Postism

Postism is a marginal movement —not a group— whose name is a contraction of postsurrealism (as can be read in the Second Manifesto, appeared in La Estafeta Literaria, special number of 1946 and signed by Eduardo Chicharro Briones, Carlos Edmundo de Ory and Silvano Sernesi), but which at first wanted to signify "the ism that is coming after all the isms", as can be seen below. With this denomination they wanted to signify that this movement came to be the synthesis of all the preceding literary avant-gardes.

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In Spain, together with the Catalan Dau al set and the Aragonese Pórtico, it was the only movement that took over the European avant-gardes after the Civil War. It was promoted above all by Carlos Edmundo de Ory (1923-2010) and Eduardo Chicharro Briones (1905-1964), and writers such as Francisco Nieva (1924-2016), Ángel Crespo (1926-1995), Gloria Fuertes (1917-1998), Antonio Fernández Molina (1927-2005), Fernando Arrabal (1932-), Antonio Beneyto (1934-2020), Gabino-Alejandro Carriedo (1923-1981), José Fernández-Arroyo (1928-2019), Félix Casanova de Ayala (1915-1990), Federico Muelas (1910-1974), Jesús Juan Garcés (1917-1983) or Carlos de la Rica (1929-1997).

Origins

Postism was born in Madrid in 1945 and continued its activity until 1950. The publication of the Tercer Manifesto del Postismo (1947) probably marks the beginning of a decline seasoned by literary incomprehension and ideological closure. The clearest influences come from the French literary vanguards: Dadaism, from which Surrealism would split off; Silvano Sernesi was strongly influenced by Marinetti's Futurism in Rome. Literary cubism was not unknown to them: the postists start from it as from a point that has been overcome: they want to reach where the three mentioned, and social poetry, have been exhausted. The movement was described by Carlos Edmundo de Ory himself as "controlled madness" versus "automatic writing" surreal.

The tradition in which Postismo drinks is deep; His anti-canonical and counterfactual position paradoxically takes root in the verbal ingenuity of the Baroque and the joyous pastiches of 18th-century satires, and goes through the bizarre, festive and mocking mood of 19th-century writers such as Ros de Olano and Miguel de los Santos Álvarez, to link with the grotesque of Valle Inclán, the Gregueresque factory of Ramón Gómez de la Serna and, already from the avant-garde, with the absurd and surreal humor of his disciples Tono, Miguel Mihura, Carlos Arniches, Enrique Jardiel Poncela and the surrounding magazines such as Bertoldo, The Machine Gun and The Quail. Invented word, then, versus inventoried word. and the playful side that appears in books on ludolinguistics such as Efforts of literary ingenuity (Madrid: Sucs. De Rivadeneyra, 1890) by not in vain from La Mancha León Carbonero y Sol or the anthology Literary Rarities. Florilegium of curious and extravagant compositions by ancient and modern authors (Cádiz, no year) made by Eduardo de Ory inspired by the previous one, father of the post artist Carlos Edmundo de Ory and modernist poet himself.

Manifestos and magazines

Postism created four manifestos. The first was published in the magazine Postismo, no. 1, Madrid 1945. The second appeared in an extraordinary number of La Estafeta literary of Madrid, in 1946. The third was published by "El Minuto", a supplement to La Hora , no. 1, second period, Madrid, 1947; These three manifestos were transcribed by Félix Grande in Carlos Edmundo de Ory, Puesta 1945‑1969 (Barcelona, Edhasa, 1970). The fourth and last appears with the others in an edition by Gonzalo Armero: Eduardo Chicharro, Música Celestial y otros poemas (Madrid: Semanarios y Ediciones, 1974). The main publications of this aesthetic are the aforementioned Postismo and La Cerbatana, financed by Silvano Sernesi, and El Pájaro de Paja and " Thursday Postista", supplement of the daily Lanza of Ciudad Real.

Poetics

Postism had an impact on the plastic arts and literature, and in the latter it reacts against the contemporary currents that Dámaso Alonso defined as uprooted poetry and rooted poetry. It is a current that seeks to synthesize the pre-war avant-garde aesthetics in a kind of germinal neo-Dadaism and as such rejects all dogmatism or imposition. Its principles can be reduced according to José Manuel Polo Bernabé to these five:

1. Supremacy of the imagination that depends on the subconscious and reason.
2. Use of sensory materials
3. His playful, dionitic and humorous character
4. Technical control that includes exploration of the possibilities of language, this perhaps distinguishes you from other avant-garde movements
5. Will to destroy prejudices.

These principles are alluded to in the first Manifesto;

The result of a profound and semi-confusing movement of springs of the subconscious touched by us in direct or indirect synchrony (memory) with sensory elements of the outside world, for whose function or exercise the imagination, automatically exalted, but always with joy, is captured to provide the sensation of beauty or beauty itself, contained in controlled technical norms and of such a character that no class of academic prejudices or historical sightings.

Carlos Edmundo de Ory defined postismo in 1946 as "invented madness", and Eduardo Chicharro, as "cult of nonsense". It was, in short, the liquidation of the avant-garde. Another famous post artist, Gabino-Alejandro Carriedo, defined it in 1949 as "a state of mind, a way of being, an aspect of art and nature [...] It is pure sensation scientifically and consciously exploited. Postismo is the intimate delight of the gods."

