Angel Gonzalez: Nostalgia and Inevitability

 

This paper was the final assignment for ENGL433: Modern Poetry, Dr. Richard Jackson, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, 3 Dec. 1987. The link on the web page to Gonzalez was added when this page was placed on the web.

© Bill Stifler, 1987

 

Somewhere near the turn of the century the world changed. Nature was no longer a well-oiled machine; man was no longer its caretaker. Logos was no longer distinct from Chaos but interlaced by it. Space and time, matter and energy, man and nature: the old categories blurred. In the poetry of Angel Gonzalez, space-time has personal dimensions, or to put it another way, personality extends through space and time giving his poems a depth of feeling, where "warm yellow street-lamps" ("Yesterday," line 26) the "whistling wind" ("First Evocation," line 17), or a "still warm bullet" ("Zero City," line 28) are not merely phenomena of nature, but expressions of the self. Often Gonzalez's poems have the sense of almost a bildungsroman where the innocence of childhood memories mature in perspective. But there is more here than just a growth from innocence to awareness. The contrast between the child's understanding and the adults' coupled with the narrator's later realization and appropriation of their feelings creates both a tension in the poem and a fulfillment. Time loses its sense of linearality, the nostalgia for the lost child is replaced by an intense empathy that both transcends time and defines it. But the awareness reached is painful because what defines the past is uncertainty, fear, agony, and rage. In this way, identification and alienation become paradoxically linked aspects of the poet's psyche.

The title "First Evocation," while it includes the calling of his mother to memory, by the qualifying "first" suggests also that the memory of his mother creates within the poem a changed perception of the world that continues to hold meaning for the poet. He begins by remembering his mother as "afraid" of the wind (line 4), of thunder (line 7), of war (line 8), and, even though the cause of her fear is far away, both spatially in the sense that wind and thunder indicate a storm's approach and temporally as seen by her fear of war "before / the last breaking / of the treaty" (lines 12-14).

For the child the "whistling wind" (line 17) is a "merry sweeper" (line 20), and while the "thunder/ thundered too much" (lines 24-25), "impossible/ to endure . . . without horror" (lines 26-27), "nothing ever happened afterwards" (line 28). The rain "erasing / the lightning's violent outline" (lines 29-30), "the rainbow . . . put / a bucolic end to so much racket" (lines 31-32).

The coupling of war and storm in the first stanza serve as a way for the writer to de-emphasize the mother's fear. The return to war in the fourth stanza, however, stands as a corrective to the child's perception. Peace comes, but this time "the wind did not bring back what it had swept" (line 36). "What was lost was lost forever, / what was dead stayed dead" (lines 39-40).

The storm takes on harsher connotations. The "wind / takes possession of the streets," (lines 44-45) "beats upon the doors, and flees" (line 46). The lightning "splits the air" (line 51), "making cats' backs bristle" (note the harshness of the glottal-stopped s's) (line 55), "upsetting the magnetic north" (line 56). The focus has pulled back from the childish perception of unchangedness after the storm to its destructive fury. And just as the past is made present in the poet's feelings, concepts of space are changed. Categories like "far away" (line 59) and "small" (line 62) become their opposites. War, like the storm, devastating, may be in "distant lands with tiny corpses,/ far-off crimes, small orphans . . . " (lines 61-62), but the reader, like the narrator, like his mother, knows its "horror" (line 26) is nearby, just in front of us.

In the same way "Zero City" juxtaposes the child's perceptions of war: "a suspension of classes, / Isabelita in the cellar in diapers" (lines 10-11), war's "daily marvels" (line 27) with the "almost incomprehensible / grief of the grownups, / their tears, their fear, / their smothered rage" (lines 19-22). Just as the narrator in "First Evocation" was aware of the "horror" (line 26) of the storm, even though a child, so, the narrator in "Zero City" has "mixed feelings" (line 5) about the war. What differentiates "Zero City," however, is that the adult's pain is for the narrator partly comprehensible, even if only "through some crack" (line 23) "vanish[ing] . . . swiftly" (line 25). The drama of the poem lies in the way in which the "daily marvels" (line 27) of the child become "blurred" (line 35) while what was "scarcely noticed / at the time" (lines 36-37) surges up to become "this pervading fear, / this sudden rage, / this unpredictable / and deep desire to weep" (lines 40-43)--the line breaks emphasizing each "this," the poet's "now for always" (line 39).

But "[t]he story does not end here" ("Intermission," line 1) The present may only be "a little pause so that we may rest" ("Intermission," line 3). Where "First Evocation" and "Zero City" pull a painful past into the present, "Intermission" pulls an equally painful future, because inevitably growing from the past, into the present. On the surface a poem about the intermission during a play, the tone is almost whimsical. The intermission is a breathing space from the "tension" (line 4) and "emotion released by the plot" (line 5) in which "dancers and actors, acrobats / and distinguished audience" (lines 8-9) can "happily / agree that it was all a lie" (lines 12-13). In this way, the intermission serves as a means of diminishing the distance between actor and audience, observer and observed. Further, the poet removes the distance between himself and the reader, telling us, "we know" (lines 17, 18), "we have seen" (line 15).

The play is a tragedy, made up of "several quick scenes that foretold death" (line 16), a "betrayal" (line 21) and a "betrayer" (line 22); "the despair is clearly / outlined" (lines 25-26). The "exuberant / gestures" (lines 29-30), "the terror / that controls / their movements on stage" (lines 33-35), the "ineffective and torturous dialogues" (line 37) that might be seen as weak acting or a trite play are interpreted within the poem as if the actors were actually trying "to avoid the rigors of fate" (line 27) or "hide / their cowardice" (lines 32-33). Perhaps, the poet suggests, this "broken panorama" (line 41) "will later explain many things, will be/ the key that at the end will justify/ it all."

Justification becomes a central theme in the poem, as perhaps it has been in each of the others. In "Intermission", the narrator suggests actions from the play that may serve to justify "yesterday" (line 38), that "vanished / time" (lines 38-39). The "words of love" (line 47), "the disguised expression, the violence / with which someone said: / `No'" (lines 48-50), and the "surprise produced" (line 52) by the gardener's statement all suggest choices, open-endedness, a reversal of the "despair" (line 25) and "betrayal" (line 21) already suggested as the end of the play. By realizing his connections to the past, and making its pain a part of himself, Gonzalez hopes to transcend it. What the poem "I Myself" suggests is that the poet can never get beyond himself, and as a result his "body walks by itself, getting lost, / distorting whatever plans [he] make[s]" (lines 16-17). "Intermission" draws a starker conclusion. As "the drama continues and the feigned / grief / becomes real in our hearts" (lines 62-64), Gonzalez realizes the past can't be transcended, that what the past feared, wept for, raged at, "is near" (line 66), that the future, like the past, "will end, no doubt, / as it must end, as it is written, / as it must inevitably happen" (lines 67-69).

 

The text of the poems analyzed were taken from a draft copy of an anthology of World Poetry which Dr. Jackson was developing. I do not know the original source of the poems or who translated them from the original Spanish. For copyright reasons, I cannot list the complete texts of the poems here; however, those interested in Gonzalez's work may want to look for Astonishing World: The Selected Poems of Angel Gonzalez 1956-1986 by Steven Ford Brown. This book contains all of the poems I was examining. The following poems were those available to me for the analysis above.

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