Talk:H. A. Murena

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This writer was best known by his pen name of H. A. Murena. --PeterCantropus (talk) 22:21, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

An article about this person already exists here:

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9ctor_A._Murena

Why a duplicate? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.57.70.136 (talk) 22:07, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

MURENA ARCHIVE / SCRIPTURES HA Murena 12/5/2013 / BY HÉCTOR SCHMUCLER The semiologist and essayist offers suggestive reading keys to access the different milestones of the work of Murena. The text we published in digital format appeared in No. 10 (1994) of the magazine La Caja.

Do not expect anything and, every day, die of an infinite wait.

Edmond Jabès

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1. The readability of the sacred

HA Murena, Héctor Álvarez Murena, died in Buenos Aires on May 5, 1975 at age 52. He was born in the same city in 1923. From the First Testament, a collection of stories published in 1946, twenty-five books with his name appeared [1]. His surname served to characterize a way of thinking America: the "murenismo" [2]. Ezequiel Martínez Estrada had preceded him with Radiografía de la pampa and La cabeza de Goliat ; but Murena was incessant in the search for God. His first book of essays, El pecado original de América, edited in 1954, divided water into literary and cultural criticism in Argentina for at least a decade and one of the works that includes, "The parricides: Edgar Allan Poe", He served Emir Rodríguez Monegal to understand a generation of writers in The Trial of the Parricides [3]. The edited number of the hundred and one, the magazine that Murena directed in 1953, is before and explains, in backlight, the most permanent and remembered Contour. Murena was the first translator of Walter Benjamin to Castilian and attentive reader, like few in his time, of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno to whom he also translated [4]. The imprint of what was called "Frankfurt School" is easily traceable in his work: Murena, in more ways than one, repeated Benjamin in Latin America. For years he worked in the writing of the United Press Agency; He also directed the Editorial Sur for years and in 1975 represented the Monte Ávila publishing house in Argentina. He did not avoid poverty or loneliness. He was a man of courage: he persisted in crossing the songs of the sirens without being tied to any mast, like Ulysses, to avoid the dangers of his charm.

HA Murena knew that the dreams of reason engender monsters, that the technique is not salvation but rather the danger that becomes visible in our time, that progress can be a sinister form of deception. He knew that beauty, when it is a mere aesthetic game, is usually a sterile trap spread by nihilism. But he also knew that art is attention to the sacred, that poetry is constant allusion to silence, to an unnamable beyond whose search gives meaning to beauty. Others were the sounds that took over the streets in Argentina, other perplexities, others fears. Murena's voice, intense in its challenge, became inaudible. It was not readable an argument that wanted to understand the world from the sacred. Today Murena is almost unknown. However, few like him could illuminate the present if we accepted that we have reached a privileged time in which - as Hölderlin wanted - the presence of all dangers makes visible what saves. The apocalyptic revelation as an announcement of the conciliation.

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2. The exile as constant

The drama of America is the double exile of its inhabitants: the primordial exile after the fall and exile of Europe. Neither European nor indigenous, the American lives the challenge of being himself. The first "Reflections on the original sin of America" ​​were published by Murena in 1948 as an article in the Verbum magazine and continued in the essay that gives name to his 1954 book. The question about what America was had revealed to José Enrique Rodó and César Vallejo, Pedro Henríquez Ureña and Ricardo Rojas, José Vasconcelos and Juan Larrea. None had attempted a theological response like the one suggested by Murena: "the feeling that being born or living in America means being burdened by a second original sin". The affirmation, Murena knows, is ridiculous "in a world that is adept at avoiding all mystery, between men who, being the actor of history, believe that it is the author of it, and can therefore explain it lightly from the beginning to the end. " The challenge is as important as the hypothesis itself: to understand history in another way. Restitute the sacred when everything was ordered to hypersecularize the world. Hugo Savino [5] mentions a similar situation regarding literature: Murena "is not tied to the demands of the historical series and the euphoria of the desacralization of literature. Radical investment. Unbearable for those who read literature from history. Scandalous investment: reading history from literature ". History, according to the philosophies that explain it -says Murena- responds to laws "that would govern in a sovereign way the development of everything to happen" (Spengler, Toynbee); or, according to sociological or economic interpretations, as a show of facts. "A game of forces in which the position and the meaning of each man are totally and exhaustively clarified." Both drag a misunderstanding that marks his repeated failures: "they intend to close the way to God, in the world." A tragic destiny that seeks the freedom of man by freeing himself from the freedom of God and thereby condemns himself to his own denial. "For escaping God," Murena says, "he falls into the hands of the man who, as is known, despite being the only creature that has raised his voice to complain against the rigor of the deity, often becomes the most bloodthirsty and cruel of the gods " [6].

There was a primal exile that constitutes us in what we are today. Our drama, our "doing," is nothing other than living in its memory. No matter the allegory that evokes that separation, the split. The words and the things. The body and the soul Every new exile updates that initial one: that's why it becomes disproportionately unbearable. Redemption restores us, but not to Paradise but to ourselves. To the possibility of being in common with the other. It makes communion possible. Mediations, the media, by consecrating distance, reinforce nostalgia, pain for the lost. The "apocalyptic look means to restore to our vision of history the notion that God is absolutely free," affirms Murena and describes the place from where she interprets the future of America: "The day that the science of history decides to govern its speculations by these mysteries of the origins and of the last years will conquer a vision of the world and of the worldly happening as free and valid as the flow of that happening ".

