«Scopes of the poetic image in Taxi Driver by Egor Mardones»

Darwin Rodriguez (Chile) Table C – Connectographies

This paper investigates the process of construction and deployment of the poetics of the book Taxi Driver, by the Chilean writer Egor Mardones. Cab Driver is a short book of poetry of multidimensional writing that dialogues with the film Taxi Driver in the first place and with a vast thickness of languages coming from cinema in general, comics, poetry, pop music and the urban imaginary of a decadent hypermodernity.

In this regard, the paper elaborates an intermodal reading mobilizing elements taken from quantum physics (in its discursive and conjectural version), from Francisco Valera's phenomenology of life, from Sergio Mansilla's idea of the lyrical subject, as well as from reading experiences (fiction, poetry and criticism) and from the viewing of films related to the atmosphere of the book, elements that conclude in a semiotic chain of paratactic structure that would occur in the associativity of memory.

In this regard, the working hypothesis considered literary practices as recursive relations between symbolic and symbolic elements both of individual thought and of the social and cultural reality where those relations occur; and literature as an artistic practice that works semiotically, that is, in an abstract plane where those relations will be recursive as the symbol is built from the sign and where the sign is subsequent to the material experience devoid of meaning; since the poetic image implies in it the possibility of new latent meanings, which explode and take on polysemic senses when acting or operating in the field of the fictional capacity of multiple observations, sinking the linearity of time: the previous is realized in the present (Nishida) and the present broadens the previous.

In this regard, the book Taxi Driver is inserted, in addition to the context of the key model paradigms of Western modernity, in the literary field of the area of Concepción, Chile, within a tradition of writings that draw on multiple languages, some coming from outside the literary field (for example, the writings of Alexis Figueroa, Tomás Harris or Carlos Decap), and which became relevant from the mid-1980s onwards as a proposal to rethink an extremely heterogeneous and discursively fragmented historical period of national and global order, from that same heterogeneity and fragmentariness, anticipating patterns of reading and writing that today assume disruptive and experimental ways of approaching knowledge, also revealing reflective processes both on the objects studied and on the ways of approaching them.