the same introducing a new vocabulary. One key concept that appears in these texts is causalidad [causality], a term that Lezama uses in different ways: as its ordinary acceptation, as an idiosyncratic coinage denoting a concept of the sistema poético (I will discuss this usage in detail in the next section), or as a combination of both. In “A partir de la poesía” (1960) for example, Lezama describes the outcome of the sublation process I outlined above as the emergence of “otra causalidad”: “Es para mí el primer asombro de la poesía, que sumergida en el mundo prelógico, no sea nunca ilógica. Como buscando la poesía una nueva causalidad, se aferra enloquecedoramente a esa causalidad… ya una vez en esa región, la de la otra causalidad, se gana después una prolongada sucesión que gana sus nudos o metáforas causales” (LLOC 821). Here Lezama characterizes the sublated “éste es aquél”—the “paradojales sustituciones equivalentes” he discussed in “Introducción a un sistema poético”—as “nueva” or “otra causalidad.” Again, it is important to note how Lezama frames the description of his poetics dialectically; “causality” is a concept one normally associates with logic or the laws of nature, but Lezama borrows it in order to trope it into its “other”—a relationship that, according to him, is “pre-logical” but not “illogical.” “La dignidad de la poesía” (1956) is a dense text in which Lezama explores the ethical dimension involved in poetic practice. This essay presents a concrete illustration of the materialization of the otra causalidad of metaphor that will prove helpful in clarifying the nature of the “new species” of tropes posited by Lezama. In one section of the essay Lezama refers to metaphor in these terms:

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Ningún ser puede igualar al portador de la dignidad de la metáfora, que posee la varilla seca que florece de pronto al lado del agua que comienza su despertar. Que es como el rayo que une las dos refracciones en las dos cámaras distintas. Su presencia entre dos adensamientos que se desconocen, logra desde el secreto ente de penetración hasta las épocas imprescindibles para aclarar hechizos de regiones desconocidas, extraños mundos saturninos, donde el hombre justifica la hostilidad que lo devora. (LLOC 769)

Here again one finds the idea of overcoming the Aristotelian concept of metaphor, just as Lezama had formulated in his “Introducción a un sistema poético” two years earlier. Metaphorical expression makes it possible to establish previously “unknown” or non-existent links (“el secreto ente de penetración”) between disparate entities (“dos adensamientos que se desconocen”). This possibility in turn allows one to imagine a network of associations that extends beyond the Classical conception of metaphor. This network is motivated neither by onto-analogical relationships predicated upon a property empirically verifiable, nor by a set of commonplace, predictable or pre-established assumptions. A few paragraphs afterwards, Lezama introduces the term causalidad to denote those mechanisms at the core of tropes that function according to the “other” logic of poetic creation. Lezama’s concrete example of this “logic” seems deliberately transgressive. He asserts that one can invert the meanings of the Gospel verses by subjecting them to the “ethos de la poesía” and thus dialectically transforming negation into affirmation: “Los versículos privativos o negativos, llevados a esa solución visible del ethos de la poesía, en su doble refracción, a medida que se hacen más terminantemente negativos cobran una gravitación inversa” (LLOC 771-2).10 As an example, Lezama quotes the verse “What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent?” (Luke 11.11; cf. also Matthew 7.10). This verse comes from a parable where Jesus teaches the Apostles that God’s benevolence (personified here as the “father”) is infinitely greater than man’s. Jesus formulates a rhetorical question to express the lesson of his parable: when a son asks his father for a fish, the father would never give the son a serpent, and if such are the acts of human generosity, then those of God are even greater. Lezama borrows the verse to illuminate something very different: he wants to show how the latent power of metaphorical expression can transform Jesus’ rhetorical question (and its implicit negative answer) into its opposite: For a suggestive analysis of Lezama’s queer readings of the Gospels see González 218-25.

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Cuando en un versículo se dice como al desgaire, en pasmo innegable de afirmación, “a nadie que pide pescado se le da una serpiente”, reaparece en esa doble refracción, que en su terateia o maravilla para los griegos, en su tranquila verificación en la poesía como total gravitación, como si el reverso de ese mundo donde petición de pescado no equivale a serpiente, fuese precisamente esa constante sustitución, casi invisible, de pescado por serpiente. Bastan unos toques ligeros de invisibles causalidades [emphasis added] para establecer la gravitación de ese posible. Es decir, pez, flecha de los líquidos; flecha, serpiente de los aires. Para que aparezca ese mundo de la poiēsis, donde transcurre con armónica fluidez, que petición de pescado inicia el otorgamiento de serpientes. Por eso, en los grandes momentos hegelianos del idealismo, la negatividad fue el soporte de lo absoluto. En cuanto el versículo dice nadie, el reverso es muchedumbre, y encuentra en su misma negatividad su gravitante. (LLOC 772)

Lezama here illustrates the “doble refracción” of converting the negative into the positive: the “other” causality of metaphor inverts Jesus’ implicit assertion into a rhetorical micro-heresy wherein “petición de pescado inicia el otorgamiento de serpientes.” How does this take place? To begin with, note the nod to Hegel: “en los grandes momentos hegelianos del idealismo, la negatividad fue el soporte de lo absoluto.” Here the Cuban poet explicitly acknowledges the dialectical structure behind his own theory: metaphor, Lezama seems to be saying, is what enables the dialectic reversal of negativity, or rather, displays the affirmative potential of negativity. Secondly, Lezama introduces two metaphors: (1) “pez, flecha de los líquidos” and (2) “flecha, serpiente de los aires.” Here Lezama appears to follow the template of the theory of metaphor in the Poetics: note the four-term Aristotelian relation of analogy or proportion (“fish” is to “water” as “arrow” is to “air”), and the fact that both “arrow” and “snake” share similar properties (both are elongated objects, both sting). The signifier flecha appears in both metaphors, but importantly, it does not function the same way in both. Using I. A. Richards’ useful terminology, flecha belongs to the vehicle of the first metaphor (“pez, flecha de los líquidos”) but is the tenor of the second metaphor (“flecha, serpiente de los aires”). The “other” causality or “gravitación inversa” whereby “petición de pescado inicia el otorgamiento de serpientes” forms a third trope, the result of superimposing the two original metaphors (1) and (2). Lezama constructs this third trope by substituting serpiente de los aires (= flecha) for flecha in the metaphor pez = flecha de los líquidos.

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(1) pez = flecha de los líquidos (2) flecha = serpiente de los aires Substituting flecha in (2) for flecha in (1) yields: (3) pez = serpiente de los líquidos

In this chiasmus, Lezama crafts a paradoxical trope (3) that “inverts” the sense of Luke’s verse and effectively links pez and serpiente. The vehicle (serpiente de los aires) of metaphor (2) becomes the vehicle of a metaphor-of-a-metaphor (3), linking pez and serpiente by means of flecha, which for its part appears as a vehicle of the first metaphor and the tenor of the second. To be sure the metaphor (3) pez = serpiente de los líquidos in and of itself looks rather ordinary—there are many obvious analogies one can establish between a fish and a snake. But the key point about this example is that Lezama did not craft his metaphor in accordance with analogies and commonplaces associated with the characteristics of fishes and snakes; rather, he did so by means of a purely formal and verbal operation—and one with a sacrilegious intentionality to boot. By crossing identity at the level of the signifier—the same signifier flecha appears in the two original metaphors (1) and (2)—and non-identity at the figural level (flecha is the tenor in one metaphor but the vehicle in another), Lezama manages the discursive twist. Lezama is demonstrating how to do things with words, not with the empirical properties of objects or, for that matter, the sense of the Scripture. What is ostensibly an “analogy” (pez = serpiente de los líquidos) is in fact the result of constructing one trope from another trope through a purely verbal manipulation. From a formal standpoint, the signifier flecha that appears in the two metaphors (1) and (2) is what supports the whole structure, but flecha disappears in the final trope linking pez and serpiente. Although the signifier remains, serving as the foundation of the edifice, it must remain elided and hidden from view—the agent of “invisibles causalidades,” in Lezama’s words. The Cuban poet claims to be presenting a concrete example of what he calls the possibility of producing “gravitación inversa” in the realm of the “mundo de la poiēsis”; or in other words, an example of the “otra causalidad” that the poetic craft sets in motion and which discloses the dialectical reversal of negativity. In the Gospel verse, the father will not give his son a serpent when a fish has been requested, but in the “mundo de la poiēsis,” another causality becomes possible (and an “heretical” one at that, judging from this specific example).

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My interest in this example has less to do with Lezama’s purported esoteric claims or sacrilegious witticism than with its implications for his theory of metaphor. The wordplay Lezama crafts consists in building one trope from another trope; demonstrating how the structure that articulates that trope can be effectively hidden from view; and how one can change, and even hide or destroy, “original” meanings and contexts. Although Lezama’s overt intention may be simply to perform a ludic display of “toques ligeros de invisibles causalidades,” one can also read his rhetorical maneuver—troping a trope and hiding this structure—as a continuation of the critique of the Aristotelian metaphor he had already begun in the “Introducción a un sistema poético.” The gist of Lezama’s view on metaphorical sense is quite similar to what Paul Ricœur later elaborates in his thesis on le travail du sens: i.e., that in principle, the writer and the reader can conceive of any number of relationships supporting metaphorical links among words. They can creatively devise contexts and establish relationships among words and expressions—no matter how dissimilar or distant—in order to “make sense” of the metaphor. A fundamental consequence of Lezama’s reading of the Poetics, or as I call it, the weak sublation of metaphor, is the abandonment of the idea of metaphor as a restatement of a preexisting and transcendent set of relationships among entities. If “making sense” of a metaphorical expression is a process of invention (and I use “invention” here both in its ordinary and etymological acceptations: “creation” and “discovery”), then what about constraints like genus, species, analogy and proportion— constraints that, according to Aristotle, have an objective and extra-linguistic existence and are needed to define the nature of tropes like metaphor and simile? One way to highlight the problem with Aristotle’s model (or any other model of tropes based on extra-linguistic constraints) is to note that such models presuppose an essential difference between, on the one hand, “properly-constructed” metaphors that basically replicate a preexistent and a priori set of relationships among substances (as opposed to relationships among words); and on the other hand, “nonsensical,” “exotic” or “aberrant” tropes that attempt to juxtapose “dissimilar” or a priori unrelated entities. This sharp division between “proper” metaphors and “nonsensical” ones is certainly problematic per se (although philosophical traditions like British empiricism and logical positivism accepted some versions of it), as is any attempt to provide a rigorous definition of analogy that assumes that it is a relationship necessarily predicated on extra-linguistic criteria. One creatively devises contexts and establishes relationships among words and expressions in order to produce a certain meaning, and there are no

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a priori limits on how these relationships can be produced in order to derive some type of cognitive content or effect. As the Baroque literary theorists first understood, here lies the potential of “éste es aquél.” There are no transcendent, extra-linguistic “first principles” from which one can formulate a taxonomy of tropes, or more importantly, establish whether a trope is “adequate” or not. As such, and in retrospect, the constraints posed by Aristotle—genus, species, analogy and proportion—are far from transcendental; ultimately, they too are rhetorical constructions. To conceive of metaphor as invention is to imply that metaphor is essentially a process occurring among words—it is not a repetition of extra-linguistic entities or properties, but a repetition of rhetoric. This leads me to another implication of Lezama’s rhetorical strategy. As stated previously, a key theoretical breakthrough in Lezama’s manipulation and inversion of Luke’s verse is the disclosure of the process whereby tropes can be built upon other tropes, and especially upon hidden tropes. My examination of the pez-serpiente metaphor reveals a rhetorical history: I attempted to trace how the pez-serpiente metaphor was constructed; how it was fabricated from superimposing two other metaphors whose basic material was drawn from a Gospel verse. Hence the rhetorical history of the pez-serpiente metaphor has formal, religious and cultural components all coexisting simultaneously. The analysis of rhetorical histories hints at what Paul Ricœur calls the “genealogical” interrogation of the metaphorical foundation of thought (280). This line of inquiry is largely derived from Nietzsche, and continued by thinkers like Derrida and Paul de Man, who attempted to demonstrate that philosophical concepts are in fact tropes created from troping other tropes. If one foregoes the assumption that naming and metaphor are necessary and motivated repetitions of extra-linguistic entities, then ostensibly “natural” analogies are not actually re-presentations of nature but part of a succession of metaphors. In particular, the formulation of concepts is tantamount to giving something a name that does not belong to that something in any natural, essential or necessary way— embodying the basic structure of metaphor.11 In other words, the appearance of the natural and the commonplace in language is actually the result of a long and forgotten rhetorical history. 11

Two of the most thorough expositions of these ideas are found in Derrida’s “White Mythology” (1971) (Derrida 207-71) and in Paul de Man’s “The Epistemology of Metaphor” (1978) (De Man 34-50), where the author attempts to show that John Locke’s arguments against figural language and his use of basic concepts are always already enmeshed in the figural.

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To be sure, Lezama’s intellectual formation is far removed from any (post-) Nietzschean tradition, so any attempt to either verify or refute his standing as a “deconstructionist” avant la lettre is not a useful exercise. What I want to stress is that Lezama’s theory of poetry and culture is in part a “tropology” of discourse—an exploration of how thought in general (philosophy, sciences, the arts, history) is actually or potentially built upon tropes, and of how these figural marks have evolved and changed through history. Lezama does not embark on his project—the sistema poético, the eras imaginarias—from the standpoint of philosophy, but from a discipline ostensibly alien to philosophy: poetry. Lezama had no intention of formulating philosophical theses. And yet, in spite of centering primarily on poetry and culture, Lezama’s theories do have important philosophical repercussions. In particular, Lezama’s theory of tropes—what I call the weak sublation of Aristotelian metaphor—is not just an ars poetica or an aesthetic program; it is, above all, a highly sophisticated speculation about how tropes function and how they use other tropes to represent the world. Lezama not only dismantles common assumptions about tropes inherited from the Classical tradition; more importantly, he advances novel ideas about metaphor. Critics have generally associated these ideas with various philosophers and writers belonging to different traditions (Ricœur, Derrida, De Man, Nelson Goodman, or Max Black, to mention just a few), but some of these ideas had been formulated independently and much earlier by Lezama himself. In sum, the weak sublation of metaphor, or alternatively, the opening up of possibilities for the otra causalidad of poetry, has the following consequences: the overcoming of the belief that metaphors are representations of previously existing and “natural” analogies; the realization that analogies are relationships we create among words, not among things; and the disclosure that supposedly “natural” analogies are in fact rhetorical constructions with a particular history—a history that may be hidden and forgotten, but is existent nonetheless. In the following section, I will pursue my inquiry into Lezama’s theory of tropes from a different perspective—through the prism of the so-called sistema poético. The path I will trace in Lezama’s thought will not be from poetry to philosophy, but the inverse, as Lezama moves from philosophy to poetry by means of a strange borrowing.

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Causalidad II: “Preludio a las eras imaginarias” If “Introducción a un sistema poético” (1954) is the sublation of Aristotle, “Preludio a las eras imaginarias” (1958) is the “cannibalization” of Kant. In this essay Lezama makes a very eccentric appropriation of Kant in order to further develop and eventually go beyond the idea he outlined in “Introducción a un sistema poético”: how poetry can become an agency to critique and overcome the Classical episteme represented by Aristotle. Considered in succession, both texts follow the pathway that traverses the very foundations of Western philosophy—from Classical philosophy to the Enlightenment. But as we shall see in a moment, Lezama’s traversal is anything but conventional. Lezama explicitly frames “Preludio a las eras imaginarias” in the context of his speculations on the overcoming of the Aristotelian epistemic paradigm and thus establishes a thread of continuity with the critique of Aristotle that he had begun four years earlier in “Introducción a un sistema poético.” In one section of “Preludio” (LLOC 798-9), Lezama presents a motley sequence of brief sketches about diverse topics: the notion of sortes experimenti [chances of experiments] from the English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon (1561-1626); a description of the sculpture of an Apsara (female spirit in Hindu religion); Balzac’s fantastic novel La peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin, 1831); the art of Van Gogh; and a scene at a café in Havana. What connects this disjointed miscellany is that, according to Lezama, each one of these themes or motifs represents an example of a situation in which ordinary or received notions about predictability and causality have been overcome. Francis Bacon was one of the thinkers from the Renaissance who attacked the dogmas of Aristotelian natural philosophy. One of his main contributions was to introduce the modern idea of experiment as part of scientific methodology. Lezama refers to Bacon’s scientific doctrines as an example of “refutación a la causalidad aristotélica” (LLOC 798).12 In his description of the sculpture of the Apsara, Lezama notes how a scorpion crawls up the nymph’s leg but, unexpectedly, her expression is not one of fear or disgust, but sexual arousal (Lezama is probably referring to the sculptures of the Kandariya temple in Khajuraho, India; they are mentioned in Paradiso, 276). Bacon introduces the notion of sortes experimenti [chances of experiments] in the taxonomy of the different ways to perform scientific experiments he presents in his De augmentis scientiarum [The Advancement of Learning], book V, chapter III. According to Bacon, one can conduct experiments involving pure chance in order to explore the occurrence of the ­unexpected.

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In Balzac’s novel, the wild ass’s skin is endowed with the magical power of granting any wish. The colors in Van Gogh’s painting are a source of fascination insofar as they are unrealistic. Finally, while in the café, Lezama overhears a phrase—“novia china, buena suerte”—which, as he points out, expresses an unreal “causal” relationship, and makes a nice verse. The purpose of this sequence of examples of “alternative,” “impossible” or “illogical” causalities is in part to prepare the reader for the strange appropriation and “assimilation” of Kant into the sistema poético. In the essay “Preludio a las eras imaginarias” Lezama depicts a scene in which two enemy armies called la causalidad and lo incondicionado clash at the foot of a castle. As I shall show in a moment, this scene is an allegorical representation of Lezama’s theory of poetic expression. The two initial sentences of the essay read: “Con ojos irritados se contemplan la causalidad y lo incondicionado. Se contemplan irreconciliables y cierran filas en las dos riberas enemigas” (LLOC 798). Then the two “armies” engage into a dialectical interaction—lo incondicionado acts upon la causalidad and vice versa—thereby producing “un monstruocillo, la poesía” (LLOC 807).13 But where do the terms incondicionado and causalidad come from? A couple of pages after the beginning of the essay we read: Kant pareció oponer lo incondicionado, la libertad, a la ley. Pero no es ahí donde plantea el problema que más nos incita, sino cuando afirma que la misma serie de lo condicionado engendra lo incondicionado, es decir, afirma una causalidad que se determina totalmente por sí misma o lo que es lo mismo, “remontar de lo condicionado a la condición en el infinito”. O de la causalidad a lo causante en la infinitud. Sigue el punto de vista anselmiano, o sea que la concepción de la misma serie de lo condicionado prueba también la existencia del nexo en lo incondicionado. Habla de la causa noumenon. Es decir, existe un paralelismo y una continuación entre la serie de lo condicionado y la causa noumenon. (LLOC 800)

Here “la causalidad,” along with “lo incondicionado”, correspond to two terms borrowed from Kantian philosophy: das Unbedingte [the unconditioned] and Kausalität [causality]. The source for this passage—which Lezama does not mention—is Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, and specifically the section Significantly, this is the model that Lezama has used in interviews to explain the sistema poético (see for example Álvarez Bravo 61-2). In this sense, it is the preferred oral exposition of the sistema and therefore displays a certain pedagogical intention.

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entitled “On the Deduction of the Principles of Pure Practical Reason” as it appeared in a 1913 Spanish translation by Emilio Miñana y Villasagra and Manuel García Morente (in the original passage, Kant discusses the “paradox” whereby moral law serves as the principle for the deduction of the faculty of freedom, even though moral law is something that theoretical reason can only assume but not prove).14 Lezama then metamorphoses das Unbedingte and Kausalität into two concepts belonging to the sistema poético: lo incondicionado and la causalidad. Toward the middle of his essay, Lezama uses the two borrowed terms from Kant to designate two armies (“poderosas huestes”) running into each other in front of a castle (LLOC 808-9). The description of this clash between the armies of lo incondicionado and la causalidad is a bizarre scene involving a jester, a bear cub, a unicorn, King David, and Orpheus; in the end what is left is: “la poesía, la causalidad y lo incondicionado al encontrarse han formado un monstruocillo, la poesía” (809).15 What does all this mean? How can one interpret these obscure tropes? Kant originally used the term “unconditioned” in the Transcendental Dialectic I consulted the compilation of Kant’s works of practical philosophy in Spanish translation Fundamentación de la metafísica de las costumbres. Crítica de la razón práctica. La paz perpetua (México: Porrúa, 1972), which includes the aforementioned translation of the second Critique. The passages alluded to by Lezama appear on pages 124-5: “La determinación de la causalidad de los seres en el mundo de los sentidos, como tal, no podía nunca ser incondicionada, y, sin embargo, tiene que haber, para toda serie de las condiciones, necesariamente algo incondicionado; por tanto, también una causalidad que se determine totalmente por sí misma” (124). “Noúmeno” (that which cannot be known by the senses; the opposite of “phenomenon”), “causa noumenon” and “remontar de lo condicionado a la condición en el infinito” appear on page 125. Lezama’s reference to Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109)—“[Kant] sigue el punto de vista anselmiano”—is somewhat misleading. In his Proslogion, Anselm formulates his famous ontological proof of the existence of God as a being beyond which nothing greater can be thought. Lezama identifies Anselm’s argument as an example of a closed causal chain in which God is the necessary first principle of everything; it is metaphysical entity posited as necessary and not caused itself by anything else. Kant, however, does not “follow” Anselm but rather attacks his theistic argument in the section “On the Impossibility of an Ontological Proof of God’s Existence” in the Critique of Pure Reason (563-9) 15 “Al llegar al castillo las dos poderosas huestes, el juglar hace sus suertes, baila el osezno, relata el falso padre, el secuestrador. Acepta bailar en lo alto de la llama, como el unicornio acepta beber en la fuente. Por la mañana ya no está. Llegó cuando no había nadie en el castillo, al despertar ya no se le encuentra. Es lo incondicionado. Se sueltan las tropas a buscarlo, armadas de una causalidad minuciosa. Es Orfeo también, sumergido en la masa tonal de los navegantes aventureros. Es David, rey viejo, rayo largo que va entrando en la noche. Lo que ha quedado es la poesía, la causalidad y lo incondicionado al encontrarse han formando un monstruocillo, la poesía. Baila en lo alto de la llama, metáfora, como el unicornio bebe en la fuente, imagen precisa de un desconocido ondulante” (LLOC 809). 14

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division of the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s critique of metaphysics (which is in part a critique of Aristotelianism) is an attempt to demonstrate that reason alone—in and of itself and independently of experience—cannot yield to the knowledge of objects. Pure reason is a procedure that begins with first principles and leads to the formulation of concepts and syllogisms by following the rules of logic. According to this model, pure reason can prove the truthfulness or falsity of propositions, determine causal relations between events and, in particular, establish the conditions [Bedingungen] of existence of a certain event or entity. Metaphysics uses abstract concepts removed from sensory experience in order to determine these causal connections. In principle, the aspiration of metaphysics is totality; therefore, it is necessary to complete and totalize causality by positing the “unconditioned”: a primordial entity such as “God,” “the Absolute,” “the soul,” or “freedom” that is without prior cause or condition. Reason posits the idea of these primordial entities, for they are necessary to bring to completion the causal chain of understanding. From the point of view of metaphysics, these entities are invested with objective existence. Kant, however, finds this stance problematic. He shows that it is impossible to demonstrate the objective existence of these metaphysical entities (Kant calls them “illusions,” and he devotes several sections of the Transcendental Dialectic division to arguing the impossibility of proving that they have an objective existence). Kant recognizes that positing the unconditioned is a necessity of understanding; at the same time, however, he argues that it would be wrong to grant an objective existence to the unconditioned, since it cannot be proved. On the other hand, the terms la causalidad and lo incondicionado in the sistema poético, despite their Kantian ancestry, are very different from Kausalität and das Unbedingte. Obviously, Lezama claims no fidelity to the meanings of “the unconditioned” and “causality” as they appear in Kant (nor does he have any interest in doing so). Note then that there is a notable difference between the ways Lezama uses Aristotle and Kant respectively in “Introducción a un sistema poético” and “Preludio a las eras imaginarias.” As I discussed earlier, in “Introducción a un sistema poético” Lezama uses Aristotle as the representative of a certain episteme (rhetoric and poetry as grounded on, and motivated by, an onto-analogical substratum) that ought to be overcome; but at the same time, Lezama believes this overcoming necessarily “rescues” or preserves that which, for Aristotle, make tropes possible in the first place: “éste es aquél,” or the latent possibilities of analogy, substitution and figurality. In this regard, in “Introducción a un sistema poético” there is an explicit use and reference to Aristotle’s

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thought—if only to critique it and think about how it ought to be surpassed. In contrast, references to Kant’s thought recede to the background in the case of “Preludio a las eras imaginarias.”16 When Lezama appropriates the Kantian terms das Unbedingte and Kausalität, he does not use them as concepts. Rather, Lezama removes these two terms from their original context and tropes them to create two altogether different (pseudo)concepts—lo incondicionado and la causalidad—which now belong to the sistema poético. In this troping, there is no explicit or intentional use of Kant’s philosophical system; this appropriation is neither an application nor even a (mis)interpretation of das Unbedingte and Kausalität. In the new context of Lezama’s essay and the sistema poético, these two concepts are practically devoid of their original signification. Lezama tropes das Unbedingte and Kausalität into lo incondicionado and la causalidad by means of two processes. The first process is what I call material appropriation. Lezama indicates, via paraphrase and a short quotation, that “lo incondicionado” and “causalidad” are concepts found in Kant, but he does not use them as Kantian concepts. Lezama pays little attention to what the quoted and paraphrased sentences originally mean (Lezama’s concern is certainly not Kant’s discussion on moral law and the deduction of the faculty of freedom; hence, strictly speaking one cannot even say that Lezama is “misinterpreting” Kant). However, albeit the reference to the original meaning of Kant’s concepts fades away, another type of reference becomes important—the reference to a specific book. In this particular case, what is relevant is not the reference to a concept but to a concrete object. A comparison between Lezama’s text and García Morente’s translation of Kant’s second Critique (the Spanish edition available to Lezama in the Havana of the 1950s) reveals that, in fact, the passage quoted above (LLOC 800) consists of short paraphrases and quotations garnered specifically from pages 124-5 of that translation. Lezama supplies no bibliographical reference whatsoever, only making the strategy of appropriation more interesting. The two Kantian concepts are subject to a violent de-contextualization: References to Kant appear in the quotation and paraphrase from García Morente’s translation of the second Critique just quoted, and in a short remark in which Lezama opposes Aristotle’s doctrine of causality—matter [hylē] as potentiality and form [eidos] as actuality—to Kant’s: “Para un griego del período aristotélico, no existían las series condicionadas ni lo condicionante, sino entre la causa y la forma, lo generatriz actuando sobre la materia producirá la forma” (LLOC 800). My contention is that despite the fact that Lezama borrows the terms lo incondicionado and la causalidad from Kant’s work, Kantian philosophical thought plays only a secondary role and is limited to the allusions just mentioned.

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they are stripped not only of their original meaning, but also of the identity of their source. Quotation ordinarily implies not only a mere copying of words, but also a reference to the broader meaning and context of the expression being quoted. These references are absent in Lezama’s use of lo incondicionado and la causalidad. In the end, Lezama is not so much referring to two concepts used by Kant as he is to two peculiar words he found in a Spanish translation of a book by Kant. Put in other terms, the immediate referent of lo incondicionado and la causalidad is not so much Kant’s treatise on practical philosophy but rather a specific material object: two pages from a particular Spanish edition of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. In this regard, Lezama’s coinage of the terms lo incondicionado and la causalidad in the sistema poético follows a logic similar to that of the objet trouvé in surrealism: “lo incondicionado” and “la causalidad” are a couple of curious mots trouvés in the landscape of a book, removed from their context and then aestheticized and metamorphosed into something else. This brings me to the second process at work in the creation of the concepts of lo incondicionado and la causalidad. The material appropriation I have just identified accompanies what is a metaphorical process, in the sense of transferring the “proper” name of something to something else. The two mots trouvés in the Kant translation become two concepts belonging to the sistema poético, personified as two armies that, upon encountering each other, enter into a dialectical relationship that produces “un monstruocillo, la poesía.” In examining this aspect of the troping it is possible to discern a modality of “return of the repressed.” The fact that Lezama does not adhere to the Kantian concepts does not mean that all conceptual traces of Kant’s das Unbedingte and Kausalität evanesce altogether. Remnants of their “repressed” original meaning do surface and become relevant upon closer examination of Lezama’s description of the dialectic between lo incondicionado and la causalidad, especially when he draws a comparison between God as Creator and poetry as a creation made to human measure. Recall briefly what the unconditioned and causality mean in Kant. The acquisition of knowledge requires establishing causal links (what causes what) by means of reason, and the positing of the unconditioned stems from the exigency to close this causal chain. The idea of God is perhaps the quintessential example of the unconditioned (Lezama may be alluding to this when he claims that “la posibilidad de lo incondicionado” emerges in “el mundo católico”; LLOC 805). God is a metaphysical idea posited by reason as the original cause of everything and not caused Himself by anything else. There can be only one direction in the movement from the unconditioned to reality:

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the former causes the latter, but the reverse is impossible because by definition the unconditioned is not caused by anything else. But in Lezama’s military prosopopoeia, the armies of lo incondicionado and la causalidad confront each other and interact dialectically—a sequence that goes “against reason” because the unconditioned cannot be acted upon by anything else. In preparation for describing this oxymoronic dialectic, Lezama asserts that “Todo lo acepta el hombre menos que es un asombro, un monstruo que lanza preguntas sin respuestas. Se asombra del incondicionado de la divinidad, pero se niega a aceptar que él es un incondicionado igualmente asombroso” (LLOC 807-8). Further on, Lezama describes “la poesía” as the “concurrencia” of lo incondicionado and la causalidad and as “el mayor homúnculo, el doble más misterioso creado por el hombre” (LLOC 809). If God is the unconditioned and human beings are God’s creation, then these two anthropomorphisms—man participating in lo incondicionado and poetry as doble misterioso created by man—figuratively endow humankind with God-like attributes. From this pseudo-theological perspective, Lezama regards poetry as the emergence of the “infinite possibility” resulting from the encounter and dialectical interaction of lo incondicionado and la causalidad. Lezama introduces two terms to name each part of these reciprocal effects: la vivencia oblicua and el súbito:17 Apenas puede la causalidad, operando sobre lo incondicionado, llegar a su apresamiento y conjugación. Tiene necesidad de un instrumento que muestre una delicadeza serpentina, no esperada, abridora de una brecha por el asombro tumultuoso. Ahí nos llega la “vivencia oblicua”, que parece crearse su propia causalidad. (LLOC 815)

Lezama illustrates la vivencia oblicua, the strange “operation” of la causalidad on lo incondicionado, through an example based on a passage from James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough.18 In that passage Frazer refers to a certain geomantic belief in China according to which the particular shape of a city influences its life and fate. Frazer relates the tale of the city of Tsuen-cheu-fu, which was shaped like a fish, and was subject to the spell of the neighboring city of Yung For an interpretative discussion of these terms, see Yurkiévich, La confabulación 123-4, quoted in Ortega, Prologue xxiv. 18 Lezama probably used the Spanish translation La rama dorada: Magia y religión, by Elizabeth and Tadeo Campuzano (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1951). 17

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chun, which was shaped like a fishing net.19 The dwellers of Tsuen-cheu-fu built two pagodas in order to counteract the influence of the net-shaped city of Yung-chun. Lezama recounts Frazer’s tale as follows: Al levantar las dos pagodas, las redes quedaban enmarañadas y rotas y el conjuro de sometimiento formal se volatilizaba. ¿En qué forma demostraba su destreza esa vivencia oblicua? Vemos un imposible engendrando una realidad igualmente imposible, es decir, si extendemos una red sobre una ciudad, la única manera de quebrantar sus cordeles es llevarle a su centro dos rompientes de lanza, donde se cuelguen y destruyan sus ataduras. (LLOC 815)

La vivencia oblicua, or the action of la causalidad on lo incondicionado, thus corresponds to a virtual “other” (of ) causality in which lo imposible is the cause of—note the oxymoron—“una realidad igualmente imposible.”20 If the shape of the city determines its fate, then one can affect its destiny by changing its shape—in this case, by building two pagodas in Tsuen-cheu-fu to destroy the net cast by Yung-chun. El súbito, the other term Lezama introduces, is “la contracifra de lo anterior, lo incondicionado actuando sobre la causalidad.” He illustrates this idea through the idiosyncratic example of the etymology of the word Vogelon: Vogelon (en alemán, el acto sexual), aislada tiene la oscuridad de lo germinativo. Esa oscuridad se rinde cuando vamos precisando dos sustantivos previos, vogel (pájaro) y vogelbauer (jaula para pájaros), no obstante, al llegar la palabra vogelon, “Another application of the maxim that like produces like is seen in the Chinese belief that the fortunes of a town are deeply affected by its shape, and that they must vary according to the character of the thing which that shape most nearly resembles. Thus it is related that long ago the town of Tsuen-cheu-fu, the outlines of which are like those of a carp, frequently fell a prey to the depredations of the neighbouring city of Yung-chun, which is shaped like a fishing-net, until the inhabitants of the former town conceived the plan of erecting two tall pagodas in their midst. These pagodas, which still tower above the city of Tsuen-cheu-fu, have ever since exercised the happiest influence over its destiny by intercepting the imaginary net before it could descend and entangle in its meshes the imaginary carp” (Frazer 1: 48-9). 20 The term vivencia oblicua first appears in “Las imágenes posibles” (1948): “Entre la carta oscura entregada por la metáfora, precisa sobre sí y misteriosa en sus decisiones asociativas y el reconocimiento de la imagen, se cumple la vivencia oblicua” (LLOC 158). In “La dignidad de la poesía” a passage reads: “el hombre actuando dentro de esa región del ethos se presenta siempre como una vivencia oblicua, como un móvil que genera una metáfora incesante entre A y B” (LLOC 766), and in the 1968 conference “Sobre poesía,” (1968) la vivencia oblicua appears as “el conmutador que se enciende engendra una cascada en Ontario” (IP 135). 19

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penetramos por un súbito la riqueza de sus símbolos, súbito que penetra en la acumulación de sus causalidades con la suficiente energía para hacer y apoderarse de su totalidad en una fulguración. (LLOC 815)

This passage has been the object of much commentary since it contains one of the most conspicuous examples of Lezama’s eccentric verbal fabrications.21 Vogelon is a corruption (unacknowledged by Lezama) of the verb vögeln, a vulgar expression in German meaning sexual intercourse. According to Lezama’s spurious etymology, Vogelon is a troping of Vogel (bird) and Bauer (cage) as “el acto sexual,” predicated on the metaphor of the bird entering the cage as sexual intercourse. In this specific instance of el súbito, tropology displaces etymology: Lezama could have borrowed the “origin” of the word Vogelon from the hypothetical treatise Origen de las metáforas mentioned in his “Introducción a un sistema poético” (LLOC 421). As the counterpart of la vivencia oblicua, el súbito—lo incondicionado acting upon la causalidad—can be viewed as a “silogismo de sobresalto” (Paradiso 421): a sudden revelation of unexpected, unforeseen and potentially wondrous causal links.22 In discussing this passage, critics have tended to emphasize the question of linguistics and pseudo-etymology, but as part of el sistema poético, el súbito is a broader idea. What Lezama calls el súbito is not merely a linguistic theory per se; rather, he coins this apocryphal etymology as only one possible example of the more general idea of lo incondicionado acting upon la causalidad. For example, while expounding his “contrapuntal” theory of culture and history in the conference “Mitos y cansancio clásico” of For an illuminating analysis of el súbito informed by Lezama’s own appropriation of Pythagoras and Giambattista Vico see Salgado, From Modernism to Neobaroque 176-80. Salgado describes el súbito as “an instantaneous glimpse into the archaeology of a word, revealing an unknown causality” (178) and can be interpreted as the “theoretical basis of Lezama’s neologisms” (177). For other discussions of the passage, see Mignolo and Rogmann. 22 For an illuminating discussion on the aesthetics of surprise in Lezama see Aullón de Haro 44‑5. To be sure, the idea of el súbito calls to mind the aesthetic doctrine of the Baroque idea of agudeza or acutezza. The cognitive and intellectual insight afforded by the agudeza lies in the discovery of unexpected correspondences among disparate elements, and this experience is all the more powerful and pleasurable by virtue of the surprise it effects on the reader. The term el súbito may also allude to Diotima’s teachings on the nature of love and beauty in Plato’s Symposium. In the culmination of Socrates’ recount of Diotima’s lesson, the final contemplation of ideal beauty is described as a sudden event: “When a man has been thus far tutored in the lore of love, passing from view to view of beautiful things, in the right and regular ascent, suddenly [exaiphnēs] he will have revealed to him, as he draws to the close of his dealings in love, a wondrous vision, beautiful in its nature; and this, Socrates, is the final object of all those previous toils” (210e). 21

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La expresión americana, Lezama explained that “en un espacio contrapunteado por la imago y el sujeto metafórico… determinada masa de entidades naturales o culturales, adquieren en un súbito, inmensas resonancias” (EA 54).23 Understood as “lo incondicionado actuando sobre la causalidad,” or equivalently, as the counterpart of la vivencia oblicua, el súbito is a way of knowing and organizing the world—a “fulguración” of surprising links, not necessarily regimented by ordinary causality, among cultural entities. In Lezama’s thought, the task of the poet, as well as that of the critic and the historian, is to bring forth el súbito. Lezama’s literary criticism and the theory of las eras imaginarias rely on this disclosure of surprising and “impossible” causal links—a creative activity shared by the author and the reader. The reciprocal actions of la causalidad and lo incondicionado, which Lezama refers to as la vivencia oblicua and el súbito, thus point toward “virtual” or “alter”-causalities illustrated by some wondrous and eccentric examples: the Chinese legend borrowed from The Golden Bough, the switch that inaugurates a waterfall in Ontario, the apocryphal etymology of Vogelon, and the “visión histórica” that serves as foundation of the eras imaginarias (EA 49). In these examples, la vivencia oblicua refers to alter-causality proper, a process instantiated by selected borrowings from myth, religion, literature, the arts, and philosophy. El súbito, on the other hand, corresponds to an epiphanic and sudden disclosure or “revelation” of a product of imagination. Obviously, such altercausal relationships have no substantive existence; moreover, in this context, one should not think or imagine them as if they existed—this would be the case with myth or religious belief, and the sistema poético is not to be confused with either. La vivencia oblicua and el súbito are discursive phenomena, and as such, in any attempt to conceive them, “discovery” and “creation” become inseparable. Through exploring the meanings of la causalidad, lo incondicionado and their interaction in the ways that I have suggested, one can begin to grasp the importance of characterizing Lezama’s theories of culture, history and poetry as radical inventions. And here invention should be understood in its double acceptation—creation and discovery. Finding or discovering the alter-causality of the impossible—the etymology of Vogelon, the cities of Yung-chun and Tsuencheu-fu, the switch that inaugurates a waterfall in Ontario—is tantamount to creating it. In Lezama’s thought, the task of the poet, who can also act as critic Given their dates of publication—the conferences of La expresión americana (from January 1957) and “Preludio a las eras imaginarias” (1958)—one can infer that Lezama probably wrote these texts around the same period.

23

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and historian, is to invent—to find and to create, and to materialize invention in discourse. Lezama closes the account of his theory of poetic thought in “Preludio a las eras imaginarias” by incorporating another neologism: el potens, a nominalization of the Latin adjective potens, meaning “powerful,” “able,” “mighty.” The exchange [intercambio] between la vivencia oblicua and el súbito creates “el incondicionado condicionante, es decir el potens, la posibilidad infinita” (LLOC 816). The material testimony of this process is the doble misterioso of poetry: “el hombre causalidad … penetra en el espacio incondicionado, por el cual adquiere un condicionante, un potens, un posible, del cual queda como la ceniza, el vestigio, el recuerdo, en el signo del poema” (LLOC 810). The term potens had appeared in the earlier essay “La dignidad de la poesía” (1956): “Pero no solo en ese período etrusco, en el momento de Numa, la creación se elevó a la infinitud, sino que se creó el pontífice, el potens, con la enorme fuerza del condicional si es posible (que tal vez pasa al virgo potens, al alumbramiento en la infinita posibilidad)” (LLOC 778, emphasis in the original). Lezama most likely borrowed the term from the biography of Numa Pompilius (the legendary second King of Rome, successor to Romulus) in Plutarch’s Lives.24 The expression “Virgo potens” refers to one of the attributes of the Virgin Mary (Almighty Virgin), who becomes an instantiation of “la infinita posibilidad” inasmuch as she is simultaneously Virgin and Mother. Toward the end of “Preludio a las eras imaginarias,” Lezama imagines poetry both as the “vestige” or “remembrance” of el potens, and as a sort of feedback loop working within a sequence of entities named germen and acto: El hombre persigue ese trueque de la nada en germen, del germen en acto … [el acto] reobra constantemente sobre el germen, procurando por ese acto volcar de nuevo su germen en una nueva extensión. Ese reobrar del acto sobre el germen engendra un ser causal, nutrido con los inmensos recursos de la vivencia oblicua 24

The passage from Plutarch reads: “To Numa is also ascribed the institution of that order of high priests who are called Pontifices, and he himself is said to have been the first of them. According to some they are called Pontifices because employed in the service of the gods, who are powerful and supreme over all the world; and ‘potens’ is the Roman word for powerful [ho gar dynatos hypo Rhōmaiōn onomazetai potēns]” (IX.1 337). Lezama probably used the Spanish translation Vidas paralelas, published by the Universidad Nacional de México (1923). In “A partir de la poesía” (1960), one finds another reference to Plutarch and el potens in the description of the era imaginaria of “lo órfico y lo etrusco”: “Reyes etruscos, principalmente Numa Pompilio, estudiado por Plutarco… Nace con los etruscos el potens, es decir, si es posible, es creíble, verificable” (LLOC 836).

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y un súbito … y aquí comienza la nueva fiesta de la poesía, el potens, el posible en la infinitud. Es decir, el hombre puede prolongar su acto hasta llevar su ser causal a la infinitud, por medio de un doble, que es la poesía. (LLOC 817)

And at the end of the essay, Lezama concludes: La poesía había encontrado letras para lo desconocido, había situado nuevos dioses, había adquirido el potens, la posibilidad infinita, pero le quedaba su última gran dimensión: el mundo de la resurrección. En la resurrección se vuelca el potens, agotando sus posibilidades… Sólo el poeta, dueño del acto operando en el germen, que no obstante sigue siendo creación, llega a ser causal, a reducir, por la metáfora, a materia comparativa la totalidad. En esta dimensión, tal vez la más desmesurada y poderosa que se pueda ofrecer, el “poeta es el ser causal para la resurrección”. El poema es el testimonio o imagen de ese ser causal para la resurrección, verificable cuando el potens de la poesía, la posibilidad de la creación en su infinitud, actúa sobre el continuo de las eras imaginarias. (LLOC 819-20)

In these two extraordinarily dense fragments, the three fundamental components of Lezama’s thought meet: eschatology, history, and rhetoric. In preparation for my discussion of the poem “Dador” in the following section, at this point I will simply underscore the connection between the ideas expressed in these passages and the idea of the weak sublation of metaphor that I discussed earlier in reference to “Introducción a un sistema poético.” In the first of the two passages quoted above Lezama reformulates the dialectic of lo incondicionado and la causalidad and the materialization of poetry using two other terms: germen and acto. Lezama describes a sequence that can be described as follows: nada-germen-acto-germen-acto-germen-acto… and so on. This sequence basically consists of a feedback loop whereby acto goes back to germen, reactivates it, and so on: “[el acto] reobra constantemente sobre el germen”; “ese reobrar del acto sobre el germen engendra un ser causal”; “el poeta, dueño del acto operando en el germen.” The terms germen and acto evoke the Aristotelian ideas of potentiality [dynamis usually rendered in Spanish as potencia] and actuality [energeia; usually acto in Spanish]. In very simplified terms, potentiality can described as the ability, capacity or power that something has to become something else in a different, more perfected form or state, and this other state in turn corresponds to actuality (an example would be a piece of marble and a statue: the piece of marble corresponds to potentiality, i.e., it is matter endowed with the capacity to become a statue, and the statue corresponds to actuality; the statue is formed

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matter, a different and more perfected entity than raw marble). The poet— “ser causal”—appears as the agent who sets the whole motion in process, and here again there is evidence of the theological anthropomorphism I mentioned earlier in which Lezama presents poetry as “el mayor homúnculo, el doble más misterioso creado por el hombre” (LLOC 809). In spite of the evident presence of religious and eschatological imagery and connotations, in the end the passage returns to the idea that the dwelling place of the poet is the realm of rhetoric and discourse: “Sólo el poeta, dueño del acto operando en el germen … llega a ser causal, a reducir, por la metáfora, a materia comparativa la totalidad.” Lezama’s theory has thus come full circle: it has established an explicit equivalence between the reobrar or “reworking” of acto upon germen on the one hand, and on the other, the poet’s invention—creation and discovery—of wondrous and hitherto unknown or unimagined correspondences among things, ideas, cultural entities, etc., through the weak sublation of metaphor. The poetic craft—“reducir, por la metáfora, a materia comparativa la totalidad”— is a way of organizing, representing and making sense of the world.25 This passage from “La dignidad de la poesía” summarizes the ideas we have explored so far, and points toward the next step in our inquiry: [al] lograr la poesía un espacio hechizado, una cantidad mágica, lograba resistir o sustituir una causalidad, que regalaba una ópera fabuladora … una de las realezas de la poesía es que a la causalidad sucesiva de la metáfora sucede el cuerpo de la causalidad asociativa o contrapuntística de la imagen. (LLOC 787)

See note 11 above. In addition to the inquiries about the nature of metaphor coming from rhetoric and the philosophy of language, two important—albeit very distinct—approaches to the question of the relationship between metaphor and knowledge are worth mentioning. I already referred to what Paul Ricœur calls the “genealogical” interrogation of the metaphorical foundation of thought: the thesis inherited from Nietzsche that all philosophical thought is inseparable from metaphor. Two prominent examples of this line of inquiry are Derrida’s “White Mythology” (Derrida 207-71), which argues that metaphysics must necessarily use— and hide—metaphor in order to express its promise of meaning, being and plenitude; and Paul de Man’s “The Epistemology of Metaphor” (De Man 34-50), which, by scrutinizing philosophical texts from the Enlightenment (Locke, Condillac and Kant), demonstrates how these texts posit a sharp division between rhetoric and truth and even their mutual incompatibility, but paradoxically do so by means of an unavoidable deployment of tropes. The other approach comes from cognitive linguistics and is associated with George Lakoff, who has shown how cognitive experience and conceptual systems are basically metaphorical. This approach has had important repercussions in literary criticism. See for example Lakoff and Johnson; Lakoff and Turner; and Slingerland 161-76.

25

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The passage from metaphor (“causalidad sucesiva”) to what Lezama calls la imagen (“causalidad asociativa o contrapuntística”) corresponds to the unleashing and materialization of the latent power of tropes in order to imagine and create worlds that Lezama characterizes as instances of “other,” “contrapuntal” causalities, and which are hypostatized through discourse and as discourse. Lezama often employs the word cuerpos to describe these discursive worlds. In a way, the idea of magic—“espacio hechizado,” “cantidad mágica”—seems an appropriate metaphor to characterize Lezama’s idea, in the sense that words are able to “create”—as discourse—another “world” that figures and materializes “(im)possible” causalities: “una región donde la sobreabundancia anula el contrasentido y la relación antecedente motivación” (LLOC 762). In Lezama’s idiolect, this is the world of potens, generated by the reciprocal activity of la vivencia oblicua and el súbito, or the “reobrar del acto sobre el germen” and vice versa. And the most radical example of these “regions,” of these verbal worlds, is Lezama’s hermetic poetry.

Chapter 2 Radical Tropology: “Dador” Peroche, sicome Iddio di quell che non è, produce quell che è: così l’ingegno, di non Ente, fa Ente: fa che il Leone diuenga vn’Huomo; & l’Aquila vna Città. Emanuele Tesauro, Il cannochiale aristotelico

Introduction In my reading of Lezama’s essays I have attempted to analyze the meaning and genealogy of various terms in Lezama’s sistema poético and to explore the imaginative and peculiar strategies Lezama uses to connect his theory of poetics to certain ideas from the Western aesthetic and philosophical tradition. While I believe this approach is fundamental for a better understanding of Lezama’s work, it is also necessary to acknowledge that such an approach has important limitations insofar as it remains within the confines of “hermeneutics” and “interpretation.” As one shifts the critical attention from Lezama’s essays to his poems and attempts to read (into) these texts, the limitations of thinking in terms of the sistema poético become apparent. This may seem paradoxical: Isn’t the sistema poético a theory of Lezama’s poetry? Only in a very narrow sense, I would argue. The sistema poético—its purpose, cultural frame, genealogy, neologisms, etc.—is an expression of Lezama’s thinking about history, culture and criticism, and about his own vision of the poetic craft. In this sense, understanding the sistema poético is a preliminary and necessary step to grasping what Lezama attempts to do in his characteristically “hermetic” poems. However, one has to distinguish the “system” and its alleged aspirations from the broader, and not necessarily intended or explicit, implications of Lezama’s theory of poetics—a theory that goes beyond the content of his essays and two novels. It would be a mistake to think of the sistema poético as an “explanation” or totalizing interpretation of Lezama’s poems. To be sure, correspondences do exist between the concepts or ideas expressed in the sistema and the signifying processes occurring within the text of the poem. Recognizing these associations may be a productive tool of analysis. At the same time, however, a fuller engagement with the notable difficulties posed by Lezama’s verse reveals the limitations, not only of this associative approach, but

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of any kind of thematic approximation. Here one must pose some important questions: What strategies exist for reading texts like Lezama’s that have been qualified as “hermetic,” “obscure” and “impenetrable”? Does Lezama’s verse admit something like “explanation”? What is at stake in attempting to derive meaning from these cuerpos resistentes? A helpful and preliminary approach to this problem is to consider the term “causality,” which, as I have suggested, has multifarious applications in Lezama’s texts. “Causality” can have different uses and refer to different things. Some uses include: “causality” in its ordinary sense; la causalidad as the material appropriation of the Kantian concept of Kausalität; and “causality” as metonymy for “reason,” often referred to as “causalidad aristotélica,” which connotes either the necessary relationships of causation among events, or the rational episteme that Lezama compares or opposes to the realms of the poetic, la imagen or las eras imaginarias. These uses are not necessarily exclusive; in fact, they often overlap or merge in specific instances. The forms assumed by “causality” are multiple as well. Often the referent of “causality” corresponds to a representation of what might properly be called “magical” or “incredible” causal relations, borrowed mainly from religion or myth. This is the case, for example, of the Christian doctrine of resurrection, or la vivencia oblicua as illustrated in the legend of the Chinese cities from The Golden Bough (cf. LLOC 815 and the discussion in chapter one of this book). In addition to these uses and forms of “causality,” however, Lezama also uses “causality” as a metaphor for the internal logic of the associations that articulate figurality (as in “la causalidad sucesiva de la metáfora” and “la causalidad asociativa o contrapuntística de la imagen” cited above). This form of “causality” denotes essentially a linguistic process: it is radically exploited in Lezama’s poetry, and does not exactly fall into the same category as the other referents or uses of “causality.” For heuristic purposes here I am implicitly discriminating between the hermeneutical aspects of Lezama’s thought and texts (the interpretation of the sistema poético, the genealogy of his neologisms, the analysis of his appropriation of myths, culture, philosophy, etc.) and the linguistic activity—resolutely tropo-logical —that resists interpretation and a thematic methodological approach. The distinction is subtle, because these two aspects, although different, are not necessarily mutually exclusive. To be sure, one can discern different emphases: the thematic aspect may be more conspicuous or relevant in Lezama’s prose and in some poems, and the tropological aspect in his more opaque poems; and on certain occasions these two modalities of signification may be in close interaction, as when rhetorical

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or linguistic displacements “contaminate” the purported “content” expressed in some of Lezama’s essays. The point I want to make is that an appreciation for the dimensions of Lezama’s work that privilege the hermeneutical—the sistema poético, the theory of the eras imaginarias, his speculative literary criticism—should nonetheless not ignore, preclude or conceal the more radical implications of the linguistic and tropological processes that are at work most visibly in Lezama’s poetry. Studies on Lezama’s poetry have often remained within the limits of thematic or hermeneutical methodologies.1 This suggests the necessity of taking a different approach that takes critical distance from the assumptions of thematic approximations and attempts to inquire more deeply into the singular linguistic experience afforded by Lezama’s verse. Lezama himself hints at this critical dimension of his work, and at the limits of hermeneutics with respect to the verbal experience produced by his poetry when he writes in reference to poiēsis: “Estamos en presencia de una serie o constante de relaciones, que no podemos descifrar, pero que nos hace permanecer frente a ella, con una inmensa posibilidad de penetración. Es indescifrable, pero engendra un enloquecido apetito de desciframiento” (LLOC 765, my emphasis). In order to analyze the critical dimensions of the linguistic experience of Lezama’s hermetic poetry and what I have termed its “tropology” I will focus on a key passage from “Dador” (P 195-218; Dador 7-33), Lezama’s longest poem, which was included in the homonymous collection published in 1960.2 Dador follows a hiatus of eleven years during which Lezama did not publish any book of poetry (the previous one was La fijeza in 1949). This was the last book of poems Lezama published in his lifetime and certain characteristics



1



2

The two best monographs devoted primarily to Lezama’s poetry are Bejel and Heller. Volume I of the proceedings of the 1982 Poitiers Colloquium is the most comprehesive collection of essays devoted primarily to Lezama’s poetry: see Vizcaíno. Some important studies devoted to readings of individual poems include Beutler, Fernández Sosa, González Echevarría, Irby, Pérez Cristóbal, and Sucre. A section of the poem appeared in Lunes de revolución 87 (1960): 14. To find a text like this in Lunes de Revolución is remarkable to say the least, given that “Dador” was the perfect incarnation of the arcane aestheticism associated with Lezama and the origenistas, and which the editorial team led by Guillermo Cabrera Infante militated against. For an insightful historical reading of the poem and this editorial circumstance in the context of the Agrarian Reform see Pérez Cristóbal. For a perceptive commentary on “Dador,” see Yurkiévich, “La risueña obscuridad o los emblemas emigrantes.” Part of Yurkiévich’s insight lies in the metacritical aspects of his analysis: the critic’s recurrent reflexion on what is at stake when reading an impenetrable text like “Dador.” Another important reading is García Marruz, “Por Dador.”

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distinguish it from the rest of his work in verse.3 Various texts in Dador are long poems (this was less frequent in his earlier books, with the exception of Muerte de Narciso) and their digressive form poses unique challenges for the reader. In terms of tone, overarching themes, and imagery, these poems show certain correspondences with the long essays in La cantidad hechizada (1970) and the novels Paradiso and Oppiano Licario.4 The long poem “Dador” in particular not only exemplifies the formal hermeticism of Lezama’s verse, but also reiterates some of the main motifs—figural, thematic and theoretical—of his prose works: the sistema poético, the appropriation of Western and non-Western myths, the recurrent crossings of paganism and Catholicism, and eroticism. “Dador” is a text of remarkable complexity, and here I will limit my commentary to a specific fragment of the poem (P 199-203, Dador 12-6) in which one finds some of the concepts and images that appear at the end of “Preludio a las eras imaginarias,” especially the terms germen and acto. The rationale for selecting this particular passage is that, by incorporating elements from the terminology of the sistema poético into the cuerpo resistente of the poem, the text explicitly displays both the dimension of hermeneutical intentionality inscribed in the sistema (Can concepts of the sistema poético “explain” the poem?), and also the linguistic dimension of pure figurality that resists the articulation of an overarching theme or interpretation. One can read the passage from “Dador” in part as a development of some of the ideas and concepts from “Preludio a las eras imaginarias” (1958) discussed in the previous chapter, but at the same time, however, the text also reveals itself as an entity that cannot be re-presented by those concepts—paradoxically, the sistema poético ultimately breaks down when subjected to the order of discourse of Lezama’s verse. Before embarking on my analysis of the text proper, two preliminary remarks are in order: one about the general structure of the poem, and another about the discrepancies among the editions. Along with its digressive character, one can discern two parallel structures in “Dador” as a whole. First and most visibly,

“Dador” is one of the attributes of the Holy Ghost (“Señor y Dador de Vida”), as expressed in the Nicene Creed. In chapter V of Oppiano Licario, at some point of her dialogue with José Cemí, Ynaca Eco mentions the works of mystical literature Oppiano Licario told her to read—San Juan de la Cruz, Santa Teresa, Miguel de Molinos’ Guía espiritual—and she refers to God as “el Señor, el Magnánimo, el Dador” (Oppiano Licario 309). In his Guía espiritual X.96, Molinos refers to God as “dador de todo bien.” 4 Lezama wrote the poem “Dador” around the mid-1950s. Other poems of the book were written somewhat later, but overall the texts are contemporary with “Preludio a las eras imaginarias” (1958) and “A partir de la poesía” (1959).

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the poem is divided into sections or strophes of unequal length (15 in total, without numbering). Secondly, the poem can also be viewed as a sequence of more or less autonomous sketches or thematic units (a pattern one also finds in some of Lezama’s long essays) that often have no clear connection to each other. These two structures run parallel to each other yet do not necessarily coincide (in other words, the beginning of a new strophe is not necessarily the beginning of a new sketch or thematic unit), and the transition from one sketch or unit to another is usually blurred. The opening section is written in prose and depicts a strange scene of three adolescents dancing behind three tables flanked by figures dressed in armor and two caryatids. The rest of the poem is in verse, and certain images, motifs or topics recur: the mijo (a type of grass) and the centifolia rose, el germen, la sobreabundancia, el análogo, mythology, biology and, most notably, eroticism. Towards the end of the poem, there is a noticeable change in tone, consisting in a shift from the profusion of elaborate mythological and homoerotic conceits to a succession of descriptions, enunciated in the first person plural, involving quotidian objects, a rainy day in Havana, and finally a series of scenes inside a bar or café (the “Salón Alaska”). All these passages are inflected by digressive breaks that at times play a metapoetic role, as in the passage to which I will turn in a moment. This description of the structure of the poem brings me to the problem of editorial inconsistencies. In the original 1960 edition the first eleven sections or “strophes” (including the opening passage in prose) are each separated by a black circular spot, but the remaining four sections (there are 15 sections in total) are separated by a blank space only. Irrespective of what this peculiar arrangement of black circles and blank spaces really means, or of what Lezama intended (if anything), this peculiar arrangement seems significant in itself and does not seem casual; in fact, it occurs in other poems of the book. In the opening note of the Alianza edition of Lezama’s complete poetry, the editor and poet César López gives a short account of the vicissitudes of the “circulitos negros” (P 15) in different editions of the poem published in Cuba. Regretfully, López decided to eliminate the “circulitos” altogether and with them a possible layer of signification in the poems of this most enigmatic of Lezama’s books.

