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ABSTRACT
This paper examines the works of Catalan poet Gabriel Ferrater (1922-1972) in relation to the economy of dilapidation that traverses his poetry, which is mostly devoted to his experiences of love and sex. I analyze the poetization of these experiences as an attempt to find a nonideological space that escaped the reality of Francoism, or, in Freudian terms, as an embrace of the pleasure principle against the reality principle that structured Ferrater's historical situation. I relate these poetics, and politics, of "pleasure against ideology" to the Barcelona School, particularly to Jaime Gil de Biedma and Carlos Barral. But the facts that, unlike these two poets, Ferrater wrote in Catalan and his family went bankrupt after the Civil War make his "dilapidating enterprise" more distressing but also more significant. Finally, I interpret Ferrater's abandonment of poetry in the late 1960s as a sign that the pursuit of pleasure had lost its subversive content and was now channeled into mass consumerism.
Under repressive dictatorships, writers who oppose the regime generally write about the anxieties of their people, the atrocities that have taken place, or the incessant longing for freedom. But Catalan poet Gabriel Ferrater, who was born in Reus in 1922 and lived his adult life under Francisco Franco's dictatorship, wrote most of his poetry about the pursuit of individual and erotic pleasure. Ferrater devoted one emblematic poem, "In memoriam," to the collective and permanent fear engendered by the Spanish Civil War; yet the themes of most of his poetry, which he collected under the title Les dones i els dies, relate to experiences of love and sex.
Ferrater has mostly been classified as a poet of experience.1 This interpretive frame assumes that poems express the concrete experiences of an individual subject. The subject observes the world without projecting previous ideological schemes on it and then hopes to extract from her experiences a moral portrait that may be communicated to others. But inevitable dialectics emerge here: while on the one hand, the poetry of experience aims to convey a real situation or a common event, and for this reason adopts narrative forms and a conversational tone, on the other hand, the radical subjectivism of this type of poetry often results in enigmatic verses and personal...