“Thénon has to change the language, then, to attend to the perception that throws up new patterns of emotion, unknown and more complex”
Despite mastering the “whorish” language (lenguaje emputecido, according to her own definition), the Argentine poet Susana Thénon never ceases to intellectually demand her reader. We’re talking about the attention to form, the disarmed syntax, the morphological centaurs (that is, in the manner of Oliverio Girondo in En la masmédula); the entire text demands reconstruction. Thénon’s language seems ordinary, but it really isn’t: it’s necessary to first get through the sea of disconnections that evidences a deep concern involving words, communication, and experience, and that implicates language and poetry.
Her poems take us to the spatial and the territorial. Ana María Barrenechea and María Negroni, two of her closest scholars (both personally and literarily), have addressed this characteristic on various occasions, although perhaps in a somewhat indirect way, without directly naming the causes and forms of that phenomenon, but rather replicating it in some way, generating a sensation similar to the original poetry. For example, in the prologue to her complete works reissued by Corregidor in 2019, La morada imposible, María Negroni writes:
[…] in that obsessive arc that goes from Edad sin tregua (1958) to Ova Completa (1987), the “strange places” are repeated as signs that allude to the “tragic and tender caducity of language,” understood as that “minimum distance that exists between us and ourselves, or between us and the other,” to convey the trace of each loneliness, estrangement, or uprooting. There is in this work, it seems, a centrifugal geography that turns towards the outside of itself to plunge into what is not seen, what is ignored or silenced for reasons of good taste or good manners, perhaps in the confidence that only a deformed map can yield the skeleton of certain obsessions.
The quotations picked by Negroni are from the epilogue to distancias written by Barrenechea, in which the critic adds a fragment of a letter sent to her by Thénon. In that same text, Barrenechea adds that these distances testify with intensity and lucidity to this search (“without truce”) for an impossible space. In them, names of spheres are disseminated that are never the sky, the center, fullness, paradise; they are traversed by the eternal wandering through the slums of the world, never to glimpse the place (not even a place).
But, going back to the prologues, and after Negroni’s in that same volume (Corregidor, 2019), Barrenechea’s text proposes this method of analysis that involves spatial metaphors. She maintains that Thénon works “from an extraterritoriality that jumps to the seclusion of the trapped without escape” and that “the poem [for Thénon] is born from the zone of silence that exists in the heart of the words. And it is in this silence surrounded by notions where it acquires its being of freedom, just as a body displaces the air, even if it is submerged in it.”
As we said, the spatial figure is evident in Thénon’s work. Three of her five published books have titles that corroborate this: Habitante de la nada (1959), De lugares extraños (1967), and distancias (1984). In addition, one of the sections of her first book (Edad sin tregua, 1958) is titled “Aledaños” [Outskirts].
But what are, strictly speaking, these “spaces,” “zones,” “places,” “distances,” “geographies,” “maps,” “slums,” and “dwellings” that Barrenechea and Negroni speak of? The answer to this lies in the poetry itself, in the themes that occupy the poetry collections and in the resources the poet uses. It is a spatializing metaphor that transforms a mood into a place, and that refers to a moment of adjustment between experience and language.
Let us take, for instance, De lugares extraños, since it’s not one of her books most analyzed by critics (those are distancias and Ova completa), and also, it offers a window that facilitates our analysis: an epigraph by T.S. Eliot1. It is a passage from Four Quartets, from 1943. More specifically, they are verses taken from the fifth part of the second poem, “East Coker.” In this passage, the poet estranges himself from the world that is becoming distant to him because it is complicated, and it is an estrangement that increases in parallel with his age. Eliot speaks of experience and of how one goes about interpreting it as one ages, while the old interpretive networks are no longer applicable to create new patterns or to recognize more complicated patterns. Feelings become increasingly distant from expression, and in “The Dry Salvages,” the poem that follows “East Coker” in Eliot’s book, there is another similar passage that says: “It seems, as one becomes older,/ That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be mere/ sequence.”
Eliot resorts to this idea quite a bit. In his essay on Paul Valéry, for example, “A Brief Introduction to the Method of Paul Valéry” (1924): “A recognition of the truth that not our feelings, but the pattern which we may make of our feelings, is the centre of value.”
