| Xavier Villaurrutia and Cesar Moro represent a sort of high modern estheticism in Latin American poetry, yet both clearly engaged with political issues in their work. While grappling with sexuality, solitude, the unconscious, death, and other concerns central to subjective experience, they also made proposals in all their books that, on some level, defended a distinctly political notion of individual and artistic autonomy. Reflejos, Villaurrutia's first collection, attacked the muralists' way of seeing and championed autonomous art centered in the subjective experience of vision. Nostalgia de la muerte put forward a type of non-ideological nationality as central to identity. Moro's La tortuga ecuestre reacted pointedly to Nostalgia de la muerte and attempted to spark Surrealism---that is, art autonomous of socialism yet politically radical---in Mexico. Le Chateau de grisou practiced a kind of post-surrealist "totem art" which Moro saw as capable of establishing a visionary, art-centered social organization not prey to the kind of ideological violence that had caused World War II. The political aspect of their work can best be described as a sustained defense of autonomy in the sense in which Zygmunt Bauman and Cornelius Castoriadis used the word: as the defining element of political agency. If politics is an act of critique by which individuals attempt to bring the institutions of society into line with their private experience, then Moro and Villaurrutia were political throughout. Rather than characterizing them as disengaged, we should therefore see them as inhabiting an ambiguous space between the private and the public, between abstention and engagement, between Eros and activism. To do otherwise reads them only halfway and fails to account for the deeply moral sense of political conviction informing their work. |
