Mourned Into Invisibility: The Erasure of the Female Subject in Pablo Neruda's "Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines"

Neruda’s “Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines” (Veinte Poemas de Amor y Una Cancion Desesperada, 1924) has been one of the best-known love poems of this past century. At the same time it is also a poem where the woman whose death he mourns is deliberately produced as an absent subject. In this essay, I will argue that the speaker's act of mourning is not merely a reaction to the loss of the woman, but rather it is the mechanism whereby she is completely possessed: by making her the reason for his grief, he possesses her more completely than love would have allowed him to possess her, thus placing her forever within the realm of his memory and outside the limits of her own ability to exercise agency. To do so, I will draw upon Simone de Beauvoir’s explanation of woman as constituting the Other, Laura Mulvey’s formulation of the male gaze as applicable to literary criticism and feminist readings of Neruda by Ibsen (1993), Detwiler (1998), and Perriam (1998). I will conduct a formal close-reading of the Spanish original version of the poem and consider its pronominal structure, tense changes, the quise/quería difference, the use of adjectives like fijos and the authorizing power of the repetition of the line “Puedo escribir.” Although the argument that the speaker's fractured emotions expose masculinity as vulnerable rather than reinforcing masculinity’s power over women will be considered, I believe that his inability to express himself reflects nothing about his right to define her experience or identity. Finally, I will examine how readers may become complicit with the speaker through his use of deictic immediacy and compression of syntax as well as through his purposeful vagueness regarding the beloved, thereby recruiting them to identify with him prior to their having had sufficient space to create critical distance from his perspective. Ultimately, this paper will conclude that there is no incidental relationship between the emotional universalism of Neruda’s poem and its structural effacement of the feminine subject: these two characteristics are, formally and stylistically, identical.