[Marxism] On Neruda (from Comrade Sonny San Juan in the Philippines)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

PABLO NERUDA FOR US: An Intervention

[Remarks delivered at the University of the Philippines on July 12 on
the occasion of "Neruda: A Centennial Celebration"]

By E. San Juan, Jr.

It is a rare pleasure and honor to be asked to intervene in this
unrepeatable occasion-the centennial anniversary of Pablo Neruda's
birth-in a site convulsed by revolutionary upheavals. A pleasure not
only because Neruda, to quote Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is "the greatest
poet of the 20th century, in any language." An honor because he was also
a communist artist. But more than being the finest poet and a communist
militant, he was one of the most useful for the "conscientization" (to
use Paulo Freire's term) of at least two generations of Filipino
intellectuals and activists. More significant, this event is happening
in the Philippines, and particularly here in the University of the
Philippines, Diliman, birthplace of the unprecedented First Quarter
Storm that exploded on the eve of the infamous martial-law regime of the
U.S.-Marcos collaboration.

Neruda is not a stranger to Filipinos precisely on account of that
terrible convulsion and catalyst called the U.S.-Marcos dictatorship
from 1972 to 1986. We, partisans in the brigade of cultural workers,
found Neruda useful for making sense of reality-the reality of
colonialism, poverty, oppression, fascist violence, injustice, and
suffering that Neruda descanted from his early Veinte poemas de amor y
una cancion desesperada (1924) to Extravagarios (1958) and the
formidable Memorial de Isla Negra (1966-70). We found Neruda of service
for making intelligible, even bearable, that fierce solitude of
underground exile, imprisonment, and desperate ostracism for which the
only remedy (given the models of perseverance in the three volumes of
Residencia en la Tierra) is fraternity, collective struggle,
intransigent sacrifice. It was both serendipitous and fortuitous.

Allow me to delineate the genealogy of this usefulness and
serviceability. >From 1927-35, Neruda served as unsalaried consul to
Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, and elsewhere. One can speculate on the
probability of his visit to the Philippines, that land (according to the
annals of the Tang dynasty in China) "fittingly inhabited by snakes and
savages." In his memoirs, he expresses identification with the travails
and resistance of diverse Asian peoples. This empathy found its
seductive mimesis in that classic of anti-romantic surrealism, the first
cycle of Residencia en la Tierra (1933), right in the midst of the
global crisis of finance capitalism, the last stage of imperialism (in
Lenin's definition). In this, as in all his works, Neruda shares Walter
Benjamin's prophetic judgment that every work of art is both a document
of civilization and of barbarism. Whether you like it or not, one cannot
escape being tried and judged in the crucible of the disasters and
crises of our time.

Both barbaric and civilized forces traverse the labyrinthine narratives
of Neruda's poetry as it evolved from the twenties to the middle of the
century. Intractable paths are inscribed in the trajectory of his
imagination. Was the obscure, bewildering style of the early Neruda an
escape from the tragic predicament of Chilean society? Was he a fugitive
from existential anguish and alienation celebrated by Nietzsche,
Heidegger and their cult of nihilist relativism? Neruda staked out a
peculiar itinerary, enigmatic but logical, in its historical
situatedness. Between the romantic exuberance of his Crepusculario
(1923) and the poignant lyricism of Veinte poemas, between the
monumental epic sweep of Canto general (1950), the rigorous
self-reflexion in Tercera Residencia (1935-47) and the disarming
simplicity of Odas elementales (1954-59), we find Neruda descending-like
Dante in La divina commedia, into the infernal wasteland. The critic
Luis Monguio captures Neruda's inscription into the historical
"thickness" of this cultural maelstrom between the "wars" whose climax
was the materialist vision of the heights of Macchu Picchu in Canto
general (1961; on Neruda's "moral realism," see the insightful essay by
Greg Dawes 2003).

