83 Shortened Title Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 42 (2008) MICHELLE CLAYTON Trilce’s Lyric Matters To speak of matter in the context of César Vallejo’s 1922 poetry collection Trilce might seem like a dubious proposition: the assump- tion underlying most critical approaches is that this poetry refers to everything and nothing, undoing its own discourse while simultane- ously opening itself outwards to a seemingly uncontrollable prolif- eration of meanings. And yet I will argue here that signiicant matters are repeatedly perceptible throughout the collection, be they bodies, landscapes, afective objects or places which populate the seventy-seven mini-narratives to which the speaker is subjected. Indeed Trilce, in its insistent reference to visible and palpable parts of a body, of a landscape, of daily life at the crossroads of traditional structures and incipient modernization, seems to be undergirded by an aesthetics of referentiality or materiality, albeit one corroded or splintered by the convergence and sometimes bewildering overlapping of diferent dis- courses employed to approach its subject-matter. I will be suggesting here that it is precisely Trilce’s insistence on the inextricability of those various discourses—indeed, on the inextricability of matter and its various discursive formations and transformations—which both stands in the way of its referents and also, paradoxically, reveals their function, their historical place, and their promise. he diiculty of Trilce resides not only in the fact that its lyric subjects and objects are themselves, in the wake of romanticism and in coincidence with the European avant-gardes, fragmented; rather, what this profoundly heteroglossic poetry suggests is that those subjects and objects can no longer be accounted for by anything like a unitary discourse, that they are caught up in multi-stranded networks of mean- ing in modernity, all of which bear upon and refract those objects in constantly shifting ways. heir parts, in other words, are also parts of diferent discourses, which both shatter objects and multiply the ways they can and must be approached. Crucially, those strands of discourse, which alternately involve languages of the aesthetic, the domestic, the scientiic, and the technological, frequently cluster around the question