Body of writing

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Body of writing

Figuring desire in Spanish American literature

Ren Prieto

Duke University Press Durham and London 2000

 2000 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Typeset in Adobe Caslon by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

To Leps

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Contents
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Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1
1 Julio Cortzars perpetual exile 17 2 More than meets the I: Guillermo Cabrera Infantes La Habana para un Infante difunto 75 3 The excremental vision of Gabriel Garca Mrquez 101 4 The degraded body in the work of Severo Sarduy 135 5 Rewriting the body: renewal through language in the work of Rosario Castellanos 173 6 The body of pleasure in Tununa Mercados Canon de alcoba 213

Conclusion 240 Notes 255 Bibliography 275 Index 285

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Acknowledgments
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Barthes used to say reading needed to be an obsessive activity. By that he meant it was preferable to become intimate with a handful of classicsto read them again and againinstead of trying to keep up with all the novelties. I want to thank him and my fellow students from his seminar at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes for impressing upon me the need to blur the boundary between reading and compulsion. Something astonishing takes place after reading the same book many times: one begins to think in tune with the author, which is another way of saying from the perspective of another. If reading is an adventure, rereading is the return journey to the birthplace of the text. Several friends traveled with me on such a journey by oering useful suggestions while Body of Writing took shape. Among them, I wish to express my gratitude to Roberto Gonzlez Echevarra and Gustavo Prez-Firmat for their many valuable recommendations. I would also like to thank Anbal Gonzlez Prez and the Caribbean Literature Series at the University of Texas, Austin, for inviting me to read the very paper on La Habana para un Infante difunto that became the starting point for this book. Like an inkblot on the page, Body of Writing spread in unexpected directions during the many wonderful discussions that took place in and after a graduate class on Indigenismo I taught at Emory University in 1994. My thanks go to all my students in that class, as well as to Carlos Alonso and Karen Stolley for inviting me to Emory. Body of Writing would not have been completed without Jared Loewenstein, Ibero-American bibliographer at the University of Virginia, who made available the remarkable collection of rare and unpublished

Spanish American manuscripts at Alderman Library; Franois Wahl, whose illuminating insights on Severo Sarduy helped me hone my own readings; and my friend John Bertolini, whose spellbinding takes on Alfred Hitchcock gave me a better grasp on the relationship between the uncanny and the artistic imagination. Body of Writing came to life in an unspoiled, rural haven in Virginia. Without the constant friendship and encouragement of Bruce and Mariana Bell, Alletta Bredin-Bell, Becky Hibbard, Kim Radclie, Hiromi, Hugo, Martin, Vita, and all the fortunate inhabitants of Southern Cross Farm, it would not shine with the same light. My loyal friends Catherine Borovski, Carolyn Bullard and Vern Berry, Philippe Delamare and Danielle Dupont, Dorothy Friedlander, Lorine and David Gibson, Helen Johnson, Jean Rembert, Cheryl and Kevin Vogel, and Bonnie Wheeler and Jeremy Adams have kept that light from going out since I arrived in Dallas, while Southern Methodist University has showered me with unstinting support. My debt to Sue Sturgeon and Rosemary Snchez can never be repaid; without their help I would have had neither the time nor the focus to nish this book. Finally, I wish to thank Cambridge University Press, the Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies of the University of Colorado, and the editors of World Literature Today for publishing my work and allowing me to use the material in this book. The articles and book chapters, none of which is mentioned in the notes, are the following: The Body as Political Instrument: Communication in No One Writes to the Colonel, in Gabriel Garca Mrquez: New Readings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 3344; A Womb with a View: Sex and the Movies in La Habana para un infante difunto, World Literature Today 61, no. 4 (1987): 58489; The Little Man on the Mirror: Reections on Maitreya and Colibr, in Between the Self and the Void: Essays in Honor of Severo Sarduy, ed. Alicia Rivero-Potter (Boulder, Colo.: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, University of Colorado Press, 1998); Cortzars Closet, in Julio Cortzar: New Readings, ed. Carlos Alonso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). And now, when all are thanked but one, in the special place that openings and closings always warrant, I thank Martine for her devotion, her presence of mind and of spirit, always a guiding inspiration.

x Acknowledgments

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Introduction
i

Years ago, in a shrewd and puzzling sentence that has been much bandied about, Roland Barthes advanced that literary texts had human form and were always a gure, an anagram, of our erotic body (Pleasure of the Text, 8). As Barthes saw it, writing is both a physical and mental process because the intellectual exercise it requires concerns itself with dramatizing behavior and behavior is naturally expressed through the body. Shadowing forth how characters follow a given trajectory brings with it a consideration of the body even when such guration is an entelechy. This entelechy must not be seen as a total abstraction, however, because the body is dramatized through the imagination which is shaped, in turn, by personal experience, by what Peter Brooks terms the complex conscious desires and interdictions that shape humans conditions of themselves as desiring creatures (Body Work, 6). The desires and interdictions Brooks refers to are the sequel to experiencessuch as birthshared by everyone. Shared, these experiences also vary in terms of our perception and recollection of them. In other words, the ingredients shaping our selves as thinking, feeling individuals are comparable, but the resulting image we have of the world diers according to how experience is perceived. Recast in writing, these perceptions result in unique projections. Because writing is the brainchild of the imagination and each imagination is dierent, the world each writer conceives is as unique as the characters that inhabit it. This is why the hand of Lautramont or of Julio Cortzar should be as readily recognizable as that of El Greco or of Fernando Botero. Curiously, although we often speak of a hand when studying painting,

we seldom do in discussing literature. We have a clear mental image of what a Blue Period Picasso or a Jos Clemente Orozco portrait looks like but little idea of the prototypes cast by Henri Beyle or Mario Vargas Llosa. This is because character in the plastic arts is visually dened in terms of mass, outline, and color whereas in literature it is conceived in terms of behavior. Behavior can be as constant and recognizable as color but not as readily apparent because it shows up quilted onto a story line. What I mean to say is that the body in ction tends to be camouaged by the action and our primary response is to the latter, to the statements which, in the words of Stanley Fish, simply refer or simply report (SelfConsuming Artifacts, 6). As Fish takes pains to pursue, although a great deal goes on in the production and comprehension of these statements, most of it is going on so close up, at such a basic preconscious level of experience, that we tend to overlook it (8). The most obvious thing we overlook is the most important: the hallmark of an authors style. Without having recourse to blanket labels such as surrealist or magical realist can anyone sum up what typies the work of Julio Cortzar or of Gabriel Garca Mrquez? Above and beyond the interest these writers have in assimilating and disseminating specic literary trends, can it be said what characterizes their feeling for words and denes their respective uniqueness? Like mineelds, plots of ction are full of buried surprises. Littering the landscape of each page, these surprises are the trace an author leaves behind, the clues that allow entry into his or her personal labyrinth. These contextual clues play as large a role in literary characterization as line and color do in painting. In fact, we need to recognize that characters in literature are not conceived so much in terms of their physical features as of their relationship to a setting, and that this setting translates an authors conscious and unconscious longings. This is why, in studying literature, personal revelations need to be sought not in the mien of characters but in their conduct. We must also explore how the mineeld conducts itself because the setting or context reveals at least as much about the concerns of an author as any character in the ction. Created as a projection of the writers desires and interdictions, it is a body exposed to view and frequently ignored by eyes that focus on character, action, and chronology. But if we say that works of literature are unique because they are projections of the person who writes them, dont we need to

Body of writing

explore their overall physiognomy, which is to say the topography of the ction? Instead of focusing so much on what is being said at the anecdotal level, shouldnt we also be concerned with the trace of themselves writers leave behind? Shouldnt literary study be just as much an analysis of surfaces as of character? Shouldnt it be conceived as an exploration of the clues that litter each page? After all, as Carlo Ginzburg points out, knowing is the experience of deciphering traces (Clues, 166). Some might fear that tracking clues and deciphering traces could take us back to the kind of arid exercise that pushed structuralism to its death. But let us remember that the wick of structuralism snued itself out by giving more prevalence to the formulas that t texts than to the texts themselves. What I am suggesting is not that we have recourse to formulas but that we consider the uniqueness of a textual sourcethe traces an author leaves behind, imprints of his or her own persona, the writing body that becomes the body of writing. Traveling back to the sources that left the imprint on the page, we need to understand how ction makes the body signify while eshing out in the process, itself a body whose symptoms are dramatized fears and longings cast into settings, characters, and action. It is this dramatizationthis secondary and allegorical level of storytellingthat is the subject of this book. My contention is that, if works of ction are anagrams of the body, then the authors intention can be recovered by analyzing the topography of texts. In the eld of English and American studies this type of analysis has resulted in trendsetting works such as Diane Price Herndls Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840 1940, a book in which the penchant in American culture to lionize feminine illness is brought to the limelight. Herndls work on illness grows out of her interest in role casting, role-playing, and, necessarily, in the body. This interest directs her to the wellspring of writing, to the source from which the word itself issues forth. As Roberto Gonzlez Echevarras towering Myth and Archive has demonstrated, it is impossible to study words of any sort without considering the question of origins. How, if this is the case, could we not take the body into account when we read? How could we deny that its portrayal is a fantasy informed by selfperception and personal longing, a projection distinguishing one work of

Introduction

literature from another? Isnt it evident that the primal source of writing is also the rst object of literature, a truism that makes the spring from which all ction ows both opaque and transparent? This book also grows out of that reection and aims to make the opaque lose ground to the transparent by looking intently at the wellspring of writing. Often disregarded, sources are the logical starting point if we engage in the unveiling of truth which, says Barthes, all narratives represent. Truth is sought in literature by journeying both forward and backward. Traveling forward, authors seek to fulll fantasies in imaginary scenarios where their innermost wishes are acted out by traveling backward to the infantile sources for those very wishes. Motivated by a wish for fulllment, writing dramatizes a desire which, as Brooks suggests, is ultimately the desire for a body that may substitute for the body, the mothers, the lost object of infantile blissthe body that the child grown up always seeks to recreate (Body Work, 24). Since writing ction is directly connected with fulllment, it follows that characterization is contingent upon the way authors see or, rather, wish to see themselves. This means not only that heroes and heroines will be lanky or plump as a response to an ideal but that the context portrayed is, in and of itself, the terrain where unconscious wishes are acted out. Accordingly, setting and point of view need to be approached as determining factors when exploring the roots of representation. It is here at least as much as in characters conduct and mien that we will nd the specic bodily markings which, Brooks argues, largely concern the modern narrative (Body Work, 26). Perhaps the specic markings that make the body recognizable are more visible in modern literature because today, more than ever, authors are using the novel as a vehicle to project their wishes and anxieties. It is as if, taking their cue from psychoanalysis, contemporary writers were using ction as a vehicle to launder dirty linen. Keeping, nonetheless, some sense of modesty, these authors seldom emphasize the soil marks on the laundry or even the laundry itself, for that matter. Instead they present a symbolic dramatization which alludes to the source that breathes life into the fantasy. If we determine someday that all literary works dramatize situations related to the life of their authors, we will have to acknowledge the impossibility of divorcing the element of confession from the act of writing, a fact that would explain why literary creation has been viewed as
4 Body of writing

therapy. Making acutely personal disclosures can often bring a sense of relief, but what if, compulsive about the need to confess, a writer felt inhibited at the same time by the very nature of the confession? Inhibited to the point of unconsciously disempowering him- or herself to recognize the essence of the secret that, unavowed, would continue to fester in silence? Inhibited to a degree that he or she would craftily transform that secret and send it to the printer disguised so perversely that even its own creator would not be able to recognize it? Can the kind of writing that masks its sources provide an author with a sense of relief ? Can such writing be a liberating experience, or will the buried secret act as a perpetual irritant goading a writer onward to search for his or her source of inspiration? Few have pondered this process as painstakingly or gotten higher artistic dividends out of exposing their traumas in public than Julio Cortzar, which is why I chose to start my own inquiry into the portrayal of the body with a look at his underhanded short stories. I say underhanded because plots as ambiguous and manipulative as Cortzars are rare. They are ambiguous not only because they portray multiple alternatives but because the anecdotal level systematically masks another in which the authors personal obsessions are revealed through symbols. Cortzars work is particularly striking because, although revealing, he always covers his tracks. To reveal his obsessions, he doesnt aunt them; never blatant about portraying what ailed him, he kept his body under wraps. This is why his revelations have little to do with skin and bone. The truth is that he dwelled more on tectonics than on anatomy, apparently more curious about the bodys relationship to its environment than about esh and blood (of which, when all is said and done, he was rather frightened). For this reason, he avoided close-ups that might bring him too close to the skin of revelation, and shied away from fractures and tears that would suggest a disjointed organism mirroring, much too closely, his personal response to the harrowing separation his characters dramatize with such persistence. This does not mean he was not drawn to images of fragmentation and loss. However, like a man who enjoys moving his foot over the edge of a precipice while rmly refusing to look down, he cunningly refrained from making obvious allusions to what he dreaded and, at the same time, most sought to fantasize about. Thus he always made a point of studying not the body per se but rather the body as it related to the space around it.
Introduction 5

That space turned out to be sinister and menacing because the characters in Cortzars stories usually react to circumstances that conne and oppress them, and these circumstances are typically a construct of the mind, a gment of their own imaginations. Imagined though they may be, these ights of fancy are in no way insubstantial, however. They dramatize a very real source of anxiety alluded to indirectly by means of an object or idea substituting for another in order to suggest a likeness between them. Cortzar was well aware of why he wrote, even if he mystied the sources from which his gurative scenarios sprang. At least in this regard, he has been a role model for a whole generation of critics who, with few exceptions, have tended to misconstrue the more recondite level of his gurative scenarios. Since my aim is to investigate how the body writes itself into Spanish American literature, it seems appropriate to turn to the work of a man who dedicated his life to both exposing and camouaging his own. The rst chapter of this book will concern itself, therefore, with images that haunted Cortzar through most of his adult life, images that have been studied by others but always as separate notions (or guras as Cortzar liked to call them). My intention is to demonstrate how these guras relate to one another and translate a very specic obsession, one that turns out to be the seedbed of Cortzars ction. I will show that the stories included in Bestiario (1951), Final del juego (1956), Las armas secretas (1959), Todos los fuegos el fuego (1966), and Octaedro (1974) are as much a confession as Jean-Jacques Rousseaus great classic and how, unless we cease to disregard their indiscreet and most revealing level, we will be unable to assess the extent of Cortzars originality. What Cortzar wrote is so extraordinarily intimate that he enveloped it in a smokescreen. For this reason his particular brand of disclosure is a perverse game, a blind mans blu in which he and each player are blindfolded. Since in his early stories he tended to turn his back on realism and, consequently, on the tradition that makes the visual the master relation to the world, it is not surprising that he placed emphasis on darkness and shut eyes. Despite this emphasis, he was nonetheless adamant about setting down on paper his obsessive preoccupation because it was only through writing that he could fulll his wish. All indications show that, at least on a conscious level, he was extraordinarily embarrassed about that wish, however. Cortzars quandary was best summed up in the comparison between the typewriter and the camera described in his masterful Las babas del diablo (Blow-Up) (from Las armas se6 Body of writing

cretas ). In that story we learn how the machine that writes cannot be trusted any more than the machine that sees; both ooze with mendacity because the human element interprets their message (Blow-Up and Other Stories, 114). For Roberto Michel, the writer, photographer, and occasional narrator of this story, the eye cannot be relied on because the brain intervenes and tells its own story about what it sees. If the instinct for looking is closely related to the instinct for knowledge, both Michel and Cortzar had a predicament that can be summed up in one question: what happens when we are forced to look at something repellent? In answer to this question, most of Cortzars characters shut their eyes. Consequently, his stories construct themselves on a model of frustration in which the desire to know is always at war with the wish not to nd out. I felt I needed to follow the study of Cortzars shut-eyed pursuit of knowledge with a look at a second confession, but this time, as a contrast, one predicated on seeing. For this reason, I chose the ultimate model of what Toril Moi refers to as an epistemophilic project: Guillermo Cabrera Infantes remarkable La Habana para un Infante difunto (1971) (Infantes Inferno [1984]). The rst-person narrator of this frolicking caste study, a self-designated scopophiliac, spends most of his time picking up women in movie theaters and endowing the act of seeing with erotic overtones. Describing bodies as objects of both knowing and desire, his chronicle is like Leporellos catalogue of Don Giovannis conquests, with one exception. Instead of falling into a hellish maw like Don Giovanni, Cabrera Infantes perpetually lovelorn hero brings about the ultimate synthesis of knowing and desire when, in a fantasy likened to Jules Vernes Journey to the Center of the Earth, he literally crawls into a womans womb. His wishful thinking humorously translates the original fantasy of the origins in which, following Lacans formula, the subject is present as a pure gaze before its own conception or, more precisely, at the very act of its own zek, For They Know Not, 197). conception (Zi I was surprised to discover that, despite appearances to the contrary, Cabrera Infantes wide-eyed pursuit of knowledge has a lot in common with Cortzars cloistered universe. The main dierence is that the protagonists in the work of one never stop staring whereas those in the work of the other cannot bear to look. Be that as it may, the aim of both is to unveil truth, but truth, like Medusas head, is fraught with danger. Symbol of knowledge and inextricably linked with things sexual, the eye is the signpost of learning, but knowledge is always painful, as we discover, for
Introduction 7

instance, in Georges Batailles Histoire de loeil when the eyeball of the butchered priest ends up in Simones vagina or, when, in Infantes Inferno, the hero realizes that recollections of his mother are often coupled with sharp, cutting objects. Writers pursue their quest for fulllment despite the pain that attends any search for the truth. That pain is typically obscured, however, because readers become sidetracked by the surface of literature. Minimizing the role of sublimation, we take the skin of stories at face value, forgetting, all too often, that characters and actions convey meaning on one level while alluding to the authors personal ordeal on another. Perhaps, in years hence, all literature will be shown to be a dramatized confession, a show-and-tell in which blatant revelations are only contingent upon the amount of rouge with which a story is daubed. A sense of accomplishment osets this pain for the writer but it doesnt make the act of creation any less stressful. After all, as Erich Neumann assures us, the kind of transformation writing requires is also the means to get rid of daunting anxiety that could readily turn a career into a veritable calvary (Art and the Creative Unconscious, 83). Cabrera Infantes calvary is also the pleasure he cannot do without, which is why, like Cortzar, he must write it down. One could argue that in the epilogue to Infantes Inferno we come face to face not only with the narrators unconscious wish to reenter the womb but also with his greatest longing: to become analogous with the phallus and father of himself, which is to say, master of knowledge. Acting on that longing is not exclusive to the epilogue but denes all of Infantes Inferno, described by Cabrera Infante as a book about books whose covers, like lips, enfold the matrix of knowledge embodied by the female genitals. Akin to the compulsion of writing the very book which contains the story of ones origins, the longing to reenter the womb is not delivered naked as a straightforward biography but clothed in the trappings of ction and cast as a catalogue of conquests, a mechanism that distances the message of primal longing from the reader. So many women show their faces in Cabrera Infantes compulsively long chronicle because, ultimately, they are all evanescent reenactments of the one the hero lost, remembrances of wombs past which, identied to the mother, are unattainable by denition or, rather, by association. Accordingly, the narrator declares at one point that for him a perfect woman is one he can see but not touch, like the eeting shadows on the silver screen (262).
8 Body of writing

After looking at projections of the bodyrst, by an author who camouages his sources, and then by one who aunts themI set out to explore the work of a third for whom writing is a political rather than a biographical undertaking. I was drawn to the ction of Gabriel Garca Mrquez because both in terms of exploring knowledge and portraying the body he begins where Cabrera Infante leaves o. Instead of focusing on one part of the body, he travels from one pole to the other in order to portray the relationship between the rational and the animal sides that the eye and the bowels represent. Retracing Garca Mrquezs journey in my third chapter, I explore the link between No One Writes to the Colonel (1961) and his often misunderstood Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). Writing works of ction that can be read on one level as metaphors of the erotic body, Garca Mrquez links the hero of his pellucid novella with dependency and an inability to nd release. Portraying the colonels body as a behavioral blueprint, the Colombian author invites readers to reect on the dangers of withholding and passivity in what turns out to be a panegyric for action that culminates in the heros physiological and psychological release. Almost thirty years after the publication of his best-selling novella, and after illustrating the balancing eects of life and death in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), Garca Mrquez returns to the subject of human commitment in the profoundly moving Love in the Time of Cholera. Self-absorbed and unable to nd release, the hero of this work resembles the colonel in No One Writes. Steadfast in his habits like the colonel, Florentino Ariza is a man who evolves, someone whose struggle to reach beyond his own limitations gives sense to his life. As in No One Writes, and again using the heros anatomy as an atlas, emphasis in Love in the Time of Cholera shifts from one pole of the body to the other. Garca Mrquez begins by linking visual perception with idealization, and showing how idealization is a deterrent to enlightenment. It isnt until the older and wiser Florentino has a thoroughly cleansing intestinal explosion that he opens his eyes to the world and sees the woman he loves as she is, for the rst time. Translated into the terms of the story, his release from self-absorption allows him to accept Fermina Daza not as a crowned goddess but as a sensuous woman with shortcomings and limitations. Making Dantes Amor conoscenza a maxim for our troubled times, Garca Mrquez reveals the limits of relationships based purely on impressions and personal needs. The crumbling, chaotic world he portrays
Introduction 9

must nd its lost balance by not letting one part of the body cheat on another, by not allowing our tendency to embroider interfere with life. The key to a more harmonious universe will be found, he suggests, when we accept each other without embellishing what we seeor, in other words, when we allow the eye to become master of the house. Refusing to accept things as they are characterizes Severo Sarduys painfully funny novels, subject of my fourth chapter and watershed of this book. Sarduy made the point I am making with every word he wrote and maintained that writing was all about scabs and scars, an archaeology of the skin laden with clues (El Cristo de la rue Jacob, 7). Old scabs on the body tell and retell the story of their origin; old scars on the psyche show up as black stitches on the white page, a mnemonic device dramatized as characters and seemingly anodyne events which are actually of momentous importance: like scratches on the skin, they picture the incident that etched them into the surface (El Cristo, 7). It was typically discerning of Sarduy to speak not just of writing on the body but to choose the metaphor of the scar to designate recorded memories. After all, the characters he portrays are always deled. The picture he paints is dramatically dierent from Cabrera Infantes and Garca Mrquezs. The desiring body in their work feels inspirited; it yearns and evolves through yearning, seldom seeking to bring about its own destruction. In Sarduys work, on the other hand, the body changes shape, tears itself up, and lashes out against the world. Pain, torture, and delement suggest a process of deterioration that goes against the grain of the usual literary portrait. Most authors conceive of writing as a process of accretion where characters add layers of consistency and denition as they develop an identity. To chisel his characters, Sarduy proceeds more like Giacometti than like Rodin, however. He whittles away at his embattled heroes, creating in order to tear apart. Tortured and deled, his beleaguered protagonists evolve through a process of abrasion and subtraction: Cobra is hung from the ceiling until his body starts oozing blood; Totem cuts o his tongue; Pup rips the ears o a little girl (Cobra, 108 09, 170, 97). Physical degradation remained an ingredient of Sarduys ctional portrayals until the end of his life, but did the withered bodies in his work always spring from the same sources, one wonders? Were they informed in his two last novels, at leastby the disease that ended up killing him? Why are his festive stories overrun with foul stenches and bone splinters,
10 Body of writing

splattered marrow, and curdling blood? Why was he so obsessed with portraying the organism as wrecked and the world as abject? Does the self-destructiveness present in Rosario Castellanoss Ocio de tinieblas (1962) have the same sources as the balefulness in Sarduy? Must the humiliation and pain she portrays be read from a dierent perspective because it was written by a woman? It is clear why Cobra is unable to accept himself and tampers with his body, but why does one of the main protagonists of Ocio cripple herself ? Pendant to the powerful Catalina Daz Puilj, the invalid, pampered Idolina startles everyone when she suddenly starts to walk. By the time Ocio de tinieblas comes to an end, however, Idolina is back in bed although no demonstrable disease mechanisms account for her paralysis. Her face is to the wall and she doesnt even seem to be listening to her nursemaids account of the Tzotzil Indians disastrous defeat. Based on the havoc wreaked on the Indians at the end of Ocio de tinieblas, the message of the novel rings clear: there is no hope for the weak. Is Castellanos suggesting that women fall into this category? All intimations of female independence and power are seemingly squelched by the time we reach the end of the novel, as active history is turned into a passive account of events. Is Castellanos bowing to conventional novelistic canons in her contrasting portrayals of weak, suering women and misbehaving strong ones who end up being punished for their sins? In fact, as we shall see in my fth chapter, she appears not so much to conform to the male-dened genre of the novel as to turn that genre to her own psychic needs. If Castellanos wrote to satisfy the demands of patriarchal disciplinary power, her novels could take their place in that power structure, and she would therefore not have to turn herself into an artistic object. She could rebel and react to exploitation using a system of representation that portrayed the very system she sought to criticize. Ever since the nineteenth century, Spanish American women authors have participated in and rened a male-dened genre. However, since the publication of Mara Luisa Bombals revolutionary La ltima niebla (1935) (House of Mist [1947]), the portraiture of sweet heroines typical of patriarchal culture has been counterbalanced by what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar describe as a madwoman in the attic: a repressed, angry voice that acts as counterfoil to the angel in the house (Madwoman, 17). Is this angry voice the same one we hear in Ocio de tinieblas, or is Idolinas and Catalinas rage dierent from the passive resistance featured
Introduction 11

by Latin American women authors writing after Bombal? If resistance is featured in Ocio we also need to ask ourselves how Castellanos tempered the personal insecurities that come through so strongly in her recently published letters to her ex-husband (Cartas a Ricardo, 1994). Unlike Cortzar, Cabrera Infante, and Sarduy, was she writing portraits that were not projections of her own anxieties and insuciencies? Did she, like Garca Mrquez, envisage her own writing as a social project designed to alter what she felt was an unfair situation? But if this is the case, why did she disarm both Catalina and Idolina at the end of Ocio? Doesnt Idolinas reversion to invalidism suggest that Ocio is a panegyric to female passivity and not a work of protest? In the penultimate chapter of this book I examine these questions before concluding with a look at Tununa Mercados celebration of female autonomy in Canon de alcoba (1989), a novel in which sex roles and the female body are portrayed in a wholly unprecedented way. Taking to heart Virginia Woolf s suggestion that women must kill the angel in the house before they can write, Mercado is determined to examine, assimilate, and transcend the extreme images of angel and monster that male authors have generated for her (Woolf, Professions for Women, 236 38). In literature written by women these images are frequently subverted by what Gilbert and Gubar describe as a dark double that serves to channel the rage of women compelled to adopt images generated by male authors in order to sell their books (Madwoman, xi). The rst thing that strikes readers of Mercado is the conspicuous absence of angry monsters in her work. Instead, what we nd in Canon de alcoba is the joyous celebration of women who take pleasure in their bodies without using or abusing anyone else. Besides vacating anger from its pages, Mercado modies the patriarchal novel by casting the women in Canon de alcoba as spectators and subjects of the action whereas the men are portrayed as the objects of womens contemplation. In her writing, male characters continue to hold the coveted emblem of power, but women appropriate power both by means of the eye and of the pen. The phallus in Canon is a tool for womans enjoyment, and the text takes pleasure in depersonalizing male characters: sexual organs are described as the focal point of nameless bodies whose identity is never revealed. Men in Canon de alcoba make no demands or impositions; they have a place and only the symbolic power that their sex organ emblematizes. Authored by women (both the writer and the female voyeurs portrayed in
12 Body of writing

the episodes composing the book), they are simply cast as organs of pleasure. Another dierence between Mercados fantasies and those of every other author studied in this book is this: because her narrative point of view is not generated by the need to attach to a perpetually eeting object, no sense of loss is ever portrayed. Loss of the love object is typically compounded with the masculine fear of the loss of the attribute, which, according to Hlne Cixous, informs the male libidinal economy (La jeune ne, 147). This is why Canon de alcoba may well be the rst true example of feminine writing as Cixous denes it. This kind of writing is crucially related to Derridas analysis of writing as dirance. For Cixous, feminine texts are texts that work on the dierence, as she once put it, works that strive in the direction of dierence, struggle to undermine the dominant phallogocentric logic, split open the closure of the binary opposition, and revel in the pleasures of open-ended textuality (Interview with van Rossum-Guyon, 480). However, Cixous is adamant that even the term criture fminine, or feminine writing, is abhorrent to her, since terms like masculine and feminine imprison us within a binary logic, within the classical vision of sexual opposition between men and women (Conley, Hlne Cixous, 129). She has therefore chosen to speak either of a writing said to be feminine (or masculine) or, more recently, of a decipherable libidinal femininity which can be read in writing produced by a male or female (129). It is not, apparently, the empirical sex of the author that matters, but the kind of writing at stake. She thus warns against the dangers of confusing the sex of the author with the sex of the writing he or she produces (Castration or Decapitation? 52). I made every eort to heed Cixouss warning when I began writing this book. I soon discovered, however, that no matter how much a given male author identied or seemed to identify with modalities of the feminine, his logic was ultimately phallogocentric and intrinsically dierent from that of women writers whose ction is the only place where criture as Cixous denes it can be found. For instance, some refer to Severo Sarduys writing as feminine and, while it is true that many of his male characters aspire to be women or, more exactly, to have female attributes, one soon discovers that femininity in Sarduy is not a token of his identication with the opposite sex but the means to mock it. What lurks behind the transvestites he portrays with such insistence is not love but
Introduction 13

anger, and his writing is not a modality of the feminine but the means to parody an object scorned. Needless to say, Sarduys scorn is not gratuitous; it has its sources in the personal history he spent his life unraveling. Like every other writer in this book, he envisaged writing as a quest for truth, a quest to be undertaken by working his way backwards. Reading the scars on his body, he told the story of his life by dramatizing the places that hurt. For him as for every other author studied here, writing became a sort of geography lesson mapped out on skin and bone and shared through writing. Because writing ction is inseparable from the notion of quest for knowledge, I let this notion guide me in choosing the authors for this book. My hope was to end up with a group of men and women who approached and handled this theme in a unique way. I began with Julio Cortzar because of his uncanny ability to simultaneously reveal and camouage his own search. Cabrera Infante was a logical second choice because instead of masking his secrets he exposes to view each and every skeleton in the closet. The choice of Garca Mrquez was a natural contrast to the rst two; his metaphors of the body have a political dimension that is simply not present in the work of Cabrera Infante or of Cortzar. The pain and disease he describes is social in contrast to the personal anguish in the work of Severo Sarduy. Unlike Cortzar and Cabrera Infante, whose characters channel the painful ordeal of revelation seeking to rescue the body through writing, Sarduys heroes wallow in pain. Although one author celebrates the body and the other decries its limitations, both Garca Mrquez and Sarduy write works of protest that revolt against restrictions imposed by society and culture. This feature links their work to the writing of South American feminists rebelling against the extreme images male authors have generated for them. Rosario Castellanos endows her heroines with the power to lead, making the invalid walk again only to mysteriously remove both abilities at the conclusion of her stirring Ocio de tinieblas. One of her characters, an Indian unable to conceive, molds with her own hands the gods that inspire her people to revolt and becomes for a time the surrogate mother of a renewed breed. Struck by seemingly divine inspiration and speaking in tongues, she drops to the ground muttering utterances that, as it turns out, can only be interpreted by Tzotzil priests, who are all male. In the character of the Indian Catalina Daz Puilj, Castellanos dramatizes what, ten years after the publication of Ocios and referring to
14 Body of writing

other sources, Julia Kristeva dened as semiotic writing (Polylogue, 18). By 1977 Kristeva believed that feminine writing as such could not exist because in order to be communicable it would have to be symbolic and fall, therefore, under the rubric of the phallic domain (Questions Julia Kristeva, 23). As she predicted, when feminine writing shows its face in Spanish America it appears not as a dierent modality of language but couched from a totally new perspective in Tununa Mercados Canon de alcoba. My own study comes to a close with a look at her work, a window opened to a new eld of view. Whether new or old, the angles of vision studied here emanate from and ow through the body, emphatically portrayed in each work I study. Vehicles through which personal truths are revealed, bodies in Cortzar, Cabrera Infante, Garca Mrquez, Sarduy, Castellanos, and Mercado strike dierent poses: some joyous, others pained, angered, or victorious. All have one thing in common, however: engaged in a process to endure, they search for knowledge in personal projections that are always revealing about the sources of ction. It is true that the work of other writers might have been just as revealing; doubtless I could have made dierent choices. In fact, the subject of this book has no natural limits and any choice on my part must appear somewhat arbitrary. I cannot even claim that my examples are representative. They have served me well, nonetheless, to make the point that ction is a show-and-tell in which the telling is largely about what the body wishes for itself. What I hope is that this book will demonstrate the validity of looking at the primal sources informing the crust of ction, alternately shaping and deforming the surface of the page.

Introduction

15

This Page Intentionally Left Blank

1
Julio Cortzars perpetual exile i

Como los elatas, como San Agustn, Novalis presinti que el mundo de adentro es la ruta inevitable para llegar de verdad al mundo exterior y descubrir que los dos sern uno solo cuando la alquimia de ese viaje de un hombre nuevo. Julio Cortzar, quoted by Fernando Ainsa

What makes Julio Cortzars short stories perplexing and disturbing at the same time? Why is it we grasp the gist of his plots but feel befuddled by the outcome of his stories, as if taking the train but letting slip its destination? Bewildered by characters who vomit rabbits, and tigers that prowl around country estates, are we conscious, when reading Letter to a Young Lady in Paris or Bestiario, of not getting to the heart of the dramas this resourceful author portrayed throughout his life? Intuitive to the core, Cortzar seldom knew what would show up in his notepad; Bestiary and Hopscotch were composed in one fell swoop, for instance, as if internally dictated (Vargas Llosa, A Writers Reality, 46). Cortzar wasnt just intuitive; he was downright possessed. From the time he started publishing, he felt the personal obsessions that haunted him stemmed neither from a conscious nor a rational plane but rather, from down under . . . from within (Prego, La Fascinacin de las Palabras, 40, 38). The demands made by these obsessions were so peremptory that he felt he needed writing as much as writing needed him as a vehicle to express itself. It was a form of cleansing or, as he once told Omar Prego, a kind of self-therapy (182). However, since according to Cortzar poets are possessed by the magnetic forces of the collective unconscious and . . . manifest in [their] writings archetypal themes and gures, he

could connect with readers directly while engaging in self-therapy (Ana Hernndez del Castillo, Keats, Poe, and the Shaping of Cortzars Mythopoesis, 4). This is why we can nd his cryptic scenarios disturbing even when we are not fully conscious of their portent. Their portent was, from the start, a private matter. By that I mean that if, by his own avowal, his writing was made up of obsessions stemming from within, the essence of Cortzars art was, plain and simple, personal experience transformed into ction. This is far from apparent because the biographical elements that inform his work are not at all transcriptions of daily events (as they are for, let us say, the Mario Vargas Llosa who writes Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter ), but are drawn from a part of himself that was well cloistered. The concealed elements were then recast into cunning scenarios that screened the sources that inspired them. The anecdotal level of his stories is so captivating, in fact, that few readers become aware of that other, highly private level without which, as we shall see, it is impossible to understand his work. Fortunately, like Theseus entering the labyrinth, Cortzar left a thread that can be followed to the wellspring from which his stories ow, although, because he wrote to exorcise the monsters that haunted him, the wellspring was more akin to a festering pool of anxiety than to a clear fountain. Cortzar manifested this anxiety through a small number of obsessive images or motifs that he labeled guras. It is through these gurashands, tunnels, dark holes, breathing disorders, and a handful of animalsthat we can penetrate to the primary level from which Cortzars stories issued. The network of guras in any given story is so complex and mesmerizing, however, that we frequently fail to reach the embedded content that Cortzar has so artfully masked. We know he pictured dark tunnels and breathing disorders, for instance, but we dont know why. In fact, so far we dont even understand how the guras dovetail into one another to create a symphony of perfectly orchestrated parts. Cortzars master plan remains enigmatic because, to borrow his own words, the point of contact in which every discordant element can nally become visible as a spoke in a wheel is still unfathomed (Libro de Manuel, 8). Into the labyrinth Cortzar gave us the thread leading into his personal labyrinth in a groundbreaking interview with Evelyn Picn Gareld. Hands have al18 Body of writing

ways been an obsession of mine, he told Picn in 1973, already in the rst pages I ever wrote hands play an extremely important part. I was very young when I wrote that piece I later included in Ultimo Round, I think its called Estacin de la mano (it is actually in La vuelta al da en ochenta mundos ) (Picn, Cortzar por Cortzar, 110). Estacin de la mano (Station of the Hand) is the story of a man who sees a hand y through his window one day. After befriending the hand he begins to fear it until, sensing it is no longer trusted, the hand ies away, never to return. Station of the Hand was the rst of many stories in which Cortzars morbid obsession with hands and gloves was showcased. This obsession was no laughing matter. Cortzar confessed to Picn that whenever he was alone in a house and there was a pair of gloves sitting on a table, he could never go to sleep until he had planted a heavy object on top of them because he had the impression that something was going to come and ll them (Cortzar por Cortzar, 11011). Startled by such bewildering disclosures, Picn urged Cortzar to elaborate. Are you referring to hands? She prodded, until he nally admitted: Yes, hands; it must be linked to a trauma from my childhood, some macabre story of strangulation (111). Mention of strangulation in connection with disembodied hands reminded Cortzar of a lm that deeply impressed him, The Hands of Orlac. As he explained to Picn, the hero of this lm is a concert pianist who has to have his hands amputated after a train accident. Fortunately, he has a good friend who is a surgeon and can transplant the hands of a man who has just been sent to the guillotine. Neither doctor nor patient knows, however, that the guillotined man was a notorious strangler. The one who nds outin the most horric of waysis the pianists girlfriend. While he is kissing her one day, the pianists hands take on a life of their own and begin wringing her neck. Continuing his line of thought at that point in the interview, Cortzar links the lms action to his own writing: theres something that really grabs me in this story of a man with murderous hands, he told Picn, just remember all the hands that whiz to and fro in my books (Cortzar por Cortzar, 111). Tight squeeze Cortzar was not exaggerating when he spoke of hands whizzing to and fro in his work. Lets take the example of No se culpe a nadie
Cortzars perpetual exile 19

(Dont Blame Anyone), one of the most bewildering dressing scenarios in the history of ction. Hurriedly putting on a sweater to be on time for a date, the ill-starred protagonist gets stuck in what is probably the wrong opening and begins to suocate under the clinging pressure of the wool over his nose and mouth. Mounting anxiety leads to utter confusion; the half-smothered hero continues to struggle in a futile eort to pull the sweater down over his head, but only succeeds in getting deeper and deeper into the engulng wool. Short of breath, unable to see, and with his head stuck into the narrow tunnel of the sleeve, he tosses, swerves, and comes out only to be attacked by his own right hand. Drawing back into the protective embrace of the sweater, blinded and disoriented once more, he falls out of a twelfth-story window (at least this is what we are given to understand, although Cortzar pointedly avoids using the verb to fall ). What we read in the last sentence is that the man redresses himself after cowering back into the sweater in order to reach at last someplace with neither hand nor sweater, someplace where there is only fragrant air to envelop him, and accompany him, and caress him, and twelve stories (Relatos, 289). In her article on the ambivalence of the hand in Cortzars ction, Malva Filer explains how their belligerence in No se culpe a nadie is another instance of the schizoid condition present in Station of the Hand, and wonders what kind of inner conict could be represented by this nightmare of having a part of the characters own body attack and destroy him (131). Filer suggests that the man with the blue pullover may have been suering from the restrictions of a very conventional lifestyle, and the split between the hand and the body could be a rebellion against that part of the self that had submitted to the tyranny of domestic and social duties (131). Filer may be right; a sort of inner rebellion could be the cause of the accident. But why restrict ourselves to speculations when concrete clues regarding the storys meaning are so liberally strewn across its pages? It is these clues that need to be considered in order to get to the bottom of what Filer calls the inner conict . . . represented by this nightmare (131). Filer highlights one of these clues herself when describing how the protagonists head emerges from the asphyxiating pullover, only to face ve black nails striking against his eyes, and pushing him into death (131). Like Dg in Station of the Hand, the right hand in this story behaves of its own accord; it pinches the narrators thigh, and then
20 Body of writing

scratches him . . . through the layers of clothing (28889). The ensuing struggle, which, anatomically speaking, splits the protagonist in two, is conspicuously linked with a sense of claustrophobia and diculties in breathing. After the protagonist feels as if his face were ushed, the blue wool clings . . . with an almost irritating pressure to his nose and mouth, it sties him more than he could have imagined, forcing him to take deep breaths until, nally, the blue envelops the wet mouth, the nostrils . . . and all that lls him with anxiety (28586). Later in the action, the sweater gets so rmly adhered to his face, that when his right hand pulls upward he feels a pain as if his ears were being yanked o . . . (28788). A lot of ink has owed on the subjects of connement and alienation in Dont Blame Anyone; not enough has been written about the more dubious business of entrances and exits. The rst point to make here is that in spite of the countless diculties the stiing sweater brings with it, the hero does manage to emerge from his woolly prison and feels, if only for a moment, the cold air on his eyebrows and forehead (289). Absurdly, it seems, he refuses to open his eyes although he knows he has come out, that cold substance, that delight is the outside air and he doesnt want to open his eyes and . . . let himself live in a cold and dierent realm, the world outside the sweater . . . (289). The outside air may well be a delight but, as Cortzar makes amply evident, not the sort of delight the protagonist wishes to recognize. In fact, as he sees it, the world outside the sweaters warm embrace is cold and dierent, which is no doubt why his own body turns against an imminent exit and cowers back into the beckoning blue folds (his left hand attacks him while the right one pulls back the sweater over his neck, letting the blue drool la baba azul envelop his face once again [289, my emphasis]). It is at that moment, in an eort to arrive somewhere where there is only a fragrant air to envelop him, and accompany him . . . , that he falls prey to the abyss of the open window (289). The ending of this story is perplexing and hypnotic at the same time. Cortzar induces a state of high anxiety in his readers without clarifying a single thing about his heros behavior. For a start, what brings on the mans stiing anguish? Is it being engulfed by the sweater, or being forced to leave behind its tightening grip? If getting out of the suocating embrace is the mans goal, why does he return to the very space he struggled to leave behind? By attacking him and pulling the sweater over
Cortzars perpetual exile 21

his neck, doesnt it seem as if his own hand were compelling him to return? But if his body is choosing to return to the connement of the sweater, did he dread connement in the rst place? Have we correctly interpreted what the hero dreads and what he yearns for? Might there be a connection between the conning body and the beckoning maw, between the dark enveloping folds, and the heros fall into the abyss? Fur fear Instead of answering these questions, Cortzar went on playing cat and mouse with his readers. The same ambivalent longing for conning spaces and stiing darkness we nd in Dont Blame Anyone resurfaces in his masterful Cuello de gatito negro (Throat of a Black Kitten) eighteen years later. As Luchothe hero of this storymakes love to a woman he has just met in the Paris Metro, the lighted bedside lamp falls to the oor with a thundering crash; the crash causes the woman to sit bolt upright, terried, refusing to succumb to darkness (Octaedro, 159). After making love, however, the couples terror is temporarily abated as they lay within the great womb of night (161). Enveloped in total darkness where one is clumsy like an infant, Lucho blindly searches for matches (161). On his hands and knees, letting his hands do the work his eyes are unable to carry out, he soon senses it was even darker, it smelled of time and seclusion (162). At this point, Dina makes a lunge for Luchos sexual organs and the jerk on his genitals made him scream more out of fear than out of pain (162). Trying to avoid her next attack, he drags himself away from the sound of her voice while doing his best to control an asphyxiating hiccup that went on and on (163). Adroitly, Cortzar adds to the pervasive sense of connement by eliminating paragraphing altogether from the beginning of the aborted castration scene until the end of the story, a practice he follows in Dont Blame Anyone as well. Visually speaking, the pages of both stories read as a solid textual mass that has no breaks, no visual breathing space of any kind. Despite the encroaching darkness, connement, and pain, there is a way out of the seemingly threatening world portrayed in Dont Blame Anyone, and Throat of a Black Kitten however. In the latter story, the window that had been featured in the sweater saga has become a door that Lucho succeeds in reaching after skirting countless obstacles. He opens it to face a frozen air that blended with the blood covering his
22 Body of writing

lips (163). As he emerges naked into the light, Lucho feels so cold and forlorn that he is ready to turn around and go back inside, repeatedly begging Dina, Open up . . . open up, its already light out (164). But it is to no avail; he is out, and must stay out. Sitting on the steps, removing the blood from his mouth and eyes, he thinks to himself, she probably passed out from the blow, adding regretfully, she wont open up, always the same, its cold, its cold (164). Naked and smeared with blood as the story concludes, Lucho goes on pleading with Dina to open up and let him back in because, if you open up, he assures her, we could nd the way out, you saw how everything was going so well, just a matter of turning the light on and continuing to search, both of us together (164). Readers of this story cannot fail to be struck by Luchos fateful generalization: always the same, its cold, its cold. Why always, one wonders? Has Lucho been thrown out, naked and shivering, from so many apartments? Even more surprising, why, as in Dont Blame Anyone, is exiting associated with pain and death, and not with release? Why is darkness deemed desirable and breathing hindered in both stories? Above all, how does one explain the protagonists struggle to return to a threatening environment? Why such determination to go back inside after getting hurt? It could be, of course, that Dont Blame Anyone, and Throat of a Black Kitten are nothing more than the tale of a poor wretch who falls out of a window, and of a more fortunate counterpart who ends up barely slipping away with his tail between his legs. Such cursory readings pose at least one problem for the critic, however: they fail to explain why the stories work. That is, reading only the more explicit anecdotal level does not make clear why the encroaching space portrayed by Cortzar is so profoundly anguish-producing. One can understand why the bite of a vampire or the imminent arrival of an oversized ape would frighten readers, but it is not readily evident why the personal panic button is set o with such vehemence when we read both Cortzars depiction of a man who almost suocates while putting on a sweater, and the misadventures of another who ends up naked and covered with blood begging to be allowed back into a womans room. Our rst reaction may be to feel we dont understand the underlying message of these stories because this message is so personal; we know, after all, that Cortzar spent his life insisting that his stories were a tool for self-analysis. No matter how personal literature is or purports to be,
Cortzars perpetual exile 23

however, we know the mirror it holds up to life is far from exclusive. Above and beyond the biographical allusions they contain, the concerns expressed in Throat of a Black Kitten and Dont Blame Anyone are, as Cortzar assures us, dramatizations of archetypal themes and gures (quoted in Hernndez del Castillo, 4). Is it then archetypes to which readers react so strongly in these stories? We may approach the answer to this question by considering one of Cortzars most captivating tales, the now-classic La noche boca arriba (The Night Face Up). Although it shares the narrative underpinnings present in Dont Blame Anyone and Throat of a Black Kitten, in The Night Face Up Cortzar goes much further in terms of making available to the reader the latent content that animates all three stories. Through the tunnel Cortzar has trumped many readers with the suggestion that the sacrice scenario of his cunning The Night Face Up should be taken as reality, while the story of the man who rides through the strange avenues of an astonishing city . . . on an enormous metal insect that whirred away between his legsis the actual marvelous dream (Relatos, 82). It must have been a perpetual source of merriment for him to watch critics splitting hairs to decide which of the two interwoven tales was reality while completely missing the point, blind to the issues dramatized in this extraordinarily deceptive story. After all, what does it matter which of the two narrative planes is real when we know they are both ction? Isnt the perversely ambiguous resolutiona playful eenie meenie about reality and dreamthe last hurdle that must be negotiated before one can grasp the sense of the story? Shouldnt our most important concern be to discover what the story suggests, not whether the Moteca dreams up the man riding the metal insect, or the motorcyclist dreams up the Moteca? Following such false leads only takes us further from the truth that Cortzar has so artfully screened. Instead, to give some coherence to the web of symbols with which he mines his narrative eld, we need to take him at his word when he tells Prego that a good many of [his] stories have grown out of dreams, and to look at The Night Face Up as we would a nightmare (La fascinacin de las palabras, 182). This double-barreled adventure about an injured motorcyclist who has
24 Body of writing

a recurrent dream featuring a Moteca warrior on the verge of being sacriced is rife with references to narrow passageways, darkness, stied breathing, tunnels, blood, and the dread of venturing away from enfolding spaces. These references appear in the section dealing with the Moteca warrior, and in the parallel story about the motorcycle rider taken to the hospital after an accident. Allusions to long narrow spaces are the rst and most enduring feature of the story, starting with references to the middle of the long hotel hallway, and to the light of the sun as it lters down amidst the tall downtown buildings (Relatos, 72). Conning space becomes even more pervasive as the story unfolds; when the Moteca warrior is brought from the temples dungeon to be sacriced, for instance, he slips through a passage that was never going to end, a corridor with . . . dripping walls that is insistently mentioned until the story reaches its bloody climax (80). As in Dont Blame Anyone, and Throat of a Black Kitten, darkness plays an important role in The Night Face Up. While the Moteca was coming out of the black pit, he was surrounded by an absolute darkness, and his ngers closed again on a black emptiness while the passageway went on endlessly . . . until it . . . rose, opening like a mouth of shadow (79, 81). As the story comes to an end, the prisoner is forced through that mouth by hot hands, hard as bronze which lift him, face up, and jerk him down the passageway toward an open double door (80). Unwilling to open his eyes, like the hapless hero of Dont Blame Anyone (useless to open his eyes and look around in every direction; he was surrounded by an absolute darkness), the Moteca tries to nd the amulet around his neck only to discover that it had been yanked o (80, 79). He then hears a yell, a hoarse yell that rocked o the walls . . . followed by . . . another yell, ending in a moan (79). The reader soon learns that it was he who was screaming in the darkness, he was screaming because he was alive, his whole body with that cry fended o what was coming, the inevitable end (79). Abruptly, at that point in the story, the protagonist shifts identities and comes out into the hospital night, to the . . . soft shadow wrapping him round where he lets out another scream and . . . pants, looking for some relief for his lungs (81). The Motecas ordeal is far from being over even at that point, and the longing to reenter the threatening spacethe same longing that we saw in the two stories we looked at earlieris reenacted by means of a recurrent dream which keeps putting the victim back in the
Cortzars perpetual exile 25

tunnel, ceaselessly repeating the endless passageway as if it were one of the sequences lmed by Morel in Bioy Casaress famous story. Brought forth with an insistence that is hard to ignore, the narrow passageway never seems to change while, in contrast, the Motecas behavior evolves dramatically. Earlier in the action he could barely open his mouth or his eyes, but as he begins to exit from the dark passageway, shiny with the blood dripping o it . . . his eyes . . . opened and closed in an attempt to cross over to the other side (79, 81). Once he opens his eyes he can smell death in the air, and see the blood-soaked gure of the sacricing priest coming toward him with the stone knife in his hand, as if exposing the outside to view brought him closer to death (82). In and of themselves, the closed eyes and darkness can give us no inkling of Cortzars intentions. But when we see how these two recurrent motifs relate to each other within the context of the stories we have looked at, we recognize that he portrays them in total contrast to light and open eyes, which, as it turns out, have a negative connotation in his scheme. In fact, Cortzar depicts conning spaces (tight sweaters, hospital wards, dark rooms, and even dungeons) as safe, whereas the outside, light-lled air he pictures as objectionable, so frightening that just thinking about it has an adverse eect on his characters breathing (Lucho has an asphyxiating hiccup, the Moteca pants, and the man in the blue sweater begins to suocate under the clinging pressure of the wool). Last, and most important, death or despair in these three stories seems to occur to characters who are forced to exit from dark, engulng spaces such as the path known only to the Motecas, the blue sweater, the bowels of the pyramid, or Dinas room. Viewed as an ensemble, these idiosyncratic features allow us to speak of an eccentric conception, of a coded message meticulously crafted. Filled with uncanny revelations and startling shifts of time and place, this coded message is nonetheless anchored in reality. For instance, the eects of the anesthetic administered to the motorcyclist in The Night Face Up (eects that include gasping for breath, claustrophobia, and nightmares) are exactly those of narcotic sleep and match the reactions of patients traumatized by birth anxiety (Rank, Trauma of Birth, 5657). Therefore, if one of the things that Cortzar is describing in The Night Face Up is the state of dread caused by anesthesia, and we are told that this dread rekindles primal trauma, we can establish that what he por26 Body of writing

traysconsciously or notis the psychical complex connected with leaving behind the most reassuring of places. Even if, for the time being, one cannot agree with my contention, it would be dicult to deny that Cortzar is systematically linking being ousted from a protective space with stiing dread, and implying that sailing forth through a dark hole shiny with the blood dripping o it (in The Night Face Up) is tantamount to nding oneself naked and smeared with blood after being thrown out of a womans private domain (in Throat of a Black Kitten) (Relatos, 79). Regardless of how the stories endings are interpreted, there is no doubt that leaving the tunnel in The Night Face Up, and the wooly prison in Dont Blame Anyone leads to death. The dread that coming out into the light inspires is such that the motorcyclist wakes up each time the tension increases, and nds himself in the warm reassurance of the hospital ward (this dread is also present in Dont Blame Anyone, whose pathetic hero refuses to open his eyes, and . . . let himself live in a cold and dierent realm, the world outside the sweater . . . Relatos, 289). At the conclusion of both stories, after long delaying their respective dislodgement, the heroes exit to their deaths, denying with their emergence, it would seem, everything I have been suggesting about the nature of their wishes. After all, am I not arguing that these stories dramatize a longing to stay safely within? Then, why isnt this longing fullled in the ction? Why do Dont Blame Anyone, and The Night Face Up culminate with dying? What, in short, was Cortzar saying about spaces that are protective in all appearances, but threatening at the same time? Paradoxical though it seems, the wish to stay in a shielded place does not have to exclude death from its program. If we believe Otto Rank, the thought of death is connected from the start with a strong sense of pleasure because death is perceived by the unconscious as a return to the womb (Trauma of Birth, 24). What is being portrayed in all the stories we have looked at thus far is not the unconscious and, at the same time, impossible wish of staying within a safe harbor, but the longing to return to a space and time before we were cast o from that harbor. This is why all three stories culminate with the fulllment of a death wish: defenestration in Dont Blame Anyone, sacrice in The Night Face Up, and castration in Throat of a Black Kitten (24). The uncanny adventures of a Moteca warrior and a motorcyclist, of a couple who meet in the Paris Metro, and of a man who falls out a window are simply Cortzars excuse
Cortzars perpetual exile 27

to detail the experience of being cast out from dark surroundings that are simultaneously threatening and gratifying, and of arming, in and through ction, the havoc birth wreaks in our lives. The desire to return to the womb is a terrifying thought because it brings together an innocent nostalgia for prenatal existence and a forbidden and therefore guilty yearning for reunion with the mother. It is this guilt that is behind the metaphorical transformation of the womb into a pyramids dark dungeon ending in a double door, of the womb into the warm enveloping folds of a sweater and, most obviously, into the private room of a woman whose head is framed in black fur (Relatos, 80). Featured in the storys title, Dinas black fur collar (misleadingly translated as throat in the title of the English translation) is like the snakes around Medusas head: both allude to the female genitals. But, as we know from Freuds unforgettable reading of Oedipus, the Medusas head evokes at the same time a terror of castration which is very much an element of Cortzars story (lest we forget, Dina makes a lunge for Luchos sexual organs, pulls his penis, and makes him scream more out of fear than out of pain, Octaedro, 62). Fusing with the mother is just what the resolution of the Oedipal complex teaches us cannot be done. Portraying the wish to return where it is taboo brings with it, therefore, a fear that is characteristically coupled with punishment. In other words, voicing in ction a yearning to return where it is forbidden sets o a tremendous psychic controversy that Cortzar translates into an ambiguous sanctuary that is welcoming as well as threatening, a shelter that is desirable and repulsive, inviting and frightening at the same time. It is by refraining from explicitly unveiling the incestuous content that Cortzar injects uncanniness into all three stories, moreover. Readers recognize the appeal of the dark, sheltering spaces described in Dont Blame Anyone, Throat of a Black Kitten, and The Night Face Up while identifying with the fear each plot contextualizes within these spaces. Made familiar through description, the blue sweater, Dinas room, and the bowels of the pyramid become frightening and unfamiliar by means, we think, of their association with death. In fact, dark passageways and the outside air are preternaturally strange in these stories because of their latent association with a forbidden longing to be reunited with the mothers body. The repressed nature of this association allows us to glean how, for Cortzar, the level of the histoire is only an excuse to divert the expression of instinctual desires from their primitive form. The seedbed
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of his design is actually found at the level of the rcit, and the stories we have studied take on their full meaning only when viewed from the perspective of primal trauma. It is from this perspectiveand this perspective alonethat the significance of key motifs in his stories becomes clear. From this perspective we can understand why the protagonists of the three stories are enfolded in darkness and have their eyes closed, why they are covered with blood or with a bluish scum, why they travel through tunnels with dripping walls, why they scream and gasp for air, why they are doomed once an amulet is yanked from their body, why they feel themselves pulled upward or outward, and, most of all, why they dont want to remain in the frozen air after they are ousted from dark surroundings (Throat of a Black Kitten, 63). Outside is death or a state akin to death, a cold place where fear reigns, as Lucho complains when he begs his fur-clad companion to let him back in. Once we understand the horror that being outside connotes in Cortzars writing, we can no longer misconstrue his metaphorical allusions to enclosed spaces such as the shelter where rosy little bodies with tiny human hands oat in a watery paradise (Axolotl, Relatos, 42223). What I am saying is that a number of his early stories were crafted as an attempt to heal a wound that could not heal; unable to ll the void, the nothingness, [which] had lasted an eternity, the character in The Night Face Up voices a universal concern, in fact (78). The only remedy against that void and, simultaneously, the means to both reveal and hide the incestuous content that fueled the stories in the rst place was to write. Fiction is the vehicle that allows Cortzars characters to get backif only momentarilyinto the place they long for. The beast in the jungle The game of hide-and-seek inherent in Dont Blame Anyone, Throat of a Black Kitten, and The Night Face Up is perversely played without giving the reader a clear understanding of the source that generates it. Ambiguous and simultaneous feelings of danger and safety are conveyed in the portrayal of shuttered places, of tunnels, and of coming out into the world, but we are not meant to grasp the imbedded source of the characters fear even though it inspires our own. For Freud the rst danger was birth, which he connected with all subsequent
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feelings of dread, arguing that such feelings were inextricable from a sense of separation from the mother (Problem of Anxiety, 94). In other words, dread brought on by the original separation can be relieved by means of symbolic substitutions. This, in a nutshell, became one of Cortzars favorite methods for provoking a state of anxiety in his readers. Instead of depicting severance and estrangement outright, Cortzar relates the misgivings they inspire to phobias. When we examine them in detail, we cannot fail to notice that the phobias he portrays bring to mind the prenatal condition (fear of light, of unprotected, outside spaces, of cold air), without explicitly depicting it. This kind of substitution plays yet another role: repeatedly returning his characters to the protective folds of a sweater or to a dark hospital ward after terrifying them with glimpses of the outside air has a calming, therapeutic eect because these reiterated returns suggested that safety is within reach. At the same time, because returning to safe harbors is such a leitmotif in his stories, when he nally dislodges his characters and has them fall out a window, or cast o a dark room, naked and covered in blood, or pulled by strong hands beyond the mouth of shadow, the resulting horror is supreme: feelings of safety, the stories suggest, are at best an illusion, a ction that can be maintained only within the parameters of that other ction, the one Cortzar is writing. Although always disguised, the wellspring of horror in Cortzars stories is not necessarily as elusive as it appears in the three stories we have been discussing. In a number of his well-known allegories of sexual discovery he alludes to the maternal body in more explicit terms, even if he almost always replaces it with a substitute. Substituting is tantamount to hiding, another way of saying that, in Cortzars stories, the mothers body and the longing it inspires tend to be repressed; in fact, to generalize, we could say that the sublimation showcased in his work always turns out to be a repression of what is too familiar, a pronouncement that takes us back to Freud. In his essay on The Uncanny, Freud argues that if the female genitals appear uncanny (unheimlich ) to the male, it is because they are in fact, too familiar, too heimisch: they are, after all, his rst home, or Heimat. If we take as our point of departure Freuds remark that the un of unheimlich is the mark of repression of what is too familiar, we could say that in Cortzar the un shields an attachment whose presence is masked behind defensive camouage which, although startling at rst, is perfectly logical
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in terms of psychoanalytic theory. For instance, besides tunnels, darkness, and the dread of being engulfed, many of Cortzars family dramas involve animals. Bestiario, to look no further, is a typical example of the kind of show-and-tell where these motifs are brought together. In this story the sinister presence of an incongruous tiger roaming around an otherwise conventional summer villa is totally puzzling as long as we accept the verisimilitude dictated by the otherwise realistic scenario. The wild beast is an obscure and almost constant threat to the Funes household, but we have no idea how it enters the house or why it has free range to roam at will. The tiger is not the only mystery in the story; family relationships are far from clear although we know that two of the grownupsRema and Nene (the Kid in the English translation)are siblings, while Luis, the third, is in all likelihood their elder brother. We also know that Luis has a son named Nino, and that, in order for the boy to have some company, the family has invited a young girl named Isabel to be his playmate for the summer. Isabel feels a strong attachment and admiration for Rema, the youngest of the Funes. She remembers Remas soft hands, and longs to feel them on (her) head forever, a caress like death almost (Relatos, 2122). Magnetically drawn to the young woman, Isabel loses no time in detecting a puzzling tug-of-war between Rema and the Kid but her age and limited experience prevent her from fully grasping its sense. In consequencesince the narrative point of view is hersthe relation of events is often shrouded by Isabels seemingly meandering thoughts on subjects that appear to be unrelated to the family drama unfolding before her but are, as it turns out, dramatizations of what she is seeking to understand. Soon after her arrival, Isabel watches Rema take a cup of coee out to the Kid, who made a mistake taking the cup so clumsily that he squeezed Remas ngers while trying to get it (2627). Rema pulls her hand back, and the Kid was barely able to keep the cup from falling and laughed at the tangle (27). What becomes apparent, soon after, is that neither is the Kid clumsy when he takes the cup, nor is he laughing at the tangle. The sequel to this episode showcases Isabels apparently unrelated thoughts about an ant-farm she is putting together with Nino, her young playmate. The girl specically addresses the issue of aggression between the red ants and the black ants sandwiched between the glass, and is enraptured with the possibility of watching them wage war against each other from outside the glass, all very safe (27). Might she not be,
Cortzars perpetual exile 31

in fact, sensing the tension between the Kid and Rema, and projecting their aggressive behavior onto the ants? Is she not relieved to be personally uninvolved in their drama andfor the time being, at leasta passive observer or, as she herself puts it, feeling all very safe behind the glass? (27). The reader soon discovers that it gave Isabel immense pleasure to think that the ants came and went without fear of any tiger (27). Because she liked to rehearse the real world in the one of glass, moreover, the ant-farm becomes the site of all her projections (27). For example, once when she sees Remas apron reected in the glass, Isabel notices that one of her raised hands looked as if it were inside the ant-farm (28). One thought leads to another, and suddenly she thought about the same hand oering a cup of coee to the Kid but now there were ants running along her ngers, ants instead of the cup and the Kids hand squeezing the ngertips (28). Her immediate reaction to this self-generated minidrama is to order Rema to take [her] hand out of the reection (28). Startled by the urgency in the girls voice, Rema asks, My hand? only to hear Isabel explain that the reection was scaring the ants (28). Apparently as a non sequitur but, actually, very much on the track that links ants with aggression, aggression with the Kid, and the Kid with Remas hand (specically in reference to the coee cup episode), Isabel asks Rema at that point: Is the Kid angry with you, Rema? but this time Rema doesnt answer (28). Instead, the answer comes through the diorama that the young girl watches and interprets on the glass of the antfarm: it looked to Isabel as though the ants were really scared this time . . . (28). The contrast made evident in this sentence between this time, and earlier (when Isabel had told Rema to take her hand out because the reection was scaring the ants) suggests that the scared ants the rst time around, at leastwere a projection of Remas feelings as perceived by Isabel. Whatever is happening between the siblings (something that is never openly stated in the story) is being acted outdramatized, as it wereby the hands that swiftly pull away from each other when they touch, and by the ants who run away as though they were really scared (28). Remas hand, which is like death, is threatened by another hand in the story, as the Kids foul desire stands in the way of Isabels own wish to be loved and cherished by her role model. In other words, the Kid is the obstacle to Isabels own fulllment, the rival she must defeat in Cortzars
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extraordinary transformation of the Oedipal scenario. Sensing the hostility, aggression, and even the sexual tension between brother and sister, Isabel reenacts on the reecting glass of the ant-farm the coming together of the Kids and Remas hands during the coee cup episode. In order to do so, she temporarily superimposes the hands onto the tunneled landscape dug out by the ants, which is to say, she brings hands and tunnels together until she blocks out the Kids squeezing hand to imagine, instead, ants running along Remas ngertips (28). The squeezing hand is a threatening hand, and Isabel senses that it upsets Rema. Somewhere within herself she also realizes the Kid is angry because Rema pulls away from his touch. But why, she wonders, does Rema ee down the hall as if she were escaping something (although, here again, this is her own reading of the events that have taken place) (28). When she watches Rema ee, Isabel feels frightened of her own question; hers is a dull fear [that] made no sense, although, perhaps, she wonders, it wasnt the question but seeing Rema run o that way, or the once-more-clear empty glass where the galleries emptied out and twisted like twitching ngers inside the soil that make her anxious (2829). At this point, the reader begins to get both a sense of what makes Rema ee, and of what upsets the girl who identies with her, and feels danger even without fully grasping its source. What Rema is escaping from is so terrifying that the still-innocent Isabel cannot put it into words. Instead, taking the place of the author, she dramatizes it, giving it the shape of an infantile-determined scenario of fulllment in which ants (animals that burrow) and tigers (vicious carnivores) are revealingly paired o. As in dreams, narrative motifs in Cortzars story appear under dierent guises; glassso important in the episode of the reected handturns up again when the window of the Kids study is shattered by a ball thrown by the children. Reacting with typical ill humor, the Kid looks out and curses the children; shaking like a leaf, Nino stands by Isabel until his uncle leaves. Later in the day, the children are playing checkers and Nino wins. Rema praises him, and Nino feels so happy that he puts his arms around her waist and kissed her on the nose and eyes, the two of them laughing (30). But, as in the scene of the coee cup on the glass of the ant-farm, the Kid shatters this picture of family bliss by bursting in, grabbing Nino, saying something about the ball breaking his window, and hitting him mercilessly, back and forth, across the face.
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The siblings body language in this scene of punishment and retribution is particularly revealing. The Kid, we are told, looked at Rema while he hit (Nino), he seemed furious with Rema and she deed him with her eyes . . . until Rema intruded herself in front of Nino and the Kid laughed, his face almost touching Remas (3031). That night at dinner, when Isabel stares at the Kid, she could see his teeth, barely revealed, glittering, and back in her room, when she looks at the ant-farm by the light of the night-lamp, she is frightened to discover that the insects were working away inside . . . as though they had not yet lost their hope of getting out (31). From this point onward, fear lurks everywhere. The children cannot play outside one day because the tiger has been sighted. Another day they cant use the dining room, or Luiss study. Isabel notices that the Kid carries a revolver, and sometimes a walking stick with a silver handle. Rema cries at night, and Luis asks what is bothering her. Isabel is unable to hear Remas answer, but Luiss voice rings clear when he replies: Hes a bastard, a miserable bastard . . . (33). The pieces of the puzzle begin to t together althoughin keeping with the premise that Isabel is too young to put what she sees into wordsnothing is explicitly stated. What is clear is that the young guest senses a cruel presence stalking about the house. She feels protective toward Rema, and wants to help her. Typically, she projects her feelings onto the animal world, and one night she begins toying with the idea of cutting o the head of a praying mantis she and Nino have caught. When, with typical curtness and, out of the blue, the Kid remarks, What a goddamned night, Isabel dreams of giving the insect a good snip with the scissors, to see what would happen (34). Goodnight kisses temporarily allay her murderous thoughts, however, and when she watches Rema kissing Luis, Isabel casually notes that shed never seen Rema kissing the Kid or a praying mantis that was so green (35). If Rema were to kiss the Kid she would overstep the boundaries of the forbidden that are set up in the story. Her unwillingness to overstep those boundaries is analogous to Isabels inability to give a name to actions which, after all, never seem to go beyond an unrequited lust. Isabels inability to voice what Cortzar himself does not put into words is also a device that translates the authors personal dilemma: calling incest by name would make it tangible and diminish the storys uncanniness. As

34

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the act is never committed, the word incest is never uttered in Bestiario. Only intention and desire are suggested, but always camouaged behind symbols, and acted out by children. Isabels personal turmoil reaches a crescendo one evening when she walks past the Kids room and he asks her to go tell Rema to make [him] a nice cold lemonade and bring it to [him] in his study (35). Although she cant understand why the Kid has to ask her to relay the message, Isabel goes back to the dining room to tell the older girl, and is immediately conscious of Remas reluctance to fulll the request; in fact, after an initial hesitation, Rema asks Isabel to wait until the lemonade is ready, and take it to the Kid herself. When Isabel begins to object (he said for you . . . , she exclaims without nishing her sentence), Rema replies with an unrebuttable monosyllable. Silently, Isabel obeys, sits down, and begins to think of her love for Rema until the latter interrupts her with a green pitcher full of ice and lemons, and instructions to take it to him. Isabel cannot fail noting that when she hands her the pitcher, Rema seemed to tremble, and that she turned her back on the table so that she (Isabel) shouldnt see her eyes (36). She is also aware that the Kids reactions are not as camouaged as Remas. When Isabel enters his study with the lemonade, he exclaims angrily, She was supposed to bring it to me. You, I told you to go up to your room (36). Recalling this outburst in the relative peace of her bedroom, Isabel recognizes that the pitcher was as green as the praying mantis (36). The following day the family drama reaches its climax. Isabel claims that the tiger is in the Kids study. After making this announcement, she makes a point of leaving the room where the family is gathered together to walk along with anyone who steps out in order to prevent her hosts from inadvertently walking into the room where the tiger actually hides. However, when the Kid lets it be known that he s going to the library (where the tiger really is), Isabel makes no attempt to go with him. That she knows the tigers whereabouts and has premeditated the Kids destruction is made clear when she didnt move at the Kids rst scream (38). The whole family runs to the scene of the accident but Isabel was still standing . . . as if she did not hear the Kids new choked cry. She does not move, in fact, until Rema made her raise her head to look at her, to stand looking at her for an eternity, broken by her ferocious sob

