Ricardo Pau-Llosa: The Rebel without an Inferiority Complex

By Armando F. Mastrapa.

Ricardo Pau-Llosa

There are those who break from the pack, and then there are those who break the pack, who simply by being themselves smash the categories and stereotypes which are ubiquitous in our culture and media.  Poet, art critic, curator, and art collector Ricardo Pau-Llosa is no one’s idea of a typical anything.  Born in Cuba in 1954, he fled the communist island in 1960 along with his parents, grandmother, and older sister.  The struggles of early exile in frigid Chicago tempered but did not embitter his view of America, combining, as he says, “The sustaining memories of the exile with the courageous purposefulness of the immigrant.”

Eventually, the family moved to Tampa and then to Miami in 1968 where Pau-Llosa has lived since.  It is not a city which has embraced him, despite the fact that many of his finest poems are vividly set in it and that, as an art critic, he has focused attention on the work of many South Florida artists.  Pau-Llosa’s articles and monographs on modern painting and sculpture have made him a respected international authority, especially on Latin American art.  As was seen in a recent feature on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (PBS), the walls of his sprawling house are covered with paintings, the furniture competes with sculptures for walking space, and folk and tribal pieces proliferate among modernist and contemporary works.  A copious library and cigar humidors are no less conspicuous.

Author of six books of poetry—the last four are the Carnegie Mellon titles: Cuba (1993, the 100th title in its Poetry Series),  Vereda Tropical (1999), The Mastery Impulse (2003), and Parable Hunter (2008)—and a frequent contributor to many prestigious literary magazines in the US, Canada, and Britain, Pau-Llosa boasts the kind of professional profile most people automatically associate with liberal or leftist intellectuals.  His denunciations of communist atrocities and those in the West who applaud them, and his equally heartfelt defense of capitalism and American democracy, shatter that paradigm.  The critic who has published exhaustively on Latino and Latin American artists, has no patience for what he calls “the spectacle of self-castration the grievance industry of our culture demands of latinos and other minorities.”  Pau-Llosa is a cosmopolitan who pays tribute to his heritage by being a cutting-edge poet and thinker, refusing to be, as he says, “a professional victim or a nostalgiaholic.”

But the rebel without an inferiority complex is still a man without a team.  Ironically, Pau-Llosa has suffered more indifference from what he calls “the genteel, philistine,  smug Right” than from his enemies on the Left.  As likely to denounce Castro’s crimes as ridicule the Cuban exiles’ neglect of their own culture, Pau-Llosa is a   socially high-profile man who is also the quintessential loner.  Truly, as Jonathan Kandell once remarked about Pau-Llosa, in an article on Miami published in Cigar Aficionado, he is “the rarest of specimens.”  However, one senses—perhaps hopes—  that history will likely see him more as a precursor than as an anomaly.

In your poetry, as well as in your art criticism, there seem to be two forces locked in combat, or perhaps in a dance.  One is a sense of foreboding, and the other hedonism.  Is it a dance, a struggle, or something else?

If a writer, or any other artist, is not focused on what is before him—which is how I see what you refer to as hedonism—and doesn’t reflect this in the work, then he, or she, may be a philosopher or an editorialist, but not an artist.  The immediacy of a work of art is what gives it lasting life.  It is a paradox, of course, which is to say a life-giving contradiction, the opposite of a solvable mystery.  And when one focuses the thoughtful mind on what is there before us, what is immanent, then a sense of loss hazes in, ineluctably.  For that idea-generating surrender to the immanent must pass, and quickly.  The trick is to enshrine that surrender in the work, so others can experience it inexhaustibly.  That is the function of art—not self-expression, not social commentary, not innovating on or reacting to what other artists have done.  To defy the temporal, the flux, art enshrines.

Are you conscious of this as it is happening, and if so, can you give an example from your work?

Yes, conscious in my case, but the process is the same in all truly creative acts of any artist; being conscious, or not, has no bearing on it.  I incorporate ideas I take from Edmund Husserl and other Phenomenologists, about the act of the mind, and combine them with my interest in metaphor and other tropes.  I have always seen tropes as structures of language which reveal a non-causal, non-linear event in reflective consciousness—a way of grasping more than one thing at a time.  It’s all much simpler than I am making it sound, and it’s a fairly universal process, whether the artist or poet has ever heard of Phenomenology, or not.  One always starts by putting aside suppositions and what one knows about a thing, the more common the object  the better, in order to grasp it vividly—which is to say, to reflect on both the thing and how one experiences it simultaneously.  This is the origin of all tropes and insights.  I cannot conceive of the creative act without tropes and the unfamiliar mode of awareness they trigger.  There was a period in my work in which I wrote poems which were lists of metaphors and other tropes, centered on a single referent—the harvest moon, a face, a fingerprint, and so forth.  The result was a vertiginous entry in the image and into its life in the mind at the same time.

You have also made the presence of tropes central to your approach to the visual arts.

