Humoring Resistance: Laughter and the Excessive Body in Latin American Women's Fiction (Suny Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture)

HUMORING RESISTANCE laughter and the excessive body in latin american women’s fiction

DIANNA C. NIEBYLSKI

HUMORING RESISTANCE

SUNY Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture Jorge J. E. Gracia and Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal, editors

HUMORING RESISTANCE / Laughter and the Excessive Body in Contemporary Latin American Women’s Fiction

Dianna C. Niebylski

S TA T E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W Y O R K P R E S S

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany ©2004 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production by Kelli M. Williams Marketing by Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Niebylski, Dianna C. Humoring resistance : laughter and the excessive body in contemporary Latin American women’s fiction / Diana C. Niebylski. p. cm. — (SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian thought and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-6123-8 (hc : alk. paper) 1. Spanish American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Spanish American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Comic, The, in literature. 4. Laughter in literature. 5. Women in literature. 6. Dissenters in literature. 7. Body, Human, in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PQ7081.5.N54 2004 863'.6099287'098—dc22

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For my brother Javier and my sisters Faviana and Jackie, with whom I share all kinds of humor

/ For my son Christopher, who has learned to humor the world, and laugh at himself, in several languages

Table of Contents

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction 1 ONE Challenging Humor Theory with the Body’s “Humors” TWO Incontinent Bodies, Mixed Humor: Laura Esquivel 31 THREE Provocative Bodies, Hard-Edged Humor: Ana Lydia Vega 53 FOUR Torpid Bodies, Skeptical Humor: Luisa Valenzuela 73 FIVE Sick Bodies, Corrosive Humor: Armonía Somers 95 SIX Mutating Bodies, Entropic Humor: Alicia Borinsky 125 Epilogue

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Notes 153 Bibliography

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Index 189

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Acknowledgments

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n the process of writing this book I benefited greatly from the advise, expertise, and editorial help of many colleagues and friends as well as institutions and organizations. It is with great pleasure that I acknowledge their generosity now that the project is completed. In the summer of 1998, Earlham College awarded me a Professional Development grant that allowed me to spend six months reading about the history of humor. A generous grant from NEH and the Social Science Research Council for 1998–1999 made it possible for me to take a teaching leave during the fall of 1998 and to have the amazing luxury of being able to spend a whole semester reading and taking notes. For initial encouragement and ideas generously offered I am indebted to Ksenija Bilbija, Evelyn Fishburn, Debra Castillo, Julio Ortega, Paul Lacey, John Newman, Walter Mignolo, Chris Swafford, Kari Kalve, Sonia Mattalia, and Paola Boschetta. René de Costa, who heard a first draft of my chapter on Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate, advised me to keep my sense of humor when writing on the topic. Although the book no doubt contains many ponderous passages, I am convinced that his advice made a difference. Other colleagues and friends provided invaluable help with individual chapters. Gail Finney read an early version of my chapter on humor theory and had many helpful suggestions. Elia Geoffrey Kantaris not only answered my first timid questions about Armonía Somers’s daunting novel Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora but immediately sent me his publications on the late Uruguayan author. María Rosa Olivera-Williams provided key details about Uruguayan political and cultural history. Also during the early stages of the manuscript, authors Luisa Valenzuela, Alicia Borinsky and Ana Lydia Vega were kind enough to give me hours of their time to answer my questions on the general topic of humor. I decided not to ask them questions about the narratives I planned to analyze for fear their answers would have too great an influence over my final interpretation of their texts. Laura Esquivel generously agreed to answer my questions on humor in writing and to send a series of lighthearted replies to what must have seemed to her overly serious questions on the subject. ix

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In the fall of 1999, Dana Nelson and Dale Bauer, my colleagues in the Social Theory Program at the University of Kentucky, carefully read what was then a ninety-page introduction and offered me their friendship along with some much needed advice for editorial cuts. Susan Bordo took time out of a sabbatical leave to read a version of my chapter on humor theory and women’s bodies; her excitement over the material encouraged me to give the project a much-needed push at a time when the promise of an ending seemed to recede further and further into the horizon. Francie Chassen-López shared fascinating details on Mexican history and movies. Enrico Santí suggested a much more concise approach to a not-yet-final version of my introduction. Susan Carvalho read an unfinished version of the manuscript and offered helpful questions for dealing with remaining gaps. Rebecca Whitehead and Inela Selimovic, PhD candidates at the University of Kentucky, made many trips to the library to double-check bibliographic data. Conversations with graduate students at the University of Chicago and the University of Kentucky led me to clarify many aspects of my analysis. A Faculty Development grant from the University of Kentucky made it much easier for me to update my bibliography, and my library, until the very end of the project. In the final stages of the project, David Wise provided much technical support, and Susan Larson took time out of a very busy semester to read my final draft. Virginia Blum was kind enough to make the first contact with James Perltz, Editor-in-Chief, at the State University of New York Press, who wrote back immediately, asking me to send along the manuscript. Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal, the Latin American Series Editor, had enough confidence in the manuscript to recommend it be sent to readers. Lisa Chesnel and Kelli Williams, acquisition and production editors, have shown remarkable patience and good humor in dealing with my technical difficulties. The final version of the manuscript has benefited greatly from the very enthusiastic responses, questions, and editorial suggestions of anonymous readers. To the extent to which I have followed their advice, the manuscript is much the better. My loyal friends Kristine Ibsen, Patrick O’Connor, and Sherry Velasco read early versions of individual chapters without a single complaint. Their encouragement kept me going through difficult stretches and happier discoveries. Neither this project nor any other of my scholarly accomplishments would have been possible without Denah Lida’s unfailing faith in my potential as a scholar and a writer. It has been my great good fortune to be able to rely on it, and on her mentoring and her friendship, since my days as a graduate student in Comparative Literature at Brandeis University.

Introduction

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Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its centre, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Mikael Bakhtin, “Epic and the Novel” In providing libidinal gratification, laughter can also provide an analytic for understanding the relationships between the social and the symbolic while allowing us to imagine these relationships differently. JoAnna Isaak, Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter

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oward the middle of Ana Lydia Vega’s story “Pasión de historia” [“Red Hot Story”],1 there is a moment when the story’s narrator, an aspiring writer, and her friend Vilma, an unhappily married femme fatale trying to cling to a Caribbean sense of pleasure in a sleepy French village, break into spontaneous laughter over a comment Vilma makes about the meal she is about to serve for dinner. In a rare show of domesticity, the spirited Vilma has taken over her mother-in-law’s kitchen to cook a traditional Puerto Rican meal of rice and beans. She does so in honor of her visiting friend, but she is well aware that her French family finds the dish unpalatable, uncivilized, and, worse, indigestible. As she begins to dish out generous portions of the “great Puerto Rican national stew” onto the “resigned plates” of her husband and in-laws, Vilma tells Carola (in Puerto Rican Spanish, so the others will not understand) that her recipe will “hit them like a stink bomb.”2 Vilma’s comment, with its nasty scatological implications, catches the normally reserved narrator off guard, causing her to lose her composure for the first time in the story. As the women start howling, the rules of civility begin to crumble

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and the normal routine around the dinner table quickly disintegrates. Vilma chokes. The old couple watches in disbelief and discomfort, and their long faces further feed the women’s laughing frenzy. The husband sits nursing his quiet but visible rage at being left out of the joke. And no wonder. While it lasts, the unpremeditated laughter turns the narrator and her friend into women who are suddenly capable of becoming temporary agents of disruption even in the face of grim disapproval. The comic exchange, neither witty nor verbally offensive in this case, nevertheless has the effect of turning the two exotic but marginalized women into potential harbingers of social and cultural chaos. An emancipatory signal and a warning sign of more dramatic transgressions to come, the laughing spectacle opens up a space for indecorous excess and illicit pleasure, a space the narrator has been eager to explore from the beginning of the story. Loud and literally uncontrollable, the two women’s laughter at the dinner table has immediate and disturbing effects. It shatters convention, it augurs trouble for family and community, and it momentarily topples the gender, age, and ethnic hierarchies encoded in the different bodies that share the stereotypically bourgeois kitchen. Significantly, the burst of unexpected laughter propels the friends into visible, and offensive, physical action: they are literally shaking with laughter. As material evidence of a surplus libidinal energy stemming from the two women’s bodies, this laughter angers those who are outside the joke (the old parents-in-law and the young husband), forcing them to take defensive measures in return. “Pasión de historia” is part of a rapidly growing corpus of works by contemporary Latin American women authors who engage multiple “genres of laughter” (Laura Mulvey’s term) and a wide variety of “performative” excesses in order to explore alternative forms of resistance to mechanisms of control and containment.3 Markedly disparate in tone, mood, and style, these works have in common their refusal to participate in the discourse of victimization that has long dominated the writings of Latin American women and conditioned a large segment of Latin American feminist criticism centered heavily on this perspective. Narratives of victimization revolve around the traits of self-abnegation, elusiveness, invisibility, compliant speech, and obedient silence, tropes often associated with the discourses of “purity,” or idealized femininity. By contrast, contemporary texts by Latin American women who engage the comic vision—lightly, darkly, ironically or absurdly—seek to counter the rarefied images and purified sounds of victimized femininity with the more entropic images and more dissonant sounds often associated with the traditions of the carnivalesque, the grotesque, black comedy, or camp. To date, Latin American literary criticism has shown little or no interest in listening to women’s humor or hearing their laughter. This oversight can be attributed to a general indifference to comic discourses as legitimate modes of literary expression, an indifference that has resulted in the underestimation

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of some first-rate authors and the dismissal of whole literary subgenres. Yet, while the last few decades have witnessed a growing interest in certain types of humor in works by canonical and newly canonized male writers ( Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Jorge Amado, Gabriel García Márquez, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Luis Rafael Sánchez, among others), less easily identifiable modalities of humor present in the literary production of so many contemporary Latin American women writers have been all but ignored. In a plenary lecture delivered at the opening of the prestigious Julio Cortázar Series at the University of Guadalajara on the subject of Hispanic humor in April 2000, Alfredo Bryce Echenique neglected to mention a single Latin American, or Spanish, woman author.4 Although Bryce cites a passage from Erica Jong’s 1973 bestseller Fear of Flying in his opening quotations, he never mentions another woman in the course of his lecture. One might have hoped that the geographical location of the lecture series (Guadalajara, Mexico) would have inspired this novelist and critic to make a passing reference to Rosario Castellanos, or at least to her predecessor Sor Juana. Given the physical proximity of their works and wit, their absence from his sweeping historical overview would seem to indicate an almost willful indifference to, or ignorance of, Hispanic women’s humor. Even as he insists on the need to transcend old clichés about humor as the special province of certain national or regional groups, on this important occasion Bryce Echenique remains deaf to the realm of women’s laughter. Feminist approaches to Latin American narratives have been likewise slow in identifying and validating the importance of humor as a transgressive discourse by contemporary Latin American women. There are important individual exceptions, of course. Some excellent studies have appeared on the subversive use of irony in Sor Juana, on the ironic mode in Rosario Castellanos, on the uses of verbal wit in Luisa Valenzuela’s short stories, on carnivalesque parody in Caribbean women authors (especially Ana Lydia Vega and Rosario Ferré), and I refer to many of these in subsequent chapters. But there has been no attempt to theorize the versatile humor of Latin American women authors as a growing and significant mode of strategic resistance in contemporary Latin American fiction. Even Debra Castillo’s groundbreaking Talking Balk and Jean Franco’s deservedly celebrated Plotting Women, while examining multifarious forms of gendered resistance, privilege non-ludic aspects either of domestic tasks and private or public gender conflicts.5 Largely preoccupied with rescuing more sober tactics of transgression or reclaiming previously silenced voices, women-centered criticism has touched only sporadically, and tangentially, on the importance of contemporary women authors’ incursions into light and dark comic practices. In an effort to redress this gap in our critical corpus, this book explores the production of humor in works by women authors who foreground to role

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or the performance of female bodily excess in the production of different types of humor. As fluid and ambiguous somatic articulations, corporeal expressions of excess are not confined to the same discursive laws as ordinary speech or more regulated bodily gestures—hence their unsuspected and unexpected powers of dissolution, disruption, and dislocation. Often aimed at dissolving fixed limits and borders or poking holes in the pretentious or reductive solemnity of social institutions and cultural grammars, the practices of gendering humor and embodying excess studied in this volume encourage ex-centricity and uncivil disobedience. The strategic and heuristic significance of these practices lies in their potential for revisiting old conflicts and old aporias from unexpected angles. Sharing a commitment to the comic vision does not imply sharing an identical sense of humor. Neither does it imply sharing a common objective for the deployment of that humor. Ranging in mood from sappy and sentimental to aggressively hostile or disconcertingly entropic, the works examined engage different moods of humor, revealing, in the process, diverse ways in which humor can lead to different degrees of resistance, transgression, or subversion. Despite some common targets, crucial ideological differences separate the sentimental comedy of Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate [Like Water for Chocolate], the carnivalesque bawdiness of Ana Lydia Vega’s “Pasión de historia” [“Red Hot Story”], the skeptical wit and ironic humor of Luisa Valenzuela’s Realidad nacional desde la cama [Bedside Manners], the devastating black humor of Armonía Somers’s Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora [Only Elephants Find Mandrake], and the entropic camp humor of Alicia Borinsky’s Cine continuado [All Night Movie].6 I chose these particular texts because of their singular insights into the relationship between different modalities of humor and the “humoring” of female excess. Furthermore, by linking texts normally characterized by their disparities rather than their structural, narrative, or thematic similarities, I aim to make an even more persuasive case for the pervasive rhetorical forcefulness of humor and corporeal humors as potential sources for dislocating and exposing solemn and solidified historical and cultural impasses that cut across generic, regional, and national borders. Throughout this book, I use the term “humor” and the adjective “comic” broadly and generically to refer to a range of discursive strategies meant to provoke an active response from readers who apprehend the incongruity, double-voicedness, absurdity, or hyperbolic nature of the articulation, utterance, or situation.7 Much can be learned from the generic preferences of the works I study, but any attempt to impose a too-rigid taxonomy on the multivalent types of laughter that emerge from these works would have the effect of reducing the degree of ambivalence present in the forms of humor and excess studied. This would be regrettable. A certain degree of semantic am-

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bivalence is part of what makes the differently coded humor and humors I discuss strategically useful and rhetorically rich. Although they engage and conflate many different comic genres, the works I have selected share important thematic parallels that cut across generic and national borders. The first and perhaps most notable of these parallels centers on the notion of how to refigure female subjectivity. With their wide parameters for play and performance, the use of both light and dark comic techniques opens up unexpected possibilities for challenging notions of fixed (gendered) identity and codified gendered behavior. Even in the mildest comic frame analyzed in this book—the sentimental humor of Como agua para chocolate—the presence of Gertrudis as an unorthodox female subject among so many conventionally feminine types constitutes the novel’s most radical strategy and its one attempt to offer an incongruous model of comic femininity. Albeit sporadic, the appearances of this outrageous, boundless Gertrudis have a decentering and destabilizing effect on the spaces around her, enough to temporarily rattle the novel’s clichéd romantic assumptions. In a more skeptical and more satirical comic vein, Luisa Valenzuela’s Realidad nacional desde la cama experiments with the unexpected disruptiveness of a lethargic, exhausted, and seemingly passive protagonist who remains in bed for the duration of the novel. Despite the limitations of her supine position, this apparently unpatriotic, apparently indifferent woman manages to resist the threat of a military takeover and to help unite the rebels without abandoning her bed until the last paragraph of the novel. At the more entropic end of the humor spectrum, the possibilities for experimenting with alternative models of female subject construction are even more dramatic: anything goes in Alicia Borinsky’s Cine continuado, where riotous, anarchic women masquerade their way in and out of multiple selves and mutating bodies, spreading chaos while experimenting with desire as a source of excess or superfluousness. In these as in other constructions of unconventional female subjects, there is a clear preference for excessive, dissolute, “contaminated,” or lawless women, women whose very presence serves both to mock the limiting potential of fixed gender roles and to highlight the need to explore the values of transience and multiplicity in ever more recombinant options. The unstable nature of these fluid or mutating female subjects contributes powerfully to the lightly comic, darkly comic, or grotesquely comic explosiveness of the humor I examine. But so does the recurrent sense of comic rage that emerges, in diverse ways and to varying degrees, from these same narratives. Appropriating Freudian assumptions about the liberating role of aggression in various kinds of humor, all the works I study find ways to exploit humor’s creatively destructive impulses. In Armonía Somers’s Sólo los

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elefantes encuentran mandrágora, a chronically ill protagonist delights at the prospect of infecting her doctors with her body’s own black (or at least darkly yellow) humor: her barely controlled fury feeds the narrative’s nihilistic rhetoric and its anarchist politics. Ana Lydia Vega’s bawdy femmes fatales play hard at games of pleasure, but the narrator’s boisterous laughter cannot hide the story’s underlying sense of barely repressed consternation, both toward the culture that forces women into limited and limiting sexual stereotypes, and toward the women who are not clever enough to escape the stereotypes imposed on them by their circumstances. Even Laura Esquivel’s conciliatory tragicomic melodrama revolves around women “at the boiling point.” The specific targets of comic rage vary significantly from narrative to narrative, but the recurrent hostility is almost always aimed at all-too-restraining or containing familial, social, and cultural environments. Not all the laughter in these narratives is sufficiently ambivalent, destructive, explosive, or entropic to be “Medusan,” in Hélène Cixous’s sense of the term.8 Even in its mildest forms, however, the laughter threatens to derail cultural mechanisms that aim to repress women’s bodies or their humor. What is more, where the practice of bodily excess and laughter is truly anarchic, the ideological and political intent is less clearly directive or prescriptive. In other words, in the darker and less festive of the novels studied here, the ludic subversions target multiple sociocultural orders simultaneously, resulting in a predictable sense of ambiguity or outright confusion. In Realidad nacional desde la cama, Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora, and Cine continuado, the mix of skeptical or entropic humor and bodily humors succeeds in shattering inherited moral and ethical certainties but resists proposing easy substitutes—facile role reversals least of all. At the darker end of the spectrum, women’s humor opts for a strategy on ongoing destabilization rather than reconciliation or substitution. It might be difficult, at first glance, to relate the comic or grotesque activities of these disruptive, contagious, or openly riotous female subjects to the chatty and even garrulous nature of the voices that narrate their story. Without underestimating the thematic and tonal differences in the narratives considered, it is worth noting that they frequently revolve around conversations, reports of past or present events, or gossip about recipes, revolutions, and rebellious women. Because the conversations are seldom rendered as dialogue but rather are retold as story, the style is rich in verbiage—a common trait of women’s narratives whether comic or not. Ironically and unexpectedly, this trait is least evident in Como agua para chocolate, where the narrative reflects a surprisingly monologic structure and flavor. Yet it is exuberantly present in Ana Lydia Vega’s long story “Pasión de historia,” in which the narrator’s celebration of the bilingual verbosity strikes the reader as one

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of the story’s best features. It is plainly in evidence in Luisa Valenzuela’s conversational skepticism and in Alicia Borinsky’s talk-show-style vignettes. The least overtly conversational of the narratives I scrutinize is Armonía Somers’s Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora, but even this richly intricate, unapologetically difficult novel derives much of its thickly bilious humor from the gushing dissemination of verbose tales that make up the narrative. Here stories lead invariably to other stories, and telling tales becomes a pathological necessity for the novel’s ill and ill-humored protagonist. Arguing against the generally accepted masculinist gendering of deconstructive practices, British science fiction writer Gwyneth Jones states that “[d]econstruction is . . . a markedly feminine activity of curiosity, greed, gossip, insatiable pursuit of secret details, the reckless, inquisitive adventure of Pandora or Bluebeard’s last bride. Its project is to bring us more, not less, from any text or any genre template: more information, more implications, more possibilities.” (130). The story-driven, gossipy, detail-hungry narratives I examine have a sharp deconstructive bite. In fact, by laying bare not only the dynamic of competing verbal discourses but the role that body language plays in the production of these discourses, these texts move beyond a discursive semantics of resistance and toward a somatized performance of the same, one in which the boisterous voice becomes indistinguishable from the permeable body. Occasionally, the superimposition of gossipy or garrulous narrative voices has the effect of diminishing the narratives’ more tendentious and potentially “offensive” humor. But nothing can deflect attention away from the intrusive presence of the female body as an incontinent, indecent, torpid, sick, or lawless source of the light or dark humor in these works. As I discuss at greater length in the next chapter, these texts share a common fascination with anchoring verbal and situational humor in the “humored” bodies and the embodied “humors,” of their female characters. 9 Whether uncontainable or torpid, degraded, mutant or mutating, the female bodies present in these narratives are resistant to any and all attempts to tame, streamline, or diffuse the light or dark “humors” that afflict them. If “writing with the body,” as both Luisa Valenzuela and Hélène Cixous remind us, is both a liberating exercise and an act of resistance, writing with the body’s “humors” is nothing less than an explosive act, whether the “humors” are melancholic, hot-blooded, skeptical, phlegmatic, or choleric. I do not mean to imply that all forms of humor examined in subsequent chapters grow directly out of the physical actions or bodily functions of female characters (although often they do); rather, that an intimate, visceral awareness of the connection between gendered humor and women’s bodies conditions every aspect of these narratives.

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DETERRITORIALIZED HUMOR, LOCAL ACCENTS Because humor is a social as well as a discursive phenomenon, it bears national, cultural, and sometimes regional imprints of the environment in which it is produced or performed. The humor of certain local stereotypes and cultural practices in Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate can be appreciated fully only in the context of Mexican history, Mexican cuisine and its crucial role in defining cultural identity, and a certain uniquely Mexican type of popular melodrama. Similarly, the overlapping curves and cul-de-sacs of Ana Lydia Vega’s comic strategies are best understood in the context of choteo or guachafita, a decidedly Caribbean expression of humorous excess. There are recognizable traces of a distinctly urban porteño comic skepticism in Valenzuela’s Realidad nacional desde la cama. Alicia Borinsky’s Cine continuado reflects the influence of tango culture (itself a national pastime easily given to parodic imitation). Armonía Somers’s biliously black humor bears traces of a specifically platense comic-gothic sensibility (the term platense comes from the Río de la Plata, the river that separates Montevideo from Buenos Aires).10 One of the discoveries I made in the course of this project, however, was to note that as the humor becomes more aggressive or entropic, the traces of national or regional inflections become less relevant to the strategic deployment of that humor. Valenzuela’s urban Argentine wit cannot be separated from the author’s incorporation of a very literary modern European tradition of comic skepticism. Borinsky’s hyperbolic, postmodern irreverence blends a colloquial use of black humor often associated with the criminal element in Buenos Aires with a much more transnational generic use of camp humor. Somers’s highly metaliterary narrative reflects clearly the influence of multiple strands of modernist and postmodernist humor that borrow heavily from European and North American traditions of the gothic-grotesque. Although I am cognizant of the risks involved in approaching discursive models across national and regional borders, the performative nature of excessive bodies I encountered in the course of this project points me toward the realization that much of contemporary women’s humor has a strong “bordered” or transnational streak. Thus, while in my analyses of individual texts I discuss the “subversive particularity” (to use Neil Larsen’s term) of specific kinds of discursive humor, highly embodied expressions of comic and grotesque excess offer evidence of cultural transbordering. To put it differently, there is substantial evidence to argue that heavily embodied comic practices have a higher index of “translatability,” or transcultural exportability, than strictly discursive modes of humor. It is interesting to note, in this context, that three of these narratives are situated on national frontiers or in cities that reflect the reality of border cultures: Como agua para chocolate is set in Coahuila, on the frontier between

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Mexico and the United States; Realidad nacional desde la cama appears to take place on the frontier between Argentina and Uruguay; and the stories told in Ana Lydia Vega’s “Pasión de Historia” take place both within and outside the borders of San Juan, Puerto Rico (itself a “border” city). The other two narratives feature movable characters all too familiar with the vicissitudes of national and international exile. Although the borderline cartographies of these narratives are hardly necessary elements for the practice of the kind of “transbordered humor” I discuss here, they are nevertheless an important reflection of the increasingly porous boundaries of national and cultural identity. Given these transversal scenarios, I think it pertinent that in Spanish the words travesura (prank, mischief ), which often relates to humor and play, and travesía (crossing) are etymologically related to the verb atravesar (to cross, to go through). The double-coded, often double-crossing element in humor not only encourages but demands a willingness to cross borders of various kinds: generic borders, national borders, ideological borders, tonal borders, discursive borders. Because a “neutral” practice of humor could only be a contradiction in terms, I make no attempt to occupy a position of neutrality in my many border crossings. My preferences for certain kinds of humor, and certain kinds of bodily humors, are fully in evidence in the chapters that follow. But this too is part of negotiating the comic crossings.

THEORIZING LATIN AMERICAN WOMEN’S LAUGHTER In the passage mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Vilma’s deceptively simple “joke” (“this hits them like a stink bomb”) momentarily obscures the very mixed sources of the laughter that follows. Despite the comic aggressiveness of the remark, the reader senses a curious disproportion between the women’s laughter and Vilma’s actual comment. It is easy enough to conclude that the women are not laughing at the comment itself but at the character’s witchy plan to inflict something like a Montezuma’s revenge on her French family, but this speculation only adds to the possible source, or multiple sources, of the uncontrollable laughter. Since it is clear from the story that the provocative femme fatale has been waiting for a chance to avenge herself on her overly jealous husband and her oedipal mother-in-law, the joke appears, on one level, to be a classic feminist joke, one that relies on a typical marker of female domesticity (cooking) to enact an angry but funny transgression. Yet the fact that Vilma has decided to cook this particular meal on the day of the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico (a date the women remember because it also just happens to be the day on which Puerto Ricans “celebrate” their pseudo-Constitution) suggests that the joke may rest not on a gendered comic revenge but on a postcolonial one

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instead. It might be, finally, that what provokes the women’s laughter is their sense that they have temporarily usurped the stiff hegemonic order of this country-French kitchen by imposing both their foreign ingredients and their loud foreign accents at the dinner table on a day that has significance only to them. My point is that, while the joke elicits immediate reactions from all those present (hilarity from the women themselves, confusion from the inlaws, rage from the husband), the source of the joke, and the real or potential targets of the laughter it elicits, are diffuse enough to discourage any onesided explanation of the comic transaction as a culturally bound joke, a carnivalesque scatological joke, or a joke with a strictly feminist edge. A combination of all these reasons might begin to provide a more complete explanation of the “source” and the target(s) of the humor in this passage, but any attempt at bringing together these competing discourses, however necessary, proves messy. In “Women and Humor,” a review of theoretical works on North American and British women’s humor and critics’ attempts to theorize it, Eileen Gillooly arrives at the conclusion that while women’s humor may be “intercategorical,” it is not “undifferentiated” (476). Writing about the “unruly woman” in Hollywood films and television, Kathleen Rowe makes a similar point when she notes that “[t]he genres of laughter have long proven elusive and difficult to theorize . . . [yet] that is no reason for feminists not to investigate these genres for what they might teach us, not only about the construction of gender within repressive social and symbolic structures, but also about how those structures might be changed”(5). With other students of women’s humor, I am persuaded that women authors’ “renegade” comic or carnivalesque tactics are best studied within frames that are fluid or porous enough to encompass the hybrid nature of the texts as well as their mixed humor. Among the contemporary writers I examine, there is a marked preference for narratives that combine and conflate comic, grotesque, and carnivalesque genres and subgenres; it would be misguided to attempt to frame any one single narrative within a single comic genre. In other words, among the various forms of resistance practiced by these authors is a resistance to rigid generic demarcations. For this reason, I have adopted the broader category of “genres of laughter”—a category used by Laura Mulvey and later by Kathleen Rowe in their respective studies of feminist and profeminist humor in Hollywood films and television—for discussing widely divergent if representative ways of humoring resistance studied in this book As should become evident through my analyses of individual works, the articulation of light and dark laughter and the performance of bodily excess play themselves differentially across the gendered humor spectrum. I came to this project as a literary critic and with the intention of approaching my subject largely from the perspective of literary analysis. Yet the

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more intrigued I became by the relationship between different modalities of embodied humor and their varied degrees of oppositional resistance, the more I was struck by the utterly contextual nature of both humor and resistance. Like laughter, the excessive body performs in social, historical, and gendered settings, and their discursive and symbolic interaction reflects complex, even messy sociocultural mechanisms of repression and resistance. Hence, my analysis of the narratives chosen for this study borrows freely not only from several (often disparate) theories of humor and comic genres, but also from feminist theories of the body, poststructuralist theories of power, cultural theories of resistance, and other critical and theoretical frameworks that have proven useful in disentangling these trans-semiotic and somatic tactics. Among the theoretical models I use as points of departure are classical and contemporary theories crafted by critics who gave little or no thought to women either as producers or active participants in humor yet have provided me with useful points of departure for testing the oppositional, resistant, or subversive level of the humor I study. As such, Freud’s theories of humor as an avenue for psychic affirmation and social aggression and Bakhtin’s theories on the potential subversiveness of carnivalesque tactics have served as useful entryways into Latin American women’s comic, grotesque, or camp practices. So have Mary Russo’s, JoAnna Isaak’s, and María Negroni’s examinations of different modalities of the female grotesque body in various literary and cultural contexts. Studies centering on the libidinal power of women’s voices, and the vocal potential of women’s bodies, especially those theorized by Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray, Debra Castillo, Jean Franco, and Diana Taylor, have helped locate and recognize certain forms of embodied excess as tactics of resistance. Critical approaches to women’s humor by British and American scholars, particularly those of Nancy Walker, Regina Barreca, Eileen Gillooly, Judy Little, Emily Toth, and Kathleen Rowe, have provided theoretical guidance and increased my understanding of how gendered revisions of traditional comic strategies can alter and even subvert their traditionally intended targets. While I have been careful not to apply these theorists’ assumptions uncritically to works that grow out of markedly different cultural, regional, and linguistic contexts, their theoretical approaches to different modalities of humor, and of women’s humor in particular in certain cases, have served as useful and thought-provoking models. The interpretive strategy that has emerged from my own selective reading of these theories and approaches has resulted in a more open and transdisciplinary critical approach than I originally envisioned; one that provides multiple and flexible ways of understanding the entanglements between humor and bodies, humor and power, and humor and gendered resistance. It is possible to read the “genres of laughter” examined in subsequent chapters as ways of “talking back”—to refer to Debra Castillo’s apt title for her influential

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study. But the “talking back” now includes outrageously comic, grotesque, or absurd behavior, unreal metabolic transformations of women’s bodies, and dizzying dis/plays of unreasoned or irrational verbal displays. One of the most distinguishing features of humor is the way in which it forces us to shift our initial expectations, and this is true whether of the source of the humor is a joke’s punchline or an unexpectedly comic situation. Shifting expectations requires shifting one’s presumed center, and moving one’s center forces one to reexamine one’s epistemological and cultural assumptions. As noted by writers as culturally and temperamentally diverse as Rosario Castellanos and Georges Bataille, humor generates a form of surplus libidinal energy that cannot be easily contained within any social or cultural economy of checks and balances. 11 Theorists have been at a loss to explain the unpredictable nature of this excess. More important, they have been unable to explain it away. This makes the practice of a strategic or tactical gendered humor and its study volatile, unpredictable, and rife with possibilities.

CHAPTER ONE

/ Challenging Humor Theory with the “Humored” Body It cannot be that [the] laughter . . . is due simply to an irksome attitude of the mind: some other cause must be thought. Herbert Spencer, “The Physiology of Laughter” The body has been regarded as a source of interference in, and a danger to, the operations of reason. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies The essence of being radical is physical. Michel Foucault, Foucault Live

I

n “The Cultural Overseer and the Tragic Hero: Comedic and Feminist Perspectives on the Hubris of Philosophy,” Susan Bordo argues that classical philosophy’s near dismissal of comic discourses can be traced to demonstrable links between the comic, the material body, and women. Although rarely quoted in this context, Bordo’s article constitutes a crucial moment in contemporary humor studies not only because of its contribution to an understanding of the subversive potential of comedic discourses, but also because its argument may well be the first critical attempt to theorize the link between a semiotics of the comic and the materiality of the body from a gendered perspective. One of the earliest attempts to theorize the devaluation of the comic on the grounds of its “feminization,” Bordo’s essay arrives at the startling conclusion that the preference for the tragic over the comic in the history of philosophy may be yet another way in which the early thinkers sought to privilege the masculine ideal of abstraction over female embodiment, 13

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of mind over concrete matter, of generals above particulars. Clearly implicated in Bordo’s argument is the contention that Western culture’s denigration of comedy is a gendered act, one with obvious repercussions not only for comic genres but for women’s bodies. A detailed account of women’s role in the history of humor theory is beyond the scope of this chapter. My more modest aim is to present a brief and selective sketch of some of the important turning points in that history, emphasizing the ways in which these key moments have influenced our conception of different kinds of humor and of women’s roles in helping shape the theories or hypotheses that emerged from these. A frequent criticism of comparative and schematic approaches such as the one I attempt in the first part of this chapter1 is that they tend to reinforce existing assumptions by playing off contrasting but widely held generalizations. Adopting David Damrosch’s view of comparative literary projects as following an “inherently elliptical” method, one that can lead to a modified understanding of the different areas under analysis, my aim in examining important turning points in humor theory (and theories of the comic) across national and historical borders is to show how different national, and sometimes transnational, views of humor practices and comic worldviews have echoed or supplemented each other in excluding or censoring women from the production and reception of humor.

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Scholars have speculated that Plato’s condemnation of comic laughter probably grew out of his disapproval not only of the viciousness of Attic comedy but also of the pornographic excesses committed by the drunken revelers who engaged in these rituals, rituals that were still practiced during Plato’s lifetime.2 Relatively recent evidence of the significant role that women played in these ancient festivals and cults, however, makes it all the more plausible to speculate that among Plato’s prejudices against Attic comedy and Attic clowning was the suspicion of widespread female participation in these practices. In “The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language and the Development of Attic Comedy,” classicist Jeffrey Henderson claims that the practice of obscene humor and joking in Attic Greece can be traced back to the cults associated with fertility rites, many of which were ostensibly performed by women. Writing specifically about the festivals of Demeter, Erica Simon speculates that the jesting and “scoffing” said to be typical of these ancient fertility

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rites may have been an attempt on the part of the celebrating women to distract the goddess Demeter away from her grief over her daughter’s loss. Simon’s speculations as to the possible function of humor in ancient rituals are of particular interest when viewed in the context of the classical condemnations of comic genres. Most classical philosophical treatises assume all expressions of humor to be a form of ridicule and hence to stem from a sense of malice. Yet in the largely female rituals described by Simon, the humorous jests and the ludic aspect of obscene bodily gestures and sexual play appear to perform a healing social as well as a religious function: ritual laughter as early female bonding. Given this scenario it is tempting to speculate that, by affirming a space for women’s laughter and for female unruliness, these early women comic “performers” posed a subversive threat to men intent on waging wars and building orderly republics.3 Moreover, given their largely physical and possibly orgiastic nature, it is entirely plausible to assume that these examples of joking and obscene women in early cultic rituals may have contributed to the growing condemnation not just of comic practices by women, but of the practice of humor tout court. Following a line of thought that began with Hippocrates and was later developed by Galen, theories linking bodily fluids with psychic temperament were the foundation of medieval as well as early modern medicine. According to Harry Levin, Juan Huarte’s Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (1575) might well have served as the immediate source of inspiration for Ben Jonson’s modern coinage of the term “humor” in English.4 Building on “established” medical lore about bodily fluids, Huarte’s work concluded that corporeal “humors” marked a child from birth as sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, bilious, or melancholy. Accordingly, he proposed that the Church and the State devise an educational program for boys and young men based on the child’s “humor” type. Suspecting such a recommendation might run counter to the doctrine of free will, the Inquisition came down hard on Huarte. But neither the Church nor the Crown had any objections to his view of girls and women as creatures made up largely of blood and tears, and hence incapable of any kind of “ingenio.” Like Huarte contemporaries Fray Luis de León and Juan Luis Vives left little doubt about the lowly rank of women’s humor, and of their “humors,” in their writings. In Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Natalie Zemon Davis explains that the viciousness with which many early modern physicians, clerics, and writers targeted “laughing” or loud women can be explained, in part, by the appearance of a few famously loud, boisterous, and bawdy women in late medieval and early modern literature. Davis points out that early European models of vocal and lewd women had a precursor in the likes of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and later reached a kind of apotheosis in Rabelais’s Gargamelle.

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Kathleen Rowe traces the figure of the “unruly woman” in medieval carnival both to “the various Mrs. Noahs of medieval plays” and to the “enormous, greasy Ursula the Pig Woman” in Jonson’s 1614 play Bartholomew Fair (36, 37). Like Davis, Rowe insists on noting that the social chaos unleashed by the carnivalesque antics of these early bawdy and burlesque women would have threatened conventionality and orthodox civility. The first of these female carnivalesque models of women who relish making spectacles of themselves in Spanish literature appears in Arcipreste de Hita’s fourteenth-century comic-erotic Libro del Buen Amor [Book of Good Love], in the guise of Trotaconventos. A Wife of Bath type, Trotaconventos is a foul-mouthed and lecherous prostitute who makes her living in the convents to and from which she “trots” (hence her name). But the most memorable archetype of an early modern Spanish carnivalesque woman is Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina, the witch/procuress responsible for the eponymous lovers’ death in Rojas’s late fifteenth-century Tragicomedia de Calixto and Melibea. Known to students of Spanish literature as La Celestina, Rojas’s tragicomedy was soon read and studied in the tradition of the emerging picaresque, largely because the old bawd who acts as go-between between the lovers soon takes over in the imagination of readers and critics, reducing the lovers to the status of a supporting cast. The obscene, loud Celestina is all for the body, all for gossip, and all for (dark and nasty) laughter. Once a prostitute, she now makes a living out of pimping and prostituting other women, threatening to stain bloodlines and disrupt class barriers all over Castille. As the best known female archetype in Hispanic literature, Rojas’s Celestina is the model for the whole army of comic and lawless female bodies that populate the Spanish picaresque novel. Appearing mostly as traveling prostitutes, female Pícaras live off their bodies and their verbal skills at conniving, cheating, and lying. Almost without exception, these overtly sexual and overtly vocal women are made to pay a heavy price for flaunting their bodies and their laughter, as they usually end in silence, hunger, and death. Behind the misogyny of these early modern works lurks the fear that, if allowed to break into uncensored speech and fleshy laughter, carnivalesque women’s “corrosive laughter” (to return to Rosario Castellanos’s image) could eat at and through the foundations of family, morals, and culture at large. A student of Juan Huarte, Cervantes borrowed his tutor’s double-coded notion of ingenio (wit and cleverness but also dominant body-”humor” for Huarte) when giving his knight the appropriately ambiguous descriptive adjective of ingenioso. Unlike Huarte’s, however, Cervantes’s humor is broad and urbane enough to imagine witty women and to have men listen to them with curiosity bordering on admiration. In their respective and well-known treatises of late Renaissance humor, both Louis Cazamian and Ernst Cassirer agree that Cervantes was the perfect expositor of a new comic sensibility (as

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was Shakespeare), one that reflected important changes in the humor gestalt of the era. In Cassirer’s words, the new brand of humor is characterized by “a strange mixture of gentleness and energy, of cautious skepticism and of fiery reforming enthusiasm” (177). Given that “gentleness,” caution, and a certain degree of “reforming enthusiasm” typically have been the province of “good” women, it is easy to see how this change in comic taste (within high culture, of course) might have played an important part in opening a door through which women could gain official admittance into the Renaissance world of the comic. Significantly, however, save for the obviously important exception of Rabelais’s work, women’s presence in Renaissance comedies and narratives tends to be marked by the ethereal quality of their verbal or mental wit rather than by the concrete physicality of their bodies or bodily antics. Thus, women’s entry into the world of Renaissance humor at a time when the carnivalesque is on the way out, or with the ostracized Rabelais (whose portrayal of voracious and grotesque women’s bodies is doused in misogyny), only works to confirm the hypothesis outlined at the beginning of this chapter: the acceptance or repudiation of certain kinds of humor implies an acceptance or rejection of certain kinds of female bodies. As countless comedies from the period make clear, when women do make their presence felt on the Renaissance comic stage, or on the comic page, as subjects or agents of humor rather than as objects of ridicule, they do so as disembodied wits rather than as grounded bodies. In many Renaissance comedies, comedias, or comédies, regardless of culture or nationality, the female wits are either mignone enough to disappear behind their mental wit. Or they are disguised as men. In any event, the appearance of a few clever women on the Renaissance stage did not cancel the entrenched prejudices against women’s laughter or wit. As Molière’s late seventeenth-century memorably précieuses made clear, a shrewd woman was a double-edged threat to a duller, or merely older, man. Finding them irresistible yet fully aware of the danger posed by smart, quickwitted women, the author of The School for Wives turned women who could outsmart men into objects of satire. Significantly, however, future playwrights and theorists of humor would seek inspiration not only in Molière’s finely tuned depictions of female wit but in his realistic portrayal of funny, fast, and furious dialogues between men and women. The dour, sarcastic condemnation of laughter in the mouths of the British agelasts in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century targeted laughing women as brutally as it targeted the poor, the indigent, the infirm, and all types of “churlish” humor. Literally “against laughter,” as their selfappointed label confirmed, this group of writers, philosophers, and social critics “pickled” humor and women indiscriminately in the acid vinegar of the one comic genre they allowed: social satire.7 Dryden and Pope were merciless in their tirades, and the younger Swift, who prided himself on having laughed

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only twice in his life, wrote some of his most acerbic satires against painted Jezebels. Masked and made-up, women sometimes appear as masquerading tricksters in Swift’s work, but once undressed and unmasked, they quickly become the object of the writer’s vicious mockery. Half a century earlier and on the other side of the English Channel, Francisco de Quevedo had favored naked women’s bodies, but like Swift he wanted none of their humor. “I don’t want women as mentors (consejeras) or entertainers (bufonas),” he wrote, concluding that good wits turned women into bad lovers (My translation, 241). Although they voiced their concerns from a strictly moral, rather than an aesthetic, point of view, eighteenth-century social and moral reformers throughout Europe took turns in warning women against the evils not just of light laughter but of comic wit as well. In late seventeenth-century France, Bishop Bossuet’s erudite work on biblical and ecclesiastical dogma about comedic practices had already illustrated the need to keep women off the stage, and as far away from it as possible. As the number of women wits continued to grow, however, so did the number of treatises warning readers, and women readers in particular, of the real and potential evils that wit and humor could bring to women. In eighteenth-century Britain, moralist John Gregory worried that young women’s laughter, however innocent, at risqué jokes or sexual innuendoes would compromise their “virtuous ignorance,” as their laughter would reveal an understanding of sexual matters that they could not possibly possess (30); John Fordyce consequently advised polite ladies who had the “misfortune” of being witty to “conceal it as much as possible” (96). British women writers and reformers shared the same sentiments. Explicitly noting what others generally implied, Elizabeth Montagu ventured that “the generality of women who have excelled in wit have failed in chastity” (471–472). In all these moralists’ condemnation of women’s humor lurked the fear that, if allowed to run free, women’s wit (a secretion of the mind, but a secretion all the same) would jeopardize the purity of their bodies. The new nations of the American continent proved no exception to this seemingly global crusade against women’s wit. During the second half of the eighteenth century and a good part of the nineteenth, male writers and statesmen north and south of the equator took it upon themselves to teach republican women how to become either enlightened matrons or gentle nurses—wholly serious, in either case. The sweeping lure of virile patriotism unleashed by the wars of Independence and the need to legislate the private and public “constitutions” of the emerging republics left little time for ludic play anywhere, much less among women. Not surprisingly, given the historical and social demands of their eras, women journalists and writers like Rosa Guerra, Clorinda Matto de Turner, Juana Manuela Gorritti, Flora Tristán, Juana Manso, or Eduarda Mansilla adopted a restrained sense of indignation or a submissive sense of feminine wit when writing public editorials or short

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articles for the national or regional press. As crusaders or moralists, they were too embattled and too dependent on masculine favors to resort to something as easily misunderstood as ironic double-voicedness or as divisive as satire. Even when they were known to have admirable wit in social situations and a marked independent streak in their private lives (as was the case with Gorriti and Matto de Turner, for example), for their more public and “scripted” personae these women opted for common sense sobriety and moderation rather than for resistant wit or subversive humor. 8 Nineteenth-century European Romantic poets and philosophers sought to wrest laughter out of the comic altogether, in part by discrediting whole areas of humor, in part by deflecting all wit toward the more serious intellectualizing work of (noncomic) irony. They succeeded in elevating humor to the realm of the transcendent and transcendental, but did so by severing it altogether from any “body” that might act as a reminder of humor’s connection to a physical world. Hegel feared the disintegrating potential and anarchic force of comic genres. While his comment apropos comic characters as “entirely without substance and contradictory” may reflect the thinker’s general dyspeptic disposition and lack of comic subtlety, his observation regarding comic characters’ potential to “dissolve everything, including themselves”(1200, 1199), acutely reflects the philosopher’s realization that the comic (or comedy as genre) was a loose rhetorical canon, one that could plant the seeds of incongruity into the most solid of systems.9 Schiller spoke about the notion of inventive play as the ultimate form of aesthetic freedom, making it nearly impossible to distinguish the playful from the purely aesthetic in his meditations, but his notion of play lacks almost all trace of humor. Kierkegaard gradually abandoned the realm of humor to devote himself to a view of irony that was much more Socratic than comic. Schlegel’s definition of irony as an “endless succession of mirrors” is highly poetic, but there is little question that humor, and certainly laughter, gets lost in the reflection. Important exceptions to the image of the tormented or melancholy Romantic archetype inevitably come to mind, but they confirm rather than invalidate the observations made earlier. Lord Byron’s Don Juan is a masterful social satire, yet partly for this reason the work’s mood is less in tune with the Romantic ethos than is Byron’s own Manfred, for example. Cast as ethereal angels or dark but beautiful demons, early Romantic heroines were too weighted down with their own and their authors’ exaggerated sense of feminine sensibility to share in ironic games. Concerning their role in Romantic fiction, Siriol Hugh-Jones concludes that “by refusing to look at [women] square in the eye,” Romanticism “dealt [them] a mortal blow”(21). It could be argued that the Romantic penchant for disembodied, playful, or Socratic irony was symptomatic both of a de-genre-ing and a de-gendering of humor in

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general and comic genres in particular. It is little wonder that Jane Austen found so much readily available material for parody, or that Mary Wollestonecraft Shelley resorted to futuristic science fiction to escape the morbidity of her environment Sensing the need to put some flesh and blood into an aesthetic sensibility that he saw as too “sublime” and too entrenched in the pastoral, Charles Baudelaire played an important hand in reversing the heavily transcendental trend that the early Romantics had made so furiously popular. Intent on pulling humor back down into the satanic depths that the ancients once denounced as the source of the malicious pride they associated with laughter, Baudelaire wrote at length about the subject in his 1855 essay “Of the essence of laughter, and, in General, on the Comic in the Plastic Arts.” As he took pains to distinguish between the circumstantially comic and the “absolute comic” (“le comic absolu”), the author of Flowers of Evil insisted that serious laughter, or the “absolutely comic,” was both cosmic and anarchic, and so had more than a trace of the demonic (311–323). As he anchored humor down to the bowels of the city, Baudelaire sought to rescue women from the solemn and sanctified morbidity in which many of the Romantics had framed them. But he brought them back to earth only to make them walk the streets in lascivious, but humorless, squalor. As vampires and prostitutes, Baudelaire’s female “grotesques” are a long way from being active agents of humor: they are not even allowed to adopt self-knowing ironic poses in the course of their lyric degradation.10 A notable exception to the enervating and disembodying tendencies in both German Romantic theories of laughter and Baudelaire’s darkly comic guffaw can be found in the late eighteenth-century work of George Meredith, a novelist and critic who devoted most of his professional life to exploring the intricacies of the comic spirit. Although greatly influenced by Baudelaire’s essay on the comic, Meredith looked backward to French and English neoclassical comedies and to the English eighteenth-century novel for more vigorous models of comic exchanges. In his 1877 “An Essay on Comedy: On the Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit,” Meredith argued that good comedy required the equality of the sexes (at least on stage). Advising women to eschew the sentimental in favor of the comic, he urges them to see the direct connection between a culture’s comic “evolution,” and the relative freedom of its women: “Let them look with their clearest vision abroad and at home. They will see that, where they have no social freedom, comedy is absent; where they are household drudges, the form of comedy is primitive; where they are tolerably independent, but uncultivated, exciting melodrama takes its place, and a sentimental version of them. . . . But where women are on the road to an equal footing with men, in attainments and in liberty . . . there . . . pure comedy flourishes” (32). Although they were argued

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persuasively and passionately, Meredith’s views were soon overshadowed by Darwinian and Spencerian evolutionary explanations of laughter. Although neither devoted too much time to laughter, both Darwin and Spencer looked at laughter as an instinctive survival mechanism, one more developed in the male than in the female of the species. Bergson and Freud, whose seminal new theories of humor at the beginning of the twentieth century would also focus—albeit from very different perspectives—on the importance of laughter as a defense mechanism, but neither paid much attention to women as subjects of humor. Preoccupied with the growing threat of technology, the author of Le Rire [Laughter] managed to write an entire treatise on the mechanicity of bodily movement without, however, positing the body as an active agent of humor. One laughs at cripples, or at people falling down the stairs, says Bergson, because at those times their bodies remind us of automatons rather than living organisms. That he did not focus on ridiculous or comic female bodies in his treatise may indeed be proof of his liberality. More likely, he found it impossible to imagine that women might be as capable as men of performing Chaplinesque antics. Yet Bergson’s observation that the production and reception of humor require an indifference (insensibilité) to the target of laughter serves as an important reminder for women writers and artists who insist on provoking harsh and caustic laughter rather than hiding behind the tearful smiles of sentimental humor.11 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Freud’s most detailed treatise on humor, joke-work, and laughter, reflects many of the prejudices I have been tracing. Arguing that aggressive wit is socially and psychically useful (because it allows for the psychic release of bad “humors”), Freud finds it necessary to insist that women lack a sufficiently developed superego to produce or appreciate more aggressive forms of humor or humor-proving jokes. Stressing the value of aggression in the practice of “real” humor, Freud observes in a later essay (“Humor,” 1927) that “humor is not resigned; it is rebellious” (162). In the same essay he also describes humor as the “triumph of narcissism” (162). Significantly, in his 1915 essay “On Narcissism,” Freud had made the case that only “women, criminals and humorists” are likely to maintain an attitude of “primary narcissism” well into adulthood. Looking at the essays side by side, a reader may well ask if there might not be an inherent contradiction in Freud’s humor theory. Ordinary logic might dictate that if laughter is the privileged terrain of the narcissistic personality, and if women are natural-born narcissists, then women might end up with the last laugh— or at least a good laugh. Freud’s conclusion, however, is that socially adept women learn to sublimate their instinctive narcissism through the serious business of motherhood. Becoming fit mothers, it appears, makes women unfit for good humor.12 Although Freud’s biological and historical prejudices

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keep him from making more of the potentially liberating ways in which humor might free women from their anxieties and repressions, his theories linking aggression to humor, and humor with social transgression and psychic release, have provided many women theorists and critics with an important basis for recognizing women’s more hostile and less easily identifiable expressions of humor. In the first half of the twentieth century, Mikhael Bakhtin played a crucial role in humor theory when he noted the need to give the body its due in the production of humor. The author of Rabelais and His World posits the carnival as a site for social revolt, arguing that physical forms of jesting in medieval popular feasts constituted an unofficial counterdiscourse to the hegemony of Church and State (285–297). Carnivalesque laughter, a laughter made vital and full-throated through bodily jesting, lower bodily functions, and bawdy gestures, “purifies from dogmatism, from fanaticism . . . from didacticism . . . from sentimentality” (123). Bakhtin does indeed associate women with the lower bodily stratum, and as such makes them active participants in carnival. “The popular tradition is in no way hostile to woman and does not approach her negatively,” writes the Russian critic in the treatise cited earlier (240). Yet, as Mary Russo and other critics of Bakhtin have rightly noted, despite his claims about the gender inclusiveness of the popular tradition, the Russian critic ultimately reduces women to their “lower stratum,” and thus to an essentially visceral nature. By doing so, he “buries” women in the “muck” of the carnival as ready objects of the laughter he celebrates but without allowing them to laugh their way in or through it. Yet, as my own reliance on Bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque shows, despite the critic’s disinterest in gender’s role in the production of humor and despite his problematic treatment of the female grotesque, his concepts of polyphony, heteroglossia, and dialogism, and his conceptualization of popular feasts as a site of subversion have been powerfully influential and useful to discussions of embodied and gendered humor.

