A reading of Poèmes mécaniques

Abstract

Pierre Garnier and his wife Ilse Garnier are fundamental authors of the vanguard literature in France. They are not situated properly in the effervescent period of the early twentieth century when, for example, Futurism and Cubism arose. They are late avant-garde, of the second half of the century, also recognized by the somewhat contradictory designation of neo-vanguardists. The fact is that all the logic of the avant-garde finds in them a resurgence: the negation of the past, the utopia of change, the revolutionary text, the recourse of manifestos. They send out the last luminous rays of what Octávio Paz (1993, p. 53) means by “twilight of the aesthetics of change”, that is, the exhaustion of the aesthetic modernity, which ends up taking new directions in contemporary times. The movement they founded, Spatialism, bequeathed visual poems of intense beauty and obscure communicability. Here we undertake a reading of Poèmes mécaniques, an experience of written production that seeks to subvert the common language.