Mnemo, Mama

Abstract

Time and time again, Montale’s poems speak to a loved and absent auditor; they address, intimately, a You, a second person or familiar other. You could call this work museic, which would be to say both that it is often musical (deploying a pleasing geometry of sound and sense bordering on the unsayable) and addressed to a muse, a cherished femme figure serving at once as a source, catalyst and inspiration for song. Among Kristeva’s gifts to practicing analysts are a series of concepts and coinages speaking directly to the question of this You, the “matrixial borderspace” or forgotten song central to language and to psychic life which is transmitted via polyphonic or polysemic modes of signifying rooted in the sounds and sensations of the body. These registers skirt a delicate and doubled line between metaphor and the meat of matter; they work, on the one hand, as a living memory of real experiences—those of infancy, anterior to the acquisition of language, or those of motherhood, surpassing words—and, on the other, constitute a timeless presence within speech and thought, a weather or welter of past, present, and future immanent to sign and to syntax. Reading Kristeva with Montale brings into bold relief the urgent necessity of the talking cure in an age in which the age-old symbolic orders governing speaking beings—the panoply of human compacts and regimes generated by song, sign and syntax—have come to founder. —Your first love?—asked Gerda. —No, it was something more lasting than that. At first an infantile hatred, then manly pity; and then oblivion. . . that is up to a minute ago, when this tune came back to me. Eugenio Montale [1] . . .what contains the entire art of the canzone should be called stanza, that is, a capacious dwelling or receptacle for the entire craft. For just as the canzone is the container (literally lap or womb) of the entire thought, so the stanza enfolds its entire technique. . . Dante, De vulgari eloquentia II.9 [2]

Keywords:

• Kristeva Keyword: Kristeva
• Maternal Keyword: Maternal
• memory Keyword: memory
• Montale Keyword: Montale
• poetry Keyword: poetry

How to Cite:

Rights: In Copyright