On March 19, 1950, Diego Rivera hosted an homage to Neruda in anticipation of Canto General’s release at Anahuacalli, a bizarre anthropological museum Rivera had begun building in 1942. The shape of a pyramid, it was built on a lava field in Mexico City, a place for him and his wife, Frida Kahlo, to “flee” from bourgeois society and the environment of a war-torn world, and to put their roots down into the Mexican soil. It didn’t open to the public until 1964, but when it did, it served as a monument to their passion for indigenous culture. Rivera’s goal, not unlike Neruda’s, was to return “to the people what I recover of their artistic heritage.” Their relationship had developed over the years. When Neruda asked Rivera to contribute to the book, the Mexican was spending most of his time at the side of his wife, who was recuperating from one of many surgeries on her spine. Rivera took a small room next to hers in the hospital and spent most of his week there, leaving on Tuesdays to clear his mind and throw himself into painting for a day.
Since their first meeting during Neruda’s time as consul, Rivera had influenced Neruda’s interest in indigenous people and the history of Latin America, which then, in turn, influenced Canto, specifically beginning with “The Heights of Macchu Picchu.” This was key to Neruda’s more intimate relationship with his people and history, at least through his poetry.
Siqueiros attended the event for Canto at Anahuacalli. Over the past two decades Neruda had become good friends with Siqueiros, from their first meeting in Argentina to their civil war years in Spain to Neruda’s embattled attempts to get Siqueiros, after his attempt to kill Trotsky, a visa to Chile in the early 1940s. There was no love lost between Siqueiros and Rivera, who, with Kahlo, had hidden Trotsky during part of his exile in Mexico. They feuded constantly over artistic, political, and personal matters. In a letter to the Russian Mexican writer Lya Kostakowsky, Delia wrote:
I’ve been so absorbed in Pablo’s sickness that I haven’t been able to consume myself with their diatribes. Except for one by Diego that I confess made me laugh so hard I started to cry, in which he accuses David of having an “anal complex,” proven by his persistence in using the color “merde” in his painting.
Fortunately, the muralists were on their best behavior for the eagerly awaited release party for the first edition of Canto General. At the party, held at the apartment of the architect Carlos Obregón on the night of April 3, 1950, Neruda, Rivera, and Siqueiros sat together and signed the books alongside a fine silver candelabra. The majority of the guests in attendance were foreigners residing in Mexico, members of European embassies, and Spanish Republicans.
Neruda considered the book to be his greatest work. Canto General is a Marxist and humanistic interpretation of the history of the Americas. The Argentine Chilean American writer Ariel Dorfman said in 2004, “I live, I still live, and I think many of us live inside the world Neruda discovered.” In Canto General, Neruda “basically named Latin America in a new way, and he claimed for Latin America the possibility of being lyrically and epically in a story of resistance.”
Canto General is one of the most impactful fusions of poetry driven by politics (ideals) and aesthetics ever written. In fact, from the political aesthetic point of view, it can be argued that Canto General has no equal. Yet while almost every poem in Residence is of strong merit, Canto General contains many verses that fall flat under the weight of sheer propaganda. “But when he hit the target in the Canto General,” Dorfman said, “what he did was he redefined what America meant. América. Even North America, but particularly Latin America.”
Awesome in scope and deeply probing, Canto General is considered by many to be one of the more important books in the canon of poetry. Its influence extends to readers from all walks of life. José Corriel, a construction engineer for the Santiago Metro, explained that while he had several of Neruda’s books, Canto General was his favorite because it was “la parte combativa de Neruda”: it revealed Neruda’s combative side. “The importance of Canto General,” he said, “is that it shows us the history of the Americas from a different point of view . . . [from] the point of view of the people themselves, not the history told by the conquerors. Yes, we could call it the ‘history told by the conquered.’” Canto General—a title that could also, in a nuanced fashion, be translated as “Song of All.”
Canto General’s literary roots are the lyrics of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Mayans’ creation epic Popol Vuh, and the Bible. Especially in the beginning, it purposefully reads like a secular version of the Bible, laying out Neruda’s vision of the Latin American Genesis, a pre-Columbian Eden, where all is innocent. The land and its inhabitants live in harmony until the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores and the subsequent “imperialistic” foreign powers’ injustices corrupt and betray the original peoples. (González Videla’s betrayal of Neruda and, in Neruda’s eyes, the Chilean people and democracy is an underlying current throughout the book, informing both the past and present history.)
Neruda establishes the foundation of his utopian vision in the book’s first poem, “Amor América (1400)”:
Before the wig and the dress coat
there were rivers, arterial rivers
There were mountain ranges with “jagged waves where / the condor and the snow seemed immutable.” There were jungles, there were the continent’s great plains, “the planetary pampas”—all of this existed before the arrival of the Europeans. In this Eden, as Neruda described it, all was pure, so
