[In the following essay, Balakian explores the Modernist poetics of Ball, Vicente Huidobro, and Pierre Reverdy.]

Three poets of the early decades of this century shed light on the major paradoxes of modernism. I am not trying to establish this triptych to exercise random intertextuality nor as a basis for a study of influences. Geography separated these poets; the age connected them. From Paris to Zurich, to Santiago and Buenos Aires, the clocks were synchronized. Their affiliation resulted from a common cultural source that nurtured them and that they recognized: the revolution that had occurred in poetics in the previous century and that was to bifurcate modernism in our time.

In the context of modernism these poets have made the following permanent contributions, evidenced both in their poesis and their poetry: they have relied on the power of the image to generate rather than reflect sense or sensation, they have attempted to redefine the apperception of reality, and they have focused their efforts on returning language to what Hugo Ball called its logos-function: “You may laugh, language will one day reward us for our zeal, even if it does not achieve any directly visible results. We have loaded the word with strengths and energies that helped us to rediscover the evangelical concept of the ‘word’ (logos) as a magical complex image.”¹

The other road of modernism leads of course to rebellion, deconstruction, relativism, non-anthropocentrism, collage, dehumanization, and the cult of the abstract. This bifurcation, which becomes more and more clear as the century nears its end, justifies references to the avant-gardes in the plural rather than in the singular, for indeed modernism has pulled in two different directions in the twentieth century.

The deterioration of culture and its reflection in the arts is comprehensively described by Hugo Ball in his article on Kandinsky in 1917:

A thousand-year-old culture disintegrates. There are no columns and supports, no foundations any more … churches have become castles … convictions have become prejudices. … There are no more perspectives in the moral world. … Above is below, below is above. The meaning of the world disappeared. … The world showed itself to be a blind juxtaposition and opposing of uncontrolled forces. Man lost his divine countenance, became matter, chance, an aggregate. … He became a particle of nature … no more interesting than a stone; he vanished into nature. … A world of abstract demons swallowed the individual utterance, … robbed single things of their names … psychology became chatter.²

If one believes that in the total scheme of the cosmos all are condemned to remain ignorant of the whole and are driven by unconscious forces, why should not art display these same forces of automatism and insufficiency of structure? The processes involved in these forms of the modern arts, then, are in a sense imitations of nature. When Boileau and Pope advised the artist to hold the mirror up to nature, the Cartesian or Newtonian assumption was that nature was orderly in its operations—and even in its aberrations—meaningful even in its destructive forces, intentioned by a superior will. Now holding the mirror up to nature reveals a nature that is random, purposeless, uncontrolled by any unifying consciousness. Thus the modern artist who sees this change in our perception of the universe is aiming at the same target as his predecessors; what has changed is his understanding of the character of nature.

But in the case of Hugo Ball's verbal painting of the disintegration of a world, the intention was not to hold the mirror up to this desolation. In fact, Ball's notion of the modern was neither to reflect the chaos nor to identify with it, but rather to react to it and offer an alternative—an optional universe. In the second part of the same article on Kandinsky he tells us that the artists are dissociating themselves from “this empirical world. … They become creators of new natural entities that have no counterpart in the known world. They create images that are no longer imitations of nature but augmentations of nature by new, hitherto unknown appearances and mysteries. That is the victorious joy of these artists—to create existences, which one calls images but which have a consistency of their own that is equivalent to that of a rose, a person, a sunset or a crystal.”³

In an equally prophetic stance, Vicente Huidobro was saying: “The epoch just beginning will be eminently creative.” His attitude toward nature was summarized in his famous cry: “We will not serve.” A bit more jaded than his two contemporaries, Pierre Reverdy hoped that the abject human plight might push the imitative faculties of the artist to the limit at which even if he was not capable of pure creation he might become convinced that he had acquired such a faculty.⁴ Resistance to chaos in the search for creative powers was the alternate direction of modernism, strongly visible in the works of this triptych. The inherent motivation of their writings was anchored in the belief that modern society's major forces of aggression would be directed against the physical universe rather than remain engaged in fratricide; there was a vision of man fighting blind forces rather than man fighting man. This spirit is indicated in the very titles of their major works. Written in wartime, none of them refers directly to the war. Huidobro's Altazor, the supereagle, born at the age of thirty-three, the day of the death of Christ; Reverdy's Les Epaves du ciel, a viewing of earth as a sky fall-out; Ball's Das Flug auf der Zeit, flight out of time? Perhaps, but also flight out of the age. In all three the fate of humanity drives the poet to a defiance of the process of representation itself, whether of humanity, of society, or of the universe, rather than to an expression of disgust, to a visionary reality contiguous or adjacent to the natural universe but independent in its purposes.

