Juan Pablo LUPI
Reading Anew
José Lezama Lima’s Rhetorical Investigations
Serie A: Historia y crítica de la literatura
Serie B: Lingüística
Serie C: Historia y Sociedad
Serie D: Bibliografías
Editado por
Mechthild Albert, Walther L. Bernecker,
Enrique García Santo-Tomás, Frauke Gewecke,
Aníbal González, Jürgen M. Meisel,
Klaus Meyer-Minnemann, Katharina Niemeyer
Emilio Peral Vega
A: Historia y crítica de la literatura, 56
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lupi, Juan Pablo.
Reading anew : José Lezama Lima’s rhetorical investigations / Juan Pablo Lupi.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Lezama Lima, José--Technique. 2. Lezama Lima, José--Literary style. I. Title.
PQ7389.L49Z776 2012
861’.62--dc23
2012018521
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eBook ISBN: 978-3-954870-15-8
Depósito Legal:
Cover design: a.f. diseño y comunicación
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
For Jacqueline and Santiago
Barbara Johnson
in memoriam
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
METAPHOR
1.RETHINKING METAPHORS AND CONCEPTS
2.RADICAL TROPOLOGIC: “DADOR”
ISLAND
3.TRADITION, DEATH AND POETICS: INSULAR TRANSITS IN “X y XX”
ALLEGORY
4.THE SPECULUM OF HISTORIOGRAPHY
5.ALLEGORY AND FUTURITY IN THE ERAS IMAGINARIAS
Appendix: Stéphane Mallarmé, “Prose (pour des Esseintes)”
Bibliography
EA .............. La expresión americana. Ed. Irlemar Chiampi. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993.
IP ............... Imagen y posibilidad. Ed. Ciro Bianchi Ross. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1992.
LLOC ......... Obras completas. Vol. 2. Mexico City: Aguilar, 1975.
P ................. Poesía completa. Ed. César López. Madrid: Alianza, 1999.
This book is the latest stage of a long personal and intellectual journey that began when I was a physics student at Universidad Simón Bolívar in my hometown of Caracas, Venezuela. It was back then when Luis Miguel Isava, teacher, mentor and friend, first introduced me to the hechizos of the study of poetry. I thank him for having shared so much of his learning with me since then. The origins of this book come from a conversation I had with him about Lezama and Mallarmé. At Harvard, the late Barbara Johnson taught me how to read anew. She was a model literary critic, and I will always be thankful for her support and for the many things I learned from her. José Antonio Mazzotti and Diana Sorensen, exemplary scholars and teachers, provided invaluable advice, insight and encouragement, both intellectual and personal: I offer them my heartfelt gratitude. Santiago Morales-Rivera was the first reader of this book; I thank him for this and for many other good things. For diverse reasons, I am especially grateful to each one of the persons in this pequeña glorieta de la amistad: Gloria Pastorino, Alberto Ribas, Andrea Bachner, Michelle Durán, Viviane Mahieux, Wanda Rivera, Susan Antebi, Antonio Córdoba, José Falconi, Martín Oyata, Gabriel Linares, Jorge Marturano, and Marta Hernández-Salván. I am deeply indebted to César Salgado, Enrico Mario Santí and Rubén Ríos Ávila for the many inspiring pages they have written and for the dialogues we had while this book was in the making.
My first research trip to Cuba was funded with a grant from the David Rockefeller Center of Latin American Studies at Harvard University. In Cuba, I counted on the institutional support of the Biblioteca Nacional José Martí and the Centro Juan Marinello; special thanks are due to its then director, Pablo Pacheco López. To Marta Lesmes and Ismael González I want to convey my gratitude for all their kindness. I am thankful to the patient staff of the Biblioteca Nacional, and especially Araceli García Carranza; much scholarship on Cuban literature would not be possible without her superb work. I am grateful also to Víctor Fowler, Enrique Saínz, Jorge Luis Arcos, Carmen Suárez León, and César López for their help and conversation.
At the University of California Santa Barbara I profited from the generous support of a Regents’ Junior Faculty Fellowship and a Hellman Family Fellowship. I thank the Department of Spanish and Portuguese for having given me a place to make this book possible. I am especially grateful to Francisco Lomelí, Silvia Bermúdez and Antonio Cortijo for their support. Leo Cabranes-Grant read various versions of the manuscript, and has offered me more encouragement and wisdom than I can acknowledge.
I thank Barbara Corbett for her thorough edition of the first version of the manuscript. María Pizarro, David Sharp and Amber Workman offered the necessary help to bring this project to completion.
Lastly, some people remain to thank because without them I wouldn’t have made any of this: Robert Spaethling, for his wisdom; Silvia Halperin, for being the person who knows me best; my parents, Óscar (1923-1994) and Marinela, for having given me a life so full of opportunities; and Jacqueline and Santiago, for their infinite patience and love.
… lo bautizarán con el grotesco de Aladino de la filología
Paradiso, chapter XIV