"Oscuro Pez del Fondo": José ÁngelValente and the Poetics of Retraction

OwaMo de U TorreCornell University

As noted by several critics, José Ángel Valente ( 1929-2000) begins to publish at a momentthat did not seem particularly receptive to the kind of poetry he was writing. In Miguel Mas'ssummary, 1950s Spanish poetry attempted to incorporate one or more of the following:a social-realist; thematic, a nod toward populism, an overt concern for promoting justiceand denouncing injustice, and an interest in communicability (17). The general attempt,then, was to grant poetry an overtly public function by positioning it within the sphere ofsocio-cultural dialogue, a tendency that came to be known as "poesia de comunicación,"and to which Valente, in truth, was not immune (as evident, for instance, in the existentialpessimism oí A modo de esperanza, from 1955). Poetry's communicational potential wasperhaps best theorized by Carlos Bousoño, who in 1952 published the first edition ofhis influential Teoría de la expression poética.^ For his part, Valente's political and social"retraction" may be dated at the early 1970s, when a sudden interest in the autonomyof literature and in the mystical dimension of poetic (in)communicability develops. Thisopposing view came to be termed "poesia de conocimiento." Yet knowledge, one may ask,of what or of whom? Focusing on Valente's later poetic work, as well as on his importantcritical-theoretical contributions (whose scope and influence rival those of Bousoño), thisarticle will argue that, in addition to affording a unique knowledge or insight in regardsto the creative process (understood as the emergence of the poem through the subjectivewithdrawal of the poet and the silencing of the voice), poetry claims to arrive at the basicyet confounding knowledge of language itself-—of language, that is, as a site of materialityand of infinite signifying potentiality. I will trace Valente's theoretic and literary curiosityas it departs from the visible relationship between poetry and society, and retracts intothe more arcane or ambiguous sphere of poetic knowledge and process. Expression,explication, ahd analysis (in one word, communication), in the course of this movement,become, for Valente, increasingly more difficult to practice and to sustain; as it movesaway from the more visible level of poetry's societal function, toward an exploration ofpoetic knowledge, the creative process, as well as what may be called the "fact" or "matter"of language, Valente's thought shifts increasingly and expectedly closer to the apophaticmode. A critical descent into Valente's work will bring to light his profound and sustainedengagement with the limits of language—limits which, in his assessment, poetic discourse

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seems particularly willing to probe; and to do so, to employ his own evocative image, as a"pez en el limo" 'fish in the mire' {Obra 57).^

It may be pertinent to begin with a discussion of language in its "superficial" form—public language—which Valente argues differs from poetic language in that it falls prey tosolidification, to a radical formalism that arrests the positive flow of polysemy. An extremeexample of such semantic containment can be seen in the discourse employed by theState. "All institutionalized order," Valente says, "carries with it an institutionalization oflanguage..." ("Ideología" 51). When arrested by the institutional hold, language is "unableto harbor new meanings and is subjected to the same immobilizing and disabling processthat characterizes the repressive, self-preserving development of the city's order, or, whatamounts to the same, that characterizes all forms of ideological crystallization" (51-52).Valente sees in the Greek figure of Antigone an example of the kind of poetic counter-discourse that holds the potential to challenge the State's congealed word, embodied inthis instance by Thebe's ruler, Creon. Antigone's word is thus simultaneously destructiveand creative, for while it threatens and breaks language in its idolatrized form, it restoreslanguage to its "communitarian" mode (54). Antigone thereby fulfills Mallarmé's beliefthat the poet grants a "purer" sense to the "words of the tribe" while simultaneously,however, suffering its social contempt and even death.^ Congealed language, on the otherhand, is pure exteriority; while devoid of its own content, it sequesters and imprisonswithin its surface discourses that are in themselves substantive and which pose a threat tothe official linguistic structure and imperatives of the State. Reading his work in relationto his own socio-political context (Francoist Spain), Christine Arkinstall positions Valentein Antigone's role, arguing, in allusion to the predominance of earthly and material motifsin his poetry, that "the poet's descent into the bowels of the earth is synonymous withhis penetrating the Regime's ideological corpus, so as to recover the devoured, retainedmatter" (80). Envisioning the task of the poet as akin to that of an archeological excavation,she further claims that "it is the poet who will struggle with the superficial and officialmeaning imposed on the wor(l)d in order to wrest from it the meaningful layers of aforgotten history" (79)."̂

On a less political and more literary note, poetry itself can be overwhelmed byrhetorical surface, a situation that Valente sees affecting the work of Ruben Darío—apoet who, as the ostensible leader of Spanish American modernismo, can perhaps beall-too-easily accused of excessive dwelling in ornament and preciosity. Interestingly,Valente can embrace Mallarmé's idiosyncratic style, his formalistic innovation, even hisunintelligibility, but cannot accept Dario's. While Mallarmé's poetry entails a critique ofParnassianism's obsession with attaining the exact word (as evidenced, for example, in his"Sonnet en-jyx"), Dario's is predominantly a recycling of Parnassian motifs and devices.While recognizing Dario's overall positive and regenerative effect on both Spanish andLatin American poetry (the very title of his essay, "Darío o la innovación," reveals anaffirmative position), when Valente decides to focus on the "weak" points in his work,he consistently returns to the issue of surplus adornment and excessive form. Thus,"Darío innovated, but his innovation frequently includes much more surface than depth"("Darío" 81).5 In another essay, Valente similarly contends that linguistic arrest can beobserved in poetry that practices a facile imposition of forms and themes, in poetry that