Mallarmé's theory of creative communication had pointed in two directions: one from the interior, nonverbalized state of consciousness to verbalized exterior configuration, the other from the discovery of an arresting exterior object to interior distillation. The implementation of this dual optic is the basis of the dialectics of modernism, expressed on the one hand as the figurative and on the other as the abstract in the arts. The triptych here discussed opted for figuration. These poets expressed in almost identical language their faith in the image as the central edifice of the work of art, whether in poetry or in painting. Analogical communication produces a confluence of objects whose associations with each other are totally dependent on the author's will and his capacity to reshuffle word associations. These are achieved associations, not random ones. As Reverdy said in Le Livre de mon bord: “Art begins where chance ends.”⁵ Chance simply flirts with the artist but as an opportunist the artist exploits chance for his own designs. Huidobro calls this facility “superconsciousness.”⁶ In other words, as André Breton was to find out, automatism is nothing without vigilance.

The tolerance of object associations translated into image associations is well known as a gauge of modernism. From Lautréamont's spectacular metaphors to the much-quoted definition of image by Reverdy, repeated by Breton and Max Ernst, the technique had actually been expressed some ten years earlier by Huidobro, who had traced it back to Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary in its definition of the imagination. Regardless of who said it first or best, the fact remains that in the early part of the twentieth century the theory of the image received recognition as the cradle of a hermetic process of creation. The association of disparate realities in the image was practiced for different reasons by different people. It was random game activity for many collage artists. It was divination for oracular ones; it was a process of gestation for still others. This last-proposed function is most significant in the case of Ball because he is generally known for his dada interlude, and for the dadaists collage was a derisive activity. Ball, participating in dada performance and talking about Rimbaud's powers of language at the same time, strikingly demonstrates as a simultaneously deconstructive and constructive artist the dichotomy of modernism. But his deeper adherence to the constructive is evident in his theoretical statements about language and its function in the creative process: “The new art is sympathetic because in an age of disruption it has conserved the will-to-image.” He goes further to proclaim: “In principle the abstract age is over.”⁷ Although much was to happen thereafter to disprove Ball's contention, as late as the 1930s Reverdy was of the same conviction as Ball: “Thought can only recognize itself and judge its limits in the concrete.”⁸

But before going further, we have to overcome a taboo of modern criticism: the so-called intentional fallacy, i.e., the relevance of the artist's intentions to the actual work accomplished. Those who object to the serious consideration of intentions argue that whatever intentions there may be should be inherent in the work itself and that outside of the work they have no validity. In the case of poetry, however, particularly modern poetry, the expression of intentions is in fact part of the poesis. Some, of course, include their awareness of process in the poem itself, turning such poems into poem-manifestos; Apollinaire and Wallace Stevens are two important practitioners of this genre. Others manifest their awareness of the process of the poetic act in their prose, considering poetic intention almost as significant as, and more consistent with their innermost being than, the individual sparks of the generative process that we call “poems.” Reverdy said: “No creation is perfect except in its hypothesis.”⁹ The implication is that too often the artist's self-assigned commissions in this world are beyond his power, however brave—or arrogant—to deliver. The poetic process is itself the experience; the single poem gives signals that go beyond what is recorded.

Intentions and their less comprehensive implementations are virtually inseparable in considerations of the features of the modernism of the triptych here in question: problems of reality, image, and language, both in their poesis and their poetry.

The demolition of the concept of reality was not something new in the twentieth century. In the midst of a loudly declared school of realism in the arts, Baudelaire, Maxime du Camp, Champfleury, and Courbet connived to distort the definition of the obvious and static connotation of the word. Realists are dreamers, said Champfleury, and he called Gérard de Nerval a “realist” in his revised definition of the word. Had Baudelaire developed his fragment, “Puisque réalisme il y a,” he might have been the theoretician of surrealism. The desire to redefine reality was for Baudelaire an epistemological need and search. “Every good poet is a realist,”¹⁰ he said, thus dislodging that well-determined signifier from the commonly signified. Many years later Reverdy was to say: “The true poet … is he who has as his primary force, the sense of reality.”¹¹ In his vision the poet is equipped with a dragnet to harvest his realities out of the miscellany of nature.

While Baudelaire was dislodging that particular signifier, “reality,” from common usage, he was in fact opening the way for the poetic manipulation of all signifiers, making of language, rather than of nature, the matrix of poetic reality. And this reality, according to Reverdy, holds its own independent space “among the things that exist in nature.”¹² As already observed of the title Les Epaves du ciel each part of the composite is easy to envisage but together the unambiguous signifiers create an ambiguity, the cause of which is neither a complicated syntax nor a far-fetched lexicon, nor even some secret mythopoetic reference—practices which were prevalent in the leading poets of the post-symbolist persuasion, contemporaries of Reverdy in his early period.

