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“The Miserable Supper”: César Vallejo and the Poetics of Communion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
This essay examines the image of the Eucharist in the poetry of the Peruvian writer César Vallejo (1892-1938). I argue that unlike his modernista forebears, Vallejo regularly employs the Eucharist not as an image of the ecstasy of sexual union, but instead as an image of guilt, melancholy, frustration, and loss. In one sense, such images can be read as deliberately blasphemous distortions of the Christian picture of the Eucharist Vallejo imbibed as a child. My central thesis, however, will be that the same images can also be read, perhaps in part against Vallejo's own intentions, not as distortions of the Eucharist but as offering insights into the nature of the sacrament itself. I develop this thesis in two parts. First, I argue that despite the centrality to eucharistic theology of the themes of communion, spiritual intimacy, and “real presence”—themes that made it an almost irresistible poetic symbol of sexual desire—the Eucharist itself is also and fundamentally a sacrament of absence, delay, and failure. Second, I suggest that by drawing, however implicitly, on these latent elements of eucharistic theology, Vallejo's poetry opens up a space to think about certain aspects of the sacrament which the modernistas’ erotic exuberance tended systematically to obscure.
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References
1 Darío, Rubén, “Ite, missa est,” in Prosas profanas y otros poemas (Mexico: Librería de la Vda. de Che Bouret, 1901), p. 85Google Scholar. Modernismo, a uniquely Hispanic fusion of Romanticism and Symbolism, should be carefully distinguished from Anglophone Modernism. For a good general description, see Jiménez, José Olvio, “Introducción,” in Jiménez, José Olvio, ed., Antología crítica de la poesía modernista hispanoamericana (Madrid: Hiperión, 1989)Google Scholar.
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4 This theme is already present as early as Gregory of Nyssa and Saint Ambrose, both of whom read the Eucharist in light of the specifically erotic elements of the Song of Songs. See, e.g., Gregory of Nyssa, In canticum canticorum, homily 10 (PG 44: 989), and Ambrose, De sacramentis, 4.2 (PL 16: 477). A similar theme is central to Dante's Divina Commedia, on which see Naya, Sheila, Dante's Sacred Poem: Flesh and the Centrality of the Eucharist to the Divine Comedy (London: Bloomsbury, 2011)Google Scholar. For a good account of the same theme in Golden Age Spanish poetry, see Mayo, Arantza, “‘Parece lo que no es, y no es lo que parece’: Guises and Disguises in Poems to the Most Holy Sacrament,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 86.5 (2009): pp. 751-761CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a fine recent book, Brannon Hancock has extended this conversation to the uses of Eucharistic imagery in postmodern narrative fiction: see his The Scandal of Sacramentality: The Eucharist in Literary and Theological Perspective (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014)Google Scholar.
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6 For more on the importance of the transformative or “magical” capacity of language in modern poetry in general, see especially Bruns, Gerald L., Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language: A Critical and Historical Study (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975)Google Scholar. For good accounts of modernismo’s appropriation of this tradition, and its relationship to Romanticism in general, see Jrade, Cathy, Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity: The Modernist Recourse to Esoteric Tradition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Jrade, , Modernismo, Modernity and the Development of the Spanish American Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998)Google Scholar.
7 The best general account of Vallejo's life and work continues to be Franco's, Jean classic César Vallejo: The Dialectics of Poetry and Silence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. See also Hart, Stephen, César Vallejo: A Literary Biography (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2013)Google Scholar. References to Vallejo's poetry are taken from Eshleman, Clayton, ed., César Vallejo: The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009)Google Scholar. Texts will be cited parenthetically by page and line number. Except where otherwise noted, I follow the published English translations.
8 See especially Risco, Alejando Lora, “Numinosidad y catolicidad en la poesía de Vallejo,” in Hacia la voz del hombre: ensayos sobre César Vallejo (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1971), p. 91-115Google Scholar.
9 See, e.g., Alonso, Carlos Javier Morales, César Vallejo y la poesía posmoderna: otra idea de la poesía (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2013), p. 160Google Scholar, and Hart, Stephen, Religión, política y ciencia en la obra de César Vallejo (London: Tamesis, 1987), pp. 17-18Google Scholar.
10 Morales Alonso, César Vallejo, p. 169, and Franco, César Vallejo, p. 29.
11 This claim is likely to sound to strange at first hearing, and it will obviously require (and receive) significant elaboration as the essay develops. To get a provisional sense of what I have in mind, see Turner, Denys, “The Darkness of God and the Light of Christ: Negative Theology and Eucharistic Presence,” Modern Theology 15 (1999): pp. 143-158CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 For an interpretation of Vallejo's “sick God” that complements my own, see Gómez, Michael A., “La presentación de Dios en tres poemas tempranos de César Vallejo,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 81.3 (2004): pp. 379-91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Franco, César Vallejo, pp. 9-10.
