Neruda's Ekphrastic Experience

Mutual Art and Canto general

Hugo Méndez-Ramírez

2000
244 pages
ISBN 0838753981

Within a comprehensive theoretical frame on the interartistic relationship between word and image, and against the background of Mexican mural art, this study engages in a careful exploration of Neruda's Canto general. The book combines a rigorous structuralist approach to the analysis of poetry and painting with new distinctions of ekphrastic poetry and recent philosophical debates about logocentrism and oculocentrism, or the relative representational capacities of the visual and the textual. The systematic interpretation and application of such a theoretical frame reveals that Canto general is in fact two books in one volume, and that Neruda closely followed the techniques, style, themes, and motifs of Mexican mural painters. Canto general, thus understood, is the textual ekphrastic equivalent of mural art, a kind of linguistic companion that also explicates and elucidates the profound human complexities inscribed in the murals.

In 1943, more than two thousand intellectual and political figures of Mexican society gathered at the Frontón Nacional in a jubilant celebration of Pablo Neruda, commemorating the three years that served as a consul for Chile, from 1940 to 1943. Among them were President Lázaro Cárdenas and the essayist Alfonso Reyes. At this event, Neruda said in a poem written expressively for the occasion: "Mexico lives on in me like a small stray eagle circulating through my veins. Only death will fold its wings over my sleeping soldier's heart." A few years later in Mexico, Neruda published the most important book of his career, Canto general. How can we account for its immediate success, as well as the radical change that took place in his poetry, beginning with the fifth section of Residencia en la tierra III?

Neruda was successful because he was able to transpose into letters the artistic notion and the political discourse that shaped the works of the Mexican muralist painters. Previous attempts to characterize his poetic conversion have tended to revolve around the biographical elements - the Spanish Civil War, the death of his father, and the visit to Macchu Picchu - all based on impressionistic rather than textual evidence. The fact is that the search for continental unity, the indigenous theme, and the use of Christian iconography are not present in Neruda's poetry before his first stay in Mexico (1940-1943). In Mexico Neruda became, more than a consul, a political, intellectual, and artistic activist, as were the three muralist painters Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Like these artists, Neruda wanted to transform in its essence the entire process of creation and the relationship between the artist and society. Already a prominent literary figure, Neruda found in Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros a dynamic force that was shaping to a large extent the intellectual, artistic, and cultural life of the country. Yet the real impact of these painters was not their political positions as much as the whole concept and form of their artistic creation. Muralist painting was the artistic way to express the sublime of pre-Columbian cultures, to depict the violent history of the continent, and to convey to a large number of people the new Marxist doctrine. By adopting in Canto general the oral tradition of the epic, Neruda hoped to create a rhetorical discourse that would reflect the panoramic, collective, and popular nature of mural art.

About the author:

Born in Monterrey, Mexico, Hugo Méndez-Ramírez received his doctorate in Spanish from the University of Virginia. Currently an Associate Professor of Latin American literature and culture at Georgia State University, he has also taught at Vassar College and The City College of New York. His research interests center on twentieth-century Latin American poetry and fiction, as well as on interartistic and literary theory and culture. He is the author of several articles published in such journals as the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Revista Iberoamericana, Hispanica, Revista Interamericana, Hispanic Journal, and others. He has also served as the Review Editor and member of the editorial board for the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and is at present Associate Editor for the South Atlantic Review.