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Abstract
The Chilean vanguardista poet Vicente Huidobro singlehandedly inaugurated the Spanish-language avant-gardes with his 1918 poem Ecuatorial [Equatorial], and remained a dynamic and controversial global figure until his death in 1948. This essay demonstrates how Huidobro appropriated Walt Whitman’s ‘Salut au Monde’ into this inaugural poem, taking from the US poet an elevated, comprehensive poetics of sight. But Whitman’s all-seeing aesthetic seriously threatened Huidobro’s own ethics and avant-garde poetic philosophy — Creationism — leading the Chilean to reject Whitman and this poetic vision in his 1931 Altazor. If Whitman’s poetic speaker could ‘contain multitudes’, seeing the whole world in instant juxtaposition, Huidobro’s ideal Creationist poet must instead empty himself, to create anew. Finally, this textual and historical confrontation reveals not only how Whitman brought his unifying vision to bear on his nation’s Civil War, but also how the aging Huidobro, facing World War II and the imperialist shadow of the US, wrote back to Whitman to qualify and clarify what this vision might mean for ‘America’.
Notes on contributor
Kelly Scott Franklin is an Assistant Professor at Hillsdale College, where he teaches US literature and courses in the Great Books. He has a PhD in English from the University of Iowa, an MA in Spanish from Middlebury College, and an MA in English from The Catholic University of America. His research interests include poetry, nineteenth-century US literature, and twentieth-century Spanish and Latin American literatures. His poems have appeared in Iowa City’s Poetry in Public project, and in Driftwood Press, vol 1, issue 2.
Notes
1 Huidobro is not alone in his suspicion of this kind of gaze: in his foundational book on gaze theory, The Downcast Eyes (1993), Martin Jay has chronicled ‘the antivisual discourse’ that ‘is a pervasive but generally ignored phenomenon of twentieth-century Western thought’ (Jay, Citation1993: 14). Tracing its development, Jay argues rightly that ‘Although definitions of visuality vary from thinker to thinker, it is clear that ocularcentrism aroused (and continues in many quarters to arouse) a widely shared distrust’ (Jay, Citation1993: 588). More recently, Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, from the perspective of disability studies, seeks to distinguish ‘the gaze’, which she defines as ‘an oppressive act of disciplinary looking that subordinates its victim’, from the act of staring, which she calls ‘an intense visual exchange that makes meaning’ (Garland-Thompson, Citation2009: 9). As such, she investigates the productive ‘mutual recognition’ that the act of staring can generate, as shock and surprise at perceived difference may lead to empathy and to action (Garland-Thompson, Citation2009: 185). As we shall see, Huidobro certainly evinces both an aesthetic and a political scepticism of vision; however, this scepticism notwithstanding, my use of the term ‘gaze’ does not seek to situate Whitman’s poetic sight within the framework of gaze theory. Likewise, even Garland-Thompson’s notion of staring, with its empathetic potential, relies on shock to foster this relation, whereas, as I argue below, Whitman’s radically empathetic gaze finds its foundation in his unique metaphysical system, and is both utterly indiscriminate and instantly welcoming to everything it touches.
2 Huidobro’s Creacionismo, or ‘Creationism’, promoted a theory of literature that, rather than representing known reality, sought to create brand new realities, new images, even invented words. This rejection of mimesis, present in the surrealist imagery of Ecuatorial (1918), finds its most dramatic form in the later, more experimental Altazor (1931).
3 I use the term ‘Hispanophone’ because it includes Spanish speakers of Latin America as well as Spain, since Huidobro participated heavily in the Spanish-language avant-gardes in both the Americas and Europe.
4 ‘formado por igual en el antro de centauro de Nietzsche y en las amorosas praderas de margaritas de Emerson, y que antes de mirar cara a cara la nueva aurora de Walt Whitman se extasió largo tiempo ante los antiguos zodíacos de los templos de Oriente’. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
5 ‘semilla prolífica [...]’.
6 Huidobro began reading nineteenth-century US literature early in his career: in the prologue to his 1916 Adán (Adam), published in Santiago just before he left for Europe, Huidobro translated a passage from Emerson’s 1844 essay ‘The Poet’, having encountered Emerson, as did many of his fellow Latin-American writers, through a French translation, in Paul Lacomblet’s 1894 Sept Essais (Goic, Citation2003a: 1389; Morales, 1999: 181 n.3).
7 ‘la mirada artística puede abarcar situaciones que ocurren en lugares distintos [...] desaparece la sucesión y pueden conocerse simultáneamente el pasado, el presente y el futuro’.
