Antonin Artaud, the man who could not think his own thoughts, whose writing spat from his anatomy leaving traces of his body on the page, conceived towards the end of his life the “body without organs”. Artaud’s “body without organs”, the interpenetration of souls, comes from a rejection of the shattered and dispersed individual body. César Vallejo’s poetry, which bears many similarities to Artaud’s fragmented but incessant output, also uses the image of the shattered body as a splinter of evidence from a profoundly damaged social body. If Artaud’s use of the body in his violent writing is politically transcendent without explicitly referring to actual political events, in Poemas Humanos, Vallejo’s body becomes a direct, although abstracted witness to the nightmare of history in the 1930-40 decade: the imminent rise of fascism and nazism, the 1929 Wall Street economic crisis that seemed to make capitalism tumble, the class struggle inspired by Marxism (Vallejo will adhere to the latter around 1929), the Soviet Union as a political paradigm admired by the left intelligentsia and finally the Spanish Civil War.

The ghost of Hamlet reminds us forever that time has always been out of joint, that history has always been a nightmare, but there are periods in history where the indescribable takes place, man’s thirst for killing, war, takes the upper hand. Poemas Humanos, a profoundly nihilistic book that ends with the blinding light of España, aparta de mí este cáliz, finally sees a healing possibility of the shattered social body through the collective violence of war. In fact, in Vallejo’s literary trajectory, the war will release both the personal and the social body from the affliction of nihilism.

Profoundly aware of the political conflicts of his time, Vallejo’s own life is besieged by financial problems, an undiagnosed illness and the uncertainty and impotence created by not seeing his writing recognised. A nihilistic vision still infected (as in Trilce) by Arthur Schopenhauer and reminiscent of the suffering in Giacommo Leopardi’s Canti, punctures the whole of Poemas Humanos with depressive connotations of a mild, perhaps even resigned despair. Progressively, the worldwide crisis will intensify Vallejo’s own personal suffering. References to the personal shattered body abound in Poemas Humanos. The poet’s own body is described as “carne de llanto (…), alma melancólica en conserva” , the poet’s own throat, (César Vallejo, el acento con que amas, el verbo con que escribes, sólo saben de ti por tu garganta ), being the site of the poet’s uttering, and thus the site of suffering . I will cite other examples where the personal damaged or dispersed body is a metaphor for Vallejo’s own suffering:

!Todo está alegre, menos mi alegría

(….)

A jugar por la forma, no obstante, voy de frente,

cojeando antiguamente,

y olvido por mis lágrimas mis ojos (Muy interesante)

y subo hasta mis pies desde mi estrella.

Mas hoy ya son las once en mi experiencia personal,

experiencia de un solo ojo, clavado en pleno pecho,

de una sola burrada, clavada en pleno pecho,

de una sola hecatombe, clavada en pleno pecho.

Escarnecido, aclimatado al bien, mórbido, hurente,

doblo el cabo carnal y juego a copas,

donde acaban en moscas los destinos

donde comí y bebí de lo que hunde

(….)

Al fondo, es hora,

entonces de gemir con toda la hacha

y es entonces el año del sollozo

el día del tobillo,

la noche del costado, el siglo del resuello

(…)

pero, donde comí, cuánto pensé!

Pero cuánto bebí, donde lloré!

(…)

delante de la sien legislativa.

In this last poem, Escarnecido…, the painful passing of time is measured through body parts, as if time slowly ate away, eroded parts of the poet’s physical existence, prefiguring its eventual disappearance. The opening word already points to this disappearance. As Jean Franco points out: en “Escarnecido..” la totalidad del cuerpo se transforma en una partida de naipes perdida de antemano con la muerte. (…). Incluso, la palabra inicial del texto “escarnecido”, trae la idea de ser castigado y avergonzado en el cuerpo, pues si bien no tiene relación etimológica con “carne”, el contexto nos hace leerla como “es-carne-cido”. Los límites del hombre están firmemente prescritos por el cuerpo, ese “cabo carnal” que comió y bebió eso que lo hunde, es decir, el alimento de su existencia, pero no el alimento espiritual de la eternidad . All this is aggravated by the fact that the universe is completely indifferent to human life and by the existence of an oppressive, socially constructed super-ego, la sien legislativa.

