The Language of Modernismo

Seeing the preceding generation's interest in the past as a conservative tendency, it is not surprising that the modernistas would turn away from those models, since their social values were not aligned with those of the previous controlling classes. Many critics of the period saw the inclination toward Europe as a betrayal of an indigenous line of evolution, a series of copying, rather than of original inventions. For example, Paul Groussac, in his review of Los raros by Rubén Darío, criticized the reverence for French writers. He saw such admiration as another step in a long line of cultural dependency:

¿Qué podría valer su brusca inoculación a la literatura española que no ha sufrido las diez evoluciones anteriores a la francesa, y vive todavía poco menos que de imitaciones y reflejos, ya propios, ya extraños? . . . El arte americano será original—o no será.^[66]

(What value could there be in its brusque injection into Spanish literature, which has not [yet] suffered the ten evolutions previous to the French one, and still lives on little more than imitations and reflections, sometimes its own, sometimes foreign? . . . American art will be original—or it won't exist at all.)

In modernista theory and practice, newly revived poetic theories are tempered by local realities. There are not two clear stages of modernismo, one being an idealistic, escapist stage, and the other a sudden awareness of the potentialities of the American idiom. For the modernistas, the preoccupation with formal beauty involves a notion of the projection of these ideal forms onto the structure of society by means of language.

Attention to innovative form is the one characteristic of modernismo that is clearly distinguishable in its main practitioners. Whether based on symbolist precepts of synesthetic correspondence or on a desire for experimental surprise and innovation, formal dexterity constitutes an indispensable characteristic of modernismo .

José Lezama Lima speaks of the importance of formal definition in any epoch:

Y la adquisición de una forma o de un reino, está situada dentro del absoluto de la libertad. Sólo se relatan los sucesos de los reyes, se dice en la Biblia, es decir, los que han alcanzado una forma, la unidad, el reino. La forma alcanzada es el símbolo de la permanencia de la ciudad. Su soporte, su esclarecimiento, su compostura.^[67]

(And the acquisition of a form or of a kingdom is situated inside the absolute of liberty. Only the events of kings are related, the Bible says; that is, those who have achieved a form, a unity, the kingdom. Form achieved is the symbol of the permanence of the city. Its base, its merit, its dignity.)

Attention to form, above all, innovative form, and the importance assigned to the nature of poetic language are the two concerns that occupy central place in modernista poetics.^[68] These concerns overshadow thematic changes, and poetry becomes its own reason for existence. Like other aspects of the movement, the changes in poetic theory arise from an expanded percep-

tion of contemporary issues and a revival of former values. modernismo differs most strikingly from its literary predecesors in its view of language itself. A constant in the poetics outlined by its exponents is the insistence on the specific nature of poetic language as opposed to language of everyday use. The reading public is perceived as humanity in general, as a brotherhood, and the poet as its redemptive voice.

The romantics had stressed the primacy of imagination in poetry, and other artists seized on this concept of the power of sensory freedom as a way to knowledge. Rimbaud and Lautréamont are prime examples. Rimbaud's figure of poet—seer is based on conscious dislocation of sensory perception: "[L]e poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tousles sens" ("The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense and methodical disordering of all the senses"). Gustave Moreau, whose symbolist paintings offers a rich fund of iconography for modernista poets (especially for Julián del Casal),^[69] perhaps as powerful an influence as that of the symbolists, adhered to the rule of imagination rather than reason. The improbable figures and visions presented by the painters of the latter half of the nineteeth century are linked to some of the same sources that poets drew from, and have their origins in much of romantic art. The Swedenborgian vision that inspired William Blake in the latter half of the eighteenth century also influenced many others.