“DISAPPEARING ACTS” II: WOMEN AND HUMOR IN THE LATIN AMERICAN CANON There is no systematic theorizing of humor in colonial nineteenth-century or even twentieth-century Latin American letters, but the attitudes I have summarized are dramatized, often in paradigmatic fashion, in some of the most representative works of period literature. The Latin American canon is replete with works that read like a convincing illustration of the argument made in the first part of this chapter. For brevity’s sake, I limit my discussion to three

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works by male authors that emphasize conflicting but often parallel desires to wrest humor out of women or women out of humor. The first of these is Fernández de Lizardi’s La educación de las mujeres o La Quixotita y su prima [The Education of Women, or Quixotita and Her Cousin] (1818–1819), a novel that incorporates many of the ethical tensions and moral agendas of the late colonial and early republican period. La educación de las mujeres, a late picaresque novel, is intended as a lesson and a warning for women who would be pícaras. The eponymous Quixotita is neither quixotic nor celestinesque. Instead, she is a mostly naive blunderer whose simple dream is to marry into the nobility. Her mother, the more openly comic Doña Eufrosina, is a good early Latin American version of the laughable female grotesque.13 Older, aggressive, and outspoken, Eufrosina poses a serious threat to public and private morality. She is a bad mother because she is a bad model of femininity. A profligate, wasteful, and, worse, politically liberal woman, Eufrosina is depicted as the antithesis of the civic model as defined by the Age of Enlightenement. To the examples of the bad mother and the misguided daughter, Lizardi opposes those of the virtuous Doña Matilde and her daughter Prudenciana (Prudence, of course). His transparently Manichean novel demonstrates the need for women to remain within their boundaries, to recognize and accept their intellectual inferiority, and to repress any desires that might match or mirror the liberal fervor of their fathers, husbands, or sons. Although Eufrosina’s voice occasionally manages, or almost manages, to subvert the narrative’s condemnations of bad feminine models by sounding convincingly articulate in her tirades, the authorial voice ultimately defeats her, and soundly so. The novel ends up extolling the feminine virtues of sobriety, thriftiness, and decorum against those of excess, garrulousness, and pleasure. It is ironic but not surprising that Lizardi should avail himself of the comic figure of a would-be pícara (Quixotita) to boost his book’s popularity even while condemning comic women as misguided at best and immoral at worst. Written over a century after Lizardi’s didactic picaresque, Rómulo Gallegos’s Doña Bárbara (1929), a novel about the tensions between rural passions and urban civilization, expresses a similar mistrust of women’s laughter. In Gallegos’s famous narrative, the hero’s arch-nemesis is the barbarous but seductive “pa(ma)trona” from whom the novel takes its title. Bárbara’s androgynous eroticism, combined with a keen if power-hungry mind and an irascible personality, make her a malevolent force, all the more so because so many men fall under her erotic spell. Despite the character’s hyperbolic traits, there is no comic flavor whatsoever to Gallegos’s depiction of the novel’s powerful matron. On the contrary, associated with thwarted nature rather than with crooked humanity, Bárbara is outside the realm of the comic.14

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Comic relief enters Gallegos’s novel, however, through Bárbara’s abandoned daughter Marisela. In her incarnation as an untamed and primitive creature at the beginning of the novel, the “wild” girl is responsible for most of the humor in the first half of the narrative. Initially the object of the hero’s laughter, she is mocked and taunted by him for her flawed (ungrammatical) Spanish as well as her for her untidy appearance. Yet she is also an active agent of humor for the young women and the farmhands who befriend her. Her humor is naive and unsophisticated, but has enough traces of witty malice to give the hero a glimpse of Marisela’s keen intelligence. But the young woman’s humorous streak is short-lived. As she gradually matures into a sensible and sensitive woman, her once naive but independent sense of humor disappears. In its place the more mature Marisela begins to show a streak of melancholy and compassion. It is thus that Gallego can return her to her “proper” place as a neo-Romantic heroine. Under the civilizing influence of the man who will become her husband at the end of the novel, Marisela not only gains a moral education but develops a civilized sensibility. The underlying thesis is, that under the tutelage of upright, cultured older men wild women can lose their traces of barbarism, and the fact that she loses her tendency to semi-”barbaric” laughter is solid proof of it.15 In Doña Bárbara, as in the Romantic and modernista models that precede it, wit and humor are traits women must outgrow if they are to occupy a seriously protagonic role, both in the evolving novel and in the new nations. I do not mean to imply that Gallego had this dichotomy in mind when he wrote the novel. Rather, to observe that the loss of Marisela’s laughter in the course of her civilizing transformation in this novel reflects the prejudices I have been tracing even when the thematic concerns of the fictional text deal with solemn issues of nation, ethnicity, and gender. Another half a century later, the novels of the Latin American Boom will present women as capable of moderate laughter but incapable of serious wit. In these narratives women’s humor is not so much morally suspect as constantly questioned. Julio Cortázar’s Morelli—the writer’s alter ego in Hopscotch [Rayuela] (1963)—joins his literary precursors in insisting that women are generically incapable of appreciating good wit. In a passage as infamous as it is famous, Morelli warns that a lector hembra [female reader] will lack the mental agility to keep up with the roman comique that he has been struggling to write. Bound to judge the book by its cover and to look for mostly moral melodrama, this “female reader” will inevitably miss the complex and complicated dark humor of the novel-cum-game that Morelli, and Cortázar, envision as their magnum opus. Cortázar clearly meant to use hembra (“female,” no way around it) qualitatively rather than generically in this passage: a shorthand way of dismissing the passive reception of any witless reader.16 Yet the description of the lector hembra as a reader who prefers “pretty book covers”

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and the false comfort of “moral comedies and tragedies” is yet another illustration of the prejudices I have been tracing. In a novel that presents itself as a complicated game, the dismissal of a “feminine” or feminoid” reader as one who lacks the mental agility to come out and play hard (like a man, if you will) with the artists and intellectuals who invent the games’ rules, is a hard blow not just for women, but indeed for anyone who does not fit the category of macho.17 In fact, the identification of a passive, humorless reading with the female gender in a discussion of the novela cómica, defined here as a genre that assumes the reader’s full range of comic-ironic and thus sophisticated sensibilities, echoes the same insidious and entrenched prejudice that I discuss in the first part of this chapter. Equally problematic is the fact that Cortázar’s memorable magas (the “magical” Lucías and the Talitas and the Polas that fire the author’s—and his male characters’—imagination) are seldom the producers of the superb humor or the darkly comic wit that punctuate his meganovel. The one character who might at first prove the exception to the rule (of humorless women) in Cortázar’s fiction is the intriguingly playful Polaquita in his later and more openly political Libro de Manuel. Yet even the clever Ludmilla/ Polaquita is incapable of matching the quick wit or smart jests of her male friends in this novel. It is worth noting, too, that in what is surely Cortázar’s funniest book, Historia de Cronopios y de famas, the irrepressibly playful and prankish cronopios (a neologism that might be rendered as “chronopians” in English) are male, whereas their humorless, hopeful, yet passive antagonists, the esperanzas [the plural for “hope”], are represented and vocalized as female. What should be evident from this brief sketch of humor theories and even briefer selection of works from the Latin American canon is that, whether as targets of didactic moralists who rage about women’s laughter, or as the frequent object of male comic barbs, women have been “trapped” by, or caught within the margins of, the frames of the comic, in theory as well as in literary practice from the start. The constant shifts between the denials of the existence of women’s humor and the many censoring mechanisms targeted at women who might dare show a sense of it (humor or wit) loudly announce the potential transgressiveness of women’s humor. They also foreground the aggressive and transgressive role of women’s bodies as metabolizing agents in the production of this humor.

RESURFACING: PERFORMING HUMOR WITH THE OUT-OF-BOUNDS-BODY The previous litany of metaphorical muzzles, girdles, and Houdini-like disappearing tricks begins to explain why, when women respond to their respective censors with their boundless, boisterous, anarchic, or outraged laughter,

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they do so by putting forth their material bodies as agents of different types of ludic resistance. In an essay published at about the same time as Hélène Cixous’s early theories of Medusan laughter, Jacques Derrida observed that discourses of resistance or deconstruction “borrow(s) from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself “ (252).17 Looking at selected but representative Spanish American narratives by women, it is possible to see the dramatization of the “humored” female body—as an excessive, uncontainable, degraded, or decomposing material presence—as precisely the kind of deconstructive, transgressive cultural appropriation that Derrida describes. The resisting, excess-prone bodies I study throughout the rest of this book target historical and cultural restrictions, prohibitions, and prejudices outlined earlier. They can be summarized as follows: (1) the incontinent body as a body that cannot be contained by the rules of etiquette or good manners; (2) the sexually excessive and verbally aggressive body as a body that defends its right to pleasure and vocalization even in the face of bad endings; (3) the torpid body as proof that even from a horizontal position and in a state of semidepression a woman’s embodied wit can be powerful enough to return a hysterical nation to its senses; (4) the ill, aged, and oozing body an illustration of how infectious female black bile (or, in this case, female lymph) can be; and (5) the entropic and lawless body as a body that negotiates urban and transnational spaces by “performing” transitive and transitional identities. In writing “with the body” (a command forcefully issued both by Luisa Valenzuela and Hélène Cixous), narrators and other women characters in these narrative discover the liberating and/or transgressive possibilities of writing with the body’s humor (and “humors”). I do not wish to imply that all humor in the works examined stems directly from physical actions or bodily functions of their characters, although in some cases it does; rather, that a deep awareness of their fictional works’ groundedness in biological as well as sexual and social bodies is somehow inseparable from these authors’ highly diverse approaches to humor and comic practices.

The Incontinent Body Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate [Like Water for Chocolate] begins with counterimposed images of gushing female bodies: the first is the image of the narrator (Tita’s great-niece) unable to hold back her tears while peeling an onion; the second is that of Tita’s formidable mother at the point at which her waters have broken and she is about to give birth on the kitchen table. As I argue in chapter three, despite the novel’s sentimentality and its orthodox gender ideology, the narrative’s dramatization of seeping, sweating, vom-

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iting, or burning bodies features ways in which even submissive women can become, at least temporarily, agents of carnivalesque liberation through excess. As the characters in Esquivel’s first novel spill their fluids—nursing milk, menstrual blood, sweat, vomit, tears—periodically throughout the novel, the repeated violations of good taste and good manners threaten to topple the traditional Romantic “moral” that parallels the cooking lesson. Thus, despite the novel’s efforts to remain on the side of cultural and social moderation, the presence of so many women’s bodies at the “boiling point” has the effect of frequently dislodging the narrative from its otherwise banal sentimentality. Because the author herself has denied that she intended the carnivalesque humor of her novel-cum-cookbook to overwhelm the sentimental melodrama of the conventional love story, the transgressive role of uncontainable female bodies in this novel becomes something like a litmus test of the power of embodied humor to introduce disruptive elements even into the most traditionally “feminine” and least aggressive of comic genres.

The Provocative Body The sexually hungry and verbally daring women characters and narrators in Ana Lydia Vega’s story “Pasión de historia” are depicted as bodies-in-heat against a macabre machista culture that seduces, traps, and eventually kills them. Caught in a film noir/pulp fiction screen that “frames” her more than once, Vega’s narrator plays at being both witness and voyeur of other female characters’ “passionate stories.” The street-tough vixens she observes have fatal blind spots, but so does the narrator, who is taken for just another femme fatale by her ex-lover. Carnivalesque both in its sexual explicitness and verbal excess, the conflicted, in-your-face humor that emerges from this author’s ambivalent celebration of exuberant female bodies and their sexual/verbal humor(s) is unsettling despite the undeniably comic flavor of the verbal puns and the visual close-ups. Noticeably overdetermined by the festive but violent nature of a postcolonial Caribbean reality, the oversexed female bodies depicted in “Red Hot Story” are caught in the comic-ironic bind throughout. Indeed, what is most intriguing about Vega’s slippery comic irony is its unstable ambivalence. As a reader, one is never quite certain of whether the gutsy humor is meant to serve as a warning to women who would perform sexual excesses or to signal a comical “j’accuse” to a testosterone-forgiving culture where vengeful men can target sexually adventurous women and get away with murder. Not surprisingly, this ambivalence places the author’s deployment of humor and excess on the borderline between a “feminist dialogics” of comic resistance and a postfeminist performance of cynical bravado.18 As long as the story stays on the side of the former, one can read the

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comic irony that sustains the story as an accusatory irony. If one decides that the story’s film noir ending overwhelms the story’s (and stories’) carnivalesque edge, then the narrative irony can be read as a mode of comical cynicism. So poised on the edge is Vega’s ironic touch that both readings work their particular brand of seduction depending on one’s mood.

The Torpid Body Satirizing and parodying this provisional acceptance of female wit conditioned on the disappearance or avoidance of the (non-streamlined) female body, Luisa Valenzuela spawns a memorably clever female character who is so “grounded” in her biological and sociological reality that she literally cannot get out of bed. An apparently symptomless abulia makes it impossible for “the señora” to get up (the protagonist is an allegorical “everywoman,” but one in particular sociopolitical circumstances). The mysterious yet evidently nonpathological nature of the condition that keeps the protagonist’s body torpid and horizontal for the novel’s duration foregrounds the inescapable realization that the uninterrupted wit in the novel spills from an unmovable and very material body, a body that is impossible to ignore qua body. Unlike the wilder, sex-obsessed younger women of Ana Lydia Vega’s stories, Valenzuela’s middle-aged protagonist is cynical, ambivalent, doubting, and self-doubting, so that her wit, her comic irony, and her frequent but openended satire succeed in disrupting everything around her, even those who attempt to lure her or shock her out of her immobility. It is true that she finally manages to get up at the very end of the narrative, but it is her mature body’s lethargic condition that remains imprinted in the reader’s memory. Her phlegmatic humor(s) eventually spread around her, helping to disintegrate and dissolve the national and political “realities” of the novel’s title. Under cover(s), this ambiguously comic skeptic is surprisingly, unexpectedly, subversive.

The Sick Body In her influential The Female Grotesque, Mary Russo notes that the grotesque female body is “open, protruding, irregular, secreting, multiple, and changing”(8). The description fits Armonía Somers’s protagonist in Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora with uncanny accuracy. A middle-aged woman hospitalized for a mysterious lung disease, the verbose Flores de Medici (Fiorella, for short) is subjected to daily “drainages” during which liters of lymph fluid are sucked out of her infected lungs. Because this image of an ill bodily bilious “humor” is at the forefront of the novel’s multigeneric and multivalent

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narratives, the tone is decidedly morbid, but all the more corrosive for its acridness. The narratives issuing from the fully functional mouth (and brain) of the ill woman explode with incidents of female madness, ill or misshapen bodies, and abject secretions of all kinds. The novel’s somatized body is thus presented a body that produces its own antibodies While the black humor of this novel provides neither catharsis nor escape, it enacts a rhetoric of destabilization that goes beyond carnivalesque inversions or ironic subversion.

The Mutating Body While many of the light or dark bodily “humors” mentioned thus far have the effect of exploding some aspects of the Law (the communal law, the law of convention, patriarchal law, and the rules of the comic genres they often parody), it is only when representation (of incontinent or transgressive bodies) yields to camps performativity that the practice of humor (and the dramatization of female bodily humors) unleashes its most entropic energies. In Alicia Borinsky’s Cine continuado, women are mutating, nomadic con artists who refuse to adopt fixed identities, fixed addresses, or even fixed bodily features. Opting instead for multiple masks (some comic, some cruel), Borinsky’s female characters play schizophrenic versions of a Deleuzian “becoming woman.” Accordingly, the novel’s anarchic and entropic humor wreaks havoc on the communal and urban spaces in which these characters move. Mary Ann Doane has noted that “vamping” and masquerade are strategies that can enable women to avoid the traps and trappings of an essentialist self. In Cine continuado, masquerading and mutating women manage to escape, confound, and conflate the categories of victimization and masochism, yet at the same time they consistently resist anything that might resemble a facile ethics of feminist or postcolonial solidarity. At the opposite end of comic reconciliation (Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate), Borinsky’s comic hostility is aggressive and purposefully anarchic. Affirming the need for hyperbolic performance as a precondition for surviving as female in a global but still largely male world, Cine continuado opposes darkly sarcastic laughter both to traditional morality and antiestablishment discourses that promise quick fixups under the mask of postcolonial multiculturalism. Offering neither solutions nor compromise, the flashes of humor in Cine continuado fade in and out of hallucinated textual and dramatic spaces, encouraging only eccentricity (or the constant avoidance of a center). “An expenditure without reserve” is how Georges Bataille, a surrealist turned postmodern thinker, describes the experience of laughter. Envisioning it not merely as psychic release but as an antiphilosophical “economy” for exploring

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excesses that resists dialectical closure, laughter for Bataille is a model of utter dissipation. Although elsewhere in his work Bataille’s thought is too archetypally phallocentric to serve as a model for a feminist aesthetics of comic resistance, his validation of laughter as a vital strategy for resisting totalizing impulses adds an important footnote to a discussion of humor, women, bodies, and excess. Summarizing and describing strategies that resist closure and totalization in works by contemporary Latin American authors of both genders, Nelly Richard coins the evocative term “refractory aesthetics.”19 Not exempt from the prejudices discussed in this chapter, Richard neglects to include comic resistance as an important “refractory” tactic. As I hope to illustrate in the following chapters, the “unlimited” (or at least multiple) reserves found in the practice of humoring/ed women’s bodies should convince us of the need to begin to do so.

CHAPTER TWO

/ Incontinent Bodies, Mixed Humor: Laura Esquivel To stress the defensive component of feminine humor is not . . . to argue that such humor is devoid of aggression: only that the aggression that generates it is more fully sublimated, or at least more thoroughly disguised, than the hostile impulse sparking . . . what Freud calls ‘tendentious’ humor. Eileen Gillooly, Smile of Discontent While every comic transaction performs the work of a complex and multivalenced kind, none can be said to induce a perfectly self-canceling set of political effects. James English, Comic Transactions Tita did not distinguish well between tears and laughter. For her laughing was a form of crying. Laura Esquivel, Como agua para chocolate

T

he spirit of playful equilibrium with which Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate enacts a permeable economy of culinary ingredients and incontinent bodies should give one pause when tempted to read this novel as a transgressive parody of melodramatic excess à la mexicana. While the consumption of food throughout the novel increases characters’ body temperatures or bodily desires, the explicit, painstaking instructions for gathering, chopping, and mixing culinary ingredients have the effect of cooling down characters’ passions and rivalries, at least temporarily. Establishing a recurring and easily verifiable pattern early on, the narrative consistently turns back to 31

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the cooking lesson when the romance becomes dangerously provocative or when characters are at the boiling point of, say, water for chocolate.1 While images suggestive of excess promise hot things to come, the intrusion of the ever-present recipe throughout each chapter or scene predictably works to tame potentially explosive encounters or situations. To put it more succinctly, by “changing the subject” of romance or revolution back to the meal in progress, the novel systematically controls its own potentially transgressive agenda. The following passage, in which the servant Chencha announces that “dinner is served” [“la cena está servida”] to the two couples about to explode with resentment, jealousy, and rage, explicitly illustrates this point. It was a blessing that, in the midst of all the commotion, Chencha appeared and pronounced the magic words: dinner is served. The announcement provided those present with the serenity and the cheerfulness that the circumstances required, and which they had been about to lose. Only in the presence of the slow or the sick does eating, a task of utmost seriousness, fail to get the attention it deserves. But this was not the case here, so they all headed to the dining room in good humor.2 Entre el desconcierto reinante fue una bendición que en ese momento Chencha apareciera y pronunciara las mágicas palabras de: la cena está servida. Este anuncio les proporcionó a los presentes la serenidad y el espíritu que el momento ameritaba y que estuvieron a punto de perder. Cuando se habla de comer, hecho por demás importante, sólo los necios o los enfermos no le dan el interés que merece. Y como este no era el caso, mostrando buen humor todos se dirigieron al comedor (157). Chencha’s announcement could serve as a syntagmatic illustration of the novel’s overall formal strategy. The lesson to be learned is clear: keep cooking, or eating, to avoid burning (mostly yourself, but also those you crave), melting, or exploding. Set in the Mexican town of Coahuila during the decades of the Mexican Revolution (the time frame of the actual story extends roughly from 1900 to the early1940s), the plot of Esquivel’s novel revolves around the long-suffering character of Tita, the youngest daughter of a family of wealthy ranchers. Lacking her dead father’s protection, Tita becomes the victim of a peculiar and peculiarly matriarchal tradition, one that requires the last-born female child in the family to give up romantic love and an independent life to care for her aging mother. Mamá Elena, a strong-willed matriarch reminiscent of García Lorca’s Bernarda Alba, but with more than a touch of the stereotypical

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evil stepmother of children’s books, forbids her youngest daughter to marry the perfectly acceptable suitor who pursues her at the beginning of the novel. No match for the matriarch’s strength or determination, the indecisive and inarticulate Pedro quickly agrees to Mamá Elena’s suggestion that he marry the elder and less attractive sister Rosaura instead. His explanation (one that satisfies the protagonist for a time) is that in this way he may live in the same house as his beloved. Rosaura, the elder sister who garners a husband and eventually a child by agreeing to this arrangement, suspects that Pedro is in love with her youngest sister but marries him all the same, presumably because she is also following mother’s orders. Witnessing the failed love story and troublesome triangle is Gertrudis, a second daughter born of the matron’s illicit and secret affair with a black slave who worked on the family’s plantation. Unlike her sisters, Gertrudis manages to escape maternal tyranny and domestic life altogether by joining the Mexican Revolution, where she eventually becomes a generala [general]. A second suitor, politically and racially “correct” as the softspoken, liberal, and light-skinned descendant of European and Native (North) American grandparents, enters the novel to test Tita’s love for Pedro, but perhaps also to finally ignite Pedro into a jealous rage that sets him on fire and nearly kills him. A few revolutionaries gallop in and out of the family ranch (and the narrative) with predictable but minor consequences. In the kitchen and on the sidelines, a chorus of indigenous female servants provide maternal affection, cooking lessons, recipes for healing, and comic relief. The melodramatic plot has a few clever twists, but it is the novel’s structural combination of cookbook and romance that gained Esquivel critical recognition as well as massive popularity. Each chapter, framed to represent a calendar month with its corresponding seasonal recipe, teaches readers to prepare a Mexican culinary feast while developing the romance. Moreoever, while the young woman who narrates the story is Tita’s great-niece, the cooking lesson itself is conducted by the protagonist, a character whose passionate yearnings and equally passionate resentments are inextricably bound to her experience of growing up—quite literally—in the family’s kitchen. Young Tita cuts her first teeth amid the kitchen bustle required to prepare tortas de navidad [Christmas rolls], sheds her first womanly tears while preparing the chabela de boda [wedding cake] that should have been her own but will now be her sister’s, and experiences virtual sexual consummation through her scrumptious mole de guajalote con almendra y ajonjolí [turkey mole with almonds and sesame seeds]. Even her death is a “culinary” experience. At the end of the novel, Tita’s own body is turned into a delectable if somewhat charred flambé de femme when what should have been her (pre-)wedding feast is stopped mid-coitus by her lover’s death from a heart attack. Whether out of sheer frustration or hoping for an apotheosis of sorts, she ingests enough matches to set herself, and the ranch around her, on fire.

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Although most interpretations of Como agua para chocolate argue that the novel’s structure is itself a parodic strategy (and my own description of the novel’s ending bears this reading out), I propose that the tactical strategy mentioned at the beginning of this chapter is meant to serve two other purposes, neither inherently parodic. The first is to draw attention away from the very thin plot of the melodramatic story. The second is to dilute the very excesses the novel hints at serving for dinner, so that finicky eaters will not be offended by overtly sexual or overtly scatological images as they savor the menu. What is more, when one looks closely at Esquivel’s first novel’s rhetorical and narrative strategies, one is struck by the ways in which the ubiquitous display of a chef ’s control over emotions and ingredients on the part of the protagonist aims to tame the carnivalesque spirit of many of the novel’s images and situations. The same control characterizes the author’s approach to the narrative’s most dramatic or carnivalesque events. Take, for instance, the description of what might have been an extraordinarily Rabelaisian-like birth in the middle of a kitchen table at the beginning of the novel. The manner in which the relatively modest list of smells in the passage draws attention away from both the gushing stream of embryonic tears/amniotic fluid and from the mother’s open body is a telling sign of the inconsistency between tone and image that I propose to illustrate: And before my grandmother could say “moo,” Tita arrived in this world prematurely, right on the kitchen table, amidst the smells of simmering noodle soup, thyme, bay leaves, cilantro, boiling milk, garlic and, of course, onions. Y sin que mi bisabuela pudiera decir ni pío, Tita arribó a este mundo prematuramente, sobre la mesa de la cocina, entre los olores de una sopa de fideos que se estaba cocinando, los del tomillo, el laurel, el cilantro, el de la leche hervida, el de los ajos y, por supuesto, el de la cebolla (4). In this as in many other similar passages, what might have been a celebratory carnivalesque description of the protagonist’s birth into the world of eating and cooking turns instead into a quaint illustration of local color, one with a sepia-tinted veneer redolent of Old-World or, in this case, “Third World” family anecdote. The “visual” suggested by the passage is one of excess, but the narrative effect is one of kitschy nostalgia with just a dash of spice.3 By the time this scene gets back to the mother’s amniotic flood on the kitchen floor—by noting that the servant who acts as midwife later harvests five kilos of salt for the family meal from the

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newborn girl’s desiccated tears—the narrative has missed the opportunity for carnivalesque excess on a grand scale. Whether intended or unintentional (and I am persuaded that it is intended), this rhetorical “taming” of the potential excess in this passage is one of the novel’s most glaring traits. What is missing from this passage is the excess verbiage, the cumulative comic force, and the uninterrupted pace that would make it either parodically or comically carnivalesque. As Esquivel herself has noted while expressing her own discomfort with critics’ interpretations of her novel as a subversive parody of popular and typically feminine genres, what Como agua para chocolate seeks, in the kitchen as well as in the bedroom, is not the potentially offensive extravagance of carnival but the magic of reconciliation.4 While the recipes delight in finding the perfect blend of spices, the narrative is after a basic meal plan aimed to satisfy two very different types of female readers by balancing more or less equal portions of archetypically feminine ideals against a mildly pro or postfeminist agenda. The alchemy chosen to syncretize this uneasy combination of antithetical values and often incompatible genres is humor. In what is also an obvious rhetorical strategy, the narrator sets out to lighten up the sorrow and resignation present in much of the plot by applying a distinctly nonsatirical, mild brand of humor. Significantly, however, because so many of the conflicts and tensions in the novel take place in the kitchen (and, to a lesser extent, within earshot of the bedroom), another brand of humor enters the story surreptitiously, challenging and occasionally defeating the kinder, gentler comic homage to domesticity and melodrama to which the novel keeps returning. Intermittently, however, the novel does succeed in creating a mildly transgressive aesthetics in scenes where the potentially explosive combination of cooking and sex is allowed to reach the boiling point promised by the novel’s title. In those instances when the narrative relaxes its control over the combustive mix of spicy sauces and female bodies, the sweet but mild flavors of nostalgia temporarily give way to the much more pungent carnivalesque. In this context, it is worth noting that while Como agua para chocolate has been consistently praised for its expressions of local color both by academic critics and the popular press, scholars have failed to observe that what foregrounds the novel’s regional particularity is not its paradigmatic version of magicalrealist nostalgia (which follows a too-formulaic version of magical realism to be effective), but its much more concrete comic rendition of bodily excess portrayed within local spaces and tending to regional practices.5 The suddenness with which bodies, bodily odors, and bodily humors can catalyze comic ingredients into provoking unexpected subversions of the narrative plot and into questioning the conventional morality espoused by the

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novel may not be sufficient to convince readers that the carnivalesque moments in Como agua para chocolate are frequent or effective enough to result in significant ideological or aesthetic disruptions. Yet even a reading that finds the parodic potential of the novel unconvincing, uneven, or ineptly handled cannot fail to take into account the change in tone that takes place as a result of the novel’s parade of boundless female bodies, or the fact that the mere presence of volatile bodies in the novel has the frequent effect of bringing the narrative perilously close to a rhetoric of excess. Even though momentary, the images of carnivalesque rowdiness or eroticism unsettle and sometimes undermine the narrative’s congenial and compromising tone.

GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, FRUSTRATED REBELLIONS Although the action of the novel begins in a contemporary Mexican kitchen in the 1980s, it immediately moves back in time to the kitchen of the De la Garza family some seventy years earlier, at the moment that Mamá Elena’s water breaks and she gives birth to her youngest daughter on the kitchen table. Tita’s birth, which parallels the country’s revolution and rebirth, casts the protagonist out of the upper-class family’s living room and into the domestic space of the family’s servants, a space Tita’s mother invades only occasionally (for purposes of supervision) and Tita’s sisters avoid altogether. It is in this space, archetypically feminine but historically linked to early experiments in feminine subversion, that the novel’s protagonist will be initiated into the secrets and mysteries of using food for mood-altering, bodytransforming purposes. As the novel begins to mix recipes for homeopathic remedies in between detailed instructions for mole, oxtail soup, and quail in rose-petal sauce, cookbook and romance, bourgeois morality and rebel protofeminism are served side by side, in varying quantities. Sniffing the hybrid narrative menu, one gets a whiff of deferred or unresolved desire for female pleasure and women’s freedom, but the novel decides to offer these as light fare rather than as the pièce de résistance. Tina Escaja states that by privileging the space of the kitchen, Esquivel’s novel “alters” the meaning of social and communal spaces, not “univocally,” but “systematically,” in a process that signals both a reinterpretation and rearticulation of social limits: “[t]hrough elements associated with the culinary universe,” she states, “there is an alteration of the limits of the home, of the body, of the topographical and historical geography.”6 In a carefully argued and nuanced article, Kristine Ibsen similarly notes that “the preparation of food” helps the women in the novel to “transcend social barriers of class, race and generation.”7 Jeffrey Pilcher also sees Esquivel’s privileging of the kitchen and the cookbook as a radical move. According to Pilcher, the “per-

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suasiveness” of Esquivel’s novel comes from “cloak[ing] a controversial feminist viewpoint in an unmistakably patriotic love for Mexican food” (6). It is indeed the case that, by linking the body and its functions with all sorts of edibles while cooking up a whole batch of humorous similes and metaphors based on a cook’s vocabulary, Como agua para chocolate proposes a sensorial epistemology based strictly on a knowledge of heat and food. Thus, Tita understands her own body’s reaction to first meeting Pedro’s gaze by likening it to “how dough must feel when plunged into boiling oil” [“lo que debe sentir la masa de un buñuelo al entrar en contacto con el aceite hirviendo”] (15); she compares her own sense of being “wasted” (as she realizes that her beloved Pedro will never be brave or rebellious enough to elope with her) by noting that “one last chile in walnut sauce left on the serving platter after a banquet could not feel any worse than she did” [“un chile en nogada olvidado en una charola después de un gran banquete no se sentiría peor que ella”] (57); and she intuitively knows that a newborn is to be wrapped “like a taco” [“como un taco”] (71). On the day of her niece’s wedding, Tita feels that she is, “at thirty-nine, as youthful and sprite as a fresh-cut cucumber” [“A sus 39 años seguía fresca y rozagante como un pepino recién cortado”] (236). Rosaura’s words, when she has the audacity to think that she can impose on her young daughter the same family curse that has victimized Tita, are described by the latter as “repugnant, foul-smelling, incoherent, pestilent, indecent and repellent” [“repugnantes, malolientes, incoherentes, pestilentes, indecentes y repelentes”] (162). Although one might wish the author had left out the abstract adjectives “incoherent” and “indecent” from the otherwise visceral list describing Rosaura’s words in the passage just cited, the piling up of the other four adjectives, all olfactory, fit the halitosis-prone, gaseous Rosaura to perfection. More important, they reflect Tita’s strict understanding of others in terms of the only lexicon she knows well. Generously sprinkled throughout the narrative, these kitchen-bound analogies have been noted by other critics as examples of the ubiquitous similes of quickly written and poorly edited pulp romance or novela rosa, or the equally poorly edited soap opera scripts. While the carelessly thrown together descriptions sometimes reflect a specifically Mexican type of socarronería or slyness, neither the slyness nor the irony is sustained throughout, and the instability between “true” melodrama-like pulp style and a comic treatment of it makes the argument regarding the overwhelmingly parodic nature of the novel’s style unsustainable. In other words, while these culinary similes present convincing illustrations of a rustic phenomenology of emotion, they are hardly ever exaggerated enough to be parodic. The kitchen is, notably and significantly, the space where Tita learns to disobey authority. Although her love of “tearing up and skinning” [“destrozar y despellejar”] (230) things is mostly “child’s play” [“un juego de niños”]

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(230), learning to break the rules on any level is an important activity in the space of the comic and carnivalesque, especially for women in traditional milieus. Tita’s lack of concern for following the rules when sewing, her playful use of a hot pan to watch the dance of water drops as they hit the burning oil, her magical culinary concoctions, her experiments with substituting ingredients in traditional recipes, her discovery of her miraculously lactating breasts, her first erotic encounters with Pedro—all can be seen in light of what Tita learns (or unlearns) in her family’s kitchen.8 Yet other than Tita’s prominent role in Gertrudis’s revolutionary escape and escapades, Tita’s rebellions lead only to temporary reactions of a strictly metabolic nature—some of them on a large scale, to be sure. The comic kitchen scenes notwithstanding, the novel expresses a largely reverential admiration of culinary practices, and in so doing ends up celebrating the traditional role of women who cook and serve. Despite what she learns (or perhaps because of what she does not learn) in the kitchen, Tita remains the family’s cook and the family man’s concubine for the duration of the story, and a fairly dutiful daughter for much of it. In this light, what other critics see as Tita’s private Mexican “revolution” can be read simply as minor skirmishes. There is no denying that the space of the kitchen is indeed the magnetic center in Esquivel’s novel, and no doubt that the novel’s engagement of the culinary discourse forces readers to tend to the significance of that discourse in the development of Mexican national identity. Yet the argument that Tita’s rebellions can be said to parallel the larger revolution in signaling the hope of radical change for women is, in my opinion, ultimately unsustainable.9 In the kitchen or out of it, Tita can hardly be considered a model of liberation or revolt.

MIXED-GENRE MENU

OR

ONE-COURSE MEAL?

As many critics have pointed out, the narrative strategy of Como agua para chocolate works largely by reference and allusion to multiple genres and generic frames. As its subtitle anticipates (A novel in monthly installments, with recipes, love stories, and homespun remedies [Novela de entregas mensuales con recetas, amores y remedios caseros]), the novel seeks to blend the cookbook, which historically has enjoyed enormous prestige in Mexican popular culture, with early (1930s and 1940s) melodramas very loosely scripted around the Mexican Revolution or subsequent agrarian reform, with the soap-opera romance or telenovelas watched by millions of Mexican viewers at any given hour of the day or evening.10 Other subgenres also brought into the mix are private journals, the indigenous homeopathic remedy book (sometimes an integral part of regional cookbooks), and the border or frontier love story. Overlooked by

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most critics is the way in which the novel’s structure and sparse dialogue mirrors the popular fotonovela or historieta [photoromance in comic-book format] in the fragmented and roughly outlined delivery of the love story. A weekly genre that sells over two million copies per week in Latin America, the fotonovela comes in various colors: “pink,” for restrained and romantic; “black,” for noir romances, and “red,” for more scabrous treatment of perverse sexuality, such as a incest or rape.11 In alluding to these multiple genres and subgenres, the author not only pays homage to Mexican popular culture but ensures easy identification with or against well-known national and regional stereotypes. At the same time, by mixing genres that touch key nerves in the Mexican body of national discourses dealing with identity formation and transformation, Esquivel can assume that most of her readers (her Latin American readers at least) will recognize the models on which her characters and plots are based. Esquivel has a playful sense of humor, and the narrative’s melodramatic plot fairly bubbles over with comic imitations of certain cultural stereotypes and generic conventions. The scene in which Pedro is stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of Tita’s breasts, exposed as she grinds almonds on the famous metate [earthen stone], capitalizes on the cultural equation of the metate with female sexuality, a convention shared by the costumbrista tradition of Mexican nineteenth-century painters and twentieth-century muralists whose paintings show barely covered women’s breasts as they kneel or bend over the stone in the act of grinding various ingredients.12 Mamá Elena’s fears that her daughter might be poisoning her echoes a longestablished phobia in Mexican cultural and culinary history, one that goes back to colonial legal and Inquisitorial records that warn of the subversive potential of women’s cooking as a potentially murderous weapon. In her incarnation as a Mexican generala, Gertrudis is obviously modeled not on any historical woman general (Pancho Villa’s armies had none), but on María Félix’s much celebrated eroticized screen renditions of this improbable historical figure.13 Wild exaggeration, argues film theorist Mary Ann Doane, is one tactic to which feminist and postfeminist narratives may resort in order to expose and destabilize the absurd or absurdly dated tropes of femininity endorsed by melodrama and other popular genres. By rendering these tropes “fantastic, literally incredible,” women authors, artists, and filmmakers can subversively appropriate the conventions and structure of melodrama (and romance) to show the need to resist or reject them (180).14 For Doane, the intervention of the fantastic in melodrama means the possibility of turning the heat up on melodramatic clichés, so that gendered character traits, emotional states, and morbid encounters that are already hyperbolic become exaggerated beyond belief. Although the kind of “serious” masquerade or aggressive vamping that

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Doane proposes in order to expose the phallocentric gaps and crevices in the representation of traditional (and culturally prescribed) femininity may be beyond Esquivel’s bawdy but insufficiently ironic humor, the novel’s exaggerations of well-known popular and cultural archetypes through its frequent use of the fantastic (or magical realism, as some critics argue) could well serve a similar desacralizing and parodic purpose. The novel’s exuberant depiction of Gertrudis literally melting with desire after eating her sister’s combustible quail in rose sauce is a good example of precisely the kind of strategy that Doane advocates for countering the fetishistic sadomasochism of traditional romance and its conventional images of feminine desire. While traditional romantic rhetoric describes a woman’s discovery of sexual desire by resorting to similes and metaphors that depict her body in various degrees of heat, Esquivel shows us what happens when the cliché is rendered literal. Although comical, the image of Gertrudis radiating so much heat that the shower that is supposed to cool her down catches fire is also absurd. In a felicitous followup to the image of Gertrudis trying to keep from being consumed by her own body heat, the narrative notes that the young revolutionary officer who “rescues” her from the burning shower stall has been led to the ranch by his good nose for scenting a woman’s body in heat (“he was led there by Gertrudis’s body” [“lo guiaba el olor del cuerpo de Gertrudis”]) (52). Tita’s “explosive” death at the end of the novel reveals an identical tactic. While Pedro’s death of stroke from a sudden release of longdeferred desire is merely comic (unless one insists on reading the ending in a seriously romantic way), Tita’s suicide exaggerates another staple of melodrama and (tragic or tragicomic) romance. Rendering as “real” the metaphorical fireworks of romantic comedies and melodrama, Como agua para chocolate ends with enough sparks to set to rest any doubts about the carnivalized appropriation of a stereotypical romantic ending. Since the sexual consummation (which does not take place in the end) occurs after the big banquet at her niece’s wedding (the novel’s other, and happier, ending), Tita’s body, as a body flamé, becomes the novel’s last rite as well as its last meal, but this does not obscure the fact that her exaggerated death, which could also be read as another death by poisoning in the novel, is indeed hyperbolic enough to suggest a parodic take on the melodramatic ritual of dying for love. As I discuss later in this chapter, the exaggeration is not to be found in the narrative description of this ending but in the suggestiveness of the image, an all-out suggestiveness that is in fact more melodramatic than parodic. It is in reference to these passages, and others less openly carnivalesque, that interpretations of Esquivel’s novel as an example of genre parody position their argument. Reflecting the prevalent interpretation of this novel, Kathleen

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Glenn speaks of the “deliberate” attempt “to emphasize the ironic distance that exists between [her novel] and the formulaic ones she recasts” (41). María Angélica Alvarez claims that the incorporated discourses are “eroded from the inside” so as to “question secular prohibitions, cultural conditioning and [gender] roles petrified by the collective imaginary.”(6) As I state at the beginning of this chapter, however, what makes these otherwise persuasive arguments ultimately unconvincing, in my view, is that they fail to mention that Mexican popular melodrama (in all its manifestations) is already melodrama elevated to the ninth power of exaggeration and extravagance. Carlos Monsiváis zeroes in on this point with characteristic acuity when he reflects on the no-holds-barred excess typical of the Mexican film industry when approaching melodrama as a cinematic genre. In “South of the Border Down Mexico Way,” Monsiváis argues that it is only by resorting to such exuberant and exuberantly nationalistic sentimental excesses that the national film industry could compete with much slicker and costlier Hollywood tearjerkers.15 As regards excesses in plot and style, Como agua para chocolate is no match for the outrageous Manichaeism, fantastic mysticism, or cheap sentimentality of the popular models it imitates. What is more, it is entirely plausible that given the extravagantly sentimental rhetoric of Mexican cinematic melodrama, Mexican popular song, and Mexican telenovelas, critics like Mary Ann Doane would need to envision a completely different register of “fantastic, literally incredible” examples of parodic exaggeration. It is not Esquivel’s imagination that is lacking. As made evident in the suggestiveness of Gertrudis’s body exuding fiery desire, the novel’s most carnivalesque images are potent enough. The problem is that, as noted earlier, the narrative swerves away from these images by detouring all excess back into instructions for a recipe or to the disciplined patience needed for completing its preparation. Moreover, even the most exciting or excessive events are narrated in the same monotonal style, a style that is entirely too moderate in its adverbial and adjectival choices to be a convincing exaggeration of an exaggeration. The description of naked Gertrudis, first escaping the fire she has herself set with her own steaming body, then galloping away with the soldier, on his horse, serves as a good illustration of the insufficiency of the narrative voice to render real the more carnivalesque images: Her body radiated so much heat that the wooden boards began to crack and burn. Fearing she would be engulfed by the flames she ran out of the shack just as she was, completely naked . . . . Naked as she was, her loose hair down to her waist and exuding a luminous energy, she symbolized what would be a synthesis between an angelic and a diabolic woman.

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El calor que despedía su cuerpo era tan intenso que las maderas empezaron a tronar y a arder. Ante el pánico de morir abrasada por las llamas salió corriendo del cartucho, así como estaba, completamente desnuda . . . . Desnuda como estaba, con el pelo suelto cayéndole hasta la cintura e irradiando una luminosa energía, representaba lo que sería una síntesis entre una mujer angelical y una infernal. (53) Later in this paragraph, the naked and inflamed Gertrudis is “swept away” by the soldier on horseback who is “summoned” from the town square to the ranch by the smell of this woman’s body. But the scene takes too long to develop (a slow two and a half pages) and the description lacks carnivalesque humor as well as comic punch. Unwilling to revel in the extraordinarily comic-erotic flavor of the event, the narrator decides to cut the description short by telling her readers what she should have shown them instead: “the meeting between [them] was spectacular” [“el encuentro entre embos fue[ra] espectacular”(54)]. Most scholars who read Como agua para chocolate as an example of a gendered appropriation of popular genres through exaggeration or parodic reversals insist that the novel’s hyperbolic treatment of these passages distances Esquivel’s parodic imitation from the models imitated.16 But the lack of ironic markers in places where the narrative needs to signal the exaggeration of an already exaggerated model (as in the passage cited earlier) signals again and again the narrator’s refusal to render the carnivalesque image in an adequately carnivalesque style. What is missing in this and other similar passages is the drunkenness, the profanity, and the sheer boundlessness of carnivalesque rhetoric. While the plot shifts from carnivalesque to comic sentimental and sometimes openly maudlin scenes, the description remains unfortunately monologic. It is conceivable, as some critics have argued, that the unremarkable and repetitive tone might itself be a parody of the untutored style of popular telenovelas or romances, but such a tactic would require a sustained pattern, or a sustained ironic edge, to be convincingly parodic. There is no evidence of such a pattern anywhere in the novel. Going a step beyond other critics in assigning a hierarchical space to cooking over other genres in Esquivel’s novel, Carlos Monsiváis suggests yet one more way in which Esquivel’s novel can be seen to undo its own semiotic and structural transgressive potential. Noting that Como agua para chocolate “turns everything, sex included, into a cookbook recipe for an autophagous reality,”17 the prominent Mexican cultural critic observes that Como agua para chocolate ends up consuming itself. A direct reference, no doubt, to the novel’s ending, Monsiváis’s commentary is also suggesting that metaphorical appropriation of traditionally feminine spaces and discourses by women authors may or may not succeed as potentially transgressive

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discursive acts. It is true that Como agua para chocolate turns gender, generational, and class conflicts into recipes for culinary consumption, but the novel’s “cannibalism” ultimately records its own (and its characters’) selfcancelling control and repression rather than its desire to consume and spit out tradition. In the kitchen as in the marketplace, consumption is not necessarily a sign of social, cultural, or gender subversion. Indeed, it might prove to be just the opposite. In Esquivel’s novel, the preeminence of the culinary over the other genres ultimately turns against the novel’s initial experimental project. By allowing its culinary discourse to devour the potentially more daring discourses of the novel’s other genres, Como agua para chocolate refuses the dialogism offered by its structural promise of hybrid discourses.18 Yet where dialogism is absent, Mikhael Bakhtin reminds us, the possibility of discursive subversion wavers and wanes.

