Utopian Thinking in Verse: Temporality and Poetic Imaginary in the Poetry of Nicanor Parra, Mario Benedetti, and Roque Dalton

In his essay "Utopía y desencanto en Hispanoamérica," Cuban historian Rafael Rojas reminds us that "desde los siglos de las disputas por el Nuevo Mundo entre los teólogos neotomistas y viajeros ilustrados, las Américas han sido lugar de representaciones utópicas y, a la vez, de caricaturas de la barbarie" (60). When thinking about utopia in relation to literature, perhaps we think of fiction, essays, and even theater, but poetry is seldom the first genre onto which utopian representation of Latin America can be imagined. In this article, I am interested in turning my attention to three poets who made an indelible mark on Latin America's poetic sphere in the 1960s and 1970s in distinct and yet related ways. I will be focusing on select poetry by Nicanor Parra, Mario Benedetti, and Roque Dalton as a way to discern how these poets crafted poetic propositions that contained within them a certain utopian desire without necessarily employing the term. We are reminded, however, that "we need to distinguish between the Utopian form and the Utopian wish: between the written text or genre and something like a Utopian impulse detectable in daily life and its practices by a specialized hermeneutic or interpretive method" (Jameson 1). In the work of the three aforementioned poets, however, this clear division between utopian form and utopian wish is not neatly delineated, precisely to avoid dualistic or dialectic trappings inherent in utopian thought and its literary manifestations.

My claim here is that in looking at the work of these poets, particularly at key texts written in the 1960s and early 1970s, we see an emphasis on rethinking utopia through verse without necessarily writing utopian literature per se. The work of these poets can be read from a utopian perspective or as exhibiting a utopian impulse, thus offering a nuanced understanding of utopian temporality beyond the reductionist or pure past-present-future temporal division. For all three poets, the utopian desire to effect social change and shift the terms of poetic production was happening in their present, which is to say as they were writing their works. Put differently, the present becomes a central point of departure for utopian thinking. In this sense the present serves as a dual platform from which we can simultaneously look toward the past and toward the future, much like a Janus-face. Thus the present positions itself as the site from which utopia is enacted. A focus on the present to think about utopia does not equate with presentism. In fact, as it will become clearer later, my interest in the present is anchored on François Hartog's recent critique of presentism, articulated in the following terms: "the sense that only the present exists, a present characterized at once by the tyranny of the instant and by the treadmill of an unending now" (xv). To claim that Parra, Benedetti, and Dalton were interested in articulating utopian thought from their respective present does not imply being blind to the past or the occlusion of the future. To illustrate this point more clearly, in the course of this article, I will turn to the work of select scholars who have written on utopian literature. From this discussion, I will focus on each of the three poets to tease out how a utopian thinking appears from within their verses. In the conclusion, and without wanting to fall into an anachronistic trap, I will briefly delineate what we can take away from these poetics propositions from 1960s and 1970s.

Literary Coordinates Toward Poetic Utopias

To identify the role of author in the creation of a utopia in literature, Robert Elliot argues that utopia "is man's effort to work out imaginatively what happens – or what might happen – when the primal longings embodied in the myth confront the principle of reality. In this effort man no longer merely dreams of a divine state in some remote time; he assumes the role of creator himself" (8-9). Elliot's idea can...