Lugones and Herrera: Destruction and Subversion of «Modernismo»

Gwen Kirkpatrick

University of California, Berkeley

Much of the attraction of the forbidden fruit of modernismo is lost to us now. As readers removed from the space of dangerous pleasure by the passage of time and the accumulation of new surprises, it is sometimes difficult to understand the uproar and scandal which moments of the poetic works of Leopoldo Lugones and Julio Herrera y Reissig evoked. However, we can recreate some sense of understanding by following the traces of this poetry in works more accessible to us. The testimony of the impact of these two writers on poets such as Ramón López Velarde, Vicente Huidobro, César Vallejo, Jorge Luis Borges and many ultraísta poets is found not only in their critical references to these two poets, but in the works themselves, which reveal the mechanics of the process of perception and assimilation. While the influence of Lugones and Herrera is evident in these poets (and even in the sound plays of poets such as Mariano Brull and Luis Palés Matos), the icons they inherit are stripped of their message content and are endowed with intentionality of a different kind. For example, the excesses of accumulation -the jewels, exotic coloration, the chinoiserie, a fleeting glimpse of the femme fatale- implied for the modernistas the luxury of accumulation in a tangible and palpable sense while also determining what was left out of the closed circle of modernismo. The elements of rarefaction, the closed circles of excess and riches, as well as a heavily loaded surface of verbal texture were in great part a reaction to what they saw as the poverty of their circumstantial reality.

In an article entitled «Acotación del árbol en la lírica», Jorge Luis Borges offers an analogy between scenic and textual spaces: «Hasta aquí, empero, sólo se ha tratado del árbol como sujeto de descripción. En escritores ulteriores -en Armando Vasseur y paladinamente en Herrera y Reissig- adquiere un don de ejemplaridad y los conceptos se entrelazan con un sentido semejante al de los ramajes trabados. El estilo mismo arborece y es hasta excesiva su fronda. A despecho de nuestra admiración ¿no es por ventura íntimamente ajena a nosotros, hombres de pampa y de derechas calles, esa hojarasca vehementísima que por Los parques abandonados campea?»¹ Using an image which suggests the curving, botanical designs of the style of Art Nouveau with its «ramajes trabados», Borges points out the traits which separate the works of a late modernismo from the tastes of later readers. What is transmitted for later readers, however, is not the plenitude of abundance but the breaks in the circle, the moment of double vision, the guilty start accompanying the look over the shoulder, knowing that someone is watching. The entrance of outside elements such as the prosaic or campestre may initiate the dissolution of the closed circle, adding dislocating elements. Yet the most subtle and disconcerting jolt is the one that arises from a slight movement within the circle itself, signaling a change of perspective.

In other words, these later modernistas allow the reader the place of the voyeur. Their works are in contrast to the doctrines of symbolism which propose the closure of the circle, where the place of the vidente is the realm of the senses, the one who resounds and reverberates in harmony with the mix of the senses. In symbolism, the addresser and addressee (or yo and tú) are declared to be in full identification. The knowing or skilled reader is the initiate into the mysterious rites. Without differential perception there is no measure of depth; everything is to occur mingled together on one plane. As if to unravel the process, the outside distracting movement found in the poetry of Lugones and Herrera adds another dimension. A voice from the outside, a subtle hint of an exterior element, leads us out of the circle to watch or to be watched as a detached observer, causing a splintering off, or desdoblamiento, of perception. But the movement of departure, if slight and unexpected, leaves us somewhere suspended between the plane of the known and a place still alien to us.

