About a recurring figure of speech in Argentinian music of popular tradition. A discursive proposal

Abstract

The study which we have carried out about discursivities in traditional popular Argentinian music in the 20th century shows the recurrence of a kind of poetic device in which some of the personal entities presented appear as if being contemplated or perceived by inert objects from the surroundings or from the landscape. Understanding this figure as a specific mode which the rhetorical and stylistic tradition has called “prosopopoeia” or “personification”, we have tried to characterize it based on the enunciation, focusing on voices and perspectives issues, which has made us locate it in a tension between “personification” and “reification”. Quite often, in a materialistic approach of discourse, we have proposed to observe how this kind of figure participates in different processes of discursive regularization. We have considered this recurrence in Argentinian music lyrics in order to show that, in spite of presenting relatively constant traces that formally characterize this figure of speech in the enunciative interplay, it integrates with different functions in regularization processes that respond to different sociohistorical determinations. For that, we have first summarized the results of our broad study, which had the goal to characterize, in the first stage of the cultural and musical movement called rock nacional in Argentina, a discursive regularization process. Then, in order to analyze how the figurative occurrences integrate, which is our focus here, we pointed out some differences in its occurrences in tango, and, after that, we mentioned the cases found in the first Argentinian rock corpus, analyzing some of them. Our conclusions locate the specificity of this personification/reification form in the initial stage of this musical movement in relation to the regularities in the person and scenography configurations which are predominant in it, and to the preconstructed presuppositions which have grounded it in the ideological conflict