Towards an Inclusive History of Existentialism: Agustini and Cortines as Specters of Malcontent

Existentialness and Latin American Literary Modernity

Conventionally, Existentialism, regardless of form, is an ode to nothingness, a feverish awakening or suspicion to the constructiveness of human Existence. All major Existentialist thinkers, from Kierkegaard to Unamuno through to the Brazilian Raimundo de Farias Brito, have at one time or another and in varying degrees, dealt with the problematic of this all-consuming freedom^[9]. Eduardo Mendieta, in the previously mentioned Situating Existentialism, offers an insightful take on the analogous relationship between Existentialism and Modernity, because as he explains “it is the quintessential philosophy of modernity. At the center of all existentialist thinking is the inescapably free subject who must make herself in a world bereft of meaning” (2012: 181). Both Agustini and Cortines address this very point, they struggle with securing meaning, that is, understanding of their inquietude. Likewise, the meaninglessness of their Existence connotes a signifying void, not the justification for decadent despair and catatonia. Quite the opposite effect is palpable in the writing of Agustini and Cortines, since Existence is wanting of meaning; they pursue that significance fanatically in their writing^[10].

Following this trend of thought, our literary Modernity of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, an era commonly understood as the first literary revolution of Latin American letters, is chock-full with what a posteriori will be understood as Existential themes and positions. A review of the ideology which energized this literary renovation evidences that “Existentialness”. For example, while referring specifically to Hispanic modernismo, Alejandro Mejías-López explains exactly what was so modern, and in my understanding Existential, about this generation: “they were the first to theorize not just Hispanic, but “Western” modernism and the problematic relationship of literature and art to the changing environment brought about by modernization” (2009: 4). The literary treatment of Modernity, with all the esthetic and ethical identity questioning that entailed is also present in simbolismo, and manifests itself, many times in self-consciousness and a sense of cultural disassociation.

The two introspective poets I will discuss fit perfectly into the intense skepticism, cynicism and overall humanist concerns common of the more ethically preoccupied writers of modernismo and simbolismo, such as José Martí, José Enrique Rodó, or João Cruz e Souza^[11]. These writings are also associable with the canonical literatures of Existentialism because of the obvious discontent centered squarely on the questioning of Existence and humanity’s meaning in it. These attitudes of modernismo and simbolismo, which expose the critical anachronism of Latin American Existentialism, are ignored by the historians of Existentialism, an inaccuracy principally based on the presumed über-estheticism of both.

We can continue to appreciate each movement’s “Existentialness” by referring to the critical reception of the closing decades of the 20^th century, which sheds light on the larger philosophical agendas of many of these writers. For example, Ivan A. Schulman explains that modernismo represented “un período de hondos buceos en todas las esferas del saber humano, una época de productivos experimentos, de brillantes hallazgos y de fervorosa actividad literaria e intelectual” (1987: 14). For his part, Alfredo Bosi characterizes simbolismo as a similarly inquisitive movement which aspired to build upon the aesthetic quality of art to “ir além do empírico e tocar, com a sonda da poesia, um fundo comum que susteria os fenômenos, chame-se Natureza, Absoluto, Deus ou Nada” (1984: 295). Clearly these critics, along with many others who have revitalized the understanding of modernismo and simbolismo, emphasize the struggles with conscientiousness of both movements which have traditionally been celebrated as primarily esthetical.

Indeed, if we read both the positions of Schulman and Bosi as illustrative of the multidimensionality of our literary Modernity, it becomes immediately apparent that the common denominator between modernismo and simbolismo, in terms of their Existentialness, becomes the sociocultural dissatisfaction commonly referred to by experts as the fin de siglo crisis, a discontented zeitgeist, not exclusive to Europe or to the 20^th century. Given all of the above, that is, the ethical undertones highlighted by the critics of modernismo and simbolismo, and the chronological proximity with the early phase of universal Existentialism, the lack of a synchronized Latin American Existentialism becomes all the more puzzling.

