This chapter appears in Luis Alberto Castillo’s La Máquina de Hacer Poesía: Imprenta, Producción y reproducción de poesía en el Perú del siglo XX. Lima: Maier Ramirez, 2019. (The Poetry Making Machine: Printing, Production, and Reproduction of Poetry in 20th Century Peru) It is available for order here.
From this place words
Come into the world, not to
Fade out like sound
Waves nor to oscillate like the
Pulse of the writer, but to remain
Fixed eternally once
Verified and set.
You, friend, are on sacred ground:
This is a printing press.
- Anonymous[1]
Modernity brought with it not only major developments in the technical apparatus and the consequent introduction of machines into all areas of human life, but the appearance of a new universal metaphor. The concept of the machine has thus served, from the beginning, to explicate the function of all existing things under modernity whether that be the organization of human organs, communal life, or the cosmos in their entirety. The dissemination of this terminology has meant a more tenuous reference to technical apparatuses themselves and, instead, a more general understanding of a gigantic organism that has ended up appropriating human existence. Marx historicizes the development of the machine in the capitalist system as being marked by the inversion of the machine-worker relationship, which is to say, the machine – understood principally as a tool – as a medium in the worker’s service morphing into a situation whereby the human being becomes a medium in the machine’s service. The Marxist idea that the machine does not serve to reduce the worker’s labor but to optimize his exploitation anticipates contemporary readings like those of Guattari that make clear that capitalism, before being seen as a mode of production, should be understood as a conjunction of apparatuses of social subjection and mechanical servitude.
We can see a clear example of this displacement in the appearance of the modern prison at the beginning of the 19th century where, with the panoptic model imagined by the English thinker Jeremy Bentham, a true vigilance machine comes into being which takes as its endpoint the creation of docile and useful individuals. Older prisons, closer to the logic of dungeons, are transformed into spaces of resocialization that seek to introduce the imprisoned to productive discipline[2]. The architectural principle of the panopticon aims to engrain in the interned a conscious and permanent state of visibility that guarantees the automatic functioning of power such that violence might be abandoned within the penitential regime.[3]
This carceral model rapidly expanded throughout the western world and Peru was not exempt from this attempted modernization of the criminal justice system. Circa 1856, after Mariano Felipe Paz Soldán had been sent to inspect two US prisons so that he could choose the type of penitentiary regime best suited to Peru, construction on the Lima Panopticon began where the Centro Comercial Centro Cívico and the Sheraton Hotel stand today. Once the Panopticon had begun operation, strict disciplinary rules were established with obligatory work as one of the fundamental pieces of the model. The idea was to convert the prisoners into productive and profitable men, such that the prison could be shifted to being a preparatory site for manufacturing, which is how workshops for carpentry, shoemaking, blacksmithing, braiding, tinsmithing, ironwork, baking, and, in 1907, typography came to be installed in the prison’s pavilions. It is important to note that the objective of these workshops was not to focus on the development of products but, more fundamentally, on the domestication of the prisoner, which is to say that beyond focusing on production itself it was about inculcating those interned into productive discipline. With that said, Carlos Aguirre has insisted that the Lima Penitentiary signified a total failure in terms of the aspirations of modernizing our criminal justice system. Rather than putting in place a humanitarian and reformist model, it brought with it an increase in violence, racism and authoritarianism in the penitentiary system (2008, p. 94). We can note, then, that the Panopticon represents a clear indication of the disconnect between modernity and the nascent Peruvian state of the 19th century as it clumsily tried to align itself with the advances of a budding globalization.
