February 24, 2017

Dear Readers,

What follows is a working draft of the preface to, and part of, the first chapter of my dissertation. It focuses on El ángel de Sodoma because this novel easily demonstrates how discourses and ideologies on sexual inversion are appropriated and, at the same time, deconstructed.

Although the title of my presentation for this workshop includes two novels, I am now contemplating breaking my analysis into two separate chapters but as parts of the same section. In other words, part one of my dissertation would focus on inverted masculinities and would include a preface that illustrates the main theoretical and analytical threads of the chapters. It will precede a chapter on El ángel de Sodoma (chapter one) and a second chapter on La juventud de Aurelio Zaldívar. This will allow me to draw similarities between the two texts while treating them as separate in their own portrayals of sexual inversion.

Thank you for taking the time to read this draft. I suspect that many of the changes and additions needed are ones that I have given some thought to but that I have yet to incorporate. For the moment, I would like to test-drive what I have written thus far with hopes that your questions, comments, and suggestions will give me more insight on moving forward.

Sincerely,

Ebenezer Concepción

This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 2 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.

PART I. INVERTED MASCULINITIES: HERNÁNDEZ-CATÁ’S EL ÁNGEL DE SODOMA AND LA JUVENTUD DE AURELIO ZALDÍVAR

Preface: “The Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name”1

On 25 May 1895, Irish playwright Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was convicted to two years’ hard labor in prison for gross indecency with men, and as a consequence of his extramarital liaison with British author Lord Alfred Douglas (1870-1945). His prosecutor, Charles Gill, used

Lord Douglas’s poem, “Two Loves,” against Wilde during his trial in order to underscore the distinction that it presumably made between “natural love” and the “unnatural” kind, ‘that which dare not speak its name.’ However, before referring to the poem, Gill gradually builds up to that moment by cross-examining Wilde with a line of captious questions:

Gill — You are acquainted with a publication entitled The Chameleon? Wilde — Very well indeed. G — Contributors to that journal are friends of yours? W — That is so. G — I believe that Lord Alfred Douglas was a frequent contributor? W — Hardly that, I think. He wrote some verses occasionally for The Chameleon, and indeed for other papers. G — The poems in question were somewhat peculiar? W — They certainly were not mere commonplaces like so much that is labelled poetry. G — The tone of them met with your critical approval? W — It was not for me to approve or disapprove. I left that to the reviews.

(Excerpt from the transcript of Oscar Wilde’s testimony)

As stated in the introduction, Wilde’s life and trial was emblematic of the tighter controls over sodomy and other forms of sexual deviance that before the nineteenth century had relatively acquired some degree of legitimacy. And yet, what I find noteworthy about his prosecution is how a literary work is used as evidence to mediate between two opposing discourses and

1 This is a phrase taken from the 1894 poem “Two Loves” by British author, Lord Alfred Douglas (1870-1945), Oscar Wilde’s lover. It was used against Wilde during his trial as evidence of his alleged gross indecency with other men. This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 3 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate. ideologies on sexual desire and love, and how Wilde reaffirms the value of the writer’s aesthetic in order to wipe clean the smear thrown on his moral character. Based on this model, a parallel can be drawn between Wilde’s strategy and what Hernández-Catá does in his novels, particularly with regard to how the discourse on sexual inversion is itself inverted to challenge the rhetoric of shame and to demonstrate the inefficacy of the theory of moral degeneracy. Ultimately,

Hernández-Catá, in Wildean fashion, takes us back to the rhetorical uses of inversion as “the turning of an opponent’s argument against himself” (OED) in order to show that the appropriation of the term by the scientific, intellectual, and institutional Establishment is itself an inversion that has less to do with sexuality than with a hypocritical sense of morality and the repressive stigmatization of difference. For instance, in the epigraph to the first edition of El

ángel de Sodoma (Madrid, 1928), two friends converse about a veiled topic in which the first speaker engages the respondent in a way that emulates Gill’s shaming cross-examination:

—¿Y va usted a escribir una novela de «eso»? ¡Qué ganas de elegir asuntos ingratos! —De «eso», sí. Los poetastros han vulgarizado y afeado tantos jardines, tantos amaneceres, tantas puestas de sol, que ya es preferible inclinarse sobre las ciénagas. Todo depende, del ademán con que se revuelva el cieno, amigo mío. Si es cierto que hay en las charcas relentes mefíticos, también lo es que ofrecen grasas irisaciones, y que lirios y nenúfares se esfuerzan patéticamente, a pesar de sus raíces podridas, en sacar de ellas las impolutas hojas. Además, como la química científica, la artística puede obtener de los detritus esencias puras. Más trabajo y menos lucido, dirá usted. ¡No importa!2

