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Abstract
Starting from Luis García Montero's own characterization of his work as constituting “una poesía urbana”, this article approaches his recent book Una forma de resistencia (2012) through an urban lens. While previous work that labels his artistic production as the “poetry of experience” is not wholly irrelevant here, it is through theories of the everyday urban experience that we can best appreciate this series of prose poems on everyday objects by a renowned left-leaning author and critic. Thus while García Montero clearly draws inspiration from Baudelaire here, the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Manuel Delgado Ruiz, Andy Merrifield, Marshall Berman and David Harvey are also relevant to understanding these narrations of a contemporary indoor flâneur. Ultimately, the poet centers the work around an urban form of resistance that is just as material as it is inmaterial – one that recovers the notion of use value within a postwar capitalistic everyday life that has been colonized. For the famed prose poet, to resist in this context is to use the personal scale of the everyday as a point of entry into the battle between use value and exchange value that characterizes contemporary urban life and that links our interior and exterior worlds.
Notes
1. Interviewed in Laura Scarano, “La reivindicación” 328. In that same interview, García Montero mentions “aquel libro de Marshall Bermann [sic]”, Baudelaire, Benjamin and Marx (328).
2. Henri Bergson's work, particularly Matter and Memory, is a good starting point for exploring these questions, and is additionally relevant given the uncomfortable and under-recognized connection between his philosophy and Henri Lefebvre's urban thinking.
3. Laura Scarano has written that “La importancia estratégica de la obra y las teorizaciones programáticas de García Montero lo han ubicado como líder y portavoz del grupo granadino de ‘la otra sentimentalidad' primero, y como paradigma y cabeza de la ‘poesia de la experiencia' expandida en toda la península, después” (“Poesía urbana” 240).
4. Elizabeth Amann also characterizes García Montero – along with Álvaro Salvador and Javier Egea – as a poet in the urban tradition (187).
5. This work's fourth edition expands its year range to 1980–2010.
6. See the urban as materially immaterial in the article by Alan Latham and Derek McCormack.
7. Urban forms of criticism began to find stable anchors in the humanities during the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Texts that stand out in this regard are Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City (1977), Marshall Berman's All that is Solid Melts Into Air (1982), Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and the English translation of Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space (1991) by Donald Nicholson-Smith, which soon became a touchstone for literary scholars. García Montero himself references Jameson's understanding of postmodernity directly in an interview (Scarano, “La reivindicación” 318).
8. See books by Baker and Compitello, Fraser, Frost, Larson, Mercer, Parsons, Ramos, Resina, Schwartz and Ugarte. The link between the nineteenth century and urban modernity is one grounded in the theorizations of Henri Lefebvre, particularly in The Right to the City and The Urban Revolution, and in research into the rise of the figure of the modern urban planner as captured in a number of works (e.g. Choay and Hall).
9. Here I draw on an eclectic body of work on urban modernity that in all cases defines it in terms that are at once political, cultural, social and economic (Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity; Berman, All that is Solid; Harvey, The Urban Experience).
10. The text cited here should be seen as one component in Delgado Ruiz's wider critique of urbanized capital that becomes most clear in Fraude y miseria (2007) and El espacio público como ideología (2010). In this text, he traces the way in which interior spaces were historically severed from the outside world.
11. In Spain, this shift is captured also in the growth of leisure economies as analyzed by Tatjana Pavlović, Justin Crumbaugh and Eugenia Afinoguénova/Jaume Martí-Olivella in particular. Lefebvre writes succinctly in his Critique of Everyday Life, vol. III that: “Incapable of maintaining the old imperialism, searching for new tools of domination, and having decided to bank on the home market, capitalist leaders treat daily life as they once treated the colonized territories: massive trading posts (supermarkets and shopping centers); absolute predominance of exchange over use; dual exploitation of the dominated in their capacity as producers and consumers” (26). This premise is expressed by Lefebvre's disciple in Spain, Mario Gaviria – see particularly his Campo, urbe y espacio del ocio and España a go-go. The links with Spain's tourist economy are made explicit in the chapter García Montero labels “La Torre”, which begins “España es diferente, afirmaba con orgullo la publicidad turística de Manuel Fraga Iribarne” (89).
