Abstract
This article begins by exploring the relationship of the production and dissolution of meaning in lyric and the analogous production and dissolution of law in the moment of violence, typically the coup [el golpe] or, as Yeats put it in the poem “Leda and the Swan,” “the sudden blow” that inaugurates history’s regimes. Yeats’s “Leda,” published in 1923, is notoriously a poem that addresses the violence out of which a civilization —that of the modern West— traces its origins or foundations. This essay focuses, by way of contrast, on the Peruvian poet César Vallejo’s contemporaneous poem “Vusco volvvver de golpe el golpe,” the ninth lyric in Vallejo’s highly experimental volume Trilce of 1922. The poem is profoundly enigmatic in every regard, but seems to operate as a meditation on the intersection of sexual and political violence and to engage in a continuous proliferation and dissolution of meaning through strategies of multiplication of meaning and of neologism, distortion and pun. The poem thus seems to challenge any limit on reading (the sort of “tact” of knowing where to stop that William Empson famously counselled at the end of Seven Types of Ambiguity) and to constitute a kind of counter-violence to the violence of the law that seeks to put a limit or determination on interpretation. Potentially, the article opens onto what Frantz Fanon once referred to as “social psychosis” and opens a further potential discussion of psychosis as a model for generative poetic meaning. In contrast with “Leda and the Swan,” Trilce IX does not sublimate the violence of the sexual or of the political into the figure of a power/knowledge relation that founds a new law or a new state, but diffuses the violence into a state of exhaustion that supposes a reiteration rather than a reproduction of foundation. Nonetheless, both poems in their similarities as in their differences, raise the question of the profound intimacy of poetry to violence and to the law alike and offers the sketch of a counter-principle to the common conception of the literary work as an institutional practice within a nationalist or anti-colonial context.
In memoriam, Michael Smith (1942–2014)
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Notes
- 1.
W.B. Yeats, “Leda and the Swan,” in The Tower. 1928, ed. Peter Allt and Russell K. Allspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 441. The poem was first printed in The Dial, June 1924, with a different first line; the version with the present opening line was first printed in To-morrow, Dublin, August 1924. For Yeats’s note on the history of the poem’s composition, see A. Norman Jeffares, A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), 295–96. See also Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 277–300; and Jacques Derrida, “Déclarations d’indépendance,” in Otobiographies: l’enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1984), 20–21.
- 2.
On Yeats’s intense meditations on the relation between poetic utterance and foundational violence, see my essay “The Poetics of Decision: Yeats, Benjamin and Schmitt,” in Études Anglaises 68, no. 4 (October–December 2015): 468–82. A couple of paragraphs from that essay have been adapted here. Michael Wood’s Yeats and Violence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), is an incomparable discussion of Yeats’s engagement with political violence that focuses on the poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” also published in The Tower; Edward Said, “Yeats and Decolonization,” in Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, ed. Seamus Deane (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 69–75, discusses Yeats’s commonalities with other third-world poets including Césaire, Neruda and Darwish. The current essay will hopefully become the second chapter of a book I am developing on poetry and violence, the first of which will discuss Yeats’s work more fully.
- 3.
Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 74.
- 4.
Ibid., 75.
- 5.
Ibid., 80.
- 6.
Ibid., 79, 74.
- 7.
I am using here the parallel text edition of Trilce edited and translated by Michael Smith and Valentino Gianuzzi (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2005). 1922 is, of course, already known as the annus mirabilis of European modernism, seeing the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and James Joyce’s Ulysses, among others. See Michael North, 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
- 8.
For an overview of these social realignments and conflicts, and of Peru’s growing subordination to North American capital, see Jorge Lora Cam, Los orígenes coloniales de la violencia política en el Peru (Puebla, MX: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2000), 97–99. On Vallejo’s use of the term “semicolonial,” see Adam Sharman , “Vallejo, Semicolonialism, and Poetemporality.” Chapter 5 of his Tradition and Modernity in Spanish American Literature: From Darío to Carpentier (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 90.
- 9.
Cam, Los orígenes coloniales, 98. “La diferenciación étnica y clasista, y la heterogeneidad popular, solo pueden ser unificadas por la violencia, el paternalismo y el racismo, bajo sus expresiones más definidas y especialmente extensas: el Ejército y la Iglesia,” Ibid., 98.
- 10.
On the suspension of “las garantías constitucionales” under Leguía, see Cam, Los orígenes coloniales, 99. Leguía was himself deposed by a further coup in 1930, eight years after Vallejo had left Peru for Paris.
- 11.
For an account of Vallejo’s arrest, incarceration and subsequent departure from Peru after his “provisional release,” perhaps to escape charges that remained in force till 1926, see Jean Franco , César Vallejo: The Dialectics of Poetry and Silence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 22–24.
