Research Agenda
My research examines the strategies and motivations of intellectuals in Latin America who reactivate historical figures and imagine transhistorical communities. I am especially interested in the many ways that these cultural imaginaries converge and collide with political proposals, national projects, as well as revolutionary proclamations. Much of my scholarship has explored how and why history was reimagined in the literature and political discourse of the past century. More specifically, I have asked why mid-20th-century Latin America experienced a rebirth of “visionary” poetry in little magazines. Why revelation in an age of political turmoil and radical social change? And why in magazines? With case studies on intellectuals of the Spanish diaspora (María Zambrano), Mexico (Octavio Paz), Bolivia (Jaime Saenz), and Cuba (José Lezama Lima), my book manuscript, Poetics of Revelation: Communities of the Literary Oracular in Latin American Print Cultures, examines the political radicalization of young intellectuals and their subsequent retreat from politics after 1940, focusing on their internalization of revolutionary fatigue and growing anxiety toward State bureaucracy and consumer capitalism, which led them to distrust any self-declared people’s party and to reimagine a variety of poetic communities.
These intellectuals’ new concern that “national energy” (Fichte) was so volatile it could turn assemblies into mobs convinced them that such a perilous force, a veritable “eternal tradition” (Unamuno), needed to be protected and transmitted for posterity, as is reflected in “Hacia un saber sobre el alma” by Zambrano, “La poesía como soledad y como comunión” by Paz, Muerte por el tacto by Saenz, and La fijeza by Lezama. Wary of the demagogic potential of populist leaders, they reactivated the rhetoric of revelation by identifying as part of a transhistorical society of kindred interpreters of history who defied western philosophy, abandoning the systematic abstraction of truth for a philosophy of life based on discipleship. Since these authors were poets, to name their marvelous visions they imagined a new language that would remain impervious to the vociferous chants of the political rally, and they distinguished it from the lapidary prose of lay reporters and advertisers who competed for the same mass readership in the marketplace of ideas.
Disillusioned with radical platforms that constructed mass culture as a people, practitioners of poetic revelation took recourse in an “oracular logic of mediation,” which affirmed the resilience of a truth older than western philosophy, the accessibility of that truth to initiated specialists, and a code of conduct that could serve as consolation for the eroded individuality of life in the bureaucratized State. This charismatic code of conduct combined the analogies of custodianship, transmission, and management into a discipline which I have coined “the literary oracular”. Zambrano, Paz, Saenz, and Lezama, in insightfully different ways, relied on this discipline to mediate between the extremes of a polarized political field as well as between elite literary production and a newly massified vernacular readership, as is reflected in El pensamiento vivo de Séneca, Los hijos del limo, “En la abadía de San Florián,” and “Introducción a los vasos órficos” by Zambrano, Paz, Saenz, and Lezama, respectively. An inquiry into the aesthetic and social regimes of visionary discourse in mid-20th-century Latin America, this book manuscript, derived from my dissertation, offers fresh perspectives on the poetics and public personae of well-known figures as well as ground-breaking studies of those who only recently have begun to receive serious critical attention. Poetics of Revelation carefully complicates the engaged-autonomous dichotomy often applied to modernist literature by identifying in it an oracular logic of mediation, situating its appearance in a moment of profound historical disorientation, and then asking how formerly engaged intellectuals used this logic to reimagine their being-in-common after the failure of radical communitarian politics.
Alongside my book project, I have remained an active scholar in modernist studies focused on Peruvian poet and journalist, César Vallejo. Building on my years of work as translator and interpreter, in October I attended the Vallejo Siempre 5th International Conference at University College London and presented a paper that genealogically traces the concept of “insufficiency” through three major critical statements and brings to bear on the expression of adversity in Vallejo’s poetry María Zambrano’s theorization of hope in Persona y democracia. This research was an opportunity for my interpretative work on Vallejo to converge with the work in intellectual history and poetic theory that went into my dissertation and has developed in my book manuscript. After reworking my conference paper into a proper article, I published it as “El problema de la insuficiencia: la historia sacrificial en la poesía de César Vallejo” in Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana XLIX, no. 97, pp. 197-216. In this article, I suggest that the category of “insufficiency” is widely used in criticism that addresses Vallejo’s poetry, but that frameworks which deploy it tend to omit the concept’s ethical dimensions. The genealogical method of this paper denaturalizes the concept of insufficiency to show a previously unacknowledged ethical critique of sacrificial history, which emerges through the lyric subject’s negative order of perception. Drawing on María Zambrano’s sociopolitical thought to describe active modes of insufficiency, I argue that the ethos of Vallejo’s poetry sought to rehumanize political life by elevating the subject’s indivisible constitution as protagonist and author of history, while proposing a responsible anagnorisis in response to the nightmare of tragedy.
Joseph Mulligan, Ph.D. 