Despite the failure of this modernization, it did lay the foundation for a series of alternative developments. The most important of these is the avant garde literature from the period immediately preceding the appearance of Colónida y Las Voces Múltiples (1916) until just after the founding of the Imprenta Editorial Minerva by the Mariátegui brothers (1925). This is to say that from the cracks in this carceral machine the bases of a national literary modernization were able to emerge given the Typographic Workshops printing of the most important books of the first decades of the 20th century: José María Eguren’s La canción de las figuras (1916); Abraham Valdelomar’s La Mariscala (1915), El caballero Carmelo (1918) and Belmonte, el trágico (1918); Luis Berninsone’s Walpúrgicas (1917); César Vallejo’s Trilce (1922) y Escalas (1923); Enrique Peña Barrenechea’s El aroma en la sombra y otros poemas (1926) – as well as a lengthy roll of civil codes, regulations for secondary education and police manuals[6]- all came off of the Panopticon’s press[7]. Hence, if the labor dynamics deployed inside the prisons constituted an experimental wager on the resocialization of the imprisoned through work, its link with the literary vanguard – an experimental form of creation – cannot be said to be mere coincidence. If the Penitentiary was – as Aguirre states – a social laboratory that ended up failing in its basic objectives, it is necessary to think about what sorts of processes it was able to set in motion. For example, in addition to Lima, Buenos Aires, Santiago and Mexico City could likewise be counted among those cities with modern penitentiaries in which there were typographic workshops. In each of them, what was printed related to “as a priority, the necessities of the different sectors of the public administration” (Aguirre, 2015, p. 148). As such, it is possible to claim that beyond the penal functions of the panopticons, they served to satisfy another type of state needs. Perhaps the deployment of a bureaucracy based in the circulation of the printed word couldn’t have been possible without the development of the mechanisms of social subjection that could legitimate the production of texts in the hands of a population of “full time workers.” With this in mind, a rethinking of the (generally invisible) material conditions out of which what Angel Rama called the “Lettered City” emerged becomes necessary.
But let us now turn our attention to what directly concerns us. To date, studies on the Penitentiary’s workshop, which was key to the history of Peruvian literature, are scarce and its mention in general has been little more than anecdotal. Nevertheless, I will try to follow those clues that do exist to establish links, aesthetic as well as social, between this printing press and the production of poetry in Peru.
In the prologue to El Caballero Carmelo, Alberto Ulloa Sotomayor describes an occasion on which Valdelomar[8]brought him to the Lima Panopticon to revise some of the details of the pressing for the book:
Before us the grille has opened and after our passing has closed with an oppressive crash. We have crossed dark
galleries, descended crisscrossed stairs, new grilles have opened and closed by the heavy hands of the jailors and we
have reached, finally, a ray of sunlight in the workshop where this book was printed.
Later he says the following:
The poor prisoners, I repeat, made the printing machines work, filled the galleys with type, loaded the pages, corrected the tests, carried out, in a word, all the humble gestation of books that were to project light onto society and that accumulated in the prisons all the darkness of opprobrium and desolation. (1918, p. 1)
These oppositions of light/darkness and creation/oppression are expressions of the new practices and relations made possible by machinery capable of bringing together men of letters and criminals who, collectively and each according to their condition, contribute to the cultural development of the country. That single ray of light that filters into the printshop after the traversing of darkened galleries is perhaps a sign of that parallel modernization that the Penitentiary brought to the development of Peruvian letters.[9]
Vallejo, for his part, includes a story in Escalas Melografiadas[10], under the title “Liberación”, which takes place in the Typographic Workshops (when, it seems, Vallejo had gone to revise some test prints for Trilce) where the printer describes details of a killing that had occurred in the shop and for which he feels somewhat responsible; perhaps a transposition of the role of the printer with respect to what happens in Trilce with the literary tradition of the country and the language itself.
If there is a single reason that the Penitentiary’s workshops have passed into the history of Peruvian literature, it is because Trilce was printed there—indeed, it was during the search for the conditions that book’s printing that I began to get interested in this subject. Thus, we will take Trilce as a reference point in our analysis.