Existentialist Voices

As previously cited, Merrim has pointed to a need for an overarching comparative study on Existentialism in Latin America; however, individualized case-studies exist and typically begin with Rubén Darío’s “Lo fatal” (1905) when the focus is poetry. According to Concepción Núñez Rey, the Nicaraguan’s poem “anticipa y sintetiza el pensamiento existencialista que ha impregnado la literatura del siglo XX” (2004: 12)^[12]. However, upon closer examination of the lyrical production of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, we find an abundance of poetry which is introspective in character and which predates Darío’s work from 1905. One concrete example, convincingly documented by Francisco Peña Bermejo, is the Galician romanticist Rosalía de Castro’s En las orillas del Sar (1884), which for Peña Bermejo marks a new philo-poetic attitude intimately associable with Existentialism^[13]. Like Rosalía and Darío, these other writers focused on the individual and his/her immediacy, that is to say the human condition in its most instantaneous state. Symptomatically these Proto-Existentialists poeticize the weight of uncertainty which permeates their Existence, often expressing itself as a struggle for self-understanding. Time and again, throughout many of these poems, and in particular the two I will directly comment on, the poetic voice deals with the despair of not knowing, while struggling for relevance, and a quantum of authenticity, a conscious tension found later in much of the work of Unamuno, Camus and Sartre^[14].

Exhibits of this embryonic Existentialism abound throughout Latin America. For example we have modernismo’s Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera and his poems “To be” (1886), “Monólogo del incrédulo” (1887) and “Pax animae” (1890); Julián del Casal’s own “Pax animae” (1892), “La mayor tristeza” (1893), “Desolación” (1893); and José Asunción Silva’s “Filosofías” (1896)^[15]. From Brazil’s analogous simbolismo, Raimundo Correia and his sarcastically titled collection Aleluias (1891) and in particular his poems “VIVER! EU SEI QUE A ALMA CHORA”, “HOMEM, EMBORA EXASPERADO BRADES”, “Imagem da dor”, “Vana”, “Meditações”, “Desiludido”, and from his Poesias (1898) “NADA! ESTA SÓ PALAVRA EM SI RESUME TUDO”^[16].

The transitional years between 1910 to 1919 also have noteworthy Proto-Existentialist voices in Hispanic America, such as Amado Nervo’s “Yo no nací para reir” (1914) and “Al cruzar los caminos” (1919), and from Brazil Augusto dos Anjos’s haunting Eu (1912) and his poems “Monólogo de uma sombra”, and “Eterna Mágoa”, “Natureza intima”^[17]. Looking further ahead and focusing less on the formal and thematic experimentalism of the vanguardia histórica, meaning from 1914 to 1936, we can tease out the pronouncements regarding bad faith, freedom, authenticity and death in César Vallejo’s poem “LXXV” in Trilce (1922) and Rafael García Bárcena’s forgotten collection Sed (1936) and his poems “Estética”, “Indagación” and “Ser”. During this same period, the history of Existentialism has given limited attention to Pablo Neruda’s “Walking Around” in Residencia en la tierra (1935), among others^[18].

As this inventory demonstrates, the poetry of Agustini and Cortines is not indicative of an eccentric or dissociative singularity. Rather these two poets form part of a larger Latin-American Existentialism avant la lettre^[19]. Agustini’s poetry, largely seen as oscillating between the decadent and the sadomasochistic, belongs to the literary history of Existentialism because in her work we corroborate a preoccupation with pain, human decay, and with time and its emotional weight on the individual. This is richly expressed in “Lo ineffable”, a poem which in fact has three known versions^[20]. The following variant is the most traditional representation of Agustini’s work and the title perfectly symbolizes the ideological tension which sustains the relationship between the Existent and Existing:

As a whole, the poem conveys a central tenet of universal Existentialism: that which is unknowable, the longing for understanding what by principle cannot be grasped is a foundational contradiction which sustains the sentient Being’s anguish^[21]. This poem, structured as a sonnet, projects a tone of lament not fatalism. What cannot be overlooked is that the culprit is not the typical sentimental longing; the poetic voice is explicit in that her pain is not Life, Death or Love. In fact, the poetic speaker recognizes her own contemplativeness as the antagonist and galvanizer for her malaise which becomes all consuming. As the lyrical voice twice confesses, she is haunted by “un pensamiento” (III, v. 5), and that thought projects psychosomatically, as is overt in the first two versions of the poem: “Yo rugiente, anhelante, los dientes apretados,/ De los nervios, del pecho, con los dedos crispados,/ Quiero, quiero arrancarlo y la angustia es atroz” (Poesías completas, Versiones I and II, vv. 10–12). This stanza, which did not survive Agustini’s last editing process, articulates that her overpowering malcontent has metastasized to every facet of her Existence, from the emotional to the physical (i.e. “anhelante” → “pecho”); however, her will to remedy equals her anguish, as the speaker repeats ‘quiero, quiero arrancarlo’ (I and II, v. 12).

