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The Geometry of CommitmentAuthor(s): Haroldo De Campos and Djelal KadirReviewed work(s):Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 66, No. 4, The Rigors of Necessity: João Cabral de MeloNeto, 1992 Neustadt Prize Laureate (Autumn, 1992), pp. 617-621Published by: Board of Regents of the University of OklahomaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40148605 .Accessed: 10/11/2011 12:59

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The Geometry of Commitment

By HAROLDO DE CAMPOS JoAo Cabral and the Generation of '45. Born in

Recife in 1920, the poet Joao Cabral de Melo Neto tends to be associated with those writers who make up the "Generation of 45." Some even see him as the uncontested leader of that generation, which, coming after the generations of '22 and '30, would have repre- sented, in a way, a reaction against "undisciplined" modernism, against its declared absence of form. Nevertheless, neither modernism could be said to lack formal concerns (its most representative practi- tioners, Oswaldo and Mario de Andrade, were tireless experimenters with forms), nor could the generation of '45 be considered to have been the founder of a new poetic order among us (unless one confuse form with a mold). Nor, for that matter, except by literal chronology, could Joao Cabral be included in that generation, in what it ended up representing as an esthetic program. In reality, the so-called Generation of '45 embodied, above all, a restorationist nostalgia for premodernist canons, linked, frequently, to a sensibility that would be closely tied to an esthetic taste that antedated symbolism itself, a sensibility almost unperturbed (at the level of metaphor, for example, where it placed its most felt revindications) by the revolution in the language of the most impor- tant symbolist poets, a revolution that reached be- yond surrealism. The Generation of '45 prefers to cultivate the sermo nobilis, the erudite word or the least common. It quarantines the dissonance of im- ages, preferring instead a disarming notion of poetic "climate" or "decorum." It rehabilitates the fixed forms of the poem, especially the sonnet.1 Joao Cabral is already at the opposing pole of these concerns. His poetry adheres clearly to a stylistic constant that could be said to take off, without disruption, from the Generation of 1922. This is the stylistic continuity of Oswald de Andrade's "poesia-minuto," the "poesia pau-brasil" that informs certain poems of the early Carlos Drummond de Andrade and finds its natural place in the terse language of Cabral's poetry.2

Joao Cabral de Melo Neto himself, in a statement written in 1955 on the Generation of '45,3 indicates the profound differences that separate him from the esthetic consensus that would define that generation. First he notes what could be called "an idealist penchant in the choice and treatment of poetry's language among that group of poets." He shows how this preference borders on becoming a valuation of the "sublime against the prosaic," of the "ineffable against the tangible," et cetera. Then he adds: "It's a question of a poetry made of surrealities, made of

dimensions exclusively human, and the end of this poetry is to communicate extremely subtle details, whose only instrument could be the most ethereal and abstract part of the dictionaries. The prosaic diction is weighed down with reality, filthy with base realities, those of the external world, which in such angelic spheres could only serve as a neutralizer." Characterized thus, a tendency (one that the future would prove as the tendency that esthetically defined the Generation of '45, or at least the work of its most convinced defenders), Cabral maintains - doubtless speaking of himself in this case - that among the poets of '45 there were also those with preference "for the means proper to prose," and therefore said gen- eration could not be characterized "by a common tendency, a general orientation of its poets." Thus his conclusion: "What those who constitute it do have in common is their historical situation. The moment in which they began their creative work." That is to say, for Joao Cabral de Melo Neto himself, the only unifying criterion between him and the generation in which he is included is chronological. And I add, for my part, that one could not even speak of a strictly common "historical situation," since this presup- poses a common historicity, a common vision of history. Such a common characteristic, obviously, could not exist between a marked idealistic propen- sity for the imponderable and a pointedly realistic tendency toward the substantial and the concrete.

