The Song of Disappearance: Memory, History, and Testimony in the Poetry of Antonio Gamoneda

This essay explores Antonio Gamoneda’s poetry as an Adornian form of testimony. With its enigmatic foregrounding of lies, the book-length poem Descripcion de la mentira ‘Description of the Lie’ can be read as a “contradictory testimony” in which the act and memory of witnessing go, as it were, underground—only to resurface, rife with loss, years after Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. Yet the abstruse character of this poetic writing prevents readers from drawing straightforward political truths about Spanish history from the poem. Losses are inscribed in the text catachrestically, as they truly are: losses. Gamoneda’s poetry has been read amid changing representations of Spain’s recent past, and thus contrastingly seen as an “undecipherable symbolic code” and as “realm of memory.” This reading, which draws on Holocaust studies, allows for a redefinition of the fraught place of modern poetry in the field of Hispanic cultural studies. Examining Descripcion de la mentira within the context of the debate about historical memory in Spain sheds light on the theoretical difficulties that dominant aesthetic tendencies encounter in the study of how Spanish poets of recent decades try to establish a dialogue with the reader regarding society, memory, and reality. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol36/iss2/13 The Song of Disappearance: Memory, History, and Testimony in the Poetry of Antonio Gamoneda Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza Harvard University The beginning of Antonio Gamoneda’s book-length poem, “Descripcion de la mentira” (1977) ‘Description of the Lie’ includes an enigmatic allusion to testimony: “Huelo los testimonios de cuanto es sucio sobre la tierra y no me reconcilio pero amo lo que ha quedado de nosotros” (El 176) ‘I smell the testimonies of all that is filthy on earth and I do not reconcile myself but I love what is left of us.’1 The statements contained within this line pose at least three questions: Who or what is “all that is filthy on earth”? What is “left of us”? With whom or with what is there no reconciliation? The poem does not provide enough context to answer these questions. Upon a first reading of the text, it is impossible to identify or characterize the name of that which is deemed “filthy,” the remains to which the verb to leave alludes, and the circumstances surrounding the estrangement that the reference to reconciliation presupposes. Reserve envelops the line and multiplies the questions: To whom does the personal pronoun “us” refer? Who cannot be reconciled? Who gives these testimonies? Who receives them? The personal deictics thrown into relief by these queries hint at a series of silences or absences. Moreover, the fact that the line mentions “testimonies” increases the sense of textual reserve. After all, any reference to testimony fosters the expectation that some direct and true knowledge will be conveyed. Yet we do not know what these singular “testimonies” are based on, nor do we know their content, their bearer, and their recipient. The mere mention of them shows that the text remains silent not once but many times. As a result, the silence kept by the line becomes ever more resonant. Although it interpellates us from the page, calling upon us through the use of the first person plural “us,” the line falls silent time and time again. It is, literally, a reticent line. 1 Aguirre-Oteiza: The Song of Disappearance: Memory, History, and Testimony in the Published by New Prairie Press 374 ST&TCL, Volume 36, No. 2 (Summer 2012) Gamoneda was born in Oviedo in 1931. Three years later he moved to Leon, a Spanish city that in 1936 would become “a privileged location” for the repression of those faithful to the Republic at the hands of the insurgents (Gamoneda, “En Asturias” n. pag.). At the age of five, he witnessed the disappearance of prisoners in Leon’s convent of San Marcos, a prison he would later call a concentration camp (Lugar 15). Gamoneda published his first poems in 1949 and began Descripcion de la mentira a few weeks after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco. The poem, composed between 1975 and 1976 in Bonar and Leon, is inflected by testimony, history, and memory: its writing constitutes not only Gamoneda’s “testimonio de un tiempo historico” ‘testimony of a historic time’ that begins in July of 1936 and ends with the transition of Spain to democracy, but also illustrates how this transition stirs up the process of memory (Gamoneda “Entrevista” n. pag.).2 Therefore, the autobiographical account inscribed in Descripcion de la mentira covers the first years of Francoist repression—the time of silence between 1936 and 1945 that meant the continuation of war as a work of cultural destruction (Richards Time 3). Time of silence is a pertinent description here insofar as Descripcion de la mentira “procede del silencio” (Gamoneda Lugar 78) ‘comes from silence.’ In 1975, Gamoneda had not published poetry for twelve years: “Durante quinientas semanas he estado ausente de mis designios, / ... silencioso hasta la maldicion” (El 175) ‘For five hundred weeks I have been out of touch with my intentions, / ... silent until damnation.’ Miguel Casado, the critic who has done the most to bring Gamoneda’s work out of silence, characterizes his poetry as a “strategy of reticence”: theoretically significant facts are silenced so as to show what “en la realidad, fuera de condiciones culturales, es sustantivo” (58) ‘in reality, outside of any cultural condition, is substantial.’ Thus, testimony and the limits of representation that reticence presupposes are traits that define Gamoneda’s poetry. In a study of Paul Celan’s poetry, Geoffrey Hartman takes into account the possible ties between testimony and the limits of representation: “We cannot read Celan’s life from his work: how then is that work related to the Holocaust? Can so reticent an art with a style that marks an absence be a form of testimony?” (Hartman 161). These questions are relevant here because Gamoneda’s 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 36, Iss. 2 [2012], Art. 13 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol36/iss2/13 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1790