Correspondingly, the poem equates cognizant human Existence and pain, associating self-awareness to martyrdom, which will be carried ‘eternamente’ (III, v. 9). In so doing, the lyrical voice connotes the burden of consciousness and the impossibility of its undoing. Furthermore, the abrasive lexical component of the poem, in particular the usage of “devorando” (III, v. 6), “abrasaba” (III, v. 8), “desgarradora” (III, v. 10), “trágica” (III, v. 10) and “clavada” (III, v. 11), signifies the expansiveness and the intrinsic quality of her anguish and also functions as an expressionist treatment to convey the dangers of self-awareness.

The poem closes by engaging another indisputable leitmotif of Existentialism, one problematized by nearly every writer associated with this philosophical attitude: the elusiveness of God. The poem accomplishes this by equating the potential end of her torment, symbolically understanding the indefinable thoughts which dominate her every moment, with grasping “la cabeza de Dios” (III, v. 14). By coupling the ineffable to God, Agustini is articulating the triumph of the impossible and the tyranny of nothingness since as with the idea of God, attempting to fully understand and conquer her enigmatic pain is a sadistic exercise of Being, or to put it differently, Agustini is caught in an Existential stalemate.

In only fourteen verses, Agustini achieves the confluence of central problems of Existentialism proper, namely, the danger of intellectualizing Existence and pain as an eternal certainty of life. Additionally, Agustini returns to and underscores the aloofness of the idea of God, a symptomatic Existentialist position when we consider Nietzsche had been propagating the death of God, only a few years before and Unamuno would struggle with the silences he encountered throughout his life, never convincingly proofing the existence or the demise of God^[22].

Another important voice, never before mentioned in an Existentialist context, is that of Júlia Cortines, who is unremittingly enthralled by shocking imagery, and completely engaged by the decomposition of morality, the chaos of the cosmos and the visceral sense of life. Chief amongst her poetic devices is the lyrical persona which constantly appears as “Eu” and the implied “Você” as both spectator and participant. This introspectiveness is apparent in her poem “Por toda a parte”:

As the title suggests, the poem is of a highly meditative and inquisitive quality, and as is unmistakable with only one reading, no proverbial stone has been left unturned by the poetic voice’s penetrating examination of herself and her surroundings. Cortines’s poem, an Existential soliloquy, is saturated by symbolic counter positions and paradoxes. These juxtapositions, sustained by rhymed couplets, bear witness to the lyrical voice’s disintegration because of the extensiveness of her self-interrogations. This intellectual journey makes use of bold and emotive language in order to transmit the sense that perception and her immediacy dictate her understanding. The couplets also link the transcendental to the elemental (e.g. from “o arcano” [v. 1] and the metaphoric “coração humano” [v. 2]). The symbols used in verses five to eight, which move from the earthly to the heavens and back again, function to epitomize the exhaustiveness of the poetic voice’s journey for self-realization and contentment. To this end, the adjectives employed signify the intensity of the philo-poetic voyage; hence the reader is exposed to the “fúria insana”; (v. 7) and the “atroz convulsão” (v. 8) of searching out the meaning of Existence, which the poetic speaker explicitly is undertaking from the onset of the poem.