The Engineer and The Psychology of Composi- tion. Joao Cabral de Melo Neto began with Pedra do Sono (Stone of Sleep; 1942). In this book we already have, in kernel, a number of qualities characteristic of Cabral's poetry: divestment, the penchant for the visual image, of tactile substance ("In the space of the newspaper / the shadow eats the orange"), what Ca- bral claims to have learned from the poetry of Murilo Mendes ("to give precedence to the image over the message, the tangible over the discursive"), and something which he no doubt learned with those of the generation of 1922 and completed with Drum- mond - a certain dry humor served by an agile ma- nipulation of turns of phrase taken directly from colloquial language and juxtaposed to his more "pure" vocabulary for that shocking effect of dialectic between poetry and prose that has always interested him. The poet also begins to turn critically on the poem itself, to hear its "liquid voices," and thus it is no accident that the book begins with an epigraph from Mallarme ("Solitude, recif, etoile . . ."), a critical poet par excellence, the Dante of our industrial age. Following that book and a minor incursion into the

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poem as dialogue ("Os Tres Mal-Amados," based on the well-known text of Drummond), Cabral begins the definitive phase of his oeuvre, publishing O Engenheiro (The Engineer; 1945) and Psicologia da Composigdo com a Fdbula de Anfion e Antiode (The Psychology of Composition with the Fable of Anfion and Antiode; 1947). In O Engenheiro the epigraph from Mallarme is replaced by another, from Cor- busier (". . . machine a emouvoir . . ."), since both architect and poet belong to the same spiritual family, the family of constructors, in which one finds Ca- bral's greatest admirations. The poet, who in Pedra do Sono still manifested the influence of surrealism's alogical effects, deliberately turns here toward the logic (not scientific, but poetic) of constructing. In the Brazilian context this is the instituting of a poetry of construction, rationalist and objective, against a subjective and irrationalist poetry of expression.4 The poems of O Engenheiro seem to be made with ruler and T-square, etched and calculated on paper. Coinci- dentally, the semantics of these poems found a visual context of references.

The light, the sun, the free air envelop the engineer's dream. The engineer dreams clear things: surfaces, tennis, a glass of water. The pencil, the T-square, the paper; the design, the project, the number: the engineer thinks the world exactly, a world covered by no veil.

The whole constructive program of the poet is to be found in this poem. Technically, it is important to consider a particular detail: the quatrain, a composi- tional unit most characteristic of Cabral, not taken as a fixed form (as mold) but as a block, as a block unit of composition, a preconstructed geometric element, apt and defined for the scaffolding of the poem. The quatrain as unit will be reduced metrically, its course interrupted by the brusqueness of enjambment. Asso- nant rhyme, more proper to expressing acoustic dis- cord, will dominate over consonantal rhyme in Ca- bral's quatrain. In O Engenheiro the poet's critical bent intensifies: he occupies himself obsessively with the mechanics of creation ("A Mesa," "O Fun- cionario," "O Poema," "A Ligao de Poesia" revolve around that minute investigation). This is an endeav- or that demystifies the poem, extricating it from its aura of mystery and the ineffable, showing it up for what it is: a human object, written "with pen and ink," manufactured by the "useful machinery" of the poet. In Psicologia da Composigdo this "white struggle on paper" is carried to its extreme. It is no coinci- dence that the poet took a keen interest in the graphic arts, printing his book himself on a manual press. Cabral's project is decisively Mallermean by now: artistic creation considered as struggle against chance. The epigraph from Jorge Guillen - "Rigorous horizon" - corroborates the implacable nature of the analysis to which the poet subjects his instrument.

