Cities in Ruins: The Politics of Modern Poetics

6. The Effects of the Real: Reading Ruins in Modern Poetry

269 Chapter Six The Effects of the Real Reading Ruins in Modern Poetry Ruins unveil the uncomfortable historical legacy of the city. Ruins are often treated as disposable waste or as valuable sites for the tourist gaze, but modern poems ultimately see ruins as the effects of the real. Echoing Baudelaire and Eliot, the modern city is dressed as the “Unreal city,” constantly changing its wardrobe. Buildings are demolished and facades are remodeled according to economic speculation, architectural fashion, and urban planning. The poetic representation of the modern city in ruins is a paradox in itself. The modern urban landscape has always been in a process of destruction and reconstruction; its promises of progress contain its “unreality.” The ever-shifting margins of the new city, its remnants, its derelict neighborhoods , its abandoned buildings, constitute the real casualties of modernization and the roads to progress. The map of the modern topos of ruins in poetry historicizes the remains of the past in a political and ethical critique of progress or war. September 11, 2001, marked the beginning of the twentyfirst century and is imprinted into the American psyche as a day of national mourning. Terrorists attacked NewYork’s symbol of economic pride and power with airplanes, products themselves of modern progress. The attacks in New York and Washington, DC, prompted a collective shocking experience and exposed American vulnerability. The ruins of the World Trade Center signified a “historical awakening” to the real that installed a state of emergency.1 But the historical awakening was a temporary wake-up call; life continues after the disruption.2 After the collapse of the Twin Towers, the war on terrorism produced wreckage in other countries, not only in the United States. However, many saw in the destruction the need to “rise up,” 270 Chapter Six expressed in Bruce Springsteen’s song, “My City of Ruins” —the ruins stirred a sense of solidarity with the people of New York. How do ruins shape our ways of reading reality and representing history? Are ruins always a sign of finitude? The attacks in Madrid on March 11, 2004, provoked political indignation and defiance when a majority of the Spanish people felt manipulated by the terrorist attacks, and simultaneously, by the response of politicians in power, three days before the national elections. The destruction of the trains meant the death of many innocent civilians, but in the atrocious face of terrorism, it also enfused a firm political response in the people, whose general cry became “queremos saber.” Contemporary historical events determine the modern representation of ruins. Madrid’s ruins during the Spanish Civil War made Neruda, a few years later, see beyond the natural and cultural communion of the isolated Machu Picchu. The overwhelming beauty of the site moved Neruda, but he decided not to evoke the past in a nostalgic restorative project. On the contrary , in his search for origins and his desire to reach the Inca past, he recognized the injustices and the violence buried among the stones. Though poetic ruins may divulge an apocalyptic vision of history and a poetics of disillusionment, in Neruda’s Alturas de Macchu Picchu, they also became a source of redemption, hope, and solidarity with the victims of the past. Modern poems on ruins can be read as historical allegories. By representing the destruction of a past, a city, an empire, they seek to rethink the historical traces of Modernity. In LatinAmerican poetry, the main historical past that tends to be buried in the layers of ruins is the indigenous legacy. Rosario Castellanos’s “Silencio cerca de una piedra antigua” presents the dilemma of the Latin American poet as the “voice of the voiceless,” even when the speaker’s “words” seem to be themselves fragmented and in ruins. The first verses of the poem depict words as ripe and untouched: “Estoy aquí, sentada, con todas mis palabras / como con una cesta de fruta verde, intactas” (61). Words are like fruits, not ready to eat, not ready to communicate. Words are also comparable to the stones of the past, the fragments of the ancient ruins that want to speak through her: 271 The Effects of the Real Los fragmentos de mil dioses antiguos derribados se buscan por mi sangre, se aprisionan, queriendo recomponer su estatua. De las bocas destruidas quiere subir hasta mi boca un canto… (61) The ruins of the Aztec and Mayan empires are projected in the fragments...