Quiroga - Huidobro and The Kingdom of Paper

Vicente Huidobro and the Kingdom of Paper
Author(s): Jos Quiroga

Source: Latin American Literary Review, Vol. 20, No. 39 (Jan. - Jun., 1992), pp. 36-52
Published by: Latin American Literary Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20111373
Accessed: 13-04-2017 13:17 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Latin American Literary Review is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Latin American Literary Review
This content downloaded from 130.104.95.80 on Thu, 13 Apr 2017 13:17:09 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
VICENTE HUIDOBRO AND THE KINGDOM OF PAPER
JOSE QUIROGA
Vicente Huidobro's work is the first to give us a poetics of language in

twentieth-century Latin America. Although his materialist and extremely physi
cal poetics was not articulated fully until Manifestes (1926), it is prefigured in
his early poems. The first sign of Huidobro's emphasis on the concrete, spatial
aspect of words on a page, appears in his early calligrammes, published inMusa
Joven [Young Muse] in 1912 and included in his third book of poetry, Canciones
en la noche [Songs in the Night] (1913).1 Here, the interplay between vision and
meaning underscores the fact that words have the power to create more than the
sum of their signifieds. Huidobro writes (or designs) a poem in the shape of a
church "Capilla aldeana" ["Town Church"], another two formed by triangles
"Tri?ngulo arm?nico" ["Harmonic Triangle"] and "Fresco Nip?n" ["Nipponese
Fresco"], and still another in shape of a double pointed arrow "Nipona"
["Nipponese"]. It was this early awareness of the figurai possibilities of
language that led to his stubborn insistence on the fact that words and texts are
concrete objects, an idea that underlies his poetics of Creationism, first an
nounced in his "Arte po?tica" (1916) and then amplified throughout the
following decade, up to the aforementioned Manifestes (1926).
Throughout Huidobro's career, and in spite of the virulent polemics it
caused at the time, his belief in the created realities of language continued
unabated within the sect-of-one that was Huidobro's avant-garde Creationism.
In fact, the more his contemporaries disputed him, the more radical his state
ments became. Taking his readers beyond the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign,
Huidobro did not hesitate to disrupt the communicative function of language in
order to proclaim the existence of a textual kingdom out of intangible words. In
his masterpiece Altazor (1931), Huidobro submitted language to a violent
breakdown in order to prove that language was a textual fact. The vowels written
as an open-ended closure to this poem take one of the more radical experiments
in the Spanish language to its limits.
Upon closer examination, however, Huidobro has given us a poetics so
disruptive that it could have originated only in the mind of a perverse creator with
a sinister agenda. For in spite of his formal intentions, Huidobro created for
himself an authorial persona that prevents critics from studying his texts
Vicente Huidobro and the Kingdom of Paper 37
precisely as formal entities, as his theory demands. Huidobro never let his
creations lead their own existence. Instead, like a minor deity (the "peque?o
Dios" ["minor God"] of his "Arte po?tica"), Huidobro tampered with his
objective universe, and imposed his own persona upon those created entities that
he, at the same time, defined as independent. Huidobro's authorial presence
precludes the formal approach that Huidobro's poetics so insistently demands.
This is why, for Huidobro's critics, the personal always threatens to overshadow
the poetics in a system where, ultimately, the poetry is obscured.2
Whereas Huidobro's critics have been quick to focus on the contradiction
produced by the interplay between Huidobro's fable and his theories of lan
guage,3 none has seen both?the persona and the work?as two sides of a
common poetics, a kaleidoscope of moving and interrelated forms played out on
a single surface.4This surface, the "kingdom of paper" in this essay, is more than
a trope from which we can reconstruct and organize Huidobro as a poet or as a
theoretician; it is, rather, the space that Huidobro inhabits, the space that he
created for himself. In Huidobro's kingdom, paper entails both copy and
original, metatext and source, text and context. It is within this space that
language can escape from the confines of its own representational arbitrariness.
My intention is to examine Huidobro's persona as a deliberate Creationist
construction?indeed, as the supreme object of his much misunderstood Cre
ationism. Taken as a whole, the relationship between persona and work yields
a double image: poetic liberation and authorial control. Freedom and control are
the underlying theme to most of Huidobro's work. On the one hand, Huidobro
liberates poetic language and allows his creations an independent existence
beyond empirical reality. On the other hand, Huidobro controls his readers by
constantly transgressing the pact between reader and writer. This essay exam
ines these two movements in Huidobro's work by seeing how the creator
exercises an almost tyrannical control over his empire, in order to allow words
to fulfill their creative role. Huidobro transformed paper itself into the concrete
stage for a theater of language, and it is from this constraint that Huidobro
produces what may be perhaps the most liberating poetry written in Latin
America.
In order to place Huidobro out of the text/context debate and into his
kingdom of paper; in order to forge a link between the persona and the poetics,
I will take a different route from the one taken by his critics. Instead of
illuminating the author's life, and then placing the theory and the work within
the parameters of Huidobro's chronological development, I intend to pursue the
reverse order, where the poetics is the true precursor of our reading of the poet.
First, I will examine Huidobro's poetics for what it can illuminate on the debate
between this particular author and his work, as it is formulated in his essay "La
creaci?n pura" ["Pure Creation"] from Saisons choisies [Selected Seasons]
(1921). I will follow this with a reading of "L'Homme triste" ["The Sad Man"],
one of Huidobro's poems fromHorizon carr? [Square Horizon] (1917). Finally,
I will return to what I believe is the primal scene for the construction of the
Creationist poet, Huidobro's first autobiographical presentation, included in
Pasando y pasando (1914).
38 Latin American Literary Review
I. THEORY ON PAPER
Huidobro saw himself as an oracle, as the ultimate source of meaning for