The “oval” of La Lucarne ovale, which has no connection with the content of the poems, illustrates the geometrical preoccupations of both the new artists and the new poets. Reverdy, like Huidobro, who entitled one of his collections Horizon carré, paid tribute to Saint-Pol-Roux; this unclassifiable poet had defined the “poet” as a geometrician of the absolute. Elsewhere Reverdy characterizes his eye as lozengical—another reference to geometrical form.

The next title, Les Ardoises du toit, seems innocuous on the surface. There appears no tension between slate—an earthy substance—and roof, equally tangible—and what is more ordinary than a slate roof? Even separating ardoise from toit, one can conceivably have a blackboard on which to write an ephemeral poem. But, wait, ardoise also means a credit account—on which the poet is free to draw for sustenance (elsewhere he has called the dream an exploitable mine), and with this extended connotation not only is the function of slate modified but it in turn alters the simple connotation of roof and assumes dimensions beyond that of housetops. Another seemingly innocuous title is Cravates de chanvre. Cravate (necktie), however, assumes an ominous change of function when coupled with chanvre, a weed used to make rope. The two words considered as individual and separate images are semantically innocent, but their rapprochement creates a lethal composite, for a cravate de chanvre is in effect a noose. But there is still another meaning lurking behind chanvre, for it is also a plant from which hashish and marijuana are extracted; so again we have the combination of the real and the illusion, of man gravitating toward hallucination and yet encompassed in a concrete reality of danger. The logos-character of words creates images that use natural data to mean something more. Curiously, the obvious reality of the moment, World War I, is obliterated from the poetry of this vintage, as it was to be from that of World War II. The same absence of the obvious conditions of life can be noted in the poetry of Huidobro and Ball from the same period.

In a poem called “La Réalité immobile,” Reverdy compares the poem to a photo without a frame, thus extending the absence of referentiality from the temporal to the spatial. In a poem called “Minuit,” this total lack of referentiality is striking in the presence of specific, concrete signifiers of elementary meaning and comprehensibility. “Minuit / La pendule sans fin sonne à coup de marteau / Sur mon coeur / En entrant dans la maison sinistre et désolée dont j'ai perdu le numéro” (Midnight / The clock endlessly hammers the hours / On my heart / Entering the bleak and desolate house whose number I have lost).¹³ Passage from the limited to the limitless is often expressed through negatives and the adjective “last,” or through an impossible comparison manipulating the signifiers of limit to cancel out their respective meanings. Such is the case in a poem called “Abîme,” where we find a line such as “La chambre s'étendait bien plus loin que les murs” (The room extended far beyond the walls)¹⁴ syntactically obvious, yet semantically unacceptable except as a poetic reality.

Reverdy is also capable of expressing flexibility of time without resorting to linguistic occultism. In “Ronde nocturne” the distant realities brought together are a cloud and a bell. The cloud's passage makes the bell ring. The poem ends with a vision of someone (persons are never named or otherwise identified in his poems) climbing to heaven or sky. The ladder cracks. It is artificial, adds Reverdy: “C'est une parabole ou une passerelle” (A gangplank or a parabola).¹⁵ The phonetic wordplay cannot, unfortunately, be communicated in English. The final line: “L'heure qui s'échappait ne bat plus que d'une aile” (Now the escaping hour beats only one wing) is neither linguistically nor referentially subject to interpretation—and no psycho-criticism will help! S'échapper is a verb simple both in its literal and figurative meanings. Time and bird escape in different images, the hour and the bird beat time also in separate configurations. In association with “wing” both verbs carry simultaneously both levels of meaning. This communication is both existential and aesthetic, and if one were to examine reader reception, one would have to do so qualitatively rather than quantitatively.