Like most epigraphs, the one above states, albeit cryptically, the main theme of El ángel de Sodoma: “eso” (“that”). What is peculiar about it, nonetheless, is that it does not explicitly state what “eso” is, rather what it could be. While it is customary for writers to use epigraphs to entice the reader with a snapshot of what is to come in the main narrative, Hernández-Catá seems

2 “—And you’re going to write a novel about ‘that’? What willingness to choose unpleasant subjects to write about! —About ‘that,’ yes. The poetasters have vulgarized and made ugly so many gardens, so many dawnings, so many settings of the sun, that it’s now preferable to favor swamps. It all depends on the manner in which the mud is stirred, my friend. If it’s true that there are mephitic nocturnal dews in the ponds, it is also true that they offer greasy iridescences, and that irises and water lilies, despite their rotten roots, pathetically make an effort to blossom their unblemished leaves. What is more, artistic chemistry, like the scientific kind, can obtain pure essences from the detritus. More work and less lucid, you’d say. It doesn’t matter!” (All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.) This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 4 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate. to be doing more than that with the topic at hand, that is, sexual inversion. In most cases, epigraphs are citations of quotations or sayings from other sources. In the one above, however, it is an original, paratextual narrative piece in which Hernández-Catá seeks to portray himself as the respondent, that is, the writer who inverts the perceived ideological and aesthetic misconceptions of his interlocutor as a preamble to El ángel de Sodoma. In effect, the friend’s description of “eso” as the pluralized “asuntos ingratos” (unpleasant subjects/matters)—that is, as not referring to not one but many issues—is telling of the magnitude of the book’s thematic content and its ideological and conceptual ramifications, those on which Hernández-Catá hopes to elaborate in the main text despite his comrade’s objections. Although he does not actually appear as a character, nor has a voice, in the text, the use of metaliterary devices allows him to position himself both inside and outside of it, therefore making less tenable the separation between author and characterization in the epigraph and, by extension, in the text that is to follow. Through paratextual techniques, Hernández-Catá begins to form part of the dialectic narrative as “the source for the aggregate of norms and opinions that makes up [its] ideology,”

(Herman 16).

In the epigraph, the reader virtually gets a glimpse of Hernández-Catá’s worldview as it expands into the main narrative that succeeds it. The writer-respondent of the epigraph achieves this when the topic of the conversation is turned into an extended metaphor comprised of antitheses about poetic-literary content and form (fondo y forma) in a style that is metafictional and metaliterary. On the one hand, it metafictionally features the respondent in the conversation as a writer that could perhaps be the alter ego of Hernández-Catá, therefore alluding to a real-life exchange between him and a friend in which the former responds to the latter’s disdain for choosing to write about a topic (i.e., sexual inversion) that is distasteful and apparently taboo. On This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 5 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate. the other, it is a metaliterary construction about the art of writing, literature, and aesthetic value, as illustrated by the reference to poetasters and the comparison to scientific chemistry. As such, the epigraph can be interpreted as the author’s attempt to frame the novel in a particular theme about the inexplicit “eso” insofar as it establishes him and writers of narrative fiction as literary and cultural authorities that weigh in on the use and interpretation of practices, ideologies, discourses, and aesthetics that are in opposition to each other. Based on this idea of opposition, I argue that Hernández-Catá’s representation of sexual inversion, of “eso,” in El ángel de Sodoma goes beyond a mere portrayal of sexual practices. It is also a function of the inversion of (1) ideological and discursive concepts and meanings through the use of literary devices such as irony and antithesis, and of (2) the contradictory social values upheld by Euro-American societies at the turn of the 19th century as expressed by the narrative voices and as portrayed by the characters in the textual and paratextual elements of the novels.

If the epigraph to El ángel de Sodoma is read in light of Wilde’s response to Gill’s citation of Lord Douglas’s poem, one can see the connection between the art of writing and morality as a common theme that runs through both texts. They both talk about literature that references same-sex desire, a desire that must be silenced, and a silence of both misidentification and lack of identification, which both works problematize. Therefore, the respondent in the epigraph and Wilde in his own testimony, strive to position themselves in an intermediary place in which they address the subject at hand while reformulating its discursive presuppositions in order to highlight their variety in meaning and their ambiguity. They challenge their interlocutors’ misconceptions in order to emphasize the complexity of the issues at hand while changing the narratives from shameful to virtuous ones, or in Hernández-Catá’s case specifically, to one worth writing about. As a result, literature has an ethical function as both writers This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 6 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate. undermine legal, moral, and scientific discourses in order to exalt the creative power of literary artifice, which in their view is consubstantial with the beauty of same-sex desire as a virtue of human dignity.

