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Violence and Representation

In Julio Cortázar and Pablo Neruda

JEFFREY KORRICK FROMUTH

DIVISON III

Committee

Chair: Monique Roelofs

Member: Aracelis Girmay

HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE

AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

MONIQUE

ARACELIS

NATALIE

KATHRYN

DEB

PETER

WENDY

HELEN AND ED

KIM

DANIEL

GRATEFUL THANKS

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION /4

CHAPTER I. JULIO CORTÁZAR: VIOLENCE AND THE “TRUTH ONLY FOR MY STOMACH” /6

Part I. /8 The stories: “Apocalypse at Solentiname” and “Blow-Up”

Part II. /20 Critical readings

CHAPTER II. PABLO NERUDA: FINDING HUNGER AND THIRST IN A PLACE OF RUINS /32

Part I. /34 Tracing Neruda’s ascent: Criticism

Part II. /44 The Cantos

CONCLUSION. /58

WORKS CITED. /60

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Introduction

This Division III project examines the writings of Julio Cortázar and Pablo Neruda, two

important Latin American modernist writers, to explore how they represented narratives of

historical loss, violence and suffering. Pablo Neruda’s poem, Alturas de Macchu Picchu (first

published individually in 1945), and Julio Cortázar’s short stories “Blow-Up” (1950) and

“Apocalypse at Solentiname” (1976) continue to generate debate on the meaning of the author’s

works, how these authors identified and reacted to different political pressures and literary

movements, and how these works corresponded to the oeuvre of both author. Both were

distinctly Modernist writers for whom the idea of ‘meaning’ in a work was always unstable and

changeable. Of the two, Pablo Neruda’s poem is certainly more divisive for critics, who continue

to engage each other with different arguments as to the relationship between Neruda and Macchu

Picchu, which in the poem is a figurative crypt for pre-Columbian Latin American history—

including the “lost voices” of the oppressed who constructed Macchu Picchu. This project

explores two themes relevant to aesthetics: suffering and representation. First, how does a sense

of hunger and other forms of human lack and desire structure Neruda’s poem, and does it

provide an interpretive method for understanding Neruda? Second, why does Cortázar represent

violence only through photography, and why does violence only become problematic to the

narrator after he views it through a photograph? As I hope to show, these authors’ use of hunger

and representation reveals their underlying concerns with how knowledge is represented in art.

The critics Santí, Rangel, and Franco agree that Neruda uses the themes of prophecy and

conversion in his poetry to represent his relationship with Macchu Picchu. Neruda, working

within Western literary conventions, adapts his poetic rhetoric so that he can better address the

lost builders of Macchu Picchu. His use of the rhetoric of prophecy, Enrico Mario Santí argues in

Pablo Neruda, The Poetics of Prophecy, is political because it subverts Western literary

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tradition. Cortázar focuses on the theme of invisibility of suffering—both on the streets of Paris

and in Latin America. Both of his stories focus on how knowledge may be conveyed through

photography. Written at different times in his life, the stories reach different—and interesting—

conclusions about the usefulness of translation and layers of meaning to uncover hidden stories.

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Julio Cortázar:

Violence and the “truth only for my stomach”

Introduction

At the beginning of Julio Cortázar’s short story, “Blow-Up,” the character Roberto

Michel explains his quandary: “I know that the most difficult thing is going to be finding a way

to tell [the story]” he says, “because nobody really knows who is telling it, if I am I or what

actually occurred or what I’m seeing (clouds, and once in a while a pigeon) or if, simply, I’m

telling a truth which is only my truth, and then is the truth only for my stomach, for this impulse

to go running out and finish up in some manner with, this, whatever it is” (Blow-Up and Other

Stories 116). In Cortázar’s (1918-1984) short stories, “Apocalypse at Solentiname” and “Blow-

up,” two male characters experience a surprising reversal of their original perspectives through

photographs that show a very different narrative. As in the above quote, the unanticipated

revelation of violence places the meaning of the entire narrative in question. Though what

Roberto Michel sees in “Blow-Up” and what the narrator sees in “Apocalypse at Solentiname”

differ, the images convey violence and suffering and evoke horrified feelings in both. The

speakers’ photographs display violent and frightening images in place of the pleasing images

they had perceived at the time. But not all photography has this effect in the stories. In

“Apocalypse,” there are two moments that involve the use of photography. In the first scene, the

narrator’s friends use a Polaroid instant camera to photograph the group, whereas in the

following scene the narrator photographs paintings that when developed are grotesque, different

images (roughly the same happens in “Blow-Up”). The moments when the speakers view the

photos from their cameras are the only times in the stories when they perceive a form of violence

that is categorically problematic and explicitly painful for them. This observation raises an

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interesting question. Why do the speakers perceive a disturbing kind of violence only upon

viewing their photographs, and what does this say about them?

I answer these questions in this chapter by examining Cortázar’s two short stories with

the arguments supplied by Alberto Moreiras, Jean Franco, and Frederick Luciani, and by making

a close reading of the text. I argue that both “Blow-Up” and “Apocalypse at Solentiname”

express a similar concern with the ability of the speaker to identify violence in a piece of work (a

photograph or a painting). However, the stories come to slightly different conclusions about the

speaker’s ability to perceive violence. In “Blow-Up,” the speaker already perceives violent

aspects about the scene but does not find them problematic until he reexamines the scene at his

apartment through a photograph. At that point, the speaker is overwhelmed by other possible

interpretations which belie his ability to form a stable conclusion. In “Apocalypse at

Solentiname,” the speaker observes nothing violent during his trip through Latin America. It is

not until he examines his pictures of paintings he photographed that he encounters violence, an

event which leads him to rethink his earlier interpretation of the images. But unlike “Blow-Up,”

in “Apocalypse at Solentiname” there are only two possible ways to read these images (Luciani

197). Both stories show instances of objects, desires and misperceptions interfering with the

narrators’ abilities to read the scenes accurately and identify their underlying violence. I also find

that both stories attribute characteristics of the ‘translator’ to the speaker. While the speaker of

“Blow-Up” permits a certain degree of violence to occur before he is disturbed by the scene, the

speaker of “Apocalypse at Solentiname” is immediately disturbed upon perceiving violence. In

this first section, I summarize “Apocalypse at Solentiname” and “Blow-Up” in detail and

identify where they raise concerns regarding the speakers’ perception of violence.

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“Apocalipis de Solentiname” [“Apocalypse at Solentiname”] (1976) is the story of a

Cortázar-like character’s trip to Latin America. In 1978 Cortázar explained at the Stockholm Pen

Club that the story “narrated a clandestine visit that I paid in 1976 to the Solentiname

community” (Moreiras 161). The story begins with his arrival to Costa Rica. At the airport he is

met by a group of friends from Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and noting that the friends have

different informal national demonyms he says:

waiting for you there are Carmen Naranjo and Samuel Rovinski and Sergio

Ramírez (who’s from Nicaragua and not a Tico, but what difference does it make

since it’s all the same after all, what difference does it make that I’m Argentine

although out of politeness I should say Tino, and the rest of them are Nicas or

Ticos). (“Apocalypse at Solentiname” 265)

Cortázar’s use of repetitive questioning at the introduction to his story, “what difference does it

make,” foreshadows an underlying questioning of how his ties to Latin America might in fact

make “a difference,” despite his insistence to the contrary. At the press conference Cortázar

gives in Costa Rica he is asked “all the usual business” including “why he does not live in

Argentina” and “why the movie Blow Up was ‘so different’ from his short story” (“Apocalypse

at Solentiname” 265-266). Even without knowing that Cortázar had been living in Paris for over

two decades when he wrote this story, the conflict between his calling himself “Tino” and his

being asked why he doesn’t live in Argentina reveals the narrator’s conflict as a nominally

identified Argentine living abroad. Cortázar’s relationship with Argentina, which he left during

Peron, was politically complex (Franco, 38), however, and it is interesting to note how he brings

up this question of nationality in “Apocalypse.” Alberto Moreiras calls the story a “great political

text” (Moreiras, 157). In her essay, “Comic Stripping: Cortázar in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction,” Jean Franco writes that while Cortázar never concerned himself with asserting

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any nationalistic ties to Argentina, his feelings toward nationalistic-rhetoric were shaped by his

experience of Peronist Argentina (Franco, 38). Franco writes, “Although in his own personal

mythology Cortázar liked to attribute his politicization to the Cuban revolution, his rejection of

nationalism, his assertion of solidarities based on personal sympathies, were attitudes shaped by

Peronist Argentina” (Franco, 38). According to Franco, this explains why Cortázar asserted the

legitimacy of his identity as a Latin American writer working in Europe even when he was

challenged by a literary culture in Cuba that emphasized the idea of the writer working within his

own nation (Franco, 38). Franco’s description of Cortázar’s personal life suggests that the

introduction to “Apocalypse” foreshadows a contemplation of that “difference,” that is, how his

residence in Europe shaped Cortázar’s literary approach to writing about Latin America.

Furthermore, the mention of Cortázar’s short story “Blow-up” (“Las babas del diablo”) intimates

a thematic connection between the two stories.

Cortázar then tours Latin America, bringing along his camera to photograph the things

he does during his trip. He stays at the Hotel Europa in San José, where he rests prior to his trip

to the Solentiname islands in Nicaragua. In San José he is surprised to see the poet Ernesto

Cardenal, his friend who he last met in Rome and who has come to San José to take Cortázar by

plane to Solentiname, where Ernesto resides (and is a pastor). In the same passage in which he

meets Ernesto, he makes an interesting reflection on the encounter:

It always surprises me, always moves me that someone like Ernesto should come

to see me and seek me out, you’re probably saying what a crock of false modesty,

but you just go right on saying it, old man, the jackal howls, but the bus passes,

I’ll always be an amateur, someone who from way down loves some people so

much that one day it turns out that they love him too, those are things that are

beyond me, we’d better get on to the next line. (“Apocalypse at Solentiname”

266)

Cortázar’s sense that he must defend the truthfulness of his words (“always moves me that

someone like Ernesto should come to see me and seek me out”) and his compulsion to defend his

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surprised and “moved” response—claiming he is an “aficionado” (or, amateur; fan)—is itself

surprising, but even more so is the line between the “false modesty” and the “amateur.” The line

“the jackal howls, but the bus passes” is rich in symbolic meaning and I explore it in depth in

section II.

After their reunion, Ernesto and Cortázar fly in a Piper Aztec plane to land near

Nicaragua and the Solentiname islands. The name of the plane “will always be a mystery” to

Cortázar and he expresses the idea that the “Aztec was taking us straight to the sacrificial

pyramid.” This brief interior monologue is his first mention of something violent awaiting him—

a ritual sacrifice—yet he quickly ends it in the next line by saying, flippantly, “It didn’t turn out

that way, as can be seen.” (“Apocalypse at Solentiname” 266)

Cortázar and his friends visit the home of the Nicaraguan poet José Coronel Urtecho,

with whom the group talks about other poets until Luis Coronel arrives by jeep to take the group

to Nicaragua.1 Prior to their departure, they take a group picture (“fotos de recuerdo”) with a

Polaroid camera. The instant camera surprises Cortázar, and he gives the following description:

“Polaroid it fills up little by little with images, first disturbing ectoplasms and

little by little a nose, some curly hair, Ernesto’s smile...I was filled with

amazement as I saw those faces and those good-by smiles coming out of nothing”

(“y polaroid se va llenando de imágenes paulatinas, primero ectoplasmas

inquietantes y poco a poco una nariz, un pelo crespo, la sonrisa de Ernesto...a mí

ver salir de la nada, del cuadradito celeste de la nada esas caras y esas sonrisas de

despedida me llenaba de asombro...”(“Apocalypse at Solentiname” 267; Alguien

81)

Cortázar suggests to the group that the Polaroid might show something other than pictured, such

as “Napoleon on horseback” and in response, “Don José Coronel’s laugh, listening to everything

as always, the jeep, let’s go to the lake now.”(“Apocalypse de Solentiname” 267)