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35

into Remas skirt, quieting her with a soft squeeze of her ngers and a murmuring against her ear, a stuttering as of gratitude, as of unnamable acquiescence (39). Bestiario is a masterpiece of intrigue through indirection. Key words are never spelled out in the story, and yet Cortzar succeeds in giving the reader a profound feeling of uneasiness. What is most remarkable about his skill is that he mesmerizes us without ever revealing what has really happened, as, for instance, when he neglects to explain what Isabel has done to deserve Remas conclusive stuttering as of gratitude. Typically, reality in Bestiario is presented as something enigmatic, something requiring an inquest into its nature before the storys message can be fully understood. Barring such an inquest would leave us merely able to react to the pervasive eerieness without allowing us to appreciate the complexity of Cortzars two-tiered scenario. On the explicit level of the story we are led to believe ( judging from Remas reaction as perceived by Isabel) that the latter succeeds in removing the unnamed threat that has been making the older woman anxious. But what can we make of the ants and, more puzzling still, of the tiger who roams freely around the country villa? So too, why is Rema associated with the insects via the reection on the glass of the ant-farm? Why would Isabel wish to do away with the Kid? And, last but not least, is he the miserable bastard that Luis is talking about? Some of these questions have answers, others do not. We will never know, for instance, if the Kid is the miserable bastard, although we are certainly meant to believe that he is, and the whole story is laid out so that we do. One other thing is certain: the scenario of Bestiario becomes much clearer when we examine it in the light of our earlier discussion on primal anxiety. It is highly signicant that this story should bring together the two types of fetish animals that weave their way into Cortzars ction: large carnivores and small burrowers. Otto Ranks fascinating work on phobias sheds light on Cortzars choice. Because creeping creatures such as insects, rats, and frogs can disappear into small holes, they translate for the unconscious, Rank believes, the wish to return into the maternal hiding place as completely accomplished (Trauma of Birth, 14). The feeling of dread which clings to them, he concludes, arises because they materialize ones own tendency, namely to go back into the mother (14). It is this dread that explains Isabels otherwise unaccountable dull fear when Rema runs o
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and leaves her staring at the once-more-clear empty glass where the galleries emptied out and twisted like twitching ngers inside the soil (Relatos, 2829). The emptied out tunnels, the gaping ant holes that stare at the girl from within the ant-farm materialize her dread of being abandoned by Rema and, conversely, her wish to be bonded with her. Ranks observations also help us understand why Isabel is so frightened to discover that the ants had been working during the night, and that if they were working so hard, it was because, they had not yet lost their hope of getting out (31). At this point in the story, it becomes clear that the ants emblematize the opposite of Isabels own wish: they want to get out, whereas she wants to get in. But somethinga major obstaclestands in her way. The nature of the obstacle barring Isabels way could be described as a variant of the refrain Whos afraid of the big bad wolf ? In Bestiario, however, although we know who is afraid of the tiger, we dont know why. To nd out, we need to understand how the unconscious perceives maneating animals. According to Freud, beasts of prey provide a rationalization of the wishthrough the desire to be eatento get back into the mothers animal womb (Problem of Anxiety, 75). Like Isabel, children are afraid of confronting the virtual means of fullling their fantasy, but this fear cannot prevent them from continuing to hope for an always tantalizing reunion with the mother and, therefore, from activating this desire by means of symbols such as tigers and wolves which dramatize the fantasy of return on a consciously acceptable level (acceptable because being eaten by a wild beast masks the incestuous desire implied in the wish to be contained). In addition, fantasizing about being swallowed brings with it thoughts of death which are themselves connected, as we have seen, with a strong sense of pleasure associated with the return to the mothers womb (Rank, Trauma of Birth, 24). We begin to understand why, in Bestiario, Isabel expresses a wish to die whenever she thinks of Rema (she wants to throw herself at Remas feet, to let Rema pick her up in her arms . . . to die looking at her, Relatos, 3536) and, most particularly, when she imagines being touched by Remas hands which made you want to cry and feel them on your head forever, a caress like death (22). Hands and the attention Isabel pays to them bring us face to face with one of Cortzars favorite motifs. Being touched by the hands of the
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woman one lovesnot only in Bestiario, but also in Nurse Cora, and in Unreasonable Hours, as we will seeis one of the ways yearning is assuaged in scenarios camouaging longing for reunion with the mother gure, as if contact with these extremities soothed pain and restored balance. The pain, as we already know, was the consequence of being ousted from enveloping surroundings like those depicted in The Night Face Up. Cortzar spent a good part of his life exploring that pain in ction and, most particularly, attempting to nd ways to resolve or alleviate it. Perhaps he liked The Hands of Orlac because he identied with the surgeon who stitches a new pair of hands onto his friends mutilated wrists. Perhaps he, too, thought of himself as someone who could put back what had been removed, heal in some way the pain that separation entails. It must have been a frustrating project, but he never gave up trying. Hence his stories are rife with clues, long threads by which his heroes and heroines could symbolically return to the cloistered labyrinth they had been forced to leave behind. Freud connects the uncanniness of dismembered limbsa severed head, or a hand cut o at the wristwith the castration complex (The Uncanny). So it is not surprising that Bestiario comes to a headnot at the conclusion but rather when Isabel, in bed after a particularly harrowing day, nally understands that the Kid is dangerous, capable of beating little boys and of frightening Remaonce the Kid reveals his glittering teeth. At that point, she dreams that her mother and aunt were pulling on gloves of phosphorescent yellow (30). The gloves take on a decidedly phallic characteristic when they transform themselves into mauve-colored caps that twirled and twirled round their heads (30). As she stares at the gloves, she thinks of the ant-farm which was there and could not be seen, whereas the yellow gloves were not there but she could see them (31). It is impossible not to recognize that Isabels dream transcribes the Oedipal scenario by featuring, rst, a childs fear of a threatening competitor who vies for the aection of the woman she loves; second, an emphasis on the competitors cutting instrument (i.e., the glittering teeth); third, a triangleinvolving Rema, the Kid, and Isabelthat mimics the geometry of desire characteristic of the Oedipal scenario; and fourth, a pair of cut-o appendagesthe gloveswhose yellow phosphorescence sets them o as distinctly separate from the bodies that wear them in this allegory of dismemberment.
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In Isabels dream the dismembered gloves emblematic of authority (worn by the mother and aunt, who are the heads of her family) are associated with the Kid (30). As the girl looks at the gloves, she realizes that they prevent her access to the world of tunnels which the ant-farm represents; because of them, in fact, the ant-farm and its tunnels are there and could not be seen (31). The tunnels are suggestive of the womb, and evoke the mother, embodied by Rema. The clash between gloves and tunnels in Isabels dream alludes, therefore, to the rivalry over Remas aection that pits the young girl against the Kid. Isabel is aware of a threatening presence that prevents her from becoming the full recipient of Remas aection. The unnamed threat represented by the phallic gloves is like the tiger: they are both presences that were not there but she could see them (31). Isabels dream also yokes together the womblike tunnels with the resolution of the Oedipus complex (alluded to in the phallic, disembodied hands) in a perfect echo of the most searing trauma of infancy. It is because castration does take place that the infant comes to grasp its intrinsic separation from the body of the mother, that it understands and acceptsto use the language of Bestiariothat it will no longer be able to see the tunnels. After all, birth (the rst time the organism feels itself cut o from its source) is inextricably linked with the resolution of the Oedipus complex because the infant feels, both times, that he has been dispossessed of something that was an extension of himself (the mother). Typically, the infant accepts the law of the father and his hegemony over the mother. Isabel is no typical infant, however. Through her, as we shall see, Cortzar sets out to reverse the outcome of the Oedipal confrontation. But before we can fully consider the outcome of this confrontation and of the story, we need to have a fuller grasp of the complex symbolism through which this rivalry is portrayed. Let us consider a second explanation for Cortzars choice of animals. Being bitten by a horse, or eaten by a wolf, Freud explains, is in each case a distortion of and substitute for another content, that of being castrated by the father (Problem of Anxiety, 32). The adult male, he writes, admired but also feared, still belongs in the same category with large animals, which one envies for many things but against which one has also been warned because they can be dangerous (32). In Bestiario the Kid is obviously analogous to the tiger, although he is certainly not the tiger, as at least one critic has suggested. The tiger embodies the
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threat that the Kid elicits, and fear of it involves a denite anxious expectation. But the anxiety that the Kid elicits has been displaced onto the tiger. If a little boy, in love with his mother, were to betray fear of his father, Freud writes, we should have no right to ascribe a neurosis, a phobia to him. That which makes this aective reaction into a neurosis is singly and solely the substituting of the (animal) for the father (32). Isabels fear of the tiger in Bestiario is a textbook case of animal phobia because she substitutes an external perceptual danger (the wild beast) for an internal perceptual one (the Kid). Such a process has the advantage, according to Freud, that from an external danger protection may be gained through ight and the avoidance of the perception of it, whereas against a danger from within, ight is to no avail (62). Unquestionably, the tiger exists in Isabels imagination as the dreaded embodiment of something she does not understand. The Kid is the source of a danger she perceives instinctually, but she cannot fear him consciously because the danger he represents is not at rst an external, perceptual one. So she foists her fear onto a substitute. The tiger lives in her mind, but Cortzar makes clear that its presence is merely symbolic a stand-in for someone elseby portraying it exclusively through Isabels point of view as a disembodied presence that is never described. Hence the text doesnt ever say that the tiger eats the Kid. We are simply told that the Kid screams, that the whole family rushes out of the room, and that Luis bangs at the door of the library as the Kids moan is heard inside. The telltale verb to eat is conspicuous in its absence, never used because the whole scenario is a dramatization of a wish fullled, not of an accident described within a realistic context. There is no doubt, on the other hand, that in his perversely subtle way, Cortzar associates the tiger and the Kid with each other. As Isabel stares at the latter during the evening meal, we are told, she could see his teeth, barely revealed, glittering (Relatos, 31). Cortzar never states that the tiger represents the Kid or his incestuous inclination, but then again, he doesnt need to. The problem that is being portrayed in this story is the issue of rivalry, and, more specically, of rivalry over the love of a woman. All the characters in Bestiario vie for Remas aection, but at the conclusion only oneIsabelis the recipient of that aection. We need to understand how Isabel gets rid of her rival, but it should be emphasized that although this story extemporizes the desire to be reunited with the maternal body, the desire is not Isabels alone. Herein lies
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the uniqueness of Cortzars conception: in the fantasies that unravel in his psychological dramas, characters are acting out universal concerns. This is why it would be a grievous mistake to approach a highly symbolic story like Bestiario from a realistic perspective, or to constrain its meaning by saying that we cannot attempt to explain what the tiger represents because that would entail suggesting answers that the story refuses to provide (Alasraki, En busca del unicornio, 176). Answers are provided in the story, but they are part of the latent content. Alasraki is right that we cannot say The Kid is the tiger, but this does not mean that we cannot, and should not, examine the clues that Cortzar obligingly leaves behind. Without understanding these clues, we can only aspire to get the sense of the story, not its meaning; we can realize that some sort of incestuous triangle is being portrayed, but we would be missing out on what Cortzar is saying about the nature of desire. Desire is, very clearly, what fuels Bestiario. Isabel longs for Remas love, and the Kid pants after it, trampling down anything that gets in his way. Melanie Klein explains in Contributions to Psychoanalysis how the anxiety felt in animal phobias is an eective reaction on the part of the ego to danger. The danger which is being signalled in this way, she adds, is the danger of castration (or, metaphorically speaking, in our story, of losing forever sight of the tunnels), and the anxiety itself diers in no respect from the realistic anxiety which the ego normally feels in situations of danger, except that its content remains unconscious and only becomes conscious in the form of distortion (135), a distortion which, in Bestiario, takes the form of a tiger. We also know from Klein that the fathers penis is an anxiety object par excellence and is equated with dangerous weapons of various kinds and with animals which poison and devour (136). The tiger in Bestiario patently emblematizes the fear of being devoured, and devouring is a propensity the child ascribes to the father until, at the resolution of the Oedipal phase, it can acknowledge and internalize the fathers authority and recognize its own detachment from the maternal body, coveted up to that point. But what if Oedipal trauma were not overcome? What if neither the authority of the father nor the separation from the maternal body it betokens were internalized? Is it not possible that the glaring absence of father gures in Cortzars ction was his way of doing away with authority? His own family drama (he told Luis Harss, my father left home when I was very young and he
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did nothing for us [Harss, Los Neustros, 262]) was translated as a pervasive absence of fathers in his work, an absence that came hand in hand with a drastic revision of the role played by both mothers and children. Erasing the father meant the role of the mother was enhanced. This did not mean she was more physically present but, rather, that the nostalgia caused by her absence was ubiquitous, a response to Cortzars own declaration to the eect that, from the time he was a child, his misfortune, and greatest joy was not accepting things as they stood, and that in the word mother began for [him] a mysterious itinerary that sometimes could be sorted out, while others drove [him] straight into the shoals (quoted in Prego, 2627). I dont think I am stretching a point when I suggest that the nostalgia for the primordial womb which Cortzar alludes to in Lugar llamado Kinsberg (A Place Named Kindberg, from Octaedro, 116) was the genesis of his ction. That other shore Cortzar was always hoping to reachwhat he labeled the Complejo de la Arcadia was his own coded way of declaring a strong attachment, one that was very possibly resolved by acting it out, not through therapy, but through literature. I wouldnt want to be misunderstood when I say that an unresolved sexual attachment informs Cortzars early writing, however. By sexual readers must not construe genital but, rather, as Peter Brooks makes clear, the complex conscious desires and interdictions that shape humans conceptions of themselves as desiring creatures (Body Work, 6). For the author of Bestiario, learning about himself always meant grasping the sense of his own traumatic experiences, experiences suciently universal that all readers can identify with the anxiety they set into motion. Cortzar spent his life dramatizing what his body remembered by means of seemingly unrelated scenarios; when we take a close look at these scenarios, we see that each portrays part of the puzzle. The stied breathing, the longing to return, the dark tunnels, and the tiger are bits and pieces which, to paraphrase Brooks, mirror Cortzars conception of himself as a desiring creature. This is why we need to look at each of his stories as if it were a dream formulated through symbols. The tiger in Bestiario may not be the Kid, it is true, but it is clear that it betokens aggression, and is feared in the same way the Kid is feared. Both are threats, and the goal of the protagonist is to eliminate threats. The Kid wants Rema, and Isabel is ready to ght him. Her covert hostility even explains why Cortzar es42 Body of writing

tablishes a tacit link between the irritable, possessive Kid and the enormous praying mantis that ies into the dining room (Relatos, 34). In itself, the choice of the praying mantis is far from gratuitous because, as is widely known, the perpetually hungry female of the species eats the male after copulating. In an analogous situation, Isabel will have the Kid torn to pieces, she will get rid of him in a scenario that strongly suggests the classical Oedipal fantasy of a child who succeeds in eliminating the dreaded father. After looking at the way the story unfolds, we could say that there are two paths, two clusters of meaning portrayed in Bestiario. For the sake of clarity, we might refer to them as the ant path and the tiger path. The rst extemporizes the desire to reenter the mothers body, while the second brings into play the fear of castration that hinders the fulllment of the rst. Both paths come together when Isabel stares into the revealing surface of the ant-farm and sees Remas hand superimposed on the tunnels. The reected hand immediately recalls how the Kids own extremity attempted to grab it when Rema brought him coee. At that moment, prompted by Isabel, Rema removes her reected hand from the glass and the Kid is symbolically stripped of the object he covets, as he will later be stripped of Rema herself. In other words, Isabel rescues Rema in a premonitory scene that paves the way for the ending when she will play hell with the Kid. Once the Kid is gone, Isabel ends up as sole recipient of Remas coveted extremity as the older girl runs her hand over her hair quieting her with a soft squeeze of her ngers (Relatos, 39). Removing both the Kids and Remas hands from the reecting glass, Isabel succeeds in erasing the Kid from the picture and, more importantly, in getting an unobstructed view of the tunnels. Not only does she rid herself of the symbolic instrument denoting her rivals power, she also lays bare the beckoning corridors that betoken the maternal body. Bestiario delineates the ultimate fantasy, therefore: the possibility of returning home, of going back to the tunnel. The story is important in Cortzars career because it teaches him to rewrite the primal scenario to suit his own aims. From this point onward, his stories will portray not just the horror of separation that we see in Dont Blame Anyone, Throat of a Black Kitten, and The Night Face Up, but a recast version of the Oedipal scenario. In this new version the traditional winner will get retribution instead of reward, and the habitual loserthe childwill be handed the best piece of the pie. Even when the child is
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not shown to be a winner, many of the stories Cortzar writes during this phase of his career are designed as healing devices by portraying, as we shall see, a recognition of loss and an acceptance of defeat. Cutting o the little tree In spite of their dierent conclusions, both Bestiario, and a spellbinding riddle entitled Los venenos (Poison) have a great deal in common. For a start, both hinge on rivalries that bring on a desire for revenge and both showcase tunnels. The rivalries are brought to life by three characters and a supporting cast but, as soon becomes apparent, Cortzar introduces a note of humor through exaggeration in the conict that he portrays in Poison. As the story opens, the male members of a middle-class Argentine family are getting ready to ush out every ant tunnel in the backyard of an otherwise quiet house with an alarming-looking engine that spits out smoke through a long metal tube (exible like the body of a worm) and ends in a spout (Relatos, 154). The white smoke that blows out of the spout is highly poisonous, which is why we are told that turning on and using the engine is mans work reserved for the young boy who narrates the story, and for his uncle Carlos (156). As for the women in the family (mother, grandmother, and sister), they need to sit down and watch while Uncle Carlos loads the ominous black engine, and sticks the spout into the holes (156). As the smoke begins to ow out of the tunnels, the boy busies himself plugging up even more holes, struck with wonder that all that smoke was underground trying to come out (156). The thrust of Poison seems to change after the men put away their frightful contraption and the whole preoccupation with killing ants is relegated to the background. The narrators aunt and her children come to visit one Sunday, and Hugo, one of his young cousins, is invited to stay for a week because he is feeling spent and needs to take the sun. Hugo brings along a prized possession: a beautiful peacock feather with a blue and violet eye the like of which the narrator has never seen (157). Hugo doesnt let the narrators sister touch the precious object, but he does let the narrator because he knows how to hold it from the shaft (157). After Hugos arrival, the men dont turn on the ant-killing engine for a whole week, which pleases the narrator, because then Hugo would not butt his nose in, since he was one of those guys who knows it all and
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opens doors to look inside things (158). The narrators sister is not as hesitant about Hugo, however, and soon declares a crush on the boy; her brother is furious and ready to rat on her, hoping their mother will slap her a couple (158). Soon their little dierences blow over, and the three cousins are having a wonderful time along with a pretty neighbor named Lila, of whom the narrator is particularly fond. He is so fond of her, in fact, that whenever Lila came [he and she] used to go down to the back garden and lie under the fruit trees (159). Face down on the ground, he enjoys the warm aroma of damp soil and mulling over things in general. Now that he had seen what ant tunnels were all about, he begins to feel more experienced. The next time he and Lila lie on their favorite spot he reects, like Isabel in Bestiario, on all the tunnels that were everywhere and that no one could see (160). One day when all the children run to meet Uncle Carlos returning from work, Lila falls and scrapes her knee. Both Hugo and the narrator want to take care of her but Hugo loses out and is pushed away. As the narrator rubs her wound with alcohol, he is amazed to see how brave Lila was, and how she stares at Hugo without crying or lowering her eyes (162). In the scene that follows, the narrator is lost in contemplation of Hugos peacock feather, which he has cautiously taken out from its hiding place. The more he looks at it, the more he thinks about weird things . . . until, nally, he has to put it back because he would have stolen it from Hugo, and that just couldnt be, even if he is convinced that there was no feather more beautiful than that one (162). The following day, a Friday, the narrator impulsively decides to dig out his little jasmine tree, the best thing he owned, and give it to Lila (163). He plants it in the middle of her own private garden, just where she liked it, and together they sprinkle it with water (164). Hugo has to return to Buenos Aires on Saturday, but his cousin is not sorry to see him go because Uncle Carlos has decided to turn on the ant-killing contraption on Sunday, and its much better if the two of them do it alone, just to make sure that Hugo wouldnt go and get himself poisoned, or something like that (164). The time comes for Hugo to leave and the narrators sister spends the afternoon moping around the house, drawing hearts pierced with arrows. The narrator is so exasperated with her that he has to leave the room so that (he) wouldnt have to smack her a couple, or go and tell mom (165). His sister is not the only girl who starts behaving strangely; Lila refuses to stay around until Hugo is picked up
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and runs o without saying goodbye. The narrator, on the other hand, is elated that things are back to normal; to be sure, he feels a bit lonely after his cousin returns to Buenos Aires, but what an advantage it was to feel that everything was (his) once more (165). Little does he suspect what lies ahead. The following day, while the engine is turned on and smoke begins to come out of the ground alongside Lilas jasmine tree, he has his rst painful revelation: he discovers that she, too, has a peacock feather as a page marker, one that is so identical to Hugos that it seemed to come from the same peacock (168). He tells himself that it couldnt be Hugos but, when asked, Lila admits that Hugo had given it to her before leaving. At that point, the narrator, who had been trying to cut o an ant tunnel before the poison could reach the sapling, throws down the shovel and gets ready to head home. But not before he takes advantage of the smoke . . . rising right by the jasmine tree, the poison getting all mixed up with the roots to load the machine with more poison, so that the smoke would invade all the ant tunnels and kill all the ants, not leaving a single one alive in the garden (169). Clearly, jealous because he has been thrown over, he reacts by poisoning all the ants in the yard, a holocaust that has as its consequence the ultimate destruction of all tunnels. Furthermore, in order to eliminate the ants and empty out the tunnels, he sacrices his own little tree. Cortzars symbols have never been as readily accessible as they are in this story; nevertheless, we are not immediately aware of how much Poison has in common with Bestiario. What we rst notice on comparing the two stories is that conict is expressed in terms of a triangle and that the Oedipal scenario is given a distorted expression in both. By distorted I mean that, in Poison, Cortzar displaces sexual desire from an absent mother to a young neighbor, while in Bestiario a girl, and not a boy, is the rival of the adult male gure. The actual expression of the anxiety is also distorted: cousins in one story, casual acquaintances in the othernot father and sonvie against one another for a womans aection. In other words, the object of anxiety in these stories is masked. Masked, perhaps, but, in Poison at least, not fundamentally altered; in this story the basic conict is clearlyalbeit symbolicallydepicted: two boys want the same girl. One of them has a remarkable peacock feather; the other does not. The girl picks the boy with the beautiful feather, and the angry loser poisons his little tree. In Early Stages of the Oedipus Conict, Freud describes an early
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stage of development which is governed by the childs aggression against his mothers body, and in which his predominant wish is to rob her body of its contents and ultimately to destroy it. Freud explains how the childs oral sucking and oral biting provide him with the idea that he can get possession of the mothers breast by sucking and scooping it out. First directed toward the breast, this desire soon extends to the inside of her body. Melanie Klein picks up where Freud leaves o to explain that at its period of maximal strength the childs sadism is centered around coitus between his parents. The death wishes he feels against them during the primal scene or in his primal fantasies are associated with sadistic fantasies which are extraordinarily rich in content and which involve the sadistic destruction of his parents. . . . The fantasies contain such ideas as that the penis, incorporated into the mother, turns into a dangerous animal or into weapons loaded with explosive substances (Contributions to Psychoanalysis, 132, my emphasis). It is not easy to be a loser, but this is the bitter pill that every child must swallow in order to evolve beyond the Oedipal conict. Fantasizing possession of the mothers body at an early stage of its development, the infant needs to recognize and accept the authority of the father, the other male in the love triangle. Before such acceptance can take place, feelings of hatred are directed against both parents who, as the child sees it, deprive him of the body he loves. Once the child understands that the mothers body is his to hold but not to have, he detaches himself from it if all goes welland accepts the authority of the father. This universal scenario is the very thing Cortzar dramatizes in Poison. After giving his favorite little tree to Lila and watching her prefer Hugos magnicent feather (so magnicent, we remember, that even he wants it for himself ), the boy is jealous and angry. His reaction is dramatically dierent from Isabels in Bestiario, however. Isabel got the Kids hand out of the reection on the glass to save Rema and get a full view of the tunnels that she was unable to see because Remas reected hand on the glass obstructed her vision. In contrast, the narrator of Poison destroys the tunnels and even the best thing he owns. Symbolically speaking, his destruction is not wanton, however; it translates his recognition of loss to a rival endowed with a more magnicent feather and, in this sense, portrays an integration of castration. In Kleins view, the aggression addressed to the mothers bodythe ooding and poisoning in our storyhave their origin in oral-sadistic
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attacks upon her breast which are reinforced by the childs original hatred of his fathers penis as he imagines it to exist inside her body (129). These attacks, she writes, are centered upon that object and culminate in its destruction; in fact, she continues, the childs hatred is soon directed to the inside of the mothers body, which thus becomes at once the target of every highly intensied and eective instrument of sadism. In early analysis these anal-sadistic destructive desires of the small child constantly alternate with desires to destroy its mothers body by devouring and wetting it (129). In Poison the desire to destroy is patently represented in the young boys wish to kill all the ants, which is to say, to get rid of all the tunnels which, as in Bestiario, emblematize the maternal body. But above and beyond the wish to destroy, it is impossible not to discern the calming therapeutic eectas well as the conspicuous psychological evolution this conclusion betokens. Cortzar begins by portraying primal trauma as a sheer and unavoidable horror in The Night Face Up, and Dont Blame Anyone, stories where no remedy is oered, nothing that shows a way to evolve from the anguish depicted. Concurrent with his portrayals of birth trauma as an unavoidable horror, he depicts a chimera in Bestiario. Based on the exclusive possession of the maternal body, this chimera is hard to sustain much beyond the conclusion because of its inherent unfulllability. In contrast, the separation from the mother disavowed in Bestiario is dealt with head-on and accepted in Poison, a story in which the young hero acknowledges he cannot have the maternal body as his exclusive possession and accepts castration, symbolically portrayed as the destruction of his own little tree. As can be determined from the dramatic shifts in the outcome of the stories discussed thus far, Cortzars scenarios evolve toward a resolution of primal anxiety. If we consider that analysts commonly view therapy as a way to bring about a belated accomplishment of the incomplete mastery of birth trauma, and feel their job is to sever the primal xation on the mother, we must go along with Cortzars claim that his own writing was, literally, a form of therapy (Rank, Trauma, 9). He began this therapy by delineating the fear of separation, and followed stories that are camouaged birth dramas with others in which the rival for the mothers love is either erased from the picture (Bestiario) or acknowledged (Poison). Despite the ambiguities in these scenarios, the nostalgia for dark, cloistered spaces and the revisions of the Oedipal scenario
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they so frequently portray stem from the same source: the incurable regret that results from primal severance. Far-fetched though this idea may seem, readers of this extraordinarily inventive author must never forget that, in what was to him the ever-fascinating subject of estrangement from the forsaken paradise, Cortzar dened the Arcadia complex as the return to the great womb (quoted in Ainsa, 437). If this initial separation was, in fact, the source for many of the scenarios he published between 1951 and 1974 in Bestiario, Final del juego, Las armas secretas, Todos los fuegos el fuego, and Octaedro, it also makes sense to let the notion of the great womb lead us to the focal point upon which so much of Cortzars early ction converges: the mother herself. Mommy dearest Three of Cortzars early storiesLa salud de los enfermos (The Health of the Sick), La seorita Cora, (Nurse Cora), and Cartas de mam (Letters from Mother)contain the most fully developed portraits of mothers he ever drew. Revealingly, all of them revolve around sickness and death, and each motherfeatured rather unsympatheticallyis manipulative and, some more subtly than others, dictatorial. Loved without a doubt, mothers are also resented. It is this resentment that oats to the surface of the stories like some shameful scum that cannot be scrubbed away. We rst spot it, shame-faced, in Luiss frequent complaints about his mother in Letters from Mother. In Paris, Luis has carved a comfortable life for himself and his wife and resents the arrival of envelopes from Buenos Aires that drag him back to the past until his hard earned freedom, that new life . . . stops making any sense (Relatos, 214). At the same time, he is so riddled with guilt that he needs to answer his mother immediately; it is his way of closing the door, of mending the torn curtain that aps between them (214). Life could be surprisingly easy in Paris, Luis woefully laments, then a letter from mama would arrive (219). Luiss ambivalent feelings about his mother are mirrored by those of Pablo, the pathetic hero of Nurse Cora. The boy cringes at his mothers imprudent upbraiding of a young nurse at the clinic, and strives to elude her embarrassing remarks (hes already fteen, the mother cruelly observes about her son, but one would hardly believe it, hes always stuck to
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me, although now that hes begun to wear long pants he tries to look like a grown man, Relatos, 170). Eventually, Pablo is compelled to recognize that his parents bother him, that he doesnt feel at ease until they are gone, and that they always say what they shouldnt (189). Exasperation at ones parents is absent from The Health of the Sick, at least on the explicit level. But can the reader ignore the note of acrimony implicit in the conclusion to this powerful parable on the exercise of control? What can be said about a mother who reduces the grown-up members of her family to lying in order to preserve her own health and the stability of her personal world? Isnt hers the ultimate perversion: to turn her children into slaves while, bedridden and overindulged, she rules over the entire household? As brothers and sisters, sons and daughters do their utmost to prevent her from having an emotional shock that could worsen her high blood pressure and diabetes, she sits in state, cooling herself down with the breeze raised by their commotioncommotion because, in order to conceal from her the death of two of her children, they fabricate letters, forge signatures, stage phone calls, have baskets of fruit delivered under false pretenses, and even manage to contrive a diplomatic incident in Brazil. The familywith one exceptionlives in a fantasy world. Ironically, the exception is the mother herself, fully aware that everyone else denies death on her account. While she grasps the truth and moves on with her life, her children are hoodwinked. Having lived so long in a world of appearances created for her sake, they end up behaving in line with their own lies: Feigning to laugh, they all end up laughing for real (Relatos, 117). Most importantly, even after their mother thanks them for having lied to her so well throughout the years, they continue deluding themselves. After she dies and one last letter arrives from Alejandrothe dead brother kept alive to make mother happyRosa, one of the sisters, catches herself thinking that as she read the letter she had been pondering how they would break the news of mothers death to Alejandro (132). Fostering lies is but one of the ways in which mothers in these stories promote infantile behavior. When in The Health of the Sick Carlos chides his mother and calls her silly mommy, Cortzar makes obvious that the immature behavior is hisand his brothers and sistersrather than the reigning mothers (127). Equally childish is Luiss irrational fear of his apparently meek and lonely old mother in Letters from Mother. In this story the mothers perverse control of Luis is such that she literally
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resuscitates his dead brother in order to haunt him and make clear to him that Laura, his wife, does not love him. The mothers revenge is complete whenlike the characters in The Health of the SickLuis and Laura begin speaking of a dead relative as if he were alive, substantiating the potential for cruelty which mothers in Cortzar are capable of wielding. No one can deny, of course, that cruelty in Letters from Mother is, most particularly, Luiss specialty. He is the one who steals his brothers girlfriend; he is the one who runs o to Paris two months after his brother Nicos death; he is the one who abandons his mother in Buenos Aires. But Luis certainly gets his due when his mother begins writing letters in which she refers to Nico as if he were alive. Did she just get his name mixed up with someone elses, or has she gone crazy? Luis wonders. The question hangs in midair until, in her next letter, the mother tells Laura and Luis that Nico is coming to Paris. Neither one believes her on a rational plane, but the truth is that Nico is very much alive in the guilty conscience of the couple, both of whom turn up at the train station on the day of Nicos scheduled arrival. The mothers schemeor should we call it her revenge?is brought to fruition with cold-blooded deftness. Luis and Laura are shown the chasm that lies between them, the emptiness of their lives, the pointless outcome of their crime. Back in Buenos Aires, their guilty love was likely responsible for accelerating Nicos death, just as the mothers brutal project, brought to fruition in Paris, is crucial in showing them the death inherent in their marriage. But what does such calculating, hard-hearted behavior between a mother and son articulate about Cortzars notion of kinship? And why does the issue of sibling rivalry enter into his matriarchal scenarios with such insistence? What sort of account was Luis really trying to settle with a dead brother he could not disparage enough, disdain enough, hate enough? Why such fury when he refers to him as a weak and inane incubus, a pathetic unky who evolved from boyfriend to brother in law, a feeble pushover with hair slicked back and corny rayon ties (222, 221, 226)? It is clear that Luis and Nico were rivals but was Laura truly the object of their rivalry, or was she a substitutelike Lila in Poison or Rema in Bestiarioscreening someone else? Letters from Mother is told from the perspective of the son who was second-best in the eyes of his mother. Only such preference would explain Luiss profound bitterness vis--vis Nico, his unconscious wish to
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hasten his brothers death and take away the woman he loved. The scenario of this story is comparable to that of Poison in that the heroes of both are victims of rejection seeking vengeance against women who have preferred other men. Both the rivals and the women are substitutes for the traditional actors in the Oedipal triangle, which is the actual wellspring of these stories. However, Cortzar, always a cunning manipulator, has done everything to cloud this wellspring. In Poison the rivalry portrayed is between cousins; in Letters from Mother it is between brothers. The loved object in one story is a neighbor; in the other, it is the brothers girlfriend. It is undeniable, nonetheless, that anger against women and the wish to punish rivals as well as love objects that occasioned the rivalry fuel both stories. Cortzar chose not to portray the recipients of this anger en toutes lettres, but camouaging them doesnt mean he didnt leave behind a number of traces that allude to the original content of the dramas. For instance, the rivals in both stories are next of kin; the women show preference for one man over another; and, punishment is meted out in both tales. Camouage also gave Cortzar great freedom. Without looking any further, it let him get away with murder: in Letters from Mother Nico gets such an emotional whiplash from Luiss ruthless revenge (i.e. taking Laura away from him) that his death is accelerated. In spite of the blatant aggression that typies them, Poison and Letters from Mother provide revisions of the Oedipal scenario meant to soothe the wound that never heals. Cortzar depicts heroes who succeed in ridding themselves of their rivals although, no matter how many rivals are removed from the picture, or how often mothers are indirectly punished, it is the latter who end up having the last word in his stories. For instance, in Letters from Mother the mother shows her surviving son that, although he may think he got rid of his brother, Nico is actually very much inside Lauras mind. As Letters from Mother shows, Luiss victory quickly turns to dust suggesting that, where Cortzar was concerned, mothers were inherently cruel. What the calculating, hardhearted behavior they exhibit in his stories articulates is that he was not ready to forgive them for treating their sons as second best. What was Cortzar the writer to do after suggesting that a mother always had the upper hand in deciding her preferences? Was there a way in which he could rewrite this scenario of dominance and control and punish a mother for her disloyalty? Could he create a female character
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who was like a mother but not a mother, someone who preferred the love of another man but ended up recognizing her mistake? This, in a nutshell, became the blueprint for Nurse Cora, the fourth of Cortzars transformations of the Oedipal scenario (after Los reyes, Bestiario, and Poison). Like Letters from Mother, Nurse Cora opens with a rivalry that soon erupts like a forest re and cannot be contained. We are struck from the start that hatred should are up with such intensity between a mother and a young nurse she has only just met. Why, without even knowing her, does the mother say about Nurse Cora, all one has to do is take one look at her to know what shes all about: vamp airs, tight apron, a sassy girl who behaves as if she were the director of the clinic? (Relatos, 17071). Boiling over with anger, the mother cannot wait to complain to the head doctor so that he will put that conceited, snot-nosed girl in her place (171). Cora is no less vehement about the mother; she refers to her as a parrot in Sunday dress, and a stupid old bitch (175, 183). In Cortzars twisted scenarios, domineering mothers use their children as pawns (The Health of the Sick), and hurt them when they thwart their expectations (Letters from Mother). Attempts are made to maintain children in an infantile state (The Health of the Sick, Nurse Cora), and rivalry appears under dierent guises, always expressed with great vehemence (Letters from Mother, Nurse Cora). Most signicantly, the feeling expressed toward the mother in all of these stories is anger rather than love. The question we need to address before going any further, therefore, is what does this anger stem from? When explicitly portraying relationships between mothers and sons, Cortzar treaded gingerly. As we have already begun to see, he adopted a variety of disguises and revealedpartially at bestfeelings that are voiced much more readily in symbolic scenarios in which the traumatic sources for the stories have been sublimated (The Night Face Up or Bestiario, for example). His portrayals of women seem to have been conditioned by what he unconsciously perceived as the inadequate love mothers provided, since they prefer someone else to the son or daughter who is typically cast as narrator of the stories. This might explain why his depiction of lial aection is heavily seasoned with resentment. Manifestly, resentment carries over to his descriptions of women in general, but to assume from thisas does Ana Hernndez del Castillothat Cortzar was a violent misogynist is to stretch the point (22).
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I agree with Ana Hernndez that feelings of anger inform many of his portrayals of the opposite sex. But it would be more accurate to say that he resented, rather than hated, women. Hernndez comes closer to fathoming Cortzars idiosyncratic attitude when she speaks of his propensity to perceive the Feminine under the guise of Terrible Mother; terrible because she failed to give the child who had originally doted on her what he most longed for (27). It is likely (whether consciously or not is immaterial) that Cortzar blamed his own mother for a traumatic separation that seems not to have been resolved for many years. Burdened by guilt regarding this unresolved longing, he dealt with it indirectly, that is, through writing. Particularly burdensome were the ambiguous feelings he had to sort out. Striving for the annihilation of spatial boundaries between him and the loved object, Cortzar was well aware of the impossibility of his quest on a rational plane. Eventually, the project of seeking to bring about erotic contact with the rst love object was repressed but not forgotten. Sensing at an unconscious level that mothers in general had with someone else the kind of erotic bond he wished for himself brought with it a traumatic severance. It reactivated the primal anxiety of birth, and made the writer harbor feelings of resentment against both parents, absent or not. This is why, in his symbolic scenarios, he made a point of both destroying rivals (the Kid in Bestiario, and Nico in Letters from Mother, for example), and omitting paternal gures. Father became the absent word, seldom uttered in his ction. The mothers lot was altogether dierent. Her presence is felt everywhere in Cortzars scenarios although, as I have already indicated, motherhood per se is seldom explicitly dealt with. The hostility he felt against mother guresone that is conspicuous in his storieswas transformed in one of two ways. Either it was repressed by being transformed into its opposite (a longing for a mother surrogate such as Nurse Cora), or it showed up as a negative energy inspiring attitudes of rejection and spite vis--vis many of his female characters (Delia Maara in Circe and Hlene in 62: Modelo para armar, are examples). In stories in which hostility was repressed and transformed into its opposite (typically those in which castration anxiety was portrayed), Cortzar directed the aggression not against the mother but, usually, against a young boy with whom he strongly identied). In other words, he did away with the child to punish the mother. This
54 Body of writing

explains why many of his male heroesone thinks immediately of Pablito in Nurse Coraare victims who die young. Cortzar punishes both the character whom he symbolically substitutes for himself and the unrelenting object of desire, the mother, who prefers the other man to the hero. This is exactly the scenario that is played out in Letters from Mother. The rivalry between Luis and that feeble pushover Nico is really a vendetta Italian style in which the hero begins by believing he has fullled the ultimate Oedipal fantasy and destroyed his rival (literally destroyed him: from the beginning Nico is portrayed as dead), but is ultimately made to understandby the mother, no lessthat he has been deluding himself, that the man he tried to destroy is still present and victorious, to boot. As Cortzar portrayed her, the Terrible Mother was a blight: aloof, ungiving, manipulative, and craftythe Rastignac in the family closet. Leery of her, he began turning away from mothers in general and created substitutes that allowed him to carry out his fantasies. Rema in Bestiario is one such idealized substitute, and Nurse Cora is an even more explicit prototype of Cortzars ideal: a kindly woman who can both love and heal. Like the Romantic poets he so admired, Cortzar conceived of women as angels or demons. In the idealized world he depicted, and for reasons I intend to explore, those who fell into the rst group were typically unattainable, and so angelic that he often dressed them in white. A heal at heart Nurse Cora is the most obvious example of Cortzars good mother/ bad mother dichotomy and a story crucial for understanding the sources for his scenarios of rivalry. In it he records both his ambivalent feelings about nurturing women and the reasons for his resentment. Typically, the conict due to ambivalence is displaced from the person who causes it onto another character who acts as a substitutein this instance, a pretty young nurse who ends up taking the mothers place after the latter is conveniently removed from the scene. The story begins when Pablo, an adolescent, is admitted to a clinic to have his appendix removed. Against her wishes, his mother is not allowed to spend the night at the clinic. Signicantly, that decision is made by a young nurse named Cora, and signals the beginning of an intense rivalry between the women. The mother is enraged to be asked to leave,
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particularly when her son assures her he is already old enough to sleep alone at night (Relatos, 171). From this point onward, the mother is ousted from the boys private space while Cora takes her place with a very revised maternal agenda foisted upon her: she will be both Pablos caretaker and his lady love. Coras relationship with Pablo begins on a bad note, however. Probably resenting the angry exchange she has had with Pablos mother, the nurse remains aloof from the boy. Worse, she treats him as a child, using the familiar t form to address him, or taking his candy away, and thinking of him as a mamas boy (174). Astutely sizing up her behavior, Pablo concludes, I bet she was angry about what went on with mama and she is now taking it out on me (172). In spite of the nurses initial chilliness, the boy is emotionally stung, however; he blushes with each of Coras words, and no matter how much he wanted to stay angry with her, he just couldnt (172). When Pablos mother arrives the following morning, she immediately reacts like a forsaken woman. Thats the way kids are, she bitterly reects, they give you so much work at home and afterwards they sleep their heads o, even if they are far from their mama who has not closed an eye all night long, poor thing (173). When the doctor comes in to examine Pablo, the mother steps outside because he was already a grown boy (173). After returning to the room, she stares at him, melodramatically, as if it were the end of the world, but he promptly reassures her before sending her o: Leave without another thought, I am just ne and I need nothing (17374). The scene that follows is one of mutual scrutiny, a taunting and barely disguised show-and-tell: Pablo asks the morning nurse to tell him the name of the young woman in the evening shift (i.e., Nurse Cora), and later that day Cora comes in and asks Pablo to take his temperature using a rectal thermometer. In a pendant scene, Cora asks Pablo what his name is while she shaves his pubic hair; she does not miss the opportunity to let him know (using terms that recall the mothers earlier words), that hes already a grown boy (Ya sos un chico crecidito, 176). Despite her ironic remarks, she is struck by Pablo. This attraction is revealed to the reader in no uncertain terms, although Cora disavows it until the end of the story. She emphatically maintains she was still irked by something about him that maybe he had gotten from his mother but shows her hand when she recognizes it even bothered me that he should be so cute and so well put
56 Body of writing

together for his age, a snot-nosed kid who probably thought he was a grown man already and might even dare to make a pass at me the rst chance he got (176). The parrying scene that follows Pablo and Coras exchange of credentials foreshadows the famous g tree exchange between Mabel and Pancho in Manuel Puigs Heartbreak Tango. Pablito begins by asking the nurse, your name is Cora, isnt it? while she tauntingly rejoins, Miss Cora (177). Shrewd beyond his years, the boy recognizes that she had said it just to punish him, and that earlier on, when she had told him he was already a grown boy she had been making fun of him (176). Pablo may be astute, but he is only half right. Cora is punishing him, but she is ultimately caught in her own web as far as the playful taunting is concerned. Pablo is angry at himself for blushing, for crying when he most needed to stay calm to tell her what he thoughtthat he wanted to be on more intimate terms and address her by her rst name (177). Instead, he gets ustered when she comes back to pick up the shaving soap, and kind of to calm him down, (she) ran her hand down his cheek (178). Again he asks, at that point, I can call you Cora, cant I? Again she answers, Miss Cora, with an emphasis on the particle (178). At this point, Pablo has a rst access of fury: I felt like hitting her, he claims, or like jumping out of bed and shoving her out of the room, or like . . . (178). Pablos anger is exacerbated when Cora shows up to give him an enema. From this point, they begin a game of retribution and reparation the nature of which is evident to both of them. As she stares at his naked bottom deled by the rectal injection, Cora tells herself, on the one hand I thought it was pretty funny to be looking at my young admirers little fanny but then, I would feel a little sorry for him; it was really as if I were punishing him (180). In the overall scheme of things Cora is, of course, punishing Pablo. Instead of sexually gratifying him she pricks him with a needle, shaves his genital area, and, worst of all, fondles him while staying aloof. Intensied by his frustration, Pablos rage turns into fantasy. As he sobs into his pillow, he thinks to himself, boy, did I cry while I cursed her and stuck a knife in her chest ve, ten times . . . cursing her in time with the blows while I enjoyed her suering and her pleading with me to forgive her (181). The next scene opens after Pablitos appendix has been removed. The operation has not gone as expected, and his condition is worsening. Cora
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holds his hand and thinks to herself, poor guy, he grabs my hand as if he were drowning, and suddenly realizes, he must think I am his mother, they all think that (181). Cora is happy to assume her new role and addressing Pablito with the formal usted for the rst timeshe encourages him, yes my child [mhijito ], here I am, complain all you like (182). She also takes advantage of his sleep to admire him: . . . you think I am your mother. You are very cute, you know . . . (182). At this point, a new and very important character enters the picture: Coras boyfriend, Marcial, one of the anesthesiologists at the clinic. Taking advantage of her night shift, Marcial comes into Pablos room and begins kissing Cora in spite of her resistance. He leaves as Pablo begins to regain consciousness, but soon the reader learns that the boy was keenly aware of what took place while everyone thought he was asleep. The scenes that follow portray Pablos jealousy and distinctly echo the primal scene when the child sees or imagines his parents having sex. Like that child, Pablito feels that the loved woman he has been pining for prefers a rivals love. Furious, the boy rejects Cora, urging her not to stay in his room but to go with him [Marcial] and kiss him in the hallway (195). Sandwiched between the episodes in which Pablito and Nurse Coras innermost fears and longings are laid out, a couple of nesting pigeons coo to each other under the eaves of the clinic courtyard. Half-asleep, Pablito hears them, immediately recognizing they make him sad (195). He complains to the morning nurse, but she shrugs and answers that many other people had already complained about the pigeons, but the director didnt want them shooed away (192). The cooing pigeons become a leitmotif in the story, their presence suggesting the love tryst from which the boy is excluded (they can love each other while he cannot be with the girl he likes). Later, dreaming after his nal operation, Pablito addresses his mother: You see mom, there they go again, its those pigeons cooing . . . I dont know why they dont get rid of them, let them y away to another tree (195). But y away is exactly what they will not do; like Cora and Marcial, like mom and dad, the love-happy birds are a perpetual reminder of the painful exclusion the boy must learn to bear. As mating pigeons bring to mind Cora and Marcial, the nurse makes Pablo think of his mother. More than once, as he awakens from his slumber, the boy recognizes that . . . [he] was confusing [Cora] with mama (184, 196). One day he begins to wonder why Cora stays in his room all the time. He stares at her hair when she is not looking and
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thinks to himself, she is so young, to think that today I took her for mother, its incredible (184). Of course, it is anything but incredible. In fact, the whole point of the story is not merely to take Cora for mother but, actually, to replace one for the other in an astutely conceived scenario that permits a full-edged dramatization of the triangular situation. Loath to portray a scene of incest outright, Cortzar dreams up a mother substitute, and a rival to the boy who vies for her aection. As in Poison, Cortzar substitutes the primal scenario for a more socially acceptable love triangle in Nurse Cora. His aims in the stories are quite dierent, however. In the ant-poisoning saga he dramatized the boys recognition of his rivals superiority; in the nurses tale he chose to stage the anger felt vis--vis the love object for preferring a rival. Pendants to each other, one stages resolution while the other highlights conict. Before he could portray anger, Cortzar needed to portray love, however, and perhaps even more than love, sexual attraction. But sexual attraction is hardly an appropriate response to a mother gure, and Cortzar had done everything in his power to assimilate Cora into one. Ambivalence enters into the picture at this point: Pablo likes Cora and repeatedly takes her for his mother. However, as his language and attitude show, he pines for her in a way that is anything but lial. He repeatedly startles her as, for instance, when he thunders, You wouldnt treat me this way if we had met in dierent circumstances (191). Dumbfounded at the inappropriateness of his reproach, she confesses to Marcial, I almost had to burst out laughing, it was so utterly ridiculous for him to say something like that (191). Claiming that she almost burst out laughing is clearly a defense mechanism for Cora; the truth is that her feelings mirror those of the pining adolescent. For instance, when her boyfriend is sent upstairs to tell Pablito that he needs to have another operation, Cora wishes that Marcial would get out and leave her alone with the boy (194), and when Marcial tells her he has requested a transfer so she will no longer have to care for the now dying Pablito, Cora thinks to herselfwith a highly ambiguous choice of wordsIm going to stay with him tonight and every night (195). One of the most interesting features of this story is the shifting point of view that makes readers privy to Pablos and Coras private thoughts. We learn not only of their attraction for each other but also that both are blind to the exact nature of Coras feelings. She nds Pablito cute and
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mature for his age but never admits to herself why she is always nding excuses to touch him, why he brings tears to her eyes, or why she doesnt want to leave his bedside. Cora represses her feelings and, more often than not, transforms them into their opposite; she is curt with Pablo, and not at all reluctant to humiliate him. What the boy sees of his favorite nurse, therefore, is either a mask of ecient and detached concern or forthright aggression. Aware of Coras actions but also of her thoughts, the reader knows dierently. Pablo imagines himself slighted in favor of Marcial. This misperceived rejection sets o his own feelings of resentment and summons his need to punish Cora. Such ambivalent combination of love and hatred is typical of the Oedipal phase. Recognizing the mothers choice of the father as partner, the infant begins to harbor feelings of hostility against both parents. However, this feeling is just as soon repressed by a process of transformation; in place of aggression against the father, Freud writes, there appears the fathers aggressionretaliationagainst the individual itself (Problem of Anxiety, 3536). Cortzar translates this aggression in the scene where Pablito literally dies at the hands of Marcial (whose very name suggests the belligerent disposition that characterizes the older male gure in the Oedipal tragedy). His death is not merely self-destructive; it is also a strike against Cora. In other words, if she wont give him signs of special recognition, he will erase himself from the picture. At this point, however, we need to think not in terms of Pablitos death wish (a presupposition we are not free to make from the scant bits and pieces the story provides) but rather of Cortzars death sentence for Pablito. We know Cortzar felt a particularly close kinship with the hero/victim of this story; in fact, he admitted to Evelyn Picn that Nurse Cora made him suer a lot because he identied closely with the character of the young boy (Cortzar por Cortzar, 69). What personal feelings could he have been venting, one wonders, in this thinly disguised Oedipal scenario? Was he suggesting that the mothers desire for the son is present although unacknowledgeable to herself ? Couldnt he also have been expressing the wish to punish the mother for preferring a rival male to her own esh and blood? But if punishing mother was one of the goals of the story, why cast Cora as a nurse? Modications that writers make in classic scenarios are always determined by inner objections that Freud refers to as psychic censorship.
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Cortzars transformations of the Oedipal triangle are no exception. In the case of portraying incestuous aection, for instance, only the notion of an impossible love nds a way into his work. Because his personal feelings are being repressed, the mother herself appears, but only briey. Instead, a nurse is substituted, someone who, like a mother, presides over the ritual of life and the nurturing process. The functional kinship between mothers and nurses grows out of Cortzars longstanding fascination with the relationship between a female doctor and a male patient, a bond he described to Picn as a curious mixture of pain and care (69). Actually, the image of the healer, of the comforting gure who takes care of ailing bodies, is always portrayed as a female in Cortzars work, even if he had to resort to a surrealistic sleight of hand to bring about a sex change (for instance, in Examples of How to Be Afraid the narrator describes how the trousers of the male doctor are pulled up to just above the knees and hes wearing womens stockings, 9). Once we recognize that a nurse can be a substitute for the mother in Cortzars scenarios, we need to return to the more pressing issue of his death wish for Pablito, but not before highlighting the particular nature of his rst and most enduring allegiance. Whether her role is assumed by a substitute or not, in Cortzars stories mothers and their alter egos are always cast with hostility. Portraying them as shrewd manipulators in Letters from Mother, as cold bitches in Nurse Cora and Verano (Summer), or as deceiving weathercocks in Blow Up, Cortzar substantiates an unwillingness to accept their betrayal: they prefer, not the hero, but someone else (Hugo instead of the narrator in Poison; Nico and not Luis in Letters from Mother; an older man instead of Anbal in Deshoras [Unreasonable Hours]). Taking the side of the underdog, Cortzar revises the Oedipal scenario in Nurse Cora so that the nurse who substitutes for the mother as caretaker and object of desire not only recognizes the heros longing but reciprocates it. This is why, on the last page of the story, the nurse nally agrees to give in to Pablitos entreaties, and lets him call her by her rst name (plainly, the gist of the name game played by both characters throughout the story is to have Cora drop the barrier of decorum and grant the adolescent the preamble, at least, of the intimacy he has been hankering after). Following the second operation, when Coras capitulation begins, the boy refuses to look at her. In complete contrast to his behavior as well as her own at the beginning of the story, Cora snuggles up to him and
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smiles. Call me Cora, she pleads, say to me: yes, Cora (196). When the boy refuses, calling her Miss Cora and shutting his eyes, she begs, No, Pablo, no, kissing him very close to the mouth, and promising him the exclusive rights hes been vying for all along: I am going to be Cora for you, and only for you (196, my emphasis). Signicantly, Pablos response is to vomit. Cora retreats in haste, but her face is splattered. Far from giving up, she bends forward and whispers in Pablos ear that she is there to take care of him, urging him to vomit all he wants. Now it is Pablos turn to reject, on the one hand, and Cortzars turn to punish, on the other. Pablitos response to Coras wish for intimacy is to retort, I would like to have my mother here (196). Undaunted, the nurse runs her hand through the boys hair, xes his blankets, and, before conceding to his request, pleads one last time, Please Pablito. Please, darling (196). At that point, the room takes on a dark silence. Hurriedly, Cora walks toward the bed and bends over to kiss the boy, but its already too late. He smelled cold, she mutters to herself while stealing away to avoid crying in front of him, for his sake (196). Pablos death wish comes true all too literally. Earlier in the story he thought he wanted to be dead, to be dead and to have (Cora) run her hand down his face while she cried (186). Cortzar fullls Pablitos wish by killing him o in a conclusion that brings to mind Otto Ranks at regarding the link between thoughts of death and the wish to return to the womb (Trauma of Birth, 24). Portraying Pablitos death achieves two ends, moreover: it acts as a revenge against the surrogate mother (giving her a just return for her earlier refusal), and it actualizes the wish to become reunited with the love object, to return to Arcadia. If Pablito wanted to be dead, it is because only in death can he obtain the physical contact he yearns for (to have [Cora] run her hand down his face). And why only in death? Because if Cora is actually a stand-in for the mother, as I argue, the nature of Pablitos wishto have a physical intimacy with heris the very epitome of what is forbidden. What Cortzar sets out to do throughout these stories, in other words, is to circumvent, perhaps even capsize, one of the primordial proscriptions of Western civilization. My sister, my love To touch upon incest without explicitly portraying it became one of Cortzars expedients during the period when he wrote House Taken
62 Body of writing

Over. At this time in his career, and again in order to secure the forbidden paradise that a repossession of the mother implied, he relied on substitutes or stand-ins who allowed him to portray close relationships and sexual attraction conjointly while skirting a taboo. The dierence with House Taken Over was that the substitutes in question were not just symbolic allusions to blood relatives but kin to each other. In view of Cortzars capitalization on doubles and seem-alikes, it is surprising that critics studying the role of incest in his work have taken these substitutions at face value and neglected to see, in the portrait of Nurse Cora, of Lila in Poison, and, particularly, of the unmarried sister in House Taken Over the artice of masks shielding from view a much more censored form of longing. In these stories Cortzar taunts the reader by revealing the nature of a secret passion while, at the same time, artfully concealing it. All three are a way of stroking the surface of truth while replacing the real object of desire with a less shameful one. Of the three, House Taken Over contains the most important piece of the puzzle Cortzar revealed over a thirty-two-year period (from the publication of Bestiario in 1951 to that of Deshoras in 1983) because it shows how the intolerably forbidden feeling drawing an infant to his mother can be redirected to a sibling. Like so many of his plots, this one culminates with the sense of anguish at being cast out from familiar surroundings, which is the essence of The Night Face Up. However, Cortzar introduces an antidote to both anguish and loneliness in House Taken Over: not just one hero but a pair, and furthermore, a pair tethered together by a bond that nothing can sever. There is a second critical dierence between the Motecas saga in The Night Face Up and the siblings ejection into the outside world. In the former, Cortzar had attempted to counter the gradually overpowering sense of estrangement by portraying his protagonist back in the warm embrace of the hospital ward even as he kept exiting through the tunnel. After delaying the exit as long as possible, the hero was forced, nonetheless, into the horror of the world outside. From that moment onward, one of the thematic dilemmas facing Cortzar was how to deal with the feelings of severance that being ousted provoked. Immediately after sacricing his Moteca hero, he began to look for a substitute for the warm security felt within, outside, in the cold and lonely world beyond the double doors that seal the womblike darkness of the pyramid in The Night Face Up.
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The mother herself could not be that substitute because the feelings she inspired were the very ones Cortzar wished to conceal. Besides, she was the primary love object but also a traitor, someone whoas Cortzar depicted hercould be both selsh (The Health of the Sick), and cruel (Letters from Mother). Substitutes for mothers, such as Rema and Nurse Cora, were successful in evoking feelings of longing that were rewarded in the stories in spite of their inherent unsuitability. However, these characters were not suciently connected to the hero to really suggest that loving them was something forbidden, a response Cortzar designed as a source for fanning uneasiness in his readers. And so, in writing House Taken Over, he sought to create a character who would be physically close to the herolike Rema, Lila, and Corasomeone who would even share the heros existential loneliness, and also be linked to him by an indissoluble bond. The brother and sister in House Taken Over live like an old married couple, in the words of one critic, until the day when a mysterious and undened presence invades the back rooms of their comfortable home (Planells, Cortzar, 63). Fleeing the invasion, they bolt a connecting door and move to the front rooms, leaving behind many of their favorite possessions. As the story comes to an end, the alien presence invades the front part of the house, forcing the couple out on the street. Locking the door behind them, the brother drops the key in the gutter, knowing that they can never return. A number of Cortzars favorite themes are brought together in this restrained masterpiece. The most obvious, pivotal to our understanding, is that of being evicted from shelter. The shelter in this instance is a roomy house, as comfortable as an old, baggy sweater. The brother and sister who share this space are perfectly happy in it but must leave, dislodged by forces beyond their control. The aftermath of their mysterious extrusion is that they have no one but each other to temper the encroaching loneliness. Dispossessed from the space they once shared, they will provide for each other the kind of reassurance their comfortable house once bestowed. The readers rst question is, of course, why must the siblings leave a space where they are so comfortably settled? We wonder about the mysterious, invading forces, whichlike the powerful arms that take hold of the Moteca warrior in The Night Face Upare beyond the protagonists control. A number of narrative elements in the Motecas saga justi64 Body of writing

ed our likening the pyramid where he is tied to the womb. A similar analogy can be made in House Taken Over. We know from Otto Rank that the house in general and rooms in particular are likened to the womb in the unconscious (The Incest Theme, 364). Given this, and Cortzars penchant for symbols, it seems evident that, as well as the unavoidable pain of leaving the rst comfortable space, what is being portrayed in House Taken Over is the siblings codependence. And this codependence translates one of the most common sequels to Oedipal trauma: the substitution of the sister for the mother in the aections of the displaced son. Because of her particular relationship to the father, the motherat rst worshipped as the emblem of the pure female idealcomes to be seen as unworthy of this status in the eyes of her son. Oedipal rejection recapitulates and brings to the fore the unhealed wounds of primal trauma, moreover. At the resolution of the Oedipal complex the infant comes to understand the dominance of the father and, as at birth, feels cast aside. This painful realization, as well as his profound attraction for the mother, quickly fall victim to repression andessential to our understanding of House Taken Overthe impulses associated with the mother but rejected by the individual are then associated with the siblings, automatically present as substitutes. In other words, House Taken Over enacts the expulsion that pairs o the siblings and also allows a substitutionnamely, that of the sister for the house, symbolic of the maternal bodyto take place. As usual, Cortzar proceeds step by step in his portrayal of divided loyalties, not showing his full hand in a single story. House Taken Over does not touch upon desire or attempt to elaborate how the sister is a substitute. It simply portrays the displacement of aect from mother to sister in symbolic terms, and leaves the more detailed account of sibling love to another, less-known of Cortzars parables on the theme of incest, Deshoras (Unreasonable Hours). In this story Cortzar assembles all the ingredients of the Oedipal drama but shues around characters and their roles to mask the forbidden content of the fantasy. Typically for his plots, the protagonists are adolescents: a narrator named Anbal, and Doro, his best friend. The boys are on such close terms that Anbal is described as Doros other half although, as becomes evident, the focus of their interests is different, and the device of homologating one boy to the other is simply a
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sleight of hand to portray incestuous feelings by means of an intermediary (Deshoras, 107). Another feature worth noting is that although both Anbal and Doro have mothers, Cortzar makes a point of undermining their importance and minimizing their role. Doros is an invalid about whom he never used to speak, and when Anbals makes a rare appearance, the boy thinks to himself that he would much prefer having Doros sister take care of him (107). Following the scheme laid out in House Taken Over, Cortzar casts the sister in Unreasonable Hours in the role of mother and, making sure no one will miss the full intent of this substitution, characterizes her with an unforgettable oxymoron: Doros older sister Sara, he writes, is her own brothers young mother (107). Anbal, Doros other half, comes to play everyday, although playing is really a pretext for catching a glimpse of the elusive Sara, who is aectionate but, much to Anbals chagrin, speaks to him as if from afar (108). Despite her forbearance, he begins to fantasize about her, casting her (as cherished women often are in Cortzar stories) in the roles of healer and nurse. Early on, when he is sick with bronchitis, he wishes Sara would be there bringing him his medicines and looking at the thermometer while sitting at the foot of the bed, and when his own mother shows up in the morning to rub his chest with an ointment, Anbal closes his eyes and it was Saras hand raising his night shirt, rubbing him lightly, healing him (10809). As in Nurse Cora, the boys daydreams in Unreasonable Hours usually culminate in an erotic fantasy masked as a healing session. At night, as Anbal lies in bed, he wishes Sara would place her hand on his forehead and pull down the sheets to check the cut on his calf (110). Two of Cortzars favorite motifs provide the warp and weft for this story about an adolescents carefully crafted daydreams: rst, the loved woman simultaneously cast as evasive and a healer and, second, the hands (and not the sexual organs) portrayed as the quintessential source of pleasure. Substituting the caretaker for a lover and the hands for sex organs are Cortzars attempts to mask the nature of desire from the start; however, the undercurrent of the story attains such levels that it cannot help but surface in Anbals sublimated fantasies, even when neutral words are systematically used in place of more explicitly meaningful ones. For instance, the organ that swells when Sara pulls up Anbals nightshirt and looks at him naked is his stomach (110); the soothing rub that
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heals him is applied on his chest (109); and when he wishes that Sara would come to his bedside and pull down the sheets, it is merely to check the cut on his calf (110). No matter how tacitly erotic, dreams about Sara have nothing explicitly sexual about them, Cortzar even making clear that when Anbals hands slide down under the sheets and he starts fondling himself . . . Sara never came into the picture (111, my emphasis). We are told, moreover, that that could not happen, not because the boy was unfamiliar with sexual practices (Cortzar wastes no time in letting us know that Anbal was well aware of what loving someone could be like, and would readily imagine it with Yolanda) but because, emblem of the pure female ideal, Sara must remain unsullied even in dreams (111). Anbal is no dierent from most boys who tend to see in their mother a noble, unapproachable saint while unconsciously conceptualizing her as the woman who serves the lusts of his father without a will of her own (Rank, The Incest Theme, 421). It is because of this emotional tug-of-war that, according to Rank, it becomes easier for the boy to displace his aection for the mother to the sister who is closer to him in age, maturity, and outlook. Most signicantlyand this is the section most pertinent to our discussionsince the sister has no sexual relations, the brother can hold nothing against her on this account . . . and she falls into one of the two mother rolesusually into that of the pure, chaste, adored one (421). (It is interesting to note that when, after reading Bestiario, Evelyn Picn told Cortzar that he had a problem with incest, he was startled because, as he put it, he had never thought about it on a conscious level. The observation caused him to take stock of his own dreams and to acknowledge that, in fact, [he] had an incestuous problem with a sister (quoted in Cortzar por Cortzar, 43). Even more startling, in light of his knowledge of and interest in psychoanalysis, is what he went on to say to Picn: The strangest thing is that on a conscious level, my sister and I have no relationship whatsoever. Weve never gotten along. We are like night and day; in fact, we have even despised each other at times. Now that years have gone by, and we dont see each other as much, our relationship is somewhat more cordial. But we are totally dierent. And in spite of it, I have often woken up with a start because I was dreaming that I had gone to bed with my sister (43). Cortzars long-lasting preoccupation with incest in literature takes on
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new meaning when we read this declaration. After spending over a quarter century writing stories laced with veiled and not so veiled references to itstories which, of his own admission, were written as a form of therapyhe was still dreaming he was sleeping with his sister in or around 1978 when Picn interviewed him. Obviously, after twenty-seven years of self-immersion he was still oblivious to what was obvious to shrewd readers like Picn. In all likelihood, if he had been able to cure himself, to bring the unconscious content of his stories to the fore, he would no longer have needed to write tales in which he dramatized the incestuous fantasies of adolescents. Instead, and for three decades, he went on describing the rejection felt after being ousted from the safety of a shelter; anger about mothers in general; and, last but not least, incestuous feelings. In the 1980s his heroes were as fundamentally alone as they are in the stories he wrote in the 1950s, although, once in a while, and in spite of such unrelenting loneliness, Cortzar intimated that a solution, help for pain, was at hand. When the hero or heroine is tenacious enough (as in Axolotl), or resourceful enough (as in Bestiario), a return to the safe world insidea repossession of sortscan be negotiated. The fact that these utopian outcomes happen in and through the act of writing suggests that they are all dramatizations of wishes: returns and repossession take place because the author wills them, because he writes them into the ction. Such writing had an artistic purpose, of course. The uncanniness that springs from these stories hinges on our awarenesseven at some imperceptible levelthat these returns and reunions fulll wishes that are both forbidden and shared. Identifying with Cortzars heroes and heroines, readers are made to feel that the forbidden is graspable, that in ction the most unfulllable dream can be fullled. The psychic controversy, the malaise that ensues from this realization, explains the eeriness we feel when we read The Night Face Up, or Poison. It is not the medium that is the message in these instances, but the other way around: the messagethe incest camouaged within the talesbecomes, in fact, the means to achieve the preternaturally strange eect Cortzars plots have on the reader. We dont understand where this eeriness originates not because we cannot intellectually grasp its sources but, rather, because recognizing them and our own identication with the wish fullled in the ction would imply confrontingand defying in thoughtthe cardinal taboo of our civilization.
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It is this tension between grasping and not grasping, between masking and disclosing the sources of our own malaise, that makes Cortzars stories so titillating. This is why he would not frankly portray the taboo he intimated for over thirty years. The pith of his plots had to suggest incest but be a scrubbed-down version of it. This is why the woman who shuns the almost ubiquitous adolescent in his stories is rst a neighbor (Lila in Poison), then a nurse (Nurse Cora) or a sister (in House Taken Over) and, nally, in Unreasonable Hours, the sister of someone who is ones other half, analogous to ourselves but dierent. This is also why the masterstroke in Unreasonable Hours was to introduce a doppelgnger. Because Anbal is Doros other half, one of Cortzars lustful little heroes can at last take to bed the woman he pines for and skirt the taboo of incest. Sara and Anbal are not brother and sister although he is the other half of her brother while she is the mother of her own brother. It takes Cortzar thirty years to nd the right formula of diluted kinship that he needs in order to accomplish the unspeakable in writing: Anbal will not only catch up with Sara in terms of age, he will actually take his other half s mother to bed. Most of the characters we have seen thus far nd themselves teetering somewhere between childhood and puberty. Isabel in Bestiario, the narrator in Poison, Pablito in Nurse Cora, Anbal in Unreasonable Hours are all on the cusp of adulthood; they are grandecitos but not quite grandes, which is another way of saying, willing but not yet able. Be that as it may, with the exception of the narrator in Poison, the protagonists of these stories do get some form of satisfaction from the surrogate mother. This satisfaction is always portrayed as being cared for, cuddled, kept in a state of babied dependenceexactly the tenor of Anbals fantasies in the rst half of Unreasonable Hours. The other half of the story is not so conventional, however; in fact, it is unique in Cortzars repertoire and, arguably, his best example of psychological legerdemain. Years after romping through the wilds of Bneld with his pal Doro and doting on his sister under the safe cover of his bed sheets, Anbal moves to Buenos Aires and becomes an engineer. The torch he carried for Sara as an adolescent still burns, however, so, in an eort to go on savoring the past, he decides to set down on paper his tortured memories of childhood. Like Cortzar at the beginning of his career, Anbal becomes a part-time writer, an artist a deshoras. One day, as he is coming out of his oce building in Buenos Aires, the
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young writer-cum-engineer catches a glimpse of Sara walking down the street, dressed in white (117). Wasting no time, he catches up to her and explains who he is to the very startled young woman. He is so grown up that she is unable to recognize him at rst. She, on the other hand, has not changed one bit: No, you havent changed, Anbal assures her, not even your hair style. You are just the same (118). Almighty ction freeze frames time, and lets Anbal catch up with Sara at this point. Not wanting to waste another minute, they sit down to have a drink and soon Anbal is telling Sara the story of his life: you were the young mother I didnt have, you used to take my temperature and stroke me until I fell asleep (119). In fact, Sara never did these things; this is pure fantasy on Anbals part, a rewriting of his own life to t his wishes, and one that mirrors the essence of literature, the liberating medium where anything can happen. After they reminisce for a while about their younger days, Anbal begins to tell Sara about an episode that made a deep impression on him. Doro and he had fallen into a muddy ditch and gotten terribly messy. When Sara saw them come into the house lthy up to their ears, she had sent them in to take a shower and then, as they were washing and horsing around in the bathroom, she had come in and spoken to them as if it were perfectly normal to be carrying a conversation with two naked boys. Anbal was so embarrassed with his showers transformation into a public spectacle that he wished to die for real and had never forgotten the incident (113). After carefully listening to Anbal, Sara gives her version of the story. For a start, she admits having thought at the time that, it was a pity he was just a kid, that it . . . didnt seem right. She had even wished back then he might have been ve years older (120). Because he was not, she decided to use the bathroom as a classroom to show him their love could not be, to make clear that she saw him as a kid, and nothing more. Sara claims she walked in on the two naked boys on purpose . . . because it was a way of curing [him] of [his] dream, of having [him] grasp the fact that he would never be able to look at [her] like that (120). Plainly, the young Sara was a clean, law-abiding mother gure who sought to erase incestuous thoughts from Anbals dirty mind. It is also clear that Cortzar not only abided by moral proscriptions when he wrote; he also compounded these social conventions with personal inhibitions. Since Sara and Anbal were not related, why shouldnt there be
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something between them? The answer is to be found in Cortzars design, in which Sara stands for Anbals mother twice removed. She is, in his words, the young mother of her brother, who is Anbals other half. In all the stories this chapter has discussed up to now, a social or psychological proscription precludes the fulllment of forbidden longings. Unreasonable Hours is the rst and only time in Cortzars ction that a forbidden longing is fullled and punishment is not meted out. The rst half of the story contains the moral interdictions Cortzar typically portrays: a boy meets a girl, the girl looks after the boy, the boy hopes for more than a soothing backrub but fails to get what he is after. In the second half, after Sara reveals her morally correct stance, she gives in to their mutual longing and they nd a room where the endless meeting of their bodies repeatedly culminates in a furious bodily frenzy that is less and less believable each time (121). And then the biggest surprise: the entire scene of their unexpected encounter after so many years, the taxi ride to a room that either he or she knew about, the frenzied implosionall take place not on white sheets but on blank pages written by Anbal, whose lifelong wish is at last consummated by and through the pen. In other words, Cortzar the writer fullls a wish by portraying Anbal the writer who writes a scene of fulllment in which his longing is satised. The dynamics at play here recall the Escher drawing of a hand drawing a hand which is drawing the original hand drawing it. The scene is also written as if it were true; in other words, the reader is made to believe that Anbal really sleeps with Sara, the stand-in for the mother in Cortzars canny scenario. Intercourse takes place only in the imagination of the character imagined by the author but, actually, it need not take place anywhere else in order for the wish to be fullled. Literature can exorcise demons and execute wishes through dramatization, which is why it works as therapy. Coming out It took Cortzar thirty years to work through the demon of incest and put this notion to rest. The dismembered hands, the burrowing animals, and the appetite for darkness so typical of his stories dramatize a universal longing he kept masked for three decades. Masked though
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it was, this longing was nonetheless fullled through writing both by Anbal in Unreasonable Hours, and, more signicantly, by Cortzar himself using Anbal as his proxy. Such fulllment and, particularly, the means through which it was obtained suggests that the stories we have read can all be likened to infantile scenarios in which imagining the implementation of an action is tantamount to having that action take placethe kind of game which is at the very source of storytelling, in other words. Doubtlessly, because he was intent on exploring the sources of writing, Cortzar was drawn to the tale of origins and made it the starting point of stories in which he cast a dark, sheltering space as the heart of longing. As time went by, the contours of the space he had originally portrayed as the enveloping folds of a sweater, the recesses of a pyramid, a womans bedroom became more specic. What the adolescent heroes of Bestiario, Poison, and Miss Cora long for is no longer a space but a body, specically the body of a woman who is as reassuring in her way as the engulng wool in Dont Blame Anyone, and the cavernous maw in The Night Face Up. Almost without exception, the longing of Cortzars heroes is never attenuated. Even when a womansuch as Nurse Cora, for instancereturns the heros love, the stories seem to say that whatever sets o longing cannot itself be grasped. This message is clear, inescapable, and a source of frustration both to his heroes and to the reader, compelled to identify with them. We are given to understand there are valid reasons for the unfulllability of the heros wish, and made aware that this wish is linked (in Bestiario, for instance), to something forbidden, albeit unvoiced within the tale. Sensing without fully grasping the actual nature of the forbidden yearning within these stories doesnt just enhance their uncanniness, it becomes the very source from which uncanniness springs forth. Master articer, Cortzar creates ominous scenarios by dramatizing a wish that is at the root of all prohibitions. The body he alludes to is not just a forbidden body but the most forbidden of all. Forbidden and yet craved, which explains why the narrator of Dont Blame Anyone attempts to cower back into his sweater, why the Moteca doesnt want to leave the tunnel, why Lucho clamors to get back into Dinas room, and why the hero of Axolotl projects himself into a warm, liquid world. Returning to the sheltered dungeon of a pyramid is as impossible as

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obtaining Coras love, however, which is why thwarting the fulllment of these wishes is portrayed as death. Readers of Bestiario or Blow-Up feel ill at ease upon completing these stories, without knowing why. Mistaking queasiness for eeriness, no doubt, they fail to see how the malaise that these scenarios evoke comes from within. Identifying with the heroes plight, and grasping how the wish for returning to a lost, protected harbor or possessing a perpetually elusive woman is taboo, we sense at some level that such wish is vicariously our own. We want Cora to give in to Pablito, Sara to yield to Anbal, Rema to place her soothing hand on Isabels head and give her the caress as if of death she longs to have. We are implicitly aware that wishing these wishes carries a moral onus even when the portent of such onus is never made explicit in the stories themselves. Cortzar may not make his readers wish the murderer would kill the victim, but he does make us hope the guilty yearning at the heart of his scenarios will be fullled. We become guilty by proxy, therefore, and it is from the conict waged between our guilt and our own desire to have the hero surmount all obstacles that the special brand of uncanniness characteristic of Cortzar issues forth. In other words, the body of the mother, always masked in his stories, is not just cast as the longed-for body but, also, as the body eliciting the readers guilt. That is, Cortzar creates discomfort and uneasiness not through invoking extraneous fear but by making his readers complicit. The real bogeyman in his extraordinary tales turns out to be not a tiger in a country house but our own conscience. Forcing readers to confront the burden of their own feelings of longing, Cortzar creates one of the most pernicious monsters ever conceived because it bites from within. In his work the safe harbor commonly suggested by the mothers body is turned into a racking prison cell, into a house pestered by a wild beast, into a choking embrace. Nevertheless, his characters continue to covet the shelter, the refuge, and the warmth of that body, and we the readers are made to identify with their yearning in a process that taints our own original love with guilty feelings. The fact is, the maternal body is both the heart of the mystery in the stories we have looked at, and a lure to the reader, a port of entry that invites a psychological commotion to take place. Only writing can heal the wound that being torn from that body has

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rent. Only writing can bridge the gap that keeps Arcadia far-removed. This is why Cortzar contrives Unreasonable Hours and craftily conceives a deputy for himself: Anbal the author who writes a scenario in which his deepest wish comes true. Transforming wishes into actions in writing does much more than get Anbal what he wants, moreover; it also heals the wound that has festered during thirty years by putting an end to Cortzars obsession with incest. Cortzars obsession ends with Unreasonable Hours, but not our story, which is the story of that obsession. After all, nothing ends without leaving a trace, and Cortzars stories are no exception. Lest we forget, he always maintained that his obsessions were more guardian demons than avenging angels, purveyors of a torment that was both painful and useful. They became sources for his plots and were cherished because dramatizing them gave him and the reader the illusion that wishes can come true. None preoccupied him more than the feelings of separation and loss, which he perceived as the core of the human legacy. This is why he wrote for thirty years about the nostalgia linked with origins. The tormented scenarios he crafted leave a trace that was in all likelihood personalone, in any event, with which his readers readily identied. His exploration of loss shed light on the very genesis of fear and took him straight to the sources of longing, to the original love story. Like the narrator of T. S. Eliots Little Gidding, Cortzar never ceased from exploration, and the end of all his exploring was to arrive where we started and know the place for the rst time (The Complete Poems and Plays, 145). The pain connected with this starting place was insurmountable as well as unforgettable but, resourceful to the end, Cortzar cunningly transformed it, through writing, into our pleasure.

