Magical Realist Residence:  Pablo Neruda's Residence on Earth

Pablo Neruda, the famed Chilean poet, is known for the many poetic hats he donned over the course of his highly prolific writing career.  Readers of poetry are familiar with Neruda the nature poet, Neruda the political poet, Neruda the writer of odes and love sonnets, but have they heard of Neruda the surrealist poet, Neruda the magical realist?  Pablo Neruda's early works, particularly Venture of the Infinite Man and Residence on Earth, have been categorized as surrealist poetry.  Characterized by an overwhelming chaos and startlingly unexpected imagery, these books are unlike any of Neruda's other work, although strains of this "surrealism" continued to surface in Neruda's poetry throughout his lifetime.  In this paper, I will discuss how Residence on Earth both embodies and transcends the title of "surrealist" to finally stand on its own as a collection that could more appropriately be called magical realist.

     In their book
Earth Tones: The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, Manuel Duran and Margery Safir argue that Neruda's Residence on Earth was influenced by the Surrealists (38).  Duran and Safir claim that Neruda rejected surrealism for mostly political reasons because of the Surrealists' evolution toward "a semi-anarchistic position" which clashed with Neruda's own socialist and communist beliefs (38).  Neruda himself never admitted the influence, nor did he completely deny it:  "Residencia en la tierra was written, or at least begun, before the heydey of surrealism, but we can't always trust dates.  The world's air transports poetry's molecules, light as pollen or hard as lead, and those seeds land in the furrows, or on people's heads, giving everything an air of spring or of battle, producing flowers as well as missiles (Neruda 293)."  While noncommittal, this statement is also quite telling.  Rather than address the ways in which his work might be surreal, Neruda chooses instead to describe poetry in general as a universal but random phenomenon that floats on the air.  Once poetry lands, it is the poet's responsibility to nurture the seeds.  Neruda does not acknowledge the influence of the Surrealists, but he readily acknowledges the power of language.  In doing so, he gives all poets, not just the Surrealists, the responsibility of harnessing this power.  Neruda seems to be saying, "Beware, for the same molecules that create great beauty (flowers) can also create violence (missiles)."

     In 1932, after spending five unhappy years as a consul in the Orient, Pablo Neruda was sent to Spain where he came in contact with the new generation of Spanish poets.  The new generation, which included Rafael Alberti and Federico Garcia Lorca, was engaged in and "undeclared but bitter war" with the well-established poets of the older generation who advocated a "pure poetry."  The older poets, Juan Ramon Jiminez in particular, looked upon the experimental verse of Neruda and his colleagues with distrust.  Jiminez went so far as to call Pablo "a great bad poet."  In response to this "old-fashioned aestheticism," Neruda published a theoretical consideration in 1935 called
Toward An Impure Poetry (Duran & Safir 42).

     
Toward An Impure Poetry can be compared in many ways to Andre Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism published in France a scant eleven years previously.  Just as the Manifesto informed the writings of Breton and other Surrealists, Toward An Impure Poetry has been called "poetics for Residence on Earth (Duran & Safir 42)."  Both Toward An Impure Poetry and Manifesto of Surrealism were written by young, talented writers in response to the constraints of the literature of their time.  In his Manifesto, Breton criticizes his contemporaries for their lack of originality:  "There is nothing to which their vacuity can be compared; they are nothing but so many superimposed images taken from the same stock catalogue (7)."  Neruda is also concerned with poetry's content.  He criticizes fellow poets who feel that the commonplace has no place in poetry:  "Those who shun the 'bad taste' of things will fall flat on the ice (Neruda xxii)." 

     Both Breton and Neruda held a democratic, inclusive view of poetry, but the ideologies underlining their manifestos differ radically.  Breton's manifesto glorifies the individual who creates art; he believes that any person could be an artist if they unlock their imagination.  The Surrealists sought elevation through the imagination, but Neruda desired to bring things "back to earth": in
Toward An Impure Poetry, he pays homage to the objects that inspire the artist.  The things themselves, not the people who describe them, are worthy of praise.  Breton's passionately worded manifesto is extreme in its idealism.  In comparison, Neruda's "manifesto" is gentle, friendly even.  Consider the wording of the title alone:  Toward An Impure Poetry.  It sounds more like a consideration than a manifesto.  Neruda offers his brief (a mere one and a half pages in relation to Breton's forty-four) essay as a suggestion, something for the reader/writer to consider.  The language itself is highly poetic while at the same time remaining earthbound: 

It is good, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest.  Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter's tool chest.  From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists.  The used surfaces of things, the wear that the hands give things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things--all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized (Neruda xxii).

