WHAT DOES IT MEAN to be a modernist poet at the end of the twentieth century? Perhaps no poet more clearly embodies the ethos of “late modernism” than José Angel Valente, whose final book, Fragmentos de un libro futuro, was published after his death in the final year of the millennium. This book is not only posthumous but also designed to be posthumous. According to its front flap, “José Angel Valente concibió una suerte de obra poética ‘abierta’, un libro que—como la parábola cervantina de Ginés de Pasamonte o la novela de Proust —no acabaría sino con la desaparición misma del autor” (José Angel Valente conceived of a sort of “open” poetic work, a book that, like the Cervantine parabole of Ginés de Pasamonte or Proust’s novel, would not end until the author himself disappeared; my translation here and throughout). The book’s futurity, then, lies beyond the lifespan of the poet. Yet, in relation to the avant-garde movements of the earlier part of the twentieth century, Valente’s book is decidedly nostalgic rather than forward looking. Its predominant tone is elegiac. While steeped in the culture of modernity, it ultimately exemplifies an arrière-garde rather than an avant-garde spirit. Given Valente’s pre-eminent position within the canon of late twentieth-century Spanish poetry, an examination of his work during the last two decades of his life can also reveal the degree to which the modernist aesthetic has maintained its vitality in the contemporary period.

This essay is divided into two relatively autonomous sections. The first defines Valente’s late modernism in relation to that of a key precursor, Samuel Beckett, perhaps the prototypical late modernist writer. I might have chosen another comparable figure, such as Paul Celan, but, as it happens, I have addressed Celan’s strong influence on Valente at length elsewhere. Valente’s deep affinities with Beckett have yet to be explored in the critical literature, and the centenary commemoration of Beckett’s birth in 1906 makes this an appropriate time to devote an article to the Irish writer. The second section addresses the question of Valente’s late modernism in the context of contemporary Spanish culture, where the problem of “modernity” is of central importance. If Valente’s literary modernism derives from a belated, Beckettian model (as demonstrated in the first half of the article), how then can it serve as a modernizing force within contemporary Spain?

I. Valente and Beckett: Residual Modernism

That Valente’s poetics derive largely from modernism can hardly be disputed. His admiration for high modernist icons is self-evident. It is not at all the same thing, however, to be a modernist poet at the beginning and at the tail end of the twentieth century. The later work of Valente, produced from the late 1970s through his death in 2000, stands at several removes from the original period in which the “great moderns”—poets like Rilke, Pessoa, Jiménez, and Breton—were forging new styles. Valente’s closest literary influences, I would argue, are writers who comprise a second wave of modernism. In historical terms, the classic period of literary modernism is the teens and twenties, when modernist writers like Joyce, Stevens, Kafka, and Woolf were active and the historical avant-garde was taking shape in movements like Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. Late modernism, then, is a second wave of modernist writing arising after World War II and exemplified by such figures as Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, and Paul Celan —all greatly esteemed by Valente.

Born in 1929, Valente is somewhat younger than these post-war European writers: Beckett was born in 1906, Blanchot in 1907, Celan in 1920. (Late modern Latin American poets—for example, José Lezama Lima [born 1910] and Octavio Paz [born 1914]—also form part of Valente’s pantheon, although his personal relations with Paz eventually became strained.) The birth dates of such canonical Moderns as Pound, Joyce, and Kafka, on the other hand, are clustered in the 1880s. Valente’s poetry of the 1950s and early 1960s bears the mark both of the social realism prevalent in Spain during that decade and the existentialist current exemplified by Jean-Paul Sartre and Beckett himself. If Valente’s turn toward a more explicitly “late modernist” aesthetic first becomes wholly visible, perhaps, in the 1971 Treinta y siete fragmentos, his mature work of the 1980s and 1990s clearly exemplifies the minimalist late modern ethos and in fact influenced many younger poets writing in the “essentialist” style. It is in this later period that he takes an intransigent stand against the anti-modernist “poesía de la experiencia” of Luis García Montero.

One way of locating Valente in literary history is to see him as writing “after Beckett,” that is, not only after the great moderns of the earlier part of the century, but also after the culmination and virtual “death” of modernism in the later texts of Samuel Beckett, who writes with an acute consciousness of being at the end, rather than the beginning, of the modern movement. As I demonstrate below, Beckett’s evocation of the literary death of modernity resonates strongly in Valente’s late and posthumous poetry. In addition, Valente also writes “after Beckett” in a more direct sense, rewriting Beckettian motifs in a minimalistic style resembling that of the Irish writer.