8 ‘poeta alado [...] de visión aérea [...]’.
9 ‘insinúa ese deseo abarcador, simultaneísta, que abraza a un tiempo las ciudades más distantes y más distintas’.
10 Indeed, in Whitman’s verse the two terms are not always as distinct as they might be. Benedict Anderson (Citation2006), for instance, astutely points out how linguistic and textual simultaneity — shared language and ritual texts — can themselves create the experience of national unity across time and space (Anderson, Citation2006: 144–45).
11 Huidobro also mentions Vasseur in his 1914 essay ‘El Futurismo’ [‘Futurism’], in Pasando y Pasando ... [Passing and Passing ...] (Huidobro, Citation1914: 163–71).
12 ‘a cantar sobre las lejanías desatadas’, ‘el mundo muere’, ‘Las ciudades de Europa / Se apagan una a una’. With the exception of his manifestos and the prose preface to Altazor, Huidobro does not typically use punctuation, so for brevity of citation I have refrained from ellipses when citing unpunctuated texts unless their absence would seriously misrepresent the sense. Because Whitman tends to punctuate his poems, I have indicated with ellipses where I have elided part of a complete sentence.
13 ‘Sentados sobre el paralelo / Miremos nuestro tiempo’.
14 For reasons of brevity, see Huidobro (Citation2003e: 494.71b, 73–74; 495.83, 85; 497.135; 498.162; 499.182; 501.245; 502.264, 274, 282; 503.292).
15 The two columns of text here manifest a kind of textual cubism, and can be loosely read left to right as one broken stanza, or as two stanzas to be — in theory if not in actuality — read at once:
Otros clavan frescas lanzas en el Congo
El corazón del África soleado
Se abre como los higos picoteados’.
16 ‘clavan frescas lanzas’.
17 ‘los negros / de divina raza / esclavos en Europa [...]’.
18 ‘El negro esclavo / abre la boca prestamente / Para el amo pianista / Que hace cantar sus dientes’.
19 ‘Hombres de alas cortas / Han recorrido todo’, ‘Los cuatro puntos cardinales’, ‘Como botín de guerra’.
20 ‘alas de golondrinas’.
21 ‘trizada a trechos’ ‘cortado en dos’.
22 ‘[...] las ciudades cautivas
Cosidas una a una por hilos telefónicos
Y las palabras y los gestos
Vuelan en torno del telégrafo’.
23 ‘El Amor / El Amor / En pocos sitios lo he encontrado [...]’. Even the distance between the words on the page emphasizes the scarcity of love in the vastness.
24 ‘Hacia el solo aeroplano / Que cantará un día en el azul / Se alzará de los años / Una bandada de manos [...]’.
25 ‘SUPREMO SIGNO’, ‘El Fin del Universo’.
26 Doris Sommer (Citation1999) reads some of these tensions as reflecting Whitman’s political philosophy, an ‘unstable but compelling solution to liberal democracy’s fundamental contradiction between demands for (liberal) personal freedom and the requirements of public (democratic) equality’ (Sommer, Citation1999: 36).
27 In his 1925 ‘La deshumanización del arte’ (‘The Dehumanization of Art’), Spanish philosopher and critic José Ortega y Gasset had defended this perceived lack of mimetic aptitude in the avant-garde by arguing that its artists sought to escape representations of the real, natural realities that he termed ‘human’ (‘humano’), meaning to reject the external realities was to ‘dehumanize it’ (‘deshumanizarla’) (CitationOrtega y Gasset, [1925] 1993: 27). Although Ortega y Gasset was correct in seeing that many in the artistic vanguard were indeed greatly antagonistic towards so-called mimetic art, as Vicki Unruh (Citation1994) persuasively demonstrates, the Hispanophone avant-garde movements were in fact more committed to engaging the ‘human’ in their art than Ortega y Gasset may have thought. The Spaniard’s article sparked among the artists of the avant-gardes a strong reaffirmation to the contrary, insisting that they were committed instead to the ‘rehumanization’ of art (Unruh, Citation1994: 21). Indeed, Huidobro himself may be replying to Ortega y Gasset’s assessment the very same year in ‘Manifiesto de Manifiestos’ (‘Manifesto of Manifestos’), when he insists that the poet provides ‘a dose of particular humanity’ (‘una dosis tal de particular humanidad [...]’) in order to create art (Huidobro, Citation2008: 79). Although Huidobro’s Creacionismo certainly fits Ortega y Gasset’s description, the source of the disagreement may be the Spanish critic’s choice of terms. Huidobro’s rejection of nature and the things of the ‘real’ world as improper subjects for Creationist poetry is clear, but for him the human subject must remain the creator of new realities and, as such, the true path of the poet must not be the more abstract dehumanization Ortega y Gasset proposes, but rather a kind of magical, originary creation from within the human self.