It was as if Neruda anticipated the searing vision of Antonio Gramsci,
his Italian contemporary, who in a way provided the ethical and
aesthetic rationale for radical anticapitalist surrealism. Gramsci
observed that in the interregnum, that volatile no-man's land, between a
decadent crumbling world and another painfully struggling to be born, we
encounter the most dreadful morbid symptoms of humans struggling to
survive. We encounter wild excesses, strange transformations, perverse
and monstrous happenings-all these spectacular or imperceptible
occurrences faithfully chronicled in the "magic realism" of Garcia
Marquez, Alejo Carpentier (who coined the term "lo real maravilloso"),
the surrealist and expressionist experiments of Cesar Vallejo, Andre
Breton, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and other avant-garde guerillas of the
last century. This is explainable as a revolt against the life-denying
repressiveness of capitalist society and as a symptom of frustration,
hopelessness, despair.

The early Neruda may be self-indulgent, like the "Europhile cadavers" he
scorned in his later years. But in his engagement with the political
crisis of his epoch, he succeeded in forging the "conscience" of his
race (to echo the hero of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man) through the critical and fantastic realism of his vocation as
citizen-artist caught between two worlds. This is the Neruda we might
consider exemplary.

We in the Philippines, and millions in the beleaguered "third world"
(now known as the peripheral South to the metropolitan North) found
insight and catharsis in Neruda's wrestling with the mystifying demons
of capital and its comprador executioners. Of course, Neruda was not the
only one we read, but he was one of the more exceptionally lucid and
provocative. This episode of Neruda's bohemian individualism soon
ended-not yet with the martial law of General Augusto Pinochet (now on
trial for his crimes), but with a benchmark event of modernity: the
civil war in Spain in 1936-1938. This was the decisive break, the
turning point, for Neruda, just as the Marcos dictatorship was for
progressive Filipino intellectuals of my generation and the next. From
this perspective, Neruda helped us make sense of that key moment in our
national life, affording us a taste of agency when the gatekeepers of
history nodded and allowed us to take a measure of control even in the
role of victims and exiles. And this break in the quotidian routine of
neocolonialism has closed, opened, narrowed, widened, in the momentous
years following February 1986, "the people power" insurrection which
overthrew Marcos, Estrada, and now threatens the present incumbent in
Malacanang Palace.

During the Cold War, in spite of the prestigious Nobel Prize, Neruda had
been reviled for his communist militancy. This dates back to his
commitment to revolution in the thirties when he sided with the
Republican forces in Spain, a turn often ignored, marginalized, or
glossed over, by scholars and reviewers. Neruda's partisanship with the
Soviet Union and the Republican cause, with the camp of Federico Garcia
Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Miguel Hernandez, and other fighters for
socialism, against fascist nihilism (allied with Hitler and Mussolini
and a death-worshipping Catholic Church that fully supported
Generalissimo Franco), all contributed to the transformation of the
neoromantic Neruda into a poet of universal import, the bard of secular
grace and materialist redemption. It was not a transformation but a
metamorphosis since old elements of baroque wit were sublated, by a
dialectical sleight-of-hand, into the ironic and comic conceits of
Incitacion al Nixonicidio y alabanza del revolucion chilena (1971). In
this he resembled the Peruvian Cesar Vallejo whose Poemas Humanos and
Espana, aparta de mi este caliz, written between 1936 and 1938, testify
to the same praxis of compassionate sharing and communal struggle.

We can say with conviction that the poet of Espana en el corazon (1937)
was the Neruda we read and translated then, the bard who spoke truth to
power, the poet of devotion to the revolutionary ideals of the oppressed
but insurgent community of peasants, workers, indigenous communities,
and middle elements. It was a meeting of comrades engaged in a common
struggle. Poetry became a mode of social action and communication,
achieving Neruda's desire to "write with your life and my own." Neruda
himself attested to what his engagement in the Spanish Civil War
contributed to his growth: it helped him understand more, be more
natural, and above all "live more near the people" (1971, 162). Our
enjoyment of Neruda's art, then, was strategic, for pedagogical and
programmatic reasons. This education of the senses-a production of
social existence, as Marx stressed in Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts of 1844 (1964)-was mediated by the practices of everyday
resistance, condensed in art, love, scientific inquiry and political
mobilization. In this way, the sensory faculties become practical
"theoreticians," debunkers of ideologies. We find the entire history of
feelings crystallized in every phantasy or intuition that condenses the
whole society's dream of release, fulfillment and happiness amid hunger,
torture, exploitation and death, the dream of freedom through the ordeal
of physical and historical necessities (Caudwell 1937).

