Descripción de la mentira

This dissertation examines the contemporary Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda's poem Descripción de la mentira (1977) as a critical and contradictory literary testimony. Attentive to the interplay between poetry and modern understandings of testimony, I study the poem as a discursive threshold where memory and history come into conflict in the representation of traumatic experiences in times of war and repression. My reading of Gamoneda's poetry as, specifically, an Adornian form of testimony intervenes in the recent debate about historical memory in Spain, understood as an issue of the political and affective responses called forth in the discovery of horrors committed during the civil war and the dictatorship. Thus, the dissertation addresses topics such as the uses of history in the present, writing and war, literature as resistance, and Hispanic literary studies in the 21st century. Known for his oblique use of language, Gamoneda grapples with the climate of repression, censorship, and silence that characterized Francoism. Descripción de la mentira , with its enigmatic foregrounding of lies and lying, is at the center of my meditation on the interplay of poetics, ethics, and politics. This and other poetic works by Gamoneda shimmer as "contradictory testimonies" in which the act and memory of witnessing go, as it were, underground--only to "resurface," rife with loss, years after the Spanish transition to democracy. One of the animating features of Gamoneda's poetry is the fraught relation between the obscure and cryptic character of poetic writing and the public reading of history. In a profound and paradoxical sense, Gamoneda gestures at expressing something inexpressible, something akin to an irretrievable history of suppression, repression, and oppression, a history in which open, direct public discourse was (and in many ways remains) a lure, an illusion, a lie, a history that can only be "told" partially, elliptically, cryptically.