Writer's Block Magazine

Photo by Uniliber

One of my proudest possessions is a collection of Pablo Neruda’s love poems in the original Spanish. I bought it for 2€ at a book stall in a subway station in Barcelona when I was 16 and my Spanish was far from good enough to fully grasp the meaning of the poems. The previous owner left an ultrasound picture between its pages – by accident or on purpose, I have often wondered. And yet, I feel that buying this humble second-hand book with an unpromising dark brown cover was a pregnant moment in my own literary life. It encapsulates why I read better than many of the other books that line my overflowing shelves. For the past six years, Neruda’s poems have kept me company in a much less obvious manner than one might think. See, I have not actually read the poems more than two or three times and I couldn’t tell you what any single one of them is about, not really, but they embody the possibility of meaning for me. Whenever I find myself longing, for answers, for reasons, for reassurance, I turn to Neruda’s poems and the ultrasound picture and I feel a deep sense of comfort. Maybe it is precisely the absence of meaning that these poems have for me that makes them so meaningful. This all harks back to the proto-Saussurean notion of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign and the Derridean concept of différance, of course. Those ideologies being something I heavily subscribe to, I often ponder how one best deals with all this arbitrariness without drowning inside of it. The bar between the signifier and the signified shall never be crossed, true meaning is endlessly deferred in the everlasting chain of signification, or so the theory goes. But what then, if someone is desperate, as we humans tend to be, for something to simply mean something for once. For the word on the page to jump up and basically scream at us proclaiming, “this is what I mean.” The elusive nature of meaning proves to be very testing for me time and again which is exactly where Neruda’s poems come into play. Although my Spanish has improved over the years, I am by no means fully fluent to the extent that I know every single word when I read the poems. Neither do I understand any allusions Neruda might be making about his own life or Chilean culture at large because I have never conducted any extensive research on the poet or his country. The poems are for me mere shells, all surface and no depth. They are the haunting signifiers, only that this time, they don’t haunt me because I have no full grasp of the signified. I don’t struggle with them not arriving at any meaning because they have no meaning for me in the first instance. And in turn, I can simply enjoy them for what they are, poetic musings about love and loss and pain in Spanish that I am free to interpret as I see fit because I am so detached from the parameters of their meaning that I can fully make them my own. And like with many texts, my readings of Neruda will differ every time and yet manage to bridge the vacuity of meaninglessness for me, even if just for a brief moment. After all, it is the search for meaning that motivates so many of my literary endeavours. Having been trained from the age of five to close-read and interpret texts, it is no wonder that my primary objective often is to look for meaning, for the moral of the story, when reading anything and everything. This is a widespread practice in our society and we are often quick to discard something if we feel like we do not agree with it or like what it means. To this, all I can say is that maybe we have got it all wrong. In her famous essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag argues for an ‘erotics of art’ in place of hermeneutics. To me this is the crux of the matter: in assigning meaning to everything, we uphold the belief that anything that does not have a meaning, that anything that evades our hermeneutical practices and proves inaccessible, is worthless. What is needed is a Sontagian erotics, an appreciation – period. The bifurcation of meaning into surface and depth, signifier and signified, black words on a white page, engenders a loss of the thing as a whole. In trying to see, it seems, we are forgetting to look. And as my experiences with Neruda have shown, sometimes simply looking can do a lot more than any close reading analysis ever could. 

Written by Emilia Rieth