We find a confirmation of this thesis in Neruda's project for an
antipoetic strategy, "Toward an Impure Poetry," targetting the elite
aestheticism of Wallace Stevens, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Octavio Paz, and
others: "Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's
obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of
lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by,
inside the law or beyond it" (Neruda 1961, 39). But this is not naive
empiricism or vulgar pragmatism. What Neruda accomplished in this
"impure" craft is the discovery of "anticipatory illumination," or, in
Ernst Bloch's words, the Marxist poet "makes the world become aware of
an accelerated flow of action, an elucidated waking dream of the
essential" (1996, 88). In the artistic dream-work, absence and presence
are articulated in a productive synthesis. Rene Jara calls Neruda's
quest for the presence of what is absent, that call for a more intense
life, the key to the principle of composition in his major works: "The
world takes on form through a mechanism of contiguities and
displacements that arises from the polyvalence of worlds and the
constitution of an alternate symbolic process that springs from a
preconscious figurative plane prior to the semantics of definition"
(1992, 149).

When Neruda became a Communist senator in the Chilean parliament, he had
to disavow sectarian ultra-leftism and fight for the democratic rights
of all the people-not just workers or peasants. He knew the lessons of
Lenin's warning against "left-wing infantilism." In his Incitement to
Nixonicide and Praise for the Chilean Revolution, Neruda rejected the
"mystical hermeticism" of his previous work by assuming the office of
the people's tribune: "I reserve, as an experienced mechanic, my
experimental office: I must be, from time to time, a poet of public use,
that is to say, I must give the brakeman, steward, foreman, farmer,
gasfitter, or the simple regimental fool the capability of cutting loose
with a clean punch or shooting flames out of his ears" (1973, 5-6).
Indeed Neruda's desire is to be the bardic witness of the people, the
organic intellectual of the laboring masses.

Let us invoke our own Amado V. Hernandez, one of the few Filipino
writers of the pre-war generation, who not only translated Neruda but
also imitated his materialist approach to ordinary things. Hernandez
drew inspiration from Neruda's love for quotidian reality:watermelon,
artichoke, dictionary, onions, animals, and so on. It was a celebration
of everyday life before global consumerism had reduced everything to
goods for sale or fetishized simulacras. It was this homage to the
sensuous texture of worldly life that appealed to the young rebellious
spirits of the First Quarter Storm and the nationalist movement that
preceded it. It was not so much the melancholy aestheticism of the
Veinte poemas and the early Residencia that fascinated us; rather, it
was the works that defied the "insurmountable solitude" of Latin America
and, from the heights of Macchu Picchu, sought to recover the
indigenous, aboriginal creativity of the millions subjugated by the
ruthless glories of the European, Anglo-Saxon "civilizing mission."

