Aesthetics of Equilibrium: The Vanguard Poetics of Vicente Huidobro and Mário de Andrade

Introduction: A Desire for Equilibrium in Avant-Garde Poetics: The Parables “Non serviam” and “Parabola d’A escrava que não é Isaura”

1 Introduction A Desire for Equilibrium in Avant-Garde Poetics The Parables “Non serviam” and “Parabola d’A escrava que não é Isaura” Among the manifestos, prologues, declarations, and other proclamatory texts characteristic of the avant-garde period’s various movements, the expression of a new poetics dominates the subject matter and tends to exemplify itself in the very format of these texts. Employing a variety of styles, the texts are sometimes allegorical; those few texts that are strictly allegorical tend to be well represented in anthologies but too often overlooked in critical analyses. In fact, these allegorical works constitute not just theoretical but also narrative sources for beliefs about poetics, and as such they are particularly rich in language , symbol, and structure. I wish to identify Huidobro’s “Non serviam” and Mário’s “Parábola d’A escrava que não é Isaura” specifically as parables. The parable is a kind of allegory that illustrates a moral attitude, a doctrine, a standard of conduct , or a religious principle [. . .] The simple narratives of parables give them a mysterious, suggestive tone and make them especially useful for the teaching of moral and spiritual truths. (“Parable”) Another kind of truth, intrinsic to these vanguard parables, can be added to the definition: artistic truth. Since the parable as a genre has a well-known biblical context, both authors’ use of the parable format likens their expressions of artistic truth to the spiritual insights imparted by Christ; this relationship has special relevance in interpreting the poet’s prophetic role. Furthermore , the parable genre’s “suggestive tone” stimulates the exploration of symbolic identities such as feminine and masculine images and, in the present case, the roles of slave and 2 Introduction master. I make the generic designation of parable exclusively for the purpose of the present study; Huidobro makes no mention of the word parable in his text, and Mário, although he gives his text the title of “Parábola,” vacillates between the terms história and quase parábola in its opening paragraph. The sparse critical attention devoted to these separate parables mixes them, in the case of each author, with that author’s other theoretical works; the tendency has been to pursue a theme or idea monolithically, quoting as needed from different manifestos or other texts and contexts. José Quiroga’s detailed look at “Non serviam” constitutes a worthy exception and will be addressed below. The comparative studies of Huidobro’s and Mário’s works or literary trajectories mentioned in the Preface do not engage a direct comparison of the two parables. In contrast, the aim of this introduction is the comparative literary analysis of these specific poetics texts, without, at this point, drawing any relationship to other poetics texts or to poetry by the same writers. Huidobro claimed that he read “Non serviam” as a conference presentation in the Ateneo of Santiago in 1914.1 Allegorically , the text defines a new poetics in the form of the confrontation between a rebellious poet slave and his mistress, Mother Nature.2 Anthologized as the first of Huidobro’s manifestos , the text can be divided into three sections: the thirdperson narrative, the poet’s address to his fellow poets, and the poet’s words to Mother Nature. Juan Larrea reveals that the title of Huidobro’s parable comes from “Futurismo,” a 1904 text (before Marinetti’s futurist manifesto) in which the author, Gabriel Alomar, portrays Adam as “el primer indómito, el primer protervo, que ha lanzado el non serviam representando la protesta de la humanidad” (qtd. in Larrea 227). This leads to the discovery of a key similarity between Huidobro’s and Mário’s parables through the character of Adam; Huidobro’s unnamed poet is a metamorphosis of Alomar’s Adam.3 The casting of Huidobro’s “Non serviam” protagonist as an Adam figure can indeed be intuited from the parable text alone, but the knowledge of Alomar’s proclamation makes it clearer and, moreover, links it definitively to Huidobro’s 1916 Adán, his first free-verse poetry. The parable’s unnamed protagonist thus prefigures Huidobro’s all-encompassing Protagonist; as 3 A Desire for Equilibrium Quiroga argues, “All of Huidobro’s heroes, from Altazor to Mío Cid Campeador, are descendants (or we should say substitutions ) of Adam” (520). Mário’s parable forms the introduction to his theoretical treatise, A...