THE COOKING LESSON: NEXT TO CARNIVALESQUE TREATS, TRADITIONAL FARE More troublesome even than the stylistic and rhetorical weaknesses in Esquivel’s novel is the way in which the novel’s “lessons” (lessons in female models of behavior, as demonstrated through a gamut of female characters, including Tita’s great-niece) happen to reinforce rather than unsettle the misogynistic and class-conscious notions behind the conventional generic formulas adapted or adopted. The treatment of the matriarch’s character is a good starting point for analyzing the ideological problems behind the novel’s inconsistent and insufficiently ironic treatment of generic types or cultural stereotypes. Described from the first as a castrating or phallic mother, Mamá Elena is blatantly uncaring, unjust, and downright nasty in her treatment of her youngest daughter. Yet she is also a paragon of strength when seen standing up to the men around her, including the revolutionaries who come to attack the ranch the first time. As a woman in charge not just of a family but of a wealthy ranch, she is able to hold her own at a time when bigger and better men than she—the hacendados or landowners against whom the Mexican Revolution was fought—lost everything, their lives included. The image of the older widow made bitter by the need to survive in a man’s world already provides at least a partial explanation for her choleric “humors” (her humor de perros [bitchy humor], as one would say in Spanish), but the novel gives us two more built-in justifications for her harsh treatment of her daughter. Not only is she herself following an established family tradition, but she also has been the victim of a frustrated love. Yet despite all this, the narrative revels in turning Mamá Elena into the image of a hysterical harpy.19

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In her discussion of Hollywood romantic comedies, Kathleen Rowe divides past and present Hollywood comedies into the categories of “comedian comedy” and “romantic comedy.” Insisting on a place for woman, explains Rowe, romantic comedy presents a “vision of a social order that is not only renewed [ . . . ] but transformed” (102). By contrast, comedian comedy sides with the father and is often guilty of “symbolic matricide”: “comedian comedy” often “direct[s] its corrective laughter onto the matriarch, displacing the hostility it is licensed to level at the father onto the repressive, phallic mother” (104, 105).20 Such a tactical move not only deprives women of a serious role in (melo)drama but turns them into “fearsome or silly symbols of repression and obstacles to social transformation,” (105) concludes Rowe. “Generic fiction may be a site for the allegorical description of social injustices displaced in time and/or place from the reader’s own society,” notes Ann Cranny-Francis in Feminist Uses of Generic Fiction, but such fiction risks being “reappropriated by the discourses against which it is written” (9) if it is not careful to resist or question the ideology behind the genre’s conventions. In other words, as both Rowe & Cranny-Francis convincingly argue, if a generic parody is insufficiently ironic in its treatment of the generic conventions it caricatures, it is unlikely to succeed in enacting the kind of revision, and re-vision, that carnivalesque parody implicitly promises. The fact that Mamá Elena becomes a victim of her own emetics halfway through the novel, and that Tita’s cooking is indirectly responsible for her death, may be proof of the novel’s intent to turn this traditional enmity between mothers and daughters into a comical version of a dark fable. But it is insufficient proof. Casting the matriarch as a devouring phallic mother is especially problematic when one considers that Mamá Elena’s more admirable traits are precisely those traits her daughter would need if she ever hoped to escape the limiting spaces of the kitchen and/or the bedroom. Equally problematic, from the standpoint of a novel that at least on some level toys with the idea of freeing women from the clutches of popular romance and melodrama, is the fact that in the narrative’s Manichean contrast between Mamá Elena’s bad and Nacha’s good mothering is the suggestion that strong, vocal (if nasty) mothers should be replaced by caring, illiterate, and submissive (indigenous?) motherly women, women with dozens of magical secrets for feeding and healing but no recipes for their own, or other women’s, independence. Like Mamá Elena and Rosaura, Chencha also belongs in the comicgrotesque category but fails to pass the carnivalesque test. Accentuating rather than parodying the class, race, and power hierarchy embedded in the stereotype of the illiterate indigenous servant, Chencha’s comic figure is never incongruous enough to suggest a carnivalesque revision of the type. In

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all the modalities of melodrama mentioned thus far, the Chencha figure is a common staple of comic relief, one based strictly on race, and class (and, in this case, also gender) prejudices. In generic terms, moreover, while Mamá Elena plays the part of the bad mother and Rosaura of the “bad” other woman, the uneducated, garrulous young Indian with the bad habit of exaggerating the truth corresponds to the figure of the (lower-class) trickster. In his anthropological study Humor and Laughter, Mahadev Apte states that in the oral tradition as well as in popular literature, the trickster is the character whose function is to “create and structure social relations” through “humorous exchanges” with the hero, protagonist, or community. If Chencha’s figure is used as a measuring stick for gauging the novel’s ideological stance vis-à-vis social and racial relations, then what emerges is once again highly problematic. As the character who most directly witnesses the effects of the revolution, first by observing the hangings in the town plaza and then by being raped by the federales (federalist soldiers), Chencha could have served as a bridge between the upper-class family and the peasant faction of the revolutionary forces. Instead, her eyewitness account of the public hangings is quickly dismissed by Tita, who is too busy contemplating her body’s goose-bump-like reaction to Pedro’s gazing at her naked breasts in the previous scene. Then, after being raped, she is unceremoniously sent home by Mamá Elena, not because of the rape itself but because she suspects Chencha of being an accomplice in Tita’s (nonexistent) plot to poison her. While Mamá Elena’s insensitivity would surprise no one, the narrator’s comments describing Chencha’s reaction to being fired are surprising indeed. Pointing out that Chencha rejected Tita’s entreaties to stay on the ranch, the narrator notes that the servant “took advantage of the excuse [of being fired] so she could go spend a few days in her home town. She needed to forget the matter of the rape.” [se aprovechó de este pretexto para irse a pasar unos días a su pueblo. Necesitaba olvidarse del asunto de la violación”] (135). It would be difficult to read this passage as parody even if it were tainted with a heavy dose of black humor, but in this case there is no humor at all—ironic or otherwise—sustaining the narrative description. Instead, the narrative replicates the insensitivity with which characters like Chencha are treated in the popular media.21 In Memory and Modernity. Popular Culture in Latin America, William Rowe and Vivian Schelling remind us that melodrama is “drama of recognition.” If Como agua para chocolate is indeed parodying the melodrama of the folletin, the fotonovela, or the hugely popular Televisa telenovelas, how does the novel’s ironic take on these genres resolve or replay the drama of recognition on which these genres’ plots are founded? Tita’s only “liberating” revelation is her explicit relization that she hates her mother

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[la odio . . . siempre la odie’] (200). Gertrudis, the freest woman in the novel and the most convincingly parodic of a stereotypical model, never uncovers her true origin. John, the gallant doctor who should discover something after hanging around the ambivalent heroine for so long, learns nothing, except, perhaps, that personal history repeats itself with variations, so his son will enjoy the privilege of marrying a De la Garza woman that was denied to him. Rather than a parody of various modalities of melodrama as genre, this list of traditional and even outmoded clichés (none delivered as particularly comic) should make clear that, far from reshaping or remixing the orthodox morals of popular melodrama, Esquivel’s novel serves them to us carefully molded and baked. Furthermore, by turning the more tastelessly excessive or more vulgar aspects of the genre into a genteel and nostalgic, if quirky version, Como agua para chocolate largely succeeds in neutralizing this already commodified and highly fetishized genre.

INCONTINENT BODIES, MASS POISONINGS, HYSTERICAL ANTIDOTES Historians and anthropologists tell us that colonial and nineteenth-century Mexican chronicles are rife with records of women poisoning their men, or at least attempting to do so.22 The first “death by chocolate” story recorded in the New World appears in Thomas Gage’s 1648 Travail by Sea and Land, or A New Survey of the West Indies, a work in which the English Dominican monk who visited the New World writes about the much-publicized murder of the Bishop of Chiapas at the hands of one of his female parishioners. The cause of death, in the bishop’s case, was declared to be “death by chocolate.”23 As Gage records the story, the bishop had forbidden his women parishioners to consume the thick popular drink during Mass, a prohibition for which he quickly became an object of hatred. Enraged by the bishop’s prohibition, the wealthy Doña Magdalena de Morales decided to take matters into her own hands by eliminating the source of the problem: she poisoned the bishop by serving him his very last earthly cup of “spiced” chocolate. No one dies from Tita’s hot chocolate, but the leitmotivs of poisoning and self-poisoning run through the novel with the stealth and efficaciousness of a stomach virus. Although inadvertently, the protagonist is responsible for poisonining hundreds of wedding guests (the tears in the cake are evidently “indigestible” as a melancholy-inducing ingredient), manages to intoxicate her sister Gertrudis to the point of sensual madness and revolutionary fervor, leads her mother to poison herself, causes Rosaura’s flatulent death from indigestion after fighting her over her niece’s future, and finally poisons her-

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self after ingesting an excess of potassium nitrate and phosphorous (part of the recipe for making homemade matches). Recurring throughout this lack of control over food and bodies introduces a much more more transgressive strain in Como agua para chocolate than the novel’s celebration of cooking or the image of the heroine as a Mexican Ceres with occasional supernatural powers.24 Nevertheless, the way in which culinary ingredients and bodily humors unleash adverse reactions on the digestive health of bodies is evidence of how the semiotic can exert pressure on the symbolic in unexpectedly subversive ways. Images of the protagonist as an accidental Circe forcefully reveal the extent to which sudden violent metabolic reactions—even when described as playfully comic rather than transgressively carnivalesque—begin to challenge the novel’s nostalgic celebration of tradition and traditional femininity. While the ongoing descriptions of traditional culinary skills focus on rich, spicy meals and delectable bodies spell out an aesthetics of quaint femininity, the recurring references to women’s bodies and biochemical reactions come very close to giving us glimpses of the grotesque body: the body that vomits, belches, bloats, farts, and dies. It is in flirting with the out-of-control female body, the body that refuses external or internal discipline, that the novel comes closest to a transgressive register, and it’s humor approaches potentially subversive levels. What is surprising is the staying power of these images, their tendency to rise to the top despite the narrator’s efforts to deemphasize them through light comedy or more cooking. Keeping with the novel’s emphasis on chemical and alchemical reactions, the narrative takes pleasure in featuring all sorts of bodily fluids. Besides gallons of tears and undigested food as vomit, we find amniotic fluids, sweat from women’s bodies, blood (including menstrual blood), and the mysterious, magical milk that oozes from Tita’s virginal but nursing breasts. Semen, on the other hand, enters this picture only indirectly, when Pedro regrets having to perform his “labor semental” [“seminal labor”] in order to impregnate his yet untouched bride.25 The intrusive presence of all these female fluids flies in the face of cultural taboos, religious injunctions, and a host of equally rigid and puritanical norms of conventional good taste; it also introduces, at the semantic and symbolic level, a strategy of resistance much more carnivalesque than any attempt (ironic or not) at parodying the various genres framed within the novel. Combining the themes of poisoning and bodily incontinence, the wedding banquet scene, with its communal weeping and vomiting, is a convincing illustration of how an episode most likely intended to be merely comic (after all, bodily excesses of one type or another are often used in melodrama for comic relief ) turns into something considerably more serious, or

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seriously carnivalesque. As a potential illustration of what Julia Kristeva describes as food abjection in Powers of Horror, the scene provokes more comic anxiety than comic relief. Perhaps for this reason, and to avoid provoking this same anxiety, the film opts to focus on the vomitona (communal vomiting) from a distance by rendering it from far away and against a horizon of soft pinks and violets.26 More along the lines of a Kristevan abjection and its attendant separation anxiety than along a comic carnivalesque (and Bakhtinian) celebration, Rosaura’s wedding banquet plays out like the temporary revenge of too much sweetness (and perhaps too much purity) on a narrative that from time to time dares to experiment with food and bodies, though perhaps too cautiously. The association of dirt and disorder with women’s fluids has been carefully studied by a number of feminist scholars, among them Mary Douglas (Purity and Danger), Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva (especially in Powers of Horror), Emily Martin (The Woman in the Body), and Elizabeth Grosz. Influenced by Mary Douglas’s anthropological study of bodies and pollution and Kristeva’s psychoanalytic interpretation of the femenine as abject, Grosz notes that “[b]ody fluids attest to the permeability of the [female] body,” and put in question “the perilous divisions between the body’s inside and its outside.”27 By historically representing women’s corporeality as “a mode of seepage,” Grosz argues, patriarchal discourses have succeeded in tattooing the link between femininity and disorder into the Western imaginary. Giving in, even if momentarily, to a carnivalesque discourse that works by exposing women’s uncontrolled, uncontained, or incontinent bodies, Como agua para chocolate exposes itself to the invasion of the abject and the grotesque. Here lies the source of the novel’s potentially transgressive humor, and humors. In explaining the subversive potential of the “carnivalized feminine principle,” anthropologist Victor Turner insists that the carnivalesque (bawdy, unruly) female body becomes an automatic threat not just to the stability of the home but also to the stability of public order. “The danger is not simply that of female ‘unrulines,’” notes Turner, but the fact that this unruliness is itself indicative of society’s vulnerability to change from below or from its margins. For this reason, adds Turner “the subversive potential of the carnivalized feminine principle becomes [especially] evident in times of social change, when its manifestations move out of the liminal world of Mardi Gras into the political arena itself ” (41–42). Although Como agua para chocolate keeps its female characters’ somatic or humoral incontinence confined to the space of the family ranch, it is possible to see in Gertrudis’s out-of-control and uncontrollable body the dramatization of this link between female unruliness on a private and somatic level and female transgression on the public sphere. In this way, while openly foregrounding comic tactics that coincide with what Eileen Gillooley defines as traditionally feminine humor (a humor

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that relies on sentimentality, subtle bursts of irony, and self-deprecation), the novel’s gendered version of bodily and bawdy humor moves toward more daring registers of humoral or corporeal excess.28 Of the three sisters, it is revealing that only Gertrudis escapes “real” poisoning. Provoked into her memorable sexual awakening by a few bites of her sister’s quail (which was basted not only in rose sauce but in the drops of blood Tita shed while holding the roses Pedro had just given her), Gertrudis leaves the maternal ranch in the arms of a galloping revolutionary, ready both for sensual escapades and revolutionary struggles. After disappearing from the ranch, and thus from the novel’s direct frame of reference, the family servants hear that Gertrudis has become a prostitute in a border-town bordello, not from desperation or indigence but to satisfy the desire for male flesh unleashed by her sister’s meal and her encounter with the galloping revolutionary (who later becomes her husband).29 Graduating, a year later, to more serious forms of galloping, Gertrudis joins the villistas and becomes a general in the armies of Pancho Villa.30 When next seen at the ranch she has an army of men who will not only fight for her but cook for her. It is the lusty and rebellious Gertrudis, not the largely submissive and sweet Tita, who holds the power to domesticate men, and she does it while barely setting foot in the family’s kitchen. In one of the novel’s memorable comic turns, Gertrudis threatens to have one of her soldiers shot if he does not manage to achieve the right consistency in the syrup he has been ordered to make for her sister’s rolls. Either in an effort to follow historical realism (as revolutionaries turn counterrevolutionaries and good bourgeoise) or, more likely, in a move to give the character a classically “happy ending,” the novel turns its one openly transgressive female model into a respectable bourgeois dama (lady). Arriving at Esperanza’s wedding in a brand new Ford Model T, Gertrudis is a married middle-aged woman with a dashing husband, a muscular son, and a feathered hat so big that she can barely get out of the car. Although she now can be read as a parody of the postrevolutionary, politically corrupt, and thoroughly capitalistic Artemio Cruz, the image has the unfortunate effect of co-opting Gertrudis’s trangressive body and her shocking past back into the familial and domestic fold. Only the mention of her carelessness in stepping out of the car, and the observation that her lusty body turns her into the first wedding guest to take her husband away from the celebration and back to the bedroom, redeem Gertrudis from being “digested” by the novel’s desire for happy (or at least romantically traditional) endings. Even more unfortunate than Gertrudis’s traditional ending is the novel’s marginalization of the character, allowed only occasional visits to the family ranch. But this is added proof that the author does not wish for the gritty and plainly subversive Gertrudis to become more of a heroine than Tita herself. In fact, were she to visit the De la Garza ranch

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more often, she might turn out to be a bad influence on the novel’s romantic female lead. What is almost certain is that Gertrudis would have stolen the show (as she does when she is on the scene), had she been fully incorporated into the novel. Whether burning with desire on horseback or threatening to put to death one of her soldiers if he does not learn to master the syrup needed for her Christmas tarts. Gertrudis’s is the only boundless body that the novel celebrates without palliatives or censoring mechanisms (except in her very last transformation, of which we catch only a glimpse). As a result, when Gertrudis is present, the novel’s carnivalesque and parodic potential reaches its perfect boiling point. Contrasting sharply with Gertrudis’ openly carnivalesque body (and with Mamá Elena’s and Rosaura’s hysterical and choleric bodies), Tita’s body remains contained within the confines of idealized femininity not only by her mother’s ironclad control but by the author’s refusal to let her heroine enter the sphere of the carnivalesque without an apron to keep herself from getting splattered by its messiness. In the early parts of the novel she is identified with whiteness and winter, a color and a season anathema to the carnivalesque. When hearing that Pedro is betrothed to her sister, she is said to feel “as though with a sudden blow winter had entered her body” [“como si el invierno le hubiera entrado al cuerpo de golpe y porrazo”] (13). Although her body is momentarily linked to the experience of abjection (she is nauseated by the thought that one of the eggs might contain a live baby chick during the preparation of the wedding cake), this link is short-lived in the novel.31 Instead, and despite her transgressions, the novel associates the protagonist with a rhetoric of purity throughout. While preparing the mix for her sister’s wedding cake, Tita fears that she will be swallowed up by the whiteness of so many kilos of granulated sugar, and the whiteness of the sugar sends her back to childhood memories where she remembers going to Church dressed in white, walking amid white candles in the white chapel where she offered her white flowers to the Virgin.32 As this passage reveals beyond any doubt, Tita’s fears and desires are both bound up in the same transluscent whiteness. While she fears the whiteness of sterility, she desires to share the bride’s enviable virginity. By anchoring the protagonist to a discourse of purity (broken only occasionally and only convincingly at the end of the novel), the novel keeps her at arm’s length from the carnivalesque realm in which her sisters and mother are allowed to enter, either as carnivalesque and erotic, or as comic grotesque and repellent.33 Even Tita’s longest episode of revolt and rebellion is cast in terms of emptiness, self-annullment, and the denial of the body. Refusing to eat and speak are not infrequent forms of female rebellion but, as other critics have pointed out, they can both turn with masochistic force on the subject’s own body. And while Tita’s magical lactation at hearing her nephew’s cries for

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food might put her in the tradition of the hysterical ilusas or deluded women described by Jean Franco in her discussion of Ana de Aramburu in the early nineteenth century, she manages to keep this miracle a secret, one she shares only with Pedro. In fact, the episode is narrated as nothing more than yet another of Tita’s “magical” feeding tricks.34 In keeping with the strategies of purity and containment that define her, the narrative casts neither Tita nor her attempts at asserting independence in comic terms. It is indeed ironic that while her alchemical powers in the kitchen result in some of the novel’s most memorable carnivalesque excesses, Tita herself must remain on the margins of the carnival. Only through her death, which she brings on by ingesting enough matches to make herself combustible, does Tita finally enter the realm of the carnivalesque: for once she stops worrying about good manners and acts on impulse. As scholars and theorists of carnivalesque practices have noted, bawdy humor and irreverent carnivalesque discourses derive much of their power from the antics and (dis)functions of bodies that are out of control and from equally uncontrolled, and uncontrollable, appetites. At its weakest, this type of unmannered humor breaks rules of decorum. At its best, it temporarily topples the social codes on which those rules of decorum, etiquette, and social hierarchies are founded. But what these critics also note is that this bodily, deep-bellied humor to begin to wreak havoc on its targeted surroundings, it must be willing to offend, and offend frequently. In this novel, the tyranny of good taste and tastefulness ultimately keeps the potential of the novel’s carnivalesque transgressions, as evinced in its presentation of incontinent women’s bodies, from exploding out of control.

NO AFTER-DINNER DRINKS To my knowledge, no scholarly analysis of Como agua para chocolate has focused on the fact that a novel based on the premise of culinary delights and the promise of erotic feasts should make so little mention of wine and other spirits. The oversight is surprising. Chapter One appears to promise alcohol some role in the story when it mentions that Mamá Elena’s gossipy friend Lupita suspects Tita’s flushed cheeks are due to having too many sips of the liqueur meant for the men visiting the ranch. In yet another demonstration of the “cooling” effects of the recipe on the love story and other passionate tensions, Tita stops Lupita’s suspicions dead in their track by sharing with her a “priced” private family recipe. After this scene, there is no significant mention of alcoholic drinks (in this novel where every chapter serves a meal) until nearly the end of the novel, where a supposedly very drunk Pedro catches on fire. Even here, however, it is clear that the near-catastrophe is brought about

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not so much by Pedro’s drunkenness as by the vengefulness of Mamá Elena’s ghost. Aside from these two allusions, the role that alcohol plays as an agent of festive excess or erotic intoxication in this novel is insignificant. The near absence of alcoholic drinks in a work that seeks to celebrate bodily excesses and carnivalesque festivities is highly revealing. As Bakhtin noted on more than one occasion, along with food and sex, alcohol is instrumental in helping to loosen the repressive and self-repressive control mechanisms responsible for maintaining individual decorum and group order. And while it is perhaps less surprising that a woman chef should be no wine steward (an assumption that should strike many of us as sexist), the author’s neglect of dinner and after-dinner drinks in her otherwise spicy and varied cookbook is yet another telltale sign of the degree to which Esquivel’s novel resists taking markedly carnivalesque risks. In choosing to relate a story of cooking, eating, and bodily excesses from the perspective of near-total abstinence, Como agua para chocolate shows the risks of approaching carnivalesque humor, and carnivalesque transgression, from a perspective of decorum and moderation. A reading of the limitations of this novel’s handling of its comic transactions is instructive: if there is to be revolt, or at least wild celebration, the gloves will need to come off.

CHAPTER THREE

/ Provocative Bodies, Hard-Edged Humor: Ana Lydia Vega Carnivalesque structure is like the residue of a cosmogony. . . . It is a spectacle, but without a stage; a game, but also a daily undertaking; a signifier, but also a signified . . . two texts meet, contradict, and relativize each other. A carnival participant is both actor and spectator; he loses his sense of individuality, passes through a zero point of carnivalesque activity and splits into a subject of the spectacle and an object of the game. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language . . . the specificity of women’s writing consists in its ambivalent attitude towards tradition: an essentially parodic attitude that embraces the values of the patriarchal discourse so as to later subvert them. [my translation] Elzbieta Sklodowska, La parodia en la nueva novela latinoamericana

L

ife is cheap in Ana Lydia Vega’s “Pasión de historia” [“Red Hot Story”].1 Narrated in a mock-noir style that overflows with colloquial bravado, the story begins as one woman’s attempt to write about a crime of passion, turns into a voyeuristic detour of another unlawful passion primed for a criminal ending, and ends with the announcement that the clueless narrator has herself been the victim of a jealous man’s bullet. The murders are in triplicate (the story “frames” all three women), the characters comically caricaturesque, and the story’s tone relentlessly irreverent, so the reader is left laughing with the corpses rather than mourning for them. But if this reader is a woman, she may want to ask herself what there is to laugh about in a story that portrays

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dark (or darker) women as exaggerated icons of histrionic sexual urges—or into gawking observers of other women’s sexual spectacles—only to have them end up pale corpses, casualties of possessive Latin lovers who turn to murder when they can no longer control their partners’ or ex-partners’ sexual actions.2 My analysis of “Pasión de historia” in this chapter sets out to answer this question by focusing on the instability and the multidirectionality of humor, irony, and the parodic construct in a markedly postcolonial context. The linguistic hybridity, stylistic exuberance, and irreverent irony typical of Ana Lydia Vega’s humor have their roots in an easily traceable tradition of Caribbean carnivalesque parody. In The Repeating Island. The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, Antonio Benítez-Rojo considers carnaval to be the only appropriate semiotic and symbolic medium open enough and multivocal enough to encompass the volatile mixture of genres, discourses, dialects, and ideologies present in Caribbean letters and Caribbean experience (5). Influenced not only by Benítez-Rojo but also by Severo Sarduy’s Bakhtinian treatment of the Latin American baroque, other Caribbean scholars have expounded on the crucial role that excess, distortion, and violent appropriation—of texts, languages, and cultures—have played and continue to play in the literature of the region.3 According to María Julia Daroqui, “[t]he tangled web of ethnic and cultural discourses, the instability of fictional games, the confusion of intertextual allusions are—among other traits—the most salient unifying traits” of Caribbean discourse (19).4 In the three decades since Emir Rodríguez Monegal’s pronouncement that the history of Latin American letters could be adequately understood only in the context of carnivalesque parody, it has become increasingly evident that it is largely in the not so “tristes tropiques” of the Caribbean axis that carnivalesque performs its most excessive articulation. It is here, furthermore, that parody signals its most carnivalesque appetite for cannibalizing anything within range of its mimetic powers. To distinguish the Caribbean practice of parody from other national or regional kinds of parodic appropriation, Benítez-Rojo coins the term “supersyncretism,” a label meant to capture both the volatile mélange and the explosive polyphony that characterizes Caribbean narratives. With their fluid slippage between genres, their ongoing love affair with popular culture, and their taste for outrageous spectacle, Ana Lydia Vega’s supersyncretic stories can be situated squarely within the carnivalesque-parodic tradition spearheaded by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Luis Rafael Sánchez, and Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá. This same supersyncretism can be seen, in different guises, in more recent work by Caribbean authors Mayra Santos Febres, Mirta Yáñez, José Alcántara Almánzar, María Palacio Rame, and Jesús Díaz, among others. Vega’s reliance on colloquial and often vulgar humor, her fascination with an eroticism that borders on the pornographic, her carnivalesque deconstructions of national and regional discourses, and last, but not least, the comic but

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double-edged irony that pervades her desacralization of the literary canon, are all recognizable markers of the regional tradition from and within which she writes.5 While Vega’s irreverent approach to the icons of national (Puerto Rican) history and her use of multiple parodic models to explode linguistic registers aligns her most closely to her compatriots Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá or Manuel Ramos Otero, the way in which she turns this humor into a gendered vehicle for comically exposing cultural prejudices has led critics to read certain of her stories (“Pollito Chicken,” “Letra para salsa y tres soneos por encargo,” “Otra maldad de Pacheco”) as defining moments in the development of a Caribbean cultural awareness.6 Other critics question the prioritization of these texts by Vega over earlier ones that explored similar problems, but grant that several of this author’s stories are particularly apt vehicles for discussing key traits and turning points in critical appraisals of Caribbean fiction.

TROUBLE

IN THE

TROPICAL CITY: NOIR

IN

TABLOID RED

The title story in the 1987 collection that bears its name, “Pasión de historia” was first published in 1984.7 Given the date of publication and Vega’s frequently admitted cinephilia, the story might well be a parodic attempt to combine two celebrated noir movies of the early 1980s, one a Hollywood blockbuster, the other an experimental short film by an independent woman director.8 The first of these films is Body Double, and there is an impossibleto-miss allusion to its director, Brian De Palma, halfway through Vega’s story. De Palma’s 1983 noir thriller begins with an image of a beautiful woman stripping before the window of a sumptuous Hollywood mansion. The struggling actor who watches the scene from his own window and is turned into an accidental voyeur by the sight of the woman’s spectacular body soon finds himself witnessing the murder of the same woman. The conventions of the genre require that the witness, implicated in this case by scopophilia, fulfill his role as avenger of the dead woman. The character’s search for answers takes him into the world of blue movies and women who work as “body doubles” in the film industry.9 The second film is Sally Potter’s short-feature Thriller, released in 1980. Shot in black and white, this film retells the story of Puccini’s La Bohème from the perspective of the doomed romantic heroine, Mimi, but Potter recasts Puccini’s romantic melodrama as a noir suspense story. Learning that she must die at the end of the story, Mimi sets out to find out why. In the process, she attempts to sort out the dichotomies between her role as the “good” woman and that of her antithesis in Puccini’s libretto, the sensual “bad” girl Musetta. Considered an early classic of feminist film, Potter’s Thriller is often discussed as a film that examines the romantic fascination with

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woman as victim, making its viewers aware of the intrusiveness of the (camera’s) gaze and the need to “mask” femininity so as to make it representable. The film borrows freely from the conventions of Hollywood noir films of the 1930s and 1940s in order to deconstruct them.10 Since these films either exaggerate or deconstruct many of the typical conventions of the film noir genre, as does Vega’s story, it is difficult to prove whether particular details in the overlapping noir plots are merely coincidental or not. What is undeniable is that through the narrator’s ubiquitous references to film directors known primarily for their noir thrillers or noir realism, the story makes its readers persistently aware of its own love affair with this particular film genre. As it does with De Palma, “Pasión de historia” tips its hat to Alfred Hitchcock, Chabrol, François Truffault, Bertrand Blier, and Michel Cané. Moreover, the story places its readers on a film stage from the start, as Carola, principal narrator, ambivalent voyeur, and would-be detective, relates her breakup with her ex-lover as if the two screaming parties had been “actors” competing for the Oscar: “I don’t know which one of us tried harder: whether it was me, feigning a cheap attack of jealousy to make my wanting out more believable, or him, playing the repentant stray in a role that could have earned him the Oscar as best supporting actor” [“No sé cuál de los dos se botó más: si yo, fingiendo unos celos de pacotilla para suavizar el karatazo o él, haciendo de chillo contrito en un papelote que bien hubiera podido ganarle el Oscar de best supporting actor”] (7). More references to films and film paraphernalia immediately follow: the narrator’s landlady is said to have aimed “her optical cannons” [“sus cañones ópticos”] (10) at the intruder who has been stopping by her house to check out the narrator’s window; upon discovering that the intruder is no other than her ex, the narrator complains that she will now be forced to watch “‘[t]he Return of Manuel:’ a movie [she] ha[s] had to watch several times already” [“‘El Retorno de Manuel,’” película que ya había tenido que tirarme varias veces”] (11). Writing about the predominance of the noir genre in American (U.S.) modernism, Paula Rabinowitz notes that “[n]oir offers a template for analyzing how cultural formations achieve legibility through stable repetitions of instability, predictable renderings of chaos, sinister animations and immobile objects” (14). Given film noir’s predilection for corrupt politicians and an even more corrupt police force, one would expect the genre to have had its own heyday in Latin American cinema, yet there is almost nothing equivalent to classic noir in Mexican, Brazilian, or Argentinean cinema in the 1940s or 1950s.11 In an essay on the history of Latin American film, Carlos Monsiváis argues that the genre failed to graft onto the Latin American cinematic palimpsest for lack of good scriptwriters and directors who would have known how to film suspense as skillfully as a Robert Siodmak or an Otto Preminger. Since any number of modernista and vanguardista short stories could have

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served as a pretext for eerily intellectual urban noirs,12 I am not convinced that a dearth of good scripts was as serious an obstacle to the development of noir in Latin America as this critic observes. Censorship undoubtedly did play a role in limiting a director’s possible takes of the darker side of the city, and Monsiváis quickly illustrates the silencing effect of the censors by noting that even the renowned Luis Buñuel, then exiled in Mexico, was trumped by the censors when he tried to make a “realistic” noir film out of Rodolfo Usigli’s 1943 novel Ensayo de un crimen [Rehearsal for a Crime].13 Yet Monsiváis’s explanation, while helpful, seems insufficient. I propose that there are at least two other reasons that help to explain the failure of film noir to yield a harvest of local versions in Latin American cinema (as did almost all other Hollywood genres). As Rabinowitz and others scholars of this genre have noted, film noir relies heavily on empty or half-empty inner-city spaces: empty parking lots, empty lots next to deserted or abandoned buildings, empty blocks in the middle of downtown areas. By the 1940s, most Latin American major cities were crammed to capacity with buildings and bodies, and a movie director’s or photographer’s camera would have had a hard time finding an empty space or empty street in sight. Latin American urban nightlife, which typically runs into the dawn hours, reduces significantly the number of hours in which city streets might be deserted. What is more, the hardened indifference of urban dwellers and passers-by to shady goings-on and suspicious bodies on which Hollywood or European noir depends is countered in Latin American urban spaces with the ever-present figure of the mirón or mirona [the curious bystander, male or female]. If noir did not succeed in grafting onto the Latin American imaginary during the 1940s and 1950s, it is safe to speculate that it was partly due to the fact that some key conventions of the genre would have rung false to a Latin American urban audience of the time. Obviously aware of the major social and cultural disjunctions that separate classic Hollywood noir (the genre that in many ways defined American classic cinema and fetishized postwar American fears) and the decidedly nontraditional noir spaces in which “Pasión de historia” takes place, Ana Lydia Vega’s parody of the genre is conflated with other genre parodies. Neither tropical, crowded, poverty-stricken San Juan (Puerto Rico), nor the misty small village in the French Pyrenees where the narrator visits her friend Vilma (and witnesses other crimes in the making) are likely noir scenarios. Yet the stories contained in “Pasión de historia,” with their bloody crimes and their dead femme fatales, belong at least on one level to the noir genre. Or do they? In large part, the extradiegetic and intradiegetic narrators’ rehearsal with multiple generic frames grows out of a recognizable postcolonial obsession: where to position the subject of discourse so that the story can be told from a national perspective? Does the carnivalesque instinct to parody every

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genre and discourse in sight signal a guarantee that the ensuing heteroglossia will find the words, and the frame, to tell the “true” cultural story of these crimes? Vega’s answers to these questions, if one may call them answers, are all ironically dual and comically ambivalent. If the noir frame turns first narrator Carola into amateur detective, her suspicion that behind the crime are real social and cultural ghosts to be unveiled turn her, ironically, toward documentary realism. She herself states early on that the crime novel she is writing is “half documentary, half detective” [“medio documental, medio policíaca”] (7). She also notes that her interest in the story grows out of the media coverage of the crime: “I’d like to think that it was the puritanism of the media coverage that got me tangled up in the project,” [“Quiero pensar que fueron los implícitos puritanos del reportaje”] (7). Newspapers and newspaper headlines appear frequently in film noir scenes. But Vega’s story takes place in the Caribbean, where tabloid sensationalism may be closer to the hard truth than governmentcontrolled newspapers. The incorporation of the tabloid into the story’s noir palette announces the intrusion of a not-so-repressed psychosexual and social rhetoric into the rhetorically reticent space of traditional noir (more interested in suggesting than in loudly announcing). Besides superimposing another genre into the space of the noir story, the insertion of the tabloid signals the story’s interest in “historia” [“history”] as social chronicle. No matter how many noir stories are happening in this city’s overcrowded apartment houses, they rely on the tabloid to put a stamp of reality on them, and this stamp of reality comes with its own interpretation of the same. The realization that the headlines have swayed public opinion to condemn the dead woman and exonerate her killer is largely what sets the narrator on the trail of gossip that surrounds the memory of the criminal event, but both Carola and her friend Vilma, who becomes the story’s second femme fatale and casualty, are described as having a weakness for such tabloid journalism. In her role as detective/chronicler, Carola is vulnerably positioned between a noir (investigating a femme fatale’s death) and a documentary frame. Both frames are exaggerated to comic parodic proportions, but the second nuances the story’s verbal humor with social concerns. Caught in a classic trap of the noir genre, Carola keeps returning to the real or imagined scene of the crime in hope of new clues. She does so first by consulting the dead woman’s neighbors, then by mentally recreating a moment-by-moment, pose-by-pose scenario of the scene immediately preceding Malén’s death. In the first case, she is stumped by the threatened middle-class mentality of the bourgeois husbands and wives who failed to stop the crime or rescue the dying woman.14 Lumped together as the “Club of Condom-Protected Wives” and the “United Males for the Protection of Virile Honor,” the neighbors defend their unwillingness to enter the crime

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scene or help the dying woman as she knocked on their doors by voicing traditional bourgeois values: “she asked for it.”15 The working-class ex-lover and assassin will give the same explanation to the police with memorably alliterative brevity: “I stuck it in her because she stuck it to me” [“se la piqué porque me la pegó”] (9). What Carola seeks is a multiplicity of voices (and indeed records a multiplicity of colorful dialects) in order to register the “national” or at least “regional” story behind the sensationalist crime story. What she finds is a single version in many different vocal registers. Despite her earnestness, the narrator gets nowhere with the Malén story. Part of Carola’s failure, of course, has to do with the fact that the femme fatale in noir is meant to remain a mystery. Her attraction and her danger depend largely on this mystery. Alive or dead, she is supposed to keep her secrets. In this respect, Carola simply fails to keep her generic conventions straight. More problematic, however, are the facts that Carola disregards, or barely notes; facts that emerge as a possible story behind the story. While she assumes that the crime she is investigating is one more “crime of passion,” what she begins to discover is a complicated picture in which sex and economics are intimately imbricated. The specter of economic stagnation and class prejudice that haunts this first part of the story comes through in spurts, partly as an explanation (although not a justification) of vicious misogyny, but the writer within the narrative (Carola) does not know what to do with these observations. In fact, neither film noir nor tabloid journalism prepares her to deal with these problems, and so the consciousness of class that pervades Part I of the story becomes merely the sum of so many seemingly unrelated details: the description of the narrator’s one-room apartment on the cheaper side of the city (“a closet masquerading as a room . . . in Humacao street, an area . . . with the frequent fragrances of sewers overflowing” [“un clóset disfrazado de habitación . . . en la calle Humacao, territorio . . . perfumado ocasionalmente por fragancias de alcantarilla desbordada”] (7); the demarcation between the legitimate (bourgeois) tenants in the building where the murder took place and the fallen, working-class woman; the recreation of Doña Fini’s working-class mannerisms, and the narrator’s mother’s discovery, later in the story, that Malén’s assassin was from a neighborhood from which only criminals could emerge. Although the hardboiled genre frequently mixes a middle-class detective with working-class characters (independently of the criminal element), the noir film tends to show the underside of the city by fetishizing poverty rather than showing it a symptom of the city. If for no other reason, the story’s generic frame needs the crassness of tabloid “realism” to counteract the slickness of the noir scenario. In her introduction to a collection of essays on film noir, E. Ann Kaplan states that classics noirs revolve around the trope of a symbolically castrated masculinity (11). In other words, it is not just “masculinity” that is threatened

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by the overtly sexual woman, but impoverished, ethnically coded, unemployed masculinity. This does not make the crime (much less the bourgeois exoneration of the criminal) any less gruesome, of course. But in Analydia Vega’s story it makes the judgment of the culture’s misogyny more complicated, and the story’s ironic take on both criminal and victim conveys these complications. Vega’s parody of noir, like parody of the tabloid, registers that complexity by allowing us to laugh, and yet to take seriously, the truculent events narrated. As does film noir, which attempts to sweep its class and race-coded paranoia under the excessively sexual skirts of the femme fatale, the narrator in Vega’s story passes over the social problems she intuits in Malén’s story without commentary. Yet like the sewer pipes in the neighborhood in which the narrator lives, the social problems mentioned overflow the frame(s) she has chosen for her novel, and she finds herself at a loss as to how to approach her Malén chronicle or case. It is partly to try other “frames” (of reference, of telling, of experiencing) that Carola accepts Vilma’s offer to come to France. Like the narrator, Vilma too assumes that the narrator’s writing problems are due to not having the proper space in which to work. One of the first things we hear Vilma say to the narrator as she shows her the guest room she has prepared for her is that she would have to be “sterile” (“machorra”) not to “give birth” (“parir”) to the novel she has been “gestating” in the idyllic space of this cozy study with a view. The problem is that the narrator will get to “view” (and imagine) much more than mountain scenery, and her space for writing about one crime will soon be crowded with details of future crimes.

TAKE TWO: GOTHIC NOIR, ETHNOGRAPHY 101, AND THE FOREIGN FEMME FATALE If Malén’s “pasión de historia” is cast in terms of urban film noir and tabloid pulp in Part I of “Pasión de historia,” Vilma’s story of passionate seduction and probable death is framed in mock-gothic noir. To be sure, references to fairy tales and the horror story (and corresponding allusions to Snow White, Blue beard, and Stephen King) are not lost on the reader, but the dominant frame is Gothic parody. Du Maurier’s novel, and the Hollywood 1940 version of Rebecca (starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine), are the natural points of parodic reference as the story places a not-so-naive ingenue character in the midst of a few misty “wuthering heights” [“cumbres borrascosas”] on the French Pyrenees. Here Carola’s friend Vilma shares a house with a husband who hunts wild boars as practice for tastier prey and is watched by an oedipal mother-in-law who hides sadistic impulses behind her grand-

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motherly apron and ever-ready coffeepot. Confronted with more than one version of the events, the narrator tries to maintain a neutral ground, forgetting that exotic women outsiders rarely have the luxury of remaining neutral toward anything. Instead of maintaining an objective neutrality, Carola soon succumbs to indecisiveness and distress. Arriving late at night after a day’s journey by air and train, the narrator lands in a small village on the Aspe Valley in the French Pyrenees, where her friend Vilma and Vilma’s husband Paul are vacationing while staying with Paul’s parents at their villa. The change of scenery necessitates a change of genre, and the narrator’s imagination is quick to switch. In typical “Tourist 101” fashion, the narrator translates everything she sees into stereotype or archetype: all the older townswomen are dressed in black as they climb up the valley to the village church, the mountains are “nestled in gray and blue mist,” the in-laws are picture-postcard perfect: he with his war beret, she with her starched apron and coffeepot. Then, as Vilma tells the story of her troubled marriage and the other characters supplement it, the figures put on other stereotypical masks. Vilma’s mother-in-law is referred to as “the witch from Snow White” and “Madame Jocasta.” Vilma’s husband is “Bluebeard,” “Gilles de Rais” (the bloody nobleman on whom the legend of Bluebeard is based), a “Caucasian incarnation of the Venetian Moor,” and, finally, the vampire Nosferatu. Nor does Vilma escape the narrator’s hybrid imagination. As she tries to see her friend through the eyes of Vilma’s mother-in-law (about whom she feels ambivalent), the narrator describes Vilma as a “plebeian Joséphine de Beauharnais” who has come to ensnare her own Napoleon of a son with her island charms. Hearing Vilma expound on her role as a trapped wife in a boring provincial French town, Carola imagines her as a “Vilma Bovary.” Watching her seduce the doctor who has come to see about the narrator’s health, Carola describes her as a “professional vamp” and “mythomaniacal Don¯a Juana.” If the immediate effect of the mix-and-match allusions is to turn the characters into comic caricatures, the secondary effect is to convey Carola’s own confusion about the nature of the scene or scenes she is witnessing. Intertextuality, as Susanne Becker has noted, is a defining trait of the Gothic, and Vega’s parody of the Gothic genre mockingly exaggerates the play of references to earlier texts and models. At the same time, as Daroqui reminds us in (Dis)locaciones: Narrativas híbridas del Caribe, intertextuality is rampant in Puerto Rican postmodern texts. The “intertextual dialogue” in these texts, states Daroqui, “resort(s) to all possible (intertextual) practices: quoting, pastiche, travestism, vampirism, allusion, parody, montage, collage” (93). In the Gothic, the intertextual reference often plays at what Becker, after Barbara Goddard, refers to as “filiation” with the (m)other texts; in the postcolonial setting it serves a desacralizing and equalizing function (66). High culture

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and mass culture, fairy tale and horror tales, are reduced to one big muddled pool of meanings. If the difficulty in telling Malén’s story was finding a platform to position the speaking subject and the thematic object, in Vilma’s story the accumulation of allusions signals the problem of representation. As the narrator faces the shock of another “red-hot story,” now in a context that is utterly foreign to her, she lacks reliable points of referentiality. Behind the comic incongruence of her accumulation of names and faces, drawn from history, fiction, and film, lies the instability of her frame, or frames, of reference. According to Susanne Becker, “gothic form seems to . . . represent a culture’s obsession with family and the home” (80). As such, Becker notes, “[g]othic horror is . . . family horror; it often relies on a specific contextual and intertextual construction of feminine monsters” (79).16 In one way or another, Gothic horror already incorporates the figure of the exotic, or foreign woman, so Vega does not have to invent a new convention in order to insert Vilma as the native vixen who has infiltrated the Old World through the legal avenue of marriage only to contaminate it with “wild” traces of illicit sexuality, deception, and chaos. In any event, it is obvious that what threatens the uneasy “pax romana” of the Old World home is the intrusion of the overtly sexual woman. All the more threatening for being foreign and thus apparently immune to “civilized” rules of Freudian decorum, Vilma’s unrepressed sexuality brings disorder to the home and the village (Vilma stops coming down for meals, the doctor and his family leave suddenly and unexpectedly), and unleashes (most likely) the violent vengeance of the cuckolded husband. By refusing to repress her own sexuality, a sexuality she celebrates even when she is complaining about her abusive marital sex life, Vilma awakes the monsters hidden beneath the facade of civility in this idyllic village and its falsely idyllic hunter-gatherer characters. Like the “mad wife” of so many Gothic narratives, Vilma exceeds the parameters of action allowed her by convention as well as tradition. Vilma’s sexual dissatisfaction with her marriage drives her to initiate scenes that might result in “secret plots”: encounters in the night, escapades, maybe even a real escape. At other times, supposedly punished for behavior by the jealous Paul, she shuts herself up or is forced to remain in her room, much like mad or maddened Gothic heroines. Witnessing all this from another angle, the narrator is once again torn between genres (in this case between the Gothic and the slasher thriller) as she keeps anticipating bad endings for her thrilling and careless friend. Ironically, she has been shown the real ending (or what we are later meant to view as the real ending), but she refuses to see the truth behind the ghoulish photo at the end of Paul’s album.17 Although she dislikes the role of accomplice that Vilma (and later Vilma’s husband and mother-in-law) expect her to play,

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Carola is lost as to just what her role is in this complicated scenario. If this were classic Gothic, she would be the new woman, the ingenue who comes to replace the femme fatale. Indeed, she sees herself as playing exactly that role at one point in the story, when Vilma refuses to leave her room and Vilma’s husband and parents “adopt” her as their new daughter-sweetheart: “The three divine characters throw themselves on me, welcoming me as the heroine of the Resistance that I’ve become. . . . I am a soft punching-bag for their frustrations. They serve me, cater to me, spoil me. With my docile personality ready for anything, I am the new daughter-in-law: the answer.” [“Las tres divinas personas se me tiran literalmente encima, me reciben como a heroína de la Resistencia que soy . . . .Soy el punching-bag mullido para sus frustraciones. Me sirven, me añoñan, me malcrían. Con mi docilidad social a prueba de todo, hoy soy la nueva nuera: la respuesta”] (31). Moreover, at various times in the Vilma story, she is aware that Paul makes passes at her, yet she never confronts him directly, nor does she tell Vilma (which makes Carola a femme fatale at least potentially). Because this is both a parodic take on Gothic and a story about postcolonial gendered subjectivities and perspective, the narrator leaves before any of the threads to Vilma’s story are tied or resolved. It is only in retrospect that she realizes that Paul probably did kill Vilma in the end, and that she (Carola) might have helped avoid this crime. “National identities,” observes Iris Zavala in “A Caribbean Social Imaginary,” are indissolubly linked to ‘narrating’ undecidabilities against the inhabited fixed world of colonial fictions” (190). Like Malén’s “noir” story, Vilma’s is left in medias res, and Carola fails a second time in her role as observer/detective and chronicler/writer. Ultimately, the narrator’s indecisiveness, and the story’s generic instability, are signals that personal conflicts in the story serve as a template for cultural and transcultural tensions.

ON

A

SERIOUS NOTE: NOIR

AS

“HISTORICIDE”

While the insistently comic treatment of Vilma’s story threatens to undermine the thematic preoccupation with family and community, the Gothic frame persistently brings us back to the issue of the need to reconstitute the family, or the fear that such a reconstitution might not prove possible. Scholars María Julia Daroqui and Juan Gelpí argue that the “foundational metaphor” of the national myth of Puerto Rico equates the nation with the extended family. Other critics agree, pointing out, however, that this mythic family cannot be just any extended family. In his collection of essays titled “El país de cuatro pisos” [“The Four-Story Country”], José Luis González notes the frequent reappearance of the jíbaro (the white farmer) and his family in

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Puerto Rican letters (both fiction and essays) dating from the first part of the century. Taking González’s observation as her point of departure, Catherine Den Tant carefully explains that the Puerto Rican model of the family that is glorified in the monumento al jíbaro denotes not only an insistence on racial purity but a clear hierarchical ordering of man, woman, child, with woman clearly positioned in a subservient position to her husband. Like her contemporaries Ramos Otero or Rodríguez Juliá, Vega approaches the canonical symbol of the traditional family indirectly and parodically in “Pasión de historia.” Refusing either utopian or epic premises in her passionate chronicle, Ana Lydia Vega ironically deconstructs the image of the traditional family in the spaces depicted in this story. Unmarried life is presented as a farce between the extremes of unemployed criminals, sexually hungry but un(re)productive women, divorced or widowed mothers, and single women involved with married men and married men on the lookout for other women. Yet the story’s only alternative to “single living” is an unapalatable image of the “Club of Condom-Bearing Wives” and their husbands, the “United Males for the Protection of Virile Honor.” One could speculate that it was out of a subconscious desire to escape Malén’s fate, perhaps, that the most self-confident of the narrator’s classmates (“Miss Self-Confidence 1972” [“Miss Segurola 1972”]) tried to find domestic bliss outside the island’s great big family. Instead of succeeding, however, she became another casualty of the myth of the exotic seductress. While Vilma’s overwhelming sensuality and liberal sexuality make her both irresistible and dangerous to European males, she is an easy body to discard when her exotic charms bring too much chaos into the colonizer’s home. Doctor Rousseau succumbs to the wiles of her not-so-“noble-savage” act, but he is quickly whisked away by his official (French) family. Paul’s fascination with Vilma as the exotic seductress has clearly turned to hatred, and his plans to turn her into one of his taxidermic trophies fits well into the Gothic/horror scenario. Admittedly, few happy families appear in stories of Gothic horror or in film noir, either. In the Gothic genres the monsters usually live at or close to home, so the home itself becomes a prison for female characters who attempt to affirm their sense of independence. Writing about the absent family in film noir, Sylvia Harvey points out that the genre shows family life as sterile, dull, and sexless, thus implicitly explaining (but never condoning) the father or husband’s susceptibility to the glamorous world of the femme fatale. In both genres, as I have noted, the most dangerous threat to the family comes from the excessively or overtly sexual woman. In the eyes of “respectable” others (the in-laws, the doctor’s wife, Malén’s neighbors) and angry rejected males, there is little difference between “free” women like Vilma and Malén (and, for Carola’s ex, Carola herself ) and the “promiscuous vipers” that the men stop to prod on their Sunday promenade. The connection between the snakes and

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herself (or the image she knows others have of her) does not go unnoticed by Vilma, who quickly walks away from the scene, or by the narrator, who registers her disgust at the men’s excitement over poking the snakes’ pit with sharp sticks. By choosing to relate the stories in generic frames that focus on the disintegrated or disintegrating family, the story’s triple “failed” family plots convey the author’s ambivalent relation to the family unit as celebrated in the Puerto Rican literary canon.18 “Pasión de historia” offers no panaceas for replacing the extinct or endangered “great white Puerto Rican” family. When considered from the standpoint of the story’s possible parody of a national discourse of identity, the author’s refusal to portray a happy ending in any of the three “stories of passion” reveals a resistance to engage in a revival of romantic or foundational models of the Puerto Rican national story, or to provide facile comic solutions to troubling national problems.