Neruda centers his argument, if it could be called that, around positivism:  his first three words are, "It is good."  Unlike Breton, Neruda does not devote much time to insulting those who disagree with him.  Neruda praises the external world and its physicality rather than the internal workings of the poet's mind.  The physical world, he says, should be our subject for poetry.  Objects themselves are "a text for all troubled lyricists (Neruda xxii)."   

     From this reading of Neruda's
Toward An Impure Poetry, one can see that Residence on Earth is not a tidy fit into the category of surrealism.  Though many of the images could be considered "surreal," the philosophy underlining the text is not.  Neruda was not content to answer insanity in life with insanity in his art.  He sought a connection with the outside world.  He felt responsible, as a poet, for the impact his words had on the world.  Neruda often told the story of a young man who committed suicide while reading Residence on Earth to illustrate this responsibility.  For a time after this suicide, Neruda publicly denounced Residence on Earth for its darkness and grim subject matter (Neruda 37-38).  As he got older, he forgave himself: "The young writer cannot write without that shudder of loneliness, even when it is only imaginary, any more than the mature writer will be able to produce anything without a flavor of human companionship, of society (Neruda 91)."  Neruda's comment is reminiscent of a line in Jorge Luis Borges' "The Shape of the Sword, "Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it (70)."

     Most of
Residence on Earth was written while Neruda was working as a consul in various Asian countries from 1927-1933 (Duran & Safir 48).  Neruda has written:  "I don't believe that my poetry during this period reflected anything but the loneliness of an outsider transplanted to a violent, alien world (Neruda 84)." David Young, American poet and translator, has written:  "In a world of war, of holocaust, of political oppression, what value does language have?  What sense can literature make?  How can art apply to, let alone enhance, life?  Finding answers to these difficult questions has produced a literature that is often outer-directed, with an attachment to objects (11)."  Young was referring to the work of Eastern European poets, but I believe his comment could be used to explain many magical realist texts as well, since South American writers have suffered through similar political upheavals.  In magical realist texts, inanimate objects often have human qualities, as does nature.  Time is not linear.  The dead come back to life.  The self can turn into "the other."  Human beings fly or adopt other animal behaviors.  Religious characters appear in irreligious contexts.  What is magical realism, if not the world turned on its head?  Is it the world viewed through the lens of a person or a country that has seen what should be impossible turn out to be all too possible? Is magical realism a response to madness, albeit a less extreme response than the Dadaists or the Surrealists?  Is it the turn the South American writer's mind takes when wondering, "If it is possible that innocent people can be tortured and killed, then why couldn't it be possible that people can fly?" 

*

     Like the magical realist stories Alfonso Reyes', "Major Aranda's Hand," or Nikkolai Gogol's  "The Nose,"  "Ritual of My Legs," a poem from Residence on Earth, brings a part of the body to life without the owner.  In doing so, Neruda turns the self into "the other," a sinister force over which he has no control.  The poet's legs are:

     
Like stalks, like some winsome and feminine thing,
     they climb from my knees, compact and cylindrical,
     tight with the turbulent stuff of my life:
     brutish and lubberly,  like the arms of a goddess,
     like trees monstrously clad in the guise of the human,
     like vast and malevolent lips, athirst and immobile...(Neruda 17).

The poem has undertones of sexual longing, a theme he deals with more fully in another poem, "Gentleman Alone." Earlier in "Ritual of My Legs," Neruda writes, "it seems something/more than a woman is breathing, sleeping nude at my side." Neruda's sexual descriptions are not beautiful, they are frightening: goddess' arms are "brutish and  lubberly," lips are "malevolent."  It is as if the legs no longer belong to him, they belong to someone or something else that means him harm.  "Ritual of My Legs" lacks the self conscious, tongue-in-cheek humor of "The Nose" or "Major Aranda's Hand."  It is closer in tone to Andre Breton's catalogue poem about his wife in which he says her movements are "clockwork and despair."  In that poem, Breton's wife was "the other."  In "Ritual of My Legs," the poet's own legs are an object to be examined.  The poet's legs are foreigners to the poet just as the poet himself is a foreigner in a strange country.

