In 1963 I began to write my book of essays/galaxies.... The book
was conceived as an experiment in doing away with limits between po-
etry and prose, projecting the larger and more suitable concept of text
(as a corpus of words with their textual potentials.... The text is de-
¤ned as a “®ux of signs,” without punctuation marks or capital letters,
®owing uninterruptedly across the page, as a galactic expansion. Each
page, by itself, makes a “concretion,” or autonomously coalescing body,
interchangeable with any other page for reading purposes. There are
“semantic vertebrae” which unify the whole.... [The book] consti-
tutes a search for “language in its materiality,” without “beginning-
middleend.” “Exterior monologue” was the phrase I used to express
this “materiality” “without psychology,” that is, language that auto-
enunciates itself. (58, my emphasis)The notion of the “galaxy” as limit text is reiterated in Haroldo’s afterword
to the Galáxias, where he refers to his text as operating “at the extreme limits
of poetry and prose.”^20 And in an interview with Roland Greene, Augusto
similarly endorses a writing “where the criteria of poetry and prose co-exist
in a boundary-situation, where the words of prose are as though ionized by
their poetic function.” “Such,” adds Augusto, “is the case in Finnegans Wake,
in many texts of Gertrude Stein, and in the Diaries of John Cage, which are
analogous to those lyric works that incorporate the language of prose, such
as certain passages in the Galáxias of Haroldo de Campos.”^21
The case of Gertrude Stein is especially interesting because, unlike the
Concretists or Joyce before them, Stein does not use innovative typogra-
phy and rarely includes foreign words, proper names, or allusions—in other
words, the exotic items whose coordination makes for visual interest in Fin-
negans Wake. Yet consider the following paragraph from “Regular Regularly
in Narrative,” from Stein’s 1931 text How to Write:
They be little be left be killed be left be little be killed
be killed be little be little be left be killed be his father be his
mother be his father be little be left be killed be his mother be
his father be left be killed be little be his father be his mother.
Be little be his mother be left be his father be little be his father
be left be killed be his father be left be killed be his father be
his mother be killed be his mother be left be his mother be little
be killed be left be his mother be his father be his father be his
mother be his father be left be his mother be killed be left be
his father.de Campos’s Galáxias and After 183