Cesar Vallejo's Search for Transcendence

Section I: Introduction

f all the themes sought after in serious poetry, the theme of transcendence is probably the most universally pursued and the least frequently realized. If transcendence means a going beyond, then the movement that leads to the beyond must begin its trajectory by being solidly grounded in the only reality that three-dimensional beings can know objectively: the physical world in which our bodies move and touch as they provide us with the sense data which form the basis of our perceptions. This study will attempt to follow that trajectory as it was experienced and recorded by a 20th Century poet whose self-confessed wish was:

 . . . to knock on all the doors,
 and beg pardon of whoever's there
 and make for him bits of fresh bread
 here, in the oven of my heart.

 ("Our Daily Bread")

At age 27, Cesar Vallejo published his first volume of poems, Los Heraldos Negros, in Lima, Peru. The date was 1919, a period of worldwide revolution in all the arts. Vallejo was probably well versed in the classics of Spanish literature; also he had enough acquaintance among the literary circles of Trujillo (the seat of his local university) to have heard of the innovations that were taking place in Mexico and South America, as well as the wider currents of literary experimentation in Europe and America. In Vallejo's early work, the informing influence was clearly that of the 'Modernist' poets, especially the outstanding South American figure in that group, Rubén Darío. Darío was of mixed Indian and European parentage, as was Vallejo, a point which has been made much of by the biographers of both poets. The group of Latin American poets who called themselves the 'Modernists' had announced a revolt against romanticism and conventional conceits and declared an intention to practice more realism in the choice of subjects, poetic diction, and imagery. However, this group rarely succeeded in their ambitions beyond a certain simplification of language and the establishment of a school of poets of local color. Darío, in spite of his wish to be a poet of the people, clung obstinately to tight forms: his incisive long satire on the bestiality of human beings, presented as a dialogue between St. Francis and the wolf, although graphic in description, makes use of persistent end-rhyme and the imagery of allegory rather than the trappings of everyday life. In general, the work of Darío is full of allusions to figures from classical mythology and invocations to God, gods, and the Muse; at this remove (he died in 1916), the action of his verses seems to take place more in the Palacio de Bellas Artes than it does in the common streets of his native village.

What he passed on to Vallejo was an almost fanatical concern for the mot juste, and a determination to pack his lines so densely with energy, vividness of motion and description, and the naked vernacular, that they threatened to explode out of the restraints imposed by their formal figures and their formal rhyme. Of the 67 poems which comprise Los Heraldos Negros, 21 are sonnets. With only two exceptions, these sonnets are regular, set up as an octave of two quatrains rhyming abab, abab, and a regular sestet of two tercets. The sestet, however, had already begun to be for Vallejo, as it had been earlier for Darío, an opportunity for playing with the possibilities of rhyme. There are almost as many variations in the rhyme scheme of the sestets as there are sonnets in the collection.

To these early sonnets can be traced Vallejo's tendency to repeat the same word over and over again in a poem. A good half of them make use of a single word to serve as an end-rhyme twice, and sometimes even three times. This tendency to use and re-use a single word or group of words, and the ability to rhyme almost invisibly, were the two formal devices that persisted throughout his entire work. The intense reverberation of a single word or phrase is one important stylistic element that makes a poem by Vallejo recognizably his. It is as though that central utterance must have drummed itself like a pulsebeat in his mind until the poem formed itself in suspension around it, like the charges of an atom around its nucleus. This centrality of a seminal idea or image is a feature of Vallejo's work at every stage of its development.

As Americo Ferrari wrote in his introduction to the 1968 Lima edition of Vallejo's Complete Poetic Works, Los Heraldos Negros is not one book, but two. After having detailed Vallejo's debt to Darío and the Modernist school, and having commented on the importance of the Indian ancestry of both poets, he goes on to say:

  . . . The poet is still seeking his language,
 and at times we find literary cliches, descriptions
 in which a preoccupation with 'form' suffocates 
 the poetic emotion. But parallel, or even sometimes 
 hidden within one of these conventional poems, 
 there rises up another tone, dry and feverish, a
 genuine style not imitative and almost inimitable,
 which transmits directly to the reader an urgent
 message, a discharge of anguish and sadness
 that sears us like a hot iron applied directly to
 the skin. In this tone, presaging Trilce and Poemas
 Humanos, there is a glimmering of Vallejo: his grand 
 poesy -- metaphysical and human, social and human 
 (Vallejo: Obra Poetica Completa, 1968, p. 17, my 
 translation).

