The empowerment of the nonhuman: some considerations on the apostrophe of prosopopeia in the poetics of the tango song (1917-1935)

Abstract

As every discursive genre, the lyrics of the tango song made use of the rhetorical arsenal for the creation of its verses. Among such resources, prosopopoeia, fundamentally as a form of apostrophe, was productive and, as we will try to show, allowed it to enrich the inflections of the lyric voices. From an early age, the tango assumed the fiction of taking as interlocutors objects or entities lacking the capacity to listen or to communicate (Luján Atienza, 2005), which fostered the dramatic profile that would constitute a relevant aspect of the identity of the gender. This characteristic was favorable for texts conceived or reformulated to be perfomatized as songs. The purpose of this article is to analyze how prosopopeia was used as an apostrophe in tango song during the twenties and thirties, the period with the highest incidence of this resource in the genre. To carry out this study, we have taken into account some contributions of the Theories of the Object (Moles, 1975; Latour, 2007, 2008; Bennett, 2004; Lash, 2005; Ahmed & Schmitz, 2014), since the prosopopeia, by its own definition, deconstructs the limits between the subject and the object, by making them enter in continuity (Bennett, 2004). In the context of a Poetic of daily life (Martini Real, 1980), this resource allowed to question the distances between the human and the nonhuman, and the relationships of men with each other and with things.