Out of Egypt:

Neruda Lit Crit, pt. II

All right, now we're getting somewhere. The Neruda poems I like are the focused ones - whether on love (as in Veinte Poemas), politics (as in the readings for Methods of Lit Study today, Tercera Residencias and Canto General), or the beauty of South America (Canto General again). I like when he gets beyond his few favorite imagistic tropes (the noun catalogs, anything involving water or the sea).

Here's my report for today, if anyone cares. It gives a little biographical context for the Tercera poems, as well as some of my evaluation and a brief critical look at "Explico Algunas Cosas (I'm Explaining A Few Things)."

The Tercera Poems and Neruda’s Turn toward Politics

Several of us have criticized Neruda’s poems for their seeming lack of focus and randomness of imagery. Last time we met, I attempted to defend this as being a stylistic technique rather than a deficiency in his work. Perhaps his catalogs of seemingly dissociated objects such as the establishments, gardens, merchandise, glasses and elevators of “Walking Around” (Neruda Selected 105) are an attempt to create a literary parallel the works of surrealists such as Dali. Still, as Dr. Barker said, we are not Neruda; without access to the workings of his subconscious mind, such poems are impenetrable.

Neruda’s poetic philosophy ultimately resists categorization, since he changed his style so greatly over time. His stance on the realist/anti-realist question can be seen, however, in these words, from his Confieso que he Vivido:

Poets who are not realist are dead. But poets who are only realist are dead also. Poets who are only irrational will be understood only by themselves and their lovers, and that is pretty sad. Poets who are only rationalist, will be understood even by donkeys, and that too is very sad. (361)

Neruda sought to retain the avant-garde flavor of his work to some extent, even as it became increasingly popular, being read at times in front of thousands of people (346-50).

It is refreshing to see, however, that in the selections from Tercera Residencia, published in 1947, what remains of the avant-garde in Neruda’s work has been transmuted into a powerful cultural and political statement. Neruda speaks now, not primarily as a lover or even as a poet, but as a witness, having seen the horrors of war in Spain. His voice will deepen still further in Canto General, which was published in 1950 and is often regarded as his principal work. This volume consists of around 250 poems in fifteen literary cycles, all of which relate to the theme of South America – “its nature, its people and its historical destiny” (Nobel Biography). Perhaps the best poem and most characteristic poem of this work is “The Heights of Machu Picchu,” in which Neruda combines a spiritual sympathy with the ancient Incas, a socialist critique of society, and reminiscence of his crisis years in the 1920s and 30s.

Perhaps the best context for a discussion of the poems in today’s reading is a history of the events which occasioned them. The Tercera poems were written over the course of 1925 to 1945, during the time of Neruda’s “deepening political commitment, first to the Spanish Republic, then to anti-fascism, and later to socialism” (Dawes). For most of this period, Neruda was abroad as Chilean consul, first to Burma, then to Spain, and finally to France (“Biography”). This experience abroad was quite disorienting and troubling to him, at first producing the poems of alienation that were collected as Residencia en la Tierra (Nobel Biography). While he was in Spain, he witnessed the Spanish Civil War, the horrors of which made him join the Republican movement and become more explicitly political (ibid.). After his European consular posts in the 1930s, Neruda returned to the continent of his birth, holding a post in Mexico as he wrote Canto General (ibid.).

In some respects, “I’m Explaining A Few Things,” from Tercera Residencias, is a return to the terser poems of Veinte Poemas de Amor<. It is, like them, restricted in vocabulary; its lines are broken to a greater extent. However, the poems in that earlier volume were essentially self-absorbed: in them, a lover writes about his love. Neruda then was still innocent enough to believe that the saddest line in verse was, “I loved her and sometimes she loved me, too” (33). It is a greater disenchantment to have seen “the blood of children [running] through the streets/without fuss,” to have seen “jackals that the jackals would despise” (153).

Now Neruda is writing on others’ behalf, and so he adopts a more public tone. He begins the poem in the interrogative, anticipating the questions of a reader, perhaps one who expects to hear the Neruda of the avant-garde poems speaking:

You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
And the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
And the rain repeatedly spattering
Its words and drilling them full
Of apertures and birds? (151)

His answer is matter-of-fact (I would have said “clipped,” but that is more a characteristic of the translation than the original). The middle section of the poem will have colorful reminiscences and sentimental questionings (“Remember, Raul?/Eh, Rafael?”), such as might have been in his earlier work, but here they are to a different purpose – as contrast for the horrors that would later come and which he will soon describe.

The poem closes in the imperative, as if Neruda were holding up this war scene to us in a glass and asking us to acknowledge its reality. Implicitly this is a call to action. “…[F]rom every crime bullets are born/which will one day find/the bull’s eye of your hearts” – Neruda states this as a proverb, but it could almost be marching orders for the revolution.