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The Hypertrope Recall that in “Preludio a las eras imaginarias” Lezama describes the materialization of poetry (“ser causal, nutrido con los inmensos recursos de la vivencia oblicua y el súbito”) as the “reobrar del acto sobre el germen” (LLOC 819), an activity inspired in the Aristotelian ideas of potentiality and actuality. The term germen first appears in “Dador” in the following passage: El germen desde la cresta del alba, entre las aturdidas risitas del instante y la discutidora, escarchada francachela del ancestro, comienza como los pájaros de largas patas, semejantes al bambú que recibe los gritos de los flamencos y crece monocorde peinado por la brisa de Deucalión. En cuanto el germen se escurre lánguido hacia el ajeno protoplasma, ya siente la presagiosa nube del tanatos vorazmente inalterable, depositando sus huevos sin lograr taparlos con la arenilla del reloj, pues ya el instante ha comenzado a ser hinchado y visible y su concurrencia se percibe como en las crónicas. (IV P 199; Dador 12)5

The text describes the awakening of el germen at the moment of dawn, confronted by the presence of tanatos. The germen-tanatos antithesis recalls that of death and resurrection, as elaborated in the 1945 text “X y XX,” where death is presented as a creative force by virtue of the effects of our experience of time and of how we receive cultural artifacts from the past (this will be discussed in detail in the following chapter). In “Dador,” death, under the guise of tanatos, goes about relentlessly “depositando sus huevos.” As the poem suggests, this paradoxical process of death-as-(re)birth is the correlate of the awakening of el germen and its subsequent becoming of something “other” (“se escurre lánguido hacia el ajeno protoplasma”); and this “other” in its turn prefigures a still potential re-birth, as indicated by the meaning of the word protoplasma (“A primitive or primary form of something; a primordial substance” [OED]. It also denotes the region inside the cell between the nucleus and the cellular membrane). As I indicated earlier, the strophes are not numbered in the original, but for the sake of convenience, I am indicating for each quotation the strophe number in Roman numerals, followed by the respective page numbers in the Alianza edition of the complete poetry (abbreviated as P ) and the original 1960 edition. Although the initial passage of the poem is not in verse, I am counting it as strophe I.

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Lezama reiterates this idea in the same passage, but using a different register by referring to Deucalion and Pyrrha, a myth of death and regeneration.6 One can read this notion of successive death-and/as-(re)birth as a reformulation of the progression of symbolic death and resurrection elaborated in “X y XX”; and also as another instance of the emergence of the “otra causalidad” that, as I demonstrated previously, Lezama associates with the actual and potential networks of tropological associations taking place in the verbal cuerpo of the poem. In “Preludio a las eras imaginarias,” Lezama couples the term germen with acto, and describes the dynamics of regeneration as “reobrar del acto sobre el germen” (LLOC 817). In the passage from “Dador” that I have been examining, Lezama expresses this same process as a sexual activity: En esa voracidad que toca al germen y lo anega, suspendiéndolo, ¿o acaso el germen es el éxtasis de la propia suspensión? se presupone una hidrópica, monstruosa prolongación de una sustancia que reclama al extenderse la penetración, como una hoja absorta para ser penetrada por los coloides de la brisa, pues esa voracidad necesita de un ancestro que pregunta; del existir en el anegado renuente, de un voraz ancestro que está en su propio protoplasma y vuelve siempre adormecido al protón y las siete ruedas somníferas. (IV P 199-200; Dador 12)

The key figures in these lines are voracidad, prolongación and penetración. This fragment describes—backwards, as it were—a process of “insemination” in which “la voracidad” touches “el germen,” and “voracidad” in turn is anteceded (“presupone”) by an “hidrópica, monstruosa prolongación de una sustancia” (also characterized as an “ancestro”) calling for “penetración.” One can trace the metaphors of voracity and thirst [“hidrópica”] to Lezama’s characterization of poetry as “una sustancia tan real, tan devoradora, que la encontramos en todas las presencias,” as he expresses it in a 1944 letter to Cintio Vitier 6



Warned by his father Prometheus that Zeus will flood the Earth to destroy humankind, Deucalion built a ship and landed on Mount Parnassus accompanied by his wife Pyrrha. As the only two survivors of the Flood, Deucalion and Pyrrha prayed for the restoration of humankind and descended from Mount Parnassus throwing stones behind them, from which sprang a new race of men and women. Significantly, in “Preludio a las eras imaginarias,” the key mythological referent behind the representation of poetic craft is Deucalion’s father Prometheus, who stole the fire from the gods and gave it to mankind: “Lo maravilloso de la poesía está en que ese combate entre la causalidad y lo incondicionado se puede ofrecer y transmitir como el fuego” (LLOC 810).

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(Cartas 254). Vitier will use this same image in the conference he devoted to Lezama in Lo cubano en la poesía (1958): “para Lezama la poesía encarna como sustancia devoradora de toda la realidad” (Vitier 444). Upon being “touched” or “penetrated” by “esa voracidad,” “el germen” becomes immersed [“anegado”] in a state of suspension, as if floating in amniotic fluid. The poet also refers to the “sustancia” behind the “voracidad” that touches “el germen” as “voraz ancestro,” and denotes the matter that penetrates with the surprising oxymoron “coloides de la brisa” (coloide is a mixture of particles suspended in a liquid and here is the material from which the “brisa” is made). One can read the metaphor of prolongación (understood as lengthening, expansion or extension) as the deployment of the process of sustancia being “reworked” as germen. As I suggested earlier, germen and acto are akin to Aristotle’s concepts of potentiality and actuality. In Aristotle, these are relational concepts inasmuch as one entity can function as actuality or potentiality depending on the process (the seed has the faculty or potential of becoming actualized in a tree, but this tree in turn is potentially a wooden chair). In the two fragments I quoted above, it is possible to intimate a similar scheme. The “hidrópica, mostruosa prolongación de una sustancia”—which the poet also characterizes as “voraz ancestro que está en su propio protoplasma”—is somehow a necessary agent behind the “voracidad” that will come into contact with “el germen.” But note also that in the earlier fragment, “el germen,” upon awakening at dawn, “se escurre… hacia el ajeno protoplasma.” Therefore, it appears that when the entity variously characterized as protoplasma-ancestro-sustancia-prolongación “touches” el germen via la voracidad, el germen in its turn becomes or is transferred into another protoplasma. The dynamics of “re-obrar del acto sobre el germen” entails something like a sequence, whereby el germen, upon being touched by la voracidad, somehow “becomes” sustancia (a few lines later one reads that “el verbo sobre el germen se aclara en sustancia”) and this sustancia in turn has the faculty to “penetrate” another germen, and so on in a feedback loop. One can read the metaphor of prolongación (meaning lengthening, expansion or extension) as the deployment of this process of sustancia being “reworked” as germen. The question is: how do all these sexual and pseudo-Aristotelian allusions relate to discourse; that is, to the verbal world of the poem? A preliminary yet still thematic elucidation of this question is partly intimated by these verses, which follow immediately upon the two aforecited passages:

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El verbo en el germen enarca la cara del viento, aún no podemos aprisionar la sucesión de sus señas, ni los signos del trenzado de los hilos del gusano azul. Sólo la voracidad del germen se incluye en la identidad de la sustancia y golpea los perros del trineo. Pero el germen pulula, se recuesta como la madrépora y se encadena en el centro a la contracción de su gota. El germen recibe el lanzazo vertical del verbo, pues el verbo había descendido sobre las emigraciones y sobre los palacios sumergidos, revisando la cara de los nombres encontrados. … El germen tras la ruptura repele la sustancia, que viene para definir la piel y su tenaz frente al vacío, o la somnolienta esfera guardada por la misma cantidad de espuma. El verbo sobre el germen se aclara en la sustancia, que no sólo recobra la unidad del centro con la piel, sino lo igual que vuelve a la humareda de los troncos navegando. Después que el verbo y la sustancia traspasaron el germen, el sentido se alzó a la estatua penetrando por la mirada, y convocando a las irradiaciones saltantes de los sábados,  y su donoso cerco de gatos ovalando la ventana lugarteniente,  sutilmente derivada, criatura adormecida y empujada. (V P 200; Dador 12-3)

Once again, Lezama tropes the chain sustancia-voracidad-germen-sustancia as penetration, insemination and (re)generation: “el germen recibe el lanzazo vertical del verbo,” “el verbo sobre el germen se aclara en la sustancia,” “el germen tras la ruptura repele la sustancia” (repeler here means to cast away violently). The transformation is materialized in/as discourse, and its outcome is the emergence of meaning [sentido]: “Después que el verbo y la sustancia traspasaron el germen / el sentido se alzó a la estatua.” Now consider the verses “Sólo la voracidad del germen / se incluye en la identidad de la sustancia.” How is one to interpret this in the context I have outlined so far? If, as I have suggested, el germen is not only “touched” by la voracidad emanating from la sustancia, but also somehow “produces” (“se escurre,” “repele,” “se aclara”) another sustancia whose voracidad “touches” another germen and so on, then it seems as if the only entity preserved in this process (“la identidad de la sustancia”) is la voracidad. This is what gets transmitted from la sustancia to el germen, which then becomes another sustancia, and so on. In other words, the “essence” of this process, what remains identical throughout, corresponds to the attribute of la voracidad. This

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leads to a significant paradox: that which remains identical is what produces constant change. If poetry is a sustancia devoradora, as Lezama described it in his 1944 letter to Vitier, then it appears that “reality” is not preserved in the verbal world of the poem, but quite the opposite: “la identidad de la sustancia” in the space of the poem is precisely la voracidad, the capacity to “devour” reality and configure the verbal world of “la posibilidad infinita” in which anything can become something else (“Porque A=A, éste es aquél”). What remains identical is the possibility of overcoming and destabilizing identity. This is the opening of an uncontrollable discursive proliferation that extends beyond the very possibility of hermeneutic fixity—as the verses quoted earlier put it: “el germen pulula” and “no podemos aprisionar la sucesión de sus señas.” This finally brings me squarely to the question of limit and (im)possibility of exegesis and interpretation. Until now I have constrained—or “repressed”—my analysis of the text by performing an exegetical reading aimed at interpreting the appearance and instantiations of certain concepts borrowed from the sistema poético. While this approach may have clarified the meaning and scope of Lezama’s theory to some extent, it has not addressed the central matter of the resistance to exegesis. On the one hand, the passages examined above partially deal with Lezama’s theory from a thematic point of view, and set in motion a host of tropological elements that serve as figurations of this thematic elaboration. On the other hand, however, my interpretation is insistently interrupted or deviated by figural digressions that undermine the attempt to fix a thematic intentionality. For example, in the lines “el sentido se alzó a la estatua penetrando por la mirada, / y convocando a las irradiaciones saltantes de los sábados / y su donoso cerco de gatos ovalando la ventana lugarteniente,” it is possible to discern a thematic layer: “el sentido” rises as a consequence of the penetration of el germen by “el lanzazo vertical del verbo.” And yet, what can “irradiaciones saltantes de los sábados” or “donoso cerco de gatos ovalando la ventana lugarteniente” possibly mean? Should one necessarily—or can one— interpret these puzzling tropes as part of the thematic development? In other words, can one read them as if they were “vehicles” of a “tenor” expressing some underlying theme or idea, however obscure the links between them? Or should one forgo this hermeneutic supposition, and critically confront the “illegibility” of Lezama’s verses or their radical resistance to interpretation? At this point two clarifications are in order. In the first place, the division I implicitly set forth between “legible” and “illegible” tropes is admittedly artificial; the purpose of this implicit demarcation is heuristic and provisional: to serve as an illustration

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of some of the complications and dilemmas behind the assumptions of a hermeneutical reading of Lezama’s poetry. One should not consider this division to be an attribute of Lezama’s self-reflexive poetics, which, in fact, ultimately works against the possibility of this sort of compartmentalization. Secondly, asserting that a text of modern poetry cannot be reduced to an exegetical reading is a truism. One could say, in principle, that this remainder is present in every text (albeit hidden or repressed in varying modes and degrees depending on how the text is read or used). But what is at issue here is that Lezama’s texts, both thematically (the theory of poetry and culture) and figurally (the intricate tropological networks deployed in them), are constantly and intensively calling attention to and reflecting upon the presence and critical significance of a remainder irreducible to interpretation. Lezama’s poetry does correspond to a highly unusual way of experiencing language. This experience produces an estrangement from ordinary participation in language. Such a distancing opens up a space within which it is possible to engage in critical reflection about how language works and how one represents and makes sense of the world. This reflective activity can take on various, closely-interrelated forms: it can intimate a disclosure of what the usual experience with language hides or represses; it can make visible how tropes help one make sense of the world and how they produce effects of meaning; and finally, it can produce the necessity of conceiving alternate ways of reading that will shift the focus from the apprehension of meaning per se toward experiencing that which lies, in the words of Mutlu Blasing, “both below and above the threshold of figuration” (35). Let me turn now to a closer examination of the question of (il)legibility and exegetical (im)possibility. The last two lines of strophe V read as follows: La aprehensión análoga es el único ojo de la imagen y el acto sobre el azogado ombligo nos rinde el cuerpo irradiante.7 (V P 202; Dador 15)

Apart from the intricate connotations it acquires in the sistema poético, “la imagen” in its simplest definition refers to something one sees. In the first verse above, “la imagen” is also an agent that sees by virtue of the faculty of

7

The figure of “irradiación” also appears in this sentence from “Las imágenes posibles”: “Pues es innegable que entre la jarra y la varilla de marfil, existe una red de imágenes, participadas por el poeta cuando las concibe dentro de una coordenada de irradiaciones” (LLOC 180, emphasis in the original).

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“la aprehensión análoga” (“el único ojo de la imagen”); moreover, this is the only (“único”) faculty that allows la imagen to see. One can read the reference to Narcissistic self-contemplation in the second verse—“azogue” [mercury] alludes to the reflecting film in a mirror—as an elaboration of the reciprocal attributes of la imagen (to see, to be seen), and as an expression of the idea that this self-reflective activity (“acto”) yields or hands over (“nos rinde”) “el cuerpo irradiante.” As I mentioned earlier, Lezama often uses “cuerpo” as a metaphor for the poem; from this follows that the faculty of “aprehensión análoga” is what brings about el cuerpo. Here it is important to recall that, in Lezama’s treatment of the Aristotelian model of metaphor in “Introducción a un sistema poético,” what must be rescued are the latent possibilities of substitution: “es en la región de la poesía donde ‘éste es aquél’, donde es posible reemplazar el escudo de Aquiles por la copa de vino sin vino, éste árbol por aquella hoguera,” and this possibility in turn yields the “análogo de infinitas equivalencias” (LLOC 421‑2)—or what I referred to as the weak sublation of metaphor. This process is precisely what takes places in the verses immediately following the fragment just cited above: El apresamiento del objeto envuelve su nevada cornamenta 1 en el otro brazo que golpea la loanza neptuniana, y lo que secuestra el objeto en la irisación de sus bromas destempladas, es el cínife que rompió el memorial de la mirada en la boca de la jarra. Los ondulantes ceremoniales del áspid trepando por el pecho del vaciado, 5 van desacordando hilacha por escama, gruñidos del barro recogidos por la lanza en el turbante genuflexo de la remera aguadora. La primera sustitución del escudo de Aquiles por la copa sin vino, no obtuvo en su disfraz el objeto en su tegumento selenita, las hilachas y los remolinos se adormecían al tropezar 10 lentamente con la corteza del adolescente dios arbóreo y la semilla en la boca de los muertos enguirnaldó su estornudo. (VI P 202-3; Dador 15-6)

Verses 1-4 shift the attention from the abstractions of “el análogo” and la imagen (which also connote discursivity and visuality) toward the ostensible concreteness suggested by the expression “el apresamiento del objeto.” I say “ostensible” because something strange takes place at the same time. Verses 1-4 stage a tension between, on the one hand, the idea of seizing or the desire to seize the “objeto” (“apresamiento,” “secuestra”), and on the other hand, a figural

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elaboration or “description” of this seizure. This elaboration, paradoxically, dissolves all reference to anything like an “object” or the act of capturing it. The poet constructs the account of “apresamiento del objeto” in verses 1-4 through an extravagant array of figures: “El apresamiento del objeto” appears to carry snow-capped antlers; an arm (whose?) hits the “Neptunian laudation”; this arm embraces [“envuelve,” literally “wraps”] the antlers. What is the referent or “tenor” of “bromas destempladas”? Are they an attribute of “el objeto”? And how can these “bromas” cause “iridescence”? The “explanation” or “description” of what seizes the object (v. 4) is no less striking: it is a mosquito (!) [“cínife”] breaking “el memorial de la mirada.” The overall effect of this digression is to inscribe a radical distancing with the ordinary referents of both “apresar” and “objeto.” These verses enact a metapoetic reflection on a mechanism of referential dissipation: paradoxically, “aprehensión análoga” or “análogo de infinitas equivalencias” means here that “apresamiento del objeto” is unlike any ordinary notion about formulating analogies or grasping an object. This signifying operation constitutes what can be called a hypertrope: a collective activity of extensive and intensive “turning” (cf. Greek trópos) of “sense units”—i.e., words, phrases, their meanings, the themes and images they allude or refer to—so that any referential or conceptual fixity is systematically obliterated. This persistent “turning” or “troping” takes place at various levels—from word to word, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, and so on. Nouns and verbs are modified or qualified by a word or clause that bears no evident relationship—other than grammatical—to its antecedent. Almost every sentence in the passage offers an example of this. The weak sublation of metaphor and its relationship to the hypertrope is further elaborated in verses 8-9, where one finds an illuminating “turn”— redundancy intended—toward Lezama’s appropriation of Aristotle’s definition of metaphor. Recall the phrase in the Poetics (1457b) “suppose you call the shield not ‘Ares’ cup’ but a ‘wineless cup,’” which is rendered in “Introducción a un sistema poético” as “[e]s en la región de la poesía donde ‘éste es aquél’, donde es posible reemplazar el escudo de Aquiles por la copa de vino sin vino” (LLOC 421). This expression appears again in “Dador” as: “La primera sustitución del escudo de Aquiles por la copa sin vino” (cf. verse 8 in the passage quoted above). This line in “Dador” stages a fascinating mise en abîme: it is a quotation from a passage in one of the essays on the sistema poético, which in turn corresponds to the definition of metaphor in Aristotle’s Poetics. Each one of these stages—and the phrase from the Poetics inserted therein—corresponds to

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a different order of discourse: Aristotle’s phrase has traversed a path that departs from the Classical treatise on rhetoric, is appropriated by the visionary—and often characterized as “Neobaroque”—theory of culture and poetics expressed in the sistema poético, and then inserted into the hypertropic poem. The mise en abîme in this verse of “Dador” thus illustrates the whole idea of sublation of metaphor: the historical and critical path that extends from Aristotle’s definition of metaphor in the Poetics, to the essay “Introducción a un sistema poético,” and to the hypertropic poem “Dador.” And there is more. Immediately afterwards, Lezama radically imagines the consequences of pushing the “infinite possibility”—the faculty, the potentiality, the potens (to use his Plutarchian neologism)—of saying “éste es aquél” to its utmost limits. Lines 8-9 read: La primera sustitución del escudo de Aquiles por la copa sin vino, no obtuvo en su disfraz el objeto en su tegumento selenita.

What can this possibly mean? By examining these two lines in relation to the whole passage quoted above (VI P 202-3, vv. 1-12; Dador 15-6), one begins to see how this bizarre conceit encapsulates Lezama’s theory as a whole. This can be seen in two interrelated ways. First, the conceit displays, rephrasing Paul de Man, the temporality of Lezama’s rhetoric. For the sake of clarity, I will quote again the verses 1-4 from strophe VI: El apresamiento del objeto envuelve su nevada cornamenta en el otro brazo que golpea la loanza neptuniana, y lo que secuestra el objeto en la irisación de sus bromas destempladas, es el cínife que rompió el memorial de la mirada en la boca de la jarra.

This passage describes the “seizing” of the “object” (“apresamiento del objeto,” “lo que secuestra el objeto”), and enunciates this action in the present tense. Within the world of the poem, then, the “seizing” of the “object” is a “current” or “actual” event. A few lines after, the image of “seizing” an “object” reappears but in a negative sentence and in the past tense: “La primera sustitución del escudo de Aquiles por la copa sin vino / no obtuvo en su disfraz el objeto en su tegumento selenita.” The two passages present an opposition between, on the one hand, the current accomplishment of the apresamiento, and on the other hand, the past failure of the “primera sustitución del escudo de Aquiles por la

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copa sin vino,” and remarkably this failed sustitución (curiously characterized as a “disfraz”) corresponds precisely to Aristotle’s definition of metaphor in the Poetics—the Classical tropological paradigm of transferring the name of something to something else on the basis of the preexisting, substantial attributes of the referents. The apresamiento could not be attained in the past (a “past” figured by no less than Aristotle’s Poetics), but is eventually achieved and materialized in the hypertrope of vv. 1-4: hence, paradoxically, the objeto is grasped—apresado, secuestrado, envuelto—in a verbal space where all referential coherence is destroyed. And this leads me to the second point. What could not be done in the past—namely, “[obtener] el objeto en su tegumento selenita”—is, as I indicated earlier, eventually achieved in the “present” world of the poem. Therefore, seizing the object in this verbal space corresponds precisely to endowing it with attributes—“tegumento selenita,” “nevada cornamenta” (!)—that, paradoxically, turns us away (cf. tropós) from any conceptualization or reference to a concrete or abstract “object.” The logic of the hypertrope breaks down the distinction between the literal and the figural, or put in other terms, between vehicle and tenor. Unlike “wineless cup” = “Ares’ shield” or “sowing the god-created fire” = “sunshine,” to borrow two examples from Aristotle’s Poetics, an expression like “el objeto en su tegumento selenita” does not seem to have another, “figural” meaning; one could even argue that the existence of such a meaning is not even intended. “El objeto en su tegumento selenita”—like many of the numerous tropes in “Dador” and other poems by Lezama—does not mean something else. One commonly experiences and thinks of metaphor as a speech act in which the metaphorist (the speaker, the writer) produces an expression that: (i) is not intended to be taken literally, but (ii) is intended to convey another, “figural,” meaning(s). In ordinary communication, the metaphor is “felicitous,” to use J. L. Austin’s term, insofar as the listener/ reader grasps its intentions and understands its other meaning(s) (in some cases the listener may even come up with additional meanings not necessarily intended by the metaphorist). What I wish to underscore here is that there are significant differences between this way of experiencing language and the experience afforded by a text like “Dador.” In Lezama’s poem, the poet radically subverts the common idea of metaphor as transferring the name of one thing to another. “Tegument” and “Selenite” certainly have defined referents, but into what exactly are they being transferred? What is the tenor or figural meaning of “el objeto en su tegumento selenita”? The difficulty increases uncontrollably precisely because what takes place in the text is not simply the occasional appearance of isolated juxtapositions of two

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or more “odd” or “incompatible” signifiers; rather, as I have shown, what takes place is a process in which the poet is constantly “turning” or “troping” the discourse, from word to word, from sentence to sentence, and so on. At every level, the text is constituted by “sense units” linked grammatically and syntactically in a standard way, but not (or not necessarily at least) thematically or semantically. What the verses intend is not exactly a “metaphorical” meaning in the ordinary sense, but rather a hypertrop(hi)ed order of discourse, one in which a deliberate, tropological density reaches a point from which it becomes practically impossible to conceive something like a “transfer” [epiphora] from the literal to another, “figural” or “metaphorical” meaning; a transfer that would somehow organize and stabilize the meaning of the text considered as an organic whole. This last statement requires an important qualification: I am neither claiming that the text is plain nonsense nor denying that the reader is engaged in trying to make sense of the text and come up with instances of meaning. Quite the contrary. The text is constituted by grammatical expressions and existing words with semantic content, and the reader is actively pursuing and extracting references, significations, images and thoughts from the text. I am only suggesting that in the experience of language opened up by a text like “Dador,” the expressions—grammatical and with semantic content—that constitute the text do not point collectively toward another meaning arrived at through interpretation. What is distinctive in this experience of language is its extremely narrow horizon of hermeneutical expectations. Consider the following sentence (cf. VI vv. 5-7 P 202-3 quoted above): “Los ondulantes ceremoniales del áspid trepando por el pecho del vaciado / van desacordando hilacha por escama, gruñidos del barro / recogidos por la lanza en el turbante genuflexo de la remera aguadora.” The expression is grammatical and has a determinate semantic content, and one can even attempt to interpret it and identify various allusions to Ancient Egyptian art and myth. And yet, if one does not consider the sentence in isolation, but puts it back into the poem and attempts to establish a coherent, organic interpretive network in conjunction with its other components—other verses and strophes, expressions like “tegumento selenita,” el germen, the Aristotelian mise en abîme, the metapoetic reflection on the “apresamiento del objeto,” and so on—then one comes to a standstill. A text like “Dador” submits and subjects the reader to an experience of language in which the original and constitutive assumption of hermeneutics is suspended. There exists an aggregate of “local” logoi, but they cannot be collectively and coherently “transferred” to another meaning via interpretation—what we have here is a paradoxical (il)legible logos.

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It is critical to emphasize the significance and role of logos and aggregate in this context. First, barring some occasional syntactic or semantic eccentricities, Lezama’s poems are usually composed of grammatical expressions with a determinate semantic content. As I mentioned earlier the verbal experimentations of avant-garde literature are conspicuously absent in Lezama: the “illegibility” of a text like “Dador” is very different from, for example, that of Huidobro’s Altazor or Vallejo’s Trilce, not to mention the compositions wholly removed from the realm of logos, like Futurist or Dada poetry. A distinctive trait of a substantial part of Lezama’s poetic corpus is this puzzling experience of a radical break with the possibility of hermeneutics, but this break takes place within the basic principles of meaningful expression. Second, I have described a structure consisting of localized logoi or “sense units” from which it is practically impossible to devise a coherent transfer to another meaning that makes available a global, organic interpretation of the whole. My use of “aggregate” to characterize this heterogeneous structure is deliberate insofar as I want to establish a sharp differentiation from the idea of the “fragmentary.” The OED provides the following two acceptations of “fragment”: (1) “A part broken off or otherwise detached from a whole; a broken piece; a (comparatively) small detached portion of anything”; and (2) “a detached, isolated, or incomplete part; a (comparatively) small portion of anything; a part remaining or still preserved when the whole is lost or destroyed.” A fragment—or a collection thereof—supposes a previous state of unity; “aggregate,” on the other hand, does not. My use of “aggregate” here seeks to convey the idea of a radical heterogeneity. I contend that a text like “Dador” is non-fragmentary precisely because there is no “whole” or “unity” that is either intended or posited but that somehow has been lost, destroyed, hidden or forgotten. The only “whole” is the text itself. I have already argued that in “Dador” (and this applies to some other poems by Lezama as well), there is no such thing as another meaning that is intended in principle, and such that the act of reading and interpreting the poem “succeeds” once one comes up with that other meaning. Hermeneutics may be practicable, but only within the very narrow horizon of the local logoi that compose the text as an aggregate. Insofar as these speculative (micro-) interpretations cannot cohere collectively, the text suspends the more general possibility of defining a stable, organic interpretive horizon. The idea of the aggregate allows one to understand this in a radical sense: Lezama’s most hermetic poetry does not refer to another, all encompassing meaning—a whole instantiated by its fragments—that in principle exists or should be posited but is ineffable or cannot be apprehended (as is the case, to

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borrow some well-known examples, the Kantian thing-in-itself, or the Absolute of the idealist and Romantic traditions). The difficulty, resistance or illegibility of Lezama’s poem is not due to the limitation of producing a meaning that is there in principle but out of reach. And there is no need to posit or intend such a meaning either. In this regard, there is neither a metaphysics nor a performativity of the Absolute: Lezama’s poem is neither noumenal nor fragmentary. I argue that “Dador”—and this is the general case in Lezama’s “hermetic” poetry—is not and does not intend to be something “ineffable” or something said “otherwise”: the hypertrop(hi)ed discourse means just what the words say.8 If the two constitutive properties of hypertrop(hi)ed discourse are suspending the possibility of hermeneutics, and meaning “just what the words say,” then one must make an important distinction between Lezama’s poetry and the mytho-poetic thought of Lezama’s essays. Despite the difficulty and bewildering rhetorical and erudite density that saturates Lezama’s essays, they remain within and subject to the ordinary expectations of hermeneutic practice. One arrives at the metaphysical, linguistic, historical and cultural speculations expressed in Lezama’s essays through interpretation, and more importantly, Lezama expressly intended that the sistema be interpreted and understood.9 The reader’s acts of interpretation do arrive at meanings, ideas and intimations not necessarily or consciously intended by Lezama (it is even likely that Lezama himself would have been happy with this), but that nonetheless belong to the orbit of his thought. In the case of Lezama’s essays, I am limiting my use of the term “intention” to the implicit requirement of submitting the text to a cohesive interpretation in order to derive something else—the “content” or “substance” of Lezama’s thought. As I have argued, however, this is not necessarily the case of the verbal experience afforded by poems like “Dador.” Even though one can and does perform local interpretations and even establishes connections with the ideas and concepts of the sistema poético, the hypertropic poem is constantly calling attention to the ostentation of a rhetorical excess that renders 8



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This is akin to what L. M. Isava calls “unsublatable text”: “a text that can only be preserved ‘as is,’” and one in which meaning must be conceived necessarily “as a unique case of verbal strings” (164, emphasis in the original). My presentation of the hypertrope is deeply indebted to Isava’s work. One should understand “intention” here only in the narrow sense of the intention to be interpreted: the text expresses certain ideas and concepts that Lezama’s work expresses, and one can arrive at these ideas and concepts through interpretation, but this should not be confused with the attempt to “reconstruct” an “original” corpus of ideas that Lezama consciously ­intended.

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a cohesive interpretation virtually impossible, by means of an extensive and intensive “turning” (cf. Greek trópos) of units of sense that suspends any referential or conceptual fixity. Unlike Lezama’s essays, one can “thematicize” Lezama’s hypertropic poetry only in a very narrow or superficial sense.10 In the first part of my analysis of “Dador,” I attempted to establish a connection between the concepts of the sistema poético and the text of the poem, but in the end this critical approach revealed both the scope and limitations of thematic criticism. As I have shown, the sistema poético does not serve to “explain” Lezama’s hypertropic poem, or it does so in only a limited and simplified way that does not and cannot fully account for the non hermeneutic supplement of Lezama’s poetry. And it is this dimension, the paradoxical (il)legible logos, that makes the verbal experience of Lezama’s poetry really unique. The analysis and consideration of the metaphysical and cultural speculations that permeate Lezama’s thought are necessary bases for contextualizing and understanding Lezama’s poetry, but they are by no means sufficient. In order to fully grasp the critical import of Lezama’s poetry, it is necessary to distance oneself from and go beyond the thematic extension and explanatory potential of Lezama’s own thought, as well as to challenge any “explanatory” protocol or method that attempts to “say” Lezama’s poetic text “otherwise.” The hypertrop(hi)ed discourse implies both a suspension of the possibility of hermeneutics and a meaning restricted to “just The tension between the possibility of hermeneutics and its suspension is visible in the anxiety transpired by Yurkiévich’s commentary of “Dador.” The Argentine critic assumes that there exists an allegorical-symbolic meaning in the poem. He not only says this explicitly, but it is evinced by his glosses on the various sections of the poem. And yet, these glosses do not go beyond mere paraphrases of longer sections of the poem or very local interpretations that do not cohere into a unified whole. At the same time, Yurkiévich claims that in Lezama’s text symbols are “en constante éxodo analógico, tránsfugas en deleitosa evasión metafórica” (“La risueña obscuridad” 191), thereby implicitly acknowledging the hermeneutical impasse staged by the hypertropic proliferation. Yurkiévich does not fully engage with the consequences of this impasse. He seems to posit that there exists or ought to exist “another” (symbolic, allegorical, metaphorical) meaning, that the hermeneutical horizon and expectations are open in principle, but that he is simply unable to grasp this meaning given the poem’s “deleitosa evasión metafórica.” Hence, he paradoxically views the text of the poem as an obstacle to understanding. As I explained above, my own reading of “Dador” does not make such assumptions. Another approach to the tension of the possibility and suspension of hermeneutics appears in Ramón Xirau’s “Lezama Lima o la fe poética.” The value of Xirau’s study lies in his placing Lezama’s thought in relation to Christian theology and the Patristic tradition. However, his resolution of Lezama’s hermetism as an expression of a theologicomystical allegory falls short of engaging with the text’s linguistic experience and its theoretical consequences.

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what the words say” precisely insofar as the intensive and extensive mechanism of the hypertrope is constantly moving and distancing the reader from any cohesive theme or interpretation. In the end, this implies a distancing of the “content” expressed in Lezama’s thought (the metaphysical, cultural, and historical theorizations) from the linguistic experience of his most hermetic poetry.

Metaphor and the Hypertrope According to Donald Davidson Most modern theories of metaphor coincide in claiming that metaphor cannot be paraphrased. Even in the ordinary uses of metaphor, various aesthetics and cognitive effects occur that are irreducible to a substitute in the form of paraphrase or gloss. One can argue that this is precisely what gives tropes their specific identity and function in discourse. The components of the hypertrop(hi)ed order of discourse obviously share this property, but their particular attributes extend even further, especially when understood as interacting elements of what I characterized earlier as the text-as-aggregate. As such, one needs to distinguish between metaphor’s property of non-paraphrasability and the properties of the aggregate rhetorical activity I call the hypertrope—meaning just what the words say and suspending the possibility of hermeneutics. On the one hand, nonparaphrasability does not preclude the possibility of hermeneutic closure. We constantly interpret metaphors and derive meanings from them. Elaborated theories of metaphor that thoroughly investigate their aesthetic dimension do posit that metaphor has a meaning that can be reached through interpretation. On the other hand, the components of the hypertrop(hi)ed discourse—including the sublated tropes theorized by Lezama in “Introducción a un sistema poético”—cannot be paraphrased either, but unlike ordinary metaphor, once these components interact among themselves and form the text-as-aggregate, the overall effect is the collapse of the possibility of ascertaining an organic hermeneutic horizon. Under the hypertrop(hi)ed order of discourse, “meaning just what the words say” (which is, paradoxically, literal discourse in the narrowest sense) entails the impossibility of paraphrase, and also the narrowing of hermeneutic expectations to the point where interpretation must remain in a state of suspension. This distinction has important theoretical implications that I will identify in the discussion that follows. To do so, I make the admittedly risky decision

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to turn to a theoretical model of metaphor from the field of Anglo-American philosophy of language. Donald Davidson’s “What Metaphors Mean” is among the most discussed and debated contemporary treatments of metaphor. By examining Davidson’s thesis on metaphor and some of the criticisms it has received, I hope to shed light on the tropological order of discourse that Lezama mobilizes in his poetry. My analysis will also provide insights in the opposite direction, suggesting how the peculiar workings of Lezama’s resistant text can illuminate aspects of the debates about metaphor that have arisen as a result of Davidson’s hypothesis. Going over these debates will allow me to revisit the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter concerning the weak sublation of the Aristotelian model of metaphor and its consequences. Davidson’s basic thesis is as simple as it is contrary to received wisdom: “metaphors mean what the words, in their most literal interpretation, mean, and nothing more” (Davidson 30). In the first part of his essay, Davidson attacks commonly held views of metaphor (30-9). His objective is to prove that, contrary to the usual theoretical assertions about it, there exists within metaphor no such thing as transference, amplification, ambiguity or coexistence of two different levels of meaning, one literal, and another figurative, metaphorical or special. According to Davidson, the meaning of a metaphorical expression is simply and nothing more than the literal and ordinary meaning of the words.11 One preliminary and important consequence of his thesis is that metaphors are non paraphrasable; strictly speaking, a metaphor is not something said otherwise. Davidson argues that conceiving metaphor in terms of meaning is a basic error, since metaphors are not propositional in character; they simply mean what words literally mean, and therefore practically always yield false propositions: A fundamental point in Davidson’s argument is that meaning takes place only in language. For Davidson, meaning is a faculty exclusively confined to words, and is not anchored in external, nonlinguistic entities or phenomena. For example, in his study on metaphor, John Searle distinguishes between the “word, or sentence, meaning” and the “speaker’s utterance meaning” which stems from the intentions of the speaker (249-50). For Davidson, meaning can only be “word”- or “sentence”-meaning, and he therefore rejects the idea that one can ascribe meaning to things like contexts or intentions. According to Richard Rorty, the signficant breakthrough of Davidson’s theory of language consists precisely in its rejection of the idea of language as a “medium… either of representation or of expression” (Rorty 10, emphasis in the original), and more precisely, “[t]he idea that there are nonlinguistic things called ‘meanings’ which it is the task of language to express, as well as the idea that there are nonlinguistic things called ‘facts’ which it is the task of language to represent” (Rorty 13). This and other aspects of Davidson’s philosophy of language have received considerable attention from the field of literary theory and criticism. See especially Dasenbrock and Wheeler.

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“my heart is on fire” or “those lawyers are sharks” cannot be literally true. For Davidson, if one thinks of metaphors in terms of their meaning, they cannot lead one any further than conveying false statements. But then, what is a metaphor? What makes an expression “metaphorical”? The answer, according to Davidson, is not meaning, but use (31). Metaphor is a certain way to use words in order to cause certain effects; metaphor “makes us see one thing as another by making some literal statement that inspires or prompts the insight” (45). Metaphorical expressions are endowed with a certain power that makes one see or understand things in ways that are new or different from those that ordinary predication may elicit. But, Davidson insists, one should not confuse this “insight” with meaning. Metaphor is a certain way of using words, and this obviously depends on what the words mean. However, words do not acquire or produce another meaning when used metaphorically; rather, they produce certain effects, and these effects are not propositional (Moran calls them “nonassertoric effects” 98). According to Davidson, then, metaphor contains not meaning but a certain “rhetorical force” (Wheeler 94): in concrete situations, the speaker intends his or her utterance to draw the listener’s (“speaker” and “listener” can also correspond to “writer” and “reader”) attention to certain similarities, connections, intimations, emphases, etc., that make him/her appreciate or discover certain facts. Metaphor, understood as use, causes these discoveries, but they do not constitute the metaphor’s meaning; for Davidson, only words have meaning: intentions, uses, contexts of utterance, or non-verbal entities like “facts” or “empirical reality” do not. In actual communication, the “felicitous”—as put by J. L. Austin—metaphorical speech act consists of a speaker uttering an expression (usually literally false) in a certain context and situation, and intending a certain rhetorical force. The listener apprehends this intentionality, and then does not take the expression literally but rather uses it to grasp or recognize some fact. The rhetorical force depends on multiple factors: the meaning of the words, the intention of the speaker, the moment and context of the utterance, the listener’s beliefs, etc. These are different in each situation and in principle cannot be controlled by the listener or the speaker. In consequence, as Davidson acknowledges, there is no such thing as a fixed protocol to understand or “decode” metaphorical expressions. Moreover, what the listener appreciates or discovers need not be coincident with what the speaker intended; in certain situations, and this is usually the case with poetry, the metaphorist’s intention may well be to let the listener discover new and unintended connections. To sum up, then, Davidson argues that: (a) metaphor is a way of using words; (b) the

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utterance is determined by a certain “rhetorical force” that causes certain effects in the listener/ reader; (c) these effects are non-propositional; (d) there is no such thing as a “metaphorical” or “figurative” meaning distinct from the literal meaning of the words; (e) the meaning of the metaphor is only what the words mean in the ordinary sense, and as such, metaphors are normally understood as literally false; and (f ) metaphors cannot be paraphrased. Not surprisingly, Davidson’s model has stirred considerable debate, and I will discuss some of the criticism it has received in a moment.12 To begin with, let me point out the similarities between the properties that characterize the hypertrope and the attributes that Davidson ascribes to metaphorical expressions. In the hypertrope, there is a use of language that is not concerned with predication, but with producing certain effects (suggestions, intimations, feelings, intuitions). In this use of language, the reader/listener should not assume there is another, “metaphorical” meaning being conveyed: the expression means what the words say. Independently of whether or not one accepts Davidson’s account of metaphor at face value—and I do not intend to debate the issue here—his concept of metaphor has significant resonances with what I call the hypertrope. Does this simply mean that the hypertrope is an extreme case of “exotic” metaphor à la Davidson? Answering with a straightforward “yes” will not do, for there are certain qualifications that must be taken into account, and as I shall show in what follows, they are of capital importance for making sense of the particular experience of Lezama’s poems and gaining insight into what this experience reveals about ideas commonly held about tropes. Generally speaking, theories of metaphor tend to focus in one way or another on two main issues: one is content, or what is being asserted, stated, or predicated in a metaphorical expression; the other is how that content is expressed, how metaphorical expression is different from “literal” expression, and how the two forms of expression relate to one another (this division is inherited from the Aristotelian distinction between dialectic and rhetoric). Both of these issues point to the effects conveyed by metaphorical expression Critiques of Davidson’s model range from outright rejection to amended versions that tacitly accept its premises but infer conclusions that Davidson did not consider. See for example Black, “How Metaphors Work: A Reply to Donald Davidson”; Moran; Wheeler 88-117; and Goodman 222-4. Adding something to this debate or formulating a critique of Davidson’s model is totally outside the scope of this work. I will limit myself to examining certain issues raised by Davidson’s model and by some of its critics because this will be helpful to get a clearer grasp of the experience of language that occurs in Lezama’s poetry.

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in general. Many theories of metaphor place emphasis on the aspect of assertion by assuming that metaphor expresses some content or meaning—call it “figurative meaning” or “tenor.” One derives or obtains this meaning by means of interpretation, and what makes the metaphorical speech act felicitous is precisely the apprehension of this meaning. In contrast, Davidson’s approach shifts the emphasis from the pole of assertion to the pole of effect. Metaphor is not about communicating another meaning, different from the literal; rather, it is about using words to cause certain effects—effects that can produce relevant intimations, insights, or emotions, but that do not, according to Davidson, belong to the domain of meaning or cognition. If assertion corresponds only to the literal meaning of the words, then practically every case of metaphor must be a proposition that is trivially false. In the case of Lezama, one might be tempted to say simply that the hypertrope is a radical instantiation of the attributes that Davidson ascribes to metaphor, and to thus characterize hypertrope as being purely about nonassertoric effects: i.e., the meaning of the hypertrope is exactly what the words say; hence it cannot be paraphrased and does not refer to “another” meaning. One might say that what differentiates the hypertrope from ordinary or literal predication is its being a use of words with a deliberate intention to forego the communication of “content” and foreground rhetorical force (where “force” or “effect” are different from meaning). Moreover, it would be in this dimension of force and nonassertoric effect where one can locate the non-hermeneutical aspect of the Lezamian experience of language. However, I submit that such a straightforward application of Davidson’s model does not present the whole story. The hypertrope is not only an instantiation of nonassertoric effects pure and simple. I would argue that the experience of the (il)legible logos—mobilized by the army of hypertropes—is not so much concerned with privileging the role of effect at the expense of assertion, or with considering them individually; rather, this experience calls one’s attention to the distancing between assertion and effect that is constitutive of any tropological event. This distance, necessarily inscribed in every trope, is the aspect that the hypertrope renders visible and that existing theories of metaphor have so far overlooked. What is this distance? How can one understand it? Let me present two different critiques of Davidson’s model that will prove useful in answering these questions. The first observation is raised by Richard Moran (104-9), who argues that in order to fully understand a metaphor, Davidson’s model needs to incorporate some notion of the preliminary “beliefs” (108) about the metaphorical

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utterance and its context. The second critique is raised by John Wheeler, who argues that the division Davidson’s model posits between normal predications that can be true, and metaphorical expressions that are almost always false, is untenable if one pushes Davidson’s own model to its ultimate consequences. I will discuss each of these two critiques separately and then draw some conclusions that will shed further light on what I have called the hypertrope and the weak sublation of metaphor. Davidson asserts that metaphors have no propositional content, other than what the words literally say: metaphors are primarily about effect, and there is no such thing as figurative meaning. In his critique of Davidson’s theory, Moran observes that, in practice, (1) one can recognize a metaphorical expression and deny it (for example: “your heart is not on fire because you don’t really love her” or “those lawyers are not sharks because they have been acquiescent with the prosecution”); and (2) one can also understand or misunderstand a metaphor (in fact, Davidson speaks of “understanding” metaphor in his essay). But how can one understand, misunderstand, or deny something that is not a proposition? While Moran sees the potential usefulness in accepting Davidson’s rejection of metaphor as a “change” or “transfer” of meaning, he argues that it is problematic to think that metaphor is only defined by its “force” or “nonassertoric effect,” given that one can misunderstand or deny expressions already acknowledged as metaphorical. In metaphor there must be something else at work besides “effect” and a proposition that is usually trivially false. According to Moran what is missing from Davidson’s model is a consideration of “the dimension of the beliefs that prompt the comparison in the first place” (108, emphasis added). In principle, notes Moran, anything can be “like” something else (Baroque rhetoricians knew this well and tried to accommodate it according to the precepts of Aristotelian logic); the possibility of establishing analogical links among words—hearts and fire, lawyers and sharks—is endless. Therefore, the very possibility of understanding or misunderstanding a metaphorical expression is predicated upon the prior existence of something like a preliminary “selection”— from among the infinite number of possible analogies between two or more words—of those aspects that are pertinent or applicable for the purpose of communication and understanding (note the similarity with Ricœur’s notion of travail du sens). In the “those lawyers are sharks” example, one must necessarily have a previous sense of which attributes of “lawyers” and “sharks” are relevant for understanding the metaphor. This preliminary selection depends on the specific context of the utterance and on the listener’s

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assumptions about the intention of the speaker. However, as Moran also points out, these “initiating beliefs” are by no means the sole determinants of the process of producing and interpreting the metaphor as a whole; such beliefs serve as a necessary and preliminary guide, but the listener does go beyond them, often in “unanticipated directions” (109). One may arrive at intimations or suggestions that the speaker did not intend or imagine. In the end, metaphor becomes an exploration of and a perspective on “the world” (109), not on the intentions of the speaker. The existence of preliminary beliefs that select, out of an infinite number of possibilities, the relevant features of the analogy in order to “get right” or understand the point of the metaphor, suggests that, contrary to Davidson’s radical view, a felicitous metaphor necessarily conveys some type of cognitive content. Otherwise, argues Moran, there is no metaphor but only the “empty exercise of keeping two things together in mind” out of the “endless trivial ways in which one thing can be like another” (106). And yet, to what extent is this exercise necessarily “trivial” and “empty”? To put it in Lezamian terms, is the posibilidad infinita of “éste es aquél” ultimately “trivial” and “empty”? Let me now turn to a consideration of Moran’s idea of “initiating beliefs” in relation to the tropes I identified in “Dador.” As I showed in my reading of the poem, the central feature of the hypertrop(hi)ed order of discourse is the presence of a basic tension between interpretation and its impossibility. This becomes manifest at several levels and in different ways. First, our hermeneutical horizons and expectations are unusually narrowed down when reading a text like “Dador.” Interpretation goes no further than local “sense units” that do not cohere into a collective, organic whole; the “sense units” vary in extension, from micro-conceits like “tegumento selenita” occurring at the level of the noun and modifier, to whole groups of verses or strophes. A second manifestation of this tension is the absence of intentionality to produce or interpretatively derive “another” meaning that would give coherency and organicity to metaphoric proliferation. As a result, any thematic approach to a poem like “Dador” is radically curtailed. One could argue that the central theoretical lesson derived from placing thematic criticism in dialogue with “Dador” and other hermetic Lezamian poems is precisely the critique of the assumptions, scope and results of the thematic approach to the literary text. And thirdly, we have the paradox of illegibility within logos; i.e., the breakdown of the possibility of interpretation and hermeneutics occurring precisely within the space of grammatical expressions with semantic content (this is the key difference between illegibility

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in Lezama’s poetry and illegibility in avant-garde experimentation). All these aspects of the dialectics of interpretation and its impossibility, of legibility and its failure, are indicators of what I characterized earlier as the distance between assertion and effect: the verbal experience of the hypertrop(hi)ed discourse takes place in this gap and makes the gap visible. The “initiating belief ” of the Lezamian hypertrope opens this rift, which is a hovering between, on the one hand, the expectations of interpretation, the tacit assumption that one can initially “select” the relevant aspects of the analogy in order to understand and “get the metaphor right”; and on the other hand, the breakdown of this assumption and, consequently, the encounter with an aesthetic experience that leaves all hermeneutic possibility in a state of “suspense,” so to speak. Insofar as it occurs within the space of logos, the hypertrop(ie)d order of discourse subjects one to the expectations and demands of ordinary, meaningful discourse, but it simultaneously distances one from any successful resolution of such assumptions. This peculiar aesthetic experience is marked by anxiety, not only because it effectively undermines the reader’s ordinary expectations (to borrow Lezama’s paraphrase of Valéry’s comment on Mallarmé I mentioned in the introduction: in order to read Lezama, one has to learn to read anew), but more importantly, because the reader does not simply renounce the possibility of meaning altogether and dismiss the text as plain nonsense. Acknowledging the “non interpretable” or “non-hermeneutic” dimension of Lezama’s poetry corresponds to an immersion in the space of effect, and a progressive—and anxiety-laden—distancing from the space of assertion, theme and coherent interpretation; and yet, this experience remains confined to the space of logos and the expectations of meaningful expressions. For this reason, locating the hypertrope solely on the plane of effect would be inaccurate, and it is here where confronting Davidson’s model with its critics proves revealing. If one accepts Davidson’s model at face value, then the hypertrope can be read as a radical instantiation of the attributes he ascribes to metaphor: a trope concerned only with effect, meaning only what the words literally mean, and therefore trivially conveying false propositions. Following Davidson’s model, recognizing the expression as a metaphor implies an almost exclusive focus on its effects; the only meaning of the expression is just its literal meaning, and this usually corresponds to a false proposition. On the other hand, however, if one assumes that the metaphor expresses and intends some type of cognitive content that supplements the literal meaning of the expression (even though this content need not be construed as “figurative meaning”) and that this content is necessarily included in the metaphoric process and its

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theorization, then the aesthetic and theoretical dimension of the Lezamian hypertrope becomes clearer. This dimension corresponds to a hovering between effect and the assertion of content—a hovering that makes visible the distance between the two and produces an aesthetic experience (anxiety, pleasure, or wonder) that delves deeper into the very structure of tropes in general. Davidson’s model of metaphor has been revealing for my analysis of the verbal experience of Lezama’s poetry, especially given its emphasis on the nonassertoric effects of metaphor (its “non interpretable” dimension) and its particular take on the constitution of metaphor’s meaning (nothing but what the words literally say). However, Moran’s critique has demonstrated that Davidson’s model cannot provide a full account of what I have called the hypertrope, for reducing metaphor to pure effect at the expense of assertion fails to take into account the issue of the distance between the two. There must be something else besides “the literal meaning of words”: this is not “another” or “figurative” meaning, but a host of beliefs and expectations about what is relevant in order to achieve a felicitous metaphorical speech act; a speech act that necessarily conveys some type of cognitive content. The hypertrope is not concerned only with effects, for the experience of the hypertrope does acknowledge the necessity of certain expectations and beliefs (which do not constitute any meaning in and of themselves) in order to “get the metaphor right.” This is the paradox of the (il)legible logos: since the linguistic experience of Lezama’s hermetic text occurs on the plane of meaningful discourse, certain beliefs and hermeneutical expectations do exist, but at the same time these beliefs are ultimately undermined and rendered ineffective by that same experience. The hypertrope does not simply forgo assertion and become pure effect; rather, it hovers between one and the other. This “position,” so to speak, affords a new perspective on how the phenomenon of the hypertrope effectively breaks down the expectations and assumptions of the hermeneutic: other than “just what the words say,” the hypertrope is not asserting any “figurative” meaning (to echo Isava, it is an “unsublatable text”); and neither is there any synthesis of assertion and effect, insofar as the hypertrope corresponds to the presentation of the distance between one and the other. Davidson’s theory and its critics can also shed light on the process I described at the beginning of this chapter as the weak sublation of the Aristotelian paradigm of metaphor and the attendant liquidation of the empirical and ontological substratum upon which it is founded. Recall that for Davidson the meaning of metaphors is nearly always false. This belief stems from his assumption that

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metaphors bear no meaning other than the literal meaning of the words; and indeed, he argues that it is this very fact that allows one to recognize an utterance as metaphorical. To put it in more intuitive terms, the reason one does not understand metaphors “literally” is precisely because they are metaphors. If I were to say to someone, “those lawyers are sharks,” the listener and I would know that what I asserted is literally false while recognizing the expression as metaphorical. For Davidson, the proposition is false—like metaphor in general—but it might nonetheless express something relevant about lawyers that cannot be said otherwise. Philosopher Samuel C. Wheeler accepts the basic premises of Davidson’s model of metaphorical language, but rejects the conclusion that the meaning of metaphors is usually false (Wheeler 95). Wheeler points out that Davidson’s claim about the necessary falsity of metaphorical expressions implies an essential division between ordinary assertions that have propositional content and can be true, understood, affirmed or denied, and expressions for which this does not apply, such as metaphors. Wheeler finds this problematic. To start, he notes that this demarcation fails to distinguish between “live” metaphor and “dead” metaphor or catachresis. Consider the expression, “The leg of the table is broken.” Is this expression necessarily false? And if not, when did “leg of the table” cease to be a metaphor? And more importantly, Wheeler argues that the division in question between ordinary proposition and metaphor conflicts with two underlying premises of Davidson’s own philosophy of language: (a) the conception of meaning as a phenomenon that is purely linguistic (i.e., meaning is restricted to “word- or sentence-meaning,” as indicated in note 11); and (b) Davidson’s skepticism toward the idea of a “magic language” (Wheeler 3)—a (meta)language of transcendent markers or entities that reveal the truth without the need of mediation or interpretation, like Platonic forms or Aristotelian nous, for example (Wheeler notes that such an skepticism is shared by theorists as diverse as Wittgenstein, Quine and Derrida). Wheeler then proposes a revision of Davidson’s model in which he carries the assumptions about “word-meaning” and the non-existence of a “magic language” to their ultimate consequences. In his “amended Davidsonism” (107-13), Wheeler argues that one cannot make any essential distinction between “routine predication and exotic metaphors,” but must view them rather as “end points on a continuum” (111); and that one can only think of distinctions between the literal and the figural, or between live and dead metaphor in terms of degree, not as absolute divisions. In the end, he concludes, “the notion of genuine metaphor has no rigorous theoretical definition” (111), and there are

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no algorithms to deduce whether an expression is metaphorical or not, or how one can interpret it beyond simply saying that it is literally false. Wheeler’s critique of the Davidsonian demarcation between ordinary (i.e., non-metaphorical) statements that can be true and metaphorical statements which are almost always false (precisely because they are metaphors), relates to my earlier critique of another division that is no less problematic: that between proper metaphors based on a priori objective relationships among things, and aberrant or absurd tropes that do not represent any “real’” analogy. If one assumes—as Davidson and Wheeler do—that there is no such thing as a primordial, self-interpreting language that is already a motivated representation of the world, and that meaning is a property limited to words—i.e., meaning is not an attribute of extra-linguistic aspects like intentions, contexts of utterance, or properties of things (these aspects are necessary for understanding and apprehending meaning in a given situation, but neither constitute meaning per se nor determine it univocally)—then analogous relationships always occur among words, not things; and any predication or conceptualization is always already embedded in and “contaminated” by rhetoric. In this sense the bizarre conceits found in a poem like “Dador” are not essentially different from calling old age “the evening of life,” to use a familiar example from Aristotle’s Poetics. This realization is the outcome of the process Lezama sketches in “Introducción a un sistema poético” and that I have called the weak sublation of metaphor. The hypertrope in this regard is an overdetermination of the path of weak metaphorical sublation. The hypertrope—that highly evolved, complex and ostensibly nonsensical “species” of metaphor (to recall Lezama’s Darwinian witticism)—retroactively illuminates how “natural” and commonsensical analogies are phenomena that occur only in words, not outside of them. It also sheds light on how readers use and interact with words as well. Viewed from the perspective of weak sublation, the continuous path from ordinary predication to metaphor, and from metaphor to the hypertrope, stages the different dialectical oppositions I have so far examined: legibility and illegibility, interpretation and its suspension, assertion and effect, meaning and non-meaning. Rhetorical contamination and rhetorical histories are present—albeit hidden or forgotten—in even the most ordinary predications and forms of conceptualization; and the dialectic counterpart of this presence is the paradox of the (il)legible logos. The hypertrop(hi)ed order of discourse is neither nonsensical nor meaningless, for it is still subject to the most basic expectations and protocols of meaningful discourse. In this sense, the possibility and the demands of hermeneutics exist,

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but they are bound within a space that is extraordinarily constricted by virtue of the intensive and extensive “turns” and deviations that dilute any prospect of articulating a coherent and unifying interpretation of the whole (or even parts of the whole). The hypertrop(hi)ed order of discourse subjects the reader to a situation in which s/he must self-consciously engage in a complex activity of imagining and hypothesizing possible links among words, meanings, intuitions, and sensations in order to “make sense” of the text. From an economical perspective, the hypertrope forces the reader to push her/his interpretive resources to their maximum potential. And yet, there is no essential difference between the creation of possibilities of sense in the extreme case of the hypertrope, and that which occurs in ordinary and commonsensical tropes: the most “natural” analogies are verbal and possess a rhetorical history. The hypertrope also works by retroactively rendering the process of invention visible, as it carries this process to an extreme; and I mean invention here in its double acceptation of discovery and invention, a process constitutive of every metaphorical speech act. The hypertrope however, does not work in isolation. The paradox of the (il)legible logos emerges as these exotic tropes interact among themselves in the entire space of the poem as a whole: interpretation is at best local; when one attempts to pursue it globally or organically, the possibility of interpretation is radically subverted. Hence the hypertrope lays bare—“tropically,” as it were, through intensive and extensive “turns” and deviations—the innermost structure of metaphor. In a way, the hypertrope can be read as a metaphor of metaphor, or better yet, a metaphor about the construction of metaphor and tropes.