Concerning the details of the work’s printing—featuring a pencil portrait of the author by Victor Morey on its cover—it is enough to note that the edition, which was printed in 200 copies, cost Vallejo 150 soles, and that he paid with the sum he had won in a literary contest in Lima in December 1921. The price of each copy was three soles, and, as Juan Especjo Asturrizaga tells it, Vallejo could not pay for the entire run because he hadn’t received his full winnings and so the book was delivered little by little over the following months. A large portion of the poems in Trilce were composed (or completed) during the 112 days that Vallejo was imprisoned in Trujillo (accused of arson and attempted murder), as well as in the two months prior to his detention in which he was hiding out in the small country house of Atenor Orrego in the Manscihe countryside. The poemario was born out of this condition of incarceration and found no better place than the Lima Panopticon for its printing, where, and this should be kept in mind, the poet himself had to both edit and assess the printing. As he wrote to Juan Espejo Asturrizaga, editing a book “is the form of making a more pure and more serious work” (Vallejo, 2002, p. 43) and so the labor of producing this edition had to be done with great circumspection and diligence.[11]
The cover of Vallejo’s Trilce
It will come as no great to do to argue that with Trilce Vallejo breaks with canonical forms of written communication where writing stands as an ideological marker of the dominant (and, we could say, free) intellectual class or that it does violence to the graphic representation of words. Still, to analyze this position in light of the work’s printing does offer interesting insights.
The advent of printing allowed for the development of exhaustive dictionaries, grammars, and fomented the desire to legislate what is “correct” in language. Grammatical errors, properly speaking, did not exist prior to the invention of the printing press. Rather, it is the press that fixed them, eternalized them, and, in a certain sense, mummified language. The poet, for his part, concocts his poetry from within this enclosure, newly confecting words that are, for that reason, not overwhelmed by prior use or by the literary tradition. Vallejo—as Antenor Orrego writes in his magnificent and lamentably forgotten prologue to Trilce—“takes the anatomical part and fits it into its functional place”; which is to say, his writing supposes a compositional – typographic– workshop in which he sets letter after letter (or slug after slug) in order to produce words still unsaturated by the intellectual weight of the tradition. Here we should remind ourselves that phonetic writing supposed a high level of abstraction that erased any identical relationship between writing and that which it represented. Still, the poet, by the means in which he brings together what all the rest of us separate and push apart, holds onto a nostalgia for this origin of writing and insists on reestablishing the analogical link and visual suggestion. The signified (which is to say, that which the word evokes) and the signifier (the anatomical acoustic image of the word) that seem to correspond arbitrarily and by social convention, find in poetry a visual union and necessary analogue. The poet, like the typographer, values words as things in such a way that he cannot think solely about what the word says, but also about what its very anatomical form expresses. As such, in “Trilce IX” where the “v” at times repeats and at times does not (“Vusco Volvvver de golpe el golpe”) it does not exactly evoke the absent female sex but rather reveals it to us visually. Something similar occurs in “Trilce XX” where – as Antonio Merino notes- the upper case “A” of the verse “bulla que reprende A vertical subornada” would seem to represent the cellmate’s posture, with legs spread, at the moment of realizing his excretory needs.[12]
What occurs in poem XIII of Trilce may be even more interesting. The penultimate verse cries out “Oh estruendo mudo” while the final verse the exclamation is reversed, becoming the agglutinate “odumodeurtse”. There are those who consider this to be graphic arbitrariness or, rather, that it is onomatopoetic creation that architecturally sustains the poem.[13] It is possible, however, to think of the Vallejian intuition as being, instead, situated in the following: before the creation of the printing press, and likewise before writing materials were accessibly priced, copyists did all they could to put the largest quantity of words on the parchment, such that there was practically no space that remained between words (the so-called escriptia continua). This made of the text something incredibly noisy, indeed quite close to oral expression, in such a manner that it wasn’t until the beginning of the 11th century, with the appearance of cheap writing surfaces, that space between words began to be introduced, and that reading was able to shift into a silent and individual act, which was radicalized with the printing press. On the other hand, the logic of the press before digitization is speculative (which is to say, relative to the mirror (Espejo)), in such a manner that, in the composition of words on the printing plate or screen, these are “written” from right to left so that they can appear printed from left to right once the type’s eye (ojo del tipo in Spanish - tr.) has been pressed against the drum (tímpano or eardrum in Spanish - tr.) that holds the paper.[14] We can now more clearly see the following possibility: by reversing the phrase “estruendo mudo” (“mute thunder”), Vallejo is rejecting the “specular” character of printing, going back to the word as that which prints and not as what is being printed. At the same time, taking the expression altogether brings violent noise into the poem, making evident the paradox of printed language itself as being none other than the mute thunder in the unsounded passivity of the page.