It is the nature of this movement of departure which differentiates much of the poetry of Lugones and Herrera. Although they do not overtly destroy the patterns they establish, the seeds of destruction are planted with the very framework of the poetry itself by its inner subversive movement. Following Roland Barthes' definition, subtle subversion does not concern itself with overt denials or oppositions. It is «not directly concerned with destruction, evades the paradigm and seeks some other term: a third term, which is not, however, a synthesizing term but an eccentric, extraordinary term»². Thus my interest concerns the identification of this subject, or addresser, in the works of Lugones and Herrera y Reissig during the late stages of modernismo. In other words, who speaks? Where is the gesture which directs the poetic process? Considering the body of their works as elements of what Barthes has called the «circular memory of literature» or its «intertext», I would like to focus their works within the movement of modernismo, to view this time of production as a fixed scene, a static space frozen in time. The topos of the fixed scene was a Parnassian ideal very dear to the modernistas themselves, with their preference for the enclosed space or interior garden, the play of light on statues, and the play of sounds on words now frozen in their iconic significance. Knowing that the close-up focus distorts perspectives and that the montage technique serves to cut up logical sequence, then perhaps the totality of the object viewed (in this case the works of poetry) and its designated movement may be restored by speaking of it in terms of the bodily metaphor. Instead of speaking of the process of reading as unraveling a woven fabric, noting its different textures and points of articulation as well as its dropped stitches, then the metaphor of the body, with attention to eroticism and violence, can reflect the process of viewing and hearing, of acting and speaking, of union and disjunction.

The existence of a constituting subject (or yo) presupposes the existence of an addressee (or tú). It is here that the corporal metaphor serves most completely to express this relationship³. Since Freud is with us (and it should be remembered that Freud was formed in the epoch of the circulation of the icons of Art Nouveau) we have learned to subsume all other relationships and functions within one scheme, like Lacan who identifies symptom as metaphor. Thought, language, body -which founds the other? More specifically, the erotic metaphor most powerfully resembles the yo-tú relationship. Its aim -union, identification, and ecstasy- is that point to which all production is aimed, the merging of identities, reunification with origins, and the dissolution of difference. Everything which serves to deflect or destroy this merging and identification, such as distancing, violence, fetishism, or perversion, may also be expressed in terms of the bodily metaphor. Inherent in this metaphor is the idea of decomposition, when the fatigue of gesture or the faltering of the voice no longer calls attention to its presence, and we look elsewhere for satisfaction.

The poetry of Lugones and Herrera belongs to a stage of modernismo similar to Severo Sarduy's description of the work of Giancarlo Marmori, which was written in roughly the same period, a stage marked by the stillness and heavy ornamentation of its rites: «La retórica de lo accesorio convirtiéndose en esencial, la multiplicación de lo adjetival sustantivado, el ornamento desmedido, la contorsión, lo vegetal estilizado, las estatuas y cisnes, y lo cosmético como instrumento de sadismo mediatizado»⁴. As will be seen, the rites of ornamentation and of breaking the silence are very different in Lugones and Herrera.

What the modernistas have not been forgiven for is not their luxury nor their abundance. The extravagance of style, the heaping up of exotic detail is surely no sin. It is the self-containment or enclosure that offends. The poets of modernismo shut the door to their garden of delights. Invited in are only the initiates, those who know the secret codes to decipher the mysterious rites of the poetic process. Like the preceding generation which flaunted its wealth with trips to Europe, thereby making more visible the poverty of those left behind, so the modernistas, rich only in knowledge, separated themselves from others by their European voyage of reading and reworking the treasures they brought back. In the same way they flaunted the poverty of what surrounded them. This is the true insult of the excesses of modernismo. Modernismo invites no antithesis within its confinement, and conflicting movement is immobilized by being woven into the texture of the circle, re-dressed to appear in good company. The discordant element is to be banished, just as Severo Sarduy describes this same movement in the Baroque: «El horror al vacío expulsa al sujeto de la superficie, de la extensión multiplicativa, para señalar en su lugar el código específico de una práctica simbólica. En el barroco, la poética es una Retórica: el lenguage, código autónomo y tautológico, no admite en su densa red, cargada, la posibilidad de un yo generador, de un referente individual, centrado, que se exprese -el barroco funciona al vacío-, que oriente o detenga la crecida de signos»⁵. The fixed scene cannot afford dissenting or distracting movement within its confines, and the perspective of the viewer must remain fixed also.