his work. This perfect origination/revelation is at the center of Huidobro's
poetics; it grounds his vision of control and of authority. In "Necesidad de una
est?tica po?tica compuesta por los poetas" ["Necessity of a poetic aesthetic
composed by poets"], Huidobro debunks outsiders' reading of poetry: "Es
necesaria una est?tica de la poes?a," he writes, "hecha por las personas de dentro
[Huidobro's emphasis], por los iniciados y no por los que miran de lejos" [An
aesthetics of poetry is needed, one that is done by the people on the inside, by the
initiated and not by those who are looking from afar ] (750). This is Huidobro
at his most obvious and authoritative, controlling what poetry is and what poetry
means. For Creationism, the subjective world of the poet is merely a filter: the
external "objective world" offers a series of elements to the poet, who then
refashions and returns those same elements as a new objectivity to the "objective
world:"
El artista obtiene sus motivos y sus elementos del mundo objetivo, los
transforma y combina, y los devuelve al mundo objetivo bajo la
forma de nuevos hechos. Este fen?meno est?tico es tan libre e
independiente como cualquier otro fen?meno del mundo exterior, tal
como una planta, un p?jaro, un astro o un fruto, y tiene, como ?stos,
su raz?n de ser en s? mismo y los mismos derechos e independencia.
(720)
[The artist gets his motifs and his elements from the objective world,
he transforms and combines them, and returns them to the objective
world as new facts. This aesthetic phenomenon is as free and as
independent as any other phenomenon of the external world, as a
plant, a bird, a star or a fruit and has, like these, its own reason for
being and its same rights and independence]
Because Creationism is based on the existence of such a category as the

"objective world" (a code-name for tangible objects) it has to take into account
the artist who apprehends or mediates between this objective world and the
reader. For Huidobro the artist is a filter, at times merely a dismembered
machine. The artist is the center, the controller, the one who names, the scientist
in a vast natural laboratory of independent natural phenomena. The author
translates the laws of nature into language by taking a raw material and
transforming it into another raw material, with no surplus, no byproduct:
Os dir? qu? entiendo por poema creado. Es un poema en el que cada

parte constitutiva, y todo el conjunto, muestra un hecho nuevo,
independiente del mundo externo, desligado de cualquiera otra

realidad que no sea la propia, pues toma su puesto en el mundo como
un fen?meno singular, aparte y distinto de los dem?s fen?menos.
Dicho poema es algo que no puede existir sino en la cabeza del
poeta. Y no es hermoso porque recuerde algo, no es hermoso porque
nos recuerde cosas vistas, a su vez hermosas, ni porque describa
hermosas cosas que podamos llegar a ver. Es hermoso en s? y no
admite t?rminos de comparaci?n. Y tampoco puede conceb?rselo
fuera del libro. (733)
[I will tell you what I understand by a created poem. It is a poem in

which every constitutive part, and the whole, shows a new fact,
independent of the external world, apart from any other reality that is
not its own, since it takes its place in the world as a singular
phenomenon, distinct and apart from other phenomena.
Such a poem is something that cannot exist except in the mind of
the poet. And it is not beautiful because it reminds us of something,
it is not beautiful because it reminds us of things we have seen, nor
because it describes things we could see. It is beautiful in itself and
it allows for no other terms of comparison. It also cannot be conceived
of outside of the book.]
Huidobro demands of language that it signify its own (or the poet's) nature,
but this demand yields no Keatsian loss, no glorious romantic defeat. When the
poem is an object whose signified is within the book itself, words do not become
a second nature but a nature that is other, one that does not tolerate interference
from the world of natural phenomena. Huidobro's is a universe that can only
exist by means of language and that, because of language, possesses an uncanny
facticity. Like Borges's Tl?n, Huidobro's created poem is a singular phenom
enon, an object that is as much a part of the universe as a bird or a tree.
Huidobro's idealistic overvaluation of language's power accounts for the
somewhat anachronistic demands of faith and authority that he imposes on his
readers. Whereas Borges parodies the imperfections of language as an instru
ment of communication, Huidobro will spare no effort in tampering with the
referential function of words, until the reader is aware of the fact that they
possess the capabilities that Huidobro ascribes to them.5 In spite of the fact that
words cannot lose their referential function within a common language, that the
letters of Huidobro's rose are the same as the reader's name forthe same object,
Huidobro wants his readers to abandon their preconceived mental image of a
rose and apprehend his. From his early manifesto "Non serviam" (1913) in
which he declares his rebellion against nature, to the hermetic language of the
last cantos of Altazor, Huidobro insists on denying the symbolic aspect of words.
He underscores the power of the signifier while obscuring the echoes of the
signified. By doing so, he creates an interplay between what is on the surface
(signifier) and what is hidden (signified), between revelation and occlusion. For
in order to let us see how words create objective realities, their communicative
power must be rent, an elision must be made, the uncontrollable signified must
be controlled.
One would expect Huidobro's poetics to create a poem inscribed in stone,
an immutable "object of nature." But contrary to what Huidobro's poetics of the
object in the poem might say, Huidobro never treats his work as a fixed entity.
On the contrary, Huidobro is one of our first conscious producers of texts, written
signs that are always open to reinvention and rewriting by the hand ofthat minor
deity. For in the same way that the objects exist in the mind of the creator without
any reference to external reality, the work as a whole is subject to systems of
authorial control that fix and define that elusive category of "text." That
Huidobro's systematic elision of the referential aspect of words also entails
mechanisms of wider textual control can be illustrated by "L'Homme Triste"
["The Sad Man"], one of his poems translated in France during 1917.1 will turn
to this example briefly, since it will shed light on Huidobro's kingdom of paper
and on the systematic elisions that poetry and persona engage in since 1914 and
that make of them both Creationist objects.
II. SOURCES TRANSLATED AND ERASED
After examining the relationship between author and work in Huidobro's

