“Where Dream used to Collide with its Reality”: The Apocalyptic Space of Negation in García Lorca’s Poet in New York

Abstract

García Lorca’s New York poetry is an invitation to death, a vocative act whose object would seem to be the negation of being and language.¹ While such negation must end in silence this is not equivalent to a nothingness devoid of any significance. Only from an oppositional point of view, would “nothing” constitute the meaningless opposite of Being. If instead “nothing” is considered to be the principle of irreconcilability, the Other that is always elsewhere and yet inhabits life—no-thing—then silence too is meaningful and makes itself felt by resonating in language.² Perhaps more than any other discourse, apocalyptic performs the impossible: it summons death in the name of everlasting life and attempts to give silence a voice. The predominant figure of apocalyptic is apostrophe and while both apocalypse and apostrophe unveil and make present, the nonobject of this revelation is death figured as silence or absence. This making present of absence is embodied in “contra-diction” which literally means “against diction” making of negation not a denial or opposite of language, but a “part” of and the “other” of language just as death is a “part” of and the “other” of life.³