Cities in Ruins: The Politics of Modern Poetics

5. Pablo Neruda's Cities in Ruins: Poetic Histories from Madrid to Machu Picchu

225 Chapter Five Pablo Neruda’s Cities in Ruins Poetic Histories from Madrid to Machu Picchu Historicizing Ruins Modern poetry on ruins yields a map of how to read the historical and the literary pasts through its metaphors of destruction. Baroque poems on ruins commemorate Classical ruins and meditate on the decay of a historical space that has lost its grandeur . This evocation becomes a didactic enterprise that laments the power of time and nature over cultural products. In turn, Romantic poems on ruins tend to dehistoricize this seemingly unreachable past. Romantic poets express the melancholic feelings that those symbols of death and decay cause in the speaker, the overriding poetic I. While in marked contrast, modern texts on ruins historicize the past, ancient and recent. Poems on modern ruins are often products of progress or war. But as I have suggested earlier, ruins’ representations in modern poetry are not limited to war poetry. For instance, Pablo Neruda’s Alturas de Macchu Picchu (written and published in 1945 and as part of Canto General in 1950) transports the reader to the lost past of the Inca city.1 To evoke the Amerindian, pre-Columbian past, Neruda engages the seventeenth-century tradition of Francisco de Quevedo ’s and Rodrigo Caro’s poetry and also establishes a dialogue with the Romantic poetic tradition. These two distinct traditions confirm and reinforce Neruda’s modern voice rather than separate it from Modernity. In this chapter, I analyze Neruda’s poems on the Spanish Civil War and Madrid’s ruins in España en el corazón (1936–38) and examine their relation to the collections Residencia en la tierra I y II (1925–35) and Alturas de Macchu Picchu. The poems about the Spanish Civil War or the pre-Columbian era link the past and the present and reflect upon their historical gaps. 226 Chapter Five In my analysis of España en el corazón within the context of Avant-garde poetry, I explain why Neruda distances himself from narcissistic, nostalgic, and melancholic feelings in his representation of war ruins.2 I analyze the political significance of ruins in Neruda’s España en el corazón, in particular “Canto sobre unas ruinas,” and how he invokes the sense of urgency, “the state of emergency,” and “cultural pessimism.”3 Nostalgia and melancholia have no grounds in the politicization of the ruins. The political and historical indignation that provokes España en el corazón strengthens Alturas de Macchu Picchu. The contemporary ruins of Spain and the aerial attacks on Guernica and Madrid foreshadow World War II battles and mold Neruda’s political reading of the present and the past when he visits the Inca ruins. The dead of the Inca city are buried, petrified in the past. As I maintain in my discussion of Alturas, Neruda inserts his poetic homage to the Inca city in ruins in the tradition of the Baroque topos of ruins, and yet the poem stresses its own artificiality, as well as Neruda’s modern quest for the forgotten in Latin American history—in this poem he privileges working men as the main subjects of history. The Spanish Civil War provoked a “historical awakening” that politically ignited the generation of Neruda, Cernuda, and even Paz, although he was ten years younger. But Neruda and Cernuda, just like other Spanish Avant-garde poets such as Alberti and García Lorca, were increasingly politicized throughout the late nineteen twenties by the demise of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (1923–29), the 1929 economic crisis, and all the turmoil during the first years of the Second Republic. None of these poets lived in a historical vacuum prior to the beginning of the war; Neruda, Paz, and Cernuda did not suddenly wake up to political reality when they saw Madrid bombed. The existential and literary frustrations of the Avantgarde movement and its “yo en crisis” led them to look for a poetic sensibility that was less narcissistic, less melancholic; they were still very interested in the literary recognition of Góngora , but Quevedo became a more influential figure because of his political engagement. Neruda’s poems of ruins avoid a melancholic and a narcissistic vision of both the Spanish present and the Inca past to highlight his solidarity with the exploited community. In con- 227 Neruda trast with Simmel’s and Starobinsky’s readings of Romantic ruins, which project a...