No hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half-savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait;
". . ."
Caught in the unstopped ear;
Giving the rocks small lee-way
The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.
His true Penelope was Flaubert,
He fished by obstinate isles;
Observed the elegance of Circe's hair
Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.
Unaffected by "the march of events,"
He passed from men's memory in l'an trentiesme
De son eage; the case presents
No adjunct to the Muses' diadem.
Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!
The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.
Christ follows Dionysus,
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations;
Caliban casts out Ariel.
All things are a flowing,
Sage Heracleitus says:
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall outlast our days.
Even the Christian beauty
Defects--after Samothrace;
We see ". . ."
Decreed in the market place.
Faun's flesh is not to us,
Nor the saint's vision.
We have the press for wafer,
Franchise for circumcision.
All men, in law, are equals.
Free of Peisistratus,
We choose a knave or an eunuch
To rule over us.
O bright Apollo,
". . ."
What god, man, or hero
Shall I place a tin wreath upon!
Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later...
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some, pro patria,
non "dulce" non "et decor". . .
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies,then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;
fortitude as never before
frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days
hysterias, trench confessions
laughter out of dead bellies.
Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
quick eyes gone under earth's lid,
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I'm trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.
I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they're all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don're really want to go to war.
America it's them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
Of course, the entire effort is to put myself
Outside the ordinary range
Of what are called statistics. A hundred are killed
In the outer suburbs. Well, well, I carry on.
So long as the great 'I' is propped upon
This girdered bed which seems more like a hearse,
In the hotel bedroom with flowering wallpaper
Which rings in wreathes above, I can ignore
The pressure of those names under my fingers
Heavy and black as I rustle the paper,
The wireless wail in the lounge margin.
Yet supposing that a bomb should dive
Its nose right through this bed, with me upon it?
The thought is obscene. Still, there are many
To whom my death would only be a name,
One figure in a column. The essential is
That all the 'I's should remain separate
Propped up under flowers, and no one suffer
For his neighbour. Then horror is postponed
For everyone until it settles on him
And drags him to that incommunicable grief
Which is all mystery or nothing.
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
III
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise
Hace poco, varios blogs reprodujeron un artículo titulado “Una aproximación a la narrativa histérica”. Sinceramente el artículo no dice nada que pueda discutirse pero es bastante claro para señalar algunas cuestiones que algunos críticos de hoy tratan como convenciones fuera de toda duda: la lucha contra el mercado como virtud literaria, la identificación de una literatura no tradicional (dentro de su idea de lo tradicional) como una respuesta al estancamiento político y filosófico, y la idea de que la literatura debe explicarnos cómo son las cosas o cómo funcionan. La primera línea del artículo lo dice todo: “Roland Barthes, en una de sus muchas iluminaciones profanas, sostuvo que la historia es histérica. Creo que ahí está el origen de este nuevo tipo de ficción.” Entonces así es como nacen las cosas; de haberlo sabido.
Y luego una joya:
“La doble lógica de la narrativa histérica también encuentra su razón de ser en que tiene que luchar en dos campos de batalla muy disímiles, donde además los enemigos se han duplicado. Así, como decíamos, sus mecanismos de seducción apuntan al ámbito literario del lector, mientras que su sistema de rechazos a las imposiciones del Mercado. Ahora bien, en el primero ya se ha instaurado la idea del Canon (suerte de imposición negativa que también hay que esquivar), y en el segundo el reinado de la Ficción Mercantil, a la que no hay que pensar en función de su éxito, sino de su deseo de ser acogida por el Mercado. Acá se ve cómo la difícil misión de la narrativa histérica es encontrar en estos campos minados y llenos de trampas y enemigos los senderos y desvíos que la puedan llevar indemne hasta el territorio que se ha propuesto ganar.”
Con toda esta jerga militar uno puede fácilmente olvidar que hablamos de literatura, aún cuando resulte conmovedor ver a los jóvenes novelistas luchando con denuedo para acabar con el enemigo. Porque según el autor, la narrativa histérica tiene una misión secreta: “denunciar sin pancartas, sin discursos, sin partidismos, sin fórmulas, el proceso de homogeneización global al que estamos siendo sometidos en casi todos los planos de la vida.” Además, las novelas de estos soldados de la literatura tienen un “carácter heterogéneo, extravagante, auto-reflexivo, por momentos fragmentario o aparentemente incomprensible, sospechoso, cuestionador y elusivo,” “que constituye la postura política de esta narrativa.”
Si algunos de ustedes se pregunta por los personajes (ya no digamos por sus motivaciones o su sentir -soy asquerosamente tradicional-), lamento darles una mala noticia: a los críticos no les interesan más, y no les interesa porque “esta lucha contra la homogeneización, esta afirmación de sí misma, es el tema de la "narrativa histérica." Al menos todo esto es lo que dice Marcelo Damiani en esta aproximación sin pies ni cabeza.
Bueno, todo esto para señalar que la idea de una narrativa “histérica” tiene su semilla en la valoración que desde las páginas de The New Republic esbozaron dos críticos increíblemente disímiles como James Wood y Dale Peck. James Wood acuñó y argumentó la idea de “realismo histérico”. Dale Peck lo llamó “recherché posmodernism”. Si se tuviera que decir en pocas palabras cómo son estas novelas realistas histéricas podríamos decir: “They're big, they're full of information, ideas and stylistic riffs; they have eventful plots that transpire on what's often called a "broad social canvas"; they experiment with form and voice; they're overtly (or maybe just overly) smart. Or at least that's what they're supposed to be like.” En la Wikipedia pueden encontrar una lista de autores bajo el mote “Hysterical Realist Authors.” Sin embargo, la discusión acerca del realismo histérico no se reduce a una serie de características superficiales entre autores aparentemente diferentes entre sí, como Zadie Smith y Pynchon o Foster Wallace o etc etc. Si les interesa el tema pueden leer los artículos de Ben Marcus y los de James Wood que he intentado recopilar en mi otro blog Realismo Literario. Hace falta linkear muchos pero espero hacerlo pronto. Yo no me encuentro en la mejor forma mental para abordar ahora este tema que me interesa mucho. Y mi prosa parece de tercer año de primaria. Yo lo atribuyo a las presiones de los últimos días, a la falta de ejercicio y a la inflamación de las células que en un tipo como yo suele conducir fácilmente a la obesidad y a la pereza mental. Como voy a estar dos meses casi solo, espero recuperarme. Sed felices.