S In strophe VI of “Dador,” a few lines after the passage on “el apresamiento del objeto” analyzed previously and the mise en abîme constructed of the phrase from Aristotle’s Poetics, the motif of analogy resurfaces: Así la escritura borra el análogo que necesita la visión y el puesto ahí fatalmente es el innumerable rechazador. (VI P 203; Dador 16, emphasis in the original)

Here one can read “el análogo” as the general possibility of establishing causal, analogical, categorical or other types of links among entities and phenomena; in this sense, “el análogo” constitutes the necessary condition for

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representation and making sense of the world (“el análogo que necesita la visión”). Yet the text also says that writing “erases” [borra] “el análogo.” A possible way to read this dialectic is as the process of weak sublation I analyzed at the beginning of this chapter: “el análogo” is simultaneously needed (preservation) and erased (overcoming). As I have shown, a fundamental topic in Lezama’s sistema poético is the passage from causality in the ordinary sense to the “other” causality that can be materialized in the poem. This progression corresponds— both historically and in the present space of the text—to the sublation of “el análogo”: historically, because Lezama expressly inserts this movement within a historical or temporal context (two clear examples are the uses of Aristotle’s Poetics in “Introducción a un sistema poético” and in “Dador”); and in the present space of the poem, because the perplexing tropology mobilized within what I called (il)legible logos corresponds to a simultaneous overcoming and preservation of the analogical. “El análogo” and its erasure are dialectical; the effect of a puzzling expression like “gruñidos del barro / recogidos por la lanza en el turbante genuflexo de la remera aguadora” relies precisely on the necessary dependence on “el análogo” to make sense of the world. Yet the passage adds a further twist that remains to be considered—“el puesto ahí fatalmente”: writing as the mark of symbolic death. The next chapter will explore this link. As I will attempt to show, what the verses above present as writing’s erasure of “el análogo,” corresponds not only to the dialectic of weak sublation and the concomitant generation of the other causality instantiated through the (il)legible logos, but also to the erasure of intentionality and to the entry of reading into history and temporality—the opening to the unforeseeable readings that will come from the future. The “other” causality—the encounter of la causalidad and lo incondicionado, and the dialectics of la vivencia oblicua and el súbito—is conceived not just by the writer but also, and more importantly, by the reader—the one who is able to uncover and produce new senses that go beyond “el análogo” once the expression materialized in writing circulates through history.

Part II

ISL A ND

Chapter 3 Tradition, Death and Poetics: Insular Transits in “X y XX” Je suis mort, et ressuscité avec la clef de pierreries de ma dernière Cassette spirituelle. —Stéphane Mallarmé to Théodore Aubanel, July 16, 1866

Introduction The analysis that follows is an attempt to probe into the foundations of a Lezamian theory of reading and literary reception. Using Lezama’s cultural and political ideas about insularity and tradition as a point of departure, I will show how the island in Lezama refers not only to a geographical and cultural condition, but that it also functions as a rhetorical device—a topos—that reflects on how poetry, the act of reading, and their respective insertion into history, are inextricably linked in the Cuban poet’s thought. These ideas are thoroughly developed in “X y XX” (1945).1 One can identify three fundamental elements that serve to contextualize and formulate this development. The first is the topos of the island itself. One must trace its presence in “X y XX” to the reflection on sensibilidad insular put forward some years earlier in the Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez (dated June 1937, first published in 1938) and to the preoccupation of both Lezama himself as well as what will become the Orígenes group regarding the possibility of conceiving a Cuban tradition amidst the perceived failure of the Cuban Republic. “X y XX” affords one crucial insight: a shift of emphasis from the realm of culture and politics—as expressed in the Coloquio and in what can be considered the “editorial line” of Orígenes—to that of poetry and aesthetics. As we shall see, the theoretical reflection that emerges from this consideration of poetry and aesthetics around the topos of the island is as complex as it is ambitious, and the overall structure and content of “X y XX” underscores the continuity between, on the one hand, the realm of the politico-cultural, and that of the aesthetic on the other.

1

“X y XX” first appeared in Orígenes 1.5 (1945): 232-43 and was republished in Analecta del reloj (1953). Various aspects of “X y XX” have been discussed in Ríos- Avila, “The Origin”; Levinson, Secondary Moderns 148-52; and my “La ciencia de Lezama Lima.”

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The second element is Lezama’s use of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “Prose (pour des Esseintes)” in “X y XX.” The island is a central image in Mallarmé’s poem, and this is the main device by which Lezama incorporates poetics and aesthetics into his own insular topos and links the question of tradition to that of the poetic craft and of the reception of literary texts. Mallarmé’s “Prose (pour des Esseintes),” as I explain below, is not so much a text “about” something but a speech act that reflects on the poem’s own performative character, and the image of the island is one of the figural axes of this reflection.2 By means of quotation, paraphrase and (mis)translation of “Prose (pour des Esseintes),” Lezama effectively grafts Mallarmé’s reflection in “X y XX.” This text then becomes the place where two “insular” imaginaries meet and complement each other: the cultural model of sensibilidad insular, and the metapoetic reflection figured by the island in Mallarmé’s poem. Lastly, the third element is the idea of muerte y resurrección. This is a topic that has received considerable critical attention but is not completely understood, partly because of the diverse applications Lezama gives to these terms, and also because the connection between how Lezama uses them and their obvious religious connotations is anything but clear. In the case of “X y XX” death and resurrection refer to the historical circulation of cultural artifacts and the implications Lezama derives from this. The Cuban poet conceives an imaginative practice that can be characterized as a creative philology: the poet-as-readeras-critic is also a historical agent—s/he is someone endowed with the capacity to creatively re-read and re-interpret culture across history in a priori unforeseeable ways. In my analysis I will approach this idea by noticing that, in addition to the topos of the island, resurrection is another pivotal image in Mallarmé’s “Prose (pour des Esseintes)”: as in the case of the respective insular imaginaries of the Cuban and the French poet, there also exists a close link between their respective concepts of resurrection. Lezama’s 1950 essay “Exámenes,” in its turn, sheds additional light on the idea of symbolic death-and-resurrection as a metaphor for creative re-reading and its concomitant temporality by resource to

2

I use “performative” here in the sense described by J. L. Austin: utterances that do not describe or assert anything, or can be true or false, but rather correspond to doing or performing certain act. The presence of “Prose (pour des Esseintes)” in “X y XX” had been addressed in Rubén Ríos-Avila’s excellent study on Lezama and Mallarmé (see “The Origin”). In what follows I will attempt to probe into various aspects of Mallarmé’s poem that Ríos-Avila does not examine and that I find highly relevant for a more complete understanding of the critical scope of “X y XX.”

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two other ideas—cópula and reminiscencia. In “Exámenes,” as we shall see, the cópula-reminiscencia progression provides an illustration and further development of the conception of reading advanced earlier by Lezama under the rubric of muerte y resurrección. No less importantly, the organic metaphor implicit in the cópula-reminiscencia series also hints at subsequent theoretical developments of Lezama’s sistema poético, especially his appropriation of the Aristotelian ideas of potentiality and actuality. There will be three components to the analytical methodology I employ in this chapter. In the first place, I will contextualize the theory expressed in “X y XX” by highlighting its relationship with Lezama’s aesthetic and political concerns during the late 1930s and early 1940s, shared with others from the Generación de Espuela de Plata (so-named by Lezama after the journal he directed from 1939 to 1941, together with Guy Pérez Cisneros, Ángel Gaztelu and Mariano Rodríguez), and later with the Orígenes group as a whole. Secondly, while I recognize that “X y XX” is a constellation of many different texts (I will return to this in a moment), my analysis will focus on Mallarmé’s poem “Prose (pour des Esseintes),” and will be guided by a “contrapuntal” reading of the Lezama and Mallarmé texts.3 The rationale behind this approach rests in part on the explicit and recurrent references to Mallarmé’s poem in “X y XX”; and more importantly, on the penetrating metapoetic reflection that Mallarmé’s text sets in motion and its relevance for Lezama’s own project. Thirdly, as I mentioned above, in “X y XX” Lezama develops one variation on the theme of death-and-resurrection: a figuration of the temporal circulation of cultural discourse and the possibility of a creative philological practice inseparable from poetics. I will attempt to link this instance of the death-and-resurrection trope with the analogous critical gesture Lezama performs in a section of the essay “Exámenes” (published five years after “X y XX”) in the context of his practice

3

The term “contrapuntal” has significant resonances in the domain of Cuban letters. To start, it is the structuring principle behind Fernando Ortiz’s masterpiece Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940)—arguably the most important work of Cuban cultural and economic history. Contrapunto, contrapuntístico are terms that appear at several moments in Lezama’s works, from his 1941 essay “Julián del Casal,” where he advocates a “contrapuntal” mode of literary criticism (LLOC 70), to the historical contrapunto he devises in the opening of La expresión americana (EA 49), to the “contrapuntos culturales” (LLOC 835) that configure the eras imaginarias. Ben Heller (Assimilation) borrows the term “contrapuntal” to describe his own critical approximation to Lezama’s poetry. My use of “contrapuntal” echoes all these references but it refers concretely to my parallel reading of the texts of Lezama and Mallarmé and their reciprocal reflections.

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of literary criticism and the use therein of the cópula-reminiscencia dyad, as well as with the figure of resurrection in Mallarmé’s poem. This will lead to a conclusion about the meaning and role of what Lezama calls lo increado and what I would like to designate as the “poetics of the incommensurable” in Lezama’s theory of reading and literary criticism.

Voices, Palimpsests, and Materials “X y XX” (1945) is one of the earliest texts in which Lezama explicitly lays out the principles he will develop at length during the 1950’s and 60’s in his theories on poetics, culture, and history. These principles include: poetry as a form of experiencing and knowing the world; the roles of time, memory and death in the production and reception of literary texts and cultural artifacts in general; the evanescence of the author’s individuality; and the island as the locus of appropriation, subversion and creative transformation of other cultures. “X y XX” is a particularly puzzling text, even by the standards of the Lezamian corpus. In a general sense, one could argue that “X y XX” is the work by Lezama that most radically resists generic classification. Lezama’s skepticism towards, or outright rejection of the avant-garde is well known. And yet, for all the innumerable eccentricities found in practically every Lezamian text, “X y XX” is exceptional in that it comes closest to being what many would consider an “experimental” or “avant-garde” work. Although it is unlikely that Lezama expressly toyed with the idea of composing an “avant-garde” text, it is nonetheless significant that he never again would write a text with the type of formal and generic strangeness exhibited by “X y XX.” An elaborate process of ruptures, interruptions, and recombination of units of discourse evince this strangeness. As will become clear, these operations have a meaning and a purpose: to present the literary work as a dynamic, historical process, and to devise a mode of reading and criticism that accounts for this historicized mutability. Lezama structures “X y XX” as what seems to be a “dialogue” in which two “voices,” designated respectively as “X” and “XX,” alternate as the text progresses. The specific use of the letter “X”—a conventional sign designating an unknown or anonymous entity—determines the enigmatic character of the text and, as I will show in due course, plays a significant theoretical role. Although the text offers sporadic indications that some “dialogue” is taking place (including the occasional use of an “I” addressing a “You,” and moments when one

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voice replies to the other), a closer inspection evinces a less stable structure. As Ríos-Avila has noted, the principle of an exchange of views or opinions implicit in any dialogue is progressively challenged in “X y XX” (“The Origin” 248): the indicators that would suggest a debate, interaction or negotiation between two interlocutors, each one sustaining an individual and differentiated position, become blurred or vanish altogether. As the text progresses, each voice ends up digressing and interfering with the other’s discourse; replies occur only occasionally and references to the statements of the other are either oblique or nonexistent. Every instance of communicative exchange is but a momentary flash before the discourse again wanders off from the “subject matter” that would sustain a proper dialogical exchange.4 Another formal attribute of “X y XX,” and one to which critics have paid scant attention, is the palimpsestic structure of the text and what I would like to call its “materiality.” One can trace the sources for various sections of “X y XX” to fragments from Lezama’s notebooks written between 1939-1943, and published decades later under the title Diarios.5 These notebooks contained scattered thoughts about literature, philosophy, music and the visual arts; aphorisms; accounts of dreams; and short commentaries on the texts that Lezama was reading at the time.6 As part of his strategy, Lezama directly or indirectly incorporates notes from the Diarios into “X y XX”—sometimes verbatim, others as paraphrases—dispersing them throughout the text without any apparent unity or coherence. These notes provide a map of readings that is essential to understanding the composition and structure of “X y XX” and Ríos Ávila calls “X y XX” a “parody of a Platonic dialogue” (“The Origin” 248). One can elaborate this further and consider “X y XX” a parody of the Platonic dialogue as a literary device. 5 These notes were initially compiled and edited by Carmen Suárez León and published under the title “Diario de José Lezama Lima” in a special issue dedicated to Lezama of Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí 29.2 (May-August 1988). Ciro Bianchi Ross added more notes dating from 1956 to 1958 and edited the whole collection in book form, published under the title Diarios: 1939-1949/1956-1958 (Havana: Ediciones Unión, 2001). All quotations are taken from this edition. 6 Some of the works commented upon or quoted by Lezama in the Diarios are Descartes’s Méditations, the correspondence between Voltaire and Frederick the Great of Prussia, Madame Bovary, Valéry’s poem Le cimetière marin and the dialogue L’idée fixe, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir, Spinoza’s Ethics, Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography, Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares, Victor Brochard’s monograph Estudios sobre Sócrates y Platón, Emile Bréhier’s Histoire de la philosophie, and Mallarmé’s “Prose (pour des Esseintes).” Most of these works were read in Spanish translation, but Mallarmé was read in the original French. 4

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of other essays Lezama composed at the time. Lezama’s notebooks also afford significant insight into the sources of Lezama’s thought during the years prior to the appearance of Orígenes in 1944 and his peculiar way of interpreting literary and philosophical texts. While Lezama did not compose “X y XX” exclusively from fragments of his notebooks, the presence of these fragments accounts in part for the text’s apparent lack of an organic or coherent structure, as scattered notes written over a four-year period become fragments in a new text and appear as “speeches” by X and XX. The process ends up subverting the device of the dialogue, whether understood as an exchange of opinions or, following Plato’s model, as sustained argumentation. In this sense, “X y XX” is less a “dialogue” or “essay” than a progressively depersonalized, two-voice arrangement creatively constructed from disparate fragments. In effect, the structure of this arrangement is that of a palimpsest, yet this structure cannot be discerned by reading “X y XX” alone—the palimpsest only becomes visible when one reads “X y XX” in conjunction with the Diarios. Only then does it become clear to what extent Lezama constructed his text from quotations, paraphrases, allusions and interpretations of other texts. This disclosure, in turn, serves not only to reveal the inner structure of “X y XX,” but more importantly, it points toward the possibility of a genetic analysis of Lezama’s thought processes during his formative years. Refracted through the lens of the Diarios, a genetic reading of “X y XX” reveals that the seemingly incoherent “speeches” of X and XX were themselves constructed from fragments of other texts, each one of which can—in principle—be identified. But in the case of “X y XX” this construction makes visible something that goes beyond what appears to be a merely standard philological procedure. The fact is that very often, whole passages of “X y XX” are composed of “bits and pieces” of books Lezama was reading at the time, and that he basically “cut and pasted,” sometimes in the form of paraphrase, other times verbatim, and without putting inverted commas or any indicator that he is quoting or referring to a specific source. Eventually they can be identified as quotes or plagiarisms from a certain book, but this is by no means evident. These sources, in their turn, correspond to very concrete artifacts: those specific editions and translations that Lezama used, the only ones he would have had access to in the Havana of the 1940’s. What I call “materiality” refers to this double quality: a text composed of fragments, bits, and pieces, but one in which these should not be regarded merely as fragments of other texts tout court, but rather as fragments from very specific material objects—the books from Lezama’s library.

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This specificity is quite relevant and eventually acquires full visibility. Lezama’s own uses and appropriations of the fragments, bits, and pieces—in “X y XX” and other texts as well—not only or necessarily refer to the content of whichever text is being paraphrased, (mis)quoted or plagiarized, but rather evince the text’s material provenance—its coming from specific editions or translations. This is manifest when Lezama—quite often without acknowledgement—uses fragments coming from appendixes, inadvertently reproduces errors or oddities found in the specific translations of foreign authors he was reading, idiosyncratically employs philosophical terminology he found in a certain book without any reference to or use of their original meaning, or when the exposition in some of his essays follows that of another, different text (and this is something that the researcher discovers a posteriori).7 In all these cases, one finds a reference not just to a text, but to a book, regarded as a concrete object, and possessing certain material qualities. In this regard, the “materiality” of “X y XX” suggests an analogy with the technique of montage used by the Dada artists and the surrealists. In montage fragments drawn from different media and materials—newspaper or book clippings, photos, paintings, pieces of cloth, dirt, objects found in the street, etc.—serve to compose a work that loses all organicity while reflecting on its own material character. While in “X y XX” obviously there is no use of diverse media as such, the piece nonetheless can be viewed in part—although not only as such—as a montage of sorts composed of Lezama’s readings from the late 1930s and early 1940s, and organized under the guise of a pseudo-dialogue. And yet, it is worth recalling that this structure is not necessarily evident on a preliminary approximation to the text, for the text is also a palimpsest: the reader does not realize at first that what s/he is reading is in fact composed in part of bits and fragments referring to other books—this aspect is “hidden,” below the surface, although eventually it may be rendered visible. To draw an admittedly superficial but nonetheless instructive analogy from psychoanalysis, the genetic reading of “X y XX” discloses an operation of distortion analogous to what Freud called the dream-work: below the “manifest” text, there is a wholly-fragmentary “latent” text constructed from a multiplicity of fragments from books that are at once appropriated (via quotation, allusion, paraphrase, plagiarism or commentary) and hidden from view. In its most radical form, the

7

Studies that analyze examples of this feature of Lezama’s works include: Santí, “Párridiso,”; Salgado, “Hybridity”; and my “La ciencia de Lezama Lima.”

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distortion operation becomes a mechanism for simultaneously appropriating other texts as materials and occulting those same texts as sources.

Insularity and Resaca In order to contextualize the image and function of the topos of the island in “X y XX,” I will now present a short overview of Lezama’s use of the island and insularity in the Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez—a precursor text of “X y XX” and arguably Lezama’s inaugural theoretical work—and how it relates to the preoccupation with tradition and nationhood during Lezama’s early career.8 This theme has already received substantial attention from critics.9 Reviewing it here—however briefly—becomes necessary in order to understand the theoretical intervention advanced in “X y XX”: the merging of Lezama’s ideas on sensibilidad insular and tradition with the Mallarmean imaginary of the island

8

Juan Ramón Jiménez and his wife Zenobia Camprubí had left Spain in the summer of 1936 and after two short stays in New York and Puerto Rico, they arrived in Havana in November of the same year. They stayed in Cuba until January 1939 (with occasional trips to New York and Puerto Rico). Camprubí’s recorded the couple’s stay in Cuba and Puerto Rico in her diaries. Being one of the foremost poets in the Spanish language at the time, Jiménez had an enormous impact on the generation of young writers that will become the Orígenes group. For an impassioned account of Juan Ramón Jiménez’ stay in Cuba and his impact on the Orígenes group, see Vitier, “Juan Ramón Jiménez en Cuba.” The Coloquio is based on the conversations between Lezama and Jiménez during the Andalusian poet’s stay in Havana. However, ascertaining the “authority” of the text and its fidelity (or lack thereof ) to the actual dialogues between the two poets is no simple matter. A preliminary note initialed by Jiménez (“J.R.J”) remarks that “hay ideas y palabras que reconozco mías y otras que no… el diálogo está en algunos momentos fundido, no es del uno ni del otro, sino del espacio y el tiempo medios” (LLOC 44). In her diary, Zenobia Camprubí writes:

Trabajé seguidamente toda la mañana mientras me dictaba J.R. del “Coloquio” de Lezama Lima. Este trabajo no es muy satisfactorio, ya que todo lo que J.R. hace es ponerlo en español. Hay tanto atribuido a J.R. que él nunca dijo ni pensó decir y tanto que realmente dijo y está incorporado a los comentarios de L[ezama] L[ima], que hubiera tomado más tiempo desenredar la madeja que escribirlo de nuevo. Sin embargo, había suficiente valor en el diálogo como para salvarlo, y todo lo que hizo J.R. fue corregirlo lo suficiente para que no se anegaran totalmente las ideas en mar de confusión debido a la oscuridad de la expresión. (1:72-3)

The Coloquio is to a certain extent a fictional re-creation of the dialogue, in which the young and still unknown Lezama Lima appropriates the voice of the Master. Ernesto Livon-­ Grosman aptly describes this as “one of the most spectacular acts of Euro-American ventriloquism of the first half of the century” (xxxviii). 9 Discussions of the Coloquio include Cañete Quesada; Cruz-Malavé, “Lezama y el insularismo” y Primitivo implorante 31-9; Heller, “Landscape”; and Goldman 41-4.

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as figured in “Prose,” and the emergence of a poetic event as a supplement of the culturalist preoccupations first addressed in the Coloquio. As is well known, theories of geographical determinism inherited from romanticism, and later, positivism, have played a central historical role in the formation of national discourses in Spanish America. In the specific case of the Caribbean, the assumption (or possibility thereof ) of identifying the nation with the island or the insular condition has been traditionally a fundamental debate, along with the issues of ethnicity and colonialism.10 The treatment of insularismo in the Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez in particular takes the traditional paradigm of identifying island with nation (Goldman 27-61) as a point of departure. One of the main concerns of the Coloquio is the possibility of identifying and conceptualizing an aesthetic and expressive mode peculiar to Cuba. Lezama chooses the topos of insularity and its possible contrasts with cultures from the mainland as the focal point of his inquiry. In the Hispanic Caribbean tradition—and predating the Coloquio by only a few years—the other classic example of this geographical-national thinking is Insularismo (1934) by the Puerto Rican educator Antonio Pedreira (18991939). Although Lezama makes no mention of Pedreira, comparing the two texts provides a useful approach for understanding Lezama’s own treatment of insularity (see Cruz-Malavé, Primitivo implorante 31-3; and Marturano). Pedreira’s essay offers a geographically- and culturally-deterministic portrayal of the Puerto Rican condition, and presents insularity as a negative element tied to geographical isolation, an unwholesome climate, and cultural backwardness. According to Pedreira, the historical confluence of Taíno, Black, and European cultures in the island had created a disharmony of potential conflicts that posed an obstacle to the collective development of a sense of nationhood. Pedreira believed that insularity was greatly to blame for many of Puerto Rico’s ills. One central aspect of this argument is Pedreira’s identification of insularity with isolation, now regarded as a harmful condition (the characterization of Puerto Rico as isolated can be traced in part to the peripheral place Puerto Rico occupied in the maritime routes during Spanish rule, especially when compared to Cuba). Isolation implies in particular a retrogressive inwards movement, an isolating perspective toward the “inside.”

For a thorough analysis of this topic, including its critique after the phenomenon of the diaspora, see Goldman.

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Arguably the Coloquio’s key intervention is to reverse the equation between island and isolation. For Lezama, insularity is not necessarily a negative condition in itself. The problem rather stems from deriving wrong conclusions about the insular condition. Lezama emphasizes two impostures linked to the insular (but which do not appear necessarily together). First, the false belief that the island has a constitutive peripheral status—a belief that inevitably condemns Cuban cultural productions to a secondary role (this is a theme he develops more fully in his 1941 essay “Julián del Casal”). The correlate of this assumption is the passive acceptance of Eurocentric modes of historicism (the 1957 conferences of La expresión americana are a highly elaborated critique of this view of history). The second belief concerns what Lezama regards as a mistaken response to the aforementioned submission to the colonial mindset: a narrow understanding of nationhood that confronts colonialism by looking toward the inside. According to Lezama, the discourses of negrismo and mestizaje—so consequential for Cuban art, literature and social sciences during the 1920s and 30s—were a conspicuous example of this fallacy, insofar as they assumed an essential link among ethnicity, culture, and the idea of Cuba as a nation. Ethnicity in its modalities—be it mestizaje, negrismo, or even a retrograde Hispanophilia—was for Lezama a manifestation of what pertains to the “local” and lies “inside”; as such, one cannot make a reductive identification of ethnicity with the nation and its culture in terms of the specific context of the insular condition.11 What alternative does Lezama propose? At the start of the Coloquio, Juan Ramón Jiménez asserts (or so the text attributes to him) that “los que viven en isla deben vivir hacia adentro” (LLOC 47), but Lezama in turn replies that one can conceive the insular condition as the very opposite: a living toward the outside. In the island, Lezama asserts, “interesará más el sentimiento de lontananza que el paisaje propio” (LLOC 48). Unlike the “sensibilidad continental” or an “introspective” insularity—either pessimistic as Pedreira’s or founded upon ethnicity as in the case of Cuban negrismo—what Lezama calls “sensibilidad insular” implies the search for an identity that necessarily looks toward This qualification is important: in the Coloquio Lezama contrasts Cuba’s insularity with Mexico’s “sensibilidad continental” (LLOC 49) and points out the very different ways in which the arts of each nation have respectively appropriated its African and indigenous heritage (LLOC 49-50). He intimates that a mestizo expression, understood as a category that belongs to the “inside,” might have a rightful place in the mainland, insofar as the “sensibilidad continental” is characterized by a gaze directed toward the inner landscape.

11

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lontananza and incorporates what lies at the horizon. This quest gives impulse to a dialectic process of assimilation from and projection toward the outside. As Heller (“Landscape” 397-401) and Marturano explain, Lezama achieves this by shifting the focus of the insular condition from landscape to seascape, using the metaphor of resaca. The word resaca in Spanish has various acceptations, and two in particular are especially relevant for our purposes here. One corresponds to “undertow”: the sea current below the surface that runs in the opposite direction of the current that reaches the shore; the other corresponds to the detritus that comes from the sea and is left on the shore as the tidewater recedes.12 Following Heller and Marturano, the resaca metaphor represents a conception of culture, aesthetics, and society that strives to conjoin the local and the universal: what pertains to the “interior” (landscape, ethnicity, the diverse manifestations of the “native” in general) and what pertains to the “exterior” (horizonte, lontananza, foreign geographies, histories and cultures) are communicated in two directions: that of the marine currents that come from the outside and reach the shore, and that of the undertow flowing from the shore toward the outside. In other words, Lezama’s concept of “sensibilidad insular” comprises a centripetal as well as a centrifugal component.13 The island is thus the locus of a dialectical participation of the local in the universal and vice versa: the island historically projects its own productions (both material and cultural) toward the outside, and is also the place for the creative assimilation and re-invention of what comes from the outside. Lezama deftly summarizes this dialectic of locality and universality in Resaca can also mean “hangover,” or the effects of some event or situation (for example: “la resaca del éxito” [DRAE]). 13 Two recent models of thinking about Caribbean and Cuban culture that draw on Lezama’s concepts of sensibilidad insular and resaca are Antonio Benítez Rojo’s notion of “Pueblos del Mar” and his use of the centrifugal metaphor of the Big Bang (i-xxxviii) and Gustavo PérezFirmat’s idea of “translation sensibility” to define Cuba’s cultural productions (The Cuban Condition 1-15). Pérez-Firmat draws from Jorge Mañach’s observation that the lack of an “indigenous substratum” (whether cultural or of natural resources) lies at the origin of Cuba’s dependence on foreign models, in order to suggest—countering Mañach’s pessimism—that Cuban cultural expression is characterized by modes of creative translation that eventually forged a national style. “Cannibalism” has also provided an interpretive model of the local/ universal and inward/ outward cultural dynamics expressed in Lezama’s work. The renowned Brazilian poet and translator Haroldo de Campos, for example, explicitly situates Lezama’s practice of appropriation of the “outside” in the category of antropofagia (17-8). For another discussion of Lezama’s “cannibalism,” see Chiampi, “La expresión americana de José Lezama Lima.” An excellent discussion on the topic of assimilation in Lezama, including a critique of the “cannibal” model, is found in Heller, Assimilation 109-12. 12

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the oft-cited aphorism that appears on the cover of first number of Espuela de Plata (1939): “La ínsula distinta en el Cosmos, o lo que es lo mismo, la ínsula indistinta en el Cosmos.” In sum, the turn of the insular perspective from landscape to seascape means that the sea does not isolate but communicates. This adds an interesting twist to a phrase found in another classic of Cuban literature published a few years after the Coloquio: Virgilio Piñera’s “maldita circunstancia del agua por todas partes”—to quote the famous opening line of his poem La isla en peso (1941)—becomes, as it were, a bendita circunstancia under the outlook of Lezama’s sensibilidad insular. Lezama’s concepts of insularity and resaca were arguably the very first theoretical approximations to the two main —and closely interrelated—preoccupations that will evolve throughout his whole intellectual career: the possibility of articulating a discourse of a Cuban cultural tradition, and the sistema poético. Under the perspective of sensibilidad insular and resaca, Lezama reclaims the topos of insularity from its purported subjection to the elements of land, paisaje, and ethnicity. This implies transferring the island from the domain of geography to the domain of culture and aesthetics: “‘Insularismo’ ha de entenderse no tanto en su acepción geográfica … sino, sobre todo, en cuanto al problema que plantea en la historia de la cultura y aún en la sensibilidad” (LLOC 47). This troping of the “island” into the realm of culture served various purposes. First, insularity and resaca provide the rudiments of what can be called a “cosmopolitan reason”—an orientation that will reach its full maturation during the early years of the Orígenes project.14 Second, Lezama’s “insularity” deliberately served to mark a sharp distinction between his own Generación de Espuela de Plata and the previous generation of Cuban vanguardismo, represented by the intellectuals and artists associated with the Grupo Minorista, revista de avance, and the aesthetics of negrismo.15 For Lezama, negrismo is the result of confusing The most visible manifestations of Lezama’s cosmopolitanism at this time were his own interest in European literature, his erudite self-fashioning, and the importance of foreign authors in the editorial line of Orígenes. For a thorough analysis of the connections between Orígenes and cultural scene outside Cuba see Kanzepolsky. As Kanzepolsky shows one can identify three different focal points in the literary networks that origenismo forged with the exterior: Lezama himself and his interests in European literature; José Rodríguez Feo’s work as Orígenes “foreign correspondent,” given his links with American scholars, his friendship with Wallace Stevens, and his own interest in modern Anglo American literature; and Virgilio Piñera’s relationship with the Argentinean literary scene during his stay in Buenos Aires. 15 Cintio Vitier discusses this generational, political and aesthetic gap—including the question of negrismo—in Lo cubano en la poesía (370-4). For a thorough historical discussion of the Orígenes-vanguardia debate see Díaz Infante 61-120. 14

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a “realidad étnica mestiza” with artistic expression (LLOC 57): the latter cannot be subsumed or conditioned by the former, for this would be tantamount to an inward-looking, and therefore reductive, form of insular sensibility. For Lezama, the attempt to produce an aesthetic based on “la sangre” is necessarily contingent, divisive and ultimately artificial (“la sangre salta cualquier axioma unificador”; LLOC 58).16 Thirdly, and more important, in its reversal of the negative values of localism and geographical determinism, insularismo in the Coloquio becomes Lezama’s attempt to hypothesize a “solution” to the challenge of “resolving” the question of cultural identity in a young Republic—itself perceived as a failed project, plagued by corruption, political instability, and US imperialism. The island in the Coloquio refers not to a geographical space but to a medium and a mode of cultural production, and resaca is what tropes the island into something universal as it figures the sea as a two-way communicating agent; assimilation from and projection toward the outside: “una sensibilidad insular … asciende de la historia al espíritu” (LLOC 59). For studies dedicated to the problem of the Afro Cuban expression in the Coloquio and Orígenes see Barquet and Cañete Quesada. Other intellectuals close to Lezama shared his attitude toward negrismo. A telling example is “Presencia de ocho pintores” by Guy Pérez Cisneros (1915-1953), art critic, future diplomat and collaborator in Lezama’s journals. Originally a speech given at an art exhibit at the University of Havana in 1937, “Presencia de ocho pintores” is a manifesto-like diatribe that eloquently describes the aesthetic and political rift that separates Lezama’s and Pérez Cisneros’s generation from that of Cuban vanguardismo (In his speech Pérez Cisneros directly attacks Jorge Mañach, Juan Marinello and, to a lesser extent, Nicolás Guillén). The task at hand, Pérez Cisneros argues, is “alentar con celo todo lo que sea capaz de crear la sensibilidad nacional y desarrollar una cultura”; and to achieve this, he claims, it is necessary to “derrocar todo arte racista, hispano-americano o afro-cubano, que pueda ser un obstáculo para la integración de nuestra nacionalidad” (66). Significantly, Lezama included this text in the first number of Verbum (the first journal he directed, while studying law at the University of Havana). Some twenty years later, Cintio Vitier would address the same ideas in Lo cubano en la poesía. As Jorge Marturano points out, in Lezama one does not find so much a rejection of negrismo in itself, but rather an impugnment of its use in nationalist discourse; i.e., the assumption that negrismo can articulate a “síntesis de lo cubano” (Marturano). The same could be said about Pérez Cisneros or Vitier. And yet, the origenista stance toward negrismo remains controversial. Espuela de Plata and Orígenes did welcome works by exponents of negrista literature and visual arts (Emilio Ballagas, Ramón Guirao, Wilfredo Lam) and pieces on Afro-Cuban culture, notably by Lydia Cabrera. Jesús Barquet examines this component of the origenista project, and argues that the incorporation of the Afro-Cuban element in Orígenes is part of “su afán por rescatar e integrar todas las facetas de lo ‘cubano’” (7). This assertion repeats a commonplace justification of mestizaje and circumvents the controversial implications and assumptions of the supposedly “anti-racialist” proposals put forth by Lezama or Pérez Cisneros. A thorough discussion of the role and status of Afro-Cubanism in Lezama and Orígenes is outside the scope of this essay, but such an analysis is still wanting.

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Tradition, Poetry and Post-Insularity In the Coloquio, however, insularity is only a tentative hypothesis, a speculation open to debate. When viewed in the context of Lezama’s work from the early1940s onward, the topos of the island appears only as an initial and transitory stage of a much larger theoretical inquiry. After the inaugural speculations of the Coloquio, the preoccupation with the search for articulating the possibility of a Cuban tradition will remain, but the theme of the sensibilidad insular in itself is abandoned and replaced with another modality of foundational discourse— poetry. Within the main poetic currents of the origenista project—Lezama, Vitier, Eliseo Diego, Fina García Marruz—poetry was considered more than a writerly craft: it was also both an ethical stance and a practice that could afford the possibility of articulating something like a “national” tradition amid the “failed” Republic.17 This belief is eloquently expressed in “Después de lo raro, la extrañeza,” Lezama’s review of Cintio Vitier’s volume of poetry Extrañeza de estar, and published in the Summer 1945 issue of Orígenes: “La poesía, lo que ya se puede llamar con evidencia los poetas de la generación de Espuela de Plata, querían hacer tradición, es decir, reemplazándola, donde no existía; querían también hacer profecía para diseñar la gracia y el destino de nuestras próximas ciudades … Si no había tradición entre nosotros, lo mejor era que la poesía ocupara ese sitio y así había la posibilidad de que en lo sucesivo mostráramos un estilo de vida” (IP 174). This is an evolution of the inquiry that began in the Coloquio. Lezama viewed himself, along with the rest of the Generación de Espuela de Plata, standing before a barren landscape: for them, the vanguardista generation had been unable to forge a genuine Cuban tradition, and the ideal of Cuba as an independent nation, endowed with a foundational discourse of a “national culture,” had not materialized.18 The absence of tradition submits a void that is simultaneously a site of anxiety and of freedom and openness toward For illuminating analyses of the place and role of the origenista poetic project in the face of the “failed” Republic see Rojas, Isla sin fin 15-45 and “Orígenes and the Poetics of History,” and Díaz Infante. 18 The idea of the absence of a national expression or tradition certainly does not mean that there is no local culture. For Lezama there are numerous manifestations of local culture, ranging from 19th century Cuban poetry to Afro Cuban art and literature, as attested by the incorporation in Espuela de Plata and Orígenes of works by Lydia Cabrera and Wilfredo Lam. Lezama’s cosmopolitanism and the model of sensibilidad insular do not exclude any of these instances of the local—they are there, and can participate of the universal and become part of the amalgam of the yet-to-be-invented tradition. The conflict, according to Lezama, is not 17

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history—it is the place of something yet-to-be-formed, the place of lo increado, to use a term dear to Lezama. For Lezama, it is the poetic craft—conceived as an activity that dialectically assimilates the opposition between the local and the universal—that must fill this void. “X y XX” and “Después de lo raro la extrañeza” appeared respectively in the Spring and Summer 1945 issues of Orígenes. The concurrence of the motifs of insularity and poetics in “X y XX” takes place both within the contextual orbit effected by the model of insularity in the Coloquio—a precursor text—and the reflections on the foundational mission of poetry expressed in “Después de lo raro, la extrañeza.” However, in “X y XX” the culturalist context consisting of a preoccupation with the possibility of forging an “insular” or “national” expression should be viewed only as a point of departure. In fact, after “X y XX” the topos of insularity will recede to the background and the central themes of Lezama’s theoretical speculations will focus mostly on poetics, literature, mythology, history, and the Cuban cultural archive.19 “X y XX” is in part a testimony of this shift. This text submits a critical reflection that, although it certainly inscribes the meditation about the possibility of an insular and national expression developed in other works, ends up going in a direction very different from that of a critique of culture and nationality. As I will argue in what follows, the critical intervention of “X y XX” is to sublate the nature/ culture dyad (originally inscribed in the sensibilidad insular) into the realm of what I would like to call the poetic event. This process is deeply imbricated in the theory of reading and literary reception advanced in “X y XX” itself and later in the 1950 essay “Exámenes.” And the practice of such a theory, in its turn, is one of the elements behind the configuration of the textual and cultural imaginaries of the sistema poético. In this regard, one can consider “X y XX” as concerned with the existence or not of genuine Cuban cultural productions per se, but with the use of wrong criteria to forge a tradition. 19 It is commonly assumed that part of Lezama’s cultural project consisted in developing the idea of “teleología insular.” I would argue that this assumption, however widespread, is inaccurate: although Lezama coined the expression (it appears in a letter dated January 1939 addressed to Cintio Vitier) (Cartas 251) he never used it again or developed a concept from it. Cintio Vitier did use the expression, and it eventually became associated with a whole political, ethical and aesthetical program of Vitier’s own creation—not Lezama’s. The appearance of the expression in the title of the lecture Vitier devoted to Lezama in Lo cubano en la poesía—“Crecida de la ambición creadora: José Lezama Lima y el intento de una teleología insular” (Lo cubano en la poesía 436-68)—only adds to the equivocal attribution of something like a concept of “teleología insular” to Lezama himself. I will return to this issue in the final chapter.

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an inaugural text of the sistema poético: it is a nodal point connecting Lezama’s early conceptualization of sensibilidad insular with his speculations in the field of poetics, history, and universal culture. In the Coloquio, the island has departed from its symbolic bond to landscape, geography or the “local,” and becomes a trope that hypothesizes a certain form of cultural production. The following two passages intimate how “X y XX” reflects upon and moves beyond the early insular imaginary: [XX:] Cuando usted le presentó ese tema [the island] a uno de los grandes poetas de la época, éste pareció negarlo. Todo es isla, decía, la tierra, la luna, los planetas. Después mostró más interés. Cuando ya ese tema solo registraba mi cansancio, quiere usted convertir la isla en una nueva interrogación para la cultura. Es decir, ¿qué surge cuando el hombre provoca ese vaciado?, ¿cuándo la extensión como coordinadora de su propia memoria se rompe?, ¿cuándo el secreto de las pausas parece imponerse a la seguridad de los enlaces de palabra, de recuerdos, de miradas? (LLOC 142-3)

X’s reply is as follows: [X:] Mientras en los continentes la síntesis tiene que ser superada por el concepto de sentirse deudor; en las islas, la suspensión que hay que vencer para llegar hasta ellas, no hacen la síntesis continental de lo blanco y de lo negro, sino de raíces oscuras, cambiantes y ligerísimas … El mundo antiguo era devoto de situar más allá de lo hialino del límite—entre los griegos una gran claridad rodea siempre al límite—un río cuya madre es de carbón; más allá de unas columnas una oscura corriente cenagosa busca un incierto destino. Pero los destinos de la imaginación varían, solamente en la cultura persa se le puede antojar a una emperatriz fletar a sus cazadores para que en el almuerzo le brinden un ave que se nutre de rocío. En el Renacimiento el hombre ya no ve más allá del límite una oscuridad, sino su esfuerzo está por estrenar, su voluntad deseosa, y entonces donde hay un límite, su apetito se encarna, encandila sus tensiones y coloca más allá de lo que conoce, islas. (LLOC 143-144)

XX’s fragment presents an explicit reference to the exchange between Juan Ramón Jiménez and Lezama in the Coloquio. It performs a gesture of ironic distancing both by alluding to Jiménez’s own skepticism towards Lezama’s proposal, and by intimating the limitation and exhaustion of the insularity topos (which, let us remember, Lezama will no longer develop after “X y XX”). In X’s reply various themes come together. To begin with, X summons up the

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opposition inherited from the Coloquio between “continentes” and “islas.” The island, as imagined in the Coloquio, is conceived in terms of the seascape and the dynamics it affords—“raíces oscuras, cambiantes y ligerísimas” that cannot be subsumed under mestizaje or “síntesis continental de lo blanco y de lo negro.” But in the remainder of X’s speech, however, we find a host of images that transcends this early insular imaginary and point toward the more ambitious scope of the speculations one will find in the sistema poético. X elaborates upon the themes of an absent “beyond,” the anxiety such an absence produces, and the best way to fill that “void,” that “unknown” (to be sure, these images echo those of the void of the lack of tradition in the contemporary text “Después de lo raro la extrañeza”). X suggests that myths provide one solution, but he also states that the early modern Western world found another solution—significantly—in the island. The allusion to Columbus’s messianic enterprise is clear in the text. Here in “X y XX” Lezama is locating the topos of the island in a particular historical, mythical and discursive space somewhat different from that of the Coloquio. In X’s description, the island of the Renaissance is the outcome of the sequence will–desire–discourse. The island, as envisioned in this passage of “X y XX,” does not belong to the realm of the concrete, the material; it has no substantive existence. Rather, it is an entity that the European subject placed in the realm of the unknown. One can intuit that the intention of X’s speech is to posit the European configuration of the New World—and to a great extent the whole rationale behind its discovery and exploration—as essentially a form of fiction: an imaginative process carried out by Europeans who thought about the unknown and tried to make sense of it. From Columbus’s Diaries onwards, imagination became the instrument to mobilize desire and subsequently served to invest the “unknown” or “beyond” with all kinds of discursive formations—mythical, religious, political, juridical, economic, etc.—drawn from the European archive. Thus, one can intimate that the island in “X y XX”—just like myth—is effectively underscoring the role of imagination in our shaping of culture. Put in other terms, the island here becomes a metaphor for lo increado. In the passage, Lezama confers on imagination the power to shape the way we conceive the world. Such is the purpose of myth and the island: they are discursive formations that attempt to fill the void of the unknown, the beyond, lo increado and to make sense of it (perhaps Lezama had this in mind in his poem “Los dados de medianoche” when the poetic subject claims to be “Buscando la increada forma del logos de la imaginación”). And as he puts it in “Después de lo raro, la extrañeza,” poetry is the medium to fulfill

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this task: “[la poesía] clamaba proféticamente para ser convertida en un recinto tan seguro como la tradición, aumentada por la suma de ortodoxos y poètes maudits, de heterodoxos y artesanos de buen signo” (IP 175). Which brings us to Mallarmé—and more concretely, to Mallarmé’s île and its grafting in “X y XX.” Je dit: [sic] une fleur Fragmentos a su imán

The Flower and the Island Stéphane Mallarmé is the figure that literally sets in motion the theoretical reflection Lezama expounds in “X y XX.” The first lines of the text read: X.— Partir de un verso. “Tout en moi / S’exaltait de voir / La famille des iridées / Sourgir [sic] à ce nouveau devoir.” Una iluminación para la familia de las iridáceas: azafrán amarillo, la piña, flor del tigre. Aun las cosas más oscuras y lejanas tienen sus deberes. Así se trata de superar ciertas limitaciones en que habían caído los griegos. Las respuestas ya no eran de Apolo, después de su muerte conversaban en la cueva los demonios y la sacerdotisa de Apolo. (LLOC 135; emphasis in the original)

The quotation in X’s speech is drawn from the eighth quatrain of Mallarmé’s “Prose (pour des Esseintes)”: Gloire du long désir, Idées Tout en moi s’exaltait de voir La famille des iridées Surgir à ce nouveau devoir, (8.1-4)

“Prose” is arguably Mallarmé’s most commented poem (the full text is included in an appendix at the end of this volume).20 Lezama wrote that it is In the bibliographical appendix to his monograph on “Prose,” Marshall C. Olds mentions over 80 studies about the poem (including “X y XX”!) published between 1886 and 1979 alone (Olds 113). Analyses of this text and its notorious difficulty encompass a spectrum of vastly diverse interpretations. To mention just a few, the poem has been read as a mere display of virtuoso versification, grotesque and nonsensical wordplay, metaphysical allegory, religious ritual, cryptic reference to the women in Mallarmé’s life, ars poetica, self-referential

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“su poema más poblado de dones acumulativos, de referencias ambivalentes a la noción y al sentido” (LLOC 527). Its most visible traits are its notorious difficulty and opacity, an unparalleled syntactic complexity, and the virtuosity in the composition of the rhymes. The poem is composed of 14 unnumbered octosyllabic quatrains (for convenience, I am indicating the number of the quatrain followed by the number of the verse). A collation with Lezama’s Diarios is revealing. In his entry dated April 25, 1943 (Diarios 59-60) Lezama quotes strophes 1, 2, 6, 7 and 8 of Mallarmé’s poem under the heading “Estudiar las siguientes estrofas del poema ‘Prose (pour des Esseintes)’, de S. Mallarmé” and then translates some commentaries on the poem from Albert Thibaudet’s monograph La poésie de Stéphane Mallarmé (1926).21 X’s introductory phrase—“Partir artifact, representation of the realm of nature, representation of the supernatural or the Ideal, a treatise on rhyme, and a treatise on aesthetics. I do not intend to give another exegesis of the poem or add anything new to this critical corpus; I limit my reading to a few specific sections, images and ideas that are relevant to my analysis of Lezama’s text. I have mainly based my commentary here on the analyses by Agosti, L. J. Austin, Bénichou, Malcolm Bowie, Olds, Ruppli and Thorel-Cailleteau 159-64. The poem was initially published in January 1885 in La Revue indépendante (there exists an unpublished first version, possibly dating from 1870) with a dedication to “des Esseintes,” the protagonist of Joris-Karl Huysmans renowned decadentist novel À rebours (1884). In the novel the aristocrat Jean Floressas des Esseintes decides to withdraw from the outside world and secludes himself in a house full of strange objects and works of art, determined to live without any purpose except to satisfy his eccentric tastes. Towards the end of book, des Esseintes mentions Mallarmé as one of his favorite poets. When the novel was published, Mallarmé was still relatively unknown beyond a small circle of friends and artists. His correspondence suggests that he received the novel with enthusiasm (cf. his letter to Huysmans dated 18 May 1884 in Correspondance 570-2). Mallarmé’s cameo in À rebours helped to divulgate his work, but also triggered a misleading association of his poetry with decadentist aesthetics. 21 After the quotation from “Prose” Lezama writes:



He aquí el comentario, de Thibaudet en su libro La poésie de S. Mallarmé, a la primera estrofa. “Estrofa I-Hyperbole! La palabra, en su sentido estricto etimológico, aparece, para indicar, desde el principio, la ambición vana de la obra suprema” La poesía pura es hiperbólica, como la duda primera de Descartes ha sido llamada por él hyperbolique: ideal lanzado más allá de toda posibilidad práctica. El arte poético que Mallarmé va a indiquer [sic] es análogo a esta estética teatral, cuyo asunto es “le Monstre qui ne peut être.” (Diarios 60).

This is a translation from Thibaudet’s monograph (Cf. Thibaudet 405-6). The phrase “le Monstre…” comes from Mallarmé’s Richard Wagner : Rêverie d’un poète français (1885) (Œuvres 2:153). Thibaudet’s reference to Descartes has an interesting afterlife. It originally comes from the concluding section of the Méditations (6.24), in which the French philosopher rejects the doubts that he had put forward at the beginning of his reflection (for example, doubting the capacity to distinguish wake from sleep) and calls them “hyperboliques et ridicules.” (Entries in the Diarios from November 1939 indicate that Lezama himself had

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de un verso”—gives rise to a complex interplay of the two different meanings of the verb partir in Spanish: to start out or depart from a particular place, and to split or divide. “X y XX” parte, or starts out from Mallarmé’s verse: from the very first line of the text, X establishes Mallarmé’s verses as the point of departure for the subsequent pseudo-dialogue on poetics and literary criticism. At the same time, the second meaning of partir indicates what has been done to Mallarmé’s verse: in X’s quotation—“Tout en moi / S’exaltait de voir”—the original verse (8.2) has literally been partido or split into two. Mallarmé’s verse in “X y XX” thus serves as both a place of departure and a place of rupture. This operation is but one of the many examples of the processes of severing, appropriating, and transforming other texts that characterize Lezama’s work. Such subversions also mobilize a subtle, self-referential strategy in Lezama: “partir de un verso” results in broken “Prose”; but broken prose, in turn, results in verse. Lezama follows the partida with a highly elaborated meditation on the poem as the place of authorial death and resurrection through memory, on the act of reading, and on the passage of time. Immediately after the passage quoted above, X continues his speech: [X:] La familia de las iridáceas, no es sentencia gratuita de Mallarmé, sino causación eslabonada de sus reminiscencias. Su procedimiento de iluminación y suspensión, de blancura continuada por una ausente longitud de onda, va persiguiendo: isla, cargada de vista y no de visiones: flor, flor tan inmensa que se separa de su lúcido contorno, jardín, pero antes, otro guión: laguna, por ahí los deseos. Vegetales creciendo como nuestros deseos, flecha sobre los flamencos. (LLOC 135)

This passage paraphrases and comments upon quatrains 6, 7 and 8 of “Prose (pour des Esseintes).” Both these verses from “Prose” and the section from “X y XX” focus on the motifs of the island and the flower: Oui, dans une île que l’air charge De vue et non de visions embarked on a thorough study of the Méditations.) Significantly, Lezama will later use the expression duda hiperbólica to name one of the “concepts” of his sistema poético (it appears in “Introducción a un sistema poético” [1954] and “La dignidad de la poesía” [1956]). It thus appears that Lezama borrowed a term found in a monograph about Mallarmé—a term already borrowed itself from a work by Descartes—and used it to coin a “concept” of his own creation bearing little or no relation to the original sources.

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Toute fleur s’étalait plus large Sans que nous en devisions. (6.1-4) Telles, immenses, que chacune Ordinairement se para D’un lucide contour, lacune Qui des jardins la sépara. (7.1-4) Gloire du long désir, Idées Tout en moi s’exaltait de voir La famille des iridées Surgir à ce nouveau devoir, (8.1-4)

This is the place in “X y XX” where Lezama’s and Mallarmé’s insular imaginaries intersect most visibly. But what does this junction, this “grafting” of one insular imaginary in another mean? To begin my critical contrapunto with the two texts it is necessary to offer a short—and admittedly oversimplified— outline of “Prose (pour des Esseintes)” as a guide to my subsequent analysis of its role in “X y XX.” The most striking features of Mallarme´s poem are the virtuosity of the rhymes and its syntactic complexity. The first two quatrains are an exordium and consist of an apostrophe in which the poetic subject addresses “Hyperbole” and inquires whether she can rise from the subject’s own memory. The following quatrains (3-12) contain what can be described as a “narrative”—a device infrequent in Mallarmé’s poetry—that functions as the axis of the poem. The poetic subject and his “sister” are together viewing a “landscape” (3.1) that is later identified as an “island” (4.1) where “immense” flowers grow (7.1). The island and the flowers present a very odd landscape. Its strangeness is indicated not only by the description above (quatrains 6-8) but more importantly, by the poetic subject’s insistence on an inability to speak about the island [“sans que nous en devisions” (6.1), “nous nous taisons” (10.1), “trop pour nous raisons” (10.4)], along with the references to various external entities [“l’ère d’autorité” (4.1), “l’esprit de litige” (10.1), “la rive” (11.1)] which seem to question or deny altogether the very existence of the island and the flowers.22 The final two quatrains (13-14) obliquely refer back to the rising of This play on the inability to ascertain whether the experience of the poetic subject is “real” or not is also a central motif in Mallarmé’s famous poem L’Après-midi d’un Faune, where it is impossible to tell whether the Faun was dreaming or not, and whether the Nymphs were “really” there or not.

22

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“Hyperbole” in the exordium, but do so through the action of the hitherto silent sister, who exclaims “Anastase!” (13.3) before a tomb bearing the name “Pulchérie” (14.3) (a word whose etymological equivalent is “Beauty”).23 Turning now to the particular quatrains Lezama paraphrases (6, 7 and 8), it is important to note that the 6th and 7th quatrains consist of a single sentence that plays a central role in Mallarmé’s poem. This is the sentence describing the landscape the poetic subject and his sister contemplate: an island inhabited by “immense” flowers that ordinary language cannot represent. This island, whose existence is simultaneously affirmed and denied is the signifying nucleus of the poem at the levels of both content and form. The hierarchical opposition “de vue et non de visions” (“de vista y no de visiones” in Lezama’s words) in the 6th quatrain places the emphasis on the faculty and activity of seeing. According to the testimony of the poetic subject, the island is a place where one is able to see by virtue of a certain medium: “dans une île que l’air charge / De vue…” (emphasis added).24 “Visions,” on the other hand, carries two connotations: first, the passive object seen, as opposed to sight itself [vue]; and second, the realm of fancy, the merely illusory or imaginary. The poetic subject is then asserting that he (along with his sister) is “really” seeing the landscape of the island with its strange flowers; that these are not “visions” but correspond to the actual faculty of sight. And yet, the poetic subject also claims that the experience of seeing This outline will prove helpful for my purpose of discussing Lezama’s use of “Prose (pour Des Esseintes)” in “X y XX,” but is by no means indicative of the overall purpose and dazzling complexity of Mallarmé’s poem. When analyzing the text of the poem, the anecdote narrated therein is of secondary importance unless one pays meticulous attention to how language is operating in the poem and interacts with its ostensible “content.” The play of rhyme, versification, and paronomasia; the patterns of repetition of phonetic, lexical, and semantic units all through the text; the disposition of pauses, blanks and enjambments; the moments of grammatical undecidability; and the highly unconventional syntax produce together a constellation of meaning, sound and vision that demands a non-linear reading and produces a network of different—often conflicting—layers of signification. As Malcolm Bowie notes in his analysis of “Prose” (43-99), the interaction between unusual but carefully crafted syntactic constructions on the one hand, and, on the other, the disposition of syntagms at various levels in the text—clauses, appositions, whole verses, sentences or stanzas, and the pauses that delimit them—require that the reader constantly go back and forward in order to (re)construct instances of meaning. Every statement or “sense unit” can be modified—even contradicted—by the sometimes explicit, sometimes oblique, “action-at-a-distance” of other “sense units.” Reading this poem should be understood as a process that has abandoned all linearity. 24 Note also that the main “action” in the narrative is precisely a figuration of a wandering gaze. After the exordium (quatrains 1 and 2), the poetic subject begins his account thus: “Nous promenions notre visage / … / Sur maints charmes de paysage” (3.1, 3). 23

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the flowers in the island is ineffable: “Toute fleur s’étalait plus large / Sans que nous en devisions.” The medium of ordinary speech (deviser means to have a conversation) is here unable to convey the experience of seeing the gigantic flowers.25 The poetic subject claims that he can see but cannot speak about what he sees, and that what he sees are not “visions.” As I mentioned earlier, however, this experience of the sublime is contested in other parts of the poem (which Lezama does not mention) when other entities—“l’ère d’autorité” (4.1), “l’esprit de litige” (10.1), and “la rive” (11.1)—cast doubt upon or deny the existence of the island and the hyperbolic flowers seen by the poetic subject. The result is an overriding tension between affirmation and negation: the poetic subject affirms that, however ineffable, his experience is not one of “visions” but of “sight” (and his sister serves as his witness);26 while at the same time, other, “external” entities deny or challenge the “reality” of what the poetic subject sees. The strangeness of the island and the flowers is evinced by another image. Surrounding the flowers is a halo, which the poetic subject describes as a “lacune,” or a gap or discontinuity, separating the flowers from “the gardens”: “chacune / Ordinairement se para / D’un lucide contour, lacune / Qui des jardins la sépara” (7.1-4). Lezama paraphrases the verses: “flor, flor que se separa de su lúcido contorno.” The image recalls the “absent” flower invoked in the following well-known passage from Mallarmé’s poème critique “Crise de vers,” written at about the same time as “Prose (pour des Esseintes)”: Je dis: une fleur ! et, hors de l’oubli où ma voix relègue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose d’autre que les calices sus, musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l’absente de tous bouquets.27 (Œuvres 2:213)

The experience of the ineffable is expressed again in other parts of the poem, most noticeably in the 10th quatrain: “Oh ! Sache l’esprit de litige, / À cette heure où nous nous taisons, / Que de lys multiples la tige / Grandissait trop pour nos raisons” (10.3-4, emphasis added). 26 See Agosti 43-6 and Olds 43-6. 27 The much-quoted passage, containing the famous motto “l’absente de tous bouquets,” first appeared as part of the preface to René Ghil’s Traité du Verbe (1886). “Prose” had appeared in January 1885 and Mallarmé sent Ghil the finished manuscript of the preface in August of the same year (see Marchal in Mallarmé Œuvres 2: 1737). Eventually, Mallarmé included the passage in “Crise de vers,” published in its full version in Divagations (1897). Lezama for his part was very familiar with “Crise de vers.” His 1942 essay “Cumplimiento de Mallarmé” (first published in the journal Grafos on the occasion of Mallarmé’s centennial) basically consists of a highly idiosyncratic reading of the other famous passage from “Crise de vers”: “L’œuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poète” (Œuvres 2: 211) [The pure work 25

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[I say: a flower! And, out of the oblivion where my voice casts every contour, insofar as it is something other than the known bloom, there arises, musically, the very idea in its mellowness; in other words, what is absent from every bouquet. (Divagations 210)]

The image of the isolated flower in both texts—separated from the gardens in “Prose” and absent from all bouquets in “Crise de vers”—sets in motion a critical meditation on the nature and materiality of language. One can read the passage from “Crise de vers” as a reflection on the negativity inherent in the very act of naming and, by extension, of language in general. Unlike the language of God in the Genesis account of the Creation or the words of the magician, whose voices are able to create actual beings, the act of naming in human language does not make the truth present; rather, it implies a withdrawal from the world to the space of language. Moreover, by virtue of this act, the signifier is necessarily, inherently, “absent” from the realm of the concrete object named, and vice-versa.28 The correlate of the constitutive negativity in the act of naming, however, is the affirmation of language as an event. In their insightful commentary to “l’absente de tous bouquets,” Ruppli and Thorel-Cailletau (153-5) argue that in the quatrains cited above, Mallarmé builds his critique of the mimetic faculty of language on the preeminence he accords to parole—understood in the Saussurean sense of “actual speech,” as opposed to langue, the system of linguistic signs shared by a community—by means of what J. L. Austin denominates a performative utterance (cf. note 2): “je dis: une fleur!” Arising from this incantation is the materialization of the event of language—a manifestation that is sonorous and visual, for the fleur is both uttered—“je dis”—and written. What Mallarmé refers to as “l’idée” is an abstraction for the “occurrence” of language: implies the disappearance of the poet speaking (Divagations 208)]. One short poem from Fragmentos a su imán (1977) significantly bears the title: “Je dit [sic] : une fleur” (P 379). 28 This reflection appears in another important section of “Crise de vers” in which Mallarmé remarks that the plurality of languages—a distinctively human attribute of language in the Judeo-Christian tradition, as expressed in the myth of Babel—prevents words from materializing the truth, as opposed to the unique language of God (see Œuvres 2: 208). This is an important theme in Walter Benjamin’s theory of language. In “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” [Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen] (1916) Benjamin analyzes the rift between language and the world from the Biblical account of the Creation; the theme reappears in “The Task of the Translator” [Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers] (1926) where he quotes the aforementioned passage from “Crise de vers.”