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veils itself in '''thematic surfaces." To this kind of solidification Valente gives the name of"tendency," the "tyrannous formalism of tendency" ("Tendencia" 11). In contrast to thepositivity of "style"—which Valente sees as enabling as long as it remains restrained, aslong as it does not eclipse the content—tendency will in every case prove disabling orimmobilizing. Tendency is again synonymous with that which Valente opposes: an excessof surface, of exteriority, and of form (Valente thus bewails the scarcity of poets "withthe ability to submerge themselves below thematic surfaces, so proper to opportunismand mediocri^^" [15]). Style is constantly threatened by tendency, which in the followingquote is represented as an "aesthetic a priori" that has the effect of subjugating the poemunder form:

Style... can fall victim to two aprioristic elements: an aesthetic a priori andan ideological a priori. Both completely liquidate ["liquidan de raíz"] everypossibility of the work of art's emergence. The aesthetic a priori causes theautonomy of the verbal medium to prevail: style disappears and becomesmanner. The ideological a priori causes the autonomy of theme to prevail: stylealso disappears and becomes demonstrative schematism. (13)

Valente will raise a similar point with respect to the poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez.In an important essay, Valente begins by quoting a passage in which Jiménez situates Daríoand Unamunp as the two figures without which no critic can begin to comprehend ortrace Spain's recent poetic traditions; with Darío, a "stylistic" vein is inaugurated, while a"metaphysical" one begins with Unamuno ("Juan Ramón" 90). Valente agrees up to thispoint, but quickly adds that the two strongest poets that followed (Machado and JiménezhimselO took: radically divergent paths, "...in such a way that in Machado 'conscious'metaphysics ["lo metafisico 'conciente'"] predominates, while in J. R. J. [sic] it is a no lessconscious stylistics..." (90). Valente's praise for Machado vis-à-vis Jimenez is unequivocal:"Machado saw much farther than J. R. J.; Machado saw and traveled so far that even hecould not catch up with himself..." (91). Both heirs to modernismo. Machado was ableto transcend the negative qualities of this movement, mainly, its excessive sentimentalismand its exaltation of the self (96). Jiménez, on the other hand, was "never" able to takethis "simple yet difficult step" (97). Jimenez's poetry, in other words, remains situatedwithin the very horizon which Valente's own poetry seeks to transcend: the horizon ofautonomous and authoritative subjectivity, or of the "essential homogeneity of the / ' (92;author's emphasis). Jimenez's work, for Valente, constitutes a poetic monologue; the poetis both the subject and object of his discourse, the continent from which he departs andtoward which he triumphantly returns, a "stationary journey which starts ofï with thepoet, traverses the poet, and ends with the poet" (98).

In contirast to this kind of language—fixed in its outward presentation in bothDarío and Jiménez—Valente insists, with Adorno, that the artwork should allow for thespeaking of that voice muffled or entirely silenced by ideology; the "revelation of thatwhich ideology uncovers" will occur by virtue of a revelatory type of art, an art whoseresponsibility or compromise lies "with the hidden," with that still-vital substance buriedbeneath ideology's petrified surface ("Literatura" 23).*̂ Valente now speaks explicitly of

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poetry's cognitive function, claiming that when poetic discourse reveals the ideologicallyhidden it fulfills its role as knowledge: "We are now at the condition of approachingpoetic activity as a revelation of the hidden, that is, of approaching the notion of poetryas knowledge [conocimiento]" (24). Knowledge, for Valente, is always knowledge ofsomething previously concealed and now uncovered, brought to the surface; or otherwisesought, discovered, and touched upon at its own deep, obscure level, encountered in itsvery depth. Poetry's movement is thus first of all a penetrative movement, after which itbecomes either a movement of resurfacing, of bringing back to light, or an explorative,palpating advance in the dark.7 The task is to go through, in a downward progress, allthe "false" layers that stand in the way of substantive truth. The struggle for poetry willthus be spoken of in terms of surface, layers, semblance, exteriority, and visibility, all ofwhich must be traversed if an encounter with "truth" is to be sustained. On the otherside of ideological surface, beyond layers of linguistic falsification, stands what can at bestbe referred to as "reality," a realm infinitely harder to define, describe or sketch than itssuperficial counterpart, since it represents the very limits of language and of articulation.In a sense, reaching this primordial linguistic "swamp" entails, for Valente, an experienceakin to witnessing the divine—something like an encounter with an angel arriving onbehalf of a nebulous, material, and formless god.

At the risk of defining it too much, of falling into an excessive predication thatwould compromise its unity or integrity, this realm—encountered, discovered, unveiledby the poetic operation—cannot be described by Valente in more detail than as "reality"or "object." "The object of poetry": what founds the poetic quest and the region towardwhich it is directed: "The sector of veiled reality which comes to find its manifestationin the poem constitutes what in another occasion I have called the object of the poem"("Literatura" 27). The real object, or the object of reality, "conditions" the poem, gives itits law. It grants the "condition" (which is to say the condition of possibility), law, and"destiny" of the poem; finally, and as an effect of these previous impositions, the poemis granted its "form," its exterior, phenomenal manifestation: "In the end, what we callform is nothing but the destiny that reality imposes on the word...." Object precedesform (synonymous with superficiality, or at least with its constant threat). There is, then,a double imposition: on the one hand, the positive imposition of the object on the poem,which grants it its identity and truth; and on the other hand, an entirely human imposition,to which Valente here gives the name of "theme," and which appears to be more or lesssynonymous with the earlier-discussed notion of "tendency." Valente cautions the readerto distinguish between these two "impositions," between the positive imposition of theobject and the negative imposition of theme on the poem:

