Dematerialization and the Fixed Scene

The compressed energy and metaphoric fury of Herrera y Reissig's poetry make it one of later modernismo 's most striking productions. Allen Phillips notes the suppression of the rules of logic in Herrera y Reissig's surprising metaphors,^[34] as in the poem "Alba triste" (PC, 317): "Un estremecimiento de Sibilas/ epilepsiaba a ratos la ventana" ("A shuddering of Sibyls epilepsed the window at intervals"). At the same time that Phillips observes the almost constant procedure of personification in Herrera y Reissig's poetry, he stresses that the suppression of logic dematerializes the natural world: "En esta desrealización quita materialidad alas cosas; . . . Herrera y Reissig nos invita a contemplar una realidad a veces en el proceso de transformarse, que se esfuma líricamente"^[35] ("In this disrealization, he robs things of their material nature; . . . Herrera y Reissig invites us to contemplate a reality, sometimes in the process of being transformed, which fades away lyrically"). In Herrera y Reissig's verse, inert or static, fixed scenes serve as backdrop while the theater occurs on the level of language. As light is reflected and refracted in the visual images, so the linguistic elements reflect back upon themselves, as in "La torre de las Esfinges":

  Las cosas se hacen facsímiles
de mis alucinaciones
y son como asociaciones
simbólicas de facsímiles . . .
               (PC,  137)

(Things become facsimiles
of my hallucinations
and they are like symbolic
associations of facsimiles . . .)

Gustave Moreau, the favored painter of the decadents and of Spanish American modernistas (especially Julián del Casal), is, according to Mario Praz, the painter of inertia's beauty. In contrast to romanticism's furious mixture of voluptousness, blood, action, and eroticism, Moreau paints the same scenes from a different stance.^[36] On adopting the iconography favored by

Moreau and other fin de siglo painters, many modernistas add disquieting or disrupting movements to these stilled, fixed scenes, which turn cultural stereotypes around. The figural use of conventionalized scenes, such as the ornately decorated interior space, reorients the reader to new paths of perception. The femmes fatales so often centered in these scenes (Eve, Salomé, Helen of Troy) laugh back at the viewer. A seemingly arbitrary rearrangement of these clichés questions their stability and thus subverts the allegorical meaning of these scenes. Julián del Casal's Mi museo ideal, eleven poems based on a series of paintings by Moreau, offers a classic example of the stilled space filled up with luxury goods. Here Casal invites the reader—spectator to become a conspirator in the game of looking. In his ideal museum, the excess of cultural bric-a-brac and stereotypical images is striking. Casal introduces conspiratorial notes in these poems that draw into question their "ideal" aspects. His repainting of the scenes, whose content is drawn from legend and mythology, offers an element unavailable to the viewer of the Moreau canvases. In eight of the poem/paintings, Casal catches the eye of the paintings' subjects in the last tercet, and three are sealed off with an upraised hand, extending the viewer's gaze in an outward swing, flinging out the victory. This swing is an indifferent one, however, and leads the eye outside the painting to another vantage point, perhaps a distanced critical stance. Just as in Casal's "Neurosis," where the "billetes en el cofre" ("bills in the coffer") break the spell of the white enclosure and remind us of the marketplace, so here we find Casal's poetic eye straying away from Moreau's fixed scenes. Though Casal can hardly be called a rebel in his treatment of modernismo 's fixed scenes (and certainly not to the same extent as Lugones and Herrera y Reissig), his emphasis on the literal aspects of his models' features questions their validity as representations of idealized values.

Herrera y Reissig practices the same type of dislocation. Although he does not overtly point out the deviations from his models as does Lugones, one can see a heightening of the same tactics that Casal so deftly employed. A reading of two poems by Herrera y Reissig can illustrate the subtle complexity of his methods.

The fourth poem of "Tertulia lunática" metaphorizes a type of subtle displacement in Herrera y Reissig's work. With an unexpected change of perspective, moving from the grandeur of infinite space, our gaze is inverted and suddenly reduced to a view through a spider's web:

El Infinito derrumba
su interrogación huraña,
y se suicida, en la extraña vía láctea, el meteoro,
como un carbunclo de oro
en una tela de araña.
                    (PC, 141–142)

(The Infinite demolishes
its shy interrogation,
and the meteor commits suicide,
 in the bizarre Milky Way
 like a golden carbuncle
 in a spider's web.)

The poems of this collection reveal, perhaps more effectively than any other group, the rapid and dizzying movement of sound play that subverts the iconic significance not only of words but of accustomed poetic language as well, for example, as in the collection's fifth poem:

  ¡Oh musical y suicida
tarántula abracadabra
 de mi fanfarria macabra
 y de mi parche suicida!  . .  
               (PC,  142)

(Oh musical and suicidal
abracadabra tarantula
 of my macabre fanfare
and of my suicidal patch! . . .

Words lose their accustomed role of designation. When the limits of the fixed scene are dissolved, its individual elements begin their own journey into a nonaligned pattern, dispersing in their wake the vestiges of a unified addresser or speaking subject.^[37]

In Herrera y Reissig's sonnet "Fiat Lux" (Los parques abandonados, 1906), similar in many ways to Lugones' "La alcoba solitaria" of Los crepúsculos del jardín, the metonymical dispersion and unusual pairings of terms do not produce the same displacement effects as do the "corsé" ("corset") and the disconcerting rhyme scheme in Lugones' similar poem. The reader's gaze is directed outward, threatens to become lost in the "curva abstracta" ("abstract curve") and the "suntuosa línea" ("sumptuous line") of the poem's design. The widening gaze, which extends to the "noche estupefacta" ("stupefied night") and the coming dawn with its odd "nimbos grosellas" ("red-currant halos"), returns gently to the erotic scene of the "Venus curvilínea" ("curvilinear Venus"): "Y como un huevo, entre el plumón de armiño / que un cisne fecundara, tu desnudo / seno brotó del virginal corpiño  . . . (PC, 414) ("And like an egg, amid the ermine plumage / that a swan might fecundate, your naked / breast welled from the virginal bodice . . ."). Rapid, quiet movement relocates the focus, although the air still resonates with the possibility of further wanderings. By not shattering the fixed scene, multiple associations are still possible.