If there are such associations, there are also total annulments of established relationships between objects and their meanings. A startling revision of perception is achieved by the dislocation of meaning in simple words and uncomplicated syntax. “Regarde / Les étoiles ont cessé de briller / La terre ne tourne plus / Une tête s'est inclinée / … / le dernier clocher resté debout / Sonne minuit.” (Look / The stars have stopped shining / The earth stops turning / A head is leaning / … / the last bell tower upright / Strikes midnight), as we find in “Son de cloche” for instance,¹⁶ or in “Minute”: “La pendule les bras en croix / s'est arrêtée.”¹⁷ Do these seemingly apocalyptic pauses in human activities, according with the cessation of nature's movements, proclaim a world of absurdity, associable with Jean-Paul Sartre's gratuitous world? Some critics have suggested as much, but I would reject such a conclusion. Reverdy's poetry creates existential states of consciousness, but Reverdy is not an existentialist in the French sense of the word. If he sees emptiness around him, he is not seized with nausea by the indifference of nature and the universe. He populates it with a network of activities controlled by his own awareness of the dynamics of existence. Such is the case in a small poem called “Feu”: “L'espace s'agrandit / Et là devant? quelqu'un qui n'a rien dit / Deux yeux / Une double lumière / Qui vient de franchir la barrière / En s'abattant.” (Space grows big / And there up front? someone who said nothing / Two eyes / A double light / Which has breached the barrier / And is collapsing.)¹⁸ If some twentieth-century writers have sought to compensate for the random character of the universe by appropriating social purpose in their writing, this is not the case for Reverdy any more than it was for Mallarmé; self-fulfillment occurs strictly on aesthetic terms.

The bridges or “passerelles” that Reverdy creates through verbal strategies between his inner state and the objects his eye absorbs are in keeping with one of the two modes proposed by Mallarmé, i.e., from the indescribable, spiritual state sensed in the abstract to objectification without psychological elaboration or intellectual analysis of the condition that gave impetus to the creative act. A line from Mallarmé's Crise de vers is often quoted to demonstrate that the voice of the poet must disappear into his work; but that need not be taken to imply that subjectivity is lost and detached from the poem. No poet worth his salt would make such a concession. On the contrary, subjectivity penetrates the language so thoroughly that it no longer needs the identity of the poet to do its work. It is a fermented entity that cannot return to its inert and flat form. The objects the poem designates have assumed the imprint of the writer.

If in studies of poetics Reverdy has remained somewhat marginal, Vicente Huidobro is hardly better known among readers of Latin American literature, let alone among those of general literature. The first major collection of his poems to appear in English came out only in 1981. To date the best references to him and his development are to be found in the comprehensive introduction to his Complete Works by a compatriot and sometime avant-garde writer, Braulio Arenas; the other solid source is a book devoted to the study of his poetic language by George Yudice.¹⁹ These are in Spanish; in addition there are a few comparative studies in dissertations in French and English. The basic biographical data that interest us here are that Huidobro's voice was heard for the first time outside of his native Chile in Buenos Aires, then during World War I in Madrid, and then in Paris, where he arrived in 1916 and where he stayed for the next ten years, contributing to the same avant-garde journals as did Pierre Reverdy. The poetry of Rimbaud and Mallarmé was his literary matrix. There was also a strong philosophical factor in his development, namely the impact of Hegel and Heidegger. This double affiliation is evident in all of Huidobro's poetry. Like a Hispanic Victor Hugo, he provides such a prolific body of poetry as well as prose that the choice of references here becomes strictly eclectic, as one selects significant pieces in what is, not surprisingly, an uneven work.

I am particularly drawn to his El Espejo de agua, which marks a distinct break with his earlier symbolist-oriented poetry. Like the titles of Reverdy, those of Huidobro have intricate connotations in their apparent simplicity. The objective realities do not seem too distant here: mirror, of course, has had from time immemorial metaphoric affiliations with water. So here we see two reflecting agents juxtaposed. But is reflection a state or a visionary agent? Are we involved with a new kind of mirror? The very first poem, entitled “Arte poetica,” initiates the animistic intimacy of the indeterminate “also,” like the “quelqu'un” of Reverdy. The referential discontinuity is accompanied even more than in the case of Reverdy by clear delineation of objects, be they man-made or natural: “Que el verso sea como une llave / Que abra mil puertas” (Let poetry be like a key / Opening a thousand doors).²⁰ But llave also means faucet, which brings us back to water, although on the rational level suggesting that poetry may be a key to open many doors is more acceptable. But in the wider circumference of double connotation the poem touches the broad notion of unlocking restrained energies, thus manifesting the process of poetic creativity. “Inventa mundos nuevos y cuida tu palabra” (Invent new worlds and watch your word). Obviously this is not to be a subconscious or intuitive pouring out of words if the poet is to mind his words, but a process strictly under control. We are reminded of Reverdy's “Art begins where chance ends.” This advice is reinforced later in the poem by the simple statement that true vigor resides in the head. And when he concludes that everything under the sun lives for us, this is not to be taken for a spiritual anthropocentrism. To live for us really means to him: to be at our disposal. He had heard an indigenous poet say: “Don't sing of the rain, poet, make it rain.” Rain is a result; making it rain is a creative process. In line with this image, Huidobro says in his “Arte poetica”: “Por qué cantáis la rosa, oh Poetas! / Hacedla florecer en el poema!” Why sing of the rose, make it flower! Everything is there, in other words, not to be admired but to be manipulated because the poet, that agent of manipulation, is, as the final line of the poem tells us, “a small god.”

