Mediating Andean Modernity: The Literary Oracular in Muerte por el tacto by Jaime Saenz

Joseph Mulligan

doi:10.5195/bsj.2021.252

Abstract

Upon his return from Berlin in 1939, Jaime Saenz started working in La Paz for intelligence agencies and public relations offices of Bolivia and the United States, which led to correspondent positions with Reuters and McGraw-Hill World News. His trajectory into Cold War Bolivian state nobility seemed all but guaranteed. However, on the brink of this breakout moment, he renounced his job —and professionalism altogether— committing himself to a life of literature and alcoholism as his marriage unraveled. In response to repeated interventions, he justified his every loss with a further indictment of the precautious, which was an outgrowth of his belief in the existence of a higher truth that was both accessible and impervious to analytical reason. In this article, I ask how Saenz’s poetry from the 1950s metabolized the rhetoric of indictment which it had inherited from the Tellurism of the Chaco generation. How might Muerte por el tacto (1957) be symptomatic of a broader aim of restoring to modern poetry its oracular legitimacy? On what grounds did Saenz indict precautious defenders of historical culture? And how did such an indictment mediate “national energy” (Tamayo) as it came into language through the nativist discourse of the land? Paying focal attention to regimes of revelation in Saenz’s early poetry and the historical conditions of its production, this article updates a discussion among Transatlanticists about the legitimization of irrationalism in 20th-century poetics and politics by assessing the socio-symbolic value of the oracular in the regionalist discourse of modernism.

Highlights

Upon his return from Berlin in 1939, Jaime Saenz started working in La Paz for intelligence agencies and public relations offices of Bolivia and the United States, which led to correspondent positions with Reuters and McGraw-Hill World News
The Literary Oracular in Muerte por el tacto by Jaime Saenz its production, this article updates a discussion among Transatlanticists about the legitimization of irrationalism in 20th-century poetics and politics by assessing the socio-symbolic value of the oracular in the regionalist discourse of modernism
By retracing the intellectual history of Tellurism, I examine the characterization of the poet as a medium, who became possessed by delirium when he rejected the social conventions of instrumental reason and embraced the genius loci or spirit of the land

Summary

Minerality and Modernism

Guillermo Francovich (1945) enjoys the distinction of having recognized the reorientation of Bolivian cultural production that had taken place during. He observed that this “mística de la tierra” [mysticism of the land] was a system of beliefs in the land’s possession of a spirit which acts through human beings, establishing individual life forms and social relations. Such practitioners as Palza and Prudencio argued that the spirit of the land engendered “tipos culturales con fisionomía tan propia como los ambientes geográficos que las han producido” [cultural types with a physiognomy as unique as the geographical conditions that have produced them] (Francovich 155-156). The poetic fiction that every person possesses a piece of our nation’s heavens at the bottom of his soul is a reality: Humus, homo] Tamayo argued that this relation was not always evident in physiological features but remained ever present in the “national character.”. As we will see in the ensuing analysis, the myths of universal terror, the destructive power of the puna, the minerality of man, and the terrestrialization of the spirit all served Jaime Saenz as rationale for renouncing instrumental reason with the aim of restoring a lost faith in the redeeming power of the genius loci

Discipline of the Plunge

Channeling through the entrañas oscuras

The Jubilant Angel