“This piano travels inward” (On the Form of Content and the Content of Form in Trilce)

Abstract

Trilce has been read by a significant number of critics as a book that resists interpretation, pushing against the boundaries of the Spanish language and poetic form to place them outside themselves. In that process, it is said, Trilce fragments and dissolves the subject of writing, signaling its emptiness and its impossibility. Explicitly or otherwise, critics often imbue these operations with an emancipatory valence since interrupting hermeneutic closure is a way of resisting the power that circulates in established discourses, including those of poetry and its interpretive apparatuses. Ultimately, such refusal to signify is posited as the direction in which Trilce moves; i.e., its meaning. Leaning on emblematic versions of this reading and revisiting how Trilce operates with such dialectical pairs as open/closed and inside/outside, among others, this essay wants to suggest a different possibility: reading Trilce’s formal gesture as a passage towards the construction, not the dissolution, of a plural subject —one whose writing moves not towards emptiness but towards plenitude and, in the process, affirming the capacity of poetic language to signify the new—.