Modernismo, then, requires good readers, those who can sift through the layers of a codified image and take pleasure in its ancestry, exclaiming over the discovery of the presence of Hugo here and Verlaine there, as well as flowers from medieval paintings as in the case of Rubén Darío. Even more pleasurable is the recognition of a fragment from a text by D'Annunzio, signaling perversity and rarefaction not permitted to the masses, whose limitations (moral, social, or educational) prohibit them from penetrating into the inner sanctum. However, just as the paintings of Moreau and the Pre-Raphaelites are made increasingly grotesque by later exaggerations and transformations (one thinks of the details in paintings by Klimt and the sadistic touches Munch added to his erotic goddesses), so the excesses of the forbidden fruit of modernismo are packed so closely together that they begin to decompose. The spirit of play takes on its darker side. Just as abundance creates poverty by contrast, so frivolity invites its lurking counterpart. Lost among the excesses of the textual surface, the speaking or acting subject reasserts itself with a gesture which draws our attention outside the static scene. The works of both Lugones and Herrera show the marks of this intrusiveness into the enclosure.

Ramón López Velarde, in his appraisal of Lugones' work, describes this process of viewing, which he calls «revelación a deshora». Praising what later readers have found oppressive and hackneyed, Lugones' «morbidez de estilo», López Velarde inspects the technique of narrowing focus which produces the voyeuristic position of the reader in Los crepúsculos del jardín: «Lujuria que vale lo que un propósito a la vez minucioso e integral, como el que hay en el remanque de una falda que permite ver un pie encubierto por la lenidad de una media, y bajo la media una vena serpeando rítmica en una ladera del empeine»⁶. The parceling out of detail, the fragmentation of total scenes, and the attention to gesture produce a heightening of pleasure, and not its deflation: «Guiños, parpadeos, esquinces, mohines... el gesto gradual y total de nuestra compañera recodada en las tinieblas, es para nosotros palmario como una estatua a mediodía, y permanente, como su faz. Nuestra emoción es como una linterna sorda que horada la cúbica negrura de los aposentos, a deshora. Instante novelesco, de novela centrípeta»⁷. What López Velarde singles out here, the «gesto gradual» which produces revelations «a deshora», is a condensation process which will be speeded up.

The process of double vision, or desdoblamiento of the wound helix of signifier and signified, rests on the interruption, or découpage, of the process. Its mechanism can be described on several levels: first, thematic, or the icons employed; second, the relationship of text-reader; and third, the nature of the larger social structure of these relationships. In examining the poetry of Herrera and Lugones I would like to concentrate on the first level, that of theme, understanding this term not only as an assemblage of different sets of icons but as a representation of the process of textual production, as an act which metaphorizes its own procedures.

The works of Herrera and Lugones may be compared for several obvious reasons. As late modernista poets they are obviously derivative from certain traditions, and the intersection of part of their works derives from a sharing of many of the same models or traditions. While the similarities are immediately obvious, down to the development of images similar even in minute details, the articulation of these elements is often strikingly different. It is interesting to note that neither of these writers was sensitive to the accusations of copying elements from other poets. In the modernista spirit, accumulation from the outside was seen as an enrichment of the general wealth. The ideal of the writer as a solitary genius, although expressed in their works, was obviously not a motivating force in their respective productions. On the contrary, both accentuate the presence of prestigious «foreign» elements.

We have an idea of Lugones as poet -the monster of style, the voracious assimilator of styles whose own style, when not consciously parodic, unconsciously generates its own parody through excess. As trickster of rhyme and master of successive literary identities, we see Lugones first and foremost as stylist. On the other hand, the body of criticism concerning Herrera's work usually attributes an intimate personal quality to his production of shocking metaphor and word plays. Where is the difference in gesture? Why does one seem to pound and the other to whisper, even while reworking many of the same materials?