28 ‘Hasta ahora no hemos hecho otra cosa que imitar el mun do en sus aspectos, no hemos creado nada’.
29 ‘Hemos aceptado, sin mayor reflexión, el hecho de que no puede haber otras realidades que las que nos rodean, y no hemos pensado que nosotros también podemos crear realidades en un mundo nuestro, en un mundo que espera su fauna y su flora propias’.
30 ‘No tiene nada semejante a él en el mundo externo, hace real lo que no existe, es decir, se hace él mismo realidad’.
31 The experimental book-length poem Altazor has a complex textual history: Huidobro wrote it in French and Spanish, revised it over several years, and only published the poem in its final form in Spanish in 1931.
32 ‘a raíz de la publicación de Ecuatorial [...]’.
33 ‘Aquél que todo lo ha visto, que conoce todos los secretos sin ser Walt Whitman, pues jamás he tenido una barba blanca como las bellas enfermeras y los arroyos helados’.
34 ‘Una tarde, cogí mi paracaídas y dije: ‘Entre una estrella y dos golondrinas’. He aquí la muerte que se acerca como la tierra al globo que cae’.
35 ‘paracaídas comenzó a caer vertiginosamente’.
36 ‘Veo las montañas, los ríos, las selvas, el mar, los barcos, las flores y los caracoles. / Veo la noche y el día y el eje en que se juntan [...]’, ‘Lo veo todo [...]’.
37 ‘cargado de mundos de países de ciudades / Muchedumbres aullidos [...]’.
38 ‘En tanto me siento al borde de mis ojos / Para asistir a la entrada de las imágenes’.
39 ‘Soy yo Altazor / Altazor’.
40 ‘Abrí los ojos’.
41 ‘Hace seis meses solamente
Dejé la ecuatorial recién cortada
En la tumba guerrera del esclavo paciente
Corona de piedad sobre la estupidez humana
Soy yo que estoy hablando en este año de 1919
Es el invierno
Ya la Europa enterró todos sus muertos
Y un millar de lágrimas hacen una sola cruz de nieve’.
42 ‘de las Alturas de estrella’.
43 ‘Basta ya / Seguir cargado de mundos de países de ciudades / Muchedumbres aullidos’.
44 ‘Dadme dadme pronto un llano de silencio / Un llano despoblado como los ojos de los muertos’.
45 ‘Robinsón por qué volviste de tu isla?
De la isla de tus obras y tus sueños privados
La isla de ti mismo rica de tus actos’.
46 ‘Romper las ligaduras de las venas’, ‘las cadenas / De los ojos senderos de horizontes’.
47 ‘Molino de viento
Molino de aliento
Molino de cuento
Molino de intento
Molino de aumento
Molino de ungüento
Molino de sustento
Molino de tormento
Molino de salvamento
Molino de advenimiento’.
48 ‘Insisto en esto, estimado tío, para que sepas que nuestra colaboración no es incondicional, sino que está originada por el hecho de que tú tengas o no tengas razón. No por las presiones que pueda ejercer tu familia sobre la nuestra’.
49 ‘Ahí van los heroicos muchachos / Con su sonrisa abierta al cielo a la tierra y al mar / Ahí van los soldados de tu América Walt Whitman’.
50 ‘Los cuatro puntos cardinales [...]’, ‘Como botín de guerra [...]’.
51 ‘Ahí van los atlantes del Nuevo Mundo / Con un hemisferio a cuestas’.
52 ‘tu América’ ‘América hermana América’.
53 ‘representa el sentido internacional del hombre [...] La generosidad, la amplitud absoluta [...]’.
54 ‘esperamos, querido tío, que después de la victoria se construya un mundo realmente habitable, un mundo de colaboración, eficaz, viril, apto para un verdadero renacimiento [...]’.
55 ‘Hoy es preciso luchar [...]’, ‘mañana será necesario crear’.
56 ‘jóvenes dioses’, ‘El Poeta es un pequeño Dios’.
57 ‘La mágica palabra’, ‘Más honda que todos los poemas’.