The American man is the bearer of a second exile. He leaves Europe to an unknown land that is offered as a promise. As a destination. The perception of Murena allows a reading of Argentine literature as a will to return, to meet. In Borges it will be a South American destiny that resembles death and in Leopoldo Marechal it will be errancy, an initiatory path, a search for origins. Return that yearns for the encounter with something that was always "beyond" in the Rayuela de Cortázar: a "sky" that is seen through the hole of a circus tent as much as in the drawing of the game inscribed in the earth. It is the "artificial respiration" of Ricardo Piglia or the return postponed forever, exile of exile, in the figure of the Italian of The fruit seller of the radiant eyes of Nicolás Casullo: an America that is made in a game of mirrors whose images are irretrievable because they always reflect something else.

The Murena of 1954 believes that the American man, from expulsion to expulsion, has been acquiring a new way of seeing things. To the double separation, a dark answer: transobjectivity. "The world has lost materiality in the American soul", that is why Martín Fierro achieves its effects "with an almost total disdain regarding descriptions and psychology", the Facundo is a look through things and facts, and in Residence on earth, "despite the constant enumeration of concrete objects", there is an evaporation of materiality, "the weeds that prevent us from going to the place where destiny plays freely" are eliminated. The bet of Murena is not insubstantial. Before the American man arises the most radical crossroads and the sharpest opportunity of the "prehuman times": or falls on the "objective spirit", example of which is North America, fascinated by science, "especially in its immediate face of technique ", Or persists in the" transobjectivity ", this rehumanization of man that, necessarily, must go through the desolation of the present exile, of the infinite sadness of so much despair.

The decisive example is Edgar Allan Poe, the parricide. Because Poe, being implacable with the world that surrounds him in North America points to what America has of Europe: "the real word that Poe throws on Europe is in general that of destruction, and specifically that of annihilation of history, annihilation of Europe, similar terms for Western man. " Kill Europe, the father, so that the European soul banished in America can join its new land. The exile of Poe gives strength to that "conscience and passion of the European desencajamiento" represented by Baudelaire and this "favors the irruption of the destructive voices" of those exiles who were Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Mallarmé. Rimbaud in A Season in Hell : "If he had background at any point in the history of France ... But no; nothing. I do not ignore that I have always been of inferior race. My day is fulfilled: I leave Europe. " But Poe not only as a critic of progress, "this great heresy of decrepitude" as Baudelaire points out in "Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe" [7]. It is also the Poe that allows Baudelaire to find in the art a proof of the "beyond" and that will guide the steps of Murena until his death.

For Poe, says Baudelaire, the Imagination, "the queen of the faculties", is not fantasy. "Imagination is an almost divine faculty that perceives in the first place, above philosophical methods, the intimate and secret relations of things, correspondences and analogies." And further on: "This admirable, immortal instinct of the Beautiful makes us consider the earth and its spectacles as a fleeting perception, like a correspondence from Heaven. (...) At the same time, through poetry and through poetry, through and through music, the soul glimpses the splendors located behind the tomb; and when an exquisite poem drenches our eyes with tears, these tears are not the proof of an excess of enjoyment, they are rather the testimony of an exacerbated melancholy, of a postulation of the nerves, of a nature exiled in the imperfect that I would like seize immediately, on this same earth, a paradise revealed. "

Poe's gesture, however, has faded. Actually, there was no place for it to prosper. Murena recognizes the failure - the failure of America - in that "treacherous convention" that says that "America is the hope of Europe". Product of the "historical fatigue of the western soul", America is seen as a paradisiacal land, "a land truly outside the world" [8]. America, where "you can live without spirit, in which the spirit is dementia, in which it has been agreed that all human effort should be limited to the economic". If it is "hope" and because it was believed to be hope, America "is a world in which the infernal experience of living the foolish dream of a fatigued continent, fed up with life, is taking place". In another sense, as hope, America was kept on the edge of life. The time of life, "time of maturation, incessant rhythm and tense fruitful death," has become in North America, to which "we will end up following in our style", pure "spatialization of time". The gigantism of the United States as an index of its lack of creative time. America, which dilates the time of parricide, is only an imitation of Europe, to which it returns a grotesque image, the "religion of space", product of the "toxics that it conceived during its life in expectation of life".

