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Mapping Violeta Parra’s Cultural Landscapes pp 57–71Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

I Don’t Play the Guitar for Applause: Turning the World Upside Down

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Abstract

Violeta Parra’s music is well known as an alternative form of critical activism. The existing literature, however, has focused mainly on its textual content and not necessarily on how some of this discursive criticism might be conveyed within her production as a whole. Consequently, this entry explores whether it is possible to find other elements of protest beyond the words being sung. Parra’s political ideology is examined as a means to assess the relationship between songs, visual art, and poetry. Using a musical organization that relies on a critical device known as the world turned upside down, this essay contends that Parra translates criticism poetically into the song “El pueblo” [The people].

The original version of this chapter was revised. An erratum to this chapter can be found at DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-69302-6_9.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Saunders (2000) describes that the CIA penetrated many cultural organizations around the world using philanthropic institutions and foundations, publishing and sponsoring abstract art to counteract art with social content. It also subsidized publications that promoted US policies, p. 260.

  2. 2.

    Neruda’s poem conveys a Communist-inspired image of a people’s will to fight. This imagery resembles the Muralist works of Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera; there is a striking similarity with Rivera’s Desfile del 1 de mayo en Moscú (1956). Chilean Socialism led Salvador Allende to power; in this sense, as stipulated by Pinedo (2000), the notion of “el pueblo” was a fundamental concept that sought to replace the individual power of the bourgeoisie with the collective power of the people, p. 138.

  3. 3.

    All translations from Spanish to English are my own unless otherwise indicated.

  4. 4.

    Wilson (1973) states that the WTUD motif has roots that go back to Virgil’s poetics of adynata or the impossibilia, p. 103. Vroom (2010) indicates that early examples of the use of this poetic tool come from Northern Europe, showing how the WTUD motif was used as a visual and textual device to portray the revolt against Spanish rule in the city of Antwerp in the sixteenth century, p. 102. Furthermore, Kunzle (1977) remarks that some suggest that Pieter Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs (1569) interpreted as simple allegories of a “universal human folly” of peasant imagery should be treated as a social criticism of the upper classes, monopoly capitalism, and the worldly corruption suffered by the lower classes, p. 202.

  5. 5.

    In Rabelais and His World (1984), Bakhtin declares: “All the symbols of the carnival idiom are filled with this pathos of change and renewal […] We find here a characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of the ‘inside out’ (à l’envers), of the ‘turnabout,’ of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings”, p. 11.

  6. 6.

    Johnson (1993) declares that there has been a systematic use of subversive discourse that has sought to “expose the mythological foundations upon which Spanish American culture had supposedly been validated … by inverting or reversing a number of traditional literary strategies, which would, in turn, cast doubt upon the prevailing authority and the ideology it espoused”, p. 5. Early examples come from Mateo Rosas de Oquendo’s Sátira (1598), which inverts misrepresentation of sixteenth-century Lima society by criticizing the corruption and human behavior in the Spanish Viceroyalty and by targeting Pedro de Oña’s Arauco domado, p. 47.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sussex, Brighton, East Sussex, UK

    Alejandro Escobar Mundaca

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  1. Alejandro Escobar Mundaca
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  1. Harlaxton College, Harlaxton, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom

    Patricia Vilches

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Escobar Mundaca, A. (2018). I Don’t Play the Guitar for Applause: Turning the World Upside Down. In: Vilches, P. (eds) Mapping Violeta Parra’s Cultural Landscapes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69302-6_5

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