Pablo Neruda

Notes on Pablo Neruda

As for politics, well, Neruda’s a Chilean.  America has a long and troubled history in Central American and South American politics.  We have generally supported the business and military interests that suit us, not necessarily the ones that would improve life for people in Chile, or Peru, or Costa Rica, or wherever in Latin America.  United Fruit was huge in central America, and in Chile, for instance, you had to reckon with Anaconda and its mining interests.  Such multinationals aren’t interested in nation-states except as a hindrance to the flow of capital to where they – the companies – want it to go, a hindrance to how they want to deal with labor arrangements and standards, and so forth.  When Chile got its independence from Spain in the 1820’s, things may have looked promising, but then the Brits stepped in and got control of many of Chile’s resources, and of course the USA had interests of its own, so we tried to foil the Brits.  Anyway, it gets ugly and complicated, and the worst of it is probably our campaign to discredit Salvador Allende, Chile’s socialist but legitimately elected president, in 1973.  After that, Augusto Pinochet established a military dictatorship.  I don’t know that the CIA planned the coup itself, but it’s obvious that the US benefited from the change and that the militarists were encouraged by the money and effort we put into destabilizing Allende’s presidency.

Neruda became very much a “poet of the people.”  But that title seems to come in the course of his political development towards leftism.  He starts off as a love and nature poet, moves on to the impure/pure poetry debate, with the “impurists” being something like advocates for surrealist description of objects, not “ego-centered.”  That’s not the same thing as realism, of course: the point is rather, I think, to embrace the fully human and reject the too-well-arranged and centered self of the bourgeois ideologue, and to embrace the heterogeneity of the object world.  See “Walking Around” for this influence (2443-44).  In André Breton’s 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, dreams and free imagination take precedence over waking, orderly reality and its prim associations between one thing and another.  In the visual arts, think Salvador Dalí.  Openness to contradiction is vital.  Neruda writes, 

"Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.

A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams ....

 
 Source: "Toward an Impure Poetry,"  [date 1935] in Pablo Neruda, Five Decades: A Selection ( Poems: 1925-1970), translated by Ben Belitt (New York, Grove Press, 1974), pp. xxi-xxii.

But as he develops, Neruda’s belief in the material-reality-rendering possibilities of language really comes into full play: see “I’m explaining a few things” (2445-46).  Why is he rejecting flowery erotic or pastoral poesy?  Well, “Come and see the blood in the streets” of Spain during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39.  That’s the imperative – to bring together the ordinary people against a fascist such as General Franco, whose rule, unfortunately, outlasted his allies Hitler and Mussolini right on through the early 1970s.

In the portion of Canto General that we have, the great Andes mountain, Macchu Picchu, at once seems to swallow up humanity and to become the symbol of its permanence, the permanence of Peruvian and indeed Latin American culture, in spite of what the Spaniards did to the Incas, Maya, Aztecs and other early civilizations.  “The Heights” and its imagery, as the editors point out, works against pure linearity as a principle of understanding history; the technique is instead to amalgamate or fuse many memories, many images, many periods into something like a unified vision founded on hope for the future.  This is a mainstay of Latin American literature, with its emphasis on what’s often called “magical realism.”  The past is never entirely lost; it haunts the present but also affords vision and opportunity to those who are willing to confront and embrace it rather than deny it.  All you need do is read Marquez’s Cento Años de Soledad to realize that.