Vol. 12, no. 1 (2020)

The contact with the landscape of Temuco was Pablo Neruda’s first conscious childhood experience. Contact and contagion of a nature at times boundless, seductive and overmastering, whose cycle of transformations displays a contrasting violence. Generative and destructive, this geography absorbs and interpenetrates, like Neruda’s poetry, wild woods, mountain and sea, invasive vegetation, the moisture of birth and of rot, timber raised, felled, buried, catastrophic rains and winds, the cyclical and imperious dominion of living forces in ceaseless metamorphosis. The rural nature of southern Chile would fix itself indelibly in the poet’s imagination and become his primordial foundation: not merely a recurring motif of his work, but the almost constant point of reference for his comparisons, the nursery of his associations, which feeds and orients his visions.

From Crepusculario to Residence on Earth, Neruda’s poetry would be a progressive attempt to free his imagination from rational controls, from every cultural complex, from history, from literature, from society. Seeking to redeem a word that would be the immediate surfacing of the inner self in spontaneous, instinctive flow, seeking to recover the deepest naturalness, once the metaphorical forces that generate mythological vision have been unleashed. His most inspired poetry, the most viscerally his own, implies a suspension of reflective consciousness, a state of rapture, of estrangement. Neruda abandons analytical thought for analogical thought. He gradually sets aside the tableau or the anecdotal, loses interest in the spectacle or the circumstance in order to recover fully the mobility and the mutability of the mythological imagination.

As it frees itself, this ancestral imagination refers us with growing insistence to natural processes, above all to organic transformations; it tends to create a biological animation. Neruda’s imagination would become ever more penetrating, less evasive, more materializing; it would seek to press inward, to reach, through deepening and immersion, that energetic nucleus of reality, that center from which every creation derives. Released to their own dynamic, without censorship, without any formalization to interfere with them, without abstraction, without any desire for stylization, the childhood fixations would manifest themselves fully. Neruda would recover the visions of basic imagination, of that pre-literary, pre-scientific mythology which transfuses all the orders of reality into intimate intercommunication, which is like a material energy, transubstantial, multiform, protean, ceaseless.

When we search for the impulses, the imaginative movements, the metaphorical processes, the insistences, the origins of Nerudian dynamism, we come up against the strong, fresh and pure world of his childhood, with the maternal matters, with wood, flesh, earth, with the sea, with the rain, with the wind, with his native geography:

De dónde vengo, sino de estas primerizas, apule

Materias que se enredan o se increspan

O se destituyen…

(Canto General de Chile, line 491)

On the many occasions when he frequently recreates the images recovered through his early experience, he tries to imitate nature in its creative processes, to conceive his poems as though they were direct manifestations of natural energy. Meaning tends toward instability, toward dispersion, toward intricate ramification, toward multiple valence; it weaves a weft often so dense that it is hard to isolate the components. The global vision matters more than any singling out of the parts; what most mobilizes the reader are the movements, the tropisms, the exchanges, the continual material transformations, rather than the repercussion of more or less independent images. This naturalism would lead Neruda to a frankly anti-intellectual stance, to avoiding all aesthetic reflection, to denying all theory, to positing a candid poetics that conceals the labor of textual production, the difficult resolution of technical problems, beneath the appearance of the irrepressible and obscure dictation of superhuman forces. In opposition to the integrity of the natural world, the city has for Neruda a negative character: it spoils, degrades, denaturalizes.

For Neruda, poetry is assimilated to nature as a son to his mother; identity, filiation is given specifically with that Chilean forest in which he spends his childhood; the origin of his poetry is located precisely at Temuco, beginning in 1906, when the future poet begins to know, to inhabit this wild beauty, enraptured and wrapped up in it. From then on his poetry would be a return to the origin, a re-actualization of that beginning; it would manifest a deep autochthony which, devoid of the picturesque or of any explicit localization, has no need of geographical indications to express solidarity with the land of his birth.