It is important, from this point of view, to distinguish carefully between theobject and the theme. The object of the poem is the region of reality, poeticallyknown [conocida], which the poem reveals. Theme is the generic statement ofthat same reality, which thus enunciated can still remain veiled. Theme doesnot determine form; instead, between the former and the object there exists adialectical conditioning. In itself, theme is poetically inert. ("Literatura" 28)

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It may ithen be accurate to say that the poem's form (a result of the conditioninginfiuence that: reality and its object have on the poem) is imposed from an externalsource or authority—a source which, while not entirely sought by the poet during thecreative process, is nonetheless successfully encountered and integrated. This represents aninstance wherein the poet's own authority is itself displaced or diminished in accordancewith Valente's poetics. The emergence of the poem, its organic coming-into-the-world,constitutes a process that is not entirely decided upon, governed, or guided by the poet'ssubjective and creative powers. As described by Valente, the poetic operation includes aperipheral, impersonal element that demands and indeed makes its own imposition onthe poem; and it is this very element that possesses the poetic residue that allows the poemto be identified as such. The "poetic object," that kernel of creative "matter" recuperatedin the poetic archeology, is thus "supra-intentional" [sobreintencional\; it does not issuefrom a subjective, private, or even human locus. Theme (and tendency) remains, on thecontrary, "intentional," decided upon and mastered by the author, by creative, humanauthority: "Theme is intentional; it is sought, proposed or imposed. The object is supra-intentional, it is found, since it is the region of reality that the word invents, that is to say,finds" (28; author's emphasis).*

Such remarks implicitly demand that critical analysis stir away from questions ofsubjectivity, personality, and, of course, biography, toward a type of hermeneutics thatwould attempt to take account of the impersonal, of the excessive element residing ineach poem. Valente thus seems to issue a cautionary note against the critical reductionof poetry to a confessional mode of expression. While Valente is very much interested indetailing the "creative process," as well as the operation by which the poem is "gestated,"this does not entail an analogous interest in the creator him/herself. Though Valenteconcedes that "writing is a completely personal adventure," in other words, that writingis, at its most fundamental level, a human task, he grants little importance to the criticalunveiling of personal or biographical circumstance in the construction of a poem. Nor isValente interested in reading the emotive effects that poetry may have on its reader. Thepoem, he admits, "may engender... in another [person] a volition, an affect, an inwardturn [adentramiento]. Another personal adventure" {Obra 11), yet he shows no interest inexploring either the content or development of this poetic-receptive consequence. Poetrymay move or touch the reader, "That is all" ["Eso es todo"] : this is everything (not much, itseems) poetry accomplishes in regards to its personal, emotive, or sentimental potential—or at least everything Valente is himself willing to say regarding this otherwise complexissue. Instead, Valente proposes to think of poetry as anonymous, as simultaneously ownedby everyone and by no one: "At the point of the unification of form," he claims elsewhere,"reference to man or to the author—who is the author?—has always already disappeared.Personal experience enters into the natural movement of the universe, into the Ursatz, theprimordial movement that at once precedes and succeeds it. The work is thus anonymous,since poetry, in truth, is made by everyone" (qtd. in Provencio 108).

It would seem as though the subjective side of the creative process (its affective causeand reception) represents yet another "veil" covering up the reality of the poem, anotherobstacle in the way of arriving at its "objective" region. In the course of poetic analysis,the poet's subjectivity proves as inconsequential as that of the reader, a conclusion arrived

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at in Miguel Mas's reading of Valente, and which he equates with a series of terms like"depersonalization," "denudation," "destruction," and "dispossession":

We witness a constant movement from the subject to the non-subject, wherethe former will be eclipsed and then violently reconstructed in a completesynthesis between being and non-being. In truth, we are dealing with theprolegomena to a writing that tends to depersonalize itself, thus destroyingthe teleological unity of the mythical creator... [we witness] a certain stateof denudation inherent in the poetic event, understood as the place ofdispossession, or, symbolically, oí forgetting [olvido]. {Al; author's emphasis)

It becomes increasingly evident that Valente grants great importance to this "subtractive"operation in the emergence of the poem (a subtraction that includes the erasure of theauthor's personality). Accordingly, it is not surprising to find an emphasis on negativityin discussions pertaining to poetic creation, such that the latter term will always beaccompanied by its opposite yet complementary operation: decreation.

Valente has explored the issue of decreation in reference to both ancient andcontemporary cultural phenomena, including Nahua rituals in Mexico and the art ofAntoni Tapies. In "Rudimentos de Destrucción," Valente retakes the issue of ideologicalveiling, which he here imagines as an act of ideological "burying," arguing that "[u]nder all orthodoxy lies buried the original forms of what could have been or of whatwas in a given time a creative vision capable of sheltering an epiphany of the real, or,if a properly religious terminology is preferred, a revelation of the divine" (71). Valentedistinguishes between "religion" proper—which he defines concisely as a "totalitariansystem of concluded forms"—and "the religious"—a liberatory-destructive movementthat "abolishes" formal and ideological rigidity (72). An example of "the religious" or"creative imagination," which also constitutes an "exercise of destruction," is provided byone of the Nahua rituals undertaken in honor of the god Quetzalcóatl: " . . . every fifty twoyears (which comprised an Indian century or the average duration of a lifetime) the nahuasthrew themselves into a systematic ritual of annihilation. They thus appropriated the cycleof temporality rather than being subjected to it; they became lords of creation and offormation rather than becoming servants to forms" (74). During such rituals, walls, vases,ornaments, frescoes, even palaces and temples, were systematically destroyed. Throughsuch devastation, the collective imagination toppled both material and abstract structuresthat had attained a certain level of negative formalization and dogmatization. In valorizingthis ritual, Valente suggests that contemporary poetry can find therein a model of positivedecreation, a model which, "[f]aced with the crystallization of forms," would establish the"perpetual flow of creative movement; for only in such movement is freedom engendered,not in the fetishization of its results or of its moments" (74).

