by interpretative comments.”^14 Indeed, Haroldo reminds us, “the ‘verbivoco-
visual’ elements of Joyce’s prose, the ‘montage word,’ regarded as a composite
mosaic unit or a basic textural node (‘silvamoonlake,’ for instance), were
emphasized from the very beginning of the Concrete Poetry movement”
(“Sanscreed” 55). And he cites an earlier formulation by Augusto de Cam-
pos: “The Joycean ‘micro-macrocosm,’ which reached its pinnacle in Fin-
negans Wake, is another excellent example [of proto-Concrete poetry]....
Here counterpoint is moto perpetuo. The ideogram is obtained by super-
imposing words, true lexical montages. Its general infrastructure is a circular
design of which every part is a beginning, middle, and end.”^15
It may seem strange that Concrete poetry, with its emphasis on graphic
space as structural agent and its conviction that in the verbivocovisual con-
stellation, form and content are isochronous, would take as its exemplar a
628–page work of continuous prose—a “novel” that, except for Book II, chap-
ter 2 (“unde et ubi”),^16 with its marginal glosses, pictograms, musical scores,
and geometric forms, does not seem to exploit the visual dimension of the
text at all. But perhaps it is the word visual that needs recon¤guration here.
A hint is supplied by Haroldo in his essay “The Open Work of Art” (which,
incidentally, preceded Umberto Eco’s well-known Opera Aperta by a number
of years).^17 In discussing the “circular organization of poetic material” in Un
coup de dés, Haroldo adds:
The Joycean universe also evolved from a linear development of
time toward space-time or the infusion of the whole in the part (“all-
space in a notshall”—nutshell), adopting as the organogram of Finne-
gans Wake the Vico-vicious circle.... each “verbi-voco-visual” unit
is at the same time the continent-content of the whole work and in-
stantly myriadminded.... a whole metaphoric cosmos is contained in
a single word. This is why it can be said of Finnegans [sic] that it retains
the properties of a circle, of the equidistance of all points on it from
the center. The work is porous to the reader, accessible from any of the
places one chooses to approach it. (Dispositio 6)The implication of such “allspace in a notshall” is that, for Haroldo, Concrete
poetics is not a matter of word placement or innovative typography (as it is
for some of his colleagues), but rather the phonemic, ideogrammic, para-
grammatic character of the morphemes and words themselves. Accordingly,
the distinction between “visual poem” and “prose” breaks down. Consider
the following passage from the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Finnegans
Wa k e. Haroldo’s translation, which becomes Fragment 8, covers the better
de Campos’s Galáxias and After 179