TIMID VOYEURS AND CLUELESS DETECTIVES: NOIR AS COMIC PARODY Scopophilia is inscribed with a vengeance in the noir genre, and Vega’s parody plays this card for all it is worth. By turning the primary narrator, Carola Vidal,19 into a woman hungry for sensationalist spectacle yet conflicted about the implications and consequences of this all-consuming curiosity, the story raises issues about female spectatorship, women as objects of spectacle, and the possible types of knowledge that might emerge from such intimate spectacles. It is not surprising that window blinds and curtains figure so prominently throughout the narrative.20 Carola’s mother, Carola’s landlady, and Vilma’s mother-in-law are driven by an equally insatiable curiosity to spy on other women’s intimate dramas.21 Whether open or partially shut, abetting or partially obstructing the spying and stalking of and by most of the characters, the strategically positioned miamis (Nuyorican for window blinds) are a flickering signal of the story’s preoccupation with spectatorship. In the introduction to The Lust of Seeing, his book on Felisberto Hernández, Frank Graziano prefaces his discussion of voyeurism by noting that the Bible and the classics are obsessive about warning readers of the explosive interplay between sexual transgression and vision. Graziano’s list of the famously blind and the visually impaired includes Tireisias—blinded for having looked too closely into the question of whether women could be more orgasmic than men; Oedipus—who blinds himself for having seen too much (of his mother); and Orpheus and Psyche—deprived of the object of their love for having looked too soon or without permission. The list can be lengthened, but these examples are enough to serve as a convincing reminder that some forms of

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“sightseeing” are not only inadvisable but punishable by cosmic intervention in the classical canon. As in the classical myths cited earlier, in “Pasión de historia” forbidden sights lead to rueful endings for the women. In Vega’s story, however, the exaggerated dramatization of the gaze and the comiccarnivalesque nature of the spectacle makes it difficult to decide if the punishment follows from an excess or a lack of vision. Influenced to a large degree by Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis as well as by Foucault’s writings on the power of control that the gaze bestows on the viewer, early feminist film theories on the subject argued that this connection between seeing, knowledge, and concupiscence has been used to turn women into objects for visual consumption. Heralded by Laura Mulvey’s famous 1975 article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” many feminist theorizations of the gaze in the late 1970’s and 1980’s insisted that, through the controlling male gaze and the power-hungry male spectator, film reduced all images of women to passive victims of scopophilia (and left no room at all for the female spectator who wished to align herself neither with the victim nor the victimizer). Film critic Rosalind Coward summed up many feminists’ fears when she stated that voyeurism, coded as male, was a way of asserting male dominance over women’s bodies from an distance: “[p]eeping Toms can always stay in control,” noted Coward, adding that “[w]hatever may be going on, the Peeping Tom can always determine his own meanings for what he sees”(76–77). Maxine SheetsJohnstone just as adamantly observed that “[t]he same power of optics that generates and perpetuates social institutions . . . generates and perpetuates both the cultural institutions and interpersonal relationship of males as sexual subjects and females as sex objects” (123).22 Since “Pasión de historia” appears to reproduce film noir’s conventional voyeurism by having the narrator both imagine and participate as an active voyeur in key scenes of passions primed for criminal endings, it was perhaps inevitable that some of the early interpretations of this story would read its treatment of vision and sensationalism as a feminist critique of male voyeurism. Unfortunately, these readings consistently neglect (or avoid) the fact that the treatment of voyeurism in Vega’s story is not only relentlessly comic but complicated by the narrative’s ambivalent treatment of the voyeur/narrator herself. Becky Boling writes that the treatment of voyeurism in this story enacts a “reproduction of [androcentric] ideology” so as to parodically deconstruct the forces that co-opt women into becoming not only other women’s voyeurs but other women’s judges. In this critic’s opinion, the narrator’s own voyeurism parodically targets the mass produced need to keep consuming stereotypical images of sexually free women as women who deserve to be victimized by the patriarchal structures they challenge.23 Andrea Ostrov comes to the conclusion that the mirror images in the story signal the way in which

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women are trapped between stereotypical cultural images that deny them the right to tell their own story.24 Both readings carefully and convincingly unpack important aspects of this story in commenting on its parodic frame. Yet by downplaying the ways in which Vega rewrites (and not merely inverts) the role of the voyeur, and by dismissing the effects of the boisterous and burlesque narrative voice on the parodic treatment of voyeurism, these interpretative readings miss or underrate the ways in which humor and hyperbole in the story complicate the possibility of reading the narrative as a critique of voyeurism per se. Although there is indeed irony in the mimicry of the sex-obsessed patriarchal prejudices frequently parodied in the story, the persistently comic tone that accompanies those scenes in which that narrator watches and/or imagines other women’s seductions so as to be able to turn them into (pulp) fiction makes it harder to reduce “Pasión de historia” to a satirical critique of the masculine or masculinist gaze. Standing in the way of reading “Pasión de historia” as a “serious” indictment of voyeurism is the narrative’s persistently mock-ironic treatment of the voyeur herself. Indeed, much of the humor in the story derives from this comic rendering of Carola as a fumbling detective, an inept chronicler, a lamentably noncommittal friend and a laughably shortsighted voyeur. The more Carola becomes entangled in the lurid details, the less able she is to “master” the larger picture. She cannot quite imagine all the details of Malén’s violent death at the hands of her jealous ex-husband, so she cannot finish writing the documentary thriller that would vindicate the dead Malén. She cannot quite disentangle herself from witnessing Vilma’s exhibitionist, adulterous seduction of the doctor next door. She lacks the self-assurance needed to refuse to look at Paul’s exhibitionist display of macho bravado. She blinds herself to the urgency of telling Vilma about Paul’s not-so-secret desire to turn his wife into another taxidermist display. Last but clearly not least, she is unable to foresee the consequences of her own ex-lover’s jealousy (and his own “peripheral” vision when guessing the reasons for her extended absence). Thus, the woman who was on the “frames” of other women’s stories is finally left outside the frame of her own. Myopia—real or metaphorical—turns out to be bad news both for Carola the would-be detective as well as Carola the accidental voyeur. “What is particularly interesting about film noir for a feminist analysis,” states Mary Ann Doane in Femmes Fatales, “is the way in which the issue of knowledge and its possibility or impossibility is articulated with questions concerning femininity and visibility” (103). Added to the parodic treatment of the narrator as a myopic voyeur is the story’s equally comic parodic treatment of Carola as a more or less clueless detective.25 Torn between her desire to be sexually active and attractive at least some of the time (why else would

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she wear the stiletto heels she takes off at the beginning of the story?), and a cool critic of the sexually obsessed or narcissistic woman, Carola is paralyzed by her inability to play either role all the time or to choose one of these roles some of the time. Not only is she not in control of her own voyeuristic reconstructions (of the Malén murder, for example), but she proves just as unable to interpret what she sees at close range. When given the opportunity to witness firsthand the moves of a seduction in progress and the premeditated murder that might follow, Carola becomes even more unsure of both the reliability of her vision and the accuracy of her sleuthing skills. If Carola’s problem in solving or exposing the “real” causes of the Malén mystery are complicated by her distance from the scene of the crime (and appear to be part of her initiation as both would-be detective and would-be writer), her blurred and double vision once she enters the Vilma story is a much more serious character flaw for her new role as a Puerto Rican Sam Spade. For Roland Barthes, suspense “constitut(es) a veribable ‘thrilling’ of intelligibility.”26 But for Carola the crisis of vision signals a crisis of epistemology. The half-committed attitude with which she tries to decipher women’s stories reflects a lack of engagement with her own life—so much so that she forgets to take a look at the mixed signals she herself is sending. In Carola’s case, her inefficiency it is not due simply to a refusal to choose between competing and perhaps antithetical identities, but to an unwillingness to choose whether she is to be at the center of the stories she tells (and lives) or on the margins of the same. The result of this simultaneous dearth and excess of perception leads in turn to her failure as a writer and chronicler. She stops trying to write her account of Malén’s story when she becomes involved in Vilma’s own troubled domestic situation, and she stops writing the journal she starts (partly to tell what she witnesses on her vacation) when Vilma’s multisided story overwhelms her. The head cold she develops at the end of her trip is symptomatic of her inability to maintain some cool objectivity in the midst of so many hotheads, and hotter bodies.

THE FEMME FATAL AS EXOTIC BUT UNREPENTANT EXHIBITIONIST The carnivalesque script that registers Carola’s discomfort at being forced to watch Vilma’s exhibitionism from too close an angle transforms what might have been an indictment of pornographic voyeurism into a comic parody of the “defenseless” friend as unwilling and voyeur. This focal shift from Carola’s ambivalent gaze to the in-your-face lusty bodies of the story’s supersexed women can be observed in almost all scenes in which Carola is portrayed as a voyeur of either Vilma or Malén’s intimate seductions. In other

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words, the narrator’s voyeurism is the necessary vehicle for providing a window through which the exhibitionists of the story—Vilma in particular—can display their sexual bravado without being turned into passive objects of desire before (or for) the reader. This last point is worth emphasizing: by depicting a voyeur who does not desire to control or possess the subjects of her gaze, the novel features a carnivalized form of female exhibitionism without falling into the fetishistic trap that is often the price of (male) voyeurism.27 Finding a way to comically engage female sexual excess is the story’s most conspicuously carnivalesque act. Vilma’s intrepid seduction of the vacationing Doctor Rousseau—who has come to see after Carola’s “head cold” but whose attention gets sidetracked by Paul’s wife’s healthy display of her “tropical tits” [“tetas tropicales”]—puts Vilma in the protagonic role she has been eager to occupy since her friend’s arrival.28 What is striking about this scene, in the first place, is the way in which the narrative highlights the utter impotence of Carola’s gaze to control the outcome of the event. Even as she watches Vilma and the ogling doctor smolder and size each other up with the help of a “seeing” stethoscope, Carola’s inappropriately understated reaction to her friend’s risky seduction is to find herself both “all worked up” and “out of it” [“exaltada”]. More important, what the passage reveals is the extent to which power and control in this instance reside not with the voyeur and would-be detective but with the exhibitionist and would-be seducer: They fondle each other with their eyes. My God, I think, the orgy will take place right here, on top of my poor helpless corpse. I may be getting ahead of myself but not by much. Vilma takes his stethoscope and places it on her own body, in a stunning display of tropical tits. I close my eyes and then reopen them, all worked up. Se soban con los ojos. Dios mío, pienso, la orgía va a ser aquí mismo, sobre mi cadáver de huésped indefensa. Mi fantasía se adelanta pero no se equivoca. Vilma le quita el estetoscopio de las manos y se ausculta ella misma, en un despliegue deslumbrante de tetas tropicales. Yo cierro y abro los ojos, exaltada (26). By turning a doctor’s house call into a seduction scene Vilma not only redirects the young doctor’s attention from her sick friend’s body to her own healthy bodily charms, but redirects the story’s focus from Carola’s role as spectator to her role as exhibitionist. It is important, furthermore, to resist the temptation to interpret this shift in focus as an attempt to render Vilma into a passive object of the other’s gaze. Fully in charge, Paul’s wife orchestrates and choreographs this scene, as she does all scenes in which she is present.

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Partly because she scripts her own act here (almost all of what we know about Vilma before this scene comes from Carola’s “transcribed” version of Vilma’s own pulp anecdotes), she is fully in control of her striptease. What keeps Carola from joining the ranks of the celebrated bodies in the story is her self-censoring habit. Timidity and decorum will stump the voyeur, just as they will stop the detective in her tracks and curse the pulp-fiction writer with writer’s block. Failing to become “the writer with a capital ‘W’ [“la escritora con E mayuscula”] (12), in part because she is afraid to describe what she must observe close up, Carola leaves herself no choice but to occupy the role of intermediary, interpreter, or, in the scene where she sits between Vilma and Doctor Rousseau, go-between. Recent work on the subject of female spectacle and on the female spectator explore ways in which women can appropriate both the power of the gaze and, with it, discover new possibilities for (self ) representation.29 Lee Horsley, for example, observes that “in more recent films and novels, ‘looking’ is complicated in ways that act to disrupt the traditionally male activity of voyeurism by representing the female appropriation of the power of the look” (194). According to this critic, these nontraditional or gendered narratives break down the old binary opposition of male/female, “active/passive . . . watcher/watched.” They do so not only through “role reversal” but, significantly, through a “network of relationships in which . . . the watcher is watched by others who are observing and manipulating his (or her) reactions” (194). Summing up recent feminist theories of female spectatorship, Suzanna D. Walters notes that “the question of pleasure is central” to contemporary feminist dialogue centered “around the gaze and spectatorship” (89). Although she alludes specifically to films and film theory, Walters’ argument regarding the need to develop theories and views that “attempt to displace the negative and oppressive images and construct instead a discourse that centers on the liberatory possibilities of female viewing practices and pleasures” is helpful in approaching Ana Lydia Vega’s story (89). In the theoretical works cited by Walters, the emphasis remains on the emancipating and pleasurable potential of the viewing subject herself. Preceding some of the theories noted in the last paragraph, part of Vega’s contribution to this theoretical switch with regard to female spectatorship resides in aiming her own “optical cannons” at the exhibitionist and her pleasure rather than at the voyeur’s nervous reaction. Despite the “bad” endings of the three principal women characters, the story affirms the performance of women’s excess. Naturally, the reader gets the pleasure of watching these virtuoso performances, but what accounts for much of the story’s subversive feel is not the critique of voyeurism but the insistence on featuring the explosively sexual and unrestrained female body even against the disapproval of timid friends and the proximity of possessive and murderous ex-lovers.

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NOIR ENDINGS

AND

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At first reading, even the experienced Vega reader finds the ending of “Pasión de historia” too much like a bad joke. As Carola, returning to her workingclass apartment, is mistaken by her ex-lover for another femme fatale (who went away with a lover) and killed (her ex-lover is never identified as the criminal), only the narrator’s editor is left to put the pieces of her novel and journal together.30 Unfinished, the journal is published as part of the feminist series called “Textimonies” [“Textimonios”] by a publishing house that calls itself “We Shall Overcome” [“Seremos”].31 With Carola dead, Malén not only dead but “unavenged,” and Vilma incomunicada whether dead or alive, the Caribbean carnival enacted by these excessive female bodies ends as not-socomic noir. In fact, if there is parody of the femme fatale story here, it is decidedly not a parody of reversal. Femmes fatales generally fare no better— except in postmodern noir, but film versions of postmodern noir do not begin to appear until the early 1990s. Writing about Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean writers, J. Michael Dash notes that “[m]aking the fragments whole is a therapeutic ideal” for many Caribbean writers. Stating that it is perhaps time for a return to the “radical difference” pursued in the work of Edouard Glissant and quoting Marianna Torgovnick’s critique of “carnivalesque rejoicing,” Dash warns against the superficial solutions proposed by writers who present Caribbean zones of “contact and polyphony” as “inherently liberating” (43).32 Although she has opted for the unifying whole rather than the multiple fragments in some of her stories (most notably in “Otra maldad de Pacheco”), in “Pasión de historia”—and, indeed, most of her stories— Ana Lydia Vega leaves readers with only an illusion of closure. The women’s “case histories” have one ending (although perhaps not, if Vilma managed to escape), but the ending is an abrupt interruption rather than a resolution. That the editor does not attempt to finish Carola’s novel about Malén, or ghostwrite her journal entries on Vilma’s story, is an important detail. Against Fredric Jameson’s position that postmodern parody has lost its “satiric impulse” (17), James English argues that what postmodern and postcolonial parody has lost is not “its bite” but simply its discursive “stability of orientation” (202). The sense of disorientation that English attributes to postmodern humor turns out to be entirely congruent with a marked trait of choteo, guachafita, or relajo, all terms used to define a humor that is typically Caribbean in its chaotic and multidirectional flavor. In his groundbreaking study of Antillean humor, Jorge Mañach argues that what is most distinctive about a Caribbean sense of humor is its all-inclusive, nothing-is-sacred attitude. The humor of “Pasión de historia” is an apt illustration of choteo and its disorienting yet irresistible irreverence. In this context, the scene in this story

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with which I begin my introduction (Vilma and Carola choking with laughter at the in-laws’ dinner table) is worth reexamining from yet another angle. The rather long passage that describes the laughing spectacle at the dinner table begins on a serious note. Having noted that cold weather and torrential rains trap them all inside on that particular Monday, the narrator then goes on to note that “something strange happened that night” [“(e)sa noche pasó algo raro”] (21). It is clear from the lines that follow that the “strange” thing refers directly to the laughing outburst, an outburst that, as I noted earlier, is left without explanation. Although it is easy to read in the “joke” the multiple levels of cultural and gender mockery I mention in my introduction, what ultimately strikes one if one persists in rereading the scene repeatedly (as I have done) is the incommunicability of this laughter. Shared by the women, but perhaps on different levels of cultural and gender rebellion, the laughter is completely incomprehensible to the others at the table. It is its utter strangeness, its untranslatability, that angers Paul and makes the old couple nervous. In not giving in to the temptation of negotiating this loud, impolite, and sudden burst of laughter through translation or explanation, the author of “Pasión de historia” appears to insist on the need to recognize that intercultural marriages, even among multilingual characters, can more easily result in the silencing of one partner’s voice (Paul’s “ça suffit” in this scene is a case in point) than in a validation of heteroglossia and polyphony. Significantly, echoes of the women’s untranslatable laughter hang over the table like dangerous radioactivity. In this particular scene, the laughter, like the imposition of silence, is nonnegotiable, both in gendered and cultural terms. Contemplating the demise of Hollywood’s femmes fatales, Janey Place argues that “it is not their inevitable demise we remember but rather their strong, dangerous, and exiting sexuality.” (48) After reading “Pasión de historia,” we also remember their verbal excess, their histrionic gestures, and their ability to laugh hard, rudely, unapologetically, and against all odds.

CHAPTER FOUR

/ Torpid Bodies, Skeptical Humor: Luisa Valenzuela . . . the absurd lies so close—ay!—to politics. Luisa Valenzuela, Interview with Gwendolyn Díaz . . . to laugh when the Pope says “God speaks through my decrees,” or when the Party says, “I am the mouthpiece of the proletariat” is to point out the ruse at the very site of its output and without having to go to another outpost to do it. Jean François Lyotard, Toward the Postmodern

W

ritten shortly after the author’s return to Argentina following a decade-long exile, Luisa Valenzuela’s Realidad nacional desde la cama (1990) [Bedside Manners]1 can be read as a postmodern political allegory, one in which the ludic-parodic elements successfully bring out the volatility and potential explosiveness of Argentina’s political and economic “reality” in the years immediately following the military dictatorship.2 From the mid to the late 1980s, during the transitional presidency of Raúl Alfonsín, inflation reached astronomical proportions, coup-happy generals on the margins of power (like Major Vento in the novel) were only too eager to mobilize their regiments, and a comatose middle class was only too willing to forget the unspoken brutalities of the Dirty War in exchange for economic stability. This was the situation facing the nation when Valenzuela returned to her native Buenos Aires in 1989. The sociopolitical instability in which the country found itself forced the recent returnee to face the prospect of reintegration without a trace of nostalgia for the lost decade, yet nostalgia for order and control was precisely

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what she found in certain sectors of the population. She was shocked to discover, moreover, the extent of the collective amnesia that was beginning to afflict the nation. Realidad nacional desde la cama reflects this disturbing reality while insisting on the impossibility of remaining aloof or indifferent to the situation. As the novel’s scenario makes clear in its own comic and postmodern way, nobody, and no body, can remain untouched by public violence or egregious social injustice. “All those things invade one’s private space,” says Valenzuela, adding that it is especially difficult—indeed, impossible—to disengage the private from the public in times of deep political turmoil. At such times, observes the author, “the border [between the two spaces] gets erased.”3 Initially conceived as a stage play, Realidad nacional retains important traces of its dramatic beginnings.4 Theatrical is the use of the bedroom (and specifically her bed) as a stage in which the protagonist finds herself: a platform within, around, and over which nearly all the action in the narrative takes place.5 Theatrical also is the exaggerated mimicry of the multiple characters who visit the protagonist in bed, their cameo appearances meant to reveal to the seemingly clueless woman some specific aspect of the national reality mentioned in the novel’s title. Slapstick effects, some vaudevillean, some cartoonish in nature, characterize many of the characters’ movements and much of the dialogue between these characters and the protagonist. In its final novel form, the dramatic action becomes part of an ongoing narrative made up of multiple dialogues, narrative commentary various other intertextual discourses (such as citations from the military. The resulting multigenred, polyphonic text can be read as both a literal and symbolic representation of the hallucinatory, unreal nature of the Argentine nation during the period in question, and of one woman’s efforts at remembering how to interpret it. The author herself has stated that she stopped trying to finish this work as a play when the opportunity to stage it did not materialize. In an interview with Gwendolyn Díaz, Valenzuela explained that her choice to take the original idea for a play and switch to the novel form had to do with her desire to sustain the practice of self-discovery that constitutes such a crucial part of her writing. Noting that she “never set[s] out to say something,” she adds: “I set out to discover what I am saying while I say it, and in the play I couldn’t understand what I was looking for” [“Yo no me propongo decir algo, propongo descubrir lo que estoy diciendo mientras lo digo y en la obra no lograba comprender aún lo que buscaba”](43).6 The open-ended, dual-voiced narrative form that the novel adopts is structurally simpler and less ambitious than many of Valenzuela’s earlier works, in part because it retains the “unities” of place and action of the initial dramatic draft. But the ironic skepticism with which the dramatic action is suffused, so characteristic of Valenzuela, has the effect of making readers question both the realities represented in the

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carnivalesque action and the degree of good (or bad) faith with which the protagonist is operating as she passively or complicitly accepts compromises and half-measures during much of the novel. Significantly, Valenzuela’s implicit complaint about her problems with writing this particular story as a play—that the form allowed no room for a narrator who searches for the meaning of what is being said in the process of saying it—coincides with Bakhtin’s criticism of drama as a genre. In Problems of Dostoievsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin states that “[a] true multiplicity of levels would destroy drama, because dramatic action, relying as it does upon the unity of the world, could not link those levels together or resolve them” (17).7 Superimposing the narrative voice onto the aborted play’s action meant, for Valenzuela, being able to comment discursively on the events and dialogues of the text even as she sought to maintain the limited action in the novel anchored to a dramatic superstructure. It meant, in other words, returning the dialogic subtext to the carnivalesque text. Ksenija Bilbija has noted the presence of at least “two linguistic consciousness in the novel,” adding that this discursive consciousness subverts the mimetic realism of the dramatic action, since the former succeeds in pointing out the gaps and inadequacies of the latter.8 In Realidad nacional, the novel’s reliance on a skeptical narrator whose ambivalent voice competes with multiple dramatic voices has the effect of decentering and destabilizing the novel’s discursive structure at the semantic level, and of exposing, critiquing, or pondering the flaws or merits of the diverse political platforms performed or discussed around the protagonist’s bed for her own (and the reader’s) consideration. Coupled with its blend of comic masquerade and satirical parody, the dialogic structure of Realidad nacional makes the novel’s carnivalesque nature evident from the start. Both Ksenija Bilbija and Ricardo Gutiérrez Mouat have commented on these carnivalesque details as undergirding the novel’s allegorical nature.9 My chapter examines instead the novel’s unusual blending of carnivalesque reversals with other comic genres and tactics, especially satirical slapstick and comic irony. While the carnivalesque favors excess and inversion, the skeptical narrative irony highlights the need to recognize multiple competing interests and versions while insisting on the equally pressing need to resist any univocal interpretations of “national realities.” The novel’s discursive skepticism works toward mitigating and tempering the more celebratory comic tactics of carnival without seriously disabling them. The ensuing resistance affirmed at the end of the novel, one that never quite cancels the tensions that polarized its characters, is optimistic but cautious. Then again, ambivalent optimism might well be the only mode of resistance befitting a subject in a state of geographical, linguistic, and psychological transition.10 To put it differently, given that the semiconscious protagonist is shown as

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vacillating between complicity (forgetting) and resistance (remembering so as to reinterpret) until nearly the end of the novel, the mixed tone and mixed comic genres of Realidad nacional provide an appropriately unstable generic, semantic, and rhetorical mix for the novel’s political and ideological “unconscious.”11 Speaking of the “multidimensional semiotics” of Valenzuela’s earlier novel Cola de lagartija [The Lizard’s Tail], D. Emily Hicks notes that this kind of text creates “meaning as an interference pattern”(106). In a similar vein, I argue that the hybrid comic modes and mixed humor of Realidad nacional stage an open, provisional—and subtly gendered—form of resistance.12 The novel’s subversive intent hinges not so much on the performance of parodic reversals but on the sustained interference of carnivalesque inversions and ironic skepticism. Because the protagonist’s use of comic irony and wit are intimately tied both to her inability to resume a vertical position and her unspoken but visible refusal to reincorporate herself into the body politic as either an active and “useful” member or an inactive but uncritical bystander, I turn first to the way in which the novel appropriates the historically negative but aesthetically popular trope of the passive, lethargic, or prostrated female body in order to (a) turn it into an unexpected “machine” (in Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of the term) for gathering information and negotiating competing realities as they are related to her or acted out for her, and (b) to transform it into a catalyst for the collective act of resistance that puts an end to the stalemate in which the nation, and the woman, find themselves. Like all of Valenzuela’s fictional narratives, Realidad nacional seeks to enact strategies of resistance not only through the dual-voiced, ambivalent, selfcritical dialogic narrative that has become one of this author’s trademarks, but also through the staging of a spatiokinetic dynamics that turns the female body, a body that is often either damaged, scarred, or worn out in many of the author’s other fictions, into an unexpected agent of external change and internal recovery.

LA DONNA NON È THE (SEEMINGLY) PASSIVE BODY

MOBILE: AS AGENT OF

DISORDER

As the novel begins, a middle-aged female protagonist, whose personal circumstances closely mirror those of the author, is so traumatized by what she witnesses on returning to her native city that she soon takes to bed, where she remains for nearly the duration of the novel.13 Further emphasizing the marginal and marginalized nature of the character’s situation is the fact that neither the bed nor the bedroom in which she lies are her own. Without giving it much thought, she has accepted an offer from a new

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acquaintance who owns a weekend bungalow located at an exclusive country club outside the capital (and who may or may not have fascist leanings, possibly suggested in her name, Carla).14 Although the protagonist is told nothing (she asks nothing) about the club or its surroundings, it is logical to assume she expects to be alone there, except for the presence of someone named María who, she is told, will be there to “take good care of her” [“María la iba a atender bien”] (10). Once there, however, she finds herself gradually surrounded by a motley crew of caricaturesque characters who walk into her bedroom unannounced and nonchalantly, first alone, then by the dozen. In fact, she soon has a whole army (or at least a regiment) parading in front of her bed, and a whole shantytown, or at least their representative hungry hands, sneaking into her bedroom to grab the food on her bed. Seemingly surrounded by bodies that range from threatening to conciliatory to pleasurable yet unable to muster the energy to get up and out of a space that soon begins to resemble a madhouse (19), she remains in bed, indefinitely. A number of contemporary thinkers have theorized the importance and the increasingly popular presence of the nomadic woman, or at least the mobile woman, in contemporary fiction, art, and film (I discuss the comicsubversive potential of this model of female subjectivity and female embodiment in chapter six). At the other end of the spectrum (of bodies and movement), Valenzuela’s strategy in Realidad nacional desde la cama is to explore the disruptive potential of the seemingly immovable or nearly immobile female body. In this novel, the female protagonist is the antithesis of the nomadic woman, but her physical immobility—which both the protagonist herself and others misinterpret as a sign of mental and psychic lethargy at first—turns out to be the appropriately subversive tactic to resist and ultimately help counter the forces that attempt to control and subdue her (and her country). Exploring the fascination that the inert female body has exerted on the Western imagination throughout history, Elaine Showalter points out that no image is more paradigmatic of the impasse of late nineteenth-century science (biology as well as psychology) than that of a female body, partially or mostly undressed, sedated or sleeping, ill or dead (and often in the process of being autopsied), surrounded by a group of fully dressed, sometimes bespectacled physicians. In Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, Showalter documents the extent to which this passive female body, powerless and fully exposed before the knowing yet befuddled clinical male gaze, became a kind of mirror into which late nineteenth-century epistemology watched its own crisis. In Realidad nacional, Valenzuela appropriates this fin-de-siécle trope of the passive or torpid body and turns it into a counterintuitive strategy for resistance by reconfiguring it into a body

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that resists being objectified by the gaze of those who observe her (everyone who comes in and out of her bedroom) while gradually gaining confidence as an observing and inquiring subject. Although the woman referred to only as la señora ironically pictures herself, at the beginning of the novel, as “sleeping beauty in the forest” [“la bella durmiente del bosque”] (11) and claims that what she needs at the moment is a “traditional and superficial” role [“tradicional y livianito”] (11), her incurable habit of asking questions makes it clear that she will be no sleeping beauty in this tale—even if she is doing her fair share of sleeping in the novel. While she may appear to have joined the ranks of helplessly horizontal odalisques who are too weakened by external troubles or internal doubts to stand up straight, the novel’s protagonist is never too dimwitted to notice and comment on the disturbing activities playing themselves out around her bed. Much as she would like to succumb to the temptation of passivity, forgetfulness, and indifference (and she does, often), she is prevented from doing so by her “chronic” curiosity and her probing, ironic sense of humor. The first keeps her in constant dialogue with others; the latter in constant dialogue with herself about what others do or say. Having been “born under the sign of the Question Mark, the way others are born under Capricorn or Leo” [“nací bajo el signo de pregunta, como otros bajo Leo o Capricornio”] (7), the congenitally skeptical protagonist quickly begins to turn her supine passivity into a space for active observation and, unbeknownst to her at first, of covert operations. Behind, or at least beside, this obsessive visual or aesthetic interest in the passive or ill female body as depicted in late nineteenth-century art and photography is the equally obsessive interest in female hysteria that colors so much of late nineteenth-century medicine and catapults physicians like Charcot (whose influence on Freud will prove to be enormous) to international fame. Related to these studies of hysteria, in turn, is the Victorian faith in what became known as the rest cure or rest treatment. As Ellen Bassuk explains, although the rest cure was originally developed to treat soldiers traumatized by battle, in practice it was used mostly to treat women with nervous disorders. The treatment involved the removal of the patient from her normal environment, followed by complete bed rest in almost total seclusion where the only person who had immediate access to the woman was her doctor (the cure also involved generous feedings, since most nervous women were considered too thin for their own mental and physical well-being and too thin, as well, for the Victorian ideal of the voluptuous and nurturing female body).15 Significantly, notes Bassuk, doctors who prescribed the rest cure viewed the improvement of the physical symptoms as only the preliminary stage in the treatment; the more important and more challenging part of the treatment was the psychological cure, or “moral reeducation,” of the patient.16

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Rest cure, or “cura de sueño” (11) is what the protagonist of Realidad nacional thinks she is about to drift into when she first arrives at the club. Her excessive desire for sleep, her sense of chronic fatigue, her admission that she has no willpower (48), and the maid’s insistence that she is ill and should see a doctor (19) are all reminiscent of the nineteenth-century, bourgeois medical practices previously alluded to earlier. The appearance of Doctor Alfredi, who practices not the rest cure but the psychoanalytic “talking cure”—at least until he decides that the “erotic cure” will prove more useful—are further evidence of the author’s appropriation of the medical discourse surrounding the treatment of anemic and emotionally unstable women in order to explore feminist counterstrategies within this same discourse. Yet, while the rhetorical metaphor of illness and cure that floats over the novel is vaguely allusive of the Victorian models described earlier, it is directly and blatantly allusive to the discourse of medicalization that circulated freely in the political statements of the military during the Dirty War. According to Ricardo Piglia, during the more repressive years of military rule there began to circulate a rhetoric of illness and medicalization throughout the State-controlled media, whose prevailing message was that a plague or virus was threatening to infect the nation’s body and that nothing short of major surgery, some of which “would have to be carried out without anesthesia,” would be radical enough to eradicate it.17 Examining the gender politics of this ultrarepressive medical rhetoric as reproduced in countless political pamphlets, journal articles, and even school textbooks from the period, Diana Taylor’s Disappearing Acts documents the frequency with which the military’s pseudosurgical practices targeted the female body, often with particular viciousness. The military’s prescribed “treatments” for what they considered subversive or simply suspicious bodies were more drastic than those prescribed by nineteenth-century doctors for their nervous or hysterical female patients, but the final goal was similar: to train and retrain not just bodies but behavior. It is no secret, of course, that bodily torture became the military’s favored method of discipline and reform but, when all else failed, bodies could always be made to “disappear.” Disappearance (so common that the adjetive “desaparecido” became both a noun and a transitive verb for the first time in the Spanish language) became the ultimate punishment for those bodies who refused to be reformed or, more frequently, for those who were seen as too corrupt to be re-formed. Realidad nacional carnivalizes and parodies the discourse of the ill or infected citizen’s body in several ways. Major Vento and the arch-conservative Maria try repeatedly to “cure” or correct the protagonist’s torpor, but they are thwarted at every turn by her insouciance and her insistence on questioning everything she hears or sees. From the beginning, however, the attitude of the señora toward those who propose solutions to her “illness” is to doubt and/or ignore whatever

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quick fixes or prepackaged versions they have to offer. Appearing to defer to María’s suggestion that she needs medical attention, the protagonist procedes to turn her “so-called” doctor into her confidante and, in the time it takes for him to run his stethoscope over her chest, her lover. Choosing erotic play over bodily discipline, the two of them fling the major’s manual far from the bed. The novel further parodies the official “cure” once forced on unsuspecting bodies by the military rulers in its characterization of Doctor Alfredi, whose reputation as a subversive precedes his appearance as a doctor on the scene. A jack-of-all-trades who works as a taxi driver during the day, as a psychoanalyst when circumstances require it, and—covertly, of course—as the dashing organizer of the countermilitary maneuver that eventually prevents the coup being planned at the club, the versatile and volatile Alfredi makes for a distinctly unofficial version of an orthodox physician. By calling the disease by a name that infers its decidedly localized origins (“mal de sauce” [willow sickness]) (49), Alfredi’s diagnosis runs directly counter to the major’s earlier pronouncement that the protagonist was the willing victim of a “virus of indifference” (36) brought from abroad.18 As diagnosed by Alfredi, the illness that is afflicting the protagonist is not only a distinctly national illness but one that has been inflicted from within. Implied in his hypothesis is that the “willow sickness” currently affecting a good portion of the population has its roots in the excessive “cleansing” to which the nation was exposed during the dictatorship, a cleansing that has led to a depletion of the nation’s vital antibodies. Moreover, by noting that the “virus” is epidemic, he implicitly reveals that there may be many torpid, lethargic (and female?) bodies out there, resisting both the government’s irresponsible masking acts and the rebel military leaders’ desire to return the country to military rule. To further carnivalize the encounter between doctor and patient, the same chapter (9) turns the housecall into a seduction scene, one in which the prone woman is a willing and able participant. Insisting that “the body is governed by its own laws” [“el cuerpo se rige con leyes propias”], and that the “the law of pleasure” [“la ley del placer”] (50) is dominant among these, Alfredi proceeds to “play doctor” as a form of erotic foreplay, and to play lover as part of his medical treatment. Although she has resisted all of María’s suggestions for combating apathy and fatigue, the protagonist now offers no resistance to this particular form of treatment. While it is true, as one critic has noted, that the protagonist’s “erotic complicity” (with her doctor-lover) is an important aspect of her recovery,19 it is also true that what brings about her contact with Alfredi, and her first “move” (picking up the phone to ask for a doctor) toward a physical and social reintegration with her environment is her determination to delve into the reasons behind her inability or unwillingness to remember and, by extension, to realize what it is that she is trying

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to repress. Not insignificantly, what allows her to begin to regain her will to remember is her ability to laugh and joke at the fanatical “puppets” (María and the major) who attempt to mold her back into shape. The woman’s unwillingness to get up and engage in the more disciplined, “healthier” motions proposed by María and the easy, loose way in which she succumbs to lust and pleasure subverts the health-conscious, disinfectant-obsessed discourse of the former dictatorship embodied in María and Major Vento. Neither virginal nor pure to begin with, the protagonist’s surrender to sexual pleasure means that she is soon covered with more and more “dirty” traces: semen and sweat, and food crumbs. With her disregard for hygiene comes her willingness to be contaminated by the ideas of the subversive underdogs like Lucho, who literally appears from underground. As her body becomes more and more of an agent of contagion around her, she becomes both virus and antivirus. She is a virus in that her disorderly conduct, her disruptive presence, and her refusal to commit to action (on either side) sickens and weakens the rigidly bipolar reality of the club and, by extension, the nation. She is antivirus in that through her broken and sporadic flashes of memory, her affirmation of pleasure and play, and her insistence on leaving questions and passageways open, she helps weaken and diffuse the hypermasculinity of the army and the equally hyperservility of the maid who has been co-opted into voicing the rhetoric of domination. Although it makes possible countless farcical and carnivalesque encounters, the protagonist’s body is itself neither comic nor grotesque. Prominently visible in its center-stage and partially static horizontality, the female body in Realidad nacional is surprisingly inorganic when compared to the female bodies featured in other works studied in this book. In fact, except for its ability to engage in erotic games and derive pleasure from them, it shows few signs of its corporeal materiality. In fact, this body doesn’t even engage in the act of eating—although this may be in part because the food disappears before the señora can consume it. As a source of both pleasure (for Alfredi) and nurturing (for Lucho), her body conforms neither to the feminine ideal of sexual desirability nor to the maternal ideal. Physically, what she herself feels is a sense of chronic fatigue, but even this physical sensation appears to be more a sign of diminished will power than of real corporeal weakness. Its minimally organic nature sets her body apart from the more carnivalesque or mechanicanized bodies that surround her. At the same time, this lack of reference to organic bodily functions is fully in keeping with the narrative’s emphasis on the protagonist’s ambivalent skepticism and polyvalent wit, traits that emphasize thinking and language rather than the materiality of the functioning body.

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For all these reasons, of all the bodies I study in this book, the female body of Realidad nacional is the one least tied to active and visibly disruptive bodily “humors” in the Renaissance sense of this term. The señora’s body is neither physically nor metaphorically incontinent (Esquivel, Vega), nor does it exude black (Somers) or choleric “humors” (Borinsky). In fact, the only bodily humor to which the protagonist’s body in Valenzuela’s novel can be linked to is phlegm, and this is entirely appropriate, considering that phlegmatic humors are traditionally associated with mental—and hence masculine—traits rather than with female corporeal “humors.” It is as a seemingly passive body with seemingly phlegmatic “humors” that the semi-amnesiac and disoriented protagonist makes her appearance in this novel. Ironically, however, the apparently apathetic, apparently unresponsive and uninvolved (e.g., phlegmatic) “humors” that characterize the señora’s present state are her entry pass to and her permit to stay in the club where she will perform significant subversive reversals without getting out of bed. They are also the steady magnet around which the “national realities” depicted in the novel get spelled out, dramatized, carnivalized, critically exposed, and, in a few cases, overturned or at least interrupted. While the allegorical import of the never-absent female body as the body of the nation (a body made ill by the disputes, excesses, and hungers of its children) adds an important dimension to the interpretation of this novel, the metaphor that Valenzuela claims to have pursued in writing the novel requires a more literal reading of the torpid body as the material space where the conflicts of memory, desire, power, and transgression play themselves out. In the author’s own words, the metaphor pursued in the novel consists of being able to see how “[t]he total passivity of the woman in bed encourages and precipitates a whole series of circular actions that eventually work to block the frontal advances of the military forces.” [“la pasividad total de la mujer en la cama permite, cataliza, toda una actividad circular que va a plantarse en contra de la actividad frontal de los militares”].20 As the body that cannot find its will to move and yet manages to realign, reorganize, or disrupt all bodies around it, the female body of Realidad nacional becomes both deterrent and catalyst: a deterrent to the progress of the reactionary forces led by Major Vento, a catalyst for the counterreactionary forces of the enervated poor, and all this without getting up until there is something to celebrate. In The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies, Maxine SheetsJohnstone argues that “the personal-political equation hinges on a realization of animate form, for it is animate form that basically ties the personal to the political and the political to the personal”(7). As scholars and critics have noted, Valenzuela’s fiction often takes just this kind of premise as its starting point, then sets out to enact the many and disturbing ways in which the “politics of the body” becomes tangled and entangled in the body

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politic, and vice versa. Valenzuela’s treatment of tortured yet transgressive bodies in Cambio de armas (Other Weapons), for example, move beyond the Foucauldian dynamics of bodies and power to explore the damaged body’s potential for release or recovery either through the discovery of alternative communities or the promise of a reconstituted subjectivity. Novela negra con argentinos (Black Novel with Argentines) revolves around the potential and the dangers of anchoring fluid notions of subjectivity to sexed bodies whose potential for violence seems inseparable from their desire for agency and their capacity for pleasure.21 As in these other works, in Realidad nacional the protagonist’s body becomes the contested space from and around which the narrative explores not the female body qua body, but the body as a magnetic force for recovering historical traces, deciphering actual political tensions, and catalyzing agents of resistance.22

SLIPPERY (COMIC) STRIP: FROM SATIRICAL SLAPSTICK TO SKEPTICAL CARNIVAL Actress, spy, maid, bargain-hunter María, the reactionary character in charge of taking care of the bungalow and its guest, moves in and out of the bedroom with all the determined dynamism that the protagonist lacks. Like Major Vento, whose plans for an upcoming coup she unflinchingly supports, she is absurdly dogmatic in her pronouncements and comically regimented in her movements. As representatives of the forces of authoritarian repression, María, the major, and his soldiers are depicted as fanatical puppets moving to the mechanical rhythms of a military march. Zealously bound to the lessons of the imported military manual (borrowed from the U.S. army), these characters embody the kind of laughable rigidity Henri Bergson studied in great detail in On Laughter. Bergson argued that we perceive mechanical, uncontrolled, or overly rigid movements (á la Chaplin or Buster Keaton, for example) in human beings as comical because they reveal something unnatural and machine-like in bodies that should be fluid and organic. The fully adapted, or adaptive, human body does not normally exhibit the robot-like qualities of a person slipping on a banana peel or falling down a set of stairs; when it does, the incongruity of seeing this body turned into a mass of clumsy limbs and mechanical gestures provokes amused laughter, usually accompanied by a sense of smug superiority, from onlookers. Judging laughter to be an important evolutionary defense mechanism (as did Darwin), Bergson proposes the theory that mechanical movements, such as those of the major when screaming orders to Lucho while visiting the protagonist’s bedroom, are laughable because they reveal a rigidity of character behind the mechanical gesture or movement. People who

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act like puppets (especially if they do so continuously), says Bergson, are people bound to an idée fixe (80).23 Although Bergson’s theory is itself rigid and even reactionary, no doubt because it is overly determined by the author’s resistance to the growing presence of technology in everyday life, it is helpful in understanding why Valenzuela might have chosen to resort to these staples of slapstick for representing the more reactionary characters: those least likely to to accept the organic flow of historical or social change. Not accidentally, even Alfredi turns mechanical when he puts on his taxi driver face: as a taxi driver he wants hard-liners in command and subservient women at home.24 The more inflexible María and the major become, the more exaggerated the slapstick humor that surrounds their movements and behavior. María’s insistence on keeping chronometric tabs on the money the señora owes her for croissants succeeds in provoking a comic reaction even when we know that the comic hyperbole feels like a realistic attempt to portray or remember the massive inflation that crippled the Argentine economy during the late 1980s. Still, the robot-like rigidity with which María keeps on adding hourly interest to the initial 13,000 pesos she claims she is owed—so that by 8:00 P.M. the amount is up to 14,200, by morning it has nearly doubled, and soon afterward begins to increase at a rate of about 100 pesos per minute—is both laughable and worrisome, because it signals the maid’s inability to step outside an outdated system of checks and balances, one that no longer applies to the volatile economy of the country in which she lives. The idée fixe behind María’s mechanical antics is a staunch belief in accounting practices that are not only corrupt to the core but have failed to take into account the needs of whole portions of the population. By these same “accounting” practices, figures like Major Vento once felt—as he continues to feel—justified in “disappearing” thousands whose numbers did not add up to the final balances the dictatorship wanted to reflect in their “virus-free” census. The same comic strategy that turns the maid into a mindlessly subservient but dangerously fanatical puppet of the system is used to represent the automaton-like behavior of both soldiers and officers during a scene in which one of the soldiers promotes Major Vento to colonel, then general, all in the time it takes to pin a couple of extra stripes on the major’s epaulettes. Picturing a possible staging of this particular scene, one imagines a Brechtmeets-the-Marx-Brothers type of performance, where the comical mechanized movements (the slapping of medals onto the uniform) render the shrill tones of the military promotion (and the major’s rise to more power) comically absurd and darkly ominous at the same time. In this way, the comic slapstick that turn María and Major Vento into fascist automatons short-circuits testimonial judgment and aims instead for comic satire, but only if we allow for a particularly nondidactic, nonprescriptive form of satire, a satire that targets not the deviation from the acceptable norm

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but the amorality of the norm itself. As Patrick O’Neill notes, contemporary or postmodern satire tends to exhibit the anomic and amoral traits that turn satire into a nonnormative critical mode. Where normative satire assumes the “regulative power of moral or social reforms,” O’Neill explains, entropic satire limits itself to “identification and demonstration” of the problem, without offering, or pretending to offer, ready-made solutions.(143) In Realidad nacional desde la cama, the use of comic slapstick for satirical purposes renders the satire not only less moralistic but also more aware of the fact that behind the individual targeted by the mockery is a whole corrupt system, and that chastising or ridiculing the individual alone will hardly solve the larger social problem. Thus, to quote O’Neill once more, the novel’s use of entropic (and slapstick) satire “focuses not on a corrigible part but on the incorrigible whole”(143). While the ideological rigidity of the more openly reactionary characters is satirized through the use of cartoonish slapstick, the movements and gestures of the poor are depicted as fluid, yet somehow in tune with their scant and barely functioning reality. The multiple hands that reach out for food on the protagonist’s bed are described as having dance-like movements and compared to “little carnivorous plants” [“como plantitas carnívoras”] (66). The fluid organicism of the simile redeems the image from the mock-satirical slapstick used to describe María and the major. As the most individuated representative of the emaciated, maltreated bodies of the shantytown, Lucho is undoubtedly meant to be a clownish figure, yet his lack of aggressiveness, his failure to comprehend why so many misfortunes are heaped on him, and his ready sympathy for other sufferers regardless of their class status (as evinced in his conversation with the protagonist in chapter 13) render him tragicomic rather than comic. He is a trenches’ version of an art-house Pierrot rather than a circus clown.25 More “sinned against than sinning,” Lucho is often rendered pathetic but never ridiculous, and the melancholic tone that accompanies his comic exchanges with the protagonist elicits complicit smiles rather than mocking laughter. Similarly, the protagonist laughs with, but not at, the marginalized bodies trying not to starve on the margins of the club. As metonymic signs for the neglected poor, both the outstretched hands drawn to the protagonist’s bed and the representation of Lucho’s body as body parts (his hands, his voice, his disembodied head) represent that segment of the population whose bodies, and bodily needs, are censored or erased from the official version of the “state of the nation” as shown on television (where everything is designed to show economic good health). Realidad nacional portrays mixed comic frames and mixed attitudes toward bourgeois women who do too much reflecting in bed, but is unambiguous in its sympathy for those who bore the brunt of the military dictatorship and now bear the brunt of the new government’s blundering economic policies.

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Yet while the individual depiction of the poor may escape ready-made comic categories, the novel’s description of the shantytown’s communal rituals and festivities are precisely what give the narrative its carnivalesque flavor.26 In the true spirit of Bakhtinian carnival, these festivities are associated with food and communal feeding. Because hunger is one of the novel’s leitmotivs (giving the lie to a popular Argentine cliché that claims no one goes hungry in the country of big beef ), the feasts are short on food but long on good will and community spirit.27 Besides the scenes that revolve around the food stolen from the protagonist’s bed, the only two other scenes involving food are the scene describing the preparations for the communal soup (“la olla popular”) (33), and the final asado or barbecue, where the only meat on the grill is the old horse that used to belong to the soldiers: when the horse dies of exhaustion, the poor cut him up for barbecuing. Made a shade darker because of the desperate measures to which these hungry bodies are driven, the carnivalesque mood of the scene is lightened once again by Lucho’s revelation that unlike other “shantytowns” (“villas miseria”), theirs has an open-door policy, welcoming anyone in need of shelter or food: “we make a point of welcoming them; not like the other shantytowns that put up signs that say ‘Middle class go home’ [“Nosotros los recibimos, no como en otras villas que pusieron carteles: ‘Clase media go home’] (75). In the final celebration scene, even the soldiers—persuaded by Alfredi to give up their arms— are allowed to join in the festivities. Although neither excess nor any other kind of orgy-like activity marks either of these communal meals, the spirit of the carnivalesque is sustained by what Bakhtin calls the “free and familiar contact between people who would be separated hierarchically,” but who succeed in realigning the ominous “national realities” that threaten to crush them through their “mass action” (PDP 123). The carnivalesque belief in the real possibility of change and renewal is dramatized in the novel by the “decrowning” of Major Vento and the mass celebration of people-power with which the novel ends. This symbolic decrowning occurs in the scene in which the major gets literally caught inside the television set and his soldiers desert him to join the feast. Conversely, there is a crowning of sorts in the scene in which the women liberate Lucho from his military-style crucifixion and dress him up as a general meant to be a scarecrow.28 The mixing of different comic tactics and diverse genres of humor that I describe in the previous paragraphs is typical of the entire novel. Chapter 17, which features Major Vento’s promotion, is a good example of this superimposition of comic frames and mixed humor. As the chapter opens, the people from the shantytown—men, women, children, and the elderly, even dogs—are shown lined up along the fence, where they have come to watch, but mostly to mock, the painted soldiers who have started to mobilize in

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preparation for their upcoming maneuver (Major Vento’s coup). Loudly announcing that they are about to bring their own music, the people treat the soldiers as the clowns they resemble, so that instead of admiration mixed with fear, the soldiers get insults and laughter. The major, who is trying to hold his regiment together against the ridicule of the poor and retain authority and power in the midst of the growing chaos, has himself been promoted in the farcical scene mentioned earlier. While watching the promotion scene, the protagonist is reminded of being in a movie set, and she tries to decide whether the movie reminds her of Steven Spielberg (fantasy-cum-science fiction) or Walt Disney (infantilized fantasy or cartoonish fantasy). No sooner has she made this observation than she is forced to duck under the covers because the painted soldiers, who have decorted the caddy with black camouflage so as to use them as tanks, begin to circle the bed, gesticulating wildly, as if already celebrating “the glorious destiny awaiting them” [“el destino glorioso que los aguarda”] (86). Feeling the proximity of the soldier’s movements as they practically invade her bed with attitudes ranging from threat to persuasion (86), she begins to consider—possibly for the first time since arriving at the club—the possibility of getting up. But either her urge to move is still too weak or her good intentions are weighed down by the piling up of so many absurd “realities” surrounding her. In either case, the conflation of the absurd with the fantastic in this chapter pulls the scene toward the edge of absurdist farce, momentarily threatening the buoyancy of the carnivalesque.29 Observing the scene around her more closely, however, the protagonist realizes that the people from the shantytown appear to be winning this battle of obscene gestures and loud voices, and that they are doing it by reducing the battle to a game of public mockery. As the people’s laughter grows more and more boisterous, the soldiers grow more and more confused at being ridiculed rather than feared: “the people . . . are not even afraid of bullets any more, so they laugh like crazy. These soldiers . . . are afraid of laughter, so they lose it” [“l]os villeros . . . no le temen a nada ni a las balas y se ríen a carcajadas. Estos soldados . . . le temen a la risa y se desconciertan”] (87). The confusion provoked by the sounds of laughter and celebration eventually disorients the agents of violent control. As the soldiers become confused, their resolution to enforce a military rule they do not understand begins to erode, bringing them a step closer to the desertion and/or disarmament to which they will succumb in the next chapters. Like the final chapter in the novel, this chapter also ends with a celebration, or at least a rehearsal for a celebration. So the crowd’s mocking laughter really does operate as a deterrent in this chapter or, more aptly, a preventive strategy. Yet, here as in the rest of the novel, the carnivalesque frame at the beginning and end of the scene does not obscure the fact that the celebratory

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mood is tempered and, to some degree, contained by the superimposition of other comic modes that mitigate and even interfere with the buoyancy of carnival. Besides the pull of the farcical (which can operate against the carnivalesque because of the force of its mockery), and the cautious skepticism introduced by the ironic narrator(s) I discuss in my next section, there is also the lingering ambivalence about how much of what the protagonist witnesses is real (although she suspects that if she could remember she would know it is all real). The result, as I’ve noted already, is a collage of comic modes that accentuates both the novel’s intentionally unstable narrative frames and the chaos—sometimes farcical, sometimes absurd, sometimes carnivalesque—that characterizes the eponymous realidad nacional. No character better embodies this mix of incongruous comic modalities and moods of humor than the chameleonic Alfredi, who switches identities in the time it takes him to switch uniforms. Critics have described Alfredi as both a dramatization of the instability of identity categories and a symbol of a possible national reconciliation.30 From the perspective of the novel’s superimposed and competing comic frames, Alfredi is the character who can slip between comic acts and comic genres without losing his footing. As Doctor Alfredi he is witty as well as playful. His crassness and rigid manners as a taxi driver turn him into a farcical figure worthy of the protagonist’s mockery. As a psychoanalist he is a self-absorbed and parsimonious parody of a stereotype. He is seriously celebratory, if not comically carnivalesque, in his role as the counterrebel who disbands and disarms the soldiers. His hybrid comic nature is important in the novel because it preempts the possibility of reading him as a model of masculine verticality, a model that might cast doubts on the protagonist’s ironic but horizontal reflexivity. Although Alfredi has a “hand” (as well as other body parts) in the protagonist’s recovery, his primary function in the narrative seems to be that of helping the protagonist to see that her resistance to the discourse of regimented hygiene and health signals her immunity to other, greater ills than the torpid “humors” that keep her in bed. What is nearly absent from the collage of humor shades and comic modes is the presence of the grotesque. Although several critics claim that the grotesque in the novel is present in the novel’s treatment of the national body the specific excesses conventionally associated with the grotesque are conspicuously absent in this novel.31 As is the case with the protagonist’s body, the novel’s treatment of other comic, farcical, or carnivalesque bodies lacks the gross materiality normally associated with the genre. Only Lucho’s body is actually subjected to the kind of bodily humiliation normally linked with grotesque bodily imagery. Yet, for the reasons I explain earlier, Lucho is much closer to the Beckettian absurd than to a Brechtian or a Bakhtinian grotesque. Even the carapintadas, the painted/camouflaged soldiers who become symbols of absurd regimentation and absurdly regimented bodies are rendered as clown-

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ish rather than grotesque (the protagonist herself identifies them with Disney or Spielberg rather than Buñuel or Dalí). A comparison of this novel’s treatment of the national body with Valenzuela’s earlier depiction of power, repression, and the national body in Cola de lagartija [The Lizard’s Tail] should suffice to illustrate this point. Whereas the earlier novel resorts to the generically grotesque strategies of dismemberment, exaggerated body parts, death, and taboo sexual practices, Realidad nacional gears even its more farcical “acts” toward either the absurd, the ironic, or the mildly celebratory carnivalesque.