Creationist aesthetics, we can concentrate now on what Huidobro does to the
surface of the page. How can we read the site where the poet's simulacra of
nature takes place? Huidobro's page has a peculiar density, a layered history that
the poet hides and reveals at the same time. We can start uncovering the various
strata on this surface by focusing on one image in a poem in order to show how
Huidobro moves within the context of writing, erasure and translation. Huidobro
proposes a theory of the poetic object, but then tampers with the object itself.
Whereas in the prose works written between 1916 and 1926, Huidobro
asserts his artistic preeminence upon arriving at the Parisian avant-garde, a
careful reading of the poetry yields a different tone. In spite of Huidobro's
combativeness during diese years, in the poetry the author disappears under
confusing shifters like "alguien" ["someone"] or "nadie," ["no one"] that
suggest an elusive, muted poetic voice. In the poems of Horizon carr? [Square
Horizon](l9ll)orinlongzrworks]ikeHallali(19l$)or^
configuration of the words upon the page underscore the space of melancholia,
as we can see in "L'homme triste" ["The Sad Man"], one of the poems from
Horizon carr?:6
TA FIGURE
au feu s'illumine
Quelque chose voudrait sortir
Quelqu'un trousse
dans l'autre chambre
UNE VIELLE VOIX
comme s'est loin
Un peau de mort tremble dans tous les coins. (226-28)
[YOUR FIGURE / illumined by fire / Something wants to come out

/ Someone coughs / in the other room / AN OLD VOICE / how far it
is / A bit of death trembles in every corner]
Death is present both in the words themselves and in the spatial arrange
ment of words on the page, words that "come out" from all sides and angles of
the "squared horizon." Those corners, spaces occupied by death, echo distance
and solitude. The trembling death of the last verse is reinforced by the shift
between upper and lower case letters that convey trembling signifiers, shadows
emanating from the fiery illumination of the body. The poem's sadness seems
to arise from that feeling of immanence, of an ominous "something about to be
born", out of fire and the ruins of old voices. The poem projects itself towards
the future, it underscores its spatial subversion by recalling at the same time the
difficult passage from anonymity, to death, to a final "coming out." The sadness
in this poem arises from elision itself, from the fact that the poem is not about
something "about to be born," but on the contrary, about something that has been
suppressed. The poem's tone, and even its spacing of words, is a sign of
mourning for a lost original.
"L'homme triste" is a poem about melancholia and translation.7 It is well
known that at the time Huidobro writes the poems of Horizon Carre, his faulty
French is revised and "corrected" by Juan Gris.8 Another language seems to want
to "come out" of the words and the spaces in the French text, the signifiers echo
an original that we, at the moment, do not possess. The only original that we have
is the Spanish version of "L'homme triste" in El espejo de agua [The Mirror of
Water] an edition whose existence as primary (or prior) text was disputed until
recently.9 Visually, the Spanish text is different: the words are written from the
conventional left margin, and there is no setting off or capitalization of words,
the poem having none of the French aura of mystery, of something "about to
happen":
Tu figura se ilumina al fuego

Y algo quiere salir
El chorro de agua en el jardin.
Alguien tose en la otra pieza (227)
[Your figure is illuminated on the fire / And something wants to come

out / The water spurt in the garden // Someone coughs in the other
room ]
Spacing is not the only difference between the Spanish and the French
versions of this poem. The latter, French version eliminates the "chorro de agua"
["water spurt"]. In the Spanish version the gushing fountain is parallel to the
imminent desire of an elliptical "algo" [something] that is joined to the opaque
shadow of the figure reflected in the fire. The source appears as an abrupt
dislocation of the image, in opposition to that desired "something" ("algo" or
"quelque chose") borne out of a reflection. By virtue of its disappearance from

the French poem, the "chorro de agua" acquires a doubly important role. The first
way of reading this elision would be to say that in the French poem, contaminated
by the surfaces and textures of Gris 's cubism, the "chorro de agua" was somehow
a three-dimensional entity that stood for an unwanted depth in the flat space of
the garden?"chorro" directly alluding to source, to a measure of past, present
and future time. In other words, the gushing water would have been an obvious
symbol, forcing the reader into an interpretation as to what the source would
signify in the open space of a garden. The erasure of this source is akin to a further
internalization of the imagery of the poem, since the garden of the Spanish
version is eliminated. That this internalization corresponds to the spatial play is
obvious: the white spaces between words do not "open" the poem but, on the
contrary, add another surface, a material awareness of the space itself as
claustrophobic. In this case, as the source, in the French text, has disappeared on
the surface of the page, the texture of the page itself is misleading in its apparent
neutrality. Its whiteness is a direct result of repression.
By rewriting this poem and eliminating its central image, Huidobro
pretends to sacrifice depth to surface. But instead of reworking the image (maybe
as a "horizontal" river, more in line with cubist and calligrammatic experimen
tation), his deliberate erasure points to ambiguity with the image itself. It is an
ambiguity not only addressed to the apparent ray of hope that the source would
cast over the poem (and the French version is decidedly more pessimistic or, at
best, more dramatic), but also to the more general idea of source itself. How does
criticism account for the fact that an origin hidden in one version of the poem
reappears by comparing one version to the other? Huidobro's paper universe
erases words, and then makes them visible precisely because of their deliberate
occultation. The author turns these Creationist poems into palimpsests.
It could be argued that all poets revise their poetry, and that Huidobro's
procedure is not unlike Borges ' s or Octavio Paz 's rewriting of their early poetry.
But at no point does Huidobro refer to "L'homme triste" as a mere "corrected"
copy of "El hombre triste," nor does he re-translate "L'homme triste" as the final
version of the Spanish poem. In essence, Huidobro's reader has to accept both
poems as coincidental and parallel, but as fundamentally different and belonging
to different books.10
We can expect, in the same way, that every sign of an underground origin
in Huidobro's work will be systematically controlled. If it cannot be controlled,
then it will be erased. Translation and control, poetry and persona, all of these
run concurrently in the work of Huidobro in a totalizing system that is difficult
to analyze. In Huidobro's universe, translation never yields a complete text, but
always a partial one. From the objective realities of nature to the creation of
objective realities on paper, discarded images can be found on the misleadingly
silent surface of the page. These images are ruins of other images that are present
and absent at the same time.
Because Huidobro attempts to control signifieds, criticism should read
both what is on the page and what is hidden by means of the page. We proceed
now to examine how this procedure is manifested in Huidobro's creation of a
poetic persona by means of writing and erasure. This will shed new light on
Huidobro's poetics, for the poetics is based not on the dialectic relationship
between author and work, but on the authorial controls that seduce the reader
with visible and invisible codes.
III. PAPER TIGER IN A PAPER WAR
In "La confesi?n inconfesable" ["The Unconfessable Confession"] an