In Infancia y poesía he describes the trains; his father drove one, and Neruda would accompany him on some of the journeys to the south. The earth would always be for Neruda “the generatrix,” the one that gives life and nourishment, generator and regenerator of life. The homeland earth, above all, would appear represented as mother and dwelling, as a woman possessive and possessed, who establishes a carnal bond with the men who inhabit her. In the course of the Canto General, the sacralization of the earth as a female deity manifests itself insistently. It is often said that Neruda, given his predisposition for extended forms, for abundant rhythms, is a fluvial or oceanic poet. Both adjectives are apt, and not only metaphorically, because moving water, of sky, river or sea, constitutes, as the poet himself declares, an overwhelming, persistent experience, the inspiration of several books. For example, concerning Twenty Love Poems: “It is a book I love because, despite its keen melancholy, the relish of existence is present in it. A river and its mouth helped me greatly to write it: the Imperial river. The twenty poems are the novel of Santiago… but the panorama is always that of the waters and the trees of the south.” El habitante y su esperanza too, according to what he confides to his friend Cardona Peña, is tied to the memory of the southern waters. Residence on Earth too, in keeping with a statement by Neruda, has the oceanic rhythm and springs from a nucleus of obscure inspiration, possessed by the movement of the waves. In his letter to G. Vera dated 6 August 1928, he says: “My new book will be called Residence on Earth and it will be 40 poems in verse that I wish to publish in Spain. Everything has the same movement, the same pressure, and is developed in the same region of my head, like a single kind of insistent waves.” Rain and waves reappear throughout his work not only as predominant motifs, but also as rhythmic impulses, as natural cadences to which the poet attunes himself in order to bring to the surface and facilitate the imaginative flow.

Neruda almost always sets out from a natural stimulus; the triggering and generating agents of his inspiration are the terraqueous or the aquatic, the vegetal, the animal, the metamorphoses of eternal matter. La copa de sangre, a text dating from 1938, clarifies for us Neruda’s substantial bond with nature, helps us to understand the poet’s disposition, his imaginative patterns, his parameters, his comparisons, the correspondences he establishes in order to interpret reality. It evokes events he considers decisive in his life and to which he returns when, in the drowsiness of half-sleep, his memory wanders freely. One is the memory of a cup of lamb’s blood that his uncles made him drink at one of the feasts where the family gathered; this experience, sacralized by Neruda, takes on a ritual character, it is a ceremony of initiation that symbolizes the accession to virility. This cup of blood appears as a sacrament that transforms a fundamental physiological fact into a ceremony charged with meaning, one that puts the officiant into communication with the supreme force of life; this cup is a manna endowed with primordial powers, it is a mythological archetype that conjoins the two basic functions of organic life: nutrition and sexuality. Another memory concerns the death of his father.

There is in Neruda a deliberate primitivism that would gradually seek its most fitting expressive vehicle. Baudelaire’s “becoming barbarian again” returns, a postulate that foreshadows one of the most persistent yearnings of contemporary poetry: to strip oneself of the too heavy cultural tradition, of literary ponderousness, of the rational, moderate and harmonious clarity of European humanism. These values prove anachronistic in a bourgeois society that, from the industrial era onward, accentuates its conflicts and its contradictions; that, as it urbanizes and becomes technical, comes to miss the goodness of natural man, undiverted by civilization. But no European poet can attain this stripping away as integrally as Neruda, as the poet of the virgin lands where history weighs less and where nature still appears in its wild state.

In his liberation from mental and literary impediments, in his return to primal associations, to atavistic consciousness, to ancestral imagination, Neruda would draw close to surrealism. Perhaps one cannot speak of influence (the first surrealist texts are precisely contemporary with El hondero entusiasta and Tentativa del hombre infinito), but of aesthetic coincidence. In Neruda there occurs, as in Breton, a mythological behavior; both pursue the naturalization of artistic language, the abolition of preestablished patterns, as if they wished to make a clean slate of what is instituted and institutionalized, of what is acquired through learning, of the accepted and of social impositions, as if they wished to annul history in order to return to a primordial mode of matter, to prime matter. And in order to consummate the regeneration, an immersion is necessary, a prior destruction, a fall into primitive chaos, into the formless, which makes possible the recovery of the integrity of the beginning. According to Mircea Eliade, these contemporary artists recover the cosmogonic myths, myths relating to the origin of the universe, to birth par excellence, to the exemplary model of all creation.

The nostalgia for the state of maximum vital splendor, for paradisal nakedness and plenitude, the longing to return to the origins, the belief that purity, integrity, truth, the greater virtues are to be found at the beginnings, when man kept his bond with nature intact, would profoundly condition Neruda’s cosmovision. As regards his poetics, he would practice and preach a naturalist conception, intentionally naive, that of unconscious power.

