Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

There is not a single style in a book of poems, book of stories, novel or play. There is a plurality of styles that fight each other. Giovanni Bottiroli, on the basis of Mikhail Bakhtin’s proposal, formulates that there are three styles of thought: separative, that is rigid and suppresses the ambiguities between signifier and meaning; the distinctive, that implies a work with the oppositions and has, sometimes, a dialectic dimension; and the confusive one, that implies the triumph of the chaos in the scope of the discourse. In «Songs of Home», the three styles of thoughts struggle: the separative that is questioned by the distinctive (which implies the dialectical treatment between writing and orality in «The distant steps», for example) and the confusing (that evidences the rupture of the syntax and the embryonic presence of some avant-garde features in «To my brother Miguel», for example).

With The Black Heralds (1919), Vallejo begins his first literary archeology that already hoarded, from previous compositions, a broad knowledge of the symbolic structures of the literary currents that flooded the gatherings and academic forums of the early twentieth century. So much so that a poem like «Campanas muertas» («Dead Bells»), published in La Reforma on november 13, 1915, that is, several years before the publication of The Black Heralds, will have a major importance. In addition, in that same year of 1915, Vallejo draws a new line in its complex poetic universe, benefiting from new friends and «fellow travelers» (Orrego, Garrido, Imaña, Haya de la Torre, etc.) and readings of Schiller, Poe and Tennyson that, with the years, will allow him to know better his reality and his time; a time that, in Vallejo, is always dialectical, that is, contradictory, pessimistic, of exaltation, of memories and expectations, but always human.

This works examines the social realist commitment characterized in the narrative of Latin American author and Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892). This commitment to a social realist cause is particularly seen in his novel El tungsteno (1931), a brilliant work that became one of the most outstanding novels of the first half of the twentieth-century Latin American literature. This paper first sheds light on the life and literary trajectory of Peruvian poet César Vallejo, one of the most brilliant lyricists of the twentieth century Latin America. Secondly, this work will examine the innovative narrative discourses embedded in El tungsteno. To do that, I will do an analytical study of social commitment in Vallejo’s narrative; then, I will examine the narrative discourses mechanisms used, partaking with an analytical study of the main characters and then exploring the realistic narrative context of El tungsteno, as it will be discussed in depth in this paper.

«El niño del carrizo» by Vallejo narrates the quest of a reed that the young Miguel partakes when trying to decorate the bust of a religious statue during the Holy Week. This quest is embedded in the Andean cultural matrix, and the story explores the traversing of Miguel from a Western cosmovision to an Andean one. This crossing from one cosmovision to the other leads to the cultural finding of the character. Miguel’s perception is linked to cultural references, those of the landscape in which the story is inscribed to, such as Santiago de Chuco, where the Andean culture is manifested in its culli version, which Vallejo captures in depth. The episodic moments that Miguel shares with his plants, dogs, and the ecstatic moment when Miguel drinks water, characterize a conscious Andean gleam typical of Vallejo’s works. Water, for instance, acquires relevance since it is the medium that connects men with nature— with the Mother Earth. This paper approach is cultural; another useful methodology was to trace Santiago de Chuco’s oral tradition.

This paper departs from the personal knowledge that Dr. Humberto Ramos Guardia (Huaraz, December 26, 1900-Lima, October 13, 1980) had of César Vallejo. Dr. Ramos was the maternal grandfather of the author of this essay. He explores the limits between the biographical person of Vallejo and the poetic person represented in his first book, The Black Heralds (1918- 1919). Humberto Ramos Guardia was a science teacher at the Barrós school in the same years that Vallejo was a teacher of History, Language and Geography. Both men cultivated a cordial friendship that allowed Humberto Ramos to get to know closely the jovial personality and mocking ideas of César Vallejo in his Lima stage. The essay will delve into some aspects of The Black Heralds that problematize the traditional image of the depressive and melancholic poet that tends to prevail in the criticism about the poet from Santiago de Chuco.

Writing a few lines about the life and work of César Vallejo is always a project that gets any biographer or literary critic frothy.

Running counter to the focus on «blackness» and «pessimism» that some critics emphasise in their assessment of César Vallejo’s first published collection of poems, in this essay I use an eco-critical approach in order to focus on the role played by greenness in Vallejo’s 1919 collection, The Black Heralds. I start with the early poems such as «Phosphorence» and «Vegetal Transpiration» and argue that they are important for an understanding of Vallejo’s primordial reliance on nature, as are those poems in The Black Heralds that focus on greenness. I then pass to an analysis of the ways in which Vallejo portrays his incestuous relationship with his niece via the heretical account of Christ’s sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene in poems such as «Nervy Frenzy of Anguish», «Comunion» and «September», and suggest that these reveal a «green» side to Vallejo’s poetic persona. Finally I draw on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory of the «cooked» and the «uncooked» and his related theory of the prohibition of incest as underpinning human culture in order to suggest that Vallejo’s poetic persona sought the sweetness of a world in which he could escape the need to communicate through the exchange of words in the same way that he refused to exchange women, and thereby, in Lévi-Strauss’s words, «vivre entre soi».

In September 1927, César Vallejo tells Pablo Abril de Vivero on a letter: «Until now I live under a temporary parentheses, always on the doors of another kind of existence, one which, I repeat, it never comes. I take everything like this: with a provisional character». Beyond a biographical speculation, the letters reveal, from the poet’s voice, the labyrinths where he had to walk in Europe: financial trouble, illness, passion, projects, political thinking, description of geographical and historical contexts, success, and adversity. By researching and comparing Vallejo’s attitudes towards different individuals, and by analyzing the emotional situations and opinions that these documents evince, I will approach to the poet’s perspective and to his lyric voice, which —immerse in some of the most trascendental scenes of the twentieth century— reflects on the unfathomable human condition.

Under the modernista model of writing, this text presents motifs related to the uncanny, the unforeseen, the unexpected; a world where the rational explanations fail to give satisfactory answers. One of the pillars of such constructions is determined by the uncanny, the perplexity proposed by the represented world. Faced with certainty, this story proposes a disturbing world.

The Abbey of Montserrat is a place in the mountains of the province of Barcelona, in Spain, with a history that goes back a millennium. Between tourists and pilgrims, an average of three million people arrive each year; the number represents three-quarters of the foreign tourists who visited Peru in 2017. This level of attention is explained not only by the geological vagaries of the landscape, with standing rocks that simulate agglomerated friars and the architectural monumentality of the Benedictine monastery with its vertical arches, but also because La Moreneta, the black Virgin who is the patron saint of Catalonia, is preserved there. A book by the poet César Vallejo is also kept there.