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2
More than meets the I: Guillermo Cabrera Infantes La Habana para un Infante difunto i

And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of ame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of re And the re and the rose are one T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Tales such as The Night Face Up, Bestiario, and Nurse Cora are exceptional in terms of disclosure even if disclosure is not readily apparent on their surface. Cortzar distanced his stories from himself, and their deep meaning from his readers, by introducing uncanny elements such as tigers in country houses and cockroaches in chocolate coating, subterfuges that make one focus more on the plot than on the symbolical allusions it contains. What happens if instead a writer were to dispense with such distancing devices and make disclosures within a realistic context assembled from elements borrowed from his or her own life? What if such refurbished autobiography turns out to be perfectly accurate, mimetic in terms of setting, albeit somewhat exaggerated, a crafty transformation as true to the original as a highly polished surface is to a stone in the rough? Works of this sort are not as infrequent as one might think. Stretching the denition of autobiography a bit, we might say that Rousseaus Confessions and Joyces Portrait of the Artist fall in this category, for instance. Both present altered portraits of their respective authors as circumstantial performers, although it is interesting to note that they do not really reveal

the phantoms which fuel the ction. Such phantoms are highly conspicuous in Cortzars fantasies, as we have seen. Doubtless because his stories are couched in metaphorical terms and are not explicitly revelatory of the problems that haunted him, Cortzar was able to give free rein to his unconscious. In the process of creating he was not confessing anything overtly; he was writing about Motecas being made ready for sacrice or about hapless victims trapped within the narrow sleeve of a sweaternot, to all appearances, about primal trauma or the problem of incest. Because he was comfortable with sublimation he was extraordinarily candid about portraying the obsessions that engrossed him. His work has extraordinary variety but also extraordinary consistency. It is astonishing to see, for instance, how few motifs he relied on, and how frequently they appear in his work. Cortzar was so remarkably obsessive that, for the critic approaching his writings, it becomes relatively easy to look at the tracks he left behind and put together the pieces of his personal puzzle. Tracks are not always so readily apparent in more blatant confessions. This is what I mean when I say that works belonging to this genre do not usually reveal the phantasms that fuel the ction. Confessions tend to be so intentional about revealing private moments that they show no cracks through which the unrehearsed voice of the author can be heard. Which is to say, if revelations become purposeful or written on command they lose the candor they were intended to have in the rst place. For instance, in his Confessions Rousseau recognized he liked older women, but his admission did not reveal the nature of his attachment. It certainly did not reveal how much that attachment was a constitutive part of him, a fundamental cell of his mental universe. On the other hand, when Cortzar dwells on breathing disorders, darkness, and tunnels he is not coldly and clinically acknowledging an attachment similar to Rousseaus, he is actually portraying the pangs of separation in full, anguished detail by means of symbols. Writing about such trauma in terms that represent a repressed complex through unconscious association frees him from the censorship imposed by modesty. The bodyhis own obsessional bodyunravels itself and becomes the stu of ction. It may appear that in contrasting Rousseaus Confessions with Cortzars opaque disclosures I am suggesting that realism and a mimetic context deter rather than invite revelations. Actually, there are a number
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of works which bring together straightforward revelations typical of the confessional mode, and unconscious but profoundly revealing elements that shed light on the psychological needs of an author, many of the very needs that want to be told and are responsible for orchestrating a work of ction in the rst place. A womb with a view Among these works is a relatively unknown, ribald rite of passage written in 1979 by Cuban-born Guillermo Cabrera Infante. La Habana para un Infante difunto (Infantes Inferno [1984]), a thinly disguised and very exaggerated autobiography, is often dismissed because it is perceived as politically incorrect, a belated and out of tune manifesto of machismo. If Don Juan had sat down to write about his own exploits, and bragged about his liaisons while describing them in full detail, his catalogue of conquests might have read somewhat like Cabrera Infantes. This comparison needs to be immediately qualied, however, because, unlike Don Juans, the long list of entanglements described in La Habana is rife with failures. What it does have in common with Don Juans catalogue is that the narrator exploits women as sex objects; he is cruel, calculating, and selsh; howeveralthough this is no attempt to excuse himhe is no harder on them than he is on himself. Disrobing himself in public, Infantes hero readily admits how seldom he got what he wanted in life, and his dog-eared catalogue soon reveals more frustrated attempts than successful conquests. Despite all the humor in this bawdy reckoning of heartbreaks, La Habana is a book full of angst, a tropical cocktail shaken with blood, sweat, and tears. We laugh, but once we grasp the heros dilemma we laugh as we do at Menippean satire: to hold back the tears. In fact, La Habana is as much about the sources of writing as it is about sex. The novels Gargantuan originality is that it shows how both are interwoven. Writing down personal experiences by means of an alter ego, Cabrera Infante reveals the convoluted relationship between the psyche, the pen, and the fable. And because it is well-nigh impossible to open the mind without engaging the body, he writes a book where sex is a vital concern. This concern is apparent from the very rst pages of the novel. Cramped in a one-room apartment where he is impelled to attune a gawky body to the fanciful rhythms of a wayward mind, the twelve-year-old narrator
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dreams about love and rhapsodizes about esh. The action begins in 1941, at a time when his family has just moved to the Cuban capital. The spindly adolescent has the impression that he has died and gone to heaven. He is smitten with trolley cars, dazzled by lights and the equally luminous characters who people his tenement building, veritable walking novels who enact the human comedy a step away from his door. On occasion, the performance of these walking novels borders on the bewildering, and (no doubt because the heros standard of perfection is the silver screen) life in La Habana always imitates art. What the hero sees or, rather, what he describes is transgured by the magniloquent wand of Hollywood, dating from one fateful Sunday when a family friend took him to a double feature at a neighborhood theater. From that day, movies become the only lasting passion he knows as a teenager. Passion in the context crafted by Cabrera Infante must be taken literally, moreover. In the womby darkness of seedy theaters, platonic caves before the screen, movies in this novel become amalgamated with erotic experience. Watching and feeling his way simultaneously, all hands and eyes, the hero fullls much more than the screen dreams that whet his appetite: he rubs elbows, squeezes thighs, and plays, whenever possible, his own variations on a theme by peg a ninny with sultry silhouettes picked up at random in the dark. In his mind, erotic experience is so inextricably bound with the movies (my eeting love for any woman linked up with my eternal passion for the movies, 78) that characters in the novel begin to cross the proscenium and enter the screen, inducing him to reminisce, I was submerged in the moviehouseas much among the shadows of the screen as amid the gures in the seats (99). Later in the novel, the least coy of his mistresses, Margarita del Campo, arouses him with a faintly lit striptease vividly recorded as a shot in black and white, a scene taken . . . from Von Sternbergs visual repertoire, while his sexual mentor, Julieta Estvez, is brought to life as a show in slow motion (630, 582). This trac from one medium to anotherfrom life to literature ltered through the moviesis in no way startling coming from a man who describes himself as a magic lantern and who readily admits, Im not just a plain old camera, Im a movie camera (596, 537). The narrator of Cabrera Infantes novel identies so closely with the camera that he remembers scenes from life as shots that freeze reality and lay bare its ctional nature. Even body parts are pictured in the language of the screen
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in what amounts to a veritable osmosis from one genre (the movies) to another (the novel we are reading). For example, the most obsessive guration in the satire, the vagina, is consistently depicted as a camera the hymen the focus, the vulva the lens, the clitoris the shutter, the secretion the silver saltson the basis of a transference of sense cunningly founded on the popular Cuban notion that to see a naked cunt was to take a photograph of yourself (475). It soon becomes obvious that for the narrator, what was taking place on the screen was . . . both life and theatre (223). It is this fascination with gazing and make-believe that always drives him toward women who are performers: Julieta, who reaches the peak of passion to the strains of Debussys La Mer, artfully mimics the pose of Goyas Naked Maja during their love sessions in the afternoon (conscious of art even during those moments when she should have been least aware of it, 368), and both she and Margarita make their living from the stage. Honey Hawthorne (in the English version of the novel)Dulce Espina (in the Spanish)is both an ex-ballerina and a high priestess of literature (440), and the young maid who embodies the heros fascination with nannies and ancillary employees enacts a false scene snatched with impunity from a soap opera (Swear to me that you love me with all your heart) as a preamble to their love tryst (514). But what of all the others, the thousand and one memorable and not so memorable faces who linger, albeit eetingly, in the pages of Cabrera Infantes catalogue? As the narrator longingly admits, these are no more than sour gropes (I.I., 81). One after another, they inspire one-sided love (137), loves labor lost (288), impotence, lovelessness, deception, and even in one instancewhen in the heat of passion he bites the beefy shoulders of a one-night standbroken dentures. Like the beleaguered Chinaman who will not give up the laundree without seeing the tickee, Infantes hero will not respond to sex without the rousing prick of performance, the allure of celluloid. The screen is such a magnetic pole of attraction because mediating space and unreachable women appeal to him best of all. Like screen stars, the girls he meets during his years in the tenement building are living proof of his self-declared attraction to impossible love objects (47), women who either turn away from him (The history of my erotic life in Zulueta 408, that stretch of my sexual via crucis, that station on my road to passion seems like a long and languid initiation to failure . . . 151), or put him in a state similar to that of his own panicked penis: cowering,
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folded back upon itself, reduced from fear of all the esh within its reach (78). The reasons ascribed to his many sexual failures are legion; they include accidents, forgotten addresses, mothers in adjoining rooms, and even imminent mutilation (161). We can sum up his sex life by saying that he fails in the esh and succeeds with loves from the world of shadows, the women he picks up in the movies or those who work on stage (89, 138). Readers of Infantes Inferno cannot help wondering what this dierence between the world of esh and the world of shadows indicates, or what this contrast in sexual prowess suggests about Cabrera Infantes personal obsessions. As we set out to unravel the many mysteries in La Habana, we discover that Cabrera Infantehimself an ardent fan of the whodunitloads his satire with clues to help us unravel them. It soon becomes apparent, for instance, that the novels main riddle can be charted from a number of intimations focusing on the eye of both beholder and beheld. The screen may be the cynosure of La Habana s perennially tangled wooer, but in watching movies, what most thrills him is what comes rst: not the movies but the act of gazing. As far as he is concerned, the eye is a lonely hunter and he has no intention of keeping his closed. In the chapter titled La vision del mirn miope (the novels English version explains, The Spanish word for voyeur, mirn [from mirar, to look], indicated someone who looked a lot or persistently, but it isnt quite the same as voyeur or Peeping Tom, a kind of pervert who in sexology manuals is called a scopophiliac, [ I.I., 209]), the hero makes no bones about his perverse proclivitythe obsession with looking, la mana de miraran endeavor at which he becomes procient when a friend lends him a pair of eld glasses, and he moves to a well-exposed apartment in the fashionable Vedado neighborhood of Havana (399). Many years before moving to Vedado, a couple of formative encounters had already given the narrator a taste for what would later become a full-blown passion. His rst experience with peeping takes place when he climbs to the roof of his rst Havana home and happens to look across the street to the windows of the Hotel Pasaje. There, on that fateful day, and structuring his magnetic mania for life, he spots a naked blond, her shiny body completely smeared with vaseline or, better yet, with butter (I.I., 116). This blond Venus is available to the naked eye yet mercifully unreachable, a vision, he will later admit, that remains ideal to this day (116).
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Years later, parapeted in his Vedado (a word which, besides being the name of a neighborhood, means forbidden in Spanish) viewing platform, his eeting glimpses of bodies in apartments across the street arouse him like a meretricious madeleine: voluptuous yet untouchable, voluptuous because untouchable. His reaction to them makes him immediately aware of the role that watching plays in the dynamics of his sexual desire: the spyglasses became a projection of my body, he admits, making the eye tactile. It could touch the prisoners of my eye, and when they undressed, it was I who removed with my outstretched ngers the garment whose absence turned them into precious gems (I.I., 214). Such a fervent gazing impulse, as we know from Freud, can be traced to the childs curiosity toward the sexual life of the parents. Freud links scopophilia with the primal scene and suggests that the xation with viewing masks the infants fascinated horror at discovering the fathers pride of place vis--vis the mother during coitus. The motherrst love objectbecomes substituted for the desire to look on, a gazing impulse which is the closest the infant can come to holding on to the body it wishes to have all to himself. Freud assures us that for the voyeur a split is always maintained between the object observed and the source from which the impulse originates. By this he means that the locus of pleasure for the scopophiliac is found in the stimulated organ itself (i.e., in the eye); in addition, in order to fulll the dynamics of the voyeurs sexual response, in order to force his gaze and thus stimulate the locus of pleasure, the object of desire needs to be at a distance. Considering the design of La Habana para un Infante difunto, it comes as no surprise that the dynamics of cinema watching should include many of the same elements that arouse the voyeur. Like the infant hiding behind the door to its parents room, in the peepers dark paradise of the movie house we stare, unseen, and as if through a keyhole, at the tantalizing phantoms ickering on a white sheet. The analogy between voyeuristic pleasure and cinema watching does not end here. In his insightful The Imaginary Signier, Christian Metz expounds on how, at the movies, the actor is always present when the spectator is not (at the moment of lming), whereas the spectator is present when the actor no longer is (the projection). An analogous staging of absence and presence takes place in the act of voyeurism: the Peeping Tom watches a love scene from which he is physically absent, and gets his pleasure alone while excluding the participants of the very act which stimulated him. The cinema viewer or
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voyeur must do without any signs of recognition; Lobjet vu ignore son spectateur, writes Metz, and it is this feature which Cabrera Infante so cannily translates in order to model and structure his heros xation: Infante the protagonist will only be aroused when the love object is distant, elusive, or an actress (who is both distant and elusive). Loving from afar, the narrators early infatuations are always unrequited (It was, it had to be, a one-sided love, [ I.I., 137]). Wishing to keep his distance, he also prefers imagination to consummation: I think I did the right thing in not touching her, he reects of a beautiful naked back he watches one afternoon at the movies, [I think I did the right thing] . . . in not stretching out my nger until I could touch her because her destiny was to become the epitome of all the backs Ive ever seen and longed for (I.I., 184). As Metz suggests, one of the key elements in the dynamics of voyeurism is that the object observed ignores its spectator (88). This is why in La Habana the woman who most arouses the narrators passion, Margarita del Campo, gets his attention by means of her uncanny ability to watch him without seeing him: I mean to say that she looked my way but her gaze went right through my body, piercing me as if I were all air, invisible, and she didnt even notice my intruding presence: the source of my stare . . . never existed for her (525). What holds Margarita dear to Infante is, clearly, her denial of his person, the lack of all recognition, of allas Freud puts itsigns of agreement from the part of the object (General Introd., 201). In fact, the narrator readily admits, That reduction to the absurd of nothingness with an annihilating, unseeing glare made her unforgettable: I didnt see her for a long time but I didnt forget her. You see, its impossible to forget the eyes of the unwitting Gorgon (535). Focusing on the eye, the hero of Infantes saga establishes relationships predicated on gazing, not on contact. Gazing is but a part of the neurotic cluster portrayed in this novel, however. It informs the nature of the heros one-sided relationships, and this unusual penchant feeds right into his enjoyment of pleasure taken in isolation. He readily admits, for instance, I always liked to go alone . . . to enjoy the solitary pleasure of the movies (192). The movies satisfy him because they fulll a sexual need that can be swiftly dened in six words of the Spanish language: se mira pero no se toca. Seeing but not touching also explains his fascination with Joseph Cottens tireless but unsuccessful pursuit of Alida Valli in The Third Man (254). What Valli represents for Cotten, all screen actors
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represent for the public; this is no doubt what the narrator means when he states, bodies didnt exist in the movies, spiritist sex sessions (191). If bodies do not exist in the movies and our scopophiliac narrator concedes that the picture palace is his favorite place for romance (197), we can conclude that bodily contact is not one of his priorities (he makes no bones about it, actually, claiming, for instance, those womenthe ones discovered from my balconyshould remain virgin, always distant [409]). Distant virgins do not usually make ideal bed partners, however; elusive as the pictures on the screen, they keep the narrator in a perpetual state of frustration. This longing is compounded because on the rare occasions when the hero has a date or visits a prostitute he cant perform. Or, I should say, he usually cant perform. As it turns out, there are three major exceptions to his xation on distant virgins: Julieta Estvez, Margarita del Campo, and Honey Hawthorne. Bringing sex appeal as well as confusion into our reading of the plot, these three women break the rule of the narrators one-sided loves. After considering the frustrated heros fondness for the movies and the strong appeal that aloof, untouchable women exert upon him, we concluded that he was specially drawn to impossible loves. Now we are saying that he has at least three full-edged relationships in the course of the novel. Infantes narrator is able to have sexual intercourse, it is true, but the key to his curious sexual xation is that the three women he performs with are all performers of one sort or another. Shared by every man who gazes at them from the safety of his seat, they are not exclusively the heros partners. We can say, therefore, that when performance does not catalyze the heros relationships, sex fails. In fact, failure is such a major component of the dynamics of love in this novel that the narrator bluntly declares at one point, a love poem is a declaration of impotence even when (or no doubt because ) he is writing a celebration of love (420). The question we need to ask ourselves at this point is, what is Infante saying about his heros sexual partners? Is his peeping performer impotent or merely confused? Because La Habana is ostensibly autobiographical, we could say that this pavane for a dead infant lays bare the authors obsessional world. Infante the character siphons o features from Infante the author, acting out behaviors which mirror the preoccupations of both. The rst and most obsessive preoccupation is sex. But why is Infante putting sex on the
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billboards in bold letters when the protagonist is so frequently unfullled, and even impotent? And if the hero is unfullled, why does he go on running after images and denying real bodies? Why doesnt he grasp what he most covets? In short, why is he still a virgin after fraternizing with not one, but three prostitutes? Why does he declare that in order to become a performer he had to stop being a spectator (319)? Wouldnt refusing to perform, as he puts it, contradict the very needs the hero clamors about in over seven hundred pages? Those needs are paradoxically fullled only through the eye that functions as the doorway to gratication but also as a protective screen. Like the hand in Cortzar, the eye in La Habana alludes to the heros personal trauma directly but symbolically by not making public that the xation with gazing from afar is strongly suggestive of the primal scene. This statement invites another comparison with Cortzar. The author of Bestiario uses uncanny features to distract and beguile the reader, to steer our interest away from the personal problem imbedded in the story line. Cabrera Infante does the same but he relies on raunchy humor and explicit sex. These distracting features shield our view from something forbidding. And what could be more forbidding than the raw exhibitionism of his ribald satire? The orphic cave When he was just twenty-nine days old, the narrator of La Habana was brought to the temple of the seventh art by his mother. In an initiatory ceremony to a religion that binds them together for the rest of their lives, Zoila creates for her son a second umbilical cord that welds him to movie watching as tightly as it did to herself (212). While he is almost born with a silver screen in (his) mouth, sheand it is not immediately clear whyis alienated by the bedsheet with lm shadows (211). To grasp why the narrator feels his mother is alienated by the screen which he describes as a bedsheet, we need to understand that, as he sees it, Zoila is a faithful wife capable of being unfaithful to [his] father . . . (212). Zoilas unfaithfulness is not of a conventional nature, however. Hand in hand with her son, partners in crime, the mother in La Habana ees into the womb of movie palaces to share her secret passion with her infant, and not with her husband. Their ights into dark theaters remind the narrator of their rst sojourn together, the solo ight they shared
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before his birth: Now the two of us were going, as in the rst days . . . on our way to the Orphic cave (212). For this reason, it is not surprising that in his memoirs, and echoing Metz, Infante should refer to the screen as the bedsheet that alienates his mother. After all, the bedsheet in question is their bedsheet as opposed to the bedsheet she shares with his father. It is the emblem of her disloyalty to the man she married and, at the same time, the token of her exclusive relationship with her son. Movies are important both as site and symbol in La Habana. They are a place to love and the place of love because the bedsheet ickering in the dark literally turns on the libidinal switch wired by the woman who brought the narrator to the Orphic cave. Movies are the spacethe time and placethat binds together mother and son; they are both their shared sin and his wish fullled: the sanctuary from which Laius is excluded. In the dark movie palace, the infante difunto can have his mother to himself. She can be seen but not touched, however: this is the price for having exclusive rights over her. A small price to pay, really, when we consider that only he, the narrator, has free access to the altar. The hero and his mother commune in the dark, and their communion sancties the bedsheet with ickering shadows, investing it with a sense of pleasure because in his mind it is associated with her. By a process of metonymy, Ma becomes linked with maw, the cavernous darkness of movie theaters conceptualized as a spacious, welcoming womb in the heros mind. Entering this womb with a view he recaptures the original feeling of well-being and communion with his mamma. The space itself is so coated with pleasure that it, in turn, conditions a mania. From his rst visit to the movies in the company of the woman he loves, objects of desire will be cast in the same lightand with the same proscriptionas she: se mira pero no se toca. It follows that actresses, women who fall in the same category as mothers insofar as they can be seen but not touched, will become the ideal love objects. At the movies perfect pleasure can be had for the price of a ticket. In the outside world the dynamics of pleasure are not so simple; the narrator must recreate the conditions which the movie theatre provides if fulllment is to be attained. His xation requires watching from a distance, so voyeurism becomes his modus operandi because it reenacts both the primal scene (from which he was excluded), and his rst visit to the movies (from which he was not). During the rst, he observed his parents from a distance; during the second, he had his mother to himself. La
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Habana, a tale of sound and fury told by a now-grown infante, unfolds as a telling and retelling of two scenesone of exclusion, one of inclusion and if this is not always evident it is because they are both wrapped in the delusive tinsel of frustrated sex. Cave at emptor At this point, and not unlike Cabrera Infante himself, who approaches the most important subjects indirectly, I would like to set aside our discussion about the role of the mother and approach it from a dierent perspective after clarifying one feature that is intrinsic to its sphere of action in the novel. At least as present as the theme of maternal hegemony is a persistent correlation between movie theaters and caves, leviathans and wombs in La Habana para un Infante difunto. Cabrera Infante may be a punster nonpareil but he is an even better master of the metaphor who builds his ction through a remarkably intricate network of associations. The rst reference to the cave appears early in the novel, soon after the heros arrival in the capital. Along with his parents and brother he spends the night in a cheap hotel, sleeping all bundled together, the four of us crowded into the same bed (25). The infamous inn or posada (the true nature of which becomes evident from the moaning and groaning heard later that night) is referred to as an Aeolian cave (27), a label which is likewise given to the rst love motel the narrator visits with Dulce Espina (463). This posada is in turn compared to a movie theater (this seemed more than ever the ticket window of a cheap movie theatre, the narrator notes as they go in [463]), and, further, to the womb: the multiple corridors seemed even narrower . . . a hallway that led to the cubicle . . . then . . . another passageway (463). This last identication becomes more explicit in the scene with the chambermaid when, during lovemaking, the hero plunges forward through a soft gully until he reached her ooded cave (517). The analogy between caves, movie theaters, and wombs develops as a full-edged leitmotif in the epilogue. In this section, called Funcin continua, the hero enters a theatre in hot pursuit of a blond. He sits next to her, and after staring for some time without getting a response, he lets his hand casually drop to her knee, then, when she doesnt seem to mind, to her bosom. The woman roars with laughter, not at him, apparently, but at
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a Pluto cartoon she is watching on the screen. Then, without batting an eyelash, she removes his hand from her breast, and returns it to her knee. She begins by squeezing it so hard between her thighs that she almost breaks his knuckles, but eventually she lets her legs fall open. Encouraged, the narrator begins a slow dive, not to the bottom of the sea but to the steamy swamp between her thighs. His disembodied hand, a Frankenstein monster . . . with ideas of its own turns into a sexual climber, crawls by itself up her garter, crosses the bulge of her cheap old-fashioned garters, and nds its nal cradle, endlessly crotched (I.I., 397). The woman has no panties on. Without wasting a minute hes inside Pandoras box but, instead of spilling out its contents, the greedy little box begins to engulf the narrators belongings: rst his wedding ring, then his wristwatch and, nally, his cu links. The woman, eager beaver suddenly turned eagle scout, hands the narrator a ashlight, and spreads her legs wide open, placing each on either arm of her seat. Not stopping to count his blessings, he begins cutting a path through the bushy hedge (403). As he pokes his head inside the opening, his shoulders slip through, and he feels afraid of getting stuck. Using his elbows as fulcrum and arms as lever, he achieves the opposite of the eect desired: the entrance becomes a sloping channel and he is swallowed in (402). Realizing he has lost his left shoe during the skirmish, he considers crawling back out, but when he peers through the orice into which he has fallen, all he can see is himself facing a dark lobby with a mauve bell up above and some deep purple hangings along the sides (404). As he continues to feel his way inwardly he realizes he is in a soft cave, more precisely, inside a pear-shaped salon (404). There is a sudden tremor at that point and he slides downward again, suddenly alone in a womans world (404). He nds a book with a Latin inscription which reads, Ovarium, corpus luteus, labium majus, matrix, tubae Falloppi (405). Without understanding a word, he declares it to be a book about books (405). The title of this books rst chapter is Cave at Emptor and it contains fragments from a diary or a ships log taken from Jules Vernes Journey to the Center of the Earth. The log entries quoted by Cabrera Infante refer almost exclusively to the sighting of terrible monsters: crocodiles with huge jaws and rows of teeth, whales with enormous ns, voracious creatures which lived deep down under the surface, and left enormous gashes and dents on any surface they could sink their teeth into, huge, dark hillocky bodies with
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appetites so unsatiable that a hundred whales a day would be insucient to satisfy (4056). As he reaches the last page in the log, in a scene reminiscent of The Night Face Up, the narrator is shaken by seismic spasms and feels his body moving along the oor. He is carried into an alluviated area where he oats in a pool of a mud-like substance; everything around him turns red, and the pool oor begins to shake, the whole basin boiling over like a pressure cooker about to explode (409). Like the characters in Vernes book he is caught in the middle of an eruption; unlike them, however, he is deeply concerned that he will be thrown out, expelled, rejected, vomited, spat into the air (410). Allowing himself to oat in the amniotic uid of memories, and as he is about to wake up screaming, he falls instead into a horizontal abyss (410). The fantasies that pullulate throughout this dream reiterate in the space of a few pages what the narrator has been saying all along: namely, that there is no place like home, and that if the infante is now difunto it is becauselike the heroes of Cortzars storieshe was cast o from paradise. It is clear from the outset that his main worry in the epilogue is that this might happen again (I.I., 410). As Rodrguez Monegal maintains (and against my own expressed opinion in an earlier article), Cabrera Infantes infante does not, in fact, emerge from the cave; he begins to spin in a wild whirlpool with no center and falls into a horizontal abyss (410). Once in the abyss he declares, heres where I came in, the very words we say at the movies when we reach the scene that was on the screen when we entered the theater (410). As expressed in the epilogue of Infantes Inferno, then, the heros wish is to stay inside the cave; this is precisely the reason he is stripped of the three elements that tie him to the outside world: his wedding band, symbol of the social contract; his watch, emblem of time; and his cu links or yugos, the singular of which translates as yoke or bondage. The obsessional contents of the dream are as revealing as the elements from which the hero is stripped before reentering the womb. For instance, the emphasis on leviathans able to gulp down a hundred whales a day and leave teeth marks as a tantalizing reminder of their ability to engulf make us recall Freuds observations about animal phobias, particularly his suggestion that big animals that swallow represent the unconscious wish to return to the womb (I.I., 407). In addition, the book the hero nds and refers to as the book of books is a trope of the female
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sex; not only does it contain a description of the female reproductive system within its cover (Ovarium, corpus luteus, labium majus, matrix, tubae Falloppi), but also, the leather lips that bind it assimilate it to the object portrayed within its pages (706; I.I., 405). Handling the book in the cave, the narrator is both held within and holding the symbol of the object he covets; like Alice on her way to Wonderland, he is simultaneously gripping and enclosed by the space he reveres. Cabrera Infante writes a book of books which evokes, as we have seen, the female sexual organs. He clothes a wish in autobiographical trappings, but distances it from his readersunable to see the tree for the woodsby staging the novel as a catalogue of conquests. So many women show their faces in this compulsively long chronicle because, ultimately, they are all slippery reenactments of the rst one, remembrances of loins past which, bringing to mind the primordial womb, are unattainable by denition or, rather, by association. In the epilogue to his catalogue Cabrera Infante reveals how far from the bush his tree of life has grown. The herono longer an infante but about to be rebornenters the cave and nds a book which stands for the womb he has lost, that is to say, the longed-for object adumbrated throughout the novel. In this serendipitous discovery we can see more than one statement regarding the narrators origins. With it not only does he go back to the source of life, he faces up to the sources of writing: his own, at least. After all, Cabrera Infante is an author of books and, like Cortzar, he is able to createthat is, to recoverthe lost cave through writing, and only through writing. In other words, he reveals the desire to reenter the womb by writing about it, and writing about it makes it possible to fulll his wish. In the epilogue the Infante comes home to stay. La Habana para un Infante difunto exists because he wrote his longing for the body that catapulted him into the outside world, and became a writer to write himself into it again, to put himself back in the place that in his eyes or, rather, in his wishful thinking, he should have never left. Sharp blades Having inquired into the authors desire, and witnessed its fulllment in the oneiric epilogue, we are now ready to examine the way in which he portrays the object of that desire in more mimetic passages. Is Cabrera
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Infantes longing for the womb conditioned by real events, one wonders, and if so, how was such longing set o in reality and, presumably, curtailed? Since the novel portrays a rite of passage and culminates with a wish fullled, shouldnt we also take time to examine how this wish was conceived? Does it come into the world as pure gment or does the reality portrayed in the novel keep it alive? With this new quest in mind, we can backtrack and pick up a thread we began to unravel earlier in our discussion; we are ready to examine the triangular relationship between the narrator and his parents. To say that in La Habana para un Infante difunto the relationship between the narrator and Zoila, his mother, is an uncommon one would fall short of an understatement. Zoilas presence permeates the ction and conditions the heros response to every aspect of life including sex. As a matter of fact, we are led to believe that his sexual appetites evolve as a reaction to her. For instance, the narrator explains his preference for small breasts by saying that they returned him to the maternal breast because his mother had small tits (468; I.I., 249). Later in the action, deeply aroused by a chambermaid, he ponders over his rapture and nds at the bottom of it the recognition, in the maids body, of his own mothers particular smell, the same kind of talcum powder my mother used to buy (I.I., 514). These are not the only times when thoughts of mother enter his mind during an episode of lovemaking, moreover. When Margarita praises him halfheartedly after their rst time together, he cannot help thinking, Was there something in her tone of the mother who doesnt reward the son but who doesnt want to hurt him either? (575). It is startling, to say the least, that the narrator should associate sexual intercourse both with his mother and with ascos in bed. His mothers own behavior (ltered, it is true, through Cabrera Infantes powers of recall) is no less abbergasting. One day, when the spent hero comes home after an afternoon with Margarita, it is she, the mother, and not his wife, who demands, Where have you been until now?, prompting him to remark, Its clear that it should have been my wife who asked me that question (601). The heros mother is not only nosy, she is also clinging, a stern judge who expects to be obeyed and demands to know his whereabouts at all times. Whenever he gives her the slip (usually to go hunting for girls), she invariably turns into a fury, and interrogates him police style upon his return (I.I., 9192; 438; I.I., 230). Turned into a meek lamb, the
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narrator cannot even call upon [his] rights because as far as his mother was concerned, [he] had none (201; I.I., 92). Zoilas authority overpowers all around her, not just her son: My mother . . . bitched at everyone in the family, including my father of course, over whom she had an advantage not only in height but in character, her dynamic vitality . . . contrasting with his passivity (439). Her authority is much more than verbal, moreover, at least in the fantasy that is constantly brewing in her sons mind. As attested by the three scenes of confrontation and pursuit we will now look atin all of which mutilation is suggestedshe inspires fear as well as awe. As we have seen, the hero of this novel is always in pursuit of women who, for the most part, slip away. Sometimes he sneaks out of the house hot on their tracks; others, he changes seats at the movies to get closer to a girl and ends up following her after the show and leaving his parents in the lurch. Frantic at her sons mysterious disappearances, Zoila set out to nd him in three episodes that can be regarded as independent dramas allegories within the ctioncouched in symbolic terms. In the rst, she is worried out of her wits because a body has been hacked in pieces that have later been strewn all over their neighborhood. The murderer has gone into hiding, and her son is nowhere to be found. When, after many hours, Zoila nally nds him calmly strolling on the Parque Central, she conveys her anxiety in terms more ambiguous and revealing in the Spanish original than in the English translation: The butcher lives in our house . . . , she blurts out, The man who was butchered, too (El descuartizador vive en casa . . . tambin el descuartizado 122; I.I., 54). Zoilas is a strange proclamation indeed. After all, arent we being implicitly asked to draw a parallel between el descuartizador who lives en casa and the one who buries limbs in the park? What sort of hacking activity is the heros family involved in? Once the narrator explains the mothers idiosyncratic use of the word casa or home to refer to the whole tenement, however, her statement about the mad hacker seems purely coincidental. At least until we realize that the element of mutilation appears in all three episodes detailing her not-so-trivial pursuit of her son. The preamble to the second scene of confrontation between mother and son takes place at the movies. The narrator, his parents, and his friend Carlos Franqui are sitting together when, all of a sudden and seemingly out of the blue, the hero stands up and announces, I cant see a
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thing (193). His mother is understandably alarmed, thinking that I had been struck by sudden blindness, a tropical Oedipus, while the father, as usual, had nothing to say (193; I.I., 87). One thing leads to another, sudden blindness to changing seats, nding a girl, leaving the theater, following her home, and nally having to confront Jocastas glaring recriminations: Kid, where the hell have you been? (199). In this second episode the reference to mutilation is oblique and less revealing than in the rst. The hero leaves the mother to nd a girl; the mother is enraged when she notices his disappearance; the father, as usual, has nothing to say. Of all the nicknames Cabrera Infante could have picked for his hero as a consequence of changing seats at the local theater, are we to think that Oedipus is purely gratuitous? What is the author saying or, rather, implying in this scene about the relationship between mother and son? That it is a constraint more than a bond? That the mother makes unreasonable demands based on her unrealistic expectations of the duties of lial love? What are these demands saying about Zoilas needs or, in other words, about Zoilas own desire? Before we attempt to answer these questions we need to look at the third and last scene of motherly pursuit in La Habana. By the time it takes place the narrator is already in his late twenties; it is late at night or, more exactly, very early in the morning, and we nd ourselves in the swinging Cuban capital of the fties. The hero has been out all night with Honey Hawthorne and returns home to hear his grandmother echo his mothers earlier remark, Muchacho, where the hell have you been? She informs him that his parents are roaming the streets in dogged pursuit of him (437). Half disgruntled, half amused, he cannot help thinking: This was really big news; here I was, no longer a minor, searched by my mother as if I were a lost child (437). Dashing out into the street, he eventually discovers her passing the spearlike lancets guarding the gate to the medical school . . . followed by [his] father who looked even smaller (437). The towering mother is once again portrayed in glaring contrast to the father, whose role is as reduced as his stature. But this is not the only disclosure made in this scene. The narrator had been drinking heavily that night and his alcohol-addled brain transforms the backdrop to his and the readers eyes by means of imagery that is as suggestive as it is revealing. In the ction anger turns the mother into a veritable colossus: She seemed taller from the quest, walking tall in her anger, a giantess upon
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seeing me appear beyond the spears, safe and sound, my mother the Fury (438). The spears on the railing of the medical school are a handy tool inviting a double entendre; using them as both the background and the basis for an artistic allusion, Cabrera Infante goes on to describe the encounter between mother and son with the title given to one of Velzquezs most famous paintings in the Prado, The Meeting among the Lances (438). Thanks to a conveniently placed visual gimmickthe lancets atop the fencethe mother in her avatar of avenger is juxtaposed with another cutting instrument: the spears, las lanzas. The spears are not the only indication of the mothers penchant for violence and of the danger she seems to embody within the ction. Zoila has no qualms about voicing her rage, either. When she nally nds her son among the lances, and realizes that he has been out with a girl, that rage knows no bounds: And Ive spent the whole night without sleeping, looking for you like a madwoman, she hisses, while you were out with a girl? (439). The heros observation immediately following his mothers is anything but naive: My mothers raging reaction upon knowing that Id been with a girl all night is curious (439). When we consider the nature of the partnership between mother and son, the formers reaction is startling, of course, but perhaps partnership is not the right word to use in this context. How could one describe a maternal bond in which jealousy is rampant as a partnership? What exists between the narrator and his mother is, clearly, a relationship but not one that is easy to dene or even to bear, at least as far as he is concerned. In addition, as in Cortzars Letters from Mother and for the same reason, the burden this relationship brings with it is not explicitly portrayed. This does not mean it is not painfully present, however. The narrator harbors ambiguous feelings vis--vis his mother from the start: she introduces him to the movies and conditions his libido for life, but she is also a pigheaded pest who pursues him whenever he is out of her sight. His fear of her is symbolically portrayed in the three scenes of pursuit we have just looked at. In the rst, she draws together an axe and a dismembered body; the second touches on Oedipus blindness; and the third frames her with a background of spearlike lancets. Manifestly, Cabrera Infante is making a statement about his mother by means of the sharp blades with which he systematically associates her. Might not La
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Habana be a chronicle of the mothers ability to hurt to the same degree that it is a tale of the sons desire to be reunited with her in spite of the pain she is capable of inicting? Are these two desires (hers to hurt, his to be reunited) so contradictory, in fact, if we are willing to recognize that what Cabrera Infante is saying is that the wound that never heals is always two-sided? Let me make myself clear. The mother in La Habana lashes out at her son during those times when she feels she is losing him. On the other hand, when she is the exclusive object of his aection, she seeks to share with him the world of the movies (associated, as we have seen, with the womb). By having her infante born with a silver screen in his mouth, isnt she making sure he will remain forever in that womb with a view which is her legacy to him? But how can the narrator respond to her wish if he is frightened of her? Isnt it fright that compels him to compare his mother with a giantess who walks tall in her anger among spears, and to declare that el descuartizador and el descuartizado both live at home? Isnt it fright and feeling woundedthat makes him identify with Oedipus? Why, in his imagination, does he make his mother larger than life? Isnt Cabrera Infante inviting a comparison between the giantess and all the other leviathans that populate La Habana para un Infante difunto? As a matter of fact, arent oversized monsters one of the leitmotifs in this novel? What do these monsters suggest? Isnt it curious that they should all have teeth capable of tearing and rending or be linked with sharp instruments empowered to cut, scar, and maim? How does this capacity to cut and maim t into their portrayal in the novel or, in other words, into Cabrera Infantes scheme? Because most of the monsters mentioned in La Habana appear in the cavern described in the epilogue, we are being directed to think of this cavern as a dangerous place, a toothy grotto teeming with jaws, a bottomless pit that could swallow the hero like the leviathans described in Vernes Journey to the Center of the Earth. Furthermore, since the cavern is associated with the womb throughout the book, we must reach the conclusion that it, too, is a dangerous place, a vagina dentata that can snatch your watch as an entre and swallow your wedding band for dessert. Because this vagina dentata is coupled with the cave, and via the cave with the movies, and with pleasure, however, it also brings to mind associations with the mother that were established early on in the heros life. As we have seen, the mother is both object of desire and taboo: se
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mira pero no se toca. She is also dangerous: mi madre, la Furia. Ambivalence is born in connection with her not because the hero longs to be reunited in some passive dream of wish-fulllment, but because she wont cut the silver cord and leave him in peace. In fact, she symbolically castrates him, shaping his libido to suit her needs and obsessions. Saying that Zoila castrates her son is no hyperbole. For a start, she makes him impotent by instilling a dread of las enfermedades malas (80). This dread is so restrictive that when he is at last ready to have sex he wilts at the thought of his mothers possible arrival, referring to her as la polica del sexo (78). Zoila is so obsessed with venereal disease that she wipes chairs with alcohol after they have been sat on by fully dressed guests whom she thinks might be contaminated. She inoculates the fear of diseased sex to such a degree that after her sons second consecutive asco at the brothel he blames it on the fear instilled in me by my mother (325). He is right, but not completely. No matter how real, Zoilas obsession with venereal disease is also a subterfuge: the pin that pops the heros balloon. It is true that she plants the seed of disease in his brain but, as we will see, this seed develops its own root system as soon as it hits the ground she has so diligently tilled. Fetus accompli We have already seen how movies represent the umbilical cord that tethers the hero to his mother. The movie theater is their shared sanctum sanctorum, a place where touching is not allowed. Because his relationship to her conditions his subsequent relationships to women, he even envisions his rst sexual encounter with Xiomara the prostitute in movie terms. Incapable of having an erection, he thinks to himself, your money will not be returned if the performance is cancelled (I.I., 64). In the heros mind, sex becomes inextricable from performance, which is in turn linked to the movies as the movies are to his mother. But Momit cant be said enoughis that which cannot be touched. Zoila conditions her son, therefore, by imprinting a sexual program on his subconscious from which physical contact is disenfranchised. Sex with bad women is dangerous because it can make you sick; sex with normal women is impossible because the one and only blueprint for a relationship between the sexes inhibitsnot to say, prohibitsit. The hero may not consciously understand why he was practically impotent when he was a teenager
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but his unfolding biography leaves no doubts as to the causes of this aiction, and the grown-up narrator telling his story in ashback is certainly aware of this neurosis (I.I., 163). When after his second failed attempt Xiomara tells him, point blank, You should go see a doctor, the hero thinks to himself, she scared the hell out of me because she meant something was wrong with my body (unless she was perceptive enough to imply that something was wrong with my head) (164). Manifestly, in La Habana para un Infante difunto Zoilas prohibition of diseased sex makes her son impotent, his sexuality displaced from one organ (the penis) to another (the eye). When sexuality does become genital, intercourse takes place, as we have seen, with actresses and performers. But we havent yet begun to explore the very revealing terms in which these sexual relationships are described. In La Habana intercourse is usually based on a fantasy in which the penis is identied with an unborn child. As movie houses are linked with sex houses ( posadas ), sex houses with caves, caves with the female sex, and the female sex with books, sexual penetration is coupled with birth and the penis likened to the fetus in three revealing instances. The rst occurs when the hero makes love to Julieta Estvez: Her vulva sliding forward and back around my naked penis, he reminisces, adopting, adapting it, the two tethered by that other umbilical cord, moving us in unison, like the mother with her son in her belly, my fanatic fetus fused with her (379). In the second, he rhapsodizes about Margaritas sex with terms that mirror his description of lovemaking with Julieta: Not the voracious vagina dentata but that vulva-versa sucking with contractions, practically an inverted birth, the penis becoming a fetus on its return trip (577). Last but not least, in the long days journey into night which is the epilogue, the aroused hero enters the womb, fullling the wish voiced in the analogy between penis and fetus in the two earlier scenes: he literally comes to occupy the place of the male sex organ within the body of a woman. These three episodes portray one and the same obsession: they substitute the fetus for the penis translating the adults wish to put himself back again into the position of the unborn. It is important to note that in Infantes fantasy of a return to the womb the female sex is not the voracious vagina dentata, moreover. This qualifying clause suggests that there are two kinds of wombs in La Habana: good ones (those you enter as a fetus), and bad ones (those of prostitutes) which you do not enter at
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all because they are polluted with enfermedades malas and, besides, the polica del sexo (i.e., Zoila) forbids it. The only way sexual congress is validated or even possible in this novel is by recreating the primal situation by means of fantasies (equating the penis with the fetus), or by going to the movies (entering the theater, we remember, is practically an inverted birth, in which he becomes a fetus on its return trip, 577). The notion of intercourse as an inverted birth in which the penis is identied with the child is not typically the infants, but the mothers (Lacan, Les formations de linconscient, 33). The mother sees her child as an extension of herself, as a tool to reach out into the world beyond the narrow connes of her own limited body, as the complement to her incompletion (i.e., the phallus) (33). This is why castration is as much a trauma for her as it is for the developing child. As we know, at the resolution of the Oedipal phase the infant sees itself symbolically severed from the object it covets. Lacan argues that the paternal proscription also cuts o, or symbolically sets apart, the mother from the body of the child whom she views as an extension of herself. But what if this proscription were never internalized? What if, as in La Habana, the father occupied a marginal position within the family dynamics? What kind of bond would exist then between mother and child? Before answering this question, we need to dwell on the childs wish to fulll its mothers unconscious desires before the Oedipal phase comes to an endparticularly since in La Habana para un Infante difunto that phase never does. Fully identied with his mother before the paternal proscription is assimilated into the unconscious, the infant mirrors her wishes, including the notion of casting himself as phallus. At this stage of its development, Lacan feels the child is not an individual but rather a blank space totally devoid of singularity because its wishes are all borrowed. If, as Zoila seems to do in La Habana, the mother treats her infant as a complement of her own incompletion (as the very organ with which the infant is identifying, in other words), the infant will be unable to break away from her sphere of inuence and forge its own individuality. There should be no doubt by now that La Habana is the tale of one such unresolved bond between mother and child. But what an extraordinary trail this bond leaves behind it. In voicing his sexual craving through seven-hundred-odd pages, the perpetually frustrated hero of this biography is actually telling the tale of his mothers wish, one to which he responds sympathetically. Taking the place of the phallus in the epilogue,
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he allows that wish to take shape and mold the ction as it has molded his own unconscious cravings. Such profound complicity between mother and child hinders the identication of the latter with the voice of authority which Lacan denes as the Name of the Father, however. (To have access to the Name of the Father is, we recall, to recognize the precept forbidding incestthat is to say, the law castrating the infants own desire.) In La Habana para un Infante difunto, the infante consistently shows, if not outright disdain of his father, at least an aloofness that is not unlike contempt, while he identies with the name of the mother in more ways than one. First of all, he adopts her fantasy (i.e., to cast himself as embodiment of the penis) and, secondly, behaving as an impotent man, he responds to her desire of a nongenital relationship (for the heros unconscious, tolerated sex is sex without contact, sex in which the theater has been substituted for the bedroom, the screen for the sheets, gazing for touching). In sum, then, the hero of La Habana is much more his mothers son than his fathers, more Infante than Cabrera, as the novels title makes readily evident. La Habana rhymes with Pavana, and although Infantes music is more a symphony for bedsprings than a concerto for the left hand, he is as able as Ravel to mourn the passing of youth, the loss of his homeland, and the bond that strapped him to mother while providing lest it be forgottenthe kindling to write this elegy. The infante in the title is also difunto, no longer an infante although still very much Infante, his mothers son. The infante difunto has, in addition, become Infante the writer, able to dramatize a return in utero that makes him both a fetus accompli and the phallus his mother wished for herself. Fully identifying with Zoila, the infante obnubilates his small, quiet, unassuming father who had succeeded in making himself invisible (24). The senior Cabrera, and notably the prohibition of incest that he is capable of wielding, are obscured in this novel because, as Lacan maintains, It is only insofar as the fathers word is acknowledged by the mother that it can be perceived to be the voice of authority. If the fathers role is shaky (within the family dynamics) the infant will remain dependent upon its mother (Les quatre concepts fondamentaux, 326). In La Habana this dependence is metaphorically illustrated by the infantes perpetual pursuit of the womb (linked in turn with that other object of desire in this novel, the movies). The hero reaches the summit of that dependence and the end of his pursuit in the epilogue, where movies
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become inseparably fused with wombs once and for all. Not surprisingly, the all-too-willing Ariadne who leads him into the moviesthe blond who laughs at Plutoturns out to be informed by the ostensibly dissonant portraits of longing and failure described earlier in the action. This girl is cast to remind the reader of the inspiring blond Venus seen naked and smeared with butter in her room at the Hotel Pasaje (which means both passage and transition in Spanish). It is not only that the Pluto blonde is described using the same words that were used to describe the Pasaje blonde (both have a cinnamon colored face, and a yellow shock of . . . bleached hair (689, 392), but also that this section of the book begins with the words I saw her. I saw her again. I saw her again years later (689, my emphasis), and the hero twice recognizes, Before, she had her back turned [i.e., in the Pasaje hotel room] . . . but now [as she buys her ticket at the theater box oce] she was looking at me only . . . though on the sly, out of the corner of her eye (689, my emphasis). The blond Venus is also an echo of Xiomara, the rst prostitute the narrator visits and fails with: I could see her body (i.e., Xiomaras) which reminded me . . . of the naked girl lying in bed in the Pasaje Hotel room. Now, for one eeting instant, Xiomara the whore brought back to me the girl I had lost (323). The lost Pasaje girl was observed from a distance; emblematic of safe sex, she was a perfect womb because untouched. Xiomara, on the other hand, was a big bad womb; deated by the beckoning abyss of her tainted sexuality, the heros little red riding hood wason that occasion, at least unable to ride. In the epilogue, Xiomara the bad and Pasaje the good are fused into one. The Pluto blond embodies what each of the others represents; she is Jekyll in Hyde, the perfect vehicle to fulll the heros fantasy of entering the womb. But as we have already indicated, there are two ways to enter the womb: intercourse, and returning in utero. Since the heros initial attachment to mother is unresolved, the rst is impossible because it is tainted with the onus of incest (he is impotent in his rst sexual encounters because of his mothers tacit prohibition). There is one way to overcome his mothers proscription, however; he can mirror her fantasy and cast the penis as fetus. At that point he can enter the womb, simultaneously chicken and egg. The womb, as we have seen, is equivalent to a cave that is in turn equivalent to movie theaters to which he was introduced by his mother, conditioning his mania for life. He longs to get into movie theaters because the notion of getting into this womb with a
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view masks and substitutes for his greatest wish: being swallowed by Mama. In the epilogue he nally gets what he wants, skirting the problem of incest once and for all. If social taboos prohibit the heros wish to get into his mothers body, a return in utero is obstructed by reality itself. It is at this point that literature comes to the rescue, however. In La Habana the narrator can at last fulll his greatest wish; in the epilogue Infante puts himself in the posture of the infante, bypasses all taboos, and reenters the room from which he had been ousted. We remember how in his fantasies with Julieta and Margarita he waxed lyrical about an ideal uterus from which he could not be cast o, a vulva-versa that would suck him in with contractions instead of ejecting him (577). Such an inverted birth is exactly what happens to the hero in the cavern described in the epilogue, a cavern he is almost forced to leave (he sees a light at the end of the tunnel), until he falls into a horizontal abyss (410). The story told in La Habana is circular, not in terms of its structure, but in terms of the wish it portrays. Like a Funcin continua of a picture that never ends, that wish is the tale told throughout the novel, the tale of the infante who becomes Infante and writes himself as the infant he never stopped longing to be. La Habana is also a declaration of love, a legacy from Zoila to her son, and from Infante to his mother whose own wish he achingly echoes in the pages of this novel.

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3
The excremental vision of Gabriel Garca Mrquez i

Such Order from Confusion sprung, Such gaudy Tulips raisd from Dung Jonathan Swift, The Ladys Dressing Room

Thus far, we have studied authors whose writing is a mirror of their private selves, whose obsessions are both the mainspring and subject of the tales they write. The body in ction need not be a reection of the person writing, however; in fact, it is most often endowed with symbolic value beyond its personal and material identity. It can be featured as a trope for Everyman or as the means to generalize about social ills, political upheavals, or emotional sensibilities. In works with a political agenda the body will, in all probability, show up as a substitution rather than a sublimation to suggest an analogy between itself and another object. The bizarre deformities of a dictator or the uncanny incorruption of a drowned mans corpse may not exclusively refer to a sick statesman or to a fallen angel but be a comment on what the statesman and the drowned man represent within a given context. Filled with allusions to bodily functions and organic metaphors, Gabriel Garca Mrquezs novels and short stories are cases in point of works that should not be taken at face value. Without stretching the point, we could say that each of them is an anatomical entity, an organism that reveals truths about the authors intentions through its own symptoms or physiological particularities. For instance, in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) the preposterous size of Jos Arcadios penis suggests his

embodiment of life forces that are contrasted with the death drive inherent in other members of the Buenda family. As in the work of Cortzar and Cabrera Infante, the full portent of organic references featured in Garca Mrquezs work is not readily evident. Tucked away beneath the epidermic tissue of the story line and supporting the narrative skeleton, these references are like muscle and bone, concealed under the surface. Grasping all their connotations is not even a requisite for understanding the plots these authors serve up, moreover; discovering the function of symbols adds to our comprehension of a story, but just as we dont need to understand every nuance about the circulation of blood to be awed by the human body, we are not required to grasp the sense of every symbol used by Garca Mrquez to apprehend the originality of his portrayals. Even in works as deceptively straightforward as No One Writes to the Colonel (1958), Garca Mrquez delivers his message through indirection. Plain-spoken to the point of pellucidness, this tale of a retired colonel who waits away his life dying of hunger for a pension that never comes could be a terse indictment of social injustice and nothing more. Certainly in 1961, when it was rst published, the story was seen in this light, which is to say that it was read on its most unmistakable level. More recently, critics such as Peter Earle and Graciela Maturo have examined the network of symbols that sustain the main theme of Garca Mrquezs novella, leaving no doubt that he conveys narrative elements some readily apprehensible, some noton many levels simultaneously. Earle points out at least three features instrumental to our understanding of No One Writes to the Colonel. After showing that the novella has a musical structure conceived on the basis of two themes which he labels discouragement and illusion, he goes on to discuss the dialectic between desire and death embodied by the colonel. Finally, he convincingly explains how the rooster that was the prize possession of the colonels slaughtered son should be seen as an allegory of vigilance and resurrection. Graciela Maturos concerns are of a more religious nature: she views the chronological development of No One Writes to the Colonel in the light of the Christian liturgical calendar. The storys action, starting around the October equinox, concludes at Christmas and suggests to her the spiritual regeneration of man (Claves simblicas, 105). What these readings both share and bring to our understanding of Garca Mrquezs novella is the importance of the theme of renewal.
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They also emphasize that the story is a rite of passage during which the colonel frees himself from the oppression and sense of discouragement which typify him at the outset. And they conclusively qualify the notion of Garca Mrquezs apparent simplicity (Earle 82). This simplicity is in appearances only because, even when the sentences are clipped and the syntax plain, No One Writes to the Colonel has the simple complexity of a romanesque cathedral: the structure is disciplined, almost severe, but the result is labyrinthine if we speak in terms of the layering system which spells out the message. Fortunately, all labyrinths have a center and No One Writes to the Colonel is no exception. In fact, a direct path to it has been laid out by Mario Vargas Llosa. In Garca Mrquez: Historia de un deicidio (1971), Vargas Llosa highlights the importance of the demons or obsessions which appear and reappear converted in themes in all works of ction. Something about this remark, forthright though it is, catches the attention. Critics approaching No One Writes to the Colonel have concerned themselves with the net result of Vargas Llosas equationthe themesinstead of directly tapping the wellspring. It is unquestionable that the ghting cock, the rain, and certain numbers are fundamental to the development of this novella. They are pieces of the narrative puzzle but not, as far as I can see, a pivotal obsession from which the whole thematic development issues. And yet, such an obsession is present. Redundance and obviousness do much to camouage it, it is true, but should in no way detract from the fact that a concern with eating and the digestive process functions as the matrix of No One Writes to the Colonel. Food for thought The action of this novella begins on a morning in October and concludes on a Sunday night in December. The protagonists are a seventyve-year-old man and his wife. He is a dreamer, an inveterate optimist; she, a woman of a naturally hard character, hardened even more by forty years of bitterness (101). They are unable to make ends meet, having waited for over fteen years for a war pension which the man, a retired colonel, should have received in recognition for his services during the war. They have no money left, no provisions, and no guarantees for the future. Their son, Agustn, was shot nine months before the beginning of the story for distributing clandestine political literature at the cockghts.
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His legacy to his parents is a ghting cock that, we are led to believe, will probably win at the ghts scheduled for January. The problem is that, left with almost no resources, the couple will have to choose between feeding it or feeding themselves. The day and the action begin simultaneously when the colonel takes the lid o the coee can and realizes that there was only one teaspoonful left (7). He throws half of the boiling water down the drain and scrapes the inside of the can with a knife to get at the last coee grounds mixed together with rust from the can (7). This initial occupation, not to say preoccupation, with food and drink is only the rst of many in the story and, some might argue, could well reect that Garca Mrquez wrote No One Writes to the Colonel while living in Paris on a shoestring budget. Real hunger will doubtlessly have a lot to do in forcing the hand of an author, but mention of eating in this instance is no reection of the authors poverty early in his career. Foodconsuming it and discharging it, buying it, xing it, tasting it, or refusing to eat itturns out to be the key to unraveling the protagonists thorny evolution as a character and grasping the otherwise problematic outcome of this novella. If we concern ourselves exclusively with the three members of the main householdthe colonel, his wife, and the ghting cockwe nd twentyfour references to eating and drinking in the 106 pages of the Biblioteca Era edition of No One Writes to the Colonel. Our rst thought is that such insistence is just a personal xation leading nowhere. What makes the references to eating and drinking signicant is that, until the last of seven sections, and with only one exception, all mention of food and drink brings forth, immediately following, a reference to death. For instance, in the opening scene, when the colonel is waiting for his coee to brew, we discover that he experienced the sensation that poisonous mushrooms and lilies were growing in his bowels (7). Soon after, when his wife, prostrated in bed after an asthma attack, drinks the last sip of coee left in the house, the omniscient narrator declares: at that moment the bells began to toll. The colonel had forgotten the burial . . . (8). His wife also begins to think about the dead man, and after nishing her coee, she was still thinking about [him] (8). Later in the action the wife recovers her pluck and xes a stew by boiling together all the edible things that tropical lands are capable of producing (27). As she and the colonel are about to nish their meal, their doctor pushes the door open and cries out, are all the sick dead?
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(28). Never one to keep her mouth shut, the wife picks up the doctors cue and develops her husbands earlier concern: One of these days Ill die and Ill take you to hell, doctor (29). In the meantime, however, she oers him a cup of coee which he turns down with revealing irony, No, thank you very much . . . I absolutely deny you the opportunity of poisoning me (29). During yet another meal, prepared by borrowing corn from the roosters provisions, the colonel mournfully reects, I am thinking about the employee responsible for my pension. . . . Fifty years from now we will be resting in peace underground while that poor man will be in agony every Friday as he waits for his own pension (66). The following day, as they nish up the rest of the corn stew, it is his wifes turn to feel despondent: I am thinking, she says out of the blue, that the man is dead going on two months and I havent given my regrets yet (68). The dead man turns out to be the same one for whom the bells toll at the beginning of the story, his body conveniently dragged out as the topic of food turns up once again. This topic is tainted with death, moreover, whether provisions are available or not, and it is relentlessly alluded to, both metaphorically, we are dying of hunger, or, as in the previously quoted examples, factually, within the ction (81). Obsessive and systematic, the association between consuming food and dying reaches a climax at the end of part six in a scene that functions as the turning point of the novella. The colonel goes to the pool hall one Sunday evening. A friend of his sons slips him a sheet of clandestine political propaganda. The colonel pockets it and, almost immediately, the music stops. It is a police raid and he realizes that, like his son Agustn, he has been caught red-handed. To boot, the man conducting the raid, the very one who shot his son, is now facing him, his rie pointing right at his stomach (89). The man stares at him unblinkingly while the colonel feels swallowed by those eyes, mashed, digested and immediately expelled (89). Signicantly, as we shall see, the murderer lets him walk his way out of the tight spot with the words Go ahead, colonel (88). More signicantly still, the next and nal section of the novella, immediately following the scene in which the colonel is metaphorically swallowed and expelled, opens with a complete reversal of all the previous premises. Of the seven sections composing No One Writes to the Colonel, six take place during the humid Colombian winter or rainy season. The seventh
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unfolds at the beginning of the springlike dry season announced from the opening line: He didnt have to open the window to identify December (90). To say that the overall tone of the novella changes dramatically after this point would be an understatement. Earlier in the action man and nature were hopelessly sick, unremittingly dreary, whereas the brave new world of section seven glistens with newness. All of a sudden, the backyard is a patio maravilloso inviting the colonel to set out for the dock, as usual on Fridays, to wait for the mail boat (90). But rather than a mere stepping out into the rain, as on previous occasions, his walk becomes a prodigious moment, made of a clarity not yet tried out, and the colonel, taking his cue from new-edged surroundings, feels crisp and clean as if made out of glass (92). From this point onward in the story, the pain of waiting seems to be over, even if waiting itself is not. The letter the colonel has spent fteen years waiting for may still not come, but hope is in the air (21). In keeping with the festive mood, the circus arrives, the rst to come in ten years, and ushers in, with a typically carnivalesque sense of inversion, the transposition of all previous conventions (93). The sun begins to shine; the colonels pernicious constipation miraculously heals. The relationship of the central couple evolves in unison. He, heretofore uncertain, begins December full of mettle, just like the ghting cock which his wife is so adamant about selling. During one of their many arguments on the subject he discovers, with no astonishment, that she awakens neither compassion nor remorse in him, and, with unfathomable kindness, proceeds to inform her that The ghting cock is not for sale (9798). The couples relationship evolves not only in what they say to each other but, more importantly, in how they say it. Up until the spring section the wife usually chose the imperative tense when addressing her husband and tended to treat him like a child: Those shoes are ready to be thrown out, she tells him in section two, go on wearing the patent leather boots (20). Later, wrangling over their most typical bone of contention, she orders him, You get rid of that rooster immediately (52) and, on a dierent subject, You take him the clock right away, you put it on the table and you tell him: Alvaro, I am bringing you this here clock (54). Always demanding money, she nally informs her husband, Dont you come back here without the forty dollars (55). The colonels aw is not merely (in the words of his wife) that he lacks
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character but that, in keeping with the inversions which typify relationships in No One Writes to the Colonel, he is often reduced to the status of a child while she, the voice of authority, behaves like his parent (79). The colonels infantile behavior is strongly suggested in three dierent scenes. The rst takes place at the post oce when he turns toward his friend, the doctor, with an entirely childish look (23); soon after, in a discussion about politics, the physician reminds him, Dont be naive, colonel . . . we are already too old to be waiting for the Messiah (24). Finally, much later in the action, when the disgruntled colonel tells his friend, If I were twenty years younger things would be dierent, he is reminded, somewhat cryptically, that he will always be twenty years younger (8384). Being fussed over parentally by his own wife further reinforces the theme of the old mans childishness. Not only does she direct and scold him throughout the story, she enhances his protracted boyishness whenever possible as, for instance, by taking twenty years o [his] back when cutting his hair, and persuading him to keep on wearing what to him frankly look like orphans shoes (35, 20). When he demurs she is quick to refresh his memory, claiming that, as a matter of fact, they are orphans of their son (21). The role of child is superseded in the last section of the novella, however, where, in addition, the wifes use of the imperative to address her husband is replaced in the Spanish text by a series of nonassertive interrogatives that fully qualify her change of status and function as foils introducing the colonels thrustful new tone: And if it doesnt come? the old woman asks, referring to the pension check. It will come, answers the husband (98). And if they dont understand? she wonders, voicing her doubts about his plan to return a slightly worn pair of shoes for a refund. Then they dont, he chips in (99). Finally, doubting once and for all the improbable arrival of the money from the pension fund, she nags the old colonel, And if it doesnt arrive? until he interjects, without batting an eyelash, It will arrive. (100) Such a complete reversal in the relationship between husband and wife is far from being the only changed feature in part seven of No One Writes to the Colonel. The references to food in this section, for one, are associated with death in the case of the wifes remarks exclusively, never that of the husband. During lunch, feeling deprived of her authority, she informs him, You should realize that I am dying, that what I suer from is not a disease but an agony (102). And later that evening, after mumThe excremental vision of Garca Mrquez 107