One wonders at the striking affinities between the lives of Neruda and
the Filipino socialist rebel. Hernandez followed an analogous path in
his transcendence of the genteel tradition via a passage through labor
union activism and his partisanship for the Huk uprising. Hernandez's
underground experience during the Japanese occupation, and his
persecution by the neocolonial state, paralleled Neruda's exile, his
return to Chile in 1943, and his subsequent political engagement as a
member of the Communist Party of Chile. Like Neruda, Hernandez valued
the creative process of work, everyday labor interacting with mundane
objects and places, humanizing the environment and caring for the now
endangered ecology of our planet In February 1948, Neruda escaped from
military violence, crossing the Andes mountains with the manuscript of
his masterpiece, Canto general, rescued in his saddlebag. He had lived
an underground life from 1947 to 1949, only to emerge into exile until
1952. Countless "third world" writers' lives-one recalls here the Kenyan
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, the Indonesian Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the Turkish
Nazim Hikmet, and many others-find an allegorical mirror in Neruda's
vocation and its articulations. For our part, we found in Neruda of the
polemical Incitation (A Call for the Destruction of Nixon) a logistical
toolkit for the simple art of speaking the truth in defense of humanity,
a calling that Robert Bly (1971), amid anticommunist hysteria, regards
as Neruda's lasting virtue. His relentless attack on U.S. imperialism
was a vow of solidarity with our struggle against that Cold War behemoth
which supplied weapons and diplomatic support to the state terror of the
Marcos regime whose blood-debts are still unsettled up to now. Neruda
took sides, a protagonist in the drama of the continuing class struggle
of our time-he chose life and the creative vitality of the people, all
the subjugated and dispossessed, as well as the indigenous survivors of
imperial conquest.

In these dark days of terror in the Homeland Security State, blessed by
the USA Patriot Act, despite the rumored end of the Cold War, we find
neoconservative scholars and even postcolonial critics praising Neruda
the surrealist, the sophisticated humanist, the lover in the 1994 film
Il Postino. Every persona or mask assumed by Neruda, no matter how
tactical or expedient, becomes aggrandized and fetishized. We can
already discern this in Ben Belitt's (1972) obsessional pursuit of the
"unknown Neruda," protean and multiplicitous. Nowadays, almost every
quality of the chameleonic poet becomes praiseworthy-except the
communist militant enamored of a classless future. Indeed the
Marxist-Leninist Neruda, winner of the Stalin Prize, is anathematized,
demonized, stigmatized. He is a curse to be exorcized by distraction and
trivialization. In his erudite volume on Neruda, Rene de Costa (1979)
would summon the figure of Neruda the flamboyant trickster, the verbal
magician, whose performance eludes discursive critique.

But these reactionary arbiters of taste cannot wholly suppress the truth
distilled in the homage paid by the Nobel Prize committee that, in 1971,
singled out Neruda's art whose "elemental force brings alive a
continent's destiny and dream." The all-encompassing mythopoeic reach of
Canto general cannot be deflected nor deconstructed into mystical
aporias. Nor can the voice of the 1948 classic ode, "I wish the
woodcutter would wake up" (1982)-read by generations of American
students-be silenced, a Whitmanesque hymn that resurrected the seemingly
eclipsed presences of the multiethnic proletariat, of the African slave
"who brought you the music born in his country," and the Native American
warriors.

In his addressing the heterogeneous multiethnic "peoples" of both north
and south hemispheres of the American continent, Neruda seemed to have
successfully translated into practice Kenneth Burke's wise but ignored
counsel to the 1935 American Writers' Congress. In the spirit of the
Popular Front, Burke proposed correctly that instead of the worker, the
symbol of the "people" be used for an effective "propaganda by
inclusion" that would engage the full allegiance of the vast majority of
citizens, including factory workers. Mindful of sectarian dogmatism and
the profoundly seductive forms of alienation pervading bourgeois life,
Burke's reason coincides with Neruda's concern for inclusiveness,
transitions, mediations, linkages: "And since the symbol of 'the people'
contains connotations both of oppression and of unity, it seems better
than the exclusively proletarian one as a psychological bridge for
linking the two conflicting aspects of a transitional, revolutionary
era, which is Janus-faced, looking both forward and back" (1997, 280).
Looking backward and forward, Neruda prophesied at the end of that
utopian but realistic epic, Canto general:

Y nacera de nuevo esta palabra,
tal vez en otro tiempo sin dolores,
sin las impuras hebras que adhirieron
negras vegetaciones en mi canto,
y otra vez en la altura estara ardiendo
mi corazon quemante y estrellado.

