Memory and Utopia

The Poetry of José Ángel Valente

Abstract

In Memory and Utopia, Manus O’Dwyer offers a new insight into Valente’s poetics. Contrary to the view that Valente detached his verse from any kind of social or political commitment, O’Dwyer claims that the notions of void and self-negation are key to understand his desire to make his lines reach a broad community and recover the memory of the dead. The author delineates Valente’s poetic career on the basis on the identification between desolation and the Francoist dictatorship. Valente’s verse points at a new nothingness, but not with the selfish aim to enjoy an isolation from reality. Quite on the contrary, in his poems and essays, the non-place or desert, together with other poetic motifs that have been previously analysed from an erotic perspective, allows the poet to portray an impossible community that accepts all those who have been denied participation in the discourse of History. It is only by means of a language that has not been corrupted by the institutional discourse that the poet can draw the map of that utopian, literary space.