In the second poem, having the same title as the collective work, “El Espejo de agua,” the transformational capacity we guessed in the title, “the mirror,” makes of it a river, then a watery globe, a fishbowl where all the swans drown, and as we go from one image to the next we notice that the orb, which also means globe, becomes more than a reflecting object; it causes an active assault on the swan-poetics of symbolism.

Mi espejo, corriente por las noches,
Se hace arroyo y se aleja de mi cuarto.
Mi espejo, más profundo que el orbe
Donde todos los cisnes se ahogaron.
(My mirror, flowing through the night,
Has become a brook streaming out of my room.
My mirror, deeper than the globe
Where all the swans drown.)(21)

In Poemas articos, where the contamination of cubism becomes evident, we can find two kinds of poems; on the one hand the passive juxtaposition of objects (what painters call nature-morte) and others more relevant to the pattern here described: images in movement, displaying the process of creation rather than the crystallization of the art process. This effect is produced, for instance, in a poem called “Marino,” where the sailor demonstrates godlike activities in concordance with the image of a bird about to soar in initial flight. The creations are a series of displacements not of vision but of human and cosmic phenomena; it is indeed a broader extension of the “making roses” proposed in his “Arte poetica.” An ancient mariner (Huidobro was familiar with English romanticism) intrudes upon the cosmography and disturbs the temporal structure of the earth as well:

Hice correr ríos que nunca han existido
De un grito elevé una montaña
Y en torno bailamos una nueva danza
Y enseñé a cantar un pájaro de nieve
Marchemos sobre los meses desatados
Soy el viejo marino que cose los horizontes cortados
(I made rivers run
Where none had been before
With a shout I made a mountain rise
And now we do a new dance around it. …
And I taught a snowbird how to sing
Let us depart upon the floating months
I am the old sailor
Who mends torn horizons.)(22)

Like Victor Hugo's La Légende des siècles, Huidobro's Adán and Altazor encompass the first and last man. Although in Altazor there are many references to God and to Satan, these are not personal identifications of divinity; rather, they embody the powers of generation and destruction. The sense of apocalypse that has been associated in this poem with modern tendencies toward deconstruction can only result from a partial reading of the poem. The devastation is described only to give the god-poet an opportunity to rethink the universe. The seismograph has taken note of his birth. The sun is born in his right eye and sets in his left eye,²³ meditates Altazor, and he suggests that if God exists at all it is thanks to the poet. This echoes what he had earlier questioned in Adán: whether the poem exists because of the water perceived, or the water exists because the poet has perceived it. He wonders: “Si tu agua forma el canto / O si tu canto forma el agua.”²⁴

Independent in his breathing and in his nourishment, the new godpoet knows it is late: “there is no time to lose,” “no hay tiempo que perder” becomes a refrain in canto 4 of Altazor.²⁵ His last image is that of a mill, but a mill reaching out eventually to constellations; distant realities again combined, the earth-power creating energy and by extension nourishment, and the cosmic power providing another form of energy, i.e., luminosity.

The epic poems of Huidobro rise to an ecstatic pitch at which the aesthetic experience of creativity becomes a substitute for religious communion. The line between the messiah and the antichrist of magic, as he describes himself in Altazor, grows very faint.

But if the struggle between spiritual communication and aesthetic expression is evident in Huidobro, the artist's confusion between aesthetic ascesis and religious ecstasy was in the case of Hugo Ball to lead actually into religious conversion. In the interval, however, between Ball's dada activities and the religious identity he eventually assumed, there is a body of writing consisting of two plays, two novels, articles, and what has been termed “a handful of poems.” It just happens that the handful of poems consists of a hundred and twenty-three poems. One might say that Baudelaire and Mallarmé are also guilty of having written a handful of poems! Ball's commentators associate him with dada and expressionism, just as Reverdy and Huidobro get swallowed up in cubism and creationism. Ball's poetry is passed over simply as “obscure” and his spiritual experience passed off as a “bad trip.”