The Psicologia da Composigdo, which reaches back through Mallarme to the well-known Poe essay "The Philosophy of Composition" on the genesis of "The Raven," is composed of three parts: the title piece, "Fabula de Anfion," and "Antiode." In "Fabula" the poet (Anfion) creates a city (Thebes or the poem itself), making it emerge from nothing (the desert), after domesticating chance ("weird beast") with the power of his flute. He then laments his achievement, comparing it to the projected work ("the uncivil dreamt cloud"), and, finding in the flute (in the instrument) the cause of the discrepancy between the original project and its realization, he rejects it, throwing it into the sea, and looks for the lost desert, perhaps so that all may begin anew. In "Antiode" the poet denounces poetry said to be "profound," and with this he puts his finger on the crisis of poetic language. Desacralizing poetry, Cabral sunders language from its noble station, showing that poetry is not "flower" but "feces" ("Poetry, I wrote you; / flower that knows itself to be excrement"). After this knowledge, which leads him to the very materiality of the poem as text, the poet emerges to call the flower flower once again, inside the poem, not a meta- phorized flower but flower which is the word flower. The poem's reality is now the reality of its text. "Flowers" and "feces" are equivalent, with no special privileges, in the dialectic of composition. The no- bility of poetry is a solipsistic falsity, as precarious as the blue fly of Machado de Assis under the thumb of the pariah. In "Psicologia da Composigao," the title poem, the problem dealt with in "Anfion" with the aid of a mythical transposition is now confronted directly, so that the former, one could say, is the key to the latter.

O CAo sem Plumas and O Rio. From the sundering of language, Cabral moves on to the problem of poetic participation. This is a natural transition, surprising as it might appear. It has been observed that the poets who have meditated most extensively on their poetic instrument are those most likely to focus on poetic participation.5 In 1954, with his essay "Da Fungao Moderna da Poesia" (The Modern Function of Poet- ry) presented before the Poetry Congress celebrated in Sao Paulo, Cabral attributed the divorce between the poet and his reader to the "preference of the poets for intimist and individualist topics." The problem of communication worried him. He launched a bruising critique against the so-called "modern poem," "writ- ten almost invariably in the first-person singular and used indifferently for any type of message," poetry that is "the very absence of construction and organi- zation, that is the simple accumulation of poetic material - rich, it is true, in its treatment of verse, of image and word, but flung helter-skelter into a depos- it box." He translated his determination to expand the audience of poetry into his adoption of his native Northeast - the critical economic underdevelopment

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and poverty of that region - as internal theme of his poetry, which had already disengaged itself program- matically from any commitments to the sublime and the seraphic. O Cdo sem Plumas, (The Dog Without Feathers; 1950), a poem of the Capibaribe River and the long-suffering inhabitants of its banks, is a first step in this direction. The book is made up in its entirety of semantic parallelisms, of deliberately rudi- mentary similes based on "as" and "when," and of prosaic terms. It is important to point out, as has been done by Antonio Houaiss,6 that the poet as- sumes the vision of the humble man, for whom the Capibaribe is a "dog-river," "father of other dogs, men-dogs, dogs with feathers," and not the stand- point of a certain heraldic perspective "that will see the river as a lion-river." In 1954, the year of the poet's thesis, he takes the same theme again in a long- winded poem, "O Rio ou Relagao da Viagem que Faz o Capibaribe de Sua Nascente a Cidade do Recife" (The River, or The Narrative of the Long Voyage the Capibaribe Makes from Its Headwaters to the City of Recife). Here we see him making prose in poetry (not poetic prose, or prose poem, but poetry that remains prose by virtue of the primary importance given to semantic information). In this sense, we could say that Cabral concedes esthetic category to a great deal of what, in the novel of the Northeast, had only documentary stature. His poetry-prose ("Quiero que compongamos io e tu una prosa" [I want you and me to compose a prose] is the epigraph from Berceo that defines it), as narrative poetry, is nevertheless highly reduced and concentrated in relation to the usual prose fiction. (Though it be longer and more discur- sive than the poetry-poetry of his previous books, O Cdo sem Plumas is to be understood as a transitional step between the two dictions of the poet, a moment of stable equilibrium between the constructive ex- ploits of O Engenheiro and the will to communicate of Psicologia, which is the opening up of the semantic ambience of the poem).7 O Rio, a poem "woven coarsely," launched in a deliberately monotonous and repetitive tone, achieves nevertheless, in its own way, an esthetic isomorphism: it attains, in the flow of the text, the live presence, the slow unfolding of the source that serves as its theme, with its contrastive procession of grandeur and misery.

