Deconstruction (and Digression) in the Poetry of Jenaro Talens

Verisimilar until proven fragmentary: this assumption is not so much a protection granted to literary texts as it is a burden borne by those poets who seek to look beyond the surface of literary representations and the political consensus and limitations they impose. "Si no perdemos de vista que la verosimilitud es una técnica," the members of the Colectivo Alicia Bajo Cero point out, "lo inmediato es preguntarse por su objeto: al servicio de qué se pone, qué es aquello de lo que se habla de manera verosímil. Esto es de capital importancia si pensamos que ningún discurso habla simplemente de la realidad, sino de una selección de la misma que excluye las restantes" (85). Verisimilitude, then, relies on notions of textual and political coherence and completeness, which in turn rely on mechanisms of selection and exclusion. This coherence and completeness, however, is already called into question by logocentric attitudes that attribute "presence" to speech and view writing with suspicion, thus requiring conventionalized efforts to create realistic and verisimilar representations. Within the context of logocentric attitudes towards writing, which already subordinate it to speech, digressions and parenthetical insertions would thus be even further removed from presence. Parenthetical insertions, then, are at best seen as neutral distractions and at worst attacks on the integrity of sentences to which they belong. The extraneous character typically attributed to digressions in general and parenthetical insertions in particular relies on a binary logic that takes for granted the supposed unity and verisimilitude of the sentences and expressions in which such digressions and insertions appear.

Discussions and theorizations of parenthetical insertions and expressions usually control for the contexts in which they appear by considering such elements as they are found in prose. Parenthetical insertions in poetic texts, though, are built upon the unstable terrain of poetry. In poetic texts, the supposedly complete, stable, and whole ground against which parenthetical insertions are judged to be inconsequential is always already undermined, as poetry is constructed according to the opposition between metrical and semantic segmentation, to use Giorgio Agamben's terminology (109). What defines poetry, according to Agamben and others, is the possibility of enjambment. Rather than merely dealing with parenthetical insertions interrupting and distracting the reader from the meaning produced by sentences, one must take into account the prior distribution of these sentences over multiple verses. As James Longenbach states, "[t]o cast syntax into lines is to provide choices, to place precision in the service of equivocation by making us consider the implications of reading the syntax in one way rather than another" (24). For Longenbach, "if line determines the way a sentence becomes meaningful to us in a poem, it also makes us aware of how artfully a sentence may resist itself, courting the opposite of what it says – or, more typically, something just slightly different from what it says" (24-25).

Whether poetry should seek to create verisimilar and realist representations of experience and reality or instead seek to resist itself has served as one of the fundamental points of contention between Spanish poets during the post-Franco period. The poetas de la experiencia, like Luis García Montero (1958-), Felipe Benítez Reyes (1960-), Carlos Marzal (1961-), and Vicente Gallego (1963-), championed a return to a more conventional and easily comprehensible poetic practice. These goals have been interpreted by some as attempts to maintain the political status quo. To a certain extent, this strain of poetry came into being as a reaction to the "elitist" and "intellectual" poetry of the so-called novísimos, whose work sought to undermine mimetic and verisimilar representations of reality in poetry. This work and its skeptical attitude towards reality and language was a reaction to the linguistic manipulation and cover up taking place on both sides of the political spectrum during the Franco regime.

Although he has questioned the utility of categories like that of novísimo poetry, Jenaro Talens (1946-) is generally considered to be one of these poets.¹ That his poetry undercuts mimetic and verisimilar literary representations and exhibits the influence of post-structuralist thought are facts...