I have examined these poems closely and see no overt rebellion of the social type that would associate him with the expressionists. These are not ideological poems that might illustrate Ball's previously quoted fresco of social devastation. Basically, they can be divided into two parts, those addressed to love in general and to Emmy, his wife, in particular, and those in which he struggles with a universe in shackles and tries to apprehend those shackles for his own purposes. When the task becomes too difficult he calls upon a sort of divinity, using the names of God, Maria, Seraphin, and so on, much as Rimbaud used the word “genie” or “force” and Rilke “the angel.” It is an appropriation of name and concept rather than an evocation of creed, baffling to the general reader just as the word “God” in Le Gant de crin has made many attribute a deep Catholicism to Reverdy. It is also a suggestion of the godly quality toward which Huidobro aimed in Adán and Altazor. One of Ball's poems actually appropriates the structure of the Twenty-third Psalm: he tries to define the presence that operates transformation upon this world and concludes with “Willst du die neue Welt erbauen.” It could be considered a religious poem except that we are not at all sure that the du, written with a small “d,” is not self-reflexive. Ball had not yet reached the moment of his religious crisis.

Clearly, the poems of Ball, like those of the other two here observed, implement the second process posited by Mallarmé: he goes from awareness of unease outward to its objectification. There is no verbal ambiguity or abstraction in Ball's poetry. These concise poems, studded with meaning, are chiseled in concrete. No mystification is created by syntax or lexicon. But in Ball's case the encounter of distant realities is achieved with the word itself. Through the miracle the German language permits him to perform, he produces what I would like to call a “bildungsgedicht.” The permitted, legitimate practice of coining new words by tying together substantives into single words is here stretched to comply with the dictum of the whole new era that new words are necessary to create a new state of existence, and new objects to occupy legitimate spaces in the cosmos. The words Ball coins by combining those in the standard lexicon come as close to a new built-in figurative discourse as I have ever seen. Ball ties substantives together that annul each other's power to signify or that create a tension among multiple significations. The fact that he wrote sound-poems in his short dada period has been overstressed as his only distinction in the annals of the avant-garde. Incidentally, these tone-poems are often attributed to primal cries of fury or expressions of the absurd. This in itself is a gross fallacy. Even a brief examination will convince the reader that structurally they are phonetic and phonemic patterns probing the nature of language, and not intended for simple shock effects. When the special role of the so-called nonsense poems is recognized in the totality of Ball's poetry, then perhaps his poems in standard structure will be approached with more respect and serious consideration. Baudelaire and Mallarmé also used standard poetic structures. But adherence to standard forms does not thereby exclude these poems from the category of the avant-garde, any more than the open structures or nonstructured utterances of so many poems in the twentieth century constitute new forms of poetic discourse. Many an open-ended poem of our day is very standard and banal in its signification.

The neat compliance of Ball with form and rules of prosody belies the explosively far-reaching steps he quietly took toward polysemy and the composition of his personal epistème. After all, he was nurtured by both Rimbaud and Hegel. Like Rimbaud, Ball knew the power of transformational semantics, and like Hegel he knew the spiritual tension that two contradictory forces can create when pitted against each other. When these two conditions meet—the manipulation of language to support the existential tension—great poetry is in the making even if in small, unassuming bundles as in Ball's case.

There is a poem of Ball's called “Mallarmé's Flowers,” which reveals Ball's subtle understanding of Mallarmé. This is quite a different response to Mallarmé than one finds in Huysmans' À Rebours. It is not a simulation of character, but a response to style. In the first line the first substantive, which is a composite, combines a number of the most important qualities of the poetry of Mallarmé: the word means literally “golden avalanche,” metal or riches and permanence, associated with the coldness and movement simultaneously implied by the second part of the word. Then, the genitive “des,” combining from and of interchangeably, introduces “alten Azur,” containing the obsession with Azur, and the cult of the ancient that evokes Hérodiade—the name not to be mentioned until some lines later. In the next line star, snow, and eternity are cohabiting with a search for beginning, and as each flower dear to Mallarmé is conjured in the next lines, the sense of toil emerges; Mallarmé's power to create a rose is likened to the creation of the flesh of a woman, thus directly referring to a divine maker. The verbs he uses are more applicable to the actions of a sculptor than to those of a writer, and the evocation of Christian symbols is a device whereby he transfers the aesthetic to the kind of religious terminology more likely to be understood by his readers. The short poem terminates in the celebration of the death of the poet in an atmosphere in which the immanence of flower-essence is as permeating as it is invisible.