[And this word shall be born again, perhaps in another time without
suffering, without the impure offshoots that dark vegetation adhered to
my canto, and once again in the heights my impassioned heart will be
burning and starry.] (Costa 1979, 177)

Cynical academics today dismiss communism as something that has
allegedly lost "gravitas" (Stavans 2004). Neruda's communism, in my
view, is what underlies his protean, versatile and metamorphic art that
Belitt, Costa and others celebrate. It is identical to his fidelity to
the vision of freedom and social liberation from natural and man-made
historical necessity. It is not dictatorship nor totalitarian domination
of the multitude condemned by liberal democrats worshipping the free
market, private property of productive means, consumerism and "free
play" of the ego-centered individual. It is equivalent to Neruda's
vision of solidarity with the builders of Macchu Picchu, with the
toiling masses of the three continents that produced the accumulated
wealth of modern society. In effect, it is emblematic of revolutionary
hope. We need to distinguish this signifier and its concept from the
straw-figure or caricature fabricated by the apologists of U.S. imperial
hubris.

We may appeal to the poet Roque Dalton's testimony to situate Neruda's
fundamental vocation: "The revolutionary is, among other things, the
person most useful to his epoch because he lives to bring about ends
that signify the highest interests of humanity. This holds true for the
revolutionary poet-as revolutionary and as poet-in that, from the
publication of his first word, he is addressing all people in defense of
their own highest longings" (2002, 9). And so it is precisely Neruda's
fidelity to the socialist goal of emancipation of the larger part of
humanity from the tyranny of profit and commodity fetishism (of whose
insidious impact Marx first warned us), from exploitation by alienated
and alienating structures of class and race, that makes Neruda's work
pernanently useful and valuable to Filipinos and "third world" peoples
(San Juan 1994). This, I think, is the kernel of the essential Neruda.

Caught in the second front of the U.S. war of terror against its
victims, we find this combative Neruda a comrade in the
anti-globalization battle-front. He provides weapons that enlighten and
sustain, necessary and pleasurable instruments for the common good. On
the whole, Neruda's art represents a subtle and passionate dialectical
grappling with the sensuous richness of nature and the built
environment. The power of his poetic intuition derives from his
political and civic responsibility, not only to Chileans but also to all
humans sharing the same predicament of fighting for justice and popular
liberation, with all its attendant dangers and opportunities. As he
affirmed in his Nobel Prize speech, Hacia la ciudad esplendida (an image
inspired by the French communard Arthur Rimbaud):

All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we
must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence, in
order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our
clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song.... For I believe that my
duties as a poet involve friendship not only with the rose and with
symmetry, with exalted love and endless longing, but also with
unrelenting human occupations which I have incorporated into my poetry.
(1971, cited in San Juan 1994, 16).

Seen from this angle, Neruda's historicizing and futurist imagination
does not contradict the Marxist stance of moral realism; in fact, it
reinforces it. We can see this prophetic and critical realism extending
its universal reach in the antiglobalization movement today, as well as
in traditional revolutionary movements-from the Zapatistas of Mexico,
the Palestinians in the occupied territory, to the Nepali and Peruvian
Maoists, to the black and brown militants in the United States, and of
course the combatants of the New People's Army in our midst. In one of
his late poems, "El Pueblo," Neruda revitalized his popular-democratic
inclusiveness, that combination of presence and absence we have noted
earlier:

Por eso nadie se moleste cuando
parece que estoy solo y no estoy solo,
no estoy con nadie y hablo para todos:
alguien me esta escuchando y no lo saben,
pero aquellos que canto y que lo saben
siguen naciendo y llenaran el mundo.

