History as Resurrection: Traces and Faces of Jules Michelet in Canto general

Abstract

In this essay I propose that Jules Michelet, the French romantic historian, is one of the main literary sources of Pablo Neruda's Canto general. Taking as starting point the intertextual resonances between the first two sections of the Canto ("A Lamp on Earth " and "The Heights of Macchu Picchu") and Michelet's conceptualization of history and its most distinctive narrative strategies, I advance the argument that the nineteenth-century French historian and "oracle" constitutes a defining model for Neruda, as a twentieth century Chilean poet in search of a voice and a historico-poetic architecture that would allow him to convey his version of Latin American history.