In March of 1928, César Vallejo struck gold. Writing from Paris as a correspondent for the Lima-based newspaper Mundial, the poet announced he’d seen a film that gave “the best interrogation of social justice of which all art d’après-guerre has been capable.” [1] He wasn’t talking about Eisenstein or even Frank Capra; he was talking about Charlie Chaplin, specifically his 1925 film The Gold Rush, where the comedian’s Tramp persona braves blizzards, starvation, and the ridicule of his fellow frontierists while working as a prospector in Alaska. It’s striking that Vallejo—a committed Marxist and anti-imperialist—would nominate this movie—a blockbuster comedy from a U.S.-led culture industry—as the greatest work of political art since World War I. Of course, he wasn’t the only modernist to take an interest in Chaplin. From Gertrude Stein to Hart Crane, Walter Benjamin to Bertolt Brecht, a vast array of writers, artists, and philosophers around the world agreed that the English clown had something big to offer their aesthetics. [2] But what exactly was that “something” for Vallejo?

The article about The Gold Rush doesn’t clarify much. The closest it comes is suggesting that Chaplin’s ability to dissolve himself into his character involves some sort of radical ethics: “Here, in this film, is Charles Chaplin, gentleman and multimillionaire, scratching the crotch of the Tramp, that beggar eaten away by giant honorable lice.” [3] This statement is deceptively simple. The exact wording Vallejo uses for “scratching the crotch of the Tramp,” “rascándose las ingles de Charlot,” carries a faint pun, playing on the similar sound of “ingles” (crotch or groin) and “inglés” (English) to crack an anti-imperialist joke: Chaplin’s Englishness sounds like a crotch. [4] On the whole, however, the admiration is sincere. Vallejo shows how Chaplin reaches his own double and touches him in the humblest way, overcoming vast differences of power and circumstance to unite with his marginalized alter-ego. This might sound awfully rosy and naïve. And it would be, except that Vallejo admired Chaplin for embodying the difficulty of such connections, particularly in a world throttled by capitalism.

We can see this in an untitled poem dated November 6, 1937. It’s a poem about the speaker’s desire to love the world despite its terribleness, and it unfolds as a litany of people he’d like to love and how he’d love them. But Vallejo immediately sabotages the sentimentalism we might expect, tripping it up with a series of twists that emphasize the obstacles impeding that aim. “Some days,” it begins, “I get a fruitful, political desire / to love, to kiss affection on both its faces…” [5] Right away, “love” fissures into multiple substitutes: desire, kissing, affection, affection’s faces. This is the poem’s signature device: a compound metonymy that figures the indirectness of the wished-for love. You can’t just have love; you have to kiss affection—but you can’t just kiss affection; you have to kiss it on both faces.

In the stanzas that follow, the speaker’s amorousness is routed through many more strange adjacencies. He wants to “iron a handkerchief / directly for one who cannot cry” and “help the nearby one-eyed man to sleep.” [6] But the handkerchief will surely never reach the non-crier, and the one-eyed man probably doesn’t need the poet’s assistance to get some shut-eye. By unfurling a laundry-list of love-objects defined by their most incongruous traits, and by repeatedly confronting the unlikeliness of actually possessing these things, the poem demonstrates how love cannot be separated from alienation.


This difficult union is, for Vallejo, the heart of a Chaplinesque aesthetics:

Oh desire, this one, mine, this one, the world’s,

interhuman and parochial, mature!

It comes to me timely,

from the base, from the public groin,

and coming from a distance, it makes me want to kiss

the singer on his scarf,

and kiss on his frying pan the one who has suffered,

and kiss the deaf man on his cranial murmur, calm,

and kiss the one who gives me what I’d forgotten in my breast, 

on his Dante, on his Chaplin, on his shoulders. [7] 

Intentionally or not, the depiction of love coming “from the public groin” recalls the portrayal of Chaplin “scratching the crotch of the Tramp” in the article on The Gold Rush. Though the echo of Englishness falls away (it’s just “la ingle pública” now, not “las ingles”), the groin’s proximity to Chaplin at the end of the stanza reveals an implicit association in the poet’s lexicon. If the star was sometimes accused of being too sentimental, for Vallejo he’s an emblem of vulgarity and sexual promiscuity.