IRONIC RESISTANCE

AND

PROVISIONAL REMEDIES

When Wayne Booth turns to the question of unstable uses of irony at the end of his Rhetoric of Irony,32 he addresses a type of irony, or ironic attitude, not reined in by the rhetorical parameters of the more or less canonical ironic mode to which he devotes most of his book. Addressing the absurdist worldviews emerging from the works of Kafka and Albee, Booth points out that the “pervasive ironies” sustaining these writers’ temper allow for an exploration of the incongruous, the unstable, and the irrational; yet he insists that even in the most nihilistic of these writer’s texts the same irony leaves open the possibility of “paradoxical communings” (265). Although Valenzuela is less optimistic about the possibilities of affirming ethical communities in and through fiction than Booth is, and the uses of irony in Realidad nacional are more firmly anchored to geopolitical, economic, and physical “realities” than to metaphysical angst, Booth’s remark proved helpful in leading me to focus on how this novel’s gendered and “embodied” version of skeptical irony has reconstructive as well as deconstructive effects on the loosely bound national community depicted in Realidad nacional. As another frequently used strategy for tempering satirical farce on the one end, and carnivalesque celebration on the other, the novel’s ironic skepticism decenters and destabilizes the narrative discourse both by doubling its possible meanings, as irony invariably does, and by opening up noticeable gaps (of meaning) where the irony itself is open-ended. In the scene where the Major insists that the hand stealing food from her bed is a left hand [“¡¡la izquierda!!”] (63), the protagonist decides to turn the major’s political accusations into an ironic semantic game by countering that the hand was, in fact a right hand [“era la derecha”]. The major, who predictably has no appreciation for either humor or irony, nevertheless registers the intent of her contradiction and orders her to stop her insubordination (“don’t turn insubordinate on me” [“no se me insubordine”](63). At this point the narrative intervenes by pointing to the many greedy hands reaching up and around the bed. When the major is paralyzed by the sight of the hands, the narrative mocks

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his cowardice and sudden inability to act: “and what can a lone man without a machine-gun do against so many serpent-like hands, hands like that gorgon’s head?”33 Comic irony is used here to deflate the threat of violence implicit in the major’s menacing order to the protagonist. Elsewhere in the novel, ironic distance, or ironic humor, serves similar deconstructive purposes by posing indirect, and hence subversive, opposition to “para-official” discourses, and by exposing the underlying hypocrisy or underlying cowardice beneath the uniform of power or subservience to power (the major, María’s, and even Alfredi as taxi driver). As Linda Hutcheon notes in Irony’s Edge. The Theory and Politics of Irony, those who have historically objected to the ironic mode for ethical reasons have done so on the grounds that ironic “duplicity and pretense” could signal skepticism, cynicism, indifference, and, at the very least, insufficient commitment to whatever is being treated ironically (43). In fact, the protagonist of Realidad nacional exhibits all these traits, to varying degrees, at some point in the novel, and a good part of her recovery consists in getting beyond the urge to keep doubting, getting beyond the temptation to bury her head under the bed linens and ignore the reality around her. Her recognition, toward the beginning of the novel, that she is “playing like an ostrich, . . . burying her head in the sand so as not to see” [“jugando al avestruz . . . metiendo la cabeza en la arena para no ver”] (14), is repeated, in some form, until nearly the end of the novel.34 Yet, because irony is double-edged and humor, even this brand of skeptical humor, invites and elicits a response—any response— from others, the very same weapons the protagonist uses as a shield to protect her initial desire for distance and detachment turn into instruments of recovery and reconciliation. Writing about the “so-called Laura” [“la llamada Laura”] in Valenzuela’s story “Cambio de armas,” Debra Castillo notes that “ironically, her forced seclusion from language provides her with the essential attribute for resistance to her tormentor’s version of the story. Her resistance to meaning, any meaning, feeds her passivity but also establishes her non-co-optability” (129). A similar double-edged movement takes place in Realidad nacional, where the protagonist’s apparent passivity, and the blank slate of mind with which she has come to the club, turn into tactics of resistance inasumuch as they allow her to reconstruct her memories of her and her nation’s past while rejecting the ready-made version of the “official story” as recited by those in power or seeking power. At the same time, because she is vulnerable, “blank,” skeptical, and horizontal, she is also able to establish a dialogue of equals with Lucho and other marginalized disenfranchised bodies, bodies who would normally find her, as an educated bourgeois woman, too aloof or too powerful to trust. The narrative’s skeptical comic irony serves as a buffering or brokering agent between differing and, to some degree, singularly insufficient, modes of resis-

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tance before these same modes of resistance find collective agency toward the end of the novel.35 In other words, the mixed, often skeptical, humor of Realidad nacional turns out to be the ideal semantic hybrid for exposing the transitory, makeshift nature of the epistemological structures that the subject must reject, and the tactics she must recover, in order to integrate the collective space of the nation once again. Since, as I noted earlier, the ironic ambivalence that this novel deploys from beginning to end helps to subdue the overall effects of carnivalesque excess, the subversive attitude affirmed at the novel’s end is celebratory but decidedly nonheroic. Both the aborted coup and the national tango that explode into a panoply of regional dances at the end of the novel signal positive but uncertain reprieves—reprieves from military force and from bourgeois complicity with the present government’s desire to bury its head in the sand. Appropriately skeptical and open, the protagonist’s question at the end of the novel (“and the country?” [“¿y el país?”] (106) leaves no doubt as to just how temporary this reprieve, or reversal of fortune, may be for all of them.

CARNIVALESQUE REVERSALS

BUT

NO FINAL GLOATING

Realidad nacional begins in a state of comic indeterminacy (somewhere in between burlesque and comedy of manners), gradually finds its way into a mix of comic farce and carnivalesque celebration, and ends as a musical, albeit one in which the female lead is initially reluctant to dance. In the final chapter, Alfredi, now in his role as clever popular organizer (one able to deflect the major’s coup not so much by his physical heroism as by his crafty shiftiness), coaxes the señora to resume (or rather, assume, once again) her former verticality and move to the rhythm of the music playing outside.36 The two begin by dancing the tango, but the steps soon metamorphose into other regional, then continental, dances: “together they begin to dance a tango . . . which then turns into a polka, a foxtrot, a salsa, a samba, a cumbia, a calypso” [“empiezan a bailar . . . un tango . . . y después se convierte en chacarera, en bailecito, zamba, samba, cumbia, calipso”] (104). The metamorphosis of the tango (as the national dance of the nation) into other transnational or continental dances seems highly appropriate here. Although the protagonist has resumed verticality, her body continues to affirm “border” realities and mutable states, change and plurality rather than fixity and singularity. The protagonist’s return to verticality (which allegorically signals the nation’s reawakening) is accompanied by play—not only through that of the mutable dance but also through the give-and-take of the football game in the background. Furthermore, recovery does not mean returning to monologic truths or univocal platforms. Born to be ambivalent, the protagonist is not about to stop

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questioning what she sees, now more clearly and with a broader perspective. When Alfredi announces that they have recovered the club (“el club ya es nuestro”) [“the Club is ours already”], the protagonist asks “and what about the country?” [“Y el país?”] (106). Because the lessons of her half-amnesiac and supine but never entirely passive body have not been in vain, her question at the very end of the narrative announces a continued predisposition for further questions. Valenzuela had already dramatized the extreme measures taken by the military to cure “infected” bodies and reform corrupt psyches in the previously mentioned story “Cambio de armas” (1982), a story well on the way to becoming a new classic of contemporary Latin American letters. Written nearly a decade later, Realidad nacional revisits the rhetoric of forced bodily and psychic re-form, by once again placing a clueless or nearly clueless woman in a position to alter the present historical circumstances by recovering her past: in the novel as in the story, personal history is a key to communal memory. Both protagonists have been rendered partially dysfunctional by recent traumas, although the “so-called Laura” bears more visible traces of her recent past than does the señora. Yet while the narrative tone of “Cambio de armas” is nothing if not chilling, Realidad nacional is a distinctly comic text, even if—as I note at various points in this chapter—the ironic skepticism at times succeeds in muting the laughter out of the carnivalesque festivities. “Cambio de armas” depends on a particularly black humor to reveal the unspoken horrors lurking behind the character’s amnesia without reducing the revelations to pathos. Written against a different historical backdrop, Realidad nacional relies instead on mock-parodic comic tactics to expose, retrospectively, the insane absurdity of a political body that actually believed it could maintain control by curing, radically altering, or “erasing” individual and collective bodies perceived to be infectious and thus threatening to the national “health” plan. Although the characters’ plight is surprisingly similar in both narratives—both women are trying, with varying degrees of consciousness and desire, to reconstruct their lives by recovering memories that imbricate the personal with the political—the difference in tone is crucial, and it appears to mark a significant turning point in the development of the author’s fiction.37 Moving away from the dark and often morbid humor of the author’s more bluntly accusatory and more darkly satirical political narratives of the 1980s, Realidad nacional embraces a more hybrid approach to the comic or comic-ironic critique to which the author exposes her characters, and a more polyphonic (less binary-bound) approach to the epistemological categories that have always preoccupied these characters (and narrators). In fact, there is a noticeable refusal to engage in traditional satire, or at least in any kind of normative satire in Realidad nacional, in large part because, as I note earlier,

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satire demands implicit but clearly prescribed solutions to the realities, characters, or situations that it mocks or critiques. Hand in hand with these tonal and discursive shifts is the transformation that the protagonic female bodies and female subjects undergo. The señora of Realidad nacional is older and visibly less mobile than the “so-called” Laura of “Cambio,” but she is considerably wiser despite her (partial) amnesia and much better at “wise-cracking,” and thus at confusing, her enemies or potential enemies. In short, she has more arms at her disposal, and even if she is skeptical as to what weapons will work best and when, it is clear that she has become much more adept at both keeping unwanted bodies at arms’ length and at catalyzing desirable bodies into action. And while the “so-called” Laura must act alone (she literally does not know whom to trust), the protagonist of Realidad nacional, ambivalent as she is about the possibility of knowing other bodies’ motives, knows that bodies, like memories, are communal organisms. Her newly recovered will to move and her ability to stand straight again are symptomatic of her renewed willingness to take sides, to join the common dance.

CHAPTER FIVE

/ Sick Bodies, Corrosive Humor: Armonía Somers Fiorella, feeling like her old self, wanted to laugh as in better times, but she couldn’t manage it: that first burst of laughter caused her such convulsions that she relived the horror of those first treatments. Armonía Somers, Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora . . . what pulls the discourse back from the edge of non-sense or psychosis, what in the end enables the speaking being to cope with the contradictory horror and fascination of the abject, is a kind of leveling humor, what Kristeva terms ‘un rire apocalyptique.’ Elia Geoffrey Kantaris, referring to Sólo los elefantes in The Subversive Psyche: Contemporary Women’s Narratives from Argentina and Uruguay

L

ike Luisa Valenzuela’s señora in Realidad nacional desde la cama, Armonía Somers’s protagonist in Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora [Only Elephants Find Mandrake] (1986) is in bed for all but the duration of the novel, but her illness is real and life-threatening, full of abject symptoms and Svengalian medical treatments. Told that she suffers from a disease about which little is known, the ill woman with the improbable name of “Sembrando Flores Irigoitia de Medicis”1 is soon referred to by the hospital personnel simply as “The Case” [“El caso”]. An unusual object of curiosity for the team of doctors, surgeons, and hospital personnel who hope to probe her deliquescent body for new scientific findings, she is first and foremost a “caso” or “test case” reminiscent of the much-publicized nineteenth- and twentieth-century

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medical case studies of women’s bodies.2 But her idiosyncratic behavior turns her into another kind of “caso” as well.3 As her chronic inability to stop her hallucinated flow of words becomes more and more evident with every chapter, she becomes the hospital’s most eccentric patient; even, perhaps, the hospital’s hysteric. Deciding to lay claim to her madness—“with or without the couch” (40)—the patient opts for spending whatever time she has left (which is nearly the entirety of the novel) reconstructing personal history through a seemingly unstoppable flow of stories. To readers acquainted with this author’s violent fiction, Somers might seem an odd candidate for a study of humor—any humor. Yet more than any of the other narratives I discuss in this book, her novel Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora nourishes the link between a particularly dark brand of feminocentric humor and women’s bodily “humors” from beginning to end. Largely narrated by a middle-aged woman suffering from a rare pulmonary infection called chylothorax,4 Somers’s experimental novel is a multigenred hybrid about everything and nothing (or, rather more ominously, Nothing). Yet ultimately the novel is about leaky bodies—mostly female—and female bodily fluids’ potential for disrupting dominant masculinist discourses, narratives, and myths.5 The author’s cynicism, set in motion by the narrator’s persistent and cutting sarcasm, threatens to dissolve systemic certainties of all types, but especially those that sustain the disembodied epistemologies of the twentieth century (medicine, politics, existential philosophy, psychoanalysis). It is difficult to imagine a feminocentric cynical humor that did not have transgression or subversion as its aim. Nevertheless, the fact that this novel’s black humor stems from a body that cannot be made to stop oozing liters of lymphatic fluid as a defense mechanism against a mysterious infection that doctors can neither locate nor identify raises the subversive and anarchic temperature of the dark comic transactions to new levels of unease. As the novel begins, what appears to be an aborted meditation on time gives way to the narration of lived time in a hospital room, as experienced by the woman who becomes the elusive but monumental subject and main narrator of this multilayered novel.6 Noting that there is “nothing more difficult and more compromising than speaking of a value called time” [“(n)o habrá nada tan difícil y comprometido que hablar de un valor llamado tiempo”] (11), the narrator goes on to say that for her the difficulty of writing about it is made even more daunting by the fact that time has “coagulated like blood or milk” [“coagulado como sangre o leche”] (11).7 An apt description for the state of lived time in a hospital room, in this case the adjective “coagulated” serves as the perfect first clue for a novel in which all pretense at metaphysical flight is soon held in check by the utterly physical reality of abject bodies. In her hospital room, a space that is more public than private, the narratorprotagonist’s thickened time is neither lost nor flowing but lying dormant in

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a sickening state of waiting (for a cure, for death). As the narrative becomes progressively denser with overlapping stories, what began as a reflection on the nature of time within the framework of a seemingly self-conscious modernist meditation turns into a postmodern gothic circus, one complete with references to women’s skulls and tyrannical or victimized mothers, classic and esoteric “monsters” past and present, and the red-headed “angel” who sits by the sick woman’s bed playing the role of reader, interlocutor, and occasionally, seductress-manquée to the doctors who make their rounds through the patient’s room. As she moves through the clinical study, gothic story, and postmodern commentary, the reader is brought back time and again to the unstoppable flow of the lymphatic fluid produced by the patient’s body. Acting as an antibody produced in excess to an infection no one can quite define, the phlegm-like liquid may well be the novel’s only real “coagulant” in a novel in which everything seems to be in a state of decomposition. Describing or dismissing the novel-in-progress as “un todo narrativo sin solución” [“a narrative about everything without an solution”] (17n), the novel’s primary narrator gives readers and critics carte blanche for approaching the novel’s open and openly transgressive structure from multiple perspectives. Although a handful of scholars have touched on Elefantes’s polyphonic and multilayered structure, the only major study of this novel thus far centers on Somers’s use of images of dissemination and deliquescence as metaphors for questioning and disrupting patriarchal discourses.8 Impossible to reduce to a single thematic preoccupation, or a single narrative plot, the novel bridges a series of contrasting or at least disparate worlds: the late modernist experimental narrative (the patient’s, and presumably the author’s, narrative) is interwoven with a nineteenth-century historical Gothic novel (the mother’s narrative), while postmodern and postfeminist intertexts continuously threaten to shatter the uneasy balance between the two dominant parallel texts. Complicating the narrative structure further is the parodic patina that clings to both of these competing voices. The insinuation of a sustained if subtle parody in what is already a highly complex narrative renders everything doubly ambiguous. Julia Kristeva has stated that abjection is “what disturbs identity, system, order . . . what does not respect borders, positions, rules” (4).9 An undeniable and overwhelming sense of abjection operates on a physical and metaphorical level in Elefantes, rendering bodies and discourses ambiguous as well as unstable. Influenced by Derrida and Heidegger as well as by Kristeva in his reading of Somers’s novel, Elia Geoffrey Kantaris argues that Elefantes is an exercise in psychoanalytic and existential dissemination. I would add that the abject dissemination and deconstructive process that Kantaris’s study details so impressively manifests itself first in the novel’s hybrid mix of genres and narrative tones.10 Although one can identify the mechanics of irony, satire,

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and parody—often working simultaneously or contrapuntally in the narrative—the novel’s sustained comic cynicism operates its subversive intent ambiguously, indirectly, and through a process of diffusion rather than accretion or crystallization. Given this tonal confusion, it is easy to see why the novel’s use of humor (and related comic strategies) presents a hermeneutic quagmire for the reader. While one senses the “darkness” of the ironic sarcasm throughout the novel, the plurality of comic and tragicomic targets, the “semantic distortions” that turn social satire into metafictive lyricism, and the constant shifting between genres and discursive registers all contribute to an indeterminateness at the heart of the narrative that complicates the question of the mordant humor’s direction or intent. The corrosiveness of Somers’s irony in this novel is more seriously transgressive of sociosexual mores than that of Ana Lydia Vega’s carnivalesque inversions and more inclusive in its targets than are Luisa Valenzuela’s comic allegories. Yet calibrating the effect of such heterogeneous and diffuse comic practices is a daunting task. It is evident, nevertheless, that the novel’s varied but always dark humor is meant to sustain both the novel’s experimental aesthetics and the narrative’s postmodern ethos, an ethos that refuses closure or compromise in its insistence on promoting disruption as well as resistance to established orders of all kinds.

ABJECT BODIES, DISTENDED SUBJECTS From June 1992 to January 1993, noted artist Hannah Wilke recorded her struggle with lymphatic cancer in a series of thirteen photographs. These photographs show a defiant and sarcastic ill woman, one who has remained a “self-assured exhibitionist” (223) even as her body, invaded by intravenous tubes and other medical contraptions, began to show evidence of her decline.11 Examining these photographs, JoAnna Isaack sees in them “the clearest example we are likely to get of what Freud calls the ‘triumph of narcissism’ which occurs as a result of ‘the grandeur of humor’ ” (223). Somers’s novel, likewise inspired by the author’s mysterious illness only a few years before her death, can be read as a similar if much more dialogic expression of the “triumph of narcissism” that ensues from transforming pain and the specter of death into an occasion for wit or black humor.12 Written with the body’s intimate knowledge of real private illnesses as well as allegorical public plagues, Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora is in many ways a powerful expectorant. Hospitalized with what first appears to be a particularly virulent strain of pneumonia or tuberculosis but turns out to be a much more mysterious (and less treatable) illness, the protagonist finds herself within a body that will not stop oozing a viscous, whitish fluid. The lymphatic fluid is referred to simply

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as la linfa in the novel, giving it a distinctly gendered character.13 Somers’s narrative corpus revolves with obsessive insistence on and around women’s material bodies and the sociocultural anxieties these bodies provoke, so Elefantes’s fascination with the abject female body does not, at first, come as a surprise. Yet in most of the author’s earlier stories and novels, women’s bodies and female sexuality are generally presented from the perspective of a male character or narrator. In these works, the horror of abjection is largely presented from the perspective of male repulsion to what the male perceives as a lack of boundaries in the constitution of female corporeality (and, most especially, sexuality).14 What makes Sólo los elefantes a decidedly feminocentric text and, despite the author’s resistance to the term, a feminist text, is the way in which the novel explores the mature, material, and nonidealized female body as a site of contamination and corruption even as it foregrounds this same body as a source of self-knowledge, curiosity, and wonder.15 Western discourses of medicine, philosophy, and literature have traditionally depicted the female body as a body out of control, one prone to exceed the limits prescribed and proscribed for it by scientific, moral, and social imperatives. As noted in my analysis of Laura Esquivel’s novel, women writers’ and artists’ fascination with female fluids is in large part an attempt (by women) to appropriate this deeply entrenched manifestation of misogyny in order to explore the kinds of disruptions and transgressions attributed to women’s all-too-fluid bodies. As I mentioned earlier, a number of Latin American writers have foregrounded women’s bodies’ propensity for liquefaction with precisely this contestatory intent, but Somers’s obsessive allusions to oozing bodies (largely although not exclusively female in this novel) infuses Elefantes with something like an illustrated (meta)physics, or at least metaphorics, of abjection. As if to underline the feminoid materiality of the abject images, eggs and lacteous images are everywhere to be found, with eggs gaining prominence over seeds. Fiorella’s mother’s reward for reading to old Abigail are the egg whites she is given to eat (the yolk is for the family’s consumptive children). The “Minotaur’s” mother feeds her son sugared egg whites. Fiorella’s mother is unable to breast-feed the child, but her poverty-stricken friend’s mother cures her of a terrible earache by pouring her own nursing milk into her sick ear. Not least, of course, there is Fiorella’s whitish lympathic fluid that is meant to suggest an impure and thick type of mother’s milk, a milk that may well have stagnated in her body as punishment for her lack of maternal and excess of “manly” intellectual skills. For Kristeva, women’s fluids (menstrual blood in particular) are forms of inner abjection because they threaten the subject’s identity and sense of constitution. Neither all-solid nor all-liquid, viscous bodily fluids threaten the illusion of firm margins separating the subject from the external world (and

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from other subjects): hence these fluids’ “powers of horror,” or at least of disgust. In many of her works, Luce Irigaray also insists that the depiction of female bodily fluids as disquieting or repulsive is directly proportional to the insistence of Western ontology to operate within a metaphorics of solids. Within prevailing philosophical models of Being, argues Irigaray, female fluids are the “other” that exceeds representation. As such, they threaten the solidity of the concepts of identity, uniformity, and self-certainty. Setting out to provide militant models for countering the image of female fluids (and by extension the female body) as abject negativity, Irigaray—like Hélène Cixous—has consistently advocated celebrating the expression of female body’s fluidity in modes of writing that bear the imprint of the women’s bodies. Somers’s own notion of abjection is much closer to Kristeva’s assessment of the discomfiting power of abjection than it is to Irigaray’s celebratory image of these fluids as an alternative source of language and/or creativity. Moreover, Kristeva’s insistence that abjection has to do with the impossibility of keeping physiological margins and psychological borders uncontaminated is forcefully dramatized in Elefantes’s perverse focus on the seepage of fluids into other fluids or into semisolid bodies. Kristeva notes that “[a]bjection is without a doubt a frontier, but it is above all ambiguity . . . although it demarcates, it does not radically detach the subject from what menaces it—on the contrary, it shows it to be in perpetual danger” (132). For Somers’s protagonist, this ambiguity is felt simultaneously on a physical, metaphysical, and ontological level. The protagonist’s ludicrous if lyrical name, with the participle dangling between an absent verb and a plural noun (“sembrando flores”) already signals the impossibility of arriving at a secure or stable sense of identity and self-identity. While lactation and blood enter the narrative in their sticky materiality, it is the preponderance of the sick protagonist’s lymphatic fluid, viscous and more worrisome (because of the excessive quantities in which it is produced) than the infection itself, that gives new meaning, and added transgressiveness, to the notion of “ecriture feminine.” If writing with fluids readily associated with female sexuality and reproduction may turn women who write with their bodies into “essences” of women, writing with an abnormal fluid somatically produced in response to a mysterious infection or illness can be a metaphor for writing from the particularity and peculiarity of a malfunctioning but conditionally situated (female) body, a body that continues to “function” as an agent of dissent and disruption even as it malfunctions. The descriptive style that records the symptoms of her illness are as incontinent and as horrific as the illness itself: And from then on a vertiginous history measuring days and nights stuck between themselves, and there she was in the midst of the whirlwind, and a sample of lymphatic fluid oozing from her body as

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if sucked out by screwdriver, drawn out just to find out what’s up out there, and a sliver of kidney, and digestive tracts, and you just swallow, swallow this paste (does it taste like plaster?) swallow it anyway, and her liver, just hold still while we press on it, and her breasts, that’s enough, you Oedipuses, enough!, and on to other orifices where if she were to move they’d think she was enjoying it and if she remained indifferent they’d think she was frigid . . . and the whole defenseless human condition under strict vigilance, and you try it, you proud bystanders, just try lying here face down while they fidget with with in the places where the angel tempted man on the fateful fall day, and then, to vary the routine, draining it out of her straight into a big container until Angel (the red-headed one) measured fifteen liters. Y en adelante una historia vertiginosa de días y de noches pegadas entre sí y alla en el centro del remolino, y una muestra de pleura saliendo en la punto de un taladro para saber qué tal ahí, y un pedazo de hígado, y vías digestivas, trague, trague esta pasta ¿gusto a pared? trague igualmente, y riñón, resista la presión sobre su vientre, resista, y mamas, ¡suelten, Odipos, suelten!, y más allá donde si uno se moviera creerían que era para darse gusto y si uno rechazara dirían bloqueo al sexo . . . y toda la indefensa condición humana bajo control, y vengan ustedes los del orgullo a ponerse aquí boca abajo mientras les explortan aquello con que el ángel trataba de tentar a los hombres el día de su captura, y por variar el vaciamiento directamente al frasco hasta que Angel contara quince litros (26–27). It is difficult to imagine a more dramatic illustration of Kristeva’s affirmation that the abject can drive a being to “the edge of non-existence and hallucination” than the passage just cited. (2) It is highly relevant, furthermore, that in this case the abnormal and mysterious fluid oozing out of her body is her female body’s instinctive reaction to an infection that has a generalized and unidentifiable malignant source that makes the metaphor of writing with the ill body (in ill times) all the more subversive. In Sólo los elefantes, writing with the chronically ill body, the body that apparently cannot be cured or killed by sundry treatments, signals a stubborn resistance to practice anything remotely resembling “feminine” writing as soft or pliable. As does time, which coagulates quickly in the protagonist’s room, so Somers’s narrative style “hardens” almost as soon one’s eyes graze over it, and this despite the overwhelming, evern vertiginous movement of the story. One of the greatest ironies of the experience of reading this novel is noticing that there is something fiercely solid in the novel’s style: as if the narrator’s words, like her lymphatic fluid, were a type of clay that hardens as it is drained out of her.

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EXCREMENTAL DIS/SOLUTIONS One of the most troubling if comic indications of this dissolution of personal boundaries is found at the end of the previously quoted passage, in which Fiorella imagines her own discarded lymphatic fluid (once a part of her embodied self ) as it joins forces with other disembodied and discarded bodily fluids in the sewers of the city. Depicted in terms not unlike that of the classical (male) hero’s journey to the underworld in search of knowledge and self-knowledge, Fiorella imagines the subterranean fate of her “linfa” as it sets out to find its final desiny. In Fiorella’s grotesquely comic scenario, the remnant of the ego visiting the underworld is not her soul but her infected bodily fluids. And added to all this the dénouement, the final destination of the endless flow in a complex web of sewage pipes, the unstoppable race below avenues, plazas and museums, bordellos and temples, prisons and Schools of Fine Art, enemies’ houses and the offices of the Salvation Army, and everything along with it below while it tickles the soles of their feet, like an aimless aquanaut over other flowing things, where the only fellow travellers were anxious beings evacuated from other prisons and with whom she would perhaps manage to have a gurgling dialogue in her new coloideal existence. Y agregado a ello el desenlace, su lanzamiento a la red cloacal sin puntos y sin comas la carrera desenfrenada bajo las avenidas, las plazas y los museos, los prostíbulos y los templos, los presidios y las escuelas de bellas artes, las casas de los enemigos y la del Ejército de Salvación y todos consigo debajo una displiscente acuanauta sobre aquellos deeslizadores, donde los únicos congéneres eran unos tipos ansiosos evadidos de un penal con los que ella alcanzaría a dialogar gorgoteando en su existencia coloidea (27). In a heated conversation with these other traveling companions at the end of this passage, the lymphatic fluid that was once part of the protagonist’s bodily identity argues the impossibility of transcendence.16 Contrary to what one might speculate, where abjection is the corporeal state par excellence, transcendence becomes an impossibility. As the quoted passage illustrates, a persistent sense of entropic dissolution (not just of her own body, but of her world as well) haunts the protagonist throughout the novel. It is in this very insistence on rejecting disembodied transcendence that Elefantes begins to affirm a specifically female type of carnal knowledge, one based more on biological contingency than sexual desire. Positing itself as a running commentary on the limits of abstract epistemologies, the abject female body in Somers’s novel literally and sym-

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bolically perforates and infiltrates the patriarchal discourses that make up the novel’s intertextual sediment. A different but equally dramatic illustration of how filtering and corroding powers of fear and disgust evoked by the protagonist’s excessive production of linfa can infiltrate patriarchal discourses and disrupt Romantic illusions of transcendence and wholeness is found in a passage in which the protagonist purposely spills the infected fluid being drained from her body in order to cut short a seduction scene between one of the various specialists who stops in to give his opinion and her companion Victoria von Scherer—the “Angel” to whom the narrative repeatedly refers. When the Aryan-looking doctor begins to woo red-headed Victoria to the sounds of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, Fiorella is determined to stop them.17 Out of anger, jealousy, or perhaps simply resentment at being preempted as the object of attention in her own hospital room, she decides to halt the seduction-in-progress by knocking down the large flask containing her excess lymphatic fluid. The liquid immediately spreads all over the floor, causing the doctor to run out of the room in fear of contagion and suspending indefinitely the potential for a neo-Gothic romance between these two Teutonic-looking creatures: . . . he and Angel looked at each other, felt the hereditary connection between their last names and said: ah, Bethoven’s Eighth, the allegretto. And suddenly she thought she saw them dancing to the melody in her own sordid hospital room. The golden-haired man was fat and the girl was all sinuous style, but what united them was the allegretto scherzando. And that’s how they remained, without talking and apparently without moving, but clearly something was happening, they were trying to hide with the opaqueness of their bodies what they were consummating in front of her own miserable immobile body as witness. And then they dared continue through the winged minuetto movement. . . . But they would not get to the allegro vivace, she would make sure of that, that movement belonged to her alone. So just when the flaming sounds of the finale were about to explode, the rightful owner of the Quilothorax spilled the whole container of it all in the middle of the room, all that heavy, thick, feminoid, her woman’s-body nothing but a thick fluid, and then the two could not go on stealing the Eighth from her, because suddenly the floor was flooded with the viscosity liquid. . . . y él y Angel se miraron, sintieron emparentarse por la raíz de los apellidos y dijeron: el allegretto scherzando de la Octava ¿no es así? Y de repente le pareció verlos danzar aquello en la sórdida pieza. El hombre dorado era gordo y la muchacha qué estilización, pero lo principal quedaba en el allegretto scherzando que los unía. Y así

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estuvieron sin hablar todo el tiempo, y aparentemente sin moverse, pero es claro que en algo más, aquella forma de cubrir con sus opacos cuerpos lo que se estaban permitiendo consumar frente a la desgraciada inmovilidad de la primer testigo. Y después tuvieron el coraje de atacar el alado tempo di menuetto. . . . Pero el allegro vivace final no, ése sería de su exclusiva propiedad. Y entonces; cuando ya iba a romper su formidable hervor, la dueña del Quilotórax lo soltó en medio de ambos, pesado, torpe, feminoide, con las blanduras de una mujer hecha de flujo, y así se vieron ellos impedidos de seguir robándole la Octava, porque de pronto esl suelo se había llenado de la viscosidad. (105–106). While this scene could be interpreted from the viewpoint of Fiorella’s lifelong jealousy of beautiful red-headed women stealing the men she loves, it is more fruitful to read the older woman’s disruption of the younger woman’s romance with an authoritative, older, and “solid” male figure as a critical rejection of the standard heterosexual romance, one in which an unsuspecting woman falls under the influence of a man in uniform, or a “uni-formed” male. In this vein, the spilling and spreading of the lymphatic fluid function as a visceral illustration of how a “real” (or at least material) woman’s body can disrupt, or at least defer, Romantic representations of idealized or fictive desire. Here the abject feminoid fluid signals ways in which bodily surplus questions, disrupts, and defers, perhaps indefinitely, the false transcendence promised by representations or dramatizations of Romantic desire.18 In a sustained effort to counteract Romantic aspirations at every turn, Somers’s novel spares no details in describing the protagonist’s ill body or the terrifying treatments to which it is subjected. First depicted as a body convulsed by its inability to stop coughing up blood and phlegm, it soon becomes a body invaded by needles and filled with experimental drugs. Daily diagnostic tests become a bloody ritual because the nurses are unable to find her veins. A shot of “Evans’ Blue,” a powerful dye injected directly into her breast to determine the trajectory of the lymphatic drainage, leaves half of her body with the same hue as the dye. A medication injected directly into her tongue turns the latter a shade of deep purple. After her final surgery, she returns to her room with the impression that she now has her head sewn backwards, in a description highly reminiscent of a Magritte painting. Complications from the surgery leave her with a numb tongue, a blind eye, half of her face and body swollen, and semiparalyzed: And let it be known too that in the mornings I see black spiders climbing the wall, and that with just one eye, since I’ve lost half my vision. And my face is swollen on one side, and I can’t raise my legs

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because they weigh so much, and I choke from so much overflow, and my tongue is full of frogs, maybe because I have been vomiting even the water I try to drink. Y que se sepa también que veo al amanecer arañas negras trepando por la pared, y eso con un solo ojo pues acabo de perder media visión. Y la cara se me va hinchando de un lado, y no puedo ya levantar las piernas a causa de su peso, y esa iracunda expectoración me ahoga, y la lengua se me ha llenado de sapos tal vez por la vomitera que me hace arrojar hasta el agua que bebo (315). Just as Fiorella’s infected lymph fluid gains recognition for its contagious potential—the hospital lab begins to requisition it because it is particularly fertile as a bacteria-growing body—the infected woman’s black humor begins to contaminate the discursive spaces around her. As the ill female bodily “humor” of choice filters into the spaces of the novel’s intertextual web of authorized discourses mostly through the metaphor of contagion, Somers’s own brand of writing-with-the-body forcefully resists a semantics of jouissance and opts instead for a semiotics of cynical engagement. The ensuing narrative is a performance of feminoid “negativity”—a writing against official stories—in which negation and negativity are conducted through the infiltration of abject black humor and condemned female humors into the solidified solemnity of patriarchal epistemologies. Although Fiorella’s doctors remain seemingly nonplussed by their patient’s eloquent sense of irony, nurses, patients, and orderlies begin to visit her room surreptitiously or on their days off, just to debate her shockingly heretical views or hear her improbable stories. In Fiorella’s case, writing with the body means contaminating the androcentric discourses that have excluded the feminine body (and denounced its fluidity) throughout history. It also means restoring previously silenced voices to the dominant discurses.

CONTAGION AS INTERTEXTUALITY, INTERTEXTUALITY AS CONTAGION As the protagonist turns her doctors’ obsession with her body’s drainage (and the duration of her hospital stay) into an excuse for remembering, and perhaps re-membering or reconstructing, her personal history—which turns out to be largely the story of her parents and of ancillary characters who play important roles in their lives—Somers’s novel becomes a complex web of textual and intertextual games. In other words, fluid contagion and corporeal uncontainability become literal vehicles for intertextuality. The reconstruction process is so labyrinthian, and the superimposition of narratives so baroque,

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that the emerging novel strikes the reader more as a compilation of chaotic ruminations than as a biographical or historical chronicle. Moreover, because Somers’s protagonist stands at the crossroads of modernity19 and postmodernity, reconstructing personal history means reconstructing not only the stories of those whose lives have intersected with hers, but the stories, beliefs, and discourses of the texts her progenitors and contemporaries read as well. Yet the novel’s modernist desire for grand, if partial, narratives is consistently countered by a thoroughly deconstructive perspective. The result is an accumulation of fragmented but overlapping narratives that grow in length and complexity, yet resist clarification, closure, and generic categorization at every turn. As the narrative’s multiple threads turn progressively murkier and stickier, the reader wonders whether the protagonist will expire from the symptoms of her illness or if she’ll be done in, instead, by the mental excesses required to keep her textual web from becoming an asphyxiating knot. As it turns out, however, the protagonist’s almost comically accidental death is not at all related to the illness that keeps her prone and in pain for most of the narrative. Almost as though to avoid ideological or moralistic conclusions, or to thwart the reader’s temptation to attribute a clear symbolism to the protagonist’s death, the novel favors the aleatory over the teleological in its treatment of the ending. Having survived her horrific illness and the presence of military violence (hovering darkly over many passages in the novel) the protagonist is killed in the most inglorious, insignificant, and unromantic of situations: she is hit by a local bus. Implicitly adopting the mask of a cranky, older, and sarcastic Scheherezade, El Caso, or Fiorella (as her mother had insisted on calling her), claims that her life hangs on her stories’ threads. The almost manic circulation of stories in the novel is in large part a defensive strategy on the part of the narrator/ protagonist against the very real impression that she is oozing away: “and I had to see it all . . . how I was seeping out of myself in the form of a milky, viscous liquid” [“y tuve que verlo todo . . . el como iba saliendo yo de mí en la forma de un líquido lactescente, espeso”] (25). But Fiorella’s semantic explosion is also her own unprescribed countertreatment. In other words, to the horrific congestion that she fears will kill her from either its symptoms or the prescribed cure, she opposes an endless dose of expectorant speech. Given these circumstances, it comes as no surprise that this speech is filled with such nasty humor(s). An illustration of Fiorella’s power to disrupt the dominant epistemologies and hypotheses that the hospital authorities insist on imposing on her ill body occurs early in the narrative, when Fiorella’s doctor takes her novel away, folding the corner of the page she is reading. Irritated by the doctor’s gesture, Fiorella observes to herself that there is a better method for “marking” a text: it consists of inserting a “plant leaf ” (“una hoja vegetal”) between the pages

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one desires to mark. Implicit in the doctor’s dismissal of his patient’s novel is the desire to invalidate both the fictive imagination (which modern science has been at pains to eradicate) and to ignore the ill woman’s right to escape the world of his official diagnosis into other alternative realms of interpretation. The discourse of “crossing” herbal specimens appears throughout the novel as a symbol of a particular kind of intertextuality and it is, without a doubt, the novel’s most subversive attempt to infect the world of the dry or “dead” (book) leaf—the pages of codified knowledge—with earlier forms of live material knoweldge. The biological term “species hybridization” accurately depicts the description of Fiorella’s notebooks as rendered by the fictional editor, who is no other than the red-headed Angel, Victoria von Scherer: *In her Notebooks, Sembrando Flores [Fiorella] would attempt three types of hybrid crossing between diverse but alternative species: Pedro Irigoitia’s books with those of Esculapio; those of Esculapio with those of Abigail; those of Abigail with those of Pedro. The result would be unique to her pharmacopoeia, if one takes into account that Pedro’s books, those that survived the domestic catastrophe, were used as herbariums in the House on the Hill. (Note by V. von Sch.) *En sus Cuadernos Sembrando Flores intentó la cruza de tres cepas alternadas: los libros de Pedro Irigoitia con los de Esculapio; los de Esculapio con los de Abigail; los de Abigail con los de Pedro. Los resultados serían exclusividades de su farmacopea, si se tiene en cuenta que los libros de Pedro sobrevivientes de la catástrofe fueran utilizados como herbarios desde la Casa de la Colina (Nota de V. von Sch.) (73). Among Fiorella’s earliest childhood memories are those of inserting live plant leaves into the pages of her father’s books. The practice turns out to be both ironic and vindicatory, since Fiorella’s habit of using her father’s library as an herbarium is not only a way of living up to the idiosyncratic name her father has burdened her with (Sembrando Flores) but also an unconscious means of setting up the memory of her mother’s first suitor—the mildmannered pharmacologist Mariana jilted when she met the tempestuous, anarchic, and authoritarian Pedro. More important, this practice of inserting a botanical nature into the father’s abstract political and philosophical culture signals from the beginning the protagonist’s desire (subconscious at first) to contaminate the textual legacy of patriarchy with the mother’s (and the earth’s) natural fluids. The gendered implications of this practice are made clear in a later chapter, when Fiorella’s father—furious on discovering that his wife and child have allowed a leper to spend the night in their yard—looks for a passage in which an arch-misogynist Schopenhauer declares women to be as

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“animals with long hair and small ideas” [“animales con cabellos largos e ideas cortas”] (89). Finding the passage, the father is shocked to see that the text has been “condemned” (contaminated, in fact) by a leaf that his daughter had placed there, a leaf that has undoubtedly bled its “green blood” all over this particular passage. As if threatened by the feminoid or herboreal infection himself, the father violently throws the book up in the air, signalling not only his fury at his daughter’s “erasure” of Schopenhauer’s misogyny (inadvertent, of course), but also his fear of being contaminated by the natural world, a green world close to women’s fluids and thus corrosive to the culture of male wisdom. An early illustration of this counterposition of discourses can be found toward the beginning of the novel, when Fiorella wishes she could find or remember the counterherb or antidote that could be used to attack the diagnosis she has just heard from one of her first doctors. As the doctor expounds what is purely a hypothetical opinion with the arrogance of a scientific jargon that does not yet know what to treat or how to treat it, the protagonist realizes the abolute state of abandonment in which she finds herself, so far away from the plants she has hidden in so many books: What to do? Our research will advance by observation and documentation, as it should be: there is a whole team of us gathering data. I direct the project and, naturally, I am in charge of systematizing the substance that your body is producing. . . . Said just like that, saving himself the trouble of giving more scientific details, only a basic introduction, something out of some simple elementary school textbook; the explanation filled her with loneliness, a poisoned loneliness, one for which she lacked the possible herbal antidote. What evil herb could I have eaten? Perhaps all that was needed was to find the root of another herb. But she stopped herself, she wasn’t going to suddenly reveal to them her herboreal history just like that. Besides, who was there around who could bring her potions from a lost world, a world where the little yellow flowers of the herbal antidote had been left in some book, and who knows which book. ¿Y qué hacer? La investigación prosigue a nivel documental donde corresponde: hay todo un equipo recogiendo datos, yo dirijo las búsquedas y, como se comprenderá, voy sistematizando el material que fluye tal eso que usted brota. . . . Y aquello dicho así, ahorrándose las puntualizaciones científicas para dar lo que correspondía a una medida profana como en cualquier lección de cartilla escolar antigua, fue el despertar de la soledad, una soledad envenenada y sin el antídoto de la contrahierba, a cuyo recuerdo ella apeló vanamente. Qué mala hierba habré comido, quizá la raíz de la contraria sería lo bueno. Pero

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se contuvo a tiempo, no iba a descubrir así como así sus historias herborísticas. Y además quién le traería remedios de esa clase desde un mundo perdido donde las pequeñas flores amarillas de la contrahierba habrían quedado dentro de algún libro, y qué libro sería (36–37).

EXERCISES

IN

HYBRID CROSSINGS

First introduced in the novel as an ill body, Fiorella is introduced next as a reader of texts: “the woman, who refused her medication, begged furiously for long novels” [“la mujer, que rechazaba con energía los medicamentos, pedía con furor largas novelas”] (11). In the novel’s opening paragraph (from which this passage is cited), a reflection on time, soon followed by abstract references to the woman’s illness and death, turns into a self-conscious and critical observation about the nature of contemporary novels. Rejecting experimental texts (like the one we are reading, of course), the patient decides the novel she wants to read is the very same novel her mother (Mariana) once read to another mother (Abigail) in exchange for food (although egg whites are all that she was given for her reading labors). This novel, a nineteenth-century historical romance entitled A Mother’s Manuscript, becomes the first intertext in Somers’ Elefantes. One of the first scholars to attempt a critical reading of Elefantes, Rómulo Cosse was also the first to insist on the importance of the novel’s “polyphonic” nature, proposing a Bakhtinian reading that stresses the parodic glossing of one text/voice/discourse by another. Cosse’s reading dwells primarily on the counterimposition of the rereading of the novel within the novel, and hence hinges on Elefantes’s two-tiered narrative structure. Although this critic notes that the novel’s estrangement of narrative voices has the effect of opening up these two tiers to further discontinuities, his reading remains dialogic (and to some degree, dialectical) rather than overtly polyphonic. While it provides a useful entryway into Somers’s novel, Cosse’s emphasis risks an oversimplified image of Elefantes’s more complex and diffuse intertextual games. Kantaris’s metaphor of a textual and intertextual “hemorrhaging” or “lymphorrhaging” is a superbly accurate image for capturing the bewildering superimposition of stories, discourses, and texts that come to make up the novel. In the first few pages, the novel moves well beyond the parallel narratives of Fiorella’s medical case, on the one hand, and the nineteenthcentury romance novel she has asked to be read on the other, to include Fiorella’s mother’s story and, by extension, the story of Pedro Irigoitia, the man who becomes Fiorella’s father. As these stories in turn rupture and contaminate each other, more narrative threads are loosed on the novel: the story of the aristocratic Abigail de la Torre (the woman who commands

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Mariana’s reading) and her grotesquely decomposing family; the story of La Caña (Fiorella’s childhood friend) and her poverty-stricken, violent, yet oddly loyal brood; the stories of two redheads who die victims of other women’s jealousy; the story of Fiorella’s half-brother Liberto (who is hospitalized as a madman for claiming his share of his father’s inheritance); the story of the liberal priest who comes close to seducing, or to being seduced by, the heretical and precocious Fiorella; the story of the Minotaur (the young man with a masturbatory obsession in the hospital room next door) and his all-toodevoted mother; the story of the Mandrake root that, appropriately, seeps in and out of other stories as a contested but obsessive and ogynous origin myth. But this is only the beginning. To these properly narrative stories the novel counterposes fragmentary allusions to philosophical, psychoanalytic, political, and religious debates (e.g., the allusion to Schopenhauer’s view of women, perforated as it is by the salve from Fiorella’s plants). Although fragments of these discourses erupt into the narrative as metaphysical and rational alternatives to the novel’s narrative “madness,” it is highly significant that the novel chooses to represent some of these discourses through texts that are already on the verge, or the margins, of these discourses. In invoking the psychoanalytic subtext, the novel alludes not to Freud’s analysis of schizophrenia and psychosis, but to the memoirs of the famous paranoid psychotic himself, Daniel Paul Schreber. The references to political and philosophical thought are similarly “liminal,” as political thought enters the novel through Pedro Irigoitia’s anarchist and utopian convictions. At the end of the novel we are told that the text that had been Fiorella’s “true” bedside companion, is Heidegger’s Being and Time, a philosophical treatise that insists on positioning itself at the “ends” of philosophy (or at least on the limits of a philosophic tradition). There is no question that the novel sets up oppositional games between the rational (dialectical) thought at the heart of these discursive systems and the embodied narratives that persistently seek to counter, critique, and contaminate these systems’ metaphysical or rational purity. Yet it is worth noting that the rational systems of thought against which the novel’s abject body of the protagonist positions itself are already on the “limits” of their respective traditions. This overlapping of discourses and stories is slippery enough, but it is made even more volatile by a constant barrage of passing references to other texts and images. Although some of these allusions are to canonical figures (Miguel Hernández, Picasso, Dürer, Beethoven), the novel engages a host of minor genres as well. Superstitions, indigenous incantations, local lore, ancient and medieval herbal accounts of plants and their curative, deadly, or magical properties become important textual threads in the narrative, both as other ways of healing as well as knowing. Finally, as if all this weren’t challenging enough, there are certain rubrics that come to allude to highly loaded

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or symbolic episodes (and to the discourse behind each episode or symbol). Thus, “my poor son Escolástico” [“pobre mi hijo Escolástico”] is the cry with which the disconsolate Abigail punctuates Mariana’s reading, but it is also the cry that links Fiorella’s present suffering to her mother’s own unhappy state in Abigail’s household; “the Unicorns” [“los Unicornios”] refers to Fiorella’s apprenticeship under her father’s friend Miravalles, the liberal tutor who became a father substitute before he disappeared from their lives, but also to the freethinking views that gave free rein to the girl’s imagination; “cleaning the well” [“limpiar el aljibe”] refers to the young girl’s descent to their well, and to the multiple Freudian symbolism attached to such an act (and such a memory). The result is a formidable, and formidably taxing, explosion of genres and texts. Structurally, thematically, and semantically, the novel opts for anarchy and excess, even if Somers’s densely detailed, neo-baroque style tricks us into an illusion of coherence and continuity. As a narrative strategy as well as an ideological position, the novel’s anarchic intertextual excess points more to asocial and destructive ends (as it does for Bataille) than to communal and reconstructive goals (as it does for Bakhtin). As these texts, genres, and discourses seep into each other, the novel’s practice of resistance to master discourses is achieved less through dialectical opposition than through random acts of “leakage” from one discourse to another. Indeed, exploring the permeability of texts and bodies is one of Elefantes’s recurrent tropes, so examples of contaminating bodies and contaminated texts abound. A similar attack is made on the epistolary novel that links Fiorella’s free act of reading with her mother’s forced act of reading as a young woman trying to earn her keep in the aristocratic de la Torre’s household. The Mother’s Manuscript, a historical Gothic romance by the Spanish author Pérez Estrich, tells the story of a beautiful woman (Margarita) who betrays the men who love her. In particular, she betrays the count who is left to tell her story. Not surprising for a novel written in the second half of the nineteenth century, the mother of the title is absent from the story—at least from the portion of the story that Fiorella reads and the novel reproduces. The catalyst for the story is Margarita’s skull, which the betrayed count now uses as a candle holder, a cigarette lighter, and a warning to his son so that the son will not follow in his father’s footsteps. Although it appears that fragments of Pérez Estrich’s novel are inserted into Somers’s narrative, what the novel records is in fact Fiorella’s loose transliteration of the original. Cosse is right to note that in Fiorella’s ironic and irreverent reading, the Gothic romance becomes a comicparodic tale of a crafty woman’s picaresque journey to fame, fortune, and lust, and of the revenge exacted on her by men determined to punish women who break the rules to pursue both power and pleasure. By “demythifying” this novel within the novel, notes Cosse, Fiorella’s version “displaces its historical

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character, one that was situated in a political context, in order to focus strictly on the adventures of a courtesan” (215). An example of the parodic carnivalization I refer to can be found in the passage in which the military hero of the novel becomes a “little officer” who “snatches” the woman from under the Viscount’s nose: So it was the little officer Pedro de Lostan who had met the Latin American beauty in Cadiz, and he snatched her from under the Viscount’s nose when he found her again in Villaverde. The two men had a sword fight over her, the Viscount ended up wounded in the bushes around the cabin, and Margarita, neither slow nor lazy for these things, picked up her jewels and things and left with her officer. Así que era aquel militarcito Pedro de Lostan el que había conocido a la bella hispanoamericana en Cádiz, y se la birló al Vizconde al encontrarla de nuevo en Villaverde. Se batieron ambos hombres a espada, el Vizconde quedó herido entre la maleza de la cabaña y Margarita, ni corta ni perezosa, empacó joyas y otros objetos y se fugó con su militar (62–63). Yet while it is true Somers’s rendition of the historical novel turns it into a comic parodic version of the original, it is also true that in reducing the earlier novel’s historical and political details to the story of a woman’s transgressions and a man’s sadistic revenge, Fiorella reduces the novel to its thematic and ideological kernel. Far from disconnecting itself from Pérez Estrich’s original, Fiorella’s sarcastically ironic version foregrounds the historical romance’s most pressing thematic concern: the danger that unrestrained and unrestrainable women pose to social order, and the concomitant need to punish these women, even if one has to take time away from fighting wars of independence to do so. It is worth noting that both the flavor and the overarching themes of the historical romance echo her parents’ own stories. Behind the comic-parodic transposition of one genre (the historical novel) into another (a romantic Gothic thriller) is the protagonist’s serious attempt to turn the nineteenth-century father’s narrative of El Manuscrito de una madre into a late twentieth-century daughter’s attempt to rescue the mother’s story, but to do it without a trace of sentimentality. In the original novel, women and stories are the objects of men’s melodramatic exchanges. In Fiorella’s version, the exclamation points of melodrama are bent by cynical irony, and it is this cynical but knowing irony that provides a common ground (located in the act of reading as interpretation) where mother and daughter inhabit the space marked by the father’s absence.20 Using her father’s anarchist ideas and antics, the grown daughter rescues her young mother from the

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silence of submission by retelling the latter’s final reading assignment in the transgressive terms her mother might have liked to use in order to rebel not just against the tyranny of the matriarch, but against a patriarchal system that values and privileges firstborn sons to the exclusion of anyone else (Abigail’s bitterness, and the source of her tyranny, stems from the loss of her first son). It is important to note that, once again, the strategy for contaminating canonical texts with subversive irony is not to set up a dialectical or systemic parodic opposition between the contaminated or parodied model and the original, but to expose the original to frequent but unsystematic bursts of dissolute appropriation.