12. Remarking on the work of García Montero in particular, Scarano notes: “La demonización de la ciudad ha dado paso al ritual de un habitus social – el urbano – que ya no se advierte como catastrófico ni abismal. El poeta flâneur de los inicios de la modernidad se ha vestido de ropajes críticos o cómplices, pero su travesía ya no es la del mero observador sino la del protagonista, de un sujeto urbano densamente entrelazado en el imaginario de la ciudad actual” (“Poesía urbana” 241).
13. Cullell n.p., who goes on to write of García Montero as an “asiduo protagonista de acontecimientos calificados como comprometidos. La ideología responsable o comprometida de autor se basa en las dicotomías de lo íntimo y lo colectivo junto con lo individual y lo político, buscando un diálogo constante entre su figura poética y el lector”.
14. For example, on 22 May 2015, El País noted that “El candidato de IUCM a la Presidencia de la Comunidad de Madrid, Luis García Montero, ha expresado su disconformidad ante la ‘prohibición' impuesta al Movimiento 15-M para que no realice la concentración prevista en la jornada de reflexión de las elecciones autonómicas y apoya al colectivo” (Jiménez Gálvez). On the 15-M Movement in general see the recent special issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies introduced and edited by Bryan Cameron.
15. See, for example, the interview with Luis García Montero that appears in the article by Medina Puerta, in which he states: “Porque la comunidad necesita unos vínculos, y para mí el amor es eso, necesidad de cuidar, necesidad de comprender que uno necesita ser cuidado. Y yo creo que no hay comunidad, ni ilusión colectiva posible si no se parte del amor”; and later, expressing the dialectical ties between the personal and the social, emotions and action: “A mí, me parece que no se puede optar ni por renunciar al amor, al diálogo o a la sociedad, ni por cerrar los ojos al amor, al diálogo y la sociedad, y por eso yo casi siempre estoy en una postura intermedia.”
16. As Stephen Vilaseca points out, signaling the links inherent to artistic space-related activism (120): “The 15-M movement did not mark the beginning of the culture of Spanish indignation, but, rather, was simply the most visible interaction recorded by international media” (119).
17. Full quotations are: “Everyday life … possessed a dialectical and ambiguous nature. On the one hand, it's the realm increasingly colonized by the commodity, and hence shrouded in all kinds of mystification, fetishism and alienation [ … ]. On the other hand, paradoxically, everyday life is likewise a primal site for meaningful social resistance … . Thus radical politics has to begin and end in everyday life; it can't do otherwise” (Merrifield, Metromarxism 79); “Daily life can also be conceived as an encounter and a confrontation between use (use-value) and exchange (exchange-value). Whatever the predominance of exchange-value and its importance in the mode of production, it does not end up eliminating use and use-value” (Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life 12).
18. These are two directions dismissed by Amann 188.
19. This is evident also in Amann's reading of García Montero's work against the grain of the “poetry of experience” approach, where she argues that his poetry calls sentimentality into question, “revealing its superficiality” (187).
20. Ana Eire, for example, launches the following definition: “Esta poesía presenta al sujeto individual como agente de reflexión y renovación en un humanismo que ha aprendido las lecciones de la postmodernidad” (220). Grappling with postmodernity in García Montero's poetry might unfold more meaningfully if it simultaneously engaged with Jameson's understanding of the postmodern as the cultural logic of capitalism.
21. This quality is noted in Bruflat 238.
22. Cullell notes that three basic elements of García Montero's compositions are “la eliminación de la división existente entre lo público y lo privado, el uso de la memoria o los recuerdos, y la manifestación de unos ideales políticos muy determinados” (n.p.).