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it is not the “idea” of the flower (the concept, representation, or signified) but rather the ever-immanent event of language itself; the materialization of the medium through which signification occurs. The scene depicted in quatrains 6-8 of “Prose” in which the poetic subject describes his experience staring at the “immense” flowers spreading out [s’étaler] over the island finds its correlate in “Crise de vers” in the “felicitous” (to borrow J. L. Austin’s expression) and self-reflexive performative utterance: “Je dis : une fleur ! et… musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l’absente de tous bouquets.” One should note here that the flowers in the island are also, in their own way, “absent from all bouquets,” for they are “separated” from the gardens: “Telles, immenses, que chacune / Ordinairement se para / D’un lucide contour, lacune / Qui de jardins la sépara” (7.1-4). The flower uttered in “Crise de vers”—absent from all bouquets—and the isolated and ineffable flowers contemplated in “Prose” are not “concrete” flowers; they do not refer to something occurring or existing in the world “outside” the poem (as I said earlier, l’idée is not the “idea” of the flower). Instead, both texts use a similar image to convey a self-referential figuration of the linguistic event that takes place within the verbal space of the text. In “Prose,” this event is materialized by the wondrous effects of signification created by the architecture of the poem (cf. note 23). For Mallarmé, poetry is not so much a literary genre but rather a particular mode of composing discourse.29 It is an activity wherein the everyday medium of words becomes subject to an order of discourse which confronts the reader with a radically different experience of “how to do things with words” and, no less importantly, “what words can do” if left to their own “initiative.” The French poet considers this experience remarkable precisely because words are the most ordinary and familiar means of signification and communication: the verbal event of poetry produces and discloses a host of semantic, cognitive, visual, and aural processes that are ordinarily concealed, repressed or forgotten in everyday speech. This is not only an aesthetic effect, but also a reflection on the use and function of language, and on how language can furnish a representation of the world around us. Mallarmé’s concern in “Prose” and “Crise de vers” is neither the external world nor its representation, but rather that which makes “[L]a forme appelée vers est simplement elle-même la littérature … vers il y a sitôt que s’accentue la diction, rythme dès que style” (Œuvres 2: 205). [(T)he form we call verse is simply itself literature… there is verse as soon as diction calls attention to itself, rhyme as soon as there is style. (Divagations 202)].

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“representation” possible in the first place, and how poetic language should be conceived in all its actuality and immanence as an activity located inside a verbal world. The rhyme “désir, Idées” / “des iridées” condenses the text’s self-referential nature by linking l’idée (cf. “l’idée même et suave, l’absente de tous bouquets) and iridées (the flowers on the island) through what Mallarmé calls “la magie de la rime” (Correspondance 386). If, as I have argued, l’idée is an abstraction for the performative event of language within the poem, then “Prose” is an attempt to present l’idée under the guise of the island and its gigantic flowers. “X y XX” is then the locus where two modalities of the insular imaginary intersect: the “sensibilidad insular” of the Coloquio and the island as a metapoetical trope in Mallarmé’s “Prose.” It may be possible to interpret Lezama’s use of “Prose” in “X y XX” as a “cannibalization” of the quintessential figure of high modern French poetry (note that in “X y XX” Mallarmé’s poem is “dismembered”—it is mal armado), or equivalently, as the irreverent subjection of Mallarmé to the “sensibilidad insular.” However, I would like to argue that such an interpretation is partial and incomplete, insofar as it remains confined to the precepts of cultural and/or geographical determinism. The encounter of the two insular imaginaries must be viewed dialectically: Mallarmé—yes—becomes subject to the “sensibilidad insular,” but at the same time the flowers of Mallarmé’s metapoetic critique are “grafted,” so to speak, in Lezama’s isla, and this in turn is echoed in the theory (to which I will turn in the following section) of reading, temporality, muerte, and resurrección that Lezama elaborates in “X y XX.” This enigmatic text presents a figuration of a path that traces Lezama’s various preoccupations during the early years of his career: tradition, Cuban identity, and cosmopolitanism, but also more abstract questions like reading and temporality, the historicity of cultural artifacts, and most important, the singular linguistic experience that is present in his most hermetic verse. “X y XX” stages a singular “transit” of the insular imaginary: from the island as geographical and national location, to the island as cultural topos, to the island as trope, and to the island as poetic event. And this event—allegorized in Mallarmé’s insular landscape and the absent flower—is in many respects equivalent to the experience of language discussed in the previous chapter that takes place in Lezama’s hermetic verse. What I called earlier “(il)legible logos” is a linguistic event—analogous to Mallarmé’s “Prose”—that is not a representation of the world but a revelation of the distance, isolation, and separation between, on the one hand, the act of enunciation and the concomitant hermeneutic expectations it raises; and on the other hand, the possibility of actually fulfilling such expectations and being able

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to fix and articulate a coherent, organic interpretation. In sum, the island in “X y XX”—the encounter and metamorphoses of the islands of the Coloquio and of “Prose (pour des Esseintes)”—is an affirmation and continuation of Lezama’s cultural preoccupations and also a consequential moment of the theorization of his own poetics.

Discontinuidad I pointed out earlier that the 7th quatrain of “Prose (pour des Esseintes)” presents the flowers on the island as being “separated” from the gardens: “Telles, immenses, que chacune / Ordinairement se para / D’un lucide contour, lacune / Qui des jardins la sépara” (7.1-4). How does Lezama represent this image of isolation, this gap, in “X y XX”? To begin, note that Mallarmé sets “lacune” in apposition to “lucide contour” (7.3); and as such, construes the halo (contour) surrounding and adorning the flowers as a gap of sorts, a discontinuity, a lacune. This lacune is skillfully overdetermined by the play of spacing and rhyme in se para (from se parer, to adorn oneself; verse 7.2) and sépara (from séparer, to separate; verse 7.4). For his part, Lezama paraphrases the 7th quatrain as “flor, flor tan inmensa que se separa de su lúcido contorno.” To borrow Enrico Mario Santí’s pun, Lezama here perpetrates an “er[r]otic” (“Párridiso” 335) encounter with Mallarmé. It begins with the Cuban poet’s mistranslation of the French verb se parer (to adorn oneself ) in verse 7.2, which he renders as separarse (to separate oneself ). Strictly speaking, the verses in the poem do not literally say that the flowers are separated from the halo, but that they are separated by the halo. In effect, Lezama’s error (French se para = Spanish se separa) translates these interplays of spacing and troping: since the halo—the contour—is a metaphorical lacuna separating the flowers from the garden, se parer is indeed separarse in the poem. But Lezama goes even further, identifying “laguna” (lacune) as the place of desire: “(…) laguna, por ahí los deseos. Vegetales creciendo como nuestros deseos, flecha sobre los flamencos” (emphases added). Lezama’s phrase “translates” the equivalence—via the rime léonine—between the isolated “iridées” (the flowers, vegetales) and “désir, Idées” in “Prose.” A final point to underscore is the fact that X added a significant qualifier to his speech in his interpretation of Mallarmé’s verse: “La familia de las iridáceas, no es sentencia gratuita de Mallarmé, sino causación eslabonada de sus reminiscencias.” This comment opens a new dimension: the reflection on memory and

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reminiscence, the passing of time, and the way we make sense of the passing of time (“causación eslabonada”). In a word, it includes a reflection on temporality, and in the last instance, on history. Now what do these gaps—discontinuidad, laguna, lacune, séparer, se parer, separarse—have to do with poetry, memory, temporality, history, and discourse? This question has to be answered in a series of steps. The first step involves the careful examination of the following long passage from “X y XX” in which Lezama develops his concept of symbolic death in poetics. For Lezama, time is the agent of the production of sense, and symbolic death is the condition for all poetic creation.30 X.—Para el griego que ve como un carro a la aurora, el caballo es el rayo de sol. Los efebos que domaban potros a la orilla del Eurotas o del Crisorroa, tenían la sensación dual, ya que habían unido la existencia de un caballo a la de un símbolo, que era al mismo tiempo una existencia que pesaba sobre sus ojos.31 La reacción provocada en nosotros por un caballo, no saltando ante nuestros ojos, sino saltando escapado de otra palabra o sensación. Y no solamente la palabra, sino otra cosa más delicada, es el tiempo el que va bruñendo sin posible persecución la palabra, comunicándole otros deseos que el primer pulso que las rigió. La manera de Cervantes nos plantea las más sutiles cuestiones del escritor como producto invariable y las edades sucesivas como producto variable. Nos ha enseñado cómo las frases se liberan, por el tiempo, de la primera extensión que las traza … Emplea casi siempre frases de originalidad media e incorpora, lo que sería sin duda en su época, frases hechas. Pero qué delicia en esa transmutación aportada por el tiempo a la frase de Cervantes. Me encuentro en las Novelas As I mentioned in the discussion of “Prose (pour des Esseintes”) and “Crise de vers” above, these texts elaborate a critique of mimesis in that they are not so much a representation of “something” but rather a reflection about what makes representation possible, and about the “event” of language itself, distanced from its mimetic intentionality. One characterization of “sense” that is appropriate for my purposes here is the one advanced by Jean-Luc Nancy in Le sens du monde: “l’écriture est cela qui precède la signification, qui lui succède et qui l’excède… Le sens, dès lors, n’est pas le ‘signifié’ ou le ‘message’: il est que soit possible quelque chose comme la transmission d’un ‘message’. Il est le rapport comme tel, et rien d’autre” (183-4, emphasis in the original). [Writing is that which precedes signification, comes after it and exceeds it… Sense, therefore, is not the ‘signifier’ or the ‘message’: it is what makes possible something like the transmission of a ‘message.’ It is the link as such, and nothing else.” (Translation mine)]. 31 The Eurotas is a river in the Peloponessus. Chrysorrhoa is a mythical river that carries gold and is mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History 5.16, and by Isidore of Seville in the Etymologies (13.21.21). Isidore traces the origin of the name to the Greek krysos (gold) and roe (stream) and also indicates that it is another name for the river Pactolus, mentioned in the Aeneid 10.142.

30

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ejemplares frases como ésta, en su tiempo frase hecha, hoy difícil elegancia: “bebió un vidrio de agua fresca”… El tiempo como aliado de los buenos escritores, no en el sentido respetuoso que siempre le atribuimos, sino mejorando sus frases, poniéndoles un nuevo sentido que tal vez les fue extraño, ha de engendrar una crítica de más exquisitos detalles, las vicisitudes históricas de cada frase, su muerte, su resurrección. En cada frase de un escritor se borra la pertenencia, y el espectador, aún siendo contemporáneo, establece distancias y recorridos que mantienen toda impedimenta de esculturación de la palabra. (LLOC 139-40)

The significance of this passage demands a careful reading. Note first that X’s reflection is based on an opposition between the two main cultural and historical coordinates of the Western world: Classical antiquity—its myths and literature—and modernity, by way of Cervantes. The contrast hinges on the difference between two epochal conceptions of language and their respective relation to the world. X speculates on what a pre-modern understanding of tropes like allegory, prosopopoeia or metaphor would be like. X seems to intuit that for the Greeks myths were a direct means of knowing and representing the world. If myth provided a direct, non-arbitrary and, as Saussure would say, “motivated” representation of the world and the means to know it, then the tropes employed to articulate mythical discourse bore a “reality” of their own; this “reality” inherent in tropes was a necessary condition to conceive of the world. X intimates that in the framework of the religious thought of Classical antiquity, the mythological imaginary had effectively linked “horse” and “sunbeam” as inseparable entities, the concept of one implying that of the other (“sensación dual”). In other words, X speculates that for the Greeks there was no rift between the world and its representation by means of tropes. Modernity, on the contrary, is founded upon the rift between world and language; between the world and the possibility of knowing and representing the world: “La reacción provocada en nosotros por un caballo, no saltando ante nuestros ojos, sino saltando escapado de otra palabra o sensación.” The equivalence “horse” = “sunbeam” is experienced as metaphor in a modern sense: something that takes place as discourse and is acknowledged as an “unmotivated” representation, not rooted in a transcendental symbology or inherent in the world.32 X seems to establish an opposition between two different ideas As I explained in the previous chapter, the Aristotelian model of metaphor is not exactly “unmotivated” because it is conceived as the expression of a pre-existing similarity between two entities. Max Black calls this the “comparison view” of metaphor (Models 35). This model has

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about the same trope: in a pre-modern conception, the trope is endowed with religious signification, is not built upon an arbitrary relationship, and is viewed as an eternal, unchanging entity; in a modern conception, on the other hand, the trope is a contingent entity, “separated” from any eternal substance, and most importantly, necessarily subject to temporality: “es el tiempo el que va bruñendo sin posible persecución a la palabra, comunicándole otros deseos que el primer pulso que las rigió.” Obviously, to say that the Greeks and the moderns see mythology differently is a truism. However, X seems to be making another, more speculative claim: that the Greeks could not conceive of the figural elements of mythology as anything other than eternal and therefore not subject to change; or put differently, that for the Greeks, myth and its constitutive tropes had neither history nor future. For the modern, anonymous X, however, myth and its constitutive tropes are subject to time and therefore partake in history. Their meanings do change, and may even acquire heretofore unforeseen meanings in the future. Unlike the Greek world, the experience of modernity X describes incorporates what I would call—inverting Paul de Man’s expression— “the temporality of rhetoric.” By this I mean the insertion of discourse into history and the concomitant possibilities of unforeseeable interpretations—in other words, the experience of lo increado.33 As such, the incorporation of historical time in discourse entails an ongoing process of creation of new and potentially unforeseen instances of signification. This modality of poiēsis implies more than just reconsidering whether meaning can be static and eternal; the experience of temporality is also a critique of the subjection of poiēsis to a unified self. When considered in its full historicity, poiēsis is necessarily anonymous and separated from the individual subject. It is in this sense that such a modality of temporalized poiēsis inscribes the event of death. Let me examine this point in greater detail. After the passage on the Greeks, X quotes a phrase from Cervantes’s La señora Cornelia (1613): “bebió un vidrio been called into question by philosophers as different as Derrida and Black himself, for one very often encounters expressions recognizable as metaphors in which it is impossible or false to ascertain whether they are in fact a representation of an underlying, pre-existing similarity. Some metaphorical expressions can actually create similarities, or be based on relationships that are themselves tropological and not substantial. 33 From the context it should be clear that my use of “the Greeks” here corresponds to what X calls “el griego” and not to the historical ancient Greek world. X’s speculative view of the Greeks may well be distorted or inaccurate, but this is beside the point. The issue is rather to formulate a critique of temporality by contrasting a conception of tropes and interpretation as unchanging and eternal (personified in “el griego”), with the historicized “nosotros.”

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de agua fresca.”34 X then elaborates a “counterpoint” of possible readings by speculating about past connotations of the phrase and comparing these with more contemporary interpretations. Here then is a synchronic perspective consisting in the simultaneous reading of two different contexts (something regarded as “frase hecha” in Cervantes’s era acquires “difícil elegancia” in X’s time), along with a diachronic perspective which acknowledges historical distance and visualizes the ways that history can “improve” a phrase. The text is always a space in constant transformation as historical time progressively inscribes the text with new significations that were inexistent and even impossible to anticipate or foresee when the text was first written. Meaning cannot be reduced to any “original” value in a denotative, connotative, or an intentional sense (“el primer pulso que las rigió”). These inscriptions are essentially contingent and will be supplemented by other—as yet inconceivable, or increadas— inscriptions in the future (“poniéndoles un nuevo sentido que tal vez les fue extraño”) as words and utterances, produced in multiple contexts, are re-read and re-inscribed with the passing of historical time. Lezama calls this temporal process of supplementary (re)inscription “las vicisitudes históricas de cada frase, su muerte y su resurrección.”35 “Death and resurrection” in “X y XX” is about insertion into history. The use of the term “death” in this context presupposes that an originating instance of authorship was somehow “alive” in the past. More importantly, “resurrection” implies the necessity of “preserving” somehow that which has died. This model does not refer exclusively to the authorial persona; it also refers to and encompasses the specific historical, cultural, and social context associated with the text’s production. Lezama refers to the originating instance of authorship through metaphors like “primer pulso” and “primera extensión.” From then The original reads “Bebió un vidrio de agua fría.” The 1739 dictionary of the Real Academia gives the second meaning of vidrio as “cualquier pieza, u vaso formada de él.” In Latin vitro designates the material, and vitreum designates the object made of glass. According to Corominas the current use of “vidrio” derives from a vulgarization of vitreum. 35 In his Secondary Moderns (148-54), Brett Levinson proposes an ingenious interpretation of the Lezamian concept of muerte as a sort of signature: death is the singular, unique and unrepeatable event that is “truly” the poet’s; therefore, death “functions… as the poet’s identity,” and the poem is the “effect or work of that dead” (151). Death-and-resurrection would then be a paradoxical affirmation of the self “by un- appearing or by losing itself in history” (152). The interpretation I will develop here has important correspondences with Levinson’s, but my emphasis will be less on the authorial figure per se and more on death-and-resurrection as the experiences of time and history in discourse—“las vicisitudes históricas de cada frase” (LLOC 140). 34

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on the sequence of death and resurrection follows a logic of preservation and supplementation. As the example from Cervantes’s text shows, a testimony must remain of that which was alive (“primer pulso”, “pertenencia”) but has died, and this testimony in its turn is the necessary condition for the historicity of the textual and authorial muerte y resurrección. Upon dying, the “primer pulso” is preserved as a trace; and this trace then becomes the present mark or inscription of an absence, of that which is no longer present.36 As time passes, the alreadymarked text circulates through different cultural and historical contexts and is supplemented by new and multiple inscriptions as distinct readers receive it and appropriate it. Lezama is interested in how words are able to receive and display the multiple marks of their circulation along the temporal dimension and across distinct historical and cultural contexts. In this regard, Lezama accords the initiative not only to words themselves, but also to time—understood in its broader cultural and historical signification. Time is an agent of the production of sense; new and unintended meanings are (re-)inscribed in words as they are incorporated into the flow of history. The agents of this historical dimension are readers and writers who, from specific contexts, interpret, consume and appropriate the circulating discourse. Words already bearing the inscription and testimony of their now-dead cultural and historical “origins” are open to receive, assimilate and display new inscriptions as they move through time and are manipulated by different communities of readers and writers. Once it has died and become a trace, the original “primer pulso” enjoys the same status as the multiple new marks that time progressively incorporates as discourse.

“Exámenes”: Cópula-reminiscencia In order to illustrate these modes of reading and appropriation more clearly, let me now undertake a brief detour and consider some passages from “Exámenes” (originally published in Orígenes 25 [1950]). This is a text that Lezama composes with assorted fragments from various genres, including poems, aphorisms, theoretical reflections on poetry and folklore, and textual commentary on works ranging from Dante’s Purgatorio to his own prose poems from La fijeza (1949). My use here of the theoretically laden term “trace” is rather conventional: the present mark of something absent. I am not referring to the grammatological concept of “trace” introduced in Derrida’s early works.

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In spite of the diversity of themes and genres, one conjoining thread is that all the fragments provide examples of the specific features that characterize the use of language in Lezama’s conception of poetry. Lezama underscores these features by way of discussing different modes of textual reception, such as criticism, paraphrase and explanation: Al desvanecerse las vicisitudes del acto creador, por haberse captado la vaguedad de la poesía en la devoradora posesión de un poema, desvanecimiento comparable al de la planta que se sumerge de nuevo en su indistinto, el poeta ya en relación con aquel acto primero, mentira o contradicción primeras, se encuentra que al repasar aquel fuego que él había enlazado, conducido y situado, ya no se reconoce, teniendo que descender los peldaños que lo reducen a una igualitaria condición de espectador, donde sus agudezas y sus vacilaciones, sus aproximaciones y retrocesos, lo mantienen en la misma relación de aquellos otros espectadores que no sentían siquiera la reminiscencia de aquel acto primero o incesante despierto. Pues aquel poema construido en el momento en que la poesía le era coincidente y lo penetraba, estableciendo así entre poesía y poema un simultáneo encuentro donde lo discontinuo puede brindarse como mansión y estado, se diferencia por esencia de aquel otro espectador que tiene que marchar reconstruyendo los fragmentos. … Preocupado como los vihuelistas del siglo xvi, porque el sonido de la tecla no volviese a su anterior, había que secuestrar del verso sus deseos de reingresar al acto que lo exhaló. De tal manera que el verso no fuese la progresión vaporosa de aquel centro de irradiaciones, sino que, por el contrario, agitado por una lenta corriente de impulsiones, perdiera su nostalgia y adquiriese un incesante apetito de penetrar en la sustancia de la unanimidad y el éxtasis de participación de lo homogéneo. (LLOC 223-224)

In place of the topos of muerte y resurrección used in “X y XX,” “Exámenes” approaches the relationship between creation and the temporal circulation of texts and cultural artifacts from a perspective that one can characterize as the dyad cópula-reminiscencia. The passage presents different figurations of the moment of creation. There is a sexual image, in which the poem comes into existence once “penetrated” by poetry (the image is an example of the Lezamian topos of the poem-as-body). Then the text introduces the phrase “mentira o contradicción primeras,” which Lezama refers to elsewhere as proton pseudos (see for example, LLOC 818 and 1215).37 Lastly, the passage resorts to a Neo37

The expression proton pseudos comes from Aristotle’s Prior Analytics B 18 and refers to the “false premise” or “first lie” that underlies every false argument. When Lezama uses the ex-

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platonic image: “la reminiscencia de aquel acto primero” (I will return to the theme of memory and reading in due course). Significantly, in Lezama’s model, the transcendental status of the creative event is destroyed; this event becomes retroactively another contingency as the text is inserted into temporal circulation and is supplemented by new significations. Once produced, the poem bears no essential relationship to the moment in which it was created or to its creating agent, who becomes reduced to “una igualitaria condición de espectador.” When Lezama asserts that the poet no longer recognizes himself/herself once the moment of creation has passed, he implicitly posits the existence of a previous, specular relationship between the poem and its creator. Once this originating event has ended, the poem becomes, as it were, a falsifying or broken mirror; it no longer “reflects” the poet-as-creator. Under this perspective, what Lezama had described as death and resurrection in “X y XX” can be read as the overcoming of mimesis, for it entails the destruction, not only of the authorial persona, but of all resemblance to that kind of authority and to the authority of resemblance itself. Perhaps this is what Lezama means when he claims that “había que secuestrar del verso sus deseos de reingresar en el acto que lo exhaló,” so that “el verso no fuese la progresión vaporosa de un centro de irradiaciones” (LLOC 224). In other words, inserted into a circulatory process connecting different temporal and cultural moments, “el verso” loses—or ought to lose—its fidelity to, and bond with, an original focus or center; and for this same reason, it cannot constitute any particular telos. In other words, the moment of creation is not something that readers must later recuperate in order to discern an “authentic” and legitimate meaning: “En realidad ese golpe fulminante, pero reverencial, comenzaba por mantener una absoluta dependencia entre poeta y poema, volvía a lograr su ruptura absoluta y su ruptura como absoluto, alcanzando ya el poema otros deseos de religación que no eran la constante de su materia trabajada” (LLOC 225, my emphasis). For Lezama, every act of creation is an act of (re)writing and (re)inscribing signifying chains with no traceable origin—“lo homogéneo,” “lo indistinto,” “la unanimidad”; and it is through this creative act that meaning is constantly (re)produced. From Lezama’s perspective, creation and reading are leveled or given a similar status, and poetry is a privileged mode of relating to language: it is, as Lezama puts it, the “éxtasis de participación en lo homogéneo.” As I pression proton pseudos, he associates it only vaguely with “los aristotélicos” (LLOC 818) and makes no reference to its original meaning or context.

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mentioned above, this model envisions certain modes of interaction between language and the body. Note for example how Lezama’s use of the verb exhalar hovers between the origin of life (the breath of God) and the moment of death (in Spanish the verb commonly refers to someone’s last breath before dying). He also offers a metaphoric description of the act of creation as a copula—wherein language “penetrates.” In this sense, the poet is inseminated by language and consequently becomes less a creator per se than a creation of language.38 In the spirit of the ideas of muerte-resurrección-cópula-reminiscencia, how does Lezama characterize literary exegesis, that is, the interpretation and explanation of a text? From an abstract and general perspective, Lezama describes the historical-cultural circulation and reception of a text as a kind of feedback loop: a dynamic process of fragmentation, construction, re-fragmentation, reconstruction, and so on. Poiēsis, as he writes in “La dignidad de la poesía,” is “indescrifrable, pero engendra un enloquecido apetito de desciframiento” (LLOC 765). This dynamic process is necessarily actualized as discourse. As Lezama puts it in “Exámenes”: “Para continuar con sus rodeos y prolongaciones, discontinuos que van hacia sus cuerpos, metáforas o fragmentos que van a sus imágenes, el poema que mostraba con agudeza el relieve de sus parejas o asociaciones reconstruidas, va a ser rehallado derivando su más firme textura de concepto, sentencia o profecía” (LLOC 224). The death-and resurrection, i.e., the temporal and cultural circulation of the poem, can only “continue” as discourse; and this discourse, in turn, is re-invented (rehallado) and instantiated as “concepto, sentencia o profecía.” What does Lezama mean by this? The following passage suggests a way to at least begin to elucidate a possible answer: Aquel primer diálogo de poeta y poema, convencido de la lenta extinción de los chisporroteos de esa incesante suma de nacimientos, podía solo valorarse en relación con un cuerpo conceptual, con el que se refracta, al que combate, y con el que desaparece. De ahí esa nostalgia que recorre el fragmento poético y que lo conduce a cristalizarse en sentencia. Las asociaciones conceptuales son siempre más lentas que ese súbito logrado por la metáfora. Supongamos el escudo de Lezama sometimes associates the acts of reading and writing with a process of assimilation and breathing the pneuma of poetry. Cf. this excerpt from an interview with the Venezuelan novelist Gabriel Jiménez Eman: “Creo que de una manera o de otra respirar es también una forma de escribir, una manera en que se comunica el espacio visible con el invisible, porque el hombre aspira lo visible y devuelve las ubres de sus entrañas. La poesía tiene que tener mucho de eso” (Lezama Lima Interview 44).

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Aquiles, obra de Hefastos el herrero, donde efebos y doncellas se agitan para la danza y la carrera, muy cerca de ellos numerosos discos, ¿qué significan esos discos cerca de los coros alegres? La respuesta demorada, aunque obvia, carece de fascinación y expira al descifrarse. “Los efebos en la carrera veloces como discos.” (LLOC 225)39

The passage speculates about the possibility of a correspondence between the original event of authorial production (“primer diálogo de poeta y poema”) and its discursive instantiation in the form of “concepto.” “Concepto” however, is not and cannot be a repetition or even a re-presentation of that “primer diálogo”; instead, there exists a tension or struggle wherein the concept “refracts” the original event and the event in turn “combats” the concept. In principle, the original “diálogo” (“penetración,” “acto primero,” “exhalación”) can only be apprehended as discourse, but this inevitably entails a distortion of the event (whose originality and full meaning cannot be preserved), and the event, in turn, “combats” the “concept” that strives to apprehend it. As a result, both end up annihilating each other: the original event vanishes insofar as no “concept” can fully apprehend it. This same process is evident in “X y XX”: the “original” event is death, and it is preserved only as a trace; hence “esa nostalgia que recorre el fragmento poético y que lo conduce a cristalizarse en sentencia.” The actualization of meaning upon one’s reception of the text is an ongoing process that can only be actualized as discourse, but cannot be fully comprehended—either diachronically or synchronically—as discourse. A reader of the text is necessarily driven to explain or interpret it, but how does Lezama envision the role and status of “explanation” (“cristalizarse en sentencia”)? Lezama contrasts “las (lentas) asociaciones conceptuales” with “ese súbito logrado por la metáfora” (note the use here of the word súbito, which in the 1958 essay “Preludio a las eras imaginarias” appears as one of the “concepts” of the sistema poético: the sudden revelation of unforeseen and potentially wondrous links among signifying units in the text). On the one hand, by virtue of their constitutive fixity, concept and paraphrase cannot participate in the dynamics of el súbito. On the other hand, “el súbito de un verso”: Lezama is referring to the final section of the famous description of Achilles’ shield in Homer’s Iliad: “Therein furthermore the famed god of the two strong arms cunningly wrought a dancing-floor like unto that which in wide Cnosus Daedalus fashioned of old for fair-tressed Ariadne. There were youths dancing and maidens of the price of many cattle, holding their hands upon the wrists one of the other” (Book 18, verses 590-4).

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[m]antiene su irradiación para propiciar los innumerables enlaces de significados. “Tu padre fue un esfinge—dice un verso de Apollinaire—y tu madre una noche”. De inmediato derivamos: lo egipcio y lo babilónico; Proserpina que no logra ascender en el renacimiento de las espigas; el bostezo de Euforión, saltando hacia el abismo; el toro alado con cabeza humana; Amenhofis II, no el monarca guerrero, sino la plácida actitud de cualquier escriba colgado del cuello de la vaca policromada de Hathor; columnas que reemplazan su función por parejas de caballos o diminutos toros pintarrajeados en actitud de clown. Y si presto el verso siguiente (“Conjuros de Jacinto y de las Cícladas”) no tendiese sobre el anterior, una cuchilla de oscurecimiento, necesaria para la progresión verbal, se convertiría el primer verso en un hechizo de actuación tan incesante sobre nosotros que nos reduciría como inermes. (LLOC 225)

The verses Lezama quotes are taken from the chorus’s song in Apollinaire’s poem “Le larron” [The Scoundrel], included in Alcools (1920).40 This poem is structured as a small drama set in the times of early Christianity about an exiled Christian who confesses to having stolen some fruits. Lezama uses the verses of Apollinaire’s poem as an “irradiación” that exemplifies the emergence and proliferation of figural networks generated in “el súbito de un verso.” As Lezama indicates, one can infer “immediately” thematic references to Egypt (the Sphinx) and Babylon (Apollinaire’s poem contains several references to Mesopotamian culture), but these “immediate” references to Egypt and Babylon then become the starting point of a subsequent succession of images connecting diverse cultural entities spanning from Egyptian and Greco-Latin culture to Cubist painting. Lezama bases his associations on metaphors built upon other metaphors and upon defamiliarizing substitutions (“columnas que reemplazan su función por parejas de caballos”). This process is inseparable from what I referred to earlier as the temporality of rhetoric and reading, and the idea, articulated in the poem “Dador,” of surpassing what Lezama calls “el análogo.” In “Exámenes” this idea is developed further in the following passage: 40

Here is the chorus’ song in the original:

Maraudeur étranger malhabile et malade Ton père fut un sphinx et ta mère une nuit Qui charma de lueurs Zacynthe et les Cyclades As-tu feint d’avoir faim quand tu volas le fruits (Apollinaire 69) [Clumsy and sick foreign thief / Your father was a Sphinx and your mother a night / Who enchanted Zante and the Cyclades with glimmering lights / Did you feign to be hungry when you stole the fruits? (Translation mine)]

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Pues entre el espejo (el hombre como espejo) y la materia signata siempre surgía el enigma (esfinge en griego significa contracción) reconocible en su rocío o en su empañamiento, ya que cuanto más intenta el hombre la copia de signos y escrituras, surge el rocío de las interpolaciones no presumibles; el lento sudor de enigmas cuanto más intentamos reproducir con exactitud intachable. (LLOC 226-7)

In this particularly dense but illuminating passage, Lezama conjoins various entities that articulate a complex metaphorical and conceptual web: the mirror, which in addition to the usual connotations of reflectivity, mimesis, and reproduction, recalls the passage quoted above in which the poet no longer recognizes himself upon the loss of the “original” event of creation (cf. “aquel acto primero, mentira o contradicción primeras”; LLOC 223); the term copia which, as Brett Levinson acutely points out inscribes the dual meanings “copy” and “abundance” (Secondary Moderns 56); the Sphinx and the “enigma,” which recall both the quotation from Apollinaire’s poem, as well as the myth of Oedipus and the riddle of the Sphinx; and the concept of materia signata, borrowed from Thomas Aquinas. Lezama’s use of Aquinas in the passage is quite suggestive. In De ente et essentia II.4, Aquinas affirms that one can understand matter as that which specifies an individual entity as such. In contrast to the Aristotelian understanding of matter [hylē] as potentiality, Aquinas introduces the concept of materia signata (variously translated as “determined matter,” “signated matter” or “matter signed with quantity”) to indicate how matter can be understood as a “principle of individuation” (Aquinas 36-7). For example, two apples are constituted of the same “raw” or “prime” matter, but the apples can be separated as two individual entities because each apple is constituted of its own materia signata or “signated matter.” In each apple, matter occupies a certain spatial extension in a certain instant of time, and this is what makes each apple different and separate from the other. As a “principle of individuation,” materia signata is then a marker of “difference” within “sameness,” and this, in its turn, condenses the copyabundance duality (cf. Brett Levinson on the meaning of copia in Lezama’s thought). By incorporating the idea of materia signata, Lezama underscores the non-identity that is constitutive of repetition or, equivalently, the inevitable inscription of difference (“enigma,” “rocío,” “empañamiento”) in the “copy” or reproduction. Repetition necessarily engenders difference and, consequently, proliferation and abundance: “porque A es igual a A, este ciervo es aquél árbol,

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esta capa [sic] es el escudo de Aquiles” (IP 133). In a strict sense, the notion of materia signata pertains to physical bodies, but here Lezama tropes the concept to use it as a metaphor for the marker of difference or “imperfection” (to borrow Levinson’s characterization) within the reproduction of sameness, not in the realm of things, but in the realm of discourse: “la copia de signos y escrituras.” The activity of writing—figured here as anxious sweating and breathing (“empañamiento,” “lento sudor”), just like the moment of cópula—is conceptualized according to the model of desire, as an unsublatable dialectic of demand and impossibility: the more one attempts to copy, reproduce, represent, the greater the enigma. In his fascinating interpretation of the myth of Oedipus and the riddle of the Sphinx (135-40), Giorgio Agamben observes that the tragic hero’s position is determined by his “hubris toward the power of the symbolic” (138).41 The Oedipal subject posits the existence of a signified that lies “hidden,” preexisting and transcending the enigma itself. The enigma ought to be solved, and this is understood as the disclosure of the hidden meaning by means of interpretation, which is experienced as the recovery of a transparent link between signifier and signified. The position of the Sphinx, on the other hand, belongs to the category of the apotropaic (< Greek apotrópaios, to turn away). Its purpose is to ward off an evil influence. In this regard, notes Agamben, the purpose of the enigma from the viewpoint of the Sphinx is not to hide a signified that ought to be disclosed, but rather to defer and maintain the distance between the riddle and its “solution.” Applying Agamben’s distinction, one can say that in the passage above Lezama is, so to speak, contraposing the positions of Oedipus and the Sphinx. The tragic hero’s position corresponds to that of (insatiable) demand—“cuanto más intenta el hombre”—founded on a mimetic conception of language and of representation as the possibility of making meaning present and intelligible. But the passage critically reflects on this assumption by simultaneously recognizing the inescapable—yet “no presumible” for the Oedipal subject—gap between representation and making meaning present: “exactitud intachable” can be nothing but “intento,” and this very attempt is in turn a perpetuation of deferral. The critique of semiology intimated in the passage goes hand in hand with the more visible intentionality of theorizing the temporality of discourse (“su muerte y su resurrección”). This points towards another—now I am indebted to Luis Miguel Isava for having pointed out to me this particular passage from Agamben and its relevance for understanding Lezama’s work.

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historical—signification of the “enigma.” In terms of the historicity of discourse—how words simultaneously inscribe and are inscribed by history and culture—literary interpretation, or the act of reading in general, are boundless activities whose condition of possibility is also the impossibility of “reproducir con exactitud intachable.” This impossibility is not just a necessary consequence of the fact that the only access one has to the past is through memory and the writing of history; the cause of this impossibility also lies in the future, or more precisely, in the essentially contingent nature of the future. Looking towards the future, one encounters the (other) causality of infinite possibility, the unforeseeable, “no presumible” súbito that will come from the future and become materialized in the verbal world of the poem. Perhaps it is in this sense that one should interpret Lezama’s reference to “profecía” as part of the poem’s “firme textura”: when considering the text in the fullness of its historicity, the invention—i.e., creation and discovery—of meaning is something that necessarily lies in the future, although one cannot foresee how that invention will be actualized. In “Exámenes,” Lezama significantly represents this temporal dimension of the “enigma”—“[lo] no presumible”—by means of a figure discussed earlier in this chapter: “Aquel verso o fragmento al huir o desvanecerse, extinguida su potencia, va a atravesar el riesgo de una suspension, apareciendo detrás de un inconnu, la isla, con vegetación e insectos de pausas y enlaces” (LLOC 224; emphasis added). And the final sentence of “Exámenes” reads: “La muerte devorada por la sistematización de un nuevo absurdo poético, la visión y la acción de gloria y la albanza en el halo de la paz estival” (LLOC 227, my emphasis). As it concludes, “Exámenes” returns to the island, and to death and resurrection—that is, back to “X y XX.”

Memory, Hyperbole and Anastasis Memory is another topic that plays a key role in “X y XX” and is closely related to the question of the temporality of discourse. The relevance of the role of memory in Lezama’s sistema poético has not escaped critics. The model of literary criticism and reading-as-production of sense subject to historical time that Lezama expounds in “X y XX” suggests that the reception of the text corresponds to a form of “recollection” or mnemonic activity.42 By this I mean See especially Santí, “Lezama, Vitier.”

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that for Lezama different communities of readers re-inscribe across time the remnants of “dead” authors, myths, texts, and past readings and interpretations in the text. As the text circulates across historical time, these memory traces are recalled and re-inscribed by the reader-as-creator and so “resurrected,” rising in a new form. Some pages after the opening section analyzed earlier where X paraphrases and comments “Prose (pour des Esseintes),” Mallarmé appears again in this enigmatic passage: [X:] Hipérbole de mi memoria, diríamos siguiendo las sugerencias del mayor de los simbolistas. Cuando la memoria no es solo la reproducción guardada del mundo exterior; cuando va más allá de la memoria prenatal, más allá de recordar las cosas que no han sucedido; todavía excluida de esas provincias, sigue atesorando la memoria. La memoria, más que el oportuno existir, más que la homogeneidad sin causaciones de los orientales, es la semilla cuya flor se va destruyendo sucesivamente al pasar del germen a la forma. (LLOC 142)

X invokes Mallarmé (“el mayor de los simbolistas”) in order to elaborate a peculiar concept of memory. X first gives some oblique characterizations of different “forms” of memory: “reproducción guardada del mundo exterior” (ordinary memory?), “memoria prenatal” (a kind of pseudo-Platonic anamnēsis?), and the oxymoronic “recordar las cosas que no han sucedido” (the gift of prophecy? a memory of “potentiality”?). These, according to X, are only some of the manifestations of memory. There is also another modality of memory, which X cryptically describes as: “la semilla cuya flor se va destruyendo sucesivamente al pasar del germen a la forma.” The image of the flower—borrowed from “Prose”— appears again, and the germen-forma “destruction” in its turn anticipates the germen-acto sequence in “Dador” discussed in the previous chapter. According to X, the flower undergoes a series of successive “destructions,” which, in turn and paradoxically, are rendered as a kind of “construction.” This notion of “memory” participates in the dialectic of muerte y resurrección. In this characterization, the strange—“hyperbolic”?—modality of memory not only evokes an entity that “dies” and has “died” successive “deaths,” but also suggests that death leads to creation and re-birth. The role of memory becomes clearer when analyzed from the perspective of the counterpoint between “X y XX” and Mallarmé’s “Prose (pour des Esseintes).” Lezama’s expression “hipérbole de mi memoria” is a misquotation and mistranslation of the first verse of Mallarmé’s poem. The first two strophes (the “exordium”) of Mallarmé’s poem read:

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Hyperbole ! de ma mémoire Triomphalement ne sais-tu Te lever, aujourd’hui grimoire Dans un livre de fer vêtu : (1.1-4) Car j’installe, par la science, L’hymne des cœurs spirituels En l’œuvre de ma patience, Atlas, herbiers, et rituels. (2.1-4)

The first stanza is an apostrophe in which the poetic subject addresses “Hyperbole” and inquires whether it is able to rise from the subject’s own memory. “Hyperbole” is a prosopopoeia denoting an autonomous entity that is residing in the subject’s memory but not necessarily controlled by the subject’s will. The mistranslation “Hipérbole de mi memoria” results both from Lezama’s changing the preposition de in French as indicator of origin (from/out of my memory) to de as the genitive in Spanish, and from using “Hipérbole” as a nominative instead of a vocative. In the original, the poetic subject exclaims “Hyperbole! Can you not rise from my memory?” or more literally, “Hyperbole! Don’t you know how to rise from my memory?” whereas X speaks of “my memory’s hyperbole.” The question that runs through the first stanza (1.1-4) is an indirect request, suggesting that somehow the poetic subject wishes for the “triumphal” rise of Hyperbole out of his own memory. On the one hand, this event, if it were to happen, would change the current state of the subject’s own memory. On the other hand, the subject describes the current state of his memory as “grimoire / dans un livre de fer vêtu.” Littré offers two definitions of grimoire: “sorcery book,” and “obscure discourse, writing that is difficult to read” (use of the word can be traced to the 13th century and it is possibly an altered form of grammaire, meaning Latin grammar, unintelligible for the common people). Memory then, as a grimoire, is hermetically enclosed in a metal case; it is an “iron-clad book” resembling a sarcophagus. And yet, something—Hyperbole—may yet rise from this inert, unintelligible matter. How can this occur? In the second stanza, the poetic subject “justifies” the request he makes at the beginning of the poem by indicating that over time he has been meticulously crafting what he calls the “hymne des cœurs spirituels,” and that this hymne consists of symbolic inscriptions: “Atlas, herbiers, et rituels.” In sum, the first two stanzas of the poem intimate that Hyperbole

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may eventually rise from the poetic subject’s memory—presently a grimoire, an unintelligible or hermetic text enclosed in a metal case resembling a sarcophagus—inasmuch as the poetic subject has composed the hymne of symbolic inscriptions. Note also that the first stanza inscribes a temporality: memory is presently—“aujourd’hui”—unintelligible and “locked” but is open to futurity. This is expressed by the poetic subject’s very question/request: can the grimoire of memory eventually open up and let Hyperbole rise? Installing the hymne of symbolic inscriptions—which condenses the acts of writing and reading—is what in time may animate memory, open the sarcophagus, transform the illegible into legible, and cause Hyperbole to rise from the subject’s memory. It is important at this point to recall that following the exordium, in the strophes I analyzed earlier (6, 7 and 8), the poetic subject describes the fantastic landscape of the island and refers to the ineffable experience of the “immense” and isolated flowers which inhabit the island and are separated from the “gardens” by a “lacune.” As I argued in detail earlier, this segment of “Prose (pour des Esseintes)” is a metapoetic reflection analogous to that of the flower as “l’absente de tous bouquets” in “Crise de vers”: the flowers on the island are a figuration of the purely verbal event that takes place in the space of the poem. As such, the poetic text emphatically relinquishes mimetic aspiration; the “flowers” on the island are not the representation or “idea” of a flower. Mallarmé expresses this negativity, as I demonstrated earlier, through the figures of “absence,” “isolation,” “separation,” lacune, and lucide contour. The island and the flowers in “Prose” can be read as a figuration of a purely linguistic event insofar as what is being “spoken” and preserved is the distance—isolation, separation, lacune, lucide contour—between signifier and signified. In spite of being ostensibly “about” the floral landscape of a mysterious island, Mallarmé’s poem is basically a performative utterance, just like the exclamation “Je dis : une fleur !” in “Crise de vers.” The poem’s dazzling imagery and verbal virtuosity corresponds to the discourse’s attempt to “isolate” itself, deferring and keeping the signified at a distance. By using an extraordinarily rich assortment of linguistic devices, the text “performs” this very activity of distancing and deferral. It is now possible to pull together some additional connections between Mallarmé’s poem and the poetics of muerte y resurrección in “X y XX.” Apart from the global consideration of Mallarmé’s poem as metapoetic reflection and performative utterance, it is also important to note that the poem begins and ends with explicit performative utterances. I have already examined the performative utterance at the very beginning, in which the poetic subject asks

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Hyperbole whether it can rise from the grimoire of memory. Significantly, the poem also ends with a performative utterance (Lezama does not refer to this section of the poem, but it is quite important nonetheless). As I mentioned in the short summary above of the “narration” that takes place in the poem, someone identified as the “Sister” (3.4) accompanies the poetic subject. Both watch the landscape of the island and the flowers, but the “description” of the island is punctuated by the poetic subject’s own insistence that his experience is ineffable, and by the reference (in sections Lezama does not quote) to various entities like “l’ère d’autorité” (4.1), “l’esprit de litige” (10.1), and “la rive” (11.1) which introduce disbelief and seem to deny that the island and the flowers exist at all (hence the poetic subject’s insistence that the island is the place of “sight” and not of “visions”). The Sister remains silent throughout most of the poem, and is therefore inserted in this space of negativity. However, in the penultimate strophe she suddenly speaks: L’enfant abdique son extase Et docte déjà par chemins Elle dit le mot : Anastase ! Né pour d’éternels parchemins (13.1-4)

Several things are worth noting here. The poem portrays the Sister as an “infant” (cf. Latin infans, unable to speak) who had been ecstatic contemplating the spectacle of the floral landscape of the island. Paradoxically, the act of speaking is expressed negatively by the verb “abdicate” (< Latin abdicare, to renounce; which in turn is derived from ab-, off, and dicare, to proclaim). The word she finally proclaims—“Anastase!”—needs to be understood in relation to its etymology. As the Lidell-Scott-Jones lexicon indicates, the Greek anastasis means “making to raise” or “making to stand” and is the expression used in the Epistle to the Hebrews to denote the resurrection of the dead.43 Therefore, the Sister appears to be saying something like the imperative “rise up!” Moreover, the first verse of the next strophe (“Avant qu’un sépulcre ne rie” 14.1) suggests that she is standing before a tomb. Therefore, as Malcolm Bowie indicates (37), the poem has a cyclical structure: at the beginning the poetic subject asks Hyperbole whether it can rise up from the iron-clad book of his memory, and at the The etymological link between “Anastase” and “resurrection” is pointed out in L.J. Austin 211, Malcolm Bowie 37, and Olds 45.

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conclusion the Sister finally speaks executing the command “rise up!”—or, metaphorically, “resurrect!”—as she stands before the sepulchre. This analysis suggests the existence of a series of parallels: poetic subject/ Sister; iron-bound grimoire/sépulcre; Hyperbole/“large” and “immense” flowers; apostrophe addressed to the Hyperbole/Sister’s command “rise up!” The sister accompanies the poetic subject as a witness of the ineffable landscape of the island (Agosti 52-3), and at the conclusion of the poem she finally commands Hyperbole to rise up from the dead. Abandoning the “infancy” and “ecstasy” of contemplating the hyperbolic flowers and uttering the command thus corresponds to a rising up from the dead grimoire, the sarcophagus of the memory, in order to be born again. And this rebirth, this restitution of life out of the inert grimoire—unintelligible speech—is discursive. As verse 13.4 indicates, Anastasis is “né pour d’éternels parchemins,” which means not only that Anastasis (that is, the act of resurrection; Hyperbole’s rising from the iron-bound grimoire) is born of the material in which discourse is inscribed (parchemins); but also that this material is its destiny—Hyperbole is born for this medium. In other words, anastasis or resurrection, Hyperbole’s rising from the grimoire, means that the ineffable spectacle of the flowers on the island can be written at last— the verbal event of the poem can take place. Resurrected from dead grimoire, discourse ceases to be unintelligible and acquires sense; it becomes logos. In “Prose (pour des Esseintes)” and in “X y XX”—emphasizing the very process of signification in the former, and the temporal circulation of discourse in the latter—death is the necessary condition of the symbolic inscription and of resurrection, understood as rebirth or the rising from the death already “traced” in those inscriptions.

Back to Futuridad As demonstrated in this chapter, the texts by Lezama and Mallarmé present variations on the general theme of rupture and renewal, including death and resurrection, present and futurity, isolation and aesthetic transfiguration, and the surrendering of subjectivity to poetic creation. Continuing this pattern, the second half of “X y XX” introduces a reflection on the relationship between rupture and the body, elaborating a network of equivalences among paradox, homosexuality, and the island:

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[XX:] lo que en la esfera del pensamiento se llama paradoja; lo que en lo moral es una aventurera desviación, en lo terrestre se llama isla. El griego utilizaba la costumbre como un telón de fondo, pero le reconocía al sujeto la facultad de desviarse, de un opinar desviado con respecto a la cultura… [O]tra de sus formas de conocimiento, es el furioso o erótico, es decir, cuando Sócrates se tapa la cabeza con un paño para poder evocar libremente a la Venus Urania. Ese otro pensar paradojal es más de lo que se cree una fuente de seguridad. Presupone en primer lugar, un macizo de opiniones, una costumbre que opina como salud. Esa desviación se está refractando constantemente con respecto al hábito. En cuanto a esa otra desviación de la moral carnal, me convenzo que nace de la pureza, del buscar la pureza como nacimiento. Esa aventura es la fuente en el aislamiento, es la pureza como un producto aislado. Alguien, hablando de los griegos, subrayaba que en ellos la ciencia se presentaba como conocimiento de la cantidad real de placer, es una frase de una poderosa gravitación. Parece una ecuación, cantidad real de placer, pero después se va trocando en un cuerpo, como una cantidad de materia necesaria para nuestra visión. Para no separar la ciencia de la sabiduría, ni la sabiduría de la santidad, conviene tener presente que el conocimiento actúa sobre una cantidad que no es simple extensión, sino extensión de materia limitada, cantidad real. Y que el placer no es como una sombra o lluvia que vuelve o cae sobre el cuerpo. Así el placer no es como una excepción o enfermedad del cuerpo, sino que es el cuerpo convertido en magnitud y actuando con la gravitación sorda de las cosas.44 (LLOC 144-5; emphasis in the original)

A thorough discussion of the topic of sexuality—or better, “pansexuality” as Salgado proposes (“Las mutaciones” 178)—in Lezama’s poetics is beyond the scope of this study, but a few remarks are pertinent here.45 Various critics have observed that androgyny and parthenogenesis play a central role in Lezama’s aes The reference to Socrates most likely comes from the scene in Phaedrus (237a), in which Socrates covers his head with a cloak and invokes the Muses in order to give Phaedrus a speech on the nature of love. The expression “conocimiento de la cantidad real de placer” appears in the entry dated May 4th 1940 of Lezama’s diary (Diarios 36-7), and comes originally from Victor Brochard’s Estudios sobre Sócrates y Platón (1st. ed. 1940) (21). In this section of his monograph Brochard discusses Plato’s Protagoras and the phrase quoted by Lezama corresponds to Brochard’s interpretation of what science means for Socrates. 45 Eduardo González’s recent Cuba and the Fall is arguably the most thorough study of queer poetics in Lezama to date. Important discussions of homosexuality in Paradiso include CruzMalavé, Primitivo implorante 70-116 and Fowler 95-111. Pellón (28-44) interprets “sexual deviation” in Paradiso as an allegory of the “dead ends from which it is impossible to issue to the golden region of poetry” (29). For an interesting treatment of sadomasochism in Paradiso see Sifuentes Jáuregui. For an excellent discussion on gay masculinity and origenismo see Keenaghan. 44

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theticization of sexuality.46 In Lezama’s own work, these ideas make their appearance at several moments, including the famous dialogue of Fronesis, Foción and Cemí in chapter IX of Paradiso, and the era imaginaria of “lo filogeneratriz,” which refers to ancestral myths of reproduction prior to sexual differentiation (LLOC 835). “X y XX” is an earlier text, but the notion, expressed in the above passage, that “la desviación de la moral carnal” corresponds to the search for “la pureza como nacimiento” suggests an image that Lezama will only fully develop later (most notably in Paradiso)—one in which homosexuality appears as the metaphor of a primordial corporeal and spiritual state anterior to sexual division and the “territorialization”—to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term—of the body.47 The use of “deviation” or “paradox” in the passage establishes an opposition between, on the one hand, this “purer,” albeit “deviated,” sexuality; and on the other hand, the heteronormative, instrumental, concept of sexuality predicated on sexual difference and the goal of reproduction. The passage also presents two contrasting forms or experiences of pleasure: the first as something essentially alien to the body (“sombra,” “lluvia,” “excepción o enfermedad”—and Lezama is perhaps associating alienation here with the subjection of pleasure to the utilitarian goal of reproduction); and a second, more genuine form of pleasure represented as the body itself “convertido en magnitud,” a “cantidad real” that can be the object of knowledge. Note also how the ideas of purity, birth and sexuality are all linked together in XX’s speech: homosexuality is an avatar of a purer, primordial state of being; and searching for this state is in turn a form of birth (“buscar la pureza como nacimiento”): the idea of birth is displaced from the realm of heteronormativity to that of an all-encompassing and non-dualist eroticism in which desire, pleasure, knowledge and spirituality become entwined under the guise of homosexuality. With this sublimated, unifying (meta)physics of desire as an hypothesis, X’s reply to XX’s speech returns the reader to questions of death, resurrection, See especially Cruz-Malavé, Primitivo implorante, Pellón 28-44, and Pérez Firmat, “Descent into ‘Paradiso.’” Interpretations on the topic are contradictory: whereas Pérez Firmat sees androgyny as an affirmation of homosexuality, Pellón sees it as its “antidote” (30). 47 And yet, there is a curiosity that should pointed out: Note that the title of the text—“X y XX”—corresponds precisely to the representation of the chromosomes responsible for malefemale sexual differentiation (XY and XX). When looking at the letters in the page, the text appears as “gendered” throughout. The fact that there is a specific pair of chromosomes responsible for sexual selection had already been established by the 1910s (three decades before Lezama wrote the essay). I have no evidence that Lezama had in mind any of this when he composed “X y XX” and may be just a coincidence—but it is a significant one, nonetheless. 46

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aesthetics, and the production of the poem in an intricate elaboration that needs to be quoted at length: [X:] Si existe la paradoja, como parece desprenderse de sus afirmaciones, es porque con relación a un cuerpo irrumpe el desvío. Si existe esa posibilidad, es porque existe la imposibilidad de transformarse, de hacer un segundo nacimiento corporal, mientras los sentidos previos, los de siempre, permanezcan invariables. Existe, todo lo que no es yo con relación a un instante, la fría extensión espacial y la fría continuidad temporal. Usted ve, paralelismo tiempo espacial, que la continuidad se va a constituir en una sustancia histórica; que esa continuidad se va convirtiendo en una resistencia. Y que las simetrías y desemejanzas entre nuestro cuerpo y esa extensión—sus acercamientos son imposibles porque si en ellos puede aparecer la voluntad de semejanza es sólo como máscara voluptuosa de la muerte—constituyen la gran masa de la continuidad. Es viciosa cuando el paralelismo entre nuestro cuerpo y esa extensión es perfecto. Pero lo que siglos después de los griegos hemos de entender por salud, es liberarse del peso muerto de la masa de esa extensión, la ligereza para emprender el segundo nacimiento. (LLOC 145; emphasis in the original)

Let me attempt to disentangle these convoluted syllogistics. To begin with, paradox [“si existe la paradoja”] presupposes the existence of a “desvío” that invades the relationship between the body and the space-temporal dimensions X calls “extensión” and “continuidad” (this terminology is in its turn inherited from Descartes’s Méditations, a work that Lezama studied in November 1939 and is one of the myriad intertexts of “X y XX.” See Diarios 21-3). Secondly, if one accepts the possibility of such a “desvío,” then the “segundo nacimiento” can only take place if there is some sort of transformation in the subject’s senses (“existe la imposibilidad de transformarse, de hacer un segundo nacimiento corporal, mientras los sentidos previos, los de siempre, permanezcan invariables”). Thirdly, the “temporal” and “spatial” dimensions X refers to as “continuidad” and “extensión” are not separate entities, but evolve together. “Continuidad,” as the passage indicates, is subject to a double transformation: it first becomes “sustancia histórica,” and this, in turn, becomes “resistencia” (within the framework of Lezamian poetics, this transformation corresponds to what I would call the temporality of discourse: i.e., the process through which texts becomes invested with new and unforeseen meanings when inserted in historical time). For its part, “extensión” (the “spatial” coordinate) is deeply enmeshed with “continuidad” (the “temporal” coordinate), for as the passage indicates,

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“continuidad” is constituted by a network of “simetrías y desemejanzas” between the body and the spatial “extensión.” This interface between the body and its spatial-temporal location is “viciosa” if there exists a perfect “parallelism” among body, time, and space. Hence, in order to born again—“emprender el segundo nacimiento”—there must be some sort of non-parallelism, deviation, or rupture in the structure of “continuidad.” What can this rupture be? The answer is death. This is confirmed a few lines later, when XX says: “La poiesis es la forma o máscara de [la] discontinuidad” (LLOC 146), and the same idea is then reiterated by X: [X:] Entonces es difícil pero ávidamente existente, la relación entre el tamaño del poema y la forma como caemos en la muerte. Si la poesía se nutre de la discontinuidad, no hay duda que la más lograda y gravitante discontinuidad es la muerte… La forma en que la muerte nos va recorriendo pasa desapercibida, pero va formando una sustancia igualmente coincidente, actuando como el espacio ocupado como un poema, espacio que muy pronto deviene sustancia, formado por la presencia de la gravitación de las palabras y por la ausencia del reverso no previsible que ellas engendran. El tamaño de un poema, hasta donde está lleno de poiesis, hasta donde su extensión es un dominio propio, es una resistencia tan compleja como la discontinuidad inicial de la muerte. (LLOC 147-8; my emphasis)48

Thus one comes full circle, for death—now the fundamental deviation or the rupture of the “continuidad”—is the condition of poetic discourse. Poiēsis, therefore, is the “mask” or “form” of death, and death, in turn, is the necessary condition for the redemptive “segundo nacimiento.” This passage is especially important because it presents the link between the idea of deathas-discontinuity-as-poiēsis and what I want to call a poetics of poetics of the incommensurable . In the first place, X describes a progression in which death is a creative force: death “acts” as the “space” of the poem, and this in turn becomes “substance.” Secondly, this “substance” has, as it were, two “sides”: “la This general idea of being and poiēsis as discontinuidad will appear in Lezama’s later works. In his meticulous analysis of homosexuality in Paradiso through the debates between Fronesis, Foción and Cemí, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé (without referring to “X y XX”) significantly points out that “Cemí propone el concepto del ser como discontinuidad,” where discontinuidad refers to an understanding of being inspired in Pauline Messianism and Augustinian conversion, both of which suppose “una ruptura radical entre lo que se era y lo que se es o se será” (Primitivo implorante 102).