14 For more on the role of evolutionary theory in Vallejo's work, see von Buelow, Christiane, “César Vallejo and the Stones of Darwinian Risk,” Studies in 20th Century Literature 14.1 (1990): pp. 9-19Google Scholar. For more on positivism, see Hart, Religión, política y ciencia, pp. 63-4.
15 See especially Franco, César Vallejo, 36ff. and Lora Risco, “Numinosidad y catolicidad en la poesía de Vallejo,” pp. 91-115.
16 Franco, César Vallejo, p. 32.
17 The literature on the Romantic motif of the poet as a seer and language as magical is massive. For good overviews, see especially Bruns, Modern Poetry, and Greene, Thomas M., Poetry, Signs, and Magic (Newark: University of Delaware press, 2005)Google Scholar.
18 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, “Ozymandias,” in Woodcock, Bruce, ed., The Selected Poetry and Prose of Shelley (Ware: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 2002), p. 194Google Scholar. For Benjamin's account of allegory and ruins, see Benjamin, Walter, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1998)Google Scholar.
19 Dante, Inferno, V.121-123 (my translation).
20 Trilce consists of 77 untitled poems arranged by Roman numerals.
21 Vallejo's mother died in 1918, before this poem was written. His father would die in 1924. On the theme of “orphanhood” in this and other of Vallejo's poems, see Cardona, Nohora Viviana, “Las imágenes poéticas de César Vallejo,” Poligramas 21 (2004): pp. 67-78Google Scholar.
22 Choclo, also called Peruvian corn or Cuzco corn, is a large-kernel variety from the Andes region and eaten in parts of Central and South America.
23 For a related interpretation of this figure, see Zegarra, Chrystian, “Culpa, castigo y no redención en Los heraldos negros de César Vallejo,” Hispanic Poetry Review 8.1 (2006): pp. 55-68Google Scholar.
24 Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 3a, a. 79, q. 8.
25 Ignatius of Antioch, Ephesians, 20:1, in Holmes, Michael W., ed., The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translation, 3rd edition (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), p. 198Google Scholar. In “Ascuas” [Embers], another poem published in The Black Heralds, Vallejo likewise casts the Eucharist as a kind of “virus” that poisons the communicant (“Ascuas,” 36, line 18).
26 Council of Trent, in Schaff, Philliip, ed., Bibliotheca symbolica ecclesiae universalis: The Creeds of Christendom, with a History and Critical Notes, vol. 2 (New York: Harper, 1919)Google Scholar, Session 13, Canon 1.
27 This should not be taken in any sense to imply that the modernistas employ the Eucharist in a theologically orthodox fashion, much less that they themselves are theologically orthodox. The point is simply that the modernistas seem to be relying on a traditional interpretation of the Eucharist in terms of presence and communion, even if they are deploying that interpretation in a heterodox, non-traditional manners and contexts.
28 Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, “Plasmar,” def. 1 (www.rae.es).
29 Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 3a, q. 75, a. 1.
30 Turner, “The Darkness of God,” p. 157.
31 Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 3a, q. 61, a. 4, ad 1.
32 In the poem's concluding lines, there may also be an allusion to Darío's “Paschal Sonnet” (1916), where the Nicaraguan poet imagines himself riding along with Mary and Joseph in their flight to Egypt: “and I, on my poor donkey, walking toward Egypt, / and without the star now, very distant from Bethlehem.” Darío, “Soneto pascual,” in Álvaro Salvador, ed., Rudén Darío: Poesía completa (Madrid: Verbum, 2016), p. 755.
33 Gregory the Great, Homilarium in evangelia, 1.8 (Patrologia Latina 76: 1104). A later writer, St. Aelred (1109-1167), Abbot of Rielvaulx, draws out the connection in considerably more detail, reading the “house of bread” as the “holy Church,” the “manger in Bethlehem” as an “altar in the church,” and the “swaddling clothes” enwrapping the Christ child as the bread and wine enveloping Christ's sacramental Body. See St. Aelred, Sermo 2 (Patrologia Latina 195: 227).
34 Here I refer specifically to Vallejo's attitude in The Black Heralds and Trilce, and to “meaning” and “hope” in straightforwardly religious senses. In later works, there is indeed a sense that social and political solidarity might provide the sort of redemption that religion is no longer capable of supplying. One thinks, for instance, of Vallejo's Marxist-inspired novel Tungsteno (Madrid: Editorial Cenit, 1931), or the poem “Masa,” published in Spain, Take this Cup from Me (1938), in which universal human brotherhood replaces Christianity as the mechanism of resurrection and immortality (610).
35 On Vallejo and Hegel, see Farjeat, Luis Xavier Lopez, “La muerte de Dios y la vida del hombre: César Vallejo y Los heraldos negros,” Topics 13 (1997): pp. 219-236Google Scholar.