NEIGHBORHOOD INTERTEXTUAL SUBVERSIONS: BOOM

OR

BUST?

At the beginning of the narrative, trapped in the Gothic horror web of the novel she has started reading in the hospital, the protagonist and narrator mentions keeping “the kind of logbook where she wrote down everything she could” [“En esa especie the Cuaderno de Bitácora donde ella anotó todo lo que pudo”] (19). While the term “cuadernos de bitácora” refers to logbooks in general, the use of capital letters makes it impossible for a reader with some knowledge of Latin American literature not to associate the term or phrase with Cortázar’s Rayuela. It is in these logbooks that the ill woman writes her thoughts, and we have every reason to suspect that the novel we are reading is a version of these logbooks. It is more than likely that Somers, an avid reader of marginalia, would have read Ana María Barrenechea’s edition of Julio Cortázar’s Cuadernos de bitácora, published in 1983, shortly after Cortázar’s death and only three years before the publication of Sólo los elefantes. Among many other fascinating details about the writing of Rayuela, these notebooks contain Cortázar’s thoughts about the difficulties he had in opting for an actual beginning to Rayuela. Most Cortázar aficionados will remember that the author of Rayuela had considered using the famous bridge scene between Oliveira and Talita/Traveler as the opening of the novel. They are less likely to know that Cortázar thought of beginning his most famous novel with a dream scene in which a woman dying in a hospital (Pola, who dies of breast cancer in Rayuela) is exposed as a wasted body hooked up to needles and tubes leading to various life-supporting machines. Significantly, not only does this scene not “make the cut” for Rayuela’s opening, but it never makes it into Rayuela at all. I am convinced that the reference to the Cuadernos in Somers’s novel is not accidental. Moreover, I would like to believe that in referring to her protagonist’s Cuaderno de Bitácora in such a way as to call attention to Cortázar’s own cuadernos, Somers is issuing a telegraphic reponse/reply not only to Cortázar but to the canonical representatives of the Boom (Somers’s

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contemporaries) who routinely left out of their narratives the bodies of women who were neither young magas [magicians] nor talismans (Talita in Rayuela) for alienated males. Given Somers’s erudition and her endless intertextual games in this novel, it is easy to speculate that just as Fiorella rewrites the nineteenth-century historical Gothic romance by contaminating it with irony and parodic humor, so does she “rewrite” the experimental, encyclopedic Boom novel, not by emptying it of its massively intellectual baggage, its ultracosmopolitan perspective, or its avant-garde experimentation, but by approaching the overall structure of the Boom novel from the perspective of the mature female body and through the voice, or voices, of women whose knowledge of “being and time” is derived from alternative ways of connecting with history, psychology, and sexuality. Furthermore, by replacing the intellectual, cynical, and generally misogyniotic view of the alienated young or younger male with the black bile (a differently coded cynicism) of the sick and imperfect female body, Elefantes revisits and deconstructs the Boom through the one type of body the Boom novel systematically excluded. Not only is Fiorella a resistant and “infected” adult female body, moreover. As a female reader (a lectora hembra), she is the proud proprietress of the kind of dark, nasty wit that Morelli (Cortázar’s alter ego in Rayuela) deemed incompatible with the female gender but indispensable for experimental literature. In fact, Fiorella’s proclivity for dark humor is as acute and as constant as her illness is chronic. Although she does indeed clamor for old novels (as Cortázar’s Morelli noted a “lector hembra” would do), she turns any and all traces of rosecolored sentimentality into an excuse for satirical and cynical commentary, dark and bilious in either case.21 Noting the intertextual nature of Somers’s novel, Rómulo Cosse invokes Bakhtin’s dialogism to make important dents in the analysis of the novel’s structure. But while both Bakhtinian dialogism and Kristevan notions of intertextuality find ready application to Somers’s dense web of texts and intertexts, the sense of both continuation and discontinuity (or continuity and disruption) that characterizes Somers’s counter- and superimposition of texts suggests the author’s desire for newer samplings of intertextuality. In Elefantes, Somers’s “misquotations” of male traditions or texts (among them, the novel of the Latin American Boom), coupled with the invention of a new textuality based on a female intellect deeply aware of her body’s contingencies, result in an exaggerated transfusion of styles, genres, and documents. The symbolic exchange that takes place in this texturized web of voices and influences is chaotic and disruptive. One senses not so much an “anxiety of influence” (Bloom) as a desire to reclaim the voices—the mother’s, in particular—silenced by those influences. Yet even this desire to reclaim the mother’s voice is undermined by the novel’s cynical humor, and what gets restored is not the

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mother’s voice (not even the mother’s story, except in splinters), but the mother’s (forced) textual connection with another mother. As the parodic irony commenting on El manuscrito de una madre becomes more and more acidic, the emerging dramatic irony of this labyrinthine novel may well be that in the end we are left with no story and no final teleolocal revelations; only a collection of episodic passages populated by mostly eccentric creatures—among them, the sick woman whose bilious wit is always ready to make dark jest of it all.

ANDROGYNOUS MONSTERS, SLIPPERY BORDERS Ernesto Sábato’s 1974 Abbadón, el exterminador [Abbadon, the Exterminator], another important landmark of the Latin American Boom, is haunted by the image of the biblical seven-headed dragon who appears at the beginning of the novel announcing the inevitable cataclysmic destruction that awaits the human race. Like García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad told from a cosmopolitan, modern, and scientific perspective, Sábato’s novel is messianic, apocalyptic, and heavily allegorical. Gnostic sects, strange seers, millennial myths, and military commandos cross paths frequently in strange combinatory sequences. A comparison of Sábato’s last novel with Somers’s Elefantes yields a number of fruitful parallels. Both novels are preoccupied with ontology and teleology, both share a fascination with the occult, both insert symbols and references to Hitler and Nazi Germany, both implicitly and explicity refer to recent national episodes of military violence, and both self-consciously engage multiple and diverse genres (journals, letters, dreams, and other texts). Once again, however, the differences between texts with many similar thematic preoccupations are telling precisely for the way in which they illustrate the importance of gender and gendering in the comparison. Whereas Sábato’s Abbadón incorporates an almost wholly androcentric tradition of esoteric knowledges and “masters,” Somers chooses to focus on the monsters and marginalized freaks that this tradition has kept in chains and in labyrinths, or hidden in forgotten or forbidden books. Exploring deeply gendered views of monstrosity, Somers comes very close to implying that our repulsion to monsters has its source in our subconscious awareness of their apparently ambiguous and hence abject sexuality. The male “monsters” in the novel (the young “Minotaur,” Cantalicio the vampire, the old leper) are too full of liquid, or too dependent on female liquids, to be properly “masculine.” By contrast, Fiorella’s own deliquescent body is held together by a disposition solid enough to be testosterone-driven. These possible parallels between the monstrous, the abject and the androgynous is further confirmed by the protagonist’s creation-myth of choice. One of the

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few books Fiorella has managed to save from her father’s “purging” of their family library contains a description of the mandrake plant as an alternative version of the Genesis story. A Borgesian heretic called Levi is brought into the passage for good measure. . . . one of the books condemned by Pedro the day of the infamous destruction had the title of Occult Sciences, and there she read as well as her reading knowledge would let her: ‘That curious plant has a root very similar to a man’s body. Some mystics see in it the umbilical beginnings of our terrestrial origins. Lévi himself thinks that man, in the beginning, had the form of a root. Ergo, he inferred that the earliest human beings came from the Mandrake family.’ . . . había uno de los echados por Pedro el día del infame saqueo con el título de Ciencias Ocultas, y allí leyó como pudo: ‘Esa planta curiosa tiene una raíz muy parecida a la figura del hombre. Ciertos místicos ven en ella el vestigio umbilical de nuestro origen terrestre. Lévi mismo piensa que el hombre, al principio, tenía forma de raíz. Por analogía, infería que los primeros hombres eran de la familia de la mandrágora’ (129–130). The fascination that this apocryphal version of the creation holds for the narrator should not come as a surprise. As a woman who spends much of her time “bleeding” boundaries and mixing ontologies, she would undoubtedly prefer the story of the hermaphroditic mandrake to that of Adam and his rib. Superimposed on the various legends surrounding the mandrake (including the one implied by the title, which refers to the belief that less than libidinal elephants must eat of the mandrake before feeling the urge for sexual intercourse and procreation) are other equally strange, supernatural, or unnatural creatures in the novel. Vampires, hybrid grotesques like the elephantine young woman Epifanía, and bodies with contagious and potentially epidemic illnesses, crawl out of the various narrative layers. Not accidentally, the largest group of sick, freakish bodies in Sólo los elefantes centers around the aristocratic and consumptive de la Torre family, whose matron, Abigail, hires Fiorella’s mother Mariana to read historical Gothic novels to her. With a cast of characters worthy of the best tradition of the (Latin) American Gothic, the family is made up of the consumptive second son Cantalicio, who returns from the dead as a vampire in order to bleed his heartless mother dry; the eccentric old Abigail, driven mad by grief over Escolástico’s (her first son’s) death—and perhaps by her guilt over abandoning her other other two children; the obese Epifanía, betrayed and forgotten, turning her erotic longings into body fat and surrounding herself with an ever-larger pack of hounds.

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Nearby, a leper walks the countryside, his body falling to pieces as he writes proto-Marxist treatises to the Vatican. In the hospital scene pertaining to the other novel, the sick protagonist is flanked by the monstrous presences of the “Minotaur,” a young man of bullish proportions who is being treated for his obsessive need to masturbate. Hands and feet tied to the bed, the young man is ministered by his extraordinarily beautiful young mother; she feeds him sugared egg whites to make up for the pleasures of onanistic orgasm now denied to him. The “Minotaur’s” loud cries of “mamáaaa” periodically but insistently interrupt Fiorella’s narrative. Finally, there is the mysterious Angel who accompanies and tends to Fiorella’s needs in the hospital, a cross between a sublime and grotesque female apparition whose presence is never explained. Although she turns out to be a real woman with an irresistible head of red hair, her utterly mysterious and curiously monstrous presence in Fiorella’s room adds to the novel’s sense of estrangement, uncertainty, and sexual tension, since she becomes a libidinal magnet for many of the doctors who visit the sick woman. As the novel fills its canvas with so many freaks, readers are once again alerted to the novel’s genre, or genres: is it metaphor or is it (really) mandrake seed? As the protagonist learns from her childhood descent into the well, only the pragmatists (in the novel) can tell, but the pragmatists are usually wrong. The novel’s abject perspective means that the dividing line between reality and (Freudian) dream, reality and fantasy, is disturbingly fluid. Arguing that the monstrous body is always an embodiment of culture in crisis, or at least culture at a crossroads, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen insists on the allegorical nature of all monster narratives: “[t]he monster signifies something other than itself,” notes Cohen, adding that “it is always a displacement” of social or cultural “fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy” (5).22 In her study of different historical manifestations of gothic modes and moods, María Negroni makes a similar point when she notes that vampires and monsters always “insist on returning from the cloister or the faraway in order to transgress the border between the sexes, between life and death, matter and spirit, body and word” (“un vampiro, a thing, un monstruo . . . que insiste en regresar del encierro/alejamiento para transgredir la frontera entre los sexos, entre vida y muerte, materia y espíritu, cuerpo y palabra”) (190). Noting that the monster is alive and well in the postmodern Gothic, Judith Halberstam insists that “[t]he monster always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities” (27). In Somers’s novel, the treatment of the monstrous body (including the liquifying body of the protagonist and the decomposing body of the leper) exposes both cultural fears and anxieties about biological, gender, and class miscegenation. It is significant that the monstrous is most conspicuously present among the members of the de la Torre family, a bastion of the old Spanish aristocracy

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in a peripheral Latin American country; a corrupt and rotting bridge between Old World values (as embodied in the nineteenth-century novels Abigail loves so well) and a new and as yet undefined world order, one that infiltrates the family through the marauding males who prey on the family’s women: the farmhand who seduces Epifanía, and Fiorella’s father, the free-thinking anarchist who takes Mariana away from a much more respectable suitor. As the family’s scions become victims of tuberculosis, the household becomes more and more Gothic and grotesque. It is only fitting that Cantalicio returns as a vampire to punish the mother who cast him away to grieve for her firstborn, and that only the child Fiorella, her mother, and Fiorella’s childhood friend “Caña” bear witness to Epifanía’s growing obesity and madness. The young elephantine woman dies with only her hounds as company. When the family lawyer is alerted to her death, the last scion of the aristocratic family is already in a state of putrid decomposition. A propos the relationship between border writing and the grotesque, D. Emily Hicks writes that “[i]n the border regions, the notion of the grotesque is linked to relations of power” (xxviii). As portrayed in the story of Fiorella’s parents, Somers’s novel weaves a subtle but inextricable link between an economy of passion and a passionate (anarchist) economics. Abigail’s family wealth is squandered by the obese and insane Epifanía, and wealth and inheritance feuds are at the heart of Fiorella’s own (paternal) family conflicts. Fiorella’s father is an anarchist who rebels against his family’s handling of money and power, but who stores his collection of socialist and anarchist “freethinkers” (librepensadores) in the cabin of his common-law wife and bastard daughter, away from his official wife and legitimate sons. Given Somers’s ample acquaintance with German twentieth-century philosophy and psychology as well as novels and journals, it is tempting to speculate that she may have been acquainted with a 1928 film by German director Henrik Galeen, based on the 1911 Hanns Heinz Ewers novel.23 Both the film and the novel are titled Alraune, the German word most frequently used to refer to the mandrake root. Obviously influenced by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein but with a misogynist, proto-fascist vein, Ewers’s early twentieth-century sensationalist novel revolves around a perversely erotic and evil she-vampire (named Alraune). Heinz’s female character, born in a laboratory after a scientist decides to inseminate a prostitute with a hanged criminal’s semen, grows up to be a depraved and sadistic seducer, causing the death or suicide of nearly everyone she meets. In Galeen’s movie, Alraune is more disturbed and disruptive than perverse and evil. In both stories, however, her rage stems from knowing her terrible origins, and her revenge is directed against her artificial father, the scientist. Much more so than the movie version of it, Ewers’s novel has disturbing racial, social, and gender prejudices.

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Similar prejudices can be found in the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga, whose only novel, El hombre artificial, is a proto-Nietzschean dramatization of the Frankenstein story set in the Buenos Aires–Montevideo metropolis of the early twentieth century. It too revolves around the artificial creation of the man of the future at the hands of three recent European immigrants. In order to give life to their artificial creation, the three young scientists in Quiroga’s novel kidnap and sacrifice an unemployed and “racially inferior” street bum. The project fails, and so, in Quiroga’s own opinion, does the novel. Somers, whose work bears not a few traces of her countryman’s Quiroga’s influence, would certainly have known of Quiroga’s novel. Whether she was acquainted with Ewers’s novel or Galeen’s film is a matter of speculation. But it is entirely possible that these texts served as yet more intertextual “blood” for the author’s insatiable intellect. After all, the fact that the second part of Sólos los elefantes teems not only with vampires and ontogenetic mandrakes, but also with Nazi sympathizers and spies, is especially relevant in light of the political and ideological disturbances that these Gothic fantastic figures inevitably suggest.

CONSUMPTIVE ORDERS, UPROOTED WOMEN Monsters are particularly prevalent at the crossroads of cultures and historical epochs, notes Slavov Zizek. Furthermore, says Zizek, the apparition or reappearance of the monster usually announces a new zeitgeist in the cultural conception of capital: “[t]he ultimate ‘social mediation’ of the monster figure,” states Zizek, is symbolic of “the social impact of capital . . . it is no accident that ‘monsters’ appear at every break which announces a new epoch of capital”(139).24 And, as the monstrous nature of the de la Torre family makes clear, the first victims of the excesses of capitalism are the aristocrats themselves. After all, the vampire Cantalicio is as much zombie as he is vampire. He may try to feed on his mother’s blood, but his mother’s body is as desiccated and anorexic as her heart. Aware of connections that are never made explicit in the novel, Fiorella’s fragmented childhood chronicle ends with the (monstrous) leper’s condemnation of gold as the ultimate plague. Later, Karl (Marx) himself makes an appearance in the novel as one of the last ghosts to pay a visit to the ill woman during her hallucinatory postoperative days. Unlike most of the other familiar and familial ghosts, Karl simply drops in to see “what kinds of madness society has been up to in his name.” The preoccupation with socioeconomic instability and potentially abysmal falls manifests itself in a way that relates the monstrous not only to cultural changes but to the fear of physical and metaphysical abjection or inbetween states. In the novel’s fictional representation of a society torn be-

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tween a consumptive and dying aristocracy and fanatical yet double-crossing anarchists, women are constantly under the threat of eviction. Orphaned and destitute, Mariana must make a home for herself on the margins of Abigail’s household (the House on the Hill) before she is “evicted” from the margins of the big house for selecting an inappropriate suitor (Mariana chooses the anarchist Pedro Irigoitia over the much more appropriate botanist who had been wooing her). As she later finds out, Pedro is already married (his first wife and sons live in Buenos Aires), so she, and now her daughter, continue to live on the borders of legality after marriage. Fiorella herself is “evicted” from her mother’s home and sent to a boarding school when her father decides the girl must be sent away from the feminoid and sick superstitions of the countryside. Even Epifanía de la Torre, despite her family’s wealth, is ejected from her household and left to live on her own devices, on the borders of sanity and normalcy. In the Mother’s Manuscript, Margarita must flee from home to home and city to city as a result of choosing passion and independence over subservience and silence. The specter of female transience and homelessness hangs heavily over all these stories in the novel. In her article on Armonía Somers’s story “La inmigrante” [“The immigrant”], Evelyn Fishburn notes that the author’s world is “governed by strange forces” that result not only in a “metaphysical oppression” but also in a perpetual sense of “socio-economic oppression” (371). The statement applies just as forcefully to the reality of Elefantes, where one of the immediate consequences of transience, for most of the women, is the fear of socioeconomic as well as metaphysical alienation. Both the monster’s body and the monstrous body contaminate and infect the symbolic order, as rational discourses and irrational myths stemming from unfulfilled or impossible desires bleed into each other’s margins. Writing about the intrusion of the fantastic and its cultural and historical relevance, Rosemary Jackson insists that eruption of fantasy “opens up, for a brief moment, on to disorder, on to illegality, on to that which lies outside the law, that which is outside dominant value systems” (4). In this context, it is of utmost relevance to recall that underscoring the various allegorical and symbolic levels of Somers’s novel is a chronicle of both personal illness and censorship and political oppression. At the time of the novel’s writing in 1986, a largely ignored and marginalized Armonía Somers had spent nearly a lifetime dismissed by her contemporaries as strangely hysterical, or valued by those same contemporaries only for her feminoid perversions (or, rather, her perverse feminoid fictions). Completed just a year before Uruguay’s transition to democracy after decades of dictatorship, the massive novel records something like the return of the repressed, and with a vengeance. Exploding with the black humor (and “humors”) accumulated for so long as a result of private disappointments and political tyranny, Somers’s novel, and its barely

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contained black humors, overflow onto a literary and cultural scene that has yet to recognize the narrative’s momentous relevance or the massive discomfort unleashed by its sick humor(s).

BLACK HUMOR

AS A

LAST COSMIC STANCE

The announcement at the end of the novel that the protagonist has been hit and killed by a bus is both disconcerting and anticlimactic. In the context of the novel’s humor, the unexpected, gratuitous death of a protagonist who survived nearly three hundred pages of a horrific illness, and its even more horrific treatment, is added proof of Somers’s unsettling black humor. The same cynicism and dark humor sustain the very sick protagonist’s sense of irony throughout, allowing her to resist the pain and humiliation of daily drainages and withstand the surgical procedures that leave her entire body a deep shade of blue (both from lack of oxygen and from injected drugs), and to emerge psychologically undaunted from a final operation that turns out to be successful in treating the disease, but leaves the patient with the impression that her face is now on backwards, and will be so for the remainder of her life (the result of having a scar on her torso longer than the crack on her backside). I am aware that my discussion thus far may have made the novel sound too somber for humor. Yet Somers’s narrator manages to infect nearly every dialogue and every narrative with an unmistakable sense of irony and satire. That the irony is bitterly cynical does not prevent it from being comic, but the humor is weighed down by the narrator’s ideological ambivalence toward most of her (comic-satirical) targets. Moreoever, unlike Luisa Valenzuela’s skeptical humor (in the novel discussed in my last chapter), which is aimed at pigeonholing or knocking down circumstantial events in historically and geographically specific sites, Somers’s irony and satire are deployed against real but much broader and hence more diffuse targets. The resulting comic transaction is distended and dark not only because of the comic irony’s bitter edge but because of the nearly cosmic dimensions of the “joke.” Even the most sustained of the novel’s satirical harangues (at the hospital’s doctors, for example) are diffused by lengthy self-reflective or intertextual commentary, and the reader is more likely to react to the brilliant wit with a painful shudder than with laughter. Although some critics have appealed to both Bakhtin and Bataille in explaining what they view as the grotesque aspects of some of Somers’s texts, it is in Baudelaire’s concept of “le comique absolu” that I find a more useful model for understanding Elefantes’s sinister but tempered and even lyrical sense of humor. Anticipating what Kristeva would later term apocalyptic

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laughter, the poet of Flowers of Evil (another abject disseminator!) argued that humor and laughter came in two categories: the circumstantial or referential comic (le comique significatif) and a broader category he labeled the absolute comic [le comique absolu]. The first type of humor (le comique significatif) is incidental and corrective, meant to mock or deride inferior or inappropriate behavior, styles, or persons. What Baudelaire’s circumstantial or referential laughter is precisely the kind of incidental, target-specific laughter Hobbes condemned so severely in his Leviathan (a book that plays an important role at the end of Somers’s novel, but not for its critique of humor). By contrast, serious laughter (le comique absolu) has its source in the “fallenness” of the human condition,25 and there is something both melancholy and diabolical about it. In retrospect, it is possible to see in Baudelaire’s concept of absolute humor an attempt—perhaps the first—to explain the nature and the source of an “existential” humor, a humor for urbane but deeply alienated denizens. Besides being inherently reflexive or philosophical, “le comique absolu” is also inherently self-reflexive and at least partially self-directed: in other words, it incorporates the producer of the humor in the joke. The urbane but deeply alienated woman who oozes enough “humors” to nearly do herself in in Sólo los elefantes is capable of sustaining just the kind of diffusely targeted comic irony that Baudelaire considers “absolutely” comic because it is absolutely serious. As the novel turns more and more into a reflection of the utter disintegration that precedes, surrounds, and will outlast the protagonist, the all-pervasive ironic tone soon permeates and corrodes every certainty available to both the protagonist and her ancestors (be it religious faith, socialist Utopia, or romantic love). By the end, the monstrous flow produced by Fiorella’s body as antibody to her mysterious illness has its counterpart in the state of unpredictable flux and uneasy deliquescence she witnesses everywhere: in nature, in the recounting of Abigail’s corrupt family and their stories, in her father’s family history, and in the chaotic civil war or violent pandemonium she witnesses toward the end of the novel. Nothing solid remains of her past as the phantoms of other lives vaporize in and out of her room, although in the wake of the encounters there is the suspicion that the only possible reaction to the absurdity of all metaphysical and economic absolutes—especially those formulated by and for men—is an ambivalent laughter, a laughter that approximates a painful groan. The humor in Somers’s Elefantes has almost nothing equivalent to the carnivalesque modes discussed in connection with other works in my previous chapters. While there are plenty of masks and masquerades—the novel’s working title was The Mandrake’s Masks [Las máscaras de la mondra’gora]—the communal celebrations that signal carnivalesque reversals (however temporary) are nowhere to be found in Somers’s last novel. Despite the perfectly pitched bilious wit that underscores practically every sentence, the (primary)

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narrator’s cynical and obsessively intellectual detachment makes it impossible for the reader to sustain comic engagement for very long. The pitch-black humor that accompanies the ongoing physical and metaphysical descriptions of abjection present throughout the novel is never effectively cathartic. More important, the sense of dislocation that stems from it is profoundly discomfiting, not because the reader senses authorial ambivalence about the ideological critique that sustains the ironic or sarcastic humor, but because its target is so overwhelmingly all-encompassing. As with Baudelaire’s sense of the “absolutely comic,” the comedic target in Elefantes reaches cosmic proportions, and there is little subversive satisfaction to be gained from throwing comic darts at an absurdly incomprehensible universe—regardless of how poisonous the humor. What emerges from the imbrication of black humor and bilious bodily humors in this novel is a deluge of free-floating meaningfragments, absurdly insufficient to solve the cosmic problems facing the novel’s cast of damned and dead. The comic-grotesque wisdom of the novel consists in being able to face the black holes of death and nothingness without losing track of the universal sewer system through which all bodily fluids and mental humors circulate. Somers’s decidedly anti-epic satire makes no pretense at being a “corrective” of any kind. Feeling the aftershocks of this cosmic resistance long after reading the last sentence in the novel, however, the reader shares the giddiness of the novel’s daring stance. A hyperlucid, ironic female Prometheus spills her guts out while a life-threatening illness drains her of vital fluids, but her black humor is so resistant that it takes a city bus coming out of left field to shut her, and her congested cynical laughter, up. The dice were cast much before she ever had a hand in her destiny, but the woman plays as if the player had a hand in the outcome; so it does.

CHAPTER SIX

/ Mutating Bodies, Entropic Humor: Alicia Borinsky What appeals to me about this vamping onto the body (to use the word in a slightly archaic sense) is that it not only grotesquely de-forms the female to suggest new political aggregates—provisional, uncomfortable, even conflictual, coalitions of bodies which both respect the concept of ‘situated knowledges’ and refuse to keep every body in its place. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque Tango teaches that a seductress, sinuous and promising but ever quite truthful, is always capable of altering the paradoxical harmony of the violent male world. Alicia Borinsky, “Gombrowicz’s Tango” I want to experience a terrible feminine. [Quero experimentar um feminino terrível”] Sonia Coutinho, quoting Antonin Artaud, Attire em Sofía

T

he young narrator in the opening sequence of Alicia Borinsky’s 1997 novel Cine continuado [All Night Movie]1 will later become the city’s most notorious stripper at age fourteen, enjoy a brief stint as a freakish grotesque after her body is scarred from having a uniform glued onto her skin, and emerge as the nation’s first “naturally” armoured-plated woman [“la acorazada”] as her body grows metal scales instead of scabs while healing from her burns. But at the beginning of the novel she is merely the envious fan who accompanies the novel’s other protagonist, Matilde, to the train that

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will take her away from her dull working-class barrio life and toward urban adventures of the “camp” kind. By the end of the novel—if one dares call the phrase “to be continued” an ending—the young girl’s and the adult Matilde’s stories will become serendipitously entwined once again, their roles now fully reversed. In between riotous sketches involving these two mobile and mutating female “stars,” the novel regales us with snapshots of other equally overwrought, outrageous, eye-popping acts. More aggressively and more radically than the narratives discussed in my previous chapters, Cine continuado is an exuberant exercise in postmodern pastiche, and as such it is campy, pulpy, and so outlandish in its characterization and convoluted plots as to move beyond the realm of comic parody and onto something else. Being able to put one’s finger on this slippery “something” else is in large part the task this novel’s often overwhelmed readers face as they puzzle through the narrative’s frenzied display of fragmented spectacle. Sporting two of the most volatile bodies spotted anywhere in Latin American fiction since Sarduy’s Cobra, the mutating Matilde and freakcyborg Noemí diva their way through Borinsky’s third novel. As the novel elliptically maps their coordinates across the postmodern but unmistakably “developing” cosmopolis featured in the segmented and intersecting stories, one is struck by the stars’ constant urge to flee their present situation. In fact, the desire for change and flight (anywhere but here, any body but this one, any role but the one I am playing) may be the only common goals shared by the novel’s multiple minor characters as well. Interwoven between Matilde’s and Noemí’s “full-feature” but highly fragmented “movies” are snippets of comic and trashy erotic interludes, hunger strikes, mass poisonings, and, above all, an ever-present media craze. All throughout Cine continuado, characterization is reduced to snapshots and even mugshots, ontology to an exercise in masquerade, political action and social activism to experimental theater. In fact, there are only three types of characters, or rather character masks, in this novel: cruel and cunning divas like the protagonic stars Matilde and Noemí, the men who live or die for them, and the cult fans or ex-wives who pursue them, either to worship or destroy them.2 For everyone else, including a chorus of bystanders and the gawking reader, life is merely a spectator sport. Borinsky has noted that her novel’s title refers to the term used in Argentina for an old filmhouse, a cinema that played two or three features continuously throughout the day.3 The novel is structured so as to read like a badly edited grade-B movie script, one in which, for example, the subtitles are there to make sure we note the pulp melodrama, kitsch, and camp of the segments that follow: “Some Homes Can Kill” [“Hay hogares que matan”] (32), “I Tried to Call You but Got a busy Signal” [“te quise llamar pero me daba ocupado”] (44); “My Hands Are Sticky from Thinking About You”

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[“Tengo las manos sucias de tanto pensar en ti”] (71); “Our Love Is More Like Torture Than Like Love” [“nuestro amor/ más que amor/ es un castigo”] (96); or “They Saw Him With Someone Else” [“Lo han visto con otra”] (187). Many of the titles—kitsch-nostalgic flavor, and humor lost in translation—are borrowed straight from old tango lyrics; others sound as though they could be.4 Like tango lyrics, both the subtitles and the narrative share a camp mix of sentimentality and exaggerated artificiality, of bad taste and painfully transparent pretentiousness, of trash and pulp and mixed politics. Technically and stylistically, however, it is obvious that the novel’s selfconscious elliptical cuts and self-parodic artificiality are closer to the fast and slick pastche of a videoclip than to the slow-paced editing of an oldfashioned movie.5 One would be imposing too much structure on this novel by speaking of overarching thematic concerns. Yet it is evident that Cine’s lineup of snapshots shares the common leitmotivs of migrancy, masquerading, and metamorphosis. It should be noted, however, that like everything else in Cine continuado, motion (inward, outward, vertical, or horizontal) is merely a frantic simulated motion, a virtual motion. Interurban escapes, searches, and abductions are rampant in the novel, yet all movement turns out to be circular, and all action leads only to an increased sense of general entropy. In the vaguely southern-cone, tango-quoting city of this cine, the characters’ urban movements circle around the same block. The farcical tactics employed in Cine continuado might be read as a form of resistance, but I would argue that their tactical goal stops at disruption and dissolution. Resistance implies a stance, a standing against something, and standing is the one pose that this fast-paced novel refuses to simulate. It is evident, furthermore, that the novel’s humor depends on diffuse comic tactics rather than any fixed strategy. To a greater degree than does Armonía Somers’s morbid black humor or Luisa Valenzuela’s skeptical wit, Borinsky’s comic camp leads readers (at least readers who find the novel’s humor effective) not to opt for a particular type of resistance or reaction but to consider if a mass mimicking of bad manners, bad form, and bad behavior might not lead to enough social and cultural entropy to clog the system and stop the social machinery from business as usual. Contrary to what one might suppose, in the novel itself the growing sense of entropy results neither in paralysis nor in fatalism on the part of the would-be characters. I suspect that beneath the absurd excess and generalized chaos is the novel’s refusal to compromise with existing global systems of information and consumerism. But this reading of an implicit agenda behind the narrative’s entropic tactics may already be a grievous violation of the novel’s refusal to spell out a specific political or ideological agenda beyond the comic and campy chaos that sustains and dissolves every scene.

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CAMP DISORDER: BEYOND CARNIVALESQUE SOLIDARITY While carnivalesque parody6 performs comic revolutions by overturning (inverting or reversing) the status quo, the kind of postmodern camp practiced by the author of Cine continuado aims to disable sociocultural assumptions through the comic-absurd aftershocks of excess and absurdity. Despite the grotesque or grotesquely maked characters and the riotous exaggerations that it presupposes and encourages, carnival seeks to convey the feel of a real community. Beneath carnival masks one expects real bodies, real subjects behind the masquerade. Conversely, camp is about nothing but spectacle, theater, and play-acting. Carnival depends on the sense of dialogic oppositions; camp likes to blur borders and borderlines with its taste for limitless exuberance. If at all loyal to its original ritualistic and social functions, carnival is after purposive change, no matter how temporary. Camp keeps its audience at too great a distance from the reality of characters and plots to inspire real revolutionary impulses. It is not that camp does not desire change, but rather that it refuses to specify which shape change should take. In Cine continuado, the point of camp is not to propose action or reaction through laughter, but to thoroughly shake and weaken every cultural foundation implicated in the stories until everything in sight is confused and chaotic. Bakhtin notes in Problems of Dostoievsky’s Poetics that carnival is “a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators” (122). Returning to this point in Rabelais and His World, he adds that “[f ]ootlights would destroy a carnival, as the absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance” (7). Conversely, in Cine continuado farcical events, unreal characters, and chaotic collective demonstrations are dependent on media coverage at all times. If a festival takes place in the city and no journalist or television anchorman is watching, then we can be sure it did not happen. By highlighting its theatricality throughout, the novel self-parodically signals its own self-awareness. Despite the crowds or large groups featured in many of the novel’s scenes, what one observes in these scenes is not the participatory nature of the comic or farcical revels but the actors’ performances and the public’s incessant gawking. Contrasting the more dynamic structure of carnival with “the stasis” typical of the camp-like circus freak show, Rachel Adams explains that “[u]nlike the raucous interactions of carnival, its more unruly festive predecessor, the modern phenomenon of spectacle is premised on the sensory dominance of the visual and the measured distance between the viewer and the choreographed activity of the performers” (12). The artificial, highly constructed nature of the spectacles featured in Cine continuado distance the novel from much more spontaneous and communal carnivalesque shows. Traditional carnival effects its subversions and garners its laughter from the communal nature of the celebration. In this

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novel, what undergirds the somatic or kinetic performances is narcissistic exhibitionism or vicarious experiences of it. In “Notes on Camp” (1964), the “notes” in which she first sets down her pivotal thoughts on the subject, Susan Sontag insists that camp seeks to “denaturalize” the “normal” sense of whatever situations or characters it (re)presents, reducing them to farcical imitations of the original (375). Theatrically exaggerated character as character “role” is one of the most enduring traits of camp aesthetics.7 More recently, Kenneth Feil insists on the importance of this aspect of camp with admirable brevity when he notes that characters in camp play their “role as role” (55). So it is in Cine continuado, where characters learn to fully embody their role by imitating actresses in movies or soap operas or by watching neighbors impersonating actors in melodrama. Exchanging pseudomelodramatic confessions with the man who is fatally attracted to her daughter, Matilde’s mother laments that her own carefully studied and rehearsed “mother’s love” will go unappreciated in the face of her daughter’s unexpected new script. She [loved] her with the mother’s love she had learned from watching movies and television, and from spying on a neighbor whose unmarried niece came every afternoon to have tea with her aunt. That’s how her own life should have been. The more she thought about it the more she cried. She had imagined the faithful company of an unmarried daughter who came for tea every afternoon at the same time, except for those times when the mother, an attractive, glamorous woman dressed in satin, has been unable to slip away from the arms of her lover . . . then the daughter would be waiting alone and worried, because nothing could mean more for her than her mother’s love. Ella con el amor de madre que había aprendido del cine, de la televisión y de espiar a una vecina que recibía a su sobrina soltera todas las tardes para tomar al té. Así tendría que haber sido su vida. Cuanto más lo pensaba más lloraba. Compañía. La verdadera compañía de una hija soltera que toma el té con su mamá siempre a la misma hora excepto cuando la mamá, atractiva, glamorosa, vestida de satén, no ha podido desligarse de los brazos de un amante . . . entonces la hija espera sola y pensativa porque para ella no existe nada mejor que el amor de madre (113). Other female characters in the novel similarly train or diet for their character role with a discipline bordering on masochism. After shooting her married lover and thinking she has killed him for the first time, Matilde

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embarks on a strict vegetarian diet of exactly “twenty-four” grapes and “a lettuce head of no more than ten leaves” per day (68, 69). Noemí subjects herself to strenuous physical and mental exercises while her body heals from its glue-burns and grows its metal scales. Salomé Moskovich (Matilde’s mortal enemy) prefers dance to dieting when changing roles and lifestyles, but she makes it clear that one’s role must be played to the limit, even if this means disappearing behind their masked persona. In an attempt to justify her grown children’s inability to recognize her as their legitimate mother, she explains that while growing up they only caught glimpses of her slightly lowered profile: “[t]hey were used to seeing just my profile while I cooked pasta for them.” [“Me veían casi siempre de perfil cocinando los tallarines” (202)].8 Like most of the other female characters in the novel, Salomé learns that a well-wrought or overwrought role is much more lucrative than an unassuming or “natural” one—in her case, she only learns this after her husband leaves her for Matilde and her children turn their backs on her. True to its camp sensibility, the narrative ironically but repeatedly states that “naturalness” is not a desirable fate in a spectacle-prone world. The cameras require full makeup, and tabloids prefer cries to whispers for their headlines. As I pointed out in chapter two, moderation and an unwillingness to offend a broad public (even in circumstances that call for excess) keep Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate from fully engaging the carnivalesque revelries it proposes. By stark contrast, Borinsky’s novel bulldozes its way through anything remotely resembling a measure of “good” taste. Purposefully testing her readers’ tolerance for trash aesthetics. Malvina (one of the lesser divas) turns a man on by creating a fantasy in which a wealthy, whitegloved lover scratches her acne-ridden body. Rosa (one of the lesbian duo responsible for Noemí’s abduction) wears orthopedic shoes with her Chanel suit because her calloused feet have corns (40).9 In the midst of their shortlasting but made-for-TV romance, Matilde and Pascual Domenico are just two overweight characters with bad eating habits who like to beat each other up and then make up.10 Young Noemi’s body is scarred from head to toe from the uniform that was pasted on to her skin with plexiglue, yet the scars clearly turn men on as much as her nubile virginal stripper’s body did before her two kidnappers pasted a uniform onto her. A common feature of camp, trash fills the novel literally and metaphorically. Addressing the reliance of kitsch on recycled goods in The Culture of Cursilería. Bad Taste, Kitsch, and Class in Modern Spain and citing Milán Kundera’s observations on this aspect of the genre, Noël Valis notes that behind kitsch’s insistence on hiding the scatological lies the fear of the eschatological (290). At the same time, Valis argues, kitsch has a way of neutralizing the presence of death by insisting on the possibility of recycling. But the prominence of trash or reciclaje as a recurring theme of Borinsky’s

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novel also signals the author’s realization that, like recycled goods, trash is ultimately the sign of postcapitalist waste. It is only logical to conclude that if trash is congruent with camp pastiche, it is so because it mirrors the urban spaces where camp sensibilities are hatched.

BODIES WITH PERMEABLE BORDERS: PICARESQUE TRACES, DIASPORIC GHOSTS The persistent focus on the whorish but self-sufficient nomadic body links Cine continuado to the tradition of the Spanish picaresque, a genre that first put narcissistic, high-strung, sexually available, and independently minded women on the novel’s stage by letting them loose on the cities of the Old and the recently discovered New World. As mentioned in chapter one, the early pícaras were lawless or anarchic subjects with little respect for the ties that bound them to persons or politics. Especially in what has come to be known as the “female picaresque,” the genre explores and exploits the figure of the lawless, transgressive, and transient woman. Not averse to prostituting themselves for food, money, or higher social status, the early pícaras often met bad endings (e.g., prison, beatings, syphylis), yet they provided a powerful countercultural antidote in Hispanic literature to the figure of the passive virgin and the obedient law-abiding mother. Like their male counterparts, protagonic pícaras had to keep moving, for the most part, in order to escape the law or stay a step ahead of it. Their mobility was in large part a result of the new topographies of space made possible by the new cities of the early modern world. These new, densely populated urban spaces provided picaresque ruffians of both genders with much needed anonymity as well as ample opportunity for gambling, prostitution, black-market mercantilism, and other types of urban crime. It also gave them the option of moving to another crowded space when the law caught up with them. It is not surprising, therefore, to find important demographic as well as thematic parallels between the picaresque and the literatures of diaspora or exile. For these reasons, it is obviously no coincidence that the figure of the anarchic or lawless nomadic woman appears with some regularity in contemporary fiction by Latin American Jewish women authors.11 Although Borinsky’s camp aesthetics makes it difficult to identify explicit allusions to a Jewish literary tradition, the persistent presence of the picaresque genre in the author’s fiction—in particular her female picaresque characters—provides an indirect but resonant entryway into themes common to literature of diaspora or exile. In her novels, the figure of the wandering Jew is transformed into a wandering woman ( Jewish or not), one sooner or later pursued by some organ of the

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law. Because of the camp frame, these nomadic pícaras have more than a trace of circus-like freakishness.12 But it would not be difficult to argue that the sociocultural space that separates victims of diaspora from circus performers (mostly freaks by most societies’ standards) is a narrow space indeed. While women writers and scholars during the early part of the twentieth century were persuaded of the importance of personal private space as a necessary part of achieving freedom from the limited roles culturally imposed on them and their women characters, in the late part of the century women writers are just as likely to value a woman’s ability to adopt nomadism as a lifestyle than to insist on a woman’s room. Julia Kristeva first considered the advantages of mobile female subjectivity in a short piece titled “From Ithaca to New York,” published originally in “Promesse” (1974). Advising women authors to replace the image of patient Penelope—the housebound wife who waits at home for a roaming husband—with that of “the female voyager,” Kristeva argued on this occasion that the potential freedom of the female voyager resides precisely in not having a place of one’s own. The free woman, adds Kristeva, considers “every home a place . . . of the Other, and irritated by its fixity, refus[es] it” (495).13 Adopting a similar argument in her influential treatise Nomadic Subjects, feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti proposes the condition of nomadism as both a condition and a trope for fluid female subjectivity. For women, argues Braidotti, freedom consists not in having a Woolfian room of one’s own but in being able to alter geographical, topographical, and relational parameters on the spur of the moment. Closer to Latin American women writers and their concerns, Jill Kuhnheim has emphasized the usefulness of nomadism as a concept when dealing with contemporary women’s fluid characters. Writing about Mexican author Carmen Boullosa, Kuhnheim states that “[n]omadism is not just a descriptive term, but a concept that allows us to focus on the cracks, the interstices, those in-between spaces where identities converge”(9). As noted at the beginning of this chapter, in Cine continuado the author’s insistence on decentering notions of fixed identity manifests itself first through the urban movements of the novel’s principal female stars. Matilde moves from the working-class barrio before she has had a chance to be “trained” in the role of working-class wife, is evicted from the phone cabin in which she lives and works as a sex operator just as business begins to boom, must seek refuge in her mother’s basement after she shoots and thinks she has killed her lover Pascual Doménico, and is soon “evicted” again (from her mother’s house) and sent to a mental hospital after she shoots and wounds Doménico a second time. When a law for the protection of illegal immigrants is mistakenly applied to her she is allowed to go free, but not for long. As a miniaturized version of herself, she is soon “captured” by the “Girls of the Cult of

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Eve” and donated as a gift (a Matilde doll) to the girl who once followed her to the train station and is now national cult icon Noemí. Yet it would be myopic to see Matilde’s urban moves as a facile form of postmodern feminist freedom. The novel makes it clear, in fact, that the diva’s urban displacements are largely the result of her multiple evictions. No sooner has Matilde begun to profit from what appears to be a promising and even lucrative career as a sex operator by using the phone booth located across the street from her ex-lover’s bar as a workplace than she receives a subpoena from the Ministry of Morality and Telecommunications demanding that she vacate the booth: To Occupant of Phone Booth No. 6758B: Be hereby notified that the space you have illegally occupied since the month of March of the current year must be immediately vacated upon receipt of this eviction notice. Failure to do so will result in imprisonment and a fine of $1,000 per day for every day the cabin is occupied hereafter. Ocupante de cabina telefónica No. 6758B: Por la presente se le hace saber que el espacio que ha estado ocupando ilegalmente desde el mes de marzo del corriente año debe ser dejado vacante en el momento de recepción de este aviso so pena de encarcelamiento y el pago de una multa a razón de 1,000 pesos por día a partir de la fecha de esta comunicación. (18) The farcical humor of the telegram makes it impossible to interpret the character’s eviction as a tragedy, yet the working-class fate and marginalized status of the diva is reflected at least partly in her multiple urban addresses. Because she is a picaresque figure, her many forced moves are portrayed as camp and comic, but the link between gendered and class-coded marginality and eviction is made theatrically clear in the novel. If Matilde is subject to urban evictions of various kinds, Noemí falls victim to serial abductions. The young stripper is “rescued” from her fallen life by two lesbian detectives who wish to reform her, then present her publicly as the cult icon that the nation (metonymically embodied in the Girls of the Cult of Eve) has been seeking since Matilde’s disappearance from the “temple.” Instead of morally reforming her, however, the two women succeed in physically re-forming her (as the uniform they glue to her body causes scarring when the girl’s still developing body starts to grow again). Although Noemí understands this uniformed torture to be part of a plan from which she will

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benefit and is inclined to trust her captors, the latter are reported to the police, who intervene by “rescuing” Noemí once again. Unable to cope with the angry girl’s insults, the police turn her over to a plastic surgeon who falls madly in love with her and proposes that they elope to a nearby beach (she agrees to the plastic surgeon’s proposition only because she needs time to let her body heal before she returns to claim her iconic place in the nation’s hearts and government). As the novel ends, she is bored with power and fame but looking further to her next “rescue” or abduction. In her next role, she is to be a museum piece, an obvious reference to Argentina’s near-canonization of Eva Perón.14 As previously mentioned, despite the farcical camp humor with which the two divas’ urban evictions and abductions are noted, it is evident that the novel resists both the easy temptation to equate nomadism (in this case, female nomadism) with freedom and agency indiscriminantly. Without abandoning the ambivalent politics of its camp aesthetics, the novel’s portrayal of these characters in a state of perennial flight highlights the character’s vulnerability, a vulnerability that is as much spatial as it is biological. It is true that the women turn every new address (including the mental institution, in Matilde’s case) into an opportunity for narcissistic profit or potential fame, but their cunning survival skills should not lead us to overlook the “homeless” nature of their urban condition. Further proof that the novel does not propose a chic brand of nomadism or an intellectual’s brand of permanent exile as a solution to global migrations is found in the novel’s treatment of the illegal immigrants in several of the novel’s shorter segments. In one especially comic passage, one of these immigrants—former circus workers now out of work who survive by pawning their last few belongings—is visiting the circus’s pawnkeeper Malvina to get back his medallion inscribed with his birthdate in order to get a birth certificate so that he can obtain a passport. Spotting another exile-to-be masquerading as a hopeful tourist, Malvina gives him a lecture in “civic” loyalty, partly because she is not about to let go of the small loot she has acquired, and partly because she is worldwise enough to know that, for the nomadic circus performer, exile will result only in a repetition of the same balancing acts: Leaving, are you? And where will you go? And what will you pack, when you’ve already pawned everything here knowing you would never be able to get it back? . . . Don’t fool yourself. No one who comes in here thinking they’ll be able to leave ever does. Keep that in mind. Abroad is far away. Don’t try to play tourist with me. Anyone can spot your type from a mile away. Written all over face . . . one look at you and anybody knows you’re the shiftless type. Irse. ¿adónde? Hacer valijas ¿para poner qué si me lo han dado todo a mí sabiendas de que no lo podrían recuperar? No se engañen.