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presencia de la gravitación de las palabras” and “la ausencia del reverso no previsible que ellas engendran.” An analogy—albeit a loose one—with Aristotelian notions of actuality and potentiality comes to mind here. One can interpret the “gravitación de las palabras” as “presencia” in terms of the actual text being read plus what I referred to earlier as its memory: i.e., the remnants of “dead” authors, myths, texts, and past readings and interpretations inscribed in the text. In principle, this memory is also legible, and its presence underscores Lezama’s own insistence that time is an agent that produces signification, and that the text (and one’s interpretation of it) is inseparable from its historical and cultural path (cf. “es el tiempo el que va bruñendo sin posible persecución a la palabra, comunicándole otros deseos que el primer pulso que las rigió”). Conversely, one can interpret “ausencia del reverso no previsible que ellas [i.e. words] engendran” as something that is not “in actuality” but that may become actualized in the future in some unpredictable form. Note that the description combines affirmation and negation: words engender; they have the faculty—that is, the potential—to create and “form” meaningful discourse (logos); but this capability is the “reverse side” of words; it is something still “absent,” non-actualized, but that will assume a form—albeit “no previsible”—in the future. In other words, this reverso corresponds to what is still increado. Death—“la más lograda y gravitante discontinuidad”—lies at the “origin” and is the “cause” behind this historical dynamic of symbolic resurrection: “La discontinuidad es la única manera de aproximarnos a la reaparición incesante” (LLOC 151). In the final pages of “X y XX,” both speakers ponder the consequences of the creative potential stemming from this poetics of “death and resurrection.” Confronted with the inescapable discontinuity of death, XX wonders about its resonances: [XX:] Yo sé que oyéndome usted no hay peligro que la palabra simbolista disminuya su poderío, pues para usted, como para mí, simbolismo es esa gran corriente poética que viene desde el poderoso Dante hasta el delicioso Mallarmé. Me parece feliz la frase de Valéry, aristocracia discontinua, hablando de Mallarmé. Así como Platón no pudo llegar en el Parménides a una definición de la unidad, podemos seguir pensando en la continuidad misteriosa, casi diríamos anteriormente resuelta de la poesía. Discontinuidad aparente; enlace difícil de las imágenes. Continuidad de esencias; prolongación del discurso y solución incomprensible de los enlaces, que nos hacen pensar en que el papel en que se apoyan desaparecería, seguiría trazando los signos en el aire, que de ese modo afirmaría su necesidad, su presencia incontrovertible … (LLOC 147)

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The tone of this passage is resolutely speculative. It represents an attempt to assess the paradoxes that arise from grounding poiēsis on death and to inquire about its possible ontological implications. A collation with Lezama’s diaries (Diarios 44) reveals that the passage incorporates the entry dated Sept. 24, 1940 almost verbatim. The figure of Mallarmé once again sets in motion the reflection on death, discontinuidad and poiēsis. Lezama borrows the expression “aristocracia discontinua” (Valéry Política 138) [“aristocratie discontinue” (Œuvres 1: 651)] from “Yo le decía, a veces, a Stéphane Mallarmé…,” the Spanish translation of Paul Valéry’s “Je disais une fois à Stéphane Mallarmé…”49 Toward the middle of his essay, Valéry speculates that poetry is grounded on a relationship between human beings and language that is anterior to writing and criticism. In this sense, he argues, every poet, no matter how contemporary, “drinks” from these “sources of language” (Œuvres 1: 651). For Valéry, the poetic craft is the testimony of a “nobility” [noblesse] founded not upon tradition, but upon that ancestral mode of linguistic mediation between the world and us. Valéry calls this imaginary lineage “aristocratie discontinue” (Œuvres 1: 651) and Mallarmé belongs to it. Lezama knew Valéry’s essay well, and it is possible that the “continuidad misteriosa… anteriormente resuelta de la poesía” may have been partly inspired by Valéry’s conjecture about a primordial linguistic stage and the idea of a lineage joining the poetic craft with this condition. And yet, there seems to be something peculiar about this concept of “continuidad misteriosa”: Wasn’t discontinuidad one of the central concepts developed in “X y XX” so far? Isn’t death-as-discontinuidad the foundation of poiēsis? What is the role of this ostensibly misplaced “continuidad” then? Is there a contradiction here? I would argue that this “continuidad misteriosa” should not be understood as a contradictory and misplaced “erasure” of the principle of poiēsis-as-death-asdiscontinuity; rather, XX’s speculation delves even further into reflecting on the nature and authority of discontinuity. In order to understand the “resolution” of the “continuidad misteriosa,” one must carefully examine the expression “Discontinuidad aparente; enlace difícil de las imágenes. Continuidad de esencias; prolongación del discurso y solución incomprensible de los enlaces.” A pair of two-term oppositions is clearly identifiable: discontinuidad versus continuidad, aparente versus esencias. At the “phenomenal” level—in contradistinction with the “noumenal”—discontinuity is characterized as “discontinuidad aparente; See Introduction, note 10.

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enlace difícil de las imágenes.” One can interpret this as the resistance met by the reader when confronting the text, and as the activity of interpreting and trying to “make sense” of it. This activity is carried out by communities of readers situated in specific historical and cultural circumstances, and is inevitably contingent and incomplete (something Lezama stresses in many forms throughout his work). The “continuidad de esencias” may seem to be the “solution” to its opposite, the phenomenal “discontinuidad aparente.” But note that Lezama refers to this supposed “solving key”—which would clear away the obscurity and “[lo] difícil” of the “discontinuidad aparente”—as the “solución incomprensible de los enlaces.” In other words: continuidad is a “solution,” but is “incomprensible”: it is impossible to understand and impossible to circumscribe within boundaries—hence, the unavoidable “prolongación del discurso.” In this sense, XX’s musings do not mean a lifting of discontinuity by a return to some primordial and essential Unity. On the contrary, XX carries the ontological signification of discontinuity to its ultimate consequences. If the “discontinuidad aparente” is only a contingent “enlace difícil,” then its opposite or “solución”— “continuidad de esencias” —is not the disappearance or lifting of difficulty that would clear the path for an unifying and totalizing presence, but rather a most radical instance of difficulty: the paradoxical solution that cannot be understood or articulated—“solución incomprensible.” One can grasp the meaning of incomprensible more fully by recalling X’s idea of muerte y resurrección as “las vicisitudes históricas de la frase,” and the association of continuidad with temporality (“la continuidad se va a construir en una sustancia histórica … esa continuidad se va transformando en resistencia”). If one considers the syllogism “Discontinuidad aparente; enlace difícil de las imágenes. Continuidad de esencias; prolongación del discurso y solución incomprensible de los enlaces” from a temporal perspective, it is possible to discern that the first part refers to actuality and the second to potentiality. What X calls “discontinuidad aparente; enlace difícil de las imágenes” corresponds to reading and interpretation in the broadest sense: the actual—and difficult—attempt to make sense of the world, the pursuit of meaning, and the concrete production of discourse about what the world is. At the same time, inserting this activity in history, which amounts to acknowledging not only its past (the “memory” of symbolic inscriptions) but also its futurity, results in the recognition of potentiality: the yet-to-be- conceived “prolongación del discurso” that is impossible to foresee in actuality—lo increado. The oxymoron “solución incomprensible” condenses the notion that continuity can only be

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conceived in its futurity, and that futurity necessarily belongs to the realm of pure potentiality—a realm that is impossible to foresee and comprehend. This opens up the space of a poetics of the incommensurable: [XX:] “Si acaso existiera una proliferación incesante de lo discontinuo, no sabemos si tendríamos la suficiente fuerza óptica y si ello pudiera renacer con una imantación coincidente” (LLOC 147). The human impossibility of imagining or knowing a future “imantación coincidente” implies that this model of poetic creation is non-teleological (or at least it foregoes teleology; for if a telos exists, it is impossible to conceive). This brings me to a final remark concerning the question of authorship. Poetry is a symbolic inscription, and it carries—or is the carrier of—the trace of death. In this regard, distancing remains a key issue. Upon “dying,” authorship becomes an inscription; its immanence is obliterated. There are two radical gaps: one between the subject of authorship as such and its inscription; and another, no less radical, between the inscription and the reader (it is by virtue of this distancing that X can, for example, read the synchronic coexistence of banality and wonder in a phrase by Cervantes). But this process of obliterating and (re-) marking authority has been before the reader’s eyes from the very start of “X y XX.” As I pointed out earlier, the Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez—a dialogue between “J. R. J.” and “Yo”—is a precursor text. It is even possible in “X y XX” to identify a few references to the Coloquio that may suggest an identification of X with Lezama Lima himself.50 However, inferences like these are inevitably precarious and ironic. Although the voice of “the young José Lezama Lima” may seem to surface at some points, the fact is that from the very start any form of authorial identity is, literally, semantically, and typografically crossed out by the insertion of an X (or two—XX). Indeed, the effect of this momentary flashing and evanescence of “José Lezama Lima” is precisely to highlight the death of authority and its transformation into a symbolic mark. A radical discontinuidad separates Lezama Lima from this symbolic mark, itself subject to the order of discourse and historical circulation. The idea of the author for Lezama is thus resolutely paradoxical: it is an anonymous entity carrying a signature—the trace of death. And this anonymity is overdetermined by the multiple, potentially unforeseeable meanings, readings and interpretations The first is X’s reference to “una pervivencia del simbolismo de mi adolescencia” (LLOC 142). The second is a reply from XX in reference to the topic of insularismo: “Cuando usted le presentó ese tema a uno de los grandes poetas de la época, éste pareció negarlo” (LLOC 142).

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produced not by the “author” but by “las vicisitudes históricas de cada frase, su muerte, su resurrección.” José Lezama Lima has to die, and resurrect as a crossed out space (“X” or “XX”). Then poetry may begin.

Part III

A L L E G ORY

Chapter 4 The Speculum of Historiography … intenta siempre lo más difícil Paradiso, Chapter IX

Introduction: Beyond Humanism and the Baroque La expresión americana [The Expression of the Americas, 1957] is arguably Lezama’s most accessible work and, after Paradiso, the one that has received most critical attention. Originally a series of five conferences given in January 1957, its relative accessibility may lie in part in its oral character, its didactic intention, and the institutional context in which it was produced.1 This particular situation is closely related to two key aspects of the work. The first concerns the reception of La expresión: its mainstream interpretations; the ideological, aesthetic, historical and institutional matrix behind them; and the place of La expresión americana not just within Lezama’s work, but also as part of the broader field of Latin American studies. The second aspect is formal, and concerns the apparently conventional organization of the text, especially when contrasted with Lezama’s speculative essays on the sistema poético. La expresión americana traces chronologically the historical evolution of the distinct artistic expressions of the hemisphere, with the inclusion of the United States (Chiampi, “La historia” 32) (hence my rendering of the title as The Expression of the Americas instead of the literal “American Expression”). With the exceptions of the very first and final sections of the work—very significant exceptions, as we shall see—the bulk of the conference follows a linear historical exposition: the Popol Vuh, the Conquest and the Colonial period, Independence and romanticism, and the vanguards. This linearity stands in contrast not only with the highly unconventional uses of history Lezama develops in his more audacious speculative essays, but also with Lezama’s own historiographical proposal in the first lecture of La

1

Lezama’s persona in La expresión americana is that of the public intellectual. The conferences had the official sponsorship of the Centro de Alto Estudios of the Instituto Nacional de Cultura and were open to the public. This contrasts with the mixture of polemics and belletrism adopted by the origenistas during the 1940s.

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expresión americana. This contrast between a “conventional” and an “unconventional” historiography is at work within the text of La expresión americana and I shall inquire into the theoretical implications of this. For the purposes of my argument the question of the reception of La expresión needs some further elaboration. The Baroque, including its “New World-” and “Neo-” modalities, is arguably the most prominent conceptual field associated with Lezama Lima, to the point it has become a readily available category for characterizing his work. This trend within Lezama’s reception owes much to La expresión americana, and this in turn is closely interrelated to La expresión’s relative accessibility and broader circulation compared to other works of the Lezamian corpus. If one attempts to trace a genealogy of this critical response to Lezama’s work, one can discern that one of the origins (although not the only one) of what can be called the “Baroque” Lezama or the “Lezama-asBaroque” lies in a certain initial contextualization of his work that conflates both a humanist and an americanista or neo-mundonovista critical perspective. Apart from a small circle of foreign poets (of which Wallace Stevens and Octavio Paz were the most famous) Lezama was little known outside Cuba until the mid-1960s. As I pointed out in the Introduction, the canonization of Lezama as a Latin American—as opposed to simply “Cuban”—writer coincided with the Boom of Latin American literature, and more specifically with the idea of “Latin American literature” fabricated by the Boom. The circumstances are well known: Julio Cortázar’s essay “Para llegar a Lezama Lima” (1967), the introduction of Lezama’s work in Spain by José Agustín Goytisolo, and the enthusiasm among intellectuals with the triumph of Cuban Revolution. This is significant insofar as one realizes that the coincidence of Lezama’s canonization outside Cuba and the Latin American Boom is, to borrow a term dear to Lezama, an instance of azar concurrente, for Lezama is not a Boom writer, albeit his initial reception was decidedly shaped by the Boom. The Boom, in its turn, along with its critical reception until the 1980s, can be placed within the centuries-old tradition of the ideologies of Latin American exceptionalism. This tradition had its remote origin with the formation of criollo identities during Spanish rule and later on assumed various incarnations that spanned the whole political spectrum—from the reactionary forms of arielismo, to the discourses on mestizaje and nationhood from the first decades of the 20th century, to certain forms of anti-imperialist thought produced by the radical left. Of all of Lezama’s works, La expresión americana is arguably the one that supports the theses and assumptions of Latin American exceptionalism most

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straightforwardly. This is already visible in the title. Indeed, this is the critical direction Irlemar Chiampi emphasizes in her splendid critical edition of La expresión. The Brazilian critic locates La expresión as part of that venerable tradition of Latin Americanism represented by Alfonso Reyes, Octavio Paz, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, and Mariano Picón Salas (Chiampi, “La historia” 10-11). This also means that Lezama’s work is then implicitly placed within a certain humanist tradition of Latin American thought.2 The Baroque, and more specifically its “New World-” modality, is part of this critical intervention. Under this humanist view, the Baroque is regarded as a historical, aesthetical and cultural phenomenon that epitomizes the “exceptionality” of Latin America. Due in a large extent to La expresión americana, Lezama has been read as one of the foremost theorists of the “New World Baroque,” and therefore, of Latin American exceptionality. This is summarized in his famous dictum that “entre nosotros el barroco fue un arte de la contraconquista” (EA 80-1).3 In this regard, Lezama Lima surfaces not only as a poet and novelist but also as a theorist of americanista thought and, if one wishes to extend the theoretical scope of this aspect of La expresión americana, as a “postcolonial,” or more precisely, a “decolonizing” thinker. Following this interpretation, La expresión americana furnishes a theory of the New World Baroque according to which a style born in Europe achieves its fullest expression in the colonies of Spain and Portugal in the New World through the simultaneous shaping of an autonomous criollo identity and the subversive incorporation of African and indigenous components into the codes of the colonizer. Significantly, the gist of this theory has also been applied to Lezama himself and his work. The Neobaroque Lezama would be the agent of a cultural operation whereby metropolitan or foreign discursive formations are “cannibalized,” subverted, re-imagined and re-created from the periphery and by the peripheral—i.e., non-European—writer.4 In sum, Lezama’s Neobaroque fashioning has a visible formal component—his idiosyncratic style—as well as a conceptual component corresponding to his theorization of the New World

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4

Recent interpretations that underscore the affinities of Lezama’s thought with late modern poetics and theory can be at variance with humanist approaches the Lezama’s work. For a forceful critique of the humanist interpretation of Lezama see Levinson, Secondary Moderns 97-129. For an excellent compilation on critical and theoretical texts on the Baroque, with particular emphasis on its transhistorical and transcultural aspects, see Kaup and Zamora. For example, Haroldo de Campos places Lezama squarely within the paradigm of the Latin American cultural cannibal. See De Campos 17-8.

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baroque or, put another way, of the “expression of the Americas.” And this is a theoretical discourse to which Lezama’s own work has become subject as well. It is not my intention to contest the mainstream americanista-Neobaroque image of Lezama Lima (or more precisely, this image of Lezama as given in La expresión americana), but I do intend to take distance from it, and approach La expresión from a different angle. My specific aim here is to analyze how the opening section of La expresión americana presents what I would like to call a historiographic speculation, where both terms should be understood by taking into account their etymological sense—as a specular reflection of the writing (< Greek graphikē ) of history.

Speculum of Historiography In La expresión americana there seem to be some markers of “exceptionality”— for example, its pedagogical intention, its relative accessibility compared to other essays—that places it at a distance of that “difficulty” that is an integral component of most of Lezama’s work. But on the other hand, the experience of Lezamian language—the lezamescos turns, digressions, and idiosyncratic concepts—is still very much present. This may seem at odds with the relatively conventional way in which Lezama puts forth his admittedly non-conventional theory of the development of cultural expression in the Americas. Some critics have been aware of this tension and have attempted to stress the role played by language in La expresión. In “The Strut of the Centipede” Gustavo PérezFirmat argues that the main difference between La expresión americana and traditional americanista discourse is precisely the shift in emphasis from “being” or “essence” to “expression,” understood not just as the production of literary and artistic works, but more generally as the talante—“the temper or quality of the American creative imagination” (“The Strut” 316). Irlemar Chiampi, for her part, suggests that the metaphorical activity of the alternative, “poetic” logos, which according to Lezama constitutes the foundation of history, is conceptualized in part as an opposition to Hegel’s Eurocentric historicism (Chiampi, “La historia” 14-7, 27-33).5 These two readings locate La expresión americana firmly

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As Irlemar Chiampi indicates in her introduction to La expresión americana, Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History were translated into Spanish by José Gaos (1928) (Chiampi, “La historia” 15). In Reason in History, the general introduction to his lectures, Hegel gives a

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within the orbit of the americanista tradition, but they also—and rightly so— underscore how the formal aspect of Lezama’s theorization is no less important than the work’s “content.” Writing in particular is part of the formal aspect. Being a set of conferences, La expresión americana was conceived as an oral performance, and endowed with a pedagogical intention, yet here I am primarily interested in the question of writing. A useful preliminary exercise is to think about other conferences delivered by “difficult” authors—one can think, for instance, of Stéphane Mallarmé’s “La Musique et les Lettres” or of Jacques Lacan’s seminars. In these examples orality is used as a medium to reflect upon writing. In the case of La expresión americana the reflection on writing is tied to the word “difficult” in a fundamental way. “Solo lo difícil es estimulante” is the very first phrase of La expresión americana and is possibly Lezama’s most often-quoted phrase. Yet the expression lo difícil, as Lezama uses it here, has a host of connotations that go far beyond its ordinary acceptation. Indeed, for reasons that will become clear in a moment, the inquiry on how La expresión americana theorizes a historiographical speculation can be rephrased as: What is lo difícil, its meaning, place and function, in La expresión americana? Let us then revisit the famous and much-quoted opening passage of La expresión americana: Sólo lo difícil es estimulante; sólo la resistencia que nos reta es capaz de enarcar, suscitar, y mantener nuestra potencia de conocimiento, pero, en realidad ¿qué es lo difícil? ¿lo sumergido, tan solo, en las aguas maternales de lo oscuro? ¿lo originario sin causalidad, antítesis o logos? Es la forma en devenir en que un paisaje va hacia un sentido, una interpretación o una sencilla hermenéutica, para ir después hacia su reconstrucción, que es en definitiva lo que marca su eficacia o desuso, su fuerza ordenancista o su apagado eco, que es su visión histórica. Una primera dificultad, en su sentido; la otra, la mayor, la adquisición de una visión histórica. He ahí, pues, la dificultad del sentido y de la visión histórica. Sentido, o el encuentro de una causalidad regalada por las valoraciones historicistas. general outline of the main elements of his historicist thesis. Hegel conceives history as the progression toward the full realization of Spirit [Geist]. This development is dialectical and “mediated by consciousness and will”; its ultimate fulfillment is “Spirit in its essence, the concept of Freedom” (Reason 69-70), this is, the attainment of Freedom as full consciousness of itself. As he poses elsewhere: “World history is the progress of the consciousness of Freedom” (Reason 24). For Hegel, Freedom corresponds to the nature of God’s will, and the materialization of the idea of Freedom is the State.

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Visión histórica, que es ese contrapunto o tejido regalado por la imago, por la imagen participando en la historia (EA 49).

Relatively little attention has been paid to what this passage is saying exactly, and more specifically, to what is defined therein. To be sure, the expression “lo difícil” here comprises the ordinary definition of the word, plus the connotations it acquires when placed in the context of Lezama’s life and work—the notorious difficulty of Lezama’s idiolect and texts; the political positions associated with his aesthetics, as evinced, for example in the debate with Jorge Mañach; and even his place and value in the Cuban and Latin American literary establishment. Yet a close examination of this passage reveals that what has become the most recognizable cliché about Lezama Lima actually corresponds to the definition of a highly idiosyncratic concept. Immediately after the term “lo difícil” Lezama introduces the term “resistencia,” which appears frequently in some of his poems and speculative essays. From the passage one can intuit that “resistencia” and “lo difícil” are not exactly the same thing, but that the former is an attribute of the latter. Also “resistencia” is posited as that which is “capaz de enarcar, suscitar, y mantener nuestra potencia de conocimiento,” thereby suggesting that “resistencia” is what keeps in motion the whole process of attaining knowledge. When Lezama relates knowledge to “resistencia,” knowledge is conceived as potentiality (“mantener la potencia de conocimiento”), and “resistencia” is conceived as the product of a lack—there is always a remainder constituted by that which remains unknown or is “yet-to-be-known.” “Resistencia” is therefore what “resists” the full actualization of knowledge; it is that which preserves knowledge-as-potentiality— “resistencia” is the preservation of that residual part of knowledge that always remains as the “yet-to-be-known.” Hence, in Lezama’s conceptualization so far, negativity—difficulty, resistance, lack, impossibility of totalization—appears as affirmation: these “negative” entities are precisely what keep in motion the whole process of cognitive and cultural activity. Moreover, the emphasis is not in the final goal of attaining knowledge and truth, but rather in the process whereby one pursues knowledge. But what type of process or activity is this? In the passage above Lezama formulates this question as: “pero, en realidad ¿qué es lo difícil?” Here “lo difícil” is not only “lo sumergido, tan solo, en las aguas maternales de lo oscuro”—in other words, “lo difícil” is not simply that which is “obscure” and opaque. Rather, Lezama characterizes “lo difícil” as “la forma en devenir—my

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emphasis—en que un paisaje va hacia un sentido, una interpretación o una sencilla hermenéutica, para ir después hacia su reconstrucción, que es en definitiva lo que marca su eficacia o desuso, su fuerza ordenancista o su apagado eco, que es su visión histórica.” To begin, note that “lo difícil” is here the name for a peculiar process of becoming, and more specifically, the process by which culture and knowledge, as understood by Lezama, acquire a certain form as they circulate across history. Lezama also claims that this process consists of three successive stages: “paisaje”; “interpretación,” or equivalently “sencilla hermenéutica”; and lastly the “reconstrucción” that discloses what Lezama calls “visión histórica”—“ese contrapunto o tejido regalado por la imago, por la imagen participando en la historia.” What does this admittedly abstruse definition mean? I will try to elucidate this in a series of steps. To begin, recall (following Irlemar Chiampi’s reading of La expresión) that one salient aspect of La expresión is its intention to challenge Eurocentric historicism. In “Sumas críticas del americano,” the last lecture of La expresión, Lezama makes a specific reference to Hegel’s views on the alienation of the Americas from universal history in order to reject them emphatically (EA 172-3).6 However, note that one can discern a certain affinity See EA 172-3. See also Chiampi, “La historia” 14-7, 27-33. For Hegel, Nature is the opposite of Freedom and Spirit. Nature is by definition ahistorical, undialectical, devoid of law, and marked by violence and injustice (note the sharp contrast with Rousseau’s view of nature, which had a profound influence on Latin American thought). In the last section of the first conference of his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel presents an outline of what he calls the “Geographical Basis of History” (Philosophy of History 79-102). Continuing the tradition of historical determinism inherited from Herder, Hegel presupposes the existence of a causal connection between land and people, and he views nature as an obstacle to the full realization of Spirit. America in particular “has always shown itself physically and psychically powerless, and still shows itself so” (Philosophy of History 81). It contains vast extensions of untamed land, and its ancient, more advanced civilizations were merely local and therefore unable to participate in the progression toward the realization of Spirit. For Hegel, whatever takes place in America at the present “is but an emanation from Europe” (82). In this regard, he makes a sharp distinction between North and South America: whereas the former displays “prosperity,” “industry” and “civil order,” the latter shows “war” and “military order,” and has retained the ills of the Catholic religion and colonial ties with Spain (83-4). Hegel’s views, however, must be put into context. The lectures date from 1822 and 1830-1, and therefore are contemporaneous with the victory of the independence struggles in Spanish America. Hegel is only speaking here about the past and the present—this is, history, strictly speaking. The future for Hegel is a different matter altogether and outside the scope of his Lectures, but it is nonetheless significant that he briefly speculates that America “is the land of the future, where… the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself—perhaps in a contest between North and South America” (Philosophy of History 86). It is likely that Hegel followed the

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with the Hegelian progression from Nature to Spirit in Lezama’s progression paisaje-hermenéutica-visión histórica. Both thinkers conceive the process toward the formation of cultural entities as departures from the realm of the “natural,” understood according to the modalities of paisaje in the case of Lezama, and Nature in the case of Hegel. Moreover, in his lecture Lezama significantly incorporates Friedrich Schelling—one of Hegel’s foremost precursors—as a philosophical referent behind his conceptualization of paisaje.7 Therefore, and despite the antagonism toward Hegel, Lezama’s concept of “lo difícil”—the evolution paisaje-hermenéutica-visión histórica that describes how culture acquires a form—displays a certain kinship with the tradition of German Idealism, and even a certain resemblance to some aspects of German early Romantic thought. I shall return to this point later on. What is paisaje for Lezama and how does it relate to nature? La expresión americana has a cyclical design. As we saw paisaje appears in the very first paragraph of La expresión but it is not until the fifth and last lecture of La expresión (“Sumas críticas del americano”) that Lezama defines the concept (EA 166-70). In that lecture Lezama states that “el paisaje nos lleva a la adquisición del punto de mira, del campo óptico y del contorno,” to then characterize “paisaje” as “una de las formas del dominio del hombre… Paisaje es siempre diálogo, reducción de la naturaleza puesta a la altura del hombre… es la naturaleza amigada con el hombre” (EA 167). Following Lezama’s own exposition one may interpret paisaje as a mode of subjectification of nature: paisaje is the primary mode of interrelation between nature and the human. In contrast with nature in itself, paisaje is nature as apprehended by the human (“adquisición del punto de mira,” “naturaleza amigada con el hombre”). Whereas nature in Hegel is ahistorical by definition, one can understand what Lezama calls paisaje as the inaugural appropriation of nature by the human. We always perceive nature already as paisaje, and in this regard, one can interpret paisaje as the primary condition for the emergence of culture and even representation in general.8 In “Sumas struggles for independence with interest and under his system may have been interpreted as events that may potentially incorporate South America into the teleology of Universal History. 7 “Si aceptamos la frase de Schelling: ‘la naturaleza es el espíritu visible y el espíritu es la naturaleza invisible’, nos será fácil llegar a la conclusión de que ese espíritu visible de lo que más gusta es dialogar con el hombre, y que ese diálogo entre el espíritu que revela la naturaleza y el hombre, es el paisaje” (EA 167). 8 Cf. this passage where Lezama introduces the concepts of “entidad natural” and “entidad cultural”: “Si digo piedra estamos en los dominios de una entidad natural, pero si digo piedra donde lloró Mario, en las ruinas de Cartago, constituimos una entidad cultural de sólida gravitación” (EA 54).

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críticas” Lezama also makes a strategic use of the concept of paisaje as a marker of the Americas’ cultural exceptionalism. In a long passage (EA 166-77) comparing various artistic and literary works from Europe and the Americas, Lezama analyzes the role of paisaje in each. He shows that paisaje in the Americas is a “protoplasma incorporativo” (EA 177), and that “ha estado siempre acompañado de especial siembra y de arborescencia propia” (EA 169), and uses these characterizations to counter the “limitaciones hegelianas” (EA 173) that posited that the Americas were not participants in Universal History. If paisaje is the subjectification of nature—the placing of nature under the gaze of the human, as described by Lezama’s optical metaphors—“una interpretación o una sencilla hermenéutica” appears to be the logical next step. By means of interpretation, paisaje or subjectified nature, is endowed with meaning and therefore enters in the realm of representation. In principle, “interpreting” the elements of paisaje corresponds to the production of discourse and, more broadly, of cultural artifacts. It encompasses myth and religion—these correspond to the first interpretations of natural phenomena in culture—and from there eventually works of art, scientific theories, etc. According to Lezama all these practices fall under the category of “interpretations.” But for Lezama, the paisaje-hermenéutica progression—a still crude version of the nature/culture dyad—presents an incomplete picture, both historically and theoretically. Lo difícil—understood as the process of how cultural entities acquire certain forms as they move across different historical epochs—is that which discloses a fuller picture, and it does so by means of the supplementary stage Lezama calls “visión histórica”—a “reconstrucción” that reveals “ese contrapunto o tejido regalado por la imago, por la imagen participando en la historia.” But what does this mean? What is this “difficult” element that comes “after” interpretation? Lezama explicitly characterizes “visión histórica” as a reconstruction (and this will be of great importance, as we shall see) but he does not define the concept in a concrete way. Rather, Lezama attempts to “explain” it by giving an example. Immediately after the opening paragraph of La expresión and the definition of “lo difícil” therein as the progression paisaje-hermenéutica-visión histórica, Lezama (as if he were a guide in a museum) describes a series of paintings from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and then establishes a series of associations among them in a long digression (EA 49-53). The works he describes are the miniature “September” from the illuminated book of hours Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry (c. 1414-1418; Condé Museum, Chantilly, France), painted by the Limbourg brothers and depicting a grape harvest against

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the background of the Saumur castle; Pieter Breughel the Elder’s The Harvest (1565; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); Rogier van der Weyden’s Last Judgment altarpiece (c. 1443; Beaune Hospice, France); Jan van Eyck’s Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (c. 1435; Louvre), which depicts the Chancellor kneeling before the Virgin Mary; and Simone Martini’s equestrian portrait of Guidoriccio da Fogliano riding between the castles of Montemassi and Sassoforte (approx. 1328-1330; Palazzo Pubblico, Siena).9 After this “guided tour” or ekphrastic sequence of representative works of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Lezama proceeds to manipulate them in a totally unexpected way (EA 51-2). He recalls the image of the castle in the “September” miniature and the image of Guidoriccio da Fogliano riding on horseback in Simone Martini’s fresco, and then proceeds to “merge” the two paintings: Lezama imagines a scenario in which the castle of the Duke of Berry opens its doors to da Fogliano in Simone Martini’s painting. The illusory merging of these two iconic representations of power from the late Middle Ages gives rise to the figuration of an “imaginary door” in which the condottiero da Fogliano, riding on horseback in Martini’s fresco, “enters” into the Limbourg brothers’s illustration of the Saumur castle: “Parece como si en aquel estelar castillo, envuelto en el nocturno esmalte de sus bandas azules, que vimos en una tarde de Septiembre, en el perdurable tratamiento de los hermanos Limbourg, abriese sus lentas puertas para dar paso a la arrogante confianza del Caballero da Fogliano” (EA 51). But then Lezama takes this already strange fusion of a Tuscan fresco with an illustration from a French medieval book of hours one step further into what he calls a “contrapunto animista”: he links that imaginary door connecting the two European paintings to two non-Western cultural referents: the hexagram “opening gate/closing gate” from the Chinese oracular treatise I Ching, and a legend from the indigenous tribes of eastern Ecuador, in which Tacquea—the guardian of fire—keeps humans from stealing the fire by leaving ajar the door of his house.10 What began as a comparative description of a sample of early

Note that this ekphrastic sequence is based on illustrations from an art monograph. Lezama never saw any of these works in person, so this “guided tour” is in fact the act of reading a text. For a study of the bibliographical sources of this section of La expresión see Salgado, “Hybridity.” 10 As Irlemar Chiampi notes (EA 52 n. 6) Lezama most likely took this reference from George James Frazer’s Myths of the Origin of Fire (1924). According to the legend, humans tried to enter the house of Tacquea transformed into birds, but Tacquea left the door half-open so that the birds were crushed between the door and the jamb as they attempted to enter. 9

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modern European paintings then becomes a “contrapuntal” assortment of disparate cultural representations—a late Medieval Sienese fresco, a French book of hours, a Chinese oracular symbol, an Amerindian legend—that presents itself as supposedly unified, organic and justified, but that obviously does not obey any conventional rationale of historical ordering or cultural compartmentalization. Lezama concludes his digression thus: “¡Manes de Victoria y de Palestrina, erudita polifonía con cuatro momentos de cultura integrándose en una sola visión histórica!” (EA 52).11 Lezama had initially described “visión histórica” as the “reconstrucción” that follows the stage of “una interpretación o una sencilla hermenéutica.” In the example of “visión histórica” Lezama gives—and which he characterizes as “contrapunto animista” and “erudita polifonía”—we certainly have a “reconstruction” in which certain cultural artifacts have been displaced from their “original” contexts and then creatively (re)arranged according to an alternative “logic” no longer subject to the order of discourse of conventional historiography or comparative anthropology. But how can the presentation of such an ostensibly ahistorical and arbitrary array of cultural artifacts correspond to a “visión histórica”? In order to begin to understand the meaning of Lezama’s critical intervention, let us start by his own commentary: “¿Qué es lo que ha pasado? Como otro flato [sic] Dei, entre cuadros, libro de horas, brillos de paños de torneo, cosecheros, trigales, que se han agitado de nuevo, comunicándoles como una nueva situación, una ininterrumpida evaporación y otra finalidad desconocida” (EA 52). In another passage he claims that “entidades naturales o culturales… adquieren en un espacio contrapunteado por la imago y el sujeto metafórico, nueva vida” (EA 54). Here Lezama elaborates the meaning of “reconstruction” by means of analogies with the ideas of God’s breath giving life and resurrection. This is a development of the idea of time and resurrection he had introduced over a decade earlier in “X y XX”: “El tiempo”—in X’s speech— “va bruñendo sin posible persecución la palabra, comunicándole otros deseos que el primer pulso que las rigió… [el tiempo] ha de engendrar una crítica de más exquisitos detalles, las vicisitudes históricas de cada frase, su muerte, su In Roman religion manes designates the souls of dead people who had a virtuous life; and the souls Lezama invokes are those of the Renaissance composers Tomás Luis de Victoria (15481611) and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594)—precisely those who mastered the technique of counterpoint in sixteenth-century ecclesiastical music. Hence, Lezama “resurrects” symbolically the two master contrapuntistas to elaborate a figuration of the “counterpoint” of four cultures configuring a “visión histórica.”

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resurrección” (LLOC 139-40). The “reconstruction” of the “forma en devenir” acquires the connotations of re-creation, re-animation and living anew—“una obligación casi de volver a vivir lo que ya no se puede precisar” (EA 56, my emphasis). Upon subjection to the order of discourse Lezama calls “visión histórica,” entities that have come to us from the past acquire new, different, and heretofore unknown “lives” and “purposes.” In retrospect, what does this tell us about the path paisaje-hermenéuticavisión histórica Lezama calls lo difícil ? The crux of Lezama’s intervention, I would argue, is the introduction of the supplement he calls “visión histórica”: Lezama places another order of discourse after and beyond interpretation—this is the point where “una simple hermenéutica” becomes difficult, so to speak. In the definition of lo difícil quoted above (cf. EA 49) Lezama explicitly contrasts “sentido” (which he associates with “interpretación,” “sencilla hermenéutica,” “valoraciones historicistas”) with “visión histórica”; moreover, “visión histórica” is regarded as a further stage beyond “sentido.” In this regard, “visión histórica” is a supplementary operation—“reconstrucción,” re-creation, re-animation— upon already “interpreted” cultural entities, and it is in sharp distinction with respect to the “previous” stage of “sentido” or “sencilla hermenéutica” (i.e., normative, conventional, rational, “valid” interpretations). On the one hand, Lezama presents Simone Martini’s fresco as an example of a cultural entity. As such, one can think up a host of “valid” or plausible implications and connotations relating the painting to disciplines like history, the arts, politics, sociology, etc. (for example, one can study the painting in its relationship to the history of the Duchy of Siena, politics during the late Middle Ages, or the origins of Italian Renaissance painting). On the other hand, Lezama supplements this conventional or “normative” interpretative network with a non-normative, extravagant, and seemingly absurd constellation he calls “visión histórica,” linking Martini’s fresco with a French book of hours, the I Ching and an Amerindian legend. Lezama claims that this is a “metamorfosis” that achieves a “nueva visión” (EA 53) and retroactively modifies the signification of cultural entities and our experience thereof.12 In this regard, the concept of “visión histórica” can Another good example of “visión histórica” is the passage from “Preludio a las eras imaginarias” (1958)—a text contemporary with La expresión americana—I mentioned earlier in chapter 1, which presents a sequence of brief sketches (LLOC 798-9) covering characters and topics as varied as Francis Bacon, Hindu sculpture, Van Gogh, Balzac’s Peau de chagrin, and a scene at a café in Havana. Although Lezama does not use the term “visión histórica” there, the logic is exactly the same: clustering a group of cultural entities around some central idea or image—in this case, experiences that surpass plausible causal relations and quotidian experiences.

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be regarded as a continuation of the poetics of muerte y resurrección presented in “X y XX.” To be sure one can say that this constellation, regardless of its extravagance, is just another interpretation, or put in another way, that it still belongs to the domain of “hermeneutics” (although not “sencilla” anymore). This seems to be a tacit assumption behind culturalist readings of La expresión americana and of the theory of the eras imaginarias which—to give a couple of examples— either see La expresión as an eccentric reinterpretation of culture that counters Eurocentrism and affirms the creative potential of the Americas, or read the eras imaginarias as a neo-Viconian revisiting of ancient cultures that posits a transcendental connection between Christian eschatology and the “poetic” creations of those civilizations (“poetic” here should be understood in the very broad sense of mythical, religious, and artistic productions in general).13 The reasons that justify such approaches are many and valid, yet I do think that one can inquire about another role of the concepts of lo difícil and visión histórica that do not pertain to the realm of cultural hermeneutics. Through the supplementary operation called visión histórica Lezama is doing something else besides a creative (re)interpretation of culture, for in the sequence Lezama calls lo difícil, visión histórica is placed after “un sentido, una interpretación o una sencilla hermenéutica.” One can certainly take the emergence of visión histórica—that contrapuntal arrangement linking late medieval European painting, ancient Chinese and Amerindian cultures—as another, more “difficult,” so to speak, level of interpretation. Yet Lezama explicitly contrasts “interpretation” and “hermeneutics” on the one hand, and the visión histórica afforded by “la imagen participando en la historia” on the other (EA 49); in this regard the latter is not simply another interpretation, but rather the supplement of interpretation. The difference between a “simple” hermeneutics and visión histórica, I want to argue, corresponds to the gap between representation and the means of representation, between some meaningful “content” that is represented (and as such, is the product of interpretation and is subject to it) and the formal devices that materialize such content as discourse—or put differently, it is the difference between “content” and rhetoric. The visión histórica—the constellation or contrapunto formed by the paintings, the I Ching, and the legend of Tacquea—is not only a re-interpretation of these cultural entities but also a On the relationship between Vico and Lezama see for example Salgado, From Modernism to Neobaroque 139-79.

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supplementary rhetorical operation: those cultural entities have been removed from their “proper” or “original” contexts and then creatively (re)arranged according to a tropological “reason.” Let us take a closer look at this operation. To begin, visión histórica belies conventional or normative historiographic criteria—it may refer to things from the past, but it is not a historical account of the past. Lezama seems to be intending this explicitly when he claims that the visión histórica participates in a poetic activity (“la imagen participando en la historia”) that is contrasted with “hermeneutics” and opposed to “las valoraciones historicistas.” In a strict sense, what Lezama calls visión histórica is an arbitrary arrangement insofar as it does not intend or lay claim to be representing any factual, substantive “content” prior to it. The visión histórica is paradoxically ahistorical insofar as it does not aim to represent any “facts” from the past, or any cause-effect or chronological sequence presenting a conventional historical account. The rhetorician, or to use Lezama’s parlance, the abstract agent he calls “sujeto metafórico” (EA 55), imagines and creates an array of connections among a priori disparate entities associated with the past. These connections are made from the standpoint of the present, and are applied retroactively to fragments of the historical past in order to make present the visión in which these fragments acquire “nueva vida” (EA 54). The conventional historiography organized according to a metonymic, cause-effect concatenation of events is metamorphosed into a network of metaphorically linked entities. According to Lezama, this supplementary re-reading and reconstruction produces a “metamorphosis” of the historicity of cultural and natural entities and of our perception and knowledge thereof. One can identify some equivalences between this rhetorical activity and the weak sublation of the Aristotelian metaphor examined in chapter I. The visión histórica is brought about by inventing—finding and creating—connections among cultural entities that come from the past, just like the sublated tropes theorized and practiced by Lezama are fabricated from inventing relationships among disparate signifiers. To continue the analogy, recall that the critical insight afforded by the sublated metaphor is the liquidation of the empirical and ontological substratum that supposedly determines and “sanctions” categorical and analogical relationships; metaphor is not—as Aristotle would have it—a repetition of a pre-existing, pre-linguistic structure, but a product of invented relationships among words. Similarly, the connections that configure the visión histórica are not repetitions or re-presentations of factual relationships among events or entities from the past; rather they are fabrications made in the present.

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Yet visión histórica plays another and more consequential role when viewed in the specific context on La expresión. If we look at the work as a whole one can discern another contrast closely related to the difference between hermeneutics and visión histórica I have been discussing: it is the contrast between, on the one hand, the relatively conventional historiographic method Lezama follows in the main part of the conference (a history of culture in the Americas from pre-Columbian times to the twentieth century), and on the other hand, the idea he presents at the opening of the conference of a decidedly non-chronological visión histórica consisting of a “contrapuntal” constellation of cultural and historical entities. With the exceptions of the beginning and the end of the cycle of conferences, where Lezama respectively introduces and recapitulates the meanings of lo difícil and visión histórica, the lectures of La expresión americana follow a chronological organization in accordance to traditional historiographic expectations. After the strange speculations in the first part of “Mitos y cansancio clásico” on lo difícil, visión histórica, and his peculiar references to thinkers like E. R. Curtius, Oswald Spengler and Ludwig Klages (I will return to this in a moment), Lezama goes on to trace a fairly “standard” historical narrative that goes from pre-Columbian cultures, the Conquest, the Colonial Baroque, Romanticism and the emancipation movements in Spanish America, to modern art, to then return in the last lecture—“Sumas críticas del americano”—to the speculative register of the beginning.14 The important point is that one can identify here a difference or gap working at the interior of the text of La expresión americana: that between a conventionally historical sequence on the one hand, and the a-historical “counterpoint” paradoxically called visión histórica on the other. Here we have two different orders of discourse placed side by side—that of conventional historiography and that of “la imagen participando en la historia.” Critics have overlooked this peculiar tension between two modes of writing (about) history at work within the same text. What can one make of this contrast, or better yet, reflection? What does the ostensibly a-historical visión I should clarify that by “conventional,” “traditional” and “normative” I am not referring to the substance of Lezama’s theory of culture in the Americas itself, which may or may not be plausible when scrutinized from the perspective of political history, anthropology, history of the arts, etc. This type of critique of Lezama’s work, however relevant, is besides the point of my argument here. My main interest pertains to the formal aspect—the contrast between a “contrapuntal” and a “causal” or “linear” mode of arranging events and cultural entities from a historical perspective.

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histórica let us see with regard to history? I argue that the visión histórica—the last stage of lo difícil—constitutes what I would like to describe as a historiographical speculation. This expression should be understood both in its etymological and denotative senses. The term “historiography,” as I pointed out earlier, can be translated as “writing of history”; and “speculation” for its part is an optical metaphor: the word derives from the Latin speculari [to watch out, to observe] and a speculum is a reflecting surface. Among the acceptations of “speculation” currently in use one finds “abstract or hypothetical reasoning on subjects of a deep, abstruse, or conjectural nature,” with the following additional connotation: “as opposed to practice, fact, action, etc.” (OED) This semantic field condenses precisely the tension between the “factual” chronology and the “poetic” constellation. Positioned at the “extremes” of a relatively conventional historiographical account, what Lezama calls visión histórica then functions rhetorically as a troping of the writing of history that both reflects and reflects upon the writing of history. Such a reflection is “distorting”: positioned before the linear chronological sequence, one finds a specular and speculative non-linear and anachronistic combination of entities belonging to disparate historical events and cultural artifacts, arranged according to a certain tropological reason. How can one characterize this mechanism of “distortion,” its effects and its critical implications? Depending on whether one wishes to emphasize the visual aspect (visión, speculation, reflection) or the textual (namely, the historiographic) one can characterize the work of distortion in the visión histórica respectively as an anamorphosis or as an anagram.15 Two historiographical modalities face one another—one diachronic, the other anachronic; one “correct” and “factual,” the other ostensibly arbitrary and “ahistorical”—and this contrast in its turn sets in motion what can be described as a dialectics of seeing. In a first approximation, one can say that the visión histórica—the “distorted,” anachronistic combination of cultural entities—acts as a speculum that allows one to “get things straight” and see both what “proper” and “aberrant” modes of historiography look like: history, when bien mirada— to recall Sor Juana’s sonnet on anamorphosis “Este que ves, engaño colorido”—looks like, or ought to look like, a chronological succession of facts. Yet this does not seem to be Here it is useful to understand “anagram” in the extended sense proposed by Andrea Bachner (6): “a process that consists in a disassembling and reassembling of parts of the same basic material”; “a meeting place of different sign systems [which] does not have to consist of units of only one of these systems”; and finally as “the site which makes the combinatorial character of sign systems visible.”

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what Lezama necessarily has in mind. For him “proper,” “normative,” “chronological” historiography belongs to the domain of “sencilla hermenéutica”; in contrast, that which appears as a distorted, arbitrary, and seemingly nonsensical pseudo-historiography is precisely what he deems as belonging to the superior realm of “la imagen participando en la historia”—this makes present a higher and “truer” vision of history in which things from the past are endowed with “nueva vida.” Confronted with and recognizing traditional historiography and hermeneutics as such, visión histórica thus performs a speculation in the form of an anamorphic process whereby visión histórica recognizes itself both as the “lowest” (absurd, arbitrary, nonsensical) and as the “highest” (poetical, participating in the imagen) mode of historiography. This “dialectics of seeing” is in turn closely interrelated with what can be described as the anagrammatic aspect of visión histórica. Along with the insight provided by the optical metaphors of speculation and anamorphosis, one can also construe the rhetorical operation at work in visión histórica as an anagram (cf. note 15): the constellation of cultural entities that articulate the visión histórica corresponds to a mode of combining signs according to a certain mythopoetical and rhetorical “reason.” The insight afforded by viewing the visión histórica as an anagram is that the “true” historical sequence is revealed as another mode of combining signs, albeit subject to a different order of discourse. The historiographical speculation mobilized by the poetical “combinatorics” of visión histórica discloses the no less “combinatorial” character of conventional historiography. And this is a disclosure of rhetoricity as well. Conceptualizing visión histórica as an anagram corresponds to contrasting two different modes of combining signs: on the one hand, a metonymical sequence according to chronological (arranging the lectures according to a conventional historical periodization) and/or cause-effect relationships of contiguity (say, biological and cultural mestizaje as causes of the works of Kondori and Aleijadinho) (EA 104‑5); on the other hand, a sublated metaphorical combination of signs invented by the “sujeto metafórico,” to use Lezama’s parlance. In each case we have a different “combinatorial” and, consequently, rhetorical logic—the “proper” ordering of conventional historiography in one case, the anagrammatic (dis)order of “la imagen participando en la historia” in the other. In sum, the critical import of the speculative activity of the visión histórica, as seen from this formalist perspective, lies in the reflection and concomitant revelation of rhetoric. This emphasizes further the “optical” instrumentality of visión histórica. This speculum, consisting of a wondrous, tropological combination of a

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priori disjoint cultural entities, serves as a “reflective surface” that denaturalizes and defamiliarizes the “prosaic” (< prorsus, “straight”) sequence of conventional historiography and presents it as a particular “combinatorial” strategy. The visión histórica thus corresponds to the “emergence,” “rising” or “lifting”—some of the acceptations of the term Aufhebung as used by Hegel—of the rhetorical apparatus of historiographical discourse.

Anschauung, Auffassung: A Philological Remark I would like to conclude my analysis of lo difícil and visión histórica with a brief remark that will be relevant for the examination of the eras imaginarias in the next section. Critics like Enrico Mario Santí, Irlemar Chiampi and Djelal Kadir have already discussed the role of Ernst Robert Curtius’s monumental Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter [European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages] (1948) in the composition of La expresión americana.16 In “Mitos y cansancio clásico,” shortly after his presentation of the contrapuntal visión histórica, Lezama elaborates on the theoretical foundations of his alternative historiography by contrasting T.S. Eliot’s “método mítico” (a concept introduced in “Ulysses, Order and Myth” [1923], where Eliot discusses Joyce’s Ulysses and its capacity to recreate the Homeric myth in modern times, thus bearing witness to the myth’s timelessness) to a “técnica de la ficción,” which the Cuban poet attributes to Curtius. Lezama argues that for the purpose of studying and valuating myths the “técnica de ficción” is more productive than Eliot’s “crepuscular” (EA 58) outlook: Que la valoración de los enlaces históricos y de la estimación crítica, tenía que ir forzosamente a un nuevo planteamiento, era cosa esperada con júbilo. Un Ernest [sic] Robert Curtius o un T.S. Eliot lo anticipan con indicios e intuiciones. “Con el tiempo”, nos dice Ernest Robert Curtius, “resultará manifiestamente imposible emplear cualquier técnica que no sea la de la ‘ficción’”… Una técnica de la ficción tendrá que ser imprescindible cuando la técnica histórica no pueda establecer el dominio de sus precisiones. (EA 55-6)

And later on Lezama adds: 16

See Santí, “Lezama, Vitier”; Chiampi, “La historia”; and Kadir 23-31. Curtius’s treatise was published in Spanish as Literatura europea y Edad Media Latina, translated by Margit Frenk and Antonio Alatorre (México: FCE, 1955).

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Nuestro método quisiera acercarse más a esa técnica de la ficción, preconizada por Curtius, que al método mítico crítico de Eliot. Todo tendrá que ser reconstruido, invencionado de nuevo, y los viejos mitos, al aparecer de nuevo, nos ofrecerán sus rostros y conjuros con un rostro desconocido. (EA 58)

According to Lezama, the metahistorical inventions of visión histórica and the eras imaginarias—which he introduces in this same section of “Mitos y cansancio clásico”—belong to the orbit of the “técnica de la ficción.” Two observations are in order. The first was already pointed out by Enrico Mario Santí (“Lezama, Vitier” 542-5): Lezama’s attribution of the term “técnica de la ficción” to Curtius is spurious. A collation with the text of Curtius’s treatise (see Curtius, Literatura europea 23-4) reveals that this expression actually comes from a quote of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History. The fragment “‘Con el tiempo’, nos dice Ernest Robert Curtius, ‘resultará manifiestamente imposible …’” is actually Lezama’s quotation of Curtius’s quotation of Toynbee, and the attribution “nos dice Ernest Robert Curtius” is erroneous. The “densidad barroca” (Santí, “Lezama, Vitier” 544) of this interplay of (mis)quotations and (mis)attributions is especially significant insofar as it involves a concept—“técnica de la ficción”—central to Lezama’s whole argument. Like Borges’s Pierre Menard, Lezama “(perhaps unwittingly) enriched the slow and rudimentary art of reading by means of a new technique—the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution” (Borges 95). There is another, arguably less spectacular, but no less suggestive use of Curtius that has passed unnoticed—the very term “visión histórica.” Like “técnica de la ficción” this term is also found in Literatura europea y Edad Media latina (Lezama does not indicate this). The expression appears in the Spanish translation of Curtius’s book on the page opposite to the beginning of the quotation from Toynbee eventually “erroticized” (borrowing Santí’s pun) by Lezama: Europa, si no es visión histórica [historische Anschauung] es sólo un nombre, una “expresión geográfica”, como llamó Metternich a Italia. Pero no decimos “visión histórica” de la anticuada historia de nuestros manuales; para ella no hay historia europea, sino sólo una serie de inconexas historias de pueblos y estados (Curtius, Literatura europea 22).17

“Europa ist nur ein Name, ein ‘geographischer Ausdruck’ (wie Metternich von Italien sagte), wenn es nicht eine historische Anschauung ist” (Europäische Literatur 14).

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The first section of Curtius’s treatise is in part a trenchant critique against the study and pedagogy of history and literature based on the model of national states. For Curtius, Europe is an organic entity and the study of European history cannot be compartmentalized into separate national histories. In this regard, applying the criterion of the nation-state for the study of literature transforms it into a “parcelación… de filologías inconexas” (Literatura europea 30). What is needed, according to Curtius, is a “historische Anschauung” (translated into Spanish as “visión histórica”) focused on the emergence of cultures, not nations (hence Curtius’s interest in Toynbee, whose historical method is based on comparative cultural morphologies). Cultures take precedence over any consideration of the “national” and constitute the appropriate object of historical inquiry. There are a couple of aspects of Curtius’s critique worth mentioning. The first concerns the specific purpose of Curtius’s book in the context of his culturalist project. In reference to the Middle Ages, Curtius writes: “[l]a visión histórica [historischen Auffassung] de Europa nos revela que justamente ese trecho, eslabón que une al mundo antiguo en desparición con el mundo occidental en formación, adquiere su significado de clave” (Literatura europea 31). Attaining a truer visión histórica [Anschauung, Auffassung] of Europe, Curtius argues, discloses the paramount importance of the Middle Ages for a culturalist historiography. The Middle Ages—a marginal component in European national historiographies—ought to be recovered as the site of emergence of modern European culture, as opposed to the site of an anti-modern, “obscurantist” episteme that was overcome and ought to be forgotten. This is the task Curtius embarks upon in his treatise. Lezama echoes this gesture in his theories of the expression of the Americas, the New World Baroque, and even the theory of the eras imaginarias, as we shall see. Like Curtius’s critique of nationalist European historiography through the study of the Middle Ages, Lezama also aims, at least in part, to recover histories and modes of expression located at the “margins” of Eurocentric historiography or even unacknowledged by it. Understood from a culturalist perspective, Lezama’s outlook on the Baroque as the “arte de la Contraconquista” (EA 80) corresponds precisely to a historische Anschauung in Curtius’s sense: Lezama views the Baroque as a style born in Europe—and later regarded as “degenerate”—but it was in the Americas where it flourished, to the point that it constitutes the first genuine mode of “expression of the Americas” (pre-Columbian cultures predate the birth—or “invention” as Edmundo

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O’Gorman puts it—of America).18 Moreover, Curtius’s methodology and interest in the marginal within the national and its history also finds an echo in Lezama’s own preoccupation with tradition in Cuba and its still unachieved form, and in his late- and post-origenista investigations on art and literature in Cuba from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The affinities between Curtius’s and Lezama’s conceptions of history is a topic that merits further study. The second aspect concerns Curtius’s own commentary, however brief, on the philosophical underpinnings of his approach. For the German historian, the correlate of a historiography based on cultures is the comparative study of myth and religion; and these, in turn, are inseparable from poetry and drama in Antiquity. Curtius intuits the existence of an original imaginative faculty shared by all humanity and which lies at the root of every cultural production. He notes (Literatura europea 24-6) that this is ultimately a philosophical problem, and that the only thinker who had made a sound attempt to grasp it was Henri Bergson (1859-1941) with his concept of fonction fabulatrice. Bergson introduces this idea in the second chapter (“La religion statique”) of his Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion [The Two Sources of Morality and Religion] (1932) and it witnesses to the irrationalist and vitalist foundations of the French philosopher’s thought. Bergson rejects both the intellectualist teleology that claims that the advancement of humanity entails a progressive withdrawal from the realm of the “irrational” toward the full development of rationality, as well as the preeminence Darwinian theory gives to individual interest and selfpreservation. Bergson critiques these ideas by introducing what he calls fonction fabulatrice (Bergson 1076). It consists of a certain faculty that inclines human beings toward the fantastic, the absurd and the strange. This faculty lies at the origin of both individual and collective fantasies, including myth, religion and the arts (hence the importance Curtius ascribes to it). Bergson also contends— contra Darwinism and rationalist teleologies—that this capability is necessary for the preservation and development of the human species. For Bergson pure intellect has an exclusive focus on the individual and responds only to individual interests. Reason and the intellect, when left on their own, can be a threat to the social order insofar as the interest of the individual may run contrary to that Note that, in spite of their philological kinship, here I am tacitly differentiating Curtius’s historische Anschauung from Lezama’s visión histórica: whereas Lezama’s theory of the New World Baroque can be regarded as a mode of the former, the latter corresponds to the speculative and rhetorical process I elaborated in the first part of this chapter.