autobiographical essay included in a collection romantically titled Vientos
contrarios [Contrary Winds] (1926), Huidobro explained his relationship to
poetry in the following manner:
"A los diecisiete a?os, me dije: 'Debo ser el primer poeta de

Am?rica"; luego, al pasar de los a?os, pens?: 'Debo ser el primer
poeta de mi lengua". Despu?s, a medida que corr?a el tiempo, mis
ambiciones fueron subiendo y me dije: 'Debo ser el primer poeta de
mi siglo ' ; y m?s tarde, estudiando la poes?a con un amor cada vez m?s
profundo, llegu? a convencerme de que la poes?a no ha existido jam?s
y que era necesario constituirnos unos cuantos en verdadera secta
para hacerla existir." (795)
[At age seventeen I said to myself "I must be the best poet of
America" ; then, as years passed, I thought: "I must be the foremost
poet of my language." Later, with the passage of time, my ambitions
were higher and I said to myself: "I must be the foremost poet of my
century"; and later, while studying poetry with an ever more pro
found love, I became convinced that poetry has never existed and that
it was necessary for a number of us to constitute ourselves into a true
sect in order to make it exist]
This statement was written at the symbolic age of 33, when the heroic
period of the avant-garde was coming to a close. It is but one instance of a
transparent will that Huidobro expressed throughout his life, and as such,
underscores the unity and constancy of a created poetic self. In a manner which
is not unlike the attempt to control the signified that we examined earlier in the
theoretical essays on Creationism, or the rewriting that can be seen in his poetry,
Huidobro's self-creation is always a manipulation of the public record, a created
system that unfolds according to various authorial controls.
In "El creacionismo" (1926) Huidobro sets the public record straight as to
who is the true originator of Surrealism's automatic writing by appealing to a
category of invisible?unpublished?works: "Despu?s que apareci? mi libro La
gruta del silencio, di tambi?n gran importancia al subconsciente y hasta a cierta
especie de sonambulismo" (737). [After my book "The Grotto of Silence"
appeared, I also gave great importance to the subconscious and to a certain kind
of somnambulism]. For Huidobro's argument, the fact that he has anticipated
surrealism's "automatic writing" is then confirmed by the fact that he at that time
submitted to the review Ideales a poem titled "Vaguedad subconsciente"
["Subconscious Vagueness"]. But the evidence is then again tainted by the
controls of textual manipulation, since Huidobro's La gruta del silencio, the
second book of his bibliography, is written after the third. Not only does the
stated bibliography not correspond to the supposed order of composition; the
chronological displacement is carried one step further by Huidobro's statement
that he announced that same year "un libro escrito ?ntegramente en aquel estilo
[automatic writing] titulado Los espejos son?mbulos " [A book totally written
in that style entitled "The Somnambulistic Mirrors"] (737). This is then under
scored by a footnote which states: "Pod?is verlo anunciado en la lista de Obras
del autor de mi librito: El espejo de agua, publicado en 1916, en Buenos Aires"
[You can see it announced in the list of Author's Work of my small book: "The
Mirror of Water" published in 1916, in Buenos Aires.] (737). It is this citation
which renders the system (chronological displacement followed by biblio
graphical reference and then by announced publications treated as factual
evidence) into a nightmarish mise en ab?me, since the existence of the 1916
edition of El espejo de agua was already disputed at the time (1926) he writes
"El creacionismo." Briefly, Huidobro grounded his claims upon a list of
projected works (unpublished, that is) found within an edition whose existence
has been questioned at the very moment he penned his argumentative essay.
Whether Huidobro anticipated automatic writing or not is not really
important. Even if we say that he did, even if literary history allowed us to take
into account the invisible work that Borges parodies in "Pierre Menard, author
of the Quijote," Huidobro does not feel compelled to bring his document to the
public eye. When he uses as evidence, a book whose existence can only be
documented by faith, the argument ceases to be important. The author is his own
proof, the one who holds the key to the argument's resolution. With this key,
Huidobro will tantalize and deceive the reader. The writer searches for every
imaginable proof in order to have his idea correspond to a pre-existing theory.
In other words, Huidobro's argumentation is founded upon his desire to fit into
a mold, into a theory that has been created already.
That the theory precedes the writer can be seen in the first autobiographical
text Huidobro offers to the public. In "Yo" [I], the first, bombastic autobio
graphical presentation from Pasando y pasando [literally, "Going and Going"
or "Passing and passing"], Huidobro attempts to close the gap between the
heroics of poets in literature and the quotidian life of the adolescent poet, by
writing an autobiography with no plot. Pasandoy pasando is, as its title suggests,
a book with no conclusion: the theme of the essay is Vicente Huidobro and the
image of the Poet he has selected from texts?an image responsible for the name
change from Vicente Garcia Huidobro Fern?ndez to the better sounding Vicente
Huidobro.11 The gerundial form in the book's title belies the poet's lack of self
importance; it defines the essays as a mask assuming the form of a tensionless
analecta, a pilgrim's progress of literary careers. Yet the desire for a structure
that will confer meaning to an uneventful life can be seen when Huidobro
abruptly ends the stale scholastic adventures, the catalogue of his exploits in
school:
Estas cosas tan de colegial no ten?a para qu?

