From imprecise geography to rhizome: elements for a rereading of the Caribbean in Canto General by Pablo Neruda

Abstract

Critical reception has made Pablo Neruda's Canto General sacred, in fixed celebratory formulas. In the same way, it has established Spain, Chile and Machu Picchu as semi-sacred places of the poetry of said collection. Starting from the idea of ​​Mario Rodríguez that it is time to stop territorializing Neruda, and from the considerations of Deleuze and Guattari who understand that a book becomes more total all the more fragmented, we will add to these spaces the Caribbean, which does not has been approached in relation to this collection of poems, despite the obvious connections that Neruda had with countries in the area in the years when the Canto General was written. The work addresses the idea that the critical updates of this region, which attribute to the territory the shape of a rhizome, would allow configuring the literary space in Canto General in the same way. Book and Caribbean are connected rhizomatically, facilitating the discursive subject to experience processes of becoming that take him away from the molar position in which his critics have territorialized him. It is intended to introduce a fragmented thought into the collection of poems that allows the displacement of identities and molar, absolute and definitive representations of the spaces to place molecular processes in their place.