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of communal life. The fonction fabulatrice is a faculty inherent to the human being: it serves as a necessary “counterbalance” [contrepoids] to individual intelligence and reason (1076), and is therefore instrumental for our survival as a species. It also explains why irrational and collective phenomena like religion have survived (Darwinism doesn’t explain this, according to Bergson). Reason and the fonction fabulatrice are complementary and mutually implied—Bergson characterizes the latter as a “virtual instinct,” as opposed to the “natural” instincts that exist in animals lacking reason (1068). Only human beings are capable of creating myths, superstitions and fantasies, precisely insofar as they are a rational species (1066-7). The kinship between Bergson’s irrationalist anthropology and Curtius’s historische Anschauung—the term Lezama will appropriate as “visión histórica”—is relevant for various reasons. Although Lezama does not mention Bergson in La expresión americana, he was well aware of Curtius’s reference to the French philosopher and the concept of fonction fabulatrice, and we also know that he was well-acquainted with Bergson’s work.19 More importantly, it is possible to identify a clear resonance between the Bergsonian principle of fonction fabulatrice and the mythopoetic aspect of the eras imaginarias. Lezama terms eras imaginarias as the epochal manifestations of the transit across history of what he calls la imagen: the concept of eras imaginarias is predicated on the existence of collective faculties in certain civilizations that allow them to construct what he views as modes of “poetic” imagination. I will discuss these ideas in the next section; for the moment I just want to point out the affinity between them and the thesis of fonction fabulatrice. Lastly, Lezama’s use of Curtius, and implicitly, Curtius’s use of Bergson, attests to the presence—but this does not necessarily mean “influence”—in Lezama’s thought of certain strains of the “vitalist” and “irrationalist” philosophical thought that were highly influential in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lezama’s writings on the sistema poético and speculative historiography contain references to the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) (LLOC 421), the historian Oswald A study of the links between Bergson and Lezama is wanting. I was able to consult Lezama’s own copy—held at the Biblioteca Nacional José Martí—of the Spanish version of Matière et mémoire (translated as Materia y memoria, La Plata, Argentina: 1943) and it showed several marginal notes in Lezama’s handwriting. Carmen Suárez León’s catalogue of Lezama’s private library includes various works by Bergson in Spanish translation—Materia y memoria, Introducción a la metafísica and La conciencia—plus two monographs on Bergson’s philosophy. See Suárez León 26 and 32-3.

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Spengler (1880-1936) (EA 53), and the psychologist and graphologist Ludwig Klages (1872-1956) (EA 60). Like Bergson in France, these intellectuals were among the foremost representatives of German vitalist thought or Philosophie des Lebens, which included a host of philosophical currents that found their inspiration in Goethe, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and the Romantics.20 The presence in Lezama’s writings of those post-Romantic and late modern German thinkers has received little attention so far. My intention here is limited to indicating the existence in Lezama’s mature work of a certain philosophical context that points toward the possibility of establishing a dialogue between his thought and what can be called a Romantic worldview. Yet it must be acknowledged that ascertaining of what such a dialogue consists is fraught with difficulties. The reason is that the differences between a Romantic worldview and Lezama’s thought can be as profound as the affinities. This dialogue—both in its affirmative and negative aspects—will be guided by certain ideas: the figure of the poet as seer and historian, the historicity of cultural artifacts, the idea of the Absolute, and its (im)possibility. The place to see these conceptual networks in action is the theory of the eras imaginarias.

From visión histórica to the eras imaginarias The idea of “visión histórica” Lezama introduces in “Mitos y cansancio clásico” constitutes one of the theoretical foundations of the eras imaginarias—a paramount concept in Lezama’s thought. The analysis made above on the formal attributes of the “visión histórica” and its implications—historiographic speculation, anamorphosis, anagram—furnishes an essential, albeit partial, aspect of the rudiments of the concept of eras imaginarias. Other features become visible upon delving further into Lezama’s eccentric cultural vision. When introducing the term eras imaginarias for the first time in the “Mitos y cansancio clásico” conference of La expresión americana, Lezama presents them as an alternative mode of historiography that transcends Arnold Toynbee’s: “[h]ay que desviar el énfasis puesto por la historiografía contemporánea en las culturas para ponerlo en las eras imaginarias. Así como se han establecido por Toynbee veinte y un tipos de culturas, establecer las diversas eras donde la imago se impuso como historia” (EA 58). Whereas Curtius saw in Toynbee’s 20

For an overview of these currents of German vitalist thought see Schnädelbach 139-60.

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and Bergson’s respective attention to culture and the irrational a reply to the flaws and dangers of national(ist) historicisms, Lezama attempts to take it one step further by focusing instead on the historical transit of the imago. In a preliminary yet still incomplete approximation, one can view this enigmatic idea as an approximation, not to cultures by themselves, but rather to the modes of imagination peculiar to different cultures, to how cultures produce certain “images,” understood as modes of conceiving and “picturing” the world (this idea echoes Bergson’s fonction fabulatrice). Lezama provides a first illustration of this by grouping together various cultural entities—the French medieval epic La Chanson de Roland, “las hagiografías de las tribus franco-germanas, la gran batalla de Carlos el Martillo, el misterio de las catedrales con sus símbolos esotéricos pitagóricos—that for him are manifestations of a certain mode of picturing the world he calls “la imaginación carolingia” (EA 59). According to the Cuban poet, “la fuerte liaison teocrática” upon which European medieval culture was founded, created a certain mode of imagination which “favorecía los prodigios y las islas de maravillas… El pueblo de Dios tenía la verdad imaginativa de que el elegido, el llamado, no tenía que dar cuenta a la realidad con un causalismo obliterado y simplón” (EA 59). Here Lezama seems to be not so much comparing two political systems—on the one hand, the theocentric monarchy in which sovereignty emanates from God and incarnates in the King, versus the secular State on the other—but rather aestheticizing a non-secular episteme that created “marvelous” ways of living and understanding the world. At first glance there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly special in this specific illustration. If one consults Curtius’s treatise one can find various examples of comparative historical and cultural analysis that inquire into how different cultures and historical epochs produce different, not necessarily equivalent, modes of conceiving the world.21 It seems altogether evident that a theocratic culture may well create a peculiar mode of imagination in which the marvelous is subsumed into “reality”; and one could argue further that positing—as Lezama seems to do—a distinction between cultures and the modes of imagination created by cultures is artificial. However, as Lezama attempts to expand and speculate upon some of the implications of his peculiar idea, things become more complicated: See for example the section on the hero in Curtius, Literatura europea 242-6—which Lezama may have known well—where the German historian compares ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Hindu, Hebrew and Greek cultures, and shows that only in the latter one finds a heroic figure that is properly tragic.

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Sorprendido ya ese cuadro de una humanidad dividida por eras correspondientes a su potencialidad para crear imágenes, es más fácil percibir o visualizar la extensión de ese contrapunto animista, donde se verifican esos enlaces, y el riesgo o la simpatía en la aproximación del sujeto metafórico. Esa sorpresa de los enlaces establece como una suerte de causalidad retrospectiva. Si subrayamos en Rilke: “pues nosotros, cuando sentimos, evaporamos”. Si nos encontramos después, en el que es para nosotros el más bello de los monólogos de Hamlet: “Que este cuerpo sólido, demasiado sólido, no pueda disolverse en rocío”. Si después leemos en Suetonio, que el Emperador Augusto, para consignar que estaba enfermo, consignaba: “me encuentro en estado vaporoso”. A través de esos enlaces retrospectivos, precisamos la vivencia de la aporroia de los griegos, de su concepto de la evaporación, y cómo esa tendencia para anegarse en el elemento neptunista o ácueo del cuerpo ha estado presente con milenios de separación, en un poeta contemporáneo, en un monólogo de Hamlet, en los peculiares modos de conversación de un emperador romano y en los conceptos movilizados casi con fuerza oracular por el pueblo griego. (EA 59-60)

Whereas the example of the “imaginación carolingia” was straightforward— to posit that a certain mode of imagination sprang from a theocentric view of the world, and to illustrate how certain cultural entities from the Middle Ages were representatives of such a mode—the subsequent elaboration of this idea, as put forward in the passage above, takes us into another, less familiar, territory. To begin, note that what the passage above is describing is an example of what Lezama had called earlier visión histórica: a constellation of diverse cultural entities articulated around some basic image or idea—in this case it is “la vivencia de la aporroia de los griegos” (in the case studied earlier of the first section of “Mitos y cansancio clásico” it was the image of the opening and closing gate).22 Unlike the example of “la imaginación carolingia,” this visión histórica gathers a motley collection of cultural entities—Lezama underscores this aspect—belong22

The Liddell and Scott’s lexicon defines aporroia as “a flowing off, stream”; “emanation, efflux.” This term plays an important role in Gnosticism and Neoplatonic thought. It refers to the belief that everything in the Universe is an “emanation” of a primordial cause (the One [Hen] in Neoplatonism, or the demiurge in Gnostic traditions). In Neoplatonic thought the idea of aporroia explains in part the hierarchy of beings: “[t]he multiplicity of beings and properties of the sensible realm unfolds itself in the hierarchy of generation from the One, and has a place in that hierarchy depending on its immediate cause” (Remes 45-6). In the famous dialogue in chapter 10 of Paradiso, and as prelude of his disquisition on androgyny, José Cemí enumerates possible subjects of study for the future: “Historia del fuego, del agua, del hálito, de la emanación, de la aporroia de los griegos” (Paradiso 304). For the references on Suetonius, Rilke and Hamlet see EA 59-60, nn. 20-2.

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ing to very diverse cultural and historical epochs under a single image. On the one hand, Lezama’s apparent intention when he first introduces the concept of eras imaginarias through the example of “la imaginación carolingia” is to inquire into how different cultures produce their own ways of imagining the world, and what characterizes each of them. On the other hand, “la vivencia de la aporroia de los griegos” appears to point toward the occurrence of a certain transhistorical imaginary that recurs across diverse epochs (“ha estado presente con milenios de separación”), as given by the references to Rilke, Hamlet and Suetonius. In this initial presentation of the eras imaginarias in La expresión americana Lezama thus indicates sequentially (EA 58-60) the two complementary theses he uses to establish this concept: each epoch or culture produces its own modes of imagining the world, and some of them incarnate the “marvelous” and the “poetical” (as given by the example of “la imaginación carolingia”); and there is the possibility of “locating” or identifying transhistorical recurrences or repetitions of such modes (as given by the example of “la aporroia”).23 As Lezama indicates in “La imagen histórica” (1959) and “A partir de la poesía” (1960), these postulates are profoundly indebted to the theory of history and knowledge of Giambattista Vico’s (1688-1744) Scienza nuova (I will return to this point later on). For the moment, I would like to remark that the more genuinely “Lezamian” intervention in the theory of the eras imaginarias stems principally from the second thesis—the possibility of apprehending and “interpreting” events and cultural entities as instances of some transhistorical mode of imagining the world. Several aspects of this intervention are worth noting: artificiality, the presence of a “supplementary” logic, the emergence of alternative temporalities and causalities, and the role of memory.

Causality, Analogy, Memory In the preliminary exposition of the eras imaginarias, the relative straightforwardness of Lezama’s reflections about a theocentric worldview and its manifestations in the European Middle Ages contrasts with the high degree of artificiality exhibited by the Rilke-Hamlet-Suetonius-aporroia constellation. This artificiality—or arbitrariness—is overdetermined: this network is composed of For a discussion of the signification of repetition in the theory of the eras imaginarias see Levinson, “Possibility.”

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entities that are disparate a priori; the agency Lezama calls “sujeto metafórico” chooses these entities a posteriori and invents a set of connections among them, in which “la vivencia de la aporroia de los griegos” plays the pivotal role. In Lezama’s characterization, this “vivencia” seems to be referring to the concept of “emanation” or “efflux” in the Neoplatonist and Gnostic traditions, and these references, in turn, articulate the “idea” that somehow joins the phrases from Suetonius, Hamlet and Rilke. Although Lezama does not state this explicitly, this constellation clearly constitutes what Lezama had termed visión histórica: it is a construction made according to the same “logic” of the “erudita polifonía” that linked the medieval paintings with the I Ching and the Tacquea legend at the beginning of La expresión. Therefore, being a visión histórica, the “reconstrucción” linking Rilke, Hamlet, Suetonius and aporroia consists then of a supplementary operation—it is an operation simultaneously “added to” and “substituting for” ordinary historiography and historical hermeneutics. Lezama characterizes this invention of connections a posteriori as a “causalidad retrospectiva.” (EA 59) One way to relate to the past and think about historical events is in terms of cause-effect relationships among them. Under this mode of historical explanation—and its corresponding metonymic, causal historiography—each event has a “reality” of its own, and the historical truth of each event is determined or caused by past events. The historian’s task is to discover the causal series of relationships among events in order to reconstruct the narrative of what, how and why things truly happened. Lezama’s reply to this “causalismo obliterado y simplón” (which in this particular context carries the connotation of Eurocentric historicist narratives) consists of a retrospective gaze in which what comes from the past is re-arranged, re-signified and re-conceptualized in the present, and consequently, what comes from the past is also open to future, a priori unforeseeable re-conceptualizations and “causalities.” This gaze effectively corresponds to a temporal experience in which the “past” is no longer what already took place “before” the present, but rather is something that is re-imagined and re-created retroactively, from the standpoint of the present: things that come to us from the past are no longer static, but can acquire new meanings when viewed retrospectively and put into relationships with the present (Borges expresses the same insight in texts like “Kafka y sus precursores” and “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote.”) In the Rilke-Hamlet-Suetoniusaporroia constellation the “cause” comes temporally “after” the “effect”; entities

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that come from the past retroactively acquire a new meaning “caused” by the temporally subsequent activity of the agent Lezama calls sujeto metafórico.24

In a section of “Introducción a un sistema poético” Lezama illustrates this retrospective gaze: “Sorprendemos en un delicioso capítulo de un economista, ‘La nueva nobleza’, un resumen hecho con toda la flatterie del siglo xviii, algo que es como un resumen anticipado de La rebúsqueda [sic] del tiempo perdido, convertido en dramatis personae” (LLOC 417). Immediately afterwards Lezama incorporates a lengthy quotation consisting of a detailed description of the lineage of two members of the eighteenth-century French aristocracy—who married whom, their descendents, etc. (LLOC 418-9). The bibliographical source (which Lezama nowhere indicates) of the quotation he describes as “un delicioso capítulo de un economista” and “un resumen anticipado” of Proust’s À la recherche du Temps perdu is Lujo y capitalismo (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1951), the Spanish translation of Luxus und Kapitalismus (1913) by the German economist Werner Sombart (1863-1941). The activity of causalidad retrospectiva casts an unexpected light on an otherwise tedious genealogical account of prerevolutionary French aristocrats:

24





Cómo, ¿los personajes de una novela existiendo doscientos años antes, desconocidos totalmente por el narrador contemporáneo de su creación, dándonos un resumen por anticipado de un extenso novelable que ya había existido en la intensidad de un párrafo brevísimo? O, por el contrario, hay una constante, la nueva nobleza, que lo mismo actúa como realidad histórica que como realidad novelable. (LLOC 419)

In the form of two rhetorical questions, Lezama speculates about possible ways to interpret “retrospectively,” and from a literary perspective, a passage borrowed from Sombart’s 1913 treatise on the history of capitalism. Lezama does not seem to prefer one alternative to the other—actually, both choices are acceptable. On the one hand, Lezama had already presented the quotation as a “resumen anticipado” of Proust’s work. On the other hand, the possibility that some cultural manifestation (“la nueva nobleza” in this specific case) can operate simultaneously in the fields of history and aesthetics—i.e., both as “realidad histórica” and “realidad novelable”—is precisely the principle behind the construction of the eras imaginarias: “[l]as complicaciones históricas y sanguíneas de la nobleza francesa alrededor de 1752, que vuelven a danzar y a soplar sus epigramas en la cima proustiana de la novelística francesa de 1910” (LLOC 419). To this one should add that in this particular example, Lezama’s retrospective gaze and poses further and possibly unintended “complicaciones.” Note that contrary to what one would expect, Lezama does not identify the “resumen anticipado” of Proust’s À la recherche du Temps perdu in an earlier literary text (as would be the case of, say, Saint-Simon’s Mémoires, to give a well-known example of an 18th-century influence on Proust), but rather in a treatise of economic history that is contemporaneous to Proust’s novels—coincidentally Du côté de chez Swann (the first novel of Proust’s Recherche) and Luxus und Kapitalismus were both first published in 1913! In other words, the case here is not that the critic looks back from the present and retroactively establishes a “causal” relationship of influence or affinity between a certain literary text and an earlier one (as Borges does in “Kafka y sus precursores”) but rather something more convoluted, both temporally and causally: Lezama appropriates a passage from a 1913 book on economics and transforms it into a “literary precursor” consisting of an account of eighteenth-century “characters” that somehow “anticipate” the characters of a… 1913 novel.

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In Nueva inestabilidad (1987) Severo Sarduy theorized this type of alternative causality and called it retombée: “causalidad acrónica” in which “la causa y la consecuencia de un fenómeno dado pueden no sucederse en el tiempo, sino coexistir; la ‘consecuencia’ incluso, puede preceder a la causa” (2:1370). Sarduy also uses the same term to designate another, no less “Lezamian” form of thought: “Retombée es también una similaridad o un parecido en lo discontinuo: dos objetos distantes y sin comunicación o interferencia pueden revelarse análogos” (2:1370). This second acceptation of retombée brings us to a process that in Lezama’s own theorization is mediated by memory. Memory is the faculty that allows the rhetorical agent to construct “contrapuntal” networks of links among cultural entities. As I pointed out in chapter three this idea appears in a text as early as “Julián del Casal” (1941), where Lezama claims that “la crítica que le conviene al poeta” corresponds to “una potencia de razonamiento reminiscente” (LLOC 68-9).25 In the final part of his exposition of the concept of eras imaginarias in “Mitos y cansancio clásico,” Lezama expands the scope of the idea of the creative role of memory he had advanced in “Julián del Casal” almost two decades earlier. The Cuban poet goes beyond the realm of literary criticism—the specific focus of the Casal essay—in order to incorporate what he calls “entidades culturales” within the creative activity of the faculty of memory. This propitiates the emergence of the contrapuntal visión histórica, along with the alternative temporalities and causalities evinced therein: “[l]a forma germinativa del análogo nemónico… la memoria sorpresa lanzada valientemente a la búsqueda de su par complementario, que engendra un nuevo y más grave causalismo, en que se supera la subordinación de antecedente y derivado” (EA 62). Lezama introduces this idea by way of a curious reference to the German vitalist thinker Ludwig Klages:26 Enrico Mario Santí elaborates this topic in detail in his “Lezama, Vitier y la crítica de la razón reminiscente,” where he studies the essay on Casal and “Mitos y cansancio clásico.” As Santí points out, the practice of “razonamiento reminiscente,” as Lezama describes it in “Julián del Casal,” is an inquiry into “la alusión literaria en el texto poético” (538) and “los estratos dialógicos de la palabra poética (and of other orders of discourse as well, I would add) que supone precisar la función del enlace intertextual” (539). 26 Ludwig Klages (1872-1956) was a German psychologist, graphologist and philosopher, and one of the most important exponents of vitalism and irrationalist philosophy during his time, second only to Bergson in France (Schnädelbach 149-51). The young Walter Benjamin was well acquainted with Klages’s thought, in spite of the latter’s anti-Semitism and sympathies toward the far right. Enrique Pérez Cristóbal suggests that Lezama’s expression “eros de la lejanía” is a borrowing from Klages’s idea of Eros der Ferne (see Pérez Cristóbal, “La imagen anacrónica” n.7). 25

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Otro de los recursos que podemos utilizar para la búsqueda de esas entidades naturales o culturales imaginarias, son las formas sutiles aconsejadas por Klages para adquirir una total diferencia entre recordación y memoria. Recordar es un hecho del espíritu, pero la memoria es un plasma del alma, es siempre creadora, espermática, pues memorizamos desde la raíz de la especie. (EA 60)

Lezama is referring to Klages’s Die Grundlangen der Charakterkunde [The Science of Character] (1st ed. 1910, expanded 1926), translated into Spanish as Los fundamentos de la caracterología (Trans. Blas A. Sosa, Buenos Aires: 1953) (see EA 60 n. 23), and more concretely to chapter IV: “Memoria y capacidad de recordación” (Klages 76-95). According to Klages’s vitalist and irrationalist philosophy, body and soul [Seele] form an organic unity bound by a vital force. The activity of the “spirit” or “intellect” [Geist; translated into Spanish as “espíritu,” although “intelecto” would be closer to Klages’s intention] threatens to tear apart this primordial unity which, according to Klages, is the foundation of life (Schnädelbach 149-50). “Recollection” [Erinnerung] and “memory” [Gedächtnis]— “recordación” y “memoria,” as Lezama puts it in the passage quoted above—are respectively associated with the intellect and the soul. “Recollection” is a faculty of the intellect and only human beings are endowed with it (Klages 86). It corresponds to the conscious capacity to fix impressions in one’s mind and then recall those impressions—events, things, people, etc.—in the future. “Memory,” on the other hand, is primarily a “vital” faculty (Klages 77) shared by humans and animals alike; it is a property of life that one has since birth, independently of intellectual or rational development. Klages associates “memory” with unconscious and instinctual behaviors (for example, one already “knows” that fire is dangerous, one is able to recognize situations, things and people automatically, without voluntarily recalling them, etc.). Once again Lezama’s text displaces the “original” meaning of a concept. Klages’s vital, non-rational faculty of Gedächtnis becomes in Lezama “la memoria … siempre creadora, espermática,” and this “memoria” corresponds both to the faculty of “razonamiento reminiscente” he had earlier introduced in the Casal essay and to the “memoria sorpresa” and “forma germinativa del análogo nemónico” of La expresión americana (EA 62). To reiterate: Lezama is neither using Klages’s Gedächtnis as a concept, nor applying Klages’s thesis about a vital faculty of instinctively “recognizing” or “remembering” things to his own theory; rather, Klages’s idea is elided as it metamorphoses into Lezama’s own thinking about a poetic—and rhetorical in the last instance— faculty that generates “contrapuntal” links among cultural entities.

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A closer look at the expression “análogo nemónico” reveals that it condenses two aspects that are unrelated a priori, for remembrance and similarity are different things. Lezama’s particular use of this expression adds a twist to the ordinary understanding of analogy that is theoretically relevant. Memory can be described here as a capacity to perform searches in a potentially infinite “archive” of cultural entities and look for possible links among them. This archive effectively functions as a virtual storage of information. Under Lezama’s view, the subject-as-rhetorician (or sujeto metafórico) “remembers” and appropriates elements stored in this virtual archive of linguistic and cultural data (hence the “mnemonic” aspect). But this in turn casts an unexpected light upon the complementary aspect of “analogy”: the subject, by virtue of its “mnemonic” faculty, picks elements from the virtual archive and looks for a “par complementario” (hence these elements effectively function as signifiers). What propels these “analogies” is the necessity to produce surprising and unexpected links that bring “new life” to those elements and allows us to see them under a different light: Lezama speaks about “memoria sorpresa”; “un complemento aparentemente inesperado … otorga ese contrapunto donde las entidades adquieren su vida” (EA 62, my emphases). In this regard, the “análogo nemónico” corresponds neither to the discovery of relationships of similarity or causality among objects or facts, nor—despite the obvious similitude—to the Baroque idea of agudeza, which 17th century theorists conceived explicitly as a para-syllogistics based on Aristotelian logic and categories (one may certainly “deconstruct” the precepts of Aristotelian metaphysics and logic and disclose their scriptural grounding, but this is besides the point I want to stress here). Análogo nemónico is envisaged here as a relationship, basically arbitrary in nature, neither causal nor paralogical, based on the unexpected, wonder and surprise and that aims toward a re-conception of our views of the world and endowing them with “new life.” Lezama states this thesis clearly in his essay “La imagen histórica”: “La claridad de un hecho puede ser la claridad de otro, cuya semejanza no es equivalente, que permanecía a oscuras, pero la iluminación o sentido del primer hecho, al crear otra realidad, sirve de iluminación o sentido al otro hecho, no semejante” (LLOC 849). The “análogo nemónico” thus unveils a shift from the realm of ontology to that of poetics, aesthetics and history. The “análogo memónico” is the maturation and amplification of two earlier ideas. First, it corresponds to the continuation—from the realm of words to that of cultural entities and historical facts—of the theory discussed earlier of the weak sublation of the Aristotelian view of metaphor Lezama presented in “Introducción a un sistema poético”: the

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concept of “análogo nemónico,” just like that of the sublated trope, corresponds to the liquidation of an ontological or phenomenal substratum of which the figural links among words or cultural entities are a necessary or motivated representation—this “análogo” is not a “repetition” or re-presentation determined by some underlying, extra-linguistic ontological or phenomenal substratum. And second, as I remarked above, it is the continuation of the criticism based on the “potencia de razonamiento reminiscente” Lezama sketched in “Julián del Casal”: the “análogo memónico” is to the eras imaginarias what “razonamiento reminiscente” is to Lezama’s early conceptualization of a non-Eurocentric, nonhistoricist literary criticism—one that creatively and contrapuntally intervenes in the tradition and from the margin. In this regard, the “análogo nemónico” can be described as a paradoxical anti-Platonic anamnēsis: what is “reminisced” does not originate from the domain of Ideas, static pure Forms, or a priori categories, but from a cultural archive subjected to multiple orders of discourse and to the twists and turns of history.27 The “nature” of the “análogo nemónico” and the visión histórica— the operations behind the construction of the eras imaginarias—is ultimately arbitrary and contingent: the wondrous links among disparate and (dis)similar cultural entities can always be expressed and effected otherwise, their meaning and force are subject to the ever-changing and unforeseeable vicissitudes of historical time, and the correlate of their power to elicit sorpresa, iluminación and sentido is their conspicuous strangeness and artificiality: it is a paradoxical mode of “analogy” within the “no semejante,” and whose “nature,” in part, lies in its being “unnatural.”

Significantly, if one goes back to the “Julián del Casal” essay, one can already locate a textual and philological intimation of anti-Platonism. Lezama writes: “Digo razonamiento reminiscente, en vez de razonamiento sugestivo como Poe, por el poderoso y pleno atractivo que tuvo esta palabra para los griegos” (LLOC 69). In view of the convergence here of “reminiscence” and the Greeks, inferring a reference to Plato seems straightforward (as point of fact, Lezama mentions the “gesto” of “la [Grecia] socrática” towards memory). Yet what Lezama employs to illustrate the Greek view of reminiscence consists of a quotation that, paradoxically, makes reference to a resolutely anti-Platonic mode of memory—writing:

27



Prometeo, en su lecho incuestionablemente incómodo, se vuelve para decirnos: “Encontré para ellos, para los mortales, el número, lo más ingenioso que existe, y la disposición de las letras, y la memoria, madre de las musas” (LLOC 69).



This is an (inaccurate) translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound: “Yes, and numbers, too, chiefest of sciences, I invented for them, and the combining of letters, creative mother of the Muses’s arts, with which to hold all things in memory” (ll. 459-61).

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From paisaje to imagen How do we complete the transit from “surprise,” “vision,” “memory,” and “analogy” to the eras imaginarias? In “Mitos y cansancio clásico” Lezama says that the concept of the eras imaginarias is the result of a shift in the object of historiography: from cultures (as originally proposed by Curtius and Toynbee) to la imago. The historiographical project of the eras imaginarias consists in “establecer las diversas eras donde la imago se impuso como historia” (EA 58). Lezama develops this idea in various essays he wrote and published after La expresión americana: “Preludio a las eras imaginarias” (1958), “La imagen histórica” (1959), “A partir de la poesía” (1960), “Las eras imaginarias: Los egipcios” (1961) and “Introducción a los vasos órficos” (1961).28 Although he never defines in a rigorous sense what is exactly the activity of la imagen in history, the following excerpt from “La imagen histórica” offers some intuitions: La imagen extrae del enigma una vislumbre, con cuyo rayo podemos penetrar, o al menos vivir en la espera de la resurrección. La imagen, en esta aceptación nuestra, pretende así reducir lo sobrenatural a los sentidos transfigurados del hombre. Lo natural potenciado hasta alcanzar más cercanía con lo irreal, devolver acrecidos los carismas recibidos en el verbo, por medio de una semejanza que entrañe un desmesurado acto de caridad, aquí la poesía aparece como la forma probable de la “caridad que todo lo cree”, charitas [sic] omnia credit. (LLOC 848)

The religious and metaphysical overtones of this rendering of la imagen are evident and I will elaborate on this topic later on. Here I would like to call attention to two points. The first is Lezama’s use of the expression “caritas omnia credit.” This is a phrase borrowed from Augustine’s Confessions 10.3, where the saint reflects on what gives authenticity and credibility to his confession. Augustine cannot prove the veracity of his confession to his readers, but they believe his account nonetheless by reason of their charity, and this is a virtue bestowed upon them by God. Lezama appropriates this idea and uses the term “charity” to refer not so much to a moral quality but to denote an aesthetic faculty. Charity, understood in this particular sense, is what permits the apprehension and With the exception of “Introducción a los vasos órficos” these essays were initially published in the first issues of the journal Islas, founded in 1958 by the Cuban poet and folklorist Samuel Feijóo (1914-1992) and published by the Universidad Central de Las Villas. “Introducción a los vasos órficos” first appeared in Artes plásticas 2.1 (1961). All these essays were compiled later in La cantidad hechizada (1970).

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“genuineness” of sobrenaturaleza and lo irreal. Poetry, in its turn, is the order of discourse in which this apprehension becomes materialized. The second point concerns la imagen proper. Recall that in La expresión americana Lezama had defined paisaje as “reducción de la naturaleza puesta a la altura del hombre… [paisaje] es la naturaleza amigada con el hombre” (EA 167). Paisaje is the starting point of a progression or sequence that continues with the intermediate stage of interpretation or “una sencilla hermenéutica,” is then followed by the supplementary stage of visión histórica, and finally the concept of eras imaginarias emerges as “las diversas eras donde la imago se impuso como historia.” If one contrasts the evolution from paisaje to the eras imaginarias described in La expresión americana with the characterization of imagen in the passage from “La imagen histórica” quoted above, one can say that imagen corresponds to a transposition of paisaje to the domain of “lo sobrenatural” and “lo irreal.” Here one comes to a full circle: la imagen is the human apprehension of sobrenaturaleza, of lo irreal, or as Lezama puts it, “reducir lo sobrenatural a los sentidos transfigurados del hombre.” In this regard paisaje is to nature what la imagen is to sobrenaturaleza: If paisaje is “la naturaleza amigada con el hombre,” then la imagen would be “la sobrenaturaleza amigada con el hombre.” It is in “A partir de la poesía” (1960)—one of the most important texts Lezama produced immediately after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution— where Lezama presents his catalogue of the different eras imaginarias (LLOC 835-7): the “era filogeneratriz,” “lo tanático de la cultura egipcia,” “lo órfico y lo etrusco,” “espejo de la identidad en Parménides,” “los reyes como metáfora,” “las fundaciones chinas,” “el culto de la sangre,” “las piedras incaicas,” “los conceptos católicos,” and the era of “la posibilidad infinita,” which incorporates José Martí and the Cuban Revolution. In the eras imaginarias “se barajan metáforas vivientes, milenios extrañamente unitivos, inmensas redes o contrapuntos culturales” (LLOC 835). In this encyclopedic survey of world history and culture, Lezama attempts to identify recurring patterns: how certain “metaphors” repeat themselves under different modalities across diverse cultures and historical epochs, and how certain cultures generate highly inventive, “supernatural” and “metaphorical” modes of understanding the world (for example, he considers ancient Egyptian and Chinese cultures as two eras imaginarias).29 Lezama’s use In his illuminating essay on the eras imaginarias titled “Tradición por futuridad” (Motivos 361-78), Rafael Rojas correctly emphasizes the anti-diachronic aspect of the eras imaginarias, and points out some striking similarities between the conception of historiography

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of “metaphor” here does not refer merely to the trope per se, but a to much broader phenomenon that also includes, first, how cultural artifacts and practices “signify” in general—e.g., how a statue represents a divinity, how a ritual performance acquires a religious signification, how a certain philosophical idea evolves across history, how historical or literary characters become archetypal— and second, what links one can form among such diverse artifacts and practices. For example: “[la] era filogeneratriz… comprende el estudio de las tribus misteriosas de los tiempos más remotos, tales como los idumeos, los escitas y los chichimecas. Los idumeos aparecen levemente aludidos en el famoso soneto de Mallarmé, que comienza: ‘Te ofrezco el fruto de una noche de Idumea’, se alude a las reproducciones del período mitológico … Estudio de lo fálico totémico … El hombre de Zohar como expresión androginal, sexología angelica: estudio de los teólogos heterodoxos, que van del zapatero Boehme al sueco Swedenborg” (LLOC 835).30 The era of “lo órfico y lo etrusco” traces the Orphic narrative of descent to Hell and views Orpheus as a “prelude” to the figure of Christ and the human/divinity duplicity. The era of the “espejo de la identidad en Parménides” encompasses characters and ideas as diverse as Aristotle, Kant, Berkeley, the goddess Reason in Revolutionary France, Robespierre, the idea of “el ser como emanación de la divinidad, previo al existir” (this corresponds to the Neoplatonic idea of aporroia that Lezama often mentions), “la poesía que va desde Parménides a P. Valéry, pasando por M. Scève. Estudio de la identidad trocada en sustancia. De la sustancia en la médula de saúco.” Ancient Egypt is an era imaginaria based on “lo tanático”—pyramids, funereal chambers, the afterlife—and is “el único país del mundo que en la prehistoria ofrece una plenitud religiosa y expresiva” (LLOC 835-7). These characterizations of the eras imaginarias are developed further in other texts like “Introducción a los vasos órficos” (LLOC 853-63), “Las eras imaginarias: Los egipcios” (LLOC 864-90) and “Las eras imaginarias: La biblioteca como dragón” (LLOC 890-925). implicit in the eras imaginarias and that of the histoire des mentalités practiced by the Annales School of the 1930s (Fernand Braudel, Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre) and continued later by medievalists like Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff, who sought to investigate the “ways of thinking” or “worldviews” prevalent in different epochs. As Rojas also points out, these parallels are all the more remarkable precisely because Lezama didn’t know the work of these historians when he formulated his theory of the eras imaginarias. 30 “Te ofrezco el fruto de una noche de Idumea” [Je t’apporte l’enfant d’une nuit d’Idumée] is the opening verse of Mallarmé’s sonnet “Don du poème” (1866). Jacob Boehme (15751624) and Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) were two of the foremost representatives of Northern European theological and mystical thought.

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The very conceptualization of the eras imaginarias gathers various intentions, sets of beliefs, discursive regimes, historic and aesthetic doctrines, and different aspects of Lezama’s own thought. These impulses are not necessarily harmonious or consistent, and can even be potentially contradictory. The eras imaginarias can mean different things depending on how one approaches them. I would like to argue that part of the theoretical import of the eras imaginarias lies precisely in the coexistence of multiple and even conflicting forces at work within their conceptualization.

Repetition, Archetype, Metaphysics Recall the initial characterization of the eras imaginarias given in La expresión americana: “establecer las diversas eras donde imago se impuso como historia” (EA 58). As evinced by their structure and intentionality, the eras imaginarias constitute a case of what Lezama calls visión histórica. The catalogue of the eras imaginarias corresponds to a highly unconventional (re)arrangement and (re)interpretation of cultural artifacts intended to produce a new, unusual or wondrous perspective on the meaning, role and temporal circulation of cultural artifacts, historical events and characters. Being a case of visión histórica, the eras imaginarias are a mode of historiographical speculation, in the sense I explained earlier. But the eras imaginarias also play another role that supplements, but does not eliminate or contradict, such a critical and reflexive function: Lezama also conceives the eras imaginarias as an alternative historiography. This becomes clear upon realizing the specific goals Lezama has in mind when he introduces the idea of eras imaginarias in La expresión americana: the shift from cultures to la imagen as the object of historiography; to surpass and overcome “una causalidad regalada por las valoraciones historicistas” (EA 49); to destroy “el pesimismo encubierto en la teoría de las constantes artísticas” (EA 62); to negate “[el] desdén a los epígonos”; and to affirm “lo creativo de un nuevo concepto de la causalidad histórica, que destruye el pseudo concepto temporal que todo se dirige a lo contemporáneo, a un tiempo fragmentario” (EA 63). Lezama envisions an alternative mode of representing history that counters hegemonic—linear, causal, rationalist—modalities of historiography. Yet considering the eras imaginarias merely as one case or mode of visión histórica hints at one potential conflict. The examples of eras imaginarias mentioned above—just like the visión histórica grouping the Book of Hours of the

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Duke of Berry, the portrait of Guidoriccio da Fogliano, the I Ching and the Tacquea legend—are constituted by aggregating disparate components from diverse epochs and cultures. There seems to be a conflict between, on the one hand, the arbitrariness of the visión histórica (an aspect I discussed earlier), and this includes the apparent arbitrariness of the collection of entities that form each era imaginaria as shown above, and on the other hand, positing that each era imaginaria corresponds to the manifestation of certain transhistoric “content.” Lezama seemed to be aware of this ambiguity. In “Mitos y cansancio clásico” he had asserted that what actualizes the visión histórica is “un espacio contrapunteado por la imago y el sujeto metafórico” (EA 54), and the eras imaginarias were characterized as “las diversas eras donde la imago se impuso como historia” (EA 58). But in “A partir de la poesía”—dated three years later than La expresión—Lezama attempts to qualify that earlier outline: No basta que la imagen actúe sobre lo temporal histórico, para que se engendre una era imaginaria, es decir, para que el reino poético se instaure. Ni es tan solo que la causalidad metafórica llegue a hacerse viviente, por personas donde la fabulación unió lo real con lo invisible, como los reyes pastores o sagrados, el monarca como encarnación viviente del Uno (que en la cultura china arcaica es el agua, el norte y el color negro), o un Julio César, un Eduardo el Confesor, un San Luis o un Alfonso X el sabio, sino que esas eras imaginarias tienen que surgir en grandes fondos temporales, ya milenios, ya situaciones excepcionales, que se hacen arquetípicas, que se congelan, donde la imagen puede apresar al repetirse. En los milenios, exigidos por una cultura, donde la imagen actúa sobre determinadas circunstancias excepcionales, al convertirse el hecho en una viviente causalidad metafórica, es donde se sitúan esas eras imaginarias. La historia de la poesía no puede ser otra cosa que el estudio y expresión de las eras imaginarias. (LLOC 832-3)

In this passage Lezama underscores the transhistorical, transcultural, and even universalizing nature of the eras imaginarias. Here Lezama seems to be stating that the eras imaginarias are not simply isolated “tropings” of historical discourse. Moreover, particular instances of philosophical, religious or mythological beliefs that are experienced as “real” despite their irreality (and for this reason participate in the substance of poetry) do not necessarily constitute an era imaginaria. Rather, Lezama claims that the eras imaginarias are to be conceived against the backdrop of vast temporal and cultural landscapes. This expansive setting, according to Lezama, is what permits the materialization across time

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of some recurring pattern of transhistorical “metaphors,” and the posterior “apresamiento”—and identification—of such a pattern. This pattern discloses the presence of certain fixed “master” or “transcendental” “metaphors” that “repeat” themselves under different forms across historical time. Lezama significantly characterizes them as “archetypal” and “frozen.” Each era imaginaria is constituted by a collection of epochs, cultures or artifacts in which these “metaphors” found an expression. Lezama’s theory may then be interpreted as a mythography. According to Lezama, at certain historical times some cultures create myths, beliefs, artworks, philosophical or religious doctrines, etc., that are the materialization or expression of a worldview endowed with a singular aesthetic force. The crux of the argument in the paragraph above lies in positing a process of repetition (see Levinson, “Possibility”): viewing how cultures unfold against the background of vast epochal scenarios makes possible the discernment of a pattern of recurrence, and repetition allows for inferring the presence of certain underlying, transhistorical “archetypes.” The components of each era imaginaria are then manifestations of this “archetype” or “frozen metaphor.” This brings us to the metaphysical and religious component in the conceptualization of the eras imaginarias. “La imagen histórica” presents two important indications of this aspect. The first is Lezama’s appropriation of the thought of Giambattista Vico: El hallazgo genial de Gianbattista [sic] Vico consistió en ver con evidencia que por la poesía el tiempo fabuloso, que si es oscuro, se hace mitología, que trenza un ramaje de dioses y de hombres con el mismo troncón. Esa adivinación, ese Deorum interpretes, que nos recuerda Vico, hace de la poesía la línea donde lo imposible, lo no adivinado, lo que no habla, se rinde a la posibilidad. (LLOC 846)

The relationship between Vico’s thought and Lezama’s has received substantial critical attention already.31 Here I will only make a few remarks pertinent to my exposition. Vico’s La Scienza nuova (1725) presents a survey of the history of mankind, from its most primitive, “natural” state, all the way up to the consolidation of the modern State, civil society and institutions. Vico attempts to understand the role that non-rational modes of knowing and making sense of the world have played in the historical evolution of humanity and the for The most thorough discussions of this topic are Márquez 155-76, Moreiras, Tercer espacio 247-56, and Salgado, From Modernism to Neobaroque 147-79.

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mation of modern civilization. At his time Vico’s culturalist and comparatist method was both highly innovative and controversial—it was in part a direct attack on the hegemony of Cartesian rationalism—but it eventually exerted a profound influence from the Romantics up until the present day. In Book IV of his Scienza nuova Vico elaborates a typology describing how humanity has gone through three stages or corsi—the poetic or creative, the heroic, and the human—each with its own types of laws, customs, institutions, languages and modes of reasoning and representing the world. The idea of the eras imaginarias is partly inspired by Vico’s corsi. According to Vico’s model, primitive societies are characterized by what he calls “poetic wisdom” [sapienza poetica] (this is discussed at length in Book II). It consists of non-rational and non-abstract modes of conceiving the world that predate the advent of philosophy proper. As César Salgado points out (From Modernism to Neobaroque 152-3) Lezama borrows this idea but inverts its original sense. Whereas Vico places the highest value on reason and its products—philosophy, science, the State, society—and regards the “poetic” stage as something that ought to be overcome, Lezama’s project is concerned with overcoming what he calls “Aristotelian causality”— which is often synonymous with pure reason—and with making the impossible part of the possible, as indicated in the quotation above. For the Cuban writer, poetry is a transhistoric mode of wisdom that, contrary to Vico’s association of the poetic with the primitive, is one of humankind’s highest achievements. This is reflected in Vico’s and Lezama’s respective treatment of Christianity. For Vico, Christianity encompasses reason, and historical evolution is subject to God or, as Vico calls it, “Divine Providence.” Vico regards primitive systems of belief and pagan religions as early stages of a teleology guided by Providence in which Christianity and reason constitute the highest achievement. La Scienza nuova is thus an attempt to conceptualize a historical—and necessary—link between paganism and Christianity. According to Salgado, Lezama attempts something similar in the eras imaginarias: both thinkers elaborate respectively “a meditation on the place of gentile religions in Judeo-Christian eschatology” (From Modernism to Neobaroque 149) (for example: in the era of “lo órfico y lo etrusco” the myth of Orpheus is an anticipation of the figure of Christ [LLOC 836]; in “Las eras imaginarias: Los egipcios,” the theme of mutations appearing in ancient Chinese texts produces “un clima de nacimientos fuera de toda causalidad, que prepara la gravitación imaginativa para el alumbramiento sobrenatural de María” [LLOC 878]). But the crucial difference between Vico and Lezama remains: the diverging roles each thinker ascribes to poetry. In Vico,

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Christianity is the necessary accomplishment of the rational agency of Divine Providence; but in Lezama Christianity partakes of the non-rational worldview of the journey of la imagen across history (“lo imposible, lo no adivinado, lo que no habla”) and its manifestations in the realm of poetry. This constitutes another intimation of the tension between the metaphysical and the discursive at work within the eras imaginarias (I will return to this later on). The place of the non-rational brings us to the second indication of the importance of the religious and metaphysical components in the eras imaginarias. The following passage comes immediately after the excerpt quoted above on la imagen and Augustine: Tres frases colocaría yo en el umbral de esta nueva vicisitud de la imagen en la historia. Primera: “Lo imposible creíble”, de Vico. Es decir, el que cree vive ya en un mundo sobrenatural, cualquier participación en lo imposible convierte al hombre en un ser imposible, pero táctil en esa dimensión. Acepta un movimiento sobrenatural, una propagación sobrenatural, un sobrenatural estar en todas las cosas. Segunda frase: “Lo máximo se entiende incomprensiblemente”. Es la línea trágica, inalcanzable, desesperada, que va desde San Anselmo a Nicolás de Cusa, que pretende hipostasiar el mundo óptico, el ser, en un cuerpo, en el mundo fenoménico. El ser máximo es, lo que es tiene que ofrecer una realidad, si no, tendríamos que aceptar que la posibilidad real no es. Tercera, esta frase de Pascal, como resguardo o conjuro: “No es bueno que el hombre no vea nada; no es bueno tampoco que vea lo bastante para creer que posee, sino que vea tan solo lo suficiente para conocer que ha perdido. Es bueno ver y no ver; esto es precisamente el estado de naturaleza”. (LLOC 848)

Viewed in the context of Lezama’s sistema poético and the theory of the eras imaginarias what seems to join the three mottos Lezama places at the “threshold” [umbral] of the journey of la imagen across history is that they all address the general question of the limits of belief and possibility. According to Lezama, each element—epoch, event, character, cultural entity—belonging to an era imaginaria represents a moment in which the limits of what is “possible” or “credible” have been expanded or transgressed in some way or another. The repetition of those elements or “moments” across vast historical extensions end up configuring “archetypal”—and historical—manifestations of what Lezama calls la imagen, and then these “archetypes” define each era imaginaria (cf. LLOC 832-3 above). Moreover, under a Lezamian perspective, questions about

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belief and possibility necessarily relate to ideas like potens, “infinite possibility,” lo increado, futuridad, etc. But let us consider briefly what each of the three phrases says in their original context to then compare it with the way Lezama uses them. To begin, note that they all come from Christian philosophers. Vico’s phrase comes from La Scienza nuova II.2 (“Poetic Metaphysics”): “[P]oetry’s proper material is the credible impossibility [impossibile credibile]. It is impossible that bodies should be minds, yet it was believed that the thundering sky was Jove” (Vico 78 §383). The second phrase is possibly borrowed from the title of chapter four, book I of Nicholas of Cusa’s (1401-1464) De docta ignorantia (“The Absolute Maximum, with which the Minimum coincides, is understood incomprehensibly”) (Cusa 8). The topic of “learned ignorance” in Nicholas of Cusa’s work corresponds to the wisdom of knowing what the limits of human knowledge are and the reasons thereof. Nicholas posits that God is simultaneously the “Absolute Maximum” and the “Absolute Minimum”: He encompasses not only everything that is, but also everything that can be, and everything that cannot be. For Cusa, God is “beyond both all affirmation and all negation”; He combines contradictories, and hence is beyond our intellectual faculties, for “our reason falls far short of this infinite power and is unable to connect contradictories” (Cusa 9). The reference to Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) alludes to his famous thesis about God as “that than which nothing greater can be thought,” and which he uses as a postulate in the proof of the existence of God he demonstrates in his Proslogion. The third phrase comes from the conclusion of one of Pascal’s Pensées, where the French philosopher asserts that men are at the same time capable and unworthy of receiving God, and that everything that appears attests to “la présence d’un Dieu qui se cache” [the presence of a God that hides Himself ] (2: 699).32 Upon viewing the phrases in their original context and contrasting them with how Lezama uses them, one becomes less clear about what “really” joins them yet more clear about how Lezama (mis)reads and displaces them. To begin, note that “poetry” means very different things for Vico and Lezama, as indicated earlier. What the Neapolitan philosopher calls poetry is a primitive, pagan, pre-rational, and historically situated mode of thinking; for Lezama The phrase from Pascal’s Pensées Lezama quotes reads in the original: “Il ne faut pas qu’il ne voie rien du tout ; il ne faut pas aussi qu’il en voie assez pour croire qu’il le possède, mais qu’il en voie assez pour connaître qu’il l’a perdu ; car, pour connaître qu’on a perdu, il faut voir et ne voir pas ; et c’est précisement l’état où est la nature.” (2: 699)

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poetry is a transhistorical and, in a certain sense, superior mode of knowledge; Vico assumes that in reality—as opposed to the fancy of peoples of the “poetic” age—the gap between the possible and the impossible is irreconcilable; for Lezama, poetry is the realm where these two realms intersect. The mention of Nicholas of Cusa and Anselm betokens the fundamental ambiguity I have mentioned earlier between the sacred and the profane, the metaphysical and the discursive. The ideas Lezama is implicitly referring to are originally Nicholas’s and Anselm’s theses about the attributes of God—God encompasses the possible and the impossible, is above all contradiction, is that than which nothing greater can be thought—but what Lezama does is to appropriate and apply them to poetry, and this is a discursive practice, not a metaphysical entity. Despite the appearances, strictly speaking Lezama is not referring to God here, or even less equating God with poetry, as a naïve “mystical” reading would have it. Rather, Lezama’s is displacing certain theses (this applies to Pascal’s quote as well) about the attributes of the supreme metaphysical entity par excellence and placing them as theses about the attributes of a non-metaphysical entity. That which encompasses the possible and the impossible, that which is above all contradiction, that than which nothing greater can be thought are now the attributes of poetry, and more specifically, of poetry’s historical manifestations. Remarkably, Lezama himself acknowledges and comments on his own (mis)reading: “Entrecruzados con esos nombres mayores del umbral… deslizamos también nuestro caduceo interrogante, pues el original se invenciona sus citas, haciendo que tengan más sentido en el nuevo cuerpo en que se les injerta, que aquél que tenía en el cuerpo del cual extraídas” (LLOC 848-9). This phrase not only reiterates the idea of “muerte y resurrección” (another displacement of a theological concept!) advanced two decades earlier in “X y XX”: “el tiempo como aliado de los buenos escritores… poniéndoles un sentido que tal vez les fue extraño” (LLOC 140); but more importantly, it constitutes Lezama’s own reflection on the disruptive quality of these thematic and linguistic displacements. Lezama dis-locates ideas that pertain to historical and ontological justifications about God’s existence and Christian belief and transposes them to a wholly different discursive regime; he displaces ideas that by their own definition (ought to) have a unique, necessary, and truthful place. With this gesture—including Lezama’s own reflection on it—metaphysics strangely becomes out of place through Lezama’s idiosyncratic (mis)readings and (mis)writings. The presence of two opposing forces at work within the conceptualization of the eras imaginarias now becomes clear. On the one hand, the idea of eras

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imaginarias relies on positing the existence of transhistorical and transcendent “archetypes” (“eras… que se hacen arquetípicas, que se congelan, donde la imagen puede apresar al repetirse”) that unfold across vast extensions of time. Each component or “moment” of an era imaginaria (for example, the Scythians, and Mallarmé’s “Don du poème” as “moments” of the “era filogeneratriz,” or Orpheus’s myth and Christ’s life as “moments” of the “era de lo órfico y lo etrusco”) is a historical instance or materialization of a certain “archetype.” Moreover, both the vocabulary and philosophical framework Lezama invokes to develop his ideas are to a large extent borrowed from Christian theology. This particular framing reinforces a line of interpretation according to which the eras imaginarias are basically a mythopoetic and mythographical theory (however idiosyncratic), and that Lezama’s unveiling and charting of the recurrence of la imagen in myths, cultural artifacts, and historical events, presupposes the existence of a substantial yet ultimately metaphysical “content” expressed in each of these moments. Using again the comparison with Vico, one can say that in the eras imaginarias Divine Providence is substituted for the historical journey of la imagen, and this is manifested by the repetition of certain “master metaphors” across different epochs and civilizations. But on the other hand, one can also identify a host of textual features and discursive operations—occurring at various levels and subject in principle to hermeneutic and non-hermeneutic critiques—that run against those transcendentalist impulses. I have already pointed out how Lezama’s strategy of misreading and displacement effectively transposes the “sacred” and its necessity to the realm of discourse and its contingency. But there are many other operations. The construction of the eras imaginarias follows the process or “forma en devenir” paisaje-interpretación-reconstrucción-visión histórica that Lezama defined as lo difícil at the beginning of La expresión americana. In this regard, at a purely formal level, the eras imaginarias—just like the visión histórica grouping the Book of Hours of the Duke of Berry, the equestrian portrait of Guidoriccio da Fogliano, the I Ching and the Tacquea legend—are constituted by aggregating disparate components from diverse epochs and cultures. It is claimed that all the components within each of these assemblages have in common their being expressions or instances of some recurring “metaphor,” form of thought, or mode of conceiving the world. And yet, it is nonetheless possible to discern a tension between, on the one hand, the purportedly archetypal and transhistoric “content” each era imaginaria manifests, and on the other hand, what appears to be the artificiality and even arbitrariness of their construction. Reviewing the

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catalogue of the eras imaginarias quoted above one may ask: Are those the only recurring “metaphors” that constitute the eras imaginarias? Can one conceive other eras imaginarias, different from the ones Lezama describes? Can one conceive of future eras imaginarias? There appears to be an incongruity between, on the one hand, the supposedly archetypal and ultimately transcendental nature of the “content” being expressed, and on the other hand, the formal properties associated with what Lezama describes as eras imaginarias—the anagrammatic character of the visión histórica, the retroactive production of a “contrapuntal” network, the figural character of such links, and their manifest eccentricity and artificiality. Positing the existence of “frozen” or “archetypal” forms runs counter to the emphasis he places throughout his work on transience, change, becoming, destruction and reconstruction, as evinced in the weak sublation of metaphor, the idea of muerte y resurrección as a trope denoting “las vicisitudes históricas” (cf. LLOC 140), and the contingency inscribed in his poetics of verbal combinatorics. Lastly, the very idea of causalidad retrospectiva begs the question of whether the belief that the components of the eras imaginarias are iterations of some transcendental “metaphor” isn’t actually a retroactive, figural construction made in the present—and subject to it—that only sheds a different light on what comes to us from the past. And lastly, isn’t the “archetypal” view of the eras imaginarias a form of historicism? In the face of all this, what do we make of the eras imaginarias then? Is there a contradiction? Should we (re)interpret Lezama’s theory of culture by taking one side to the exclusion of the other?33 This tension between, on the one hand, the aspiration, expectation or intention of expressing a certain substantive content, and on the other hand, the distinctively Lezamian experience of language and thought that runs against the promise of fixing a stable or clearly defined “signified,” is a theoretical problem that traverses Lezama’s work as a whole. We had seen previous instances (or should one say “repetitions”?) of this conflict: the critique of metaphor, analogy Brett Levinson’s reading of La expresión americana highlights the roles of process, transience and historical contingency to the point of arguing that “repetition” should be understood here not as an external process applied to texts, but as an intrinsic property of every text (“part of their infrastructure”) consisting of their “becoming-different over time” (“Possibility” 57). My own reading shares Levinson’s views about the theoretical significance of becoming and difference, yet nonetheless it remains necessary to address the fact that in “A partir de la poesía” (cf. LLOC 833) Lezama states that “repetition” corresponds to the disclosure of stasis and the archetypal.

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and hermeneutics in “Introducción a un sistema poético” and “Dador,” the problem of the lack of tradition in Cuba and the possibilities to fill this void as set forth in the Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez and the Orígenes cultural project, and the task of literary criticism as muerte y resurrección in “X y XX.” The eras imaginarias, in particular, stage this tension in terms of the temporal circulation, interpretation and signification of cultural artifacts and historic events. In the next chapter I am going to argue that, once again, rhetoric provides a singular tool to understand the theoretical challenge posed by the eras imaginarias—this tool is allegory.

Chapter 5 Allegory and Futurity in the Eras Imaginarias

Why Allegory? Invoking allegory as a critical tool to grasp the theoretical implications of Lezama’s theorization of history and culture—or even any other aspect of Lezama’s work—is bound to meet resistance, and for multiple reasons. To begin, the central theoretical concept in Lezama’s sistema poético is metaphor, not allegory. Lezama does not seem to be very interested in what is commonly understood as allegory. He hardly ever mentions allegory in his work, and when he does it appears to play a marginal role.1 Second, it is hard to accept that Lezama’s texts are allegories in the way that, say, one considers Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose, scenes from Dante’s Commedia, or even Kafka’s stories as allegories. One may certainly claim that, for example, works like Paradiso or Oppiano Licario contain allegorical elements; for instance, one can view the characters of Fronesis and Foción as personifications of friendship and self-destructive confusion respectively. However, these are isolated cases, and more importantly, this type of reading can be overtly reductive in the end as it risks overlooking crucial elements of the novels, the characters, and their construction. Lezama’s work does not belong to what is ordinarily considered the genre of allegory, and as I have attempted to show in this book, the resistance to interpretation that Lezama’s texts stage seems at odds with the most basic purpose and claims of such a genre. In what sense can allegory be a powerful theoretical tool for understanding Lezama’s intervention then? The initial step of this task is to begin by narrowing down what I mean by my use of the notoriously equivocal term “allegory.” As is

1

For example, the short poems titled “Las siete alegorías” included in Fragmentos a su imán (Poesía 398-401) consist of descriptions of figures—“el puerco con los dientes de estrellas,” “la Diosa Blanca,” la “Rueda de Rocío,” etc.—each standing for some abstract meaning. Here Lezama uses allegory in a conventional sense and highlights the visual aspect of the genre.