If we hunt for revealing signs of the fissure of a poetic text, the slight entrance which helps us understand the shrouded mechanics of construction, what we find in Lugones is an anticipation of this intrusion. Rather than be discovered, with the startled look over the shoulder by the intruder who peers into the circle, Lugones makes great whacks in the circle, violent jolts which leave at least the window wide open. He invites the voyeur to enter the circle, like the circus barker who drums up business. The defined poetic yo stands back as interpreter or summarizer, the parodist who breaks the identification between the representation of the scene and its observer. This interruption, or distancing, may be caused not just by parody but by the insertion of the deflating or disquieting moment, the wrong word, the colloquial turn of phrase into the fixed scene.

On the other hand, the work of Herrera presents another possibility of articulating the quantity of icons available to his epoch. If we think of the modernista epoch as a field of play, then it is Lugones who refuses to become lost in the game, who is unwilling to relinquish the operations which constrain the game and make it accessible to measurement and evaluation. For example, the introduction of prosaic or urban elements in a tableau presentation of a crepuscular landscape, so favored by the modernistas, threatens its enclosure. The presence of prosaic elements invites metonymical displacement, breaking the circle of metaphoric enclosure, leaving the emblematic scene open to multivalent interpretations. For Lugones the emblem (icon, gathering-together, metaphor, composure) is coded in terms of the evocative power of language in relation to its place in the hierarchy of the heritage of literature, important as a social institution. Enclosure, or closure, must always be reasserted by an identification of the speaking subject. In an individual poem this assertion of the yo may be present as a narrative voice, the binding and encircling presence of rhyme, or the deflationary movement of conscious parody. More generally, within the structure of the volume itself, this reassertion may take the form of an attached prologue, an arrangement of poems in a progression of theme, knowing titles and dedications, etc. Lugones rejects the independence of language outside its socially coded nature and therefore rejects the liberty of the reader. Yet given the verbal mastery of a poet such as Lugones, the binding process must be strong to contain deviations inherent in the nature of language itself with its multivalent associations and resonance. Therefore, for us as modern readers, Lugones is only interesting when he steps outside the circle, when encircling repression snaps and the body of language reasserts its primal will. In the poetry of Lugones the coded thematic systems of eroticism, the night, and urban living provoke this slip and fall. Whenever introduced these elements are either parodied, transformed into a larger didactic text, or linked very carefully with the obvious imitation of another text, such as those of Albert Samain and Jules Laforgue. Yet in Lunario sentimental, Los crepúsculos del jardín, and parts of Las montañas del oro, the figure of the representing subject loses ground. In each case meter, rhyme, and metaphoric progression are distorted and never totally recaptured. The rhyme scheme and sound patterns become agitated, calling attention to themselves as a distancing countermeasure to the introduction of these themes. In a poem such as «Pescador de sirenas» from the Lunario the metaphor itself, the body of the woman, is literally cut apart and floats to the surface:

Bogan muy cerca de la superficie Blancas y fofas como enormes hongos, Deformando en desconcertante molicie Sus cuerpos como vagos odres oblongos.8

Not only is the image dissected and dismembered, but the general pattern of reference is shattered as well. The song of the sirens, distant, compelling, and dangerous, is silenced along with the destruction of the corporeal image. As is seen in many other poems, e. g., «La alcoba solitaria» of Los crepúsculos, the theme of the femme fatale nearly always invites its deflation, if not always its dismemberment.