Poems like Parado en una piedra, Un hombre pasa con un pan al hombro, Los nueve monstruos, are political in an explicit way, and foreground the futility of high culture when the every day is punctured by social injustice and human suffering. Other poems though, superimpose the anonymous worker’s body on the sick social body, showing how capitalism’s social control affects everything down to the individual’s physiological level of existence, fragmenting the body, reifying it, in some cases even stealing it away:

!Hay gentes tan desgraciadas, que ni siquiera

tienen cuerpo; cuantitativo el pelo,

baja, en pulgadas, la genial pesadumbre

(…)

Vanse de su piel, ráscandose el sarcófago en que nacen

La cólera que quiebra al hombre en niños,

que quiebra al niño en pájaros iguales

(...)

La cólera que quiebra al alma en cuerpos,

al cuerpo en órganos desemenjantes

y al órgano, en octavos pensamientos;

la cólera del pobre

tiene un fuego central contra dos cráteres.

Jamás, hombres humanos,

hubo tanto dolor el pecho, en la solapa, en la cartera,

en el vaso, en la carnicería, en la aritmética!

(…)

Jamás, señor ministro de salud, fue la salud

más mortal

y la migraña extrajo tanta frente de la frente!

The biological, the reality of our biological needs and the biological reality of death (acaban los destinos en bacterias y se debe todo a todos ) accompanies all these poems with a conflicting attitude towards our nature as animals (desgraciado mono, jovencito de Darwin….atrocísimo microbio ). Rather than sacred beings beyond the unnecessary violence of “civilization”, animals are treated as lesser beings in these poems, being animals, even if thinking animals, “bestias dichosas”, lessens us. We are ultimately reduced to our physiological existence, undoubtedly, an animal existence and we must be aware of this at all times:

Tengo un miedo terrible de ser un animal,

(…)un disparate, una premisa uberrima

a cuyo yugo ocasional sucumbe

el gonce espiritual de mi cintura.

(…) bestia dichosa, piensa;

dios desgraciado, quitate la frente.

Luego hablaremos.

Objects related to the body, clothes, the signs of culture, are there to remind us of our schizoid reality, of the fact that we inhabit a space between two worlds, but also, of the fact that objects might survive us and that under capitalism we are all interchangeable, cultural signs, commodities, having replaced the body:

Y me alejo de todo, porque todo

se queda para hacer la coartada:

mi zapato, su ojal, tambien su lodo,

y hasta el doblez del codo

de mi propia camisa abotonada.

The image of woman is virtually absent from these poems, an exception being dulzura por dulzura corazona, a poem to his beloved where she is addressed as ”costilla de mi cosa” . It is interesting that in the next poem, ello es que el lugar donde me pongo, Vallejo, mentioning Georgette, his wife, seems to point to this blindspot, moreover, to the fact that seeing is a social practice, it comes from without, becoming part of a within:

De veras, cuando pienso

en lo que es la vida,

no puedo evitar de decírselo a Georgette,

(…)

del mismo modo, sufro con gran cuidado,

al fin de no gritar o de llorar, ya que los ojos

poseen, independientemente de uno, sus pobrezas,

quiero decir, su oficio, algo

que resbala del alma y cae al alma.

Vallejo, after mentioning Georgette, his wife, makes reference to his own blindspot, a blindspot, a distorted vision constructed by the social (su oficio) that is superficial (resbala) but becomes an inherent part (cae) of vision. It would seem that Poemas Humanos identifies humanity with man, the working man, leaving aside half of the planet. All throughout, the double alienation of women is ignored. The working man sung by the intellectual working man is the archetype of an alienated humanity. The working woman does not exist. The mass is identified with the working man. Although this is probably related to the fact that the original project, having been inspired by his third journey to the Soviet Union, was originally supposed to be entitled “Arsenal de Trabajo” , it was precisely in the Soviet Union that the image of the new working woman was promoted in countless conferences, posters, pamphlets as a new working revolutionary force. Whilst the factory male worker is seen as alienated, the double alienation of the female factory worker (subjected to even lower wages) remains invisible.

The nihilism inherent in Poemas Humanos will dissolve in España, aparta de mi este cáliz. From the shattered space of the body we come to a mirage of a unified body, the militia, mirage because the Spanish Republican militia was fragmented and divided into different political views, a unified body composed of insurgent docile bodies, docile in as far as they are being entreated as possible sacrificial victims of a utopian dream that includes violence and death.