Duas Aguas. CabraPs concern for the dialectic of the creative process did not abate with his social commitment. His poetry is dialectical not for the convenience of some ideal synthesis, hypostasized into an absolute; rather it serves to engender a perma- nent antithesis between conflicting elements, which struggle for conciliation where the possible displaces the eternal. Duas Aguas (1956) is the suggestive title of his collected poems [to that date - Tr.], "poetry of reflective concentration and poetry for large audi- ences," critical poetry and poetry that places its own instrument, once passed through its critical sieve, at

the service of the community. To the first Agua belongs the admirable "Uma Faca so Lamina" (1955; Eng. A Knife All Blade), where psychology turns to phenomenology of composition,8 where in "the style of the knives" we experience the implacable peeling off of the poetic object. To the second Agua belongs the auto titled Morte a Vida Severina (1954-55; Eng. "Death and Life of a Severino"), the poet's least consummated but most dispersed work in that pro- gram of social participation, well rendered and of interest as dramatic poetry.

Terceira Feira (Quaderna, Dois Parlamentos, Serial). With Quaderna (Four-Spot; 1960), Cabral continues on course. This is a book basically con- structed on the model of the squared quatrain.9 The quaderna or "four-spot" is that face of the die which, in Cabral's "throw of the dice," prevails over all others. As with the neoplasticist esthetic of Mon- drian, "The relationship of position - the rectangular relationship - is indispensable to the expression of the immutable in contrast to the variable relations of dimensionality. Neoplasticism seeks to express the variable and the invariable simultaneously and equal- ly."10 Here the invariable relationships would be those figured by the quatrain; the variable would be found in the semantic play. In Quaderna these two streams of our poet join as tributaries from the same spring and can only be differentiated at times by their thematic articulations. This is where Spain comes in. The poet is to reencounter his native Northeast dur- ing his prolonged stay in Spain. The hard plain of Castile and the harsh Northeast of Brazil become optically superimposed, just as the Spaniard and the native of the Northeast fraternize in their respective drought-stricken destinies. "Paisagens com Figuras" (Landscapes with Figures), poems of 1954-55 pub- lished in Duas Aguas, with their deliberately alternat- ing scenes from Spain and the Northeast, could be considered as the nucleus of this 1960 book. In Quaderna poems such as "De um Aviao" (From an Airplane) and "A Palo Seco" (Unceremoniously), fundamentally poems about poetry, stand out. The first originates, through the circles of flight of a plane that takes off from Recife, in the phenomenological epokhe of the poem and in the vision that it entails until its eidos : from the "illusory diamond" that is Pernambuco as seen from above and already trans- formed into memory, to the man who is "the nucleus of the nucleus of his nucleus." The second poem defines Cabral's poetic attitude in terms of a concrete Spanish experience (as, for example, in the poems of "Paisagens," or of the didactic "Alguns Toureiros" [A Few Bullfighters]). "A Palo Seco" (Unceremoni- ously) could be considered even as the emblematic poem of Cabral's entire poetic endeavor in its hard- ness and dryness, in its incisive laconicism: "It's said without ceremony / the song without guitar; / the song without; the song; / the song with nothing

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else."11 In this vein, and governed also by the strict modality of the quatrain, the poem "Paisagens com Cupim" (Landscapes with Termites) stands out. There "everything carries its decay / Everything: from the living to the dead. / From the embauba tree of the scrub lands / to the economy of the canefield." In Quaderna on the other hand, the feminine motif shows up, a rarity in the poet's previous work (recall "Mulher Sentada" [Sitting Woman] in O Engenheiro); it is treated, however, with extreme temperance in poems (e.g., "Estudos para uma Bailadora Andaluza" [Studies for an Andalusian Dancer] and "Mulher Vestida de Gaiola" [Woman Dressed in a Cage]) that reveal a technique of conversion from abstract emo- tion to concrete images, a "thingification" that evokes the love poetry of England's seventeenth- century metaphysical poets such as John Donne.12

