Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (4 page)

But these complaints are unjustified. In recent years there has been an effort to conceptualize
Modernismo
in ways unattainable to Unamuno. Clearly,
Modernismo
was, more than anything else, a metaphysical pursuit by a cadre of intellectuals disenchanted with institutionalized religion and with the ideological currents available. In Darío’s case, he was influenced by Pythagoreanism, a view (adapted by Spinoza in the Renaissance) suggesting that the entire universe is permeated by, and manifests, the divine. An essential ingredient of this worldview is the concept of harmony. God is a harmonious entity and so is nature, made of eternal male and female elements. The Pythagoreans sought a unity of life based on their faith in a universe that was orderly, intelligible, and logical, and on the need to find balance between the masculine and feminine sides of the self. The search for unity leads to the concept of a mirror between the microcosm of humanity and the macrocosm that is the universe. The
Modernistas
sought to understand their surroundings through theories such as this one. They perceived the poet to be a biblical character of sorts, whose talent, much like that of the prophet, lay in his ability to perceive the layers and connections that make reality what it is. The poet was able to communicate with the higher spheres through his intellect and song, and he (for these were male-dominated times) needed to offer those gifts to the people even if the message might be misunderstood and rejected. This haughty attitude toward art was typical in the twilight of the nineteenth century. Among the
Modernistas
in Latin America, it sometimes found itself mixed with politics. That is the case of the Cuban José Martí, of course, and, as I will discuss later, also with Darío, although to a far lesser extent.

The term Modernism—in spite of the way Paz, or better, his translators, and others use it—should not be confused with its Spanish version,
Modernismo
. As it turns out, the meaning of the words in the two languages is diametrically different, identifying trends that belong to radically divergent cultural landscapes. (Hence my use, throughout, of the italicized Spanish.) “Modernism” is the rubric used in Europe and the United States to designate the artistic generation between the world wars (the dates range from approximately 1914 to the mid-fifties), personified by, among others, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. Their pursuit was aesthetic in nature as well as political and linguistic. They believed that the patterns of life at the end of the Industrial Revolution, as they applied to art and philosophy, were outmoded and needed to be revitalized, sometimes by “renewing” old forms, genres, authors. Thus, in the area of literature, the practitioners of Modernism sought to invigorate the page by making language less rigid, more flexible. They embraced concepts such as “stream of consciousness” in order to portray characters in nontraditional ways—from inside out, so to speak. All of this makes the Modernists in Europe closer to what are called the
Vanguardistas
of Latin America (e.g., César Vallejo, et al.).

In contrast, the
Modernistas
in Latin America appeared earlier on the cultural map. Their revolution occurred roughly between 1885 and 1915 (or, with Darío’s death, a year later) and although it spilled into other artistic areas, its central tenets apply to literature almost exclusively, and to poetry most vividly. The writers of the
Modernista
movement are much closer in spirit to the Romantics in Europe, whose poetic search is also for unity and harmony in the universe at large. Latin America never had a Romantic movement per se; indeed, it skipped it, because by the time that particular aesthetics arrived on this side of the Atlantic the region was consumed with ideas of independence and revolution. Politics mingled inextricably with daily affairs and there was no time to be concerned with that sublime and tragic sense of life. But by the end of the nineteenth century, nations such as Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia had become autonomous, and they were focused on finding their own collective identity. Others, such as Cuba and Puerto Rico, would be at the junction of the Spanish-America War of 1898, through which Spain lost its colonies in the Caribbean Basin and the region entered the orbit of a new imperial power, the United States. Thus,
Modernismo
is, in essence, a loose Latin American version of Romanticism, infused with an understanding of language and politics that is influenced by global events at the time and by post-Romantic artistic movements in Europe such as Symbolism and Parnassianism, which embraced an esoteric, somewhat hermetic conception of art. The poet, in the view of these movements, connected with archetypes embedded in the cultural consciousness. Aside from Darío, the movement included Martí, Colombian José Asunción Silva, Mexican Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, and Argentine Leopoldo Lugones. Through his combination of literature and essays, Martí, like Darío, was an assiduous correspondent to newspapers such as
La Nación
in Buenos Aires, and his readers soon made him an idol—and, with his death on the battlefield in 1895 in the struggle for Cuban independence, a martyr as well. But while these two authors have much in common, they are also quite different. Darío, for one thing, is an aesthete, even though he wrote copiously on the imperial hopes of the United States in the Spanish-speaking hemisphere. While Martí remained focused on Cuba no matter where he was throughout the Americas and in exile in Key West and New York, Darío wandered the globe. Darío’s itinerant agenda as a diplomat, journalist, and traveler brought him to distant regions—distant at least for a citizen of a small, impoverished nation such as Nicaragua.

Darío was comfortable with the effort behind
Modernismo,
although he grew suspicious of the rubric itself. In his eyes the movement should have represented progress in a myriad of areas, from science to technology, from economics to education. He envisioned—and with enormous enthusiasm—a transition for the Americas from an awkward, dependent region still lingering in its mediocrity, stuck in a dogmatic tradition, and blindly loyal to a feudal Spain, to a fully cosmopolitan society attuned to the principles and fashions of the West. This, for him, was the announcement of a new type of life. This
Modernismo,
he stated, “is beginning to give us a place apart, a place that is independent.” It must be kept in mind that with the exception of the luminous seventeenth-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz and an improbably small cadre of
americanistas,
the number of authors from the New World that were recognized at all in Spain was insignificant. So for Darío and his peers, recognition in Madrid was important, since it meant legitimacy: if the former colonial power could validate their work, the status of that work was automatically more solid, less ethereal.