The 18th of July 1936, Spain, whose Republican government had been elected by a majority in February of that same year (Un día prendió el pueblo su fósforo cautivo…y soberanamente pleno, circular, cerró su natalicio con manos electivas; arrastraban candado ya los déspotas y en el candado, sus bacterias muertas… ), was invaded by the Nationalist military, resulting in the Spanish Civil War. In June 1935, the First Congress of Antifascist Intellectuals and Writers took place in France. The Second Congress for the Defence of Culture was celebrated in Barcelona, Valencia and Madrid in July 1937. These events attracted a passionate participation by the left wing intelligentsia, most of which will become well-known literary names. Vallejo assisted to the Second Congress as the Peruvian delegate, the terror of war being audible from the inside. The congress is characterized by an optimistic belief that words can transform the world, that the compromised writer can fight fascism and capitalism, through poetry, through writing, that writers can and must actively engage in the fight against these ills through awakening the awareness that will make the antifascist struggle (antifascist is conflated with anti-capitalist) take root in the consciousness of others. Poemas Humanos, with España, aparta de mi este cáliz, as tail-end attests to a journey from nihilism to the realization that nihilism debilitates the personal and social body. España, aparta de mi este cáliz is Vallejo’s answer to this Second Congress and to the reality of the Spanish Civil War. A change in vision that had started in Poemas Humanos, finds its conclusion in España, aparta de mi este cáliz. It is a vision that fully responds to the cries of the world and is truly engaged with what it sees is, far from the disembodied eye that observes and reports, that objectifies and enframes . Vallejo, becomes a fully compromised observer.

The opening poem, Himno a los voluntarios de la república, is a celebration of the spontaneous Republican volunteers who become an idealized embodiment of the poet’s vision. If in Poemas Humanos, dystopia was signalled through the personal and anonymous dispersed body of both the poet and the worker, in this poem utopia is celebrated through a language of reconciliation, synthesis and concord (there is even a reconciliation with our nature as animals), where the dispersed body gives way to a unified social body:

Proletario que mueres de universo,

!en que frenética armonía

acabará tu grandeza, tu miseria, tu vorágine impelente,

tu violencia metódica, tu caos teórico y práctico,

(…)

!Constructores

agrícolas, civiles y guerreros,

de la activa, hormiguenate eternidad: estaba escrito

que vosotros haríais la luz, entornando

con la muerte vuestros ojos;

que, a la caída cruel de vuestras bocas,

vendrá en siete bandejas la abundancia, todo

en el mundo será de oro súbito

(…)

!Entrelazándose hablarán los mudos, los tullidos andarán!

!Verán, ya de regreso, los ciegos

y palpitando escucharan los sordos!

This messianic vision, based on the miraculous topography of paradise, points to utopia in its literal sense: utopia, a place that does not exist. Not only will a new social body emerge but even irretrievably damaged body functions will be restored to their full capacity. Not only will there emerge a unified social body, but with it, everything else will be complete and unified.

In España, aparta de mi este cáliz, the Spanish Civil War is transcendentalised, becoming the possibility of worldwide conflict resolution, social transformation and individual liberation being inextricably linked . According to Herbert Marcuse, “Marxist emphasis on the development of political consciousness shows little concern for the roots of liberation in individuals, i.e., for the roots of social relationships where individuals most directly and profoundly experience their world and themselves: in their sensibility, in their instinctual needs”. As Marcuse, Vallejo is intensely aware of the intimate needs of individuals, aware of that space where individuals deeply experience themselves. Thus, not only will there be a social unified body, but “(los hombres) ajustarán mañana sus quehaceres, sus figuras soñadas y cantadas! ¡Serán dados los besos que no pudistes dar!”

If the injustice of working conditions is an exclusively male malaise, war, the legalised sanction to kill, is the testosterone game par excellence . With the exception of the mentioning of Lina Odena (you learn that she was a war heroine through reading critical texts about Vallejo) , images of virility, although not reaching Miguel Hernandez’s bravado: “No te van a castrar: no dejaras que llegue/ hasta tus atributos de varon abundante” abound in España, aparta de mi este cáliz, courage -the power to fight and to kill- being related to man’s genitals, to his “cojones” (Ramón de pena, tú, Collar valiente, paladín de Madrid y por cojones ), whilst a ten verse homo-sufficient fantasy where everything (animals, horses, reptiles, vultures, flies, olive-trees and even the sky) becomes “man” sums up this same sex rhetoric where the male body will even be capable of giving birth, “engendrarán todos los hombres”:

para que el individuo sea un hombre,

para que los señores sean hombres,

para que todo el mundo sea un hombre, y para

que hasta los animales sean hombres,

el caballo, un hombre,

el reptil, un hombre,

el buitre, un hombre honesto,

la mosca, un hombre, y el olivo, un hombre

y hasta el ribazo, un hombre

y el mismo cielo, todo un hombrecito!