In contrast to the civic, outwardly directed messages found in Spanish and Spanish American romanticism, modernismo, in its rediscovery of the romantics and the discovery of the symbolists, focused on human interiority, which is seen to be physiologically and spiritually connected to an outer reality. In discussing the poets of modernismo Amado Nervo emphasizes the special nature of the poet and the role of introspection in learning to see the interrelationship of outward things:

Pero los sentidos de la especie, singularmente los sentidos del poeta, que es el ser representativo, por excelencia, de la humanidad, se han ido afinando y hemos empezado a ver "hacia dentro." Hemos comprendido que las montañas, el mar, los astros no son más que grandes aglomeraciones de materia o grandes

equilibrios de fuerza. . . . Que, por último, todas las cosas tienen una fisonomía especial, un alma, una vida poderosísima; que es necesario, en el sistema del espíritu, pegar el oído al vasto pecho de la tierra para escuchar los cien mil latidos de sus cien mil corazones; y que seguir cantando al mar, a la montaña, al cielo, así, en bruto, sin contemplar sus tenues e infinitas estructuras maravillosas, sus variadísimas modalidades, la innumeridad de sus matices y el milagroso enredo de sus afinidades secretas, es ofender al cielo, al mar y a la montaña.^[70]

(But the species' senses, singularly the poet's senses—who is the representative being, par excellence, of humanity—have been refined and we have begun to look "within." We have come to understand that the mountains, the sea, the stars are nothing more than great agglomerations of material or great equilibriums of force. . . . That, ultimately, all things have a special physiognomy, a soul, a very powerful life; that it is necessary, in the system of the spirit, to place one's ear to the vast breast of the earth to listen to the hundred thousand heartbeats of its hundred thousand hearts; and that to continue singing to the sea, to the mountain, to the sky in that way, in a rough manner, without contemplating their tenuous and infinite marvelous structures, their extremely varied modes of being, their innumerable shades and the miraculous intertwining of their secret affinities, is to offend the sky, the sea and the mountain.)

Poetry is to be estranged from all other forms of writing, by virtue of not being used as a measure of exchange. The poet, by using as his material the world's form of exchange, enters into a problematic and paradoxical relationship to it. The poet deals with worldly materials but seeks to transcend them. On a certain level, this refusal to use words for their practical exchange value, or communicative usage, deprives the poet of an active participatory function in external reality.

Edgar Allan Poe is often quoted by the modernista poets in support of their poetic ideals. He stresses the nonreferential aspects of language, comparing poetry to music rather than to other denotative systems:

It is in Music, perhaps, that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles—the

creation of supernal beauty. . . . I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the intellect or with the Conscience it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth.^[71]

Not only was Poe's poetry influential, but his theories of poetry were in wide circulation. Defined by Poe, poetry owes no acknowledgment to the outside world for its aims; as in romantic definitions, the role of the poet is bestowed by carpicious destiny. Unlike some romantic ideals, however, for Poe the poet's responsibility does not extend outward toward a greater public.^[72] By its self-reflexive nature, it presumes no larger sphere of influence than its own self-contained world.

Baudelaire, whose work almost all the modernistas adapted and admired, emphasized the higher powers that are an attribute of the poet:

Il y a dans le mot, dans le verbe, quelque chose de sacré qui nous défend d'en faire un jeu de hasard. Manier savamment une langue, c'est pratiquer une espèce de sorcellerie évocatoire.^[73]

(In the word, in the Word, there is something sacred that prevents making it into a game of chance. To handle a language wisely is to practice a type of evocative sorcery.)