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3. The ultranihilist

The original sin of America was the most solid argument of Murena about a metaphysical destiny of America. The appeal to a God who should inspire the action of the American man was, to some extent, an analogy with the destiny of the Jewish people, chosen for the last days and, nevertheless, permanent symbol of exile. But hope in another story will decline at the same time that the renewed lucidity illuminated his spirit. Years of turmoil, of ruthless eyes on a world - now the world and not only America - that saw nihilism grow in the worst possible way: without perceiving it. Murena reminds Nietzsche: "I describe what is coming, what has no choice but to come: the irruption of nihilism. (...) This future already speaks by mouth of a hundred signs; this fatality is announced everywhere; for this music of the future all ears are already sharpened ". What was "music of the future" had been transformed for Murena, more than thirty years ago, in the "silent stridor of the present, a stridor so total that it can not be heard". If the despotic principle of hereditary power was replaced by access to the government of "men inept to shame who manage to escalate such positions not only for a hypothetical divine mandate but for the skillful and devious management of the mass media information ", the structure social that supplanted the closed monarchical organization has crystallized as solidly as that, "although in this case erecting as a cardinal value the economic, acquisitive capacity of individuals."

In the essay "The ultra-nihilist", published in Homo atomicus, Murena wonders what is offered to the man of the time so that his action is affirmed in some belief. How to avoid being immersed in a conformism capable of taking him to see and applaud "the noon in the darkest darkness". How to avoid the external egalitarian imposition that "hurts, mutilates, impoverishes" since, apart from the egalitarian act of dying and being born, "there is no more than an empire of diversities". "Only in the order of love," he says, "is not a hypothesis that human creatures, created ineffably different, are equal." The statement answers a question but opens a thousand uncertainties about how to move forward. The catalog that describes our time (because we have only perfected the evils for thirty years) are aphorisms that recall Orwellian 1984 : "the art of healing has become the art of getting sick", "the art of building has become the art of destroying "," the art of thinking has become the art of not thinking "," the art of expressing has become the art of not expressing "," the art of educating has become the art of not educate "," the art of orienting has become the art of confusing ". It is the triumph of the negative arts that prevails in the "chaos", immense and tenebrous space, which requires transforming into cosmos, "the order that the gods have implanted in chaos through the act of creation". What is possible to do if, from another place, the marasmus is observed as an end and. consequently, as the possibility of another principle? Murena: "My first duty is to become aware that chaos and nihilism are installed in my life." The ultranihilismo is the action after the conscience. The ultranihilismo like "extranihilismo", that is to say, like possibility of acting in the exteriority of the negative thing.

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4. The metaphor and the sacred

There is a third Murena. The ultranihilist knows, too, that there is a place of rest. An arrival. Baudelaire resounds when Murena affirms "the essence of art is nostalgia for the Other World". With the metaphor and the sacred, perhaps the most significant (the most beautiful?) Book of Murena, a space is cut out where a year before had installed FG, a barbarian between beauty , in which poetry circulates without obstacles between the poems and the comments that follow. A space that is amplified in the poems of The eagle that disappears, published after his death, and that already existed in his dialogues with David Vogelmann collected in The Clear Secret. The work of art, in itself, means nothing. Murena distances herself from all aestheticism: mundane, attainable objects, what can be called "works of art", "are never more than occasions taken to express the fundamental nostalgia for the impossible". The metaphor is the instrument to carry ( fero ) beyond ( meta ) the meaning "of the concrete elements used to forge the work". Art is the possibility, through metaphor, of "bringing the universe that is beyond the senses closer". The essays of La metaphor and the sacred recover all of Murena's past. The order necessary for death to become possible. "A congruent and meaningful figure. And in march: in ascent ", discovers Raimundo Lida [9] when he realizes, distant, a balance of the life of Murena.

At the end of the prologue of The Metaphor and the Sacred Murena, the date is specified: July 15, 1973. Why did you need to specify the moment so precisely? Because he knew that it would be his last book of essays or because he wanted to point out the circumstance of his grief and his more intense wait? In July 1973, in Argentina, confusion, that way in which evil crosses men, flooded streets and spirits. A dull thud voided any possibility of silence or recognition. The omens, once again, were not mistaken: ignominious death lived behind the sordid noise. Surely Murena knew that nihilism, whose presence was growing in the world, was tearing a little more that which surrounded him. And that could not be otherwise. Also, surely, they were moments of revelation. All his life, of which he still had two years left, had sought him out: each of the thoughts that had transited him became "not significant, outdated." He says: "Any human arrives at a certain moment to the area where there are no answers. It is found through every way: passions, thinking, leisure. The unanswered area is one in which the sense that hitherto attributed to our lives collapses, is nullified, is the area in which we discovered that the problems we had believed solve are really rooted in the mystery, inviolable by our will, inertia, thinking. " In his film Stalker , Andréi Tarkovski shows a "zone" invisible to the human eye. But how to show what is not seen? They distinguish objects, people. However, you know you do not see. One senses that one could only see it if one were able to belong to it by the infrequent act of opening oneself to the possibility of a miracle. Nothing more like the area to which Murena exposes us.

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5. The readability of Murena

In the usual space of the Argentine culture Murena does not have validity. Few remember his name. His books are practically untraceable. There are, as a brotherhood, some for whom Murena is the inspirer of his reflections. They are almost initiated. Why the oblivion of Murena? Through some of his writings I have tried to show different moments of his thought, diverse and one. Intolerable for a time where everything seems to be understood to be tolerated, consensual; where everything is negotiable. I have tried to show what could be the entry keys to read his work. Perhaps it is our most relevant task: to read Murena. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tejinderbir (talk • contribs) 22:36, 20 March 2018 (UTC)