The Poet of Electroshocks: On the Radioactive Mystics of Francisco Matos Paoli

ABSTRACT: Francisco Matos Paoli (1915-2000) is probably Puerto Rico's most famous Nationalist poet. His Canto de la locura (1962) is probably his most important work. It was the last in a cycle of prison poems, written after the Puerto Rican Nationalist Insurrection in 1950. Like much of his work, Canto is a hermetic text that has been the object of much speculation and interpretation by literary critics and historians alike. In this article, I argue that Matos Paoli's Canto is an assault on the belief in the existence of a self-identical, serene, and self-originated Puerto Rican spirit or soul by the newly instituted Commonwealth government of Puerto Rico. Matos Paoli's book of poems instead reveals the dependence and fragility, the contradictions and antinomies, at the center of subjectivity in general, and at the center of the fiction of the omnipotent and almighty Christian subject in particular. As such, the book undermines the foundation of what I call the faitheistic state, a state that presents itself as secular, but in reality is dependent on the existence and recognition of an omnipotent Other modeled after the Christian divinity. At the same time, Matos Paoli embraces a radical serenity based on a different account of subjectivity, more fragile and dependent.