Auf Goldlawinen des alten Azur,
Aus der Sterne ewigem Schnee nahmst du im Anbeginne
Für eine, vom Weh noch unberührte, jungfräuliche Flur
Die großen Kelche deiner Schöpferminne.
Der Zynnien helle Hälse, die falben Gladiolen
Und jenen göttlichen Lorbeer der seelisch Verbannten,
Hochrot erglühend wie eines Seraphs Sohlen,
Die von der Scham zertretener Morgenröten entbrannten.
Die Hyazinthe beriefst du, die Myrthe geistern und bleich,
Gleich dem Fleisch einer Frau schufst du als Rose
Grausam jene Herodias, die noch im Gartenbereich
Vom strahlenden Blut des Propheten träumt überm Moose.
Und bildetest aller Lilien schluchzende Blässe,
Daß sie im Weihrauch verblauender Horizonte
Aufstiegen über die Seufzermeere der Messe,
Um zu verschmachten im Anblick weinender Monde.
Hosannah, Maria, in deinem Garten und Schoß,
Daß das Echo verebbe in himmlischen Abendlüften,
Wo der Heiligen Gloriolen schimmern extatisch und groß.
Selig, o Mutter, sind deiner blühenden Brüste
Erhabene Kelche voll Wein und voll Brot.
Selig der Dichter, daß es ihn siechend gelüste
Nach künftigem Leben in einem balsamischen Tod.

“Mallarmés Blumen”

Oh, königlicher Geist, dem aus den Grüften
Die Leoparden folgten und Delphine
Im Tiefgeschlecht sahst du die Menschenmiene,
Gegrüßt von allen Brüdern in den Lüften.
Die Leier eingestemmt in junge Hüften,
So standest du umbrandet auf der Bühne.
Vom Tode trunken summte deine kühne,
Berauschte Stimme mit den Blumendüften.
Du kamst aus einer Welt, in der das Grauen
Die Marter überbot. Da war dein Herz
Zerronnen erst und dann erstarrt zu Erz.
Durch jede Sehnsucht drang dein liebend Schauen.
Es führten dich die Vögel und die Fische
Im Jubelchor zum höchsten Göttertische.

“Orpheus”

In view of the innumerable powers of Orpheus that had been generated during the symbolist era, it would seem impossible to expect of Ball any originality in the handling of this myth. Yet Ball's “Orpheus,” written just before Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, is a small masterpiece. If God is the doubling suggested in the image of Mallarmé, the image of the king of heights and depths is associable with Orpheus, the dialectics of position resolved in a unity of concrete brotherhood. From the depth to the heights, the recognition of the human countenance is envisioned not as an abstraction but as a composite of leopard, dolphin, and bird. In the lines that follow, the interplay between fauna, flora, and the mineral world is identified with the torture of Orpheus. The struggle ends in his resurrection in what could have been an abstraction but instead is a physical intoxication at a table (concrete object) belonging to God. If the theme of the Orpheus legend is death and transfiguration, the poem achieves it in the encounter of the most concrete objects connected by the power of Orpheus, who thus creates a unity in a divided world, one might add; but the generalization is in the reader's mind and not in the poem, for the poem has cleared a space where naming directly refers to Orpheus alone.

This concrete quality is apparent in Ball's characterizations of dreams. In view of his German romantic heritage, one would expect the dream to be a strong poetic factor in Ball's work and the techniques of veiling and fantasy to be devices of his dream transcriptions. He does indeed get from Novalis the notion of Dursichtigkeit, but he is not peering through veils. Rather he sees through bright and concrete entities. His dreams are, as he says, “evergreen”: “immergrünen Traüme.”

The process whereby dream becomes poetry, and the ordinary globe-dweller takes flight, is strikingly represented in a poem called “Like a Caterpillar.” The worm collects mulberry leaves and sucks deep their juice—an image reminiscent of Mallarmé's faun sucking the grape pulp and peering through the skin. Here we see silk-foam oozing out of the worm's mouth. With the nourishment of dreams, equated here with the silk-foam, the worm weaves a net in its underground abode, and it whiles away its time in puppet shows and masquerades until it pierces the darkness of its covering and soars with wings stretched out into a new sun where death and joy converge. My paraphrase goes no further than to suggest the very concrete character of the transformation of the earthbound into a soaring being and the risks involved in the process. The linguistic movements creating the transformation are much more important, poetically speaking. The contradictions of lowly and lofty, sublime reality and delusive fantasy, are in Ball's poem verbal strategies, and the break that brings about the transformation is expressed by a verb which is generally connected with the breaking of a solid substance into particles. Equally, the spreading out of the wings is described in a word that denotes the stretching of something of a material nature rather than a spiritual one. And most notable is the fact that the dream is not an ineffable state but as real as grass and silk, and as intoxicating as champagne. The poem demonstrates once more the power of the poet to manipulate natural objects: to make them do and be according to the orders of the poet, who does not serve but is served.