bling her prayers in bed (the original version literally says, chewing her prayers [mastic oraciones, 102]), she complains, I dont want to die in the dark (103). There is one other signicant change in this last section: the colonel is nally rid of his digestive troubles. He feels good, we are told, December had wilted the ora from his viscera (92). So not only does he prepare and consume food that is untainted from aliation with death but, just as importantly, he is rid of the excremental curse which hounds him throughout the six earlier sections. Tulips raised from dung The fact that the actual full-edged demon, the obsession, in this novella should comprise not one single ingredient but rather a kinship of contrariesfood and excrementcomes as no surprise. We are dealing with a narrative scheme in which all the supporting elements are portrayed as pairs, beginning with husband and wife, winter and summer, assertive and submissive. The scatological xation should surprise us even less: the anal weapon is brandished throughout Garca Mrquezs ction from In Evil Hour to Love in the Time of Cholera. After all, carnival (and the carnival literature which these works epitomize) is also, according to Bakhtin, a celebration of the forces of the lower body, a mighty thrust downward. This thrust penetrates the novella from the rst page, where the colonel is assailed by the invading sensation already alluded to, the poisonous mushrooms and lilies growing in his bowels (7). This same curse reappears as a leitmotif thirteen times throughout the tale, as has been noted by critics such as George McMurray in his insightful study of Garca Mrquez. However, McMurrays sense of propriety gets the better of his analysis when it comes to describing the colonels ailment, which he identies as gastritis. A close look at the nature of the colonels complaints is enough to ascertain that his ailment is wholly dierent from McMurrays diagnosis. After agonizing many hours in the privy, sweating ice, feeling that the ora of his viscera was rotting and falling in pieces, the perpetually pained hero of this story learns that all was really a false alarm (52, 26). Squatting on a platform of rough-hewn boards, he anxiously experiences the uneasiness of an urge frustrated (26). His trouble, in other words, is not an inammation of the lining of the stomach as McMurray would have us believe but rather, and speaking
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very plainly, constipation. This constipation is resolved at the very beginning of section seven, as we have seen, after the colonel feels swallowed and rejected by his sons murderer. Confronted with death at this point, he behaves courageouslyperhaps for the rst time in his lifeby pushing aside the barrel of the rie which the poker-faced murderer is pointing right at his stomach (88). In this scene the colonel nds something he didnt know he had: courage. He emerges not only safe and sound from his close encounter with death but also a changed man, one ready to y on his own and leave his old defenseless and childlike mask behind. His transformation is described as a physiological process in the story; when the murderer stares at him, he feels swallowed . . . mashed, digested and immediately expelled (89) The colonel, constipated swallower of seldom-to-be-had victuals, becomes part of the food chain and is swallowed in turn. The physiological resolution he goes through (being swallowed, digested, and expelled) drains, in turn, a thematic bottleneck and warrants the utterance of previously censored scatological language. To his wifes last injunction, Tell me, what do we eat, the now feisty colonel rebelliously answers, Shit (106), bringing together the two poles of the symbolic matrix in an echo of Freuds succinct formula, excrement becomes aliment. The obvious question at this juncture is, how does this conuence t within the scheme of the action? In No One Writes to the Colonel meaning is apprehended on three autonomous and interwoven levels. On the rst and most obvious, we read the injustice of the political system which aicts the hero. The second level records the evolution in the relationship between a man and his wife and, read in the light of the rst, raises a pivotal question, namely, why is the colonels battle fought on the home front? Since the context depicted is the family (common ground to all), and not the battleeld, I would suggest that Garca Mrquezs aim in this novella is to portray the urgency of evolving beyond the submissiveness which lies at the base of all social injustice abetted by the men who wait rather than act. After all, the tting phrase applied to the last Aureliano in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the habit of obedience had dried up the seeds of rebellion in his heart, could just as easily apply to the retired colonel at the beginning of this tale (308). But unlike Aureliano, the colonel evolves toward a self-realization which culminates at the conclusion of the novella when he feels pure, explicit, invincible (106). What is less manifest
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is that this evolution is depicted through the guration of bodily functions, a physiological frame which operates as the third level of the narration, and one which Garca Mrquez plainly conceived on the basis of psychoanalytic theory. We have already seen the emphasis given to eating and swallowing in this story. We also know that, according to psychoanalysis, the oral phase is a period of dependence, a period during which the child is incapable of accepting separation from the mother. Isnt Garca Mrquez highlighting the link between dependence, childlike behavior, and food intake in his story? By juxtaposing the ingestion of food with death, isnt he suggesting that the oral xation portrayed in this case is a curse because it entails dependency? Isnt this why there are twenty references to eating and drinking during the time the colonel submits to his wife and is treated like a child (addressed in the imperative voice and directed in his actions)? Psychoanalysis also teaches us that the incapacity to accept separation from the mother is, in Norman O. Browns classic formula, the core of the human neurosis (Life Against Death, 284)neurosis because separation confers individual life to all organisms while, at the same time, it leads to death. Mans inability to deal with this prospect makes him repress the death instinct but, in so doing, he ironically denies life which can only come through individuation. In other words, during the oral dependent stage, a xation with the body of the mother brings together the nourishment which provides life, and the subjection which denies it, a fact which distinctly illuminates the link between food and death in No One Writes to the Colonel, and one that also explains the denial of elimination (the colonels urge frustrated) in the rst six sections of the novella. Antithetically, the oral phase foregrounds incorporation while the anal is characterized by separation. Freud sees in this separation a path through which the organisms innate destructive instinct (the death instinct) is channeled. The organism converts the destructive energy into an aggression directed onto others, he argues, which preserves it from harm and makes its own existence possible (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 69). But we must not see in this aggression forces which are ultimately destructive of the organism itself. On the contrary, rejection is the very mechanism of reinstatement, driving the organism forward in a dynamic confrontation and involvement with life. It is, as Julia Kristeva points out, le mcanisme mme de la relance, de la tension de la vie (Rvolution, 13637).
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In light of Kristevas remark we can better grasp the full tenor of the colonels evolution, and recognize how the climactic ending of the novella betokens in every way the beginning of a new life for its hero. We can also see how the conclusive invective at the end signals a release; it is not at all ironic, as McMurray would have us believe (22), and certainly not a new way of expressing violence, as Angel Rama suggests, but rather the most fundamental step on the path toward self-realization (Un novelista de la violencia americana, 119). As it unfolds, and very conclusively in its last scene, isnt Garca Mrquezs story conveying how the hero has evolved away from submissiveness and become capable of asserting his independence? It is not surprising, then, that he should feel pure, explicit, invincible as he prepares to oppose the will of his wife and assert his own for the rst time in the action (106). It is even less surprising that the word used to arm this newly acquired self-suciency should be the emblem of the rejection he is about to carry out. And by rejection I do not mean that he breaks away from his wife but, simply, that their relationship evolves until it reaches the climactic conclusion which puts the hero on the threshold of a fresh involvement with life. No One Writes to the Colonel is in every way a eulogy to independence pictured as an organic evolution and a portrayal of the struggle required to achieve it (dramatized in the continuing dialogue between husband and wife, authority and subordination, parent and child). It is also an indictment of political injustice and, implicitly, an injunction to those who, through their passivity, make it possible. Fully in keeping with his political aims and his rm belief in social evolution, the novella reects Garca Mrquezs wholly original artistic creed. By this I do not mean his artful technique but, rather, the less conspicuous undercurrents of his multilayered conception. Working on several levels simultaneously, he transforms reality, including, very often, political reality. Garca Mrquez has always repudiated the misjudgment inherent in the bending of artistic inspiration to serve political aims. In a very revealing article published in Tabla Redonda in 1960, he intimated what was to become the basis for all his ction: It is perhaps more rewarding to write honestly about what one is capable of telling for having lived it than to write, with the same degree of earnestness, about that which our political position suggests must be told, even if it means inventing it (quoted in Fossey, Entrevista, 8). Forcing the pen to t the message, he feels, leads unremittingly to
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failure. With equal conviction, Garca Mrquez indicates that the best means of eliciting reader response is through suggestion and challenge, not pontication. All this by way of saying that, in keeping with both his political and artistic beliefs, the message of No One Writes to the Colonel does not jump out at the reader. The violencia which tore Colombia in shreds starting in 1948 is implied throughout, but Garca Mrquez does not write a tale of war. He portrays instead a much more penetrating message, a struggle between two peopleEveryman and Anywoman cannily conceived on two levels. As the body is the mirror of the soul, he allows the vital processes of his protagonists to dictate the dynamic evolution of their relationship. The rst six sections of the novella, in which orality and an inability to evacuate are emphasized, are followed by a seventh where Garca Mrquez makes clear that the break away from passive dependence must be self-initiated. It takes an act of courage to move beyond passivity but once the rst step is taken, courage has a way of snowballing and transforming behavior. No One Writes to the Colonel is about political involvement but shows how such involvement begins with personal freedom, and cannot exist without it. A childlike old man who is willing to waste away his life waiting for a letter instead of ghting for his rights is shown to be correspondingly passive and dependent in all his relationships. One day, he takes his life in his own hands, sees that he is capable of making a stance and, feeling digested, comes out into the light a changed person. An emphasis on eating in the rst six sections ushers in evacuation and release in the seventh. For this reason, the digestive process is as important in understanding No One Writes to the Colonel as the dialogues between the characters, perhaps even more so. On one level, this tale is about the heros physiological release while, simultaneously, on a symbolic plane, this release suggests his break from dependence. Through the universal language of the body Garca Mrquez voices both a tale of struggle and a panegyric to action that applies equally to all humans. In this sense, it is perhaps one of the most political of his novels. The message it conveys is do not wait: act. It also establishes that action need not be postponed until the day of battle but can take place across the dinner table, while putting on a pair of shoes, or walking down the street. Passivity is a straitjacket, and a person who does not exercise freedom of action will become cannon fodder for those who come in to trample, quell, and subjugate.
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A quest for true love If No One Writes to the Colonel is the most insinuatingly political of Garca Mrquezs novels, Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)because it portrays an emotion that knows neither limits nor bordersis the most inuential. Like the earlier panegyric to action, this much misunderstood eulogy to love speaks to humanity as a whole, and features the body not as a reection of the authors own but as a vehicle to educate readers. By 1985 Garca Mrquez had written about nding courage and needing to break the yoke of submission (No One Writes to the Colonel, Innocent Erndira [1972]), about the sempiternal struggle between the forces of life and death (One Hundred Years of Solitude ), about the horrors of totalitarianism (The Autumn of the Patriarch ), and about the unavoidability of destiny (Chronicle of a Death Foretold ). His purposeful sagas make one think of the Human Comedy because, like Balzacs, they are clearly designed to teach a moral lesson. Always didactic, they furnish evidence of an unfailing optimism, which is why, like his much-admired William Faulkner, Garca Mrquez refuses to admit the end of mankind. Such end, he reasons, can come about in one of two ways: as an explosion that would erase all traces of humanity from the face of the earth, or as an emotional implosion that would cauterize love and thus abolish the species. Either way, humanity would come to an end for the same reason: because men and women do not know how to relate to one another in a signicant way. It seems logical, thereforeespecially from the perspective of a humanistthat an educational program be charted for teaching the human animal how to bond in more enduring ways. Surely other alternatives exist and we have not found them, or found and later forgot them. Unable to voice what they feel, men and women stray away from lasting satisfaction, from relationships that could give their lives meaning and purpose. When Garca Mrquez stated, in his Nobel address in 1982, that love really can be true, wasnt he suggesting that love as we presently feel and show it was not true, that we have spent centuries misconstruing it? Or was he, perhaps, taking up Calderns lament, What is love, if not an illusion? Three years after voicing these doubts and making the claim that love could be true, his extraordinary Love in the Time of Cholera saw the light. It contained Garca Mrquezs reections on a subject close to his heart,
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and some of the most poignant opinions on the theme of love written in our century. The book was very well received by the general public but criticized by a handful of critics who found it trite, and even repugnant. The problem with such readings was that, once again, the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude was being taken at face value. When he included a character who had 622 long-term liaisons, apart from . . . countless eeting adventures, many readers felt he was parodying Don Juan, and making a mockery of love (152). They couldnt have been more mistaken. Love has not been taken more seriously in a humorous tale since Much Ado About Nothing was written. The ending of Garca Mrquezs eulogy was less ambiguous than the tortuous development, and for this reason, easier to grasp. In a perceptive reading, David Buehrer rightly armed that the nally consummated love of Florentino and Fermina in old age as the climax of Love signals the beginning of a new era, a post-apocalyptic one that sees the return to traditional humanistic values as its wellspring of hope (A Second Chance on Earth, 21). But what do we do with the four hundred and some pages that come before this new era? Why, for instance, does the book begin with the suicide of a man whose very nameJeremiah de Saint-Amoursuggests the holiness of an emotion which is the sum and substance of the entire novel? Why, if love is the essence of this novel, is the tale of Saint-Amour (whose name literally means holy love) dropped after twenty pages, and only picked up again in passing references? Isnt Holy Love related to the rest of the novel? And what about Juvenal Urbinos and Fermina Dazas picture-perfect marriage, and Florentinos endless liaisons: how do they relate to the new post-apocalyptic era at the conclusion? Ever the humanist, Garca Mrquez seldom writes without engrafting the body into his narration. To answer these questions we must turn to his characters and observe not merely what they say but also what they do. It is in their graphically obsessive behavior that we shall nd answers to the riddle portrayed in his 1985 masterpiece. Blind stare The myriad relationships portrayed in this novel (which are, as in Infantes Inferno, conceived as a catalogue) can be pigeonholed under ve headings: marriage (Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his wife Fermina); Platonic love (Florentino and his secretary, Leona Cassiani); sex without love
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(Florentino and his 622 mistresses); love without sex (Florentino and Fermina); andfor lack of a better term fullled love discovered by the same couple once they come to know and accept each other. I have purposefully not included in this list the opening tale evoking the relationship between Jeremiah de Saint-Amour and his mistress because it does not seem to relate to any other in the book, unless it is somehow linked to the new era of consummated love betokening the return to traditional humanistic values at the conclusion of the novel (21). Such a link is likely if we agree that beginnings and endings of novels are often related; enigmas are introduced in the former, resolutions provided in the latter. Since Saint-Amours tale opens the novel and the new era of consummated love closes it, the two might be connected in some as yet undetermined way. But if they are, why does Saint-Amour commit suicide while the old couple at the end sails on, impervious to the ravages of death and disease, and AmericaFlorentinos prophetically named fourteen-year-old wardslashes her wrists in despair? Whether or not it ts within the overall puzzle, we will have to look at the episode in which Jeremiah de Saint-Amours fateful sacrice is brought to life. However, given the potency of Florentinos sex life and the astounding number of his involvements, it seems most tting to begin a study of love by studying this characters relationships and, particularly, the one that lasts longest and develops in most detail: his love for Fermina Daza. Even before fully embarking on this discussion, however, I wish to emphasize my choice of words. I wrote that Florentinos love develops. Since it evolves along with the novel, we need to look at it in all its phases, especially when we consider this characters focal position within the narrative. The rst phase of Florentinos relationship with Fermina begins with a cataclysm of love that lasts over half a century and is unleashed by a casual glance the day Fermina, still a girl, raised her eyes to see who was passing by the window, and saw Florentino (55). From that point onward, gazing and the eye become inextricable from the tale of the solitary hunter and the impossible maiden (56). In his cunning Loeil vivant, Jean Starobinski notes that gazing opens the gates of desire without satisfying it. This is exactly what takes place in Love in the Time of Cholera. Early in their relationship, just seeing [Fermina] was enough for Florentino (56). This is a big just, however, a need that soon becomes dependence, obsession, disease. Florentino keeps it at bay by
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putting a park between himself and the woman he pines for. Every morning from seven oclock onward, he sat on the most hidden bench in the little park pretending to read a book . . . until he saw the impossible maiden walk by in her blue-striped uniform (56). He would see her pass back and forth four times a day accompanied by her aunt Escolstica, and once on Sunday when they came out of High Mass (56). One day, as this gazing ritual has begun to reach a pitch of frenzy, Florentino discovers Fermina sitting under the almond trees at the doorway to her house in an open-air repetition of the scene he had witnessed the rst afternoon in the sewing room: the girl giving a reading lesson to her aunt (59). He sits down to watch them, forlorn on his bench across the square, not even bothering to make a pretense about reading. Fermina is not wearing her school uniform any longer, but a narrow tunic in the Greek style, and on her head . . . a garland of fresh gardenias that made her look like a crowned goddess (59). At rst, Florentino thinks the lesson under the almond trees is a casual innovation but he soon learns it is a daily ritual that will take place, every afternoon at the same time during the three months of vacation (60). Every day, henceforth, he sails to this new Byzantium to lose himself in contemplation. Howeverand it is this detail that is most pertinent to our discussionhe did not have the impression that he was seen, he could not detect any sign of interest or rejection (60). This is not the rst, and certainly not the only, time Florentino stares and his lovelorn glances nd no sign of interest. During the rst phase of his relationship with Fermina, it seems that she walks through him, an empty respondent impervious to his longing. While Florentino gears his day around the four glimpses he hopes to catch of his crowned goddess on her way to and from school, she glides by, with natural haughtiness, her head high, her eyes unmoving (56). Later on, when she becomes aware of his constant presence and steals rapid glances at him while he is not looking, she seems to maintain her distance, giving poor Florentino the impression that both she and her aunt cross the park without looking at him (58). It is curious to read, moreover, that although Escolstica and Fermina both hurry to look at him with a rapid glance, what Florentino sees when he raises his eyes are two rigid, aloof women who crossed the park without seeing him (58). We must adduce that either they are very quick in disguising their movements or Florentino simply sees what he wishes to see. In view of
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his penchant for fantasy, the second possibility, paradoxical though it may be, seems the most likely. Still, one cannot help wonder why he would not wish to be acknowledged by the woman he loves, and prefers to cast himself as unseen when in fact Fermina is so eager to catch a glimpse of him that her blood frothed with the need to see him, and one night she awoke in terror because she saw him looking at her from the darkness at the foot of the bed (58). Instead of responding to her need, Florentino watches her from a distance. What he sees across the park is an illusory maiden who does not even respond with a charitable glance (60). On the basis of this curious game of hide-and-seek between Florentino and Fermina, the geography of love portrayed in this section of the novel can be mapped out in three spaces: rst, the place occupied by Florentino, the lonely gazer; second, the place occupied by the object watched, Fermina; and, third, the seemingly unbridgeable chasm that keeps them apart. I say unbridgeable because Florentinos xation is no dierent from a voyeurs, and voyeurs do everything to keep the object they long for out of reach, giving gazing the primacy over touching, as we have already seen in Infantes Inferno. According to Christian Metzs spellbinding discussion of voyeurism, an empty no mans land, a chasm between the viewer and the object viewed is an essential ingredient in the pathology of the voyeur (Le signicant imaginaire, 6365). If this chasm were to be bridged, the voyeur would resolve the problem of absence and longing which are at the base of his perverse desire. The problem is that he doesnt wish to resolve it. The voyeurs yearning actually restages the infants longing for the mother, observed, or imagined, in the act of lovemaking with the father, the act from which the infant is excluded. Excluded in the esh and yet included par voie interpose, the infant who grows pathologically dependent on this bizarre geometry of desire learns to derive gratication from watching, the locus of pleasure becoming transferred from the penis to the eye. From then on, the body it pines for is kept at bay, recreating in its distance the dynamics of the primal scene which taught the child to watch and not to touch. Gazing at an impossible and unreachable love object becomes, thereafter, the infants supreme source of pleasure. For this reason, he must perceive the rift which keeps him at bay from the object he longs for as something unsalvageable, even when that rift is purely imaginary, fueled only by his needs. Directly connected to our discussion, the need to keep fueling the fantasies of distance and of the
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objects ungraspability explains why Florentino ignores Ferminas growing interest in him, why he fails to see her rapid glances, her frothing blood. He cannot see her glances because he does not want to; she must remain, at this stage of the game, at least, a crowned goddess. Galatea cuts the cord Fermina is not a crowned goddess, however. She is a woman of esh and blood who sweats and gets saddle sores, who locks herself up in her bedroom, the door bolted with a crossbar, to smoke hand-rolled cigarettes and talk about men with her cousin Hildebranda; she is a woman who will not allow her fathers bone-breaking will to trample her own when he tries to separate her from the accursed upstart whom he did not remember ever having seen, and takes her away on a demented trip to the end of the Earth (80). Back from her enforced exile a year later, she is a changed woman or, more exactly, a woman tout court. Not somebody elses projection of an ideal girl, but a forest animal ready to pounce out of her skin in order to satisfy her own longings (159). Ferminas profound transformation is made explicit on her rst visit to the marketplace the day after she returns home to run her fathers house. Out shopping with her maid, the erstwhile shy and demure schoolgirl enters every doorway where there was something for sale, and everywhere she found something that increased her desire to live (99). The two paragraphs in which her shopping expedition is vividly sketched are drafted as a shopping list itemizing the wonders she discovers: She relished the aroma of vetiver . . . she wrapped herself in embossed silks, she laughed at her own laughter . . . she sampled an Alicante sausage that tasted of licorice . . . she crushed leaves of sage and oregano in the palms of her hands . . . and bought a handful of cloves, another of star anise, and one each of ginger root and juniper (99). The foodstus, spices, and silks Fermina touches, smells, and drapes over her body envelop her in more ways than one, sharing with her a measure of their sensuality. Her body becomes the recipient into which the world around her pours itself. To emphasize not her coming of age but, rather, her coming to be, Garca Mrquez showers the two paragraphs that sketch her Archimboldian romp amidst the vegetables with twenty-six third-person feminine pronouns that leave no doubt as to her newly found central position within the narrative. She enters, she nds, she relishes, she wraps herself, she
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laughs, she picks the lid of a barrel of herring; at this point, like the Eucharist, Fermina has transubstantiated: the watered-down schoolgirl of a year earlier has become a grown woman, the center of the universe portrayed in Love in the Time of Cholera. Her scene of initiation is reminiscent of Mariselas lustral cleansing at the beginning of Rmulo Gallegoss Doa Brbara. The dierence is that there is no Santos Luzardo in Love in the Time of Cholera, no Holy Light to cast o the shadows from the cavern. The man who follows Ferminas step after startled step is blinded not by her dazzle, but by the glow of his own idealized projection. Because in the marketplace he was seeing (her) for the rst time in her natural state, in fact, Florentino is practically unable to recognize her, and when he nally plucks up enough courage to speak to her his words are simultaneously a denial of her newly found identity, and a wish to continue inicting on her the mask he had invented: this is not the place for a crowned goddess, he mutters (99, 102). Unable to continue staring at herself in the mirror of his illusion, Fermina feels the abyss of disenchantment for the rst time, and understands the magnitude of her own mistake, wondering how she could have nurtured such a chimaera in her heart (102). The Florentino she loves in her imagination, clearly, does not correspond to that livid face, those lips petried with fear that address a crowned goddess a few inches from her face (102). Correspondingly, the woman Florentino loves is not the sensual and resourceful maiden who prowls through the marketplace with such ease. Goddesses dont prowl, and Fermina is no goddess, which is why she is the rst to grasp the quagmire of their illusion and erase Florentino from her life with a wave of her hand (102). It cannot be emphasized enough that Fermina, not Florentino, becomes conscious of their shared blindness. Typically in Garca Mrquez, the lucid role is womans. As is usually the case in his work, men in Love in the Time of Cholera are shortsighted and stubborn, restless dreamers who are outwardly ecient but, down deep, incompetent nincompoops like the rst Jos Arcadio Buenda in One Hundred Years, or senile babies like the urban Dr. Urbino whom Fermina Daza ends up marrying (26). Mention of mens dependence ushers into our discussion the second type of love portrayed in Love in the Time of Cholera. If a single determining feature links the Urbinos married love to the idealization of FlorenThe excremental vision of Garca Mrquez 119

tinos and Ferminas rst phase, it is the childlike way men behave in their relationships with women. In Garca Mrquezs ction, women nurture the men they love while men think they do all the important work, like ght wars, for instance. To point out how really childish are most of mens endeavors, Garca Mrquez portrays wars as protracted and useless aairs in which even those ghting lose their sense of reality and forget whether they are liberals or conservatives. Men also see themselves as important because they are great explorers, even if, more often than not, their forays into the unknown have no purpose and they return home hungry, dusty, and ea-bitten after traveling around in circles. Returning home empty-handed does not deate the Jos Arcadio Buendas of this world because men are tough. We know how to argue and ght although, it is true, our arguments tend to be over stupid, childish matterssuch as which is the better ghting cock in the ringand we end up killing each other over dierences as insignicant as the right way to peel an egg. According to Garca Mrquez, the disadvantage of being a man is not that males are the intrinsically inferior sex but that they spend most of their time trying to convince the world that they are not (224). For this sin men are punished, and their punishment, like Oedipuss, is blindness. Unless an epiphany of some sort occurs (like the colonels in No One Writes or Florentinos at the end of Love in the Time of Cholera ), men spend their lives strutting and fretting upon some ridiculous stage, or, like the quintessential wise fool in One Hundred Years of Solitude, tied to a tree while women go on solving the menial tasks of daily existencefeeding the family, keeping the children clean, paying the bills, and doing their best to keep their husbands out of trouble. Women at work Garca Mrquez strongly suggests that, too blind or too stupid to love women as they are, men change them over, inventing an idealized image that blurs reality; they marry Fernanda del Carpio instead of Petra Cotes; they turn schoolgirls with braids into crowned goddesses, and fail to discover whats underneath the crown. Perhaps men dont love women enough to love them as they are because men are profoundly afraidas Garca Mrquez makes plain in all his novelsof their superior common sense and ability to live without squelching everyone around them. Rather than recognize the truth, men suppress it and invent an ideal
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which they impose through sheer physical strength. Not given the option to choose, women are cast in one of three roles: little girls, crowned goddesses, or whores, roles that are kept alive by legal conventions enforced by men and abided by women who identify with power in order to forge themselves an identity. In other words, as Garca Mrquez portrays it, ties between the sexes are established on the basis of lies born out of mans fear. To keep women in their place, men rule, but they rule blindfolded. The blindfold is not removednot in worshiping from afar, as Florentino does, nor during marriage, in spite of sharing the same roof. Fermina marries Dr. Juvenal Urbino half out of inertia, half out of curiosity, but fully compelled by the force of his desire, his will that it be so. As for love, he was aware that he did not love her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part (159). Their marriage is a perfect one in the eyes of the world; they are the most prominent couple in the city, the best dressed, the most sought after, the most cultured, and full of charm. Their married life has all the right trappings, but after fty-three years, nine months and seven days, when Juvenal dies and Fermina is lost in her longing to understand their years together, she comes to the realization that she could not conceive of a husband better than hers had been, and yet when she recalled their life she found more diculties than pleasures, so many diculties, in fact, that they made her wonder how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems . . . and not really know if it was love or not (329). Ferminas doubts regarding her love for her husband shed light on Garca Mrquezs design. Writing about love, he takes pains to describe how little we know about it, and how seldom we feel it. To drive this point home, he conceives Florentinos 622 love aairs, impelled by his sudden revelation that his illusory love for Fermina Daza could be replaced by an earthly passion (143). It is this third form of illusionthat lust can be substituted for lovewhich explains why sex is overacted to the point of histrionics in Love in the Time of Cholera. Il catlogo questo Many readers are put o by the ostentatious catacomb of Florentinos love life without realizing that, piling Ossa upon Pelion, Garca Mrquez
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is poking fun of his heros remedy for heartache and substitute for love. There can be no doubt that Garca Mrquez amused himself with the portrayal of Florentinos outrageous love aairs and that these multitudinous encounters were conceived as sideshows to caricature physical relationships which are an end unto themselves. Mockery and grotesque exaggeration enter Florentinos love life from the day he is deowered by an anonymous river voyager who seizes him by his shirt sleeve one night with a hand like the talon of a hawk, and pulls him into a cabin where her ageless body . . . pushed him onto the bunk . . . unbuttoned his trousers, [and] impaled herself on him as if she were riding horseback (142). This mysterious stranger who traveled with a baby in a large wicker birdcage, and urged Florentino in a hushed voice to go and forget all about their lovemaking because it had never happened, is equally as outlandish as his rst ocial mistress, the ironically named Widow Nazaret, whom he talks into sundry activities that include letting themselves be observed while they made love, replac[ing] the conventional missionary position with the bicycle on the sea, or the chicken on the grill, or the drawn and quartered angel, until they almost broke their necks when the cords snapped as they were trying to devise something new in a hammock (151). The lubricious widow is in turn replaced with the wife of a hairy ship captain, a saucy fty-year-old who opens the door stark naked except for the ribbon in her hair, and undresses Florentino on the spot where he stood because she thought it was bad luck to have a clothed man in the house. She is left in the lurch when Florentino repairs to the arms of an elephantine lady of mother-of-pearl whiteness and alpine bosom, who is unable to reach the heights of glory while making love unless she is sucking on a pacier. Finally, the Gargantuan Venus is displaced when Florentino picks up a madwoman for a lark, unaware that she had decapitated a guard from Divine Shepherdess Asylum who tried to stop her from dancing at Carnival. The tenacious hero of Love in the Time of Cholera survives all the titillating ignominies of sex, thrives on them, even. But there can be no doubt in anyones mind that the burlesque quality of these liaisons is designed to show up their ludicrousness, and that they are no less a lion in the path of love than Florentinos own idealized feeling for Fermina or Urbinos marriage of formulas and conventional expectations. Barren and selsh, Florentinos 622 catalogued adventures are based neither on
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sharing nor on giving; they are something that resembled love but without the problems of love, something that led his own mother to say that the son she had conceived in love and raised for love was immune to any kind of love (198). Which is why he becomes known around town as the man most avid for love as well as most niggardly with it, the man who gave nothing and wanted everything, and whyagain by way of the bodyGarca Mrquez insists so tellingly about his chronic constipation (216, 286, 54). Should I the queen of love refuse because she rose from stinking ooze? Florentino is so detached in his involvements that he is regarded as a man passing through life while his own body is paradoxically stopped up (198). From the start, we learn that his constipation was so chronic he was forced to take enemas throughout his life, and he became so fond of this remedy that he started using it in bed as a spicy condiment for sex (54). Later in the novel, after Urbino dies and Florentino repeats his vow of eternal delity and everlasting love to Fermina Daza and is told to leave her house never to return, he suers a crisis of constipation that swelled his belly like a drum (277). But when, after he has hounded her with letters for months, she invites him back, the eects of the chronic ailment are reversed, and his intestines suddenly lled in an explosion of painful foam (304). A bastion against release, the body that had remained immured for seventy-six years begins to liquify at the onset of what promises to be an emotional catharsis. Florentino tries to repress the sudden urge, but it is to no avail: a twisting in his guts like the coil of a spring lifted him from his seat, the foaming in his belly grew thicker and more painful, and he began to look more and more like a corpse, frightening the maid who brought him coee (304). Lest Fermina hear the deadly griping of his bowels, he ees at that point, promising to come back another day (304). And then, just barely after the premonitory sound of his automobiles backring faded at the end of the street, he shifts into a less painful position in the back seat, closed his eyes, relaxed his muscles, and surrendered to the will of his body (305). To him, it was like being reborn, but his usually impassive driver warns him, somewhat alarmed, Be careful, Don Floro, that looks like cholera (305). Florentinos intestinal explosion is not the rst time that the eects of
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love are compared with those of cholera in the novel, but the message conveyed in this scene of release is very dierent from that of many others in which the symptoms of love are shown to be analogous to those of disease. Garca Mrquezs point is well taken; once it takes root, love can make one nauseous and feverish, catatonic or convulsive. In extreme cases, its symptoms may even be similar to those of the plague, but one thing is certain: in Love in the Time of Cholera the disease of love does not relate to elimination except where Florentino is concerned. This does not mean that all allusions made to excrement in this novel refer exclusively to Florentino, however; in fact, carefully tracking the excremental theme, we soon recognize it is so pervasive because it holds a prominent place in Garca Mrquezs master plan. We learn early in the action, for instance, that the entire city ooded in winter until the latrines turned the streets into sickening bogs (17). The excrement then dried in the sun, turned to dust, and was inhaled by everyone along with the joys of Christmas (109); people in the streets of the city featured in this novel are perpetually enveloped in a tender breath of human shit; the bay is described as a stagnant garbage heap, and the marketplace is set on the spot where the bay belched lth from the sewers back onto land (17, 19, 110). Filth is pervasive but, as in other examples of carnival literature, we soon realize the excremental vision in Love in the Time of Cholera is associated with growth, not with decay. We can assume, therefore, that in Garca Mrquezs didactic fable, one that culminates in a new era of consummated love betokening the return to traditional humanistic values, the slow transit through and nal explosion in Florentinos bowels are in some way connected with this characters evolution; they are a rite of passage in both senses of the phrase (21). Writing a book about love and never straying from his didactic intent, Garca Mrquezlike Florentino and Fermina themselvesis searching for a way to the heart of love. One cannot help wondering, nevertheless, how such a tortuous path can be connected to Florentinos dicult transit. What can Garca Mrquez be saying about love, and the art of love, through Florentinos body? Why is this body rst shut and then open while the narrative focus evolves from its upper quadrant (the eyes) to its lower (the bowels)? Is Garca Mrquez simply pulling our leg with all this tomfoolery about constipation, griping of bowels, and backring automobiles? The possibility that he was having a grand old time writing about
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Florentinos excremental journey must not be ignored; however, we should not look askance at tomfoolery and let ourselves be ruled over by a notion of comedy which denies meaning to wit. Garca Mrquez may well be more deliberate in his approach than someone who is merely being gratuitously scatological and just having fun. Isnt Florentino actually evolving in his approach to love as the novel unfolds? Isnt his development parallel to the capricious but expressive activity of his intestines? How does Florentinos ckle organism speak the message that Garca Mrquez delivers per angostam viam ? To begin with, Florentinos chronic constipation is not his only anal characteristic. His miserliness, his extreme personal immaculateness, maniacal sense of order, secretiveness, eagerness to ask for everything and give nothing in return, even the fact that he is always dressed in black all are features suggesting an anal personality (286). To those who think I might be stretching the point, let me note that the color black is consistently linked with excrement in dream analysis and psychoanalytic literature; Garca Mrquez emphatically and repeatedly describes Florentino as someone almost always dressed in black, someone who had one black suit, someone who walks over in this same black suit to see the woman he loves looking as if he was going to a funeral (58, 56, 65). Why, after he begins to have a mature and realistic relationship with Fermina and, very pointedly, after his moment of rebirth when he lets his intestines explode in the backseat of his car, does he show up dressed in comfortable white shoes, slacks . . . linen shirt [and] . . . a white Scottish cap . . . instead of the funereal clothing he had worn all his life? (330). Let us suppose that the insistent association of the color black with Florentino and his shift to white clothes on board the New Fidelity are not part of a scheme, of an undercurrent of meaning in the novel. Could the same be said about his obsessive secretiveness? Why, then, is he persistently described as the solitary hunter with a secret life, as someone who was always one of the protagonists, but always, as in almost everything he did, a secret protagonist? (56, 193) In his liaisons Florentino tends to slip in by the back door, almost always very late at night, and sneak away on tiptoe just before dawn (197). He hides constantly, a penchant that induces Fermina to describe him as not a person but only a shadow . . . the shadow of someone whom no one had ever known (198, 204). Florentino is a shadow because he is invisible in the darkness, always alone (231). And isnt he invisible because he does not and will not
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give of himself, allowing no woman to leave a trace of her passing in his heart? (216). Is it not possible, then, that at some level the purpose of this novel is to show that mans inability to give of himself is the source of our profound solitude? Isnt our lack of generosity, our unwillingness to share, one of the two great obstacles in nding true love? And isnt our lack of tolerance, our refusal to accept the love object on its own terms, the other? Furthermore, isnt this second impediment subsumed in the conict between our animal body, appropriately epitomized in the anal function, and our pretentious sublimations, more specically the pretensions of romantic-Platonic love? Arent these pretensions at the bottom of Garca Mrquezs plan to cast Fermina as a goddess and an impossible maiden in the rst part of the book? Arent these conventional terms used to reveal the illusion in the mind of the adoring male, the illusion that his beloved from afar is all crown and wings? Where does this leave the Fermina with an irrepressible desire to live, the one who felt in her blood the wild beating of her free will (329, 347)? True, Urbino loved her, but he loved her with his ocial love and only for his own sake (329, 221). Florentinos love was dierent from Urbinos, but no better. His feverish excitement when they were young had been something very noble . . . but it had not been love (317). Fermina had detested the sentimentalities of his letters, and his lyrical lies addressed to an ideal woman that wasnt she (317). The young Florentino had an innite capacity for illusion; consequently, the love he felt for Fermina was nothing more than an illusion (230, 132). Both Florentino and her husband projected their own needs onto Fermina; both refused to see her as she was, to recognize her identity. That mans idealization of woman was very much on Garca Mrquezs mind when he wrote Love in the Time of Cholera can be gleaned from the entry poem on divided love which Florentino and his mistress Sara Noriega jointly submit to the Fifth Poetic Festival. The idea for this poem comes to them one day when Florentino had asked himself which of the two was love: the turbulent bed or the peaceful afternoons or, in other words, physical or spiritual love (199). Sara calms him down with the argument that love is a combination of both aspects, not one or the other taken in isolation. As she puts it: Spiritual love from the waist up and physical love from the waist down (199). The problem is that hu-

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manity seldom thinks like Sara, or if it does, it doesnt behave accordingly, at least not in the pages of Love in the Time of Cholera. This becomes obvious when we compare the ve tales composing the novel: Jeremiah de Saint-Amours, the young Florentinos and Ferminas, Dr. Juvenal Urbinos and Ferminas, Florentinos and his 622 mistresses, and, most importantly, the mature Florentinos and Ferminas. The three central episodes interwoven into the long midsection of the novel are designed to portray divided love, the love which is not a combination of the physical and the spiritual but gives precedence to one over the other. Consequently, in each of the three talesFlorentino and his mistresses, Urbino and Fermina, Florentino and Fermina when younglove is never a fullling experience, even if, as is the case of the Urbino couple, it looks perfect from a distance. As Garca Mrquez paints it in this modern-day parable, the problem aecting the lives of his characters is an imbalance between higher and lower functions. Our animal body, appropriately epitomized in the anal function, is just what Florentino is repressing in his relationship with Fermina. He will not touch or speak to her, limiting his contact to the writing of lofty formulas culled from the classics, thoughts and ideas which mask and inhibit his own. And this repression is, as we have seen, at the base of the romantic illusion embodied in his personal conception of the crowned goddess. Conversely, Florentino represses the spiritual or ideal with his mistresses, with whom he is all body but fundamentally absent, unable to give of himself beyond the bedroom. In sum, then, what Garca Mrquez is voicing is a ferocious critique of sublimation, which he depicts as the relationship between higher and lower, spiritual and physical, showing that sublimations basic structure is, to use the psychoanalytic formula, displacement from below upward (Brown, Life Against Death, 194). As the emphasis was given to the mouth and orality to suggest dependence in No One Writes to the Colonel, in Love in the Time of Cholera the stress is placed on the eye as the sublimating organ which seizes an image and appropriates it. By appropriating it, the eye denies the images own identity, however. As long as they continue to deny those to whom they attempt to relate, Garca Mrquez is saying, humans will continue to exclude themselves from the ultimate happiness, which is based on communing. Communing is based on acceptance, and acceptance is contingent upon knowing the others

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identity. If we deny the other through idealization, how can we ever hope to establish fraternity among human beings and peace on earth? At present, our relationships are shallow, simultaneously limited and limiting. Florentinos 622 liaisons are only from the waist down. Urbinos love for his wife is made up of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words (211). In fact, the doctor believed it was against all scientic reason for two people who hardly knew each other, with no ties at all between them, with dierent characters, dierent upbringings, and even dierent genders, to suddenly nd themselves committed to living together . . . to sharing two destinies that perhaps were fated to go in opposite directions (209). As for the third kind of love found in the body of the novelidealizationwe cannot ignore that in the rst stages of his romance with Fermina, the solitary hunters intense and binding anal xation goes hand in hand with an inhibited sexual response to her. One gets the impression that his anal xation is so pernicious that it impairs or inhibits normal sexual relations, that the anal obscures any development of the genital, as is clearly suggested by the otherwise cryptic episode when Florentino approaches Fermina for the rst time. In this scene, the solitary man in black brings a letter to the girl who sits embroidering in the doorway to her house. As he takes out the blue envelope from his inside jacket pocket, she does not dare look at him. Then, when she raises the embroidery frame toward his hand, the startling but suggestive occurs: a bird shook himself among the leaves of the almond trees, and his droppings fell right on the embroidery (61). Excrement taints the couples rst contact and brings to mind the old colonels relationship to his wife in No One Writes to the Colonel. Like the colonels, Florentinos problem is translated into a visceral cryptogram: the formers inability to relieve himself suggested his dependency; Florentinos constipation betokens his inability to give of himself. Both are stuck. The colonel condemns himself to a belated infancy; Florentinos inability to pass through dramatizes the quandary of the analretentive personality whose genital response to the woman he loves is inhibited. Garca Mrquez uses his heroes malfunctioning bodies as a metaphor to portray their dilemma andas the action unfolds and they healto signal their evolution. As each tale reaches its climax, the heros ability to relieve himself brings with it a new sense of self and betokens freedom. At the conclusion of No One Writes to the Colonel the old colonel
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begins taking action into his own hands; at the conclusion of Love in the Time of Cholera Florentino shows up in white from head to foot, ready to engage in the arduous process of accepting someone else for the rst time in his life. Heretofore, love had been confused with sex or substituted for an ideal. In the novels last episode, however, the emotion depicted is of a dierent kind, one founded on the bedrock of mutual knowledge, recognition, and acceptance. Sailing straight to the heart of love The cardboard-stage symbolism of Florentinos and Ferminas allegorical journey on the Magdalena river makes Garca Mrquezs intentions amply clear. After wasting half a century wallowing in memories, and over two years in pursuit of false illusions, the couple sets sail on a ship named the New Fidelity where Fermina is housed in a regal suite with an enclosed observatory that has the climate of perpetual spring (326). Like Florentino, the ships captain, Diego Samaritano, is dressed in white from head to foot, and to underscore the reigning theme of rebirth within a decaying world (on the riverbanks all nature is perishing: the alligators have eaten the last butteries; the manatees, parrots, and even the villages are gone), the seventy-six-year-old hero has become an ageless man with skin like a babys, and the heart of an adolescent (340). The obvious symbolism of this last episode is not what is most important, however. What catches our attention is the evolution in the way Florentino and Fermina love each other. Garca Mrquez begins the New Fidelity episode by insisting on the couples mutual discoveries of, and ensuing disappointments over, their respective bodies. The rst time they touch hands, they were not the hands they had imagined because they were made of old bones (329). This initial disappointment is immediately followed by acceptance, however: In the next moment . . . they were (329). One night, Fermina sits motionless until dawn thinking about Florentino, not as the desolate sentinel in the little Park of the Evangels, whose memory did not awaken even a spark of nostalgia in her, but as he was now, old and lame, but real (330). Florentino writes Fermina a letter as lyrical as the others except that it had a foundation in reality (330). He even begins looking dierent, not only because she saw him now with
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other eyes, but because in reality he had changed (330). Finally, several days after setting sail it seemed to her that she knew him as well as if she had lived with him all her life (335). Doing without chimeras is not an easy task for people who have been tangled in self-deception all their lives, however. Unable to face having sex together, Florentino and Fermina get drunk one night to give themselves courage, and end up failing miserably. Is isnt until much later, when the inspiration came to them without their looking for it, that they made the tranquil, wholesome love of experienced grandparents (341, 345). Love that is not heartfelt, Garca Mrquez is saying uninspired loveis as barren as the banks of the Magdalena River described at the end of the novel. If the description of barren love takes up the better part of Love in the Time of Cholera, it is only as a foil to introduce the kind of nurturing aection that one hundred years from now, and after much practice, might put an end to solitude. Taking his cue from Dante but bringing the action of his novel closer to earth, Mrquez demonstrates that there can be no love without knowledge, conoscenza. Human beings must learn to accept each other as they are, without gilding the lily or, to put it in Mrquezs own terms, without crowning the goddess. This is the lesson that Love in the Time of Cholera teaches us through exempla like those of a medieval romance. In the three central tales love is misconceived and fails because the love object is never acknowledged. The characters idealize and misconstrue each other, capsizing on the shoals of unreal love (282). Garca Mrquezs point is that sublimation is a lie and cannot survive confrontation with the truth. In One Hundred Years he demonstrated the terrifying solitude to which human beings seem condemned; in Love in the Time of Cholera he shows that this condemnation is selfimposed. If we are alone it is because we are more prone to bewitchment and lust than to mutual understanding based on acceptance. Conceived as a model of love based on knowledge, the tale of Florentinos and Ferminas gerontic idyll sheds light on the novels rst episode while being illuminated by it. Both talesthe one that opens and the one that closes the novelrelate to each other as do the two extremes of the body, upper and lower. As emphasis on the upper body is superseded by a release in the lower, the obscurities of the rst tale are resolved in the allegorical conclusion. Without the coda, in other words, the puzzling opening story of Love in the Time of Cholera makes no sense and serves no
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purpose. Until we reach that coda, we cannot fathom the unsavory revelations contained in Jeremiah de Saint-Amours eleven-page suicide letter to Urbino, revelations which might have changed [Urbinos] life, but are never disclosed (11). Bitter almonds, sweet dregs Once readers understand that Love in the Time of Cholera is about the search for love and that love must be based on mutual understanding, they are equipped to grasp the sense of the opening tale. When that time comes, although the contents of Saint-Amours mysterious letter are never disclosed, the nature of his revelations can be gleaned from the life he led, his relationship to the woman he loved and, most of all, from the symbolic role in which he is cast. After all, in a novel that portrays the accelerating destruction of a continent while a character named America commits suicide, a novel in which a good-hearted ship captain surnamed Samaritano espouses the cause of an old couple until the end of time, it would be foolish not to take the imposing name of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour literally. That is, given the conspicuous signicance of many names in the novel, it is not far-fetched to assume that in a book about love someone christened Holy Love (Saint-Amour) would have considerable signicance. It would be equally naive to think that the name Jeremiah shows up by accident. One of the two giants of Hebrew prophecy, Jeremiah fearlessly denounced the social ills of the Hebrew nation, and warned of the disasters that would follow. His agony was echoed more than two thousand years later in the words of Shakespeares Hamlet: The time is out of joint; o cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right! Unlike his illustrious predecessor, Garca Mrquezs Jeremiah does not consciously set out to put anything right, however. The one who does is Garca Mrquez, who painstakingly sets up this character and the nature of his love as examples to be contrasted with the didactic tales that follow. Saint-Amour does share a number of signicant traits with his Biblical namesake, however. Both Jeremiahs emerge as lonely and sensitive gures wrenched by inner conict. Both are radical in their thinking; both are overwhelmed by the burden of disillusion (Love, 8). Jeremiah the prophet states that God told him not to get married and have children, while Jeremiah de SaintAmour lived a clandestine life shared with a [woman] who was never
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completely [his] because, as she later explained, that was his wish (14). Both men are cut o from the fabric of ordinary life; one is a visionary zealot, the other a judicious criminal. One is known as a prophet, the other is described as a saint (6). Jeremiah the prophet compares Yahweh to the watchful almond tree whose owering announces the coming of spring. The tale of SaintAmour the saint harkens, likewise, the coming of a perpetual spring in the concluding episode of Love in the Time of Cholera. Like Yahweh, Saint-Amour is linked to the almond tree, which explains why, when Urbino enters his home and nds him dead, he is overtaken by the scent of bitter almonds (3). The scent of bitter almonds reminds the straitlaced doctor of the fate of unrequited love, and unrequited love is what the novel is all about, with two exceptions: Jeremiahs and the old couples at the end (3). Urbino also likens the scent of bitter almonds to hapless love although, ironically, Saint-Amours love is far from hapless (3). On the contrary, the woman he shared half his life with respected his dream with devotion and tenderness beyond death; she abetted his suicide out of respect for his wishes, and put those wishes before her own needs. In other words, she instinctively did what only the old Florentino and Fermina eventually learn to do: love beyond oneself, beyond egotism and personal vanity. The great prophet of the seventh century b.c. is not only similar to Mrquezs character, he is also curiously close in spirit to the modern world. Jeremiah lived in a confused and insecure time in which the old values were crumbling, and even a man of God could be assailed by doubt and a sense of alienation from society. Nonetheless, Jeremiah clung to a vision of a happier world beyond disaster, where men would have entered into a new covenant to renew themselves. If at times he felt overwhelmed by the burden of disillusion, it was because the Jews forgot how to love Yahweh. In our own time, men and women are worse o: they have forgotten how to love each other. The consequences of their respective shortcomings are similar: chaos in a world slowly but relentlessly decaying, like an angel condemned to putrefaction (Love, 9). Striving to stir his people into action, Jeremiah the prophet shocked the worshippers who had gathered at the Temple, and swore that if they did not mend their ways, God would destroy their sanctuary. In Love in the Time of Cholera, his prophecy comes to pass: the calcinated atlands stripped of forests echo T. S. Eliots The Wasteland; the debris of
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god-forsaken villages whose streets remained ooded even in the cruelest droughts and the nauseating stench of corpses oating down to the sea suggest the holocaust announced in the Old Testament (Love, 336). Jeremiah promised his sinful brethren exiled in Babylon that, in the end, God would bring them back home in peace. To his pained wondering, Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all who are treacherous thrive? Garca Mrquez seems to be answering: humanity has erred in its ways. We deny our partners essence when we repress his or her identity and substitute our own projections for it. How can we possibly build societies and prosper when we havent learned to communicate? To teach humanity a mature and signicant way to do so, Garca Mrquez conceives Love in the Time of Cholera as a moral fable and sets up the example of the opening love story, one in which the wishes of each partner are heeded above all other considerations. We cannot ignore, in addition, that his prophetic Jeremiah takes his life the night before Pentecost, the Christian feast on the seventh Sunday after Easter commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles. That descent conferred the gift of tongues, faith healing, and premillennial teaching upon his disciples. It taught them a whole new way of life and prepared them to teach others, the way Saint-Amours tale teaches modern readers about respect and acceptance in the life of a couple. The rst recipients of such salutary teaching are the old Florentino and his partner Fermina, emblem of everywoman. Thus, in spite of the proliferating decay which surrounds the aged couple at the end of their voyage, Love in the Time of Cholera can be said to cling to a vision of a happier world beyond disaster. It is a novel about renewal that opens and closes with a model to strive for, and describes the limitations and shortcomings of idealization and lust. Florentino casts Fermina as an untouchable ideal; Urbino assigns her the role of the perfect society woman and mother; and Florentinos relationship with his 622 mistresses is a love without love. Looking but not touching and, conversely, touching but not giving are a paltry expression of the human capacity to communicate; one way or another, the human animal continues holding back. Florentino Ariza is an example of such withholding. His aective retention is ironically paired o with constipation to drive the point home. Early on in his career, constipation is also linked with scopophilia, since he begins his love life by relating exclusively through eye contact. Sex is conspicuously absent from his rst relationship with Fermina, and yet it
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dominates to the detriment of enduring aection in his endless liaisons. Neither type of relationship is healthy; neither can last because neither takes the love object into account. In contrast with such idealizations and examples of unfullled liaisons, Florentinos and Ferminas mature love in the last episode portrays the essence of Garca Mrquezs humanist teaching. The author is not singing the praises of geriatric love out of irony; his aim is to draw an analogy between age and experience, between experience and acceptance. Experience acquired through time is mapped out directly on Florentinos body: his gastric explosion after his third visit to the widow Urbino signals a release of the curse which has shackled his intestines as well as his aections. He begins a new life, no longer idealizing but actually getting to know, and understand, the woman he loves. The concluding episode invites readers to recast civilization and discard the hollow substitutes for love that society has been living with until now. As in No One Writes to the Colonel, Garca Mrquez uses the body as a mirror of the human condition with the aim of motivating social change. In other words, organic symbols enter his composition as a means to orchestrate his civilizing message. After all, as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White point out, the body cannot be thought of separately from the social formation, symbolic topography and the constitution of the subject . . . it is rather that the body is actively produced by the junction and disjunction of symbolic domains and can never be legitimately evaluated in itself (Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 192). When Garca Mrquez endows the body with symbolic value beyond its material identity, he is simply acknowledging that it has a cultural importance which has often gone unrecognized, thatin his ction, at leastthe organism is a trope for the polis, an agency that permits him to generalize about constipation while referring to the passivity of an old colonel or to the compulsive retentiveness of a voyeur pining for love. His emphasis on excrement is not a gratuitous and windy cacophony but a meaningful metaphor of release, a hopeful remedy for our ailing times.

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4
The degraded body in the work of Severo Sarduy i

Tela zurcida y oscura. Vendas. Llagas purulentas que sudan sobre las cuentas del collar que las sutura. Ni otra forma ni mas pura del cuerpo que se quebranta. Babal Ay

As the real subject of Las Meninas is the art of painting, the real subject of Severo Sarduys novels is the art of writing. The analogies between the Cuban authors hermetic writing and Velzquezs enigmatic masterpiece do not end here, moreover, leading one to believe that the kinship between these works is more than coincidental. As in the puzzling royal portrait, mirrors invite us to delve further into Sarduys compositions; ickering in the dark backgrounds of intimate scenes, they reect casual events that turn out to be crucial in solving both kinds of conundrums. Not the least enigmatic feature of these riddles is that, like Velzquez, Sarduy includes himself in his work. He is both actor and creator, an active participant whose presence reminds us that the world he portrays ows directly from his pen. His writing sits on the page like pigment on canvas, a mnemonic trace recording outlandish circumstances that turn out to be of momentous importance because, like scratches on the skin, they picture the incident that etched them into the surface (El Cristo de la rue Jacob, 7). Sarduywho epitomizes the subject of this bookwas a staunch be-

liever that writing was an archaeology of the skin; he liked to say, extending the metaphor to a dierent eld, that scabs on the body could be peeled back to expose the original wound and give an idea of the instrument that scratched them on the esh (El Cristo, 7). It was typically discerning of him to choose the metaphor of the scar to designate recorded memories. After all, the bodies he portrays are often battered. His fantasy was very dierent from Cabrera Infantes or Garca Mrquezs. Bodies in their work are always inspirited; they yearn and evolve through yearning, seldom seeking to bring about their own destruction. In contrast, in Sarduys writings the body is beaten, mauled, torn to pieces. Pain, torture, and delement suggest a process of deterioration that goes against the grain of the usual literary portrait. Most authors conceive of writing as a process of accretion through which characters add layers of consistency and denition as they develop an identity. To chisel his characters, Sarduy proceeds more like Giacometti than like Rodin, however. He whittles away at his embattled heroes, creating in order to tear apart. Tortured and deled, his beleaguered protagonists evolve through a process of abrasion and subtraction: Cobra is hung from the ceiling until his body starts oozing blood; Totem cuts o his tongue; Pup rips the ears o a little girl (Cobra, 10809, 170, 97). In Maitreya (1978), the old hags who attend the holy man drink repulsive liquids: saliva and urine in order to humiliate themselves; one of them spits on her neighbors feet, pierces her lips with a pin, burns her arms, and hangs two bloody chicken necks from her green and saroncolored dreadlocks (66). After the Most Noble Infant they serve stops breathing, the old acolytes lunge for his body with the voracity of a pair of vultures, and start to tear away handfuls of hair, eyebrows and lashes (72). Once they have distributed these relics among the faithful, they chop up his remains into one hundred pieces and empty out the head; in an unmarked tomb, they reconstitute his broken body and abandon themselves to rapture: Here is the fragmented body . . . , they gloat, here is the object of desire (74). In Colibr (1984), sweaty, muscular wrestlers who exude testosterone and excel in the art of humiliation lock arms on the makeshift stage of a homosexual bar ironically named the Big House (la Casona ). They shame, insult, and spit on the loser, taunting aroused onlookers to buy them for the night on the basis of their ability to pummel their sexual partners. In turn pursuer and pursued, the novels hero is slapped across
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the face and brought down on his knees, his body covered with green spittle (12324). Colibr is not the only character whose body is fouled with vile droppings and ejections, moreover; the horde of pursuers who shake a tree to knock him down from its branch is drenched in viscous cobweb threads, tiny rotten eggs and excrement (49). Excrement enters Cocuyo (1990) as a pivotal theme for the rst time in Sarduys writing: San Sebastian is deled by it, caught in the act of defecating as his body is pierced through with arrows (14), and the novels hero slides down a slope at full speed while holding on to his potty turned sled (1112). Defecation in Cocuyo is described as something that robs us of part of ourselves, emphasizing the element of attrition fundamental in Sarduys portrayal (14). Over and over, diminished organisms in his work are ravaged by mutilation and decay, showcasing the loss of self in a crumbling world in which even condemned angels topple down from the heavenly vault amidst strident squeals (Cocuyo, 16). Sarduys angels squeal because the world they live in is an alarming place where pain is all too readily dispensed. The truth is, all of Sarduys characters are cruel, bent on harming themselves and each other as they trim down the universe around them. The universe mimics the characters: it is continually crumbling. Like one of Julian Schnabels shardcovered canvases, the landscape in Sarduys novels disintegrates before our very eyes: the sun devours everything with its leprosy and cruelty, the humidity and heat are like acid that corrodes the facades of houses, the ocean is anemic, the land exudes a putrefying stench (Cocuyo 155, 102, 189, 208). Detailed in El Cristo de la rue Jacob (1987), the narrators body is as bruised and wounded as the landscape in Cocuyo: sharp thorns puncture his skull; two of his teeth break; his gashed lower lip needs to be stitched; a wart grows on his foot (11, 21, 25). True to his prediction that the body is a fragile and opaque container always ready to break, the heros organism ends up depicted as a conquered territory (Cocuyo, 18). In Pjaros de la playa (1993), his last novel, the body continues to corrode on its unremitting path to putrefaction. A slow kind of leprosy scorches it until the narrator turns into an organic wreck (132). His energy drained, each day witnesses the ebbing away of his faculties: to write, to think coherently, to remember. Each new crisis is more shattering than the ones before; they water down the humor that trickles through his veins, dissolve the marrow in his bones (137). The narrating body turns out to be a pitiless
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enemy; his nails are chewed up, the sole of his feet and tender esh around his toes invaded by a whitish, microscopic fungus that eventually bursts out into swollen, pussy pimples (156). A persistent gash that will not heal tears the skin between his hollow, white-haired left testicle, and the no longer impetuous, shrunken penis (157). His gums bleed, and his eagerness to put an end to the bundle of farts and excrement that is his body can come as no surprise to the reader (16566). The degraded walking carcass in Pjaros de la playa is not that of a transvestite in a Moroccan nightclub, or of a wrestler in some godforsaken male brothel, moreover. It is the narrators own, painstakingly described until it becomes confused with that of Sarduy, who was dying of aids while he wrote these pages. Scourged and devastated, Sarduys body eventually became indistinguishable from those of his most vilied characters; marking it, blotting it, taking possession of what was theirs to begin with, putrefaction and decay ended up imitating art at its most macabre. Physical degradation remained an ingredient of Sarduys ctional portrayals until the end of his life, but did the withered carcasses featured in his work always spring from the same sources, one wonders, or were they altered by his own disease? Why were his amboyant stories overrun with foul stenches and bone splinters, splattered marrow and curdling blood? Why was he so obsessed with portraying the organism as wrecked and the world as abject? In short, where was Sarduys destructive vision stemming from? The fragmented body In Cobra, his towering masterpiece of 1972, Sarduy dramatized the fantasy of the dismembered body for the rst time in his career. Running the full gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous, the hero of the novel spends the rst seventy pages searching for ways to reduce the size of his feet. After many experiments, including mainlining curare juice into his veins, his feet dont get any smaller but his body splits into two and, from that point forward the full-grown hero shares the limelight with a pintsized version of himself. Later in the action, the schizoid and sexually ambivalent Cobra sets out in pursuit of a second transformation, which, as Alicia Rivero Potter

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has explained, is metaphorically equivalent to the rst. After nally tracking down the elusive Dr. Ktazob (whose name alludes to the organ Cobra wishes to be rid o ), he submits to his blade and the doctor tears out the superuous in one fell swoop (Cobra, 85). But then, scarcely fteen pages after his operation, Cobra is surrounded andin spite of his fancy drag and elaborate makeupimmediately recognized as a man: its him, cries out an old lady in the crowd (130). Given all the emphasis on reducing the size of extremities, tearing o limbs, and chopping o sex organs, readers of this novel have had no diculty in recognizing Sarduys preposterous dramatization of castration. Much has been written about Cobras mutilated body since the novel appeared in print, but nothing has been said about the heros last and most signicant gender switch. It is signicant because, if Cobra recovers his original gender after Ktazobs removes the superuous, isnt Sarduy suggesting that castration has been in some way annulled? Castration is particularly trenchant in this novel because, quite literally, the hero is a penis with a mind of its own, a talking head with no use for his feet. As I have suggested elsewhere, in the chapter titled The Conversion Sarduy makes a point of establishing a homology between the snake and the male sexual organ. This is why, following the castration scene, Cobras pillow is found to be smeared with limpid starch or semen, and immediately afterward, the heros behavior is described with an ambiguous terminology that could apply to a penis as well as to a reptile: It raises itself . . . it unfolds . . . the triangular head crowned with an arch . . . contracts and dilates ooding everything with spurts of corrosive juices . . . (118, 119, 120). The nexus between penis and reptile is conspicuous not only in the passage describing the castration ceremony. When an Alexandrian saint emasculates himself in mystic rapture, we are told he amputated his own basilisk with a single blow, and when a snake coils itself around Totems sexual organ, its head and his glans adhere to each other, the reptiles pointed tongue dashing in and out, dripping semen (89, 142). The hero is not simply named after a reptile; he looks and behaves both like a snake and a penis. Like Shivas, Cobras avatars are the serpent and the lingam. For this reason, his castration implies much more than having his genitals removed; it betokens the eradication of a feature that is analogous to himself and suggests the obnubilation of his whole identity. Like a pipe

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organ that chooses not to blow, what Cobra denies is, in point of fact, his very essence. This brings us directly to the question of the self as it is generally portrayed in Sarduy, which is to say, as unable to accept or, in other words, coincide with itself. His characters are not just in pursuit of an ideal that seems to elude them; they loathe their own bodies, a rejection that lies at the base of their mutilations and perpetual transformations. As Sarduy portrays it, identity is friable. It is no coincidence that so many of his characters spend time staring at themselves in mirrors, and that some are unable to recognize themselves, as if the image behind the mercury lining were someone elses (Colibr, 178). Mirrors and an inability to recognize oneself bring to mind Lacans much repeated and, in this case, very applicable remarks regarding the infants development of a separate identity. We know that, like Sarduys ighty hero Colibr, the infant in the rst phase of Lacans mirror stage fails to recognize itself in the mirror. Fully identied with the mother, it does not yet have a sense of itself as separate. That sense only develops after the paternal proscription which psychoanalysis terms a symbolic castration takes place. However, if the infant fails to internalize the Name of the Father or, in other words, if castration falls short, it does not develop a sense of itself as distinct, and will remain identied with the mother. Sarduy referred to the mother and to the trauma of separating from her on several occasions, although never more explicitly than in El Cristo de la rue Jacob. All autobiographical references contained in this extraordinary little book must not be taken at face value, however. As Rosemary Feal has pointed out, more than the story of ones life written by oneself, autobiography has come to be seen as synonymous with the exploration of the self through writing, exactly the tenor of Sarduys so-called personal revelations (Novel Lives, 11). Like many of his characters, his revelations are often in drag, dressed up in bangles and beads that are a response to the overarching needs of the narrative. Sarduys autobiographical I is always a mask, in other words, a gure split in two that remains nonetheless revealing about the author and his designs. For instance, in a particularly candid episode of El Cristo de la rue Jacob, the narrator reminisces about his childhood as the period in which, as he puts it, my mother and I were very close to each other; we were almost . . . the same

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person (11). That seamless bond is broken when the young Sarduy hurts his head and grasps, almost simultaneously, that it wasnt [his] mothers body that felt pain but, actually, his own (11). What is most relevant about this anecdote is not whether the events really took place, but the way in which Sarduy chooses to tell the story, that is, the way he chooses to frame those events. Revealingly, the discovery made by his alter ego in El Cristo de la rue Jacob involves a mirrored reection; the narrator-cum-author stares at his own distorted, and asymmetrical, body on the shiny surface of the oor tiles in the surgery room and has a painful epiphany: we [i.e., his mother and he] had become separated in and through pain (12). The instant he feels the burning lips of his wound stitched together, the narrator recognizes his own insularity. This realization comes hand in hand with another: his ability to obtain pleasure is likewise self-determined and isolating. The scene in the surgery room is both a restatement and a culmination. It is a restatement because it brings together three features that insistently show up in all works of prose that Sarduy wrote in the seventies and eighties: rst, a close bond between the hero and an older woman (Cobra and the Seora; Colibr and the Regent; the dwarf and Lady Tremendous; the narrator of El Cristo de la rue Jacob, and his mother); second, a mirror in which one or both characters are reected together; and, third, a scene of separation. It is a culmination because the ction wants us to believe that the two characters who are bonded to each other, reected on the same surface, and then separated are not merely symbolic substitutes but the author and his mother. On the basis of this connection between mother and child, it could be said that El Cristo de la rue Jacob is a kind of viaje a la semilla, a close look at the sources that inspire the three main features which, thematically speaking, tipify Sarduys work during two decades of his career. A fourth feature characteristic of his work during this period is the emphasis on eroticism. One cannot help noticing that while the accent is on eroticism, however, the presence of genital sex diminishes proportionately as we travel from Cobra to Pjaros de la playa. When we take a close look at their behavior, we realize that characters in Cobra, Maitreya, Colibr, Cocuyo, and certainly in Sarduys last novel have little or no contact with each other, sexuality becoming progressively more autarchic as the author gets older. Furthermore, because all four features appear conjointly in his

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work, we are led to believe that there must be a connection between mirrors, the sexual activity they reect, and an arresting diminution of physical contact. Two scenes in Maitreya corroborate this connection. Through the looking glass In the rst of these scenes, Luis Leng contemplates his own reection contemplating three women who are themselves contemplating their interstices in a mirror; as he begins to masturbate, the women reappear in a veritable apotheosis of voyeurism: reected in miniature in a translucid drop that glistens on the head of his penis (120). As he watches their reection, they approach him with a bedspread with which they shroud his body and, soon after, they begin making waves in a tortuous up-anddown movement described as the Asiatic transmutation of the fort-da (121). Leng then orders Lady Tremendous to take his sex with her mouth, demanding that it be done without touching it (121). She obeys in spite of herself because, although she wanted to catch it, she caught nothing (Maitreya, 122). Lengs screened vignette mirrors, while inverting, an earlier scene that opens with Ladies Divine and Tremendous wantonly sprawled on a sofa. In the scene in the looking glass we have just described, the women walk toward Leng under the protective cover of a blanket before covering him with it, while in the episode on the sofa it is the Chinaman who approaches the ladies camouaged behind bedcovers. All the sleepy duo see as he moves closer is the gradual advance of a velvety black screen which Leng will eventually drop . . . on them like a fallen curtain (96). Protected by . . . the sudden intervention of invisibility, the Chinaman proceeds to strip naked at that point and soon begins caressing himself, enveloped in what was a double opacity for the twins, facing their . . . buried bodies (96). What cannot fail to strike readers of the sofa episode is that Leng throws o his clothes as if alone or absent-minded, and that he only dives between volumes of esh wrapped in the undulating thickness of the bedspread when he feels the germinating spark . . . beginning to rise from the ball-shaped distilleries (96). In other words, the lascivious lothario reaches a climax by himself aroused by what is near but, ultimatelyas is always the case for voyeursseparate and unavailable.

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The rst two mirror scenes in Maitreya reveal an obsession and invite what may seem like a hasty generalization this early on in our discussion: intercourse seldom takes place in Sarduys scenarios, and when it does, contact tends to be screened, prophylactic, or sterile. As pictured by Sarduy, physical contact is curiously mediated by distance; characters in his mirror scenes come together but something keeps them apart even while in each others presence. One cannot help wonder why sexuality is an independent and self-gratifying activity in Sarduys novels, one that brings with it a sense of exclusion and separation. Considering his emphasis on eroticism, why does he proscribe intercourse whenever he portrays men and women together? Why does he bring bodies close to each other but keep them from touching? Couldnt the link between isolating sex, blankets, mirrors, and the emphasis on gazing rather than on physical contact be his tongue-in-cheek allusion to primal scene fantasies? Primal scene fantasies translate an unresolved conict; they dramatize the kind of triangular dynamic which, as in Lengs show-and-tell, exclude the primal viewer from playing an active role in the sexual act. Instead of physically partaking, the viewer becomes a passive respondent, displacing the erotic locus from the genitals to the eye, the organ with which he watches from a distance a scene he can only enjoy by means of a substitute. As it turns out, the displaced viewer upstaged by a rival is a prescriptive feature of the last and most revealing mirror scene in Maitreya. In the concluding quarter of part two (the sections titled The Fist I and II), Lady Tremendous takes center stage after pricking her twin sister with a pin that deates her like a character in a Tom and Jerry cartoon (114). Once the randy twin is whisked out of the ction, Sarduy pulls one of his favorite toys out of the bag. The dwarf, that body fallen from Cobra after he has had his penis removed, comes back with a vengeance in Maitreya, a book in which Sarduys intentions for casting him as alter ego of the hero are made amply clear (Cobra, 115). The little fellow rst shows up as part of a threesome that includes Lady Tremendous and a well-endowed Iranian chaueur (but I am getting ahead of myself because the Iranian only comes to occupy pride of place after the dwarf is displaced, and it is the removal of the little man that is crucial to understanding Sarduys plot). To begin with, what the fantasy in the last quarter of Maitreya dramatizes is the little tykes anal penetration of Charming Chubby with his st. The Iranian enters both

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the drama and the Lady only after the dwarf has ruled the annals of the Empire in tableaux which contain every element depicted in Luis Lengs earlier menage trois, beginning with mirrors (Maitreya, 161). The rst time the dwarf puts his joined ngertips into Lady Tremendouss rectum, she sees the reection of his little hand sinking into her body in the tiles of the Turkish bath where the scene takes place. Moreover, as in earlier erotic episodes, the Lady perceives her own body as if it were someone elses (156). Literally putting the scene in wraps and further adding to the distancing eect suggested by Lady Tremendouss alienation, the Iranian shows up with an unfolded screen which he places right in front of the gasping players, and behind two large lamps, turning in this manner the living tableau into a screened performance, life into an art form in which the characters appear as silhouettes (156). It is impossible not to recognize Christian Metzs description of the relationship between voyeurism and cinema watching in the Iranians cheat sheet. Sarduy aunts his sources, in fact, as emphatically as the Iranian parades his erections; both kinds of citationsverbal as well as bodilyare hard to avoid. But just in case anyone wants to ght the evidence that nothing in his scenarios is gratuitous, that the intention of the lecherous dwarf s sour gropes extends far beyond Lady Tremendouss gummy center, Sarduy clobbers the reader with allusions in a pendant to the dwarf s rst erotic scene. The role played by the lusty dwarf in the matching tableau is dramatically dierent from his rst stewardship. In the second scene, the Iranian chaueur is in the drivers seat, and his ruttish tiger in the Ladys tank. For overdoing his digital assuagement, and sticking his hand where he shouldnt have, the dwarf has been pursued, pounded to a pulp, and thrown in the boot of a car (162). By the time the trio resurfaces at the Grand Htel de France a few pages later, we nd the lady slithering into position for intercourse, and the Iranian chaueur ready for action (172). But what about the dwarf ? It is at this point that Sarduys intentions begin to make sense. To begin with, the little tyke, pijirita, no longer has his nger in the pie. By that I mean that the Ladys body is no longer at his disposal. His reaction to this displacement is one of total regression: he closes his eyes tightly, and covers his ears with his ngertips, bending over, shrinking, until his elbows met his knees (172). From this fetal position he falls to the oor. As the two big people get ready to tango, pijirita looks like he is
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about to walk on all fours, and his little face is prenatal with amazement (172). A cat accompanying the trio begins to purr as if seeking at the bottom of a closet a newborn babe (172). Could all these references to newborn babes, walking on all fours, and prenatal amazement be mere coincidences, or is Sarduy suggesting a parallel between the displaced dwarf and an infant after it has been separated from the body it loves? And why does the chaueur stand by, ready for action but, instead of having sex with the Lady or, that is, beating around the bush, he ends up choosing the narrower among forking paths, and his st over his y? (175). Is Sarduy building ction not just as a house of mirth but, more to the point, as a house of wish-fulllment? Arent we seeing, rst, the displacement of the dwarf from his privileged attachment and, second (when intercourse between the Big Mama and her well-endowed consort fails to take place), the annulment of his rivals hegemony, even before this hegemony can be established? Was Sarduy ghting the dwarf s battle, or was the dwarf acting out the most immoderate wish of newborn babes: to revoke all privileges from the burly man who usually gets his big foot inside Big Mamas door? Undeniably, at the beginning of the scene in which the three key gures are brought together, seeing the Iranians erect penis sends the dwarf into some sort of prenatal regression. By the end of the scene, however, the little tyke is triumphant because he managed to keep his archrivals sexual consummation from taking place. This annulment, or displacement, of the big guys power in favor of the little guy turns out to be the real tour de force in Maitreya. Since the characteristic exclusion of the little man from the primal scenario is absconded with in Sarduys novel, the Cuban author sticks closer to his sources, in fact, than even Freud. After all, Oedipus does manage to get rid of his father and keep Jocasta to himself. In Freuds version Jocastas body is taken away from the infant, however. Skipping over Freuds transformation of Sophocles, Sarduy goes back to the source. Like Oedipus, the dwarf in Maitreya disempowers his rival in the triangular conict and becomes a leading gure in the resolution, as we shall see. Discussing, analyzing, and even parodying Freuds reading of the family drama were very much on the agenda of intellectuals revolving around Tel Quel, a group with which Sarduy became closely aliated between 1965 (date of his rst collaboration with the journal Tel Quel ), and the early 1970s. During these years of great intellectual ferment in Paris,
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members of Tel Quel were particularly interested in what they termed the theory of the subject, and sought to explore the nexus between ontological development and the creative act. Julia Kristevas thesis on Mallarm (La rvolution du langage potique ) and Roland Barthess spellbinding essays on Michelet, Racine, Fourrier, and Loyola are but two of the theoretical ventures that grew out of these interests. Of those caught up in the creative energy surrounding Tel Quel, the only one who explored in ction the theory of the subject and the forces shaping artistic development with any degree of success was Sarduy. In fact, beginning in 1972 with the publication of Cobra, the subject in process becomes one of the thematic springboards into his ctional world; from this point forward, disguising them in one form or another, he only orchestrated ontological psychodramas. Because he turned to his own experience in order to understand the way the self develops, his focus in Cobra, Colibr, El Cristo de la rue Jacob, and Pjaros de la playa was directed toward the forces that shape artists, artists who include transvestites, painters of eas, and even authors who have their plots stolen by characters in the ction. Was Sarduy poking fun at the creative process? Pondering overbut very tongue in cheekTel Quels theories? Of this there can be no doubt; in fact, as Roberto Gonzlez Echevarra states with typical acumen, Sarduy transforms the contradictions of structuralism into a sort of sideshow, and ctionalizes them in a process akin to a deconstruction avant la lettre (La ruta de Severo Sarduy, 46). And yet, even with tongue rmly in cheek, Sarduy was also being carried away by the psychoanalytic and formalistic fevers that were taking Paris by storm in the seventies. He parodied Freuds and Lacans theories but he could not avoid exploring their implications while mocking them at the same time. Focusing most particularly on the development of both author and self in Colibr (1983), Sarduy writes a family melodrama that leads one of the narrators to defy paternal authority and write books that break away from the conventional, law-abiding type of narrative discourse such authority represents. His exploration of the rivalry between father and son in Colibr is highly parodic, alluding to purportedly autobiographical episodes and making revelations that shed light on those made in Maitreya by means of the dwarf. White and tiny, this dwarf is reminiscent of the bodies that y out of the mouths of the dead in medieval paintings, the uominini which, today, we might refer to as projections of the self. These
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uominini were painted on wooden retablos, and frequently on diptychs and triptychs in which the resurrected and the dead were placed on opposite panels of the composition. Also like the panels of a diptych, the meaning of Colibr is so closely dependent upon the parody of the family drama portrayed in Maitreya that it is impossible to understand one without referring to the other. In fact, in many ways the tale of Lady Tremendous, of her prodigiously endowed consort, and of the little guy who runs circles around them both is Sarduys masterplot, the source from which his ctional universe after De donde son los cantantes (1967) derives. I said earlier that I would return to the matter of the dwarf s revenge and his reappearance after getting rid of the big Iranian. In order to discuss revenge, however, it is essential to point out that in Maitreya the dwarf s repossession of the Big Mama follows her repudiation of him. The family plot Sarduy portrays with such insistence in this novel develops in three phases which can be summed up in three words: rejection, retribution, and repossession. In the rst, Big Mama throws the little fellow over for the Big Guy. But even before the Iranian can stake his claim, the dwarf gets back into the picture, displaces his rival, and gets the Lady pregnant. In terms of the family triangle the story parodies the dwarf violates a proscription in order to get what he wants. When Lady Tremendous makes clear to him that having his way with her is forbidden, he drag[s] himself convulsively to her feet screaming like a newborn rabbit (Maitreya, 155). Screaming never stops him from trying to get her back, however. Clearly, the newborn rabbit depicted in Sarduys fantasy is a clever bunny who nds another way of getting back into the hutch, even after being told it is forbidden. Getting into the hutch entails, rst of all, getting rid of the rival. But Sarduy doesnt completely run o the well-meaning and ultimately useful Priapus; he just tampers with his belongings. Appendages in Maitreya are not cut o as they are in Cobra, they are merely disempowered. Immediately after Lady Tremendous slithers into position for intercourse, and the Iranians massive muscle is ready to throb into action, the dwarf falls to the oor and has the scene of regression in which he is described as prenatal with amazement (172). As if by magic, Big Papas erection is suddenly whisked out of the picture, deated not from lack of vim but by a choice which is entirely the authors. Such sleight-of-hand is part of a charade that begs to be looked at in closer detail.
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Sarduy begins by placing his characters in a triangular confrontation in which the dwarf, likened to a newborn babe, gazes at Lady Tremendous about to be possessed by the other man in the picture. But then, suddenly, the scene resolves itself into a dissolve with no penetration, no intercourse, nothing sti and without veins as Sarduy rewrites the script for the primal scene fantasy he was in the process of parodying (172). Instead of the child watching with horror as the father and mother grapple in each others arms, the newborn babe in Maitreya s primal scene gets what he most wishes, which is exactly what the ction portrays: to erase the erection from the scene and make it impossible for the Iranian to slither into position (172). As I have already indicated, the Iranian is not without a role, however. Soon after his failed coupling with the Lady, we nd him ready to perform for public view. The scenario is framed with creamy-colored sheets that partially reveal, partially disguise what is about to take place (175). Lady Tremendous appears naked and painted pink, while the Iranianpricked by sexual abstinenceis itchy to get on with the show. At that point, the dwarf gets ready to crash a pair of cymbals but, mimicking the Iranians enforced impotence, stops right before the crash. The three performers look each other in the eye; the Iranian begins to undress, and soon reveals a big bundle from which the vibrant dart leapt out rapidly, like a Chinese squirrel set free from a trap (176). At the sight of the squirrel, the dwarf runs o, soon to return with a copper platter on his head, and the ensuing scene is described from above, literally, a vuelo de pjaro. Are we to see shades of Salome and decapitation, or of Bette Daviss and Joan Crawfords birdie on a tray in Sarduys parable of the platter and the prick? Everything up to the point in which the platter turns up has seemed to indicate that intercourse is imminent. Instead, it turns out that, like St. John the Baptist, the Iranian ends up having one of his extremities removed. Rather than having sex with Lady Tremendous, he begins to eat, his coitus once again interruptus, this time by an exchange of saliva-drenched delicacies which he, the Lady, and the dwarf inserted between each others lips with their ngertips (177). After eating, and in keeping with the symmetry binding things oral with things anal, foreplay turns into hindplay. Instructed by the dwarf, who masterminds the scene, the Iranian chaueur sinks his hand into the Ladys rough passage . . . as far as the phalanxes, while the dwarf
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watches from below (178). As in other episodes we have looked at, a reecting surface turns out to be a key element of this sex scene: The dwarf had placed a Moroccan mirror on the carpet, and in the oval mercury . . . he contemplated upside down the giants entrance into the cave (178). The primal scene inspiring this travesty is as upside-down as the giants entrance. Upside-down because in spite of his amply described sex organ, what the giant puts into the Lady is not his penis but his hand. The penis, as in the earlier scene, has temporarily disappeared from the giants loins andhere is a new developmentbecome emblematized by the dwarf, who out of ritual excess or sarcasm had donned a big hat like a tower, and becomes, guratively at any rate, the Ladys partner, a penis for her thoughts (17879). The big towering hat not only squats, squints his eyes, and examines the threshold of penetration in the mirror; it also stops the sweaty penetrator of the crime (i.e., the Iranian) from going any further (179). The following night Lady Tremendous begins to swell and, within hours, gives birth to the runt hatched by the dwarf (181). It is this runt who turns out to be Maitreya, the future Buddha, the last reincarnation in the chain of evolution, the one betokening perfection, and the end of all desire. But whose desire is being emblematized in the two scenes weve just described? Obviously the runts, which, as we will see, turns out to be a deconstruction of the primal fantasy. In that fantasy, the child perceives itself as displaced, understands the preponderance of the father in the alchemy of family life, and, if all goes well, identies with the fathers longing for a body of a dierent gender. Plainly, this identication is what never takes place in Sarduys scenario, however. What we see instead is the fathers rebuttal by the son who takes his place. That place is the place of the phallus, what Lacan would call the object little a, an object that the runt clearly embodies in Sarduys allegory. Becoming identied with the phallus allows the object of the mothers longing, here represented by the dwarf, to impregnate the Lady and become father of himself or, rather, father of his own alter ego who is Lady Tremendouss anal son, the twin to whom he is joined together (186). The resolution of Maitreya is thus a masterpiece in terms of wishfullment, since the emblematic infant in the ction brings about the greatest of all fantasies: to dismantle the fathers power, take his place,
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and reenter the mothers body. Far from being an anus miserabilis, therefore, Lady Tremendouss narrow path functions as a fertile furrow, a beckoning crack drawing the writers fantasy back to the space his tiny protagonist keeps craving for. The pijirita in the novel is manifestly a projection of the pajarito who wrote that novel, a little tyke who allows Sarduy to saunter playfully back into the hutch. Better a bird in hand than a hand in the bush Clearly relishing the transformation of theory into parody, and using both to shed light on the byzantine complications of the family plot, Sarduy went on turning truths into ction in his next novel. Instead of the symbolic allusions typical of Maitreya, however, in Colibr he called things by their proper name, with one exception: he substituted the body of the mother for the body of the text as the object of rivalry between two men. Like its immediate predecessors, Colibr showcases androgynous characters and sex changes. The bird-named hero is a dancer-cum-wrestler in a bar, the Big House, somewhere in South America. The two other main characters are the Regent, a white-haired matron in charge of the bar, and a Japanese karate master with whom Colibr ees from the homosexual club where he dances every night. After countless ploys that take up about a third of the novel, the Regent nally comes close to catching Colibr. At that point, rescued by a big-headed little giant, the bird man deploys the skills that make him worthy of his name (i.e., Hummingbird) and ies away (136). From that moment onward, the story repeats itself: once again Colibr takes to his heels, once again he joins hands with the Japanese karate master; together, they ee until a party of grubby hunters surrounds them (155). The hunters intention is not to harm Colibr and the karate master, however, but merely to tell the hero, Youll return in order to burn down. To destroy. You are the only one who could get into the Big House and take the reins of power without hindrance (158). The hunters prediction comes to pass; Colibr returns and razes the Big House. He then opens a new bar, and takes the place of the Regent. In fact, his transformation is so complete that when he stares in the mirror at the end of the novel, at rst he fails to recognize himself: as if someone else showed up behind the mercury lining (178). Once again, as in Maitreya, Sarduys narrative plot is a facade masking
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the most fundamental geometry of desire: a triangle which includes, this time around, the narrator, his father (who enters the story in part 2), and an object of desire which turns out to be the tale itself, perpetually getting away from its author. Getting away in this instance must be taken literally, moreover. As in Pirandellos Six Characters in Search of an Author, in Colibr a group of choreographing Myrmidons steals the story in progress, and changes its style and setting, lling it with pom-poms, old fashioned frills and the namby-pambiness typical of pastoral novels: useless adjectives, synonyms and antonyms, gratuitous complications and repetitions (112). After a while, Colibr reappears looking just like he was at the beginning, but due to the Myrmidons tireless shifting of the original scenario, everything else is changed. The Big House, that haven of truck drivers smelling of greasy screws . . . that stalwart stud-farm . . . had become, believe it or not, a harmless phalanstery or, if one prefers, a sophisticated tea room (113). The story continues in search of an author, and the chapter concludes with the voice of the father addressing his son, who is actually one of the narrators about to do away with the most ignominious pages that the choreographing Myrmidons have forced down his throat (129): Is it possible!admonishes the fatherburning papers again! What bad habits youve got, son! Jesus, what an obsession! Not only do you waste time writing them; afterwards you put a match to them. . . . Its outrageous! And look here . . . I need to have a few words with you. You are already a grown man and a member in good standing of the Sarduy family in which, up until now, there havent been any queers. I dont want anyone pointing a nger at me when I walk down the street. So you are going to go right this minute and burn those four pieces of shit. Who has ever seen a man playing with papier-mch fruit? (129) The fathers tirade is essential in understanding Colibr because the whole novel is conceived as a rejection of paternal authority. In the quoted passage, when Sarduys father enjoins his son to burn those four pieces of shit, we are led to believe that he is referring to the shiny fruit that glitters on the turban of the dwarf dressed as Carmen Miranda in the same chapter. However, as we look more closely, we realize the subject of the fathers tirade is not just the dwarf s headgear, but writing itself. The them the father disparages refers to his sons papers, not to the fruit. The
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father is enraged over the time Sarduy the narrator wastes writing these papers; he also does not want anyone to point a nger at him on the street and assures his son there havent been any queers orin a literal translationany birds ( pjaros ) (the slang term for homosexual in Cuban Spanish) in his family. He makes clear that the four pieces of shit are somehow connected with the sons sexual inclination, moreover, and that to destroy them would amount to removing the stigma that threatens to tarnish the family name. Implicitly, the paternal injunction condemns not only the sons sexual deviance but also, and even more pointedly, the sublimation and dramatization of this deviance, which is his writing (Dont you waste enough time already writing . . . ?, scos the senior Sarduy). Given the link between writing and sexual transgression in the fathers words, isnt it possible that the four pieces of shit referagain, very much tongue-incheekto the four novels Sarduy the author had published up to that point: Gestos, De donde son los cantantes, Cobra, and Maitreya ? Isnt Sarduys homosexuality cried from the rooftops of these novels? And, given their transgressive tenor, dont they breathe of a rupture with paternal proscriptions and, by the same token, with the normative identity which the fathers authority attempts to impose on Sarduy, the narrator of Colibr ? Clearly, Sarduy is playing here with both sources and origins; he is taking bits and pieces of life, and recasting them into ction, inventing a feathered alter ego who ends up as the absolute victor of his tale. The story of the bird subjected to a smothering matron is written by a man whose father tells him not to be a pjaro because he doesnt want his own name tarnished. Both birds have much in common. For a start, the one that saunters through the story and the one who writes that story are linked to each other by the very instrument that denes them; it is no coincidence that pluma should mean both feather and pen, the latter an instrument which happens to be the tool of Sarduys art. In addition, as the matron cannot control her bird, the narrator cannot control his story, which keeps getting away from him and refusing to come out the way he would like. He is so exasperated by the storys seeming independence, in fact, that he is ready to burn it. It is at this point that his father intervenes and tells himwe think, at rstto stop playing with fake fruit or, in fact, to stop writing.

