In a 1927 chronicle titled “Latest Scientific Discoveries”, Vallejo bears witness to the innauguration of the Boulevard Haussmann in Paris, one of the most emblematic spaces that emerged from the urbanism of the 19th century. For Walter Benjamin, it is a space that synthesizes the alliance between the modern city and global capitalism, one of the principle sources from which to read the work of Charles Baudelaire in “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century”, and the central image from which his most important work, posthumously titled The Arcades Project, is derived.
Vallejo’s approach highlights the economic expenditure that the construction of this architectural milestone signified, which “has given space to a thousand demolitions and expropriations and where, as in no other space, the subtle and prepotent pulse of the life of Paris must be felt.” (2021, p. 69) Throughout the reading that Benjamin makes of Baudelaire, he observes Haussmann’s arcades, “temples of merchant capital”, but he likewise highlights the mode in which these are taken as a particular dialectic between the new and the old. This corresponds to the dialectic that econmpasses more than modernity understood simply as “creative destruction”. That is, a phenomenon whose progress, more than a sum of conquests, is, in reality, a conjuncture of accumulated ruins in the storehouse of history.
How does Vallejo differentiate his position from Benjamin’s? What answers does he find facing the malestrom of urban capitalism and its technical innovations? And in what ways do these implied spacio-temporal transformations echo through his poetry?
I want to suggest two ways that Vallejo we can link Vallejo to these questions.
In the first Vallejo acts as a chronicler who follows the course of the new as it emerges from the city, at the same time that he warns against the despair that the lights of capitalism not only fail to acknowledge, but engender and reproduce. In the second, Vallejo acts as a topographer who observes the unevenness of the enunciatory terrain from the here-and-now that conflicts with his voice. He attempts to construct a more microscopic vision that attends to the spacio-temporal transformations that modernity signals to us in the roughness of its language, its interruptions, its broken syntax, with which Vallejo works.
Let us follow the first route.
In Vallejo’s Paris chronicles references to the city and the alienating effects of capitalism on its inhabitants abound. It’s true that, on his arrival in Paris in 1923, Vallejo was fascinated by the City of Light, but that fascination quickly collided with the poverty, hunger, and precarious labor that existed there. Framed by the advance of the Russian Revolution and the Mariateguist program in the Latin American sphere, this would later be the foundation for his progressive adhesion to Marxism circa 1927.
That same year Vallejo also published a note titled “The Resurrection of the Flesh”. There he amazedly describes the existence of an automaton child in the window of the Bon Marchè, a doll that had supplanted a flesh and blood child and received Santa Claus one Christmas night.
“People attended that dream entranced, which is to say, deliciously deceieved” (1987, p. 193). The anaesthetizing effect that the commodity provoked in the passerby/consumer to which Vallejo refers is a clear manifestation of what, following Marx, Benjamin called the phantasmagoric character of the commodity, a spiritualization of the objects whose fantastic attribute expands to the detriment of the spirituality of the person who consumes it. Yet it doesn’t seem merely by chance that a child is the protagonist of the scene, a figure whose spontaneity belongs to the extreme opposite pole from that of the automaton. Ironically, Susan Buck-Morss (1986) writes:
…if playing with dolls was originally the way children learned the nurturing behavior of adult social relations, it has become a training ground for learning reified ones. The goal of little girls now is to become a "doll." This reversal epitomizes that which Marx considered characteristic of the capitalist-industrial mode of production" Machines which bring the promise of the naturalization of humanity and the humanization of nature result instead in the mechanization of both.
This is an index of the type of critique that Vallejo will offer of modernity. Like the German writer, Vallejo writes about the technical development of the west and registers the latest novelties from the automobile, to the airplane, to the wireless telegraph, the radio, the cinema, etc. But he takes a critical angle on each of them that separates him from the vanguardist enthusiasm for novelty and the machine. The fetishizing of these tools, and, moreover, the alienation of all forms of artitifice from what he calls their “vital breath”, is taken by Vallejo to be vain imposture. Certainly thinking of the avant gardes (Futurism and Surrealism were his principal targets), the poet writes: “[made] from symbols, present strip yourselves naked in public; only then will I accept your pants.” (1973, p. 63)
Let us not confuse this critique of modern technics with a regressive impulse toward nature or to a romantic wager on a spontaneity uncontaminated by any sort of mediation. The author of this verse who writes “believe in the lens, not in the eye” can’t be very close to that idealist position. And in effect, in another note symptomatically titled “Tell me how you write, and I will tell you what you write, he holds that: “Technics in politics, like in art, denounce, better than all the programs and manifestos, the true sensibility of a man (…) They exposes what we, in reality, are and where we are going, while still gainsaying the false designs, the nuevo riche and Johnny-come-lately celebrations in which we would like to wrap ourselves.” (1973, p. 67)
It is having mapped this constellation that I would like to pause to follow the second route that I wanted to explore in this paper: the idea of Vallejo as topographer of the modern sensibility.
The experience of the discontinuous is one of the principle characteristics that Walter Benjamin attributed to urban life, mediated by the technical development of capittalism. “Both the assembly line and the urban crowed bombard the senses with disconnected images and shocklike stimulae.” (Buck-Morss, 1989) From this angle, similar patterns have been distinguished among the Fordist assembly line and certain formal procedures of the artistic avant gardes, almost always associated with the Dadaist collage or the decomposition of the Renaissance organic image that Cubism innaugurates. It is film, nonetheless, at the same time a technical process and a structure of feeling, that is the artistic form that best responds to these new demands.
