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

Chapter Five. At the Dock and on the Street: The Loss of Purity and Solidarity in Mário’s Poetics

129 Although “Prefácio” displays a loose, aphoristic structure whereas Escrava more closely approximates a formal treatise, the two texts share a defense of avant-garde poetry, a personal, tragicomic tone, and an expository style that includes brief narrative fragments and anecdotes, of which the most well known is “Parábola d’A escrava que não é Isaura.” These narrative fragments yield a wealth of densely symbolic images that articulate Mário’s avant-garde poetics, specifically pertaining to the functions of the conscious and the unconscious in the act of writing poetry. One of these crucial images is the dock. It appears first in the allegory of Dom Lirismo in “Prefácio,” characterizing a procedural loss of lyric purity, and then a second time, in relation to an emotional loss of understanding, in the hallucination sequence in endnote Q of Escrava. The dock is a liminal zone; within these contexts, it may be seen as the contact point, yet also the barrier, between a semiotic source and symbolic expression, or between the collective unconscious— source of poetic inspiration and ultimately of the artist’s solidarity with the public—and the individual nature of conscious expression. Similarly, the street, as a commonplace, serves as a point of reunion for Mário and his public. Although the writer’s sense of solidarity on the street most often eludes him, his desire to achieve it leads to some of his most creative meditations on the artist’s role in society.1 • El Dorado Mário’s clearest insights, regarding this question of the degree of conscious and unconscious activity in the process of poetic creation, appear in the allegory of Dom Lirismo in “Prefácio”: Chapter Five At the Dock and on the Street The Loss of Purity and Solidarity in Mário’s Poetics 130 Chapter Five Dom Lirismo, ao desembarcar do Eldorado do Inconsciente no cais da terra do Consciente, é inspecionado pela visita médica, a Inteligência, que o alimpa dos macaquinhos e de toda e qualquer doença que possa espalhar confusão, obscuridade na terrinha progressista. Dom Lirismo sofre mais uma visita alfandegária, descoberta por Freud, que a denominou Censura. Sou contrabandista! E contrário à lei da vacina obrigatória. (PC 73 [21]) The word “desembarcar” and the pivotal image of the dock (“cais”) establish Dom Lirismo’s journey as having been over water. Although no boat is directly mentioned, it would seem that either the name of the boat—in which Dom Lirismo traveled from the land of unconsciousness—is “Eldorado,” or that the name of the boat is “Eldorado do Inconsciente,” in which case the boat itself represents unconsciousness. In either case, Mário establishes an important frame of reference by unequivocally uniting both the signifier “Eldorado,” and a body of water , with unconsciousness. This associative framework, which expands the scope of the narrative considerably, refers to the New World legend of El Dorado. According to the chronicler Juan de Castellanos—his version of the legend was one of the most popular of several slightly differing accounts—El Dorado was the leader of a tribe in the vicinity of Bogotá. During certain ceremonies, the leader’s assistants would disrobe him and coat him from head to toe with gold dust; afterwards they would all ride out in a raft onto a lake in his domain, and would throw emerald-studded jewelry and golden ornaments into the lake as an offering. At least one other version of the legend implies that the golden chieftain would dive into the lake himself in an act of ritual purification. Iberians in the Americas came to associate the name El Dorado with an Edenic land of great riches, especially gold (Hemming 97–109). The core elements of this legend— the lake, the raft, the gold and jewels, and the submersion of the gold, jewels, and chieftain in the lake—provide the background for the allegory of Dom Lirismo. Mário’s often-used term for the unconscious—“subconsciência”—displays the prefix, meaning “under,” which has influenced the manner of thinking about the unconscious as below the surface of consciousness . Indeed, below the surface of the lake lie the cer- 131 At the Dock and on the Street emonial (and therefore symbolic) riches of the tribe; probing the waters, one gains insight by glimpsing the glittering flashes of the tribal community’s...