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The stories of both birds have at least as much in common as the bird themselves, and theythe birdscan be readily compared to another of Sarduys protagonists: the dwarf in Maitreya. Like the dwarf and Colibr, the narrator, who is a Sarduy, wants to hold on to a body that gets away from him. In Maitreya that body is Mamas; in the parallel tales of Colibr it is the Japanese boys in one, and the tale itself in the other, a pairing o that suggests a link between the writing which the father forbids and homosexuality. Another shared feature is that Colibr, the dwarf, and Sarduy all have a rival: Colibrs is the Regent, the dwarf s is the Iranian, Sarduys is his father. All rivals want what the heroes of both novels want for themselves. Colibr wants a sexual partner, the dwarf wants Mama, and old Sarduy wants to have a rm hold on authority, he wants to tell his son o. Both novels portray a revolt: the dwarf defeats the Iranian, Colibr the Regent, and Sarduy his father. In sum, both novels are about transgression andgiven the nature of Sarduys writinga transgression unto themselves. Sarduy is famous for writing transgressive literature that breaks with all the canons, all the principles of logic and of the mimetic novel. In Colibr his transgression is more than just logical, structural, and aesthetic, however. His deance also shows up on the title page, where his patronymic (which, we remember, the father does not want smeared) is coupled with the name of a bird, the ambivalent noun that designates the weakness the father censors above all others (You are already a grown man, and a Sarduy, among whom, thus far, there havent been any birds, [ pjaros, i.e., any queers] [Colibr, 29]). Is it not possible then, that Colibr is Sarduys facetious answer to theby way of this very answer slighted father who harangues him in the previously quoted passage? His answer was facetious because Sarduy was a product of his time. True to the spirit of the seventies, he explored deance and transgression in kitsch melodramas comparable in spirit to Warhols and Lichtensteins pop art creations. When Lichtenstein paints a woman drowning with a big tear rolling down her cheeka cartoon bubble with the words, Help me Brad, Im drowning! emerging from her mouthhis subject is both enhanced and diminished by being a monumental pastiche, a cartoon that creates a distance between itself and the viewer because it is so selfconsciously nonmimetic. As in a play by Brecht, this distance is a framing device that encourages viewers not to empathize but to judge without

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letting themselves get emotionally involved. Contemplating Warhols boxes of Brillo pads could lead to a reection on modern-age commercialism and the ironic beauty of disposable artifacts. But such reections are couched with irony (the suggestion that art is consumable and therefore disposable) and a sense of play, the very devices that typify Sarduys work in the seventies and early eighties. Sarduys, Warhols, and Lichtensteins devotion to prototypes reveals how all three were arrested in what Harold Bloom terms a poetic misprision (The Anxiety of Inuence, xxiii). Mocking the qualities of cultural icons such as Liz, Marilyn, Campbells soup cans, as well as the rivalry between fathers and sons, they were caught in the web of their own irony, becoming, if not the great cultural anthropologists of our era, certainly the visionaries who brought the tinsel tawdriness and emotional dilemmas of our times to public consciousness by espousing that tawdriness or revisiting family scenarios in outlandish fairy tales. For instance, parodying the masterplot of masterplotsthe tale of OedipusSarduy falls in love with his source and casts it not as the cause but as the consequence of what Bloom would likely call his own anxiety. In other words, he makes fun of the rivalry between fathers and sons only to end up seriously exploring his own joke in and through the ction. And, because his involvement with Tel Quel had such impact on his thinking, he explores this source by creatively interpreting the gurus of this group: Freud, Lacan, and Bataille. In fact, we would not have Cobra, Maitreya, Colibr, Cocuyo, and Pjaros de la playa without Sarduys reading of these gurus, even when such reading became a parodic transformation of its sources, a complex act of strong misreading, as Bloom would say (The Anxiety of Inuence, xxiii). Among the Tel Quel gurus no one was more fervently parodied than Jacques Lacan. From his writings and seminars the topic that most tantalized Sarduy was what Lacan called the mirror stage in the process of ego development (le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Lacan advanced that the phallus represented the authority or law of the father and that, since the father embodies the threat of castration for the child, the phallus eventually comes to suggest separation and loss in the childs mind. Informed with a great deal of irony and transformed into a pastiche, the equation linking together the phallus, the law, the father, and a sense of loss structures the

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role of the little man in Sarduys fantasies after 1972 (publication date of Cobra, the most Tel Quel-inuenced of his novels). Another feature that Sarduy borrowed from Lacan is the mothers longing for the phallus (which the French analyst maintains symbolically stands for the power she does not wield). As Lacan saw it, the infant, fully dependent upon the mother and not yet having a sense of itself as separate, identies with her longing (i.e., wishes to be what she most wishes for), and this identication turns him into a passive element, a receptacle for the mothers wishes (a fact that explains why both Cobra and the dwarf in Maitreya are homologated to the phallus in Sarduys uproarious take on Lacan [Kristeva, Rvolution, 44]). After identifying with the mothers longing, Lacan continues, the infants imago combines an assumed relationship that fuses the self with the other, and a love that determines the other as an object apart from the self. At this stage of development the infant is not an individual, says Lacan, but a blank space (un manque). This notion of the as yet unindividuated personality informs, in turn, Sarduys characterizations and helps explain why, in his novels, identity is volatile. If identity is constantly eroded and transformed in his work, it is because, as one of his protagonists reveals, characters are missing something critical. What is missing, explains Cocuyo in one of the eponymous novels key revelations, was not air to breathe, or the precise contour of things . . . but something simultaneously more vast and recondite which could be found neither here nor there but besides these things (73). What is missingSarduy melodramatically suggestsis what the dwarf in Maitreya is after: the mother, the woman from whom the narrator of El Cristo de la rue Jacob had become separated in and through pain (12). The uctuating sense of identity resulting from this separation also explains why Colibr cannot recognize himself when he rst stares into the looking glass (178). As the novel evolves, however, he realizes that the face on the other side, this reecting-reected I, as Lacan would say, does not refer to anything other than himself, and he ends up identifying it: It was his look of astonishment that made him recognize himself (Lacan, Le stade du miroir, 9091; Colibr 178). Lacan places the resolution of the Oedipus complex between the second and third phases of the mirror stage, separated from one another by the fathers proscription which compels the child to repress its imaginary

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unity with the mother and allows it to develop its own identity. In the words of Kristeva, Grasping the import of castration makes the subject independent from the mother and, by way of this cleavage, transforms the phallic function into a symbolic function. Decisive moment full of consequences: discovering its identity in the symbolic, the subject breaks loose from its dependence vis--vis the mother, establishes its libido as a genital drive and transfers the semiotic impulse into the symbolic order. (La rvolution du langage potique, 45) According to Kristeva, we have a shift in identication from the mother to the father once the Oedipus complex is resolved, once the symbolic castration splits up the dyadic unity between mother and child. What Sarduy chose to dramatize in his ction, howeverand saying this I revise my own earlier opinionwas not so much castration (as one might think after nishing the rst half of Cobra ) but its failure to take hold. This is why, in terms of a creative misreading the most important scene in this novel is not the one portraying the heros sex-change operation, but the one in which he is recognized as a man after his penis has been lopped o. The reversal or denial of Ktazobs operation tells us two things: rst, that gender is an ineradicable part of the self, both a mental and physical perception of oneself that endures even when the penis has been severed from the body, and second, that, symbolically speaking, the evolution from the second phase of the mirror stage (during which the infant perceives itself as dependent) to the third (in which the dyadic unity between mother and child is split up) is being disowned by Sarduy. This, in a nutshell, is the gist of his misreading, the essence of his revision of the Lacanian mirror stage. To drive this revision home, Sarduy writes a scene in which Cobra is recognized as a man immediately after shefollowing the sex-change operationhas been staring at her new and already wrecked image in the mirror of a photomaton and, was able to size up the damages: the severe scaolding of her hairdo crumbled on all sides, the curls . . . dripping bleach . . . a large black stain rolling down from her eyes, the blue shadow emerging around her mouth (129). As her ridiculous pastiche of a female identity literally dissolves in front of her eyes, Cobra is at a loss to recognize herself. If, as Sarduy doubtlessly wished us to, we view this lack of recognition from the perspective of the mirror stage being parodied, we
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are forced to conclude thatto translate his obstreperous burlesque in plain termsthe subjective development of the hero comes to a standstill at a point before the Oedipal crisis is resolved. Picturing the development of his heroes frozen in place before the Oedipal crisis comes to a head, and erasing intercourse from his farces, Sarduy suggestsparodying both Freud and Lacan, at this juncture that his characters libido is arrested prior to the genital stage. We dont need to look very far to begin uncovering the hilarious depiction of objects and images that translate the sadism, will to power, and death wish characteristic of the anal stage, and resulting from the breakdown in libido development imagined by Sarduy. The epitome of his histrionic emphasis on things anal turns out to be the heroine of Maitreya. Lady Tremendous wears a bracelet marked with the cryptic initials f.f.a., initials that, the reader soon discovers, refer to a worldwide ring of lasciviousness known as Fist Fucking of America (110). When the trio made up of the Iranian, the Lady, and the dwarf travels to Oman, other aspiring members of this chang sect line up to receive digital assuagement from the latter, who appoints himself master of all things retro, thrives on giving enemas, and ends up, as we already know, penetrating and impregnating the Tremendous Mama from behind (Maitreya, 156, 162). This anal penetration signals, among other things, the dwarf s repudiation of the other channel, the via recta which, in normal circumstances, is the domain of the rival represented in Maitreya by the burly giant with the squirrel in his pocket. In contrast to the well-endowed Iranian, the dwarf rules over things anal, his name an abridged anagram of his function in the novel: enano [i.e., dwarf ] mano en-ano. The anagram is as abridged, most likely, as what the enano keeps hidden and substitutes his mano for. The mano is forced into every ano in Oman, a country whose name is, also very conspicuously, another anagramthis one of mano. The mano is also a ve-nger pyramid, a pirmide falangista that is shoved to the accompaniment of slaps, burns, whacks, and wallops in the Oman bath house were the faithful undergo the apotheosis of the st to the strains of eses and emes that is to say, of ss and ms (Maitreya, 154, 159). Directly falling within the purview of the anal function, sadism is ubiquitous in Cobra, Maitreya, and Colibr. What distinguishes these novels from each other is that Sarduy fullls a dierent objective in each before building to a climax in the last. Cobra broadcasts his denial of
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castration; as its hero is a symbolic substitute for the phallus, the en-ano in Maitreya rules over the annals of the Empire (Maitreya, 161). In other words, in Cobra Sarduy nullies the traditional consequences of the Oedipal conict; in Maitreya he pictures the supremacy of the anal stage. If the anal reigns supreme, it means that the genital shines forth through omission brilla por su ausencia a fact that explains why sexual intercourse is glaringly absent from the pages of these novels. Denied in both Cobra and Maitreya, the genital function is the domain of the other man, the rival of the little tyke who rids himself of him before getting back into the hutch. Typically associated with the forces of death, anality underlies the preponderance of severed organs, bleeding bodies, and struggles over power and dominance dramatized by Sarduy. His playfully destructive visionif we can call it thatdoesnt stem from a gratuitous love of destruction but from a wish to parody the stages of libidinal development, and to show that in the ctional universe he creates, Freuds unacceptable scenario is being totally recast. Recast because, as in Cortzars Nurse Cora, the older man in the love triangle portrayed in Sarduys misreading of Freuds version of the Oedipal legend doesnt win out, the little tyke does. But does winning out against his burly rival mean he also prevails over Lady Tremendous? If that were the case, then what can we make of Maitreya s last scene when the emblematic Big Mama puts on her shiniest pair of high-heeled shoes and steps over the dwarf s tomb until it sinks into the ground? (186). To answer this question we must turn to the third installment of Sarduys misread depiction of the Oedipal legend. Colibr begins where Maitreya leaves o with one exception: the hero of the bird saga is not dead and buried like the dwarf, but alive and kicking, ready to illustrate, through his own evolution, the last stage in Sarduys refutal of Freud. As in its immediate predecessors, we soon recognize signs of anality in Colibr: rampant violence, sadomasochism, the will to power, and feelings of division and fragmentation. Most particularly, feelings of division and fragmentation appear at all levels of the narration: rstand as the model and source of other kinds of disconnectednessbetween the older Sarduy and his son; second, between the narrator and the plot that escapes him; third and fourth, between the Regent and Colibr, and Colibr and the Japanese wrestler; and, last but

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not least, between the many characters who split themselves into doubles and pairs. The disconnectedness or, more exactly, the rift between Sarduy the narrator and his father brings to a head the authors conspicuous rejection of authority, one so plainly portrayed in Colibr that we cannot fail to see in this novel a resolution of the Oedipal parody pictured by Sarduy. The burning issue of authority emerges the moment Colibr and his men walk into the Big House after setting it on re and watching it blaze. As Colibr soon discovers, the re doesnt spare much except for the Regents private boudoir, miraculously untouched by the ames. He halts upon entering into that inner sanctum, completely freaked out by two things he notices . . . which obscured his personal history as if someone were jotting it down while it unfolded (177). The two things in question are a neon ring, partly broken and used to plug up a circular fanlight, and a collection of stued birds on the walls. Signicant to our understanding of Sarduys puzzle is that right underneath the neon ring is an old rocking chair in front of a vanity table strewn with old-fashioned jars of make-up and powder pus. It is in the mirror of that same vanity tablethe Regents ownthat Colibr rushes to look at himself for the last time in the novel (178). But even before we consider looking into this last reection, shouldnt we be struck that the hero is freaked out by what he sees in the boudoir, and that these things obscure his personal history? How could a broken neon sign and some dusty trophy cases obscure someones history? In order to answer this question, we need to start by noting that the neon sign blocks a round window. The sign appears to retrace the shape of the windows perimeter althoughsince part of it is brokenit has become an incomplete ring (177). We have, therefore, a C shape strung over an O which, in addition, has been plugged up (177). The plugged-up window is a passage whose original function has been cut o. We remember, of course, that the rst half of Cobra also comes to a head in a scene in which something is cut o, although later, as we pointed out, the consequences of that severance are annulled. Are the consequences of plugging up the tunnel likewise nullied in Colibr ? Is this scene a restatement, a recapitulation of denial, or is it a step forward in resolving the mystery of the mirrors and the problem of authority portrayed in Sarduys trilogy?

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Taking over mamas private parts As it turns out, the little birds entry into the old ladys re-spared den represents both a nesting and a branching out. For a start, it is important to note that he manages to enter the room in spite of the obstructions blocking his way. It should also be noted that the passage is round, a lucerna (177). Another name for lucerna is ojo de buey (bulls-eye window), a synonym that must have crossed Sarduys mind because the verb he chooses to indicate that the window or eye has been plugged up is cegado, that is, blinded (177). Sarduys choice of words might seem fortuitous until we turn to the conclusion of Cobra and discover that, not only is the golden statue of Gautama (i.e., Buddha) lit by a neon light, but the monks watch the sun set amidst snow-covered valleys . . . right besides the great stupas and the eyes, already erased across the towers of the father land (26263; Sarduys emphasis). The question we need to ask ourselves at this point is, why did Sarduy want readers to pay particular attention to eyes? And why should he again allude to the image of an eye framed in neon lights at the conclusion of Colibr ? Equally of interest, why are eyes in both novels portrayed as dysfunctional? In Cobra they are erased . . . ; in Colibr, plugged up. Arent both the eyes and the message they contain further linked together through the allusion to the neon light which appears in both novels and, by inference, to the rst syllable of Cobra and Colibr suggested by the broken ring representing the c, and the plugged up bulls-eye window mimicking the o? Might this coincidence point to a connection between both endings? What, in fact, is taking place as we reach the last few pages of these novels? Cobra concludes with the worship of a golden Buddha whose lips are stretched in a rictus (262). In Sanscrit, Buddha means enlightenment, which is to say, the nal blessed state marked by the absence of desire or suering. Colibr ends with the displacement of the Regent and the heros takeover. In the last scene, when Colibr looks in the mirror, he cant recognize his face. His mouth, like the Buddhas, is stretched in a rictus: Las comisuras de los labios han bajado (178). Are we to think that, as in Cobra, what we are meant to read in the conclusion of Colibr is the end of all desire? Isnt this also, by the way, the concluding message of Maitreya insofar as it depicts the birth of the future Buddha and the novels last words are that what they did was done to prove the imper160 Body of writing

manence and the emptiness of everything? (187). Can there be desire if everything is empty and impermanent? If Sarduys intention is to emblematize the birth of the man who represents the end of all desire, then why does this man-child end up embalmed and buried next to his father and twin, the dwarf (Maitreya, 186)? Is there something about the drama portrayed in Maitreya that nixes the possibility of nirvana? Is this also the case in Colibr ? Now that we have twisted three endings together into a knot, let us proceed to unravel Sarduys mystery. Cobra, as we have seen, portrays a rejection of castration. Cobra-Oedipus (Oedipus means swollen foot, and Cobra hates his feet because they are too big) is castrated, but this castration is overturned in the ction, and the novel concludes with a vision of phalluses lined up in rows (260). Dramatizing a barely disguised fantasy of incest in Maitreya, a spunky little fellow takes the place of a big man and impregnates a tremendous Mama. His engendro, the runt who emblematizes the end of all desire, ends up getting buried, and his burial mound is attened out of all recognition by his own mother (186). Was this Sarduys way of saying that fullling a wish could still leave us unfullled? What I mean to say is that, if the object of Maitreya was to portray the little tykes takeover, then why would he end up attened out by mom (186)? Was Sarduy suggesting that, after being a winner, the little man was still, somehow, a loser, thatas in Cobra sacricing oneself to an ideal was no guarantee of overcoming impediments? Was theremight there bea way for the little fellow to get his wish and, at the same time, avoid getting rolled over by his man-eating mama (186)? It was to travel one step further on the road to wish-fulllment that Sarduy wrote Colibr, a novel in which the dream of possession harbored in Maitreya is left behind. Freud believed such a dream perseveres if the childs imaginary unity with the mother is not repressed in the Oedipal crisis, in which case the child remains dependent upon her. Sarduy dramatized this dependence when he portrayed the little man dragging himself convulsively to Lady Tremendouss feet, and screaming like a newborn rabbit. He went on to suggest that the little mans imaginary unity was in no way repressed when he portrayed him displacing the Iranian and getting into the lady himself (Maitreya, 155). But, isnt it time we asked ourselves where these subterranean excursions actually get the dwarf ? As the novel comes to an end, he is literally squashed by the very
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woman he longed for. When he succeeds in becoming father of his own twin or, in other words, of his mirror image (which is another way of saying that he becomes father of himself ), there is no doubt he gets what he is after, but then he ends up embalmed and buried when Lady Tremendous stamp[s] her two-toned high-heeled shoes over [his] grave (Maitreya, 186). The truth is that Lady Tremendouss carnivalesque burial of the dwarf isin spite of the ironic bantera pretty explicit portrayal of ambivalence regarding mother gures in general, and prepares the way for Sarduys next novel, one in which a ruling and androgynous matriarchthe Regentis avoided as primary love object, and the hero substitutes himself for that object. Freud suggests that each stage of the infants libidinal development is structured as an attraction to one of the two original sexual objects: himself and the woman who takes care of him (Lacan, Seminaire I, 151). Once again seeking to parody his models, Sarduy latched on to Freud. From Freud he learned that as the homosexuals imago develops he begins to move away from the mother as primary love object (an interdependency which Freud labels anaclitic), and to substitute himself instead, a pivotal point that Sarduy transforms into the concluding scene of Colibr. In this novel the portrayal of desire is simply an inversion of the earlier model; it is no longer the little man who is after the big Mama, but the matron of the Big House who pursues the pajarito. Sarduy has inverted their roles for two reasons. To begin with, the Regents futile pursuit of the swiftest of birds is a denial of possession (Colibr cannot be had), and a mockery of dependence (unlike the dwarf in Maitreya, the bird doesnt want the ruling matriarch to be his overlord). At the end of the novel, Colibr supersedes the matriarch who held the reins of power from the beginning and he razes the Big House in order to build his own replica of it, indistinguishable in all respects except that, this time around, he is the one in control, the subject and not the object of desire. To prove that control, he yanks o the papier-mch fruit from the hands of his Japanese lover reminding him to leave all that fag stu aside because power is in the hands of macho men, and he smashes not one but two mirrors in the Big House in order to show that power (1767). This nal scene of destruction is, in fact, Sarduys way of suggesting an evolution beyond the rst phases of the mirror stage. The rst smashed mirror alludes, in all semblance, to the annulment of the fathers wish (i.e., castration), and the
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second to the conclusion of the anaclitic phase which has kept Sarduys alter egoes dependent on ruling matrons all along. If, as I argue, the real subject of Sarduys novels is the art of writing, it makes all the sense in the world that his novels should outline in what way the writers alter ego develops or, in other words, how this ego becomes empowered. Cobra, Maitreya, and Colibr are the tale of this empowerment, the tale of a dissatised travesti who is superseded in the next novel by a developing runt who, stepped upon in every way, succeedsin the last installment of the trilogyto overcome all obstacles and rule over a Big House. There can be no doubt that Colibr is cast as a prizeghter because he is meant to be a winner. After all, he is the only bird who manages to get back into the Regents lair even though the round window above the doorthe tunnel above the slitis plugged up. It is striking that this entrance should be in the shape of an eye, moreover, an eye that, as we have seen, has been erased across the towers of the father land (Cobra, 26263). We have already wondered what the concluding image of the eye suggests in both novels; the time has come to examine how this image relates to the heros forceful entry into the Regents inner sanctum. Our rst intuition could lead us to relate the symbol of the eye to Vedantic speculations on ultimate reality and the liberation of the soul. I am fairly certain Sarduy had something more basic in mind, although something just as consciously and playfully pedantic. I say this on account of a conversation we once had in which he spoke at length about the blind spot (to which he kept referring in French because he said he couldnt come up with a good enough term for it in Spanish). Like Sarduy, Bataille (in his spellbinding discussion on Hegel) culled la tache aveugle to dene the spot in our understanding which he felt was reminiscent of the structure of the eye (Hegel, in Oeuvres compltes, 5:127 30). Because of my own blind spot, no doubt, it didnt strike me until recently that the erased Eye at the end of Cobra and the ojo cegado at the conclusion of Colibr were, in all probability, allusions to the tache aveugle and, via this overarching reference, to Hegels own discussion regarding the development of the various . . . stages of spirit on the way to full self-comprehension (Phenomenology of Spirit ). Whether through allusions to Lacans mirror stage or to Hegels congurations of spirit, and laced with a good dose of irony and ridicule, there is no doubt that Cobra, Maitreya, and Colibr trace a process of selfThe degraded body in the work of Sarduy 163

discovery and self-comprehension. Cobra, the rst phase of this process, is an allegory of the negation of consciousness, a story of how the I refuses to be what it is (i.e., a man) and is unable to be what it wishes (i.e., a woman). Maitreya shows I as separate although fully dependent upon she, involved in a relationship that eventually attens him. A new twist to the dialogue between I and she springs forth in Colibr, a novel in which, for the rst time in Sarduys trilogy, I is not pursuer but pursued, and, close to the end, not a dependent object but subject of desire. For this very reason, it is hardly surprising that this novel should culminate with what Hegel refers to as an intuition of the identity of ego and non-ego when the hero understands himself to be something other than a she as he grasps the thought of [his] innermost depth (Phenomenology, xxi, 166). At rst unable to recognize his own reection in the mirror, Colibr ends up realizing the face on the quicksilver is his own, grasping, once and for all, that the ego is not only the self, but it is identity of the self with itself, separate and self-reliant, a castaway who, like the young narrator of El Cristo de la rue Jacob, grasps the sense of its own separateness through pain (Phenomenology, 167, Hegels emphasis; El Cristo de la rue Jacob, 12). Likewise essential to our understanding of Sarduys purpose and meaning in the trilogy is that Hegel portrays knowledge as a closed circle and suggests that circular, absolute wisdom is the denitive form of nonknowledge. To put it another way, we could say that upon reaching the summit of understanding (in the event that this were possible), we wouldnt know anything more than when we started o (Phenomenology, 127). Understanding, no matter how thorough, would be incomplete by denition, an incompleteness that Hegel likens to a broken circle or ring. Incompleteness wraps itself around (potential) completion as the broken neon ring in Colibr winds itself around the blinded eye, circular symbol of absolute knowledge. According to Hegel, closing the ring is tantamount to developing a sense of self-awareness, of grasping the human ipse. Selfawareness is what takes place when Colibr nally recognizes the reection on the mirror as his own. It is this sense of self as separate symbolized by the broken ring around the oculus above the door of the Regents boudoirthat empowers him to become master of the house. Colibr, that is to say, Hummingbird, becomes master of one house, master of one tale, but what happens to the other bird, the narrator of Colibr named Sarduy whose own spiraling tale was getting away from him at one point? The empowered Hummingbird addresses that other
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pajarito with the following words of admonishment: the real fool in this tale is you who stayed forever outside the Big House and the game . . . (174). Your role, concludes Colibr-Hummingbird, is the easiest one: to leave, tell about it [contar ], and not to play (17475). Colibr is almost completely right. Unquestionably, Sarduy the narrator leaves lots of baggage behind (his motherland, the original Big House, his role models). It is also true, although only partially, that he doesnt play. His empowerment, unlike Hummingbirdswhich is merely a ctionis the real thing, so real, in fact, that borrowing once again the language of his elders, Sarduy pairs o the tools of his tradethe pencil and notebookwith the tool tout court (su sexo, junto al cuadernillo y el lpiz) in the novel that follows Colibr (Cocuyo, 134). Sarduy the narrators break from the forces that subjected himfrom his own regentsis made apparent in and through the trilogy that parodies and transforms the Oedipus legend. This parody and this transformation was Sarduys way of both cutting loose fromand repossessingLacan, Freud, Franois Wahl: his models and fathers, in other words. Colibr is right, therefore, when he says that Sarduy leaves, tells about it and [does not] play, but he is wrong to chastise the narrator of his own talehis own creatorabout not playing. The truth is that Sarduy both plays and doesnt play. He doesnt play because, unlike Colibr, he doesnt live in a world of fantasy. One could argue, however, that telling is his way of playing. He plays by amusing himself with dismantling the voice of the masters, but his play is mighty serious. Decidedly, both birds play. Hummingbird and Sarduy the narrator have much in common. Like his creation, the pajarito who writes takes over a Big House that used to be governed by a domineering ruler, and becomes its master. It seems astonishing, given their similarities, that Hummingbird should tell o Sarduy the narrator, and call him a fool. Astonishing, that is, until we remember that Sarduy also tells o his models, and builds his towerhouse of ction on the decrepit ruins left behind by his own creators. If we must nd a dierence between the author-cum-narrator, and the hero of Colibr it might be that the latter acts out his independence while the former uses him as a vehicle to play out his own agenda. Sarduy is explicit about this when he portrays the hero of the novel as text by covering his body with scribbles that make him readable as the story itself is readable, and referring to him as el Manuscrito (Colibr 68). Even if one character is the creation of the other, however, there is no doubt that
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both are equally successful in their endeavors. The hero of Colibr takes over the Big House, while the narrator demonstrates his empowerment by writing a quest for knowledge and self-awareness of which he is ultimately the recipient. Knowledge and self-awareness are both predicated upon a recognition of ones identity, which is exactly what Sarduys fairy tale takes pains to portray. Awareness of the self as self requires breaking away from a dependence on models, which, in the symbolic terms of Colibr, translates as ousting the Regent from her private quarters. Once she is out of the picture, the hero can at last identify his reection in her vanity table mirror in a scene packedfor very signicant reasonswith allusions to fairy stories of all sorts. The ultimate fairy tale Since fairy tales deal imaginatively with the most important developmental issues in our lives, it is not surprising that so many of them center, like Sarduys trilogy, on Oedipal diculties. For instance, although disguised, as Bruno Bettelheim indicates, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs portrays a feminized Oedipal struggle between a daughter and a mother who hates her (Uses of Enchantment, 20203). The emphasis on mirrors in Snow White pregures Colibr in more ways than one, pointing, rather emphatically, to the narcissistic theme of the story. Like Sarduy, the Grimms portray the evolution of a young, beautiful creature who eventually succeeds in getting rid of her abusive mother and in nding an identity. Like Colibr, Snow White is docile and submissive at the beginning of the tale, while both the Queen and the Regent are malevolent. Also like the Regent, the Queen has a secret lonely chamber where no one was likely to come (Grimms Fairy Tales, 169). It is here that she prepares the poisonous apple that, to all appearances, kills Snow White. After her apparent death, Snow White is laid out in a glass con and becomes a living emblem of passivity until a Prince shows up and falls in love with her. At that point, she regurgitates the poisoned apple, comes back to life, and watches the Queen dance herself to death in redhot iron shoes. In other words, like the Regent in Colibr, the old Queen in Snow White is displaced by the new Queen who takes her place in a Big House. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Colibr are homologous in more fundamental ways as well. To begin with, they are both tales of
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empowerment and self-discovery. Like many other fairy stories, they permit the child to comprehend that not only is he jealous of his parent, but that his parent may have parallel feelingsan insight, according to Bettelheim, that can . . . permit dealing constructively with diculties in relating which otherwise would not be accessible to resolution (Uses of Enchantment, 195). As Roberto Gonzlez Echevarra has shown, nding an answer to the question of origins is one of Sarduys central aims (La ruta de Severo Sarduy, 34). In ction, the problem of origins is usually portrayed as a struggle to escape the triadic existence (between father, mother, and child) in which others serve mainly as foils who facilitate or impede nding oneself. After illustrating the many perils of unresolved, destructive attachments (the kind that atten the dwarf in Maitreya ), Sarduy concludes his trilogy with a modern-day fairy story in which the hero frees himself from the grip of domination. As is always the case in fairy stories, perils in Colibr are successfully overcome; the nal outcome is not death and destruction (as in Maitreya ), but higher integration symbolized by victory over the enemy or competitor. The competitor in question may be a thinly disguised parent gure such as the wicked queen in Snow White. In fact, like Colibr, fairy stories often portray sons replacing their fathers, and fathers doing everything in their power to forestall their sons wish to replace them. Replacing ones father is but one facet in the process of growing up, which, as it happens, all fairy tales portray. Growing up entails coming to terms with who we are, recognizing the self as self. Such recognition implies severance, implies learning that one need not be subservient to the demands of a clinging mother like the Regent or the beautiful Queen who spends her life talking to her mirror. That such severance is possible is the message of both the Grimms tale and Sarduys. Both are humorous and yet somber rites of passage, didactic projects to bring relief from Oedipal anxiety and designed to provide a happy solution to the problem of dependence. Dependence is dangerous, lethal if we listen to Sarduy when he portrays castration (in Cobra ) and getting buried by a Tremendous Lady in Maitreya as part and parcel of undierentiation. To highlight the consequences of a heros identication with, or absolute reliance upon, the opposite sex, frame his personal reaction, and drive his point home, Sarduy turns to one of the screens most masterful depictions of dominant mothers, clothing the conclusion of his facetious fantasy on personal origins with allusions to the most macabre of modern-day fairy tales.
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Like Norman Bates, the protagonist of Alfred Hitchcocks masterful Psycho, many of Sarduys heroes have an old lady in the closet from whom they seem unable to extricate themselves: the Seora in Cobra, Lady Tremendous in Maitreya, the Regent in Colibr. Like Hitchcocks, Sarduys hero is so identied with the emblem of power in the story that he cannot separate his reection from hers: Colibr is unable to recognize himself when he stares into his mothers mirror, and Norman dresses up in his mothers clothes and speaks in her stead. A taxidermist by avocation, Norman goes to such lengths to satisfy his fantasy of dependency that he mummies his mommy to keep her present. Was Hitchcocks tale not every bit as facetious and pun-lled as Sarduys? When we rst meet Norman, he is in a room with stued birds perched on every wall. Sarduy recreates this room in Colibr as a sort of visual pun, and fuses it with Mrs. Batess own private space, the bedroom. This explains why, after the Big House burns to the ground, the walls of the one room left standingthe Regents boudoirare covered with a collection of the most varied stued birds (177). Like Mrs. Batess domain, the Regents boudoir is furnished with a coqueta, a vanity table. Both Hitchcock and Sarduy linger lovingly, almost enviously, on the jars of make-up, the creams and combs that cover every square inch of this table (Colibr, 178). The jars reection on the vanity tables mirror makes the arsenal of beauty seem limitless, a womans endless resource. Colibr runs to stare at himself in this mirror, coqueto en la coqueta, Narcissus ogling the pond. Unable, at rst, to recognize himself, he begins to borrow the tools of artice, the cotton balls and peroxide, to change his appearance. Changing appearances reminds us of Cobra, whose original aim was to be a woman. Sarduy tackles one subject, reaches a resolution, and moves on, however. In Colibr, the notion of fusion with another identity has been superseded. The hero identies with the Regents image, but simply as an emblem of power. He takes over her room and borrows her makeup, just as Norman Bates borrows his mothers voice and her clothes. Norman and Colibr cannibalize the women who obsess them; they put on their trappings but go on being themselves, at least for awhile. As a psychoanalyst explains during the arraignment scene in Psycho, Norman could be both personalities, carry on conversations . . . he was never all Norman. By the same token, through most of the lm, Norman could not be all mother, either. Even at the end, when Mrs. Bates drowns out Normans voice, Normans body remains, a perpetual reminder of the
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other in the mother who has ceased struggling to come out. The outcome of Psycho is that Norman loses the struggle. Swallowed up by his own projection of Mrs. Bates he ends up relinquishing his own identity. This is where Hitchcock and Sarduy part ways. Unlike Bates, the victorious Hummingbird is not swallowed up; instead, he takes over the Big House after getting rid of the wicked lady who tried to rule over him. At the end of the novel, dropped on the ground, the Regent remains, inanimate . . . giving no signs of life (174). Defeated and cast aside, the Regent translates Sarduys wish to punish, a wish he shared with Hitchcock, who spent much of his lm career tormenting women on the screen. As Hitchcock saw it in Psycho and Sarduy sardonically depicted it in Colibr, women committed an unpardonable aront: they preferred grown men to little fellows who spent the rest of their lives longing for them. Like the Regent, Normans mother was a clinging demanding woman with whom the boy (like the protagonist of El Cristo de la rue Jacob ) had lived for years . . . as if there was no one else in the world. Then, one day, the mother met a man and, it seemed to Norman that she threw him over for this man. That pushed him over the line and he killed them both. After he killed his mother, Norman stole her body from the graveyard, embalmed her, and began wearing her clothes. Hitchcock could go no further to portray the Unheimlich as home, the other as self. Cobra, the rst installment of Sarduys trilogy on the theme of dependence is no dierent from Hitchcocks fantasy of undierentiation except for the fact that it is even more ridiculous, a kitsch take on Hitchcocks already kitsch take on the Oedipal masterplot. Like Norman, Cobra yearns to be taken for a woman, to be a woman. He dresses in womens clothes and, one-upping Norman, he has his penis cut o. The dierence is that when Sarduy worked through this notion in ction, that is, by the time he wrote Colibr, he came to the conclusion that becoming the other was a chimera, although one that doesnt exclude the possibility of identifying with what the other represents as long as the cord of dependency and not the penisis cut o. Sarduy was quite funny but also quite adamant about this: the Regent had to be thrown out of the Big House before the swiftest of birds could take her place. In fact, the serious aim of his comic parody was to show the identity of the self with itself after having been the object and extension of the mothers power (Hegel, Phenomenology, 167).
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Colibr must be seen as a resolution, as the last step in a rite of passage that opens with an attempt to become fused with the other (Cobra ), is followed by the depiction of an unresolved attachment leading to selfextermination (Maitreya ), and culminates with the recognition of ones distinctly separate image (or, as Freud would put it, with a transition from the anaclitic to the narcissistic stage betokening the beginning of ego development). As in all fairy tales, the message of Sarduys trilogy is that oedipal entanglements and diculties may seem to be unsolvable, but by courageously struggling, the odds are successfully overcome (Bettelheim, Uses of Enchantment, 199). Not death and destruction as in Maitreya, but higher integrationas symbolized by victory over the enemy or competitor . . .is the heros reward at the end of the fairy tale (199). Like Colibr, all birds have to search, travel, and suer through years of a lonely existence, but at the end of the rainbow awaits the possibility of discovering the identity of the self, neither as a reection of, nor, as dependent upon the other but, very simply, with itself (199). This, in a nutshell, is the knowledge that the eye symbolizes in Sarduys work, his personal discovery and wink to the reader. Since the self takes the place of the other in Sarduys willful miswriting of the Oedipal scenario, we still have one question left unanswered, however. What happens to the other, what happens to the coveted object whose elusive presence has been the mainspring of Sarduys fantasies all along? Does substituting the self put an end to desire, or is there a way to recreate the otherto mummify the mommy, as Norman Bates does? Might the body that can never be possessed be somehow displaced and represented in the body of ction? If, as Kristeva suggests, writing is a way to represent both absence and desire in symbolic terms, isnt there a way in which the maternal space could be colonized as Colibr colonizes the Regents private quarters? The heinous takes over the home As we have already seen, while he alluded to the symbolic content of scars only in El Cristo de la rue Jacob, Sarduy dramatized mutilation and wounds every time he wrote. As I hope I have been making clear, rampant violence is not just the consequence of his xation with fragmentation. Issuing, it is true, from a fragmented body image, the portrayal of

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heads emptied of their contents, of limbs scattered like a handful of jacks thrown in the air, of blood mixed with tears, and of brews intended to empty out the body suggests a breakdown of the boundaries that separate the inside of the body from the outside (Maitreya, 81; Cocuyo, 114; Pjaros de la playa, 121). Confronting these portraits, readers feel queasy without knowing why. The truth is that approaching Sarduy is dicult not only because of the perpetually shifting scenarios and the ironic distancing mechanisms that he deploys but also, and in a more immediate way, because of the confrontation with the bodys insides which he imposes on the reader. In her enlightening Powers of Horror (1980), Kristeva has pointed out how all bodily uids are psychologically upsetting because they ow from within, calling to mind the space where we, ourselves, were once housed. Urine, blood, saliva, and sperm, she observes, frequently show up as a substitute in analysis. Those who voice a constant preoccupation with bodily uids appear to be sublimating an unresolved attachment to the mother and, in their fantasies, the uids themselves act as a substitute, suggesting an ongoing physical bond (Powers of Horror, 65). Substituting bodily uids for the absent and primary source of longing endows these uids with sexual energy, moreover. Voicing or writing the abject is an extraordinarily eective way of negating the trauma of separation because it keeps alive the bond between a speaker or author and the inside of the body from which he was forcefully ejected. After losing the primary love object, in other words, the unconscious can conceive a fantasy in which the abject comes to occupy the place of that object. Such a fantasy, Kristeva assures us, is a way of annulling castration, of keeping alive an unresolved attachment to the mother. Let us look no further for a key to Sarduys portrayal of mutilated, bleeding bodies. Bleeding bodies were present in his work from the start, and remained important features until the very end. They are not, like his facetious allusions to Freud and Lacan, based on prototypes but rather, most likely, on an unconscious reex that can be understood on the basis of Kristevas reections. The consequence of Sarduys encompassing obsession with loss (in La ruta, Gonzlez Echevarra rightly points out that absence, separation and the notion of want distinguish his work, 5) was to bring back the presence his protagonists longed for by means of images that evoked the inside of the body which he was in the process of can-

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nibalizingwhich is to say, of revisiting, as he revisited Lacans and Batailles textswhenever he wrote about it, even if such writing was highly parodic. Simultaneously subject and object of longing, the eeting bodies in Sarduys fairy stories were a sort of onanistic pacier, a personal reminder of the loss which he excelled in camouaging through parody. Making fun of Freud and Lacans theories on primal attachment, Sarduy was nonetheless caught in the prison of the master texts. Even when his stories disempowered the emblems of authorityand, most particularly (as in Colibr ), when they disempowered the fatherrejecting authority could not make up for the original severance. Severance was a fact of life even Severo had to deal with. He dealt with it, not as a loss but as inspiration for his enigmatic fables, fables in which he dramatized the quest for realization by revisiting the sources that inspired him. Recasting Freud and Lacancolonizing the voice of the masterswas his way of becoming father of himself, and mothering a house of ction. Built, like the Casona, on the ruins of what the bird razed when he repossessed it, that house accommodated his personal history mortared with a good sense of humor and the enduring legacy he plundered from the past.

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5
Rewriting the body: renewal through language in the work of Rosario Castellanos i

Man acts as if he were the shaper and master of language, while it is language that remains mistress of man. When this relation of dominance is inverted, man succumbs to strange contrivances. Language then becomes a means of expression. Where it is expression, language can degenerate to mere impression. Even where the use of language is no more than this, it is good that one should still be careful in ones speech. But this alone can never extricate us from the reversal, from the confusion of the true relation of dominance as between language and man. For in fact it is language that speaks. . . .Heidegger, Dichterisch Wohnet der Mensch . . .

Ocio de tinieblas (1962; The Book of Lamentations, 1996) opens with a rape scene and closes with the self-imposed silence of a young invalid. Hovering between ravishment and prostration, Rosario Castellanoss arresting novel lays bare the suering of the oppressed. Like Garca Mrquez, Castellanos cuts open the abscess that festers at the base of human relationships to expose the personal politics that compel a society to strike, trample and persecute. In her novel, families fall apart, communities crumble, words turn to dust. The social body she portrays is mirrored and mocked most specically in the body of women who are hurt by extraneous forces, and inict pain on themselves. The female body is not just harmedit is stripped of power and ultimately disabled. We have already seen how maimed bodies translate Severo Sarduys wavering identication with power and disregard of symbolic authority. The time has come to ask ourselves if persecuted and invalid women in Ocio de tinieblas are likewise featured to show rejection of the dominant

power structure, or if the humiliation and inrmity in Castellanoss writing must be read from a dierent perspective. We have made clear why Sarduys Cobra is unable to accept his imperfections and tampers with his body, but why does one of the main protagonists of Ocio cripple herself ? Pendant to the powerful Catalina Daz Puilj, the sickly, pampered Idolina startles everyone when she suddenly begins to walk. By the time Ocio de tinieblas comes to an end, however, the young woman is back in bed, although no demonstrable disease mechanisms account for her paralysis. Her face is to the wall, and she doesnt seem to be listening to her nursemaids account of the Tzotzil Indians disastrous defeat. Given the havoc wreaked on the Tzotzil at the end of the novel, is Castellanos suggesting there is no hope for the oppressed? Insofar as all intimations of female independence and power are squelched by the time we reach the end of the novel, is she also indicating that women fall into this category? After all, Castellanos appears to be bowing to conventional novelistic canons in her contrasting portrayals of rewarded meek women and misbehaving strong ones who are punished for their arrogance. Are the characters she portrays shaped by forces that are cultural as well as biological? Is her elaboration of the construction of genderof woman as a cultural product rather than a biological essenceas well as her focus on womans fundamental otherness in relation to men a notion Castellanos borrows from Simone de Beauvoir to develop her own feminist theories of sexual dierence? But if Castellanos was a feminist, why does she systematically neutralize the women in her novels? Did she write Ocio de tinieblas to satisfy the demands of patriarchal disciplinary power or are her portrayals of invalid women a subversive reaction to the exploitation and abuse imposed by that very power? Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, Spanish American women authors have participated in and rened a male-dened genre. Particularly after the publication of Mara Luisa Bombals revolutionary La ltima niebla (1935) (House of Mist [1947]), however, the portrayal of sweet heroines typical of patriarchal culture has been counterbalanced by what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar describe as a madwoman in the attic: a repressed, angry voice that acts as counterfoil to the angel in the house. Isnt this angry voice the same one we hear in Ocio de tinieblas? Isnt Catalina Daz Puiljs rage a foil to Idolinas passive resistance? If resistance is featured in Ocio, we also need to ask ourselves how Castellanos tempered the submissiveness that comes through so clearly
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in her recently published letters to her ex-husband (Cartas a Ricardo, 1994). Unlike Cortzar, Cabrera Infante, and Sarduy, was she writing portraits that were not projections of her own anxieties and insuciencies? Did she, like Garca Mrquez, envision her own writing as a social project designed to alter what she felt was an unfair situation? But if this is the case, why did she disarm both Catalina and Idolina at the end of her novel? Doesnt Idolinas reversion to the sick bed suggest that Ocio is a panegyric to female passivity and not a work of protest? Something like a dirty joke Much like other women authors writing about the Indian struggle Juana Manuela Gorriti and Clorinda Matto de Turner, for instance Castellanos begins Ocio de tinieblas by drawing a parallel between the deated social status of Indians and that of women. Undeniably, both groups have much in common: exploited, they have traditionally resorted to passivity, contributing in every way to maintain the system that oppresses them. Like her fellow Neo-indigenistas, Castellanos focuses on human dynamics as they aect the underprivileged but, unlike them, she nds room to explore the inner psychology of characters. Her novel can be compared to a gigantic body in which each organ is diseased. Church and state, Indian and ladino, rich and poor gure in its pages at odds with each other, cards in a deck stacking up to a vicious struggle for power. Wielding or yielding that power, having or forsaking it, killing for it, lying, cheating, beating and raping in order to hold on to it sweeps all characters into a maelstrom that culminates with a resounding return to inequality, exploitation, and passivity. Nothing sums up better the bonds between the characters in Ocio de tinieblas than the words of Castellanos when she describes the yoking together of two carnivorous beasts of dierent species that suddenly nd themselves locked up in the same case. They scratch, they bite, and devour each other to conquer one more inch of the half of the bed. . . . And not because the bed or the portion of food is important. What is important is to make the other submit into slavery. To annihilate him (Cartas a Ricardo, 87). In the struggle depicted in Ocio de tinieblas, four women stand out: all of them shrewd, all manipulative, each a mainspring in one of the four interwoven plots composing the novel. One is a mother, the second a wife, the third a mistress, the fourth a daughter. Keeping pace with the
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shifts in character, the setting alternates between the village of San Juan Chamula and Ciudad Real (San Cristbal de las Casas) in Castellanoss native Chiapas. As the action opens the reader confronts the frustrations of a Tzotzil woman unable to conceivea great source of shame among their people. Catalina Daz Puilj will not be shamed out of the picture, however. Rather than meekly submit to a separation from her husband, which is the conventional aftermath to sterility among the Chamulas, she modies her role from mother to soothsayer and eventually comes to be highly respected for her powers. Soon after the action begins Catalina visits Ciudad Real with a group of women. They are attacked by thieves, become separated from each other, and one of the youngest is raped. When a few months later Catalina notices that same young woman is pregnant, she engineers a marriage between her own retarded brother and the young woman. When the child is born she names it Domingo (Sunday), and raises him as her own, altering her prospects once again through guile. Aware thatif determinedshe can retool the course of life, Catalina sets out to change the destiny of her people. Tired of her husbands wise but meek leadership of village aairs, she remembers a cave she happened upon as a childan old, forgotten Mayan sanctuarywhere she rediscovers the silenced gods of her ancestors (209). Soon after her discovery, the cave becomes a secret place of pilgrimage, and the silenced gods begin to speak through Catalina, their new oracle. In ts of incomprehensible ramblings that must be interpreted by Tzotzil shamans, the sybil or ilol lets her people know the time has come to free themselves from the paleskinned usurpers who have taken away their land and their freedom. While the seeds of revolt are slowly simmering in San Juan Chamula, Castellanos returns to the scene of the rape and begins probing the rapists own byzantine family entanglements. After a barren marriage to the prudish and now embittered Isabel Zebada, the insatiable Leonardo Cifuentes amuses himself by running after women. His marriage to Isabel is surrounded by an aura of mystery on account of her rst husbands alleged suicide. As it turns out, everyoneand, most notably, Isabels daughter Idolinasuspects that Leonardo killed him. During a violent argument with her mother soon after her fathers death, Idolina has a t of hysterics from which she emerges an invalid. From that point onward, she accuses her mother of abetting her fathers murder, and uses her inrmity to punish and manipulate her.
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Idolinas passive posture is contrasted with the ease and dynamism of a newcomer to Ciudad Real, the beautiful Julia Acevedo, who, to compound matters, becomes Leonardos mistress. Julia is so engagingly aggressive that she manages to make her way upstairs into Idolinas bedroom during a party and, surprising the young invalid outside her bed, succeeds in obtaining her trust. At that point, Julia has not yet succumbed to Leonardos advances and Idolina, hungry for aection, becomes enthralled with her. Under Julias watchful eye, the miracle takes place: Idolina starts walking again, and, in the course of time, begins to go out and have a life beyond the four walls of her self-imposed prison cell. To jump from Indian village to city bedroom, as I have done in attempting to summarize the extraordinarily complex, multi-level action of Ocio de tinieblas, may give the impression that the novel is divided in two halves focusing rst on San Juan, then on Ciudad Real. This is far from being the case. Instead, the plot line shifts regularly between one context and the other and among each of the four related plots. Taking turns to come to the fore, the plots build, nonetheless, to one and the same crescendo: a confrontation between the Indians of San Juan and the nonIndians of Ciudad Real, a confrontation that brings Catalina and her nemesis Leonardo Cifuentes face to face. The terrible battle that puts an end to the power struggle is not depicted in the action, however. We learn of the Tzotzils defeat only through Idolinas nanny, who tells her the story as something that took place long ago, turning, in the process, active history into passive myth. The implications of myth were very much in Castellanoss mind when she wrote Ocio de tinieblas. As Martin Lienhard has shown in a cunning article, cyclical time was as relevant to her thinking as linear time (La legitimacin indgena, 14). Fusing together dierent historical epochs namely, the late nineteenth century and the 1930sCastellanos recasts the crucixion of a young Indian in Kanjobal in 1889, President Lzaro Crdenass social and land reforms in the 1930s to benet Indian minorities, and the notorious Indian raid on San Cristbal de las Casas to suit her own ends. I say she recasts because instead of wholly inventing her plot, she dresses the bare bones of history with events of her own design. For instance, the crucied child in Ocio turns out to be Catalinas adopted son, Domingo, whom she forsakes so the Chamulas can become equal to the ladinos by having a man die on the cross for their sake. Inventing the motivation for actions that actually took place, Castellanos
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sheds light on the opaque behavior of indigenous communities that have left no written records. Ocio provides, therefore, a complement to history and, by complementing it, completes the picture with fabrications that, as it turns out, reveal a great deal more about their author than they do about history. Making choices that are only partially determined by what took place, Castellanos emphasizes some aspects of relationships rather than others, and explores idiosyncratic emotions that keep turning up in the portraits she draws. For instance, in order to nd an explanation for the crucixion of an Indian by his own community, she explores the intimate bonds between parents and children, a subject that always drew her attention. What she imagines between Domingo, Catalina, and Catalinas husband Winiktn is rivalry, resentment, and jealousy. She sees the same negative forces in the relationships between Idolina and her parents, and between Marcela (the raped Indian girl) and hers. Such insistence on warped family triangles compels us to conclude the obvious: her dramatization of parental jealousy was likely designed to get a better grasp of a scenario that haunted her personally. Isnt it striking, after all, that there should be no aectionate mothers in Castellanoss work and that, despite appearances to the contrary, even the initially very maternal Catalina Daz Puilj should be no exception? Catalina, who wants a child more than anything in the world, gives him up to be crucied once she feels he is getting too close to his adopted father, and she herself has given birth to the gods, molding them with her own hands (249). In other words, as Castellanos portrays them, mothers are far from being the kind of sustaining refuge we often see in romantic novels. Instead, like Isabel Zebada, they pull away from their children when they are most needed or squelch them with misguided benevolence. Struggling to nd voices of their own, their ospring Idolina, Marcela, and Domingoend up being the victims of their oppressive demands. As Castellanos saw it or, at least as she portrayed it, an abyss gapes open between parents and children. Having always been second-best while growing up and made to feel guilty for the death of her brother at a very early age, she understood rejection well, as we learn from one of her pulverizingly frank letters to Ricardo Palma. I have always felt a bit embarrassed about being alive . . . , she admits to the man who would become her husband, I had a brother . . . who died and . . . my parents,
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although they never came right out and said it, gave me to understand that it was unfair that the boy of the house had died while I, instead, was still alive and kicking (Cartas a Ricardo, 35). In the very autobiographical Baln Canan (1957), Castellanos did not mince words while portraying parental rejection, but this portrayal pales in comparison to the searing one she drew in Ocio. Like Cortzar, turning to scapegoats and subterfuges allowed her to be much more transparent about her pain. She could explore and talk about it better by projecting it onto characters whose circumstances, in all appearances, did not resemble her own. But that she looked inwardly in search of features to draw those circumstances is made clear when we read her correspondence. In another letter written to Palma on 6 November 1950, for instance, she reveals the chemistry that would later propel the ctional Idolina to react: Whenever I live on my own, I am always inventing illnesses to give myself the opportunity to pamper myself (78). Inventing illnesses is a way to somatize anxieties whose origins are dicult to grasp because unconscious. The hysteric displaces pain springing from undenable sources unto a graspable eldthe bodyand the body, as Castellanos used to say referring to her own, was my most inopportune and cumbersome companion (Cartas a Ricardo, 39). Finding your tongue Castellanoss letters to Ricardo Palma provide readers with a rare and useful document. Voicing her insecurities, an aecting vulnerability, and a seemingly limitless capacity for loving Palma, Castellanos exposes herself to a degree seldom seen outside ction. This is why, in her stirring introduction to these letters, Elena Poniatowska refers to them as a formidable and vital document, the kind of personal revelation that will seduce men and women who seek to understand the way women think and act (Cartas a Ricardo, 19). Like the character in Edith Whartons early short story The Fullness of Life who compares a womans nature to a house full of rooms that includes a hall through which everyone passes . . . a drawing room, where one receives normal visits, and an innermost room . . . far beyond . . . [where] the soul sits alone, we could say that Castellanoss frank correspondence opens up unsuspected vistas. The dierence between the house described in Whartons story and Castellanoss letters is that the soul mentioned in the former waits for a
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footstep that never comes whereas in the latter the ground is covered with imprints. Thus far in this book we have adduced facts from ction and made a number of assumptions, which, for some, may be hard to accept. But with Castellanoss correspondence in hand we can enter directly into the heart and mind of an author and document how the dramatizations she created were based on private experiences. This is one reason why I was drawn to her work, among so many potential choices. Other writers may be more representative of, let us say, the feminine outlook, or of a feminist stance. Others could possibly broaden our analysis of the body in literature more dramatically and explicitly than Castellanos. But no one else has left behind an annotated guide like Cartas a Ricardo in which candid revelations go hand in hand with piercing intelligence and psychological insight. Any of the other authors we study might have peeled him- or herself down to the raw core, but none did, or have as yet. In addition (with the exception, perhaps, of Elena Poniatowska in Querido Diego te abraza Quiela [1978], [Dear Diego ]), few women authors seeking to formulate a voice that is feminine, honest in itself, and politically correct shift their narrative stance as dramatically as Rosario Castellanos to make a point that is, true enough, often missed. A revolutionary in both purpose and design and a feminist by all accounts, Castellanos nonetheless portrays women as defeated, their anger turned to silence. This is a seeming contradiction that begs to be examined, and it is the reason for which I say she shifts her position. What I would like to make clear in this chapter is why the shift occurs and what it implies regarding the place of women in writing. How does a woman aiming to examine and ultimately alter gender roles take hold of a pen to vindicate herself and her sex? If, to abide by conventions and, therefore, to mirror reality, she portrays women as weak, how can she ultimately expect to bring about changes in social perception and gender roles? Is pity the best reaction a woman author can hope to get from her readers, or should she aim for understanding? What sort of understanding did Castellanos have in mind when she declared, My combat literature or whatever you want to call it is not designed for the hands and eyes of someone who is going to come in and change the situation. I simply want people to become aware . . . or, at the very least, I want to become aware myself about the implications of certain behavior patterns? An author aiming to make us aware of the social roles played by
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women would choose to portray, it seems, as many as possible to allow her readers to generalize about the feminine condition. Therefore, in order to determine what Castellanos was saying about women, we need to examine the roles she gives them in Ocio de tinieblas. When we do, the rst thing we discover is that, from the start, she binds behavior or performance to language and examines exploitation, passivity, activism, defeat, and, ultimately, hope by exploring their nexus with the speech act. In her novel, as we will see, power and gender are inextricable from the issue of lengua seen in a variety of roles as language and tongue, langue and parole, a tool to control, dene, and possess. The masters whip In The Conquest of America (1982) published twenty years after Ocio de tinieblas, Tzvetan Todorov highlights the link between language and power in ways that retrace almost word for word Castellanoss reections on the subject. Todorov explains how in pre-Colombian Mexico power demands wisdom, and wisdom is attested by the capacity to interpret (78). From the start of his chapter Montezuma and Signs, Todorov links linguistic excellence with control, taking up a subject that can be said to be the backbone of Ocio de tinieblas. Written in a formalized, ritual, and, in the opinion of some, highly contrived style, the opening pages of Ocio were meant to evoke the language of indigenous manuscripts such as the Popol Vuh (Lienhard, Legitimacin indgena, 4). Describing these pages as a misguided attempt to cast ancient rhetoric as representative of contemporary indigenous culture, even the characteristically insightful Joseph Sommers misinterprets Castellanoss intention (Changing View of the Indian, 51). Beginning with a mimicry of the language used in the Popol Vuh was meant to suggest that her book should be seen as another genesis, but one, we must keep in mind, written by a woman who does not forget the oppressed. First under a cloud are the Indians, and the instrument with which they are subjugated, language. From the start of Ocio de tinieblas Castellanos makes clear the profound dierences between Tzotzil and Spanish. Poet to the core, she speaks of the latter only metonymically, referring to it as castilla (a term still used by many Tzotzil speakers), and not castellano, that is, Castilian. The temptation to trace the etymology of Castellanoss linguistic choice is dicult to resist. Castilla is, of course,
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the name of the region in Spain (Castile) famous for its many castles, or castillos, built for protection against invaders. Castillo evolves from the latin castellum, which means fortress, and is a diminutive of castrum, a fortied place. Curiously, the latin form of castrum is akin to castrare, to castrate, which is exactly what castilla does to Tzotzil in the region of Chiapas, according to Castellanos. We also know from heraldic devices, coats of arms, and feudal banners that castillos in Castilla were fortied buildings that were usually towershaped. Castellanos makes ample use of the signieds implicit in this iconography to develop the action of her novel. She begins by evoking the erect, tower shape of castillos in two weapons: the sword and the whip. From the start of Ocio the language called castilla is described as a cast iron instrument of control, a conquering weapon (arma de conquista ) in contrast with Tzotzil, which has a dreamy, unconscious quality (a language que se dice tambin en sueos, 9). The castled language of Castilla, we are told, is not only iron hard ( frreo ) and the butt-end of a body (not the whip itself but its tip, the punta del ltigo ), but also emblematic of power because it is the whip of the law or ltigo de la ley (9). Castillos, or castles, are sti and upright like whips and usually built on summits, placements that pregure the station of the Spanish in the social hierarchy of the New World. According to Castellanos, the men who spoke the castled language wore the sun on their face, and their speech was haughty in contrast to Tzotzil, which she describes as a balbuceo, a stammer (9). If we abide by the terms of her metonymy we could say, then, that Ocio depicts the struggle between sti, inexible instruments, and blind bats (which is what Tzotzil means) for control of the whip of the law (9). Bats y in the dark, and darkness contrasts with the sol en la cara of the Spaniards as markedly as castilla diers from Tzotzil. Castilla is a metonymy that can harm because it is described as a frreo instrumento, an iron instrument. Its ability to cause pain is made clear at the beginning of the novel immediately after the young Indian woman is raped. Disconcerted by her daughters disappearance and eventual return empty-handed (like the typical girl in one of Jean-Baptiste Greuzes portraits, she has lost the clay pots she was carrying on her back), her mother strikes her and begins insulting her in Tzotzil. The mother uses only one word in Spanish in her long tirade and we are told this word, cabrona, cracked like a whip (restall como un latigazo ) in the air, and
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on her daughters back (27). Of course her insult is not the only whip that cracks open Marcelas skin; the girl is also pregnant after her close encounter with Leonardo Cifuentess punta de ltigo, and from this union is born Domingo, who will die on the cross years later unable to expiate the sins of his people, a potentially pregnant symbol turned into a barren sacrice. As Castellanos depicts it, women willingly put up with pain as long as they can be left to admire the power of the whip. The omniscient narrator of Ocio points out how, despite her hatred of her husband, Isabel Zebada, the submissive wife of Leonardo Cifuentes, considers this weapon the emblem of manliness with which the male subdues the female (76). Women such as she, we are told, keep the memory of countless humiliations among the relics of love (76). Although the reader will never know for certain, it is very likely that Isabel knew about Leonardos murderous intentions regarding her rst husband. If she did nothing about it, it was because she had nothing but disdain for the weak man to whom she was married and much preferred the whip as the emblem of manliness of the one who, in all probability, did away with him (76). In contrast with her rst husband, Leonardo is willing and able to pull by the mane any who resist him, be she headstrong, churlish or capricious (76). Is Castellanos suggesting, like Verdi in Rigoletto, that women feel bound to the men who rough them up? How, otherwise, could they both love a man and tolerate the punishment he metes out? That much is made of Leonardos whip is a point no reader of Ocio de tinieblas can ignore. He is not only the Don Juan of Ciudad Real but also one of the citys varas altas or tall rodsanother metonymy translated from Tzotzil that is used to designate the men chosen to govern in Indigenous communities. Leonardowho lived in the certainty of the irresistibility of his authorityis appointed to head the forces charged with reducing the Tzotzil to submission (68). It is no coincidence that his stepdaughter Idolina associates him with the King of Swords because of the ideas both suggest: Leonardo is a symbol of virility and the living incarnation of military might (85). He has what all the characters in Ocio struggle to obtain: power. To suggest that power whenever she refers to him, Castellanos brings into a cluster the sword, the whip, and the phallusin other words, the erect symbols of potency emblematized in castillos. It follows that if languageand specically Castilian is associated
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with the weapons of war, which are in turn identied with virility embodied in this novel by Leonardo Cifuentes, anything having to do with femininity would be part of a contrasting semantic eld. Those who feel I build castles in the air when I suggest that Castellanos yokes together language, power, and the phallus might change their minds after being made aware of the painstaking symmetry with which she likewise sketches the feminine domain. While pinpointing the link between power and language mastery, Castellanos does not fail to establish a nexus between passivity and linguistic incompetence or, at its nadir, between passivity and the absolute denial of language. For instance, Isabel Zebada, whose habit, we are told, was to resign herself, nds a refuge in total muteness whenever she discovers her wishes had been overruled by Leonardos, and her daughter Idolina completely shuts o the expression of her body as she sinks into an inrmity that has nothing to do with physical lesions (67). To understand both Idolinas invalidism and Castellanoss referent when describing the behavior of women who make themselves sick, we need to recall Lacans denition of hysteria as le vide absolu. Curiously, in Ocio le vide absolu is not the exclusive domain of women. Emptiness and self-denial are likewise attributes of Indians, who are at the opposite extreme of ladinos on both the social ladder and the chain of power. For instance, after her rape, the young Marcela Gmez Oso discovers the paradise implicit in the supreme abolition of consciousness (24). The place where memory hurt her stops being bleeding viscera to become, we are told, marvelously empty (45). And her husbandCatalinas retarded brother brought out of hiding to camouage Marcelas rapeis both impotent and mute (41). In sum, then, language in Ocio is the ladinos private domain, while women and Indians have to conform themselves with the sounds of silence. Describing a world where changes are slow to take place, where everyone turns a deaf ear to a neighbor, Castellanoss only hope is to reach the reader, to make people more aware, as she once declared to Luis Adolfo Domnguez (Entrevista, 17). Some readers might be willing to listen, but in Ocio the Indians are struck dumb and women turn a deaf ear. The silence of the latter is self-imposed when they discover they have no language of their own, whereas the formerwho do have a language realize from the start it is a blunted instrument: the stammering of a race