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Ninguno de los que llega pensando que se va a ir, lo hace. Dése cuenta. Está lejos. No finja ser turista que lo reconocerían en cualquier lado. Cara de buscavidas (127). Significantly, the rest of this segment clearly links the parodic treatment of the postmodern global immigrant with the wandering Jew in an abrupt shift of style that makes it impossible not to notice the dual parody that simultaneously mocks a García Marquez-like nostalgia with a Borges-like fascination with Jewish patriarchs and hidden kabbalistic dreams. . . . after thinking twice about it he ended up proposing that they elope that same evening in a homemade raft that he had spent months building for his wife and his three children without realizing that it was meant from the beginning of time for the pawnshop keeper and himself, now eternally in her debt. She, in turn, had entered through his breath and his saliva into a hut where a darkhaired woman, perhaps his mother or his aunt, looked at him severely before slapping him. In a corner of the room a white-haired man whom he had called father sewed some white garment, perhaps a bride’s dress. Hearing the sound of a face being slapped, the whitehaired tailor started to murmur something in a language she could not understand, while the son knelt before the stern woman and obediently proceded to eat something thick and soupy and light brown off the floor. y pensó dos veces antes de proponerle que se fueran juntos esa misma tarde en una canoa que había estado preparando desde hacía meses para su mujer y sus tres hijos sin darse cuenta de que desde el principio estaba designada para la prestamista y su eterno deudor. Ella había entrado por su aliento y por su saliva a una choza donde una mujer de pelo oscuro, acaso su madre o una tía, lo miraba severamente antes de darle una cachetada. En un rincón un hombre canoso a quien él había llamado padre cosía algo blanco, probablemente un vestido de novia. Al oír el sonido de la cachetada el sastre empezó a susurrar algo en un idioma que ella no entendía y él, sangrando, se arrodilló frente a la mujer y comió obedientemente en el suelo una sopa espesa y marrón (127). The passage’s parodic mockery of Caribbean magical realism overlapped with the Borgesian fantastic is exaggerated to farcical proportions. Camp exaggeration reduces the dream of erotic escape from the patriarcal home into a scatological retribution (“eat shit”!).

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Significantly, the passage illustrates one of the major leitmotivs in the novel, or novel’s “movies”: the fact that you cannot go home again. Matilde tries repeatedly to go home when she is evicted from her phone booth, succeeding only after several telegrams from her mother. After agreeing to share a portion of the unfinished basement with her mother, Matilde returns to a home that has been turned into a boardinghouse, and a mother who is mostly interested in her daughter’s wardrobe. Instead of reinserting herself into the family history, however, the daughter sets out to expose the common version of the family’s story (which might or might not be exclusively the mother’s version) as false, creating havoc once again. Whereas before she created havoc in other people’s homes, now she sets out to explode the fantasy of the happy family in her mother’s home. As Matilde prepares to try her mother for her father’s murder using the boarders as judges, the house becomes part melodrama, part mockery of Greek tragedy. Yet the segment that revolves around Matilde’s return to her mother’s house illustrates both the utopian fantasy of the prodigal’s return and the impossibility of sustaining that fantasy’s expectations. Turning this theme into a leitmotiv (that of the failed return to a home that was never promised in the first place), the novel weaves its way into the discourse of diaspora once again. The frequent references to the community or shantytown of unemployed circus performers further emphasize this connection between the picaresque and the diasporic. At the same time, the figure of the illegal alien as circus performer further provides an automatic connection between these genres and the novel’s camp preoccupation with eccentricity and freakishness. By linking stories of immigration and exile with scenes of sexual escapades and illicit eroticism, the figure of the “undocumented” circus performer makes visible the connection between picaresque cross-dressing and postmodern camp excess as performative modes for thinking and rethinking gender identity and sexuality.

EXPLODING FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY: FROM MASQUERADE TO “MORPHING” AND BEYOND The themes of migrancy, nomadism, and exile bind Borinsky’s entropic postmodern camp to the picaresque genre. So does the novel’s fascination with masquerade and corporeal mutability. First discussed in contemporary feminist and film criticism by Claire Johnston in her analysis of Jacques Tourneur’s 1951 film Anne of the Indies, the concept of masquerade was initially applied to a simple case of cross-dressing (specifically, a woman dressed as a pirate). Studies of early modern literary and historical cases of travestism and transgendering by Marjorie Garber, Leslie Feinberg, and Sherry Velasco

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have variously noted the links between earlier manifestations of masquerade and contemporary versions of it. Similarly, the picaresque antecedents of female camp are forcefully noted in Cine continuado. A cross between nomadic pícaras with working-class roots and modernist cruel vamps, Matilde, Noemí, their female entourage of fans, journalists, and vengeful ex-wives with murderous intent mask their anxieties and ambitions behind a variety of perversely sexual, transexual, and even postsexual roles. Morever, while the characters’ interurban moves reflect their vulnerability and marginalization—as working-class women with oversized egos and ambitions—their “inborn” skills at masquerading and mutating immediately turn them into urban subversives. Shedding not only addresses and names but personalities, body sizes, and occupations with mind-boggling speed, Matilde’s “movie” (or composite stories) reads like a rehearsal for a one-woman mutant show. A cynical exhibitionist at the beginning of the novel, she is next seen as the submissive and masochistic lover of the barkeeper who renames her Felipa as proof of her submission (she is Felipe’s woman). No sooner does she begin to stir feminist readers’ disapproval with her masochistic role, she decides its time to capitalize on the S&M techniques she learned from her barkeeper by turning the phone booth across the street into her own private bordello. As the functionally erotic, hooked-on-Prozac-phone-cabin-sex “operator,” she is at her comically caricaturesque best. Dislodged from her basis of genital and oral operations by the outraged phone company, with whose oral communications systems she is competing, she is seduced by and in turn seduces a balding, short, shrill-voiced Italian ex-family man. To become the real-life model of her Italian lover’s erotic fantasies of a short, stocky, and rotund, chocolate-loving women named Lucía (a fantasy no doubt based on imagining the rotund divas whose operatic arias he heard on the radio while eating his wife’s tallarines), she shrinks vertically, expands horizontally, and changes her bedroom technique. After shooting him and thinking she has killed him (we never know why because we obviously “miss” this part of the movie), she dons a trench coat, grows to her impressive original height, and becomes an imposingly androgynous Marlene Dietrich-like vamp who sends her mother in-house telegrams accusing her of killing her father and has trouble hiding her mustache. A few weeks and another murder attempt later, she gives an unforgettably pulp performance as the now committed “ferocious assassin” who tells her interviewer that the man she shot twice and eventually killed by spitting on him was “the love of her life,” whether people understand it or not (175). Poisoned by her ex-lover’s ex-wife, she survives as a miniaturized version of herself but retains her ability to “shrink and stretch like a cheap sweater” (166). More subdued but callously self-parodic as a mini version of herself,

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she ends up as a doll-sized drinking companion and confidante to the powerful but bored new Noemí. At the end of the novel, she is once again in the limelight, as the mourning “widow” who goes to retrieve the Fed-Ex package with her lover’s dead remains (he too has “shrunk” in the meantime). Early on in the novel, the following dialogue between Matilde and her mother and the subject of what the daughter wants to be called encapsulates the manipulativeness behind this comic mutability: —Don’t call me Bochita anymore. —And what do you want me to call you? Greta? Marlene? They go well with the trenchcoat. You’re right. Divorced and all, Bochita sounds like a housewife’s name. It’s a bit vulgar, and now that you’re on to another face. . . . —Juana. —Juana? It’s a cleaning lady’s name, good for a boardinghouse keeper, maybe. I can see being called Juana, but not you. —Juana. Like the old man. If Juan was good enough for him, Juana will be good enough for me, for what I have to do. —Up to you. But you could do much better. A foreign name, maybe, like the ones in perfume adds, Elizabeth, Michelle. Or if you want something with more of a national flavor, Alejandra, but Juana. . . . —No me llamés más Bochita. —¿Y cómo querés que te llame? ¿Greta? ¿Marlene? Va bien con el impermeable. Es cierto que divorciada y todo Bochita queda demasiado de barrio, tiene cierta vulgaridad, y ahora que estás en otra cosa . . . —Juana. —¿Juana? Es nombre de lavandera, de dueña de pensión, yo, por ejemplo prodría muy bien llamarme así, pero vos, en cambio. —Juana, cómo el viejo. Si Juan era un nombre suficientemente bueno para él, Juana me servirá para lo que quiero hacer.

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—Allá vos. Y pudiendo tener un nombre como la gente. Algo extranjero, como de aviso de perfume, Elizabeth, Michelle, o, si insistís en lo nacional, Alejandra. Pero Juana. (55). A model of mutation on demand, Matilde soon becomes Felipa, Matilde Felipa and Felipa Matilde, Lucía, Estela Ramona, Bochita, Juana, la patrona [the patron saint], and the “ferocious asssassin.”15 As her story advances, cutand-paste style, the character gains national and international media attention through her hyperadaptive surviver’s body. Matilde’s morphing body, like her transitoriness, allows her to transcend many of the antinomies that would keep her torn between equally undesirable extremes and thus to negotiate more effectively the shock value and performance potential of her frantic mobility. Like the historical Evita, the first patron saint (“la patrona”) of the Girls of the Cult of Eve is a narcissist with mean survival instincts and a knack for knowing what to wear in public, depending on her audience. There are echoes of Alice in Wonderland in Matilde’s story, which is not surprising considering Borinsky’s sustained interest in Lewis Carroll’s work, but behind this character’s masquerades is the author’s insistence on problematizing the limits and risks of identity politics. Closer to a Deleuzian than a Foucaultian notion of mutable subjectivity, the novel’s antinaturalistic, hyberbolic, seemingly frivolous treatment of contested feminist issues like female identity and gendered positionality is bound to offend many readers. Yet in Matilde’s joyride through multiple identities and matching body sizes, one finds echoes not only of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming (multiple) wom[e]n,” but also of the parodic performative subjects Judith Butler endorses in Gender Trouble, of the aforementioned “nomadic subjects” theorized by Braidotti, and of Maria Lugones’s shape-shifting “worldtraveler.”16 Patrick O’Connor has observed, however, that Borinsky’s interest in fragmented and multiple female selves can be traced back at least to a 1973 critical article on Felisberto Hernández’s novella Las Hortensias,17 predating at least some of the theories mentioned and nourished by markedly Latin American fictional and theoretical influences.

STRIPPING

INTO

CYBORG MODE

In The Body Politic, the first anthology of feminist writings published in Great Britain in 1972, editor Michelene Wandor tackled the question of how feminist thinking could theorize the female body as a material space between biology and sociology, nature and culture. Countless feminist treatises, including many of those I have referred to in this book, have since addressed

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the difficult question of material corporeality and its link to gendered identity. The problem of thinking and rethinking female embodiment has been further complicated, in the last few decades, by radical advances, or changes, in technology and medicine, both of which have forced feminist theorists to reconsider the limits and the potential of the female body’s mechanisms for transformation, as well as its vulnerability to laws that seek to control its reproductive potential. It is no doubt ironic that a genre as kitsch and anachronism-bound as is camp is also one of the fictional genres most likely to raise (in its usual hyperbolically excessive way) questions regarding the intersection of technosciences, bodies, and culture. Giulia Colaizzi observes that camp aesthetics help expose the socially constructed and thus artificial nature of the “categories of masculine/feminine, inside/outside, above/below, ahead/behind.”18 In more recent years, camp genres have often sought to explode the antinomies between the human and posthuman. In Cine continuado, the treatment of bodies as fluid and mutable organisms covers the range between more primitive forms of quick metabolism (a body that “stretches and shrinks like a cheap sweater”) to more futuristic bionic options through the character of Noemí. Identified only later (and only implicitly) as the narrator who follows Matilde to the train station in the novel’s opening segment, Noemí first makes waves in the novel as the city’s most acclaimed stripper, acclaimed in part because she gives the appearance of preternatural nakedness. She is seduced and abducted shortly afterward by lesbian detectives who hope to transform her into a version of the much sought-after Matilde after they cure her bad habit of stripping. She makes headline news as “la llagadita” (the scarred girl) when the uniform her kidnappers have glued on to her results in permanent scarring. Rescued and “abandoned” by the police who fail to understand her anger at them for turning her into tabloid news before her kidnappers had finished re-forming her, she is immediately turned over to the care of a suspiciously self-trained plastic surgeon who cannot resist a woman whose body sheds whole layers of skin without the need of lasers or chemical treatments. It is after he convinces her to elope with him to an “idyllic” nearby beach that her uniform finally comes unglued (too much sun and salt water) and her human skin grows opaque but certifiably metallic scales. She returns to the city an impenetrable Venus-de-steel, or a Joan-of-Arc-style virgin/goddess, safe from anyone’s desire to strip her. She is also fireproof, at least metaphorically, flattered but unmoved by the worshipping followers of the Cult of Eve (who have given up on finding Matilde and are ready to replace her with a new patron saint). In an obvious reference to the return of Evita (as Isabel Perón), the novel highlights the improbable fascination of a nation with this popular icon and the absurd lengths to which

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her followers were willing to go so as to keep her an icon. By the end of the novel, Noemí has already become bored with power and fame but looks forward to her next transformation as a museum piece as the nation’s first naturally armoured woman. Both Matilde and Noemí have traces of the grotesque and the freak, but Noemí’s naturally grown steel armor is an obvious reference to biotechnical posthuman bodies. Matilde’s rapidly shrinking and expanding body mocked conventional models of femininity by parodying Western culture’s obsession with body sizes and weight. Noemí’s cyborg points readers to more futuristic kinds of alien mutations. In her famous “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway observes that the cyborg body “is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity” (71), “nature and culture are reworked” (71). Haraway’s view of the cyborg as a “creature in a post gender world” (33) is shared by Anne Balsamo, who observes that “[c]yborg identity is predicated on transgressed boundaries” (155). Addressing the issue of the cyborg as a creature that defies prescribed or accepted models of femininity, Francesca De Ruggieri adds that both in fiction and in cinema, the female cyborg is a “symbol of the anti-maternal” (124). Mean, street-smart, and hard “as steel” Noemí is an unnatural woman in more ways than the obvious one. Not only is she indifferent to male (or female) erotic desire and incapable of erotic pleasure (her reactions to the doctor’s massages and sexual foreplay make this clear), but she is also devoid of the nourishing maternal traits one would expect of the nation’s new patrona. Her reaction to being given the Matilde-doll by the Cult of Eve followers is not to play with it, or to pretend to care for it, but to turn it into her drinking partner. Stating that innocence is often a point of departure for camp, Sontag then notes that camp is interested in innocence only to corrupt it “when it can” (282). Noemí’s transformations from young fan to acclaimed stripper to techno-woman marks the passage from daring but impressionable naivete to cynical narcissim. Unlike either of the two Evitas (Eva Duarte and Isabel Perón), Noemí not only knows the score but has a knack for knowing when to place her bets and with whom. Even more clearly than Matilde, the young icon also knows that she cannot be all things to all people, but she can be many different things to different people: She is:/ a stainless-steel goddess/ an / ex kidnapping victim/ ex scarred girl/ ex leper/ an ungrateful wretch who does not bother to call her ex kidnappers/ a faithless tramp who would forget him as soon as they got back to the city a calculating bitch a poor ignorant fool without a university degree a frigid chick in a tin body, a lice-infected tramp who needs to get her hair done, the siren of our dreams.

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Es:/ una diosa de acero inoxdiable/ una/ex raptada/ ex llagada/ ex leprosa/ una desagradecida que no llama por teléfono a sus raptoras una infiel que se olvidaría de él ni bien volvieran a la ciudad una calculadora una ignorante sin título universitario una frígida con cuerpo de lata, una pioja que necesita ir a la peluquería, la sirena de nuestros sueños. (137) In a city where the population is increasingly bewildered by the masked identities of so many “illicit” bodies and plagued by mass poisonings, hunger strikes, and suicide lines, Noemí’s chances of maintaining public order appear slim. But public order is precisely what she must avoid if she wants to remain an unruly cyborg on top. Ruggieri reminds us that cyborgs, like robots, emerge from the patriarchal traditions of capitalism and war and as such bear within them traces of that tradition. Among these traces, says this critic, are “force, violence, [and] war,” but also “speed [and] productivity” (125).19 A cross between the technobody or cyborg and the freak, Noemí’s appeal is multiple because her body signals efficiency as well as aggression. She is both patriarchy’s wet dream and its worst nightmare. While dancing at the national celebrations, she is proud of being the one body that just keeps going, and going, and going. As is the case with Matilde, Noemí becomes more artificial, more unreal, more “celloperated” and mask-like with every transformation: also, more self-parodic, world-weary, and globe-wise. A media-age creature, she has a pervasive sense of herself as iconic image. When her would-be lover and now manager Doctor Gutiérrez wants to polish her body to make it shine, she insists that the opaqueness gives her character: “Opaque looks better. It’s more stylish” [“Queda mejor un poco opaco. Da categoría”] (169). Already anticipating her next role in the national museum and aware of how visitors will see her, she reminds Gutiérrez that the medieval armours at the Metropolitan Museum of New York don’t shine (169). Despite the character’s ultracamp personality and outrageous transformation, however, it is possible to speculate that the term “llagada,” which conveys the dual sense of “wounded” and “scarred” in Spanish, implicitly reflects the young girl’s resentment toward a culture that has forced her to grow such a hard skin. Even in such camp cross-dressing, the image of the “wounded” woman’s body resonates with Gloria Anzaldúa’s description of the border woman as a “llaga abierta” or open gash. While there is no question that Noemí’s persona is exaggerated beyond all real and credible proportions, it is possible to view her as an example of an extreme border(line) character, one whose whole survival strategy has been determined by her ability to bridge class, gender, and finally human margins. It is also possible to see in Noemí

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an antiutopian camp story. In The Culture of Cursilería, Valis remarks on the fact that kitsch culture “both mimics and parodically subverts the utopian narrative” (191). Noemí’s once scarred, now nearly indestructible yet ultimately on its way to oblivion as a museum-bound body, reflects and refracts the less comical antiutopian discourse in Cine continuado.

POSTMODERN URBAN SPECTACLES: MAD DANCING, MEDIA SCAMS, AND THE FINAL (CAMP) “SOLUTION” Mina cruel, Borinky’s first novel, parodically reenacts many of the spectacles of Argentina’s Dirty War and the return of Perón. Borinsky’s second novel Sueños del seductor abandonado [Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer] retains an image of a deranged but still identifiably southern-cone nation, although the national parameters have become more diffuse. Despite the two “Evitas” included in its sequential, segmented stories, Cine continuado depicts a much more postnational or global spectacle. Although geographically and culturally mapped by tango lyrics, and national dishes like “tallarines” [the Argentine term for spaghetti] and “bife” [any cut of beef ], the nation featured in Cine might be any country in the grips of global transmigrations and unemployment and victim to a media frenzy of epidemic proportions. At the beginning of her discussion of nationalist spectacles during Argentina’s Dirty War, Diana Taylor argues that “spectacle [was] a locus and mechanism of communal identity through collective imaginings” (ix). There is no doubt that Cine continuado parodies the practice of political spectacle (a practice that García Canclini insists runs through the history of Western politics). In order to remain popular with her people, first-cyborg Eva/Noemí devises a political platform composed almost entirely of national contests. Among Noemí’s contests are “skating on grease,” “choirs of adolescent boys whose voice is about to change reciting poems in twenty different languages simultaneously,” “changing diapers,” “sex for senior citizens,” and “tonguetwisters in Latin” [“patinaje sobre grasa,” “declamación de poemas en veinte lenguas simultáneas por coros de niños a puntos de cambiar la voz,” “cambio de pañales,” “coitos en la tercera edad,” and “trabalenguas latinos”] (124). The passage illustrates the zaniness of camp absurdity as well as the genre’s dependence on kitsch. It also parodies the absurdly patronizing tactics that depraved and fraudulent governments use to manipulate their citizens. Yet by campily featuring the postnational as well as posthuman female body as a comic nodal cause of chaos on global rather than local spaces, Cine continuado distances itself from national parameters. Emblematic of this move beyond purely national concerns is the transformation of the stadium.

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Once a stage for Dirty War tactics of mutilation and disappearance, it is now a park where Noemí can be photographed wiping her perfect metal smile after eating a state-funded meal with countless homeless illegals who look shamelessly and scandalously “satisfied” in the tabloid photos taken for the occasion (158). At the same time, the novel features international newswomen who are more interested in covering spectacularly strange expanding-shrinking bodies than nationwide but regrettably “unsponsored” hunger strikes. The Barbara Walters-like globe-trotting reporter Chantal Des Mesnairs20 has neither the desire nor the inclination to cover the mass-poisoning epidemic taking place in the country where she has come to interview her celebrity or the plight of the thousands of unemployed illegal immigrants who greet her, try to seduce her, or bribe her for their fifteen minutes of tabloid fame. Yet she goes to any lengths to secure a rare face-to-face with “ferocious assassin” and incredible shrinking (and stretching) Matilde. Sandwiched between the subtitles “let her pass, the lady is with me” [“dejenla pasar, la señorita viene conmigo”] (144) and “in life one has to take risks” [“en la vida hay que arriesgarse”] (157), one of the novel’s segments depicts the nation as a giant casino, one that caters to multiple gambling addictions but also offers death-by-jumping as the only “solution.” As with everything else in the novel, even death must be recorded and photographed. As in any Las Vegas-like attraction, these gamblers-unto-death have their photos taken before making the plunge: “the taciturn losers line up before a balcony and jump to the abyss after having their photos taken and signing a document releasing the management from all responsibility” [“los taciturnos perdedores hacen cola frente a un balcón y se tiran después de sacarse una foto y firmar un documento exonerando al casino de toda responsabilidad”] (156). Not surprisingly, the “solution” turns out to be the casino’s biggest attraction. The novel’s vaudeville image of mass deaths/suicide may well be intended as a brutally campy allusion to the Holocaust. I suspect, however, that the passage is Borinsky’s mock-ironic homage to the early Cortázar and his über-alienated world-weary characters, so “cosmopolitan,” so cool about life-as-a-slow burn, so incurably Argentinian (porteños, to be precise). In the suicide-line passage, the tone is a camp imitation of vintage Cortázar; the red tile on the courtyard below a dead giveaway: In front of me there is a guy who has won a fortune and he wants to give us ninety-nine per cent of his earnings but no one wants to lose his place in line because if you do you have to start making bets again start taking risks again speak with the croupier again no way no way we all know that his generosity is a trick we say enough this is a bad joke a trap to separate us from the nearing vertigo now it’s

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almost my turn soon I feel the cool shadows of the courtyard below and the cold impact of the reddish tile on my neck it is always your neck first. Delante mío hay un hombre que ha ganado una fortuna y quiere darnos el noventa y nueve por ciento pero nadie quiere perder su sitio porque si lo hace habrá que volver a apostar correr riesgos charlar con el croupier no no no todos sabemos que su generosidad es un engaño y decimos basta esta es una broma inadmisible, una trampa para separarnos de este vértigo me toca pronto siento la penumbra del patio abajo al fondo y el impacto de la baldosa bermeja en la nueca, es siempre en la nuca (156). Borinsky’s earlier novels feature detectives whose “searches” parodically recreate the detective work involved in the process of reconstructing the specters of the disappeared in a post-Proceso Argentina. In Cine continuado many of the novel’s segments aim for a comic but cruel camp-noir, except the outcome is no longer the alienated overeducated narcissist’s “long-day’s journey into night.” The suicides (is it possible that they are all male?) have their photos taken before their necks hit the courtyard. In their wake, everywoman’s dream is to become an international tabloid freak: a Madonna of sorts. Madonna, as in “Evita,” of course. Looking at the postcapitalist-like trash aesthetics and the surviving women the novel has lined up to this point, the reader begins to wonder: is there real resistance behind all this spectacle?

PERFORMING RANDOM ACTS

OF

CHAOS

While carnival seeks to convert and thus to persuade the spectator to join the festivities, camp, as Susan Sontag first noted, operates a seduction, and the seduction can be as slippery, duplicitous, and treacherous (281). The difference between carnivalesque conversion and semiotic or bodily seduction can be stark. Given its refusal to compromise or settle on a single position, view, or body type, Cine continuado seeks to effect a series of unspecified subversion by posing the text as a stage for performing resistance rather than a platform for enacting a politics of defiance. Alternatively, the novel might just be proposing the kind of “politics of performance” that Baz Kershaw advocates in The Radical in Performance when the critic speaks of going from the political to the radical by engaging performative rather than discursive tropes. The “journey from the political to the radical” (17) described by Kershaw in his study of contemporary theater alerts readers to the ideological shift that

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separates Borinsky’s earlier novels from Cine continuado. Moving beyond the portrayal of nation as absurd spectacle, Borinsky’s third novel allows disruptive female improvisational acts to threaten the borders of national patrimony. It is true that within the space of the narrative these improvised and mutating female bodily acts provoke mayhem, but mayhem is what women on the verge of persecution, eviction, or abduction need to guarantee their survival and their comebacks. In the final segments of Cine continuado, the mad metropolis that serves as a stage set for this “all night movie” is energized by the marches and music that mark the celebration of these festivals. In a description that parodies both Freudian penis-envy and the back-to-nature New Age experiments so popular in the 1980s, somewhere between mock-epic and neo-picaresque, the utterly kitsch descriptions of these “premenstrual festivals” at first reading appear to signal a parody of a carnivalesque community. A closer reading, however, reveals that the potential parody of a carnivalesque community is deflected toward anticommunitarian and antinationalistic performances: the motley mix of anxious and whimsical (hence disorderly) participants: “[d]ressed in bright red, men, post-menopausal women, children and disoriented adolescents celebrate their cravings and anxieties to the sounds of drums and tambourines” [“Los festivales premenstruales han sido incorporados al latido de la ciudad. Vestidos de colorado hombres, mujeres post-menopáusicas y adolescentes desorientados celebran sus ansiedades y caprichos acompañándolos con sus bombos y panderetas”] (170). The red-clad crowd might pass for any garishly dressed carnivalesque crowd if it were not for the fact that “colorado,” a particularly working-class and trashy shade, is likely to remind readers acquainted with foundational Latin American literature of the Argentine statesman and writer Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. A die-hard Unitarian, Sarmiento railed against the barbarous savageness of the bright red [“colorado”] required to signal loyalty to the Partido federal. A well known harangue against this particular shade of red in Sarmiento’s autobiography Recuerdos de Provincia attests to his phobic reaction to the color’s symbolic resonance.22 As I discussed in chapter one, for classical Greek philosophers, the anarchy and disorder Sarmiento saw in the red-clad federales was usually targeted against the noncitizen’s body. In ancient comic celebrations, as scholars have pointed out, this body was often female. By extension, one might speculate that the earliest condemantions of women’s comic performances, and their concommitant laughter or excess, could very well have signaled Western culture’s fear and loathing of pre and postmenstrual “syndromes” of any kind. Pushing beyond a parody of a nation eager to celebrate “the return of Evita,” and toward a performative camp of Bacchic and Dionysian proportions, Cine

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continuado presents the possibility of rethinking the politics of (gender) identity and the politics of nation as a performance or spectacle both diasporic and picaresque. Néstor García Canclini, who has never, to my knowledge, discussed women’s chances of increasing their social, sexual, or economic options through chaos-bound humor, maintains that the manipulation of spectacle at the hands of a global media in unlikely to lead to either general anarchy or group solidarity. But he also notes that it is likely to result in pockets of disorder.23 While the anarchy and chaos resulting from the female characters’ riotous acts in Cine continuado have no particular political end or agenda in this novel, there is no doubt that the disruptions occasioned by so many borderline and border-crossing (female) bodies have the symbolic effect of breaking up existing orders. Despite its science-fiction touches, Cine continuado resists all possible connection with utopia. Indeed, the fact that Matilde shrinks to doll-size measurements (the result of her excessive diet, perhaps), and Noemí’s performance ends up as part of the national archive, would seem to signal the novel’s refusal to see in these chaos-prone characters a real model of change. What they are, however, are agents of chaos, a chaos necessary to break up the stolid and stale foundations before radical changes become possible. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the fact that no new order or orders are proposed as viable substitutes to the ones that are being shaken to their foundations by mocking laughter is consistent with the novel’s interest in an openly deconstructive rather than a reconstructive camp aesthetics. In an essay entitled “Pensando en la diáspora” [“Thinking About Diaspora”] translated into Spanish for Heterotopías: narrativas de identidad y alteridad latinoamericana, Stuart Hall argues that “the diasporic perspec-tive . . . subverts traditional cultural models based on the notion of nation” [“esta perspectiva diaspórica . . . como subversiva de los modelos culturales tradicionales orientados por la nación”] (487). Similarly, says Hall, “cultural globalization has deterritorializing effects” [“la globalización cultural es, en sus efectos, desterritorializadora”] (487). By privileging “unscripted,” or at least free-floating, disruptive performances over subversive discourse, Cine continuado highlights the potential of picaresque dystopias (the dsytopia of postcapitalist globalization, for example) to point us toward a posthuman space that invites “mutation” rather than conversion; co-performance rather than reconstitution. After heady dialogues, the ancients would bring on the drunken, dancing, chaos-prone revelers they called komos, perhaps to guard against the solemnity to which they had been party. 24 Moving past carnivalesque parody and into deterritorialized camp, Cine continuado loosens the improvised and improvisational bodies of its female characters on the space of the globalized

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metropolis so as to disrupt the possibility of going about business as usual. In the midst of the ensuring chaos, Borinsky’s troupe of social outcasts never coalesce into a comic community, but they can put together a camp performance wild enough and transformative enough to give audiences pause, and they’re always ready to take their act on the road.

Epilogue

/

Humor does not invoke a truth more universal than that of the masters; it does not even struggle in the name of the majority by incriminating the masters for being a minority. Humor wants rather to have this recognized: there are only minorities. Jean-François Lyotard, Toward the Postmodern The point is not to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network of marginal zones is spawned from other disciplinary centers and which, together, constitute a multiple displacement of those authorities. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

O

ne of the turning points in the project that grew into this book was the realization that while I had been preparing to treat the presence of humor in Latin American women writers primarily in terms of intellectual wit and verbal humor, their works would oblige me to devote much of my time reflecting on the many ways in which gendered bodies can slip, slide, or perform their way through sociopolitical and cultural frames intended to contain and control them. Another was realizing that as the level of comic aggression increased, so did the sense of ambivalence and ambiguity regarding the strategic use of the ludic tactics deployed. With every turn of the color lens toward the darker side of the humor spectrum, the ideological agenda behind the practice of diverse types of humor became less easily definable. In other words, the more disruptive the humor, the less concrete its politics. All situations that engage tactics of comic exceess aim to destabilize or temporarily upset the prevailing context in which they take place. Yet while milder or lighter forms of humor operate their destabilizations by resorting to reversals or exaggeration, more entropic comic transactions deploy multiple means of disruption in order to create a general sense of disorder or chaos. As Freud observes in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, uncertainty and ambivalence regarding its ultimate meaning, intention, or effect is 149

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an unavoidable aspect of tendentious humor. Operating, as it generally does, through mechanisms difficult to account for and even more difficult to explain within the logical economy of verbal (or bodily) grammar, the deployment of humor is likely to result in as many alliances as divisions. It is not surprising, therefore, that the affirmation of plural voices that do not cohere into a single vocal register is a common trait of the works examined in my book. A good illustration of this point, Luisa Valenzuela’s novel Realidad nacional desde la cama insists on turning the national dance with which the novel ends into multiple and mutable regional dances. Alicia Borinsky’s Cine continuado similarly refuses to privilege a single point of view or a single cause. Discontinuous and fragmented, the novel becomes a site where everyone is a “circus performer” of one kind or another but no one ever manages a successful balancing act. Armonía Somers’s comic cynicism in Sólo los elefantes dissolves any hope of an “imagined” community; the corrosive satire eats away and through the fantasy of an imagined national community in a place where vampires, minotaurs, lepers, anarchists, fascists, and brilliant but bitter ill women compete with each other in a mad contest to impose their version of history, or at least of their own history. Even in its most conciliatory form (as illustrated by my discussion of Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate), comic disruptions have the effect of unhinging and fragmenting family, regional, and national units. Admittedly, some of these tendencies toward fragmenting the possibility of what Benedict Anderson famously termed “imagined communities” of nation can readily be found in the work of contemporary women authors whose writing does not evince a comic, carnivalesque, parodic, or camp vision. Mentioned in my introductory chapter, Nelly Richard’s summary of the techniques that qualify for a practice of a “refractory aesthetics” incorporates many of these tactics. Because Diamela Eltit is often summoned as the contemporary writer who best exemplifies this refractory aesthetics, alluding to her her extraordinarily “resistant” oeuvre for purposes of contrast is useful. Eltit’s fiction fully engages the previously listed tactics of excess, duplicity, mimicry, inversion, and disorder. Yet it also implicitly (and only implicitly) proposes a solution to the plural marginalization(s) that these refractory techniques signal by conveying an aesthetics of the margins that also contains a marginal but tactical politics. Describing Diamela Eltit’s aesthetics in Eltit’s novel Lumpérica, Julio Ortega observes the extent to which it “put[s] into crisis the very possibilities of representation and the logical structures that define and and divide the masculine and the feminine as biological destiny, social roles, discursive economies, fables of identity and configurations of power” (55 ).1 One might almost claim that the observation applies with equal perspicuity to Somers’s and

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Borinsky’s narratives. Only not in the same way. Where these same refractory techniques become implicated in an aesthetics of comic resistance, the destabilizing semantics and semiotics of skeptical, entropic, or black humor make it much more difficult to intuit a political ideology behind the refraction. Runaway parody, bilious black humor, and chaos-prone camp set out to “bring down the house” without the concession of solemn demolition ceremonies or the promise of reconstruction. It is not surprising, therefore, that authors who opt for particularly aggressive forms of humor and encourage a “politics of performance” rather than a discourse of resistance stop short of articulating a macro- or a micropolitics of postresistance action.27 While it has generally been the case that marginalization and marginalized characters play an important role in transgressive or subversive discourses by women authors, what is significant about the treatment of marginalization in works that share a predominantly comic vision—regardless of how grim the humor—is the extent to which marginalization is validated as eccentricity. An unlikely source of inspiration for a discussion of feminist transgressive aesthetics, the American pragmatist Richard Poirer is nevertheless helpful on this point. The real importance of “the encouragement of eccentricity” argues Poirer in The Performing Self, resides in that only through an exploration of eccentric sites, activities, or character types can culture hope to “be able to locate, scrutinize and periodically shift its center” (186). As one of the constants in women authors’ practice of comic resistance, the “encouragement of eccentricity” means that these works welcome freaks, outlaws, and outsiders, but always as plural figures. Especially where aided by openly postmodern techniques, comic resistance reintroduces a version of the Greek chorus, a remnant of pre-Attic Dionysian theater, onto the novel’s or narrative stage. The shantytown people in Realidad nacional, the multiple ghosts who visit the ill woman Fiorella in the hospital, presumably to give their version of history, and the family chronicle in Sólo los elefantes encuentran mandrágora, the motley revelers who partake of the premenstrual festivals in Cine continuado have no more important role in these texts than to provide vocal counterpoints or alternative choreographies to the principal characters’ or narrators’ dance, voice, or act. Moreoever, the use of the metaphorical chorus in these works reminds readers of the importance of the performative aspect in the comic transaction. As an alternative to narratives that explore a semantics of localized marginalization, women authors who variously engage the comic vision—whether from the perspective of carnivalesque excess, ironic parody, skeptical humor, black humor, or camp chaos—opt for performing resistance on expressive registers that include but are not limited to linguistic discourse. Although contained by narrative frames, the corporeal or somatized nature of the disruptions I have discussed allows for new

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spaces for approaching eccentric bodies and borderline identities when the latter are always on the verge of eviction and relocation, and perpetually in a “bordered” state. It remains to us, as critics and readers, to encourage critical avenues and mechanisms that will allow us to venture future explorations of these new spaces.

Notes

/

INTRODUCTION 1. For a discussion of possible translations of the title of Vega’s story, see chapter three. Andrew Hurley renders this story’s title as “True Romance,” but the English title barely begins to convey the playful punning of the original. I have opted for “Red Hot Story,” realizing that my title also misses the play between “story” (historia) and “history” (historia) present in the Spanish. Translations of this and other passages from the story are my own, as are all translations of the fictional works I examine in my book. 2. “Esto les cae como bomba, me dijo mientras depositaba, profesional, la gran mixta nacional en los platos resignados de suegros y marido” (21). 3. It should be clear that I cannot claim to be exhaustive or all-inclusive in this study. There are dozens of other contemporary Latin American women writers who explore different aspects of the comic (comic-ironic, satirical, or farcical) vision in their writings. Important among them are Cristina Peri Rossi, Isabel Allende, Mireya Robles, Zoé Valdés, Mirta Yáñez, Margo Glantz, Mayra Montero, Fanny Buitrago, Luisa Futuransky, Ana Maria Shúa, Guadalupe Dueñas, Angélica Gorodischer, Stefanía Mosca, and Albalucía Angel’s early narratives. In theater the work of Griselda Gambaro and Sabina Berman provides rich territory for examining tactics of comic resistance. In poetry there are notable examples of black humor in the work of the late Alejandra Pizarnik and the corrosive but comic sarcasm of Minerva Margarita Villareal’s epigrammatic poetry. Alicia Borinsky’s poetry exhibits many of the same camp traits that I discuss in her prose. An even broader study would need to also account for the humor of women authors who write almost exclusively in a popular or journalistic vein, Elizabeth Subercaseaux and Guadalupe Loaeza among them. Recent and highly innovative work by women authors of comic strips opens up possibilities for a cultural study of new gendered popular icons. By theorizing a spectrum of women’s humor in a Latin American context, I aim to set useful parameters for future students of Latin American authors’ incursions into different varieties of comic tactics. 4. Bryce Echenique’s lecture is reproduced in the May 14 Sunday 2000 edition of La Nación, Section VI, pp. 1–4. 5. It is telling, for example, that Debra Castillo’s selection of quotes in the final section of her brilliant book leaves its readers with images of sharp fingernails and razor-sharp “polished” skin. So is the fact that Jean Franco opts for tragic Greek archetypes as entryways into the female cultural types she examines in her book. Thus, 153

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even studies that consider ludic politics as a point of departure (as the titles Talking Back and Plotting Women would seem to indicate), soon exile humor to the margins. 6. Except for Armonia Somers’s novel, all these narratives have appeared in English translation. However, I have used my own translations for all passages cited. 7. I am not proposing, of course, that all comic practices are actually or even potentially transgressive. As any quick overview of comic strips and editorial cartoons from local newspapers anywhere in the world will immediately show, many popular comic practices continue to evince a reactionary attitude toward gender and gender roles. Moreover, in my discussions of individual texts, I explore some of the ways in which humor can be used to support rather than transgress culturally established gender roles even when the overall intent of the comic frame is one of mild subversiveness. 8. In choosing Medusa as the face and symbol for women’s laughter, Cixous alludes to the archetypal fears of castration evoked by the figure, then rewrites the famous myth when she counters that Medusa “is not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing” (255). Noting that her own work is invested in “break[ing] up” theories that inflict tragic powers and tragic gestures on powerful women, Cixous projects this power of aggressive celebration onto women’s laughter. 9. I have appropriated medieval and renaissance lists of “cardinal” bodily humors, as outlined by Ben Jonson and other early modern thinkers and natural scientists. I have added “lymphatic” to the list in order to fit the lymph-infected “humors” of Somers’s protagonist, and I have revised “blood” (one of the bodily humors) as “hotblooded” to better fit the description of Ana Lydia Vega’s female characters and their temperamental and exuberant humor. 10. The novel makes some explicit references and many implicit allusions to the political situation in Uruguay at the time of the novel’s writing and to the history of the anarchist and later the Marxist movements in Uruguay. Yet even its satirical barbs at specific historical situations are couched in a literary brand of black humor. 11. George Bataille makes precisely this argument in discussing the nature of both laughter and eroticism. Similarly, the extraordinarily versatile Rosario Castellanos repeatedly urged her women readers to combat the stultifying force of Mexican culture’s repression of women’s voices with a “campaign” of laughter. In an essay first published as a newspaper editorial and later reprinted in Mujer que sabe latín [Woman Who Knows Latin] (1973), Castellanos noted that tactically deployed humor has appreciably greater oppositional powers than recriminating tears or somber indignation.

CHAPTER ONE 1. My heading for the first section is borrowed from Diana Taylor’s celebrated book on the subject of dictatorship and gender in Argentina, Disappearing Acts. Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War.”

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2. See also Henderson’s “The Demos and the Comic Competition” and James Redfield’s “Drama and Community: Aristophanes and Some of His Rivals.”

3. See also Dolores O’Higgins’ forthcoming book, Women and Humor in Classical Greece. 4. According to Harry Levin, Juan Huarte’s Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (1575)—widely read as part-scientific, part-etiquette manual in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe—might well have served as the immediate source of inspiration for Ben Jonson’s modern coinage of the term “humor.” Jonson is often credited with being one of the first to use the term in its modern sense 5. Influenced by Rojas’s Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea as well as by the anonymous bestseller Lazarillo de Tormes (the formal archetype for future picaresques), a host of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century novels featured female picaras in the lead role. Well known among them are La lozana andaluza [The Lusty Andalucian] (1527), La pícara Justina (which uses this genre’s label as an adjective for the female protagonist in its title, 1605), La hija de la Celestina [Celestina’s Daughter], La niña de los embustes, Teresa Manzanares [Teresa Manzanares, The Trickster Lass] (1632), and La Garduña de Sevilla y anzuelo de las bolsas [Seville’s Sneakiest Pickpocket] (1642). For an extended study of the female picaresque, see Anne Cruz’s Discourses of Poverty: Social Reform and the Picaresque Novel in Early Modern Spain. The translations of the novels’ titles are my own. 6. Providing a sharp contrast to this chorus of gamine and cross-dressing female wits is the scandalous work of Aphra Behn, whose very popular comedies were both bawdy and witty. In Spanish Golden Age comedia, the role of the mujer esquiva, the Spanish counterpoint to Shakespeare’s chorus of independent and vocal “shrews,” can be read as another exception to the de-gendering of Renaissance female wits on the stage. Writing about the figure of esquiva (literally, “the one who dodges”) in Spanish Golden Age drama, Melveena McKendrick describes her as “the woman who, for some reason, is averse to the idea of love and marriage. As a natural outcome of this, she is usually, though not invariably, averse to men as well” (115). Yet while some of these esquivas are indeed witty, they are made to “reform” by the end of the play, and the “happy ending” subdues them into sense, thus “promising” to destroy their wit through the acquisition of common sense. 7. Often credited for putting the nails on comedy’s coffin for a while is Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan describes laughter as a form of pure malice. In all fairness to Hobbes, it should be noted that his definition does not mention women. 8. When strategic or resistant humor by women does enter the picture of Latin American letters it does so through the privileged doors of beauty and class. Writing in the first decades of the twentieth century, the clever and glamorous Venezuelan Teresa de la Parra would use a spectrum of humor to critique gender stereotypes and the submission of women in her Ifigenia; or Diario de una señorita que escribía porque se fastidiaba, but she had her wealth (and famed good looks) to protect her from public reproach. It would take nearly another half a century before a middle-class Latin

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American woman, one like Rosario Castellanos, would feel confident enough to use ironic humor for transgressive ends. 9. While reviewing this chapter I came upon Judith Butler’s fascinating “Commentary on Joseph Flay’s ‘Hegel, Derrida, and Bataille’s Laughter,” in which Butler, influenced by Flay’s reading, argues that Hegel may have patterned the structure of his Phenomenology after Cervantes’s Don Quixote. According to Butler, a reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology as a tragicomic drama may result in a much more open understanding of what has been interpreted as a closed project of totalization. Nevertheless, Hegel’s comments on the comic mode in the Aesthetics reflect his conviction that laughter (or humor) is something to be transcended. 10. Nevertheless, Baudelaire’s notions of a corrosive and entropic humor have had an important and pervasive influence on women writers whose sense of humor tends toward the anarchic and the sinister. One can detect important traces of his “bile” in the work of Armonía Somers and Alicia Borinsky, for example. 11. “Le rire n’a pas de plus grand ennemi que l’émotion” (3). Translation mine. 12. JoAnna Isaak, who insists on recognizing the importance of Freud on women artists’ use of liberating comic strategies, points out that Freud returns to an enigmatic exploration of humor while addressing the figure of the “smiling woman” in his essay “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood” (Isaak, 11–12). 13. For a treatment of the misogyny present in Lizardi’s novel see Francisco López Alfonso’s “La Quixotita y su prima, tratado de oprobio” in Sonia Mattalía’s Mujeres: Escrituras y lenguajes, pp. 141–150. 14. Bergson’s insistence that only the “human” or anthropomorphic can provoke laughter is one of his most convincing points. Even animals, notes Bergson, must remind us of some human-like trait to appear funny. Nature can be savage or grotesque, but it can’t be comic. 15. It is not surprising that Santos’s “unsentimental” education aims to correct not so much the consequences of the neglect that Marisela suffers at the hands of the drunk father who raises her, but the “savage” traces she inherits from the half-Indian and all-too-corporeal mother—no matter that the girl has had no contact with the mother who rejected the infant at her birth. 16. Cortázar apologized publicly for the sexism of his “gendered” formula for two types of reader in an interview with Evelyn Picón Garfield (1973), but, as I note in my text, the comment remains particularly problematic because of the way in which it records a historical and cultural prejudice that Cortázar himself does not seem have considered. 17. The translation of these phrases from Rayuela [Hopscotch] are my own. It is clear that Cortázar means the reference to “honest man” (in French in the passage) to signal the boorish and boring bourgeois who are the antithesis of the author’s, or at least the author alter ego’s, idea of a “brave homme.” 18. In “Structure, Sign and Play.” 19. I am borrowing Dale Bauer’s title, in part because Bauer’s argument explores ways in which irony targeted at women can signal a “politics of failed community.” 20. Richard explains her notion of a “refractory aesthetics” in La insubordinación de los signos (cambio político, transformaciones culturales y poéticas de la crisis).

