Abstract
Chapter 3 examines the material poetics of relation that contribute to the Juan Luis Martínez-assembled 1970s artist’s book La nueva novela. It is constructed from such diverse parts as: visual maths problems in which, for example, a painting of Rimbaud and a military jacket minus a shoe, a boot and a sock equals suspenders, a spat and a sock; metal fishhooks taped to a page; riddles and circular problems of logic; other people’s poems; musical scores; drawings, for example, of a pipe split in half (titled ‘Meditations on René Magritte’ and dedicated to Foucault); among many other things. This chapter turns to Édouard Glissant’s ‘poetics of relation’ and Manuel DeLanda’s elaboration of ‘assemblage theory’. By bringing together these texts, which both draw from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, this chapter demonstrates poetry’s condition of being is as a ‘multiplicity’, one that, as Martínez says, ‘operate[s] permanently in every direction’. By comparing how the book’s contents work to both bind it together as a whole and unbind it into a near-infinite network of pieces that can and do belong to other assemblages, this chapter makes a case for understanding books and their contents as bound by relations of exteriority.
Highlights
Este artículo considera La nueva novela, un extraño libro-objeto construido por el poeta chileno Juan Luis Martínez en el siglo XX, en conversación con Édouard Glissant y su “poética de la relación” y Manuel DeLanda y su “teoría de ensamblajes.” Al reunir estas teorías, ambas basadas en el concepto de rizoma de Deleuze y Guattari, este ensayo demuestra que La nueva novela puede ser entendida como una poética material y relacional, un ensamblaje con componentes que a la vez contribuyen a la construcción del libro y a su desconstrucción
In the case of La nueva novela, in place of any kind of authorial “I” is a series of material components including drawings, cartoons, math problems, paradoxes, photographs, other people’s poems, homework assignments, and, in one case, actual fishhooks taped to the page, among many other things
This essay will bring together Glissant’s theorization of relation with Manuel DeLanda’s elaboration of assemblage theory, both of which extend from Deleuze and Guattari’s work with the rhizome, in order to consider how La nueva novela materially constructs relation as a poetics
Summary
This article considers La nueva novela, a strange book-object assembled by twentieth-century Chilean poet Juan Luis Martínez, in light of Édouard Glissant’s “poetics of relation” and Manuel DeLanda’s elaboration of “assemblage theory.” By bringing together these texts, which both draw from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, this essay demonstrates how La nueva novela can be seen as a material poetics of relation, an assemblage whose many parts work to both bind and unbind the book together as a whole. This article considers La nueva novela, a strange book-object assembled by twentieth-century Chilean poet Juan Luis Martínez, in light of Édouard Glissant’s “poetics of relation” and Manuel DeLanda’s elaboration of “assemblage theory.” By bringing together these texts, which both draw from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, this essay demonstrates how La nueva novela can be seen as a material poetics of relation, an assemblage whose many parts work to both bind and unbind the book together as a whole. An autodidact who left formal schooling behind as a “rebellious, car-stealing, motorcycle racing” (and crashing) adolescent (Weintraub 2015, 2), Martínez’s rigorous engagement with philosophy, mathematics, poetry, and art took shape outside of institutional settings and at the margins of more cohesive artistic movements taking place in Chile at the time Despite his status as a cult figure, his poetic output worked constantly to displace the cult of authorship. Each of these components “constitutes a poem; but at the same time they are all fragments of the whole which is the book itself” (Martínez 2016). There is no value difference between these fragments, and the more readily recognizable poetry within the book is as much poetry as any of the book’s other parts, as Figure 1 suggests
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