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that has lost its memory (143). Homologated, both minorities talk without speaking, are seen but not heard. Womanspeak: a language no one can understand? In and of itself, associating submissiveness with silence is nothing original. Where Castellanos breaks new ground is in the recovery of language made by the most startling character in her saga, Catalina Daz Puilj. Castellanos begins by portraying Catalina as unable to bear children and then highlights the dire consequences of sterility among the Tzotzil. Catalina is a resourceful woman who will not let herself be undone by social conventions or even biology, however. To compensate for her lack of children, she casts herself as priestess. Soon, everyone in San Juan Chamula acknowledges her powers, which she readily accepts with the placid recognition of someone receiving her dues (86). Gradually, however, she comes to realize that in spite of their respect the Tzotzil continue to see her as a pariah because of her sterility. When circumstances turn propitious, she conceives an audacious plan by which she becomes the assumed mother of Domingo, whose name prophetically means both master and lord. Endowed with what she perceives as a new extension of herself, she feels she would never be alone again, never be humiliated again (13). But Catalina miscalculates the control she can exert over a child not biologically her own in a traditional community where men of all ages bond together in daily chores. As he grows older, it is toward his adopted fatherCatalinas husband, Pedrothat Domingo turns. Enraged by this unexpected turn of events, she sets out to nd a substitute for the missing husband and the abducted child (192). At that point she remembers how, as a young girl, she had happened into a cave where three stones shaped like people were hidden (192). By degrees the reader comes to understand that these are ancient Mayan idols, lost gods that Catalina hopes to nd again in order to ll her emptiness because, forced to face the truth, she has begun to tell herself, Cant you see you have been lying to yourself all these years? Cant you see you were lying when you said you were [Domingos] mother, and your husband his father? (193). She even concedes at this juncture that her much touted supernatural powers are a lie: Your frown is a cloud without lightning, your left hand a conjured catastrophe (194). Forsaken by

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185

her family and forgotten by her peers, she feels abandoned by the gods: Deaf are their ears . . . barren their promises (194). I am alone, she gradually realizes, I need to accept this. Entirely alone (192). No sooner has she recognized her bereftness than she runs into the forest, desperately climbing, creeping, and falling. Struck by the low branches, her skin torn by brambles, she makes her way to the cave that hides its secret. When she nds it, she feels once again owner of the world . . . owner of her destinya destiny that incites her to run and yell, Let all men bow to you! (196). Catalina has no doubt that the stone idols are the emblem of the great repressed power of the Tzotzil people but she also recognizes that they are deaf and dumb (172). In spite of their silence, when she lets the Tzotzil know of her discovery everyone comes to visit the place of worship and to hear with their own ears that the god forgot our language and no longer knows how to speak to us (21011). On the edge of despair, Catalina goes into a trance, thick foam oozing between her tightly shut teeth, and she begins to mutter incoherent, senseless words which no one around her can understand (212). She gives birth, at last, but her ospring is no ordinary stock. What she brings into the world is the esh made verb. This verb is shrouded in mystery, unfathomable. And yet, when Catalina speaks her people are stirred because her voice lls itself with the rumble of the dreams of her tribe . . . the reminiscences of an abolished past (212). Even without understanding the enigma surrounding this sacred woman, the people begin to venerate and obey her, at least until Father Manuel, the Catholic priest of San Juan Chamula, realizes that his parishioners are showing up less often to church, and goes to the mysterious cave to nd out why. In a frenzy when he discovers the seditious nature of Catalinas revelation, the priest begins tearing away at the ornaments and yards of fabric which the faithful have wrapped around the stone idols, and drags them outside and across a square littered with the peel of fruits, leftovers and garbage (226). As they stare, thunderstruck, the Indians wonder how the ancient powers will react to the sacrilege that is being perpetrated against them. But nothing happens. Once again dispossessed, Catalina falls to the ground and loses consciousness as all abandon her. Thus far, no one has taken time to consider the role Catalinas incoherent, senseless words play in Ocio de tinieblas. When we consider how important language is to the thematic development of this novel, how186 Body of writing

ever, it seems that casting one of her protagonists as a creator of a unique form of articulation needs to be seen as a signicant feature of Castellanoss design. Portrayed as a distinct register characterized by gestures and prosody instead of symbols and grammar, Catalinas language is easily distinguishable from the phallogocentric whip of the law wielded by men like Leonardo Cifuentes. Hers gives primacy to the voice as rhythm and timbre, to the body as movement and gesture. It can be heard but not understood; it has its place and reason for being but without the symbolic whip intervening as order, identity, and consciousness, it is perceived as mere babbling even if, as it turns out, that babbling is sacred. The incoherent sounds Catalina utters spring from the primary and presymbolic modality that Julia Kristeva refers to as semiotic and links to the feminine chora. Being presymbolic, Catalinas language dispenses with morphological units. This is why, when she rst raises her voice in the cave of Tzajal-hemel, she didnt modulate syllables, she didnt construct words. It was simply a moan, an animal or superhuman rattle that shifts and reaches an almost imperceptible register until it becomes like the ripple of a distant, underground spring (219). The primary impulses characteristic of the semiotic also include nonverbal features apparent whenamidst stammersCatalina gestured, banging her head with clenched sts. Or repeated disconnected words, sounds of an invented language that lled everyone with wonder and awe (219). Catalinas invented language turns her into a symbol both for her peoplewho have no voiceand for the reader, who can only listen. Language gives her power but it is a power she is constantly being deprived of, as if it didnt belong to her. Why, after showing that women are systematically neutralizedMarcela is raped, Isabel silenced, Idolina bedridden, Julia ostracizeddoes Castellanos empower Catalina through language? And why, after empowering her, does she strip the sacred woman of that power? Is Catalinas linguistic epiphany meant to be read as the turning point of Ocio, the moment when, to put it in general terms, woman discovers and reappropriates herself as subject? Let us consider this question for a moment. Up until the scene of investiture at Tzajal-hemel, Castellanos shows women as the objects of male desires, male fears, and male representations. When Catalina allows the voices of her body to be heard, however, she articulates a language that people respond to even if they cannot grasp its sense. The Tzotzil rush to the cave to witness the miracle
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and leave behind the language of the law articulated in the Catholic Church of San Juan Chamula. Put in Castellanoss own symbolic terms, they abandon the whip and turn to the cave; or, stated otherwise, recognizing the power of the semiotic, they turn their back on the symbolic. There is no doubt that establishing a distinction between one form of articulation (male, symbolic, and dominant), and another (female, semiotic, and sacred) opens the possibility for a distinctly feminine space within language as well as within the structure of power. In other words, it suggests a separate house or domain from which the feminine voice can be articulated. Catalina invents a language that shakes up old habits of thought and old ways of seeing. It comes as no surprise that this language eventually instructs the Tzotzil to revolt against the ladino forces that emblematize law and order in the novel. True, the Indians lose the battle, but does their defeat really alter Castellanoss design? One of the points Castellanos is making in Ocio is that both women and Indians have alternatives. Before they can act on those alternatives, they must develop a sense of themselves, however. Catalinas didactic role is to show this development, although, as Castellanos makes clear, what she brings into the world is trampled by those in control. Domingo is taken away, her language is translated by Mayan shamans, the gods she nds are cast from their altars by the Catholic priest, and her people are massacred. Husband, community, religion, and the law take every opportunity to silence her. Once in the novel she overpowers the forces of repression, however: when she creates not as an act of the will but through her own physical body. Body talk After the priest of San Juan Chamula removes the gods from the cave, Catalina feels dispossessed. In the weeks that follow, however, this feeling becomes the fuel that helps her overcome her sense of loss. Tenacious, she learns to thrive in vicissitude. When she at last returns to the empty cave at Tzajal-hemel, her hands begin to sculpt the shapes of the sequestered gods, seemingly of their own accord. The terms in which Castellanos describes Catalinas creation are highly signicant: as the priestess molds the wet clay she pants in a restless frenzy, with the panting of women who are about to give birth (249). Issued from her exertions, shaped by her ngers, the new gods emerge ready to command.
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Catalina becomes their mother and mediatorthe means through which they communicate with the faithful. Thereafter, her wishes are law. She too is law but a law thatas we shall seethe fathers in the novel nd hard to tolerate. When Catalinas gods begin speaking once more, the Tzotzil return to the sacred place of their ancestors. One day, Father Manuel discovers the new treason and travels to the cave to reclaim what he has lost. The rst time he had gone to Tzajal-hemel he knocked down the gods without hesitation or consequences. The second time, the gods he nds are made of dierent stu, however; these are Catalinas creations in every sense. What we have in this second version of the cave scene is not only Mayan versus Christian beliefs but also a confrontation between phallogocentric authority (represented by the Church, ladino culture, men in general), and female power embodied in a high priestess who has become an organ for her people. The power of the whip cannot tolerate rivalries or confrontations, however. It comes as no surprise, therefore, when we read that Father Manuel enters Catalinas cave brandishing this weapon. Whip in hand, he begins thrashing altar and worshippers alike. But this time his destruction is cut short as Catalina breaks his weapon across her knees (Catalina quebr el fuete contra sus rodillas, 26364). As if this were a concerted signal, the Indians fall on the priest, and pummel him until all that is left is a revolting mass of bones and blood (264). Threatened by a new order, the whip lashes out against the power of the cave, one organ striking another until the whips destructiveness is silenced by a new voice issuing forth from the deepest layers of Catalinas psyche. Catalinas language and the alternate order she embodies are Castellanoss attempt to portray both a new poetics and a new politics based on womens reclaiming control over their bodies, an aim which, according to Susan Rubin Suleiman, characterized the rst wave of feminism. There can be no doubt that in the cave scene Catalina nds her identity and a voice to speak forth that identity, and, more to the point of our discussion, that she nds both by means of her body. But the larger issue Castellanos also questions is whether that voice can hold its own ground. Providing an answer takes her extraordinarily topical Ocio de tinieblas much beyond the rst wave of feminism, and straight to the heart of the feminist polemics of the 1980s. After linking language with power and endowing Catalina with a unique form of speech, Castellanos explores the plausibility and eventual
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consequences of a form of discourse that would be inherently womans (what Luce Irigaray would term, years later, a parler femme or womanspeak), dierent and independent from phallogocentric language. Can woman, wonders Castellanos, create a form of discourse thatas Irigaray also thought at one timerejects patriarchy and allows her to escape the oppression of phallogocentric society? The Mexican author dramatizes her answer to this question in Catalinas personal saga. At rst marginalized because her body does not respond to the criteria imposed on women by patriarchal society (i.e., womens purpose is to conceive), Catalina begins to have mystical visions. If, as Irigaray argues, the mystical experience is precisely an experience of the loss of subjecthood, of the disappearance of the subject/object opposition, mysticism in general would seem to hold a particular appeal for women such as Catalina whose subjectivity is already being repressed by patriarchal discourse (Speculum, 238). Touched by the ame of the divine, Catalina is transformed into a uid stream dissolving all dierence between subject and object. She becomes le vide absolu, and it is from this undierentiated perspective that she begins to carve out purpose and meaning for herself. Castellanos establishes a clear dierence between borrowing an identity and dening your own, or, to put it in terms of womans dilemma as symbolically portrayed in Ocio, between seizing the ready-made emblems of power (the ancestral gods) and creating her own. The rst culminates in Father Manuels reappropriation; the second suggestsfor a while, at leastthat woman is capable of articulating her own form of language and can assert her otherness through a voice unique to herself. Castellanos is too lucid to entertain this chimera for very long, however. Ocio de tinieblas seeks to determine in ction questions that Shoshana Felman would articulate years later: Is it enough to be a woman in order to speak as a woman? Is speaking as a woman a fact determined by some biological condition or by a strategic, theoretical position, by anatomy or by culture? What if speaking as a woman were not a simple natural fact, could not be taken for granted? (The Critical Phallacy, 3). Using Catalina as a vehicle, Castellanoss answer to Felmans questions rings clear: speaking as a woman with a voice that is unique cannot be taken for granted. It would be a wonderful thing if, as Luce Irigaray suggested in the eighties, women could enunciate their own form of articulation distinct from phallic discourse. However, as Julia Kristeva has repeatedly pointed out, the inherently feminine semiotic modality
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cannot prescind the symbolic register. Without that register, without the symbolic Name of the Father intervening as order and identity, language cannot be understood. The heroic stammering of Catalinas underground spring is a case in point (219). As Kristeva has argued, from the writing of her prophetic Polylogue onward, to avoid psychosis, the feminine element in women as well as in men needs to be inscribed within the symbolic order. In her opinion, it is doubtful whether any society could be matriarchal in anything but namegiven that the symbolic is the precondition of social life. This is why both her and Castellanoss approach to feminism could never be couched within an either/or polemical framework of the feminine semiotic on one side or the masculine symbolic on the othera position that was long contested by Irigaray and many of her advocates. Elizabeth Grosz, for instance, began by nding Kristevas arguments puzzling in feminist terms, and ended up saying that Kristevas theory of sexual dierence implies an anti-feminist stance (Sexual Subversions, 97). The same sort of criticism has been directed at Castellanos. Readers have pushed her novels into a closet (it took over thirty years since its publication in Spanish before Ocio was translated into English, for instance), not because her ction is perceived to lack quality but because her political posture regarding women is generally perceived to be muddled. To this day, critics cannot comprehend Castellanoss apparent surrender of feminine power. Why, they wonder, does Catalina Daz Puilj nd her tongue only to be ultimately silenced? Why do men in the microcosm portrayed by Castellanos ultimately crush powerful women like Julia Acevedo? Does casting women as underdogs in spite of their potential for power suggest that Castellanoss view of the war between the sexes is fundamentally pessimistic? Assuredly, to grasp all the implications of the gender dynamics portrayed in Ocio we need to consider the female voice not in isolation but in confrontation with the language of power. In other words, we need to consider the cave not in and of itself but as it interacts with the whip. Taking each side of this dialogue in turn, we could begin by saying that what Catalina gives birth to in Tzajal-hemel is what Hlne Cixous refers to as the voice: a song before the Law, before the breath was split by the symbolic, reappropriated into language under the authority that separates (La jeune ne, 172). The voice nds its source in a time before the Law came into being, says Toril Moi, nameless . . . it is placed
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rmly in the pre-Oedipal stage before the child acquires language, and thereby the capacity to name itself and its objects (Sexual/Textual Politics, 114). Cixous convincingly argues that women have this privileged relationship to the voice because of their relative lack of defense mechanisms: No woman ever heaps up as many defenses against their libidinal drive as a man does (173). Whereas man represses the mother, woman doesnt (or hardly does), adds Moi (115). This repression is clearly portrayed in Ocio de tinieblas. In fact, one could argue that the novel was designed as an anatomy lesson, as a way to dissect the cancer that allows the sick body of society to thrive on exploitation. Repressing the mother, man represses woman, whomas is clear in Castellanoss portraithe views as an antagonist. Mans stance is defensive; judging from the ruthlessness with which he treats women, he is also angry. What is it in womens voices, which, in those rare moments (as in the cave scene in Ocio ) in which it is uttered, drives men into a rage? Why is it that Catalinas always reasonable husband feels so threatened by his wifes empowerment in the cave that he strikes her after witnessing her linguistic frenzy? Isnt it clear that when Catalina speaks in tongues or, as Cixous would say, when the voice springing from the deepest layers of her psyche can be heard at last, that she nds an identity which, for the rst time, is neither borrowed nor dened by a law exterior to herself ? And who emblematizes that law? Isnt it Pedro and all the men in the novel who wield it, albeit to dierent degrees? Doesnt it follow, then, that by nding her voice Catalina (and any woman who would dare do the same) antagonizes the law? From the perspective of those in control, wouldnt her sudden empowerment be considered a threat? Wouldnt such a notion explain why we are told that, when she nds her own voice, Catalina takes away one of [Pedros] possessions, part of his personal domain (213)? Clearly, what ensues from the clash between the voice and the law, the power of the whip and the power of the cave, is a ght to the quick, one that reveals the deep antagonism that drives men and women apart, undercurrent not just of Castellanoss novel but of every story we have looked at in this book. The source of mens fear? What is at the origin of this rivalry, at the root of these ambivalent feelings of attraction and rejection that draw men and women together
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and apart? For Dorothy Dinnerstein the answer is clear: the rivalry is predicated on fear, and specically, as we see in Ocio de tinieblas, on fearing the will of woman, which is the rst and most enduring authority we know (Mermaid, 161). According to Dinnerstein, all human beings live in perpetual terror of sinking back into the helplessness of infancy, a time when the idea of absolute power was inseparable from the image of woman (161). Infancy, she goes on to say, is the time when a link is established between societal despotism, female rule over childhood, and male rule over the historical process. The notion of viewing woman as the living embodiment of despotism is born because, as infants, we internalize her socializing program and strive to please by submitting to her every wish. The time comes when, during the last phase of the mirror stage, the infant grasps the notion of its own individuality, however. From that point onward the will of the mother is perceived as that other voice against which ones own identity must be forged. In Dinnersteins words, maternal will emanates, rst of all, from a subjectivity that we encounter before our own sense of subjectivity is at all clearly established. It is the rst separate subjectivity of which we become aware, and its separateness is a fact to which most of us are never fully reconciled (163). We have seen the inability to come to terms with separateness in the writings of Cortzar, Cabrera Infante, and Sarduy, authors who never ceased portraying longing for the rst space they left behind. In Ocio de tinieblas we witness not the inability but the consequences of reacting to a separate subjectivity. Castellanoss cave is a space that is rst trampled, and ultimately conquered, by the whip. The whip lashes out because it lives in perpetual fear of submitting to the opposing will. And since the whip destroys what it touches, society is in perpetual upheaval. Thus the winding path of history is littered with rubble. The sad thing is that, as we move forward in time, the paths prospects look little better because we have made almost no eort to examine the roots of belligerence. Only our collective lack of insight into the link between female rule over child rearing, and male control over the historical process, can explain the shared self-delusions on which [that] historical process now rests (Mermaid, 163). As long as we entertain these self-delusions, Dinnerstein maintains, we shall be unable to alter the course of history. Altering the course of history would have probably sounded far too ambitious a task for someone as unassuming as Castellanos. More modLanguage in the work of Castellanos 193

est in her aims, she only wished to get a better grasp of the muddle that was life in her beloved Chiapas, to understand the reasons behind the seemingly endless strife between races, genders, and social classes. This is why she writes a novel in which all manner of power struggles play themselves out. If she chooses to give particular emphasis to the role of women it is because social, racial, and gender dierences spotlight the issue of identity, and any consideration of identity logically pushes her to ponder her own. If she casts a Tzotzil prophetess as the protagonist of her deeply disturbing novel, it is because following the footsteps of a character who was both a woman and a native American meant she could take the question of marginality almost as far as it could go. Catalina is also sterile, not only sexually and socially inferior but biologically dysfunctional, an outcast in every sense of the word. Everything she turns to in an eort to carve out a private space, to dene her uniqueness, is taken away from her, repossessed by her husband, or the village shamans, or the priestuntil she is empowered in a symbolic scene in which she gives birth to gods and becomes their oracle. At that point in the novel it is clear she dees an authority that, up until then, had been vested only in men. Castellanos makes this deance manifest when she portrays Catalina breaking the priests whip across her knees or enraging her husband, who senses that, endowed with her new gift, Catalina takes away one of [his] possessions, part of his personal domain (213). So personal, in fact, that he feels both naked, and ayed (desollado ), a bleeding body stripped of a vital organ (213). Even if only alluded to in gurative terms, Catalinas phallic appropriation is hard to miss. All we need to do is walk our way back through the referents used for language in the novel and substitute each of them for what the seer acquires in the cave of Tzajal-hemel to realize that, symbolically speaking, what she seizes from Pedro is not castilla but his own personal tower, the castillo that is the symbol of his strength. Stripped of something vital, Pedro feels betrayed, his lessened body in vivid contrast to Catalinas enhanced image (213). Castellanos portrays the loss in one and the gain in the other in terms of both languagehis phallic and symbolic, hers preverbal and semioticand the body: Pedro is ayed; Catalina gives birth. Giving birth gives her both social status and personal signicance: she becomes not just a mother but mother of gods, and she rules for the rst time because they speak through her.
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The kind of language we speak determines our identity, and, conversely, the kind of identity we develop informs the language we speak. Articulating language, human beings develop a self-image made manifest not only in terms of sounds but also of gestures and attitudes that are socially and linguistically programmed and read as constitutive elements of the gender package. Language mastery is something all characters of Ocio aim to have. Pedro and Catalina are cases in point. Seemingly ghting over the control of language, their real struggle is unquestionably over power. This is why the clay idols that Catalina molds with her hands irritate Pedro and Father Manuel not in and of themselves but because they communicate with the community and their wishes are obeyed. It is signicant that to create these idols Catalina pants as if about to give birth, moreover (213). As she sculpts the wet clay and gives birth to gods, her issue is homologized to a child: it becomes the object little a. Empowered with her own object, wielding her own whip, we are told, her need of Pedro is soon eclipsed (213). Like each and every Tzotzil, Pedro is relegated to the empire of shadows, a stuttering bat who has been ayed or, in other words, dispossessed of his organ. In the cave scene in Ocio Castellanos dramatizes womans biological preponderance. Up until Catalinas epiphany, men in the novel controlled language and through language held power, but the role of creating those who through sheer force hold unto that power (the role of giving birth to gods, to use Castellanoss terms) is womans and womans alone. This is another way of saying that the symbolic sphere cannot do without the semiotic, or that phallic authority cannot prescind the maternal body. Men in all societies may continue pushing woman into the periphery but even from that periphery she will go on exercising a procreative role that is hers as a law of nature. Over and over, the precedence of the semiotic will be denied in a phallogocentric society, but even persistent denial will not annul its validity. The vindication of the female body lies in its capacity to continue formulating the very sign from which society and biology continuously strip it. If recognizing our natural dependence on women is dicult, it is harder still to tolerate it. Accepting the importance of the feminine element in the historical process implies, in Castellanoss terms, giving credence to the language the priestess articulates; it implies giving faith to the power of the cave. As we know from Dinnerstein, however, accepting the will of woman implies sinking back into the helplessness of infancy; recognizing that will leads to fear, and fear
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quickly turns into antagonism as a defense mechanism. No wonder then that Pedro Winiktn should allow himself to be overcome . . . with obscure terror when he hears his wife speaking in tongues and sees her possessed by the gods (213). Terror, according to Hlne Cixous, distinguishes the whole male libidinal economy. Predicated on a fear of expropriation, of separation, of the loss of the attribute, it is the male response to the threat of castration ( Jeune ne, 147). Males are so afraid of losing that we are not even comfortable receiving, since, the moment you accept something you are eectively open to the other, and if you are a man you have only one wish, and that is hastily to return the gift, to break the circuit of an exchange that could have no end . . . to be nobodys child, to owe no one a thing (Cixous, Castration, 48). Unable to give, man cannot show a single crack in his armor. In contrast to men, Cixous points out, woman gives because she doesnt suer from castration anxiety; she is not afraid of losing the attribute ( Jeune ne, 147). Perceived as a sign of weakness, her openhandedness is a further irritant to men, who take advantage of her generous passivity to trample on her. In Ocio de tinieblas the epitome of passivity is Idolina. Like much else in the novel, the young invalid girl is not what she seems, however. There is no denying that by refusing to walk she sinks back into the helplessness of infancythe time in life when the idea of absolute power is inseparable from the image of woman. What is not clear is why she regresses when regression implies forfeiting her independence and putting herself at the mercy of a mother she loathes.

Little i-dol
For me the universe is dumb, Stone-deaf, and blank, and wholly blind; Life I must bound, existence sum In the strait limits of one mind; That mind is my own. Oh! narrow cell; Darkimagelessa living tomb! There must I sleep, there wake and dwell Content,with palsy, pain, and gloom. Charlotte Bront, Frances

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What a curious name: Idolina. Others before me have remarked on its uniqueness, seen in it an allusion to religious ritual, to gods, and to worship. But if Idolina is a little idol, isnt it time we found out who worships at her altar and what sort of Mass theyor sheociates? Does it make sense to portray an idol as sick, an object of worship as invalid? Arent idols normally inspiring? Isnt their power of suggestion an active force? Isnt the little idol in Ocio de tinieblas a little too idle to be idol? Why, instead of ghting, like Catalina, does she pull back from the fray? Why, instead of forging a language, does she sink into silence? Why, instead of giving birth to gods, does she become the living denial of a time and a place she appears to abhor? Is her refusal to walk a statement of nonbeing to the same degree as her muteness at the end of the novel? To answer these questions we need to look into the genesis and subsequent development of Idolinas paralysis. Clearly the young womans passivity is as important to the novels design as Catalinas tenacity, making both women foils of one another, a mismatched pair used to portray the feminine condition as Castellanos saw it. Idolina is from rst to last a woman withoutoutside society, without parents or friends (her father is dead and she despises her mother), without physical or mental attractions, without condence or health. Benumbed, she is an inoensive shadow who has given up her independence as an act of protest, suggesting, through her behavior, that escape becomes increasingly dicult as women internalize the destructive strictures of patriarchy. Locked into herself, defeated from the start, Idolina is tormented by the realization that she has bought survival at the price of never fully existing, voiced anger by retreating into the dull grave of her paralyzed body. At the end of the novel, dispossessed not only of meanings and goals, but also of power, she listens to her childhood nanny tell her the story of the Tzotzils defeat. Her face is to the wall, her head sunk deep into the pillows, her eyes shut tight to make the world disappear, once and for all (565). Adopting the pose of a nineteenth-century ctional heroine, the young invalid closes the novel as she opened it: pale, passive, and inert. She oers a vision of a moral, feminine world that suggests that claims about womens weakness are true: that women might prove too passive to rule. As Diane Price Herndl points out in her enlightening Invalid Women,

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becoming sick was a way to reconcile and arm the cultural discourse that cast the nineteenth-century heroine as perpetually weak or with a predisposition to illness (Invalid Women, 39). As portrayed in ction, invalidism traditionally refers to a lack of power and, etymologically speaking, to the nonvalid in general, but it was also a way to strike against the establishment since women are taught that illness and death oer them the best route to power (3). Backtracking to the time of Idolinas rst attack of paralysis, and keeping in mind Price Herndls dual propositions, the rst questions we need to answer are, What is the young invalid striking against? and, in embracing illness, is she seeking refuge and solace or empowerment? Idolina stopped walking after her mother remarried, an event that takes place before the action described in Ocio de tinieblas begins. As we already know, her mothers second husband, Leonardo Cifuentes, is a willful, domineering man, a contrast in every way to Idolinas spineless father. Leonardo rapes, murders, and steals; Isidoro ees from the stables whenever a calf is going to be branded, and abandons his wifes bedside when Idolina is born to avoid witnessing her pain. One dares all; the other buries his head and shirks from confrontations. It doesnt take long for Idolinas mother to recognize that her husband was a weak man and, regretfully, one with whom her daughter identied from the moment she was born (76). Nervous, easily upset, and glued to Isidoros anks at all times, Idolina bursts into tears even at the sight of guests invited to celebrate her birthday. When Isidoro dies from a gun accident in mysterious circumstances and his body is brought home, Isabel thinks her daughter will not endure the pain. Idolina surprises everyone, however. She doesnt shed a tear during the funeral services, asks no questions, and gives no sign of regret. She knew all there was to know about absence from a very young age, we are told, and now that absence would be permanent no one ever heard her ask for its reason or voice a complaint (77). Her only reaction after her father is gone is to turn to her mother, clinging, begging for aection. Isabel resented all the attention, however, and tried to push her away with mockery and disdain, but nothing succeeds in severing the cord that tied mother and daughter to each other (77). That is to say, nothing succeeded until Isabel suddenly married her ex-husbands suspected murderer, Leonardo Cifuentes. After her mothers wedding ceremony Idolinas behavior was dras198 Body of writing

tically altered: for weeks she refused to touch food. She lost weight until she was nothing but skin and bones. And every time she stared at herself in her wardrobe mirror her eyes shone with a malignant sort of glee (77). Soon after, Isabel begins giving in to her daughters unvoiced demands: she spoon-feeds her but, even then, Idolina refuses to eat, determined to let herself be consumed (77). Leonardo could not forgive his new wife for letting herself be manipulated, and his anger became the rst crack on the wall raised by the new couple (77). This is Idolinas rst victory. Full of spite, Leonardo begins seeking the company of other women. It is Isabels turn to feel hurt and abandoned. Looking for solace, she condes in Idolina, who revels in her mothers grievances and comes to see in Leonardo the perfect instrument with which to punish her. For, with an agenda of her own, Idolina desperately needed to have Isabel punished (78). One night when the young woman is practicing the piano Leonardo comes in drunk and makes fun of her. Choking with hatred, Idolina clenches her sts and bangs them on the keys with all her might before dashing in the direction of her stepfather to knock him down, to break him (78). After taking a few steps, however, she collapsed, spitting foam and falling unconscious (78). When she comes to, she is no longer able to move without asking for help (78). Doctors are called in, local ones, then specialists from Guatemala and Mexico City, to no avail. Embarrassed about her inability to discuss or even recognize the symptoms she is supposed to have, Idolina contradicts herself in her answers and confounds medical experts by exaggerating her pain. The more condent the doctors feel about curing her, the more resilient she becomes to their treatment, since it had become a point of honor not to let herself be healed (83). The reader assumes at rst that if Isidoros death was such a shock to Idolina she must still feel very close to him. When her new friend Julia Acevedo asks the girl if she loved her father, however, her negative answer is so categorical that she startles even herself. The omniscient narrator peevishly asks, at that point, What force had uprooted Isidoro from his daughters heart? (95). The answer, we soon learn, is a sudden resentment, a fulminating disappointment; Idolina had felt her fathers death as a personal aront, as an unfullled pact and a broken pledge. It was the rst time she felt betrayed (95). In fact, Idolina fabricated her inrmity and kept her subsequent recovLanguage in the work of Castellanos 199

ery secret to strike back against those who betrayed her and stayed alive. When after many months in bed she secretly takes a few steps around her room, we are told not to consider her walking as a triumph of the will but as the means to conciliate her willpower with a wish to punish her mothers conduct using herself as a vehicle (88). In other words, Idolinas body houses and discharges emotions that are directly addressed to others. Her inability to move is a form of passive aggression, the conditioned reex of what J.-D. Nasio refers to as a dissatised ego deployed to manipulate those around her (Lhystrie, 18). Nasio convincingly argues that the female disease Freud designated as hysteria (because it takes its name from the Greek word for womb, hyster, the organ that was supposed to cause this emotional disturbance) never strikes isolated individuals. As far as he is concerned, hysteria is a neurotic relationship that subjugates one person to the will of another. Hysteria, he claims, is the name we give to the ties the neurotic establishes with another individual on the basis of the phantasms he or she creates (18). Victims of hysteria are tyrants, master manipulators who impose on others the sick logic of their unconscious fantasies. Instead of casting themselves as masters, however, they fantasize themselves as victims because they are always dissatised with their lot. As long as hysterics remain dissatised and in the role of victim, Nasio explains, they keep themselves from focusing on what their unconscious imagines as an imminent danger to their safety and well-being (19). Perpetually afraid, hysterics make themselves dissatised to keep their minds busily attuned to activities other than considering imagined threats that they perceive as real. They somatize. In Ocio de tinieblas, when Idolina discovers that her stepfather has decided to give a party and her mother has been coerced into throwing it, her unconscious sets out to thwart their plans. Her body turns a yellowish color; she is unable to keep down any food; she shuts her eyes and lies perfectly still, almost catatonic. Because it seems to obey its own laws, her body, one thinks, is out of control, but nothing could be further from the truth. Although the plaything of her unconscious, her body becomes a tool that is both controlled and in control: through it Idolina can wield power, aect the actions of those around her. She coerces her mother to plead with her, to stay by her bedside, to become her slave. Even if she does not wish to recognize it, Isabel feels directly responsible for her daughters relapse. Eventually unable to tolerate the guilt, she
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rationalizes and pulls away from her as if oended (89). In a complicated game of projections and rationalizations it is not just the daughter who feels oended by the mothers improper conduct, but the mother who feels personally insulted by her daughters inrmity. Isabel is not mistaken; she sees Idolinas behavior at face value and reacts in kind: From the threshold of her bedroom she declared that she would never again worry about such an ungrateful person who abused the patience of those unfortunate enough to be obliged to take care of her (89). Was this what Idolina was after, one wonders: getting rid of her mother? But when the invalid goes on to become the best friend of Isabels rival for the love of Leonardo, we begin to realize that getting rid of her mother is only part of her scheme. In fact, to understand the full extent of her inclinations we need to backtrack to the rst blush of her inrmity. The angel-woman and the monster-woman Idolinas paralysis can be likened to a prenatal posture in a variety of ways. If birth is the time when an infant is forced to take its rst step toward autonomy, the loss of motor ability followed by a total regression into passivity can be seen as a restaging of life in utero. Signicant to Castellanoss design is that whenever Idolinas mother attempts to make her daughter walk, she fails. The guilty Isabel Zebada (who seems to have looked the other way if and when her husband was murdered) wants her daughter out of the picture. Idolina refuses to move; her feet will not carry her o from what she perceives as the scene of the crime. Her inrmity is also a way to assert her power: unlike her father, she will not allow herself to be whisked away, at least not feet rst. Becoming an invalid whenever her mother is present, she sinks back into the helplessness of infancy and puts herself at her mercy. Idolina is a dependent object exacting its own demands, however, someone who is looking out for her own interests. The invalid girl wants something her mother refuses to give her, and vice versa. As it did in the work of Sarduy, the rivalry between both women in Ocio a dramatization of the equivocal relationship between a wicked mother and her victimized daughterreminds us of the Grimm brothers Little Snow White. As in the fairy tale, the central action of the family drama in Castellanoss novel arises from the relationship between a young, pale, and ostensibly weak woman and a second, not as
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young, and ercer version of the rst; the one a daughter, the other a mother; the one ignorant and passive, the other cunning and active; the one idle as an idol, the other an artful witch. Idol and witch are at odds with each other from the start, and, since Castellanos has made amply clear thatwith the exception of Catalina Daz Puiljwomen in Ocio are dispossessed of whips, Idolina and her mother ght with one of the weapons patriarchy ascribes to them: passivity. When Leonardo spurns her, Isabel retreats into her sanctum sanctorum: the sewing room. When he mocks Idolina she cowers into a cocoon: inrm after confronting him, she leaves neither bedroom nor bed for several years. But we soon discover that both isolated refuges, both enclosures or caves, are fortied places of action from which wars can be waged. Good mothers are not supposed to wage wars, however. For that reason, as in Little Snow White, the mother in Castellanoss story metamorphoses. Married to the weak, gentle Isidoro, Isabel is a beautiful but dissatised Queen. Fifteen days after her wedding to Isidoro, he locks himself up in his room for no apparent reason and refuses to speak to her. Rebuked, Isabels gentle Queen falls prey to sexuality: she whiles away the hours leaning over the balustrade and watching Isidoros adopted brother Leonardo gallop across the elds. She is tormented by a wish to run toward that man and beg him to save her from such an unfortunate destiny (75). Ultimately, she does, although not directly. Burdened with guilty feelings about Leonardo, she begins by confessing to the bishop (75). A few months later, while Leonardo is showing a new and (perhaps inadvertently) loaded gun to his brother, he accidentally presses the trigger and pierces Isidoros heart. Isabels husband dies and Leonardo marries his widow even before the period of mourning was up (70). As I have already indicated, even after this second wedding takes place, bliss fails to come to Camelot because Idolina enters the picture and begins exacting her revenge. Demanding attention, she succeeds in turning Leonardo against Isabel. Several months after marrying Leonardo, Isidoros erstwhile sweet young bride has turned into the embittered consort of her rst husbands adopted brother. She has become the other side of the mirror, the bad Queen. Signicantly, whenever Idolina plays solitary, she assigns the role of King of Swords to her stepfather, and that of Jack or, in Spanish, sota, to her mother (85). Sota also means hussy and substitute, roles Isabel adopts throughout the novel. Like the Queen in
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the Grimms fairy tale, she is two women in one or, more exactly, two facets of the same woman presenting themselves in rapid succession, like a chrysalis that turns up, one day, with a new set of wings. The good Queen is replaced by the mischievous hussy who lures Leonardo to her bed, a woman whose great thirst of that man [i.e., Leonardo] was never sated (73). She is also her daughters rival although, in her telling, Castellanos revises the role of rivalry. According to Bruno Bettelheim, in the Grimms tale Snow White and her wicked stepmother, the bad Queen, are involved in a sort of feminized Oedipal struggle for the Kings attentions (Uses of Enchantment, 202). In other words, they both want the King for themselves. In Ocio de tinieblas rivalry does not at rst appear to be over the Kings body or what this body represents (i.e., power and control), but Isabel and Idolinas struggle is charged with sexual energy, although this energy is foisted onto a third character who acts as surrogate for the invalid girl. Setting out to study the roles women play in patriarchal society and to explore where these roles ultimately lead, Castellanos assigns the manifold incarnations of womanhood (the good and bad mother, the daughter, the mistress, the panderer, the witch) to a variety of characters who in some ways complement and, in others, compensate for one another. For instance, the other side of Idolinas angel-in-the-house prototype is the beautiful, passionate Julia Acevedo, who forces the invalids condence after introducing herself into her private sanctuary. Julia is a brazen woman who startles the conventional souls of Ciudad Real by strolling the streets unaccompanied, by stating her opinions openly, and, most of all, by letting her long auburn hair cascade loosely down her back (she strolled alone and with her hair unbraided like a mare, 72). For this reason, her ultra-conservative neighbors nickname her la Alazana (the roan mare). The red-haired beauty, we soon discover, is everything Idolina is not. While one is physically impotent, the other is sexually promiscuous; while one does not walk, the other struts. Idolina is the heroine of a life that has no story; the Alazana is an adventuress, a fascinadora de hombres, a woman with far too many stories in her life (73). As Idolina has no story she also has no self-image. Much is made of her lack of identity in the novel, in fact, and it comes as no surprise that mirrors play a leading role in the long party sequence in which she observes her parents guests, unobserved, from a garret window.
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Through an artful ellipsis that compresses several years into two pages, the party sequence in chapter 8 follows almost immediately after the rst mention of Isabels marriage to her brother-in-law at the conclusion of chapter 7. As we have said, this marriage is a shock to Idolina. Soon thereafter, she starts refusing food and studying her rapidly transforming body in the wardrobe mirror. The weight loss resulting from her anorexia is so dramatic that she is soon unable to recognize the image on the mirror as her own (77). This sense of estrangement or loss of identity is exacerbated by the years spent in bed after the onset of her paralysis so that, when she nally gets up and watches herself standing up for the rst time, reected on the wardrobe mirror, she became scared because her body was very dierent from the way she perceived it from within (8788). At that point, as Lacan would say, the image on the mirror no longer coincides with her own. The scene that follows the rst mirror episode is the one in which the party is described, a party, it must be added, from which Idolina is excluded because, ostensibly paralyzed, she has not left her room in years. Unbeknown to all except her Indian nanny, Idolina has been practicing walking, however, and on the night of the big event she will not be dissuaded: she must watch the guests as they arrive. From a garret overlooking the patio, Idolina admires the dancing couples and wishes to be each of the girls who were dancing (92). As she studies the patio from the other side of her glassed-in parapetfrom the other side of the mirror, one might sayshe fuses together the idealized image of the dancing girls with her own reection, excluding no one (as a potential model) until her soul, normally so lackluster, overowed from the reality conferred to it by other women (9293). Each gesture made, each step taken by the women milling around the patio gave her enough material to compose herself a personality (93). But this personality had no specicity until Julia Acevedo, who had been snooping around the house, abruptly entered Idolinas dark little garret, her private room with a view. Idolina is mortied to be discovered not only hiding and gawking at the guests but, worst of all, outside her bed and walking. But Julia doesnt bat an eyelash when she nds her. In fact, she is delighted to have landed upon the mysterious and reclusive girl she immediately refers to as the famous daughter of Leonardo Cifuentes, an allegation that Idolina vehemently parries, insisting, Leonardo Cifuentes is not my father (93).
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Without further ado, Julia forces Idolina to walk to the window to get a closer look at her (94). Framed as a pair within the reecting surface, the Alazana traces the outline of Idolinas face with the tip of her nger and, ignoring the girls angry response to her earlier allegation regarding her origins, she insists: you dont look like him (i.e., Leonardo; 94, my emphasis). Struggling against Julias commanding authority but drawn all the same into the dark, powerful image that represents the other side of herself, Idolina begins to relinquish her own sense of self as she slowly succumbs to the power of the other (94). Thereafter, Julia will carry out what is undoubtedly Idolinas dark desire: to conquer Leonardo and take him away from Isabel. Explaining the very similar scenario of Little Snow White, Bettelheim alleges that the mother in that story is threatened by her young daughters budding sexuality as the daughter is by the mothers possession of the father (Uses of Enchantment, 2023). Without going so far in our discussion of Ocio, suce it to say that Isabels marriage and possession of the fatherpredicated on what amounts to be a personal loss for Idolinasevers the bond between the women. I speak of loss because Castellanos makes amply clear that Idolina sees herself as an extension of her father. In fact, Isidoro denes Idolina to such a degree that her pusillanimous and dependent behavior in every way mirrors his own; he is the object little a she will not relinquish because it denes her. Discussing identication with the father in her illuminating Feminine Psychology, Karen Horney argues that this process is the root of the castration complex in women, an allegation that also sheds light on Idolinas hysterical behavior (48). Unable to give up Isidoro even after he dies, Idolina makes him a part of her own persona, integrates him physically into her body by somatizing. Horney explains how hysterical patients displace the feeling of having sustained a wound to other organs so that when [their] obsessional symptoms had been resolved the clinical picture is markedly hypochondrial (51). Plainly, Idolinas obsessional symptoms are a conversion reaction in which a psychosexual conict is transformed into a bodily disturbance. One of the essential features of conversion hysteria is the presence of a physical complaint without demonstrable physiological or disease mechanisms to account for it. According to the American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (dsm-iii), conversion disorders present a clinical picture in which the predominant
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disturbance is a loss of or alteration in physical functioning that suggests physical disorder but which instead is apparently an expression of a psychological conict or need, exactly the nature of Idolinas inrmity, in other words (232). The girls paralysis is her way of dramatizing loss, of dealing with her feeling at having been deprived of an extension of herself (i.e., her father). Idolina blames Leonardo Cifuentes and her own mother for this loss. As far as she is concerned, Leonardo is an usurper who erased her father from the picture and removed the only thing she fathomed as her own: her source of identication, the man she loved and admired while he lived and despised after his death because he let himself be defeated. As Idolina sees it, Isidoro didnt love her enough to live for her sake, and so she feels betrayed and ends up despising her father. Imagining her mother as Leonardos ally in the plot against Isidoro, the young invalid blames Isabel and seeks to punish her with a revenge that parallels the punishment which, as she sees it, Isabel perpetrated on her: she aims to take away her mothers phallus, which is to say, her mothers man. Once she contrives this plot, she moves forward in two ways: hysterical and invalid, she begins by turning Leonardo away from her mother by demanding so much attention that she ends up making her stepfather jealous and, ultimately, angry at his new wife. But her revenge does not crystallize until she meets Julia. It is through Julia (with whom she becomes homologated in the mirror scene in the garret) that she will ultimately take away her mothers man. Idolina and Isabel are not the only women in Ocio de tinieblas who hate each other. The fact is that most of the women portrayed in the novel end up estranged from each other, conrming Gilbert and Gubars allegation that female bonding is extraordinarily dicult in patriarchy: women almost invariably turn against women because the voice of the looking glass sets them against each other (Madwoman, 38). The voice of the looking glass is the patriarchal voice of judgement that rules the Queensand every womansself-evaluation (38). The patriarch decides, for a start, that his consort is the fairest of all, and then, as she becomes maddened, rebellious, witch-like, that she must be replaced by his angelically innocent and dutiful daughter, a girl dened as more beautiful still than the Queen (38). The twist that Castellanos gives the old Brothers Grimm plot is that she casts the bad Queens rival as not just

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another woman but as a pair of opposites who are complementary to each other: a passive virgin and a ame-haired adventuress who will stop at nothing to get what they want. Idolina senses Julias resolve because it mirrors her own, and this is why, after the latter leaves the garret, the former runs back to the window not like the rst time, with her attention virgin and unfocused. This time she was looking for someone (96). What she nds is Julia . . . who [likewise] seemed to be waiting for someone (96). After Idolina sees her new friend, Leonardo Cifuentess steps are heard in the patio, and Julia turns around to look at him with her face lighted by a cynical smile that was full of promise (96). At that point, the invalid understands the nature of their relationship or, at least, the likelihood of what will eventually take place; her eyes ooded with tears (96). Julia, her other I reected on the mirror in the garret, will bring about the punishment she seeks. She will take Leonardo away from Isabel but, by the same token, he will take Julia away from Idolina, once again stripping the girl from any power she has. In sum, Idolinas revenge succeeds against her mother but fails against Leonardo, and, to compound matters, both Julia and Idolina end up dispossessed. What Castellanos voices through the parable of the weak i-dol is that womens actions are not just triing but also self-damaging: they end up becoming the victims of their own machinations. This happens because they identify with the opposite gender and not with their own. Time and again, they see men as emblems of power, and they seek not to have that power themselves but rather to bask in its light. They confuse holding with having, preferring to charm and lure in order to shine with borrowed light rather than to kindle a light of their own. Exercising a pull on men is no problem for women, but as Castellanos makes amply clear, once they are drawn to the ower and taste its nectar, men are once again on the prowl, and womenlike Marcela Gmez Oso at the beginning of Ocio have to deal with the consequences. Like Marcela, Isabel Zebada is a victim in the social drama she accepts with all its conventions and limitations. Drawn to the emblem of phallic power, she gives up everything to get Leonardo, only to end up with dregs in her heart. Her own daughter turns against her instead of seeking to punish her stepfather, the actual perpetrator of the crime. And since the best way to punish Isabel is to take Leonardo away from her,

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both mother and daughter end up estranged from Julia. Potentially sisters, women end up tearing each other up for the sake of men who use them and leave them. Women, Castellanos is saying, have magnetism but no powerat least not one that endures. Idolina, for instance, seeks to control Leonardo through her mother, but she is in-valid in more ways than one, her power that of a lame duck who cannot even hide the secret of her paralysis. To punish those around her, the girl uses her body as a weapon but that bodyas Castellanos makes clearis always defeated by the symbolic power that the whip emblematizes. Idolina embodies the quandary of many women for whom the body is a trap, a trap because they havent learned how to use it properly to get what they want. Castellanos touched upon this idea as early as 1960 in a poem titled Presencia where, with typical foresight, she predicted: Some day I will nd out. This body that has been my house, my prison, my hospital, is also my tomb. How could the life-sustaining body of woman also be a tomb? In Ocio Castellanos shows its mortifying limitations by portraying the way it is most typically used: as a lure (by women like Julia), or as a plaything (by men like Leonardo). In either case, women are ultimately squelched because their bodiesprogrammed to abide by the rule of patriarchy are all esh and no voice, at least not a voice of their own. It is true that women create in and through the body, but their creationslike Catalinas godsare taken away from them, repossessed, once again, by the whip. The whip, as we have seen, is castilla, the frreo instrumento de seoro (9). Only those who wield it rule, which is why, in a painfully sardonic episode, we nd the Tzotzil carving open the bodies of their ladino enemies in search for the voice box that empowers them. Misguided, they look for this elusive appendix in the trampled esh, in the spoils left behind on the battleeld. Symbolically castrated, the Tzotzil seek a way to compensate for their loss. Instead of empowering themselves through language they are reduced to stammering: the ruling oligarchy keeps them from learning Spanish lest they become uppity and independent (5657). Likewise castrated, women are reduced to borrowing the whip; they grow up believing their only means of ushering power into the house is by using their bodies as a lure. For a time, the lure works, but Castellanos shows how the power women derive from men is not lasting because, perpetually dissatised, their partners are always after new chimeras.
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Arousing them does not amount to having them stay. Deaf to this sentence, women have deluded themselves since time immemorial; they have identied the symbolic power of the phallus with those who control and latched on to men to be ruled and dened by their wishes. In patriarchal society even womens biological supremacy culminates in loss. Like Catalina Daz Puilj, women create something that is in every sense an extension of themselves and has a commanding voice. But this voice has to be interpreted by the forces of law and order, and womenwho are not part of these forcesare ultimately stripped from the beings they give life to, making one wonder if there can be any hope for sustaining feminine power. Name of the father/name of the mother From Delilah to Madonna, women have sought to manage and control by turning their physical charms into articles of trade. As Castellanos makes clear, however, lasting power cannot come through a body that is both, as she puts it in Lvida luz, a prison and a tomb. The only power that endures is engineered through language. The language spoken in Ocio de tinieblas is castilla; it is in castilla that orders are given and judgments pronounced, in castilla that punishments and rewards are meted out (9). Both castilla and castillos are traditionally ruled by men. In fact, writing has been considered as a kind of male gift, and, as Gilbert and Gubar point out, the pen has been seen in some sense (even more than guratively) as a penis (Madwoman, 4). Castellanos revises these characterizations by suggesting that the pen is not a penis but a phallus, that is to say, a symbol of power available to whomever puts this instrument to its rightful use. Her symbolic conception of the empowerment provided by language pregures Edward Saids sober discussion of the relationship between creation, possession, and power in Beginnings: Intention and Method, where an author is dened as someone who originates or gives existence to something, a begetter, beginning, father or ancestor, a person also who sets forth written statements. . . . Auctoritas is production, invention, cause, in addition to meaning a right of possession. Finally it means continuance, or a causing to continue. Taken together these meanings are all grounded in the following notions: (1) that of the power of an individual to
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initiate, institute, establishin short, to begin; (2) that this power and its product are an increase over what had been there previously; (3) that the individual wielding this power controls its issue and what is derived therefrom; (4) that the authority maintains the continuity of its course. (83) One of Saids statements is particularly pertinent to our discussion: that the individual wielding this power [i.e. to initiate, to set forth written statements] controls its issue. The issue of Ocio de tinieblas is, to all appearances, the defeat of both women and Indians. Since the publication of the novel in 1962, the silencing of Idolina and the decimation of the Tzotzil forces emboldened by Catalina Daz Puilj have been interpreted as a message of hopelessness. Critics who have expressed this opinion have focused on the conclusion of Ocio without taking into account Castellanoss extraordinarily subversive method, one that takes its cue from one of the oldest forms of womens art: embroidery. From the start, the role of language and the exploitation of the female body by both men and women are themes stitched unto the fabric of Ocio de tinieblas like colored threads weaving their way through the complex pattern of a huipil. These threads appear and disappear, no less present for working their way below the surface of the novels epidermic tissue. As Castellanos saw it, language and body are the respective weapons of men and women, quarrelsome partners in a struggle for supremacy. In the interaction between yoke-matesWiniktn and Catalina, Isidoro and Isabel, Leonardo and Isabel, Idolina and Leonardo, and Leonardo and JuliaCastellanos portrays the whip as the instrument emblematic of power, puts this instrument in the hands of those who command, and threads together the issue of command with the notion of language, namely, castilla. We have spoken at length of castillos and castilla in Castellanoss novel. There is one related term we have neglected to include in our discussion, however: the name of the woman who drew the comparison between both. Herself the weaver, Castellanos is implicitly caught in the web of language and what is implied about its function in Ocio de tinieblas. In fact, her portrayal of language, of the power it brings and, as Said puts it, of the individual wielding this power turns out to be like one of Lewis Carrolls circular puns because it involves her as author. After all, the individual wielding this power is caught as both observer (by writing about it) and observed (like Catalina,
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Castellanos is a woman seeking to use language as a weapon) in the portrayal of womans relationship to the power structure, one that turns out to be a cornerstone of Ocio de tinieblas. Let me be more explicit. We cannot forget that the person writing a story about how women undermine their potential for self-expression was herself a woman and one whose great passion in life was, borrowing Saids terms, to set forth written statements. In Ocio de tinieblas Castellanos sets forth her points both by writing and by omitting to write. It is practically impossible to ignore that the word she omits in her elaborate presentation of the structure and ramications of power is a homonym of her own name. The defender of women and Indian rights is Castellanos and this defense, in castellano (i.e., Castilian), is quilted into an attack against those who speak in castilla by a writer who, in formulating that criticism, excludes her own signier. The missing signier invites us to ponder over the castration perpetrated by phallocratic society, a society that, as Castellanos describes it, speaks castilla not castellano. As signier, castellano is missing from the action but not from the title page. The novel about the men who speak castilla and control everyone and everything is, as this page makes clear, Castellanoss own doing, an extension of herself. Stated otherwise, we could say that the phallus in Ocio de tinieblas is Rosarios, hers the power that engineers an action in which women are trampled because they havent learned to use language to obtain power. It is to teach them that that power is within their reach that Castellanos wrote Ocio de tinieblas, a novel in which a woman herselfhas the last word. To attain and maintain power, Castellanos is saying, women must articulate their own language, one that cannot be the whips own arma de conquista. And so, in Ocio de tinieblas, she writes an indictment giving literary expression to womens greatest error of judgment: seeking power by selling out the body. She is intent in showing that, even if temporarily successful, using the body to gain power leads nowhere in the long run. Idolinas story serves to illustrate this point. The only power that endures, Castellanos is saying, is the power of the word, the power she herself deploys to make clear womans need to use it. Women must stop attempting to draw castilla into their house, stop seeking safety in the power of the whip, stop neglecting to use their own voices. Absconded as signier from the action of Ocio de tinieblas, the Name of the Father (i.e., Castellanos) is immanent in the act of writing or,
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rather, in the auctoritas this act implies. What that auctoritas highlights is the dichotomy between body and language which has thus far kept women on the fringes of power. Relying on the body as a magnetic weapon that works by attracting the frreo instrumento to oneself leads only to disaster: Catalina gives birth to gods and these gods are taken away; Isabel and Julia draw Leonardo to their respective beds only to lose him once he chooses to explore virgin territory; Idolina controls those around her with her self-imposed inrmity but ends up empty-handed, her face to the wall, silenced by the power of men. Even when a supposedly sick woman like Idolina has been sentenced (by an author, by society, by herself ) to imprisonment in the infected house of her own body, she may discover that, as Sylvia Plath once put it, she has a self to recover, a queen. Recovering that self is not Idolinas job, however. For Castellanos it made more sense to illustrate through her characters behavior how the self could be recovered than to have her characters perpetrate that recovery themselves. This is why we must not read the losses and defeats of woman in Ocio de tinieblas as conclusive evidence that Castellanos felt lost and defeated herself. Women in her novel are defeated, but they are defeated to bring home the authors didactic message: that the body, in and of itself, cannot provide anyone with the kind of power that endures. Womens misconception that it can are the tinieblas the writers ocio seeks to dispel. While demonstrating that the body cannot be used as a means to obtain power, Castellanos makes an equally important point: that only symbolic language emblematized in the name of the father can empower women, validate the in-valid Idolinas, and make the Catalinas of the world fecund. As she makes evident, the whip and the cave can both be instrumentos de seoro. To reveal the truth of what she suggests in ctionand in spite of personal insecurities and professional doubts Castellanos overcame her own paralysis and published Ocio de tinieblas, a novel that highlights the bitter truth about the feminine condition but one that, by virtue of its very existence, indicates the path that invalids seeking to walk need to follow.

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6
The body of pleasure in Tununa Mercados Canon de alcoba i

There is not much more left of the sea than a word without water: for we have also translated the words, we have emptied them of their speech, dried up, reduced and embalmed them, and they can no longer remind us of the way they used to rise up from the things as the peal of their essential laughter . . .Hlne Cixous, Lapproche

Stunningly original, Tununa Mercados Canon de alcoba (1989) is a series of oneiric tableaux that have been stitched together, a sort of dreamingthrough-images version of the popular game of painting by numbers. This remarkably poetic book has neither plot nor chronological development nor characters whose lives unfold piecemeal throughout the ction. There is a sequence of events in each of the vignettes that compose it, but the purpose of these vignettes is to titillate the reader, not to reach a dnouement. Reaching a climax is not what Mercado or her characters are after. Instead of focusing on the culmination of acts, she revels in the acts themselves, portraying them by means of provocative pictures designed for the readers pleasure. Rousing every sense, these pictures invite a response, engaging us mentally as well as physically. Writing makes the body happen, writes Mercado, which is why, in Canon de alcoba, body and word are one, the word is the body (107, my emphasis). As Valeria Manca observes in El cuerpo del deseo, . . . young women poets have started to break away from another tradition: that of hiding away their own feminine condition. . . . The fact that they have chosen the body as the language to speak about themselves strikes me as an act of deance, one that happens to turn into an extraordinary pleasure.

This body is no corpse exhumed for our perusal, but a living entity, a construct of the mind that tickles the imagination. Transmuted into suggestive pictographs that Mercado calls imgenes-palabras (wordimages), this body is designed to touch and be touched. Reading Canon de alcoba can be compared to lovemaking, a lectura-cuerpo in which writing and reading take place through the body of both author and reader. Transported by the stimulation these body-images provide, readers become distanced from reason or sense. Mercados sexy pictures impregnate our personal fantasies and invite us to embrace a text whose dreamy sequences stimulate our own. More than meets the eye One of the features that enhances this physical involvement with the text is the emphasis on the eye and on visual imagery in general. Constantly putting readers in the position of voyeurs, Canon de alcoba promotes a state of arousal that invites sexual fantasies and subjective wishes to engage in sex. The wall of ction that keeps readers from penetrating the traditional novel (the wall that serves to dene and maintain the text as Other) crumbles in front of Mercados reader. Time and again we are led to establish a close intimacy with characters who remain unnamed, and nd ourselves involved in the type of correlative relationships described by Lacan in one of his seminars: the objects in Mercados tableaux turn out to be the subjects of stimulation while the reader ends up becoming the tableaux, the canvas upon which this stimulation is painted (Quest-ce quun tableau, Sminaire, XI, 97). In the seven sections composing Canon de alcoba (Antieros, Mirages, Dreams, Realities, Eros, Amor Udri, and The Last Stitch [which could also be translated as The Final Period]), references to the eye and to dreamingan activity described as seeing without seeingshow up with extraordinary regularity (50). The physics of seeing is curiously conceived, moreover, because Mercado turns narcissism into an act that is both self-reexive and reective, an act in which the self observes its own reection in the eye of the other who functions as mirror: She is looking at herself this very minute, with those eyes staring into the eyes of the other, plumbing with intensity the secret message she had begun to guess hours earlier (34). Curiously, this passage about looking into the depths of oneself ap214 Body of writing

pears in a subsection entitled Oir (To Hear [from Mirages]) about three women whose adjoining rooms are mediated by a door left ajar. Two of them make love to each other while the third, her head to the wall, imagines what is taking place a few inches from her headboard. Nothing in the action is fortuitous: the women know each other and have agreed to play dierent roles in the mnage trois. What Mercado makes immediately clear is that their participationboth as a construct of the mind and as a response to the touchis equally active. In fact, it is the woman alone in a room who describes the events taking place, her aroused imagination providing details designed to stir the reader, who pursues his or her own act of imagining. One of the main thrusts of Oir is that everything happens within the self, both the self in the ction and the imagining self of the reader: When overheard, lovemaking is like the sound of the ocean inside a shell, writes Mercado. The eyes dont see, the nose doesnt smell, the hands dont touch, but that ocean hurls its angry waves against the clis or tamely subdues itself on the sands of the beach (32). To listen, Mercado adds, is to know, to see with the eyes within (32). Besides exposing the tenets of her philosophy regarding the body, this important section of the book sets forth the aims of Canon de alcoba. Mercado begins by exploring the relationship between perception and knowledge while raising questions about our fascination with bodies in general, and about the means we deploy for grasping their sense. The subject of knowing brings to mind what Freud referred to as the epistemophilic urge and its link to sexuality (in Brook, Body Work, 9). Freud argued that the sexual urge was directly linked to the drive to know, a drive typically understood by the unconscious as the wish to see. For it is sight, with its accompanying imagery of light, unveiling, and xation by the gaze, that represents knowing and even rationality, as we observe in Canon de alcoba. For instance, in the section entitled Final Judgment (from Dreams) the narrator reects upon the fragmented nature of experience witnessed by an eye staring out from the middle of a mirror (42). Sight, we are told here, can arm and disarm, build and destroy the stirrings of the bodies decked out in dresses (42). The eye not only sees, it brings sense to what it sees; it arms and builds the scenes we watch (42). Like Mercados, Freuds writings emphatically return to the theoretical bases of eroticized seeing. These bases grow out of his theory, articulated
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in Civilization and Its Discontents, that the sense of smell, which is characteristically dominant in all mammals, was repressed when humans rst stood upright and the sense of sight took its place as the main source of stimulation and knowledge. No doubt seeking to subvert the patriarchal perspective, Mercado takes Freuds reections about the correlation between the primacy of sight and standing upright tongue in cheek: in her own book homo ludens overrides homo faber laying him to rest, quite literally, on his back. Like Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons, characters in Canon de alcoba address philosophical and ontological issues from the at perspective of their beds, exposing to each others gaze a sexuality from which all sense of privacy and all sense of shame have been abstracted. The bodys most intimate secrets are thus oered to the reader, inviting what may well be a unique bond in literature because our physical selves are directly involved in the action. The tableaux oered for our jouissance or bliss are, to borrow Barthess terms, a reported pleasure (Pleasure, 17). The question that comes immediately to mind is, as Barthes himself wonders, how can we enjoy a reported pleasure? (17). Only, he says, if we can read this reported pleasure as a primary pleasure of its own. The problem is that we cannot take this reported pleasurethis critical texton its own terms. Barthes feels we cannot become the condant of this critical pleasure, we must become its voyeur: the commentary then becomes in [our] eyes a text, a ction, a ssured envelope (14). Presumably this is also how Mercado wishes us to read Canon de alcoba. It is a ction and must be read as such by the reader as voyeur, by the reader willing to see it as a text of jouissance, and not as a nished object from which we are separate. Nothing can complete this text, not even our own voyeuristic reading, and this feature is fully in keeping with Mercados approach to knowledge and to pleasure in general, as we shall see. Likewise concerned with the pleasure of the eye and its link with knowledge, Georges Bataille casts eroticism as an integral element of his ontological reection. The dierence between Bataille and Mercado is that his emphasis on expenditure or dpense always leads to death, whereas nding oneself in Canon de alcoba is a never-ending jouissance portrayed under the watchful gaze of an exultant subjectivity that encompasses the reader. What is missing from Mercados text (and most denitely not from Batailles) is that most Spanish of themes, desencanto. Canon de alcoba is a song of triumph in which there is no disappointment,
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no sense of loss, no recrimination, and no rage. No rage because Mercado has refused to adopt images generated by male authors. The women she portraysthe three nameless protagonists of Oir are a case in point are agents in and of the ction, not its objects. In fact, women are never cast as objects in Canon de alcoba, a book where no one is exploited, and no one is abused. Instead, the most banal circumstances become festive and downright titillating, inviting us to ponder the implications of Mercados perpetually jubilant attitude. Closing the gap In all the works we have studied so far, the intrigue has centered on an unattainable object (for example, Sara in Cortzars Deshoras, the mother in Infantes Inferno, the feminine gender in Cobra ). Incessantly pursued, this object can be seen but remains out of reach, suggesting in its impermanence feelings of loss beyond redress. These feelings bring with them a sense of frustration that eventually translates itself into a rage of which women are most often the recipients. That rage is clearly present in the two models which, according to Gilbert and Gubar, subordinate and imprison women in patriarchal texts (Madwoman, 13). In their probing study of major nineteenth-century women writers these authors explore the dynamics of female literary response to male literary assertion and coercion as well as the dominant patriarchal ideology and the feminine models the male establishment chooses to portray (xii). As they see it, in patriarchal texts women are depicted as either angels (when they are passive recipients, willing receptacles of mans fantasy), or monsters (when they reject the submissive role patriarchy has laid in store for them). In her own sensitive study of The Madwoman in the Attic, Toril Moi hones in on this dichotomy adding, behind the angel lurks the monster: the obverse of the male idealization of women is the male fear of femininity (Sexual/Textual Politics, 58). Such fear explains the repressive stance of patriarchy and leads Gilbert and Gubar to conclude that since both patriarchy and its texts subordinate and imprison women, before women can even attempt that pen which is so rigorously kept from them they must escape just those male texts which, dening them as Cyphers, deny them the autonomy to formulate alternatives to the authority that has imprisoned them (13). Rosario Castellanoss Ocio de tinieblas is a good example of the kind of
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novel in which an author attempts to escape the male texts that dene women as cyphers. Castellanos shows that women have the tools of language at their disposal but makes this clear while succumbing to the very formulas that oppress and determine every woman reader, namely, the dichotomy between passive angels and female monsters typical of patriarchal fantasies. In other words, Castellanos pillories the yoke that subordinates while simultaneously imprisoning women by portraying them as succumbing to that yoke. Women in Ocio de tinieblas formulate alternatives to the authority that has imprisoned them, but these alternatives fail, with one exception (Madwoman, 13). Castellanos empowers herself through the pen and demonstrates that women can nd their own voice. It is this voice that endures even beyond Catalina Daz Puiljs defeat. Castellanos also recognizes that womens eorts must make themselves manifest through the body, but because this body has been paralyzed for so long by the dominant patriarchal ideology (the invalid Idolina is a case in point), we see the blossoming of female autonomy wither in the bud. Even if the women portrayed in Ocio de tinieblas fail to break away from the strictures of patriarchal ideology, the need to bring about this break is voiced in the ction and makes its way as coded message to generations of readers. Canon de alcoba is a response to the questions raised by Castellanos in her incisive portrayal of gender politics, a text in which women escape the prison house of male-designed roles to engage in their own fantasies. Traditionally, as Gilbert and Gubar point out, women have been barred from creating their own images of femaleness and have sought to conform to the patriarchal standards imposed on them. Their response to male literary assertion and coercion has been twofold: either to reproduce the dominant model of patriarchal ideology in their own work (casting the passive angel in the house ideal of contemplative purity as the heroine of their novels), or to create a dark double of the seless heroine, a murderous or, at least, inexplicable grim interior Other that is opposed to the pure, contemplative, passive ideal, and is the vehicle through which women voice their frustration and rage (Madwoman, xii, 25). Another author studying role playing in ction written by women is Annette Kolodny. Kolodny has located several stylistic patterns in female ction, among which the two most salient are reexive perception and

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inversion. Reexive inversion occurs when a character discover[s] herself or nd[s] some part of herself in activities she had not planned or in situations she cannot fully comprehend (Some Notes, 79), and inversion occurs when the stereotyped, traditional literary images of women . . . are being turned around in womens ction, either for comic purposes, . . . to reveal their hidden reality [or] come to connote their opposites (80). Inversion thus comes to sound like an early version of Gilbert and Gubars theory of the subversive strategies located beneath the surface of womens ction, strategies that were being deployed because women felt entrapped and conditioned by the images men had cast them in, and such entrapment typically resulted in feelings of rage. According to Gilbert and Gubar, women authors began voicing this rage in passive-aggressive ction such as Jane Eyre, works in which a madwoman pent up in the attic acts as counterfoil to the angel in the house. We have already seen this type of scenario in Ocio de tinieblas, although Castellanoss alterations to the standard prototype need to be recognized as a step forward in the evolutionary chain of womens writing. The madwoman in Ocio de tinieblas Catalina Daz Puiljis not pent up in the attic, she is out in the streets and, further, out in the streets leading a revolt. Her ragelike Rochesters mad wifesis evident. Unlike Bronts heroine, she is not consumed by the re she herself sets, however, although the revolt she leads is ultimately defeated. And yet, despite her defeat, her voice lingers and her story of revolt, told to the passive Idolina, becomes a mythic tale conceived to be repeated, a legacy transmitted to younger generations who might ultimately take up the ght themselves andthis time aroundwin the struggle. Tununa Mercado is clearly one of the many women who listened carefully to the tale of Catalinas defeat. Of those who heard that tale or other versions of it, many reacted with an anger that a passage from Jean Rhyss classic Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) perfectly encapsulates: One day, quite suddenly, when you are not expecting it, says Rhyss heroine thinking of a man, Ill take a hammer from the folds of my dark cloak and crack your little skull like an egg-shell. Crack it will go, the egg-shell; out they will stream, the blood, the brains. One day, one day. . . . One day the erce wolf that walks by my side will spring on you and rip your abominable guts out (107). The dierence between Rhys and Mercado, between the whole gener-

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ation of feminists whose writing follows Castellanos and Mercado, is that the latter has neither a wolf by her side, nor a skull-cracking agenda to fulll. Anger is conspicuously absent from her 1989 tour de force. Considering her long-range aims, this absence is not surprising. After all, anger is a response to repression and rekindles the coals of exploitation and defeat. Anger is the response of mauled and battered women and a legacy of patriarchy, one of the many scars left in its wake. It is doubtless one of the modalities of womanspeak but it is the response of victims to oppression, not a voice that resonates with an untainted desire motivated by its own, unfettered inclinations. A feminine voice In terms of portraying feminine desire and feminine fantasies, Mercado is a bellwether. For a start, she is not defensive about being a woman. If she is, this defensiveness is simply not present in Canon de alcoba, a work that celebrates the female body and paints a picture of feminine identity not determined by the patriarchal establishment, one that does not fall in either of the categories examined by Gilbert, Gubar, and Kolodny. There is nothing in her extraordinarily visual gallery of erotic tableaux (can we call it a novel?) that its bevy of heroines wishes to tear from themselves, no feelings of guilt or dependency, no belligerence. Quite the contrary, in fact. Like Hlne Cixous, Mercado believes that the writing woman is immensely powerful: to borrow Cixouss terms, hers is a puissance fminine whose giving is always suused with strength. As Cixous writes in La jeune ne, The more you have, the more you give the more you are, the more you give the more you have (230). Like Cixouss, Mercados female protagonists give because giving lls and fullls them. Giving, they evolve while involving themselves in relationships that include both men and women. Men are very much present in the ction, and even when portrayed as objects of pleasure they are never disparaged. Canon de alcoba is not a work of vindication. Instead of seeking to chastise the opposite sexand like many Mexican woman writers with whom she can be readily comparedMercado seeks to understand male mechanisms at work in given situations but not with rancor or rage like those felt by women from other generations but with tenderness, humor, curiosity, trying not to untie the bonds of friendship with the other sex (Hlsz, El cuerpo del deseo, 70).
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Most of what Cixous writes about the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector is equally applicable to Tununa Mercado: her openness, generosity, and, above all, her capacity to endow words with their essential meaning (LApproche, 410 n. 7; 412). Endowing words with their essential meaning invites us to consider the relationship between gender and perception. Isnt it evident that what is essential to one gender is not to the other? Or, stated otherwise, that the perception and expression of signs are gender-determined? After centuries of conditioning, however, most women describe the world abiding by hegemonic patriarchal canons. Their vision, as Gilbert and Gubar never tire of saying, is either borrowed from patriarchal literature or a reaction to that literature. Either way, until very recently, women authors had not endowed words with meaning from the perspective of their own femininity but allowed themselves to be penetrated, instead, by the phallic probings of masculine thought. Even in feminist works as radically subversive as Nicole Brossards Amantes, Le sens apparent (both 1980), and Le dsert mauve (1987), masculine thought colors the ction and determines the nature of the writing project. Like Mercado, Brossard assimilates the process of writing to the release of sexual desires, but these desires stem from a fundamental rejection of males as sexual partners. Brossards descriptions of lesbian love are beautiful in terms of the writing but they close the door, quite adamantly, to the other sex. Her portrayals are suciently categorical in their exclusion to suggest that angerone that is certainly understandableis orientating her writing agenda. Scarred in gender politics, Brossards body seeks jouissance but also revindication. I wouldnt want readers to misinterpret what I am saying regarding Brossard, however. I am in no way condemning the nature of her writing project; my point is that its vengeful and justicatory orientation implies the presence of an Other from whom one seeks to be exonerated. The presence or, at times, the contrived exclusion of this Other paradoxically taints feminine expression. In other words, if men were neither irritants nor sore points, authors like Brossard and Monique Wittig would not be so defensive about portraying them, and would dene feminine identity in ways that were not blatant reactions against the male gender. As Luce Irigaray once put it, if womens struggles are to be waged other than by simply putting forward demands, if they are to result in the inscription of equal (but necessarily dierent) sexual rights before the
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law, women . . . must be allowed access to another identity. Women can only take these rights if they can nd some value in being women, and not simply mothers. That means rethinking, transforming centuries of socio-cultural values (Equal or Dierent? 31). Rethinking and transforming centuries of sociocultural values about women is exactly what Tununa Mercado sets out to do in Canon de alcoba. The sex that is one Traditionally dened by the Other, most women spend their lives in a state of alienation. Festering in the creative imagination, this alienation often bred monsters in the novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, monsters (like the abusive village priest in Clorinda Mattos Aves sin nido [Birds without a Nest ] and, even more obviously, Mary Shelleys Frankenstein) that embody a consuming rage, and share the stage with angelic creatures. This alienation lasted well into our century when, profoundly inuenced by the writings of Simone de Beauvoir, some among the rst generation of feminist authors (Erica Jong in the United States, Monique Wittig in France, Rosario Castellanos in Latin America, for example) began writing works in which anger was much more openly voiced and taken so far, in some instances, that one whole sex was portrayed waging war against the other, the weak pitted against the strong. In Wittigs utopian Les gurillres (1969), for instance, the action takes place in an Amazonian society in which women nally win the war against men. Told like Canon de alcoba in a series of fragments or vignettes, this story oers no individual characters, no psychology, and no recognizable experience with which the reader can identify. What it does oer, instead, are long lists of womens names printed in capital letters in the middle of otherwise blank pages. These pages alternate with poems, the fragments in which the Amazonian society is described, and a drawing (whose symbolism is rejected as a form of inverted sexism at a later stage in the book) of three large circles representing the vulva. Seeking to come to terms with Wittigs work, feminist critic Nina Auerbach imagines a unitary voice responsible for the ritualistic chanting of the womens names in Les gurrillres. As far as she is concerned, these names seem a human joke, since they are attached to no character we come to know, and, although they take on their own incantatory

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life, the empty resonance of their sound is also the death of the real people we used to read novels to meet (Communities of Women, 19091). Auerbachs point is that when the novel ceases to portray specic individuals cast as the source of language and experience, humanist feminism must lay down its arms. Once this page of the struggle has been turned, she hopes for better days in the future of feminism: Perhaps once women have proved their strength to themselves, she writes, it will be possible to return to the individuality of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy . . . (191). What Auerbach doesnt seem to recognize is that before a return to individuality can take place and before the role of women within a social dynamic can be claried, the feminine ego has to be recognized and dened from a feminine perspective. Such recognition and denition must prevail over the present ones, which are ctitious constructs designed by a foreign culture and imposed on, in the words of Irigaray, the sex that is not one. Womans budding sense of self can be compared to the infants at the onset of the mirror stage when it perceives its image as unitary and whole while its inner sense of self, as Peter Brooks points out, remains incoherent, unformed, incompletely separated from its surroundings (Body Work, 14). Until very recently, the ego recognized by woman was, like the infants, not identical with the self but an imaginary identity that was a reection of mans (and not womans) idealized projections. Be it womans or the infants, an imaginary identityas Brooks reminds usis always other, while the other is always an alter ego (emblematic of the law, of the Name of the Father, of patriarchal authority, 14). Also like the infants during the mirror stage, feminine identity is a priori alienated, the product of the gaze in a society that has traditionally gendered spectatorship as male (14). No wonder, then, that Mercado places such emphasis on the eye, and seeks to dene the ego as a quilting point where many gazesboth male and femalecross over. Who is woman? is the essential question she seeks to answer by opening up to spectators what is traditionally veiled: feminine dreams and fantasies of wish-fulllment. The readers knowledge about the sex which, until now, has not been one must evolve from self-knowledge (both the characters and our own), a knowledge that can be acquired, in reading, through vicarious experience. It makes sense, therefore, that the epistemological project of feminism should be conceived as a stage, as a

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scenario, in which fantasies are acted out under the watchful gaze of both characters and readers. The multitude of roving eyes in Canon de alcoba all seek experience, which is to say, they are after knowledge, and specically knowledge about themselves. Antieros, the rst vignette in the book, sets the selforiented tone that characterizes Mercados search to dene the feminine ego. A busy housewife cooks a meal with such ardor that the smells, colors, and textures of the foods she lovingly prepares end up arousing her. Her communion is so consuming that she begins to react like the herbs and bones that simmer slowly in the stockpot: like them, she too nishes stripped of her essence (15). Once she is down to bare essentials, stripped to the marrow, as it were, her communion becomes an epiphany in which each detail begins to take on its own particular meaning of object unto itself, of object endowed with its own particular, even prodigious, existence (15). After losing her own unbending outer shellthe armor-plated crust of the dutiful bourgeoiseshe nds herself like the green outer leaves of the leeks she is cooking: softened in a slow, allconsuming mijotage (15). Only at that point, after losing her protective exogenous hardness, can she come into her own, nd an existencia propia (15). In Antieros Mercado allegorically portrays the transmutation that needs to take place in order to reach the essence of being. In a process very like psychoanalysis (of which the author herself was both passive victim and active recipient), the tough outer skinbruised and beaten in the long arduous process of growthis slowly tendered until it peels away, and leaves the inner core free to become integrated with others like it and ultimately produce a profound chemical and physiological reaction. The meat and vegetables in the stockpot are the living ingredients that, like men and women, must slough o outer layers before they can nd a life of their own (15). The process Mercado describes in this rst vignette is dramatically dierent from the male reaction of closure that Octavio Paz so insightfully sketches in The Labyrinth of Solitude, one that the well-known Mexican ranchera or country song sums up in one sentence: Ay Jalisco, no te rajes! (in other words, dont let any cracks mar your surface, dont let the outside world see the vulnerable inside). The ranchera warns men to clam up. It is as if by closing up the body to feelings and to expression

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we could preserve all the precious essences within us. Not so much loss itself as a sense of loss scars the male psyche to such a degree that the typical reaction of our sex is to thicken up the tough outer layer in order to preserve the tender core. What Mercado makes clear in her book is that, if the core is never revealed, never entered into the mijotage of life, the stock will have no avor, no essence, no meaning. Everything in the recipe her protagonist prepares in the kitchen culminates, therefore, in opening, in outow, in releaseresponses which, culturally speaking, are more representative of women than they are of men. For instance, the garlic, propelled from its skin with the edge of the knife allows a larval substance to issue forth; blood seeps from the beef, and produces a correlative distillation of saliva in the mouth; the lemon spurts its juices; the skin of the chickpeas slips between the ngers, and the grain is propelled into the platter; the egg dribbles out from its shell while unfolding the yolk; under the tender pressure of the ngers the squid spurts a see-through nail from its very center; the lettuce spews forth its heart (15). The woman in Antieros lives in tune with exudation, with the seepage of animated substances, with the outpourings of vital matter. It is not long before lifes vivifying wave sweeps her in its wake. As she handles the food and watches it give way under the gentle pressure of her ngers, the loving tongues of the heat, and the embrace of the cooking juices, she, too, begins to seek release. Slowly unbuttoning her blouse, she exposes her breasts; with her index nger dipped in oil she rubs the round rim of each until her nipples become hard to the touch. Alternating back and forth between each breast, coating her nger now with oil, now with fresh dill, now with sage, she uctuates between cooking down the stock, and exuding her own juices until, nally, her body and the essences of life are fused together: Let the res burn, the cauldrons bubble forth their water and their juices. . . . Turn them o and, enveloped in silence, become neatly aware of the sounds of transforming matter (15). Manifestly, the matter that transforms itself, that yields to the pressure of the hand and the eect of the heat is also her own, physically opening itself up to the outside, to the steam in the kitchen, to the reader. The sense of self as an exclusive, shuttered body dissolves as a preamble to the adventure of reading Canon de alcoba. To enhance this sense of a missing I, of a vanishing consciousness, the entire rst vignette is written in the

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impersonal innitive tensethe only voice that accuses no person behind it, no agent. However, in Spanish the innitive tense can also function as a command so that, To leave the res burning can (and should) also be read as, Leave the res burning! (15). The reader is enjoined, nay, commanded, to let him [or her]self be invaded by the ultimate culmination amidst the sweat, and the smells (16). Mercado does not simply transform the commonplace routine of a housewife; she adds to its sense, empowers it and all women involved in such activities by letting her character be(come) one with what she is doing. In a life in which every activity enters into a mijotage with oneself as ingredient, all acts generate sense because they are processed through and incorporated into the body. This includes not just cooking but even the most routine of daily tasksmaking the bed, waxing the furniture, sweeping, scrubbing the oorswhich the woman in Antieros performs with as much zest as sweating onions and caramelizing juices. The title Antieros suggests that these activities, traditionally perceived as part of womens daily drudgery, dull the senses. But the only character in Mercados rst episode purrs with pleasure in her kitchen, and rejoices in the soothing sheen of table surfaces. To her, domesticity is not drudgery, it is delight. She is not swept away by the demands that life and others make upon her; she commandeers and indulges in her daily occupations. Dusting furniture and boiling stock perhaps out of habit but also literally nding her own jouissance, she ends up appropriating her daily tasks and being possessed by them until even the peeling of an avocado becomes an intense erotic adventure. The tower of subservience to which woman has been traditionally relegated turns into a pleasure palace. Domesticity is colonized as is writing, traditionally mans domain. As the characters casa in Antieros quickly becomes her cosa, Mercadobreaking away from the strictures of the canonical bourgeois novelmakes writing her thing. Taking Myra Jehlens advice quite literally in this one regard, Mercado wants womens stories to become the investigation, from womens viewpoint, of everything (Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminine Criticism, 577). Revising the perception of everything from house chores to making love, she rewrites the canon, searching to pinpoint the dierence between womens writing and mens that no study of only womens writing can depict (584). Since she is looking at life not from what Jehlen calls the universe of masculinist assumptions but from the womans viewpoint,
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one of the things she considers with most insistence is the male body, specically focusing on its center, the cosa housed in that casa.