However, virility is not only about fighting and killing, but also about assuming the role of the sacrificial victim with transcendent pride. The unified social body, utopia, can only be born through human sacrifice, the sacrifice of volunteers, republicans, workers. For a new society to emerge, for a new social corpus to be born, these virile bodies have to welcome their pulverisation in the name of a noble act. España, aparta de mí este cáliz, is littered with enthusiastic words about the nobility of sacrifice, littered with ennobling calls to sacrifice, the worker being made into our saviour:

!Constructores

agrícolas, civiles y guerreros,

de la activa, hormigueante eternidad: estaba escrito

que vosotros haríais la luz, entornando

con la muerte vuestros ojos;

que, a la caída cruel de vuestras bocas,

vendrá en siete bandejas la abundancia, todo

víctima en columna de vencederos:

en España, en Madrid, están llamando

a matar, voluntarios de la vida!

!Obrero, salvador, redentor nuestro,

perdónanos, hermano, nuestras deudas!

Redentor nuestro? Nuestras deudas? Las de los intelectuales pecadores? The worker’s body becomes the sacrificial body of Christ, being addressed with the glorious nobility of immolation. Vallejo is embarrassed about his status as cheerleader, as fan (perhaps football is a replacement for war), Vallejo is a compromised observer, who from his desk (fusil doble calibre”’ sangre y sangre. !El poeta saluda al sufrimiento armado! ), is asking the worker to sacrifice himself for the sake of a unified social body the ideal of which has temporarily improved the poet’s health. Vallejo passionately beliefs in this ideal. At the same time, the worker, is being asked to pardon those who are telling him to sacrifice but will not go through the inconvenience of sacrificing their bodies themselves. I find these calls to sacrifice deeply problematic, although at the same time, perhaps, it is all too easy to say so. How can a poet sing to “el pueblo” to shed their blood -undoubtedly, for a noble ideal- from the safety of his home in Paris? I understand that Vallejo had his own set of problems, that he disavowed his own pessimism (pessimistic words are deleted in his manuscript) in order to encourage a sacrifice that was nevertheless taking place, that hope is necessary for a feeling of purpose, I understand that it is easy to give an opinion with historical distance and never having been in through a war, but these passionate calls to sacrifice seem to me an appeal from above, given to workers whose sacrifice is being sung from the ultra safe distance of words and the convenient acknowledgement of stating your own cowardice and sense of inferiority before these tragic kamikazes.

The utopian impulse is one of the most archaic longings of the human race. In España, aparta de mi este cáliz, César Vallejo breaks with the mutilated sensibility put forth in Poemas Humanos as an empathic (empathic to the alienated working man) although resigned metaphor for social dystopia, to give way to a utopian vision of a unified social body that will also cater for individual’s intimate needs.

However, this unified social body, can only come about through a transcendent pulverisation of the body, the volunteer’s bodies. The dispersed body of Poemas Humanos, was not a transcendent body, that was part of its sadness. The pulverised body of the volunteer will give way to a unified social body through its willingness to decompose well before its time. Dystopia, utopia, pulverised docile bodies, listening to the beautiful lyrics coming from above where human sacrifice is a noble act, not for me, my weapons are words, for you, whose words are not powerful enough to save your skin.

But perhaps I am being harsh. We are all these things we are not supposed to be and don’t want to be, deep contradictions adhering to so many well-meant acts. Vallejo was profoundly aware of the necessity for social change and he was compassionately writing about a war fought in the name of this necessity, his vision of liberation coinciding with that of Marcuse. In Marcuse’s words, written quite a few years later “the construction of a free society presupposes a break with the familiar experience of the world: with the mutilated sensibility. Conditioned and 'contained' by the rationality of the established system, sense experience tends to 'immunise' man against the very unfamiliar experience of the possibilities of human freedom. The development of a radical, non-conformist sensibility assumes a vital political importance in view of the unprecedented extent of social control perfected by (advanced) capitalism: a control which reaches down to the instinctual and physiological level of existence. By the same token, resistance and rebellion, too, tend to activate and operate at this level. Poemas Humanos, with España, aparta de mí este cáliz , was profoundly aware of the body as a battleground. Vallejo’s utopia of a unified social body was inclusive of Artaud’s “body without organs”, the interpenetration of souls. If in Artaud textual violence was the main means to shock the system into a new vision, in Vallejo’s last works, the embodiment of a new vision might only be possible through the transcendent pulverisation of the sacrificial body.