Three years later, in 1922, Trilce burst forth with the brutal and dissonant phrases which announced Vallejo's permanent break with traditional Spanish verse. It is as though, having exhausted his patience with trying to force conventional forms to serve as containers for his turbulent message, he allowed the full range of his utterance to break through the barriers of pre-cast form and flow like lava, melting every obstacle until that surge of primal energy -- crystallizing into coined words, irregular and truncated lines, contorted chunks of metaphor and image -- revealed in its random patterns a kind of free-form verbal sculpture, which nevertheless invariably preserves in its basic structure traces of its creator's mastery of sound, cadence, and harmony.

Perhaps frightened at his own intrepidity, Vallejo wrote:

 This book was born from the greatest emptiness. I'm
 responsible for it. I assume complete responsibility 
 for its aesthetics. Today, and more than ever perhaps,
 I sense an until now unknown most sacred obligation
 gravitating over me, as a man and an artist: being free!
 If I don't have to be free, I won't ever be. I feel the arch
 of my forehead gaining its most imperative force of
 heroism. I offer myself in the freest form I can and this 
 is my greatest artistic harvest. God knows how far 
 my freedom is true and real!  God knows how much 
 I suffered so the rhythm didn't overrun this freedom
 and slide into license! God knows what hair-raising
 ledges I've looked down from, full of fear, afraid 
 everything was going to die in my poor living soul! 
 (Smith, 1973 -- introduction to Trilce.)

Once launched on the poems in Trilce, Vallejo never looked back at tradition for permission to leap to an extended metaphor. His bondage to schools, linguistic conventions, and literary expectations was over; henceforth he would seek the material for his championship of human aspiration in the everyday physical reality that surrounded him. He was to find more than enough sources to feed his social and humanistic ideals during his life in Europe.

Poemas Humanos covers the period (15 years) of Vallejo's residence there. Much of his activity during those years was political, including his support of the Spanish Republic and his involvement with the Communist Party. A comprehensive documentation of those years exists in a series of articles and other prose pieces, including a novel, written by Vallejo; however, very little of this prose has been translated into English.

Deported from France in 1930 for his Communist activities, he spent two years in Spain, working for the cause of the Spanish Republic as a journalist, observer and commentator. Vallejo's biographers all point to the fact that his emotional state strongly affected his physical health. Although he had been allowed to return to Paris in 1932, much of his time was spent traveling throughout Europe, with frequent visits to Spain and several to Russia. The illness which he developed shortly after the collapse of the Spanish Republic, and from which he died a few months later (at the age of 44) was exacerbated by despair and depression. He had invested, perhaps, more energy than he could afford in his hopes for the evolution of a new social order. The heavy weight of this defeat is perceptible throughout almost all of his last poems.

During the Fall and Winter of 1937, Vallejo wrote 25 of the poems represented in Poemas Humanos and the entire text of España, aparta de mí esta cáliz (Spain, take this cup from me), which can probably best be described as a kind of verbal Guernica. The best of these last poems exhibit a blend of participation and reflection where time, space, and motion seem to come together in a new dimension of reality. The play of variations on themes and word groups serves to weave each poem together in a mounting crescendo of emotional impact, manipulated so powerfully that the lack of resolution of the chords of sound and imagery leaves behind an impression of the poem as a great suspended sigh. This has the effect of forcing the reader to provide his own resolution and allows the poet to refuse the limitations imposed by taking a moral position.

Vallejo spent a lifetime trying to force opposites to coalesce. An investigation of the movement of his thought through the increasing aliveness and immediacy of his imagery, and the gradual broadening of his subject matter to include a universal range of human experience, will show how he persistently 'rejected outer logic in favor of inner logic' (to quote James Higgins in his anthology of Vallejo's work) in search of his own center. The emotional and spiritual richness and the daring balance of pathos and defiance in the last poems reveal that the view from this center extended far beyond his own personal horizons and extended, likewise, the recorded range of human understanding.