Cual los imbéciles, buscando un bastón (En torno al enmarañado viaje de Henri Michaux al Ecuador)

Abstract

In Ecuador. Journal de Voyage (1929), Henri Michaux aspires to go beyond the vertigo of emptiness and nothingness in search of meanings that elude him, and that would perhaps reveal a “transreal” dimension of reality. It is with that perspective, and bearing in mind the historical and ideological context, that one must approach the diary of the Belgium-French author’s travails along the Atlantic, Ecuador’s Andean region, and the Amazon realm. Thus, it is important to illustrate, however tangentially, the literary practices that determine that work in order not to turn it into a mere travel journal when, in fact, we have at hand a demanding book which suggests an effort, not to say a treatise, of poetic and theoretical inspiration that points to an aesthetic and a design, to a stylized and even systematic world view. The avant-garde inspired analogies and juxtapositions reveal a world where the sparks, and contrasts of the exterior and the interior, the static and the dynamic, the everyday and the bizarre, the vast and the intimate, the sacred and the profane, and the limited and the infinite come together.