“One Must Remember Towards Tomorrow”*: A Pragmatic Study of the Expression of Memory in the Poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez

Abstract

Starting from temporality as the organizing principle of any communicative situation, the present study investigates the use of verbal paradigms in Spanish when expressing memory and forgetfulness in a fictional speech act, such as poetry. Every text, including poetic, is a pragmatic unit of interaction in which an enunciator transmits a linguistic fact in order to awaken certain effects in the addressee. Nevertheless, successful communication depends not only on what is actually said, but also and above all, on what a reader or listener can deduce from what is said. Linguistic communication is not only an encoding-decoding process, but mainly the complementary process of ostension and inference, as Sperber and Wilson (1986) show within the theory of relevance. The explicit and implicit meanings of statements can always be understood only through the context, which is constantly changing as the presumption in the process of communication. Subsequently, the presumption that poetic language provokes a specific implicit meaning in the reader enables the establishment of complex relations between the significance and plurality of contexts within the lyrical discourses.The study focuses on two collections of poems, Eternidades (1918) and Piedra y Cielo (1919), written by the great Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, and explores the possibilities of explicit and implicit meanings of time and memory that are incited by the verbal paradigms. Both collections, which represent the beginning of a new era in the poet’s creation, are characterized by intense self-reflection. Time, forgetfulness and memory are, similar to the poetic word itself, the essential means that enable the poet to establish individual moments of eternity within the implications of lyrical communication.