The Incertitude of Language and Life in the Poetry of Olvido García Valdés

Two of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s formulations serve as guideposts for the analysis of the poetry of Garcia Valdes: the concept of language-game and the Creation Mystic Experience, or seeing the world as a miracle. The paper first considers the language-game in terms of “unbound” or exempt language. The poet, recognizing the metamorphic nature of language, frees it from predetermined cultural content and, most notably, from grammatical rigidity, toying with ambiguity and fluidity through such techniques as juxtaposition, pronoun vagueness and ellipsis. The second part of the study considers the poet’s exploration of the ineffable, which embraces both the astonishment of being alive in the world—a mystic experience—and the mystery of death. The discovery of the wondrousness of the real comes through unhurried observation—principally visual, but also auditory and tactile—and is expressed with poignancy in language exempt from conventional constraints. When the focus is on mortality, additional textual strategies are present, for example, locating death in the body and placing a single sound within vast silence. What predominates is neither the astonishment of the real nor the menacing nearness of death but tension between the two; the ineffable balances on an axis of chiaroscuro. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol36/iss2/7 The Incertitude of Language and Life in the Poetry of Olvido Garcia Valdes Sharon Keefe Ugalde Texas State University Olvido Garcia Valdes (Santianes de Pravia, Asturias, Spain, 1950) has published six books of poetry, El tercer jardin (1986) ‘The Third Garden’; Exposicion (1990) ‘Exposition’; ella, los pajaros (1994) ‘she, birds’; caza nocturna (1997) ‘night hunt’; Del ojo al hueso (2001) ‘From Eye to Bone’; Y todos estabamos vivos (2006) ‘And We Were All Still Alive.’ In 2005 an anthology, La poesia, ese cuerpo extrano ‘Poetry, that Strange Body,’ appeared, and in 2008, a volume of her collected poetry, Esa polilla que delante de mi revolotea ‘That Moth that in Front of Me Flutters.’ The adjective “abstract” is frequently used to describe the poetry of Garcia Valdes (Blesa, Garcia Fernandez); thought-provoking is perhaps a better choice. The reception of the poet’s oeuvre mirrors what Ludwig Wittgenstein hoped for from readers of his Philosophical Investigations: “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own” (viii). This desire is not the only link between the Spanish poet and the philosopher. Wittgenstein’s formulations serve as useful guideposts in the analysis of Garcia Valdes’s poetry; two in particular stand out: the concept of language-game, principally formulated in Philosophical Investigations (1953), and the mysticism alluded to in his Tratatus (1922). The preface to Philosophical Investigations, in which the philosopher confesses his inability to successfully wield his thoughts into a whole, confirms a view of language as unstable and fragmented (vii). Language bounces around, evolves and eschews unity. Meanings of words, symbols, and sentences are metamorphic, always provisional: “New types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence and others become obsolete and get forgotten” (Philosophical 1. 23). Wittgenstein became a model for 1 Ugalde: The Incertitude of Language and Life in the Poetry of Olvido Garc Published by New Prairie Press 274 STT you approach the same place from another side and no longer know your way about” (Philosophical 1.203). Garcia Valdes’s poetry mirrors not only the language-game concept of the later Wittgenstein but equally the mysticism alluded to Tractatus. In this early treatise he emphasized that the expressive capability of language is limited for the most to descriptive statements, such as those found in the natural sciences, but also recognized that “there were certain ineffable truths about what is real that had to be passed over in silence yet were not for this reason unimportant or insignificant for human life” (Nieli). Michel de Certeau explains that Wittgenstein reduces “truths” to “linguistic facts and to that which, in these facts, refers to an ineffable or ‘mystical’ exteriority of language” (11). Important passages of Tractatus broach this mystical exteriority, which relates to experiences that give insights into the meaning of life (Nieli), for example: “The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time (It is certainly not the solution of any problems of natural science that is required)” (6.4312). Our analysis of the poetry of Garcia Valdes first considers the concept of the language-game in terms of unbound or exempt language and second, the presence of mystical elements.