In De lugares extraños, Thénon shows a desperate attempt to at least gaze at an unreachable space and time (which function as the same thing in the book). What kind of spaces? Despite speaking about another book by Thénon (the aforementioned epilogue of distancias), Barrenechea speaks of “Outskirts, strange places, spheres that are real, concrete, precise to the point of pain, or that are displaced into sleep, memory, the expected and never-reachable paradise, nothingness.” She then adds some words from Artaud, which are from Le Pèse-nerfs2: “There were some of us at that time who wanted to try things, to create spaces for life within ourselves, spaces that were not nor seemed to have a place in space.”
“That is Thénon’s terrible dissatisfaction, the one she shows throughout her work: the poet is a clumsy howler who tries to knot the impossible”
The space that Thénon glimpses is that of a nucleus that needs to be expressed; an emotion or a feeling, Eliot would say. But it is not possible to create it; that space cannot be made with the language that it has, and therefore, if we continue to apply Artaud, the space is not a space (it is the impossible dwelling that gives title to the posthumous volume) and has no place anywhere. The first poem of De lugares extraños says: “The one who seeks an unforeseen fountain/ finds the fountain of thirst, with its blazons/ and its vigils of sand.” That is to say: whoever seeks water will not be able to find it and will be shipwrecked on a desert island, which is a non-place; she looks for something and finds the opposite. That space is an inaccessible and impossible place, but it is everywhere, in the “eternal wandering through the slums.”
The bull that Thénon takes by the horns is the problem of language and referentiality. She always speaks of that space that remains far from her, as a way of nostalgia; a space where signifier and signified fit in the poet’s mind. Time and space come together as two sides of the same coin, loaded with emotive memory3, a particular memory, an unexpressed, inexpressible, or not-yet-expressed emotion, which is fundamental throughout Thénon’s poetry, because that is the space to which she always refers and around which she revolves like a satellite. Space is the correspondence of expression and experience, always impossible due to the inability of language to apprehend and replicate a fragmented, broken, mysterious, and constantly changing reality. Inhabiting that space is impossible since it implies skipping over the aforementioned limitations that language proposes. Spaces cannot, therefore, be controlled or “governed.” Continuing with the first poem of the book, we read: “Love augurs and beats for no one/ in isolated forts and carriages,/ in windless berths,/ in narrow ungoverned prows.”
Other times, these spaces are recognized a posteriori, in tranquility, after the emotions. During that process the feelings are fixed and verbalized, but the moment remains in the past: “The gaze has memory/ of non-existent spaces and times.” Thénon has to change the language, then, to attend to the perception that throws up new patterns of emotion, unknown and more complex.
There we have the plotted maps, the old networks of language and the new and old patterns. Language always runs behind thought. And it is not about words, but about constructs, about networks. That is why Thénon’s choice of epigraph is not gratuitous, nor is it a passage that changes its meaning out of context4.
Every time an attempt is made to apply language, it’s like starting again from scratch, and it always fails; words age; each attempt is an approach to the inarticulate, the formless. Therefore, Thénon seems to oppose the Mallarmean idea that the role of poetry is to interrupt language’s lie of referentiality. For Thénon, the poet suffers that lie and has no choice but to sing that dissatisfaction.
The “places” are not fixed: they flow, they pass, they drag themselves along, they slip, but, before that, they have to navigate and erect themselves inside the poet (“you erected yourself/ in my seabed of shadow and submerged earth”). The beach (again, the image of the beach as in the poem cited above) is not even a place, it is something that passes. And that something is absent, and the years therefore pass “wounded” without the poet being able to name it, although it is attempted with poetic resources, techniques, and under the linguistic prism, all “clumsy ambushes” and “howls.”
That is Thénon’s terrible dissatisfaction, the one she shows throughout her work: the poet is a clumsy howler who tries to knot the impossible. Therefore, it is never possible to inhabit that zone where language and understanding do not remain truncated.
Notes:
1 “Home is where one starts from. As we grow older/ The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated/ Of dead and living.”
2 “Nous sommes quelques-uns a cette époque à avoir voulu attenter aux choses, créer en nous des espaces à a vie, des espaces qui n’etaient pas et ne semblaient pas devoir trouver place dans l’espace.”
3 This refers to the emphasis on the fact that the two dimensions (or the space-time dimension), which are actually very abstract and complicated, come together in Thénon’s poetry as a very concrete object (with two sides) that has value for the poet.
4 The poem from which she takes the epigraph for De lugares extraños begins like this: “Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres—/ Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt/ Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure/ Because one has only learnt to get the better of words/ For the one thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which/ One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture/ Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate/ With shabby equipment always deteriorating/ In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,/ Undisciplined squads of emotion.”