Yes, especially in my approach to Latin American art of our times.  I have put forward the idea that the importance of tropological thinking—the way in which images combine more than one referent, in the manner of metaphor or metonymy in language—in Latin American painting and sculpture sets it apart from Western European and North American art of the same styles and periods.  In Europe and the US, artists from Cubism onward were mostly reductivist in their pursuit of new ideas, whereas the Latin Americans were more theatrical, combining styles rather brazenly and throwing ideas together which elsewhere artists considered mutually exclusive.  Latin American modernists were cumulative rather than reductivist, and they were more interested in theatrical combination of ideas, and therefore in expanding the role of reference in art, and less interested in the abstract or non-referential qualities of a work of art for their own sake.  For us trope, and not medium, was the message.

Why do you think that occurred?

I surmise that the importance of liturgy-based worship, the combinations of Catholicism, the indigenous religions which survived the Conquest, and the cosmologies of the West African slaves, set the stage for a theatrical sensibility in the visual arts.  Protestantism is word-centered and Biblicist, which feeds the impulses of literature and shapes a law-based civic life.  But logos-centered cultures usually have a suspicion of visual representation, hence the desire to keep art non-referential, a thing rather than a narrative or a discourse.

In other interviews I’ve heard you talk about the way the visual arts have taught you to reflect on seeing itself.  What lessons has American poetry taught you, as a poet or as an art critic, or both?

It’s always seemed strange to me how little value is given to American poetry overall, in contrast with American novelists or film-makers or playwrights.  Some of the greatest achievements in American letters of the last hundred years have been in poetry.   I am always startled by the way in which Richard Wilbur can make the reader inhabit a poem.   He is most celebrated for his formalism, but not only is he one of the great imagists, a true innovator in metaphor and metonymy, his poems have all the clarity of a well lit stage upon which a great dramatic moment of thought and action is about to take place.  Wallace Stevens, among the founding modernists of American poetry, is one of three great poet-philosophers of the twentieth century, along with Rainer Maria Rilke and Jorge Luis Borges.  Stevens, Rilke, and Borges  capture the moment in which an idea becomes tangible.  There are many other astonishing American poets, but that tradition is threatened by its own success.  So many people publishing work that is either obscure, self-absorbed or sociological—in other words, so little of it exhibiting any depth that it seems the anti-intellectualism of popular fiction and movies has finally taken possession of poetry in America, to its great loss.  Nonetheless, I truly cannot fathom how it is that no American poet has ever won a Nobel Prize, or that foreign writers and critics think more of a trite simpleton like Hemingway than of a Stevens or a Wilbur.

Do you have any comments on the Peace Prize this year?

Only that the President, had he declined it however decorously due to the obvious fact that he doesn’t deserve it, certainly not at this juncture. . . had he declined it, he would have garnered the imposing respect of friend and foe alike.  But he chose to believe in the smug banality of the Norwegian committee and passed up a unique opportunity to transcend.  I am thankful to have been spared a ratcheting of the faux-messiah propaganda which declining the award would have inflicted on us.  Nor am I surprised that he accepted the Prize; he is a mirage, the iconic puppet of the virtual age, maneuvered by a handiwork of meticulous malice.  The Prize is as vacuous as he is, hence he is more its mate than its recipient.

You are an outspoken critic of the Leftist cant that dominates the worlds of culture and academe.  How difficult has this made your life?

Freedom and the meritocracy are inseparable.  The arts have indeed been taken over by the Left because success there is by determined by the decree of a self-appointed elite.  It is the opposite of sports or business or the sciences where actual achievement is what counts.  Being hostage to dictated whims, the arts provided fertile ground for a Leftist takeover, for socialist ideas are not beholden to facts or real life or actual cause and effect.  The arts are ruled by pitiless commissars, petty eunuchy hush-buddies.  And, yes, denouncing the destruction that socialism has visited on Cuba and more recently on another country I have affection for, Venezuela, and most importantly of all: warning the deaf and the vain that it can indeed happen here and is being foisted upon us as we speak . . . none of this has  exactly won me the kinds of friends one needs to succeed—really succeed—in the arts.

The “hush-buddies” you refer to, the secretive and tyrannical designators of worth in the arts, of who can speak and who must be ignored. . . .

Exactly.  Yet, enough editors respect what I write to publish me, so I am grateful for that.  Actually, I find greater fault with the Right for having given up culture, academe and, up until Fox News came along, the media as well, to the Left without much of a fight.  Because the Right is all about individualism and merit, and because there are too many conservatives who feel all they can do is defend the positions where they still feel strong—religion and business, for example—the Right has embraced an anti-solidarity mentality which is of little help to the artists and writers who embody the culture of freedom and fight to preserve it.  This anti-solidarity is part of the defeatist attitude of the Right, and a license to do nothing to retake a more visible position in the arts and academe.  “As long as my church and business and  country club are safe”. . . but they won’t be for much longer.  Parochialism, which is self-absorption disguised as a vague affinity for community, is suicidal in this age where ideology and values are locked in definitive, mortal combat.  I don’t regret the price I’m paying for speaking out.  Nicholas Berdyaev, who endured and later fled the Stalin terror, said, “The truth is always dangerous.”  So is not speaking it, much more so, actually.

Armando F. Mastrapa has written about Cuban political, cultural, and military matters for a variety of publications, and is on the board of the online newspaper La Nueva Cuba [ www.lanuevacuba.com].   More information on Pau-Llosa can be obtained on his website at www.pau-llosa.com.