Huidobro, Cagliostro: Demiurge as Mage Conjuring a Metaphor for the Avant-Garde

Alexander Starkweather Fobes

Abstract: Inspired by the Italian magician of legend, Vicente Huidobro’s Cagliostro is both an original creation and an ingenious product of what Apollinaire termed L’Esprit Nouveau. Intuiting cinema’s effect on his readers, and desiring wider recognition for his art, the avant-garde poet sought to discover a new mode of representation. The result: a novel anti-novel, or rather, a poem that masquerades as a “novela-film.” Cagliostro is at once a playful critique of the act of movie-viewing, a suggestive story of a fabled necromancer, and an unorthodox, ludic treatise of Creacionismo. As meta-art, Cagliostro constitutes a transposition from one genre (the novel) into another (film), which is then renovated according to the conventions of the latter. Yet Cagliostro is more than just an innovative response to the question of whether and how cinema can influence the novel. The metapoetic theme of demiurge as mage parallels Huidobro’s transformation as poet and inventor of Creacionismo.

“It would have been strange,” mused Guillaume Apollinaire (1880- 1918), “if in an epoch when the popular art par excellence, the cinema, is a book of pictures, the poets had not tried to compose pictures for meditative and refined minds which are not content with the crude imaginings of the makers of films” (1971: 228). Writing in 1918, Apollinaire aptly apprehended the influence of the burgeoning motion-picture industry on the European avant-garde, whose poets had already begun collaborating with Cubist painters and experimenting with the visual dimensions of their poems. “At the height of the Cubist movement in Paris,” L. C. Breunig notes, “no fewer than fifteen significant poets kept company with the painters” (1995). Paramount among them is the Chilean Francophile poet Vicente Huidobro (1893- 1948), who came to Paris in 1916. In his visual poetry, mysterious and inscrutable images abound, each one created through the juxtaposition of disparate realities that appear to have no logical relation. Utilizing images conceived intuitively rather than rationally, the poet endeavored to transport his audience into another, supernatural reality, 60 Alexander Starkweather Fobes or magical world. With an artistic sensibility akin to Apollinaire’s, Huidobro sought to give new dimensions to his art. Overturning poetic tradition and literary convention, he continually adopted new forms to express his aesthetic of Creacionismo, engineering its most startling metamorphosis in his filmic novel Cagliostro. Inspired by the legend of the magician Conte Alessandro Cagliostro (Giuseppe Balsamo, 1743-1795), Huidobro’s tale is both an original creation and an ingenious product of what Apollinaire termed “L’esprit nouveau.” Conscious of cinema’s effect on his readers, and desirous of wider recognition for his art, the demiurgic poet, in keeping with the rich cultural zeitgeist, seeks to discover a new mode of representation. The result: a novel anti-novel, or rather, a poem that masquerades as a “novela-film.” Cagliostro is at once a playful critique of the act of movie-viewing, a parody of nineteenth-century melodrama, a suggestive story of a fabled necromancer, and an unorthodox, ludic treatise of Creacionismo. Whereas Huidobro’s departure from literary convention and his fascination with the marvelous does little to distinguish him from his avant-garde contemporaries, the uniqueness of Cagliostro lies in its generic ambiguity, and in the way Huidobro successfully recontextualizes an eighteenth-century legend to at once demonstrate the essence of his particular aesthetic and emblematize the avant-garde’s break with traditional forms. Like the wizard he portrays, Huidobro himself practices magic, in the sense that he fabricates illusory realities for an astonished audience. With a filmic novel as his medium, he finds himself with a host of new tricks at his disposal for conjuring unreal, mysterious images; he is free to play with the speed, sequence and dimensions of his images, and even to toy with the reader’s perspective. In order to fully comprehend Cagliostro’s relation to Creacionismo and the avant-garde, we must first consider how Huidobro’s aesthetic derives from the idea of art as experiment and revolt against tradition.1 In 1914, at the age of twenty-one, he delivered his first manifesto, “Non Serviam,” in the Athenaeum of Santiago, Chile, proclaiming that, “Hasta ahora no hemos hecho otra cosa que imitar el mundo en sus aspectos, no hemos creado nada [. . .] Non serviam. No he de ser tu esclavo, madre Natura; seré tu amo” ‘Until now we have done nothing but imitate the world as it appears; we have not created anything [. . .] Non serviam. I do not have to be your slave, Mother Nature; I shall be your master’ (2003: 1294-95).2 Though he did not