Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) Read Online Free Page A

knights in shining armor (or “Prince Charmings,” “principes azules,” literally “blue knights,” in Spanish). The title of that first influential collection, in Darío’s view, pointed to the color of daydreams, an azure found in the work of Victor Hugo, “the color of art, a Hellenic, Homeric color, a color oceanic and firmamental, the coeruleum which in Pliny is the simple color that resembles the sky, and sapphires.”
    In any case, Azul . . . ought to be read as an itinerary of sorts, announcing the direction Darío would take in his life-long oeuvre. Most of the attention it commands comes from its crystalline stanzas. But it also contains stories such as “The Bourgeois King,” subtitled “A Cheering Tale,” about a pompous monarch who hires a poet to play the organ in his garden parties, “near the swans.” The fairy tales function as an excuse for Darío to analyze two social types: an emerging bourgeoisie in Latin America, uninterested in art, and the artist with lofty ideals. The poet is clearly Darío’s alter ego. He states: “My lord, for long years I have sung the word of the future. I was born in the time of the dawn and I have spread my wings in the hurricane. I seek the chosen race that awaits, with hymns upon their lips and lyres in their hands, the rising of the great sun. . . .” And: “I have caressed great Nature, and I have sought, in the warmth of the ideal, the verse that lies in the star at the end of the heavens, the pearl in the depths of ancient Ocean. I have sought to boom, to crash! For the age of the great revolutions is coming, with a Messiah that is all Light, and Agitation, and Power, and we must receive his spirit with a poem that is a triumphal arch, with lines of iron, and lines of gold, and lines of love.” The survival of this hungry artist depends on the bourgeois king. At the end of the story, Darío has him perish “thinking that the sun would rise the next day, and with it, the ideal . . . and that art would wear not wool pants, but a mantle of gold, and flames. . . . And the next day the king and his courtiers found him there, the poor devil of a poet, like a swallow frozen in the ice, with a bitter smile on his lips.”
    In comparison with Darío’s poetry, his stories have commanded limited attention. They are skillfully written, but they suffer for their ambitions, in that they rarely generate the genuine psychological terror achieved by Poe and Stevenson, and also from the fact that their author died too soon to benefit, as Borges did so exotically, from the discoveries of Sigmund Freud. Still, they are marvelous in the traditional sense of the term: filled with precious marvels. And they ought to be read in their own historical context. As a fin-de-siècle literari, Darío employed images and symbols, much in the way the nineteenth-century Romantics did. He wasn’t interested in plot. Instead, his objective was to communicate “truths.” What makes him so compelling, I would argue, is his perversity—perversity of spirit, sexual perversity. In “The Ruby,” for instance, the precious stone is created by means of the blood of a woman that has been kidnapped and maybe raped. Thus, the gems that result from it are dependent on violence, wounding, abuse, violation of all sorts. There is also the dance-read-as-sexual-dalliance of “The Palace of the Sun,” the “murder” of art by a jealous wife in “The Death of the Empress of China,” and “El Fardo” and countless other similar stories in which the artist-figure is insensitive to the pain of others. It is in his stories that Darío is at his most Decadent and the humanistic paradigm is inverted. For what is Decadence if not a form of writing obsessed with style, in which the subject tends toward the perverse, dark, and sinful, and in which sensation is more important than morality? In his fiction Darío does tend to be overly allegorical for the pre-Chekhov and pre-Joyce reader, delegating