decirlas, pero como humb de narrar mi vida de estudiante...
Y ahora entro de lleno en mi corta vida literaria y de
hombre.
Empezar? por decir que desde hace cinco a?os, o sea
desde los quince, leo generalmente seis horas diarias. Al
principio le?a con desorden, le?a por leer, despu?s poco a
poco he aprendido a leer, estudiando y sacando de la lectura
observada el mayor provecho posible. (656)
[These schoolboy things I did not have to say, but since I had
to narrate my life as a student...
And now I come to my short literary and adult life.
I will say first of all that for the last five years, since
age fifteen, I generally read six hours per day. In the begin
ning I read without order, I read for the sake of reading;
afterwards, slowly, I have learned how to read, studying and
deriving from the readings I have made the utmost benefit.]
The more obvious sign of an order that Huidobro is searching for can be
found in his use of an anterior preterite (hube de narrar), a tense that underscores
an outside imposition. Huidobro, the writer of an autobiography with no events,
reveals that his more fascinating exploits belong to the mechanics of reading. He
has arrived at the present moment in five or six succinct pages and, since there
is nothing else to say, time stops. Narration yields first to a semblance of his daily
life, and then to poetics. He pronounces himself as "feliz, exceptuando la gran
tristeza del Arte y su dolorosa inquietud" [happy, except for the great sadness of
Art and its painful anxieties] (656), but no real unhappiness threatens this
discourse; on the contrary, Huidobro is married, has a child, loves his parents,
and has absolute faith in himself?hardly the kind of exploits suitable to the
autobiography of a Byronian hero. This hero merely reads and imagines his life.
Because the narrative has concluded, he attempts to scandalize the reader with
his most famous pronunciamiento:
En literatura me gusta todo lo que es innovaci?n. Todo lo
que es original.
Odio la rutina, el clich? y lo ret?rico.
Odio las momias y los subterr?neos de museo.
Odio los f?siles literarios.
Odio todos los ruidos de cadenas que atan.
Odio a los que todav?a sue?an con lo antiguo y piensan que nada
puede ser superior a lo pasado. (568)
[In literature I like everything that is innovation. All that

is original.
I hate routine, sliche and rhetoric.
I hate mummies and museum undergrounds.
I hate literary fossils.
I hate all sounds of chains that bind.
I hate those that still dream of the ancient and think that
nothing can be superior to the past.]
The static enumeration, with the compulsive repetition of "odio," is the

structural center of "Yo" [I], a center that hides a lackluster present and that
reveals the particularly childish quality of Huidobro's aesthetics, grounded upon
absolute, unmediated oppositions. The continuity of the autobiography is
broken, since no memory can overcome the emptiness of the present.12 The hero
has done nothing, and his present is composed of a lack displaced and deferred
by the enumeration?a supplement that materializes the present. The list tropes
back upon those endless hours that are the empty center of Huidobro's life and
that, like the kaleidoscopes, usher a kingdom of paper that frames the self within
the "squared horizon" (Horizon carr?) of an apparently unlimited life. This life
is, of course, precisely the life that is offered by poetry.
We should pause in order to examine the consequences of this abrupt
transfer from Ufe to poetics, especially for what it reveals about Huidobro at this
moment. For it is significant that Huidobro stops the narrative framework, that
no conclusion can be found within life in order to justify this autobiography.
From the point of vie w of this text, life itself is the excuse for the poetics, gushing
forth from those uneventful hours of reading and disciplined study. The essay is
an elaborate frame for the young Huidobro, who can offer us at this time only the
enumeration of his likes and dislikes. "Yo" cannot be written except from the
conversion of Vicente into a young writer, and the egomaniacal title exemplifies
the lack of imagination of the autobiographical framework. "I" is not contained
in the banal exploits at school that Huidobro had to narrate, but in the poetic
manifesto. Before the essay is written, "I" is already a poetics, and the essay
deliberately covers up for the lack of a wider theoretical framework (what
Huidobro will find in Creationism), since theory at this point can only originate
from the self. Nevertheless, we should be careful not to consider "Yo" as the
origin of the Creationist poet, for the visible trace of this origin is not in the essay
but in the concrete object of which the essay is but a part. It is the book, Pasando
y pasando, which contains the personality framed as an objet dart.
Huidobro states in "Yo" that "Obras en proyecto tengo muchas pero no
quiero hablar de ellas" [I have many works in progress but I do not want to speak
about them] (658). But in the rare first edition of the book, under the heading
"Obras del autor" [Author's works], the budding eighteen-year old genius has
arranged for fifteen titles to appear in three sections: published works, soon-to
be-published works and works in preparation.13 Most of the latter were never
published, and there is no indication as to whether they were written or not. Of
these phantasmagoric titles, only one, Dulzuras de luna [Sweetness of Moon] is