The work of Catalan painter Antoni Tapies similarly offers a desirable model ofdecreation, which here assumes a more subtle and non-violent process of subtraction ratherthan one of proper destruction. Among its results, subtraction includes the abandonmentof cultural baggage, the renunciation of the "clutter" of pictorial tradition, images, themesand formulas that have, throughout time and by appropriation, become habitual—all

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of this with the objective of attaining a kind of non-abstract or, synonymously, materialessentiality. Speaking of modern painting in general, Gilles Deleuze describes the dilemmafaced by artists in precisely these terms:

The painter has many things in his head, or around him, or in his studio. Noweverything he has in his head or around him is already in the canvas... so thatthe painter does not have to cover a blank surface but rather would have toempty it out, clear it, clean it. He does not paint in order to reproduce on thecanvas an object functioning as a model; he paints on images that are alreadythere, in order to produce a canvas whose functioning will reverse the relationsbetween model and copy. (71)

Deleuze believes that the painter starts out from an already-filled canvas, whichis populated ;by a constellation of elements foreign to the composition. He refers tothis extraneous constellation as the "cliché": "The painter's problem is not how to enterinto the canvas, since he is already there (the prepictorial task), but how to get out of it,thereby getting out of the cUché, getting out of probability (the pictorial task)" (78). Inreference to the poetic process, Valente advocates an analogous process of denudationor "deconditioning," saying that "[the poem's] [f]orm is attained only through a radicaldeconditioning [descondicionamiento] of the word. The experience of writing is, in truth,the experience of such deconditioning; therein the dissolution of every referent and ofevery predetermination must be performed" (qtd. in Provencio 107). The destructivetask ("ejercicio de destrucción") thus entails, in painting, a systematic renunciation ofthe cliché, by which painting paradoxically arrives at the "white" canvas—a region thatTapies himself refers to as "el muro" 'the wall'; analogously, in poetry it is reference andexternal "predeterminations" that must be renounced in order to arrive at the realm ofpure language. The wall represents for painting an ambiguous zone akin to that profoundand amorphous space wherein poetry finds its object, that is, a pre-representational regionthe figurai vacuity of which entails the inclusion, in potential form, of an infinite numberof concrete figurations. Furthermore, just as poetic language becomes inoperative in itsattempt to articulate or define the objective region from which the poem emerges, paintingis itself forced to problematize its use of sensorial perception and manifestation. To put itmore clearly, just as in Valente poetry renounces the power of speech and inches closer tosilence and the apophatic mode, painting in Tapies renounces the authority of sight anddefines itself in terms closer to those of touch. Thus, referring to the composition of oneof his paintings. Tapies says: "The eye no longer perceived differences. Everything cametogether in a uniform mass. What was ardent turmoil transformed itself into static silence"(qtd. in Amorós 18). If the eye "no longer perceive [s] differences" within the pictorialspace, this is because the gaze is no longer subordinated to a tridimensional perspective,acquiring instead a kind of tactile function that invites it to dwell on the work's plasticity.'

An effect of the loss of authority of the sense of sight is a departure from the demandsand constraints imposed by figuration and representation. In "Cinco fragmentos paraAntoni Tapies," Valente argues that Tàpies's work does not belong to a properly figurativetradition. His interest, in other words, is neither to represent objects nor to narrate events,

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but to manifest that which precedes representation and narration: "There is no sense inspeaking of Tàpies's art in terms of abstraction or figuration. Eorm does not represent:it is. Form is matter. Matter—the matter on the canvas or on the composition—doesnot serve as the support of anything superimposed. It is not the matter of any particularform, but the absolute form of itself" {Obra 43). Tàpies's painting is not subordinatedto mimesis, where the purpose would be to go from base materiality towards figuration.Painting does not paint "something": rather, it paints itself The object is not to renounceplasticity in favor of abstract sense, but to exhibit painting's materiality, suspending it inwhat also entails a suspension of representation. Concomitantly, the function of color andits effect on the spectator is not as relevant as that which antecedes color (the whiteness ofthe canvas) and the paradoxical act of non-spectatorship (the blindness of the subject). AsValente puts it in a prose poem from No amanece el cantor, and in resonance with Tàpies'sdescription of "el muro": "I see, I see. And you, what do you see? I do not see. Whichcolor? I do not see. The issue is not what is seen, but seeing itself The gaze, not the eye.Antepupil. Non-color, not color. To not see. The transparent" {Obra 252).