1 Curiously, Cortázar misspells the family name of the Nicaraguan poet, José Coronel Urtecho

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The group takes a canoe to the Solentiname islands. When they arrive Cortázar is again

amazed when he finds paintings at the community center: “the work of peasants from the

region...some signed and others not, but all so beautiful, once more the first vision of the world,

the clean look of a person who describes what’s around him like a song of praise: midget cows in

poppy fields.”(“Apocalypse at Solentiname” 267-268) Ernesto tells Cortázar that “the sale of the

paintings helped things along” and that he would show other kinds of art work done by him and

the peasants in the morning. The next morning Cortázar observes mass at Solentiname where

different members of the community comment on the theme of the scripture (“Jesus’ arrest in the

garden”) and Cortázar hears in the commentaries a common theme of fear of “being pounced on

at night” or of the “life of permanent uncertainty on the islands and on the mainland...and, yes, in

all of Latin America, a life surrounded by fear and death.”(“Apocalypse at Solentiname” 268) On

the day of their return, in “the dazzling light of noon,” Cortázar “remembers the paintings” and,

enlisting the help of his friend Sergio to hold them up, photographs each one in such a way that

the paintings fill up the entire frame of the camera lens and consequently uses the remainder of

his color film on the paintings—the exact number of negatives for the number of paintings to

take. Cortázar tells Ernesto what he has done and, in response, his friend laughs and replies “art

thief, image smuggler.” Cortázar acknowledges his culpability in “stealing,” taking their images

in photographs without paying for the works: “Yes, I told him, I’m taking all of them, I’m taking

all of them, I’ll show them on my screen back there and they’ll be bigger and brighter than these,

screw yourself.”(“Apocalypse at Solentiname” 268-269)

After this exchange, Cortázar flies back to San José, visiting Cuba, and then returns home

to Paris. In Paris, he says, he adopts “once more the life of wristwatch and merci, monsieur,

bonjour, madame, committees, movies, red wine and Claudine...” (“Apocalypse at Solentiname”

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269) Claudine, Cortázar’s romantic partner, takes his many rolls of film from his Latin American

tour to be developed into slides, and sometime later Cortázar remembers that the pictures are

ready to be picked up.

Sitting alone in his Paris apartment, in which there is “no need to draw the curtains; the

cooperative night was there already,” Cortázar puts the picture slides into his slide projector and

positions the screen for the display. Remembering the paintings, Cortázar chooses to look at the

Solentiname pictures first, though as he does so he asks himself why he should choose them

before the pictures of his trip, “why the professional deformation, art before life?” Cortázar,

waiting expectantly for the pictures to come on the screen, remarks at how “pleased” he is to

think that “everything would be revealed to me again little by little.”(“Apocalypse at

Solentiname” 270)

He views pictures of the mass first, which he says are overdeveloped, but he passes

through those pictures quickly, eagerly awaiting the paintings. What he views when he gets to

the paintings disrupts all his notions of what he had seen. He thinks of the Solentiname

community “surrounded by water and police” and in the next picture sees a boy “surrounded”

and falling after being shot from an officer’s pistol. He inadvertently presses the slide button and

sees a picture of a mine (“endless sand flat”) where bodies are prostrate facing up as a group of

people watch and a different, uniformed group, walks back to a “Jeep waiting at the top of the

rise.”(“Apocalypse at Solentiname” 270-271) Cortázar says “I know I continued on, in the face

of what resisted all sanity the only thing I could do was keep pressing the button,” and with each

slide he sees more pictures of violence, explosions, torture, and rape. Cortázar remarks that he

was no longer aware if he was pushing the button, and he sees a picture of his friend Roque

Dalton (who he had talked about at the Utreche house) facing the pointed weapons of an armed

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group. Cortázar arrives to the end of the slide, the screen “fills with mercury” and with Claudine,

who has arrived home and wants to see the slides. Cortázar hides his horror from her and sets her

up to watch the slides as he gets something for her to drink. He talks of going to the bathroom

and sitting on the edge of the tub in silence before going to the kitchen to fix Claudine’s drink,

and hearing no shout of surprise or horror from Claudine he returns, dismayed. The story ends

with Claudine asking him who had made the paintings (“you couldn’t see the signatures”) to

which Cortázar does not reply. (“Apocalypse at Solentiname” 271-273)

“Las babas del diablo” [“Blow-Up”] (1959) is one man’s story of a walk he had taken on

an autumnal Sunday in Paris and his photographs from that day. There are two narrative tenses

in the story. The narrator who begins and ends the story speaks in the present about an event he

experienced in the past. When he begins to tell that past story, the narrative tense is mostly in

the past—occasionally broken up by commentary from the narrator in the present—and reflects

the narrator’s previous lack of understanding prior to the culminating event of the story, which

ends in the present. Time progresses for the present tense narrator as it does for the reader, but

while the reader may expect a linear narrative, the narrator does not know how best to tell it.

The story begins with the line, “It’ll never be known how this has to be told; in the first

person or in the second, using the third person plural or continually inventing modes that will

serve for nothing.” (Blow-Up and Other Stories 114) This line introduces a theme anxiety with

time and storytelling which will pervade the rest of the story and draw attention to what might

provoke anxiety during the previously “confident” character’s account of events. The narrator

offers examples of what this “invented mode” might look like, such as “you the blond woman

was the clouds that race before my your his our yours their faces” but admits the failure of each

one (“What the hell”). (Blow-Up and Other Stories 114) This failure appears to stem from

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inflexibility in language. Language, the narrator suggests, cannot express simultaneity: it cannot

fit within the same sentence multiple point of views without privileging one view over the other

in the order that they occur and, as the narrator demonstrates above, without confusing the

meaning of the sentence. Accuracy in telling the story is his concern in the next paragraph:

One of us has to write, if this is going to get told. Better that it be me who am

dead, for I’m less compromised than the rest; I who see only the clouds and can

think without being distracted, write without being distracted (there goes another,

with a grey edge) and remember without being distracted...(Blow-Up and Other

Stories 115)

The narrator’s emphasis on his loss of “distraction” as the result of him being dead (for he “is

less compromised than the rest”), and his description of a passing cloud “(there goes another,

with a grey edge)” show an immunity to any overstimulation of the senses. The narrator can

convey simultaneous events because he is not “distractible” as someone living might be; —

perhaps dead/living is a metaphoric comparison between someone describing an event after it

happens compared with someone describing it in the immediacy of the moment. The narrator’s

admiration for the machine suggests something else: while he may be unencumbered by

distraction when he tells a story, a typewriter that could “continue by itself...would be

perfection.” Because he is not a typewriter and because he has “the dumb luck to know that if I

go this Remington will sit turned to stone,” he will write—but he suggests that what he writes

will be flawed. (Blow-Up and Other Stores 115)

The narrator begins his story by explaining that “we’d be walking down the staircase as

far back as Sunday, November 7, just a month back.” He describes his character as having a

“large appetite” to take photos and then, interestingly, returns to the theme of “telling the story.”

(Blow-Up and Other Stories 116) The narrator says,

It’s going to be difficult because nobody really knows who it is telling it, if I am I

or what actually occurred or what I’m seeing (clouds, and once in a while a

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pigeon) or if, simply, I’m telling a truth which is only my truth, and then is the

truth only for my stomach, for this impulse to go running out and to finish up in

some manner with, this, whatever it is. (Blow-Up and Other Stories 116)

As I will explain in the next section of this essay, I find that this is the most provocative sentence

of “Blow-Up” and a strong analogy for a central issue in “Apocalypse at Solentiname.” That is,

the division of knowledge between different fields of representation. The narrator identifies four

discrete ways of representing this: the first person narrator named Roberto Michel telling a story;

the actions of an event; the object that is looked at; and the narrator as a self-satisfying storyteller

(composing a narrative merely for, using his reference to the stomach, his own digestion). The

narrator characterizes this fourth way of representing as an “impulse to go running out and to

finish up in some manner.” This is the way of knowing that pervades the story of the past in

“Blow-Up” and which receives its greatest challenge—an assertion that it is not a sustainable

way of knowing—at the end of the story. The words “impulse” and “stomach” suggest

immediacy and hunger, respectively. I will examine these in greater depth in my theory section.

The narrator begins to tell a story from his past. He is a French-Chilean man named

Roberto Michel who is a professional translator and a hobbyist of photography. On the Sunday

when his story takes place, Michel is translating into French a treatise by “José Norberto

Allende, professor at the University of Santiago.” He describes moments of being “unable to

find the way to say in good French what José Norberto Allende was saying in very good

Spanish.” Desiring to walk and exploit the ideal light of that Sunday afternoon for photography,

Michel goes on a walk. The present tense narrator intervenes in the past tense story and starts to

lecture on how to “contest level-zero” with a camera, an activity which requires an “aesthetic

education.” The narrator’s earlier concern with the multidimensional forms of representation and

assessment makes this endorsement of taking an “aesthetic education” ironic and out of place.

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The narrator also dismisses journalistic photography as one of the ways of reaching “level-

zero”—perhaps he is also stating what he thinks art is not—calling it an act of “snapping the

stupid silhouette of the VIP leaving number 10 Downing Street.” Indeed, much of his instruction

here, such as “in all ways when one is walking about with a camera, one has almost a duty to be

attentive” reads ironically because of the self-conscious assuredness of the tone contrasted

against the narrator’s previous state of confusion with how to represent things in his story.

(Blow-Up and Other Stories 116-117)

During his walk he stops to rest and view the river and again the narrator interjects with a

richly complex sentence:

Right now (what a word, now, what a dumb word)...I was able to sit quietly on the

railing overlooking the river watching the red and black motorboats passing

below without it occurring to me to think photographically of the scenes, nothing

more than letting myself go in the letting go of objects, running immobile in the

stream of time. And then the wind was not blowing. (Blow-Up and Other Stories

118)

Here the narrator is drawing attention to temporality, moving the scene—momentarily—from the

past tense story of Michel’s walk to the present tense narrator on his typewriter through the use

of the word “now.” But now hardly suffices for him as a placeholder for present time and it

frustrates the narrator that he should have to use this word to change tenses. The narrator is also

extending his earlier conversation about aesthetics with the line “without it occurring to me to

think photographically,” however this time his view is quite different when compared to the

“aesthetic education” that he endorsed before.2

The narrator switches back to the past tense and explains that Michel moved to a wall and

had lit a cigarette when he noticed that his earlier assessment of a couple was mistaken. What he

had thought was a couple was in fact an older woman and a boy, “turning fourteen, perhaps

2 see pages 27-28 for further explanation

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fifteen.” Looking closer, he discovers that the woman is attempting to seduce the boy and he

decides to linger a little longer (“As I had nothing else to do, I had more than enough time to

wonder why the boy was so nervous...”). (Blow-Up and Other Stories 118) The narrator

interjects again to describe the face of the woman and then returns the narrative to the past tense

Michel. It is at this point that Michel begins to translate the scene, saying,

I see her much better at that first second when I read her face (she’d turned around

suddenly, swinging like a weathercock, and the eyes, the eyes were there), when I

vaguely understood what might have been occurring to the boy and figured it

would be worth the trouble to stay and watch. (Blow-Up and Other Stories 119)

Michel uses this opportunity to address the reader in the present and explain that he “knows how

to look” and that he knows “every looking oozes with mendacity.” Michel is now fully engaged

in the role of translator, relying on his ability to read faces, to “know how to look,” to determine

the meanings of the scene. His “looking” is the performance of his knowledge of an “aesthetic

education.” Even if looking is at first untruthful, he says that the lie of looking “can be seen

beforehand” and that one can look again to see past the lie, to see the difference “between

looking and the reality looked at...” Michel, because he “knows how to look,” believes he can

correct the “mendacious” qualities of looking as he observes the couple. (Blow-Up and Other

Stories 119)

As he describes the physical appearances of the woman and the boy, he pauses and

inserts a significant sentence:

(I’m tired of insisting, but two long ragged ones just went by. That morning I

don’t think I looked at the sky once, because what was happening with the boy

and the woman appeared so soon I could do nothing but look at them and wait,

look at them and...) To cut it short, the boy was agitated... (Blow-Up and Other

Stories 121)

Parentheses break the narrative flow of the story and remind the reader that the speaker can enter

the story at any time. What is so interesting about this sentence is that it privileges the

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perspective of the clouds, one of the ways of knowing that he had mentioned earlier, and the line

“I’m tired of insisting” makes it seem that Michel must insist or the cloud’s perspective will be

ignored in preference of Michel’s past tense narrative. However, parentheses also attract critical

attention to the relationship between the clouds and meaning. Their interruption in the narrative

seems to limit meaning.