a book of poems. There is a book of stories, Bajo ese cielo azul [Under that Blue
Sky]; two dramas in three acts, La donna e movile [The Flighty Woman], and La
serenata de Schubert [Schubert's Serenade]', two books of criticism, El templo
de belleza [The Temple of Beauty] and Los que van [Those who go]; two books
of "philosophical essays," La linterna de Diogenes [Diogenes's Lantern] and
Nuestros peripat?ticos [Our Peripatetics], the latter identified as a book of
"philosophical dialogues"; three novels, Los h?roes del dolor [The Heroes of
Pain] and La rival de Frin? [Frings Rival], and probably the most interesting
of them all, Do?a Quijota. The same list appears in one of the verso pages of
Canciones en la noche (1913).14
The paper constructions that accompany this book present the author as a
limitless, protean creature, able to play all of the parts in the dramatic formulas
of genre: he is a poet, but above all, given the sheer number of works offered, a
novelist and philosopher. His life is already a life sacrificed to paper, catalogued
in terms of works published or in preparation. The book itself has been made into
the object of a personality, a synecdoche for the writer, a laboratory of self
invention. 15 Huidobro confronts the reader with the blatant fact of a constructed
persona of which he is both a dissembling center and origin. If the book is the
object of personality, the frontispiece tropes upon itself as the image of
Huidobro's work?hidden within its own centrality, outside of the text yet
inside, available to the reader only by examining a specific edition.
The creation of the author parallels the creation of the book. This kingdom
of paper will transgress the autobiographical pact, since what has been promised
within it is never delivered. A game is played between revelation and occulta
tion: although books that exist in this realm can be used in order to furnish the
evidence of self-anticipation, they are not published, nor brought into the public
domain. These texts are followed in the rest of Huidobro ' s work by the creation
of not one chronology but two, the real and the possible?one composed of the
written and published works, the other openly referring to the possibly written
and unpublished works. Huidobro wants to create a non-contradictory image in
which the external order is equivalent to the internal, to the extent that the poet
finally loses all possibility of distinguishing between truth or falsehood, a victim
of his own rhetorical formulation. Huidobro becomes his own aesthetic cat
egory, an image created from previous texts. This can be seen in the prophetic
authority that opens his autobiographical essay:
Nac? el 10 de enero de 1893.

Una vieja medio bruja y medio sabia predijo que yo
ser?a un gran bandido o un grande hombre.
?Por cu?l de las dos cosas optar?? Ser un bandido es
indiscutiblemente muy art?stico.. .Ser un grande hombre?
Seg?n. Si he de ser un buen diputado, senador o ministro, me
parece lo m?s antiest?tico del mundo. (651)
[I was born on January 10, 1893.

An old lady, half witch and sage, foresaw that I
would be either a great bandit or a great man.
Which of the two should I chose? To be a great
bandit is indisputably very artistic... A great man? It de
pends. If I end up as a great deputy, senator or minister, I
think it would be the most antiaesthetic thing in the world.]
There is no action in this drama; the underlying tensions are resolved before
writing begins. Huidobro's birth is already a conclusion, an event framed as an
aesthetic category. Aesthetics guides the reader's response and modifies the
temporality of discourse: it presents ufe as already-written, foreshadowed. The
sage predicts a glorious future, but Huidobro will not merely fulfill the predic
tion. He will name it, and by naming it, surpass it. Language, literature, even life
always go back to the same place in which the heightened sense of drama that
the persona offers the public is uncannily equivalent to the sense of nothingness
that it seems to inhabit. Huidobro exercises his aesthetic choice between two
versions of the same law that portends an unquestionable greatness. The fact that
this greatness is beyond the origin, beyond physical birth, means that it can never
be put into question. All questions have already been taken into account, and the
poet and language can exist in a realm of total liberty.
The key word in Huidobro's universe is control. Huidobro controls the
signified in Creationism, by having it refer only to the author's created realms.
He exercises the same control by writing and rewriting his works, forcing the
reader to take into account two or more versions of a created poem as indepen
dent objects that coexist in a textual universe. Finally, Huidobro submits the
relationship between author and public to a systematic transgression of the
autobiographical pact. Not only his creation, but his self-creation, is an emblem
of control. The only aesthetic pact, for Huidobro, is that of the author with
himself. It is surely a paradox that this absolutely controlling system grounds, at
the same time, some of the most unfettered linguistic expression in Latin
American poetry. For Huidobro liberates his readers by pointing out precisely
the paradoxical ambiguity of language and text. The author's freedom is gained
at the expense of pointing out precisely the ways in which he is enslaved to the
work. Huidobro can only be a minor deity within the kingdom of paper he
creates. It is within this realm that the emperor holds allegiance only to himself.
Huidobro's work should exemplify a new reading of poetry, one that holds
open the possibility that poets, with all their attendant discourses and polemics,
live within the words they have created, and within the systematic relationships
that they control by means of their textual universe. When the gap between
poetry and persona is so great, as it is (or seems to be) in the case of Huidobro,
we should not look for and underscore the dialectics, for these are but a poetic
illusion. Criticism on Huidobro has fomented the illusion by contrasting
Huidobro's apparently insufferable persona, his demand of allegiance to his
poetic theories, to his revolutionary poetry. In the avant-garde, in particular,

poets inscribed their persona under the rubric of the various poetic movements
to which they lent their signatures. In Altazor the poet and the antipoet find in
words the only possibility of a life beyond life. In spite of the critical attempts
at framing Huidobro, his persona and his work are continually shifting catego
ries, since Huidobro, better than most, knew how to frame and catalogue
signifiers, poems, even a list of unpublished works, while he himself remained
immune to any categories imposed from without. Huidobro, the poet who
defined everyone else, is a poet who resists definition.
The image Huidobro wants us to have of himself is that of the writer who
has unconfessed secrets to confess, whose poems possess a hidden code. This is
why finally, and in order to surmount the systems of control that Huidobro
establishes, the only option left open for the critic is to concentrate on the
seduction of the code itself. In Huidobro's work, meaning itself does not exist
beyond, or within words, but in their dramatic unfolding.
THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
NOTES
1 Huidobro's bibliography is full of confusing and misleading dates.