The compendiousness of the poem, an all-inclusive Existential odyssey for answers, continues in verse nine when the poetic voice summarizes the extent of her questioning: “interrogaste enfim tudo” (v. 9). What the confessional, incessant tone of the poem finds after much deliberation is that invariably pain endures. For the poetic speaker, perceptive Being, which has been spurred by an ineffable “sentir” (v. 2), culminates with this incontrovertible tenet of Existentialism, which Cortines posits as a question: “Que encontraste afinal? / -A dor! a dor! a dor!” (vv. 12–13). Much like Agustini and Unamuno would assert in later years, sentient Existence is pain and pain is one of the only certainties of Existence and in turn Being^[23]. The virtue of this short poem is that Cortines has succinctly poetized the dangers of consciousness, that is to say questioning and knowing as a precarious endeavor, both blessing and curse. By employing symbols to denote all manner of existable space, from the abstract to the concrete, from the emotional to the elemental, the affirmation of the triumph of pain has been literally meticulous, and figuratively exhaustive and exhausting.

Revisiting Existentialist History

Certainly, the two poems commented here are only small samples of both poets’ Proto-Existentialist qualities. As early as 1903, Agustini was dealing with questions of authenticity, expressing a need for self-understanding and poetizing the virtues of life in general, especially in poems such as “Monóstrofe”, “Al vuelo”, “La musa gris”, “Átomos”, y “Diario Espiritual” to name only these from her earliest publications in literary magazines in Montevideo and collections such as El libro blanco (1907), Los cantos de la mañana (1910) and Los cálices vacíos (1913)^[24]. The same holds true for Cortines, whose most interesting Existentialist incursions are “Soledade”, “Entre abysmos”, “Via Dolorosa”, “O tempo”, “Renuncia”, “A beira do abysmo”, “Eu estou fatigada” and “Última Página”, from her Versos (1894) and Vibrações (1905). In both poets, the precocious appearance and continuous interest in the question of Being and the voracious inquisitiveness with regards to Existence, yield poetic testimonials which not only show them as precursors for 20th century Existentialism but which demand inclusion in a canon where they are noticeably absent.

The shared dissatisfaction with literary and ideological status quo unites the innovators of poetry in Latin America. Referring to modernismo, Aníbal González has explained that “Modernismo’s modernity resides in its embrace of the modern tradition of deep, often revolutionary philosophical criticism” (2007: 6). This far-reaching dogmatic reevaluation, manifest as a constant searching and an explicit discontent, is self-evident in the two poems presented here, but is also prevalent in the other poets mentioned earlier, all of which shared an aesthetically and ethically disruptive viewpoint.

The poets assembled in this essay offer case studies in reflectiveness and contemplativeness from a vigorous ethical perspective, far removed from the purely speculative artist stereotype erroneously associated with modernismo and simbolismo in the past. The poetic voices confront the contradictions of life, and explore the deep seeded inquietude which plagues their Existence. In the end, as commentaries on the sense and/or senselessness of life, they imply that Existence is enigmatic, concomitant, agonizing and ultimately cruel and solitary. Other women writers, following in the footsteps of Agustini and Cortines, take up similar anthropocentric perspectives on Existence, dealing with repressive norms which they find lacking as projects of Being, as is the case of María Vaz Ferreira, María Luisa Bombal, Clarice Lispector and Yolanda Oreamuno, all writers missing from most of the histories of Existentialism.

I have purposefully concentrated on women writers in the present study because as a whole their contributions have been the most impacted by the critical myopia of the historians of Existentialism^[25]. These same historians would be well-served to take note of how Agustini and Cortines as poetic commentators disquieted and haunted by their own inquisitiveness fit perfectly into the earliest stages of Existentialism. Furthermore, as I have shown, the late 19^th century and early 20^th was a thriving moment of literary Modernity in Latin America, where certain writers intellectualize their Existence from a malcontent position. This discontent manifested into poetic and narrative voices, some of which became icons of the 20^th century, and in Latin America proliferated into the likes of Bombal’s Ana María, Lispector’s Joana and Oreamuno’s Teresa, and many others^[26].

Ultimately, these poems help to dispute our presence outside the margins of the Existentialist canon, particularly when we collectivize the scope of material which has yet to be read from an Existentialism perspective. The latest work by Domingo Toledo and Mendieta foreshadows a promising future, but much is left to be done to synchronize the contributions of Latin American Existentialism. Given the resilience of universal Existentialism, that is to say its continued presence well into the 21^st century, and the ethical/esthetic malaise of the modernizers of Latin American literature, the 19^th century seems as good an era as any to begin with this much needed historiography^[27].