Satyr: or The Power of Words

'Satyr' is Huidobro's last novel, published in Santiago in 1939, at a time when little of his work was in print in his native land. While that situation would be rectified two years later, with the release of two major poetry collections, this volume is his final work in prose, and one that has mostly escaped attention since. Closer examination of the text reveals however that it contains a number of the author's literary, social, political and philosophical preoccupations, with many themes from his poems, essays, and manifestos re-occurring in the book, the protagonist of which, Bernardo Saguen, may be regarded on one level as a failed artist. This would-be writer is one that goes to the bad, and whose mental collapse - he seems to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia - and moral disintegration seem to parallel the kind of disintegration seen in some of the author's later poems. Written at a time when Huidobro was unsure of his literary position in Chile, the book is much concerned with the idea of poetic creation, while also worrying at the concept of reality, whether artistic creations are part of reality itself, and whether the artist himself is part of reality. As the novel proceeds, Saguen finds himself increasingly untethered from that reality as he has a nervous breakdown, only for his return to a measure of sanity and composure to coincide with horror, and then total mental collapse. The reader's sympathies lie with him at the outset, but we have only his word for the events that transpire; his unreliability as a narrator becomes ever more obvious, and clues begin to mount. Have we, as readers been deceived by a monstrous and amoral egoist, or have we really observed a total mental breakdown, as it was happening? Nothing is clear at the end, apart from the horror.

About the Author :
The Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948) is one of the most important figures in 20th-century Hispanic poetry and, with Cesar Vallejo, one of the pioneering avant-gardists in Spanish. Originally from an upper-class Santiago family, Huidobro was fortunate to have the means to support himself and his family while he found his artistic way. After an early phase writing in a quasi-symbolist style in his native city, he moved to Paris and threw himself into the local artistic milieu with a passion, quickly becoming a notable figure, publishing two full-sized collections and four chapbooks in 1917-18, and a French-language selected poems in 1921. Influenced initially by Apollinaire, Huidobro quickly befriended both forward-looking French writers such as Reverdy, Cocteau and Radiguet, and the Spanish expatriate artists, including Picasso and Juan Gris. He was to reach his artistic maturity in 1931 with the publication of two masterpieces: the long poem, 'Altazor', and the book-length prose-poem 'Temblor de cielo' (Skyquake). Two further collections followed during his lifetime, both published in Santiago in 1941. While he is best remembered today for his poetry, his fiction and other writings are also still worth the reader's attention.