In 1961 Cabral gave us simultaneously Dois Parla- mentos (Two Voices) and the anthology Terceira Feira (Third Fair) with the previously unpublished Serial. The first carries social commitment to the point of satirizing political customs, rehabilitating in the pro- cess a genre that the poet, in his 1954 thesis, consid- ered unjustly expelled from the category of good literature. In Serial the confluence of the "two streams" occurs through the principle of serial com-

position (exemplified in other artistic domains such as dodecaphonic music and constructivist painting). This solution was natural for Cabral, since one of his stylistic constants is the technique of repetition (the parallel similes of O Cdo sem Plumas could be seen already as true semantic series) and the standardized modality of composition. The serialization of his poems was only a step from there. The series is thematic (the same theme) and formal (the same number of quatrains). Cabral, however, does not con- ceive the series as an industrial product, projected to be reproduced in n samples from a prototype. His series is still artistic in the sense of objects made by hand by a craftsman who never produces any two

identical but works and reworks, turning out minute and subtle variants under the apparent similitude of the lot. This artisanat furieux explains the mannerism of some of the poems, the luxuriant complacence in the difficulty that becomes facile through the excess of competence that the poet has in his workshop. Coincidentally, one notes in some of those poems a certain distancing from objects, a certain tedium of events, touched by the curve of alienation from which the poet had unburdened himself in other books: when he turns and turns before the eye the epony- mous hen's egg in "O Ovo da Galinha," he comes across as a cultivator of strange occupations such as those ironized in O Rio, devoted to studying "how they brushed their teeth in this parish." The poet who, between the arid ground on the one hand and the canefield on the other, knew to see man as "the most frail plant / in this environment of predation," now contemplates the canefield from the porch of the plantation house and chats about the weather. These contradictions are not culled for judgmental pur- poses, but foremost to show that the poet's mind does not rest on impact and counterimpact, that his strug- gles and perplexities have not been placated, which could be fruitful as well. In the same Serial there are other poems such as "Velorio de um Comendador" (Wake of a Grandee), where the edge of social criti- cism is not allowed to be dulled by any socio-on- tological nostalgia of "times past."13 The book's best poems, however, are those dedicated to the poet's intellectual admirations, the series "O Sim contra o Sim" (Yes Against Yes), where we find clippings in the very words of Cesario Verde, Augusto dos Anjos, Marianne Moore, Francis Ponge, Miro, Mondrian, Juan Gris, Jean Dubuffet.

The work of Joao Cabral de Melo Neto, far from ending and still holding many surprises, is without any doubt today the most coherent and of the highest order in Brazilian poetry. Cabral's work would do honor to any literary tradition and would be unusual in any national literature by virtue of its quality. Its resonance, limited still [in 1963] among the poetry- reading public (that fiction) of Brazil, is due to the fact that only recently (speaking in relative terms [relative in the context of 1963]) has he begun to be published commercially, but above all it is due to his work's poetic conceptual rigor, which has never suc- cumbed to the "vice of national rhetoric" and to epidemic sentimentalism, unlike the case of so many poets who make ostentatious show of their modernity and even vanguardism. Even in its participatory as- pect, the work of Cabral is not easily accessible to the reader, who will be baffled by its hardness and dry- ness and who will be faced with an acrid and bruising testimony where, possibly, he would expect a charita- ble sort of rhetoric or a demagogic appeal. Among poets, however, especially among the new generation, the poetry of Joao Cabral de Melo Neto has a privi-

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leged place: the Cartesian position of greatest lu- cidity.

Sao Paulo

Translated from the Portuguese By Djelal Kadir

1 Sergio Buarque de Holanda, who in 1952 was engaged in militant criticism of poetry, was among the first to detect "the penchant for the accepted norm that is so often confused with the norm of convention and with that of the stereotype." He wrote at the time: "Whoever does not recognize that taste of the stereotype in the decrees, for example, of one of the young poets of the 'Generation of '45,' when he claims that good verse does not contain dactyls (despite Camoes), that the word firuta ought to be banished from poetry in favor of fruto and the word cachorro likewise abolished in favor of cdo, and, what's more, the Pacific Ocean (good-bye Melville and Gauguin!) is not at all poetic, much unlike the case of its neighbor, the Indian Ocean?" From "Re- beliao e Convene, oes," Didrio Carioca, 1, 20 April 1952, citing an article by Domingos Carvalho da Silva with objections of this nature to Joao Cabral de Melo Neto's Cdo sem Plumas in the Correio Paulistano, 4 March 1951.

