Daimonic identity: Twentieth century artistic culture in the poetry of Luis Cernuda.

摘要

Criticism on Luis Cernuda has tended to emphasize a unifying tendency in his poetry coinciding with a platonic desire to attain an idealized object of desire (an edenic garden, an elusive love object) within a realm devoid of temporality. The present study argues against these critical commonplaces by asserting that a radical model of the human subject akin to what Gianni Vattimo has described in recent years as weak being emerges in Cernuda's poetry. In order to appreciate the poet's earlier surrealist verse, it is necessary to read Cernuda's poetry in light of Georges Bataille's influential writings regarding surrealist art that promote an anti-platonic fall into what he termed informe, or formlessness. The first chapter of this dissertation focuses on Cernuda's early poetry that, like Pablo Neruda's early writings, features a images of human subjects falling into a realm of formlessness and shadows in a realization of what Bataille's friend Roger Caillois termed the autonomous or "cast" shadow. The second chapter looks at subsequent collections of early poetry wherein Cernuda demonstrates an interest in jazz music that soon finds echoes in the New York verse of Federico Garcia Lorca. For both Cernuda and Lorca, jazz functions as a subversive force that blows stable identities off of their pedestals and towards an in-between state that recalls the figure of the daimon in early Greek philosophy, especially in works by Plato and Heraclitus. The third chapter examines Cernuda's interest in such daimonic figures as Holderlin, Mozart, and the biblical Lazarus. The fourth chapter examines similarities between Cernuda and the contemporary Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo, whose criticism on the poet praises his dualistic exilic gaze; both Cernuda and Goytisolo explore themes of fetishism and subversion in their works.