Dissemination centers

Postism's dissemination centers were located mainly in Madrid and Ciudad Real (many poets from La Mancha joined the movement; Ángel Crespo, Francisco Nieva, Antonio Fernández Molina and José Fernández-Arroyo, as well as Carlos de la Rica from Cuenca and Federico Muelas), and some fundamental publications of the movement were created there, such as El Pájaro de Paja and Jueves Postista).

Evolution

In his work It is not a dream (Diary: 1954-2006), José Fernández-Arroyo describes Postism in these terms:

Postism is actually the result of photographic experiments that organized for the 1930s and so many my already disappeared friends Gregorio Prieto and Eduardo Chicharro "Chebé" during the years that they lived as scholarships at the Academy of Spain in Rome. Chicharro, a great fan of photography and a good photographer, with his sensibility as a painter, performed a series of photographs and assemblies taking as a motif ruins of statues and Roman temples and using as a model Gregorio Prieto. Means of serious joke, Chicharro called his "postist" style, meaning with this name a tendency that surpassed the last "ism" then prevailing in art and literature, which was French surrealism. They decided that their new style was beyond all "isms."

Years later, returning to Chicharro A Madrid, he met the poet Carlos Edmundo de Ory and, through it, the young Silvano Sernesi, the son of an Italian financial officer and, among the three, decided to "launch" this movement seriously with the edition of a magazine called Postism, in which they published the first Manifesto, presided over by a photo of Gregory of those made in Rome. The one Manifesto It must have seemed scandalous and suspected of rebending the cultural authorities at that time, and the magazine was immediately banned. Not giving up, they soon edited a new magazine called The Cerbatana, that ran the same fate as the first. For this time, Gabino-Alejandro Carriedo and Angel Crespo begin to publish every two months a very modest revision to which they baptized Paja Bird, where the postist movement pegged hard until, in 1946, it appears in La Estafeta Literaria the Second Postist Manifesto and, the following year, in the supplement The Minute of the student magazine The time, Chicharro launches Third Manifesto, dedicated to student youth, with the pilgrim intention of attracting it to its cause.

But the truth is that, despite these three “Manifestos” in which the so-called cultural movement does not seem to manifest itself very solidly structured, but rather seems to be reduced to a kind of cultural divertimento, postism knows a brief period of validity between the founding poets, to which very soon my dear and missing friends Angel Crespo, Gabino-Alejandronovado and Fala are incorporated. The truth is that, only to them is due the scarce work that can be considered really postist, apart from that of Carlos Edmundo de Ory and that of Chicharro himself, although, later, other names (including Arrabal) and other few works more or less distantly related to the postista orthodoxy in which, on the other hand, all heterodoxy could have a place.

It does not fail to be curious how an almost insignificant phenomenon of a poetic avant-garde, which basically sought to confront itself as an alternative (perhaps more fun than deep) to the neo-classicist style permitted by the Franco regime, and represented by a group of poets who were called "garcilasist", has succeeded in attracting, after the years, both interest and attention as it seems to awaken postism now. I think that this must be motivated, precisely, because postism was the only cone of rupture (although it was more formal, rather than ideological) that emerged against the transenochado and uniform style generalized among the poets protected by the regime and exclusive acaparators of all literary publications permitted by the "imperial national-unionist movement".

According to Jaume Pont, The Straw Bird, Deucalion and Doña Endrina, together with Carriedo, Crespo and Fernández Molina, encouraged in its pages the postista legacy, as well as the first theater of Fernando Arrabal (Pic-nic, El cementerio de automóviles...) or, even more clearly, the & #34;Teatro furioso", the "Theater of farce and calamity" and the "Teatro de crónica y estampa" by Francisco Nieva, "greatest exponent of direct and indirect assimilation of postist theses in the field of theater: carnivalesque prints, irrationality that critically sublimates the grotesque, plastic symbiosis of the various arts, carefree humor and, relevantly, a theatrical functionality of the word that enhances the three magic keys aired so many times by Chicharro, Ory and Sernesi in their manifestos: the absurd, madness and nonsense" (J. Pont, "Postism, the witchcraft of the word", in El Cultural, supplement to El Mundo, 06/27/1999).

Derivations of Postismo can be found later in José Luis Castillejo, Juan Eduardo Cirlot, Visual Poetry and the Zaj group. An attempt to revitalize the aesthetics of Postismo was led by Carlos de la Rica, who promoted Neopostismo through the poetic group of "La Camama" led by José del Saz Orozo, Manuel San Martín, Carlos Asorey and Luis Lloret, supported by media of his modest editorial "El Toro de Barro", founded in 1965 and of significant work in the eighties.

Fonts

• Jaume Pont, Postism. A cutting-edge aesthetic-literary movement. Barcelona: Ed. del Mall, 1987.
• Jaume Pont, "Postism, the witchcraft of the word", in The Cultural, supplement The World, 27/06/1999).
• R. Herrero "Claudio", Anthology of Postist Poetry (Zaragoza, 1998).
• F. Casanova, "Anecdote and theory of Postism"Papers of Son Armadans1964, No. 106)
• Amador Palacios, Thursday Posters. The role of Ciudad Real in Postism. The articles of "Lanza", Ciudad Real, Diputación, 1991.
• M. I. Navas Ocaña, Postism, Cuenca, The Baroque Bull, 2000.