Vicente Huidobro and the Curse of the Aymara

Let us imagine the young Vicente Huidobro, intrepid explorer of the heights of poetry, as he stands among swirling clouds, braced against the whistling wind of an Andean mountaintop, in the epiphanic moment in which he receives the following pearl of wisdom from an elderly Aymara poet-guru:

"El poeta es un dios; no cantes a la lluvia, poeta: haz llover." 

The magic words echo among the peaks as the guru disappears into the mist. The young Huidobro, grateful and enlightened, reluctantly makes his way down the cordillera, feeling very reassured by what he has heard. The mystical aphorism affirms the apprentice seer's yearning for the godlike power of original imagery and semantic immanence.

Such a scenario is what Huidobro would like for us to believe in "La creación pura: Ensayo de estética," his manifesto attempting to arrange and defend his poetics, first published in French in L'Esprit Nouveau in April 1921. Regardless of the origin of the guru's cryptic phrase (Juan Larrea, for example, suggests that Huidobro merely switched one kind of "Indian" for another, in that the phrase is elsewhere attributed to a Hindu poet), and its various modifications in several of Huidobro's texts--such as

"Por qué cantáis la rosa, ¡oh poetas! / Hacedla florecer en el poema" ("Arte poética")

--the essence of its meaning challenges the temporal nature of poetry as an art of words through its mandate (the command "make") to execute something akin to organic immediacy. In fact, as our daring adventurer (cue stirring music) returns with the boon of knowledge from his heroic quest, beginning to sense within himself the intense desire to conceive of a--yes, that's it!--a metalinguistic parachute voyage, he does not suspect (ominous key change) the perils that await him. He does not yet understand that the mystical message, still resounding in his ears, bears the potential to be both blessing and curse. He walks, confidently, into a trap.

The paradox of the Aymara's blessing/curse is the synecdoche trap, my metaphor for describing the necessity to create an image, part by part, in an always and essentially incomplete way, especially as compared to image-creating in the visual arts. Given the temporal limitations of the written word as artistic medium, it is impossible to perceive the entire image or range of actions, at one glance, of, for example, a body--an image at once very ordinary and yet complex. Such a total perception at one glance is at least theoretically possible in the visual or spatial arts, but a writer must name, and describe, a body part by part, action by action.

The truest solution to the synecdoche trap is to employ some kind of radical onomatopeia, impossibly expanded beyond the range of mere sound such that the word IS the image IS the thing itself. One of Huidobro's examples in this vein would be his palindrome neologism "eterfinifrete" from his 1931 masterpiece Altazor. Such words can exist with effect in a certain context, but they're better for inventing than for describing, and the semantic problem with the end of Altazor is that the entire context--no longer just a word here and there--is composed of this kind of invented words.

Huidobro's more frequently deployed solution, more orthodox in a paradoxical vanguard way, is best explained in his earlier manifesto "La poesía": to find the novel juxtaposition of "palabras enemigas" whose semantic charges ignite the sparks of illumination. An example that he trots out is the title image of one of his collections, "horizonte cuadrado." Preferably such images occupy no more than two words: a smaller word count means greater proximity to the simultaneity or totality for which many vanguard writers envied the plastic arts and also music. But it is never as easy in practice as it sounds in theory, and this tension between plan and execution is essentially what articulates the theme of Altazor, in which the reader's gaze falls along the pages into the impasse of separating form from meaning, with any degree of success, in written expression.

[...]

my further explorations of these ideas:

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

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures. Purdue University Press, 2006.

"Altazor: A New Arrangement."
Hispanic Issues On Line Volume 6 (Spring 2010):  
Huidobro's Futurity: Twenty-First-Century Approaches (eds. Luis Correa-Díaz and Scott Weintraub)

Corporeality in Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature: Body Articulations.

Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming January 2013.