One of the major sources of imagery in Lunario sentimental, the urban setting, also evokes this chain reaction of the splitting of familiar images. It is interesting to note that Jorge Luis Borges, in signaling the influence of the Lunario as a prefiguration of the metaphor development of the ultraístas, points out the poems which dwell on the urban theme. It is as if the mere presence of the urban setting served as a catalyst for the destruction of the metaphorical patterns which were associated with a calmer, more enclosed world. Perhaps it is in this sense, and not that of the shocking juncture of disparate terms into metaphor, that Borges' remarks about the Lunario may be understood. Nowhere is the horror of the swarming mass of humanity more evident than in «Los fuegos artificiales», with its terror of a mechanical world and its instruments, the sense of being lost in the carnival crowd, of no longer being directing creator but instead an anonymous participant in the observation of technical prowess. It is perhaps no coincidence that the Lunario was published in the same year, 1909, as Marinetti's first Futurist manifesto. In Lugones' «Luna ciudadana» the tragedy of the young poet is made more intense by recounting only «una tragedia vulgar de clase media». So, Lugones must trivialize or explode the scheme of value-laden imagery which no longer has impact in a transitional era. Once one of the most innovative poets of the language, after the Lunario he will turn his back on the present baffling scene and return to sing the hymn of the «patria». His poetic journey, once the most wide-ranging of all, will end back at the doorstep of the provinces, praising its «latinidad», sunlight, and its neutrality.

What creates the impact in both Lugones' and Herrera's poetry is the physicality of the language itself, its very malleability, as in the abundance of esdrújulos, difficult and often cacophonous rhyme. The dense verbal texture is paralleled by an emphasis on the physical, tangible aspects of imagery. A physical detail is often spun out in all its possibilities. In Lugones' work there is also a thematic emphasis on physical violence, especially in connection with eroticism. With the cutting apart of the imagery system, the dismembered parts of language's evocative structure float to the surface. Violence is apparent first in fetichism -the extreme and closed metonymical dispersion of the figure of the female in «Los doce gozos»- and is followed in the Lunario by a violent dissection of the lunar imagery of dreams, poetry, and the feminine image. The nexus of contiguity in «La alcoba solitaria», for example, is a closed one. The gestures which might provoke further reflection, such as the «gota de sangre», are blocked, just as the reflection from the mirror is stunted: «El espejo opalescente/Estaba ciego»⁹. The distracting and jarring rhyme, along with the presence of the «corsé de inviolable raso», which does not fit smoothly into the elements of the room and clashes in its pairing with «una magnolia», tips the poem so off-balance that the web of suggestiveness is torn through by the attention-getting gestures of the not-so-distant speaking subject, the interrupter, the summarizer.

Rhyme in Lugones' work can be a sign of loss, as in much of Lunario sentimental; it has nowhere to go. Like a trace of a past pattern, it limps across the page, calling attention to itself, trying to bind together the pieces of the shattered pattern. The limping movement of recuperation, awkward because it is out of place, calls attention to a past pattern of writing. Lugones is mainly monstrous because he would rather destroy than give up.

Herrera, on the other hand, preserves the metaphor even while the movement of operation is similar to that of Lugones. Rather than being destructive, his movement of disclosure is subversive. Subversion does not create confrontation of polar opposites, which invites domination and destruction. Instead, with its subtle slant, subversion introduces a third element which throws the other two off-balance, causing them to collapse. Piling the structure high, layer by layer, the sheer weight of exaggeration and accumulation in Herrera's poetry threatens to drag it down, to let it fall. Just at this point, when the bases of credibility are stretched to the limit, we are moved to another plane, quietly and without looking back to the turbulent place we were so involved with. The rapidity of the movement, the total change of scenic space does not cancel out the other. We are left with two suspended places, and the space of non-comprehension is the moment of silence, the «instante novelesco», the drop and the fall. However, when this moment is avoided, when the gaze is not removed from the spot, the process of accumulation proceeds to decomposition, the edifice falls down or destroys itself from within like the «gangrena» of putrefaction often present in the sensual imagery of Herrera.

