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Reinscribing Poetry's Potential: José Emilio Pacheco Reads Ramón López Velarde
- Hispanófila
- The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Romance Studies
- Volume 154, Septiembre 2009
- pp. 59-72
- 10.1353/hsf.2009.0024
- Article
- Additional Information
REINSCRIBING POETRY’S POTENTIAL: JOSÉ EMILIO PACHECO READS RAMÓN LÓPEZ VELARDE by John V . Waldron IN Mexico, as in other parts of Latin America, it is not uncommon for officials of the government and its various branches to raise authors and their texts to an iconic status hailing them as representative of national values. Such is the case with Mexican poet Ramón López Velarde who was labeled “national poet” by president Echeverría in 1971. With López Velarde, as with other artists, the official conception which allows for his assimilation into the cultural imaginary often elides elements disruptive to the unities the nation wishes to create. As the nation narrates its past through the incorporation of texts, authors and heroes, it seeks to assert an uninterrupted, unproblematic connection between the present and the past. It takes figures like López Velarde and turns them into public, national icons in an effort to create a common set of images that support national ideals. The relationship between nation and the arts however is never an easy one. For example, in the particular case of literature the metaphoric potential of language must be reduced or eliminated in order for it to be used in national discourse. For similar reasons, the official reading of Ramón López Velarde as a national icon is at variance with the often times frustrating ambiguities one finds in trying to arrive at an understanding of his life or his work. In spite of this difference, the multiplicity represented by his private, literary persona is infrequently forced to confront the official image. By not placing him in relation to his official persona, literary interpretations of his work have indirectly gone along with the nationalist, official efforts to exclude the potential created by his metaphoric language from the cultural imaginary. José Emilio Pacheco however places the officially accepted understanding of López Velarde into relation with the more problemat59 ic interpretation of his work and life. By doing this Pacheco reasserts the place of poetry’s potential in the political sphere. This unsettles the official cultural imaginary. Many studies have shown how the construction of the cultural imaginary, a set of approved images that a community holds in common, often leads to exclusions and silences. These studies then seek to unearth the repressed texts and voices or read the accepted texts against the grain to show the fissures that exist within the smooth narrative the nation wishes to construct. Recent critical works on the transformative potential of poetic language share a common interest with such studies with one important difference. Rather than offering a reading of poetic works that completes the national narrative by bringing to light elements previously silenced, they try to understand the multiple, and therefore indeterminate nature of metaphoric or poetic language in relation to the political context or cultural imaginary. In this case what has been silenced by national discourse and in many ways left unstudied by critical works is the relationship between the potential of poetic language and the cultural imaginary . Critical works on Latin American poetry that study the relationship between poetry and politics have underlined the power of poetic language to subvert codified discursive practices. However perhaps due to the very nature of poetic language itself, subversion here is never a completed project, it is rather a subversion that is always in process. Julia Kristeva has already pointed out the revolutionary potential of poetic language once it is recognized that its meaning is always “in process.” Through an analysis of the sign, the mythic structure of language is destabilized thus de-authorizing meaning. This has an effect of causing “crises within social structures and institutions” because they are thrown into a moment of “mutation or disarray” (125) since the very basis upon which identity of meaning and other unities are created is unsettled.1 Extending Kristeva’s thought in some ways is William Rowe who, in his study on contemporary Latin American poets, says; “where (or when) symbols are formed is the location of the poetic imagination’s power” (12). Rowe goes on to argue that, poetry’s most important potential is not in the reflection of...