Neruda, in the best of his work, tends to return to an a-literary literature, to pass beyond the protocol, that formal arrangement, that code which makes a piece of writing enter the field of the literary. His poetry confirms, more than any other, the theory of Northrop Frye. According to Frye, literature answers to permanent laws and structures; it is basically constituted of pre-literary categories such as rites, myths and folklore. Writers tend, more or less unconsciously, to return to these sources. Literature would be a gradual complication of a narrow set of simple formulas or archetypes that proceed from basic imaginative modes and that can be studied above all in archaic cultures. In connection with the literary work, Frye determines the relation that exists between rhythm, cycle, rite and dream. For Frye, the content, the ultimate reference of art is nature, and in art the bond with nature derives principally from the artist’s synchronization with the rhythms of his environment. Almost all these rhythms are cyclical and are ritualized: seasons, day and night, tides, solstices, gestations, breathing. Ritual is a voluntary effort to recover a lost relation, a magical relation, with the natural powers. Ritual contains in germ the mythological archetypes. A myth is a verbal crystallization of fragments of meaning into an organic form that is grasped globally and suddenly fuses, and at times transmits, rite and dream. Mythic literature presupposes a global order of nature, to which corresponds, by imitation, a similar order of the word. And just as there is an energetic center of nature, there exists, in coincidence, a deep center of imaginative experience from which myth arises as oracle, as revelation. To this center Neruda descends by immersion into the depths of consciousness, until he incarnates in words those vital forces, which are linguistically metaphorical forces and mythological forces. His visions would recreate the repertoire of mythologemes that constitute the basis not only of the primitive or popular mentality, but of all human imagination.

We are outlining a poetic personality conditioned by certain childhood experiences, with a definite vision and attitude toward the world, which would progressively seek the most suitable verbal means to express them. Diachronic analysis shows how Neruda little by little adjusts expressive intention and verbal representation. Neruda has a romantic temperament, and his most characteristic style is expressionist. As early as 1926, in the prologue to El habitante y su esperanza, he states:

“I have a dramatic and romantic conception of life; what does not reach deeply into my sensibility does not correspond to me. It has been very difficult for me to bring this constant of my spirit together with a more or less proper expression…”

Let us see how and when this alliance comes about. In Crepusculario, his first book, dating from 1923, as in Los heraldos negros by Vallejo and in Huidobro’s early poems, the process unleashed by modernism draws to a close. Neruda assimilates the tendencies of his age, practices the modes in vogue: Darío-style modernism, melodramatic romanticism, or a simplicity that puts him in contact with what is near, with his real time and space. The analogy between woman and earth recurs, between feminine fecundity and telluric fecundity: “Your flesh is earth that will be ripe / when autumn stretches out its hands to you.” The poet, in sacralizing the earth as universal generatrix, sacralizes love, the sexual union with the woman who embodies terrestrial fertility. Human acts and feelings are bound to cosmic models. Poet and landscape merge, romantically stirred by cataclysms, shaken by catastrophic forces. Referring to the stage after Crepusculario, Neruda says: “…I wanted to be a poet who would embrace in his work a greater unity. I wanted to be, in my own way, a cyclical poet who would pass from the emotion or the vision of a moment to a broader unity.”

In El hondero entusiasta he approaches the style that best suits the properties of his inspiration; here the imprint of the future Neruda is manifest, his central motivations: cosmic vertigo, the compulsive, penetrating, submersible imagination that seeks to install itself in the energetic nucleus of matter, the materializing eroticism, the genetic and the genital, the interactions among all the orders of nature. The movement of El hondero entusiasta extends until it provokes a flow of verses which, brought together, would make up Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. In this third book, the poet would try to adjust his tools according to his expressive intentions. This confused and tumultuous communion with the universe, this intuitive absorption of nature in the fullness of its energy, comes to be accentuated with Tentativa del hombre infinito. Published in 1926, Neruda assigns it decisive importance within his poetic work, because it surpasses Twenty Love Poems in the aim of managing a poetry that would agglutinate all antagonisms, that would encompass all the powers of the world, and because it constitutes a first definer of the poet’s most characteristic stimulus.

Oretta Guidi, a graduate in classical letters, taught Italian language and literature in a comparative perspective at the University for Foreigners of Perugia.
She has published two essays, on the Fantastic and its surroundings and on twentieth-century Irregulars. Her interests lie in twentieth-century literature; she takes part in literary conferences on modern and contemporary themes and authors, and contributes to various publications as well.