Yet, as René de Costa highlights, while Breton and other surrealists wanted to capture the voice of the subconscious, Neruda wanted to only emulate its style. Toward this end, he didn’t let the flow of spontaneous thought fall purely onto the final page. Instead, he filtered those “scattered expressions” with some review and revision, improving the composition’s clarity, creating some conscious constructions and recurring themes.*
These measured changes gave Neruda a kind of life preserver for the poem to stay afloat above the incomprehensibility of the deep unconscious. Thus protected, Neruda moved closer toward recapturing the subconscious through his novel technique of stripping out all punctuation and capitalization, not only as a means of bringing his poetry closer to “naked thought,” but as an artistic aid that loosened the flow of the poetic discourse, an uninhibited structure that mirrors the poem’s dreamscape setting.†
That dreamscape permeates the book, which centers on the fantastic nocturnal voyage of a melancholic young man who sets off on a quest to rediscover himself, to reach a state of pure consciousness. We accompany him as he embarks on a journey through time and space, through unity and disunity with the night, a lyrical narrative, played out over fifteen cantos, each uniquely composed but intimately linked. They are spread over forty-four pages, divided up and placed on each page in an inconsistent but not random fashion, creating blocks of white space that add to the book’s illusory feel.
The poem’s Infinite Man searches for absolute oneness, a new reality, a restored consciousness—a quest that mirrors Neruda’s own search for self-discovery and expression. In fact, the book has been described as “one part quest and one part inner map.” And interestingly, it is through a creative process originating in “scattered” thoughts and unconscious tone that the quest is composed. Neruda was twenty when he first started writing venture; at the beginning of the book we learn that the poem’s subject is “a man of twenty.” We see this young man with his “soul in despair,” the same state in which Rubén found Neruda just before he began writing venture, with his soul “spinning around itself, seeking its own center.”
In the opening canto, Neruda depicts an almost cinematic tapestry of the nocturnal void through which the man will travel. Soon, like Alice with her looking glass, he will shatter “my heart like a mirror in order to walk through myself.” He is now enabled to travel through night, attempting to conquer it so that he can achieve that absolute oneness. In a midbook climax, he achieves physical union during a sexual experience with night, personified as a woman; he becomes one with the night:
twisting to that side or beyond you continue being mine
in the solitude of dusk your smile knocks
in that instant vines climb to my window
wind from high above lashes the hunger for your presence
Following the ecstasy of this climactic encounter with night, we no longer find him melancholic. He is enlivened:
ah i surprise myself i sing delirious under the big top
like a lovestruck tightrope walker or the first fisherman
He also now has the ability to be a poet, and he begins to meditatively seek his inner self:
letting the sky in deeply watching the sky i am thinking
sitting uncertainly on that edge
oh sky woven with water and paper
i began to speak to myself in a low voice determined not to leave
This ties in to Rubén’s description of Neruda’s determination to conduct his own introspective search. This desire for self-exploration and the craving for new perspectives through which he might ground himself not only led Neruda to experiment with his creative process and style, but also manifested themselves as elements of venture’s narrative: that meditative thinking generates the poetic narrative.
And while, by the final canto, it seems that he has achieved his quest (“i am standing in the light like midday on earth / i want to tell it all with tenderness”), off the written page, the completion of the book brought no immediate personal resolution to his trio of agitations, “love, money, and poetry.” His new book failed to garner the critical and popular reception he had hoped for, outside of those few on the vanguard.* Indeed, in 1950, twenty-five years after he finished writing it, Neruda noted that venture was “the least read and least studied of all my work.” The book has consistently been passed over primarily because of its heavy experimentalism, which, on the one hand, makes it so exceptional and rich, yet, on the other, has caused readers, critics, and publishers (and translators) to shy away from its unconventional form. It didn’t help that its feeble reception was quickly overshadowed by the tremendous achievements of Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth), his subsequent book of poetry (achievements, as we shall see, that were in part due to his experimentation in venture).
One of the first mainstream reviews of venture came from Raúl Silva Castro, the former student leader who was the first to publish Neruda in Claridad. Now a critic for El Mercurio, he complained: “The flesh and blood we had admired so much in the author’s other books are missing here . . . [A reader] might just as well begin to read from the back as from the front, or even the middle. One would understand the same, that is to say, very little.” Alone, who wasn’t too keen on Twenty Love Poems, was perplexed at this latest work. He referred to the book as “going the way of the absurd.”
Venture’s negative popular reception was certainly disconcerting to Neruda. But still, he had accomplished a remarkable achievement: for a poet known for his constant evolution, venture is one of the most striking examples of Neruda’s growth as a poet. He successfully broke out of the confinements of the conventions he first trained on and found a