The rest of the story follows Michel’s observations of the couple. He decides to take a

picture of them. Preparing to take a picture, Michel moves the lens of the camera away from the

black car, which he calls a “private cage stripped of the beauty that motion gives it,” so that it

will not be in the picture. Within that car sits a man reading a newspaper who, Michel guesses, is

also watching this “uncommon couple” and experiencing “that malicious sensation of waiting for

everything to happen.” Both men, Michel thinks, are waiting for the seduction to happen. He

describes himself imagining the couple returning to the woman’s home and he “closes his eyes.”

He says, “I set the scene: the teasing kisses...perhaps...the initiation of the adolescent would not

happen, she would not let it happen...resolved in who knows what, in a separate and solitary

pleasure, in a petulant denial...” So Michel, in addition to looking, reads into the “scene” and

carries it out to its next stage. Michel suspects that the woman is perhaps “exciting herself for

someone else” because, “that woman invited speculation.” He takes the picture of the couple and

describes the blonde woman as “irritated” and “feeling robbed.” She demands Michel return the

picture on the grounds that “no one had the right to take a picture without permission,” but

Michel decides to keep it. The boy runs off during their argument and, following that, the man

who had been reading steps out of the black car. Michel notes his pallid face and wrinkles as the

man approaches the two and, after the three people form a silent “unbearable triangle,” Michel

laughs and walks off. (Blow-Up and Other Stories 122-126)

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After some time passes, Michel develops the photos from that Sunday. He likes the

photograph of the woman and the adolescent so much that he has it enlarged (a Blow-Up) and

hangs it on his wall where he can see it while he translates. Michel says,

The first two days I accepted what I had done, from the photo itself to the

enlargement on the wall, and didn’t even question that every once in a while I

would interrupt my translation of José Norberto Allende’s treatise to encounter

once more the woman’s face, the dark splotches on the railing. (Blow-Up and

Other Stories 126)

He continues to translate the treatise, and as he does so he comes to the conclusion taking the

photo, which allowed the boy to run off, “had been a good act.” Shortly after this, Michel says

that he no longer knows why he had hung the picture onto the wall. In the middle of translating,

he ignores the movement of the leaves in the picture and the woman talking to the boy because

“Habits are like immense herbariums, in the end an enlargement of a 32x 28 looks like a movie

screen...” But when the woman’s hands begin to move, Michel says, “There was nothing left of

me, a phrase in French which I would never have to finish, a typewriter on the floor, a chair that

squeaked and shook, fog.” Petrified, Michel watches as the scene plays out again. Again the

woman is seducing the boy, who appears as if he is succumbing to her seduction, and the boy

looks over his shoulder. (Blow-Up and Other Stories 128) Michel knows that over the boy’s

shoulder is the man waiting in the car. He says,

When I saw the man come up, stop near them and look at them, his hands in his

pockets and a stance somewhere between disgusted and demanding, the master

who is about to whistle in his dog...I understood...And what I had imagined earlier

was much less horrible than the reality...The real boss was waiting there, smiling

petulantly, already certain of the business... (Blow-Up and Other Stories 129)

Michel finally understands a different scenario, one in which the woman was not seducing for

herself but for the man, who would lead the boy away with him for his own pleasure. He

becomes “a prisoner of another time;” he is the “lens of my camera, something fixed, rigid,

20

incapable of intervention.” The “good act” of having taken the photograph no longer exists, and

Michel can only watch as the act of seducing the boy is carried out. He screams—yet before the

scene ends he watches the boy again run off and away from the woman and the pallid man.

The final paragraph is a description of the clouds that day which Michel says is “as on all

these days, all this untellable time.” He concludes that the only thing to be said is “always a

cloud, two clouds, or long hours of a sky perfectly clear, a very clean, clear rectangle tacked up

with pins on the wall of my room.” (Blow-Up and Other Stories 131)

II

In this section I summarize the readings by Moreiras, Franco, Johnson, and Luciani and

integrate their ideas with my reading of the text. To achieve this, I have selected certain passages

from the texts of both stories to analyze how these two speakers to perceive violence both in

immediate experience and through the examination of a photograph.

At the beginning of “Apocalypse at Solentiname,” the speaker makes an interesting

comment in response to being greeted by Ernesto Cardenal:

It always surprises me, always moves me that someone like

Ernesto should come to see me and seek me out, you’re probably

saying what a crock of false modesty, but you just go right on

saying it, old man, the jackal howls, but the bus passes, I’ll always

be an amateur, someone who from way down loves some people so

much that one day it turns out that they love him too, those are

things that are beyond me, we’d better get on to the next line.

[Emphasis added] (“Apocalypse at Solentiname” 266)

In his essay, “Apocalypse at Solentiname” as Heterological Production,” Alberto Moreiras gives

a compelling explanation of the “jackal” by pointing out some subtleties in Cortázar’s Spanish

(absent from the English translation). In this translation of the story, “Bus” has been used in

place of the Spanish word “ómnibus.” Yet there are several ways to say “bus” in Spanish and not

21

all of them are limited to the same meaning. Moreiras points out that the word “ómnibus,” from

the Latin word meaning “for all,” can mean “the vehicle that carries all things” in Spanish, which

he notes is very close to the idea of a metaphor. According to Moreiras, “To listen to the howl of

the jackal when the totality of things moves by, when metaphor slips by and at one with it,

implies a certain capacity to empathize with things, to feel pain at a distance, as in sacrifice.”

(Moreiras, 159) His explanation also implies that the cry is silent for those who ride in the

ómnibus. If a representation of suffering—embodied in the jackal—cries out to show suffering

yet its howl cannot stop “all things” from moving by, then it is unheard as well as invisible. In

addition to “a capacity to empathize with things,” Cortázar’s use of the word also implies

translation. While all that pass by do not hear the cry—do not even mistranslate it—the person

who hears it and recognizes it also translates it so that the “cry” may be understood as a plea for

attention to suffering. Moreiras, working with the idea of the jackal as a symbol of silent

suffering, writes “the jackal in Cortázar’s text foretells an extraordinary act of ectoplasmic

translation.” (Moreiras, 160) Moreiras uses the word “ectoplasm” to refer to the upcoming scene

in Cortázar’s journey when he describes the appearance of parts of the human body appearing in

the Polaroid photograph (“first disturbing ectoplasms and little by little a nose, some curly hair,

Ernesto’s smile...”). (“Apocalypse at Solentiname” 267) Moreiras explains that the jackal

predicts this event because the Central American animal’s cry “culturally translates the howling

of the wolf in other latitudes: ominous, portentous.” (Moreiras, 160)

Additionally, the line is strange because of its location in the stanza. Its position after

“you just go right on saying it, old man,” gives it the appearance of being an elaboration or

implication that would follow after a colon (e.g. old man:) yet the meaning of the line, defined

above, has virtually nothing in common with the words around it. This “jackal” is a lone wolf in

22

the sentence, so to speak. But then why does it appear in this paragraph? I read it as a

foreshadowing of something that will occur between Cortázar and Ernesto Cardenal later in the

text because it is used literally in the middle of Cortázar’s defense of his feelings for Ernesto. Yet

the meaning of the jackal is also “foreboding” (see above), so its use in this context is strange. I

think this may be an instance of Cortázar intentionally misusing the phrase. By this I mean that

he is introducing the idea of the cry of those who suffer but are not heard which will be heard

later. Heard, that is, after Cortázar dismisses Ernesto’s quip that he is an “image smuggler,” and

after Cortázar views the photographs he took of the paintings at home on his projector. It is a

delayed cry, something which Barbara Johnson describes in her essay on the role of the aesthetic

in Toni Morrison’s book Sula. Johnson writes, “The dissociation between affect and event is one

of Morrison’s most striking literary techniques in [Sula].” (Johnson, 168) After giving an

example of a woman who morns the loss of her friend 70 pages after she encountered the event

that separated them, Johnson writes, “A good deal of the novel takes place in the space between

the moment when the howl is called for and the moment when it occurs.” (Johnson, 168) I find

that this “disconnect” also occurs in Cortázar’s “Blow-Up.” It is this separation between affect

and event, Johnson argues, that Morrison constructs her novel around the question of the role of

aesthetic and rapport in daily life.3

The interaction between Cortázar and Ernesto during Cortázar’s ‘illicit’ photographing of

the Solentiname paintings in “Apocalypse” also conveys an instance of how Cortázar perceives

violence. It also an instance in which Cortázar appears to practice an act of translation.

3 Johnson writes: “’Aesthetic’ moves from the domain of sense experience to the domain of artistic forms, while

‘rapport’ names connection and trust but at the same time, archaically, mesmerism—a much more uncanny form of trust. I think that in many ways the novel is precisely about the relations between aesthetic and rapport. If aesthetics is taken as the domain of the contemplation of forms...and rapport is taken as the dynamics of connectedness, the two words name an opposition, or at least a set of issues, that are central in Sula. (see ‘Aesthetic’ in references)

23

The exchange is as follows:

I remembered that I had a roll of color film in my camera and I went out onto the

porch with an armful of paintings; Sergio, who was coming up, helped me stand

them up in a good light, and I went along photographing them carefully one by

one, centering them so that each painting filled the viewer completely. Chance is

like that: I had just the number of exposures as there were paintings, not one was

left out and when Ernesto cam to tell us that the outboard was ready, I told him

what I’d done and he laughed, art thief, image smuggler. Yes, I told him, I’m

taking all of them, I’ll show them on my screen back there and they’ll be bigger

and brighter than theses, screw yourself. (“Apocalypse at Solentiname” 269)

Moreiras writes that Cortázar’s photography of the Solentiname paintings creates a

rupture between two types of “writing.” “One the one hand,” he notes, “a foundational writing,

orphic, world-giving, an ontological and poetic writing, which is the one offered in the peasant

paintings...” “On the other hand” he adds, “a kind of writing that I will call sacrificial, following

Georges Bataille’s notion: a writing of expenditure and horror, nihilist, essentially destructive,

which is the sort of writing that is carried out in the act of translation that Cortázar’s camera

operates on the pictographic text.” According to Moreiras’ argument, Cortázar causes the images

of horror to project onto his slide projector screen because of his “investment” in that second

form of writing, which Moreiras says is also a form of translation.4 (Moreiras, 163-4)

Frederick Luciani, who reads “Apocalypse at Solentiname” as a “self-referential

metaphor for Cortázar’s problematized political conversion” (which allows room for “existential

self-questioning”) examines the moment that Cortázar choses what to see on the projector as an

act self-questioning brought up at the beginning of the story during the press conference.

(Luciani, 198) Similarly—though not the same—to Moreiras’ discussion of translation, Luciani

4 See Moreiras on Georges Bataille’s heterology, pages 165-7. M. writes, “In my interpretation, “Apocalypse at

Solentiname” entirely underwrites the Benjamanian concept of mimesis (“the practice of nonsensuous similarity”). In the intersemiosis of translation from one into another sign system, from paintings into photographs...the rupture of semiosis is unavoidable or consubstantial: It therefore facilitates, or even causes, the apparition of the phantom.”

