Creationism literature was a movement that developed in the early 20th century among Hispanic writers in France, Spain, and Latin America. It is considered that its foundation was carried out around 1916 in Paris by the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro.
From France, the country where Huidobro lived until World War II, creationism influenced Spanish poets such as Diego Cendoya and Juan Larrea, until it gained great influence on the avant-garde poets of France, Spain and Latin America.
For creationist writers, the poet’s role was to create an imaginary, personal world rather than to describe the world that reality offered them. These writers combined images and metaphors, using original vocabulary and combining words irrationally.
Origin of Literary Creationism
According to Huidobro, creationism was not a school that he sought to found and spread, but a theory that he himself began to elaborate around 1912. According to this, the first works of this author were not entirely creationist, but could already be perceived in them. they are the first steps of the literary current.
The name “creationism” comes from religious doctrines that hold that all living beings come from the hands of a creator god.
In this sense, Huidobro proposed that the author fulfill the role of god creator of the universes and logics of his own work.
However, this should not be confused with “creationist” doctrines. That is, those who oppose evolutionary theories that support the religious belief that a creator god exists.
Features of Literary Creationism
The main characteristic of creationism was the rejection of mimesis, that is, the reflection of reality in a credible way. According to the ideology of creationist poets, referring to existing reality implies not creating anything.
In the worlds that poets create for their works, they assume the role of “a little God”, as Huidobro described in his poem “Poetic Art”. For this reason, in his works everything was allowed, including the creation of new words or the use of metaphors without logical bases.
For creationists, the poet had to stop depicting nature in his works to start creating his own world. Therefore, creationist poetry implied the need to create new images vivid enough to constitute a new reality in themselves.
For this reason, creationism used various techniques to face these new worlds that were created in the work of each author.
Some of these worlds included new languages that broke with the norms and aesthetics of language, as well as with syntax.
They also used wordplay, long sequences of enumerations, mindless games, and the lack of a narrative thread, which gave their creations the appearance of a random object emerging from the hand of a creator god.
This irrational structure, devoid of meaning and divorced from aesthetic norms, was heavily influenced by other avant-gardes, such as ultraism and Dadaism.
Another important feature was its polyglot nature. As this trend is created mainly by Spanish-speaking authors based in Paris, several languages converged in their works, which were sometimes used in an undifferentiated way.
main representatives
1- Vicente Huidobro
Vicente Huidobro was born in Santiago de Chile in 1893 and died in Cartagena (Chile) in 1948. He is considered the founder and main exponent of creationism, and a great promoter of the avant-garde in Latin America.
The maximum development of creationism was reached by Huidobro during his stay in Paris, the city where he arrived in 1916, in the middle of the world war. He would later travel to Madrid, where he would meet new writers who were followers of the current.
Altazor , his main work, was published in 1931 and was creationism’s most iconic novel. However, Huidobro maintained that he began producing creationist texts from 1912, before his first trip to Paris.
In 1925, he returned to Chile and, from his arrival, took up an active literary and political production, notable for the foundation of the magazine La Reforma and the newspaper Acción . In addition, his political activity led him to be a candidate for president, a failure that motivated him to return to Paris.
2- Juan Larrea
Juan Larrea was born in Bilbao in March 1895 and died in Argentina in 1980. He made his first publications in magazines of the ultraist movement. However, he later became linked to creationism, motivated by his closeness to Vicente Huidobro.
In Paris, he was in contact with other avant-gardes, such as Dadaism and Surrealism, and adopted French as a poetic language, in order, as he expressed it, to achieve maximum creative freedom from the ties of his mother tongue.
His complete work was published in Spain in the 1960s, when avant-garde poetry reached a peak. The book that collected his poetry was called the Heavenly Version, and as a result of this publication he became a cult poet.
After his visit to Paris, he moved to Latin America with the intention of learning more about the native peoples of this continent.
Finally, he settled in Argentina, where he made abundant poetic and biographical publications on the authors with whom he had been associated.
3- Gerardo Diego
Gerardo Diego was born in Santander in October 1896 and died in Madrid in July 1987. Although his journey in poetry and literature began with an approach to traditional verse, his time in Paris would allow him to relate to the avant-garde of the time.
In this city, he met Vicente Huidobro, thanks to whom he ventured into the production of texts with creationist characteristics.
Furthermore, he himself would later recognize his weakness in relation to other artistic and literary avant-gardes such as Cubism and Dadaism. In fact, the fusion of characteristics from different streams was one of his main qualities.
As a result of his time in Paris, he published Image (1922) and Foam Manual (1921). In this last book, for example, he merges two or three poems into the same poem, creating new images.