[So let no one worry when
I seem to be alone and am not alone,
I am not with nobody and I speak for all-
Someone is listening to me and, although they do not know it,
those I sing of, those who know
go on being born and will fill up the world. (1970, 453)

Our debt of gratitude to Neruda can be measured only by the victories of
our national-democratic struggle. For his resourceful resistance to
fascism in Europe and Latin America, for his resolute opposition to the
U.S. invasion of Vietnam and Cambodia, for his sympathy with the Cuban
revolution, for his support of President Salvador Allende and the brief
socialist interlude interrupted by the Pinochet coup of September 11,
1973, twelve days after which Neruda died-all these are registered in
the 6,000 pages of his Obras completas -we salute Pablo Neruda (born on
July 12, 1904 as Neftali Ricardo Reyes y Basoalto and died on September
23, 1973) and express our solidarity with the invincible peoples of
Chile and the Americas. Mabuhay si Pablo Neruda! Long live Pablo Neruda!

[For the invitation to present parts of this paper during a program to
honor Pablo Neruda on July 12, 2004 at the UP Faculty Center, I
acknowledge the support of Professors Adelaide Lucero and Nonilon Queano
of the U.P. Department of English, and, in the course of our short visit
in Diliman in June-July 2004, various assistance given by Professors
Tomas Talledo, Bienvenido Lumbera, Rogelio Mangahas, Fe Mangahas, Lulu
Torres, Joi Barrios, Mrs. Karina Bolasco, and Mrs. Ana Maria
Ronquillo-Nemenzo, Esther Pacheco, and Mila Aguilar.]

REFERENCES

Belitt, Ben. 1972. "The Moving Finger and the Unknown Neruda." In Pablo
Neruda: New Poems, edited and translated by Ben Belitt. New York: Grove
Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books.

Bloch, Ernst. 1996. "Marxism and Poetry." In Marxist Literary Theory: A
Reader, edited by Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne. Oxford UK: Blackwell.

Bly, Robert. 1971. "Refusing to be Theocritus." In Neruda and Vallejo:
Selected Poems, edited by Robert Bly. Boston: Beacon Press.

Burke, Kenneth. 1997. "Revolutionary Symbolism in America." In Communism
in America: A History in Documents, edited by Albert Fried. New York:
Columbia University Press.

Caudwell, Christopher. 1937. Illusion and Reality. New York:
International Publishers.

Costa, Rene de. 1979. The Poetry of Pablo Neruda. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.

Dalton, Roque. 2002. "Poetry and Militancy in Latin America." In Art On
the Line, edited by Jack Hirschman. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press.

Dawes, Greg. 2003. "Realism, Surrealism, Socialist Realism and Neruda's
'Guided Spontaneity." Cultural Logic <http://www.eserver.culturallogic>

Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York:
International Publishers.

Jara, Rene. 1992. "Chile." In Handbook of Latin American Literature,
edited by David William Foster. New York: Garland Publishing Inc.

Marx, Karl. 1964. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,
edited by Dirk Struik. New York: International Publishers.

Monguio, Luis. 1961. "Introduction" to Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda,
edited and translated by Ben Belitt. New York: Grove Press.

Neruda, Pablo. 1961. "Toward an Impure Poetry." In Selected Poems of
Pablo Neruda, edited by Ben Belitt. New York: Grove Press, Inc.

----. 1971. Towards the Splendid City / Hacia la ciudad esplendida. New
York: Harcourt Brace and Co.

----. 1972. Selected Poems, edited by Nathaniel Tarn. New York: A Delta
Book.

----. 1973. Incitement to Nixonicide and Praise for the Chilean
Revolution, translated by Steve Kowitt. Austin, Texas: Fly by Night
Printing Collective.

----. 1982. "Pablo Neruda's 'Let the Rail Splitter Aware" and "Notes on
the Poem and the U.S. Peace Movement." Ray O. Light Newsletter 11
(August): 1-20. Reprinted from Let the Rail Splitter Awake and Other
Poems by Pablo Neruda, published by Masses & Mainstream Inc., New York,
1950.

San Juan, E. 1994. From the Masses, to the Masses. Minneapolis, MN:
Marxist Educational Press.

Stavans, Ilan. 2004. "Pablo Neruda: A Life Consumed by Poetry and
Politics." The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 2)
<http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i43b01301.htm>

 [The author can be reached at: <philcsc@xxxxxxxxxxxx ]

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