2 Oliveira Bastos, "Esquema, Poesia e Processo," Didrio de No- ticias, Rio de Janeiro, 1 January 1956; "Vinte e dois e forma," Didrio Carioca, 1 April 1956.

3 "A Gera?ao de 45," Didrio Carioca, 4, 21 December 1952. 4 We have taken into account here and elsewhere in this study

the succinct but fundamental analysis of the dialectic of invention in Joao Cabral de Melo Neto carried out by Decio Pignatari in "Situagao Atual da Poesia no Brasil" (thesis-report for the II. Congresso Brasileiro de Critica e Historia Literaria, FFCL de Assis, 1961). The same author, in a 1957 study, "Poesia Concreta: Pequena Marcagao Historico-Formal," now republished in Teoria da Poesia Concreta, Sao Paulo, 1965, already noted certain basic characteristics of Cabral's poetry: ". . . the naked and dry word, the few words, the substantive choice of the word, the orthogonal structure, architectonic and neoplasticist, of the strophes, the play of equal elements ... at the service of a didactic will of direct language, a lesson that ought to have not been forgotten."

5 Pignatari, op. cit.: "Only the radical attitude in poetry - the attitude that is always asking 'what is poetry?' - nourishing indefi-

nitely and concretely its contradictions, could lead to the integral responsibility of the poet bent on constructing and to positive poetic results."

6 "Sobre Joao Cabral de Melo Neto," in Seis Poetas e um Proble- ma, Rio de Janeiro, Serv. de Documentagao, MEC, 1960.

7 In 1964, in the epilogue I wrote for the German edition of O Cdo sem Plumas (Der Hund ohne Federn, translated by Willy Keller, Stuttgart, Rot Handbooks, no. 14), I formulated the problem as follows: "In the first line the self-critical poem predominates, the poem-on-the-poem-itself (the poem as a metalanguage turned on the mechanics of its own language-object); in the second line, the poem's text is the material support for documentary or semantic information on a determinate reality or social context outside the poem. In O Cdo sem Plumas . . . the poet achieves an equilibrium between the two characteristic aspects of his work." This epilogue was republished under the title "El Geometra Comprometido" in the review Cormoran y Delfin (Buenos Aires), no. 7 (November 1965).

8 Concrete poetry announced this evolution in Cabral's poetry. In a 1956 manifesto, "Olho por Olho a Olho Nu" (now in Teoria da Poesia Concreta), I wrote by way of proposal-instigation: "not merely psychology but phenomenology of composition." Concom- itantly, I published the series "o a mago do 6 mega" (1955-56), inspired by that phenomenological attitude of reductive inquiry of the eidos of composition ("the thing / of the thing / of the thing / . . . zero to the zenith / luminescent / ex-nihilo").

9 Jose Lino Griinewald, "O Ultimo Livro de Cabral - Quaderna," Tribuna da Imprensa, Tabloide, Rio de Janeiro, 6/7 August 1960.

10 Arte Pldstico y Arte Pldstico Puro, Buenos Aires, Leru SRL, 1957. Mondrian, in his neoplasticism, considered poetry also, explicitly: "The art of the word thus also becomes plastic expres- sion in relational equilibrium . . . plastic of relationships" (O Neoplasticismo, Sao Paulo, Gremio da FAU, 1954). Mondrian's manifesto was launched in Paris in 1920.

11 See in my study "Drummond, Mestre de Coisas" (Metalingua- gem, Sao Paulo, Cultrix, 3d ed., 1976) the observation on "poetry with a lesser sign," note 6.

12 Augusto de Campos, in his note to the translation of John Donne's poem "Em despedida, proibindo o pranto," made this comparison (Suplemento do Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, 5 May 1957).

13 The poet, to whom I read this essay in Geneva in 1964, argued that he was not interested in the Proustian recuperation of "tempo perdido," of memory's time, but solely (in the cited poem, "O Ovo da Galinha") in the fixing of physical time (or times) of perception.