When Vallejo centers his critique on the movements of the avant garde, foregrounding that what they are attempting is not a revolutionizing of the lexicon, but one of the esthesis itself, the awakening of new “new nervous temples”, he raises an analogous opening to the interest that Benjamin demonstrates in the cinema, not only in the reproduction of reality in motion, but rather this modificitation of a perceptive schema, initiating an alternate way of looking at reality.
Vallejo writes about the movement from silent to sound film, the films of Chaplin, the technical innovations of Abel Gance and accentuates his interest in this art form by traveling to Russia and observing the social importance conferred upon Eisenstein, the master of cinematographic montage. But what I would like to observe briefly is the mode in which this new sensibility operates in Vallejo’s writing, not thematically, but syntactically. One of these methods occurs in what we might call a “poetics of the jump”, one that organizes its semantic unities through “Discontinuous images superseded one another in а continuous series.”, as Benjamin defines montage. (Buck-Morss, 1986)
In a dispatch published in 1926, Vallejo writes: “the places are terrible. They know how to quietly play strange games, to the point that, in order to catch hold of them one need not always be guided by immediate and visible pespective, but to leap over unheard abysses, consciously or unconsciopusly giving oneself to truculent adventures and to absurd cabals and odyssies”. (1987, p. 97)
This text might almost be seen as an exit out of the impase proposed in that other note written in the same year where Vallejo says that he hates “…the streets and the paths don’t allow one to forget oneself. In the countryside and in the city, one is too much beset by routes, arrows, and signs, to be able to get lost. One is unfailingly limited there, to the north, to the south, to the east, to the west. One is irremediably situated there (…)” (1987, p. 37)
But beyond the matter of this blockage, the act of “leap[ing] over unheard abysses” to which he refers in the first paragraph, is made more evident in the poems than in his prose texts. Indeed, it is more evident in those that, contrary to the discontinuity that the jump supposes, would seem to defend the linear succession of history, probably influenced by Max Easteman, a North American Maxist whom Vallejo read enthusiastically circa 1927, and his teleological vision of history. While I can’t get into the difficulty of unifying the ideas about time that sometimes seem at odds with one another as they appear in his poetry versus in his texts in prose, I recommend the essays of Martha Ortiz and William Rowe that are edifying on the subject. [See Ortiz (2015) and Rowe (2006)]
The leap or jump, as the equivalent of a caesura proper to montage, appears in that line in Trilce VIII when Vallejo writes: “Tomorrow that other day, some- / time I might find for the saltatory power, / eternal entrance ”. Miguel Casado (2019) and Mario Montalbetti (2019) have operationalized the meaning of the word “hifalto” to think about the way that Vallejo’s poems move. In ornothology, “hifalto” is the word given to birds’ movement while hopping instead of flying—as with sparrows, to take one example. Casado refers to the preference that the poet has for birds that hop out of necessity, being flightless, like the ostrich or ñandú. The recurrent interruption that a hop figures, in contrast to the homogenous continuity of flight, is an index of the type of procedure to which Vallejo looks where arrhythmia and dissonance are intertwined in the broken syntax of the poem. From there one can reread verses like “This piano travels within, travels by joyful leaps.” in Trilce XLIV. Or, keeping with an apparently cinematic consciousness, the following where the scene begins with what happens between two eyelids so as to later convoke the “collasal montage of the sky”. (Human Poems). The cinematographic montage’s own form of temporal juxtaposition is likewise to be found in “Four consciousnesses are / simultaneously snarled in my own!”. And the logical twists that batter the chronological chain in “He who will come has just passed” (Human Poems) or “In that corner where we slept together/ so many nights, I’ve now sat down / to wander.” (Trilce XV). A more attentive analysis of each of these verses would be useful so as to observe the way that they are organized within the poems, and are in dialogue with other texts by Vallejo. For now, however, it will suffice to follow these clues to the type of cinematic procedure they suggest, and to the interrupted rhythm with which:
“Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it cristallizes into a monad,” Benjamin states in 17 from Thesis on the Philosophy of History.
This image resonates in Vallejo, but perhaps what is most interesting is not only to verify his connection with Benjamin—there is no evidence Vallejo would have read Benjamin—but the mode in which this image of sudden stoppage is articulated in the language and affects the level on which the technical and the organic are intertwined.
Above all, the socialist horizon that Vallejo and Benjamin point to moves to deprivatize the social content of language that has been taken from all of us. How to convert this mute language, mere excrecence of capitalism, into an active voice that does not exclude its own silence, being, as it now is, our own? Vallejo does not want to repeat the paternalist refrain of giving a voice to the downtrodden, but, rather, to give a “body” to that voice to a certain degree. The syntactical torsions, the assonances, the arrhythmic pulse of the language, before being vanguardist audacities are, thus, emergent forms of giving a body to that voice— a which is its own. Vallejo’s struggle for life and with language are always fed by that hope.
References
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Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing. MIT Press, 1989.
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Casado, Miguel. “Las cuatro paredes, y los dos, más dos. Notas para seguir leyendo Trilce.” En Un discurso republicano. Madrid. Libros de la resistencia, 2019.
Montalbetti, Mario. El pensamiento del poema. Variaciones sobre un tema de Badiou. Cinosargo-Marginalia, 2019.
Ortiz Canseco, Marta. (2014) Crónicas desde París: modernidad y capitalismo en César Vallejo. Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana, 43, 359-376.
Rowe, William. “César Vallejo en París: las velocidades de lo moderno”. In: Annina Clerici, Marília Mendes, eds. De márgenes y silencios. Homenaje a Martín Lienhard, Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2006. 177-190.
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