23. The poet's sensitivity to the relationship of the individual scale and the political scale is evident in the interview conducted with Scarano (“La reivindicación” 315–16). That same interview features some intriguing comments by García Montero on this theme. He mentions a tendency to use art as an escape but then subsequently corrects this position, suggesting that art must be politically committed: “Como el mercado lo está devorando todo, como todo está envenenado, yo tengo que renunciar a la realidad, porque la realidad siempre está manipulada por el mercado. Entonces, lo que tengo que hacer como artista es delimitar un ámbito de pureza que esté al margen del mercado. El que meditó sobre esto de la manera más inteligente, a mi modo de ver, fue Adorno”; “Eso es lo qu e a mí me ha preocupado como planteamiento ideológico. No me puedo quedar en las reservas porque eso significa renunciar a las normas. Entonces ¿qué batalla me parece ahora más arriesgada o más interesante? Luchar en las normas, en vez de aceptar el margen que se me da, dejando el centro en manos de los valores establecidos; luchar por establecer nosotros nuestras propias normas. Dinamitar las murallas del centro y buscar allí construir la disidencia, devolver a la poesía su función de ética pública, reivindicar al individuo como unidad moral en el espacio público” (in Scarano, “La reivindicación” 320–21).
24. Other possible connections between García Montero's book and the French context should be entertained – such as Francis Ponge's Le Parti pris des choses, which contains 32 prose poems, or François Bon's Autobiographie des objets – but here I focus exclusively on Baudelaire as an intertext linking use value, exchange value and urban modernity specifically.
25. See the discussion in Merrifield, The New Urban 86–88. Lefebvre writes of this shift in The Right to the City.
26. “It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Marx, Capital 165). “On this level, objects are not simply means or implements; by producing them, men are working to create the human; they think they are molding an object, a series of objects – and it is man himself they are creating” (Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism 169). See also Harvey, A Companion 15–53.
27. Readers should note that Lefebvre's theory took anchor in Spain through the work of Mario Gaviria; see his Campo, urbe (1971) and España a go-go (1974). Gaviria's basic premise is soundly Lefebvrian, as is clear in the first lines of an essay from 1978 that continues Lefebvre's thesis regarding the role of space in contemporary urbanized capitalism, where he writes: “Para analizar los problemas de suelo hay que partir –al menos yo parto– de los análisis críticos hechos en torno al tema de la producción del espacio. El espacio se convierte con el capitalismo avanzado en un valor de cambio” (“La competencia” 245).
28. Quoted on p. 50 of Harvey's Rebel Cities, similarly from 2012; see also 130. García Montero also discusses the brute materialism of the US direcly in an interview (Scarano, “La reivindicación” 318–19).
29. The appearance of the word paisaje at the end of the indented quotation above – which is itself the last word of the first contribution to García Montero's collection – is particularly revealing. It uses the metaphor of the outside to reimagine an urban interior. In a sense this is a metaphor that renders the interior of his home public space. Landscape in this sense has a use value, not an exchange value.
30. Reading Una forma de resistencia one notes that, when consumer goods do feature prominently in García Montero's prose poems, they, too, are approached through an affective web – effectively as a recolonization of the colonization of everyday life. The poet does not cite directly the intrusion of capitalist consumerism into our abodes, but he does consciously set out to reclaim the space of his home as an intimate space.
31. In particular, Georg Simmel, whose echo can be heard in David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Michel de Certeau, and Manuel Delgado Ruiz, among others.
Additional information
Benjamin Fraser is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Chair of Foreign Languages and Literatures at East Carolina University (North Carolina, USA). Among his 14 books are Digital Cities: The Interdisciplinary Future of the Urban Geo-Humanities (Palgrave, 2015), Toward an Urban Cultural Studies: Henri Lefebvre and the Humanities (Palgrave, 2015) and Antonio López García's Everyday Urban Worlds (Bucknell UP, 2014). He is the Founding and Executive Editor of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, Co-Editor of the Hispanic Urban Studies book series, a Senior Editor of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies and an Associate Editor of Hispania.