Finding Delight in the Ineffable

by Lara López de Jesús
translated by Zachary Romansky

“Every day, while stock markets are rising and falling, neoliberal economies are shuddering, and unjust wars are claiming the lives of millions, there are people devoting their time to bringing a painting, a book, a novel, or a poem into the world,” comments Mara Negrón Marrero, comparative literature professor and the present coordinator of the Women and Gender Program at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. “Every human being, in one way or another, aspires to have an aaesthetic understanding of the world. Art provides a way to grasp our surroundings.”

“For me, the place that artistic creation holds in the so-called real world has never ceased to be enigmatic. Judging by journals, books of poems, and drawings left behind by those who have suffered countless forms of hardship and loss, we can conclude that creative ability fulfills a need that goes beyond the dichotomy of usefulness and necessity,” she says. 

In her recent work, an anthology of essays to be published by the University of Puerto Rico Press in March of 2009, Negrón Marrero has included her concern about the unsettling “foreignness” of artwork in the contemporary world, as well as the current rejection of the untranslatable, the unrecognizable, and the intolerable. Nevertheless, the author has always positioned herself within spaces that could be catalogued as beyond words or difficult to understand. Throughout her academic career, Negrón Marrero has studied the literary works of writers such as Clarice Lispector, George Sand, and Marina Tsvetaeva; she has reflected upon and analyzed the theories and philosophy of such figures as Hélène Cixous, Luisa Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva; and she has translated texts, including those of Jacques Derrida, Henry Bauchau, and French philosopher Sarah Kofman.

“Along the way, I’ve gone about discovering that the texts that attract me are those exploring certain ambiguous, tense, and empty places, because they cannot easily define themselves or affirm any set identity. I’m also deeply concerned with aesthetics. When you’re dealing with writing, you don’t focus solely on the sociological aspects or the narrative structures, you also contend with the signifier’s dimension within the text. Language is very powerful and says much more than what appears in writing,” she explains.

In her new book, Negrón Marrero sets forth poetry of the strange as a criterion that entails an interpretive exercise. This criterion seeks to expose the reader to the plurality of meaning and produce readings and interpretations rather than the aesthetic consumption of a product. The author explains that she enjoys writing so much because she has not taken disciplinary rules into consideration, and she has ventured into philosophical texts, into psychoanalysis, and then back full circle to her most familiar territory, literary texts. All the essays respond to various forms of fusion, to disciplinary contiguities that revolve around three metaphors or axes upon which the book is laid out: animality, body, and city. 

In Western literature and philosophy, the animal is that which is not, that which has no language, and that which cannot construct the other. The author explains that, in literature, animals have marked the place of tension, an ineffable tension that, in the end, tells us more about human nature than it does about that of animals, thereby reaffirming the humanity of humankind by highlighting the possession reason, logos, and writing.    

As for the body, Negrón Marrero has thought up and written several essays attempting to read sexual differences as textual marks to be interpreted. She recognizes that the body of any literary text is its language and it is the only means through which the libidinal economies of masculinity and femininity at play are recorded. 

“I tell my students that no one can ever truly be outside of gender, because no one is ever truly outside of language. And every time I say I am a woman, I say it through a particular language. So gender allows me to be within a language, and is produced within a given context and culture. ‘Being a woman’ has infinite meanings, and is both vertiginous and perhaps polyvalent,” she explains.

Negrón Marrero also has participated in debates regarding the urban organization of San Juan. In the book, she has interpreted the city as the body of memory when reflecting on how, in Puerto Rico, development has meant rapid wealth for developers without consideration of ecological impact. The city portrayed by Negrón Marrero is a body experience related to walking that leads the walking subject to remember.

Animality, the body, and the city are metaphors of the strange that have allowed her to slip back once again into wordplay.