Like Tàpies's painting, the poem, in Valente's understanding, liberates itself fromthe exigencies of figuration and signification. The poem does not intend to communicatea particular sense but, rather, to suspend communication itself, thus allowing a primordialsilence to quiver in and through the poetic word. Just as the project of painting is definedby subtraction and retraction, the object of poetry consists in denuding itself of theexterior voice in order to "articulate" the silence that precedes ordinary articulation. Onceagain in "Cinco fragmentos," Valente refers to this task in terms of a "temptation" thathas historically plagued poetry: "Much poetry has felt the temptation of silence. Becausethe poem tends naturally toward silence. Or because it contains it as a natural substance.Poetics: the art of composition of silence. A poem does not exist if, before its word, its silenceis not heard" (42). A shift from representation to apresentation, from word to silence, isthus traced, or what in another occasion Valente synonymously describes as a shift fromcommunication to incommunication: "Poetry is not only not communication; it is, beforeanything or long before it can be communicated, incommunication" {Obra 11).'°

Such remarks situate Valente within a long-established tradition of artistic andpoetic engagements with silence. In "The Aesthetics of Silence," Susan Sontag claims thatthe West's modern fascination with silence is a symptom of art's attempt to abolish itself,to negate or cancel art by means of art, which issues the imperative that ".. .art must tendtoward anti-art, the elimination of the 'subject' (the 'object,' the image), the substitutionof chance for intention, and the pursuit of silence" (5). This makes art "no longer aconfession," but a "deliverance, an exercise in asceticism" (6). The obligation is to subtract,retract, and discard rather than to expand, expound, and accumulate. Concomitantly,the relation that the artist has with the reader or spectator changes drastically; it is nowgoverned, on the artist's part, by a "reluctance to communicate," by a temptation "tosever the dialogue [the artist] has with an audience." Sontag further states that such aposition derives, as in Valente's case, from a discontent with the utilitarian status thatsociety accords to language. Eor this reason, "A good deal of contemporary art is movedby this quest for a consciousness purified of contaminated language and, in some versions.

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of the distortions produced by conceiving the world exclusively in conventional verbal (intheir debased sense, 'rational' or 'logical') terms" (22).

Sontag's reflections are useful to understand the role of silence in Western poetryand art in general. Amparo Amorós, in "La retórica del silencio," provides an equally usefulpanorama of the same topic as it resurfaces in Spanish poetry from the 1960s onward.Besides Valente's "Cinco fragmentos para Antoni Tapies," she finds the most sophisticatedtheorizations pf silence in Tàpies's "Comunicación sobre el muro" (originally publishedin Essais in 1969) and in Pere Gimferrer's "Tapies: el silencio y el trazo" (included inRadicalidadesl^ from 1978, 18). What these figures, as well as their predecessors andfollowers (frohi San Juan de la Cruz to José Luis Jover), have in common is a tendencyto foreground! silence as the limit place of poetry, "to question the expressive capacity oflanguage... turning one's attention towards hushing, insinuation, allusion/elusion, nudity,concentration! and synthesis as the most lucid symptoms of ancient topics' and words'expressive insufficiency..." (21).

Valente's shared interest in incommunication and silence derives from his assertionthat the principal task of poetry is to make its way through the layers of communicationaland linguistici concealment. Everyday articulation is itself the surface to be traversed.Silence, on the other hand, is the poetic object, the poetic thing to be sought. Thispreoccupation obeys Valente's constant undermining of subjective authority: silence andincommunication constitute the region where the subject is effaced, where the singular,idiosyncratic voice of the subject is replaced by the anonymous yet universal "voice" ofsilence. The voice that in itself contains, in potentiality, the distinct modulation of humanvoices. Beyond the difficulties presented by such a task as regards to its own articulation, tothe apodas it itself faces in describing its own project and the "successful" attainment of thepoetic object br the silent utterance, the kinship that Valente's poetry holds with respectto apophasis becomes evident in its considering the poetic object as the word of words,that is to say, ! in its considering the poetic object as the originary word that sustains allothers—a word which, for this very reason, remains paradoxically abject and marginalized.Curiously—yét perhaps not surprisingly—this is a function that apophasis itself, as a non-canonical genre that has not been altogether integrated within the standard list of literarygenres, has sustained. It has been suggested that the unsayable, "as a condition of sensefor all senses,] or a discourse indirectly articulating the silence from which any genericdiscourse needs to set itself off in order to be perceptible as such," renders apophasis"more like a genre of genres" (Franke 3). If this is the case, then Valente's silent wordis, once againi like the word of words, and his poetry is like the poetry of poetry. Thistranslates intoi saying that his poetry is principally concerned with exploring the conditionof possibility of poetic discourse: language itself—which expectedly includes its negativeyet complementary facet: silence itself.

Silence | is for Valente what "el muro" is for Tapies: the infinitely substantialspace whereiri potential meanings and forms are hosted." Asignifying in itself, silenceconstitutes the "superior" sense that conditions the emergence of multiple, contingentsenses. Valente delineates an inherent difference between an easily-apprehensible senseor senses, and an amorphous sense dwelling at the limits of articulation. This "superior"sense, beyond comprehension and signification, is what ultimately makes the poem

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inexhaustible. It acts as a kind of unreachable anchor hidden in the depths of a linguisticocean preventing the poem from being entirely transported onto the surface plane offiguration or narration. When all contingent senses are disclosed, silence—the ultimatesense—remains (stubbornly rooted on its ground like a hedgehog). It is what the poemretains after all other exhaustion. To this residual kernel of superior sense, Valente, in thepassage that opens "Cómo se pinta un dragon," gives the name of "enigma": "Multiplierof senses, the poem is superior to every one of its possible senses. And though each [sense]may be given to us, the poem will have still retained from its nature that which, strictlyspeaking, constitutes it, the fascination of the enigma" {Obra 9). Like all enigmas, theenigma of poetry is simultaneously puzzling and fascinating, yet ultimately inscrutable.

