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César Vallejo and the Narrative Dialectics of Socialism

Fri, May 24, 12:30 to 2:00pm, TBA

Abstract

Peruvian writer César Vallejo (1892-1938) is best known for his poetry, particularly for the avant-garde lyrical style of his second collection, Trilce (1922). However, while Vallejo’s poetics have been canonized, researched, and admired, his narrative production has been less studied. The Marxist sympathies revealed in these works—including a novel, crónica, essays, and prose poems from the late 1920s-early 1930s—reflect Vallejo’s growing engagement with leftist politics as they elaborate arguments for socialism in the age of capital. Rather than retreat to dogma, these narratives employ diverse discourses, including pseudo-Darwinist and sometimes religious and aesthetic ideas, to describe an ideal socialist society that includes indigenous peoples and cultures.

I analyze Vallejo’s novel, El tungsteno (1931), and poetic essay collections Contra el secreto professional (1973) and El arte y la revolución (1973), among other texts, to examine their curious fusion of religious, scientific, and other discourses. Revealing an intertextual relationship with indigenista novels of the 19th century, several of Vallejo’s narratives warn of the eventual extinction of indigenous cultures, and even of creole Peruvian culture, at the hands of omnivorous global capital and the dólares it craves. Consequently, they present socialism as the synthetic—human—resolution to the oppositional evolutionary trajectories of life and capital. Thus Vallejo’s narratives describe a dialectical relationship between capitalism and Marxism, exploring “la cabeza y los pies de la dialéctica” as they search for the synthetic expression of, and justification for, socialist humanism through philosophical prose and poetic essay.

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