     As in many magical realist texts, time in
Residence on Earth is not linear, the dead are not dead.  As in Pedro Paramo, the dead populate the streets; they are more present than the living.  In "Nocturnal  Collection," the narrator speaks of  "you slumbering dead who so often/have danced with me (25)."  In "Burial In The East," Neruda writes: "Under my balcony pass the terrible dead/sounding their coppery flutes and their chains/strident and mournful and delicate (11)."   In the poem "Alberto Rojas Jimenez Comes Flying" (a poem that American poet Elizabeth Bishop later emulated in her poem "Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore), Neruda's drowned friend Alberto Rojas Jimenez is dead, but he flies, "flowing fast under time."  The dead can dance and play instruments like the living, but they can also fly like birds and defy the constraints of time.  In "Ablerto Rojas Jimenez Comes Flying," immortality is intertwined with mortality in a way that is distinctly magical realist (we saw this especially in Carlos Fuentes' "Aura" and Maria Luisa Bombal's "New Islands").  Jimenez comes with "laughter and marrow," but while "the rain of (his) bones falls."  The "shadows that blacken" Jimenez's hair "are a lie."  In this poem, Jimenez is both alive and dead, both human and superhuman.  The dualities of life/death and time/timelessness arise in many other poems in Residence On Earth as wellIn "Nocturnal Collection," two people are "dumbly dispelling a ghost with (our) breathing."  In the sorrowful "There's No Forgetting," the poet asks, "Why should day/follow day?  Why must the blackness/of nighttime collect in our mouths (45)?"  Time is again undermined, questioned.  In "Ode With A Lament," the oft-used metaphor of time being a river is given a dark twist:  "water like time breaking free of itself, black water (33)." In this line, time is no longer linear.  Time breaks free of its boundaries, and in doing so becomes black as the poet's mood. 

     Although there are many other qualities that could define
Residence on Earth as a magical realist text, I am going to focus finally on one of the recurring characteristics we've seen in our readings:  inanimate objects adopting human behaviors.  Throughout Residence on Earth, objects are endowed with emotions.  In "Dream Horse," Neruda writes, "drained violets drowse and grow old;/and those bustling abettors, the brooms, in whose image,/ assuredly, sorrow and certainty join (3)."  It is interesting that, in this passage, a simple household object offers more consolation than beautiful flowers.  The violets nap and "grow old" like humans (and like the poet), and the brooms are both sorrowful and supportive, like a mother figure.  In "Walking Around," Neruda again credits objects with feeling:  "mirrors/that must surely have wept with the nightmare and shame of it all," and laundry on the line "slowly dribbling a slovenly tear (31)."  These are both objects that have a direct relation to the poet:  the mirror in which he sees his reflection, clothing that he or some other human wears.  Both of the objects are steeped in sorrow.  As the renowned Spanish Scholar Amando Alonso points out, these emotions are the poet's own; he ascribes them to the object observed (70). 

     
Residence On Earth is said to have "played a paramount role in sensitizing Latin American and Spanish readers to the values of surrealist styles in literature (Duran & Safir 39)."  It has also been suggested that the "surrealistic personae" in Neruda's poetry is a metaphor for Latin America's alienated man, a man who "until quite recently could not find roots in his own land nor discover as an exile a place he could truly call his own (Monegal xii)."  It is quite possible that both of these things are true.  While speaking as "Latin America's alienated man," Neruda might have also been influencing the very countries he was alienated from.   In the evolution of Neruda's poetry, Residence on Earth is also a gateway book.  In it, he writes of the objects that would become increasingly important in his next collections, General Song and Elemental Odes.
In the odes, Neruda again returns to physical things to show us something profound about the world.  He uses everyday objects as his primary subjects for poetry, taking them, "out of what would be their routine or normal apprehension (Anderson 13)."  Taking objects out of their "normal apprehension"…..now isn't that just like a magical realist, leading the reader in with the familiar before turning the familiar on its ear?





Works Cited

Alonso, Amado.  "From Melancholy to Anguish."  Modern Critical Views:  Pablo Neruda.  Ed. Harold Bloom.  New York:  Chelsea House, 1989.

Anderson, David G. 
On Elevating the Commonplace:  A Structuralist Analysis of the Odas of Pablo Neruda.  Spain:  Albatros Hispanofila, 1987.

Breton, Andre. 
Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver & Helen R. Lane.  Anne Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 1972.

Duran, Manuel, Margery Safir. 
Earth Tones:  The Poetry of Pablo Neruda.  Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1981.

Monegal, Emir Rodriguez.  Introduction. 
Seven Voices.  By Rita Guibert.  Trans. Frances Partridge.  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.

Neruda, Pablo. 
Five Decades: A Selection.  Ed. & trans. Ben Belitt.  New York:  Grove Press, 1974.

Neruda, Pablo.  Interview. 
Seven Voices.  By Rita Guibert.  Trans. Frances Partridge.  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1973.

Neruda, Pablo. 
Memoirs.  Trans. Hardie St. Martin.  New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.

Young, David.  Introduction. 
Interferon, or On Theater.  By Miroslav Holub.  Oberlin College, Ohio:  Field, 1982.

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