24

observes an act of “interpretation” occurring in Cortázar’s viewing of the paintings of

Solentiname on the projector: “The problem of seeing and interpreting, rather, is divided

between people: the newly aware narrator, who sees the horrible, versus the complacent

Claudine, who sees only the picturesque, the idyllic, and the consumable.” (Luciani, 197)

Cortázar writes:

suddenly the screen filled with mercury and with nothing and with

Claudine, who was coming in silently, casting her shadow on the

screen before she bent over and kissed me on the hair and asked

me if they came out well, if I was pleased with the pictures, if I felt

like showing them...I got up and slowly sat her down in my chair

and I must have said something to her about going to get her a

drink. In the bathroom I think I threw up or I didn’t do anything

and just sat on the edge of the bathtub letting time pass until I

could go to the kitchen and fix Claudine her favorite drink, fill it

with ice, and then feel the silence, realize that Claudine wasn’t

shouting or running to ask me, silence...”They came out so well,

that one with the smiling fish and the mother with the two

children...tell me who painted them, you couldn’t see the

signatures. (“Apocalypse at Solentiname” 272-3)

Luciani reads Cortázar’s earlier internal debate over where among his many photos to begin the

projector slide (“but why the paintings first, why the professional deformation, art before life,

and why not, the one said to the other...”) as relating to “the narrator’s divided self” between

Latin America and Europe and Neruda’s interview at the beginning of the story. (Luciani, 197)

Similarly I read the passage above as an unfolding of the plot, or what Luciani calls bringing the

story “full circle,” (Luciani, 197) in which the events of the beginning of the story repeat again.

After his press interview Cortázar travels to the Hotel Europa, at which he takes a “shower which

caps trips with a long monologue of soap and silence.” Almost immediately following this he is

met by Ernesto, who greets him warmly, “a hand tugged at my jacked,” and with whom he later

views the Solentiname paintings and discusses having photographed them. The Solentiname

paintings, Cortázar says, are “all so beautiful, once more the first vision of the world, the clean

25

look of a person who describes what’s around him like a song of praise.”(“Apocalypse at

Solentiname” 267-8) This process repeats when he returns to Paris, where he experiences “a

weariness that was full of nostalgia;” meets Claudine; and, repeating his language upon viewing

the Solentiname paintings, encounters “once more the life of wristwatch...committees, movies”

[emphasis added]. (“Apocalypse at Solentiname” 269) At the end of the story Cortázar describes

the “silence” of Claudine while she viewed the paintings and the “silence” of the bathroom as he

recovered himself after having viewed the horrific images of the pictures he took, the same

“silence” he had enjoyed at Hotel Europa in Costa Rica. (“Apocalypse at Solentiname” 272, 266)

This repetition, even if just a plot device, raises an interesting observation about the structure. In

Latin America Cortázar enjoys silence and is mesmerized by the Solentiname paintings, whereas

in Paris silence—which is at one point broken by “a sugary Bolero”—haunts him after viewing

the images (“Apocalypse at Solentiname” 272). Violence in this story disturbs Cortázar most

when he views it at a distance. Jean Franco writes that Cortázar defended the legitimacy of his

approach to Latin America as an Argentinian living in Paris by claiming (in her words) that

“writing outside a national context gains in breadth what it loses in detail. (Franco, 38) Cortázar

is quoted saying that ‘it becomes so to speak more global...it achieves a lucidity that is

sometimes unbearable but always enlightening.” (Qtd in Franco, 38) By this argument, the

revelation of the horrifying photographs in “Apocalypse” was not a challenge to Cortázar’s

European location so much as an affirmation of his interpretive power. As Moreiras concludes in

his essay, “The screen projection is, then, nothing but a legitimate continuation of the projection

of desire that took Cortázar into the theft of the image.”(Moreiras, 169) Yet, if the images of

violence contain what Moreiras calls a “secret” or represent “solidarity with the destitute,” why

is it only Cortázar who can interpret an underlying narrative of violence while Claudine cannot?

26

(Moreiras, 176-7) Why, in other words, is Cortázar the only character who represents Benjamin’s

idea of the “translator” who has the “task” of “releasing...language [under] a spell? (Moreiras,

169). In her book, An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature, Franco depicts Cortázar with

the following: “[Cortázar’s] writing is international rather than national yet who, like other

members of the avant-garde, tended to see women as the epitome of the passive, automatised

reader” (An Introduction, 336). Franco adds, “Cortázar never entirely extricates himself from

gendered dichotomies which either deprive woman of speech (La Maga) or make her

complicitous with Eurocentric colonisation of the mind” [sic] (An Introduction, 338) In the

speaker’s and Claudine’s mutual viewing of the paintings on the projector, only Cortázar can

find a political statement that the images encode, and it is difficult not to see this as part of his

accepted understanding of political awareness divided between gender binaries. Perhaps

Cortázar claims this interpretive right, but if he does so he seems to justify it through personal

biography alone. His real-life occupation as a “translator” appears his only non-gendered

explanation for how he is able to make a “political” reading of images and not Claudine.

The role and interpretive quest of the translator become even more significant in “Blow-

Up.” At the beginning of the story the narrator says:

It’s going to be difficult because nobody really knows who it is

telling it, if I am I or what actually occurred or what I’m seeing

(clouds, and once in a while a pigeon) or if, simply, I’m telling a

truth which is only my truth, and then is the truth only for my

stomach, for this impulse to go running out and to finish up in

some manner with, this, whatever it is. (Blow-Up and Other

Stories 116)

Luciani writes that Cortázar’s “departures” from the narrative techniques often attributed to

Hitchcock, mysteries with a linear progression and satisfying resolutions, are what would lead

other directors like Antonioni and Hollywood in general toward new innovations in film.

27

(Luciani, 187) According to Luciani, “Those departures, in sum, can be characterized as a kind

of staged surrender of semantic control. For example, Cortázar’s story [“Blow-Up”] takes the

search for truth beyond the conventions of mystery narrative and explicitly thematicizes it

as...unsolvable.” (Luciani, 187)

I have quoted from the passage at the beginning of my paper because it places the

interpreter—literally the physical body (“stomach”) of the interpreter—at the center of the

narrative. Although this occurs in both “Apocalypse” and “Blow-Up,” the speaker in “Blow-Up”

is overwhelmed by different possible explanations for the event. I think the quote above, and its

reference to the body, emphasize the difficulty of conveying knowledge within a system with

multiple sources of meaning. The speaker lists some of these sources: I, “what actually

occurred,” “what I’m seeing,” or simply “my truth.” The quote begs the question: which

narrative does one rely on when seeking information? But it also parodies the act of storytelling

as much as it conveys the speaker’s anxiety to give an accurate explanation of events. Finally,

the speaker describes the idea of “the truth only for my stomach” with the line “the impulse to go

running out.” This recalls one of the previous paragraphs in which the narrator says that his need

to “tell it” is like when “someone has told a good joke and immediately there starts up something

like a tickling in the stomach and we are not at peace until we’ve...told the joke again.” (Blow-

Up and Other Stories 115) The truth for “my stomach” suggests something which is personally

gratifying to the narrator but that leaves the reader—implied in the line “you’ll see when we get

to the moment,” an instance where the text appears to acknowledge its fictitiousness—

uninformed. (Blow-Up and Other Stories 115)

As Luciani noted, the story “Blow-Up” is about a thwarted search for meaning. The

process of enlarging the picture, he writes, leads to an “uncontrolled proliferation of meaning”

28

which is eventually “metaphorized in the enlargement of images that reveal less as they reveal

more.” (Luciani, 187) Throughout “Blow-Up” are various signs and images which interrupt

interpretation. While the narrator observes the boy and the woman he is distracted from reading

the woman’s face by “the boy’s fright.” Furthermore, the speaker’s perception of violence, in

this case the woman’s sexual harassment of the apparently frightened boy, becomes distracted by

his own fantasies of what might happen to the “uncommon couple” once they returned to the

woman’s home: “Closing my eyes, if I did in fact close my eyes, I set the scene: the kissing

teases...” (Blow-Up and Other Stories 123) We therefore see desire intervening in “Apocalypse”

(for the paintings) and in “Blow-Up” (through a voyeuristic sexual stimulation). In both cases,

desire leads to a common narrative—the possession of the paintings or the visualization of the

tryst between older woman and an adolescent boy—which has its own interpretive lenses.

It becomes clear through the lines:

Right now (what a word, now, what a dumb word)...I was able to

sit quietly on the railing overlooking the river watching the red and

black motorboats...nothing more than letting myself go in the

letting go of objects, running immobile in the stream of time (Blow

up and Other Stories 118)

And

The first two days I accepted what I had done, from the photo itself

to the enlargement on the wall, and didn’t even question that every

once in a while I would interrupt my translation of José Norberto

Allende’s treatise to encounter once more the woman’s face, the

dark splotches on the railing. (Blow-Up 126)

It seems clear that “Blow-Up” depicts a concern with the influence of different mediums

to direct interpretation. “Running immobile in the stream of time,” the character Michel says, is

not “thinking photographically.” Instead it seems like a state in which meaning is suspended. The

narrator is drawing attention to temporality, moving the scene—momentarily—from the past

29

tense story of Michel’s walk to the present tense narrator on his typewriter through the use of the

word “now.” But now hardly suffices for him as a placeholder for present time and it frustrates

the narrator that he should have to use this word to change tenses. The narrator is also extending

his earlier conversation about aesthetics with the line “without it occurring to me to think

photographically,” however this time his view is quite different when compared to the “aesthetic

education” that he endorsed before.

Similarly, the photograph, prior to revealing a different narrative of a frightening crime,

is a certain type of narrative lens for the speaker. Like with the Solentiname paintings, the

speaker takes pleasure in viewing the photograph and decides to make an enlargement (a “blow-

up”) of it. It is through his role as a translator, transferring a text from Spanish into French, that

Michel identifies a very different explanation of events. Then, as with the dissociation that

Johnson describes between affect and event, the speaker finally identifies—and reacts to—a

depiction of violence: “...but the man was directly center, his mouth was open, you could see a

shaking black tongue, and he lifted his hands slowly, bringing them into the foreground...I didn’t

want to see anymore, and I covered my face and broke into tears like an idiot.” (Blow-Up and

Other Stores 131)

Finally, the story ends with an image of the clouds. The clouds are the final interpretive

lens of the short story. After interrupting the narrative earlier through parenthetical interjections

in the story, at the end of the story “clouds” appear to have a narrative that limits interpretive

meaning. Cortázar conveys this in the line “Now there’s a big white cloud, as on all these days,

all this untellable time. What remains to be said is always a cloud...That was what I saw when I

opened my eyes and dried them with my fingers...” (Blow-Up and Other Stories 131)

30

We find in both of Cortázar’s stories that the narrative demonstrates a concern with the

ability of the speaker to identify violence in a piece of artistic work (a painting or photograph).

What is also apparent from these stories is a progression in Cortázar’s use of ontological

confusion as a plot device. (Luciani, 197) Whereas in “Blow-Up” the conclusion is a

broadcasting of multiple meanings, making any one ‘interpretive lens’ seem incomplete,

“Apocalypse at Solentiname” makes two discrete readings of one image. Frederick Luciani has

pointed this out in his study of both works, writing that while “Blow-Up” ends with a confusion

of interpretations [in addition, I add, to the apparent death of the translator, who leaves “a phrase

in French which I would never have to finish”], Apocalypse “offers two irreconcilably different

visions (one idyllic, the other apocalyptic) of Latin American reality” (Luciani, 196). He

attributes the different conclusions to “Cortázar’s political and literary evolution” between the

two works (Luciani, 184). But, in addition to the question of Cortázar’s political identity, I agree

with Jean Franco’s observation that Cortázar has left an impression of the invisibility of violence

in Latin America to those who live outside of its collateral area. In the introduction to her book

The Rise and Fall of the Lettered City, Franco briefly notes the “invisible” character of some

events in Latin America: “The time lag between past atrocities—the overthrow of Arbenz, the

overthrow of Allende, the invasion of the Dominican Republic, the dirty wars and Operation

Condor, the war against Noriega—has given a phantasmagoric cast to the immediate past. The

time lag means that news only “breaks” when there is no longer danger of a spontaneous revolt.”

(Rise 15) Considering the world’s gradual awareness of the many “disappeared” people in Latin

America during the mid-1970s when “Apocalypse at Solentiname” was written, it is not

surprising that we find the theme of dissociation between affect and event repeated. At the

31

period that this story documents, awareness outside Latin America of such atrocities still

remained to be a “truth for [the] stomach” of the translator.