In the sonnet «Fiat Lux», which is similar in many ways to Lugones' «La alcoba solitaria», the metonymical dispersion and unusual pairings of terms do not produce the same displacement effects as do the «corsé» and the disconcerting rhyme scheme in Lugones' poem. The reader's gaze is directed outward, threatens to become lost in the «curva abstracta» and the «suntuosa línea» of the poem's design. Yet the widening gaze, which extends to the «noche estupefacta» and the coming dawn with its odd «nimbos grosellas», is returned gently to the erotic scene of the «Venus curvilínea»: «Y como un huevo, entre el plumón de armiño/que un cisne fecundara, tu desnudo/seno brotó del virginal corpiño...»¹⁰ Rapid, quiet movement relocates the focus, although the air still resonates with the possibility of further wanderings. By not shattering the fixed scene, the author makes multiple associations possible.

The fourth poem of «Tertulia lunática» metaphorizes a type of subtle displacement in Herrera's work. With an unexpected change of perspective, moving from the grandiosity of infinite spaces, 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.11

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

¡Oh musical y suicida tarántula abracadabra de mi fanfarria macabra y de mi parche suicida!12

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 non-aligned pattern, dispersing in their wake the vestiges of a unified addresser or speaking subject.

Though many traits are shared by the poetic works of both Lugones and Herrera, these instances of poems metaphorizing their own destructive and subversive movements can be seen as indicators of their modernista works as a whole. Their verse marks the end of a stage of modernista poetry. Lugones highlights its fragmentation, and the masked poetic yo stands back and directs our gaze. In contrast, Herrera introduces a third element apart from the two opposing traditions. This is the movement of shifting perspectives, the unidentifiable movement which creates the sense of loss, the knowledge that our hierarchies are being threatened by invisible forces.

For present equivalents of the subversion of modernismo and the subversion of values associated with such a system of language, we would have to look today to many of our prose writers. There are writers such as Sainz, Sarduy, Cabrera Infante, Cortázar who interweave snatches of other languages in their prose, who drop us from one set of expectations to a place we did not expect to be in, who destroy our world view (or our allegorical system) by playing with the words we control it by. They make us feel uneasy by turning our slang inside out with neologisms and shattered sequences, making us doubt the passage from one page to the next. Will we «catch on»? Can we decipher it by our previous schemes? With a little practice, the answer is yes. The whole machinery of criticism and self-portraits gives us an entrance into this new enclosure. Soon we will feel comfortable because we will have been taught to read this new language. Yet we will be left behind again. Someone will start parodying them when the model is fixed, and we will feel duped by falling into the arms of a new religion which begins to be displaced, whose language becomes decipherable through exegesis, which repeats itself too much. When this happens, when the tumult dies down, the slight voice or gesture until then unnoticed will gain more force, and we will discover that the seeds of destruction and subversion were already planted.

So, to understand the confusion that poets such as Lugones and Herrera evoked, we have to understand them by listening to their readers who were closer in time. Most responded in extremes, with either loud applause or derision. Few reacted as did Rubén Darío, who nodded approvingly and advised postponement of judgment. Just as Octavio Paz in «El caracol y la sirena» has given us an almost indestructible reading of Darío -indestructible because it is so coherent, it smooths away the knowing smiles and recovers Darío's passion, pain, and tackiness in an assimilable way by the metaphor of eroticism and the desire for union- so most readers have preferred to see the fervor of Lugones and Herrera, «la ametralladora metáfora», as a bringing together of disparate areas of writing and experience, of slang, preciosismo, advertising, neurasthenia, cold cream, and angels. Yet their creation of metaphor involves little union and dissolution of difference. The gestures, violent or quiet, which lie outside the periphery remind their readers that the new center also cannot hold. As Jorge Luis Borges remarks in Proa in 1924: «Añadir provincias al Ser, alucinar ciudades y espacios de la conjunta realidad, es aventura heroica»¹³. These two late modernistas, in their destruction and subversion of modernismo's secret gardens, provided a glimpse of new hierarchies which were struggling to emerge¹⁴.