The particularity—as well as paradox—of Valente's description of this silent locusis its necessity of being described in and through a predominantly material register. Inthis sense, Valente faces the aporia encountered by any discourse that regards silence as itsend, by any saying that pretends to utter the unsayable, and by any representation thataims for the unrepresentable. This aporia has been pointed out, among others, by GiorgioAgamben, using the example of Frenhofer, a painter in Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiecewho attempts to paint a non-figural and entirely abstract work that would be pure idea,but who throughout the process must constantly wrestle with and incorporate the verything he seeks to traverse: form itself, such that materiality constitutes the very—andultimately inescapable—means through which to achieve ideality ( JÄe man 10). Similarly,Valente describes the modality anterior to the formal manifestation of the poem throughdistinctly material and organic means. Thus, in speaking of the pre-phenomenal existenceof the poem, in the mode it assumes before its printed or outward inscription, he resortsto a metaphoric register that, far from connoting an incorporeal, void, or ghostly space(traits one might associate with silence), designates a material, earthly, and crude regionof language—a region where the word, the sign, is pure matter. In describing the poem'sdwelling in this substantial space, Valente uses the term "gestation," saying that "[t]hepoem is also born at the beginning of a long gestation that takes place prior to what weshould call exterior writing" {Obra 10). Likewise, Valente reiterates that the poetic word's"essential" mode of being is not its emerged state, but its "submerged" habitation, its"submerged process, radically interior to its gestation." The poem born in this organicmanner represents the "natural" poem, whereas "the overly-corrected poem is an artificialproduct, like a gestation that takes place outside the uterus."

Insofar as it constitutes the place where "gestation" occurs, where a sort of poeticspontaneous generation takes place, this region is also imagined by Valente as a primordialmire. Numerous instances can be found in which mud assumes a generative function, andin which writing, in turn, is specifically conceived of as a slow, deliberate, tactile, yet alsopassive exploration of this region. Thus, a prose poem from Mandorla maintains that:

To write is like the secretion of resins; it is not an act, but a slow, naturalcoming into form. Moss, humidity, slime, phenomena of the depths, and notof dreaming or of dreams, but of the dark mud wherein ferment the figuresof dreams. To write is not to make, but to dwell \aposentar\, to be [estar].{Obra 115)

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In a similar fashion, the poetic operation is imagined as a fish that scuttles through theopaque and muddy floor of an infinite linguistic ocean:

Como él oscuro pez del fondogira en el limo húmedo y sin forma,desciende túa lo qué nunca duerme sumergidocomo el oscuro pez del fondo.Venal hálito.{Obra 3'4)

"Como el oscuro pez del fondo" obviously aludes to Juan Ramón Jimenez's Animal defondo (1949), 'a late collection that is generally seen as his most metaphysical work. Yet italso constitutes a departure from Jiménez, who even here, at his most mystical moment,remains firmly inscribed within the realm of subjective authority. As Jiménez wants tomake clear in the concluding notes to his book, "For me poetry has always been intimatelyfused with all I my existence, and has almost never been objective poetry" {Animal 114).Concerned with achieving a knowledge and experience of the divine, of God, Animalde fondo ultimately finds this God within the depths of the poet himself, such that thefondo which the title speaks of is not, as in Valente, the impersonal and exterior depth oflinguistic meaning, but the familiar depth of the poet's interiority. God is none other thanthe poet himself, "tú estás y eres / lo grande y lo pequeño que yo soy, / en una proporciónque es esta mía, / infinita hacia un fondo / que es el pozo sagrado de mi mismo" (110)."Como el oscuro pez del fondo" may also allude to Jimenez's prose poem "Espacio,"particularly its final "Fragmento tercero," which narrates the poet's revelatory yet horrificencounter with a crab as he strolls through the beach. The poet crushes the crab with hisshoe, only to discover an empty, substance-less shell that both reveals and reproduces alarger, more horrific possibility: the universe itself as an immense hollowness {Antología592-98). Valente's poetry may be seen as an attempt to rewrite this scene, to vindicatethe crab and its habitat (that is, objective reality, the world external to the subject) asprofoundly meaningful regardless of the poet's presence.'^

In another occasion, a poem titled "El ángel" {Obra 10) argues in favor of matter'ssignifying richness through a rewriting of the biblical episode in which Jacob is forced towrestle with the angel of God, a struggle that in the Hebrew bible takes place in the night anduntil daybreak; but that here occurs during the more ambiguous period of dawn, "cuandola dureza del dia es aún extraña" 'when the day's hardness is still uncanny' The originalityof Valente's brief yet intense adaptation of this biblical scene resides in its describing theangel as a kind of ambassador of an indefinite, formless realm—a realm that antecedesthe comfort, clarity, and intelligibility of the day. As "señor / de lo indistinto" 'lord of theindistinct,' the angel is ambiguously presented as not entirely apprehensible by the senses,as himself not restricted to a particular perceptible form ("tu oscura transparencia" 'yourdark transparency,' "tu rostro no visible" 'your non visible face"). The poem ends with animperative, given by the "host" to the visiting angel, not to divorce concepts and ideas

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from their material ground: "No separes / la sombra de la luz que ella ha engendrado" 'Donot separate / the shadow from the light which it [itself\| has engendered'—yet anotherallusion the god conceptualized by Jiménez, who, shunning opacity, is doubly transparent:"la transparencia. Dios, la transparencia" {Animal 8).