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| 2

Pablo Neruda:

Finding Hunger and Thirst within a Place of Ruins

“In the ruin, history has physically merged into the setting. And in this

guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so

much as that of irresistible decay.” –Walter Benjamin

Introduction

Pablo Neruda’s long twelve-section poem, Alturas de Macchu Picchu [“Heights of

Macchu Picchu”], written and published in 1945, continues to generate new critical readings. In

a speech given in 1954 at the University of Chile, Neruda described how his 1943 visit to Machu

Picchu gave rise to his poem, Alturas de Macchu Picchu, and how it would shape his later

poetry. (Pablo 116) The speech, his first of two accounts, explained that his visit to the ruin

transformed his “idea” for his epic—a 15-section and over 300 poem project—Canto general

(1950) because it expanded his focus beyond his native Chile to “the whole of America.” Neruda

said:

After seeing the ruins of Macchu Picchu, the fabulous cultures of antiquity

seemed made of paper maché. India itself seemed miniscule...compared to

the proud solemnity of the abandoned Inca towers. I could no longer set

myself apart from these constructions. I understood that if we trod the

same hereditary ground, we had something to do with these high efforts of

the American community, that we could no longer ignore them, that our

ignorance or silence was not only a crime but the continuity of a defeat.

Aristocratic cosmopolitanism had made us revere the past of the most

distant peoples and had blinded us to our own treasures...I thought about

ancient American man. I saw his ancient struggles linked to our own.

(Santí’s translation) (Pablo 116-119)

Although Neruda’s account introduces themes of solidarity with Latin American identity and a

“Romantic theme of the marriage between mind and nature in poetic perception,” Santí disputes

its value as an interpretive lens for the poem (Pablo 119). He notes that this first account stressed

a marital theme of cultural recreation through union between poet and ruin, whereas the second

33

account, given eight years later, conveyed the poem through a “maternal motif” of a womb

“welcoming back the poet.” (Pablo 121) Santí claims: “despite their documentary value, these

texts cannot yield any positive critical insight because they deliberately confuse Neruda’s

recollections of the visit with the actual poem.” (Pablo 119) According to Santí’s argument,

Neruda’s accounts have contributed to a “failure” in past criticism of the poem, which cannot

“discriminate between text and experience...conferring authority on both an autobiographical

source and the thematics of cultural identity” (Pablo121) Of course, Santí’s interpretation of the

accounts and characterization of criticism helps to establish his later (and polemic) claim. I will

discuss it in greater depth later, but I note it here because of its reference to the history of critical

debate over the poem.

The characteristic of Alturas de Macchu Picchu that continues to generate renewed

attention to the poem has less to do with the poem’s structure or with readings of Neruda’s

“autobiography” than with the complexity of the poet’s voice and linguistic experimentations.

This is what Cecilia Enjuto Rangel calls a “complex web of meanings and associations.”

(Politics 258) Various critics show how Neruda’s poem contains a system of comparisons and

apostrophe that convey the poet’s relationship to the ruins. However, one motif that pervades the

poem, and which I have yet to find explored in depth within criticism on Alturas de Macchu

Picchu, is the theme of “hunger” and bodily lack. In the poem, both ideas are part of this system

of comparisons and metaphorically express recognition of a kind of lack and a need to restore

what is absent, such as “todos desfallecieron esperando su muerte, su corta muerte / diaria: / y su

quebranto aciago de cada día era / como una copa negra que bebían temblando” (III) and

34

“Hambre, coral de hombre, / hambre, planta secreta, raíz de los leñadores...” (X).5 Santí makes a

keen observation about how this line works in the poem: ‘“hambre,”an awareness of lack and a

need to replace that lack with substance, becomes the recurrent metaphor for demystified

knowledge throughout the speaker’s interrogation [in canto X]. IN this canto the speaker seeks to

acquire factual knowledge beyond the distorting laws of archeology.” (Pablo 165) I show below

how critics have characterized the poet’s difficult access to knowledge of the “lost voices” of the

past—a primary instance of lack met with desire to recover what is absent. I then turn to examine

how “hunger” and other metaphors for lack and desire figure in Alturas de Macchu Picchu.

I

Since 1950, Alturas de Macchu Picchu has been read both within the context of Neruda’s

Canto General, in which it was republished, and as an independent and “self-contained” work.

(Pablo 105-106; Companion 183) In this chapter, I map out some of the significant

contemporary readings of the poem, showing where they agree and differ, and then offer my

reading of the poem. My analysis of “hunger” and, relatedly, “thirst” in the poem stems from my

reading of Michael Kelly’s book on aesthetics, A Hunger for Aesthetics. I examine the complex

ways that Neruda uses “hunger” and “thirst” in Alturas de Macchu Picchu, and I propose an

understanding of these themes based on a careful textual reading of how they operate within the

poem.

Alturas de Macchu Picchu is about Neruda’s attempts to recover Latin America’s lost

history, often read as an analogy of a pilgrimage that takes the speaker from the vacuous city of

“many little deaths” to Macchu Picchu, within which knowledge of the past (symbolized by the

figures of the city’s pre-Columbian builders) is buried. (Pablo 104-175, Cities 22-23) According

5 “all of them weakened, waiting their death, their brief death / daily, / and their dismal weariness each day was

like / a black cup they drank down trembling.” (III) “Hunger, coral of humankind, / hunger, hidden plant, root of the woodcutter,” (X) (Felstiner’s translation)

35

to Santí, the poem’s “narrative representation of conversion splits the speaker into two entities—

the one before the conversion experience and the one after it, the speaker as character and the

speaker as author of the poem.” (Pablo 127) He explains that first canto of Alturas is a

“prologue” for the rest of the poem, in which the speaker encounters his future self who has

already found Macchu Picchu, “un mundo como un torre enterrada.” (Pablo 126-7) This

“narrative unfolding,” the viewing of the image of the self that has already completed the journey

constitutes a “retrospective” moment “[that] encompasses both the experience of the poem and,

at a biographical level, a rewriting of Neruda’s own past, for which the poetry of Residencia

stands.” (Pablo 128) According to Santí’s argument, the speaker performs his conversion by

returning to his earlier collection of poetry, Residencia en la tierra, to “rewrite it.” (Pablo 125)

In other words, rewriting is a retrospective act that allows the speaker to connect a narrative from

his past, embodied by Neruda’s Residencia collection, to his current pilgrimage toward the

recovery of historical narratives buried at Macchu Picchu.

Other critics also find that the first five sections of Alturas contain allusions to the

Residencia poems and a process of “conversion” or transformation. Rangel writes that in

Neruda’s search for the lost origins of Latin America’s history, he “has to leave behind his

melancholic wanderings around the modern city, his own Residencia en la tierra, to be able to

integrate himself into the natural and the historical landscape of Macchu Picchu.”6 Santí, Rangel

and Felstiner find that the poet descends toward death in the first five cantos. Rangel writes that

Neruda’s descent, while necessary to eventually “rise” with the ability to “truly ‘see,’” makes

him “closer to Dante’s traveler, who gets lost in the beginning of his journey only to find his way

6 This departure from the tone of his previous poetry is conveyed in the lines, “Cuántas veces en las calles de

invierno de una ciudad...me quise detener a buscar la eterna veta insondable” [II] and “...Qué era el hombre? En qué parte de su conversación abierta...vivía lo indestructible, lo imperecedero, la vida?”[II] [“How many times in the city’s winter streets...have I wanted to stop and seek the timeless fathomless vein” and “What was man? Where in his simple talk...lived the indestructible, the imperishable—life?” (Felstiner’s translation)

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with Virgil’s help in the Divine Comedy” (Cities 258) Felstiner describes canto VI as “the

watershed of the poem,” when the poet begins his upward journey. (Translating 167) Neruda

writes, “Entonces en la escala de la tierra he subido / entre la atroz maraña de las selvas perdidas

/ hasta ti, Macchu Picchu” [“Then on the ladder of the earth I climbed / through the lost jungle’s

tortured thicket / up to you, Macchu Picchu”] (Translating 214-215) Rangel finds that cantos X

through XII are “[Dante’s] Paradise is closer,” but that “it is only truly experienced with a

moment of illumination...” (Cities 259) In other words, the poet experiences revelation only

through a moment of calling on the dead at Macchu Picchu to “rise,” but without knowledge of

the past the poet cannot sustain a vision of the dead. Jean Franco agrees with Santí’s focus on

transformation, writing: “Santí perceptively notes that the poem circles around the theme of

conversion and prophecy, which is rehearsed in several different forms.” (Rise 74) Though the

text may contain a Dantean structure, John Felstiner importantly points out that Neruda’s

objective is not to introduce Dante’s voice into the text but rather to “speak for the voices utterly

lost.” (Translating 172)

Santí writes that the central tension within the poem is the poet’s inability to represent the

past (“through naming [it]”) while he is still writing within a system inherited from Western

literary tradition. (Pablo 124) Neruda does not know what the buried “languages” at Macchu

Picchu sound like because he still depends on a Western linguistic system to interpret these

languages, which originate from an entirely different system of knowledge. The poet asks: “Qué

dicen tus destellos acosados? / Tu secreto relámpago rebelde / antes viajó poblado de palabras?”

[“What do your tormented flashings say? / Your secret insurgent lightning—did it / once travel

thronging with words?”] (Translating 222-223). Rangel, among others, notes that the only way

Neruda can summon the “lost voices” is through apostrophic address, such as to the sacred Incan

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river or to Macchu Picchu (commanding, “Devuélveme el esclavo que enterraste!” [“Give me

back the slave you buried!”]). (Pablo 135, 157-158; Cities 261-263)

Rangel and Santí offer two different approaches to reading Alturas. I begin with Santí’s

to show the strengths and limitations of his interpretation, and then turn to Rangel’s

interpretation, which allows for greater flexibility while maintaining that ruins express a certain

claim about knowledge in Modern poetry. In addition to Felstiner’s translation and explanations,

these critics provide a basis for understanding how “hunger” and “thirst” operate in this text.

After I apply their arguments to this question, I move to my interpretation.

Santí claims that Neruda’s Alturas reflects the poet’s “formal adoption of the prophetic

mode as mediated by the Romantic tradition.” (Pablo 15) Neruda does this, Santí writes, because

there is no rhetorical system other than the rhetoric of prophecy (which asserts an “absolute

knowledge”) that would allow Neruda to claim to have knowledge of the “voices” of the

oppressed at Macchu Picchu. (Pablo 124) Neruda essentially lends his poetic voice to the silent

“language...barely uprooted from your Andean foam” (canto VIII) (Felstiner’s translation).

According to Santí, “Neruda’s version of prophetic dialogue is his poetry’s commerce with

poetic tradition...The prophet speaks...as if on his own self-assured behalf all the while he is

echoing the phantoms of earlier ‘discoveries.’” (Pablo 16) For example, when Neruda uses

apostrophe in his questioning of the sacred Wilkamayu river in canto VIII (quoted above) he is

recognizing that “Macchu Picchu is dead, wholly other, a ruin.” (Pablo 170) Neruda’s use of the

“prophetic mode” to address the buried history at Macchu Picchu makes Alturas “an allegory

that asserts a negative knowledge as part of its statement on history and culture.” (Pablo 170)

Santí’s claims that Alturas is a political work because the speaker uses rhetorical devices from

Western literary conventions to expose their artificiality in a Latin American context—their

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inability to revive life at from Macchu Picchu: “In its precise, even meticulous revision of

literary history, the poem flaunts rhetorical manipulation of sources that amounts to a subversion

of the Western library.” (Pablo 171)

The issue with Santí’s approach is that it negates any reading of the poem that

presupposes the poem’s ability to communicate solidarity with the oppressed. He writes, “For to

restrict the poem’s politics to the pious theme of “social conscience” or to such platitudes as

“empathy” and “solidarity,” as critical tradition has in fact done, is to commit the same (political)

error that the poem constantly avoids.” (Pablo 170) Jean Franco disagrees with this approach.

