Rethinking
Spirituality
Through Music.
Trakl - T h e Poet's F ad in g Face- A lb e rto G irri, R afael C ad en as a n d P o s th u m a n is t Latin A m e ric a n P o e try
10Girri's books published between 1946 and 1962 are: Playa sola (1946), Coronacio? n de la espera (1947),
Trecepoemas (1949), El tiempo que destruye (1951), Esca? ndaloy soledades (1952), Li? nea de la vida (1955), Examen de nuestra causa (1956), La penitencia y el me? rito (1957), Propiedades de la magia (1959), La condicio? n necesaria (1960) and Elegi? as italianas (1962). His later works are: El ojo (1963), Envi? os (1967), Casa de la mente (1970), Valores diarios (1970), En la letra, ambigua selva (1972), Diario de un libro (1972, prose), Poesi? a de la observacio? n (1973), Quien habla no esta? muerto (1975), El motivo es elpoema (1976), Arbol de la estirpe humana (1978), Lo propio, lo de todos (1980), Homenaje a W. C. Williams (1981), Li? rica de percepciones (1983), Monodias (1985), Existenciales (1986), Tramas de conflictos (1988), and 1989/1990 (1990).
11Girri coincides chronologically with the Argentinean "generacio? n del 40," that poet and critic Ce? sar Ferna? ndez Moreno catalogues as including: Daniel Devoto, Roberto Paine, Basilio Uribe, Carlos Latorre, Carlos Alberto Alvarez, Alfonso Sola Gonza? lez, Ana Maria Chouhy Aguirre, Eduardo Jonquie? res, Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, Alberto Ponce de Leo? n, E? dgar Bayley, Olga Orozco, Jose? Mari? a Castin? eira, Vicente Barbieri, Silvina Ocampo, Juan Ferreyra Basso, Enrique Molina, Miguel Angel Go? mez, Leo? n Benaro? s
and Miguel Etchebarne (225). Greatly influenced by Federico Garcia Lorca, Rainer Maria Rilke, Neruda's Residencia en la tierra and French poetic tradition, the confluence of neo-romanticism and surrealism is the dominant shared parentage of their poetry, manifested in the their expressions of melancholy, pessimism, rebellion and longing for infinitude (Ferna? ndez Moreno 227). With their romantic tone and turbulent, grandiloquent first-person poetic subject, Girri's earliest books-- Playa sola (1946) and Coronacio? n de la espera (1947), in particular-- coincide with this aesthetic trend, but these characteristics fade in his following collections.
12Cadenas is associated with the Venezuelan "generacio? n del 60" whose most prominent poets--Alfredo Silva Estrada, Guillermo Sucre, Luis Garcia Morales, Alfredo Chaco? n, Rafael Jose? Mun? oz, Juan Calzadilla, Caupolica? n Ovalles, Vi? ctor Valera Mora, Gustavo Pereira, Hesnor Rivera, Amoldo Acosta Bello, Francisco Pe? rez Perdomo and Jose? Barroeta-- generally follow one or more of these four poetic lines: 1) linguistic and political subversion; 2) surrealist and oneiric experimentation; 3) telluric expression; and 4) formalist/ textualist/ transcendentalist approaches (Miranda 103-4). These poets also formed several important groups-- Cantaclaro, Sardio, El Techo de la Ballena, Tro? pico Uno and Tabla Redonda-- that produced collective manifestos and magazines. Cadenas was a founding member of the leftist Tabla Redonda
26 CONFLUENCIA, FALL 2014
? group (1959-61), affiliated with the Communist party, which was founded to "1. Denunciar con voz revolucionaria la realidad venezolana. 2. Oponerse a las tendencias intelectualistas de algunos grupos literarios. 3. Defender la libertad del creador" (Vera 43). Cadenas later renounced his political affiliations, and his publications from Falsas maiobras (1966) on approach poetry as an ascetic search for individual authenticity.
13 Chronologically, Cadenas' poetic oeuvre is composed of: Cantos iniciales (1946), Una isla (1958), Los cuadernos del destierro (1960, 2001), Derrota (1966), Falsas maniobras (1966), Intemperie (1977), Memorial (1977), Amante (1983), Dichos (1992), Gestiones (1992), and Obra entera. Poesi? ay prosa (Editorial Pre- Textos, 2007; Fondo de Cultura Econo? mica, 2000, 2010).
14For an analysis of Foucault's critique of humanism and the concept of Man as it relates to the Latin American tradition and particularly to Borges, see Zavala.
15 Foucault describes the construction of Man through three doublets, or binary oppositions that structure humanistic thought: 1) an empirico-transcendental doublet; 2) the cogito and the unthought; 3) the retreat and return of the origin. Dreyfus and Rabinow elaborate on these categories: "(1) as a fact among other facts to be studied empirically, and yet as the transcendental condition of the possibility of all knowledge; (2) as surrounded by what he cannot get clear about (the unthought), and yet as a potentially lucid cogito, source of all intelligibility; and (3) as the product of a long history whose beginning he can never reach and yet, paradoxically as the source of that very history" (31).
16All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
17Heidegger attempts to ask the question of Being explicitly, not in terms of beings themselves (the ontic), or a conceptualization of Being in terms of a highest being. In his earlier works, Heidegger seeks a meaning of Being, but then reformulates his question in the 1930s as an inquiry into the truth of Being. Truth (aletheia) is understood as the way in which the world is opened up, or in other words, the process whereby the horizon within which beings appear is produced. This process and horizon, Heidegger specifies, is historically conditioned, and epochal: "There is Being only in this or that particular historical character: physis, logos, en, idea, energeia, Substantiality, Objectivity, Subjectivity, the Will, the Will to Power, the Will to Will. [. . . ] The manner in which it, Being, gives itself, is itself determined by the way in which it clears itself" (Identity and Difference 66-67). This part of Heideggers thought-- a historical, as opposed to a transcendental approach to Being-- is not far from Foucault's epistemological periodization of knowledge. 18Heidegger's quaternary description of the world, whose terms originate from a poem by Holderlin, has often been criticized by scholars as a flight of poetic fancy in its description of the interrelatedness of things. Graham Harman, however, evocatively suggests that the "fourfold"-- instead of an arbitrary number of categories to classify the things of the world-- is a means to describe the "structure of reality itself" (176) in which "earth" and "sky" are the respective terms for the universal processes of revealing and concealing, and "divinities" and "mortals" are terms that capture how this dualism operates at the ontic level (see Chapter Two, "Beyond Being and Time," particularly section 18 "The Fourfold"). Both understandings of the fourfold, however, are useful in approaching Girri's and Cadenas' poetry.
19I would like to highlight, following Alain Badiou, that the field of cultural studies is possible because of its grounding in a particular humanism of Man that emanates from the hegemonic logic of late capitalism (Ethics 4--5) that, in his view, neutralizes alternative philosophical inquiries. As Foucault suggests, true thinking today is only possible within "the void left by man's disappearance" (The Order o f Things 343). See also Badiou's discussion of the disappearance of Man and God in Le Siecle (243-51).
20 Many studies test Edward Said's classic model of Orientalism in the Hispanic context, concluding that most Latin American authors do not partake in the power dynamics, cultural representations and political doctrines that constitute Said's definition. See: Tinajero (2004) and Kushigian (1991). Few critics have examined in a systematic fashion the appropriation and adaptation of Eastern philosophical concepts by
Latin American authors.
21 See the following books that explore the connections between Heidegger and Eastern philosophies and religious traditions: May (1996) and Parkes (1990).
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