I hope to have shown, in the above analysis, the manner in which Valente remainsloyal to the imperative of thinking light and dark, language and matter together and asinseparable instances of the poetic process. By dwelling in the non-instrumental quality ofthe word, Valente "discovers" and rediscovers anew what is perhaps the most patent—andperhaps also most "proper"—part of the human subject: its immersion in a linguisticuniverse. To do so, it is obliged to retract: politically, it withdraws from what it perceives asa negatively congealed discursive zone; subjectively, it retreats from the comfortable shelterof the poet's interiority; linguistically, it disavows the excessive utterance, draws its breathin, and withdraws into silence. If poetry, as Valente argues, is first and foremost a typeof knowledge, it is knowledge of the fact and matter of language, of its existence and itspresence. Poetry would thus entail the knowledge that language not only signifies, but alsoresides. It is toward this region—language's opaque mire—that the poet, driven by theimperative to find a purer, more material sense, attempts to carry the words of the tribe.

Notes' Although I do not have room to explore extensively the argument made at this time on behalf of poetry asa form of communication, I wish to repeat Miguel Mas s observation that its supporters often referenced theauthority of Vicente Aleixandre, who at various times issued statements like the following: "Poetry is a deep,communicated truth ["profunda verdad comunicada"]"; "The poet invites communication, and his affectiveclimax ["punto de efusión"] establishes a human community"; "Poetry is not an issue between ugliness orbeauty, but between muteness or communication" (qtd. in Mas 17-18). Through multiple examples ofSpanish verse, the first chapter of Bousofio's book, "La poesía como comunicación," explains what is meantby this expression. At the beginning, Bousoño succinctly states that "Our initial affirmation will be this:poetry is the communication, through simple words, of a peculiar type of knowledge: the knowledge, as is, ofa psychic content: that is, of a psychic content understood as a particular totality, a unique, intuitive synthesisof a conceptual-sensorial-affective [content]" (19; author's emphasis). See Bousoño 17-57.2 Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Valente's poetic and critical works are my own. Translationsof Antoni Tapies, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Miguel Mas, Amparo Amorós, Carlos Bousoño, and VicenteAleixandre are also my own.3 "This is one of the central axis of the social function... of art: the restoration of a communitarian languagethat has been deteriorated or corrupted, that is to say, the historical possibility of 'giving a purer sense to thewords of the tribe'" ("Ideología" 54). Valente develops a more extensive analysis of Antigone's "response"to Creon in "La respuesta de Antígona," making the "idolatrous" aspect of the discourse of the Law morevisible: "The god of the city [Thebes] is a god wherein the law seeks its explicit foundation: the know god.His kingdom is that of the human law, that is to say, of manifest truth" (43). Similarly, "Creon upholds acurrent [vigente] or manifest form of truth: the harmony between the law of the city and the 'non-codified'[law] of the gods. Antigone breaks this harmony. In a certain way, in opposing the law of the city sheopposes the revealed god or god in its revealed form" (49). Mallarmé's famous verse, "Donner un sens pluspur aux mots de la tribu," is taken from the poem "Le tombeau d'Edgar Poe," and is obviously what providesthe title to Valente's book Las palabras de la tribu. In Mallarmé's sonnet, Poe, like Antigone, is the figurestigmatized and mocked by society.•* Understanding the function of poetry and of the poet as one involving a kind of archeological explorationthat includes the act of digging, excavating, uprooting, etc., establishes a clear link with a poetic-archeological adventure occurring earlier on the other side of the Atlantic: Pablo Neruda's Canto Ceneral(1950)—a poetic archeology that, in contrast to Valente's, embraces a subalternist, anti-colonial position.5 Similar instances in which Valente reproaches Dario's formal excesses include: "Darío in a way presentshimself as an urgently-needed innovator, brilliant yet excessive in his abundance, and often superficial..."