Preoccupations with polysemy and polyvalences, as well as reader reception, may seem associable with the work of these three poets because of the use of similar terminologies and a common interest in the functioning of language. Astute critics, acting as heroic mediators between author and reader, decipher meaning by decoding the writer's use of language and recoding it for the new reader. But at the threshold of the century, the cult of linguistic structures as a source of creativity had as its objective a different sort of hermeneutic operation. The poet did not seem concerned with the production of a text laden with multiple meanings, intended for a reader smarter than himself, who would extrapolate them in order to create his own rational subtext. Instead, as evidenced continuously in the writings of these poets, language was a power-generator; the poet used it to provoke the imagination, primarily his own, and to release creative energy intrinsic to poetic achievement, associated in his mind with some form of divine process. The process of language generation—which Reverdy called “a high voltage transformer”²⁶—fascinated these writers much more than did the actual production of multiple meanings for themselves or for anybody else. From artist/mirror to artist/god was the path predicted for modern times by Huidobro. The analytical exercise that fascinates literary critics, namely the transfer of a rational communication to a rational reception thereof in some modified form, is an ideological exchange, not a great concern to poets. On the other hand the stimulation of the reader's power to create images by getting involved in the creative process of the poet is an aesthetic experience. Empirical criticism has encouraged the confusion between informative communication and aesthetic co-experience. In the climate of the modernism discussed here language was interesting only as a source or pool for the creative process, and hermeneutics was writer-oriented rather than aimed at reader reception. Language was important only as it illuminated the poetry; when the tables are turned around, poetry becomes interesting only as it illuminates language! For this particular set of poets, of which the current triptych delineates a model, aesthetics was much more than a preoccupation with art. Their metaphysics were encrusted with and encapsulated in their aesthetics because at that point poetry had become much more than discourse about beautiful things or unusual emotions. It was a counterproposal to ordinary living. In trying to emerge from the linguistic labyrinth, these poets thought they were leaving the poem, not as a testimony to their struggle with language, but as an opening created in the darkness, a passage to freedom. So the poem itself was not an exercise in analytical thinking but a cameo of the struggle for synthesis, not an object reflecting the writer but a system to revise the cosmos through the potentials of naming. These poets converging from three different national cultures identified a major step beyond the attribution of sign-meaning to objects or states of consciousness; they made meaning a variable in the establishment of equations between signs and between writer and reader.

Notes

1. Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time (New York: Viking, 1974), 68.

2. Ibid., 224-25.

3. Ibid., 226.

4. Pierre Reverdy, Le livre de mon bord (1930-36; reprint, Paris: Mercure de France, 1948), 95.

5. Ibid., 94.

6. Vicente Huidobro, “Manifiesto de Manifiestos,” in Obras completas (Santiago: Zig-Zag, 1963), 1:664.

7. Ball, 60.

8. Reverdy, 227.

9. Ibid., 83.

10. See Balakian, “Fragments on Reality by Baudelaire and Breton,” in Fragments: Incompletion and Discontinuity, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1981), 101-9.

11. Pierre Reverdy, Le Gant de crin (1926; reprint, Paris: Flammarion, 1968), 64.

12. Ibid., 47.

13. Pierre Reverdy, Les Ardoises du toit, collected in La Plupart du Temps, Poèmes 1915-22 (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 136.

14. Ibid., 164; trans. Mary Ann Caws and Patricia Terry, Roof Slates and Other Poems of Pierre Reverdy (Boston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1981), 45.

15. Ibid., 168-9; trans. ibid., 53.

16. Ibid., 170; trans. ibid.

17. Ibid., 178; trans. ibid., 55.

18. Ibid., 153; trans. ibid., 65.

19. George Yudice, Vicente Huidobro y la motivación del lenguaje (Buenos Aires: Editorial Galerna, 1978). In English see The Selected Poetry of Vincente Huidobro, ed. David M. Guss (New York: New Directions, 1981).

20. Vicente Huidobro, “El Espejo de agua” in Obras completas, 1:255; trans. D. M. Guss, The Selected Poetry of Vicente Huidobro (New York: New Directions, 1981), 3.

21. Ibid., 255; trans. ibid., 3.

22. Ibid., 319; trans. ibid., 51-52.

23. Ibid., Altazor, canto 4, p. 394.

24. Ibid., “Adán ante el mar,” Adán, 240.

25. Ibid., Altazor, canto 4.

26. Reverdy, Le livre de mon bord, 153.

Selected Bibliography

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Shattuck, Roger, “After the Avant-Garde.” New York Review of Books, 12 Mar. 1970, pp. 41-47.

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Somville, Léon. Devanciers du Surréalisme. Genève: Droz, 1971.

Spender, Stephen. The Struggle of the Modern. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1963.

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