Poetry is a sacred rite. Deriving from an inner source, its practice and message are not to be judged by utilitarian standards. The theory of pure poetry, the idea of transforming external signs or objects into a new pattern to conform with a wholly new internal reality, has Mallarmé as its foremost exponent:

Narer, enseigner, même décrire, cela va et encore qu'à chacun suffirait peut-être pour échanger la pensée humaine, de prendre ou de mettre dans la main d'autrui en silence une pièce de monnaie, l'emploie élémentaire du discours dessert l'universel reportage dont, la littérature exceptée, participe tout entre les genres d'écrits contemporains. . . . Au contraire d'une fonction de numéraire facile et représentatif, comme le traite d'abord la foule, le dire, avant tout, rêve et chant, retrouve chez le Poète, par nécessité constitutive d'un art consacré aux fictions, sa virtualite.^[74]

(To narrate, point out, even to describe is fine, and for exchanging human thought, perhaps it would be sufficient for each one to take or put a coin silently in the hand of another. The elemental use of discourse communicates the universal reportage in which all genres of contemporary writings, with the exception of literature, participate. . . . In contrast with an easy and representative numeric structure, as the masses treat it in the first place, speech, above all dream and song, recovers in the poet its virtuality, by the necessity of an art dedicated to fictions.)

For Darío the word is not a means of expressing set ideals but is enmeshed in an underlying world consciousness, like music, which is nonreferential and only acquires referential or signifying power by an externally imposed scheme of values. Poetry is linked to problems of life and death: "El don de arte es un don superior que permite entrar en lo desconocido de antes yen lo ignorado de después, en el ambiente de ensueño o de la meditación"^[75] ("The gift of art is a superior gift that allows entrance into what is unknown previously and afterward, into the atmosphere of dream or meditation"). The art of poetry, of evocation, is a gift, a superior gift bestowed by grace, not by a set of circumstances or an application to cultivation of forms:

En el principio está la palabra como única representación. No simplemente como signo, puesto que no hay antes nada que representar. En el principio está la palabra como manifestación de la unidad infinita, pero ya conteniéndola. Et verbum erat Deus .

La palabra no es en sí más que un signo, o una combinación de signos; mas la contiene todo por su virtud demiúrgica.^[76]

(In the beginning is the word as sole representation. Not simply as a sign, since there is nothing beforehand to represent. In the beginning is the word as manifestation of infinite unity, yet already containing it. El verbum erat Deus .

The word in itself is nothing more than a sign, or a combination of signs; yet it contains everything due to its demiurgic virtue.)

Darío's unending search for the perfect form to express the enigmatic fusion of spirit and matter often contrasts with the practices of other modernistas . Poets such as Lugones and Her-

rera y Reissig strenuously point to the failing mechanics of their works and lead the reader to question the steadfastness of its spiritual cornerstones. They break with a world view profoundly influenced by romanticism and its artistic legacy. While Darío laments the discordant elements that disturb the harmonic universe, other poets seize upon them and generate a new poetics, a process that parallels early twentieth-century music's fascination with dissonance and atonality.

Lugones too points out the superior, sacred nature of language and its powers of symbolic expression. But it is its use-value that determines its sacred or profane powers, not its inherent qualities: "Sagrada prenda es la lengua. . . . Pero es al mismo tiempo infame instrumento que degüella y envenena, cuando el alma que la mueve ha descendido hasta la rabia contra el ideal"^[77] ("Language is a sacred gift. . . . But it is at the same time a vile instrument that beheads and poisons, when the spirit that moves it has descended into rage against the ideal"). For Lugones, language being an instrument, its use can be cultivated. A richly expressive language can be acquired not only by natural gifts but by incessant study. Verbal equivalents for all emotions may be found with proper application:

Hay que poseer, ante todo, una lengua rica, superlativamente rica, hasta el extremo de que ninguna emoción se quede sin su expresion real y verdadera. Una lengua rica, y sobre todo, una lengua propia. (PL [1897] in "Negro y oro")

(One must possess, above all, a rich language, superlatively rich, to such an extreme that no emotion remains without its real and true expression. A rich language, and above all, one's own language.)

This emphasis on the necessary richness of poetic language, the belief in the possibility of extracting the exact expression to express any given emotion, best characterizes the nature of Lugones' poetry. It is also the quality in this verse that has attracted the attention of his most fervent admirers and critics. By directing attention to language as a technical instrument, Lugones initiates a dissonant trend in modern Spanish American poetry.