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("Darío" 80); "Poet of forms and sonorous shells [caparazones sonoros], under which sometimes is glimpsed, inwell-recognized moments, a Darío with no gown [casulla], less alliterated and pseudo-hexametric, but moreessentialist: [the Darío of] the three Nocturnes, of the Phocás, and of the poem to Francisca Sánchez" (82).'' Valente takes his understanding of ideology from both Engels {Anti-Dühring [1877]) and Marx {TheGerman Ideology [1932], co-authored with Engels), which he understands as "the process by which the veryprinciples of representation of reality substitute reality itself, moving from the knowledge of reality to itsoccultation" ("Literatura" 23, footnote 3).^ Although I will not attempt a comparative reading, I cannot resist the temptation to compare this imagewith T. S. Eliot's well-known lines from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": "I should have been a pair ofragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."* Valente is most likely evoking the etymological meaning of "invent" ("to come upon," "discover," "findout"), which would resolve the apparent contradiction between "inventing" and "finding."' In this sense, "el muro," as descriptive of a kind of tactile artwork, functions in a way similar to Egyptianbas-relief, understood by Deleuze as the intermingling of the senses of touch and of sight: "Bas-relief bringsabout the most rigid link between the eye and the hand because its element is the flat surface, which allowsthe eye to function like the sense of touch; furthermore, it confers, and indeed imposes, upon the eye atactile, or rather haptic, function; it thereby ensures, in the Egyptian 'will to art,' the joining together of thetwo senses of touch and sight, like the soil and the horizon" (99).'" In this same passage, taken from "Cómo se pinta un dragon," Valente describes the poem as an objectthat compels the ¡reader to withdraw from the world, to retract into an interior space—"hole," "bedroom,""maternal cloister"—, much in the same way as a hedgehog retracts behind its quills to protect itself fromharm: the poem prompts one to "stick out one's hedgehog quills and remain inside a hole unseen" (11).Valente, consciously or not, perpetuates the metaphor by which the poem is imagined as a hedgehog, ametaphor that Derrida famously uses in his idiosyncratic response to the impossible question "Che cos'èla poesia?," and which—Derrida claims in another text—is an image used by Friedrich Schlegel, Jean-LucNancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe to describe the "fragment," and by Martin Heidegger to imagine theconcept of the "always-already-there." I lament the fact that spatial constraints prevent me from analyzingValente's hedgehog—each instance in which its curled-up body may appear—in relation to these otherhedgehogs. I merely hint at the potential fruitfulness of such a project, which could take into accountthe various figures and concepts proposed by these thinkers and poets, including retraction, withdrawal,integrity, yet also exposure and disaster. For Derrida's treatment of the hedgehog, see "Che cos'è la poesia?"and "Lstrice 2: Lck biinn all hier. " See also footnote 12.' ' In this regard, it is also what the white canvas is for Austrian painter Susanna Fritscher, wherein, accordingto Jean-Luc Nancy, what takes place is neither narration nor figuration, but something like the taking-placeof painting itself: "To paint is neither to represent nor to cover a surface; rather, it is to touch on the absolutecharacter of a there is. A thing agrees to exist; it occupies its place, the place where it takes place, and makessense only by opening this place. To paint is to agree to this agreement. It is neither to bespeak the eventof this taking-place nor to hold significations in check. Rather, to paint means to agree to the division thatdeposes and exposes the thing" (185).'2 It would be interesting to read in more detail the entire poetic zoology that has subtly yet persistentlycome up throughout this discussion, which would include, in addition to the creatures figuring in Valente'sown animal kingdom—the red kite, the dark fish, the hedgehog—Derrida's own exposed hedgehog, as wellas George Bataille's eagle, which, identified politically with imperialism and metaphysically with the idea(34), appears to function in a way similar to Valente's. Arkinstall, for example, discovers that at times birdsrepresent non-poetic discourse, particularly the word of the State or "the ideological language of power"(84). Arkinstall offers his own translation of an extract from "La ciudad destruida" as an example: "Oh night!/ An immense bird / hangs over the air, / bringing shame on the ages, slaking / its dark thirst for blood."A possible analysis of this zoology would also include the revolutionary "supereagle," described by Batailleas the symbol of utopia, and, on the other side of the spectrum, the "old mole," which, arising out of "thebowels of the earth, as in the materialist bowels of proletarians," represents in turn a kind of "geologicaluprising" (35). When considering Bataille's theoretical attention to the informe, as well as to the vulgarobjects and concepts that humanity busily attempts to traverse or sublimate—the "big toe," the anus, bodilyexcretions, base riiateriality—but which nonetheless always return to haunt and to sustain a symmetric anduncanny resemblance with the objects elevated by thought, it is evident that Bataille is closer to Valente thanone would expect.

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Works CitedAgamben, Giorgio. The Man Without Content. Trans. Georgia Albert. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.Print.Amorós Moltó, Amparo. "La retórica del silencio." Los Cuadernos del norte 16 (1982): 18-27. Print.Arkinstall, Christine. "Destruction and Rearmament: The Poetic Process in José Ángel Valente." Literature

and Revolution. Ed. David Bevan. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989. 73-82. Print.Bataille, Georges. "The 'Old Mole' and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme [Superhuman] and Surrealist."

Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Ed. Allan Stoekl. Trans. Donald M. Leslie Jr.Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985. 32-44. Print.

Bousoño, Carlos. Teoría de la expresión poética. 4th ed. Madrid: Gredos, 1966. Print.Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota

P, 2004. Print.Derrida, Jacques. "Che cos'è la poesia?" Points... Interviews, 1974—1994. Ed. Elisabeth Weber. Trans. Peggy

Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. 288-99. Print.. "Istrice 2: Ick bünn all hier." Points... Interviews, 1974—1994. Ed. Elisabeth Weber. Trans. Peggy

Kamuf Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. 300-26. Print.Franke, William. Preface. On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature,

and the Arts. Ed. William Franke. Vol 1. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2007: 1-8. Print.Jiménez, Juan Ramón. Animal de fondo. Buenos Aires: Pleamar, 1949. Print.

. Antología poética. Ed. Carmen Jiménez and Eduardo Márquez. Barcelona: Planeta, 1988. Print.Mas, Miguel. La escritura material de José Ángel Valente. Madrid: Hiperión, 1986. Print.Nancy, Jean-Luc. "The Title's a Blank." Multiple Arts: The Muses II. Trans. Simon Sparks. Stanford: Stanford

UP, 2006: 181-190. Print.Provencio, Pedro. Poéticas españolas contemporáneas: La generación del 50. Madrid: Hiperión, 1988. Print.Sontag, Susan. "The Aesthetics of Silence." Styles of Radical Will. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969:

3-34. Print.Valente, José Angel. "Darío o la innovación." Las palabras de la tríbu :77-88. Print.

. "Juan Ramón Jiménez en la tradición poética del medio siglo." Las palabras de la tribu :89-101.Print.

—."Ideología y lenguaje." Las palabras de la tribu :51-58. Print.. "La hermenéutica o la cortedad del decir." Las palabras de la tribu :59-70. Print.. "La respuesta de Antígona." Las palabras de la tríbu :39-50. Print.. Laspakbras de la tribu. Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1971. Print.. Obra Poética 2: Material Memoría (1977-1992). Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2001. Print.. "Rudimentos de destrucción." Las palabras de la tribu :71-74. Print.. "Tendencia y estilo." Las palabras de la tríbu :11-15. Print.

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