César Vallejo #08 - The Co-substantial Movement of Matter

In a collection of short prose pieces titled, Against the Professional Secret, César Vallejo formulated a measured response to Cocteau’s essay The Professional Secret. By 1926, Vallejo had already expatriated from Peru & was living in France, from which he would venture off to Russia twice in order to get a first hand experience of the revolution. In this essay, Vallejo attacks the idea of simultaneity with regards to substantive reality. In the context of literature, this enables him to counter the aesthetics of Cubism & Surrealism, where reality is represented as fragmented. For Vallejo, reality is a parade, where everyone & everything is in line, & moves forward in a succession, one after the other. It is not hard to see the Whitmanian influence here, though clearly being pushed towards a Marxist ideology, which the Peruvian does indeed do in other parts of this collection.