James Higgins

Vallejo as Icon

n Peru, CCsar Vallejo is a national icon whose image has appeared on postage stamps and banknotes. The basic reason for his iconic status is that as someone who won international celebrity, Vallejo has boosted the self-esteem of a country that occupies a peripheral position in the world, both geographically and in terms of prestige. Yet his case is very different from those of beauty queens and sports stars who have likewise boosted the nation’s morale. Vallejo’s standing is not ephemeral but long-lived, as is evidenced by the fact that he continually crops up in the country’s literature as an intertextual referent. In some cases it may be a passing allusion, as in Julio Ram6n Ribeyro’s “De color modesto,” where the protagonist, embarrassed at having behaved foolishly, chides himself with a phrase recalled from his reading of Vallejo: “Caballisimo de mi.”’ In other cases the intertextual allusion adds a significant dimension to the story, as in Cronwell Jara’s Puti6ufopu~u un cu6affo (1989), in which the children of the shantytown of Montacerdos gather around the dying Pompeyo Flores, hero of the struggle to resist eviction by the police, and plead with him, in a manner that echoes Vallejo’s poem “Masa,” to go on living:

The Conflict of Personality in César Vallejo's "Poemas humanos"

From a literary point of view the years 1921–23 were the most successful period of Cesar Vallejos life. During this time he published a number of prose works—Mas alla de la vida y la muerte (1921), Escalas melografiadas (1923) and Fabla salvaje (1923)—and a second volume of poems, Trilce (1922), which was to establish him as one of the foremost poets of Spanish America. Luis Monguio has examined Vallejos prose and shown that its interest lies primarily in the light it throws on his poetry.