La poètica del buit en Víctor Sunyol

Abstract

As is known, conventionally speaking, Western literature has often tended to be carried out in the full space of the black of the letter, it has tried to build a meaning in the substance and consistency of the word. But what happens when the word has lost its prestige, when the end of grand narratives and the degradation and discredit of language have made the very exercise of literature almost unfeasible? With the taxonomic category «poetics of the void» (singularis pro plurali) we want to account for a whole series of practices that, approximately from the last third of the 20th century to the present, have made the crisis of language and its consequent silence a literary space of its own, the starting point of a language whose poetic and critical use thinks and speaks of conflict as conflict and, therefore, in (the) conflict. The difficulty that these practices face is not precisely that of silence. Hence the notion of void that is proposed to differentiate them, since the crisis is the reason for their existence, a negative reason that leads them, however, to the affirmation of a language that is also in crisis; to the difficulty of thinking and speaking not of but in and from the difficulty itself. Within the framework of a discourse that no longer makes silence a saying –phoné– but a writing –gramma–, the poet of the void strives to situate herself in the neutral space of a between, in the interstice of silence and word of a writing that maintains tense and conflictive relations with reality (and thus its ethical and political character), whose language is always open, in search of an empty and deserted centre, in permanent transit and oriented towards the nothingness of its own existence. It is in this framework in which we study the poetics or the «poetics essays» of Víctor Sunyol (Vic, 1955) as those which speak precisely on the border of his saying and make of silence, not a theme, but the place and the speech action. As explained in the first part of the work, in which the very name «poetics of the void» is constructed and justified, the empty or silent space of the blank page becomes in these practices a new centre of attention, not as an object of discourse (romanticism-symbolism) or as its provocative subversion (historical avant-garde), but as the place in which it is still possible to say. Starting from a journey through the key moments of Víctor Sunyol’s work, this study will analyse, in the second part of the work, the unique proposal of Sunyol’s poetics, going through the motif of death as an experience of a void in the «referent» in Ni amb ara prou from 1984; in the «subject» and «work» in El buit i la novel·la and Cap a Tirèsies from 1994 and 1997; in the «word» in Stabat from 2003; and, finally, in the «language» itself in Des d’ara from 2005; all of them being experiences of the nothingness of a language that, assuming “in its own flesh” the non-being that constitutes it, tries to «be where not to be» (Birnam, 2015), that is, not to speak or remain silent in front of what it cannot be said, but to make of silence a non-saying, the affirmative act of a writing that constantly escapes any dichotomous pattern