She writes, “But the “platitudes” that Santí points out are difficult to dismiss because, as he

wrote the poem, Neruda not only found himself responding to different publics but increasingly

attended to writing poetry that was to be performed before a sympathetic audience. This is not a

trivial matter.” (The Decline and Fall 74) In other words, identifying claims of “solidarity” or

“empathy” in the poem is defensible because Neruda sought to write poetry that could register

emotionally with his audience during readings. She points out that what mattered in addition to

the content of the poetry was Neruda’s ability to connect with his audience and bring them into

the lettered sphere, making the reading event a “counterhegemonic common ground between

writer and public.” (The Decline and Fall 74) Franco supports her claims by pointing out the

“devices of orality” that are “especially effective” in Alturas. According to Franco, Alturas

“includes the cadence of prayer, litany, and the solemnity of funeral oration as the poet addresses

the dead in a shamanistic appropriation of their power.” (The Decline and Fall 74)

In comparison with Santí, Rangel takes a less exclusionary tack in her reading of Alturas

and finds that the poet both visualizes the deceased builders at Macchu Picchu as well as

empathizes with them. (Cities 257, 259) She agrees with Santí’s claim that Neruda employs the

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rhetoric of prophecy, writing, “I insist, as Santí does in his introduction, that the prophetic mode

is a rhetorical device. Neruda may dress himself as a prophet and may transgress the role

himself, but the criticism regarding his works need not reduce his poetics to Romantic versions

of the poet.” Further, like Santí, Rangel asserts that the poem “stresses its own artificiality.” Yet

she differs from Santí’s reading of Alturas by identifying the speaker’s empathy with the dead in

cantos X – XII and by claiming that Neruda is more concerned with emulating Quevedo’s “stoic

vision of death” than he is invested in “his neo-Romantic vein in search of a different poetic

idiom.” (Cities 257, 259)

According to Rangel, Neruda’s Alturas reflects his embrace of the Baroque poetry of

Francisco de Quevedo at a time when the “intimist sensibility was becoming stale and Romantic

metaphors exhausted.” (Cities 256) Roberto González Echevarría’s characterization of the turn

among Avant-garde and Spanish poets to embrace Modernism supports this claim. Echevarría

writes that Neruda’s epic, Canto General, showed the poet’s use of “his Avant-garde experience,

particularly the surrealist, and [tempering] it with a keen historical force.” (Modern 72)

According to Echevarría, Canto general “expressed the hope that out of the ruins of Europe and

Western civilization in general, Latin America would emerge as a new, vital force, untainted by

the sins of the Old World.” (Modern 72) Rangel stresses the importance of Quevedo to Neruda

by quoting Robert Pring-Mill: “Neruda makes clear that Quevedo’s neo-stoicism seemed to offer

a way out of his personal horror at the inexorable quality of time and death, which dominated

many poems of Residencia.” (Cities 256) Her primary claim is the identification of Quevedo’s

“teaching” as an invisible guide for Neruda in Alturas as the poet contemplates death:

“Throughout [Neruda’s] ascent and his immersion in the collective historical conscience of the

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place, he is able, with Quevedo’s teachings, to embrace death as a form of revelation and

integration with the other, the dead, the workers.” (Cities 257)

I cite the arguments of Santí and Rangel to show how both contribute to an idea of

“hunger” and “thirst” as concepts relevant the poem. The ruins of Macchu Picchu evoke an idea

of hunger within the poet, who likens it to a force that has climbed up the mountainsides to this

high plateau in canto X: “Hambre, subió tu raya de arrecife / hasta estas altas torres

desprendidas?” [“Hunger, did your reef-edge climb / to these high and ruinous towers?”]

(Felstiner’s translation) Indeed, in the conclusion to her book, Rangel asserts the role of

aesthetics in ruins, writing, “I have argued that the poetic portrayal of the modern city in ruins is

part of an aesthetic, ethical, and political critique of the new versions of progress, the process of

modernization, the brutality of war or the erasure of the historical traces of the past.” (Cities 273)

In the preface A Hunger for Aesthetics, Michael Kelly refers to remarks made by the

artist Barnett Newman in 1952. When Newman opined that aesthetics was “for the birds,” Kelly

writes, he meant that contemporary aesthetic philosophy had moved in the direction of turning

aesthetics into an almost “value-free science” (as in the practice of ornithology). (Hunger xv-xvi)

According to Kelly, Newman protested that this “suspension of aesthetic judgment” would be

“even tragic” because it “would leave practicing aestheticians, the museum directors and

newspaper critics” without the “guidance” they depend on to pass judgments—one of the

defining characteristics of their work. (Hunger xv) Secondly, Newman protested against the

“separation of ‘scientific’ aesthetics from ethics and other sources of value (e.g., politics)

constitutive of art and aesthetic experience.” (Hunger xv) Kelly points out that Newman believed

“such suspension” would perpetuate a “lack of moral purpose [within] philosophical aesthetics.”

(Hunger xv) He uses Newman’s comments as a model to show how he will use the word

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“hunger” in relation to aesthetics through his book. According to Kelly, Newman showed a

“hunger for aesthetics” because he sought to rescue aesthetic judgment—one based on the

application of a value system and “ethics”—from becoming a practice influenced by the “legacy

of Duchamp” in which “anything goes.” (Hunger xv) Newman’s protest against contemporary

aesthetic practice reflected a “call for a ‘new kind of ethics’ that would be integral to the new

aesthetics he imagined.” (Hunger xv) Kelly argues for the “regeneration of aesthetics” so that

aesthetic judgment may better approach questions raised by “moral-political” art. Kelly writes

that Newman’s comments represented showed “the enactment of a hunger for aestheticians to

become more, rather than less, engaged with contemporary art.” (Hunger xvi) Through this

analogy Kelly shows that Newman’s criticism of the state of contemporary aesthetics was

actually a “hunger for aesthetics.” Kelly’s book details significant instances of the anti-aesthetic

stance in in the work of artists and art critics and reveals how a hunger for a “recalibrated

aesthetics” lies at its core.

I use Kelly’s preface on aesthetics to raise a question about the experience of reading

Alturas de Macchu Picchu. I can identify passages throughout the work that clearly evoke

feelings of hunger and corresponding feelings of absence. Neruda’s line, “Hambre, coral de

hombre” is one of the primary instances of the poet calling attention to an idea whose meaning

originates with the senses—the perception of a lack, such as the sense of need evoked when one

smells appetizing food. Kelly’s argument that the anti-aesthetic stance is propelled by an

“underlying” hunger for a new way to apply aesthetics to make critical judgments of art, and a

simultaneous “morning” of aesthetics that cannot deliver this critical reflection, establishes an

idea of “hunger” for an interpretive method. As I show below, the examples of “hunger” and

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“thirst” in this poem are active metaphors for forms of lack—especially Neruda’s difficulty in

recovering history from the site of Macchu Picchu.

From the air to the air, like an empty net,

I went on through streets and thin air, arriving and

leaving behind,

at autumn’s advent, the coin handed out

in the leaves, and between spring and ripe grain,

the fullness that love, as in a glove’s

fall, gives over to us like a long-drawn moon.

(Felstiner’s translation, canto I)

The poet’s body is carried “from the air to the air” as in the rise and fall of loose “net.” There is

no sense of accomplishment in these lines but instead an empty net, perhaps fishing net without

fish, which evokes hunger. This first line is one of many figurations of emptiness in the poem.

But if this is hunger, what is its cause? The extended “coin” as the object “left behind” is John

Felstiner’s rendering of the line, but he notes in his translation:

To settle then on la moneda “the coin” as the object of despedir...No editions have a

comma there, but Neruda does pause markedly in two phonograph recordings...so,

despite the pun, I think we see him leaving behind or forsaking the season’s generosity,

what the leaves and what love has to give. (Translating 154)

Interestingly, “love” is conveyed through the vertical movement of a falling glove and associates

the word “love” with momentum and quickness. And yet in the quickness of a “gloves fall” has

the opposite effect of turning the poet’s mind away from love and toward a “long-drawn moon.”

Felstiner reads this “larga luna” as representing duration instead of size “larga implying duration

rather than distance,” and finds that it alludes to Neruda’s older poem, Galope muerto.

(Translating 154) That poem explored “a consummation that could seem a moment’s doing yet

stretch on endlessly,” but which now is a memory from a previous season. (Translating 155) If

this is emptiness that Neruda describes, then I see this “empty net” as being part of a larger

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narrative concerning a hungering for something that the poet has yet to reveal to us. The

contemplation of this emptiness can direct our thinking to its fulfillment.

Santí defines the word “hambre” (hunger) in “Alturas,” as “human lack and desire,” and

(from the line “hambre, coral del hombre) notes the “uncanny closeness of human nature to

human lack beyond historical redemption.” (Pablo 165) Hambre and its metaphorical equivalents

appear throughout the poem in lines such as “men were beset by bread” / “el hombre asediado

del pan” (III) and “what language do you bring to the ear/ barely uprooted from your Andean

foam?” | “qué idioma traes a la oreja apenas / desarraigada de tu espuma andina?” (VIII) This

last line, showing the poet in a process of recalling buried stories, conveys the sense that hambre

is an awareness of something provoked by its absence (the language before it is uprooted). In his

introduction, Kelly describes art as providing an “affective and cognitive experience,” which

suggests that a “hunger” for art could also be an affective and cognitive hunger for the recovery

of “lost voices.” (Hunger 22) I argue that the poem is about the poet’s hunger—again, an

awareness of an absence—for an art form that will effectively unveil the stories and “languages”

of repressed and silenced people. Aesthetic examination of “Alturas”—e.g. what Kelly calls a

“critique of these affective and cognitive forms against the social-political background”—

(Hunger 22) ultimately offers a unique reading: Neruda’s greatest “hunger” is caused by the

absence of an answer to the question “Qué era el hombre?” which, because he seeks to merge

with this world, also reads as “what am I?”

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II

Canto I

The cantos of “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” follow a progressive and retrospective

structure. According to Franco, the first five cantos of the poem represent “a descent, down into

individual consciousness” which is met by “the failure of any individual life to give the poet a

sense of values or significance.” (An Introduction 287) However, at canto six the poet begins an

upward constructive movement, one which is quite changed from the “solitary” and “anguished”

world used to characterize Residencias and the first five cantos. (Translating 11) The

contemplation of the Macchu Picchu ruins is eventually followed by the discovery and naming of

all humans who are in some way lost, unrecognized, repressed or mute. The overall structure of

this first canto thus reveals a vision of the journey that the speaker will take. In canto I, Santí

observes that the first two stanzas represent the voice of the poet who wrote Residencia

collections, whereas the latter two stanzas represent the voice of the poet “rewriting his history”

so that he may leave the listless world of Residencia “como una red vacía” and enter the “mundo

como una torre enterrada” [“world like a buried tower”] at Macchu Picchu. (Pablo 127-128)

With the publication of Veinte poemas Neruda had become a poet who sought to unify his

current world with the world in his poetry. (An Introduction 280-281) He attempts to make the

same unison in “Alturas.” Though Santí offers a detailed explanation for why unifying these two

worlds is difficult for Neruda to accomplish, the obvious effort involved in “rewrite[ing] [his]

own past” should make this evident. The Residencia collection is often characterized as

rumination on a disintegrating world, and so lines like “battered stamens of the nuptial land;

steels transmuted / into silent acid” seem to recall those poems. (Translating 87)

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The first canto is a retrospective on Neruda’s past as well as a prologue for the poem, but

it is also deeply concerned with a certain kind of hunger. Imagery such as the “red vacía,” the

emptiness of the streets that Neruda travels through, the reference to “harina,” the “mundo como

una torre enterrada” all convey different senses of absence and hunger. The buried “mundo” is an

example again of the cognitive hunger, in which one hungers due to the awareness of an absence.

If this is the world the speaker wishes to join, the hunger is caused by what is not there. Santí

adds that the brackets around the second stanza add to a “confinement.” Yet he observes that the

third and fourth stanzas “by contrast,” replace the negativity of the first two stanzas with tangible

progress, such as the “meeting with a third person and with the speaker’s return to a point of

origin.” (Pablo 126-129)

Canto II

The critic John Felstiner, who analyzes and translates the poem in his work, Translating

Neruda, the Way to Macchu Picchu, describes the change in poetic tone in Neruda’s writing as

witnessed between the Residencia poems (1935) and Alturas de Macchu Picchu (1945). Felstiner

explains the “slow evolution” in the poet’s tone, writing, “Like Residencia en la tierra, the

beginning of “Alturas de Macchu Picchu” is pervaded by loneliness, thwarted passion,

disintegrative forces, and death. Then midway in the poem he climbs “through the lost jungle’s

tortured thicket / up to you, Macchu Picchu,” naming the place for the first time.” (Translating

12) Neruda begins Alturas by reflecting on the past, at first keeping the same poetic tone as

Residencia. Then, with rich tonal and visual language, the poet begins a new voice with a tone

conveying rejuvenated poetic vision and a reassessment of his environment. The importance of

“naming the place for the first time” is that by “naming” the poet is making a positive act of

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creating new images, territory and environment. “Naming,” in this sense, is constructing—

Neruda is essentially building an image of Macchu Picchu for an audience.