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well known, definitions and valuations of allegory have varied widely across a history that literally spans millennia: extended metaphor for Quintilian; didactic genre during the Middle Ages and early modernity; epistemological device for the early German Romantics; mode of signification representative of late modernity from Benjamin onwards, and so on.2 For our purposes here, I need to begin pointing out that allegory can basically refer to three things: a particular genre, a mode of interpretation, and a mode (and theory) of signification. These three modalities of the term “allegory” are not mutually exclusive— they can overlap (and necessarily do in certain cases), but they can also be confused. This is succinctly expressed in Maureen Quilligan’s remark that “some works are allegories, while others are merely allegorical” (18-9). If one attempts to show—as Quilligan does—that allegory is a genre in itself, having specific characteristics, then it is necessary to distinguish allegory as genre from allegory as a mode of interpretation (or signification). Northrop Frye addressed this issue in his classic Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Frye established a distinction between, on the one hand, interpretative commentary as allegoresis: “thematic criticism… may and does allegorize” (53-4); “commentary thus looks at literature as, in its formal phase, a potential allegory of events and ideas” (89); and on the other hand “actual allegory”: “when a poet explicitly indicates the relationship of his images to examples and precepts… A writer is being allegorical whenever it is clear that he is saying ‘by this I also (allos) mean that’” (90). According to Frye, authorial intention is what determines whether a text is an “actual allegory” or not. For its part, thematic interpretation, understood as allegoresis, extracts or infers some “content” from the literary work and regards the literary work as a mode of “saying otherwise” the “content” inferred by the critic. The important point is that for Frye allegoresis does not transform the work into an allegory. In principle, the thematic critic-commentator can “allegorize” any text, but only certain works are already allegories in the proper sense, and only because they were intended as such. I mention Frye’s characterizations of thematic interpretation as allegoresis, and of what constitutes “actual allegory,” or equivalently, works that belong to the allegorical genre, because they hint at what Lezama’s works are not about. In general, it may be problematic, or at least reductive, to ascertain an allegorical For a recent collection of essays on the theory and history of allegory and a list of bibliographical sources on the topic see Copeland, and especially 1-15 for a historical overview of the meaning and use of the term.

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intentionality in Lezama’s texts. Moreover, in my own approach to Lezama’s corpus I have proposed a critical shift away from the tenets of thematic criticism—i.e., allegoresis—in order to search for other modes of production of sense in Lezama’s texts. And yet, this negativity hints at the very ambiguities and paradoxes that traverse allegory and makes it the trope of modernity par excellence.3 According to the most traditional view, allegory expresses or translates certain abstract ideas or content by means of verbal or visual depictions of concrete objects or situations—ordinary things, cultural artifacts, persons (as in prosopopoeia), pictures, portraits, narratives, or combinations of these. On the one hand, understood in this conventional sense, allegory “intends” a specific meaning, and this constitutes one usual prejudice against allegory: it “prescribes the direction” of the critic’s commentary (Frye 90). On the other hand, the means of expressing this purported meaning is by no means organic, but rather consists of the host of multifarious elements—ultimately arbitrary and contingent—that compose allegory’s visible form. Viewed through this perspective, allegory appears to the beholder not so much as the expression of a determinate content, but rather as an ostentation of artificiality—another, yet quite different, prejudice against allegory. Allegory becomes the staging of a conflict between, on the one hand, an intended rigid figurality, and on the other hand the production of other [allos], uncontrollable meanings that stem from the heterogeneous, and not necessarily intended, sensuous and semiotic effects that the formal components of allegory display. Contingency and arbitrariness are the correlates of this heterogeneity and absence of organicity. One may express an idea by using some verbal or visual representation, but under the allegorical regime of signification nothing prevents us, in principle, from deriving other, unintended meanings from such a representation, or expressing the idea originally intended by means of other figures. Hence allegory is the presentation of a lack of correspondence between its deliberate figural claim and the disorderly semiotic effects of its form.4

For two insightful studies on the relationship between allegory and modernity see Kelley, and Moretti, especially 77-98. 4 From a contemporary viewpoint perhaps the most patent example of this is the emblem, where a visual composition expresses what is written in the motto. This inscription is a verbal statement of what the picture means, but the fact is that putting aside the esoteric, religious and philosophical assumptions that were behind the composition of the emblems in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the motto bears no indexical or a priori relationship to what is depicted in the picture. Therefore the emblem is the very presentation of the conflict 3

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This, in a nutshell, is the peculiar experience of allegory as a mode of signification. The incongruity between allegory’s fixed intentionality and its plurivalent signification is also the source of another paradox. Allegory’s inherently conflictive mode of signification has been the reason behind its rejection—this is manifest, for example, in Coleridge’s often-quoted passage from his Stateman’s Manual, where he opposes symbol’s capacity to render reality intelligible to allegory’s fanciful and arbitrary attempts to associate abstractions with “apparitions of matter” (Coleridge 661); or in Hegel’s view that in allegory there is no correspondence between form and Idea, and that the proliferation of sensuous shapes conflicts with the manifestation of ideal content—and also behind its vindication and the theoretical prominence it gained in certain currents of modern thought, as evinced by the influential analyses of allegory made, in different contexts, by the early German Romantics, Walter Benjamin, and Paul de Man. This conflict or incongruity is what constitutes allegory as a mode of signification: it is what gives allegory a particular theoretical import, and as I will show, it affords a powerful insight into understanding the type of cultural and historical critique at work in Lezama’s eras imaginarias. I will approach this question from two complementary perspectives. The first belongs to the theory of allegory espoused by the early German Romantics, and Novalis’s idea of poetry as Zufallproduktion [production of chance or contingencies]. This will cast light on the formal properties of the eras imaginarias and the question of the “Absolute” in Lezama’s work. The second perspective corresponds to inquiring into what I would like to call the “double life” of the eras imaginarias—simultaneously “archetypal” and “artificial”—through Walter Benjamin’s ideas of the “antinomies” of the allegorical, and allegory’s staging of the passing of time.

Absolute and Allegory I will begin by addressing the question of the Absolute and its relationship with allegory.5 The philosophers of Frühromantik or early German Romanticism—Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg, best known by his pseudonym



5

between the semiotic fixity imposed by the motto and the arbitrariness and semiotic proliferation effected by the picture. For the discussion that follows on early German Romantic thought I have relied extensively on Behler, Beiser, Andrew Bowie, Frank, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Saul, and Schulte-Sasse.

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Novalis, the brothers Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Friedrich Schleiermacher—were first and foremost direct inheritors and readers of Kant. Kant’s most basic preoccupation concerned a fundamental limit in our possibility of knowing the world: we cannot know things in themselves; understanding can only come from our perceptions of things; thinking consists of “synthesizing” our perceptions to then form concepts. Recall the discussion on Kant’s notion of das Unbedingte (“the unconditioned”—the word Lezama appropriates in “Preludio a las eras imaginarias”) in chapter one. The unconditioned is a primordial entity—such as “God,” “the soul,” or “freedom”—that is without prior cause or condition and whose objective existence cannot be proved by reason. The concept of the Absolute in the Romantic and idealist traditions is a development of the idea of the unconditioned: the Absolute is the necessary foundation of all being and consciousness, and it has no prior cause or condition.6 Is there a way to cognize the Absolute? Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis argued that there are experiences that resist conceptualization and can only be conveyed by “feeling” and “belief ” (Mittman and Strand 58). Such experiences are very real and cannot be subsumed under abstract and fixed principles, and they pose a challenge to the assumption of the absolute sufficiency of self-consciousness. These experiences indicate the need of positing a “non-Self ” that partakes of the Absolute and is necessary for the Self to cognize itself. This is expressed by Novalis in one of the Logological Fragments as “Self [Ich] equals non-Self—the highest principle of all learning and art” (Novalis Philosophical Writings 59, emphases in the original; quoted in Mittman and Strand 59). But where do these experiences come from? The answer is given in Novalis’s quote: for the Romantics, this experience of an alterity irreducible to conceptualization and pure self-reflection is intimated in the realm of art. The fundamental intervention of the thinkers of Frühromantik was to understand art as the necessary complement of philosophy, and aesthetics as the necessary component of knowledge. This is precisely what Novalis’s fragment quoted in “Introducción a un sistema poético” (LLOC 420-1) is about—poetry as “lo real absoluto.”7 The experience of art is linked to the manifestation of an alterity irreducible For a lucid introduction to the concept of the Absolute in German Idealism see Beiser 349‑59. For an overview of the philosophical background of early Romantic thought and their conception of the Absolute see Andrew Bowie. 7 For his part, Friedrich Schlegel puts this idea thus: “The whole history of modern poetry is a running commentary on the following brief philosophical text: all art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one” (Schlegel 157). 6

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to pure thinking and self-reflection. Poetry and art, says Novalis, correspond to the “presentation of the unpresentable” [Er stellt das Undarstellbare dar] (Philosophical Writings 162; Schriften 3: 685; quoted in Frank 53). This alterity is inexhaustible and cannot be grasped by concepts. In order to present itself, this incommensurable alterity can only be manifested obliquely, by indirection or allusion—it can only be said “otherwise.” The early Romantics called this mode of signification allegory.8 Art intimates the infinite from the finite, and allegory is the mode in which this disclosure takes place. In Manfred Frank’s formulation, allegory is “the tendency toward the Absolute amidst the finite itself ” (206). The sensuous forms of art afford a reservoir of finite, particular elements that, upon contemplation, serve as a concrete specification or “presentation” of an allusion to something that is beyond reach or comprehension. This alterity can only be hinted at allegorically; in other words, it is said “otherwise” by means of the finite components of concrete aesthetic experience—namely, the work of art. The work of art is allegorical in the sense that it hints at something else beyond itself. And the correlate of this synecdoche—allegory as “pars per toto” (Frank 208)—is that allegory mirrors the necessary recognition and mediation of alterity for knowledge, or as Novalis puts it in the fragment mentioned above, equating Self and non-Self corresponds to “the highest principle of all learning and art.” For the early Romantics, positing the Absolute—understood in a (post-)Kantian sense as the unconditioned foundation of all being—was a necessity, but they also acknowledged that it was a principle impossible to reach or comprehend. This acknowledgement was not viewed as a limitation, but as a fundamental aspect of understanding itself. Our own sense of finitude calls for means other than philosophical concepts to address the paradoxical presence of the “unpresentable.” Allegory is the mode of signification that reflects these ambiguities. In this regard, the Romantics viewed the work of art as an allegory of the experience of the necessity of the Absolute. This does not imply any identification of the work of art with the Absolute; rather, the point is that the work of art—inexhaustible, approachable only obliquely by the medium of criticism—effects a dialectic of immanence and transcendence that allegorizes the experience of the Absolute and the limits of philosophy.

8

In his introductory lecture of his Transcendental Philosophy Friedrich Schlegel states: “Reflection and speculation are the forms of all thought; thus the only result of thought is allegory” (Schulte-Sasse 256, emphasis in the original); and in his Dialogue on Poetry we read “[A]ll beauty is allegory. Precisely because it is inexpressible, one can only express the highest allegorically” (Schulte-Sasse 189).

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Counterpoint: Lezama, Novalis, Dilthey The thought of Frühromantik—especially Novalis and to a certain extent Friedrich Schlegel—has important resonances with Lezama’s own thought. To begin, Lezama mentions Novalis in some key passages of his work.9 The following fragment from “Introducción a un sistema poético” is particularly revealing as it spells out Lezama’s philological and imaginative appropriation of certain trends of German Romantic and post-Romantic thought. Antes del gran ordenamiento aristotélico, afanoso de aclarar las concepciones de la poesía como oposición a tecné, es decir, como ser universal y padre universal. Y que retorna en el absoluto de los idealistas alemanes de Hegel a Novalis, situando siempre a la poesía en el ser principio, en la total causalidad inmanente. En la poesía como lo real absoluto y la filosofía como operación absoluta, de Novalis, reaparece esa concepción griega primigenia, del ser universal de la poesía, en oposición a los alemanes neoclásicos del período de Lessing que juraban por la poética aristotélica como si fuese el escudo de Aquiles. Pero antes Goethe, en quien lo dórico apolíneo délfico aviva su devoción por la luz suprafísica (espacio etéreo, firmamento para la guardia trácida, ensueño y elevación, claridad y alegría serena, sucesora de aquella sobriedad y sana inteligencia, en Platón), lo llevaron a la configuración de la imaginación poética como urdimbre y nexos, según los términos empleados por Dilthey. Sin duda, ofrecería una gran fascinación el estudio de esa urdimbre en relación con lo contrapuntístico, llegando así a diluir la sentencia poética en la imagen tonal del poema. (LLOC 420-1)

Note first how Lezama situates his own poetic ideas with respect to the tradition. This passage immediately precedes the section discussed at length in chapter one of this book where Lezama critiques Aristotle’s definition of 9



Julio Ortega has pointed out some important parallels between Lezama’s and Novalis’s works in his “La biblioteca de José Cemí.” The most important passages where Lezama mentions Novalis are in “Introducción a un sistema poético” (LLOC 420-1) (I will turn to this passage in a moment) and in “Paralelos: La pintura y la poesía en Cuba (Siglos xviii y xix),” where Lezama claims that the concept of la imagen “únicamente podrá ser esgrimido por un verdadero poeta, que tiene que ser, como ya lo vio Novalis, omnisciente, es decir, ‘un cosmos en miniatura’” (LLOC 950). This comes from the Logological Fragments: “The true poet is allknowing—he is a real world in miniature” (Philosophical Writings 80) [“Der ächte Dichter ist allwissend—er ist eine wirckliche Welt im Kleinen” (Schriften 2: 592)]. Novalis also appears in the famous dialogue in chapter 9 of Paradiso, where Foción mentions the blue flower in Novalis’s allegorical novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (Paradiso 248), and in a couple of interviews (see interview with Gutiérrez Delgado, and “Interrogando a Lezama Lima” in Simón 38).

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metaphor and outlines the idea that I denominate the “weak sublation” of metaphor (LLOC 421). When viewed in this broader context, one can see that here Lezama is effectively establishing a connection between, on the one hand, Romantic and post-Romantic thought (or better, his interpretation thereof ), and on the other hand, his theory about metaphor and the surpassing of the necessity of an “ontological” foundation of rhetorical construction. There are two important references in the passage. One is this fragment from Novalis: “Poetry is the truly absolute real. This is the heart of my philosophy. The more poetic, the more true” (Philosophical Writings 117) [“Die Poësie ist das ächt absolut Reelle. Dies ist Kern meiner Philosophie. Je poëtischer, je wahrer” (Schriften 2: 647)].10 The other reference is Vida y poesía, the Spanish translation of Wilhelm Dilthey’s Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung [Experience and Poetry] (1st ed. 1906).11 Dilthey’s book inquires into the relationships among philosophy, aesthetics, and literature during the period from the Enlightenment to the culmination of Romanticism through individual chapters devoted to Lessing, Goethe, Jean Paul, Schiller, Novalis and Hölderlin. In the passage Lezama makes an explicit reference to the second section of the chapter on Lessing, where Dilthey discusses the Aristotelian background of Lessing’s aesthetics (see Vida y poesía 34-6). The Cuban poet establishes an opposition between, on the one hand, the Classical—or “Aristotelian,” to use Lezama’s terminology—tradition that goes from Aristotle to the eighteenth-century Classicism represented by Lessing, and on the other hand what comes “antes del gran ordenamiento aristotélico” (the pre-Socratics? Homeric epic? The form of the Platonic dialogue, so admired by the early Romantics?): a mode of thought that conceives of poetry as “ser universal y padre universal,” and which also, as Lezama suggests, somehow makes its “return” in German Romanticism and idealist philosophy, with the figure of Goethe as a precursor.

In the critical edition of Novalis’s complete works (Schriften) this passage appears in fragment 473, which forms part of a group of notes on Goethe and natural philosophy. The passage also appears in an anthology of Novalis’s writings in Spanish translation, titled Los fragmentos, seguidos de Los discípulos de Sais (Buenos Aires, 1948): “La poesía es lo absoluto real. Esto constituye el núcleo de mi filosofía. Cuanto más poética es una cosa, tanto más real es” (Fragmentos 148). It is worth pointing out that this Spanish translation is not from the German original, but from the French translation made by Maurice Maeterlinck, the famous Belgian symbolist playwright. 11 Vida y poesía (México: FCE, 1945), translated by Wenceslao Roces, with notes and prologue by Eugenio Imaz. 10

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The passage intimates a self-conscious identification between Lezama’s own poetics and that of the Romantics—“la poesía como lo real absoluto.” And yet, if one delves deeper into the text, some unexpected displacements emerge that complicate the figure of the “Romantic Lezama.” This is concealed in the phrase “la configuración de la imaginación poética como urdimbre y nexos, según los términos usados por Dilthey.” Again, Lezama—aided inadvertently by the Spanish translation of Dilthey’s text—engages in an eccentric play of philological and conceptual creativity. The phrase refers to the following passage from the chapter on Goethe in Vida y poesía: Nexos vitales* dominan la fantasia poética y cobran expresión en ella, pues ya influyen en la formación de las percepciones del poeta. Procesos involuntarios, imperceptibles, rigen por doquier. Actúan constantemente sobre el color y la forma del mundo en que vive el poeta.12 (Vida y poesía 148)

The asterisk in “nexos vitales” refers in its turn to this footnote: “Bebensbezüge [sic], urdimbre de la vida, nexos vitales o ‘referencias’ vitales, una especie de intencionalidad profunda.” The expression Lebensbezüge (with “L”; rendered in Vida y poesía as “nexos vitales,” and variously translated in English as “vital-” or “life-relations,” “life-relationships” or “life-connections”) appears at several points in Dilthey’s works. Here one needs to discern between what it means in Dilthey’s thought and Lezama’s use and interpretation thereof. Broadly The original reads:

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Lebensbezüge beherrschen die poetische Phantasie und kommen in ihr zum Ausdruck, wie sie schon die Bildung der Wahrnehmungen im Dichter beeinflussen. Unwillkürliche, unmerkliche Vorgänge walten hier überall. Sie arbeiten beständig an Farbe und Form der Welt, in welcher der Dichter lebt. (Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung 186) [Lived relations govern the poetic imagination and come to expression in it, just as they have already influenced the perceptions in the poet. Involuntary, imperceptible processes are present everywhere. They are constantly working on the color and shape of the world in which the poet lives. (Poetry and Experience 240)]



As Makkreel and Rodi point out in their introduction to Poetry and Experience (8-10), the main concern of Dilthey’s philosophy was the incorporation of individual subjectivity and what he called “lived experience” or “life-experience” [Erleben] into both transcendental philosophy and the understanding of history. In this framework, literature acquires a special importance because it establishes a bridge between psychology and history: the creative activity of the poet and the testimony thereof are processes in which subjective experience and cultural tradition are intertwined. For Dilthey literature is a window to inquire into history and the “human sciences” from the non-universal standpoint of individual experience, in contradistinction to the universalist stance of religion or philosophy.

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speaking, Lebensbezüge refers to the network of relationships between individual life and the external factors that somehow influence it or have an effect on it. Lezama for his part takes this concept out of the context of Dilthey’s vitalist system and uses the idea of “nexos vitales” in reference to the possibilities of forging imaginary and figural links among signifying entities. Whereas Dilthey is speaking about the link between the poetic imagination and the vital experience of the poet—how everyday experience and relationships with external objects and events shape the poet’s individual existence—Lezama seems to be speaking—(mis)using Dilthey’s terminology—about abstract relationships among words, their referents and their aesthetic implications. Again, like in the case of das Unbedingte in Kant explained in the first chapter, Lezama utilizes a concept found in one of Dilthey’s works as a mot trouvé, decontextualizing it and resignifying it for his own purposes.

Allegory, Chance and Purposiveness: From the Absolute to el potens Lezama’s intervention in “Introducción a un sistema poético” is to subsume a host of multifarious modes of thought—the ideas of poetry and the Absolute in early German Romanticism, Dilthey’s vitalism, the overcoming of the Classical (“lo aristotélico”), and the “combinatorial” aesthetics inscribed in “lo contrapuntístico—into his own conception of poetics. In particular, the reference to Novalis hints at a correspondence between Lezama’s own poetic thought and the Romantic view of poetry as an (allegorical) intimation of the Absolute. But what is the role—if any—of the Absolute in Lezama’s work? The question is not idle for there exists a veritable critical corpus that has effectively treated Lezama as a neo-Romantic poet whose thought is primarily concerned with some version of the “Absolute.”13 However, the reference to Dilthey and the The examples are many: Emilio Bejel takes “la Imagen” (with capital I) not merely as a concept within Lezama’s sistema but as a metaphysical principle: it is “la potencia creativa que surge de una carencia fundamental de orden natural” (14); “La Imagen trata de integrar en un nivel simbólico lo que en la realidad cotidiana se representa como una fragmentación sin sentido” and hence is endowed with a “sentido de salvación” (82). Fina García Marruz suggests that Lezama’s poetry hints at “el encuentro con la sustancia paradisíaca de lo no dañado” (“Por Dador”) and constitute “único impulso creador que recorre la naturaleza y la historia hacia su definitivo esplendor” (“La poesía es un caracol nocturno” 234). For Gustavo Pellón, Lezama’s poetry “has as its goal… the precipitation of a transcendental signified” (28). Jorge

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“configuración de la imaginación poética como urdimbre y nexos”—or equivalently, the “combinatorial” aesthetics of “lo contrapuntístico”—may well take us in a different direction. Let us take a closer look at this ambivalence. The philosophy of Frühromantik understood infinitude, inexhaustibility, and absence of a regulatory ideal in a radical sense, and this became manifest in the role they ascribed to contingency and arbitrariness, and in the idea of the fragment.14 The following two fragments by Novalis reflect upon the links among arbitrariness, speculation and understanding. As I will show in a moment, these fragments offer a powerful insight not only into the similarities between Lezama’s text and allegory as understood by the early Romantics, but more importantly, into a key difference—their respective relationship with the Absolute: In our mind everything is connected in the most particular, pleasing, and vivid way. The strangest things come together through one place, one time, one strange resemblance, a mistake, some kind of chance [Zufall; also translatable as “contingency”]. Thus strange unions and strange combinations arise—and one thing reminds us of everything—it becomes the sign of many and is itself signified and called forth by many. (Philosophical Writings 160; Schriften 3: 650) The poet employs things and works like keys [Testen], since the whole of poesy is based on active association of ideas—on the self-active, purposeful, and idealistic production of chance [Zufallproduktion]—(fortuitous—free concatenation.) (Causistics—fate. Causation.) (Play) (Notes 168, emphases in the original; Schriften 3: 451)

The two passages are partly about how allegory’s signifying components operate and are subject to the incomprehensibility of the Absolute. Allegory’s signifying components can be combined in any way, but these combinations are “purposeful” [absichtlicher] insofar as they “allegorize” the incessant, always provisional and fragmentary activity of producing meaning. If one goes beyond the specific context of early German Romantic philosophy, one cannot help to notice the resonances between this thesis on poetry as the “self-active, Luis Arcos sees in Lezama’s sistema poético a Messianic attempt to “superar el dualismo, reencontrar la unidad primordial” and return to “un principio creador, genésico” (42-3, emphasis in the original). Ramón Xirau and Luis Fernández Sosa both see Lezama’s hermetism as an indicator of an ineffable metaphysical-religious referent. 14 See Behler 68-71.

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purposeful, idealistic production of chance” and Lezama’s own theorization on poetry, culture and knowledge. These resonances are many and complex, for the differences are as consequential as the patent affinities. Let us take a closer look at this. What Novalis calls Zufallproduktion—the free production of “chance” or “contingency”—and the cognitive possibilities that arise when one thing “becomes the sign of many and is itself signified and called forth by many” is echoed in various ideas, scenes and images throughout Lezama’s work. I have discussed two examples already: the process of signification I called “weak sublation” of the Aristotelian model of metaphor (“es en la región de la poesía donde ‘éste es aquél’, donde es posible reemplazar el escudo de Aquiles por la copa de vino sin vino, éste árbol por aquella hoguera”), and the idea of visión histórica (“ese contrapunto o tejido regalado por la imago, por la imagen participando en la historia”). Lezama continues exploring the relationship between chance and poetics in later essays. In “Saint-John Perse: Historiador de las lluvias” (1961)—the prefatory piece to the Spanish translation of Saint-John Perse’s Pluies (published in Havana in the same year) and later included in La cantidad hechizada—Lezama employs the concept of chance to characterize poetic activity. It is here that he introduces the often-quoted expression “azar concurrente”: “La poesía prefiere ser la configuración del azar concurrente… Todo azar es en realidad concurrente, está regido por la voracidad del sentido” (LLOC 1185-6). And in chapter XIII of Paradiso, Oppiano Licario explains that interpreting and deriving meaning from “[la] excepción” (Paradiso 412)—i.e., chance encounters, exceptional situations, contingencies—is for him a philosophy of life.15 For Novalis—just like for Oppiano Licario—“the In one of the scenes that takes place inside the bizarre bus propelled by a decapitated bull’s head in chapter XIII of Paradiso, Oppiano Licario (“el anticuario”) explains his hermeneutical method as he meditates about chance and how to make sense of it:

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Cada instante lleva un pez fuera del agua, y lo único que me interesa es atraparlo. Primera vez en mi vida que a mi lado unas muchachas sacan esos papeles de análisis en un ómnibus, aprovecho esa excepción para mostrarles mi secreto. Si no es por la ocasión, remolino de coincidencias que se detienen en escultura, ¿cómo podríamos mostrar la sabiduría? La vida es una red de situaciones indeterminadas, cada coincidencia es algo que quiere hablar a nuestro lado, si la interpretamos incorporamos una forma, dominamos una transparencia. Dispénseme, pero esa situación indeterminada, una muchacha en un ómnibus, con unos análisis, a mi lado, adquiere forma, tengo que interpretarla, porque eso es muy posible que no se vuelva a repetir mientras yo viva. Lo único que puede interesarme es la coincidencia de mi yo en la diversidad de las situaciones. Si dejo pasar esas coincidencias, me dejo morir; cuando las interpreto, soy el artífice de un milagro, he dominado el reto informe de la naturaleza. (Paradiso 412)

Licario’s speech takes place right between two unexpected encounters inside the bus. First, he is sitting next to a woman who is talking with two other friends about the results of her med-

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poet orders, combines, chooses, invents—and even to himself it is incomprehensible why it is just so and not otherwise” (Philosophical Writings 162-3; Schriften 3: 686). For Lezama, the sujeto metafórico invents connections among disparate entities that come from the past, and is able to materialize the wondrous visión histórica that brings “new life” to them. The fundamental belief shared by Novalis and Lezama is precisely the conception of art as a free, unregulated, and ultimately contingent process of the production of meaning that unfolds historically. But do these affinities reveal that Lezama is merely a “neo-Romantic” thinker? Not exactly, for if we take into consideration the specific philosophical background of Novalis’s thought and, more importantly, inspect closely how Lezama misreads and miswrites this context, a more complicated picture emerges. Let us consider Novalis’s idea that poetry constitutes a “purposeful [absichtlicher], and idealistic production of chance.” How should one understand “purpose” in connection with “chance” or “contingency”? In broad terms, one can say that the “production of chance” inherent to the poetic craft is “purposeful” insofar as it is produces meaning. In the case of the early Romantics, knowledge is determined by the necessary positing of the Absolute as the unconditioned foundation of all beings and consciousness. The Absolute is incomprehensible: it cannot be grasped by concepts or apprehended but can only be hinted at, intimated. When Novalis says that poetic Zufallproduktion is “purposeful,” he is claiming that it aims toward the Absolute. For the early Romantics, knowledge is “asymptotic,” to borrow the mathematical term, with respect to the Absolute: the “purposeful” poetic activity is a striving for knowledge, and this activity is inexhaustible and limitless in the sense that its end can never be reached, but the horizon of the Absolute is there, even though it cannot be apprehended, conceptualized, or assume the form of a regulatory ideal (as in the case of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, for example). This corresponds to what Behler calls the ical tests (“unos análisis”). Licario uses this “excepción”—the chance encounter with three women discussing medical tests on the bus—to explain a doctrine in which the hermeneutics of the unexpected becomes a philosophy of life. In order to be alive and master “el reto informe de la naturaleza,” Licario has to come up with interpretations of everything that is contingent, random or unexpected, and by means of interpretation he has the power to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Significantly, this is what happens in the following chance meeting inside the bus, where Oppiano Licario, after talking with the three women, turns his gaze toward another man who happens to be no other than José Cemí—the son of his friend the Colonel, the “complementario” (Paradiso 413) he had been waiting for.

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early Romantic ideal of “infinite perfectibility” (4, 68-71). This dialectics of positing a necessary and all-encompassing foundation of Being (to which the faculty of “perfectibility” owes its existence), but one that is forever out of reach (“infinite”), constitutes the basis of the early Romantic concept of allegory. The Absolute can only be hinted at, intimated, said “otherwise”; and knowledge is always already provisional, partial and incomplete. As Friedrich Schlegel puts it in “On Incomprehensibility” [“Über die Unverständlichkeit,” 1800]: “everything is still only tendency” [alles sei nur noch Tendenz] (Schulte-Sasse 122). If we now turn to Lezama we can see one crucial difference. In Lezama there does not seem to be any idea of “perfectibility” akin to that of the early Romantics; the epistemic purpose of Romantic allegory—the intimation of the Absolute—is alien to Lezama. To begin, in Lezama’s thought there is no such thing as a theory of knowledge predicated on the necessary existence of an entity like the Absolute. Nowhere does Lezama suggest that knowledge is something “perfectible,” predicated on, or measured against, the idea of the Absolute. And it would be misleading to infer that such a theory ought to exist necessarily by virtue of Lezama’s avowed Catholicism, for there is no indication that Lezama deduces any “hard” epistemological claims from his religious beliefs. The “purposiveness” of Lezama’s discursive “production of contingencies” is not the Absolute, but what he describes in “Preludio a las eras imaginarias” as “el incondicionado condicionante, es decir el potens, la posibilidad infinita” (LLOC 816). There exists, to be sure, a close interrelation between el potens and the Absolute, but in a characteristically lezamiana fashion, this relationship has less to do with philosophical concepts or metaphysics than with highly elaborated textual displacements. Recall the analysis of the neologisms causalidad and lo incondicionado in chapter one. In “Preludio a las eras imaginarias” Lezama depicts two armies named causalidad and lo incondicionado—two “concepts” of the sistema poético derived respectively from the terms Kausalität and das Unbedingte as used by Kant—that clash at the foot of a castle and produce “un monstruocillo, la poesía” (LLOC 807). The first half of the expression above—“el incondicionado condicionante”—has two referents. One is its “original” meaning: the concept of das Unbedingte [the unconditioned] as it appears in Kant. According to this specific conceptual framework, the expression “el incondicionado condicionante” refers precisely to the metaphysical notion of the Absolute: the foundation and cause of all Beings, and is not caused itself by anything else. The other referent is lo incondicionado as it appears in Lezama’s essay: an army (“ejército”) that clashes against the enemy

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troops of la causalidad (“Con ojos irritados se contemplan la causalidad y lo incondicionado. Se contemplan irreconciliables y cierran filas en las dos riberas enemigas” [LLOC 797]). Here lo incondicionado is a “concept” of the sistema poético, represented by… an allegory (!): a concrete image (an army at the foot of a castle) stands for an abstract concept (lo incondicionado). The term “lo incondicionado condicionante” deploys a complex web of connotations—the philosophical notion of the Absolute, the “concept” of lo incondicionado in the sistema poético, and allegory as a rhetorical device. If now one turns to the second half of the expression, things are complicated further: “lo incondicionado condicionante” equals “el potens, la posibilidad infinita.” “Lo incondicionado condicionante” corresponds—among other things—to the concept of the Absolute in the philosophical tradition, but note that this concept is something wholly different from the second half of the equation—the “infinite possibility,” or as Lezama calls it elsewhere, lo increado. On the one hand, the Absolute is both a foundation and epistemic horizon. The “infinite” of the Romantics points to the fact that the Absolute cannot be fully apprehended or conceptualized; knowledge is an infinite process in the sense that it cannot be brought to completion, but the Absolute remains an epistemic horizon. Knowledge is not boundless, and the Absolute, understood as the metaphysical foundation of all being and thought, does not leave room for “infinite possibilities” outside the realm of knowledge.16 On the other hand, there is no such a “horizon” in Lezama’s thought: ideas like el potens, la posibilidad infinita, las eras imaginarias, visión histórica, contrapunto, imagen, the weak sublation of metaphor and the hypertrope, are all in one way or another predicated precisely on the absence of such a horizon or necessary epistemic closure. This casts new light upon the equation “el incondicionado condicionante, es decir el potens, la posibilidad infinita”: Lezama uses an expression that describes the Absolute to designate something unlike the Absolute and which constitutes the virtual—as opposed to metaphysical—foundation of his rhetorical investigations. The mode of signification the Romantics called “allegory” is in action in the eras imaginarias and other “contrapuntal” artifacts theorized by Lezama, but with the fundamental difference that it is not subject to any epistemic horizon like the Absolute. These artifacts have a virtual, not substantial, foundation: “infinite This dialectic of finitude and infinitude is a central tenet in early Romantic thought; its manifestation is precisely the idea of the work of art. In the Athenaeum fragment 297, Friedrich Schlegel states that “a work is cultivated when it is everywhere sharply delimited, but within those limits limitless and inexhaustible” (Schlegel 204).

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possibility” does not correspond to a metaphysical substratum but to what happens upon eliminating such an entity. The purposiveness of Lezama’s allegorical artifacts lies in their capacity to “materialize” in discourse and as discourse the realm of “infinitely possible” events that emerge after having overcome “el análogo,” to use Lezama’s parlance. The emphasis Lezama places throughout his work on figures of change and transitoriness is a conspicuous manifestation of the logic of the “infinite possibility.” We have seen already many examples of these figurations: the germen-acto sequence, death and resurrection, the “weak” aspect of the sublation of the Aristotelian model of metaphor, or the imagining of alter-causal correspondences among events and objects. How is history understood under this logic? And how does it relate to allegory and its “virtual” foundation?

From Archetype to Artifice The eras imaginarias, I would argue, constitute another of Lezama’s attempts to fix “una dualidad imposible” (LLOC 178, my emphasis). The “archetypal” (cf. LLOC 833) quality Lezama ascribes to the eras imaginarias ought to be confronted with their manifest artificiality. As I indicated earlier, one possible interpretation of the eras imaginarias is that they constitute an alternative historiography in which cultural artifacts and their historicity are subject to an order of discourse that aims at making manifest the hypostases of what Lezama calls la imagen across diverse cultures and historical times. In this alternative writing of history, events and cultural artifacts are not necessarily related by considerations like linear chronology, historicist designs, or “national” narratives (however, the Cuban Revolution, as the last era imaginaria, is an important exception in this regard—this has significant implications that I will address later). For Lezama, this turning away from (cf. trópos, “turn”) conventional modes of historical narrative discloses an alternative network of trans-historical and transcultural associations among historical and cultural events and artifacts. These associations are brought to light by the poet-historian of the eras imaginarias, and are manifestations of the transits of poetic modes of cognizing the world across history. The metaphysical overtones of this conception of history—not unlike those of historicist narratives—are plain to see, and participate in the theological and philosophical background I examined earlier—Vico, Nicholas of Cusa, Anselm and Pascal—against which Lezama builds the idea of the eras

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imaginarias. And this brings us to the question of allegory: I would argue that the mode of signification at work in the eras imaginarias is allegorical. This thesis may seem counterintuitive and must be considered carefully. If one reads Lezama’s description of what the eras imaginarias express and speculates about his possible intentions, it would seem appropriate to say that the eras imaginarias are a symbolic, not allegorical, construction. The concept of eras imaginarias posits the occurrence of hypostases of what Lezama calls imagen across different cultures and historical epochs. La imagen, as Lezama uses it here, appears under the form of historical events, characters, myths, beliefs, etc., that take place and may recur across different cultures and epochs: “milenios… situaciones excepcionales, que se hacen arquetípicas, que se congelan, donde la imagen puede apresar al repetirse” (LLOC 833). When Lezama asserts that “los idumeos, los escitas, los chichimecas,” Mallarmé’s sonnet “Don du poème,” and “teólogos heterodoxos” like Jacob Boehme and Emmanuel Swedenborg are components of the “era filogeneratriz” (cf. LLOC 835-7), each of these entities presumably functions as a symbol of a metaphysical ideal of non-sexual reproduction, or more precisely, as a symbol of the modes of imagining this idea in different times and cultures. In this sense the eras imaginarias appear to be a manifestation of the “translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal” (661) to use Coleridge’s description of the symbol, and which he posits as the very opposite of allegory. For Lezama certain historical events, myths, characters or cultural artifacts function as instantiations of the transits of la imagen across history; they are “moments” or “episodes” of an era imaginaria. The aforementioned entities are “episodes” of the “era filogeneratriz” precisely insofar as they hypostatize modes of grasping and cognizing certain “metaphysics” of reproduction. It can be argued that a symbolic mode of signification is at work here to the extent that each of these historical and cultural entities is inseparable from the ideal it supposedly conveys and makes present across history. However, this impulse paradoxically collapses upon moving toward the supplementary layer of signification that consists in the articulation of the form of the era imaginaria proper. This form corresponds to the very formation of the collective visión histórica that gathers disparate historical and cultural entities and endows them with “new life,” the constellation of events and entities that would reveal the occurrence of transhistorical and transcultural modes of poetic cognition. This grouping of heterogeneous and disparate elements corresponds to a supplementary mode of signification that, I would argue, is allegorical, and subverts the symbolic and metaphysical pulsion underlying the concept of eras imaginarias.

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To begin, note that the symbolic gesture—the correspondence between a concrete historical or cultural entity and the metaphysical idea “repeated” in the era imaginaria, or put differently, the principle that a certain historical or cultural entity is a “moment” of an era imaginaria—is in reality a retroactive operation. A narrow metaphysical interpretation of the eras imaginarias would take isolated historical or cultural entities as a priori individual instantiations or hypostases of a certain metaphysical idea. This idea is in turn regarded as “archetypal” in view of the recurring appearance of these entities that a priori instantiate such an idea across different epochs and cultures. The task of the historian of the eras imaginarias would be to identify those entities that are always already “symbols” or instances of the archetype. On closer inspection, however, one realizes that endowing cultural entities with such “symbolic” attributes is actually an operation performed a posteriori, just like the case of the visión histórica that opened the lecture “Mitos y cansancio clásico” from La expresión americana. The poet-historian of the eras imaginarias is not so much “recognizing” attributes already present in things that come from the past (such as symbolic potency vis-à-vis la imagen), but inventing them a posteriori: from the standpoint of the present, the poet-historian of the eras imaginarias selects events, entities and artifacts that come from the past, to then establish links among them and conceive a historical and cultural constellation that is presented as if having a transcendental referent but which in reality is nothing but a rhetorical creation. In spite of the metaphysical underpinnings, the selection of the components of the era imaginaria—its “episodes”—is ultimately arbitrary, and so is the identification of a “transcendental” referent instantiated by those components. The eras imaginarias, despite their historiographical aspirations and Lezama’s emphasis on repetition and the “archetypal,” are substantially different from Jung’s archetypes, Freud’s analyses of myth, or Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, to mention a few examples of transhistorical modes of understanding culture. The “logic” of poetic reason—“Es para mí el primer asombro de la poesía, que sumergida en el mundo prelógico, no sea nunca ilógica. Como buscando una nueva causalidad, se aferra enloquecedoramente a esa causalidad” (LLOC 821)—inevitably “contaminates” and subverts the positing of a substantive referent expressed through the network of “analogous” cultural entities.17 Lezama does not frame explicitly the theory of the eras imaginarias in terms of the theory of rhetoric he advanced in texts like “Introducción a un sistema poético,” “La dignidad de la

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Here we have moved from archetype to artifice, and this is precisely the movement enacted by allegory. The idea of the eras imaginarias corresponds to some of Lezama’s most conspicuously metaphysical speculations, and this is precisely what endows it with allegorical attributes. On the one hand, the concept of the eras imaginarias rests on the positing of a transcendental, metaphysical, and trans-historical signified; but on the other hand, what purportedly represents this signified is an idiosyncratic array of disparate elements that have been violently removed from their original context. Most importantly, one cognizes this signified—the transits of la imagen across different cultures and epochs—only through the mediation of this array: the signified cannot be presented directly; it is only “said”—so to speak—allegorically, through the collection of diverse historical and cultural entities that constitutes the era imaginaria. And at the very end, there is nothing but this collection. It is not the case, as a symbolic mode of signification would have it, that some pre-existent archetypal entity serves as the foundation and “logic” of a collection of seemingly disparate cultural and historical elements, but rather the opposite: an actually disparate, a priori arbitrary and contingent collection of cultural and historical elements is organized in such a way that it produces its own phantasmatic foundation or “logic.” As concept and as form, the eras imaginarias then correspond precisely to Walter Benjamin’s description of allegory’s mode of signification: what allegory means is “the non-being of what it presents” (Origin 233).18 The eras imaginarias are in the end nothing but the presentation of a collection of heterogeneous historical and cultural artifacts: this miscellany is not the re-presentation or hypostasizing of a pre-existing foundation; rather the metaphysical substratum that is instantiated in each “moment” of the era imaginaria can only appear as the presentation of this historical-cultural miscellany. In this regard, the eras poesía” or “A partir de la poesía,” but both theories were developed at around the same time, and it should come as no surprise that the very concept and structure of the eras imaginarias point toward the same tensions disclosed by Lezama’s reflections on metaphor: the dialectical oppositions between content and form, the literal and the figural, tenor and vehicle, assertion and force. Recall Lezama’s critique of the Aristotelian theory of metaphor in “Introducción a un sistema poético”: Aristotle’s insight was “señalar que es en la región de la poesía donde ‘éste es aquél’” (LLOC 421). At the core of this intuition is the realization that, contrary to what Aristotle believed, metaphor is not a verbal representation or repetition of some preexisting, pre-verbal domain of analogical relationships, but rather a construction made exclusively with words and properties that pertain to words. This cognizance discloses the domain of an “infinite possibility” of figural equivalences—“éste es aquél”—actively created by the poet and the reader and not derived from an extra-discursive substratum. 18 I have profited from the analyses of Benjamin’s theory of allegory in Cowan and Finkelde.

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imaginarias are truly poetic: being pure presentation, the collections of artifacts Lezama calls eras imaginarias create their own foundation—and such a foundation is wholly phantasmatic. The symbolic impulse I mentioned earlier, whereby a historical event or a cultural artifact may be considered a hypostasis of the historical transit of la imagen, corresponds to this phantasm: this symbolic intentionality is not a cause, but an effect of the phantasmatic “substratum” enacted by the very presentation of what is a contingent and arbitrary array of artifacts.

The Double Life of the Eras Imaginarias This dialectic of archetype and artifice, symbol and allegory, representation and presentation, metaphysical substance and phantasm, echoes what Walter Benjamin called “the antinomies of the allegorical” in his study on the Trauerspiel or German Baroque mourning play (Origin 174). Allegory sets in motion a dialectic of “devaluation” and “evaluation” (Origin 175). As everyday objects are invested with the power to point toward something else—i.e., as they become “vehicles” for representing another [allos] meaning and are subordinated to this role—they are stripped of their immediacy and “phenomenal” nature, and simultaneously raised to a realm beyond the “profane” as they signify higher truths. In the eras imaginarias two contradictory impulses coexist: on the one hand, that of arbitrariness, contingency and mutability; and on the other hand, that of the stability afforded by a transcendental realm which, in turn, finds its materialization in certain historical and cultural artifacts. When an assortment of historical and cultural entities is subject to the “logic” of the eras imaginarias, those entities become “signifiers” of a trans-historical and trans-cultural imaginary. Lezama characterizes this process in overtly theological terms: “en un espacio contrapunteado por la imago y el sujeto metafórico” cultural entities acquire “nueva vida” (EA 54). But this “evaluation” or, to use Lezama’s own expression, “resurrection” of historical and cultural entities, comes at the price of artificiality. In order to become “moments” of the eras imaginarias, or put in other terms, in order to become signifying materials subject to the order of discourse of the eras imaginarias, historical and cultural artifacts are put into “alternative” relationships (for example, linking the Chichimeca peoples and the Zohar as two moments of the “era filogeneratriz,” or the myth of Orpheus and the figure of Christ in the era of “lo órfico y etrusco”) that supplement the “normal(ized)” relationships already established by conventional

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historiographies and which constitute what one commonly considers as the “proper” context of such artifacts. But this supplementary—and redemptive for Lezama—re-contextualization actually corresponds to a violent de-contextualization in which disparate and heterogeneous elements are collected and (mis) placed in an eccentric arrangement. For Lezama, enlisting a historical event or cultural artifact in the service of the eras imaginarias is a redeeming act—it brings “new life”—yet, paradoxically, this also corresponds to enlisting them in the service of artifice. In allegory, objects lead a double life: their ordinary existence and their standing for metaphysical truths or abstract concepts. The components of the eras imaginarias, or equivalently, what Lezama calls entidades culturales (EA 54), also lead a double life. An entidad cultural is a natural, cultural or historical object, artifact or event in the ordinary sense, and it is also a signifying component of the historical-poetic constellation Lezama calls era imaginaria. The Scythians (LLOC 835) are simultaneously the nomadic warriors that occupied the Black Sea region in antiquity and a “moment” of the era filogeneratriz. Orpheus, the Etruscans and the figure of Christ are all components of the era imaginaria of “lo órfico y lo etrusco” (which for Lezama stands for the human-divine duality—incidentally, what allegory is about). In all these cases, historical, religious or mythical “objects” exist simultaneously in the “ordinary” realm of history and in the realm of the eras imaginarias, and this latter form of existence, the object’s being a “moment” of the eras imaginarias, corresponds to being a sign in a rhetorical construction that, as I pointed out earlier, creates its own phantasmatic “truth”—that of the transit of la imagen across history. The metaphysical scheme that Lezama delineates in the eras imaginarias stages a mode of signification analogous to that of the Baroque emblem and allegory. In this mode of signification, as Giorgio Agamben puts it, “[e]ach thing is true only to the extent to which it signifies another, and each thing is itself only if it stands for another” (142). In the context of the eras imaginarias “to be true” is to be a “moment” in the transit of la imagen across history, but as I indicated earlier, this “truth” is a phantasm enacted by the presentation of an arbitrary array of artifacts. A historical event or cultural artifact is a “moment” of an era imaginaria by virtue of an ultimately arbitrary link to another historical event or cultural artifact, which in turn is linked to another, and so on. As I argued earlier, there is no correspondence between a historical event or cultural artifact and a trans-historical, pre-existing and ultimately metaphysical faculty of poetic cognition; rather, a collection of diverse historical events or cultural

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artifacts is arranged in such a way that the arrangement itself creates its own “logic” and justification. The eras imaginarias are constructed as if certain historical events and cultural artifacts were expressions of some trans-historical, a priori and metaphysical substratum; but this substratum is an a posteriori “logic” built from and caused by an ultimately contingent collection of objects. If, as I have argued, the “metaphysical” justification of the eras imaginarias is in reality a phantasmatic effect produced by the very presentation of a collection of historical events and cultural artifacts, then to be a “moment” of an era imaginaria, to be an hypostasis of this metaphysical substratum, is in reality equivalent to “standing for” such a collection of historical events and cultural artifacts, and this is precisely the way allegory and the Baroque emblem signify.

Misreading as Ruination How do historical events and cultural artifacts acquire this “double life”? How do they “supplement” their “ordinary” existence by becoming signifying components in the eras imaginarias? By way of anachronistic (mis)readings—this is what transforms historical events and cultural artifacts into signifying components of the eras imaginarias. In order to understand the significance and implications of this operation it is useful to draw an analogy with Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the role of ruination in allegory. Among the insights of Benjamin’s study on the Trauerspiel or German Baroque mourning drama was how allegory, in forms like the emblem and the Trauerspiel, staged the passing of historical time. Benjamin underscores the role that the ruin played in Baroque allegory thus: “ruins, the highly significant fragment, the remnant, is, in fact, the finest material in baroque creation… the literature of the baroque [piles up] fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal” (Origin 178). The causes and significance—theological, ideological and political—of the Trauerspiel’s emphasis on transitoriness, decay, death and the ruin come to light when placed against the historical backdrop of the Counterreformation and the Thirty Years’ War. The Trauerspiel—represented by playwrights like Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664) and Daniel Casper von Lohenstein (1635-1683)—is a genre tied to the Protestant idea of a fallen world in which human deeds do not secure salvation. One central aspect of Benjamin’s analysis concerns how melancholy ensues from the subject’s awareness of his or

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her already fallen state, and how this sentiment is echoed in the significance the Trauerspiel ascribes to transitoriness, ruination, and the figure of the tyrant. The Trauerspiel stages a figuration of the world after the Fall, and Benjamin identifies how allegory’s distinctive mode of signification is the correlate of this subjection to a fallen world. As Benjamin famously quips, in allegory “any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else” (Origin 175), and this corresponds to the transitoriness, contingency and lack of ultimate purpose of a world devoid of salvation. Allegory is the mode of signification of mankind’s fallen state: it stages the unbridgeable rift between truth—natural or divine—and representation, intention and arbitrariness, the eternal and the transient, salvation and decay. In allegory, the ruin serves to stage the passing of history; it refers not so much to an object from the past, but to its historical distance from us. Things from the past always come to us upon being subject to inexorable and unforeseeable transformations, and the ruin is the material instantiation of these transformations. This concept of the ruin amounts to the destruction of the Classical ideal and to a catastrophic vision of history. In this regard, ruination and allegory’s mode of signification echo each other. The lack of “any strict idea of a goal” in how allegory “piles up” signifying materials corresponds both to the inherent arbitrariness and artificiality of the allegorical genre, and to a non-historicist conception of history that rejects ideas like the postulation of “progress,” the existence of transcendental reason that guides history, or the possibility of recovering the past “as it really was” (Benjamin will develop at length this critique of historicism in his theses “On the Concept of History” [Selected Writings 4: 389-40]). The historical counterpart of the arbitrariness of allegory (“Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else” [Origin 175]) is the transitoriness of everything that serves as a “signifying component” of allegory (ruins, remnants, fragments). Transitoriness in allegory is overdetermined, for the ruin refers not only to ruined objects but also to ruined signs. The ruin is the presentation of how that which comes from the past has been subject to the vicissitudes of historical time, but this subjection is not limited to the materiality of the ruined object, but to its signification as well. By definition, ruins—ancient monuments, myths, characters, works of art, historical events, etc.—no longer signify what they did in ancient times or the more recent past, and this is also a mark of the passing of time. In this view of history, this temporal succession of—contingent and unforeseeable—significations also configures a “ruined landscape” superimposed

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on and inseparable from the landscape of the concrete objects that come to us from the past.19 If ruination marks the passing of historical time and the transitoriness of signification, then the anachronistic (mis)readings that transform historical events and cultural artifacts into signifying components of the eras imaginarias can be read as a form of ruination. The Egyptians, the Etruscans, the I Ching, the Incas constitute a ruined landscape. But “ruination” here must be understood not only in its ordinary sense, i.e., as remnants of old epochs, but most importantly, in a semiotic sense: as “ruined” discourse. Our knowledge of what comes from the past, or more precisely, our discourses about the cultural entities that come the past, become subject to Lezama’s anachronistic misreadings. From Lezama’s perspective, ancient civilizations, cultural artifacts, historical events, etc., refer less to real, concrete, entities than to entities that belong to the order or discourse. Lezama’s vision of the world is always already mediated by the book. He doesn’t merely “(mis)read” the Egyptians—rather, he (mis) reads readings of the Egyptians. And these readings are already the product of the historical subjection to the order of discourse, as performed by critics, historians, archeologists, philosophers, etc. Lezama’s supplementary (mis)reading of readings—his “ruined” discourse—thus overdetermines the passing of historical time, and the mutability and transitoriness of culture. This can be understood in terms of the double life of historical and cultural entities in the eras imaginarias. As I mentioned earlier, the eras imaginarias are in part an alternative mode of historiography—not to be confused with an “alternative history”—in which events are not laid out in a chronological or causal sequence but in accordance with the transhistorical principle of la imagen and its hypostases. Recall also that what Lezama calls visión histórica in “Mitos y cansancio clásico” can be viewed from a scriptural perspective as an anagram in which historical and cultural entities have been taken out of their proper context and chronological location and then reorganized according to the alternative 19

What I refer to here as the “ruination” of signification is intimately related to the question of the aestheticization of the ruin. In “Scribbling on the Wreck” Francine Masiello writes: “in both extremes of ‘then’ and ‘now,’ between totality and infinite fragments, ruins always oblige us to see and think in double time… Ruins speak a lack in my primary experience; they scream out my inability to capture the past accurately. I then try to impose my own experience on a past that I cannot reach directly. I fill in the gaps; I make sense of the rubble, and when all else fails, I try to find an aesthetics of the ruin” (28-9, emphasis in the original). For two excellent works on ruins and Hispanic culture and literature see Lazzara and Unruh (which includes Masiello’s essay) and Enjuto Rangel.

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“logic” of the “contrapunto o tejido regalado por la imago” (EA 49). In this regard, once a historical event or cultural artifact becomes a component of an era imaginaria, it steps outside history proper. In order to participate in the visión histórica or, equivalently, to become a signifying component of an era imaginaria, the historical event or cultural artifact ought to be subject to a violent operation of de-contextualization. Hence, what I referred to as the “double life” of historical and cultural entities means living simultaneously inside and outside history. And this in its turn should be understood dialectically. Anachronism here is not a negation or deviation from history but rather the opposite. In Lezama’s speculations, anachronism becomes a way to delve further into the experience of historical time, and this is because the eras imaginarias and visión histórica put forth a profound correspondence between anachronism and signification. Transforming a certain historical event or cultural artifact into a signifying component of networks like the eras imaginarias or visión histórica necessarily supposes a double act of interpretation: first, a recognition of the “common,” “usual” or “accepted” understanding of the event or artifact, of its place and significance in the order of discourse of traditional historiography; and second, the supplementary, anachronistic and de-contextualizing interpretation that transforms the event or artifact into a signifying component of the era imaginaria or visión histórica. The correlate of the double life of historical events and cultural entities—living simultaneously as “facts” and as signifying components of the eras imaginarias—is this double act of interpretation. This act is essentially a process of reading and reading anew: the learning and acknowledgment of facts about history and culture (which in Lezama’s case is literally the activity of reading his books in his library at Trocadero 162), is followed by an anachronistic, speculative and imaginative re-interpretation of those facts according to the alternative logic of the eras imaginarias. The difference—temporal, cultural, semantic, hermeneutic—between these two readings, I would argue, is an allegory of the experience of historical time. To begin with, anachronism presupposes history: the past can only be acknowledged as such in history, and it is only in history where things from the past can be uprooted from their proper place and transposed elsewhere. Second, re-interpretation or re-reading is a properly historical activity in the sense that it supposes not only a temporal interval but a host of other differences as well: re-interpretations are made and re-made across different and ever changing cultural, ideological, social, geographical, and political situations. Anachronism

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only makes these gaps more visible insofar as the subject of anachronistic rereading is conspicuously presented as “out-of-time” and “out-of-place.” A visible manifestation of this disjunction is precisely the artificiality and rhetorical excess in the construction of the eras imaginarias and the visión histórica. By “allegory of the experience of historical time” I mean that the difference—temporal, cultural, semantic, hermeneutic—between reading and re-readings is mediated and represented by these highly artificial constructions, and each of their signifying components is not only itself (a certain historical event or cultural artifact) but also something else—an “event” of an era imaginaria. Lastly, the eras imaginarias need not be regarded as a form of historical revisionism. The aim of anachronism in the eras imaginarias is not the representation of alternative accounts of historical facts but the presentation of the gap that exists between the fact and its eventual and contingent representation(s) in history.

History Inside Out Walter Benjamin famously wrote that events become historical “posthumously” (Selected Writings 4:397). What Lezama calls sujeto metafórico, or what I call the poet-historian of the eras imaginarias, are “historicizing” agents insofar as they also bring about a “posthumous” organization of artifacts and events from the past. Behind this organization, as I have indicated, there is a metaphysical intentionality, which corresponds to the positing of the eras imaginarias as hypostases of the historical transit of la imagen. The overall effect of this “posthumous” arrangement of past artifacts and events is the production of that phantasm that corresponds to the metaphysical foundation the eras imaginarias. Put in other terms, metaphysical intentionality engenders a phantasm that retroactively becomes the simulacrum of a transcendental or, as Lezama puts it, “archetypal” foundation for the organization of historical events and cultural artifacts. What is remarkable about this organization is its reflective capacity—it produces something that is simultaneously inside and outside history. One can say that the eras imaginarias are “historicized” to the extent that they are the offspring of a posthumous organization of the past. Moreover, this past is already historical—the poet-historian of the eras imaginarias re-reads what already belongs to history—and in this regard one can consider that the arrangement of cultural entities and historical events in the era imaginaria is in effect a discursive supplement of history. Yet on the other hand, one cannot say that the

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eras imaginarias are “historical” in a strict sense. The anachronistic re-readings of events and cultural artifacts and their subsequent organization under the guise of what Lezama calls visión histórica are in the end rhetorical operations, and their function is not to articulate a representation of historical facts. As I have argued, the eras imaginarias should not be understood as an “alternative” or “revisionist” form of history since historical factuality is not their concern. Viewed as rhetorical construction, the eras imaginarias—or, more broadly, what Lezama calls contrapunto or visión histórica—constitute a historiographical speculation, and being such, it is distanced from history proper. The poetic agency of the sujeto metafórico produces a “contrapuntal” arrangement of historical events and cultural artifacts that sets in motion a critical reflection on how history is written. A posthumous organization of events that intends or aims to be historical is, in part, a rhetorical operation, and this is precisely what the eras imaginarias and the contrapunto—understood as “others” of history, as the “outside” of history—disclose. As we have seen, the eras imaginarias and the contrapunto are highly artificial constructions, yet they happen to be composed of historical and cultural “facts.” Upon confronting dialectically history proper— the representation of historical facts—with these artificial creations made up of (past) “facts” and “realities,” what takes place is the disclosure and “raising” (and this is one of the meanings of the term Aufhebung as used by Hegel) of the rhetoricity of history. The dialectical encounter between history on the one hand, and the rhetorical and artificial construction made of historical facts on the other, discloses and raises the rhetorical constitution of that posthumous arrangement known as and intended as “history.” And this element is precisely the non-factual component of history—history’s very own (repressed, forgotten) constitutive artifice, its (a)historical remainder. This does not imply an empty revisionism that claims that history is merely an artificial construction. On the contrary, the dialectic of the eras imaginarias and history hinges precisely on the distinction between artifice and what is regarded as historical factuality, and on the recognition of each as such; and this opposition in turn raises the rhetorical articulation that the representation of an event qua historical fact is subject to. From this one can move from the “outside” of history toward its “inside” and attempt to grasp how the eras imaginarias stage the experience of historical time. I mentioned earlier that anachronism in the eras imaginarias aims toward the presentation of the gap that exists between the “fact” and its eventual and contingent representation(s) in history. But this gap is not only between the past and the present, but also between the present and the future. The eras imaginarias

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are not only a contemplation of the ruins of the past, but also the prophetic presentation of the future ruination of the present—in other words, the anticipation that the present will be eventually ruined and (mis)read.

