Voices thinking of me when I think of them: intertextual dialogue in Jazmina Barrera’s essays

Abstract

This article studies three books of Jazmina Barrera (Mexico, 1988): Cuerpo extraño (2013), Cuaderno de faros (2019) and Linea nigra. Without losing sight of the fact that, as the author herself affirms, an essay is a hybrid and unclassifiable text, this work observes the features of the essay genre that allow us to understand each book in its singularity, as well as the universe to which they belong to. In this way, it is based on a review of these characteristics, among which are its experimental and playful nature (Bense), the desire to build itself from what already has a form (Lukács) and the use of quotes such as textual underpinning technique. Immediately, after reviewing the layout of each book, intertextuality is addressed as understood by Genette, including ekphrasis as one of the privileged techniques used by the Mexican author’s prose. In this sense, the obvious similarity that exists between essay writing and collecting as understood by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Jean-Claude Nancy is observed, that is, as the always unsatisfied desire to annul the distance that separates the collector from the loved objects to become them. The semantic resonance that occurs between images related to the intersection between life and death is also addressed, on the one hand, and with motherhood as recognition and appropriation of otherness, on the other. This article finally identifies a poetics where the biological body and the textual body are interchangeable notions.