Canciones en la noche is Huidobro's third published book, although it is the
second one he wrote, preferring obviously to publish first La gruta del silencio.
The same bibliographical tampering will be found late on with?7 espejo de agua.
and even with Altazor, which Huidobro dates from 1919. Some of these
bibliographical plays will be taken into account in this essay. An indispensable
resource for Huidobro's dates (and the one I am using here), is Nicolas Hey's
bibliography in Revista Iberoamericana. Except where noted, all references to
Huidobro's work are from Volume I of the Obras completas, ed. Hugo Montes,
(Santiago: Editorial Andr?s Bello, 1976). All translations into English are mine.
2 See, for example, Pablo Neruda's commentary as emblematic of this
issue: "As? como la mayor?a de su prosa peca de su persona, de su juguet?n
personalismo, su obra po?tica es un espejo en el que se suceden las im?genes de
la delicia pura o el juego de su propio sacrificio. Porque a m? me parece que
Huidobro se consumi? en su propio juego y en su propio fuego. A pesar de que
su inteligencia po?tica es la clave de su brillo, tuvo tal predilecci?n por forjarse
un anecdotario personal que termin? por abrumarlo y sepultarlo. Por suerte, su
poes?a salvar? su recuerdo, recuerdo que seguir? creciendo en profundidad y
espacio." [Just as most of his prose is guilty of his persona, of his playful
personalism, his poetical work is a mirror in which images of pure delight or the
game of his own sacrifice follow each other. For it seems to me that Huidobro
consumed himself in his own game and in his own fire. Although his poetical
intelligence is the key for his brilliance, he had such a predilection to make
himself a personal collection of anecdotes that he was ultimately overwhelmed
and buried in them. Luckily, his poetry will rescue his memory, a memory that
will keep on growing in depth and space]. See Ren? de Costa, "Sobre Huidobro
y Neruda,"Revistalberoamericana, 106-7 (1979): 379-386. Neruda's "B?squeda
de Vicente Huidobro" is on pages 383-384.
3 See, for example, Ren? de Costa's illuminating attempt at bringing in text
and context under the guise of Huidobro's various "careers" in Vicente Huidobro:
The Careers of a Poet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
4 For Huidobro, the kaleidoscope is an instrument that has "algo de sagrado
y de juego inmortal [something sacred and of inmortal play to it] (794), since it
is "la m?sica de ojo" [the music of the eye] (795)?capable of opening the door
to the unity of all perception.
5 A study of the Borgesian text as a parody of the avant-garde and of
Huidobro's Creationism is in order, particularly in the link between the language
of Tl?n and Huidobro's Canto VI and VII in Altazor. For a brilliant reading of
Tl?n and Ultraism, see James Irby's "Borges and the Idea of Utopia" quoted
below.
6 The poem first appears in Nord-Sud 2 in French as "L'homme triste"
(Paris, 15 April 1917), p. 9 with a note "traduit de l'espagnole."
7 I should clarify that I am not referring only to the transfer from one
language to another, but to Huidobro's rewriting of the same text into two
different forms, of the same Creationist object as it is written and erased on the
page. In other words, taking Huidobro to his final conclusions, if the Creationist
object refers only to itself, if it creates new phenomena with no recourse to
natural creation, what is the role of copying and reproduction within this system?
What are we to make of the same object, when it possesses two different forms?
8 For a fascinating glimpse into this relationship see Ren? de Costa (1984),
43-44.
9 For the best survey of this dispute see Admussen, Richard L., and Ren?
de Costa, "Huidobro, Reverdy y la edici?n pr?ncipe de "El espejo de agua, ' " in
Vincent Huidobro y el creacionismo, ed. Ren? de Costa, (Madrid: Taurus, 1975),
249-264.
lOHorizon carr? is a book almost forgotten by critics, and the suggestive
problems of translation that the book proposes in terms of its possibilities for
investigation are all but conveniently subsumed in the criticism on Huidobro by
the emphasis on the more Byzantine aspects of the links between the poems and
creacionismo, a focus which inevitably leads back to the interminable polemics
between Huidobro and his antagonists. One of the consequences of this anxiety
is that the work itself is forgotten, or examined according to parameters from
outside the system. The system itself offers a degree of complexity that is
unmatched in other Latin American poets.
11 As we can seen in the extraordinary collection of Huidobriana as
sembled for the Spanish journal Poes?a by Ren? de Costa, it is only with the
publication of Las pagodas ocultas in 1914 that the young writer settled on
Vicente Huidobro. See Poes?a. Revista Ilustrada de Informaci?n po?tica, 32-33
(Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1989): 28.
12The most obvious model for this list, which reveals Huidobro as an
aesthetic despot, is Marinetti 's "Manifesto of Futurism," published in Le Figaro
on February 20,1909. Nelson Osorio Tejeda has unearthed a Spanish translation
from 1909 in Honduras. See his "Sobre la recepci?n del Futurismo en Am?rica
Latina" in Revista Chilena de Literatura, 8,15 (1982): 25-37. The more widely
circulated translation was done in 1909 by Ram?n G?mez de la Serna for the
Spanish review Prometeo. There is also a Portuguese translation the same year
in the Jornal de Noticias, in Salvador, Bah?a, according to Klaus M?ller Bergh
(158). Huidobro, who includes in his book of detailed critique on Marinetti,
underscores this compedium of infantile hate as evidence that he has come to the
point of departure for his essay.
13The fascinating account of this first edition, systematically confiscated
and burned by members of Huidobro's family, is found in de Costa, 1984, (4).
I am using the first edition, consulted in Yale University's Sealy Mudd Library.
The complete title is Vicente Garcia Huidobro Fern?ndez, Pasando y pasando,
cr?nicas y comentarios. (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Chile, 1914).
14Vicente Garc?a Huidobro Fern?ndez, Canciones en la noche: Libro de
modernas trovas, (Chile: Imprenta y encuademaci?n Chile, 1913). In the first
edition of his later Ad?n (1916), Huidobro once again announces titles that are
nowhere to be found: two books of poems?El canto imperceptible and La
dulzura inefable?and El hombre eterno, a long poem whose title could be an
anticipation for the much later Altazor (1931).
15The model that Huidobro offers to the reader is of course based on the
immensely influential Historia de mis libros, written by Rub?n Dario in 1909.
For Dar?o, the writing of literary autobiography entailed a previous reading of
the "obra" as a synecdoche of personality, a category that runs concurrently and
illuminates the category of "life." Writer and personality are thus merged in
Dar?o's book with the benefit of hindsight. Dar?o can attempt a definition of
himself as writer and his books as his possessions precisely because those books
have been published and are rescued by the author himself. The act of fixing
chronologies or interpretations is always a posteriori, inscribed as possibility,
since readers have already been acquainted with the body of work in question.
WORKS CITED
Collazos, Oscar, Ed. Recopilaci?n de textos sobre los vanguardismos en la

