The Impossible Utterance: Imagining Ineffability in the Spanish American Lyric

Abstract

The ineffable is a mode tied closely to metafiction, metapoetry and metacriticism; the subject of the contemporary Spanish American poem?implicitly or explicitly?is the poet's contention with the sayable and the unsayable, often taking the form of a metaphoric negotiation through the limits of language, the incommensurability of speech and experience, and ultimately, the poetics of the inarticulate: language dismemberment and silence, the latter of which borrows from Oriental (read anti-rhetorical) rhetoric, both in form and content. The Spanish-American tradition offers a full taxonomy of strategies of saying the unutterable, and demonstrates ineffability's other stricture: not what cannot be said, but what may not. As a result the poetic voice takes one of two basic stances toward language: martyrdom or nostalgia. Underlying either world-view is an important, modern assumption: that the world is a broken book.