Closing: Teleology, Revolution, and the Future of the Eras Imaginarias The last era imaginaria is “la posibilidad infinita, que entre nosotros la acompaña José Martí” (LLOC 838). At the time Lezama wrote these lines of “A partir de la poesía” (the essay is dated January of 1960), the triumphant Cuban Revolution was the ongoing event of this era imaginaria. In Lezama’s catalogue of the eras imaginarias, amid the Egyptians, the Etruscans, the Greeks, Orpheus, medieval kings, Parmenides, Robespierre, and the Idumeans, the Cuban Revolution stood out as the only event that did not come from the past but was actually happening—as of January 1, 1959, an era imaginaria was taking place in “real time.”20 It goes without saying that the topic of the relationships among Lezama, his legacy, the Cuban Revolution, and the Revolutionary state is fraught with polemics. To be sure, Lezama’s own position underwent important changes from the triumph of the Revolution until his death in 1976 (in spite of being attacked on various fronts, he had a relatively active intellectual life during the first years of the Revolution until he eventually became ostracized after the Padilla affair). Lezama’s “afterlife” complicates matters further due to diverse factors, such as the changing reception—and eventual co-optation—of the figure of Lezama by the Cuban state; the conflicting testimonies—direct or indirect—about Lezama’s life after 1959; the momentous significance Lezama and Orígenes had in the literary production of post-Soviet Cuba; and last but not least, the cryptic and equivocal nature of Lezama’s writings about the Revolution. I do not intend to add anything here to what critics and historians more knowledgeable than me on this specific topic have already said.21 My intention here is much more mod An earlier and somewhat longer version of the section in “A partir de la poesía” on the Cuban Revolution appeared under the title “Triunfo de la Revolución Cubana” in a special dossier of the Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí (1988) on rare and unpublished writings by Lezama. 21 On the role of Lezama Lima and Orígenes in post-Soviet Cuban literature see Heller Assimilation 153-62 and especially Buckwalter-Arias. On the co-optation of Lezama and Orígenes by the revolutionary discourse, as represented by Cintio Vitier or the state institutions see Díaz 20

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est, yet directly pertinent to the analysis of the theoretical significance of the eras imaginarias and Lezama’s theory of poetics, history and culture. I am interested in exploring how to read the insertion of the Cuban Revolution in the space of the eras imaginarias and, more precisely, in the logic of the posibilidad infinita. This logic, I would argue, is essentially in conflict with a historicist episteme, and at the same time, it may also be potentially in conflict with any type of authorial intention. I will limit myself to the reading of certain texts, and then attempt to draw some conclusions based on the theoretical implications of the views on temporality and historiography that Lezama expounds in his essays. This is neither a historical inquiry on the relationships between Lezama and the Revolution, nor a speculation on Lezama’s own views towards it. Nor do I claim that my analysis of the insertion of the Revolution in the eras imaginarias is true to Lezama’s own intentions, whatever these may be (at any rate, this is immaterial for my purpose here). What I will attempt is to inquire into what his texts are saying and what are the implications. Unlike other figures of the Cuban canon, Lezama Lima does not fit easily within the polarizing dichotomies that pervade the discussions about the political and intellectual life after the Revolution. On the one hand, obviously one can associate Lezama and his work with values that from an orthodox stance can be deemed as “counter revolutionary”: aestheticism, elitism, Catholicism, homosexuality, bourgeois nostalgia, etc. But on the other hand, Lezama is also close to a certain trend of Cuban nationalist thought that Rafael Rojas describes as a “racionalidad moral emancipatoria” (Isla sin fin 31), based on the values of justice, equality and an anti-capitalist ethics that, in its more radical version (and not necessarily shared by Lezama), took openly anti-liberal overtones. 22 Significantly, the incorporation of the triumphant Revolution into the era imaginaria of “la posibilidad infinita” echoes this modality of nationalism by presenting an idealization of poverty as an ethical and patriotic virtue: Entre las mejores cosas de la Revolución cubana, reaccionando contra la era de la locura que fue la etapa de la disipación, de la falsa riqueza, está el haber traído de nuevo el espíritu de la pobreza irradiante, del pobre sobreabundante por los Infante; Santí, “La invención”; and Ponte. For a suggestive application of Lezama’s theories to the Che Guevara myth, see Rowlandson. 22 See Rojas, Isla sin fin, especially 15-72, for a detailed discussion of this modality of nationalism, its historical trajectory (Father Félix Varela, Martí, Chibás) and its relationship with origenismo and the revolutionary movement.

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dones del espíritu. El siglo xix, el nuestro, fue creador desde su pobreza. Desde los espejuelos modestos de Varela, hasta la levita de las oraciones solemnes de Martí, todos nuestros hombres esenciales fueron hombres pobres. (LLOC 838)

Then Lezama concludes: La Revolución cubana significa que todos los conjuros negativos han sido decapitados… Comenzamos a vivir nuestros hechizos y el reinado de la imagen se entreabre al tiempo absoluto. Cuando el pueblo está habitado por una imagen viviente, el estado alcanza su figura. El hombre que muere en la imagen, gana la sobreabundancia en la resurrección. Martí, como el hechizado Hernando de Soto, ha sido enterrado y desenterrado, hasta que ha ganado su paz. El estilo de la pobreza, las inauditas posibilidades de la pobreza han vuelto a alcanzar, entre nosotros, una plenitud oficiante. (LLOC 839-40)

Although Lezama does not say it explicitly, the Revolution is presented here as a vivencia oblicua. Just like the pagodas of the city of Tsuen-cheu-fu that repel the influence of the neighboring city of Yung-chun in the geomantic legend Lezama recounts in “Preludio a las eras imaginarias” (LLOC 815), the Revolution is that unconceivable event that destroyed the evil spells that had hindered a genuine project of Cuban nationhood. Lezama is also portraying the Revolution as a Messianic event. As Antonio José Ponte—not without a dose of sarcasm—puts it: “Los origenistas, desganados de siempre por la historia política, encuentran en la Revolución cubana de 1959 el final de los tiempos, la Parusía, el mejor de los mundos posibles, la segunda venida de Cristo Martí, el estado prusiano de Hegel, la última venida de las eras imaginarias y un último esfuerzo de imaginación histórica” (Ponte 98). Each era imaginaria is fashioned from a certain idea, metaphor or image that recurs across vast temporal extensions. The era imaginaria of “la posibilidad infinita” incorporates two: poverty as a patriotic and ethical virtue—a belief with deep historical and ideological significance in Cuba—and the Messianic fulfillment—or desire thereof—of this idea. Yet the idea of Messianism and its connection with the concept of revolution poses an important question: Doesn’t this open the way for a historicist narrative—precisely what Lezama’s historiographic speculations seem to be opposing all along? In order to elucidate what is at issue here it may be helpful to examine, however briefly, the vicissitudes of one of the most famous expressions penned by Lezama—teleología insular. Lezama mentions the term “teleología”

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for the first time in the Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez: “Nosotros, obligados forzosamente por frontera de agua a una teleología, a situarnos en la pista de nuestro único telos, no exageramos al decir que la Argentina, México y Cuba son los tres países hispanoamericanos que podrían organizar una expresión” (LLOC 61). He does not specify what this telos or finality is, but from the context and themes of the Coloquio, it is possible to speculate that it alludes to the seascape—plus the attendant notions of “resaca” and “lontanza” I discussed in chapter three of this book—and how this has shaped and may shape the possibilities of a Cuban expression in the future. The expression “teleología insular” appears two years later (January 1939) in a letter addressed to Cintio Vitier, who was then only 17 years old. Here Lezama extends some words of gratitude to the young man for having invited him to a poetry reading, and after praising Vitier for organizing these activities, he adds: “Ya va siendo hora de que todos nos empeñemos en una Economía Astronómica, en una Meteorología habanera para uso de descarriados y poetas, en una teleología insular, en algo de veras grande y nutridor” (Cartas 251). Lezama will never use the expression again in his writings, but Vitier and many others with him ended up taking Lezama’s zany proclamation—choteo?—very seriously, for Vitier eventually equated Lezama’s work with the search for teleología insular, as expressed in the title of the lecture he devotes to Lezama in Lo cubano en la poesía: “Crecida de la ambición creadora: José Lezama Lima y el intento de una teleología insular” (436-68). As a consequence, teleología insular came to designate—inaccurately, in my view—Lezama’s own project, when in reality he never used the expression after his 1939 letter, and most importantly, he never actually developed it into a concept—it was Cintio Vitier who actually accomplished this. Lezama even expressed in his 1956 piece “Recuerdos: Guy Pérez Cisneros” that he “rejects” the expression he introduced in the Coloquio (“Recuerdos” 28). And yet, the fact is that the specter of the teleología insular continues to haunt Lezama. The foundations of Vitier’s thought lie his Catholic faith, nationalism, and the figure and ideals of José Martí. He and his wife Fina García Marruz were the origenistas who openly embraced the Cuban Revolution, and Vitier eventually became the official exegete of Orígenes, Lezama, and his legacy.23 Beginning with his anthology of origenista poetry Diez poetas cubanos (1948), continuing with the conferences of Lo cubano en la poesía (1957), and culminating in Ese sol del mundo moral (1975), Vitier traces a teleology that retrospectively On Vitier’s role see Rojas, Tumbas 228-43, Ponte 133-8, and Díaz Infante 223-32.

23

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emerges as a self-fulfilled prophecy. Amid the experience of political and moral disintegration of Cuba during the Batista regime, Vitier concludes in the final lecture of Lo cubano en la poesía that all the foundational body of civic, political and national virtues that configure the ideal of Cuban nationhood can only be thought as an impossibility—“lo cubano como imposible” (Lo cubano en la poesía 576). But years later, in Ese sol del mundo moral (1975)—Vitier’s “historia de la eticidad cubana” (Ese sol 7)—the Cuban Revolution (and more precisely, the assault on the Moncada barracks in 1953) is presented precisely as the event in which lo imposible took place (Ese sol 176). Vitier’s gesture articulates a striking temporal and historiographical logic. What is nihilistically depicted as an impossible ideal in 1957 becomes Messianic fulfillment in 1975. Vitier’s “teleología insular” underwent a radical shift: from phantasmatic teleology built upon an unsublatable dialectic of demand and impossibility (a nationalism founded on “lo cubano como imposible”) to eschatological narrative in which lo imposible, incarnated in the momentous happening of the Revolution and the subsequent realization of Martí’s ideals, took place. Antonio José Ponte cogently describes Vitier’s teleology thus: “La Colonia, según Cintio Vitier, existe porque devendrá en Martí. La República, según Cintio Vitier, existe porque devendrá en Revolución, Martí mediante” (27). The paradox of Ese sol del mundo moral is that “lo imposible” is transformed into the only thing possible. Vitier’s revolutionary eschatology is another retroactive construction: unlike a traditional Messianic narrative founded upon the belief that the telos, the event of Messianic fulfillment, will necessarily and eventually happen, in Ese sol Vitier fabricates a narrative in which what already happened—the Moncada, the triumph of the Revolution—is retroactively constructed as the wondrous Parousia that has always already been the historical destiny of the nation. In Ese sol del mundo moral historical discourse consists of a retroactive arrangement of events according to a causal sequence determined by the hypostasis and Messianic accomplishment of the nationalist and revolutionary ideal. This substance is initially hidden or frustrated but is eventually—and necessarily—revealed. The very destiny of the nation consists precisely of this revelation that, paradoxically, is constructed as a destiny after having taken place (in 1957 it was viewed as “lo imposible”). Under this perspective Ese sol del mundo moral can be considered as a pre-modern epic, in the sense that it is a narrative subordinated to the necessary triumph of the heroes that incarnate “la eticidad cubana.” This ideal traverses a path that goes back to the roots of Cuban nationalist thought in the nineteenth century, reaches its apex in Martí,

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endures in the “actividad silenciosa” (Ese sol 153) of the poets of Orígenes and is finally materialized in the event of the Cuban Revolution. What is the relationship between this teleology and Lezama’s era imaginaria of “la posibilidad infinita”? What do they share and how do they differ? In the critical literature the two are often confused, as when “teleología insular” is mistakenly viewed as a concept developed by Lezama, or is associated to origenismo in general without being attentive to the important differences among its members. I would like to argue that in spite of their significant similarities (the Messianic element, the celebratory depiction of the Revolution, the Catholic imaginary) there is one crucial difference between Vitier’s and Lezama’s historiographies of the Cuban Revolution. According to Vitier’s epic teleology, the Cuban Revolution becomes the only possibility—it is a historical destiny. Lezama’s potens, “la posibilidad infinita,” is precisely the opposite. As I argued earlier, anachronism in the eras imaginarias corresponds to a presentation of the gap that exists between the “fact” and its eventual and contingent representation(s) in history. And this gap, as I mentioned, is not only between the past and the present, but also between the present and the future. It is this dimension, I would argue, what in the end transforms “la posibilidad infinita” into a fundamentally anti-teleological historiography. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Casa de las Américas (Nos. 51-2, November 1968-February 1969) published a dossier titled “Literatura y Revolución,” in which various writers and intellectuals from Cuba and from abroad were asked to answer four questions regarding the relationships between the Revolution, their literary production, and Cuban literature and history.24 Lezama’s answers to the questionnaire (written almost a decade after “A partir de la poesía” and the depiction therein of Martí and the Cuban Revolution as components of the era imaginaria of “la posibilidad infinita”) shed light on the relationship between the Revolutionary event, its insertion in the eras imaginarias, and Lezama’s view of history under the “logic” of infinite possibility and el potens. When asked about how the Revolution has found an expression in Cuban culture, Lezama answers: La Revolución no expresa una forma, en el sentido de configurar o de etapa última de la materia, actúa sobre la ascensional de la espiral telúrica. No una forma sino la acrecida de un devenir, imposibilidades que se rinden ante For a reading of Lezama’s contribution to this number of Casa de las Américas see Santí, “La invención.”

24

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posibilidades, hechos que terminan en imágenes que aclaran una perspectiva … no hablo de forma sino de éxtasis, de poderosas ensoñaciones que guían al hombre hacia la tierra prometida. No creo que haya una forma en Martí, sino la promesa del éxtasis en la alegría, la búsqueda obsesionada de la tierra prometida. (“Literatura y revolución” 131)

The association between the Revolution and the mythological use of Martí is there, yet Lezama introduces various elements that undermine any monolithic narrative of historical destiny. In the first sentence Lezama implicitly uses the Aristotelian concepts of matter [hylē] and form [eidos] as metaphors to illustrate that the Revolution is not the “etapa última de la materia”—hence it is neither form nor telos—but rather something that “acts” upon an upward [“ascensional”] process of becoming [“devenir”], and is characterized variously as “éxtasis,” “ensoñaciones,” “promesa del éxtasis” or “búsqueda.” Lezama describes the “devenir” as a temporal process in which “impossibilities” can become “possibilities,” and this is precisely the “logic,” as he states in many of the essays on the sistema poético, that guides the production of poetic discourse. It is therefore not surprising that Lezama establishes a correspondence between poetry and the Revolution: “En mi opinión, el mundo relacionable más profundo es el de la metáfora. Para mí, la revolución es una metáfora del hombre con su devenir. Una fulguración que aclara la proximidad y la lejanía. Lograr un ritmo increscendo entre un hecho titánico como es la revolución y una creación por el lenguaje y su acarreo, es el análogo de la metáfora actuando en la sobrenaturaleza” (131-2). In a gesture analogous to the aestheticization of theological and philosophical concepts that Lezama puts forward in his essays on the sistema poético, here Lezama establishes a hierarchy in which the idea and event of the revolution are subordinated to his vision of poetry: Revolution is described in terms of metaphor—“el mundo relacionable más profundo.” This stands in sharp contrast with the opposite hierarchization that Vitier establishes in Ese sol del mundo moral, in which poetry is valued as the silent shelter (Ese sol 152‑3) of Cuban ethics during the years of the failed Republic, but eventually the groundbreaking revolutionary “acto” (176) ends up surpassing and transcending the poetic craft. In his answer to the last question, “¿Qué cambio fundamental se ha operado en usted ante la Revolución entre 1959 y hoy?,” Lezama explicitly frames the event of the Revolution in terms of the theory of the eras imaginarias:

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En vísperas de la Revolución yo escribía incesantemente sobre las infinitas posibilidades de la imagen en la historia. Entre las sorpresas que ofrece la poesía está la aterradora verificación del antiguo es cierto porque es imposible. Comprobaba por el mundo hipertélico—lo que va más allá de su finalidad—de la poesía, que la médula rige al cuerpo, como la intensidad se impone en lo histórico a lo extenso. En una palabra, cómo los países pequeños pueden tener historia, cómo la actuación de la imagen no depende de ninguna extensión. Inauditas sorpresas de la causalidad, extraños recomienzos, ofrecía la imagen actuando en lo histórico. Y de pronto, se verifica el hecho de la Revolución. Nuestra historia se vuelve un sí, una inmensa afirmación, el potens nuestro comienza a actuar en la infinitud. (“Literatura y revolución” 132, emphases in the original)

In this passage Lezama establishes a set of correspondences among theology, political history and poetry. The Cuban poet borrows Tertullian’s famous paradox concerning the human nature of the body of Christ (“The Son of God died: it is immediately credible—because it is silly. He was buried, and rose again: it is certain—because it is impossible” [De Carne Christi 5.4]) and transposes it to the realm of possible historical events. But this paradox, in its turn, is also a manifestation of the “logic” of infinite possibility, which finds its expression in poetry: “la línea donde lo imposible, lo no adivinado, lo que no habla, se rinde a la posibilidad” (LLOC 846). Lezama is establishing an analogy between a historical event and the “impossibilities” that are materialized in poetic discourse. In the theory of the eras imaginarias Lezama offers a catalogue of epochs in which the non-rational and the “impossible”—often in the form of myths, religious beliefs, esoteric doctrines, etc.—participated in what was deemed as “reality.” These are instantiations of poetry, understood as a transhistorical mode of apprehending the world. The Revolution is portrayed here as a wondrous event in which “lo imposible… se rinde a la posibilidad,” just as in the case of poetry. Two things are worth noting. The preoccupation with history and tradition in Cuba—a subject that traverses the totality of Lezama’s work since the Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez—surfaces again. The small country that lacked “orgullo de expresión” (LLOC 61)—as Lezama wrote in 1937—and was sunk in a process of political and moral disintegration throughout the years of the failed Republic, finally—Lezama proclaims in 1968—is able to “tener historia.” And yet, this phenomenon is not conceived in terms of historical necessity. Quite on the contrary, the triumph of the Revolution is viewed as one outcome (and more precisely, a very unlikely outcome) that sprang from the virtual space of infinite possibility: “inauditas sorpresas de la causalidad, extraños

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recomienzos, ofrecía la imagen actuando en lo histórico. Y de pronto, se verifica el hecho de la Revolución.” The event of the Revolution participates in the “reino de la eterna sorpresa” (LLOC 51), to use Lezama’s own characterization of poetry in the Coloquio. In the end the revolutionary event becomes subsumed under the “poetic reason” of infinite possibility, and this historiography, I would argue, is radically non-teleological. Lezama saluted the triumph of the 1959 Revolution as the possibility of historical salvation. The Revolution is the redemptive moment in which “todos los conjuros negativos han sido decapitados” (LLOC 839): the heretofore disintegrated body of the failed Republic can at last recompose itself and, guided by the impulse of the ideals of Martí, “avizorarnos las cúpulas de los nuevos actos nacientes” (IP 209), as Lezama wrote in the issue of Orígenes dedicated to Martí’s centennial in 1953. But from this one should not infer that Lezama effectively devised a teleology. In Lezama the figure of Martí and the Republican idea are expressed in terms of desire and possibility, not in terms of necessity or historical destiny, as in the case of Cintio Vitier. As “A partir de la poesía” attests, this possibility was fulfilled, but it is represented precisely as one of the “inauditas sorpresas” that may take place in history. What the logic of “el potens … en la infinitud” discloses is not a teleology, but the wondrous and unexpected fulfillment of a historical desire out of a virtual infinitude of possibilities. Constructing a teleological narrative out of what is really the open space of posibilidad infinita—as Vitier and other interpreters of Lezama do—is precisely the type of retroactive and discursive operation that Lezama’s historiographical critique unmasks. Constructions like the visión histórica or the eras imaginarias, as I argued earlier, stage a mechanism in which history on the one hand, and a highly artificial arrangement composed of historical facts on the other, dialectically disclose and raise the rhetorical constitution of that posthumous arrangement known as and intended as “history.” Lezama’s era imaginaria of the Cuban Revolution submits a powerful historiographical critique that comprises two complementary aspects: first, it discloses how Vitier’s version of the “teleología insular”—just like other historicist narratives based on the idea of Revolution—is a post facto construction in which the contingent occurrence of an event is retroactively re-presented both as telos and foundation of a certain historical necessity; and second, it also discloses how this “posthumous” arrangement of historical facts is an attempt to negate the logic of “infinite possibility”—in the teleology, in other words, the event of the Revolution appears as the only possibility. The era imaginaria of the Revolution

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is an affirmation of becoming and infinitude, and it reveals how a teleological narrative is a re-signification and rhetorical reorganization that attempts to negate or cancel out the very logic of el potens. Whereas in the teleology Revolution is telos, the experience of the end of history, in the eras imaginarias one contemplates the past ends of history—ancient civilizations, myths, etc. And these are ruins. Alberto Moreiras aptly characterizes what Lezama calls the “espacio gnóstico americano” (cf. EA 178) as ruled by “la relación entre la decrepitud de lo ya muerto para la historia, pero todavía dominante, y el espíritu naciente que quiere volver, o empezar, en la historia” (Moreiras, Tercer espacio 260). This corresponds precisely to the temporal and signifying logic of the eras imaginarias—a “tragic” awareness of history that, as Moreiras puts it, “revela antes que nada el cadáver de lo precedente” (Tercer espacio 261). The ruin in the eras imaginarias refers not only to the depictions of past civilizations, but also to semiotic ruination—how the signifiers that stand for things from the past have been—and will be—subject to the passing of time. In this sense, ruins are for Lezama dynamic entities that can live anew, for ruination is also resurrection: “Las culturas van hacia su ruina, pero después de la ruina vuelven a vivir por la imagen. Esta aviva las pavesas del espíritu de las ruinas. La imagen se entrelaza con el mito que está en el umbral de las culturas, las precede y las siguen en su cortejo fúnebre. Favorece su iniciación y su resurrección” (“Imagen de América Latina” 462). Therefore the eras imaginarias are not only about the past but also about the future—and more concretely, about the future ruination of the present. Lezama himself hints at this implication when he claims that “la historia tiene que valorarse a partir de lo que va a ser destruido” (LLOC 950, my emphasis). The Revolution, insofar as it is conceived as a “moment” of an era imaginaria and subject to the logic of “infinite possibility,” is not part of a teleological design. But how then, under the outlook of the eras imaginarias, is one to understand Lezama’s depiction of the Revolution as a Messianic event? Not, I would argue, as the end of history—“el final de los tiempos” as Ponte put it (94). Such would be the case of a teleological (and theological) nationalist historicism, but this runs counter to the decentering impulse of “infinite possibility.” The (un)reason of el potens or “infinite possibility” gives Messianism a resolutely paradoxical twist: the event of the Cuban Revolution in the era imaginaria of infinite possibility becomes, so to speak, a localized and ephemeral Messianic moment. At a certain point, as Lezama expressed it in his writing, the event of the Cuban Revolution is invested with Messianic power and signification, but being

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part of an era imaginaria, the Revolution is also part of a vast constellation of ruins, anachronisms and misreadings. When Lezama wrote the passage of “A partir de la poesía” in which he saluted the Cuban Revolution as a moment of the era imaginaria of the “posibilidad infinita,” the Revolution was an ongoing event that Lezama interpreted in a certain way at that time. And yet, two facts stand out: first, the Revolution stands amid a landscape of ruins—Egyptians pyramids, Etruscan priests, medieval kings, ancient myths and esoteric doctrines, dead philosophers and theologians—and second, all these objects forming a ruined landscape have been violently and anachronistically misread, and severed from their “proper” context and background. Regardless of how Lezama’s relationship with the Revolution changed from 1960 to the 1970s, and regardless of the subsequent history of the Cuban Revolution, its successes and failures, the very insertion of the Cuban Revolution as an era imaginaria is in the end a tragic gesture. As a moment of an era imaginaria, the Revolution stands before the corrosive activity, both physical and semiotic, of historical time. In the era imaginaria of la posibilidad infinita, the Cuban Revolution is only ephemerally Messianic, for if one bears into account the fuller implications of the “tragic” historicity of the eras imaginarias, the Revolution, understood as a moment of the era imaginaria of “infinite possibility,” also appears as the (future) ruination of a Messianic moment. The eras imaginarias are in this regard a form of memento mori, but at the same time, according to Lezama’s equation of ruination with resurrection, they are also a form of memento resurgere. The future of the eras imaginarias lies in the realm of “lo increado, la futuridad” (Oppiano Licario 310), and this corresponds to the “infinite possibility” of future resurrections. The eras imaginarias—along with the visión histórica—constitute the prophetic foreshadowing that the present will be (mis)read and ruined in unforeseeable ways in the future.

Appendix

Stéphane Mallarmé, “Prose (pour des Esseintes)”

Published in La Revue indépendante, January 1885 1 Hyperbole ! de ma mémoire Triomphalement ne sais-tu Te lever, aujourd’hui grimoire Dans un livre de fer vêtu : 2 Car j’installe, par la science, L’hymne des cœurs spirituels En l’œuvre de ma patience, Atlas, herbiers et rituels. 3 Nous promenions notre visage (Nous fûmes deux, je le maintiens) Sur maints charmes de paysage, Ô sœur, y comparant les tiens. 4 L’ère d’autorité se trouble Lorsque, sans nul motif, on dit De ce midi que notre double Inconscience approfondit 5 Que, sol des cent iris, son site, Ils savent s’il a bien été, Ne porte pas de nom que cite L’or de la trompette d’Été. 6 Oui, dans une île que l’air charge De vue et non de visions Toute fleur s’étalait plus large Sans que nous en devisions. 7 Telles, immenses, que chacune Ordinairement se para D’un lucide contour, lacune Qui des jardins la sépara.

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8 Gloire du long désir, Idées Tout en moi s’exaltait de voir La famille des iridées Surgir à ce nouveau devoir, 9 Mais cette sœur sensée et tendre Ne porta son regard plus loin Que sourire et, comme à l’entendre J’occupe mon antique soin. 10 Oh ! sache l’Esprit de litige, À cette heure où nous nous taisons, Que de lis multiples la tige Grandissait trop pour nos raisons 11 Et non comme pleure la rive, Quand son jeu monotone ment À vouloir que l’ampleur arrive Parmi mon jeune étonnement 12 D’ouïr tout le ciel et la carte Sans fin attestés sur mes pas, Par le flot même qui s’écarte, Que ce pays n’exista pas. 13 L’enfant abdique son extase Et docte déjà par chemins Elle dit le mot : Anastase ! Né pour d’éternels parchemins, 14 Avant qu’un sépulcre ne rie Sous aucun climat, son aïeul, De porter ce nom : Pulchérie ! Caché par le trop grand glaïeul.

Bibliography

Works by José Lezama Lima Books Cartas a Eloísa y otra correspondencia. Ed. José Triana. Madrid: Verbum, 1998. Dador. Havana: Impresiones Úcar García, 1960. Diarios: 1939-49/1956-58. Ed. Ciro Bianchi Ross. Havana: Ediciones Unión, 2001. La expresión americana. Ed. Irlemar Chiampi. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993. Imagen y posibilidad. Ed. Ciro Bianchi Ross. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1992 Obras completas. Vol. 2. Mexico City: Aguilar, 1975. Oppiano Licario. Madrid: Cátedra, 1989. Paradiso. Ed. Cintio Vitier. Madrid: ALLCA XX, 1996. Poesía completa. Ed. César López. Madrid: Alianza, 1999.

Essays “Imagen de América Latina.” América Latina en su literatura. Ed. César Fernández Moreno. Paris: UNESCO, 1972. 462-68. “Literatura y revolución (Encuestas).” Casa de las Américas 51-52 (1969): 131-33. “Recuerdos: Guy Pérez Cisneros.” Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí 29.2 (1988): 24-37.

Interviews Interview by Luis Gutiérrez Delgado. Diario de la Marina 6 July 1958: 6D-7D. Interview by Gabriel Jiménez Emán. Imagen 109 (1976): 42-46.

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Other Works Aeschylus. Prometheus Bound. Trans. Herbert Weir Smyth. Perseus Digital Library. Vers. 4.0. Ed. Gregory R. Crane. Tufts U, n.d. Web. Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Agosti, Stefano. Lecture de “Prose pour Des Esseintes” et de quelques autres poèmes de Mallarmé. Savoie: Editions Comp’Act, 1998. Álvarez Bravo, Armando. “Órbita de Lezama Lima.” Simón 42-67. Apollinaire, Guillaume. Alcools. Paris: Gallimard, 1920. Aquinas, Thomas. On Being and Essence. Trans. Armand A. Maurer. 2nd rev. ed. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1968. Arcos, Jorge Luis. La solución unitiva: Sobre el pensamiento poético de José Lezama Lima. Havana: Editorial Academia, 1990. Aristotle. Art of Rhetoric. Trans. John Henry Freese. Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1926. —. Poetics. Trans. W. H. Fyfe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1932. Aullón de Haro, Pedro. “Los escritos de estética de Lezama Lima.” Letral 4 (2010): 38-46. Austin, L. J. “Mallarmé and the Prose pour Des Esseintes.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 2.3 (1966): 197-213. Bachner, Andrea. “Anagrams in Psychoanalysis: Retroping Concepts by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-François Lyotard.” Comparative Literature Studies 40.1 (2003): 1-25. Barquet, Jesús J. “El grupo Orígenes ante el negrismo.” Afro-Hispanic Review 15.2 (1996): 3-10. Behler, Ernst. German Romantic Literary Theory. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1993. Beiser, Frederick C. German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781-1801. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002. Bejel, Emilio. José Lezama Lima, poeta de la imagen. Madrid: Huerga & Fierro Editores, 1994. Bénichou, Paul. Selon Mallarmé. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Benítez Rojo, Antonio. La isla que se repite: El Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna. Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1989.

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Benjamin, Andrew E., and Beatrice Hanssen, eds. Walter Benjamin and Romanticism. New York: Continuum, 2002. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborn. London: Verso, 1985. —. Selected Writings. Ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, et al. Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1996-2003. 4 vols. Bergson, Henri. Œuvres. Ed. André Robinet. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959. Beutler, Gisela. “José Lezama Lima: ‘Danza de la jerigonza’ (1949): Algunas consideraciones sobre un texto hermético.” Actas de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas. Vol. 12. Birmingham, UK: U of Birmingham, 1995. 87-98. Black, Max. “How Metaphors Work: A Reply to Donald Davidson.” On Metaphor. Ed. Sheldon Sacks. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. 181-92. —. Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1962. Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 2007. Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin, 1998. Bowie, Andrew. “Romantic Philosophy and Religion.” The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism. Ed. Nicholas Saul. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009. Bowie, Malcolm. Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978. Brochard, Victor Charles Louis. Estudios sobre Sócrates y Platón. Trans. León Ostrov. 2nd ed. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1945. Buckwalter-Arias, James. Cuba and the New Origenismo. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Tamesis, 2010. Cairo, Ana. “La polémica Mañach-Lezama-Vitier-Ortega.” Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí 92.1-2 (2001): 91-130. Camprubí, Zenobia. Diario. Ed. Graciela Palau de Nemes. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, Editorial de la U de Puerto Rico, 1991. 3 vols. Cañete Quesada, Carmen. “José Lezama Lima y su noción de ‘teleología insular’: Lectura del Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez.” Afro-Hispanic Review 25.2 (2006): 33-54. Certeau, Michel de. L’écriture de l’histoire. Paris: Gallimard,1975. Chacón, Alfredo, ed. Poesía y poética del grupo Orígenes. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1994.

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Chiampi, Irlemar. “La expresión americana de José Lezama Lima: La dificultad y el diabolismo del caníbal.” Escritura: Revista de Teoria y Critica Literarias 10.19-20 (1985): 103-15. —. “La historia tejida por la imagen.” Introduction. La expresión americana. By José Lezama Lima. Ed. Chiampi. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993. 9-33. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Major Works. Ed. H. J. Jackson. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2000. Copeland, Rita, and Peter T. Struck, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Allegory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2010. Cortázar, Julio. “Para llegar a Lezama Lima.” La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos. Mexico City: Siglo xxi, 1967. 40-81. Cowan, Bainard. “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory.” New German Critique 22 (1981): 109-22. Cruz-Malavé, Arnaldo. “Lezama y el insularismo: Una problemática de los orígenes.” Ideologies and Literatures 3.2 (1988): 185-96. —. El primitivo implorante: El “sistema poético del mundo” de José Lezama Lima. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Curtius, Ernst Robert. Europäische Literatur und Lateinisches Mittelalter. Bern: A. Francke, 1948. —. Literatura europea y edad media latina. 1948. Trans. Margit Frenk Alatorre and Antonio Alatorre. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1955. 2 vols. Cusa, Nicholas of. On Learned Ignorance. Trans. Jasper Hopkins. Minneapolis: Arthur J. Banning P, 1990. Dasenbrock, Reed Way, ed. Literary Theory after Davidson. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1993. Davidson, Donald. “What Metaphors Mean.” On Metaphor. Ed. Sheldon Sacks. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. 29-45. De Campos, Haroldo. “De la razón antropofágica: Diálogo y diferencia en la cultura brasileña.” Vuelta 68 (1982): 12-27. De Man, Paul. Aesthetic Ideology. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. Díaz Infante, Duanel. Los límites del origenismo. Madrid: Editorial Colibrí, 2005. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung. Leipzig and Berlin: B.G. Teubner, 1922.

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Index

A À rebours (novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans) 121 absichtlicher. See purposeful Absolute 44, 58, 86, 181, 199, 208‑210, 214-215, 217-219 Achilles 39-42, 44, 80, 81-82, 138, 141, 211, 216 acto 28, 62-63, 65-68, 72, 74-76, 79‑80, 135-136, 138, 140, 143, 191, 220, 238 actuality 59, 66, 74, 76, 105, 128, 152, 154 Aeschylus 190 Prometheus Bound 190 Agamben, Giorgio 141, 225 agudeza 46, 63, 137, 189 Aleijadinho (Antônio Francisco Lisboa) 175 allegoresis 206 allegory 31, 56, 87, 131, 203 and the Absolute 208-210 and the work of art 209-210 definitions of 205-208 Walter Benjamin on, 226-228 anachronism 177, 229, 231, 237 anagram 174-175, 181, 228 análogo 39-41, 73, 80, 99-100, 121, 139, 220, 238 análogo nemónico 187-190 anamnēsis 143, 190

anamorphosis 174-175, 181 anastasis 142, 146 androgyny 148-149, 183 Annales School (Fernand Braudel, Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre) 193 Anschauung 176-180 Anselm of Canterbury 57, 198-200, 220 ontological proof of the existence of God 57, 199 antropofagia 113 Apollinaire, Guillaume 139-140 “Le larron” [The Scoundrel] 139 aporroia 183-185, 193 Apsara 55 Aquinas, Thomas 19, 140 archetype 27, 31, 196, 198, 201-202, 220, 222, 223 Arcos, Jorge Luis 35 Ares 40-41, 44, 81, 83 arielismo 160 Aristotle 19, 29, 36-44, 47, 52, 55, 58-59, 76, 81, 83, 98-99, 135, 172, 193, 211, 223 metaphor according to 40-43 Poetics 40, 50, 52, 81, 98, 100 Prior Analytics 135 Auffassung 176, 178 Aufhebung 44-45, 176, 231 Augustine 191, 198

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caritas omnia credit 191 Confessions 191 Austin, J. L. 28, 83, 90, 127 performative utterances 104 authorship, evanescence of 106, 122, 133, 136, 138, 155 avant-garde 19, 23, 36, 85, 95, 106 azar concurrente 17, 160, 216

B Babel 126 Babylon 139 Bacon, Francis 55, 170 Ballagas, Emilio 115 Balzac, Honoré de 55-56, 170 Baroque 17, 42, 46, 53, 63, 93, 160-161, 173, 178, 189, 224‑226, see also Neobaroque, New World Baroque Barthes, Roland 27 Batista, Fulgencio 236 Baudelaire, Charles 45 Benítez Rojo, Antonio 113 Benjamin, Walter 31, 126, 187, 206, 208, 223-224, 226-227, 230 “On Language as Such and On the Language of Man” [Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen] 126 “On the Concept of History” [Über den Begriff der Geschichte] 227 Origin of German Tragic Drama [Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels] 31, 224, 226-228 “The Task of the Translator” [Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers] 126 Bergson, Henri 179, 180-182, 187 fonction fabulatrice 179-180, 182 Bianchi Ross, Ciro 107 Black, Max 42-43, 47, 54, 91, 111, 131-132

Blasing, Mlutu 24, 79 Boehme, Jacob 193, 221 Borges, Jorge Luis 15, 177, 185-186 “Kafka y sus precursores” 185-186 “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” 177, 185 Bowie, Malcolm 121, 124, 146, 208 Bréhier, Émile 107 Breughel, Pieter, the Elder 168 Brochard, Victor 107, 148

C Cabrera Infante, Guillermo 71 Cabrera, Lydia 115-116 Campos, Haroldo de 113, 161 Camprubí, Zenobia 110 cannibalism 113, 161 canon 16 Carpentier, Alejo 17 Catholicism 72, 218, 233, 235, 237 causalidad 48-52, 54-64, 66-68, 70, 75, 100, 163, 183, 187, 194‑195, 197, 202, 211, 218, 222, 239 causalidad retrospectiva 185-186 causality. See Kausalität Cellini, Benvenuto 107 Cemí, José (character in Lezama’s fiction) 72, 149, 151, 183, 217 Cernuda, Luis 17 Certeau, Michel de 27-28 Cervantes, Miguel de 107, 130-134, 155 La señora Cornelia 132 chance 214-216 Chanson de Roland, La 182 charitable interpretation 19 Chiampi, Irlemar 17, 113, 159, 161‑162, 165, 168, 176 Christianity 139, 197, 200 chromosomes 149

BIBLIOGR APHY

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 208, 221 Columbus, Christopher 119 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 67 continuidad 150, 154 contraconquista 17, 161, 178 contrapuntal 63, 68, 105, 169, 171, 173, 176, 187-188, 202, 219, 231 contrapuntístico 105, 211, 214 contrapunto 105, 123, 164-165, 167‑169, 171, 183, 189, 216, 219, 229, 231 cópula 105-106, 134-135, 137, 141 Cortázar, Julio 17-18, 160 Cruz, San Juan de la 72 Cruz-Malavé, Arnaldo 18, 151 Cuban Revolution 16‑17, 25‑26, 160, 192, 220, 232‑242 Curtius, Ernst Robert 173, 176‑182, 191 Cusa, Nicholas of 19, 31, 198‑200, 220 De docta ignorantia 199

D Dada 85, 109 Dante 40‑41, 134, 152, 205 Darwinism 179 David 57 Davidson, Donald 30, 43, 88-99 “What Metaphors Mean” 89-91 de Man, Paul 21, 53, 67, 82, 132, 208 death 104‑106, 122, 132‑133, 136‑138, 147, 149, 151‑152, 155 Deleuze, Gilles 149 demiurge (Gnosticism) 183 Derrida, Jacques 45, 53‑54, 67, 97, 132, 134 Descartes, René 107, 121‑122, 150 Deucalion and Pyrrha (myth) 75

259

Díaz, Duanel 18, 25 Diego, Eliseo 116 difícil, lo 163, 164‑167, 170‑171, 173‑174, 176, 201 Dilthey, Wilhelm 31, 180, 211‑214 Erleben 213 Lebensbezüge [life-relations, nexos vitales] 213‑214 discontinuidad 130, 151‑155

E Ecuador 168 Egypt 139, 193 Eliot, T.S. 176‑177 Enlightenment 55, 67, 212 eras imaginarias 23, 26‑27, 31, 54, 64, 66, 70‑71, 105, 171, 176‑178, 180‑181, 184, 186‑187, 190‑192, 194‑198, 200‑201, 203, 208, 219‑226, 228‑233, 237‑242 Erinnerung [recollection] 188 eroticism 72‑73, 149 eschatology 66, 171, 197, 236 Espuela de Plata (journal) 114‑116 Etruscans, etrusco 26, 65, 192‑193, 197, 201, 224‑225, 228, 232 extensión 150 Eyck, Jan van 168

F Feijóo, Samuel 191 filogeneratriz, lo 26, 149, 192‑193, 201, 221, 224‑225 Foción (character in Lezama’s fiction) 149, 151, 205, 211 Fogliano, Guidoriccio da 168, 195, 201 form [eidos] 59, 238 Frazer, James G. 61‑62, 168 Golden Bough 61, 64, 70

260

Reading Anew

Frederick the Great (King of Prussia) 107 Freud, Sigmund 19, 109, 222 Fronesis (character in Lezama’s fiction) 149, 151, 205 Frühromantik. See German Romanticism Frye, Northrop 206‑207 futuridad, futurity 145, 147, 154, 192, 199, 242

G Gadamer, Hans-Georg 25 García Marruz, Fina 71, 116, 214, 235 Gaztelu, Ángel 105 Gedächtnis [Memory] 188 Generación de Espuela de Plata 105, 114, 116 Genesis 126 German Romanticism 166, 206, 208‑212, 214‑215 germen 65‑68, 72‑75, 77‑78, 84, 143, 220 Ghil, René 125 Gnosticism 183, 185 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 40‑41, 181, 211‑213 Góngora y Argote, Luis de 24 González, Eduardo 18 Goodman, Nelson 29, 43, 54, 91 Gospels 49, 53 Grafos (journal) 125 grimoire 144‑147 Grupo Minorista 114 Gryphius, Andreas 226 Guattari, Félix 149 Guevara, Ernesto “Che” 233 Guillén, Nicolás 115 Guirao, Ramón 115 Gumbrecht, Hans 24

H Hamlet 183‑185 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 19, 31, 44‑45, 50, 162‑163, 165‑166, 176, 208, 211, 217, 231, 234 Heidegger, Martin 19 Heller, Ben 18, 24‑25, 105 Henríquez Ureña, Pedro 18 hermeneutical expectations 84 hermeneutics 84‑88, 96, 98, 165‑167, 170‑172, 175 historicism 112, 162, 165, 202, 227, 241 historiographic speculation 162‑163, 174‑175, 181, 194, 231 historiography 162-176 Hölderlin, Friedrich 212 Homer 138 homosexuality 147‑149, 151, 233 Huidobro, Vicente 23, 85 humanism 159, 161 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 121 Hyperbole 121, 123, 142, 144, 146, 147 hypertrope 29, 74, 81, 83, 86, 88, 91‑93, 95‑96, 98‑99, 219

I (il)legible logos 23‑24, 84, 87, 92, 96, 98, 100, 128 I Ching 168, 170‑171, 185, 195, 201, 228 Idealism 166, 209, 212 illegibility 24, 78‑79, 85, 94, 98 imagen 18, 57, 62, 66‑68, 70, 79‑80, 164‑165, 167, 171‑173, 175, 180, 187, 191, 194‑195, 198, 201, 211, 214, 216, 219‑225, 228, 230, 234, 239, 240‑241

BIBLIOGR APHY

imago. See imagen incondicionado 65, 218‑219 increado, lo 106, 117, 119, 132, 152, 154, 199, 219, 242 infinite possibility 43, 61, 82, 142, 199, 219‑220, 223, 237, 239‑242 insularismo, insularity 110-115, 155 Isava, Luis Miguel 86 Isidore of Seville 130

J Jarvis, Simon 24 Jean Paul (Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich) 212 Jiménez, Juan Ramón 110, 112, 118

K Kant, Immanuel 20, 42, 55, 56‑60, 67, 193, 209, 214, 218 Critique of Practical Reason 56, 60 Critique of Pure Reason 57‑58 Kausalität [causality] 56‑60, 70, 218 Klages, Ludwig 31, 173, 181, 187‑188 Kondori, José 175

L La peau de chagrin (novel by Balzac) 55 Lacan, Jacques 163 Lakoff, George 67 Lam, Wilfredo 115‑116 language-game 37 Last Judgment, The (polyptych by Rogier van der Weyden) 168 Latin American Boom 16‑17, 160 Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry (illuminated book of hours) 167, 195, 201

261

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 211‑212 Levinson, Brett 18, 133, 140‑141, 202 Lezama Lima, José “A partir de la poesía” 26, 48, 65, 72, 184, 191‑192, 195, 202, 232, 237, 240, 242 Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez 30, 103, 110-119, 128‑129, 155, 203, 235, 239‑240 “Cumplimiento de Mallarmé” 125 “Dador” 23, 29, 66, 71-88, 94, 98, 139, 143, 203 “Después de lo raro, la extrañeza” 116‑117, 119 Diarios 107‑108, 121, 148, 150, 153 “Exámenes” 30, 104‑105, 117, 134-142 Fragmentos a su imán 120, 126, 205 “Introducción a los vasos órficos” 191 “Introducción a un sistema poético” 29, 39, 43, 48, 55, 58, 66, 80, 82, 100, 122, 186, 189, 203, 211, 222 “Julián del Casal” 30, 105, 112, 187, 190 “La dignidad de la poesía” 15, 48, 62, 65, 67, 122, 137, 223 La expresión americana 18, 26, 31, 64, 105, 112‑113, 159-192, 194, 201‑202, 222 La fijeza 134 “La imagen histórica” 184, 189, 191‑192, 196 “La pintura y la poesía en Cuba” 26, 211 “Las eras imaginarias: Los egipcios” 191 “Las imágenes posibles” 46, 62, 79 “Nuevo Mallarmé”, II 28 Oppiano Licario 35, 72, 205, 216‑217, 242

262

Reading Anew

Paradiso 17, 35, 55, 63, 72, 148‑149, 151, 159, 183, 205, 211, 216‑217 “Preludio a las eras imaginarias” 29, 48, 55‑56, 58‑59, 64‑65, 72, 74‑75, 138, 170, 191, 209, 218, 234 “Recuerdo de lo semejante” 23 “Saint-John Perse: Historiador de las lluvias” 216 “Sobre poesía” 62 “X y XX” 30, 74, 103-110, 117‑125, 128-134, 142-156, 200 Licario, Oppiano (character in Lezama’s fiction) 72 Licario, Ynaca Eco (character in Lezama’s fiction) 72 Limbourg brothers (Herman, Paul and Johan; Dutch miniature painters) 167‑168 lo incondicionado 56‑57, 59‑64, 66, 75, 100, 218‑219 Locke, John 53, 67 Lohenstein, Daniel Casper von 226 Lunes de Revolución 71

M Madame Bovary (novel by Gustave Flaubert) 107 Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (painting by Jan van Eyck) 168 Maeterlinck, Maurice 212 Mallarmé, Stéphane 15, 28, 30, 95, 103‑107, 120‑129, 143, 145, 147, 152‑153, 163, 193, 201, 221 “Crise de vers” 125‑127, 130, 145 La Musique et les Lettres 163 L’Après-midi d’un Faune 123 “Prose (pour des Esseintes)” 120‑129, 142-147

Mañach, Jorge 113, 115, 164 Marinello, Juan 115 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 24 Martí, José 232, 234‑236, 238, 240 Martini, Simone 168, 170 Marx, Karl 19 materia signata 140 material appropriation 59‑60, 70 materiality 107‑109, 126, 227 matter [hylē] 59, 140, 238 melancholy 226 memory 106, 122, 129‑130, 136, 142‑145, 152, 184, 187‑188, see also  Erinnerung, Gedächtnis, recollection Mesopotamian culture 139 messianism 234, 236‑237, 241 mestizaje 112, 115, 119, 160, 175 metaphor 35-68, 88-99, 205, 238 according to Aristotle 35-68 according to Davidson 89-91 in Baroque literary theory 46 metaphysics 45, 58, 67, 86, 189, 200, 215, 218 Mexico 17, 61, 112 mimesis 130, 136, 140 Molinos, Miguel de 72 montage 109 Moran, Richard 90‑94, 96 Moreiras, Alberto 16‑17, 241 muerte y resurrección 104, 131, 133‑135, 137, 141, 143, 145, 154, 156, 171, 200, 202‑203

N Nancy, Jean-Luc 130 negrismo 112, 114‑115 Neobaroque 18, 82, 161‑162 Neoplatonism 136, 183, 185 New World Baroque 17, 25, 31, 161, 178‑179

BIBLIOGR APHY

Nietzsche, Friedrich 19, 42, 53, 67, 181 nonassertoric effects 90, 92‑93, 96 non-hermeneutic 24‑25, 29, 36‑37, 95, 201 noumenon 56‑57 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg) 31, 208‑212, 214‑217 Numa Pompilius 65

O O’Gorman, Edmundo 179 objet trouvé 60 Oedipus 140‑141 Orígenes (journal) 25, 103, 105, 108, 110, 114‑117, 134, 203, 232, 235, 237, 240 Orpheus 57, 193, 197, 201, 224‑225, 232 Ortiz, Fernando 17, 105 Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar 105

P pagan 197, 199 paganism 72, 197 paisaje 112, 114, 163, 165‑167, 170, 191‑192, 201 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi 169 Parmenides 26, 152, 192‑193, 232 parthenogenesis 148 Pascal, Blaise 19, 31, 198‑200, 220 Pensées 199 Paz, Octavio 15, 17‑18, 160‑161 Pedreira, Antonio 111‑112 Peregrini, Matteo 46 Pérez Cisneros, Guy 105, 115, 235 “Presencia de ocho pintores” 115 Pérez-Firmat, Gustavo 113, 162

263

performative utterance 126‑127, 145 Perse, Saint-John 216 Philosophie des Lebens 181 see also Vitalist philosophies Picón Salas, Mariano 18, 161 Piñera, Virgilio 114 Plato 19, 63, 108, 148, 190 Phaedrus 148 Protagoras 148 Symposium 63 Pliny 130 Plutarch 65 poetic event 30, 111, 117, 128 poetics of the incommensurable 151, 155 Ponte, Antonio José 18, 234‑236, 241 Popol Vuh 159 posibilidad infinita 26, 65‑66, 78, 94, 192, 218‑219, 232‑234, 237, 240, 242 potens 65‑66, 68, 82, 199, 214, 218‑219, 237, 239, 240‑241 potentiality 59, 66, 74, 76, 82, 105, 140, 143, 152, 154, 164 production of meaning [travail du sens] 46‑47, 52, 93 Prometheus 75, 190 prosopopoeia 61, 131, 144, 207 proton pseudos 135 Proust, Marcel 107, 186 Puerto Rico 110‑111 purposeful 215, 217 Pythagoras 63

Q Quilligan, Maureen 206 Quine, W.V. 97 Quintilian 206

264

Reading Anew

R recollection 30, 142, 188, see also Erinnerung, Gedächtnis, memory reminiscence, reminiscencia 105‑106, 130, 134‑135, 137 repetition 194, 196, 198, 202 resaca 113‑114, 235 resistencia 163-164 resurrection 104‑105, 122, 133, 136‑137, 146‑147, 149, 152, 224 retombée 187 revista de avance (journal) 114 Revue indépendante, La (journal) 121 Reyes, Alfonso 17, 39 Richards, I.A. 43, 47, 50 Ricœur, Paul 40‑43, 45‑47, 52‑54, 67, 93 Rilke, Rainer Maria 183‑185 Rimbaud, Arthur 39‑41 Ríos-Avila, Rubén 104, 107 Robespierre, Maximilien 193, 232 Rodríguez Feo, José 114 Rodríguez, Mariano 105 Rojas, Rafael 18, 192‑193, 233 Romantic worldview 181 Rorty, Richard 89 ruin 226‑227, 241 ruination 226‑228, 232, 241‑242

S sadomasochism 148 Saint-Simon (Louis de Rouvroy, Duke of ) 186 Salgado, César 18, 148, 197 Santí, Enrico Mario 18, 129, 176‑177, 187 Sarduy, Severo 187 Saussure, Ferdinand de 131

Scève, Maurice 193 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm 166 Schiller, Friedrich 212 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 209 Schlegel, Friedrich 209‑211, 218‑219 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 209 Schopenhauer, Arthur 181 Searle, John 43, 89 sensibilidad insular 30, 103‑104, 110, 112‑114, 116‑117, 128 sexuality 148‑149 sistema poético 15‑16, 21‑23, 29, 35‑38, 49, 52, 54, 56‑58, 60, 63‑64, 69‑70, 72, 78‑79, 81, 86, 88, 98, 100, 105, 114, 117, 119, 122, 138, 142, 159, 180, 198, 205, 209, 214‑215, 218, 238 sobreabundancia 68, 73, 234 sobrenaturaleza 192, 238 Socrates 63, 148 Sombart, Werner 186 sortes experimenti (Francis Bacon) 55 speech act 28, 30, 83, 90, 92, 96, 99 Spengler, Oswald 173, 181 Sphinx 139‑141 Spinoza, Baruch 107 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 107 Stevens, Wallace 17, 160 súbito 61‑66, 68, 74, 100, 137‑139, 142 sublime 125 Suetonius 183 sujeto metafórico 29, 64, 169, 172, 175, 183, 185‑186, 189, 195, 217, 224, 230, 231 surrealism 60 Swedenborg, Emmanuel 193, 221

T Tacquea 168 tanatos 74

BIBLIOGR APHY

teleología insular 117, 234, 236‑237, 240 teleology 155, 166, 179, 197, 232, 235, 237, 240‑241 Teresa, Santa 72 Tertullian 239 Tesauro, Emanuele 46‑47, 69 The Harvest (painting by Pieter Breughel) 168 thematic criticism 70‑71, 87, 94, 206 Thibaudet, Albert 121 Toynbee, Arnold 177‑178, 181, 191 Trauerspiel 31, 224, 226-227 tropological 23‑24, 36, 38, 41, 70, 75, 78, 83‑84, 89, 92, 132, 172, 174‑175

U Unbedingte [unconditioned] 56‑60, 209, 214, 218 unconditioned. See Unbedingte UNEAC 17

V Valéry, Paul 15, 28, 95, 107, 152‑153, 193 Vallejo, César 24, 85 Van Gogh, Vincent 55‑56, 170 vanguardismo 114‑115 Verbum (journal) 115 Vico, Giambattista 19, 31, 63, 171, 184, 196‑201, 220 corsi 197 Divine Providence 197‑198, 201 Scienza nuova 184, 196‑197, 199 Victoria, Tomás Luis de 169 virgo potens 65 visión histórica 31, 64, 163, 165‑167, 169, 170‑181, 183, 185, 187,

265

190, 192, 194‑195, 201, 216‑217, 219, 221‑222, 228‑231, 240, 242 vitalist philosophies 179‑181, 187‑188, 214 Vitier, Cintio 19, 25, 30, 75‑76, 78, 110, 114‑117, 187, 232, 235‑238, 240 Ese sol del mundo moral 235‑236, 238 Extrañeza de estar 116 Lo cubano en la poesía 76, 114‑115, 117, 235‑236 vivencia oblicua 61‑65, 68, 70, 74, 100, 234 Vogelon 62‑64 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de 107

W weak sublation 39, 44, 47, 52, 54, 66‑67, 80‑81, 89, 93, 96, 98, 100, 172, 189, 202, 212, 216, 219 Weyden, Rogier van der 168 Wheeler, Samuel C. 89‑91, 93, 97‑98 magic language 97 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 97

X Xirau, Ramón 87

Y Yurkiévich, Saúl 87

Z Zeus 75 Zufall. See chance Zufallproduktion. See chance

Otros títulos recientes de esta colección Cañete Quesada, Carmen: El exilio español ante los programas de la identidad cultural en el Caribe insular (1934-1956). Madrid / Frankfurt: Iberoamericana / Vervuert 2011, 272 p., Ediciones de Iberoamericana, A 51, ISBN 9788484895732 Ehrlicher, Hanno; Schreckenberg, Stefan (eds.): El Siglo de Oro en la España contemporánea. Madrid / Frankfurt: Iberoamericana / Vervuert 2011, 328 p., Ediciones de Iberoamericana, A 55, ISBN 9788484896036 Hammerschmidt, Claudia: “Mi genio es un enano llamado Walter Ego”. Estrategias de autoría en Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Madrid / Frankfurt: Iberoamericana / Vervuert 2012, 350 p., Ediciones de Iberoamericana, A 60, ISBN 9788484896777 Mualem, Shlomy: Borges and Plato: A Game with Shifting Mirrors. Madrid / Frankfurt: Iberoamericana / Vervuert 2012, 246  p., Ediciones de Iberoamericana, A 54, ISBN 9788484895954 Salvador, Gonzalo: Borges y la Biblia. Madrid / Frankfurt: Iberoamericana / Vervuert 2011, 160  p., Ediciones de Iberoamericana, A 52, ISBN 9788484895749 Setton, Román: Los orígenes de la narrativa policial en la Argentina: recepción y transformación de modelos genéricos alemanes, franceses e ingleses. Madrid / Frankfurt: Iberoamericana / Vervuert 2012, 286 p., Ediciones de Iberoamericana, A 57, ISBN 9788484896685