The illustrious prisoner

desabrocha la hebilla, desliza el cierre que ilustre prisionero guarda. Desata las agujetas que voy a navegar en tus aguas Kyra Galvn, from Alabanza escribo

I cant nd a better way to sum up Mercados attitude vis--vis the body than to say her erotic portrayals are a joyous celebration of both maleness and femaleness. Diametrically opposed to Wittigs warring vision of the sexes or to the Marquis de Sades portfolio of ramming penises that destroy and vilify the bodies of women, her portrayals frame what is best described as happy sex. The second vignette in the section titled Mirages brings this portrayal to the fore in the story of an arrestingly dressed black man who wears a long, open coat lined with lambskin, no shirt, and trousers that are barely held up by a string around his waist (21). The man is all up front: trousers unbuttoned, y wide open, an enormous, dark gray sex organ peeking through the opening (21). Bouncing to and fro like a pendulum, the mans penis keeps time with his owner as he struts up the hill under the admiring gaze of ecstatic passersby who seek to freeze the picture in their minds or to leave behind, in that oscillating sex, the promise of a love to come (21). Oblivious to everything and everyone, the man walks onward, and onto a hanging bridge from where he straddles the city and looks over his dominions . . . like a king (21). In this witty, tongue-in-cheek episode Mercado demonstrates a skill at creating polyvalent images that we soon come to recognize as one of her trademarks. Clearly, what we are confronting here is not the conventional male character of a mimetic novel. The he-goat in Mirages II has no personality, only essence; he is an incarnation of maleness, a walking penis that keeps showing its face throughout her book. His outlandish outt (he is both dressed and undressed, wrapped in his clothing and hanging out of it, the epitome of an erotic object as Barthes denes it) is a case in point of intentionality disguised as nondesign. Almost naked
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under a loose lambskin coat that practically covers him from neck to foot, he is a metonymy of the very thing that draws all gazes. Like the oscillating sex, his whole gangly body has a cadence to it as he walks, a paso cadencioso, and is covered by an outer sheath that is suggestive of the foreskin (21). As the episode unfolds before our eyes, the man is objectied while his penis is personied: we see not just a single character but a penis and a man (in that order) who climb onto the parapet of the bridge (Mercado intentionally uses the plural form of the verb: suban, 21). In keeping with this personication, the rst time the word king is used, the noun is in the plural form: penis and man . . . like kings, but in the last sentence of the episode, when they both tower over the city from the heights of the bridge, penis and man are assimilated into a single essence, like a king, looking over his dominions (21, my emphasis). In Mirages II Mercado suggests the primacy of the phallus as well as the relevance of the penis, which, as the episode makes clear, towers over everything. Its exalted status is not just a gure of speech or a topographical accident, moreover. Mercados admiration for the one-eyed hero knows no bounds; in a later vignette we learn it has a sharp and intelligent head coveted by every tongue in the book and is considered to be a beautiful trophy with the most beautiful texture, delicate, an object of worship (111). However, the penis is neither the exclusive plaything of men nor an emblem of male power in Canon de alcoba. True, it is an appendage of mens bodies, but women use the men who wield that appendage while availing themselves of itas if of a tool, to give themselves pleasure. It is also relevant to keep in mind that each and every fantasy in Canon de alcoba is engineered by a woman whobecause she concocts the dierent scenarios, and decides the action to followwields the ultimate power; she (and not the male sex organ) is the phallus in a work of ction in which the penis is personied but has no identity other than the one provided by its primary sexual function. In other words, Mercado is not bent on portraying mens subjectiveness as companion for the penises she pictures. In her ction the penis is not cast as the appendage of Tom, Dick, or Harry whose personalities and petty power struggles accompany them into the ction. The penis, as Mercado paints it, is not a power tool but a pleasure instrument, on occasion personied, but with no psychology or motivation, its function no other than to provide jouissance.
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It follows then that the penis can be a construct of the mind, a fertile gment to entertain the gaze and tickle the imagination. In Mirages III, for instance, a woman stares at a tall man who holds his penis in his hand in a crowded subway car. Once again, as in the earlier fantasy, the male organ is personied: it has a single eye, a very smooth body and a head which seems to say . . . this is what I am all about (22). The penis has an identity while the man in the subway has none: One would not be able to say what sort of face he had, we are told, nor what sort of clothes he wore . . . nothing [about him] could be dened with any degree of certainty (22). The man is so lackluster or, more exactly, his role as man is so insignicant in Mercados fantasy, that he is completely overshadowed, erased from the page by the force of his own penis: it would have been interesting to examine other features of the man . . . but he was in no condition to project distinctive features of his personality or physique due to the sheer strength with which that uncovered sex organ predominated over his person (23). Like the black man in Mirages II, the faceless fellow in the subway (it is no coincidence that all characters in Canon de alcoba are nameless, with no personality other than the one their sex provides) is a nonentity; his penis, on the other hand, exerted such a powerful attraction that it was impossible to steal away or avoid staring at its head peeking through the ngers (23). The true hero of the tale does not even need to engage in action to become endowed with an almost immanent light by the womans gaze: Once its shape, weight and sheen had been assessed by that stare, it didnt need to dress itself up; all it had to do was simply make a statement about its existence; its image penetrated easily and found its own place and resonance in the retina (23). The peniss locus is not so much in the mans body (the man exists in the ction but is as quickly dispensed with as a banana peel) as in the gaze of the observer, in the retina of the woman. Seen or imagined, the penis becomes her possession, her thing; in fact, the bond between one and the other is as strong as the one that can link together . . . two equals who discover each other (23). This bond is based on a shared communication predicated on pleasure, just like the act of love, but a pleasure acted out in the viewers imagination. The penis in this story, we soon discover, is a construct of the mind designed to titillate both the woman in the metro and the reader. As the story comes to an end, once the woman has had her ll of
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gazing at the portentous organ, the man stands up and the bulbous object in his hand turns out to be a pear that he puts in his pocket before getting o the subway, its mission fullled, its potential energy discharged not by the peara mere stimulusbut by the woman who imagines everything and uses her imaginationtitillated turned titillatorto goad herself and, via her creation, the reader (23). This is why, later in the book, Mercado describes dreamers as artists, and demiurges who spew forth pigments or phrases, and then pull away from the canvas or page, hiding away the hand that had not hesitated to strip away all sense of propriety a few minutes earlier, and turn it into lust (106). For Mercado, all voyeurs are creators; hence they play a fundamental role in a book where she is doing the upmost to come to terms with the meaning of the creative act. Like readers, voyeurs get pleasure from images rather than from doing things themselves. This analogy becomes the basis of her innovation. If instead of writing closed, linear stories based on enigmas that are slowly revealed to the reader she were to compose by means of tableaux that could be read in a variety of ways, like paintings, she could introduce a more open, less determined, freer alternative to orthodox reading and writing. Her pictorial language would of course need words to be translated from the page to the reader but it would be one step closer to semiotic language and more akin to poetry, to the polyvalent use of signs and symbols that we nd in the work of Artaud, Joyce, Mallarm, and Sarduy. In other words, Mercados aim (contrary in every sense to that of patriarchal texts) is to write without imposing herself on anyone, allowing and even inviting alternatives. Thus her tableaux are lled with options: horses that gallop by during a walk through the forest are simultaneously described as what is seen, what is not seen, as cantering both nearby and in the distance (53). So too, in the love scenes she describes, the partner is often either or both he or she (el otro, la otra, 78) or of undisclosed gender so that the naked bodies caressing each other in the dark become whatever the reader wishes them to be. If Mercadoslet us call itfeminine stance is predicated on not imposing her view (which is another way of saying on not imposing her authority), then her works can be described as open constructs allowing readers to make choices. This is also why her stories dont come to an abrupt, categorical end. Instead, images fade out as they do in the movies when objects or people move beyond our eld of vision: the two horses in
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Pero todava vibra (Its still shaking), for instance, grew smaller and smaller until the image ran out (53). Above and beyond the choices she provides and her fade-away endings, Mercados main contribution to an alternative form of writing is the introduction of what she refers to as imgenes palabras (word-images, 50). At this point in her career these word-images are the only way she wants to write, her only andadura posible (65). The pictures she paints are almost without exception like those described in a vignette titled The House of Love: libidinal fragments, messages as desperate as tongues (65). The libidinal element is obvious to all her readers but, given Mercados penchant for ambiguity, dont we need to question what she means by tongues? Is she referring to anatomy or to linguistics? In fact, as she soon makes clear, she has both in mind when, and as, she writes. Because in her writing words serve to picture the body, they become analogous with it. This postulate is not unique to Mercado, of course. In a well-loved short poem, Emily Dickinson went against the grain: A word is dead / When it is said, / Some say. / I say it just / Began to live / That day. Sistering herself in more ways than one to Dickinson, Mercado wonders more than a century later, What if we were to think that the word is the body? (or, in other words, that uttering sounds endows them with a density and reality of their own). Born from the body, she maintains, writing gushes forth as a live and, in her own hands, erotic secretion: as if the amorous substance owed out from the nger itself to wet with its touch the folds of the skin (110). The problem is that even if they emanate directly from the body, as soon as they are printed on the page words freeze over; they become calcied, rigid, inexible. Once frozen, the open reading that images or concepts suggest before becoming signiers is no longer possible, dooming to failure, it would seem, Mercados own revolutionary design. Feminine writing? In a section entitled El prximo recodo (Around the Next Bend) Mercado considers the dichotomy between words and images, and the implications of this dichotomy for herself and for the kind of writing she wants to produce. Simultaneously describing lovemaking and the endless possibilities of language (words where anything is possible, 111), and
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once again showering much praise on the penis (which she describes as the hero of the day, and an object of worship, 111), she points out how, once lovemaking is over and the male organ lies at rest, vulnerable and unaware of the words that have described it and engraved its many names on the page, the concept that was heretofore beautiful and alive because it was free loses that life because it is translated into symbolic language: The design of writing [and here Mercado is clearly referring to her own] is to remain neutral [meaning nondeterminative, polyvalent, semiotic], but little by little that intention has become compromised (111). The limits of matter, she goes on to say, of an erotic matter that wished itself free of symbols, one that sought to be formless, vast and multiple in its desire, have become frozen into an ivory dildo, painfully perfect (111). As an image that allowed itself to be subjugated by every eye in the room, the penis was everywhere . . . a beautiful trophy between the legs (111); described with words, betrayed by signs, that same image becomes lifeless, bridled and girthed by the writer. This is why the design of writing [i.e., to remain neutral] has become compromised (111). But does this necessarily mean that the project of creating feminine writing has failed? Recovering words that are lost, betrayed is quite a task, Mercado recognizes (59). Is it really feasible to recover words betrayed by the patriarchal, symbolic model in order to create a feminine language? Years ago, going against the grain of feminism, Kristeva argued that even though a characteristically feminine semiotic register existed, there could not be a feminine language per se (Questions Julia Kristeva, 23). Before the presymbolic articulations of the semiotic could be transmitted and understood, Kristeva observed, they would have to be voiced through signs and symbols and fall, therefore, under the aegis of the Name of the Father. Feminism could not simply reject the symbolic phallogocentric order since the total failure to enter into human relations such rejection implies would, in Lacanian terms, make us psychotic. In other words, we have to accept our position as already inserted into an order that precedes us and from which there is no escape. There is no other space from which we can speak: if we are able to speak at all, it will have to be within the framework of symbolic language. This is the argument that Mercado takes up when she contrasts the esh-and-blood penis to the ivory dildo in El prximo recodo. The rst point she makes is that describing the former in writing turns it into
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the latter; what both Kristeva and she call a stammering, a balbuceo simply become words inscribed on the page (110). Words transform both the throbbing, living organ and the concept into symbols that can no longer be object[s] of worship because they are inert (111). Mercados next pointthe next bend in the road to which her chapters subheading doubtlessly refersis that the concepts inherent life can be preserved if portrayed within the context of jouissance. This notion is also something Mercado borrows from Kristeva. We know from Polylogue that the revolutionary subject, male or female, is one able to allow the jouissance of semiotic motility to disrupt the strict symbolic order (43). Examples of this kind of revolutionary activity can be found in the writings of Lautramont, Mallarm, and Joyce. Since the semiotic can never take over the symbolic, however, one may ask how it can make itself felt at all. Kristevas answer is that the only possible way of channeling the semiotic drive into the symbolic is through the predominantly anal activity of expulsion or rejection (Rvolution, 11314). In textual terms this translates into a negativity masking the death instinct (a negativity that we have already witnessed in the work of Severo Sarduy, for instance), and that Kristeva sees as the most fundamental component of the semiotic drive (2728). The most fundamental, perhaps, but not the only one. It is at this juncture that Mercado parts ways with Kristeva. As we have seen in the rst four chapters of this book, the anal activities of expulsion and rejection are characteristic reactions of male writers. These activities are also present in works written by womenin Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea, in Wittigs Les gurillres, in Albaluca Angels Las andariegas. As pointed out, reactions to the patriarchal establishment are part of the motivating forces behind these texts, however. They are the kind of angry responses that usher in Gilbert and Gubars madwoman in the attic, responses that suggest an unresolved attachment to the patriarchal establishment, and to the models imposed by patriarchal literature. Insofar as women do not experience the sense of loss that comes with castration, there does not appear to be an inherent tendency to reject or lash out in feminine texts that are free from the grip of patriarchy, that are truly a manifestation of the feminine (Kristeva, Rvolution, 4344). But are there many of these? The fact is, rejection and expulsion are conspicuously absent from Canon de alcoba, nor can signs of negativity be detected
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anywhere in this book. Since the anal activity of expulsion is absent from Canon, are we to believe that the semiotic has not found its way into Mercados project, or has she perhaps found other means of opening the sluice gates that would allow it to ood her text? Keeping in mind how jouissancewhich is characteristic of the semiotic motilityis one way to disrupt the strict symbolic order, what would happen if a book were designed as a vehicle to communicate not simply jouissance but, specically, the jouissance of woman? Luce Irigaray has not been alone in pointing out how little we know about this kind of feminine enjoyment (Ce sexe., 8889). Isnt it time that literature began to hold a mirror to women, a mirror that reveals not just the angry face of the displaced stepmother but the fullled one of the castaway who has found, at last, a room of her own? What if this project we are talking aboutMercados projectwere designed as the means to voice this seldom heard, hardly known, unique form of jouissance? In addition, what if feminine jouissance could be conveyed through images that were sketched the only way we know, by means of signs, but signs that were left open and ambiguous (such as a penis that turns out to be a pear, a man that is a metonymy of the penis, a woman who exudes her own juices like the meats and vegetables in a stockpot)? Wouldnt we have, then, a new kind of writing? Not, surely, in terms of the composition itselfof the formbut in its content and scope? This writing project need not just be an exposition or revelation of feminine jouissance, moreover. It could also be an overarching reection on the nature of femininity and, by means of such a reection, a search for the place of the feminine subject. As Mercado points out, referring to her own sex (and echoing the Irigaray of the late seventies, who wrote Ce sexe qui nen est pas un ), we dont occupy the space that we should naturally occupy among humans (61). In ction that space has to be dened in the inherently masculine symbolic language, but neither the fantasies portrayed nor the characters themselves need to be reections of those described in patriarchal literature. Words are also womens domain. We are reminded of it in Canon de alcoba when an unnamed character, calling a political meeting to order, admonishes everyone in the room: let the comrade speak . . . (dejemos hablar a la compaera, 59). The compaera speaks but no one understands her. She starts to tie herself in knots, to fall down a cli (enredarse, desbarrancarse, 60). Her discourse teeters painfully close to a stammer, threatens to tear itself in shreds until a voice
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interrupts her to say: Comrades, thats enough pussy-footing about . . . nothing is being said here, we have stopped saying. At that point, male authority comes in to close shop, put the lid on, batten down the hatches (60). Mercados reaction to such obstruction is to tear the patriarchal novel to pieces, to stab and poke stillborn signiers in conventional novels that have only one constricting, overpowering meaning. Brandishing her imgenes-palabras sin contornos, she begins revealing feminine dreams and fantasies emblematic of that other voice, constitutive of that other literature (50). Eros, not Thanatos That other literature is dierent because its scenarios have nothing to do with oppression and control. According to Mercado, desire is not a function of Eros . . . the self-governing and power plays no part in loves agenda (95, 98). Jouissance rules in her novel but even this notion has been refurbished. By refurbished I mean that Canon de alcoba is not The Story of O. For a start, there are neither exploiters nor exploited; in the breathless atmosphere of the bedroom as well as in the spirited mijotage of the kitchen, all ingredients get red to the same temperature, and sweated to the same degree. When two women make love to each other, a third, eavesdropping from the next room, is thankful to be listening to women because their lovemaking, will not sound like a struggle, or suggest an obstinate persistence, or a culmination in which no one will ever know who came out the winner, or a hoped for simultaneity that went awry although mutual concealment attempted to mask it in the last pantings of love (33). Lovemaking with men, it is suggested, gets easily confused with a combat in which some triumph, and, presumably, some lose. Women, on the other hand, dont need to overpower anyone. Another dierence between the sexes is that men strive toward culmination while women linger on each caress, focusing on the moment, heightening sense awareness to the utmost. Almost as if giving a prescription for continuing good health Mercado advises: Well then, never reach a climax, leave things in midair, get them to the point of ripeness, cut in only in the initial stages during the evolution of a given element, and then foresake it to its own inertia, neither precipitate nor impede its reaction, these were the laws of that obsession which sated all my obsessions and dened all my longings (En estado de memoria, 36).
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Over and over in the stories composing Canon de alcoba we are told there is no need to consummate sexual activity. This savvy Kama Sutra makes clear that women nd puntos de goce (pleasure points) without end while men gallop blindly across open elds, reach the starting line, and pull out falos brillantes (shiny phalluses, 93). Clearly, warring [phallic] love . . . brandishes its weapon much too soon, trampling down the grass with giant steps, not realizing that longing cracks its door open ever so gently, hardly drawing a breath, barely touching the handle or making the hinges squeak (78). There is no recrimination for such male behavior on Mercados part, however; such behavior is simply taken down as a statement of fact. After mapping out the dierence between men and women concerning puntos de goce (women are sensitive; men, rough), the female narrator of Las Amigas appraises with tenderness the rm texture of testicles soft like the skin of a fruit, and the three women involved with each other in the same episode long for the presence of a man even though, we are told, they need no one (93). The sexual activity portrayed in Canon de alcoba is dierent in yet other ways from that in works written by men. Bataille, for instance, speaks of a negativit sans emploi as the motor force behind his compositions, while everything in Mercado has an emploi a reason for being, a potential use (Bataille, Lettre X., charge dun cours sur Hegel . . . Oeuvres compltes, 5:36970). For her as for Bataille jouissance is a form of dpense or expenditure, but since her own brand of jouissance is not geared toward culmination, pleasureas she portrays itheightens itself and each partner in the act of love like a miraculous machine that recharges its own energy without ever spending itself. From the perspective of women there is no waning, no abatement in love, only fanning out in unceasing crescendoes. Consequently, there is no sense of loss needing to be resolved or palliated, no unsatiable hunger, no feeling of incompletion because love has come to an end and parting ensued. For man, on the other hand, dew turns into tears, time runs out while galloping across measureless plains hell-bent on exterminating, pulverizing petals with his hoofs and, above all, very distant from the body that is oered to him (79). Once his love is shot, ejected through the eye without sockets like an arrow he, the combatant . . . remains very lonely (79). Spent, like a Bataillean hero, he feels an incurable, desperate sense of deprivation, a little death he tries to overcome by charging anew, seek-

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ing to conquer what is unconquerable because he can neither see nor understand it: a bulls eye that is further beyond and has little to do with the love underlying his charge (79). Bound to a death in life by a loss he can neither forget nor forgive, man tears down and tramples, cursed with anger, condemned, like a modern-day Sisyphus to eternal solitude and waning desire after love. In contrast to mans waning desire, Mercados heroines are perpetually aroused because they dont bank on the notion of consummation. As far as they are concerned, desire need not ever end; because of such ow, all of life becomes infused with a sense of celebration. As love is an endless adventure, so is language. We have already seen how, for Mercado, words and the body are analogous to each other, her prescriptions for lovemaking undistinguishable from her norms for writing, the canon for the bedchamber one and the same as the canon on which her criture feminine is based. For instance, her storieslike love in these same stories have no climax. What writing is saying, claims Mercado, is an imaginary game of perpetual search like an organ that does not reach a climax [or] sex without penetration when the ames of desire are perpetually fanned (119). Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, the perpetual state of intensication brought on by making love without ever reaching a climax or by writing without ever coming to a dnouement is a way to dismantle the precedence, the potency, the power of the phallus (119). The phallus seeks to control and conclude, erecting its version as the one and only with any sort of validity. By suggesting that neither lovemaking nor story-telling needs to reach a culmination, Mercado gives precedence to a noncategorical, unprepossessing voice which she contrasts with the power of the phallus (109). She advocates, in other words, love that does not seek power (el amor sin ninguna ambicin de poder ), and seeks to portray a polymorphic sexuality which, like Virginia Woolf s Orlandos, transforms itself as it goes: appearing, sometimes, in feminine guise, but becoming predominantly phallic as it goes (68, 70). This androgynous subject, like the unprepossessing voice that does not seek power, counterbalances the preeminence of the phallus: and the penis simultaneously penis and vagina, and during penetration no one penetrating or being penetrated but one single, perfect fusion (110). Despite her portrayals of androgyny, it bears to keep in mind that, unlike some of the more re-eating feminists, Mercado is not advocating

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the extermination or obnubilation of men. Her aim is to oer an alternative to phallic power, to the kind of love it champions and to the sort of writing it produces. The phallic attitude that consists of ramming, seizing, and nishing up quickly in order to start up all over again leads humanity forward in short spurts. Mercado proposes an alternative philosophy predicated not on culmination but on making things last; she invites us to think that a deseo sin nal (a desire without end) might make human beings develop in a more expansive, unlimited fashion. Such desire would be more akin to human nature, which she compares to a quilting point or stitch which, when allowed to unravel, revealslike her own writingmyriad other texts hiding beneath the folds of its multisignifying thickness (119). Desires are also like ideas and, as she sees it, we are perpetually just two steps away from the vertigo of knowledge that a phrase can bring on (109). She goes on to compare ideas to elds and trees observed from the window of a moving train, scenes that erroneously make us think all there is is what lies in front of our eyes as we fail to consider how, besides the trees and elds, the window reects our own face, those of other passengers, and even, across the railway car, another window opening up to other vistas and, beyond that, to the dark pits of night at a time when not a ray of light has yet begun to insinuate itself on the horizon (109). Like the scenes one watches from a moving train, life is not just the rapid succession of events that ash in front of our windows; it is also the permanent assault of whats dierent (109). That is why edges between words, and dierences between terms . . . have gone up in smoke in Mercados novel, a text that leaves itself open to uninterrupted stimulation, like the erect nipples of two sweaty bodies rubbing against each other (110). Words must be free to invite alternate meanings, not shackled to a single destiny; stories must be free to suggest other voices, not restrained by a terminal conclusion; bodies must be free to choose the pleasure they seek; pleasure must free itself to continue its perpetual search. Like the re and the rose which, in T. S. Eliots phrase, become one once the tongues of re are infolded, the image of the erect organ with which Mercado concludes El ltimo recodo is sure that the sex in which it is about to lodge itself is simultaneously all and one: dark channel, luminous gate . . . welcoming bay (110). That welcoming bay is also the alternative space Mercado has been carefully crafting, the answer

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to the patriarchal novel: her masterful Canon de alcoba, a novel that introduces a feminine body unencumbered by the shackles of patriarchy, the body of a new kind of jouissance which, like Mercados writing, lies invitingly open, suggesting, in its generous pliancy, endless and heretofore unsuspected vistas to the reader.

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Conclusion
i

In literature the body is never alone. Robinson Crusoe had Friday and, even before running into his sidekick, a whole carnival of characters roamed within his head. Defoes star playerswhether in Robinsons imagination or wending their way across a desert islandare never unwarranted. In all works of ction leading protagonists, even supernumeraries, have a mission to fulll. Considered from the readers perspective, this mission is to amuse and edify, but characters also come alive to fulll personal needs. They play a key role and serve a fundamentally cathartic function because all literature portrays relationships that reect the dynamics of foundational ties between parents and children. These ties are acted out in works of ction, turning behavior and settings into mirrors that reect an authors innermost longings and fears. What I set out to understand is how these longings and fears speak themselves into literature, how they inform characterization and plot. As writers listen to an inner voice when they write, I listened to the writers themselves, paying particular attention to both the ways in which they imagine and symbolize bodies, and to the traces their own bodies leave on the page. I began by considering the body, in the words of Brooks, as an object and motive of narrative writingas a primary, driving concern of the life of the imagination, and my aim throughout this book was to explore how Spanish American authors turn it into a key symbol, a token in their writing (Body Work, xi). Since many of my discussions of the body draw on psychoanalysis, I chose to focus on stories written by contemporary authors for whom psychoanalysis was likewise a concern. Some, like Julio Cortzar and

Severo Sarduy, believed that writing was therapy; others, like Tununa Mercado, forged their projects as a reaction to personal discoveries made in analysis; each and every one of them assumed that, again in the words of Brooks, psychic process and literary process are mutually illuminating, and some went as far as to include theoretical discussions regarding this interchange in the books they wrote (xii). In fact, in one way or another, all of them weave together story lines and lines concerning how a story is woven. Even Cortzar, who doesnt bring theory into his short stories, portrays sublimation and catharsis as integral elements in many of his plots. The photographer in Blow-Up stops a potentially traumatic incident from scarring an adolescent, an action that brings him both a spiritual renewal and a release of tension, and the hero of Unreasonable Hours clinches the incestuous liaison that has been plaguing him all along not in bed but by writing about it and tricking the readerfor a time, at leastinto believing that his guiltiest wishes have been fullled at last. Readers of this and other stories by Cortzar feel a sense of malaise. At the same time, we are encouraged to identify with the plight of his perpetually frustrated heroes, wishing for them what they wish for themselves. Our study of Cortzars cunning plots revealed that the motifs he repeatedly relies on in his storiessevered hands, fear of open, well-lit places, of animals that burrow, and of large carnivoreswork as a lead wall that prevents readers from seeing the real object of both longing and dread hiding behind his elaborate pageant. When we read his work what we see is not what we get, and, curiously, what we dont get is what is upsetting, the reason for the malaise his stories provoke. Even without understanding what gives rise to this malaise, readers are aware, however, that the heroes desperate longing for shelter or to have intimate contact with women who remain inaccessible is ruled out in and by the ction. Shelter will not be recovered once it is left behind, and impossible women will acquiesce to the heros longing only iflike Anbal in Unreasonable Hourshe pictures their downfall in writing. Reasons for this inaccessibility are never given; in most cases the ction simply hinders the hero from fullling his longing. Looking behind this hindrance we found the epitome of all proscriptions rearing its head. Well concealed beneath the cunning camouage of voracious tigers and chocolate-covered roaches, incestuous feelings informed the action of Cortzars short stories. What is downright perverse is that, given our
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strong identication with the heroes plight, we espouse their longings in these stories without understanding their origin. It is from the conict that pits our wishes for their success against our own guiltsince we are well aware at some level that their wish is forbiddenthat the unbridled strangeness of Cortzars scenarios is born. What we think of as strange is, in fact, a thorn in the eshin our own eshbecause, soliciting our complicity, Cortzar forces us to sympathize with a behavior that is fundamentally transgressive, and the conict launched by this identication ushers in the uncanniness that is his trademark. The pernicious role of transgression and guilt, not just in Cortzars stories but in all works studied in this book, substantiates how the body is, above all things, a body in crisis, perpetually struggling to come to terms with its own essence and make its existence more bearable. Part of this struggle is determined by early attachments that emblazon the body with meaning and program it as a perpetual wanderer attempting to recover what it has lost. Because the original scar in all bodies is similar, because we share a sense of irrecuperable loss, we nd many points of comparison in the work of authors who, geographically, historically, and aesthetically speaking, are dissimilar from each other. Even though their backgrounds, plot lines, and narrative goals are dierent, the work of Cortzar, Cabrera Infante, Sarduy, Garca Mrquez, and Castellanos springs forth from similar sources and reacts to a shared sense of severance. I chose to study their work in particular because, in spite of the sources they share, each of them gures the body in a dierent light or from a dierent perspective. It is true that other authors could have been included, but Body of Writing would have become a Faustian book about books, so I was forced to make choices. The same applies to the many other theoretical sources that could have been researched. Perhaps some will nd my choices objectionable, or not suciently representative. I suggest they be viewed as a sample pool, as the eldwork of a literary anthropologist who doesnt pretend to explore a whole mountainside but focuses on a circumscribed plot, and makes deductions about the surrounding terrain from the ndings in the site chosen for the study. Other researchers might care to add to these ndings; may such complementary readings become other books that look to this one as a point of departure and inspiration. My study of the way the body is gured in the literature of Spanish America has no pretensions to be all-embracing, although my conclu242 Body of writing

sions are broad-based enough, I feel, to encompass other bodies in other books. I say this because one of the two most striking features I discovered was a thematic continuity between authors, a continuity that suggests their obsessions are, if not generic, at least representative. The other feature was the loyalty authors have to these obsessions and how systematically and consistently they condition the way in which the body is gured. For instance, there are frequently adolescents in Cortzars stories, and these adolescents are always threatened by circumstances or hurt (in Blow-Up, Nurse Cora, and Bestiario, to name three instances). Hurt is also present in the work of Severo Sarduy, but in his case pain is the consequence of severance, which is ultimately what his characters are after. Diametrically opposed to Sarduys sadistic parodies is Tununa Mercados portrayal of jouissance in a novel from which aggression is totally absent. The contrast between these two authors is so dramatic, in fact, that it provides a turning point for my conclusions. Aggression is a strong componenta key building block, one might sayin stories written by men. Characters insult each other, harm, and kill each other in the work of Cortzar, Cabrera Infante, Garca Mrquez, and Sarduy. A break in thematic continuity occurs when we read Rosario Castellanos and Tununa Mercado. The latter paints a picture from which sadism and pain are preempted, while the body in Castellanoss masterful Ocio de tinieblas is as injured, lame, and abused as it is in Infantes Inferno. It is from such an aggressive core that the action of these masterplots spreads forth as points of a star growing out from its center. In addition, with the notable exception of Garca Mrquezs Love in the Time of Cholera and Tununa Mercados Canon de alcoba and usually tucked away under the thick veneer of humor and mysteryfear and anger lurk behind every page we read. The sources of such fear take many formsfrom an elusive tiger in Cortzars Bestiario to an absorbing vagina that engulfs the narrator of Infantes Inferno with greedy forward and back contractions. These two authors are the most explicit in portraying the sources of anguish dramatized or alluded to in the works we studied. The heroes of Cortzars short stories repeatedly dramatize what amounts to a chronic fear of leaving behind dark, enclosing surroundings. For instance, the Moteca warrior in The Night Face Up sweats, pants, shivers, and screams at the thought of getting through a dark tunnel with blood dripping o its walls (Relatos, 81). Repeatedly waking up and
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dropping back into a world described as a terrifying nightmare, he delays exiting until nally, unable to put it o any longer, he reaches the mouth of the tunnel while letting out a hoarse yell, and realizing the amulet that had kept him alive until then has been yanked o from his body. Like the Moteca warrior, the protagonist of Dont Blame Anyone has a massive anxiety attack, halted breathing, and cold sweats as he is about to emerge from the encroaching dark folds of a prison, which, in this story, turns out to be the embrace of a tight sweater hugging his nose and mouth. Surprisingly, once his head begins to emerge from the sleeve he has mistakenly plunged into and he begins to see light, his one free hand grabs the oending sleeve and pulls it up over his face once again. As in The Night Face Up, leaving the safety of the dark, enveloping space is threatening, and analogous to death. Like the narrator of Dont Blame Anyone, Lucho in Throat of a Black Kitten seeks to get back into the very space from which he has been evicted. The warm, engulng maw in this story is no longer depicted as a sweater but, more explicitly in terms of revealing Cortzars design, as a womans private quarters. Naked, cold, and covered with blood, Lucho bangs at her door, begging to be allowed back in, complaining to himself, its always the same . . . (Octaedro, 164). Bang all he will, the woman will not let him back, will not open the door. After loving him and hurting him (by almost yanking o his genitals), she pushes him out (162); isnt she unforgivable even if her actionslike Valmonts loathsome behavior in Dangerous Liaisons are beyond her control? Isnt being outside a fate worse than death, the beginning of a threatening existence in a cold, lonely world? The protagonist of Guillermo Cabrera Infantes riotously funny saga fares better than Cortzars heroes when faced with similar circumstances. In the epilogue to Infantes Inferno he manages to crawl inside a womans dark, enveloping soft cave (404). He oats in a tumultuous sea before ending up in an alluviated area where he glides across a pool of a mudlike substance until everything around him turns red, the ground begins to shake, the whole basin boils over like a pressure cooker about to explode, and he is thrown out, expelled, rejected, vomited, spat into the air to bask in the amniotic uid of memories from which he draws the inspiration to write Infantes Inferno (410). After so many scenes of eviction, so many thwarted hopes (in the form of wishes to stay in dark comfortable tunnels and enveloping rooms), it
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is no wonder that Cortzars and Cabrera Infantesnot to mention Sarduysheroes should be so angry. Havoc has been wreaked on their lives; they have been cast o from the gratifying place where, in all appearances, they wished to stay. Who or what is to blame for such harrowing exile? Very simply, when not explicitly portrayed as Circes, Medusas, child molesters (in Blow-Up), one-breasted Amazons (Margarita del Campo in Infantes Inferno ), white-haired Regentes who enslave young men (in Colibr ), and aloof crowned goddesses who let heroes pine away for love (in Love in the Time of Cholera ), then enveloping tunnels emblematic of the estrecho dudoso through which these unpardonable shrews evict their victims. Guillermo Cabrera Infantes genial fantasy of an omnivorous vagina that swallows up the hero and sends him for a fallopian spin before spitting him out again sums up, much more explicitly than any other work in this study, a picturesque if hardly reassuring tradition of lethal genitals that spans centuries and cultures. Murderous females appear in Greek mythology, medieval French poems and Nahuatl lore. The fear of woman thus seems endemic and permanent. It is born of mans early total dependence on his mother, and his longing, frustrated love for her, his defenseless lassitude after intercourse, and the frightening aspect and portentous implications of the female genitals. The Medusa and all the dangers to mans virility she stands for are a very old story, one that we see recast in each and every tale we read with the exception of Tununa Mercados Canon de alcoba. What to make of it? Are these novels and short stories acts of revenge designed to vent anger or are they meant to heal? Addressing the issue of female subordination, Freud, Horney, Beauvoir, Wolfgang Lederer, and, most recently, Dorothy Dinnerstein have explored, in the relationship between the sexes, what it is that makes men want, guratively speaking, to kill women. What Horney called male dread of the female is a phenomenon to which Lederer has devoted a long and scholarly book. As Horney and Dinnerstein have shown, male dread of women, and specically the infantile dread of maternal autonomy, has historically objectied itself in vilication of women, while male ambivalence about female charms underlies the traditional images of such terrible sorceressgoddesses as the Sphinx, Medusa, and Circe (which Cortzar brings to life in his eponymous short story). One of the most idolized goddesses we looked at in our reading was
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Fermina Daza in Love in the Time of Cholera. It came as no surprise that when this adored and feared woman (whom Florentino doesnt dare even address for many months) nally opens the door of her house to the man who has been pining for her for fty-one years, nine months and three days, his reaction to her invitation is to have a fecal explosion of such magnitude that his chaueur cannot help thinking that he, too, has succumbed to cholera. Centuries before Garca Mrquez and Freud, Swift had emphasized the connection between idealization, anality, and human aggression that is so masterfully described in Love in the Time of Cholera, one which translates in literature what could be termed the male plight. Feeling rejected or abandoned at the resolution of the Oedipal phase, men project their libido not forward in the direction of genital development but backward, regressing to the anal stage characterized by deance, mastery, and the will to power (Brown, Life Against Death, 192). Spurned and despondent, men steep in their own rage, a feeling that becomes objectied in a vilication of women and shows its face in all the portrayals of the body read in this book, with the exception of Mercados. The interconnection between human aggression, the will to mastery, and anal organization that Garca Mrquez depicts with such gusto provides the seedbed, likewise, from which the compositions of Severo Sarduy spring forth. Strange though it may seem at rst, the designs of both authors have much in common. Both use wit to mock ideas they hold seriously. Garca Mrquez makes the hero of Love in the Time of Cholera a comic embodiment of the repressed, anal personality, and shows how, screening anal eroticism behind an idealization of the fair sex, men condemn themselves to a life of solitude. Showcasing lives of lies to dramatize truths about the way we relate to one another, Florentinos, Juvenals, and Jeremiah de Saint-Amours stories are roguish exempla designed to teach men to stop denaturing women in order to persuade themselves of their own superiority. In his kitsch melodramas Sarduy also transforms the nature of women and dramatizes triangular relationships, but, fascinated with Freuds, Lacans, and Batailles theories from the days of his involvement with Tel Quel, he focuses on Oedipal discord, and writes a trilogy on the nature of desire. Spiking his sources with his own version of Cuban choteo, Sarduy willfully misreads the tale of Oedipus but cannot avoid falling prey to the truths it encapsulates. Rewriting Freuds version of this tale to suit his
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own ends, he parodies the gurus worshipped by Tel Quel, and unveils truths about the self, the nature of attachments, and the creative act. His characters bleed, decompose, and cut o their sexual organs in a sadomasochist frenzy that can only be compared to those of Artaud and William Burroughs in the history of literature, and to Francis Bacon and James Rothko (two of Sarduys own favorites) in the history of painting. The Cuban authors portrayals of mutilation and delement are literally written on the body because his fantasies chartvery tongue in cheek, it is truethe licentious evolution of a bawdy artist in quest of freedom. His parodic design was every bit as didactic as Garca Mrquezs. When exposing the macabre machinery of sadomasochism, he sought to show that man was in a bind because, like a bird caught in a net, he was involved in largely unresolved relationships to gures of authority. In his novels these authority gures are usually women or parodies of women: transvestite owners of nightclubs, bloated Big Mamas, androgynous shrews who rule over the hero. In Colibr, the string of termagants is nally superseded, and the hero ends up taking the place of the boss. His empowerment is meant to be seen as the nal step of an arduous process that leaves behind a sea of severed heads, rivers of blood, and vales of tears. Perhaps what all the problematic relationships and all the anger and anxiety portrayed by Sarduy, Cortzar, Cabrera Infante, and Garca Mrquez reveal is thatmelodramatic though it may soundthe victims of the human drama are men, not women. Brawnier, and no brainier, males react to what are clearly self-imposed limitations by victimizing, exploiting, and controlling the weaker sex, and women, identied with patriarchal authority in order to develop a self-image that is socially empowering, abide by the ridiculous terms of a sick social contract. Every male author studied in this book depicts human beings writhing in timeless torture; only Garca Mrquez makes clear that women are spared from such self-induced pain although victimized by the unleashed rage and idealization which seem to be mens revenge for having been evicted from their rst home and then estranged from their rst love (who, to compound matters, consented to the separation). An albatross hangs around the neck of men, while women, such as Fermina Daza, can pretty much go about their business. True, as depicted in Love in the Time of Cholera, they may still need to hide in the bathroom to catch a forbidden smoke, but arent they inherently spared from the self-imposed death in life that hounds men?
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How is it, then, that women in ctionwomen like Isabel Zebada and her daughter Idolina pictured in a novel written by a womancan express such loathing of their own inexorably female nature? Identifying with the canonical images of patriarchal society, women have traditionally spurned the reality of their own bodies and sought to accommodate their mental and physical images to the dictates and fantasies of male authority (casting themselves as weak, pale, helpless creatures, for instance). So too, since the dominant patriarchal ideology traditionally presented artistic creativity as a fundamentally male quality, the dominant literary images of femininity have been rife with male fantasies. Gilbert and Gubar point out how women were denied the right to create their own images of femaleness and sought, instead, to conform to the patriarchal standards imposed on them (Madwoman, xii). These standards were reproduced in books written by both sexes from Jorge Isaacss Mara (1867) to Clorinda Matto de Turners Aves sin nido (1889) (Birds Without a Nest ). By the 1930s this tradition of weak, angelic heroines who were a reection of patriarchal models began to be superseded in Spanish America by authors such as Mara Luisa Bombal. The protagonist of Bombals dreamlike La ltima niebla (1935) (House of Mist ) is a total mist. Neither angel nor demon, she tries to t into a social context she has neither dened nor engineered. Unlike her earlier counterparts, she fails miserably and cannot become a reection of the dead woman her husband would like her to be. By the time we reach the 1960s, authors such as Rosario Castellanos have perfected Bombals model, radically revised patriarchal images, and are beginning to introduce heroines like Catalina Daz Puilj who take authority away from their husbands and seek to carve a future for themselves. But Castellanos was too intelligent and realistic, and much too committed to the cause of feminism, to portray a ridiculous chimera that did not echo what was really happening out on the streets. She wrote a revolutionary novel, not a fairy tale. This is why women in Ocio de tinieblas ght wars but lose battles. As recently as the 1960s the only winner in a feminist novel could be authors who used writing as a didactic tool to describe the plight of the feminine condition, authors who used writing as the means to bring about social change. When she writes Ocio de tinieblas (1962) Rosario Castellanos makes paper speak just like her character Pedro Winiktn when he grasps the power of words (58). One of her aims in writing was to show women how
248 Body of writing

unreasoned their behavior was, how mistaken they were to use their bodies as a lure. Identifying with the ruling structure of patriarchy, and feeling physically and mentally inferior to men, women have traditionally sought to access power by becoming temptresses (Cleopatra), murderesses ( Judith), or mothers (Mary). Rather than engendering power themselves, they have scented it out and brought it into their homes. They have not imagined they could shine with a light of their own and have sought, instead, to become the reection of the men in their lives. Casting women as satellites has long been a literary tradition: Jane Eyre looks up to Rochester, Elizabeth Bennett to Darcy, Emma Bovary to Rodolphe, Marisela to Santos Luzardo, even when the authors have made clear that the women in these couples are morally, spiritually, or mentally superior to their male counterparts. Attributing power to men did not mean women were not interested in it. Although, from the perspective of their own deated self-images, they could not conceive of themselves as doers. The Mariselas in works of ction have always whiled away their time darning Santoss socks. The angel has lurked in the shadows in life as well as in literature: Camille Claudel sculpted, some say, as well as Rodin but he ended up being the genius, she the madwoman; in the able hands of Elena Poniatowska, Quiela (the Russian painter Angelina Belo ) is a sensitive artist who feels incompetent while attributing every bit of genius to Diego Rivera, the man who abandoned her; and, in her letters to Ricardo Palma, Castellanos repeatedly claims (after she has published two of the most beautiful books ever written in Mexico) that she cannot write. Coerced by the establishment or burdened by their own self-image, women disempower themselves in both society and ction. Disempowering themselves did not mean power was out of reach, however. Womens method for obtaining it became contingent on their ability to use men as agents; if they succeeded, they could glow, thereafter, with borrowed light. The body turned out to be the best bait to catch the sort of mediator that empowered women and acted in their stead. This meant that Lady Macbeth did not have to kill the king; she waited outside while her husband did the job. When women wished to change the course of their lives, they never took direct action (they couldnt, after all, since their hands were tied); they didnt pack up their bags and run o to Rouen; they stayed in Yonville and waited for a Lon
Conclusion 249

or a Rodolphe to transform their boring existence. To catch a Lon or a Rodolphe, to draw them into their lair, they resorted to their charms, they sold out the body because they had always been taught it was their only weapon. In Ocio de tinieblas Castellanos shows how, even if temporarily successful, using the body to gain access to power leads nowhere in the long run. Women like Isabel Zebada and Julia Acevedo lure Leonardo Cifuentes into their beds but he eventually runs o to nd someone new. The power women derive from their all-consuming guests is not lasting becauseperpetually dissatised, perpetually deprivedmen are always after new chimeras. Arousing us to come in does not mean we will stay around when the re dies down. Deaf to this sentence, women have deluded themselves; they have identied the symbolic emblem of maleness with those who control, and latched on to the opposite sex in order to be ruled and dened by its wishes. Women, Castellanos is saying, cannot continue to be all esh and no voice if they seek power, if they mean to move into a room of their own. They must learn to articulate their own language since language, as is made plain in Ocio de tinieblas, is the instrument of the law, the arma de conquista (9). And so Castellanos writes an indictment that gives literary expression to womens greatest error of judgment: seeking power by selling out the body. Borrowed power such as Idolinas can be smothered at the slightest whim of patriarchy. The invalids story serves to convey this message, and if she ends with her face to the wall, paralyzed, and unwilling (or unable) to speak, it is to drive home Castellanoss point: women cannot master the power of their own bodies because they themselves are mastered. The only power that endures and to which women have access is the auctoritas with which the word is invested, the auctoritas that Castellanos herself deploys to make clear womens need to use it. The body that she puts forth for our perusal is the body of language, and her literary contribution is a reminder that women, not men, give birth to gods. It takes almost thirty years for Castellanoss message to transform feminine literature in Spanish America. Tununa Mercados Canon de alcoba (1989) signals the birth of a new kind of writing, the birth of a feminine language with its own thematic perspective, one from which power struggles, violence, and sadism are excluded. Of course, women actively responded to Castellanoss message in the twenty-odd years between the publication of Ocio de tinieblas and that of Canon de alcoba,
250 Body of writing

but their work of protest was, for reasons that are evident, radically angry. Keeping pace with the French feminists of the sixties, women in Spanish America recast in literature manifestoes of enraged feminism comparable to Monique Wittigs Les gurillres works that were militant in design and aggressive in method, works that, as it turns out, use power struggles as ingredients to the same degree as the canonical works of patriarchy. Like men, feminists of the sixties, seventies, and eighties were angry, but their anger was not predicated, as is mens, on an irremediable loss. As Gilbert and Gubar explain in The Madwoman in the Attic, what women sense and portray as a loss is not a body to which they were once united but power, a sense of self, and the power that comes with that sense of self. And since the dominant patriarchal ideology presents artistic creativity as a fundamentally male quality, it follows that the dominant literary images of femininity have been, more often than not, male fantasies too. Traditionally speaking, and as Castellanos took pains to show in the characterization of Catalina Daz Puilj, women have been denied the right to create their own images of femaleness. It is this image that comes to life in Canon de alcoba. Vindicating and justifying womens rights are viable responses to male literary assertion and coercion; they are reactions to oppression, however, another reected voice contingent upon the actions of men. Instead of writing echoes of and reactions to the establishment, Mercado engenders what Luce Irigaray had argued for in The Sex That is Not One, a form of womanspeak, a voice and a style that do not mimic those of patriarchal literature. Delving into fantasy and breaking away from conventional strictures of time, place, and character unity, she writes a book in which visual iconography comes to the fore and draws in the reader, happily obliged to occupy the locus of voyeur. Tearing away the classic unities and modifying the typically passive posture of readers are not the only features Mercado alters in her iconoclastic revision of the novel. Even the wall that traditionally stands between the sexes topples in the act of love as she portrays it: penis and vagina simultaneously one and the same (110). Erasing dierences and bringing about a fusion by means of erotic love is the key to an innovation whose highly poetic imagery introduces a fresh way to envision the relationship between reader and writer. Mercado feels the time has come to get rid of words in order to focus on the tasks of the body. The bodies she portrays are focused on physical
Conclusion 251

pleasure, on jouissance; their genders and the roles they play are not explicitly dened. There may be three women together, or two women and a man, or a woman who gazes at a man and freely fantasizes on the basis of what she sees or thinks she sees. The reader is privy to these activities designed as tableaux and meticulously described. Given the high degree of ambiguity concerning genders and situations, the reader, like the characters in the ction, ends up actively relying on his or her imagination and freely engaging with a text that has forsaken the coercive strictures of traditional prose ction designed to plant a single image in our minds. For instance, Mercado begins by exploding and expanding the normally restrictive and eminently phallic relationship between signiers and signieds. The images she portrays are purposefully ambiguous horses simultaneously move away and toward the viewer, galloping and walking at the same time; the arousal of a woman is akin to the slow and continuous simmering of a stockpot in which all manner of vegetables and essences of meats and marrow sweat and melt together until a state of fusion is attained; a half-naked man walking down a street becomes indistinguishable from his own penis in the way he moves, in the way he is described, in his attitude; edges between words, and dierences between terms, go up in smoke (110). The penis enters Mercados ction often and insistently. But it is not a sex organ that trails a personality behind it. Mercado repossesses it, lays a claim on it, turning it into an erotic plaything, seldom taking time or space to describe the bodies to which it is attached. In her ction the penis is an organ of pleasure that does not impose its will on women. In fact, nothing and no one imposes a will of any kind in Canon de alcoba. Preoccupied with neither power nor control, women focus instead, on the tasks of the body (61). These tasks fall to them because the feminine body is open by nature, and will not be lled by any presence whatsoever (61). Unlike Isabel Zebadas, and Idolinas, and Mariselas, the body of a woman today can be free if it chooses to be; it no longer needs to turn to a man for instructions on how to behave. Those days, Mercado is saying, are behind us. Realizing and arming this truth ushers an extraordinary sense of celebration into her portrayals; it is not surprising that she entitled an earlier work Celebrar a la mujer como una pascua (1967) (Celebrating Women as if They Were Christmas ). Rethinking and transforming centuries of sociocultural values, Mer252 Body of writing

cado nds her own room and her own view. She realizes that if literature is a mirror of the body and the body a source and locus of meanings, once we witness the grief, fear, and violence in the pictures painted by the likes of Cortzar, Cabrera Infante, Garca Mrquez, and Sarduy, we will be forced to conclude, along with Garca Mrquez himself, that men (who both wrote and acted in these dire visions of life) are indeed condemned to one hundred years of solitude, and belong to a race that may not have a second opportunity on earth (One Hundred Years, 383). Mercados vision of a world where power plays no part presents as tempting an alternative to the putrid place of patriarchy as her answer to the hegemonic novel. Both her vision and her answer give the body free reign and suggest, like the Gordian knot with which she concludes her book, that a new scheme is at hand and that since writing, like love and life, always introduces new threads, what she has nurtured may well transform the multisignifying pattern we call the world.

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Notes
i

1. Julio Cortzars perpetual exile

1 These are far from being the only characters who have trouble breathing in Cortzars stories. As Antonio Planells reminds us, Nico in Cartas de mam, Claudio Romero in Los pasos en las huellas, and Torito in the eponymous story die of tuberculosis (Cortzar, 9293); in Bestiario Isabel is sent to the country because she suers from delicate lungs (20), and the narrator of Reunin has a condition described as a hellish asthma, and is persistently troubled by coughing and a wheezing sound in his chest (470, 475). Many of Cortzars characters suer from lung ailments like Cortzar himself, who, as a child, spent long periods in bed plagued with asthma and pleurisy (Prego, La fascinacin de las palabras, 25). However, suggestingas does Planellsthat Cortzar was obsessed with breathing disorders simply because he suered from asthma as a child does not get to the bottom of the problem (9293). 2 Freud assures us that all anxiety has . . . separation from a highly valued object as its content and is directly related to the trauma of birth (The Problem of Anxiety, 76). 3 As Gregorio Kohon observes, what makes sexuality in human beings specically human is repression, that is to say, sexuality owes its existence to our unconscious incestuous fantasies. Desire, in human sexuality, is always transgression; and being something that is never completely fullled, its object cannot ever oer full satisfaction. Reections on Dora, 371 (Kohons emphasis). 4 In the subway scene with which the story opens, Dina, the black protagonist, wears the fur-trimmed coat alluded to in the title, Cuello de gatito negro. When the story was translated, the word cuello was changed to throat. A literal translation of Cuello de gatito negro (black kitten collar) would have been misleading; however, by changing collar or neck to throat, the translator unwittingly removed the ambiguity of Cortzars original title (Dinawrapped in a coat with a mangy fur collaris black herself and, like a cat, she scratches. In short, she behaves like a gatito negro ). 5 According to Otto Rank and pertinent to our understanding of Axolotl, the widely dispersed legends of the water of life correspond to the birth waters (The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend, 252).

6 One needs only to recall Luchos entreaties to Dina to let him back in, and his insistent reminders about how everything was going so well when they were together within the same dark room, to get some idea of just how dreaded this separation from the maternal hiding place really is (Cuello de gatito negro, Octaedro, 164). 7 Ranks explanation sheds light on many of Cortzars animal stories, most conspicuously those which feature swallowingCirce, for instance. The confections prepared by Circes protagonist, Delia Maara, are perverse as well as profoundly disturbing: disturbing in a way that seems disproportionate on a conscious level with the act of swallowing chocolate-covered animals. In and of itself, after all, feeding on animal tissue is not considered dreadful by most people. But let us think for a moment about the kind of animals that Delia chooses for her repugnant alchemy. These include spiders (135; all the page numbers here and after come from Relatos ), rabbits (135), a live mouse (139), a centipede (142), roaches (144), ants (145), and a goldsh (146). All of them fall within Ranks category of animals that can completely disappear into small holes. What we seem to be witnessing in this story, then, is the dread of being swallowed, which extemporizes birth trauma at its most explicit level. The link I suggest between small animals, swallowing, and birth trauma may seem far-fetched to some, but Cortzar provides enough clues to leave no doubt that this is what he intended. For example, before Roloone of Delia Maaras hapless boyfriendscommits suicide, the Maaras neighbors reveal that his crying had been like a choked up howl, a scream between the hands that wanted to strangle him, and it is not surprisingin view of Cortzars narrative designthat he should end up asphyxiated (136137). We have already considered choking and shortness of breath as symptoms associated with birth anxiety. What we need to recognize at this point is how the fear of swallowing or vomiting animals might set o primal anxiety by evoking in the reader the wish to return into the maternal hiding place as completely accomplished that Rank refers to (Trauma of Birth, 14). I believe this is the anxiety that explains the feeling of horror in stories like Circe and Letter to a Young Lady in Paris. The small burrowing animals portrayed in both instances materialize, in fact, the wish to crawl back into mother. That chimera is painful for the very reason that it is unrealizable. Cortzars stories dramatize an impossible longing, therefore, an unfulllable dream. This unfulllability explains why his characters are often viewed as existential outsiders or descolocados, in the phrase of Fernando Ainsa (Las dos orillas de Julio Cortzar, 426). 8 Graciela de Sola, Julio Cortzar y el hombre nuevo, 49. Also Malva Filer, Los mundos de Julio Cortzar, 35. 9 Dont forget, Cortzar once told Picn Gareld, that an author usually attributes to some characters in his books the realization of his own desires, his own dreams (Cortzar por Cortzar, 80). 10 The idea of being eaten by the father belongs to the primal stock of childhood ideas. Analogies from mythologyKronos, for instancereadily come to mind. Freud tells us that the idea of being eaten by the father is the regressively debased expression of a

256 Notes to chapter one

11

12

13

14

15

16

tender passive impulse which craves to be the object of the fathers love in the sense of genital erotism (Problem of Anxiety, 34). Antonio Planells mentions the lack of characters that might represent the father, a leader, or a role model in the work of Cortzar (Cortzar, 31), and Joaqun Roy observes, in the world inhabited by the protagonist of Bestiario, the absence of the father is blatant. So many children portrayed by Cortzar live in similar circumstances (i.e., without a father) (Roy, Julio Cortzar ante su sociedad, 81). There is no doubt that Cortzar goes to great lengths to make fathers conspicuous by their absence. For instance, in Los reyes he transforms the legend of the Minotaur in ways that are highly revealing. Plutarch describes Theseus as a son who dreams of coming home to please his father, and Aegeus jumps into the sea when he sees the black sail, raised by mistake, which was the agreed-upon signal to let him know his son had died in the Labyrinth. In Cortzars transformation of the legend, however, Theseus scorns his fathers ineptness and old age, and blames him for their countrys military failure. Discussing what Cortzar refers to as el complejo de la Arcadia, el retorno al gran tero, el back to Adam, le bon sauvage, Ainsa suggests that the idea de un paraso perdido o de la isla paradisaca aparece burlonamente referida, pero buscada con igual tenacidad (Las dos orillas, 437 n. 28). I am not so sure that Cortzar was referring to the lost paradise as ironically as Ainsa pretends. The high narcissistic value attaching to the penis, explains Freud, may refer to the fact that the possession of this organ contains a guarantee of reunion with the mother (or mother substitute) in the act of coitus. Deprivation of this member (symbolically speaking, of course) is tantamount to a second separation from the mother (as in the case of birth) (Problem of Anxiety, 78). Anguish remains a constant feature of Cortzars stories until he writes Cuello de gatito negro. By the time Queremos tanto a Glenda, appears in print, however, the obsessive material (i.e., the guras ) depicted in his earlier work has conspicuously diminished. It is interesting to note that the spellbinding quality of his earlier work has, likewise, sadly diminished. Doing his own analysis through writing, it seems, Cortzar freed himself from the demons that haunted him and made his work enthralling in the rst place. As Planells rightly suggests, if there would be such a thing as a winner (in Letters from Mother), it would be the mother (who is also, one might add, the one and only winner in The Health of the Sick) (Cortzar, 98). In spite of its overall accuracy, one of the problems I see with Ana Hernndezs explanation is that Jungian concepts, being archetypal, apply to humanity as a whole. Jung does not take the individual psyche suciently into account, and his symbols are attributed indiscriminately. In studying the development of a persons artistic consciousness, it is important to proceed through a process of individuation, examining one by one the obsessions that bolster anxiety. In the case of Cortzars ction, for example, hands, ants, and a humid pit below a pyramid are not archetypes but, rather, manifestations of a phobia.

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17 As Freud makes clear, the striking coincidence that both birth anxiety and the anxiety of the infant alike claim separation from the mother as their prerequisite needs no psychological interpretation. It is simply enough explicable biologically, he feels, by the fact that the mother, who in the beginning had satised all the needs of the fetus through her body mechanisms, continues after birth as well to exercise in some measure the same function although by other means (The Problem of Anxiety, 77). 18 The child begins to feel hostility against his parents, Klein explains, as soon as he wants to achieve genital union with his mother and destroy his fathers penis which he supposes to be inside her body (Contributions to Psychoanalysis, 133). A sadistic aggression develops that is soon intensied by the ongoing libidinal frustration. Klein argues that the destructive cravings which are fused with the libidinal ones and cannot be gratied will probably lead to a further intensication of sadism and to an activation of its methods (130). 19 This identication is plain in a story like Las babas del diablo (Blow-Up). Here, the young, innocent boy is clearly set up to be the sacricial victim, while the womanacting out the role of the motheris ready to sell him out, to torment him because she gives in to the wishes of the father-substitute in the story. The father gure, by the way, is the dark presence behind the wheel of the car, unseen until the last minute. Roberto Michel, the storys narrator, rescues the child from becoming the victim. In other words, he obliterates the primal scene and the trauma that comes with it when, in the role of voyeur and photographer, he freeze frames the terrible preamble between a boy, a man, and a womanand prevents its aftermath from taking place. By intruding into the triangular relationship before fulllment of an unspoken and unspeakable act is committed and allowing the boy to run o without having to come to terms with the painful truth that results from primal scene trauma, Michel rescues himself by foisting a personal anxiety onto a substitute whom he saves, unscathed, from a potentially destructive confrontation. 20 It is far from gratuitous, moreover, that Marcial should be an anesthetist, a specialty that connects him with the act of breathing and brings us back to Cortzars obsession with respiratory disorders, disorders that are usually linked with death in his stories. The rival in Nurse Cora is a father-substitute willing to wage war at all times (as his name attests), and an attendant at Pablos death. We could further explore the symbolism of Nurse Cora by suggesting that death comes about as a result of having the boys little appendage cut o from his body. 21 Cortzar was conscious of his own problems and, on at least one occasion, he admitted to Evelyn Picn, I dont trust myself. I corroborate many of Freuds claims in my own reactions (Cortzar por Cortzar, 71). 22 In Spanish the preposition por in the phrase por l ambiguously suggests both for him and for his sake. 23 For the unconscious, the room [is] the space which . . . symbolizes the female genitals (364). 24 The rst story containing veiled references to Oedipal trauma is Bestiario, pub-

258 Notes to chapter one

lished in 1951; incestor, more exactly, a symbolic enactment of incestis nally carried out in Unreasonable Hours, published in 1984.

2. More than meets the I: Guillermo Cabrera Infantes La Habana para un Infante difunto
1 Unless otherwise indicated, all parenthetical page references throughout this chapter are to the Spanish edition, La Habana para un Infante difunto (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1979). 2 This literally translates as The vision of a nearsighted voyeur but the title of this chapter in the English version of the novel is Vigil of the Naked I. Because Infantes Inferno (trans. Suzanne Jill Levine and Cabrera Infante, New York: Harper and Row, 1984) is both a translation and a transcription of La Habana para un Infante difunto, I will alternate between both versions whenever the one in English adds a nuance to the one in Spanish. The English version will be identied as I.I. 3 We know from Christian Metzs insightful Le signiant imaginaire (Paris: Union Gnrale dEditions, 1977, 88) that for the voyeur the object of desire is by denition untouchable, a xation informed by primal scene fantasies in which the child always casts himself in the passive position of observer. 4 A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, 201. 5 Metz, Le signiant imaginaire, 88. 6 Ibid. 7 Joseph Cotten spends most of the movie trying, unsuccessfully, to get near Alida Valli. It is not surprising that the hero of Infantes Inferno likes The Third Man so well since this movie, like his own tale, is a recasting of the Oedipal scenario: two men love the same woman but she prefers one to the other. 8 For instance, after staring at the beautiful naked body of Etelvina, he walks away without touching it and wonders: I dont know how I managed to leave the room, how I was able to leave so much potential bliss behind . . . (79). He also fails at the brothel, a scene described on page 325. 9 The dead infant is clearly the narrator-cum-author who is no longer a child. A pavane is a musical composition that has a duple rhythm just as the word infante has a double meaning in Cabreras saga. On the one hand, infante is the child the hero no longer is and, on the othercapitalized this timeInfante is the maternal name with which he clearly identies, so much so, in fact, that the whole novel can be read as a declaration of love. 10 The lost paradise in the work of both authors is always a symbolicand often ironic allusion to the womb. 11 Rodrguez Monegal, Cabrera Infante: La novela como autobiografa total, Revista Iberoamericana 47 (1981): 26571. 12 Problem of Anxiety, 34. 13 The paintings ocial title is Rendition at Breda.

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14 I refer readers interested in this question to Grard Pommiers Lexception fminine (Paris: Point Hors Ligne, 1985). When discussing the notion of infantile desire, Pommier feels, like Lacan, that the male child readily identies not just with the mother but with the object of her longing, which, he argues, is the phallus (26). Lacan argues along the same lines in La mtaphore paternelle and Les Trois Temps de lOedipe, Le Sminaire, Livre V: Les formations delinconscient, 16196 and 18283.