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CHAPTER TWO 1. All translations of Esquivel’s novel are my own. 2. As has been pointed out in numerous articles about the novel, the dual meaning of the expression “como agua para chocolate” [like water for chocolate] presupposes and underlines the intimate link between cooking, bodies, and bodily humors. While water needs to be at the boiling point before chocolate can be added to prepare the hot drink, bodies that are about to explode (from pleasure or anger) are also said to be at the point of “like water for chocolate.” 3. The film by Fernando Arau based on the novel (and on Esquivel’s script) captures the excess of this particular scene better by emphasizing the noisy chaos of the kitchen at this moment, but even the film tones down the carnivalesque spirit of excess by showing wide-camera angles and using diffused images when portraying scenes involving sexual or visceral excess. Recall, for example, the soft pink and purple hues, and the careful distance with which the film approaches the mass vomiting scene at Rosaura’s banquet. 4. Laura Esquivel agreed to allow me to send her my questions dealing with aspects of humor in her first novel and to return her written answers in early winter of 1998. Regarding the potentially parodic (and ironic) treatment of popular genres, she wrote, “I have said before that I never deliberately set out to parody anything. . . . In the event that I would consider parodying something, I would choose to parody pretentious and intellectual literature . . . not the naive functionality of sentimental novels” [“Ya dije antes que mi intención deliberada nunca fue parodiar nada. . . . en caso de que se me ocurriera parodiar algo, me parecería más merecedor de parodia la literatura pretenciosa e intelectualoide . . . que la ingenua funcionalidad de cualquier novela sentimental”]. Unpublished interview, to be included in my forthcoming book Other Ways of Laughing: Latin American Women Authors and Humor. 5. It is largely for this reason that the comic and carnivalesque Gertrudis (an exaggerated version of María Felix’s cinematic renditions of the soldadera, discussed later in my chapter) in most scenes is a much more effective presentation of local color than are Tita’s equally excessive expressions of her grief (her mile-long blanket, for example). The latter are generalized examples of magical realism; the former localized forms of parody. 6. “A través de los elementos asociados al universo de la cocina se alteran, entre otros, los límites de la casa, del cuerpo, de la geografía topográfica o histórica” (572). Translation mine. 7. In Ibsen’s “On Recipes, Reading and Revolution.” 8. In the interview with Esquivel mentioned earlier, the author states that “strict rules do not apply in the kitchen” [“las reglas estrictas no funcionan en la cocina”], but she quickly adds that, creativity aside, “no one would dare sprinkle water inside a pan with boiling oil” [“estoy segura que nadie se atravería a verter agua en un sartén con aceite hirviendo”]. The author’s comments reflect well the novel’s desire to find a balance between, creativity and caution. In the novel, the young Tita does dare to sprinkle water on the boiling oil just to see the “water dance,” but when sister

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Rosaura burns her fingers trying, Mamá Elena punishes the instigator for daring to use the functional space of the kitchen as her playground. 9. Pilcher’s thesis, argued convincingly and with ample historical documentation, is that the long tradition of cookbooks and other culinary manuals in Mexican history records the “process of unifying regional cooking styles into a national cuisine” (3). Addressing regional and class differences, as well as the decisive role of gender, in regional and national debates over culinary tastes, the author outlines the importance of this form of popular culture in the formation of national identity. For another excellent discussion of nineteenth-century cookbooks, nationalism, and gender specifically in relation to Esquivel’s novel, see Kristine Ibsen’s chapter on Like Water for Chocolate in Latin American Literature and Its Times. 10. Allusions to Mexican popular music are also present, especially to the corridos, rancheras, or boleros of the Mexican pop music world. 11. For a study of the history and current popularity of the women’s fotonovela in Mexico, see Cornelia Butler Flora’s article. A broader treatment of the history and politization of fotonovelas and historietas (of all types) can be found in Ann Rubenstein’s excellent Bad Language, Naked Ladies, & Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico. Alex Giardino’s 1999 article, “Strip Tease: Mexico’s SoftCore Comics Craze,” provides recent proof of the genre’s continuing popularity. 12. See Jeffrey Pilcher’s book (58). 13. The soldaderas were a reality of the Mexican Revolution. What is improbable is that a character like Gertrudis would ever have reached the rank of general, especially under Pancho Villa. I thank Mexican historian Francie Chassen-López for bringing this to my attention. See also note 30. 14. It is important to note that Doane does not include comic or carnivalesque genres as a possible site of “textual intervention.” Adopting an almost exclusively Freudian view of humor, she fears that the “joke” will be on the woman if/when women use jokes. As Kathleen Rowe notes in her own assessment of Doane’s theories in The Unruly Woman, Doane seems to miss “an obvious site of fantasy and masquerade [in] comedy” (6). 15. The exotic but rather modest tragedies of this novel cannot even begin to match what Monsiváis calls “the incontinence” [“la incontinencia”] of Mexican melodramas such as Ismael Rodríguez’s “We, the Downtrodden” [Nosotros los pobres], or “The Two Little Orphans” [Las dos huerfanitas] (1943). Anyone who has recently seen even one episode of a Mexican telenovela could make the same point. In Monsiváis’s Album de Familia, pp. 66–68. 16. Beatriz González Stephan, Kristine Ibsen, Gastón Lillo, María Angélica Alvarez, and Monique Sarfati-Arnoud are among these critics. 17. Monsiváis makes this comment parenthetically in his collection of essays, Aires de familia. Cultura y sociedad en América Latina (46). The neologism refers to the biological phagocyte that ingests and devours microorganisms or body cells 18. On this point my view is antithetical to that of Kathleen Glenn, Tina Escaja, Kristine Ibsen, María Angélica Alvarez, and a number of others who have argued the “dialogic” nature of Esquivel’s narrative in this novel. As developed in the rest of this chapter, my argument is that while the novel has the structural promise of dialogism,

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its monologic voice, its trivialization of dialogue, and its tendency to reduce all metaphors to culinary images cut that promise short. 19. Rosaura’s treatment as a female grotesque in the novel is equally problematic. By projecting grotesque qualities onto the elder sister, Esquivel reproduces the Cinderella story without questioning the complex social motives and cultural fears that turn women into “ugly stepsisters.” Serving also as the model of the “other woman” in melodrama, Rosaura comes to represent (but not subvert) all the negative stereotypes about young wives who are neither exceptionally nurturing nor exceptionally erotic. The depiction of her out-of-control body makes fun of but does not question the pernicious cultural prejudices that turn pregnant, unloved, and overweight women into women who “explode” because they cannot control their urges (when in fact Rosaura is the most repressed of the three sisters) and thus deserve their miserable fate. Her death of digestive problems, manifested in a noisy and malodorous attack of flatulence (232–233) is intended to be one of the funniest moments of the novel, but here the humor turns viciously against the ill female body. 20. Rowe credits Lucy Fischer’s article, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child: Comedy and Matricide,” for this insight. 21. The treatment of the Chinese salesman and counterfeiter who profits from the revolution but is valued by the family for having been able to find the fabrics for Rosaura’s wedding dress is likewise stereotypical. He is referred to simply as “this little Chinaman” “[e]ste chinito”] (31). 22. Ruth Behar has amply documented the early history of this fear in her studies of the Mexican Inquisition (178–206). 23. In Coe and Coe, A History of Chocolate in the New World, 184–186. 24. When Pedro enters to the kitchen and sees Tita nursing his son, he regards her as “Ceres personfied, the goddess of nourishment herself ” [“Ceres personificada, la diosa de la alimentación en pleno”] (77). 25. The novel’s title is itself a reference to a fluid, at least when taken in its literal meaning. 26. It is important to recall that the wedding banquet scene immediately follows the all-white description in which Tita fears she will be “swallowed up” by the whitness of the sugar she is adding to the wedding cake. 27. In my discussion of bodies and fluids, I have also been influenced by Klaus Theweleit’s analysis of fluids and abjection in pre-Nazi Germany. For Theweleit, the female and the marginalized body’s fluids are perceived by National Socialism as threatening to the health of a “solid” nation. 28. In her introduction to Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and NineteenthCentury British Fiction, Gillooly explains that she uses the term “feminine” in a theoretical, not an essentialist, sense, to differentiate a certain type of humorous affect that reflects “values and qualities that culture . . . has deemed to be appropriate to or characteristic of women” (xxii). Although Gillooly does not include irony as a trait of typically feminine humor (associating irony with more aggressive and more masculinecoded comic practices), it is evident that the gentle or teasing irony in Esquivel’s novel belongs to the novel’s gentle or “feminine” humor.

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29. In her letter to her sister, Gertrudis reveals that Juan, the soldier who took her away from the ranch, left her because he could not keep up with her sexual demands [“[m]e dejó porque sus fuerzas se estaban agotando a mi lado, sin haber logrado aplacar mi fuego interior”] (126). In Gertrudis’s case, the parody of inversion is maintained until nearly the end of the novel. 30. As mentioned earlier, the choice of Pancho Villa as the revolutionary figure under whom Gertrudis fights seems to be based strictly on name recognition, but shows little interest in historical research on the author’s part. Elizabeth Salas points out in Soldaderas in the Mexican Military, that Pancho Villa was the most misogynous of revolutionary leaders. As such, he was much less likely than other revolutionaries to allow a woman to rise to the ranks of general. On the other hand, Kristine Ibsen points out that the character of Gertrudis is a parody not so much of the soldaderas of the Mexican revolution, but the representation of these women as revolutionary soldiers in popular Mexican literature and film. 31. It is also fully in keeping with the theme of anxiety over maternal separation. 32. Emphasizing even more the symbolic representation of purity that the protagonist fears yet appears to desire, this passage then reveals that what Tita remembers having dreamed is that one day she would be walking on that same aisle hanging on a man’s arm. 33. The film confirms this image of Tita as a “virginal” heroine (even after she has sexual relations with Pedro) by casting the petite and demure Lumi Cavazos in the title role. While Tita is said to have a body much like Gertrudis, who is described as voluptuous and depicted as such by the actress who plays her role, our filmic image of Tita is more Audrey Hepburn than Rita Hayworth. 34. See Jean Franco’s chapter “The Power of The Spider Woman: The Deluded Woman and The Inquisition” in Plotting Women (55–76).

CHAPTER THREE 1. Andrew Hurley translates the story’s title as “True Romances,” capturing the “tabloid” and pulp-fiction flavor of the story. My translation aims to convey both the detective and pulp aspect of the story with “Red-Hot Story.” Neither mine nor Hurley’s translation captures the double meaning of historia as both “history” or “chronicle” and “story” or “fiction.” 2. I include Vilma’s husband Paul among the “Latin lovers.” Although French, he turns out to be a more sophisticated but no less misogynistic version of the Latin macho. 3. Benítez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island, Roberto González Echevarría’s work on Alejo Carpentier, and María Julia Daroqui’s (Dis)locaciones: Narrativas híbridas del Caribe hispano were particularly useful on the subject of carnivalesque parody in a Caribbean context. 4. Translation mine. In the same passage, Daroqui points out that the different uses of these traits also distinguish the different nationalities within Caribbean discourse.

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5. Daroqui dates this typically Puerto Rican concern with “desacralizing” language to a famous debate that took place at the University of Puerto Rico in 1970, where the literary historian Francisco Manrique Cabrera and the writer Luis Rafael Sánchez took opposing sides on the issue of linguistic purity. The debate was subsequently published in the journal Zona de carga y descarga (1972–1975). 6. Ana Lydia Vega has expressed some consternation at being straightjacketed into a brand of early feminism that does not suit her own or her stories’ ambivalent position on gender problems. Yet she has consistently opted for themes and narrative voices that highlight sexual and gender conflicts as platforms for comically exposing the entrenched conventions and prejudices lurking behind cultural stereotypes 7. As noted on the title page, the story wins the “Premio Juan Rulfo Internacionale” in Paris, in 1984. 8. While the importance of the detective story genre has been discussed with relation to this novel, the connection to film has been made only in passing. No one, to my knowledge, has developed the important link between this story and film noir. Given Ana Lydia Vega’s self-admitted cinephilia, it is highly probable that she would have seen the two films I mention in this paragraph and made them part of her parodic “collage” of noir thrillers. 9. De Palma’s horror film Carrie, in which a woman’s revenge is predicated on her abject fluids, might be a pertinent but indirect allusion in the story. 10. No woman director is named in the story. What has convinced me that Potter’s short film may serve as a second “textual” background for the parody is not only the fact that the author spends considerable time in France, but that this film was much talked about in European cinephile circles in the early 1980s. I confess, however, that my thinking of Potter’s film in relation to Vega’s story involves the visual impact of a detail rather than from analytical detective work. The word “libreto” [“libretto”] on the first page of the story, unusual in a story that refers mostly to noir films first, and to gothic and horror novels next, immediately alerted me to the possible influence of Potter’s film. 11. These were the major Latin American film industries at the time. 12. Including, naturally, the early “crime” stories of Jorge Luis Borges. 13. In Monsiváis, “South of the Border, Down Mexico’s Way. Hollywood in Latin American Cinema,” Album de familia, 73–74. 14. Although this might appear to contradict what I say earlier about the lack of indifferent bystanders, it does not. The neighbors all claim to have clearly heard the noises leading to the crime, the actual crime itself, and the woman’s screams as she rounded the corridors in search of help. They simply did not think the sensual, oversexed, unmarried woman was worth saving. 15. "Por estar rezando no fue, epitaña el Club de Esposas Condominadas mientras Machistas Unidos Jamás Serán Jodidos recoge la consigna herica del asesino que se entrega al día siguiente” [“It didn’t happen because she was praying, announced the Club of Condom-Protected Wives while the United Males for Protection of Virile Honor take up the heroic banner of the assassin who turns himself in the next day”](9).

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16. Susanne Becker notes, too, that the rise of the Gothic as a novelistic genre coincides with the first modern wave of feminism at the turn of the century (79). 17. Judging from the photograph at the end of his dead taxidermic trophies’ album, Paul has been scheming to “hunt” Vilma for some time. 18. Paul’s French parents might be a possible exception, but their marriage is in France, not Puerto Rico. 19. The narrator’s name is a particularly good pseudonym for a woman detective/writer. While “Carola” is a reminder of the Puerto Rican appropriation of an American name, “Vidal” is clearly meant to suggest the root of “ver” and “visión,” even if the term is etymologically closer to vital (vital, alive). As the story makes clear and as I discuss later, however, Carola’s view of things is always peripheral. She appears to see more than she wishes to see, but her speculative powers are sadly myopic. 20. Carola appears embarrassed by the all too sordid details of Vilma’s account of her sexual and psychological abuse at the hands of her spouse, feigns both shock and discomfort at being trapped into witnessing Vilma’s erotic seductions of Doctor Rousseau, and expresses genuine displeasure at being coerced into looking at Paul’s trophy photos of the dead and stuffed animals he has hunted (or the wife he plans to turn into a trophy). Yet she does not actively attempt to remove herself from these scenes of spectacle. 21. It is clear from the narrative that Carola’s mother had spent considerable time spying on Malén’s “indecent” behavior. Vilma insists that her mother-in-law enjoys standing outside her bedroom when she and Paul have physical fights. Doña Finí, Carola’s landlady, spends almost all her time documenting the comings and goings of Carola’s “stalker,” who turns out to be none other than an ex-boyfriend (and future killer). 22. Sheets-Johnstone adds that, by positioning themselves at the vantage point of the epistemological power granted to specifically male vision, “males instantiate females as bodies that are in themselves powerless, bodies that are there to be subservient and useful to males; and females, acquiescing to this archetypal power of optics, instantiate males as bodies that are in themselves powerful, bodies that are there to hold sway and dominate” (123). 23. I refer here to Becky Boling’s carefully argued article, “The Reproduction of Ideology in ‘Pasión de historia’ and ‘Caso omiso,’ in which the critic reads the stories not as parodies, but as satirical parodies that reproduce the conventions of the detective and the tabloid story to reveal both their misogynist implications and the fact that even the (woman) “victim is trapped by the imaginary concepts of the pornographic mind” (95). 24. This is Andrea Ostrov’s view in “Escritura femenina/escritura especular.” Acta Literaria 16 (1991): 77–83. 25. It is worth noting that while the detective or mystery genre dramatizes the equation between voyeuristic seeing and a will to know(ledge) in ways that are impossible to miss, the preoccupation with the possible link between concupiscence and the desire for knowledge is at least as old as St. Augustine and his Confessions, as the saint (as converted sinner) worries that the concupiscentia hidden in his desire to understand may not be entirely unrelated to his earlier concupiscentia for women’s bodies. This fear

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of a conceptual overlap between knowledge and cupidity runs through Western philosophy and psychology right up to the present. Freud speaks about it in his essay on Leonardo da Vinci, where he speculates that the pursuit of knowledge requires training in sexual sublimation. Taking St. Augustine’s phrase “lust of the eyes” as his point of departure for his reflections on the subject, the Heidegger of Being and Time observes the difficulty of fleshing out the desire to understand from sensual desire (212). 26. In Image-Music-Text, 119. 27. For Mulvey and other feminist critics of male spectatorship, the direct consequence of the male gaze is that it fetishizes women. 28. Vega’s flawless sense of comic timing in this story is often achieved with the simple but perfect (and perfectly ironic) choice of names. It had to be a Rousseau who would come to treat the “noble savage” (Carola) only to be trapped by a set of “tropical tits.” 29. Mulvey herself reconsiders her earlier premises and reconsiders the relation between spectacle and spectator in “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’” 30. For the reader with the appropriate personal gossip about the “real” Ana Lydia Vega, it is impossible to miss the parallels between Carola Vidal and the author (both teachers, both writers, both fascinated with the “fait divers,” both pleased to have their “very own Woolfian room”). Yet the possible narcissistic parody becomes even more carnivalesque if one decides that the other two women—the truly “spectacular” women in the story—are also foils for Ana Lydia Vega: Malén’s physical description (the “Lolaflores hair,” “the bee-stung lips”) [ “melena lolaflores, labios más que carnosos”] fits the sensual and exotic-looking author; Vilma’s marriage to a Frenchman captures yet another well-known fact of the author’s biography. As a self-parodic coup, this one plays with notions of multiple selves and mirror reflections in an Irigarayan sense. In this reading of the ending, the story’s final carnivalesque joke would consist of trapping the reader into witnessing the staged death of the author not once, but thrice. 31. It is evident from the comic tone of the series’ name that the Spanish is meant to convey a stronger meaning than “We Shall Be,” which I find to be a weak translation of “seremos” in this instance.

CHAPTER FOUR 1. A literal but awkward translation of the novel’s title would be National Reality from the Bed. Bedside Manners is the title of the published translation of this novel. All translations of passages cited in this chapter are my own. 2. Officially and euphemistically labeled “Proceso de reorganización nacional” (“Process of National Reorganization”), this period of military rule encompasses the years between 1976 and 1983. It is better known, of course, as the Dirty War. 3. Commenting on the circumstances that inspired the story of Realidad nacional in an interview with Gwendolyn Días, Valenzuela notes that what appears dream-like in the novel is in fact reality: “I’m not dealing with dreams. Everything that is happening

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finds its way into your private space. There is no separate public realm, especially when you’re dealing with a situation like the one that Argentina went through in that period of hyperinflation, the rebel military maneuvers of the carapintadas, the lootings in supermarkets and the martial orders; all this was so overwhelming and so violent [“no se trata de nada onírico. Todo lo que te está ocurriendo se cuela en tu espacio privado. No hay un exclusivo dominio público, sobre todo cuando pasa lo que pasó en la Argentina en el momento de la hiper inflación, de los levantamientos de los cara pintadas y los saqueos de los supermercados y las órdenes marciales; un momento tan desbordante y de tanta agresión] (43). In La palabra en vilo, ed. Díaz and Lagos. My translation. 4. Valenzuela has noted on several occasions that Realidad nacional was initially a work commissioned by an avant-garde New York theater troupe. The production was never funded, and the author gave up on trying to finish it as a play. For more details of the theatrical beginning of this novel, see the author’s interview with Juanamaría Cordones-Cook, “Luisa Valenzuela habla sobre Novela negra con argentinos y Realidad nacional desde la cama.” 5. Early in the novel the protagonist muses that “it was possible that the huge bed in the middle of that single room had made her feel as if she was in the middle of a stage.” Continuing in the third person, the narrative reveals that “[s]he liked to act, this woman”(11). 6. In the interview with Díaz cited earlier, Valenzuela makes the following observation: “in the play I couldn’t quite grasp what I was looking for. That’s why I wrote the novel” [“en la obra no lograba comprender aun lo que buscaba. Por eso escribí la novela”](43). 7. Bakhtin makes an exception for Menippean medieval satire and certain kinds of mystery plays. It is no accident that Realidad nacional shares a number of important elements with Menippean satire, such as the use of the fantastic in the service of philosophical or ideological purposes, the mix of different generic elements, the “experimental fantasticality” that allows for “oversaturation [of reality] from some unusual point of view,” the reliance on oxymoronic contrasts, among others. Problems of Dostoyevski’s Poetics, 114–117. 8. Ksenija Bilbija, “El gran teatro del mundo (argentino)” (197). Taking a very different approach to the novel by emphasizing the “testimonial” self-portraiture of the narrative, Helene Anderson sees the dual narrative as divided between the mimetic and the self-reflexive, and she argues that the construction of the self-portrait is the subtext of the novel. 9. Bilbija discusses the “unmasking” of the nation’s false realities through the novel’s carnivalesque inversions in “El gran teatro del mundo (argentino).” Ricardo Gutiérrez Mouat focuses on the novel as a carnivalesque national allegory in “La alegoría nacional y Luisa Valenzuela.” Diane Marting has also written on the allegorical nature of this novel. 10. D. Emily Hicks’s categories of “border spaces” and “border subjects” have influenced my articulation of resistance in this novel. Hicks discusses Valenzuela’s earlier fictions, “Cambio de armas” and Cola de lagartija, in Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text.

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11. In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson writes that the “function of the cultural text is . . . staged . . . as an interference between levels, as a subversion of one level by another” (56). 12. Writing about this novel in After Exile. Writing the Latin American Diaspora, Amy Kaminsky notes that “[t]he instability of identity in this text is a function of survival” (122). I am in complete agreement. Nevertheless, along with this desire for survival is a script for resisting conditions that would make future survival either less likely or less worthwhile. 13. Unlike the shifty and fickle stereotypical donna addressed in Verdi’s famous aria in Rigoletto, the señora in Valenzuela’s novel is not going anywhere, nor will she let anyone (including Alfredi) move her until she has found a way to commit to a version of reality. 14. The allegorical nature of many of the novel’s characters (“Lucho,” for struggle, “Patri” suggesting “patria” or fatherland) makes it tempting to extend the same treatment to Carla’s name, which sounds both unusually masculine (for a feminine name) and vaguely Germanic in Spanish. Naturally it could also be suggestive of Marx, but the way in which Carla stresses the fact that “not anyone” has access to her country club leads me to reject the latter possibility. 15. In “The Rest Cure: Repetition or Resolution of Victorian Women’s Conflicts,” Bassuk explains that the rest cure was developed by Philadelphia neurologist S. Weir Mitchell to “treat soldiers with battle fatigue,” but she adds that “the majority of women treated in this manner” were diagnosed with “severe” or “obstinate” nervous symptoms and chronic pelvic complaints. She goes on to note many of those subjected to the treatment never improved. 16. According to Bassuk, Dr. Mitchell and his followers believed that nervous women were “profoundly selfish and tyrannical” and that they succeeded in “exerting a negative influence on everyone around them.” The “moral reeducation” (Mitchell’s term) that Bassuk describes in detail in her article consisted in teaching women “to keep feelings under control.” The system that Mitchell advised for his own patients was a rigorous, methodical program of “order, control, and self-restraint” (143). 17. Piglia writes that the medical discourse that circulated during the dictatorship insisted that “the country was sick, a virus had corrupted it, it was necessary to perform a drastic intervention. The Military State considered itself the only surgeon capable of operating, without delay or demagoguery. To survive, society had to survive that major surgery. Some zones had to be operated on without anesthesia” [“el país estaba enfermo, un virus lo había corrompido, era necesario realizar una intervención drástica. El Estado militar se autodefinía como el único cirujano capaz de operar, sin postergaciones y sin demagogia. Para sobrevivir, la sociedad tenía que soportar esa cirugía mayor. Algunas zonas debían ser operadas sin anestesia”] (180). 18. The narrator appears to read the major’s mind when she states that the military personnel see her as some “luckless nobody” who came back from abroad infected with “la peste de la indiferencia” [“the plague of indifference”], an ailment that prevents her from seeing the “brilliant national destiny” that they (the military) embody.

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19. In “La alegoría nacional y Luisa Valenzuela,” Gutiérrez Mouat argues that the protagonist “finally recovers through her erotic complity with the latter (Alfredi) and the (carnivalesque) defeat of the military rebels” [“La señora finalmente se recupera mediante la complicidad erótica con este último y la derrota (carnavalesca) de los golpistas”], 214–215. 20. Interview with Gwendolyn Días, 43. In the article mentioned earlier, Bilbija notes that “the señora, seemingly passive and naked, is in reality and actively involved in the recovery and reconstruction of national identity” (“[l]a señora que aparece pasiva y desnuda realmente está involucrada activamente en la recuperación y construcción de la identidad nacional”] (201). 21. These issues are in turn cast against a complex dynamic that pits historical memory against present accountability. 22. Debra Castillo has argued along similar lines in noting that Valenzuela’s characters frequently and successfully usurp the weapons and tactics of domination (the master’s weapons) for purposes of both survival and transgression. Although the lethargy and passivity of the señora are self-imposed, the body undergoes a similarly subversive treatment in Realidad nacional. 23. It is possible to see in Bergson’s comments a reaction not just against technology but also against eccentricity. His theory, which tends toward the prescriptive and not merely the descriptive, insists on a certain model of adaptive body—one that would seem to exclude the very models of alienation that will make us laugh (and think) in much of twentieth-century fiction. Despite these caveats, his comments are indeed helpful in understanding why certain kinds of what we would call slapstick comedy strike us as laughable. 24. The association of working-class trades with reactionary attitudes is problematic; on the other hand, as I discuss later, the shantytown dwellers are not characterized by these mechanized movements. 25. According to Marcel Gutwirth, the melancholy figure of Pierrot “rose to heights of augmented pathos throughout the nineteenth century,” replacing the “nimble, shrewd [and] unscrupulous” antics of the earlier Harlequin with a befuddled and confused, if endearing, clumsiness. Gutwirth sees Pierrot not only as the inspiration for Baudelaire’s “Vieux saltimbanque” [The Old Acrobat,] but of Kafka’s “Hunger Artist “ (146). 26. The carnivalization of language, an important aspect of the carnivalesque in the novel, has been discussed by both Bilbija and Gutiérrez Mouat in the articles mentioned earlier. 27. It is highly relevant that in a novel in which everything and everyone seems to have allegorical subtexts, hunger is simply physical, anatomic hunger. 28. In Problems of Dostoievsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin states that the “mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king” is central to the theme of death and renewal that accompanies carnivalesque rituals. (124). 29. It is worth noting, however, that although the novel teeters on the edge of farce throughout, it never completely succumbs to this mode. Morton Gurewitch differentiates between the “farcical absurd” and the “ironic aburd” by pointing out that the “ironic temper lacks the reckless, manic vitality of farce”(101). Thus, although the

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collage of parody, slapstick, and the absurd contribute to the novel’s farcical effects, the equally sustained uses of irony and the carnivalesque keep the novel from evolving into an all-condeming farce. 30. Bilbija speaks of “la inestabilidad y la ambigüedad de la identidad” (202) in the novel. Gutiérrez Mouat highlights “el corifeo de la reconciliación nacional.”(214). 31. Anderson, Bilbija, and Gutiérrez Mouat all use the term to refer to certain aspects, or characterizations, in the novel. 32. The major part of Booth’s study, which remains extraordinarily helpful to date, focuses on readings of stable (more classical) uses of irony, most of which are noncomic in tone. 33. The allusion to Freud and Cixous is obviously intentional and comic in this passage. 34. She even resists getting up one more time when Alfredi, triumphant after having convinced the soldiers to march to dinner instead of war, invites her to get up and dance with him. 35. Lucho is of course the most obvious symbol of the victimized and co-opted poor. The people heaping insults on the soldiers are there to mock authority. The protagonist is the passive critic. Ironically, the novel suggests that while each of these resistant poses is necessary, none is sufficient by itself. 36. It is worth noting that when the protagonist asks him who he really is, he says he is “the one who came to end the farce” [“el que vino a acabar con esta farsa”] (104). 37. I do not wish to underestimate the importance of the historical moment in commenting on significant changes I perceive in the author’s trajectory; simply to note that the change in tone is evident despite the recurrence of common themes and common “ghosts.”

CHAPTER FIVE The original of the first epigraph is: "La antigua Fiorella quiso reír como en sus mejores tiempos, mas no lo logró: la primera carcajada le vino a ocasionar tales trastornos respiratorios que volvió casi a repetir el trance de aquellas atosigantes nebulizaciones” (34). This novel has not been translated to date. 1. E. G. Kantaris translates the protagonist’s name as “disseminating flowers.” Given to her by her anarchist-utopian father, the name could also be literally translated as “sowing” or “seeding” flowers. Confronted with the child’s name as a fait accompli, her mother decides to call her Fiorella. Her childhood friend Caña (or “la Caña) calls her “Sembra,” for short. 2. See the previous chapter. 3. This behavior includes her demand to be read old novels, her insistence on scribbling copious notes in her black logbooks, her conversations with real and ghostly guests, and her questioning of her doctor’s treatment at every stage of her illness. 4. Although Somers was reticent about the personal details of the disease that afflicted her shortly before her death, it is reasonable to suspect that it was either

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chylothorax or a similar ailment, so there is a strong autobiographical strain in the novel. Chylothorax is a rare disease in which excessive amounts of lymphatic fluid are found in the pleural space between the chest wall and the lungs. A related disease known as pseudochylothorax results in a similar increase in pleural lymphatic fluid and is usually caused by a chronic inflammatory infections such as tuberculosis. Common treatments of the disease include the practice of thoracentesis, in which a needle is injected through the back and into the pleural space to drain the excessive lymph fluid. If this method is insufficient, a tube is inserted into the patient’s pleural space to drain the extra fluid. In the novel, the patient is subjected to this drainage (through a semipermanent tube) throughout. 5. There are also male bodily fluids in the novel. Most notably, the “Minotaur’s” semen and the nasal discharge of Fiorella’s first boyfriend. But the novel clearly privileges the female body and “feminine” fluids. 6. The novel contains multiple narrative voices, but is framed and sustained by a third person narrator. Yet the intimacy established between narrator and protagonist from the outset leads the reader to believe that the protagonist is narrating her own story, the story she supposedly writes in her hospital notebooks. 7. In his excellent psychoanalytic-existential study of the novel’s discourse on abjection, Elia Geoffrey Kantaris notes that the multiple implications and intertextual echoes of the novel’s opening cannot be fully understood until one is aware of the importance that Heidegger has for the protagonist. Toward the end of the novel, the novel’s fictional editor finds a copy of Heidegger’s Being and Time on the patient’s night table and comes to the realization that this, not the Mother’s Manuscript, was the patient’s more worrisome bedtime reading. As I note briefly later in the chapter, the meditation on Time at the beginning of the novel is also an unmistakable allusion to the canonical novels of European modernism, so many of which, like Mann’s Magic Mountain or Proust’s famous novel, took psychic time and invalid bodies as their object of narrative exploration. 8. Rómulo Cosse’s discussion of the novel’s structure is extremely helpful. But Cosse himself admits that it is only a partial and schematic study of the massive novel. 9. See Kristeva’s Powers of Horror. 10. Despite its dark edges and often complex targets, there is little doubt as to the comic undertones of the novel’s cynicism. While it is difficult to imagine a feminocentric humor that did not have transgression or subversion as its aim, the fact that this novel sets the site for its acid wit and caustic satire around a body that cannot be made to stop oozing a highly infectious fluid makes the anarchic potential of the humor all the more notable. 11. See JoAnna Isaak’s Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter. 12. The autobiographical nature of the novel (not only in the fictionalized treatment of the protagonist’s illness) has been noted by various critics but most insistently by Perera San Martín and Rómulo Cosse. 13. The writer could have referred to the lymphatic fluid as “el fluido linfático.” By calling it simply “la linfa” she turns it into a notably feminine discharge. 14. For a discussion of the female body in Armonía Somers’s earlier work (especially her two novels La mujer desnuda and Un retrato para Dickens), see Alexandra

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Fitts’s thesis, “Reading the Body/Writing the Body: Constructions of the Female Body in the Work of Latin American Women Writers” (1995). 15. Significantly, in a notable departure from the author’s earlier works, the protagonist female body is neither an object of male desire (the only scenes in which it is depicted as such are distanced by memory and dramatically interrupted before any consummation of this desire could take place) nor a reproductive vessel. 16. Commenting on this same passage, Kantaris observes that “[t]he draining away of the lymph fluid, the losing of the proper and ‘becoming other’ of self, is a steady erosion of the identity structures of the symbolic through a corporeal dissolution which, as with all bodily wastes, renders the borders of the body worryingly indistinct” (97). 17. In another example of intertextuality, Somers’ reference to Beethoven as “el Gran Sordo” is surely borrowed from Carpentier’s own nickname for Beethoven in Los pasos perdidos. 18. I am not implying the possibility of a conflicting lesbian desire on the part of the protagonist in this scene, although lesbianism does appear, indirectly, in Somers’s novel. What strikes me as relevant in this scene is the desire to stop the Romantic Eighth Symphony from “seducing” a young woman into false romantic illusions. 19. I use modernist and modernity in the general sense usually accorded these terms outside Latin American literature. As my section on intertextuality makes clear, the influence of the Boom canon on Somers’s novel is everywhere, but so are Somers’s own postmodern deconstructive tendencies. 20. Kantaris discusses the novel’s interest in building “a continuum” between mother and daughter as the novel’s most radical project. 21. A more extensive reading of Elefantes as a counter-Boom novel might note the parallels between Fuentes’s Death of Artemio Cruz and Somers’s novel. Reading Somers’s Elefantes against Bombal’s La amortajada and Donoso’s El obsceno pajaro de la noche would yield fascinating results. 22. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” (Monster Theory: Reading Culture. E. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996): 3–25. 23. Also of interest is the fact that Ewers is sometimes considered a Nazi author, yet his ambivalent relationship to National Socialism led to a banning of his books in 1934. 24. Zizek is referring specifically to temporal or historical crossroads, but his point can be applied to geographical crossroads as well. 25. “The comic can only be absolute relative to fallen humanity,” notes Baudelaire in “De l’essence du rire” (986).

CHAPTER SIX 1. As with the other texts I discuss, I have used my own translation of Borinsky’s novel throughout. Cola Franzen’s translation of the novel, entitled All Night Movie, has just appeared in print.

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2. While every man who makes a cameo appearance in the novel seems to be desperately seeking his Matilde (or Malvina), every woman is out for herself. Both pseudonun Analía and the Girls of the Cult of Eve appear capable of lasting devotion and loyalty, but only until they tire of their frustrated searches or find a better idol to follow. 3. In conversation, the author mentioned that she remembers spending whole Sunday afternoons and evenings as a young adolescent in such cinemas, sometimes falling asleep and waking up in the middle of another film. 4. Titles like “con la frente marchita” [“with lines on my brow”] and “hoy te llaman perdida” [“Today They Call You Whore”] lose their comic-nostalgic flavor when translated literally. More important, they lose the connection to some of the most popular of tango lyrics. 5. García Canclini had already noted the link between videoclip and postmodernity in Culturas híbridas, when he argued that the videoclip was the genre that best captured the postmodern sensibility (284–285). 6. I am grateful to Patrick O’Connor for asking me to explain the difference between the carnivalesque and camp and in so doing getting me to shift the initial focus of this chapter. 7. Many scholars of camp distinguish between a general and a gay camp aesthetics or sensibility, although they agree that both share the important conventions outlined in this discussion of the genre. Along with other writers of gay camp, Kenneth J. Feil explains that while both genres of camp share a view of dominant cultural modes as repressive and both “overvalue” the marginal, gay camp seeks to impose a gay “view” on its audience, while general camp stops at ridiculing or parodying the social codes it targets. Borinsky’s novel favors heterosexual practices, but the “practices” in which heterosexuals engage are so perversely strange that one could not possibly associate them with sexual “norms” or “normalcy.” 8. Later in the novel, the ex-Mrs. Fracci as Salomé Moskovich makes a fortune for herself by opening a school of ethnic dances, which I suspect is nothing but a glorified tango school. 9. The novel first introduces homoerotic desire (or the mimed pose of it) at the end of this first scene, as young Noemí plants a wet kiss on Matilde’s lips before the latter boards the train. It returns to it later in its treatment of Raquel and Rosa. But lesbianism always appears as tangential or incidental to the heterosexual or masturbatory perversions featured in the stories. 10. I find echoes of the 1980s hit sitcom Roseanne in this particular story. 11. Margo Glantz, Luisa Futuransky, and Ana María Shúa come to mind. 12. María del Mar López Cabrales recently referred to the Jewish traces in Borinsky’s poetry and fiction in a paper delivered at the 2003 Latin American Studies Conference in Dallas, Texas. Her work on contemporary Latin American Jewish authors promises to be both timely and revealing. Although I make note of various points of intersection between Jewish literary themes or figures and this particular novel, it should be clear that the ethnic aspect of Borinsky’s novel is only of tangential importance in this chapter (and only of tangential importance, I would argue, in the author’s present fictional corpus). 13. First published as “D’Ithaca à New York” in 1974. Reprinted in Polylogue (1977), 495–515.

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14. I return to this point later in this chapter. 15. Later in the novel, the narrator will cheekily acknowledge the absurdity of her multiple names with a chapter title that quotes one of tango’s most famous lyrics: “acaso te llamaras simplemente María” [“perhaps you were just called Maria”]. 16. See Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, Rosi Braidotti’s Nomadic Subjects, and María Lugones’s article, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception.” 17. O’Connor’s article, “The Abandoned Seducer: Alicia Borinsky Reads Felisberto Hernández,” will appear in an upcoming collection of essays on Alicia Borinsky edited by Miriam González Echeverría. 18. ". . . un corpo che gioca con le categorie maschile/femminile, dentro/fuori, sotto/sopra, avanti/dietro, percezione soggettiva/definizione sociale della materialità corporea” (100). My translation. 19. "Il cyborg . . . introduce sul corpo delle donne elementi propri della storia del patriarcato: la forza, la violenza, la guerra, la velocità, la produttività . . . anche l’organismo cybernetico nasce in ambienti capitalistici e militari” (125). My translation. 20. I have wondered if Chantal’s first name and Fran Camufa’s (the pseudonym Rosa and Raquel choose for their editorials) might not be a comic allusion to the sociologist Chantal Mouffe, who does write about identity politics, but the connection seems far-fetched even for Borinsky. 21. The mention of the tile, in particular, makes the allusion to the last chapter of the second part of Cortazar’s Rayuela hard to miss. In this scene, readers will recall, Oliveira jumps to his death (or contemplates doing so), aiming to have his body hit “heaven” on the hopscotch that the inmates have drawn on the sanatorium’s tile. 22. For Sarmiento, this color is the living and visual emblem of savage native hoards and Asiatic barbarism. 23. These observations come from García Canclini’s essays “Fronteras multiculturales” in Cultura y Comunicación: entre lo global y lo local. 24. In Greek drama, mythology, and philosophy, the komos were the drunken young revelers (male in most sources I consulted) who are summoned at the end of a symposium to lighten up the atmosphere and entertain the men. Plato mentions them on several occasions (sometimes in relation to his discussion of prostitution).

EPILOGUE 1. "Se trata, por lo tanto, de poner en relieve el sistema mismo de la representación, la lógica que divide y define lo masculino y lo femenino como destino biológico, roles sociales, economías discursivas, fábulas de la identidad y verificaciones del poder” (55). My translation. 2. My reference here is to Anny Brookbank Jones’s essay, “Latin American Feminist Criticism Revisited,” published in 1996. Brookbank Jones, on the other hand, does argue for the desirability of such a political strategy behind the recognition of difference (213).

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Index

/

Abjection, 29, 48, 50, 95, 96, 97, 104, 105, 98–102, 110, 115, 117, 119, 122, 123, 159, 161, 168 Adams, Rachel, 128 Albee, Edgard, 89 Allende, Isabel, 153 Alvarez, María Angélica, 41, 158 Amado, Jorge, 3 Anderson, Benedict, 150, 164, 167 Angel, Albalucía, 153 Apte, Mahadev, 45 Austen, Jane, 20

entropic, 26, 29, 131 ill, 7, 32, 69, 97, 99, 100, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120, 121, 165 incontinent, 7, 26, 29, 31, 48, 51, 82, 100 lawless, 5, 7, 16, 26, 131 mutating, 5, 131–139, 147 torpid, 5, 7, 26, 28, 76, 77, 80, 82, 88 Bodily fluids, 4, 5, 10, 15, 27, 28, 34, 47, 48, 54, 83, 85, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 117, 123, 132, 140, 159, 161, 168, 169 Boling, Becky, 66 Boom, Latin American novel of , 24, 113, 114, 115, 169 Booth, Wayne, 89, 133, 167 Borders Bossuet, Bishop Jacques, 18 and humor, 4, 5, 8, 9, 14, 16, 54, 97, 100, 120, 128, 129, 146, 169 Bordo, Susan, 13, 14 Borges, Jorge Luis, 3, 135, 161 Borinsky, Alicia, 4, 5, 7, 8, 29, 82, 125–148, 150, 151, 153, 156, 169, 170, 171 Braidotti, Rosi, 132, 139, 171 Bryce Echenique, Alfredo, 3, 153 Buitrago, Fanny, 153 Butler, Judith, 139, 149, 156, 171 Byron, Lord, 19

Bakhtin, Mikael, 1, 22, 43, 48, 52, 54, 75, 86, 88, 111, 114, 121, 128, 164, 166 Balsamo, Anne, 141 Barreca, Regina, 11 Barthes, Roland, 68 Bassuk, Ellen, 78, 165 Bataille, Georges, 12, 29, 30, 111, 121, 154 Baudelaire, Charles, 20, 121, 122, 123, 156, 166, 169 Bauer, Dale, 156 Becker, Susanne, 61, 62, 162 Behar, Ruth, 159 Behn, Aphra, 155 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, 54, 160 Bergson, Henri, 21, 83, 84, 156, 166 Berman, Sabina, 153 Bilbija, Ksenija, 75, 164, 166, 167 Bodies deliquescent, 98–105

189

190

INDEX

Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 3, 54 Carnivalesque, 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, 16, 17, 22, 27, 28, 29, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 42, 44, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 57, 66, 68, 69, 71, 75, 76, 81, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 98, 122, 128, 130, 145, 146, 147, 150, 151, 157, 158, 160, 163, 164, 166, 167, 170 Cassirer, Ernst, 16, 17 Castellanos, Rosario, 3, 16, 154, 156 Castillo, Debra, 3, 11, 90, 153, 166 Cazamian, Louis, 16 Cervantes, Miguel de, 16, 156 Chaplin, Charlie, 83 Chaucer, 15 Cities, and women’s humor, 8, 9, 20, 23, 26, 29, 57, 58, 59, 60, 76, 102, 119, 120, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 131, 132, 133, 134, 137, 140, 141, 142, 146, 148 Cixous, Hélène, 6, 7, 26, 100, 154, 167 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 117, 169 Colaizzi, Giulia, 140 Comedy, 17, 20, 25, 44, 155 Attic, 14 romantic, 40, 44 Community, and women’s humor, 2, 45, 63, 83, 86, 89, 128, 136, 146, 148, 150, 155, 156 Cortázar, Julio, 3, 24, 25, 113, 114, 144, 156, 171 Cosse, Rómulo, 109, 111, 114, 168 Coutinho, Sonia, 125 Coward, Rosalind, 66 Cranny-Francis, Anne, 44 Cruz, Anne, 49, 155, 169 Cyborgs, 141, 142 Damrosch, David, 14 Daroqui, María Julia, 54, 61, 63, 160, 161 Darwin and laughter, 21, 83

Dasch, J. Michael, 71 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 15 de la Parra, Teresa, 155 De Palma, Brian, 55, 56, 161 De Ruggieri, Francesca, 141 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 29, 139, 176 Derrida, Jacques, 26 Diaspora in Latin American discourses, 131, 132, 136, 147 Díaz, Gwendolyn, 163, 166 Díaz, Jes˙s, 54, 73, 74, 164 Disney, Walt, 87, 89 Doane, Mary Anne, 29, 39, 40, 41, 67, 158 Donoso, José, 169 Douglas, Mary, 48 Dryden, 17 Eltit, Diamela, 150 English, James, 15, 18, 20, 25, 31, 46, 71, 153, 154 Escaja, Tina, 36, 158 Esquivel, Laura, 4, 6, 8, 26–52, 82, 99, 130, 150, 157, 158, 159 Ewers, Hanns Heinz, 118, 119, 169 Exhibitionism, and women, 68–72 Families, and women’s humor, 1, 2, 9, 16, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 43, 45, 48, 49, 51, 62, 63, 64, 65, 99, 110, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 136, 137, 150, 151, 159 Farce, 64, 87, 89, 91, 166, 167 Félix, María, 39, 157 Fernández de Lizardi, 23, 156 Film noir, 55–60 Fishburn, Evelyn, 120 Fitts, Alejandra, 169 Flay, Joseph, 156 Flora, Cornelia Butler, 158 Fordyce, John, 18 fotonovela, 39, 45, 158

INDEX Foucault, Michel, 13, 66 Franco, Jean, 3, 11, 51, 73, 153, 160 Freedom, and women’s humor, 15, 18, 19, 20, 22, 36, 64, 66, 84, 86, 111, 118, 123, 132, 133, 134, 147 Freud, Sigmund, 5, 11, 21, 31, 62, 66, 78, 98, 110, 111, 117, 146, 149, 156, 158, 163, 167 Futuransky, Luisa, 170 Galeen, Henrik, 118, 119 Galen, 15 Gallegos, Rómulo, 23, 24 Gambaro, Griselda, 153 García Canclini, Néstor, 143, 147, 170, 171 García Márquez, Gabriel, 3, 115, 135 Garfield, Evelyn Picón, 156 Gelpí, Juan, 63 Giardino, Alex, 158 Gillooly, Eileen, 10, 11, 31, 159 Glantz, Margo, 153, 170 Glenn, Kathleen, 41, 158 Glissant, Edouard, 71 Gorodischer, Angélica, 153 Gorriti, Manuela, 19 Gossip, and women’s humor, 6, 7, 16, 51, 58, 163 Gothic, and humor, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 97, 103, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 162 Graziano, Frank, 65 Gregory, John, 18 Grosz, Elizabeth, 11, 13, 48 Guerra, Rosa, 18 Gutiérrez Mouat, Ricardo, 75, 164, 166, 167 Halberstam, Judith, 117 Hall, Stuart, 147 Haraway, Donna, 141 Harvey, Sylvia, 64 Hegel on humor, 19, 156 Heidegger, Martin, 97, 110, 163, 168

191

Henderson, Jeffrey, 14, 155 Hicks, D. Emily, 76, 118, 164 Hitchcock, Alfred, 56 Hobbes, Thomas, 122, 155 Horsley, Lee, 70 Huarte, Juan, 15, 16, 155 Hugo-Jones, Siriol, 19 Humor absurd, 88 anarchic, 111, 147 black, 4, 8, 29, 45, 92, 96, 98, 105, 120, 121, 123, 127, 151, 153, 154 camp, 4, 8, 128, 129, 134, 135 carnivalesque, 42, 52 choleric, 7, 15, 43, 50, 82 choteo, 8, 71 entropic, 4, 5, 6, 8, 29, 125, 136, 149, 151, 156 farcical, 81, 87, 88, 89, 127, 128, 129, 133, 134, 135, 153, 166, 167 guachafita, 8, 71 sentimental, 5, 21 Humors bodily, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 15, 21, 26, 29, 35, 43, 47, 48, 82, 88, 96, 105, 120, 122, 123, 154, 157 Hurley, Andrew, 160 Hutcheon, Linda, 90 Hyppocrates, 15 Hysteria, 96 and humor, 78 see also madness Ibsen, Kristine, 36, 157, 158, 160 Intertextuality, 61, 62, 74, 103, 105, 107, 109, 111, 114, 119, 121, 168, 169 as contagion, 81, 103, 105 Irigaray, Luce, 11, 48, 100 Irony, 3, 19, 27, 28, 37, 49, 54, 55, 67, 75, 76, 89, 90, 97, 98, 105, 112, 113, 114, 115, 121, 122, 141, 156, 159, 167

192

INDEX

Jackson, Rosemary, 120 Jameson, Fredric, 71, 165 Jones, Gwyneth, 7 Jonson, Ben, 15, 16, 154, 155 Kafka, Franz, 89, 166 Kaminsky, Amy, 165 Kantaris, Elia Geoffrey, 95, 97, 109, 167, 168, 169 Kaplan, E. Ann, 59 Keaton, Buster, 83 Kershaw, Baz, 145 Kitsch, 34, 126, 127, 130, 140, 143, 146 Kristeva, Julia, 11, 48, 53, 95, 97, 99, 100, 101, 114, 121, 132, 168 Kunheim, Jill, 132 Lacan, Jacques, 66 Larsen, Neil, 8 Laughter, 1, 13, 21, 45, 83, 156, 168 Levin, Harry, 15, 155 Lillo, Gastón, 158 Little, Judy, 11 Loaeza, Guadalupe, 153 López Cabrales, María del Mar, 170 Lyotard, Jean FranÁois, 73, 149 Madness, and women’s humor, 29, 46, 62, 96, 110, 116, 118, 119, 146, 150 Mañach, Jorge, 71 Mansilla, Eduardo, 18 Martin, Emily, 48 Mass culture, 62, 158 Mattalía, Sonia, 156 Matto de Turner, Clorinda, 18, 19 McKendrick, Melveena, 155 Melodrama, 6, 8, 20, 24, 27, 31, 33, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 55, 112, 126, 129, 136, 159 Meredith, George, 20, 21 Modernism (continental), 56, 168 Molière, 17 Monsiv·is, Carlos, 158, 161

Monsters and the gothic grotesque, 62, 64, 97, 115, 117, 119, 120, 122 Montagu, Elizabeth, 18 Montero, Mayra, 153 Mosca, Stefanía, 153 Mulvey, Laura, 2, 10, 66, 163 National identity, and humor, 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 14, 19, 28, 38, 39, 41, 54, 55, 57, 59, 63, 65, 74, 75, 80, 81, 82, 86, 88, 89, 91, 92, 115, 133, 138, 139, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 150, 158, 164, 165, 166 Negroni, María, 11, 117 Nostalgia, and women’s humor, 34, 35, 46, 47, 73, 127, 135, 170 Novela rosa, 37 Ortega, Julio, 150 Ostrov, Andrea, 66, 162 Palacio Rame, María, 54 Parody, 8, 34, 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 46, 50, 53, 54, 55, 58, 60, 63, 67, 73, 76, 92, 97, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 127, 135, 137, 139, 142, 150, 157, 161, 163 Pastiche, 126, 131 Perera San Martín, Nicasio, 168 Peri Rossi, Cristina, 153 Picaresque novel, 16, 23, 111, 131, 133, 136, 137, 146, 147, 155 Picaresque women, 23, 131, 132, 137, 155 Piglia, Ricardo, 79, 165 Pilcher, Jeffrey, 36 Place, Janey, 72 Plato on humor, 14, 171 Poirer, Richard, 151 Pope, Alexander, 17, 73 Postcolonialism, 9, 27, 29, 54, 57, 61, 63, 71 Potter, Sally, 55, 161

INDEX Purity discourses of, 2, 18, 23, 48, 50, 51, 52, 62, 64, 70, 110, 160, 161 Quevedo, Francisco, 18 Rabelais, 15, 17, 22, 34, 128 Rabinowitz, Paula, 56, 57 Rage, and women’s humor, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 25, 32, 33, 64, 103, 118, 134, 140, 157 Ramos Otero, Manuel, 55, 64 Richard, Nelly, 30, 150 Robles, Mireya, 153 Rojas, Fernando de, 16, 155 Romanticism, 5, 32, 39, 40, 44, 50, 55, 65, 112, 122 Rowe, Kathleen, 10, 11, 16, 44, 45, 158, 159 Russo, Mary, 11, 22, 28, 125 Sábato, Ernesto, 115 Salas, Elizabeth, 160 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 54 Santos Febres, Mayra, 54 Sarduy, Severo, 54, 126 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 146, 171 Satire, 5, 17, 19, 28, 67, 75, 84, 85, 89, 92, 93, 97, 98, 114, 121, 123, 150, 153, 154, 162, 164, 168 Menippean, 164 Schelling, Vivian, 45 Schiller on humor, 19 Schlegel on humor, 19 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 110 Scophophilia, 55 Shakespeare, William, 17, 155 Shelley, Mary Wollestoncraft, 20 Showalter, Elaine, 77 Shua, Ana María, 153, 170 Simon, Erica, 15 Sklodowska, Elzbieta, 53 Socarronería, 37

193

Somers, Armonía, 4, 5, 7, 8, 28, 82, 95–123, 150, 154, 156, 167, 168, 169 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 3 Spectacle female, 2, 53, 54, 65, 66, 70, 72, 126, 128, 130, 143, 145, 146, 147, 162, 163 Spectatorship female, 68–70 Spencer on laughter, 13, 21 Spencer, Herbert, 13, 21 Spielberg, Steven, 87, 89 Subercaseaux, Elizabeth, 153 Swift, Jonathan, 17, 18 Tabloid, 58, 130 Taylor, Diana, 11, 79, 143, 154 Theweleit, Klaus, 159 Tristán, Flora, 18 Turner, Victor, 48 Usigli, Rodolfo, 57 Valenzuela, Luisa, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 26, 28, 73–93, 95, 98, 121, 127, 150, 163, 164, 165, 166 Valis, Noël, 130, 143 Vega, Ana Lydia, 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 27, 28, 53–72, 82, 98, 144, 153, 154, 161, 163 Velasco, Sherry, 136 Vives, Juan Luis, 15 Voyeurism, 27, 53, 55, 56, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 162 Walker, Nancy, 11 Walters, Susana D., 70, 144 Wandor, Michelene, 139 Wilke, Hannah, 98 Yánez, Mirta, 54 Zavala, Iris, 63 Zizek, Slavoj, 119, 169