- 12.
César Vallejo, Los Heraldos Negros (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1961), 9.
- 13.
Ibid., 26.
- 14.
Cited in Terry Castle, “Stockhausen, Karlheinz: The unsettling question of the Sublime,” New York Magazine (August 27, 2011), http://nymag.com/news/9–11/10th-anniversary/karlheinz-stockhausen/.
- 15.
Michelle Clayton, Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), 95. I am, as surely any reader of Vallejo now must be, deeply indebted to Clayton’s powerful and persuasive readings of Trilce and the poet’s whole oeuvre.
- 16.
Franco, Vallejo, 124: “In Spanish b and v are pronounced in almost identical fashion so that ‘Vusco’ looks like a spelling error for ‘busco’.”
- 17.
Michel Smith’s largely excellent translation of the poem betrays that temptation: “everything assures truth.”
- 18.
The puns are noted by Michael Smith in the notes to his translation of Trilce, 220. “In the beginning was the pun” is Samuel Beckett ’s conceit. See Murphy, in Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition, vol. I: Novels, ed. Paul Auster (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 42.
- 19.
See the Appendix to Michelle Clayton, Poetry in Pieces, 263, where she reproduces Clayton Eshleman’s translations from The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo: A Bilingual Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
- 20.
Smith’s “commit” seems to have the opposite sense, though he alliterates it with “crags,” and Eshleman’s “transasfixiate” is hard to fathom, though it picks up the breathiness of halaga that he carries forward into “asperities” for fragosidades.
- 21.
The phrase, peculiarly apt to Trilce, is Saul Yurkievich’s . See his “En torno de Trilce,” in César Vallejo, ed. Julio Ortega (Madrid: Taurus, 1974), 258.
- 22.
The terms are, of course, those of Immanuel Kant’s 1790 Critique of Judgment .
- 23.
See William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1966), 244–47.
- 24.
See Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” trans. Anthony Uhlmann, SubStance 24, no. 3 (1995): 3–28, pages 3–4 especially. My thanks to Fred Moten for directing my attention to this essay, which is, as always, in conversation with his own work.
- 25.
On the paradoxical ways in which the “end of the poem” both defines and undoes the poem, see Giorgio Agamben, “The End of the Poem,” in The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics , trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 109–15.
- 26.
See Yurkievich on Trilce XXV “En Torno de Trilce,” 258: “No hay desarrollo lógico, ninguna concatenación episódica. Los objetivos se conjugan libremente: las palabras están enhebradas por vínculos internos.”
- 27.
For critiques of that model of poetic writing/reading, see John Wilkinson , “Tenter Ground,” in The Lyric Touch: Essays on the Poetics of Excess (Cambridge: Salt Books, 2007), especially pp. 23–25; David Lloyd, “Limits of a Language of Desire,” Poetics Journal 5 (May 1985): 159–67, and “Valéry on Value: The Political Economy of Poetics,” Representations 7 (Summer 1984): 116–32, which addresses the “labor theory of value” on which that model depends.
- 28.
See Clayton, Poetry in Pieces, 134–50, for a discussion of the “indigenist” reading of Vallejo, especially with reference to José Carlos Mariátegui ; and Sharman, Tradition and Modernity, Chapter 5, for a discussion both of the limits of Vallejo’s modernist appropriation of indigenous materials and of what Sharman refers to as “anthropological” arguments for the traces of indigenous modes of temporality in Trilce. The tenor of my own argument, however, runs against Sharman’s claim that the temporality of Trilce is consubstantial with “the time of modern poetry” in general, 103–4.
- 29.
William Rowe, “Prólogo” and “Trauma y memoria: los nombres, el tiempo y los tropezadores,” in Ensayos Vallejianos (Berkeley and Lima: Latinoamericano Editores, 2006), 9 and 49 respectively (my translations).
- 30.
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception . 2003, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 62.
- 31.
Ibid., 57.
- 32.
On Yeats’s unusual career as a nationalist poet who was also a—strictly-speaking—postcolonial poet, see David Lloyd, “Nationalism and Postcolonialism,” in W.B. Yeats in Context, eds. David Holdeman and Ben Levitas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 179–92.
- 33.
See Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides),” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XII, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press / Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1958), 67.
- 34.
See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, foreword by Homi Bhabha, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Books, 1986), 11.
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Lloyd, D. (2017). On Poetic Violence: W.B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” and César Vallejo’s “Vusco volvvver de golpe el golpe”. In: Onega, S., del Río, C., Escudero-Alías, M. (eds) Traumatic Memory and the Ethical, Political and Transhistorical Functions of Literature. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55278-1_3
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