3. The excremental vision of Gabriel Garca Mrquez

1 Gabriel Garca Mrquez, El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (Mexico City: Biblioteca Era, 1984). All page references are to this edition; all translations of this novel quoted in this chapter are my own. 2 Peter G. Earle, El futuro como espejismo, in Gabriel Garca Mrquez: El escritor y la crtica (Madrid: Taurus, 1981). Graciela Maturo, Claves simblicas de Garca Mrquez, 2d ed. (Buenos Aires: Fernando Garca Cambeiro, 1977). 3 Earle relies on J. E. Cirlots A Dictionary of Symbols (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962, 49) in order to interpret the role of the rooster in No One Writes to the Colonel. 4 See pages 7, 8, 10, 20, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 38, 51, 53, 66, 69, 71, 72, 78, 86, 89, 90, 99, 101, 102, 104. 5 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hlne Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), 370. 6 George R. McMurray, Gabriel Garca Mrquez (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977). 7 Kristeva has been studying the relationship between rejection and creativity continuously from the time she worked on Mallarm and wrote La rvolution du langage potique, but she dwells most particularly on this relationship in her more recent Pouvoirs de lhorreur (Paris: Points, 1980). 8 Rama takes this word purely as an expletive forgetting, it seems, that the colonel most emphatically expresses a distaste for cursing when he visits Alvaro. The last word in Garca Mrquezs novella is used with a great deal of forethought and has meaning on dierent levels, as we shall see. 9 Garca Mrquez says as much himself to Mario Sergio Conti in A New Epic from Garca Mrquez, World Press Review (October 1986), 60. 10 In a rare interview Garca Mrquez told Marlise Simons that aging had made him realize that feelings and sentiments, what happens in the heart, are ultimately the most important. Garca Mrquez on Love, Plagues, and Politics, New York Times Book Review, 21 February 1988, 2325. 11 Writing about El amor en los tiempos del clera in December 1985, Francisco Lemos Arboleda declared that the novel portrayed a series of repugnant and sick sexual passions (El Pas, 3 December 1985, 14). 12 In an early article titled The Motif of Voyage as Mythical Symbol in El amor en los tiempos del clera by Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Margaret Snook argues that this author presents the symbolic voyage from one narrative space to another under dierent guises, and that one of these guises is always the human body. As I demon-

260 Notes to chapter three

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14

15 16

17

18 19

20

strate in this chapter, and Snook herself argues, in Garca Mrquezs work, the human body [is] transformed metaphorically. In her article she studies the body only as a guise for the voyage, but her intuition regarding the work of the Colombian author was certainly an inspiration to me (Hispanic Journal 10 [1], 1988, 8591). Leona Cassiani, we are told, was the true woman in Florentinos life, although neither of them ever knew it and they never make love (182). Ten years after she goes to work for the River Company, She loved him so much that instead of deceiving him she preferred to continue loving him, until he grasped, at last, that it is possible to be a womans friend and not go to bed with her (188). One critic has referred to the novel as an encyclopedia of love although, as I will show, not all so-called love relationships portrayed in Love in the Time of Cholera involve love (Mijal Heidi Gai, Un temprano cuento de amor de Garca Mrquez ledo desde Los tiempos del clera, Neophilologus 73 [3], 1989, 385). One of the points Garca Mrquez is making is that we need to rethink what is meant by love. With typical accuracy, Mabel Moraa writes that Love in the Time of Cholera is a kind of frieze on which are displayed all possible stages of love (Modernity and Marginality in Love in the Time of Cholera, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 14 [1], 1990, 28). Voir ouvre tout lespace au dsir, Starobinski writes, mais voir ne sut pas au dsir (LOeil vivant, 13). That watching and the eye are motifs associated with Florentino and his love for Fermina is made evident in a variety of ways. For instance, the house he builds in the hope of making Fermina Daza, and no one but Fermina Daza, happy is in the Street of the Windows. Lest this reference be too veiled, Garca Mrquez makes a point of adding, that it was a haven that suited his way of loving, because the location was discreet despite the fact that the numerous windows that gave the street its name made one think of too many eyes (164). Florentino even buys the looking glass from Don Sanchos Inn where Ferminas face was once reected during what was, for him, a memorable dinner, and hangs it across from his mothers bed (288). Unable to have the real thing, he buys Ferminas reection and pairs it with the bed in which, according to Christian Metz, the voyeurs trauma begins (Le signiant imaginaire [Paris: Union Gnrale dEditiones, 1977], 288). Ferminas centrality is further emphasized in these two paragraphs by twelve thirdperson feminine possessive objects and two reexive pronouns. It should be obvious, from this remark, that Love in the Time of Cholera is about dierent kinds of aective and/or erotic relationships that are not love. Despite what Bernard Schulz-Cruz maintains, Florentinos and Ferminas youthful idyll cannot and should not be compared to their mature relationship in the last chapter (Bernard Schulz-Cruz, La vocacin de la escritura en El amor en los tiempos del clera, INTI: Revista de Literatura Hispnica 31, 1990, 2134). Later that day, when her father is taking his afternoon nap, Fermina sends Florentino a two-line note informing him, Today, when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion (102).

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21 Garca Mrquez dened Ferminas role in the novel when he said, she is the strong one, Fermina Daza. She is the novel (quoted in Francisco Arroyo, El amor, la vejez, la muerte, in El Pas 321 [12 December 1985]: 2). 22 While men strut about convinced of their importance, women alone knew how tiresome was the man they loved to distraction, who perhaps loved them but whom they had to continue nurturing until his last breath as if he were a child, suckling him, changing his soiled diapers, distracting him with a mothers tricks to ease his terror at going out each morning to face reality (202). Fermina Daza is the epitome of the wife-mother in Love in the Time of Cholera. This is why, for instance, after bathing her husband, she helped him to dress: she sprinkled talcum powder between his legs, she smoothed cocoa butter on his rashes, she helped him put on his underwear with as much love as if it were a diaper. . . . Their conjugal dawns grew calm because he had returned to the childhood his children had taken away from him (31). 23 Florentino succeeds in accumulating some twenty-ve notebooks, with sixhundred-twenty-two entries of long-term liaisons, apart from the countless eeting adventures by the time Dr. Urbino drops dead (152). 24 The Urbinos marriage seems to be such a perfect alliance when described by other characters in the novel that one tends to forget that Juvenals . . . suit had never been undertaken in the name of love (205). The many worldly goods he oers Fermina security, order, happinessmight resemble love, almost be love. But they were not love, we are distinctly told (205, my emphasis). Garca Mrquez also emphasizes that life without love was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other in society in order not to commit murder (211). 25 As Mabel Moraa rightly arms, Florentino Ariza is committed to no project other than himself (30); it is just as true, however, that he evolves dramatically in the last chapter (Modernity and Marginality in Love in the Time of Cholera, 2743). 26 The barrenness of Florentinos liaisons works both ways and is never more evident than when he is voraciously snatched away by a woman with the revealing name of Ausencia. She is a woman who is so absorbed in herself that when she mounts him she leaves him exhausted, incomplete . . . with the impression of being no more than an instrument of pleasure (178). In fact, once when he reproachfully tells her, You treat me as if I were just anybody, she doesnt mince words. Not at all, she answers, as if you were nobody (my emphasis, 178). 27 One of Florentinos mistresses, Andrea Varn, attributes a distinctive sensuality to enemas and convinces him to share them with her as they tried to create even more love within their love (271). 28 After Florentino saw Fermina for the rst time, his mother knew, because he lost his voice and his appetite and spent the entire night tossing and turning in his bed (61). Then, when he began to wait for the answer to his rst letter, his anguish was complicated by diarrhea and green vomit, he became disoriented and suered from sudden fainting spells, and his mother was terried because his condition did not resemble the turmoil of love so much as the devastation of cholera (61). When a

262 Notes to chapter three

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

homeopathic doctor is called in to look at Florentino, he concludes, likewise, that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera (62). For instance, love and excrement are brought together when Leona Cassiani is described as a erce black woman smeared with shit and love (187). However, this is one reference that bears no relation to the grand scheme of withholding and release in which Florentino plays the main role. According to Norman O. Brown, in Gullivers Travels the Yahoo ritual of discharging excrements on the heros head, for example, symbolizes the renewal of society (Life Against Death, 190). In her shrewd article on the novel, Margaret Snook links Florentinos spartan lifestyle to his personal austerity, suggesting that his sparsely furnished house corresponds to the emptiness of his emotional life (Lugar y espacio en El amor en los tiempos del clera, 95101). For studies in which excrement, the color black, and the devil are linked, I refer readers to J. E. Bourke, Scatological Rites of All Nations (Washington, D.C.: W. H. Lowdermilk, 1891), 163; Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare (New York: Liveright, 1951), 122, 203; M. J. Rudwin, The Devil in Legend and Literature (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1931), 45, 207, 250; and, of course, Dantes Inferno, canto 34, 7693. In the episode that describes the interconnection between lofty words and shit, Garca Mrquez revisits Freuds discussion of what is highest and lowest in human nature. In Freuds terms, Thus it is that what belongs to the lowest depths in the minds of each one of us is changed, through this formation of the ideal, into what we value highest in the human soul (The Ego and the Id, 48). With a great deal of irony, Garca Mrquez travels not from the lowest depths to the formation of the ideal but instead inverts the direction of Freuds equation. Thus he taints the lofty and idealistic letter that Florentino writes Fermina with what belongs to the lowest depths. Just as signicant as the bird droppings on their rst exchange is the fact that Ferminas last letter to Florentino before her father sends her away is written on toilet paper (82). We know that in literature as well as in dreams a voyage always presents an act of evolution and, consequently, rites of initiation often take the form of a symbolic journey (see, for instance, Juan Eduardo Cirlots Diccionario de smbolos, 460). Parallels with No One Writes to the Colonel are, once again, obvious. December is the time of renewal, and the climate of perpetual spring is the time of growth in both tales. In terms of human relations, Garca Mrquez always puts the accent on knowing. In Spanish, the etymology of the verb to know bears out his choice. The con in conocer (to know) derives from cum; nocer cum literally means to be born with and implies the presence of someone else with whom we engage in a process of exchange. Other critics have noted the rich ambiguity of Saint-Amours name, including the connotation of lamentation and destruction associated with the name Jeremiah. Mijal Heidi Gais Un temprano cuento de amor de Garca Mrquez leido desde los tiempos del clera is a case in point.

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38 Garca Mrquezs modern-day Bible is humanistic rather than religious; consequently, his own Jeremiah is described as an atheistic saint (6). 39 Much to Urbinos unfathomable capacity for astonishment, Jeremiahs mistress was aware that he was about to kill himself because he had made the irrevocable decision to take his own life when he was sixty years old, and all she did was help him to endure the suering as lovingly as she had helped him to discover happiness (15). When Urbino suggests to her that her duty was to report him, she answers that she could not do that because she loved him too much (15). To the dismay of her emotionally impaired husband, Fermina fully understands such expressions of loyalty. When Urbino voices astonishment that Saint-Amours mistress did not stop him from committing suicide, Fermina explains that it seemed to her a heartbreaking proof of love that she had helped him carry out his decision to die (32). 40 This process of renewal in Love in the Time of Cholera is made clear not only through Florentinos gastric explosion and his change from black to white clothes, but also by Ferminas ritual cleansing. After her husbands death, in an attempt to come to terms with her new situation and wishing to be herself again, to recover all she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that . . . did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity, she burns innumerable objects so tied to her life that by now they formed part of her identity (179, 281). Ferminas ritual burning signals the end of one era, and the beginning of another. 41 Behold, I am bringing upon this city and upon all its towns all the evil that I have pronounced against it ( Jeremiah 19:15). 42 This whole land shall become a ruin and a waste ( Jeremiah 25:11). 43 Could it be that Garca Mrquez chose his heroines name because a close homograph of Fermina is femina (woman)? 44 Garca Mrquez once declared that he could not have written Love in the Time of Cholera when [he] was younger (Marlise Simons, Garca Mrquez on Love, Plagues and Politics, 2325). Michael Palencia-Roth argues that the novel is a reection on old age; I feel that old age is simply the mask worn by experience, which may sound like another way of saying exactly what Palencia-Roth claims but is not (Michael Palencia-Roth, Gabriel Garca Mrquez, 5458). Love in the Time of Cholera is not about one age in particular; it is about learning how to love. Because learning is a process, it makes sense to portray the couple who learns to love after many struggles and setbacks as old, in order to emphasize their evolution.

4. The degraded body in the work of Severo Sarduy

1 The narrators and characters of Sarduys novels spend considerable time and space pondering over the meaning and practice of writing. The rst few pages of Cobra are a veritable canon of the art. In Colibr one of the narrators is named Sarduy, and the heros tattooed body is referred to as the manuscript. 2 This is particularly true in Colibr, in which a father addresses one of the novels narrators to inform him: you are already a grown man and a member of the Sarduy family (129).

264 Notes to chapter four

3 This pint-sized version of Cobra is a white dwarf called Pup, short for La Poupe. 4 After pointing out the link between phallus and foot in Cobra, Alicia Rivero-Potter adds something I had missed in my own reading: uno de los libros que [Cobra] lee, she explains, es sobre la reduccin de testculos y Cobra intenta aplicarse el mtodo a los pies (Autor/Lector, 111). 5 I pointed this out in an article published in 1985, where I explain that Sarduy takes the term zob (borrowed from Arabic but, nowadays, of current use in French slang) as the point of departure for the Moroccan doctors name (Cuadernos americanos, 258, 243). To this root he adds the consonants Kt, a phonetic approximation of the Spanish verb quitar, to remove. The name of the castrating doctor in Cobra isand I say this parodying Severothe signier of his own signied: the zob remover. 6 I again refer readers to my article in Cuadernos americanos, where this homology is explained in full detail. 7 When the father symbolically splits up the mother and child during the Oedipal crisis, the latters desire for the mother or the imaginary unity with her must be repressed. Sarduy may be referring to the fusion between mother and child prior to the symbolic castration when, allegedly remembering a childhood accident, he explains to the reader, my mother and I . . . were almost one and the same person (El Cristo de la rue Jacob, 11). As J. Hillis Miller maintains, a literary text is inhabited by a long chain of parasitical presences, echoes, allusions, guests, ghosts of previous texts (The Limits of Pluralism, III: The Critic as Host, Critical Inquiry [spring 1977], 446). Miller is specically referring to artistic inuences, but the past also includes an authors personal life. Clearly, it, too, is a previous text exerting inuence upon work in progress. 8 Roberto Gonzlez Echevarra discusses this period of Sarduys life in great detail in La ruta de Severo Sarduy, 4047. 9 Never one to do anything gratuitously, Sarduy probably amused himself foreshadowing the outcome of the couples liaison in his choice of profession for the Asian master in self-defense. Karate literally means empty hand in Japanese; very ttingly, the drama that Sarduy spent his life portraying was the quest for the unattainable. 10 According to legend, the Myrmidons were Thessalian soldiers who fought in the Trojan War under Achilles. Typical of his penchant for inversion, Sarduy is choosing the prototype of the macho soldier to embody the eeminate troupe that steals his narrators developing tale. 11 plastic nger bananas, glitter walnuts, a golden peach and a raspberry (Colibr, 128). 12 The writings to which the father is referring to in this tirade are, very pointedly, ludicrous parodies of homosexual fantasies in which the characters vilify each other and long for their own castration. As we soon discover, in Colibr the body of desire is a slippery one that gets away from its author until he chooses to stand up to his father. The father described in the novel begins by putting ice under his sons testicles, and follows the cold treatment demanding he burn the four pieces of shit (111, 129). The son disobeys him but, unlike Oedipus, he manages to keep both his eyes and his wits because, when all is said and done, Sarduys is a tale que pincha pero no corta. The fact is: nothing in this story is removed. The fathers wish is ignored, and the result of this disobedience turns out to be the sons writing, including Colibr.

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13 In an article titled La ambiviolencia en la obra de Severo Sarduy (Cuadernos Americanos 285, no. 1, 1985), I argued that Cobra was a staging of castration and the castration complex. 14 Psychoanalytic theory stresses the interconnection between anal organization and human aggression to the point of labeling this phase of infantile sexuality the anal sadistic phase. Deance, mastery, will to power, suggests Norman O. Brown, are attributes of human reason rst developed in the symbolic manipulation of excrement and perpetuated in the symbolic manipulation of symbolic substitutes for excrement (Life Against Death, 192). 15 Cobras great aw marring his otherwise perfect body is to have feet so big that seeing them makes men ee (11). 16 In Cobra the hero wants to be a mirror reection of the primary love object from which he has never established a distance; unable to fulll this fantasy, he changes his tune. In Maitreya his wish is not to become the other but to enter her body. In other words, in the earlier novel, the hero does not dierentiate his own image from the mothers; in the later one he does but is fully dependent on his desire to become reunited with her. 17 The Seora in Cobra, Lady Tremendous in Maitreya, and the Regent in Colibr are the most typicalalthough by no means the onlyexamples of ruling matriarchs in Sarduys work. 18 According to Hegel, the broken circle represents the incomplete status of human selfawareness, while the full circle symbolizes complete understanding which can only be divine. 19 Referring to this repossession, Roberto Gonzlez Echevarra writes about Sarduy, La ausencia, la separacin, la carencia marcan su obra tanto como el deseo de una plenitud recuperada. Por eso los actos de recuperacin son tan complejos y ricos, y la recuperacin . . . se equipara al acto de la escritura (La ruta de Severo Sarduy, 5). 20 As Dorothy Dinnerstein has proposed, male anxieties about female autonomy probably go as deep as everyones mother-dominated infancy (The Mermaid and the Minotaur, 5). Both Dinnerstein and Karen Horney show that male dread of women and, specically, the male dread of maternal autonomy has objectied itself in vilication of women (Horney, The Dread of Women, in Feminine Psychology, 1454). For a discussion of the Medusa Complex and its misogynistic message, interested readers can also see Philip Slaters The Glory of Hera and R. D. Laings classic, The Divided Self. 21 In the words of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Little Snow White begins when the Queen, having become a mother, metamorphoses into a witchthat is, into a wicked step mother (Madwoman in the Attic, 37). The Grimms sleight of hand is to substitute a bad mother for the good one, masking the Oedipal rivalry which is the bedrock of this story. 22 In The Juniper Tree, another folktale that shares a signicant number of symbolic features with Sarduys trilogy, the young hero is transformed into a furious golden bird who sings a song of vengeance against his murderess, and ends up crushing her to death (in other words, exactly what she does to him in Maitreya ). The conspicuous

266 Notes to chapter four

aggression and violence present in the Grimms fairy tales andalthough for the most part tongue in cheekin Sarduys trilogy make obvious the anger harbored by the male imagination as it transcribes the relationship to the mother. 23 A representative example of a story in which a father does everything in his power to forestall his sons wish to replace him is the Grimms The Golden Bird. 24 As I trust it has become clear from this reading, whether Regent or Queen, male or female, the oppressive rulers portrayed by both Sarduy and the Grimms are thinly disguised mother gures.

5. Rewriting the body: renewal through language in the works of Rosario Castellanos
1 Neoindigenistas are a handful of twentieth-century Latin American authors who have pleaded the case of Indians in their works of ction. Because they are not Indians themselves, their work cannot be called indigenous; as the great Peruvian theoretician Jos Carlos Maritegui has pointed out, their perspective on Indian culture is that of a sympathetic outsider. However, unlike their fellow Indigenistas, the Neoindigenistas seek to penetrate the indigenous cosmic vision. Their highly stirring novels and short stories rise above the level of propaganda to become art with a mission. The great masters of Neoindigenismo are generally acknowledged to be Ciro Alegra (Peru), Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala), Manuel Scorza (Peru), Rosario Castellanos (Mexico), and Jos Mara Arguedas (Peru). 2 A ladino is anyone who is not Indian, including people of mixed Indian blood such as mestizos. Indians who adopt habits or fashions extraneous to village lifefor instance, wearing shoes and factory-made clothesare referred to as indios ladinizados. 3 . . . el ayuntamiento de dos bestias carnvoras de especie diferente que de pronto se hallan encerradas en la misma jaula. Se rasguan, se mordisquean, se devoran, por conquistar un milmetro ms de la mitad de la cama que les corresponde, un gramo ms de la racin destinada a cada uno. Y no porque importe ni la cama ni la racin. Lo que importa es reducir al otro a esclavitud. Aniquilarlo. 4 In a memorable interview with Luis Adolfo Domnguez, Castellanos made the point that, as far as she was concerned, writing was a vehicle for self-analysis: Lo que pasa es que yo escribo para m, she declared, Me interesa, como lectora, aquello que yo puedo escribir. Hay una serie de fenmenos en el mundo que no entiendo si no los expreso . . . , she assured Domnguez, y me interesa entenderlos. Entrevista con Rosario Castellanos, Revista de Bellas Artes, April 1969, 14. 5 un formidable documento vital, un testimonio de primer orden que seduce a las mujeres y a los hombres a quienes les interesa comprender a las mujeres. 6 Mi literatura . . . de combate, o como se le quiera llamar, no est hecha para las manos y los ojos de alguien que vaya a resolver la situacin. Yo simplemente quiero que se haga conciencia . . . por lo menos hacerme yo conciencia, respecto de un tipo de fenmenos (Interview with Emmanuel Carballo, Diecinueve protagonistas de la literatura mexicana del siglo XX [Mexico City: Empresas Editoriales, S.A., 1965], 27).

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7 The elected functionaries in these communities are called varas altas or tall rods for the stas they carry as symbols of rank. 8 It bears keeping in mind that caxln, a Tzotzil word used to designate those in power and used throughout the novel, is almost homologous with castellan. 9 As Luce Irigaray points out, Si nous continuons nous parler le mme langage, nous allons reproduire la mme histoire (If we continue to speak the same language to each other and to ourselves [nous parler has both meanings], then we shall reproduce the same story and the same history. Quand nos lvres se parlent, in Ce sexe qui nen est pas un (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977), 20517. In other words, feminine discourse must struggle to speak otherwise, which is exactly what we see Castellanos attempting to portray in Ocio de tinieblas. 10 Kristeva developed the term chora in order to account for the extralinguistic function, which she believes distinguishes language from other sign systems and which marks the subjects condition in language as dialectical or double. Kristeva borrows this term from Platos Timaeus and uses it to refer to a receptacle that is hybrid and anterior to identity and naming. In La rvolution du langage potique she uses the Platonic term in two dierent but related ways. First, the chora signies a hypothetical space or phase that precedes the childs acquisition of language and is prior to the mirror stage. Kristeva describes this preverbal chora as rhythmic, nourishing, maternal, and formed by what Freud dened as instinctual drives. In a second use of the term, she associates the chora with the extralinguistic functioning that she contends is a dimension of all signifying practice. For Kristeva, the childs acquisition of language necessitates a rupture, which is at once a conscious-unconscious division of the emerging subject, and its detachment from the presymbolic chora. In La rvolution du langage potique, Kristeva develops the notion of language as a dialectical struggle between two polesthe semiotic (a pre- or translinguistic modality of psychic inscriptions controlled by the primary processes of displacement and condensation) and the symbolic (propositions or representations constitutive of language as a system of signs). Kristeva maintains that although language always includes both of these modalities, modern Western society has consistently refused the semiotic, thereby dissociating the subject from language and adopting a onedimensional model of language and self. Intending to challenge this unitary model, she elaborates a theory of subject identity as produced in language, in dialectical process between the semiotic and the symbolic poles. She explains how, without the symbolic intervening as order, identity, and consciousness, there would be no art or language as communication. On the other hand, without the semiotic, the symbolic would lack any form of materiality, with the result that there would still be no art or language as communication. 11 There are no coincidences in Ocio de tinieblas. The reemergence of the whip in the cave of Tzajal-hemel is no exception to this rule. We rst saw this weapon associated with castilla, the discourse of power. Later in the action it appears depicted as an emblem of manliness (sign of manhood the whip with which the male overpowers the female, 76); almost immediately, the whip is connected to the living embodiment of that powerLeonardo Cifuenteswhose own punta de ltigo makes Mar-

268 Notes to chapter ve

12

13

14 15

16

cela pregnant. The whip in Ocio is there to hurt, and its victims are usually women. However, this trend is cut short in Tzajal-hemel the second time around. After giving birth to the gods, Catalina annuls the power of the whip and replaces it with what could be referred toborrowing Castellanoss own symbolsas the power of the cave. According to Suleiman, the goal of any author seeking to redene the position of women should be to invent both a new poetics and a new politics, based on womens reclaiming . . . control over their bodies and a voice with which to speak about it (Re)writing the Body: The Politics and Poetics of Female Eroticism, in The Female Body in Western Culture, 7). For a period of over ten years, Irigaray was vehement about the possibility of articulating a form of womanspeak. Dened as mother-substance, she argued in 1985, often obscure, often occult of the verb of men, we need our subject, our noun, our verb, our predicates, our elementary sentence, our base rhythm, our morphological identity, our generic incarnation, our genealogy (Femmes divines, Critique 454 [1985], 294308; translated by Stephen Muecke as Divine Women [Sydney: Local Consumption, 1986, 11]). Arguments in favor of womanspeak are also present in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985) and Womens Exile, an interview with Irigaray translated by Couze Veun, in Ideology and Consciousness 1 (May 1977), 6276, esp. p. 64. The pre-Oedipal stage before the child acquires language corresponds to what Kristeva calls the semiotic and Castellanos refers to as inspired stammers. It is highly signicant that Castellanos has named the priest who gets butchered by the Indians Manuel. Manu, the rst man as well as the rst king, means, at the same time, the rst dead (Dumezil, Mitra et Varuna, cited in Kristeva, Rvolution, 546). Castellanoss cave scene is an allegory of womans powers of procreation, a power that has been reenacted in rites from time immemorial. Its ancestry can also be readily traced back to many myths, a prime example of which is the tale of Isis and her brother Osiris. Like the god Osiris, Pedro Winiktn in Ocio was the enemy of all violence, and it was by gentleness alone that he subjected his people. Out of jealousy (or, in other words, out of male rivalry) Osiris was killed and his body cut to pieces. Her wife and sister Isis found the pieces and, because of her powers of sorcery, succeeded in restoring her husbands dead body to life. In psychoanalytic terms, Osiriss dismemberment dramatizes mans inherent fear of expropriation, of separation, of the loss of the attribute, while Isiss sleight of hand discloses womans ability to give life anew (Cixous, Jeune ne, 147). In one of his incarnations Osiris was a vegetation spirit that dies and is ceaselessly reborn. The ability to overcome death is the gift his wife gives him, as the myth makes amply clear. This ability to procreate is symbolically dramatized in Castellanoss cave scene, but Winiktn cannot tolerate Catalinas power because he misjudges it. He perceives it as an attempt on her part to dispossess him of power when, in fact, it is her procreative gift that enables him to brandish the Name of the Father. As Kristeva explains, La mre dtient la gnra-

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17 18

19

20

21

22 23

24

tion et donc la cohrence des ensembles sociaux, mais cette fonction nest quune fraction de la loi qui gre les ensembles, et dont le meurtre du pre constitue la face cache (Rvolution, 547). In Ocio there is also a rivalry between men and between races; Winiktns nonviolence is contrasted to Leonardo Cifuentess ruthlessness. Beginning with the similarity of their namesIsidoro and IdolinaCastellanos makes apparent the link between them. As if to elaborate upon Aristotles notion that being female was in and of itself a deformity, the nineteenth-century medical establishment thought that hysterialike many other nervous disorderswas caused by the female reproductive system. The motifs associated with Isabel and Idolinasewing, enclosure, silence, and passivityare key elements in the traditional lives of women, and preponderant themes in womens writing. Signicantly, in their discussion of Little Snow White Gilbert and Gubar argue that to be caught and trapped in a mirror . . . is to be driven inward, obsessively studying self-images as if seeking a viable self (Madwoman, 37). In Little Snow White the wicked Queen is always looking into her magic mirror, doomed to an inward search that psychoanalysts like Bettelheim censoriously dene as narcissism. As Mary Elizabeth Coleridges The Other Side of the Mirror suggests, however, this kind of inward search is dictated by the kinds of lives from which all outward prospects have been removed. In Ocio de tinieblas the one who looks into mirrors is Idolinanot the wicked Queen, but her victim. Be that as it may, what Coleridges poem suggests is just as applicable to Idolina as it is to the Grimms witch. A life from which all outward prospects have been removed is what Castellanos is depicting in her fable, the quandary facing not merely Idolina but all women. Algn da lo sabr. Este cuerpo que ha sido mi albergue, mi prisin, mi hospital, es mi tumba (from Lvida Luz ). The whip of the law is only in the hands of white landowners and, to be a landowner implies being part of a race, a language, a history that . . . Indians were incapable of improvising (58). Describing his theory of poetry to Richard Watson Dixon, and after suggesting that the artists most essential quality was masterly execution which is a kind of male gift, and especially marks o men from women, Gerard Manley Hopkins went on to add, the male quality is the creative gift (The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, ed. C. C. Abbott [London, Oxford University Press, 1935], 133).

6. The body of pleasure in Tununa Mercados Canon de alcoba

1 Revising the notion that the pleasure of reading comes from the resolution of enigmas, Mercado teaches us that the kind of enjoyment Barthes referred to as jouissance is present at each step of the reading process in the pictures she paints to arouse and delight.

270 Notes to chapter six

2 . . . las jvenes poetas han empezado a romper con una tradicin: la de ocultar la propia condicin femenina. . . . El hecho que hayan escogido el cuerpo como lenguaje para hablar de s mismas, me parece un desafo que se convierte en un placer extraordinario (El cuerpo del deseo: Poesa ertica femenina en el Mxico actual [Xulapa: UAM Veracruzana, 1989], 36). 3 Ella est mirndose ahora, con esos ojos, en los ojos de la otra, extrayendo con intensidad el secreto mensaje que haba comenzado a adivinar desde horas antes (CA, 34). 4 El amor que se oye es como el mar que se escucha en los caracoles. Los ojos no ven, la nariz no huele, las manos no tocan, pero ese mar levanta sus olas bravas en los acantilados o se serena mansamente sobre las playas (32). 5 Luce Irigaray complains that Freuds scenarios of sexual curiosity and dierence are invariably visual, and indeed Schaulust or scopophiliathe eroticized desire to seeis a prime theme in Freuds writings, and is closely tied to the Wisstrieb, epistemophilia. Speculum de lautre femme, 53. 6 I am using jouissance (bliss) in contrast to pleasure ( plaisir ) as does Barthes, although he himself assures us it is impossible to make a clear distinction between these terms (Pleasure, 14). Jouissance is, in fact, a useful term in our discussion of Tununa Mercados erotic work because one of its literal meanings is to come in orgasm. The term cannot be fully rendered into English although it translates well into the Spanish gozar, which means physical enjoyment. I will continue to use the French word in my discussion because, as Stephen Heath has observed, bliss is a dubious translation of jouissance since it brings with it connotations of religious and social contentment which are completely at odds with what Barthes meant in French, a radically violent pleasure which shattersdissipates, loses[the] ego (Image-Music-Text, selected and trans. Stephen Heath [New York: Hill and Wang, 1977], 91). 7 See Julia Kristeva, Rvolution, 4349; also, Jacques Lacan, Subversion du sujet et dialectique du dsir, in Ecrits, 822. 8 Kolodnys groundbreaking article, Some Notes on Dening a Feminist Literary Criticism, was rst published in Critical Inquiry in 1975 (2, 1, 7592). It was soon after reprinted in Cheryl L. Brown and Karen Olson, eds., Feminist Criticism: Essays on Theory, Poetry and Prose (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1978), 3758. 9 Signicantly, Mercado refers to the cooking process as a session furthering the comparison between psychoanalysis and mijotage. She also makes a point of adding that no one, no stranger can interrupt this session in which everything takes place according to a routine but in which each detail soon takes on a special meaning of object unto itself . . . (15). 10 Among the many diculties Mercado encountered during her long psychoanalytic cure, some of the most poignant are described in her stirring En estado de memoria (1992). There is no doubt she belongs to what Irigaray denes as a philosophical tradition in which psychoanalysis takes its place as a stage in understanding the selfrealization of consciousness, especially in its sexuate determinations (Equal or Different? 31).

Notes to chapter six

271

11 In Pleasure of the Text Barthes explains that desire is never predicated on revelations in full but on half-disclosures; for him the locus of erotic desire is the place where the skin peeks through the clothing suggestingand never fully revealingwhat hides beneath it. In his eyes the erotic always relies on what he calls intermittence: . . . the skin that ashes between two pieces of clothing (the pants and the sweater), or between two edges (the unbuttoned shirt, the glove and the cus of a shirt (19). 12 Even the narrator is sometimes like the reader, presented with alternatives, claiming that the morning after dreaming images continue to run through her minds eye, like a lm that she sees without having to look (50). 13 Like Cixous, Mercado feels that words have been translated, that speech as a whole has been emptied out of its meaning until words have become dried, reduced and embalmed (Cixous, Lapproche, 412). This is why her aim is to renew language from a feminine perspective. 14 According to Mercado, words also awaken the body, reenact it, and translate it: for instance, a pubiss briny smell is so pungent as to almost come alive in the words that describe it (101). 15 It is to these reactions that Irigaray is referring when she says, Letre sexu feminin dans et par le discours serait aussi un lieu de dpts des restes produits par le fonctionnement du langage (Ce sexe, 88). 16 Gilbert and Gubar highlight how women are denied the right to create their own images of femaleness, and instead must seek to conform to the patriarchal standards imposed on them (Madwoman, xii). 17 In 1967 Tununa Mercado, having left Argentina for political reasons, settled in France, where, for a few years, she taught Spanish American literature in the Facult des Lettres of Besanon. It was an experience she recalled as harrowing. The only French she knew at the time was a fragment of Sartres Nausea that she had memorized in French class two weeks before leaving Buenos Aires. Nonetheless, it is clear that this stay in France had considerable impact on her life, her readings, and her intellectual development. Among Latin American authors, she is one of the most conversant with French criticism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and feminism (En estado de memoria, 1214). 18 It is no coincidence that the voice which calls the assembly to order should completely depersonalize the woman speaker. By telling her, nothing is being said here, he is literally erasing her as agent from the action. 19 Canon de alcoba (Canon for the Bedchamber ) needs to be read, therefore, as an instruction manual for loving and writing. 20 It is crucial to note that Mercado says phallus and not penis, neatly dierentiating between the male organ and the symbol of power, of the Name of the Father, of arbitrary (and usually intolerant) authority. 21 Unlike Cixous and Kristeva (in Stabat Mater), Mercado does not propose androgyny as a panacea, however. Her proposition is truly predicated on love between the sexes, and we are reminded in Las Amigas that, even when sexually fullling

272 Notes to chapter six

themselves, the amigas in question go on yearning for the presence of men: en algunos de sus gestos se percibe un clamor por la presencia del hombre (9293). 22 Jouissance is pleasure and pleasure, too, is an epistemological experience.

Conclusion
1 Karen Horney, The Dread of Woman, in Feminine Psychology, 13346; Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur, 12454. For discussions of the Medusa Complex and its misogynistic message, see also Philip Slater, The Glory of Hera, and R. D. Laing, The Divided Self. 2 Arguably the wittiest portrayal of the excremental vision, Swifts A Tale of the Tub dates from 169698. 3 That loneliness is the essence of the human condition is the subject of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). 4 Gilbert and Gubar explain how diseases like hysteria are caused by patriarchal socialization in several ways. Most obviously, they say, any young girl, but especially a lively or imaginative one, is likely to experience her education in docility, submissiveness, self-lessness as in some sense sickening. To be trained in renunciation is almost necessarily to be trained to ill health, since the human animals rst and strongest urge is to his/her own survival, pleasure, assertion. Such training also explains the virulent anger we nd in novels such as Albaluca Angels Las andariegas (Madwoman, 5354). 5 We say this keeping in mind that, as Ellen Moers and Elaine Showalter have shown, by the nineteenth century women had a rich culture and literature of their own. As Gilbert and Gubar go on to say, this was a community in which women consciously read and related to each others works. However, this does not change the fact that their images in literature were still being dened by men, and that they acted out male metaphors in their own texts (Madwoman, xii). 6 Idolina tries the opposite tactic to obtain power, but she also acts it out by means of the body. Instead of putting forth, instead of displaying her charms like Julia, she withholds them. The roan mare is a passionate woman; Idolina becomes an invalid. Their approach is dierent, but their goal one and the same: to manipulate, to gain attention and power through the body. Idolinas scheme fails as plainly as Julias, however.

Notes to conclusion 273

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284 Bibliography

Index
i

Abject: in Sarduys work, 138, 171; as a substitute for the absent and primary source of longing, 171 Aggression: as a key element in stories written by men, 243 aids: in Pjaros de la playa, 138 Anaclitic phase: and the conclusion of Colibr, 162, 163 Anal activity of expulsion: and the semiotic drive, 233 in Canon de alcoba, 234 Anal eroticism: screened behind idealization of the fair sex, 246 Anal xation, in Love in the Time of Cholera, 128 Anality: in Colibr, 158; and destructive desires, 48; epitomized in our animal body, in Love in the Time of Cholera, 127; Florentino Arizas inability to give, 123, 125, 133; Florentino Arizas surrender to the will of his body, 123, 134; parodied in Sarduys ction, 157; phase of, and separation from the mother, 110; and scatological xation in No One Writes to the Colonel, 108 Anal stage, 246; and human aggression, 266 n.14; and mutilation in Sarduys work, 158; supremacy of, in Cobra and Maitreya, 158 Androgyny: not a panacea in Mercados work, 272 n.21; subject in Canon de alcoba, 237

Anger: in Nicole Brossards work, 221; in feminist works of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, 251; in men, 237; vis--vis mother gures in Sarduys work, 267 n.22; vacated from Canon de alcoba, 220; voiced in stories by Cortzar, Cabrera Infante, and Sarduy, 245; in the work of the rst generation of feminist authors, 222 Animals: in Cortzars work, 31, 36, 256 n.7; creeping, in Cortzars stories, 36; man-eaters, 37; phobias, 88 Antagonism: between men and women, 192, 193 Anxiety: sources of, in Cortzars work, 6 Arcadia: complex of, and separation anxiety in Cortzars work, 257 n.12 Auerbach, Nina: on Monique Wittigs Les gurillres, 22223 Autobiography: refurbishments in, 75 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 108 Balzac, Honor de: Human Comedy, 113 Barthes, Roland, 1, 216, 227; on erotic desire, 272 n.11; and jouissance, 270 n.1, 271 n.6 Bataille, Georges, 246; dierence between his notion of eroticism and Tununa Mercados, 216; on eroticism, 216; on Hegel, 163; on negativity that serves no purpose, compared to Mercados work, 236; and role of the eye, 8

Beauvoir, Simone de: and notion of womans fundamental otherness in relation to men, 174 Bettelheim, Bruno: on the daughters budding sexuality in Snow White, 205; and Oedipal diculties in fairy tales, 166, 167; on the role of the bad Queen in Snow White, 203 Birth, 29; and dread, 30; and Oedipus complex, 39; portrayed as a regression into passivity in Ocio de tinieblas, 201; and symbolic substitutions, 30; waters and Axolotl, 255 n.5 Birth trauma, 26, 28, 29; and dread of being swallowed, in Cortzars stories, 256 n.7; mastery of, 48 Black: linked with excrement in Love in the Time of Cholera, 125 Blind spot (la tache aveugle ): and Hegels discussion of stages of spirit en route to self-comprehension, 163 Bloom, Harold: notion of poetic misprision and the work of Sarduy, 154 Bodily functions: as underlying thematic principle in No One Writes to the Colonel, 110 Body: analogous to words in Canon de alcoba, 237; awakened by words, 272 n.14; as bait, 249, 250; celebration of, 14; celebration of, in Canon de alcoba, 227; celebration of female, in Canon de alcoba, 220; in crisis, 242; and desire, 4, 7; as didactive vehicle, 113; dismembered in Cobra, 138, 139; endowed with symbolic value, 101; evolution in Love in the Time of Cholera, 124; female, as portrayed by Castellanos, 218; gured in the literature of Spanish America, 24243; forbidden, 72; fragmented in Sarduys work, 136; in Garca Mrquezs work, 114, 260 n.12; identity in Ocio de tinieblas, 189; as it relates to the space around it, 5; vis--vis its surroundings, 5; kept at bay in the dynamics of voyeurism, 117; and knowledge, 7; and language, 212; limitations of, in writing, 14; as a lure, in Castellanos, 24950; maimed, in Sarduys work, 173; in Mercados work, 251; and

the modern narrative, 4; of the mother, and guilt in Cortzars stories, 73; of the mother, as lost object of infantile bliss, 4; of the mother, as object of rivalry in Maitreya, 150, 152; as object and motive of narrative writing, 240; in Ocio de tinieblas as indictment against selling it out, 211; portrayed as a symbol by authors in this book, 240; portrayed as a trap in Ocio de tinieblas, 208; and power, 212; in Diane Price Herndls work, 3; process dictating the dynamic evolution of protagonists in No One Writes to the Colonel, 112; scabs on, in Sarduys work, 10; as source and locus of meaning, 253; taking pleasure in, 12; of the tale, in Colibr, 153; works of ction as metaphors of the erotic, 9 Bombal, Mara Luisa, 11, 12, 248 Breathing: act of, in Nurse Cora, 258 n.20; diculties in Cortzars stories, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 244, 255 n.1, 256 n.7; stied, 42 Brooks, Peter, 1, 4 Brossard, Nicole: on link between the process of writing and the release of sexual desire, 221; rejection of males, 221 Brown, Norman O., 127; on incapacity to accept separation from the mother, 110; on symbolic substitutes for excrement, 266 n.14 Buehrer, David, 114 Carnival literature, and the work of Gabriel Garca Mrquez, 108 Castilla: language, in Ocio de tinieblas, 182, 209, 210 Castillos: in Ocio de tinieblas, 18182, 183, 209, 210 Castration: and animal phobias, 41; annulment of, in Colibr, 162; anxiety in Cortzars stories, 54; complex, and the uncanniness of dismembered limbs, 38; in Cuello de gatito negro, 22; fear of, 43; horror of, 28; integration of, in Cortzars Los venenos, 47; and mans inability to give, according to Cixous, 196; and the mother in La Habana para un

286 Index

Infante difunto, 95; in Ocio de tinieblas, 208; perpetrated by phallocratic society, 211; resolution of Oedipus complex, 39; in Sarduys Cobra, 139, 156; in Sarduys scenarios, 265 n.12, 266 n.13; symbolic, 97, 140, 156, 265 n.7 Caves: and leviathans in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 86, 8788, 94; likened to movie theaters in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 85, 88; likened to the womb in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 85, 86, 87, 88, 94, 244; in Ocio de tinieblas, 176, 18586, 202, 269 n.11, 269 n.16; power symbolized by, in Ocio de tinieblas, 188, 189, 191, 192, 195 Childishness: of grown men in Garca Mrquezs ction, 120 Chora: as dened by Kristeva, 268 n.10 Cinema: watching and voyeurism, 81 Cixous, Hlne, 13; on androgyny, 171 n.21; compared to Mercado, 220; on feminine language, 191; on feminine writing, 13; on terror and the male libidinal economy, 13, 196; on women and their libidinal drive, 192 Confession: intentionality vs candor in, 76; Jean-Jacques Rousseaus, 6; literature as, 8 Confessional mode: in Cabrera Infantes work, 7; in Cortzars writing, 6 Connement, 2122, 25 Conversion reaction: in Ocio de tinieblas, 2056 Darkness, 25, 26; in Cortzars short stories, 6; as desirable in Cortzars stories, 23 Death: analogous to leaving the safety of dark, enveloping spaces, 244; associated with return to the womb, 37; associated with thwarted longing, 73; confrontation with, in No One Writes to the Colonel, 109; death instinct and destruction, 110; in life, as lot befalling men, 247; link with eating and drinking in No One Writes to the Colonel, 1045, 1078, 110; in Nurse Cora, 62; wish, 27 Death drive: negative masking of the, 233

Debussy, Claude: La Mer, 79 Delement: in Sarduys work, 13637 Degradation: in Sarduys portrayals, 10 Dependence: in No One Writes to the Colonel, 9; and oral phase, in No One Writes to the Colonel, 110; in Sarduys ction, 167, 169 Derrida, Jacques: on writing as dirance, 13 Desire: instinctual, 28; to know, in Cortzars writings, 7 Destructiveness: of self, in Ocio de tinieblas, 11 Dinnerstein, Dorothy: on male fear, 193, 195; on mother-dominated infancy, 266 n.20 Don Juan, 114 Dreams: analogous with Cortzars plots, 42 Dwarf: as alter ego of the hero in Sarduys ction, 14345, 146, 147; compared to the hero of Colibr, 153; master of things retro in Maitreya, 157; pursuit of Lady Tremendous in Maitreya, 16162; as symbolic substitute for the phallus in Maitreya, 158 Earle, Peter, 102 Eating: in No One Writes to the Colonel, 103, 104, 110, 112 Ecriture fminine, 113; Mercados canon for, 237 Eroticism: and act of seeing, 7, 215; desire and intermittence, 272 n.11; desire and Mercados heroines, 23; experience and the movies, 78; ction as metaphor of, 9 Excrement: and the anal phase, 266 n.14; and the color black linked with the devil, 263 n.32; and food in No One Writes to the Colonel, 108; in Guillivers Travels, 263 n.30; linked with proliferation and growth in Love in the Time of Cholera, 124; in Love in the Time of Cholera, 263 n.29, 264 n.40; in No One Writes to the Colonel, 108; in Sarduys work, 137; tainting Florentinos and Ferminas relationship in Love in the Time of Cholera, 128

Index

287

Eye: in Georges Batailles work, 8; in Cabrera Infantes La Habana para un Infante difunto, 8081, 82, 84; cast as the sublimating organ in Love in the Time of Cholera, 127; evolution from upper quadrant (the eyes) to lower (the bowels) in Love in the Time of Cholera, 124; and knowledge in Canon de alcoba, 224; as locus of pleasure, 81, 96, 117, 142; as master of the house, 10; and the notion of pleasure, 216, 223; in Sarduys work, 160, 163, 170; as signpost of learning, 7; as symbol of absolute knowledge, 164; and visual imagery in Canon de alcoba, 214, 215, 229. See also Watching Fairy tales: and Oedipal diculties, 166 Family drama: parody of, in Maitreya, 147, 150 Family triangles: in Castellanoss novels, 178 Father: absence of, in Cortzars stories, 257 n.11; and authority, 41; being eaten by, 256 n.10; in Colibr, 172, 257 n.11; death of, seen as a broken pledge in Ocio de tinieblas, 199, 206; dismantling the power of, in Maitreya, 149; and fear of being devoured, 41; forestalling sons wish to replace him, 267 n.23; identication with, in Ocio de tinieblas, 205; obscured in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 98; of oneself in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 9; role of, during Oedipal crisis, 265 n.17; and son rivalry in Colibr, 146, 151, 153, 154; and son struggling for power in fairy tales, 167. See also Horney, Karen Feal, Rosemary, 140 Fear: as key component in works by Cortzar, Cabrera Infante, Castellanos, and Sarduy, 243; of leaving behind dark, enclosing surroundings, 243; of women, 245 Fecal explosion: in Love in the Time of Cholera, 246 Felman, Shoshana: on speaking as a woman, 190 Female: autonomy in Canon de alcoba, 12;

body, portrayed in an unprecedented way in Canon de alcoba, 12; genitals seen as a room by the unconscious, 258 n.23; genitals as uncanny (unheimlich ), 30; male dread of (according to Karen Horney), 245; passivity, 112; seen as a deformity, 270 n.18; weakness, 11. See also Women; Ecriture fminine Feminine body: unencumbered by shackles of patriarchy, in Canon de alcoba, 12 Feminine condition: writing as didactic tool to describe the plight of, 248 Feminine language: and Tununa Mercado, 250 Feminine writing: Julia Kristeva on, 15; in Spanish America, 15 Femininity: modalities of, 13; parody of in Sarduys writing, 1314 Feminism: rage of, 251 Feminist critics: puzzled by Castellanoss position on the role of women, 191 Figuras: in Cortzars stories, 6, 18, 241, 257 n.14 Filer, Malva, 20 Fish, Stanley, 2 Food: associated with death in No One Writes to the Colonel, 1045, 1078 Foot: in Cobra, 266 n.15 Fragmentation: in Colibr, 15859; in Sarduys characters, 13839; Sarduys xation on, 17071 Freud, Sigmund, 28, 19, 109, 246; on animal phobias, 37, 88; on being eaten by the father, 256 n.10; on birth anxiety, 258 n.17; on the castration complex, 38, 39; on childs aggression against his mothers body, 4647; creative interpretation of, in Sarduys work, 154; and the epistemophilic urge, 21516; on the high narcissistic value attached to the penis, 257 n.13; and the infants libidinal development, 162; on the Oedipal crisis, 161; on Oedipal phase, 60; and psychic censorship, 6061; Sarduys facetious allusions to, 17172; Sarduys parody of the family drama, 145, 146, 157, 158; on scopophilia, 81, 271 n.5; on signs of

288 Index

agreement from the part of the object, 82; as subject, in Cortzars discussions with Evelyn Picn, 258 n.21; and the uncanny, 30; on what is highest and lowest in human nature, 263 n.33 Fulllment: as confession, 4; scenario of, in Bestiario, 33; wish for, 4, 8 Gallegos, Rmulo: Doa Brbara, 119 Gazing: fascination with, 79, 80; impulse and the primal scene, 81; in Love in the Time of Cholera, 115, 11617; relationships predicated on, 82. See also Eye Gender-determined signs, 221 Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar, 11, 12; Madwoman in the Attic, 174, 206, 209; on mothers and daughters, 266 n.21; on the two modes that subordinate and imprison women in patriarchal texts, 217, 218, 219, 220, 233; on womens conformity to patriarchal standards, 248, 272 n.16, 273 n.4, 273 n.5; on women and power, 251 Ginzburg, Carlo, 3 Gonzlez Echevarra, Roberto: on the act of repossession in Sarduys work, 266 n.19; Myth and Archive, 3; and the quest for origins in Sarduys writings, 167; La ruta de Severo Sarduy, 265 n.8; on Sarduys involvement with Tel Quel, 146; on Sarduys obsession with absence and loss, 171 Goya y Lucientes Francisco, Jos de: Naked Maja, 79 Grimm brothers, 203, 206, 266 n.21, 266 67 n.22 Grosz, Elizabeth: critique of Kristevas theory of sexual dierence, 191 Gubar, Susan, and Sandra Gilbert. See Gilbert and Gubar Guilt, 242 Hands: in Cortzars ction, 19, 31, 32, 33, 43, 256 n.7; linked with death in Cortzars stories, 31, 32, 3738; substituted for sexual organs, 66 Hands of Orlac, 19, 38 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm F., 266 n.18; and

congurations of spirit, 163; and intuition of the identity of ego and non-ego as portrayed in Colibr, 164 Hernndez del Castillo, Ana: on Jung and Cortzar, 257 n.16; on misogyny in Cortzars work, 53 Horney, Karen: Feminine Psychology, 205; on male dread of women, 266 n.20 Hysteria, 200; caused by patriarchal socialization, 273 n.4; medical notions about, in the nineteenth century, 270 n.18 Idealization: as denial of the other in Love in the Time of Cholera, 128; of Fermina Daza, 118, 119, 126; as the seedbed of unreal love in Love in the Time of Cholera, 130 Identity: and language in Ocio de tinieblas, 195 Illnesses: feminine, 3; Idolinas, 197, 199; Imgenes-palabras in the work of Mercado, 231; invented by Castellanos, 179; typical of the nineteenth-century heroine, 19798 Imaginary Signier, The (Le signiant imaginaire ), 81 Imperative tense: in No One Writes to the Colonel, 106, 107 Incest, 3435, 6771; circumvention of, 62; and the fantasy of returning to the womb, 37; in House Taken Over, 62 63; informing the action of Cortzars stories, 74, 241; in Maitreya, 161; in Nurse Cora, 59; portrayed by means of an intermediary, 6667; and repression, 255 n.3; in Unreasonable Hours, 259 n.24; veiled allusions to, 76 Indians: deated social status in Ocio de tinieblas, 175 Indirection: in Garca Mrquezs ction, 102 Individuation: lack of, in Sarduys ction, 155 Infant: casting himself as phallus, 97 Infantile behavior: of grown men in No One Writes to the Colonel, 107, 110 Inrmity: Idolinas, in Ocio de tinieblas, 206

Index

289

Invalidism: in Ocio de tinieblas, 1112 Invalid women: and lack of power, 198; and manipulation of others in Ocio de tinieblas, 176, 200, 201; in Ocio de tinieblas, 174, 184, 197, 208 Irigaray, Luce: Ce sexe qui nen pas un, 234; criticism of Freuds emphasis on scopophilia, 271 n.5; on equal sexual rights, 22122; on feminine jouissance, 234; on psychoanalysis, 271 n.10; and womans ability to enunciate a form of articulation distinct from phallic discourse, 19091; and womanspeak, 190, 251, 268 n.9, 269 n.13, 272 n.15 Jehlen, Myra: on the new recipe for womens writing, 226 Jeremiah, 13133; in the Bible, 264 n.41, n.42; in Love in the Time of Cholera, 263 n.37, 264 n.38 Jouissance: in Canon de alcoba, 216, 234, 235, 236, 239; denition of, 271 n.6, 273 n.22; in Mercados Canon de alcoba, 234; in the work of Mercado, 243, 252, 270 n.1 Klein, Melanie: on animal phobias, 41; on child sadism, 4748; and childs hostility against his parents, 258 n.18 Knowledge: instinct for, in Blow-Up, 7; quest for, and writing ction, 14 Kolodny, Annette, 271 n.8; on role-playing in ction written by women, 21819, 220 Kristeva, Julia, 15; on androgyny, 272 n.21; on feminine semiotic modality, 19091; Mercados borrowing from, 233; Polylogue, 191; on the possibility of forging a uniquely feminine language, 232; Powers of Horror, 171; on purposes of writing, 170; on rejection and creativity, 260 n.7; on rejection as the mechanism of reinstatement, 11011; La rvolution du langage potique, 146, 156; and semiotic writing, 15; on the term chora, 268 n.10 Lacan, Jacques, 246, 260 n.14; and fantasy of origins, 7; on hysteria, 184; and infants development of a separate identity, 140, 155; and the mirror stage, 204;

and the Name of the Father, 98; and notion of an inverted birth, 97; Quest-ce quun tableau, 214; parodied in Sarduys work, 146, 15455, 157, 163; and paternal proscription setting mother apart from the body of the child, 97; and resolution of the Oedipus complex, 155; Sarduys facetious allusions to, 17172 Ladino, 267 n.2 Language: bound to behavior or performance, in Ocio de tinieblas, 181, 18687; childs acquisition of, according to Kristeva, 268 n.10, 269 n.14; distinctly feminine space within, 188, 190; endless possibilities of, 231; and identity in Ocio de tinieblas, 195; as the ladinos private domain, in Ocio de tinieblas, 184; mastery, in Ocio de tinieblas, 195; and power, in Ocio de tinieblas, 187, 189, 209, 21011; recovery of, by Catalina Daz Puilj, 185, 187, 189; renewal from a feminine perspective in Mercados work, 272 n.13; as tool of power, 250; which seeks to remain neutral, in Canon de alcoba, 232 Lichtenstein, Roy: and Sarduy, 153 Lienhard, Martin: on Castellanoss use of language in Ocio de tinieblas, 181; on cyclical time in Ocio de tinieblas, 177 Lispector, Clarice: compared to Tununa Mercado, 221 Literature: as the liberating medium where anything can happen, 70, 71; as a mirror of the body, 253 Loneliness: in One Hundred Years of Solitude, 273 n.3 Longing: unfullled in Cortzars stories, 241 Looking: and eroticism, 7; and fantasy of the origins, 7; and knowledge, 7; and not touching, in Infantes Inferno (La Habana ), 8. See also Eye; Gazing; Scopophilia Loss: experience of, scarring the male psyche, 225; of the love object, 13; sense of, shared by all readers, 242; and women, 233 Love: detached from power in Canon de

290 Index

alcoba, 237; and excrement in Love in the Time of Cholera, 263 n.29; learning how to, in Love in the Time of Cholera, 264 n.44; linked to disease in Love in the Time of Cholera, 262 n.25; in Love in the Time of Cholera, 261 n.14 Male: and the gift of creativity (according to Gerard Manley Hopkins), 270 n.24 Marginality: of Indians in Ocio de tinieblas, 194; of women in Ocio de tinieblas, 194 Maternal body, 4, 30; longing for, 40. See also Mother Matriarchal scenario in Cortzar, 51 Matriarchs: as rulers in Sarduys work, 266 n.17 Maturo, Graciela, 102 McMurray, George, 108, 111 Medusa: complex, 266 n.20, 273 n.1; and danger, 7; and female genitals, 28; as symbol of knowledge, 7 Men: in Canon de alcoba, 12; victims of the human drama? 247 Men and women: dierences in regard to lovemaking (according to Mercado), 236 Menippean satire, 77 Metz, Christian, 117, 144, 259 n.2; The Imaginary Signier, 8182, 85 Miller, J. Hillis, 265 n.7 Mirrors: of the body, literature as, 253; in Canon de alcoba, 214; Colibr identies his reection on, 166; in Ocio de tinieblas, 2034, 206, 207; in Sarduys work, 140, 141, 142, 144, 149, 150, 159, 160, 164, 168; smashed at the conclusion of Colibr, 162; in Snow White, 270 n.20, 270 n.21; which reect an authors innermost longing and fears, 240 Mirror stage, 14; and infants inner sense of self, 223; parodied in Sarduys fantasies, 15455, 156, 162; in Snow White, 166 Moi, Toril: and the language of women, 192; on The Madwoman in the Attic, 217 Mother(s): ambivalence about, in Sarduys novels, 162; anger toward, harbored by the male imagination, 267 n.22; as authority gure in La Habana para un In-

fante difunto, 91; being swallowed by, in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 100; body of, as object of rivalry in Maitreya, 150, 153; bond to, in Sarduys work, 141; and castration in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 9495; cast as dominant in Sarduys and Hitchcocks scenarios, 168; and Cortzar, 42; in Cortzars stories, 4965; dependence on, 245, 266 n.16; and feelings of guilt, 28; gures in Sarduys and Grimm brothers work, 267 n.24; fusion with, 28, 43; guarantee of reunion with (according to Freud), 257 n.13; in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 8486, 90; in La Habana para un Infante difunto compared to the mother in Cortzars Letters from Mother, 93; and hands, 38; having the upper hand in Cortzars scenarios, 257 n.15; and her ability to hurt in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 94; identication of, in El Cristo de la rue Jacob, 14041; infants longing for, 265 n.7; and lack of aection in Ocio de tinieblas, 178; longing for, 30, 38, 117; longing for, in Sarduys ction, 155; and love between siblings, 65; as primary love object, 162; punished by their daughters in Ocio de tinieblas, 201; reunion with, 37, 68; and social role (according to Kristeva), 26970 n.16; substituted for the drive to look on, 81; as traitors in the work of Hitchcock and Sarduy, 169; and trauma of separation in Sarduys work, 140; turned into a colossus in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 9293. See also Body Movies: and mother in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 95; and the womb in Cabrera Infante, 94, 98 Mutilation: in Sarduys writing, 170 Mystical experience: and the loss of subjecthood in Ocio de tinieblas, 190 Myth: role of, in Ocio de tinieblas, 177 Name of the Father, 98, 140, 223, 232; in Ocio de tinieblas, 21112; and Pedro Winiktn in Ocio de tinieblas, 269 n.16; and the phallus, 272 n.20

Index

291

Narcissism: in Canon de alcoba, 214; and mirrors, 270 n.21. See also Seeing Nasio, J.-D.: on hysteria, 200 Negativity: vacated from Canon de alcoba, 233 Neo-indigenista(s), 175, 267 n.1 Neumann, Eric: Art and the Creative Unconscious, 8 New poetics: based on women reclaiming control over their bodies in Ocio de tinieblas, 189 Nirvana: nixed in Maitreya, 161 Nonentities: in Canon de alcoba, 229 Non-knowledge: absolute wisdom as the denitive form of, 164 Novel: projection in, 4 Object: unattainability of, in works of ction, 217 Object little a: in Ocio de tinieblas, 195, 205; parody of, in Maitreya, 149 Obsession(s): according to Mario Vargas Llosa, 103; in Cabrera Infantes La Habana para un Infante difunto, 80, 83; in Garca Mrquezs ction, 108; in the work of Cortzar, 6, 76 Oedipal anxiety: relief from, in fairy tales (including Sarduys Colibr ), 167 Oedipal complex and feelings of resentment, 28, 60; Cortzars revision of, 43, 46, 48, 5253, 61; fantasy of destroying the rival, 55; resolution of, 39, 47, 155, 156; scenario, 33, 38, 60; and tunnels, 39 Oedipal crisis: Freuds thoughts on childs imaginary unity with the mother, 161; role of the father in, 265 n.7; Sarduys rewriting of, 15657, 158 Oedipal legend: Sarduys willful misreading of, 154, 15859, 165, 169, 170, 246 Oedipal phase: and acquisition of language, 269 n.14; and mens feelings of rejection and abandonment, 246; resolution of, 97 Oedipal scenario: in Snow White, 203, 266 n.21; in The Third Man and Infantes Inferno, 259 n.7 Oedipal trauma: in Bestiario, 25859 n.24; fantasy of eliminating the father,

43; and substitution of the sister for the mother in Cortzars stories, 65 Oral phase: associated with inability to evacuate in No One Writes to the Colonel, 112; dependence typical of, in No One Writes to the Colonel, 110 Origins: fantasy of the, 7; nostalgia about, in Cortzars writings, 74; tale of, as wellspring of writing, 72 Osiris and Isis: compared to roles of Winiktn and Catalina in Ocio de tinieblas, 269 n.16 Outside: horror of, in Cortzars scenarios, 29 Pain: as a result of separation, in Sarduys work, 243 Parental rejection: in Baln Canan and Ocio de tinieblas, 179 Parody: in the work of Severo Sarduy, 150, 165 Passivity: and the denial of language in Ocio de tinieblas, 184; and Idolina in Ocio de tinieblas, 197, 201, 202; in No One Writes to the Colonel, 9, 111, 112 Patriarchal literature: Mercados response to, 23435; novel, 12 Patriarchy: and artistic creativity, 251; disciplinary power of, 11; ruling structure of, womens identication with, 249 Pavane: in Infantes Inferno, 259 n.9 Paz, Octavio: The Labyrinth of Solitude, 224 Penis: as anxiety object for the infant, 41; associated with reptile in Cobra, 139; emblematized by the dwarf in Maitreya, 149; as emblem of maleness in Canon de alcoba, 22728; identied with the unborn child in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 9697; in Mercados ction, 252, 272 n.20; as pleasure instrument in Canon de alcoba, 22829, 232 Phallic: gloves, in Bestiario, 3839; providing alternatives to, in Canon de alcoba, 238; relationship between signiers and signieds, in Mercados work, 252; symbolic phallic power, in Ocio de tinieblas, 207, 209

292

Index

Phallogocentric authority: in Ocio de tinieblas, 189 Phallus: analogous with the hero in the epilogue to Infantes Inferno (La Habana ), 8; dismantling the power of, in Canon de alcoba, 237; dwarf in Maitreya as substitute for, 158; and foot, link between, in Cobra, 265 n.4; infant taking the place of, in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 8, 97; in Mercados work, 272 n.20; mothers longing for, parodied by Sarduy, 155; and the pen, in Ocio de tinieblas, 209, 211; primacy of, in Canon de alcoba, 228; rivalry over, in Ocio de tinieblas, 206; as tool for womans enjoyment, in Canon de alcoba, 12 Phobia of animals: in Cortzars scenarios, 40. See also Animals Picn-Gareld, Evelyn, 1819; on incest and Cortzar, 6768 Pictographs: in Canon de alcoba, 214, 230 Pommier, Grard: on male infants identication with the phallus, 260 n.14 (chap. 2) Poniatowska, Elena: on the frankness of Castellanoss Cartas a Ricardo, 179; and Querido Diego te abraza Quiela, 180 Potency: symbols of, in Ocio de tinieblas, 183 Power: Catalinas appropriation of, in Ocio de tinieblas, 194; Idolinas loss of, in Ocio de tinieblas, 197, 207, 208; through inrmity, in Ocio de tinieblas, 201; and language in Ocio de tinieblas, 189, 208, 209; and men in Ocio de tinieblas, 189; according to Mercado, 235; in patriarchal society, 209; role of, in love novels, struggles absent from Canon de alcoba, 252, 253; tactics used by women to obtain, in Ocio de tinieblas, 273 n.6; and the whip as its emblematic instrument, in Ocio de tinieblas, 210; and women, 12, 187, 209, 235, 249 Prego, Omar, 24 Prenatal condition, 30. See also Birth; Birth trauma Price Herndl, Diane, 3; Invalid Women, 19798

Primal anxiety, 36; and dread of being swallowed, in Cortzars stories, 256 n.7; reactivation of, 54 Primal scene, 58; allusions to, in Sarduys work, 143, 145; and Blow-Up, 258 n.19; Cortzars rewriting of, 43, 59; dynamics of, 117; parody of, in Maitreya, 14849 Primal trauma, 26 Procreative powers and cave imagery, in Ocio de tinieblas, 269 n.16 Projections of the body: in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 9 Psychoanalysis: compared to cooking in Canon de alcoba, 224 Rama, Angel: on No One Writes to the Colonel, 111; on use of expletives in No One Writes to the Colonel, 260 n.8 Rank, Otto: on death and the wish to return to the womb, 62; on incest, 67; on link between rooms and the womb, 65 Reader and writer: fresh way to envision relationship between, in Canon de alcoba, 251 Regression: in Maitreya, 14445 Rejection: of paternal authority in Colibr, 15152; vacated from Canon de alcoba, 23334 Renewal: in Love in the Time of Cholera, 133 Rhys, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea, 219 Rivalry: in Ocio de tinieblas, 203, 2068 Rivero Potter, Alicia, 138 Sadism: and anality in Sarduys work, 157; in childrens fantasies, 4748; preempted from Canon de alcoba, 243 Sadomasochist frenzy: in Sarduys tales, 247 Said, Edward: on the denition of author and Auctoritas, 20910 Scatological: xation in No One Writes to the Colonel, 108; language in No One Writes to the Colonel, 109; in Love in the Time of Cholera, 124 Scopophilia, 80; and constipation in Love in the Time of Cholera, 133; in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 7; and primal scene, 81. See also Voyeur(s)

Index

293

Secrecy: in Love in the Time of Cholera, 12526 Seeing: and the epistemophilic urge, 215; as eroticized activity, 215; physics of, in Canon de alcoba, 216 Semiotic: 233, 234; denition of, 268 n.10; language in Canon de alcoba, 230, 232; language in Ocio de tinieblas, 187, 188, 269 n.14; sphere in Ocio de tinieblas, 95; writing, 15 Separation: anxiety in Cortzars stories, 255 n.2; dread of, in Cortzars writings, 256 n.6 Sexual activity: unconsummated in Canon de alcoba, 236 Sexuality: associated with exclusion and separation in Sarduys work, 143; autarchic in Sarduys later work, 14142 Sex without love: caricatured in Love in the Time of Cholera, 122 Sibling rivalry: in Cortzars stories Silence: of the gods in Ocio de tinieblas, 186; and submissiveness in Ocio de tinieblas, 185; of women and Indians in Ocio de tinieblas, 210 Snow White, 266 n.21; and Colibr, 166; discussion of, in Gilbert and Gubar, 270 n.20; and Ocio de tinieblas, 2023, 205 Sommers, Joseph: and misinterpretation of Castellanoss intention in Ocio de tinieblas, 181 Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White: Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 134 Starobinski, Jean: Loeil vivant, 115 Sterility: consequences of, among the Tzotzil Indians, 185; in Ocio de tinieblas, 176, 194 Storytelling: sources of, in Cortzars work, 72 Structuralism, 3 Subject-in-process: in Sarduys ction, 146 Sublimation: critique of, in Love in the Time of Cholera, 126, 130; while reading, 8; and romantic-Platonic love in Love in the Time of Cholera, 126; in the writings of Cortzar, 241 Submissiveness: associated with silence in Castellanoss Ocio de tinieblas, 185

Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 269 n.12; on aims of the rst wave of feminism, 189 Swift, Jonathan: and connection between idealization, anality, and human aggression, 246; A Tale of the Tub, 273 n.2 Symbolic, 234; denition of (according to Kristeva), 268 n.10; dramatization in novels, 4; in Ocio de tinieblas, 188, 191; order, 223; power and sex organ, 12; prescinding of the semiotic, 195; as unavoidable space from which we can speak, 232; writing, 15 Symbols: animal, 37; in Cortzars stories, 5, 24, 42, 75, 76; in dream formation and the conception of plots, 42; in the movies, 85 Tel Quel: Sarduys involvement with, 246 Terrible Mother, 55; the Feminine as, 54 Todorov, Tzvetan: The Conquest of America, 181 Transgression, 242; in Sarduys writing, 153 Transvestite: in Sarduys ction, 13 Truth in writing, 4 Tunnels: in Bestiario, 43; longing to stay within, 244, 245; in Los venenos, 44; 45, 46, 47, 48 Tzotzil Indians, 11; defeat of, in Ocio de tinieblas, 174, 177; priests and interpretation, 14 Uncanniness: sources of, in Cortzars ction, 68, 7273 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 103 Velzquez, Diego de Silva y: The Meeting among the Lances (Rendition at Breda ), 93; Las Meninas and Sarduys art of writing, 135 Vilication of women: according to Dinnerstein and Horney, 266 n.20 Violencia in Colombia, 112 Visual: as master relation to the world, 6; perception as idealization, in Love in the Time of Cholera, 9. See also Eye; Looking Voyeur(s), 80; as creators in Canon de alcoba, 230; in the dynamics of pleasure

294 Index

(according to Barthes), 216; as locus of Mercados reader, 25; and primal scene fantasies, 259 n.1, 261 n.17; readers in the position of, in Canon de alcoba, 214, 216. See also Scopophilia Voyeurism: apotheosis of, in Maitreya, 142; chasm between viewer and the object viewed, 117; dynamics of, 82; in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 85; in Love in the Time of Cholera, 117 Warhol, Andy: and Sarduy, 15354 Watching: as motif associated with Florentino in Love in the Time of Cholera, 261 n.16 Wharton, Edith: The Fullness of Life, 179 Wittig, Monique, 221, 251; Les gurillres, 222; and vision of the sexes, 227 Womanspeak in contrast to phallogocentric language, in Ocio de tinieblas, 190, 191 Womb: in Cortzars work, 42; and the movies in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 84, 94, 99; nostalgia of, in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 8, 28, 8990, 98; perfect because untouched in La Habana para un Infante difunto, 99; return to, in Cortzars stories, 27, 99; and tunnels in Cortzars stories, 39, 88 Women: authors of Spanish America, 11 12; cast in one of three roles, 121; celebration of, in Canon de alcoba, 12; deprived of power in Ocio de tinieblas, 187, 207, 212; exempt from castration

anxiety, 196; monsters in the work of, 112; portrayed as mothers of their husbands, in the work of Garca Mrquez, 262 n.22; and place in writing (according to Castellanos), 180; and power, 21011, 235; punished for their betrayal by Hitchcock and Sarduy, 169; rivalry between, in Ocio de tinieblas, 2026; and rough treatment, in Ocio de tinieblas, 183; and self-damaging actions, 207; sense of self among, 223; sociocultural values of, reconsidered in Canon de alcoba, 222; and social roles they play (according to Castellanos), 18081. See also Female; Feminine; Feminine writing Woolf, Virginia, 12 Words: analogous to the body in Canon de alcoba, 231, 237; dried up (according to Mercado), 272 n.14; freed in Canon de alcoba, 238 Writing: as archaeology of the skin, in Sarduys work, 136; in Cabrera Infantes work, 77; colonized by women in Canon de alcoba, 226; and the confessional mode, 4; and desire, 4; as dirance, 13; as erotic sensation in Canon de alcoba, 231; and fulllment, 4; as healing process, 7374; and personal relief, 5; as political undertaking, 9, 14; as social project, 12; sources of, 5, 72, 89; as therapy, 45; used to represent absence and desire in symbolic terms, 170; as vehicle for self-analysis (according to Castellanos), 267 n.4; which searches for the place of the feminine subject, 234

Index

295

Ren Prieto is Professor of Spanish in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of Miguel Angel Asturiass Archaeology of Return (1993), and coauthor with Ted Perry, Michelangelo Antonioni, A Guide to References and Resources (1986). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Prieto, Ren. Body of writing : guring desire in Spanish American literature / Ren Prieto. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. isbn 0-8223-2451-2 (alk. paper). isbn 0-8223-2488-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Spanish American ction20th centuryHistory and criticism. 2. Sex role in literature. I. Title. pq7082.n7 p75 2000 863dc21 99-049778