Assembling La nueva novela: Juan Luis Martínez and a Material Poetics of Relation
Chapter 3 examines the material poetics of relation that contribute to the Juan Luis Martínez-assembled 1970s artist’s book La nueva novela. It is constructed from such diverse parts as: visual maths problems in which, for example, a painting of Rimbaud and a military jacket minus a shoe, a boot and a sock equals suspenders, a spat and a sock; metal fishhooks taped to a page; riddles and circular problems of logic; other people’s poems; musical scores; drawings, for example, of a pipe split in half (titled ‘Meditations on René Magritte’ and dedicated to Foucault); among many other things. This chapter turns to Édouard Glissant’s ‘poetics of relation’ and Manuel DeLanda’s elaboration of ‘assemblage theory’. By bringing together these texts, which both draw from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, this chapter demonstrates poetry’s condition of being is as a ‘multiplicity’, one that, as Martínez says, ‘operate[s] permanently in every direction’. By comparing how the book’s contents work to both bind it together as a whole and unbind it into a near-infinite network of pieces that can and do belong to other assemblages, this chapter makes a case for understanding books and their contents as bound by relations of exteriority.