And then, in one of the poem’s most astonishing stunts, Charlie gets transformed into a body part to be kissed—like “Dante,” like “shoulders.” We might speculate that the pairing of Chaplin and Dante is meant to style the actor as something of a modern super-artist. But there’s another thing that unites the Tramp and the bard of Florence besides their greatness, and that is their association with comedy in the broadest sense. Indeed, the poem’s series of disjointed metonyms is rather comedic: a parade of unrealized attempts to do something weird and quixotic for love. To be sure, Vallejo isn’t trying to be laugh-out-loud funny. But even so, with its emphasis on failure, its metonymic contortions, and its recursive start-stop rhythms, the poem displays a kinship with the grammars of slapstick film.

I’m building on the ideas of scholar Michelle Clayton here, whose analysis of Vallejo’s late work (including this poem) first got me thinking about what slapstick poetry might look like. [8] However, I disagree with Clayton on one important point. She argues that Vallejo’s writing models an “ethics of the fragment,” of subjects scraping by as a hodgepodge of shattered wreckage. [9] But the metonyms that drive his slapstick poems don’t remain in isolation. They insist on feeling the milieu where broken selfhood subsists and where it strives to imagine itself as somehow unbroken. Loving and suffering, however solitary, are social and historical, bound up in the fraught connections and disconnects that shape our damaged lives. By stressing this, Vallejo’s poem challenges the familiar critical habit of centering fragmentation in discussions of modernist poetry (a tendency Ruth Jennison critiques in her book The Zukofsky Era). [10] We need more precise language for understanding how parts, in their apparent separateness, can make up a dynamic whole—a necessary task for any poetics averse to capitalism. 

This poem exemplifies one way of seeing modernist fragmentation differently. It would doubtless be a stretch to call it a summons to revolutionary action, just like it would be wrong to say it’s especially humorous. But it wouldn’t be off base to read this poem as comedic, in the very old, broad, Dantesque meaning of comedy as a genre oriented toward reconciliation and repair. [11] That is the trajectory Vallejo tries to map out with his metonymic grasping and desperate efforts to locate love, and he gives us a companion to help us picture the way there. But the name of this guide isn’t Virgil; it’s the Tramp.






Notes

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[1] César Vallejo, “The Passion of Charles Chaplin,” in Selected Writings of César Vallejo, ed. and trans. Joseph Mulligan (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015), 178.

[2] For an overview of the influence of film comedy on the interwar avant-gardes of Europe, see Malcolm Turvey, “Comedic Modernism,” October 160 (2017): 5–29. For a discussion of Chaplin’s reception by Latin American writers, see Jason Borge, Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008), ch. 4.

[3] Vallejo, “The Passion,” 177.

[4] It’s helpful to know that throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and into the early twentieth, British finance dominated the Peruvian economy, controlling its guano exports and later its railroads. See José Carlos Mariátegui, “Outline of the Economic Evolution,” in Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, trans. Marjory Urquidi (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 9–16.

[5] César Vallejo, “Some days I get a fruitful, political desire…,” in Complete Later Poems, 1923–1938, trans. and eds. Valentino Gianuzzi and Michael Smith (Exeter, UK: Shearsman Books, 2005), 233, translation modified.

[6] Vallejo, “Some days,” 233.

[7] Vallejo, “Some days,” 233, translation modified.

[8] Other scholars have offered interesting interpretations of what a slapstick poetics might look like. I’m particularly intrigued by Cliff Mak’s reading of Marianne Moore’s syllabics as a way of making language “malleable, fluid, and unpredictable” and thereby dramatizing the limits of the scrupulous ethics to which Moore subscribed and for which she was known. See Cliff Mak, “On Falling Fastidiously: Marianne Moore’s Slapstick,” ELH 83, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 873–98, 884.

[9] Michelle Clayton, Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 3. For Clayton’s readings of this poem, see 194–95 and 229–32.

[10] See Ruth Jennison, The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Garde (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 2–3. My reading of metonymy in Vallejo also resonates with Rob Jackson’s work on the metonym as a way of representing the movements and transformations of value in a Marxian critique of capital. Value, writes Jackson, “indexes a fragmentary relation between producers and the products of their labor, displaced over an ever-expanding network of contingent social relations.” This notion of a “fragmentary relation” is a helpful alternative to the prevailing idea of fragmentation in modernist aesthetics, which frequently sidelines the social, economic, material contexts out of which fragments appear. Metonymy, by figuring such a “fragmentary relation,” can help us envision those contexts. See Rob Jackson, “Metonymy,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 27, no. 1 (2025).

[11] “The theme of the comic is the integration of society, which usually takes the form of integrating a central character into it.” Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 43.