But let us focus on the fundamental fact of Trilce’s publication that concerns us. We need not ignore that it was the same prisoners who put each one to the letters on the peomario’s pages. Let us simply recall that prisoner-printer to whom Vallejo alludes in the story “Liberación” – who he refers to as “my worker” and of which he maintains that “I would say that he has lost the sense of his misfortune or that he has become an idiot” – printing “Oh las cuatro paredes de la celda” (“Oh the four walls of the cell”) or “El compañero de prision comía el trigo / de las lomas, con mi propia cuchara” (“the prison mate used to eat wheat / from the hills, with my spoon” or “En la celda, el lo solido, tambien / se acurrucan los rincones” (“In the cell, in what’s solid, the / corners are huddling too”, to give just a few examples. This gesture undoubtedly ends up being less innocent than one might expect, as it isn’t just any day that a poemario that dynamites the canons of written communication is printed precisely by those that are excluded from the circuit of communication. It is not only that Vallejo resorted to the most economical workshop in the city, but that it was a setting in motion of this destruction within the carceral-productive machinery (we have already made note of how this link between the laboratory that the panopticon signified for Peruvian society and the laboratory of the literary avant guarde cannot be treated as coincidental). As such, the gesture reaches magnitudes of revenge and vindication that are possible to track in Trilce, but which end up being more discursively evident in “Liberación”. In it, Vallejo writes the following:
Yesterday I was in the typographic workshop of the Panopticon, to correct some of the test prints.
The head of it is a prisoner, a good guy, as are all the felons of the world. Young, smart, quite courteous; Solis, as the prisoner was named, immediately made his great intelligence known to me, referring me to his cas,e and exposing his complaints and his pain to me.
-Of the 500 prisoners here—he says—hardly one third deserve to be locked up this way. The rest no; the rest are perhaps as or else more moral than the very judges that convicted them. (Vallejo, 1998, p. 353)
Beyond the moral vindication of the felon, which cannot be seen solely as a sublimated defense of his own condition as an ex-convict, but also as a denouncement of justice’s margin of error, what Trilce represents is the paradoxical circulation of words that are born from confinement[15], composed and printed by men whose condition of subjection and mechanical servitude would seem to, before reforming them, make them into idiots.[16] Here Vallejo establishes an embryonic precedent for his future interest in returning the social and universal content to words, only that here it is not incorporative of those at the bottom of the social pyramid but of those that have been excluded from it, of all those that have been put behind bars by the lettered authority.
It is no surprise, then, that months after the publication of Trilce, due to the terrible void and incomprehension into which his work had fallen, Vallejo wrote to Luis Alberto Sánchez telling him that he felt himself to be beyond his book.[17] If it is true that in Trilce we don’t have something like the aristocratic word or that of the professional who refuses to reveal his secret, unrepeatable poetic formulas, but the figure of the pariah, of the man who speaks from the substrata of civic life and the citizenry, his words are still unable to realize a fairness and precision that can reach the proletariat. To that end, Vallejo’s poetic project will be reformulated and realized in Europe though not, importantly, through a newly acquired cosmopolitan consciousness. Rather, it will find take root in his social commitment, which went beyond even partisan claim-staking. In Spain, Take This Cup From Me we see how the aforementioned torsion of Vallejian terms reaches another type of transcendence, as when in the poem to “Pedro Rojas” the words “viban” (“live”) and “abisa” (“abyss”) are expressed with the oral echos of the Republican volunteers, “con esta b del buitre en las entrañas” (“with this vulture’s v in the guts”). And toward the end of the poem, Pedro Rojas himself, comes back from the dead and writes in the air with his finger: “Viban los compañeros! Pedro Rojas” (“Long live the combanions! Pedro Rojas”) It will not be the page, then, that supports the poem but the world where the word is shaped in a universal manner and as the vehicle for the unification of humankind.