There was much debate in Spain at the time about the accuracy of describing the overall effort as
Modernismo
and about the ultimate endurance of the work. Juan Valera, in a column called “American Letters” for the literary supplement of the newspaper
El Imparcial,
expressed his enthusiasm. He remarked on Darío’s French tone and the highly polished Spanish of the pieces. Valera eventually wrote to Darío: “None of the men of letters of the Peninsula that I have known with more cosmopolitan spirit, and that have resided for a longer time in France, and that have spoken French and other foreign languages better, have ever seemed to me so deeply filled with the spirit of France as you, sir: not Galiano, not Eugenio de Ochoa, not Miguel de los Santos Alvarez.” Valera added a little later: “It seems that here, a Nicaraguan author who never set foot out of Nicaragua except to go to Chile, and who is an author so
à la mode de Paris
and with such ‘chic’ and distinction, has been able to anticipate fashion and even modify and impose it.”

 

In 1890, a couple of years after
Azul
. . . was published, a coup d’etat in Nicaragua forced Darío to move to Guatemala, then to El Salvador. In 1891, his son Rubén Darío Contreras was born in Costa Rica. In 1892 he also made his first, revelatory trip to Spain, a country with which he had an emotional relationship described in the chronicles and literary portraits of
España contemporánea
(Contemporary Spain, 1901). This was the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s so-called discovery of the Americas, and Darío was on the verge of replicating, at the aesthetic level, Simón Bolívar’s effort to achieve continental independence from Spain. Over time he met several Spanish writers with whom he established a lasting friendship; some of them, including Ramón María Valle-Inclán, Antonio and Manuel Machado, and Juan Ramón Jiménez, later to win the Nobel Prize for literature, became supporters or wrote prologues for his books. It was also at this time that Rafaela Contreras Cañas died. Shortly after, Darío married his second wife, Rosario Murillo.

Darío finally traveled to Paris in the early 1890s. There he at last met one of his idols, Paul Verlaine, and, on a trip to New York, he forged a friendship with Martí. Three years later, in 1896, now known as the
annus mirabilis
in Darío’s career, two of his most important books,
Los raros
(The Misfits) and
Prosas profanas y otros poemas
(Profane Prose and Other Poems), were published by Imprenta Pablo E. Coni, their publication costs paid by Carlos Vega Belgrano, editor of Argentina’s
El Tiempo,
a newspaper for which Darío regularly wrote. These two efforts are fascinating in that they push Darío’s aesthetic views to new dimensions.
Los raros,
published in Argentina, includes profiles of characters Darío is attracted to (Poe, Verlaine, Rachilde, Villiers de Lisle d’Adam, et al.). Their appeal is to be found in the desire they nurture to not adapt their needs to society, to break rules, to rebel. In
Prosas profanas,
on the other hand, the term “profane” is crucial: Darío strove for a poetics akin to his age, connected to Catholicism but seeking alternative modes of faith. He looked toward mythology, and he also looked toward pre-Columbian history. His memoir
Historia de mis libros
(The Story of My Books), serialized in Buenos Aires’s
La Nación
in 1913, along with his autobiography, allow us to understand Darío’s own perception of his poetic mission. In that first book, he writes: “[In] all the Spanish Americas, no one held any end or object for poetry save the celebration of
native
glories, the events of Independence, the
American
nature: an eternal hymn to Junín, an endless ode to the agriculture of the torrid zone, and stirring patriotic songs. I did not deny that there was a great treasure trove of poetry in our prehistoric times, in the Conquest, and even in the colony, but with our subsequent social and political state had come intellectual dwarfism and historical periods more suitable for the blood-dripping penny dreadful than the noble canto. Yet I added: ‘Buenos Aires—cosmopolis! And tomorrow!’ The proof of this prophecy can be found in my recent ‘Canto to Argentina.’ ”

This volume again contains classical examples of Darío’s aesthetics, including a sonatina about a princess, an early poem about a swan, and a couple of poems that might well be considered his
ars poetica
: “Love Your Rhythm” and “I’m Hunting a Form.” In the former, Darío, in a self-referential voice, maps out his poetic pursuit, offering a vision of the poet as a medium between the earthly and celestial spheres. The poem includes this stanza:

 

The sonnet “I’m Hunting a Form,” on the other hand, is the most representative of Darío’s confessional pieces. It mixes classical and mythical ingredients, from the Venus de Milo to Sleeping Beauty, concluding with the swan, specifically its question mark-shaped neck, as a symbol of doubt. This is a memorable disquisition on the evasiveness and vulnerability of poetry. The last two stanzas read:

 

On the other hand,
Los raros
is, in my estimation, one of Darío’s most bizarre, most daring works. Mexican critic Jaime Torres Bodet once said that the book contains portraits of artists better known for their proclivity toward the uncanny than for their authentic genius, and more apt to produce episodic—that is, forgettable—art than art that is likely to endure throughout the ages. But a mere list of those discussed by Darío instantaneously proves the thesis wrong: Martí, Poe (who, according to Dario, “passed his life, one might say, under the floating influence of a strange mystery”), Ibsen, Verlaine, Léon Bloy, and Isadora Duncan, to name only a handful. Darío does not attempt to deliver a balanced view. Instead, he is interested in an open, confessed display of subjectivity. His portraits are about exceptional natures, about freedom in art, about talents whose life, like Darío’s, is spent “hunting a form that my style can barely trace.” Needless to say, Darío’s choice of a subject for a book was, in a way, a self-justification. After all, he, too, was
un raro,
an eccentric who had a huge influence on literature and was recognized as something of a genius. This, by the way, wasn’t the first time he had embraced a tangential approach to writing: Darío was often known to choose a theme in order to talk about himself and his place in society, the place of his poetry in society, and the place of the artist in society. The argument in
Los raros
is that those who rebel, those who assert their difference, are those whom, in the long run, we most prize.