Am?ricaLatina. Habana: Casa de las Americas, 1970.
Costa, Ren? de, Ed. Vicente Huidobroy el creacionismo. Madrid: Taurus, 1975.
-. "Sobre Huidobro y Neruda."?E 106-7 (1979): 379-86.
-. Vicente Huidobro: The Careers of a Poet. Oxford: Qarendon Press, 1984.
Dar?o, Rub?n. Obras completas. Ed. M.Sanmiguel Raim?ndez. Madrid: A
Aguado, 1950-1955.
Hey, Nicholas. "Bibliograf?a de y sobre Vicente Huidobro." Revista
Iberoamericana 91 (1975): 293-353.
Huidobro, Vicente. La gruta del silencio. Santiago: Imprenta Universitaria,
n.d.1913.
-. Canciones en la noche. Libro de modernas trovas compuestas por Vicente
Garc?a Huidobro Fern?ndez. Santiago: Imprenta y encuademaci?n Chile,
1913.
-. Pasandoypasando... Cr?nicas y comentarios. Santiago de Chile. Imprenta
Chile, 1914.
-. Antolog?a. Ed. Eduardo Anguita Santiago: Empresa Editora Zig-Zag,
1945.
-. Obras completas. Ed. Braulio Arenas. Santiago: Editorial Andr?s Bello,

1976. 2 vols.
-. Obras completas. Ed. Hugo Montes. Vol 1. Santiago: Editorial Andr?s
Bello, 1976. 2 vols.
Irby, James. "Borges and the Idea of Utopia" Books Abroad45 (1971): 411-420.
M?ller-Bergh, Klaus. "El hombre y la t?cnica: contribuci?n al conocimiento de
corrientes vanguardistas hispanoamericanas." Revista Iberoamericana
118-19(1982): 149-76.
Osorio Tejeda, Nelson. "Sobre la recepci?n del futurismo en Am?rica Latina."
Revista Chilena de Literatura 8.15 (1982): 25-37.
Poes?a. Revista Ilustrada de Informaci?n Po?tica 32-33. Madrid: Ministerio de
Cultura, 1989.

Quiroga - Huidobro and The Kingdom of Paper

Transféré par

Informations du document

Description originale:

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Quiroga - Huidobro and The Kingdom of Paper

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Vicente Huidobro and the Kingdom of Paper

Author(s): Jos Quiroga

Vicente Huidobro's work is the first to give us a poetics of language in

Huidobro saw himself as an oracle, as the ultimate source of meaning for

Because Creationism is based on the existence of such a category as the

Os dir? qu? entiendo por poema creado. Es un poema en el que cada

independiente del mundo externo, desligado de cualquiera otra

[I will tell you what I understand by a created poem. It is a poem in

II. SOURCES TRANSLATED AND ERASED

After examining the relationship between author and work in Huidobro's

[YOUR FIGURE / illumined by fire / Something wants to come out

Tu figura se ilumina al fuego

[Your figure is illuminated on the fire / And something wants to come

"quelque chose") borne out of a reflection. By virtue of its disappearance from

III. PAPER TIGER IN A PAPER WAR

In "La confesi?n inconfesable" ["The Unconfessable Confession"] an

"A los diecisiete a?os, me dije: 'Debo ser el primer poeta de

Estas cosas tan de colegial no ten?a para qu?

[In literature I like everything that is innovation. All that

The static enumeration, with the compulsive repetition of "odio," is the

these phantasmagoric titles, only one, Dulzuras de luna [Sweetness of Moon] is

Nac? el 10 de enero de 1893.

[I was born on January 10, 1893.

poetic theories, to his revolutionary poetry. In the avant-garde, in particular,

THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

1 Huidobro's bibliography is full of confusing and misleading dates.

Collazos, Oscar, Ed. Recopilaci?n de textos sobre los vanguardismos en la

-. Obras completas. Ed. Braulio Arenas. Santiago: Editorial Andr?s Bello,

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi