No. 0 (Inaugural) 2010

 

Negative Dialectic or "fatal paradox"? Tension and disunity in the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Vicente Huidobro, 1916-1935

Tim Bowron (Spanish Program, University of Canterbury, New Zealand) Email

 

Abstract:

This article argues that the ultimate failure of the early 20^th century Latin American avant-garde to carry through its original promise of transforming reality through art, as viewed through the vanguardista poetry of Vicente Huidobro and Pablo Neruda, is only a failure if we measure it against Hegelian expectations of an artistic vision of unity or totality. On the other hand, if we accept that contradictions in an artist or an artistic body of work can exist without being "problematic" or necessarily demanding resolution then arguably the poetry of Huidobro's Altazor and the first two cycles of Neruda's Residencia en la tierra is a more faithful and accurate record of "lived experience" than more "realist" post-vanguardist works such as Neruda's Canto general or España en el corazón.

 

 

Introduction

 

The two Chilean poets Pablo Neruda and Vicente Huidobro have been characterised by many scholars as representative of two rival, antagonistic tendencies within the 20^th century literary avant-garde. On the one hand, the poetry of Huidobro is generally seen as tending towards abstraction and the exaltation of the poet's ability to transcend reality, while on the other the poetry of Neruda (at least in his pre-1935 vanguardista phase) is perceived as tending towards dissolution and self-negation (see for example Yurkievich "Los avatares de la vanguardia" 352-353).[1] Other scholars have identified these two rival tendencies as belonging not exclusively to particular poets but rather to two different "phases" of the avant-garde - the first (optimistic, affirmative) corresponding with the initial publication of various revolutionary manifestos, the second (pessimistic) with the production of the major poetic works themselves (see for instance Shaw 32-33).

However, this article will contend that on the contrary these two opposing tendencies (of self-affirmation and self-negation) can be seen to be present simultaneously in the avant-garde poetry of both Neruda and Huidobro, and that as such the similarities between these two poets are more significant than their differences. This despite the well-documented, bitter decades-long literary rivalry between Huidobro and Neruda (also involving a third party in the form of their fellow Chilean Communist Party member and vanguardista Pablo de Rokha) that came to be known as "la guerrilla literaria" (Zerán 23-26). Ultimately it will be argued that it was the perceived incompatibility of this artistic disunity or contradiction with a commitment to orthodox Marxism that led Neruda (along with many other avant-garde poets such as the Peruvian César Vallejo and the Spaniard Rafael Alberti) to renounce vanguardismo in favour of a more "realist" aesthetic. As a result, only Huidobro and a handful of other Spanish American poets such as Octavio Paz and Oliverio Girondo were left to continue with the so-called "vanguardist experiment".

This view is based on fact that orthodox or "classical" Marxism, due to its Hegelian origins, is predisposed to seek unity in any given set of contradictions, and as such cannot reconcile itself to an aesthetic (such as that of vanguardismo) which is inherently unstable, hermetic and self-contradictory. In the world of Hegelian dialectics, thesis plus antithesis must necessarily lead to synthesis. However, the argument put forward here is that, contrary to the Hegelian view, resolution of the many inherent contradictions within the literary avant-garde was neither inevitable nor necessarily desirable.

In this respect this author does not reject a dialectical approach to art so much as the Hegelian version of the dialectic, following the neo-Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno who famously argued against the concept of dialectics and in particular the "negation of the negation" as an instrument allowing the reconciliation of mutually antagonistic elements into a positive totality (an application of the dialectic typical of leading orthodox Marxist practitioners such as György Lukács).[2] As Adorno says in his Negative Dialectics:

To equate the negation of the negation with positivity is the quintessence of identification; it is the formal principle in its purest form. What thus wins out in the inmost core of [Hegelian] dialectics is the anti-dialectical principle: that traditional logic which, "more arithmetico", takes minus times minus for a plus (Negative Dialectics 158).[3]

In what follows then, we shall attempt to show that the conflicted and often contradictory poetry of Huidobro and Neruda written in the period between 1916 and 1935 constitute an example of this "Negative Dialectic" in motion - that is to say, that far being merely (in the words of Huidobro's Altazor) a "paradoja fatal" the contradictions of these poets represent the only rational response to the fragmented and irrational nature of capitalist modernity.

 

Defining the avant-garde

 

The so-called vanguardia literaria or literary avant-garde is a phenomenon that almost defies definition. As Renato Poggioli noted in his seminal 1962 work The Theory of the Avant-Garde:

The particular poetics of various movements in the avant-garde do not lend themselves to study under the species of a single aesthetic concept, and the difficulty is even greater because of the lack of temporal distance necessary to establish a fair historical perspective. They are to be examined, if at all, case by case (5).

In the context of the two Chilean poets under discussion here, this problem of definition is made even more acute by the fact that their works reveal the overlapping influence of literary schools (Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism etc) whose aesthetic principles were often inconsistent and contradictory in nature. Nevertheless, a number of general characteristics of these avant-garde works have been identified by scholars that may serve as a descriptive - if not definitive - guide.

The Symbolist poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and the philosophy of Henri Bergson have been noted as one set of influences shaping the aesthetics of avant-garde writers (Perdigó 120-121) as has the invention of the X-Ray machine that revealed for the first time the existence of the "fourth dimension" (Bohn, The Rise of Surrealism 8). As Amado Alonso observed in his pioneering study of the poetry of Pablo Neruda, another characteristic of the avant-garde was its hermetic or "trobar clus" quality (Alonso 9). This tendency towards "ensimismamiento" or opaque introversion has historically been one of the biggest obstacles to the reception of avant-garde poetry by both readers and critics alike, and has fuelled criticism (including by some of its former practitioners) that it was fundamentally elitist.

The turn inward from external reality must though be understood in the context of the desire of the literary avant-garde to radically alter the nature of the relationship between art and reality (Harris 3-4). In place of the conventional mimesis according to which art was a mirror held up to nature, the avant-garde sought instead to imbue artistic creations with their own autonomous, generational capacity (Pérez 50).

However this autonomy was essentially negative in nature - as the critic Peter Bürger points out the avant-garde sought to stress its independence from bourgeois society primarily as a reaction against the set of capitalist economic relations that the avant-garde artists saw as undermining their status within that society (Bürger 85). Whereas in feudal society art had performed a vital role in legitimating the power of the aristocracy and the Church, in the age of capitalism the artist was deprived of the security of noble patronage and condemned to eke out an existence as a producer of commodities whose success or otherwise depended on the vagaries of the market.

No wonder then that Adorno should feel moved to make the provocative claim that "art is the social antithesis of society" (Aesthetic Theory 8). Given the prevailing state of "unfreedom" and irrationality in bourgeois society, Adorno argues that rejection of the empirical world is for the artist the only logical choice. In opposition to the champion of Marxist realism Lukács, Adorno stressed the impossibility of objectivity or "disinterestedness" in art, for as he points out in a society riddled with so many antagonisms and so much irrationality the very idea of an artistic conception of organic unity or totality seems manifestly absurd (Bürger 84).

On the other side of the ledger, the continuity that existed between the 20^th century avant-garde and earlier schools such as Symbolism, Romanticism and Hispanic Modernism (in particular the poetry of Rubén Darío) has led to some scholars casting doubt on the notion that the avant-garde constituted a radical or revolutionary rupture in the history of Western literature. While most would not go as far as Poggioli in concluding therefore that the real starting point of the avant-garde should be pushed back to the mid-19^th century, there appears to be a general consensus that many of the literary techniques and motifs employed by the poets of the avant-garde were borrowed from writers like Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Whitman and Darío (Yurkievich, "Los avatares" 359; Costa, "El creacionismo pre-polémico" 262). Moreover, while the profound political and spiritual crisis of the First World War is often credited with a crucial role in the formation of the avant-garde, in fact its two founding documents (Marinetti's Manifesto del futurismo and Apollinaire's Les peintres cubistes) were published before 1914.

Undoubtedly the key figure in the birth of the avant-garde in the Spanish-speaking world was the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. While the other great literary revolutionary the Italian Filipo Marinetti was not without influence (especially in the area of poetic imagery) the core aesthetic of his Futurist credo was criticised by leading Spanish American vanguardistas such as Huidobro, who famously observed that "cantar la guerra, los boxeadores, la violencia, los atletas, es algo mucho más antiguo que Pindaro" ("Futurismo y maquinismo" 744).

Even in Spain itself, Futurism - despite gaining wide currency during the second decade of the 20^th century thanks to the proselytising efforts of its chief local adherent Ramón Gómez de la Serna - was superseded from around 1920 onwards by the followers of Apollinaire (Bohn, Apollinaire and the International Avant-Garde 170). Against the "cult of the new" proposed by Marinetti, Apollinaire and the literary cubists grouped around the Parisian review Nord-Sud stressed the key role of the poet in not merely imitating the new reality but also in fundamentally transforming our perception of it. As Apollinaire put it in his 1917 manifesto L'esprit nouveau et les poètes:

Même s'il est vrai qu'il n'y a rien de nouveau sous le soleil, il ne consent point à ne pas approfondir tout ce qui n'est pas nouveau sous le soleil...Il y a mille et mille combinaisons naturelles qui n'ont jamais été composées...Il est tout dans la surprise. (391)

(Even if it is true that there is nothing new under the sun, it [the new spirit] does not consent to abjure the discovery of new profundities in all that is not new...There are thousands upon thousands of natural combinations that have not yet been composed...Everything is in the element of surprise)

The practice of the juxtaposition of seemingly antagonistic or contradictory elements to form new images is without doubt one of the most important contributions of Apollinaire to the literary avant-garde, as René de Costa underlines in his biography of Huidobro (Costa, Careers of a poet 49). To be sure, this practice had certain historical precedents in the baroque poetry of Góngora and the English metaphysical poets, however as Renato Poggioli points out despite the sense of disillusionment or desengaño present in both the poetry of the baroque and avant-garde schools there is a fundamental difference in terms of their attitude towards the literary past. While the poets of the 17 ^th century looked back to a lost "Golden Age", the 20^th century avant-garde had its eyes firmly fixed upon the future (Poggioli 209-212).

In addition, it should be stressed that although the literary movements to which Apollinaire gave birth generally rejected the triumphalism of Marinetti and the Futurists, it could not be fairly said that they were uniformly pessimistic. Instead, as the scholar Saúl Yurkievich has noted, we must recognise that within the avant-garde both "modernolatría" or the cult of the modern and the tendency towards philosophical/historical pessimism co-existed in equal measure (Yurkievich, "Los avatares de la vanguardia" 352-3).

This is hardly surprising given the many contradictions inherent in Western society at the time - as Ana Pizarro notes one of the most interesting things about the literary avant-garde of the early 20^th century was precisely the way in which it managed to bring to the surface "…a través de su sintaxis las contradicciones de la complejidad cultural e ideológica de un momento de crisis" (Pizarro 109).

In terms of chronology it can also hardly be coincidental that the publication of the first poetic work by a Spanish American poet that could properly be called "vanguardist" - Huidobro's El espejo de agua - occurred in 1916, at the height of Apollinaire's literary career and on the eve of Huidobro's embarkation from Buenos Aires for Paris to enrol himself in the ranks of the literary Cubists.

Hugo Verani in the introduction to his book Las vanguardias literarias en Hispanoamérica advances the view that: "en el continente latinoamericano los límites temporales de los vanguardismos son, aproximadamente, 1916 y 1935" (13). Derek Harris in his study of the Spanish avant-garde proposes 1936 as a logical end point, and within the framework of Spanish history it is easy to see why this would seem an obvious choice (Harris 8). Other critics suggest a timeline that extends out into the early 1940s (Shaw 31).

However as the subject under discussion here is the poetry of Vicente Huidobro and Pablo Neruda, Verani's end point of 1935 seems the most logical given that 1935 saw the publication of the second cycle of Residencia en la tierra and with it the closure of Neruda's vanguardista phase. The following years, 1936-37, saw him consciously reject the avant-garde aesthetic in favour of a simpler, more didactic style[4] - typified in the following lines from the poem "Explico algunas cosas" from Tercera Residencia (1947):

Preguntaréis: Y dónde están las lilas?
Y la metafísica cubierta de amapolas?
Y la lluvia que a menudo golpeaba
sus palabras llenándolas
de agujeros y pájaros?
Os voy a contar todo lo que me pasa… (Neruda, Obras completas 369)

Huidobro on the other hand despite sharing Neruda's membership of the Chilean Communist Party and commitment to the anti-fascist cause did not feel the need to subordinate his art to political expediency, remaining true to the avant-garde aesthetic even though his creacionista enterprise failed ultimately to realise its original Promethean promise.

 

Huidobro's "Cubist" poetry - El espejo de agua and Poemas árticos

 

We begin our investigation with the two volumes of Spanish-language poetry published by Huidobro during his "literary Cubist" phase, that is between the years 1916 and 1918 when he was either heavily influenced by or in active collaboration with the group of poets (Apollinaire, Reverdy, Dermée, Jacob) around the Parisian review Nord-Sud.

In affixing the label of literary cubism to El Espejo de agua and Poemas árticos we do not mean to suggest a lack of originality on the part of Huidobro in producing these works. Rather, it is merely a recognition that throughout his career Huidobro's aesthetic was a constantly evolving one which drew upon many different literary influences - moving from the Romantic and modernista models which underpinned most of his pre-1916 poetry, through literary Cubism to his later encounters with Surrealism and Dada in the form of André Breton and Tristan Tzara.

That Huidobro was capable of synthesising these divergent schools to create his own unique artistic works is beyond doubt, however in his desire to defend himself against accusations of plagiarism by his literary detractors the Chilean poet was often driven to make extravagant claims about the status of his work as an artefact created as it were ex nihilo. Examples of these claims can be seen in the various literary manifestos published by Huidobro after the death of Apollinaire and the break with Reverdy at the end of 1918 - for instance the famous defence of his literary school of "creacionismo" as: "Un hecho nuevo inventado por mí, creado por mí, que no podría existir sin mí" ("El creacionismo" 248).

Given this evidence of an ongoing and fluid process of evolution in Huidobro's poetry we are tempted to agree with René de Costa when he says: "The only constant element in Huidobro's complicated life and works is not his much touted Creationism, at best a banner of the 1920s, his personal label for literary Cubism, but rather change and the ferocity with which he defended the integrity of his thinking as it evolved" (Costa, The Careers of a Poet 4).

What then are the poetic techniques that make up these two collections - El espejo de agua and Poemas árticos distinctive?

In essence what Huidobro does in these poems is to create new and startling images through the union of seemingly unrelated elements - for instance those of the night/forest, mirror/water, dream/ship - which in turn work to form inter-textual patterns of connotative or evocative meaning. Thus although the significance of the various objects or images is not immediately clear when they are viewed in isolation, taken together they invite the reader to participate in a radical "re-visioning" of reality that goes beyond the level of surface appearances.

As Huidobro had earlier written in his 1914 collection of essays, Pasando y pasando:

Admiro a los que perciben las relaciones más lejanas de las cosas. A los que saben escribir versos que se resbalan como la sombra de un pájaro en el agua y que sólo advierten los de muy buena vista (qtd. in Caracciolo-Trejo, 33).

In addition to this fragmented 're-visioning' of reality, we also often find in Huidobro's poems a state of tension between a centrifugal force that tends towards separation and a centripetal force that tends towards unity - the forces which according to his most famous literary manifesto correspond to the "two personalities of the poet" ("El creacionismo" 245).

A good example of this tension can be found in the poem "Año Nuevo" in Huidobro's 1916 collection El espejo de agua, in which the transcendental urge of humanity to be at one with the gods expressed in the first stanza:

El sueño de Jacob se ha realizado
Un ojo se abre frente al espejo
Y las gentes que bajan a la tela
Arrojaron su carne como un abrigo viejo

- a stanza that reads as though it might have been written by one of the English metaphysical poets such as George Herbert or Henry Vaughan - is completely undermined in the closing lines:

Detrás de la sala
Un viejo ha rodado al vacío (Obra poética 403) [5]

The tension between the transcendental projection and dissolution of the poetic "yo" is also reflected throughout El espejo de agua in the frequent references to sleepwalking or "sonámbulismo". Nowhere is this more evident than in the collection's title poem in which the poet is passive, an empty vessel propelled along by the turbulent seas of his own subconscious - here represented by the mirror/pool:

Mi espejo, corriente por las noches,
Se hace arroyo y se aleja de mi cuarto…
Sobre sus olas, bajo cielos sonámbulos,
Mis ensueños se alejan como barcos.

Only in the concluding lines do we witness the return of the poetic "yo lírico", the Romantic figure who recalls nothing so much as José de Espronceda's pirate captain:

De pie en la popa siempre me veréis cantando.
Una rosa secreta se hincha en mi pecho
Y un ruiseñor ebrio aletea en mi dedo. (392)

In the next poem in the collection, "Arte poética", the classic idea of art as a mirror held up to nature is contrasted with the voluntarist notion of inventing "mundos nuevos" and the idea of the poet as "un pequeño dios". Yet as we progress through the other eight poems of Espejo de agua this exuberance diminishes and in its place there arises a prevailing sense of melancholy and unease. "El hombre triste" warns of the dangers of "puertas mal cerradas" while everywhere things seem to be in a state of decay - "todo se abate".

The image of the "estanque verde" which we encountered first in "El Espejo de Agua" recurs in many of the poems that follow it such as "Nocturno", but instead of existing as a space of dream-voyaging/liberation it becomes instead associated with death:

El miedo se esparce en el aire
Y el viento llora en el estanque…
En la casa alguien ha muerto (400)

This mood persists through the next few poems "Otoño", "Nocturno II" and "Año nuevo" (see above) before the final enigmatic poem "Alguien iba a nacer" closes out the collection:

En la vida
Sólo a veces hay un poco de sol.

Sin embargo vendrá
Alguien la espera. (405)

The contradiction between artistic dissolution and transcendentalism is further heightened in the next collection, Poemas árticos. The distortion of time in poems such as "Horas" "Luna" and "Campanario" is one way in which a sense of decay or paralysis is evoked - objects are suspended in motion and the relationships between them inverted - "las horas maduras / caen sobre la vida" (532), "la luna sueña como un reloj" (562) "Sobre la lejania / un reloj se vacía" (580). Positive images of dream/memory and creativity/transcendence are also present in the form of ships and birds, yet in many cases the ships have become shipwrecks or succumbed to some other form of mischance, while the birds have frequently become lost or deprived of the ability to fly. Thus the "viejo marino / que cose los horizontes cortados" in "Marino" asks rhetorically in "Puerto":

En dónde naufragaron
Mis naves florecidas (590)

- while in "Ruta" we learn that:

Aquel pájaro que voló de mi pecho
Ha perdido el camino (544)

Other images of dissolution/destruction that are repeated throughout the collection include the bird with broken wings, the bird who "agoniza en la garganta" and the absent, unnamed interlocutor to whom the poet often addresses himself, as in the following passage from "Égloga":

EN DÓNDE ESTÁS

Una tarde como ésta
te busqué en vano
Sobre la niebla de todos los caminos
Me encontraba a mí mismo
Y en el humo de mi cigarro

Había un pájaro perdido (547)

Not all images of destruction are negative however. Along with the anguish and suffering of the "yo lírico" and its many-plumed birds of poesy there exists with the dawning of the "Machine Age" the possibility of an alternative route to transcendence through technology and in particular through powered flight. Thus in "Wagon-Lit" instead of a comet it is a train that breaks away from the stars and cuts across the heavens, while in "HP" the poet launches upon a paean to the possibilities of the new era that is almost Futurist in its conception:

Mi mano
Dirige el automóvil
Igual que un autopiano
La estepa
80 caballos de fuerza (591)

Once again though there is no final resolution of the conflicting centripetal and centrifugal tendencies in this collection - no neat synthesis tying together all of the "loose ends". Instead we find in the last, eponymous poem of Poemas árticos a return to the lyricism of Huidobro's earlier work:

Sobre los mares árticos
Busco la alondra que voló de mi pecho (594)

- albeit a lyricism that is now clouded by absence and negation. As was the case with the final poem in El espejo de agua we remain trapped in a state of limbo, waiting.

 

Neruda's Tentativa del hombre infinito

 

Like those of his fellow Chilean Huidobro, Pablo Neruda's early works (Crepusculario and Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada) can be classified as belonging very much within the Romantic and modernista traditions. However, as a younger man of more limited economic means (in contrast to Huidobro's patrician background Neruda was the son of a railwayman who grew up in rural southern Chile) Neruda's ability to participate directly in the latest cultural trends emerging from Europe was necessarily constrained and as such his entry into the ranks of the Latin American vanguardia literaria occurred somewhat later, with the publication in 1925-26 of Tentativa del hombre infinito ("Venture of the Infinite Man").

Written in the wake of Breton's publication of the first Surrealist manifesto in Paris, Tentativa reveals many stylistic and thematic similarities with the work of that poetic school. However, in contrast to Huidobro's fondness for inventing new literary schools and movements Neruda was never much interested in labelling his work with some precise doctrinal label, though he was undoubtedly aware of and influenced by many of the various "- isms" which continually vied for supremacy within the early 20^th century avant-garde. As Neruda wrote in his memoirs:

"Algunos me creen un poeta surrealista, otros un realista y otros no me creen poeta. Todos ellos tienen un poco de razón y otro poco de sinrazón" (Confieso que he vivido 382).

The truth is that there existed not one but many different Nerudas, depending on which phase of his poetry we are investigating. This is generally acknowledged by most scholars, although some such as Greg Dawes still argue for the existence of a dialectical unity or "progression" in Neruda's work (Dawes 15-21). In this way Dawes hopes to rescue Neruda's earlier works from the charge of abstract Formalism or Aestheticism, while simultaneously implying their inferiority to more "mature" pieces such as España en el corazón and Canto general. Yet the Neruda who wrote the hermetic verses that make up Tentativa and the first two cycles of Residencia en la tierra is manifestly not the same Neruda who later complained that:

La burguesía exige una poesía más y más aislada de la realidad. El poeta que sabe llamar al pan pan y al vino vino es peligroso para el agonizante capitalismo. Más conveniente es que el poeta se crea, como lo dijera Vicente Huidobro, "un pequeño dios". (Confieso que he vivido 385)

Within each of the stages of Neruda's artistic evolution (the course of which was neither linear nor inevitable) there existed also many contradictions - including in Tentativa. In the works by Huidobro already surveyed, one of the major contradictions was between the transcendental, Promethean spirit and the impulse towards entropy and dissolution. In Tentativa we find the same basic tension between a personal quest for/attempt to embrace the absolute on the one hand, and on the other the strong conviction that this attempt can only ultimately end in failure.

Throughout Tentativa there is a strong atmosphere of liminality or being between and beyond different times and/or spaces. This is accomplished right at the start of the poem in the first canto which concludes with the lines "sólo una estrella inmóvil su fósforo azul / los movimientos de la noche aturden hacia el cielo" (Canto I) and continues into the following two cantos with the references to twilight ("el crepúsculo rodaba", Canto II) and the state of lucid dreaming ("el sueño avanza trenes", Canto III). The dream-sense is heightened by lines such as "la luna azul araña trepa inunda" (Canto II), in which the chain of logical cause-and-effect seems to break down entirely.

The sense that we are confronted with a suspension of the laws of the natural world is further heightened in Canto IV where the poet addresses himself rhetorically to the star mentioned in the opening canto: "que deseas ahora estás solo centinela /corrías a la orilla del país buscándolo / como el sonámbulo al borde del sueño". This sleepwalking motif deployed in this passage is also used later in the poem in Canto XII: "…quién te dice / sonámbulo de sangre partía cada vez en busca del alba".

In Canto VI the Promethean dream of storming heaven seems about to be realised as the stars descend "a beber al océano" and "el corazón del mundo" unfolds. The night becomes "un pozo inverso" - reminiscent of the appearance of Jacob's ladder in Huidobro's poem "Año nuevo".

Along with the night, another symbol of the poet's quest for the absolute/infinite is the nameless woman to whom he frequently addresses himself throughout the work. Yet she too is caught up in the prevailing atmosphere of timelessness/liminality, as can be seen in the following lines from Canto I: "pero estás allí pegada a tu horizonte / como una lancha al muelle lista para zarpar lo creo / antes del alba". This same image of the nameless woman (la ausenta) as a ship preparing to sail at dawn is repeated at various points in the poem, for instance at the end of Canto IX, after a brief union (real or imagined) between the poet and his "señorita enamorada".

In Canto XI the poetic voice switches between past and present tenses, symbolising the distortion of time as the poet voyages on in his "inmóvil navío". The closing lines of the canto - "apresura el paso apresura el paso y enciende las luciérnagas" also evoke obvious comparison with the refrain from TS Eliot's The Waste Land - "HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME" (The Waste Land, line141). The sense of frustration is compounded in Canto XIII where we are told that "todo está perdido las semanas están cerradas" and the poet-voyager finds himself confronted with "el otoño taciturno" and "la situación de los naufragios", while suffocating in "las noches antárticas".

However, unlike other epic poems dealing with the idea of the Promethean quest such as Milton's Paradise Lost, the movement in Tentativa (and in Neruda's Residencia en la tierra as well) is ultimately cyclical rather than linear. We can see this further down in Canto XIII where the conflation of interior and exterior space that is also characteristic of Huidobro's El espejo de agua is found once again: "veo llenarse de caracoles las paredes como orillas de buques / pego la cara a ellas absorto profundamente" (211).

In Canto XIV, time becomes completely fluid ("el mes se junio se extendío en el tiempo con seriedad y exactitud") and the even laws of elemental physics are overcome: "…y entonces / amanecía débilmente con un color de violín / con un sonido de campana con el olor de la larga distancia". Then at last in the final canto the poet asks to be returned to the night and we are left with the image of him awaiting the onset of dusk and another attempt at the conquest of the absolute by "el hombre infinito":

espérame donde voy ah el atardecer
la comida las barcarolas del océano oh espérame
adelantándote como un grito atrasándote como una huella oh espérate
sentado en esa última sombra o todavía después
todavía (213)

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[4] The view I advance here is that initially put forward by Amado Alonso, who was the first to identify 1935 as the decisive year marking "la conversión poética de Pablo Neruda" (Alonso 339-341) and generally adopted by most scholars. However alternative schemas have been proposed by other Neruda scholars that variously identify 1956 and 1958 as the key turning points (see for instance Loyola 27-29, Oviedo 344-345).

[5] All further page references given in parentheses in this chapter refer to the 2003 edition of Huidobro's Obra poética edited by Cedomil Goic, unless otherwise explicitly stated.