In this article for the special issue of Revista Chilena de Literatura devoted to Chile’s bicentennial, I explore multiple literary, scientific, and geographic connections between Vicente Huidobro’s poem Altazor and the global philosophical-scientifi c contexts of the first few decades of the 20th century. I consider the impact of a series of linguistic, critical, allegorical, and gravitational “falls” in the trajectory of Altazor’s “viaje en paracaídas” in order to think through the impact of a linguistic event in the poem’s gravitational field. By engaging myriad critical approaches to the poem’s “illegible,” ambiguous conclusion, I link the Chilean and European avant-garde poetic scenes (Madrid-Paris-Santiago) with the scientific imaginaries of important discoveries in theoretical and experimental physics in the early 20th century (Berne and Copenhagen). I explore the ways in which Altazor in and of itself the marks the discursive passage between Newtonian and quantum cosmovisions vis a vis the historical context of the quantum/relativistic paradigm shift in physics that was contemporary to the poem’s composition. Altazor’s meaning-making activities, read with respect to quantum and cosmological concerns, show how Huidobro’s long poem traces the falling motion of a linguistic and cosmic event that, nevertheless, is horizon-less and radically heterogeneous in nature –a facet of the poem that is indicative of the kinds of quantum fl uctuations whose “path” cannot be accurately predicted or described with total certainty or mastery.
Weintraub, S. (2010). Berne-Copenhagen-Madrid-Paris-Santiago: relativistic interpolations, quantic variations and cosmic impacts in Altazor (1919-1931). Revista Chilena De Literatura, (76). Retrieved from https://cuadernosjudaicos.uchile.cl/index.php/RCL/article/view/1140
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