According to Santí, the second canto is “the actual dramatic starting point.” It alludes to

the language of Residencia en la tierra (“[descriptions] in terms of vision and hearing”) and to

some of its poems (“Unidad” and “Sistema sombrío”). (Pablo 128) Canto II begins the linear

structure of the poem. From this canto through canto V, the speaker details a movement through

multiple images of death, absence and disintegration—the same themes of Residencia. However,

each canto contains the same sense of awareness of or desire for something absent.

The ideas of “hunger” and “human,” the lack and its satisfaction, and their relationship

within the poem are sublimely represented in one line from canto X. Neruda writes, “Hunger,

coral of humankind, / hunger, hidden plant, root of the woodcutter, hunger, did your reef-edge

climb / to these high and ruinous towers?” (Translating 230-231). The passage is strikingly

similar to the concept of art creating a lack in its viewer and the viewer’s need to satisfy that lack

through art.

Throughout my analysis I find instances in which the language of the poem reveals an

idea of “lack” or “thirst” (in canto III, “y su quebranto aciago de cada día era / como una copa

negra que bebían temblando” [“and their dismal weariness each day was like / a black cup they

drank down trembling”] to underscore the metaphorical importance of “hunger” to the poem.

(Translating 208-209) This demonstrates the importance of hunger to the concept, as stated by

Kelly, of the aesthetic experience (in which a viewer makes demands on art and art makes its

own demands).7

7 Kelly quotes from Dewy on page 21: “Every need, say hunger for fresh air or food, is a lack that denotes at least a

temporary absence of adequate adjustment with surroundings. But it is also a demand, a reaching out into the

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In canto II the poet elaborates on this hunger for knowledge (cognitive hunger) and makes his

first reference to the question that troubles him in the midst of a meaningless environment.

Neruda writes,

I had no place to rest my hand,

none running like linked springwater

or firm as chunk of anthracite or crystal

to give back the warmth or cold of my outstretched hand.

What was man? Where in his simple talk

amid shops and whistles, in which of his metallic motions

lived the indestructible, the imperishable—life?

(Translating, 206-207)

Several aspects about this canto—the use of the words “manantial” (spring; springwater),

“descansar” (rest), “el calor o el frío” (warmth or cold), “mano extendida” (outstretched hand),

thematically signify a kind of hunger. Felstiner calls the “manantial encadenado” (linked

springwater) an instance of Neruda describing Incan “stepped conduits and irrigation runnels”

which are “controlling yet releasing a life-giving source.” (Translating 162-163) Aside from his

definition, the image of running springwater calls to mind a sense of thirst—that is, an awareness

of springwater, made all the more appealing because it is “corriente” (running). Further, the

grammatical structure of this stanza suggests that the lines between “No tuve sitio” (I had no

place) and “mi mano extendida” (my outstretched hand) be read so that the “linked springwater,”

the “anthracite” and the “crystal” are synonymous with the poet’s concept of a place “donde

descansar la mano” (to rest the hand). Springwater, anthracite coal and crystal, in other words,

are the objects capable of satisfying the poet’s need for rest. “Touch” seems not just to be the

literal moment of a hand touching something else, but the consummation represented in the

joining of need with the corresponding object capable of providing satisfaction. By using other

environment to make good the lack and to restore adjustment by building at least a temporary equilibrium...These biological commonplaces are something more than that: they reach to the roots of the aesthetic in experience.”

No tuve sitio donde descansar la mano

y que, corriente como agua de manantial encadenado,

o firme como grumo de antracita o cristal,

hubiera devuelto el calor o el frío de mi mano extendida.

Qué era hombre? En qué parte de su conversación abierta

entre los almacenes y los silbidos, en cuál de sus movimientos

metálicos

vivía lo indestructible, lo imperecedero, la vida?

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forms of affect (thirst, coldness, warmth) to describe a need for a place to “descansar la mano,”

Neruda is encouraging a kind of reading that identifies multiple and concurrent modes of desire.

But why does the poet need to rest his hand? The action of touch, especially touch with

one’s hand, is a central metaphoric vehicle in canto II. Touch of something else with the hand is

itself an expression of desire (repeated in the above stanza with the images of warm anthracite or

cool crystal). Accepting the idea that there already exists a need within the poet, a “lack” that the

poet has already recognized at the beginning of the poem, then it seems that the performance of

touching is a form of “recognizing” that a need. The third stanza of canto II demonstrates this

recognition and subsequent demand for satisfaction of that need. The third stanza returns to the

setting where the poet began the narrative—“las calles de invierno de una ciudad”—streets that

in the beginning were merely filmy paths for the wandering poet. Again, these streets represent

something missing. Neruda writes, “Cuántas veces...me quise detener o buscar la eterna veta

insondable / que antes toqué en la piedra o en el relámpago que el beso desprendía” (How many

times...have I wanted to stop and seek the timeless fathomless vein / I touched in a stone once or

in the lightning a kiss released). (Translating 204-205) Not only is Neruda apprehending his

hunger for a “la eterna veta insondable,” which may be interpreted to mean his access to a source

of knowledge, a stream like the “linked springwater,” but he represents this need with a

biological image—the “vein.” Vein, in this sense, also seems to be an interconnected network. It

seems that the poet not only seeks some “eternal” revelation of history and knowledge, but that

he seeks a biological equivalent for knowledge—a union with the blood of another body or

bodies, all connected to this network of veins. In addition to the images of “swelling breasts” and

a “ceaselessly tender” history—a “yellow history” that suggests the pollination cycle—in the

fourth stanza, the addition of bodily union introduces a sexual hunger to the central question,

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“What was man?” (Translating 204-205) Franco summarizes the place of this question in the

context of the poem writing, “The search for the ‘indestructible’ in man leads [the poet] only to

death.” (An Introduction 287) Canto III describes the death of various male figures, listing them

with a colon (“el ganadero: el hijo de los puertos, o el capitán oscuro del arado”). After showing

the deaths of other male figures, canto IV describes the death of the poet, thus revealing the

poet’s failure to satisfy his various hungers.

What is less clear in cantos III and IV is what these various male figures share. The first

three figures, “el ganadero” (“the cattle driver”), “el hijo de los puertos” (“the son of sea ports”),

and “el capitán oscuro del arado” (“the dark captain of the plow”) seem to participate in the

marketplace of the city (“agriculture and trade”), yet the fourth figure “o el roedor de las calles

espesas” (“those who gnaw at the cluttered streets”) and the poet do not have this relationship.

Perhaps what they share is an existence in the city—a city where “lives like maize were threshed

in the bottomless / granary of wasted deeds, of shabby / incidents...”—which, by its association

with the market, proves futile. The drover as “the son of seaports” and as “captain of the plow,”

at the time of Neruda’s writing in 1945, was increasingly displaced by a globalizing marketplace

as rural trade gave way to modernized industry and manufacturing. These are, perhaps, figural

representations of Neruda’s ethical Marxism condemning the deracination of traditional rural

trade and self-sufficiency. Overcome by an American world moving toward the city and away

from its pre-Columbian origins, the poet’s existential anxiety leads to an image of gloom in the

streets. Further, Neruda separates the drover from the latter two characters with a colon. The

aesthetic experience emerges again in these lines with the introduction of the uncanny: “el roedor

de las calles espesas.” The imposition of a human figure characterized as a rodent breaks down

the sense of orderly transition from the rural countryside to the city and, by virtue of Felstiner’s

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translation of el roedor to “those who gnaw,” repels the earlier aesthetic hungers (Translation

208-209). Neruda makes a critical transition with this line. Attributing the cause of death of the

drover and the other figures with the line, “men were beset by bread or by the knife”—a line in

which the use of the word “bread” is perhaps a metaphor for famine, Neruda strings along the

word roedor in the same list as captain and hijo to create an image of humans gnawing at the

streets. A narrative that began with a desire for, “lo indestructible, lo imperecedero, la vida,”

ends with a view of rejected and repressed humanity. Neruda’s aestheticization of the city leads

to a confrontation with the uncanny, a rejection of the earlier hungers. The scene of the city

prevents the consummation of the aesthetic experience defined by Dewy. Tellingly, the poet

situates his own death within the city in the lines, “then I went street after street and river after

river, / city after city and bed after bed, / and my brackish mask crossed through waste places, /

and in the last low hovels, no light, no fire, / no bread, no stone, no silence, alone, / I roamed

round dying of my own death.” (Translation 210-211) The poet, vanquished by his unfulfilled

hungers “light, fire, bread, stone, silence,” faces the immanence of death.

Cantos I – V in ““Alturas de Macchu Picchu”” describe the fate of those who apprehend

their own hungers but cannot recognize them in their own environment. The poet explains that

vital human nourishment cannot be found within the city walls. The effect of the industrializing

city, it seems, is the extermination of the aesthetic experience and, in canto V, the overpowering

“cold gust / that passed through loose gaps in the soul.” However, though he describes the places

where the aesthetic experience is not, the poet has yet to explain how these different hungers

may be satisfied: “all I found in the wound was a cold gust / that passed through loose gaps in the

soul.” (Translating 212-213) The poet’s journey has reached its nadir; the image of a wind

blowing through “los vagos intersticios del alma” gives the sense of complete spiritual and

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conscious absence as he attempts to heal the figure with the “iodine bandage,” and arrests the

poet’s downward movement. This is also an image of what in canto I the poet called “la gastada

primavera humana.” The quest for an understanding of the human soul is a cognitive hunger. The

poet hungers to understand what has happened to the “soul”—or spirit—of humankind in the

Residencia-like world of cantos II-V, yet he is denied that satisfaction in canto IV (“blocking

path and door so I would not touch / with my streaming hands their wound of emptiness”). In

canto V, the poet finally reaches the “alma.” Yet in canto V the poet only recognizes the

‘remains’ of a soul within a world like an “exhausted human spring.” It has “loose gaps” rather

than substance; it has been subjected to man’s violence in the industrialized world (represented

with the mining imagery in canto II of “drills,” “pulsing metal” and the “hostile trappings of the

wire”). Thus canto V only shows him the fate of the human soul in the world of the “gastada

primavera humana,” and cannot satisfy his cognitive hunger to know [emphasis added] where in

humankind “vivía lo indestructible, lo imperecedero, la vida? From the poet’s wandering, his

questions and his observations of the conditions of the human soul, I interpret cantos II-V to

represent the apprehension and recognition of the poets demand, which fall short of satisfying his

demand to know the original state of the human soul before its exhaustion in the world of “cada

día una muerte pequeña” (“each day a petty death”). Finally, canto IV reveals that the poet can

succumb to the same fate of a muerte pequeña with the line, “Rodé muriendo de mi propia

muerte” (“I roamed round dying of my own death”), clarifying that the poet’s hunger to locate

“la vida” is both a quest for self-knowledge and preservation.

The first stanza of section IV explains that the “poderosa muerte” invites the poet “many

times” through the “dissemination” of things like taste [“sabor”] and invisible salt (which also

suggests taste). It is through his sense of taste that the poet becomes aware of the death that

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invites him. And this taste contains both opposition (“half like sinking and half like height”) as

well as immensity (“huge structures of wind and glacier”), suggesting that it is not the same

death as the “petty fat-winged / death” the poet found in the city in section III. Felstiner points

out that the singularity of this “mighty death” is unlike the many deaths described in III

(Translating 164-167). Further, I find that the “petty” death was uniquely situated in the city and

its “suburban mud,” whereas this “mighty death” reigns over “wind and glacier.” Felstiner writes

“Now in “suburban mud” or “cluttered streets” (III) [the poet] looks for the dimension that

people lack, crying out to it ancho mar, oh muerte!, “broad sea, oh death!” (IV). (Translating

165) Felstiner also notes that this “mighty” death is unlike the “many deaths” of canto III,

associated with the city containing men who “die day after day” because it is singular.

(Translating 165) This singular death points to something which is outside of the city—in this

case Macchu Picchu. Felstiner provides an illuminating translation of the lines, but I think there

is one more step that he has not taken. Neruda’s line, “y lo que su invisible sabor diseminaba /

era como mitades de hundimientos y alturas / o vastas construcciones de viento y ventisquero,”

describes a “sabor” existing between the poet and “mightiest death.” Taste [“sabor”] is what

invites the poet to death because it appeals to his hunger. I think the possibility that something

actually connects Neruda to this lost past—a “sabor” that the past “disseminates”—is a

provocative notion that deserves further exploration.

Canto VI

Canto VI marks the beginning of Neruda’s ascent to Macchu Picchu. It is a constructive

event, and the despairing closing line of canto V is immediately replaced with the concrete image

of the “escala de la tierra” which the poet begins to climb. Franco writes, “with [canto VI] the

ascending movement of the section begins.” (An Introduction 287) The first obvious change

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from cantos I-V to canto VI is the movement from a place pervaded by various “depths”

(subterranean, depthless-ness, meager griefs) and inertia (from air to air). This canto contains the

first instance in which the poet introduces the concept of a specific origin of “man” and nature,

both of which remain in a preserved state. Neruda writes,

Then on the ladder of the earth I climbed

through the lost jungle’s tortured thicket

up to you, Macchu Picchu.

High city of laddered stones,

at last the dwelling of what earth

never covered in vestments of sleep.

In you like two lines parallel,

the cradles of lightning and man

rocked in a wind of thorns.

(Translating 214-215)

The introduction to this “high city” describes a place diametrical to the city of cantos I – V in

which the poet had wandered endlessly and without resolution. Importantly, this city is a

“dwelling” that holds the “cradle” of natural forces (lighting) and the birthplace of humankind.

The poet’s consistent use of the word “hombre” throughout Alturas is reflected again in the lines,

“En tí, como dos líneas paralelas, / la cuna del relámpago y del hombre / se mecían en un viento

de espinas.” Neruda aestheticizes Macchu Picchu as the “cradle” specifically for a male human

subject. It is a harsh yet nurturing terrain, a place where natural overgrowth “the lost jungle’s

tortured thicket” seems to have arrested the movement of “sleep” over the “dwellings” on earth.

Aesthetically, the site of Macchu Picchu is opposite of the city. The identification of the cradle of

man at Macchu Picchu begins to answer the hunger for the recurrent question in ““Alturas de

Macchu Picchu””, “What was man?”

Canto VI is also the first place in which the poet’s aestheticization of Macchu Picchu

begins to satisfy a hunger for accessing the lost stories of the city’s repressed human inhabitants.

Like the drover and the son of seaports in the city below Macchu Picchu, Neruda identifies

Entonces en la escala de la tierra he subido

entre la atroz maraña de las selvas perdidas

hasta ti, Macchu Picchu.

Alta ciudad de piedras escalares,

por fin morada del que lo terrestre

no escondió en las dormidas vestiduras.

En ti, como dos líneas paralelas,

la cuna del relámpago y del hombre

se mecían en un viento de espinas.

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different tradesman in canto VI who represent a vital part of his aesthetic recreation of the ruins.

Neruda writes,

I look at clothes and hands,

the trace of water in an echoing tub,

the wall brushed smooth by the touch of a face

that looked with my eyes at the lights of earth,

that oiled with my hands the vanished

beams: because everything, clothing, skin, jars,

words, wine, bread,

is gone, fallen to earth.

(Translating 214-215)

Just as it had occurred earlier in the work, “touching” reveals a history of a ‘lost’ people. The act

of touching is performed in response to his apprehension of a certain hunger compelling him to

act on the object. At the site of Macchu Picchu, the object touched—the wall—responds to the

poet’s touch by allowing him to recognize the sensation of a human face. This is the face of the

person who constructed the wall. The moment of satisfying a hunger comes with the sensation of

that other human presence. Yet, applying Michael Kelly’s argument, the poet’s relationship with

the object does not end merely at the satisfaction of the viewer, but the object itself places certain

aesthetic demands on the viewer as well.8 The progression of this stanza illustrates the

development of the poet’s aesthetic and social-political experience. Having witnessed the face of

the builder, the poet now reconstructs the life of the builder through his or her trade. The lines,

“que miró con mis ojos las lámparas terrestres, / que aceitó con mis manos las desaparecidas /

maderas: porque todo, ropaje, piel, vasijas, / palabras, vino, panes, / se fue, cayó a la tierra” plot

the trajectory of the poet’s developing social-political relationship with the early inhabitants of

8 Kelly writes on page 22: “Art as enactment means that hunger is given affective and cognitive artistic form that

enacts the moral-political demand that the hunger be apprehended and recognized publically (objectively) so it is not merely an internal (subjective) affect or idea. In turn, the artistic form demands, but also helps to engender, a moral-political commitment to satisfy the hunger once (or as) we apprehend and recognize it, thereby avoiding the criticism, in principle, that art is merely the aestheticization of hunger.”

Miro las vestiduras y las manos,

el vestigio del agua en la oquedad sonora,

la pared suavizada por el tacto de un rostro

que miró con mis ojos las lámparas terrestres,

que aceitó con mis manos las desaparecidas

maderas: porque todo, ropaje, piel, vasijas,

palabras, vino, panes,

se fue, cayó a la tierra.

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the city. Not only has the poet recognized a face and—perhaps—satisfied his desire to know

“what man was” by seeing him at work, but he now identifies with the builder. This poet’s

identification with the subject captured in the aestheticized wall essentially closes the space

between the speaker and the addressed object. This is the beginning of a social-political

experience for the poet, because the act of passively satisfying one’s own hunger to know who

made the wall developed into an active interaction with the subject of the artwork. The poet

literally “touches” the wall, thereby extending his perception not only to the builder of the wall

but to the reconstruction of the human site at Macchu Picchu that includes its ephemera

(“clothing, skin, jars, / words, wine, bread...”).

Arguably the most striking passage in ““Alturas de Macchu Picchu”” is in canto x, when the

poet addresses hunger directly. Neruda writes,

Hunger, coral of humankind

hunger, hidden plant, root of the woodcutter,

hunger, did your reef-edge climb

to these high and ruinous towers?

(Translating 230-231)

Felstiner reads canto x as a series of “questions and imperatives” that “either ask or

demand to know something the city has not revealed.” (Translating 184) For Felstiner, Neruda’s

invocation of “hunger” three times seems to “be calling out an oracle of the city.” (Translating

184) Though I see the value of Felstiner’s observation, in my reading of “hunger,” I understand

Neruda to be addressing some eternal guide, which is also part of humankind. The pairing of

“hambre” (“hunger”) and “hombre” (“humankind”) achieves a remarkable feat for Neruda. It is

hunger which has brought—literally guided—Neruda to this place, Macchu Picchu, in search of

a way to know his self and the human soul. The use of the word “coral,” a universal symbol for

biodiversity and symbiotic niche habitation, to modify the word hunger adds greater power to the

Hambre, coral de hombre

hambre, planta secreta, raíz de los leñadores,

hambre, subió tu raa de arrecife

hasta estas altas torres desprendidas?

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concept. From the comparison of coral to hunger, hunger to humankind, Neruda suggests that it

is hambre which sustains human life—just as it was a cognitive hambre for the meaning of

mankind, an awareness of a lack and a desire to fill that lack, which brought him to Macchu

Picchu. The “hidden plant” recalls the buried stories and languages Neruda encountered earlier.

The root of the woodcutter, again, is a constructive, positive image of an object which sustains

both action and identity (“woodcutter”).

Hunger, in other words, is visible not just in the words of the poem but in its themes (a

search to fill an “empty wound,” to find “man”), its images (parched lips and dry, windy places),

and in the transition of its tone from a listless searching (which appears to end in the poet’s

death) to an energized awakening and discovery. It is as if hambre, the metaphoric guide of

“hombre,” has opened the ‘castle gate’ previously blocking entrance into the “High city of

laddered stones.” The trajectory of the poem plots Neruda’s poetic journey to recover the lost

voices and languages of the repressed and, through satisfying his cognitive hunger for the

meaning of “mankind,” to come into his own as a poet.

***

This chapter merely proposes the idea for a much larger examination of how Neruda

figures the human body into his work as an interpretive guide at Macchu Picchu. The reality is

that this poem’s “complex web of meanings and associations” requires greater sustained focus on

how Neruda figures ideas such as touch and thirst within his greater project of recovering

narratives of the “lost voices” of Macchu Picchu. I introduced this paper with Benjamin’s quote

because his words convey a sense of the corporeality of ruins. Much as Benjamin describes the

ruins “merged into the setting,” Neruda begins his journey of recovery by physically plunging

into the subsurface in what Rangel calls an “act of knowledge...represented as a sexual act,

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where the sword and the hand are the means of penetrating the earth in a sensual, violent way.

The speaker manifests his pursuit for the “eternal,” the cultural and natural roots of Latin

America, in his desire to reach the core of things.” Santí’s argument is that Neruda’s rhetoric of

prophecy shows a “negative knowledge” in the ruins and the inaccessibility of knowledge from

the past. (Pablo 170) Though Neruda can only locate the traces of “frozen syllables” in the

buried history through apostrophe to the Wilkamayu River, his descent into the soil and, in canto

XII, his request “Fasten your bodies to me like magnets” conveys his access to knowledge of the

past through his body, not just his mind.

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Conclusion

Julio Cortázar remains a popularly read poet both within college and for his inventive

stories. Three years ago I was in a basement at a group reading when a friend walked up to the

microphone and announced that she would be reading a story inspired by Cortázar’s “Axolotl.”

The story was about a woman who after living in her house for so long became it. “Now I am the

house,” she said.

One of the values of Cortázar to modern literary criticism is his ability to continue play

with contemporary understandings of perception and relations between people and their

environments. The stories I examined in this chapter I think at their core are concerned with how

humans can become the places they inhabit. His character Roberto Michel is profoundly affected

by changes in light, magnification, the hiding effects of cars, the way trees in the city interact

with light. In one of the fascinating lines of “Blow-Up,” he says, “I was able to sit quietly on the

railing overlooking the river watching the red and black motorboats passing below without it

occurring to me to think photographically of the scenes, nothing more than letting myself go in

the letting go of objects, running immobile in the stream of time. And then the wind was not

blowing. His environment, Paris in autumn, is so alive with movement that he appears to—at

least momentarily—surrender both his senses and his body to the environment around him. The

concern is less with how to represent than with how to be affected by the surroundings,

something which he appears to lose sight of when he begins to focus on the uncommon couple at

a wall nearby. Just as then, the concern with the body’s relationship to and interaction with the

city remains a very important question.

The current post-mortem analysis of Neruda’s body, taking place after it was exhumed

earlier this year to re-determine the cause of his death, belongs to a long tradition in Latin

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America of continued attention to the bodies of the powerful and deceased. As Gabriel Garcia

Marquez illustrated in his novel Autumn of the Patriarch, the body of the charismatic leaders,

revolutionaries, poets, and matriarchs in Latin America, are preserved--if not always literally—

figuratively in the imagination. Neruda, like Salvador Allende in 2011, is being examined

currently to determine if he was poisoned by members of Augusto Pinochet’s newly founded

regime shortly before friends of Neruda planned to fly him to asylum in Mexico. To this day,

Neruda remains a very powerful political figure. The possibility that he might have been

preemptively silenced by the Chilean regime is credit to the power of Neruda’s poetry. It also

represents his staying power in the world of literary figures and popular poets. Writing for the

New Yorker, John Lee Anderson notes the symbolic significance within Neruda’s

exhumation: “In the end, even if Neruda died of cancer, as was said at the time, his exhumation

is an opportunity to reinforce the message to authoritarians everywhere that a poet’s words will

always outlast theirs, and the blind praise of their powerful friend.” (Anderson, “Neruda,

Pinochet, and the Iron Lady.”)

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