Perhaps a look at the conditions of the first edition of Spain, Take This Cup From Me’s printing can better explain the transformations of Vallejo’s poetic project as directly related to this theme.
In 1938 the Hospital de la Sangre y la Unidad de Imprentas del Ejército del Este was established in Monasterio de Montserrat in Catalonia. The Spanish poet and printer Manuel Altolaguirre was in charge of this clandestine press. He relates on more than one occasion how the volunteers of the Republic appropriated an abandoned paper factory on the outskirts of the monastery in which they produced a precious paper on which they printed various books. At the same time, he tells how the raw materials used for the pages of those books were enemy flags, trophies of war, and the uniforms of the Italian and German soldiers.[18] It is on this clandestine press that the edition of Spain, Take This Cup From Me is produced.
Juan Larrea has given two distinct versions of the destiny of this first edition. In the first, he maintains that the book’s printing had begun but that it lamentably remained on hold due to enemy attacks; in the second, he says that the book was effectively published, but that it fell under enemy control when it had begun to be distributed. The latter remained the official version for far longer, and it is widely cited within much of the criticism. Nevertheless, in 1973 the Spanish critic Juan Gilabert received an anonymous letter after publishing an article on the subject. In the letter an ex-volunteer of the Republic noted the error in Larrea’s versions: “What I would like to note is that in note 9 of your article you indicate that the edition of Vallejo’s book was destroyed before it was distributed, and that is not correct. I, who participated in the publication and printing of the work, can attest to the fact that we finished a number of copies; I myself have one of them and I know of others who may have a copy” (Vélez y Merino, 1984, pp. 142-143).[19] This letter changed all understandings of the publication, which had even included the assertion that it had never been performed. Julio Vélez and Antonio Merino began a tireless search to find at least one example of that first edition. It would be to their enormous surprise when in that same Monasterio de Montserrat they found not one, but four copies of Spain, Take This Cup From Me together with a copy of España en el Corazon (published in English as Spain in Our Hearts – tr.) by Pablo Neruda and one Cancionero Menor Para Combatientes by Emilio Prados, all of which had been printed on the Ejercito del Este’s press. The discovery proved to be massively important and reconstructed a piece of the history of the Spanish Civil War which had seemed condemned to oblivion. Thus noted, I would like to now attempt to establish the place of this first edition within Vallejo’s oeuvre.
My dear José Antonio:
I printed Pablo’s book in the Monasterio de Montserrat where the friars had one of the best workshops in Cataluña. I thought to do it on a pedal machine that I brought with me to this same front to publish the Boletín Diario of XI Cuerpo de Ejercito, the literary broadsheet Granada de las Letras y de las Armas and some pamphlets and propaganda.
We didn’t have paper for these works and, as my commander, the lieutenant coronel Paco Galán didn’t want to send me to the trenches, I wanted to be useful working on the press. We found out that close to the front, in Orpi, there was an abandoned paper factory and we decided to put it to use. It was the chief commissar Juan Ignacio Mantecón and another dear friend, Arturo Cuadrad, who organized the production and facilated all of the elements.
The day that the paper for Pablo’s book was made it was soldiers who were working the mill. Not only were they using the raw materials (cotton and rag) which helped the commissar, but the soldiers tossed clothes and bandages, trophies of war, an enemy flag, and the shirt of a Moroccan soldier into the mix.
Pablo’s book, printed under my direction, was put together by hand by the typographer soldiers and printed by soldiers as well. The type used was elzeverriano. We only made 500 copies; some copies were brought across the border in the soldiers’ rucksacks, but almost the entirety of the edition stayed in Cataluña.
Yours, Manuel Altolaguirre. (Merino y Vélez, 1984, pp 146-147)
It isn’t all that outlandish to claim that the edition of Spain, Take This Cup From Me must have gone through a similar production process. Indeed, the myth around the paper for its publication being made using the uniforms of a fascist general who had fallen in battle is a clear demonstration of how in times of crisis reality encounters unexpected forms of realization.
the colophon of Vallejo’s España, aparta de mi este cáliz (Spain take this cup from me)
But now to the heart of the matter. The colophon of the book states the following: at the top, the name of the author (and beneath, in parentheses, his date of birth and death[20]) and the title of the book; at the center of the page, in parentheses “Prologue by Juan Larrea” – alluding to the prologue Profecia de America- and “Dibujo de Pablo Picasso”, which makes reference to the portrait that the Spanish painter made of Vallejo from photographs of his corpse; we can likewise read, at the bottom of the page “Soldiers of the Republic made this paper, / composed the text and handled the machines. / Ediciones Literarias del Comisariado. / Ejército del Este / War of Independence, Year of 1939”.[21] What we have here is a gesture similar though much more powerful than that of the edition of Trilce from 1922. It is enough to imagine these same Volunteers of the Republic publishing the verses that relate to their own exploits and hopes. It is no exaggeration, then, to link this gesture to the possibility of the realization of the vanguardist utopian linkage of art and life. In other words, of the organizing, through art, a new vital praxis (although certainly in a tragic sense, as Vallejo had died while the book was being edited and fascism ended up being imposed in the Spanish Civil War).
These conditions set before us a type of poetry that took form as a collective act, the production of which all the men participated (we recall that even the enemy was involved in this not only in a symbolic manner but that their flags and uniforms were used in manufacture of the poem’s printed surface, itself). We are presented here with the always imprecise commonplace in Vallejo criticism of “poetry made for all”, though it is possible to see in this case that that notion corresponds to a particular form of conceiving of the work. Poetry made for all is nothing but that poetry which is realized through productive machinery in which each individual occupies one or many places in the division of labor. This is the proletarian literature that Vallejo spoke of where, against the empty words and lack of collective attribution of bourgeois literature, a language speaks that wants to be common to all. This is the infinite collectivization of the life of the workers: poet, critic, painter, editor, printers, soldiers, heroes; everyone participates, but from the Marxist conception of the future society in which each individual person can be polytechnic at the same time that they carry out specific functions and bear distinct economic responsibilities. It is not about immobility within the productive machinery of the capitalist division of labor, but a situation where the poet has also been at the battlefront, the printers are soldiers and all those involved are fundamentally human.[22] Vallejo, who is absolutely consequential in his critiques of silk-robed poetry that remains sequestered behind closed doors, throws himself in his final months of life into the production of Spain, Take This Cup From Me, where he completes his poetic project not only of proletarianizing poetry, but also returning to words their universal social content.
…
It might seem that this almost genealogical analysis of two of the poemarios that Vallejo prepared for publication has taken us somewhat off track. But we will return to the main point. As we have been able to appreciate, the failure that the Panopticon signified in the modernization of our criminal justice system was not an impediment to the growth, from the cracks in the carceral machine of the (even if still incipient) material conditions for the modernization of our literature. Although it seems contradictory, the Penitentiary allowed the process of book production and the poet to draw closer together such that it would allow not only a certain autonomy, but also a reconfiguration of the relations that were established between the author and his own work. Still, Peruvian literature would only undergo a major technological turnover in the middle of the 1920s with the appearance of the Mariategui brothers’ Imprenta Editorial Minerva.