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

Chapter Three. Dimensions of the Poet God: Huidobro’s Final Manifestos

85 The common thread that links Huidobro’s diverse manifestos is the binary struggle to maintain a complete equilibrium between the conscious and unconscious processes of poetic composition . This balance is the same one that Ernst Kris identifies in his study of the artistic ego, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. Artistic inspiration is born in the unconscious, but its elaboration is a conscious act. Writing about regression as access to the unconscious, Kris exposes the dangers of losing the balance during the process of artistic composition: When regression goes too far, the symbols become private, perhaps unintelligible even to the reflective self; when, at the other extreme, control is preponderant, the result is described as cold, mechanical, and uninspired. Poetry is, to be sure, related to trance and dream [. . .] But it is also related to rigorous and controlled rationality. No account of the aesthetic process can be adequate without giving due weight to this “intellectual” component. (254) A predisposition toward this intellectual or rational component of artistic expression, seen first in “Non serviam,” continues especially in “El creacionismo” and in the critiques of surrealism in “Manifiesto de manifiestos” and “Yo encuentro . . .” Huidobro’s last manifestos explore the idea of a divine, organic consciousness to which the poet has exclusive access by virtue of godlike qualities. In his comparison to Christ and in his prophecy of the total poet, Huidobro develops his famous conclusion from “Arte poética,” “El poeta es un pequeño Dios.” Ironically, Huidobro polished the controlled structures of these poetic prose texts, which exemplify Kris’s balance of dream and rationality, during the same years he was developing the Chapter Three Dimensions of the Poet God Huidobro’s Final Manifestos 86 Chapter Three spectacular impasse that closes Altazor, a text that embodies the dangers of Kris’s regression: “the symbols become private, perhaps unintelligible even to the reflective self.” • The Poet as Christ The final phrases of Christ on the cross articulate the structure of “Las siete palabras del poeta,” originally in Manifestes as “Las sept paroles du poète” and then published in Spanish in La Nación, January 31, 1926. After an initial paragraph, each phrase appears in capital letters, unchanged from the Gospel tradition, and followed by a short series of paragraphs that expands the context of the poet’s artistic identification with Christ. The specific historical context of this manifesto involves Huidobro’s chiding self-defense against his critical enemies, and for that reason the general tone of the piece is hyperbolically egotistical.1 However, the imagery continues Huidobro’s already established use of Adam and the axis mundi tree as representations of the poet fulfilling his creative powers. The figures of Adam and the tree transform into Christ and the cross; Jung has shown, by means of alchemical and apocryphal sources, that the ancients had already read such a symbolic transformation into the Bible: The [Syrian] “Book of the Cave of Treasures” states that Adam stood on the spot where the cross was later erected, and that this spot was the centre of the earth. Adam, too, was buried at the centre of the earth—on Golgotha. He died on a Friday, at the same hour as the Redeemer. [. . .] God said to Adam: “I shall make thee God, but not now; only after the passing of a great number of years.” (Mysterium Coniunctionis 388–89) Jung argues that the collective unconscious incorporates both Adam and Christ, as well as the tree and the cross, as representations of the self. Similarly, the cross symbolizes, according to Hahn’s study of Huidobro’s 1918 Ecuatorial, “la conjunción de los opuestos y [. . .] el centro místico del universo” (“Voluntad inaugural” 25). The self, the dissolution of opposites, the center: these are the evident connections analyzed in Huidobro’s “Non serviam” and Mário’s “Parábola”; 87 Dimensions of the Poet God Huidobro’s poet incarnates both Adam and the Redeemer, while Mário’s Poetry links Adam, her creator, to the Christlike Rimbaud. “Las siete palabras del poeta” resembles the “Prefacio” of Altazor in its images of birds and heights. The manifesto begins : “Desde lo alto de mi cruz, plantada sobre las nubes y más esbelta que el avión lanzado a la fatiga de los astros, dejaré caer sobre la tierra mis siete palabras, más cálidas que las plumas de...