Separate Rooms: Luis García Montero and the Reading of Experience

Abstract

The strain of contemporary Spanish poetry known as the “poetry of experience” has often been characterized as a more engaging form of lyric, one that comes closer to its reader. This article seeks to challenge this view through close readings of two poems by the leading figure of the movement, Luis García Montero: “Life Vest under Your Seat” and “Garcilaso 1991” (Habitaciones separadas, 1994). Although these poems draw the reader in and encourage him or her to identify emotionally, they ultimately put this sentimental engagement into question, revealing its superficiality and its tendency to falsify and gloss over the subtleties of the poetic vision.

Acknowledgments

Elizabeth Amann is professor in the department of romance languages (other than French) at the University of Ghent (Belgium), where she specializes in modern Spanish literature and culture. She has taught at the University of Chicago, Yale University, and Columbia University and is the author of Importing Madame Bovary: The Politics of Adultery (Palgrave Macmillan 2006).

Notes

¹For an excellent overview of the various currents of Spanish poetry in the post-Franco era, see Cano Ballesta.

²See also the studies of Bruflat, Calles, Geist, and Maqueda Cuenca.

³Cano Ballesta has called the movement “an adventure ‘en busca del público perdido’” (701). And in his introduction to Felipe Benítez Reyes's Poesía, García Montero describes poetry as “un territorio material capacitado para crear una experiencia viva, un simulacro abierto a la identificación del lector” (13).

⁴Laura Scarano has discussed the poem as an example of the emphasis on urban existence in the poesía de la experiencia (230–31).

⁵As Cano Ballesta observes, the term recalls William Blake's Songs of Experience as well as Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of Experience.

⁶In his essay and manifesto, “La otra sentimentalidad,” García Montero gives Garcilaso a privileged place in the history of poetry as “el primero que hizo de su intimidad una aventura definitiva.”

⁷Dolores Romero López interprets the poem as an instance of what Harold Bloom has called tessera, an attempt to suggest that “el mundo del precursor estaría desgastado si no fuera redimido por él y convertido en un mundo nuevamente lleno y ampliado” (780). As I will argue in what follows, however, García Montero draws attention to the emptiness of this new world, to his own act of force fitting.

⁸García Montero briefly discusses Sonnet V in a critical essay titled “La literatura y sus incertidumbres” (Aguas territoriales 58).

⁹In an essay on Garcilaso, García Montero emphasizes how the poet applies texts from the past to his own life: “No se glosa el pasado, se aprende de él para construir el futuro, como se utilizan los versos clásicos para cantar la propia intimidad” (El sexto día 86). We might argue that García Montero makes a similar use of Garcilaso's own poetry.

¹⁰In this reading, I depart from Raquel Chiquillo's interpretation of the poem, which concludes that love has allowed the “yo” to assimilate the sonnet into the present: “Lo que hace posible la sobrevivencia del hombre y de la poesía es el amor” (66). It is not sentiment that makes poetry possible here but rather vice versa. Chiquillo distinguishes between Garcilaso's “amor individualista y cortesano” and García Montero's “amor que llega a redimir al ser humano en un acto de solidaridad” (67). I would argue, in contrast, that the only one who experiences love is Garcilaso. The true solipsism here is that of García Montero's lyric voice, who must invent a “tú” to make the Renaissance poem relevant.