As in Hernández-Catá’s epigraph, Wilde counters and astutely inverts Gill’s arguments against homosexuality by using tactful language in order to correct the prosecutor’s notions on sexual misconduct:

‘The Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the ‘Love that dare not speak its name,’ and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

Wilde flips the script in order to fill conceptual gaps and to identify that which dares not speak its name, that “eso” that is taboo. On one end, there is Wilde, who identifies it by placing himself as the identified alongside literary and artistic figures. On the other, there is Hernández-Catá, who does it by writing a story about a young man who struggles with sexual inversion. This process, by which encoded meanings are reworked to revert dominant discourses and reoriented toward marginalized individuals, is what José Esteban Muñoz describes as disidentification:

Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message's universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture. (31)

There is a performative element to Muñoz’s theory, or what he refers to as “disidentificatory performances,” whereby culture is recycled and then remade (ix). In their writings, Wilde and This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 7 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.

Hernández-Catá respond to encoded messages that are regulatory and universalizing by recycling and then remaking them. These messages seek to wield the subject to conform to, and perform, a heteronormative way of life molded by the institutional practices of society (the dominant culture) and the repressive mechanisms of the state. However, as Derrida would have it, performativity is not solely mimetic because a mark or gesture that is repeated would have already occurred in a different temporal context from its original upon its repetition, therefore it would have exceeded the sameness it attempted to emulate. In addition, if considered within processes of identification, performing an identity does not remove a subject from other forms of identification, affects, its body, and its agency, that is, from its ability to disidentify.

For instance, Wilde contests that there is more to same-sex desire that goes beyond Gill’s perceptions. It is also spiritual, emotional, and intellectual. Furthermore, it is fluid and variable to other forms of desire. In other words, he places himself in the place of identification but then disidentifies. Sylvia Molloy, in her analysis on posing, reminds us that Wilde was not accused of being a sodomite in his first trial but of posing as one, which was part of the reasoning for his acquittal (145-146). In fact, the prosecution along with the accuser Marquess of Queensberry

(Lord Douglas’s father) caught on to the possible symbiosis of posing and being, which is why they moved on to another trial, confident that they could then indict Wilde of actually being a sodomite. These developments are noticeable in the use of the poem as evidence, which can also be read as an allegory of the legal proceedings. The poem tells the story of a man who dreams of himself meeting Love in a garden as personified by a youth who kisses him (also the personification of the love that dare not speak its name). In that same garden is another man who claims that the youth is lying. He says that the young boy’s name is not Love but Shame and that he is the one true love, that which is between boys and girls:

A purple robe he wore, o’erwrought in gold This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 8 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.

With the device of a great snake, whose breath Was fiery flame: which when I did behold I fell a-weeping, and I cried, ‘Sweet youth, Tell me why, sad and sighing, thou dost rove These pleasant realms? I pray thee speak me sooth What is thy name?’ He said, ‘My name is Love.’ Then straight the first did turn himself to me And cried, ‘He lieth, for his name is Shame, But I am Love, and I was wont to be Alone in this fair garden, till he came Unasked by night; I am true Love, I fill The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame.’ Then sighing, said the other, ‘Have thy will, I am the Love that dare not speak its name.’

(Last verses of “Two Loves”; my emphasis)

Like Wilde’s prosecutor and the first speaker in Hernández-Catá’s epigraph, the opprobrium toward homosexual love is also seen in this poem, which is also the premise on which Hernández-Catá bases his novel, La juventud de Aurelio Zaldívar (La juventud; 1911). Its story begins in medias res, right after the protagonist, young Aurelio, has had a same-sex encounter with an older man, Mr. Velist. The encounter is not narrated in the novel. Instead, it starts with a conversation about said encounter between Aurelio and his 54-year-old mentor/father figure, Juan Antonio Méndez, in which Méndez tells Aurelio the following:

Yo en lo fundamental, nada le aconsejo…Creo que no debe abandonarse a estériles desesperaciones; creo que, en todo caso, usted debe sufrir hipócritamente. Para la sociedad que nosotros frecuentamos, ni una confidencia, ni una queja indirecta, ni un reproche; que Madame Luzis, que Natalia Roca y M. Argely, que todos los que van a las reuniones de los Craud, no sepan nada. (11)3

La juventud is the first text in which Hernández-Catá addresses sexual inversion. As in El ángel de Sodoma, it is presented in this earlier novel as a veiled topic in a conversation between two characters. However, contrary to El ángel de Sodoma, the conversation is part of the main narrative instead of an epigraph. Juan Antonio advises Aurelio, much like the writer’s friend in

3 “I fundamentally cannot advise you…I think that you should not abandon yourself to sterile desperation; I think that, all in all, you should suffer hypocritically. Not one confession, not one indirect complaint, not one reproach to anyone in the society we frequent; let Madame Luzis, Natalia Roca, M. Argely, and all those that go to the reunions at the Crauds, know nothing.” This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 9 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate. the epigraph of El ángel de Sodoma, not to talk to anyone about “eso,” that is, his same-sex sexual encounters, out of fear of shame and dishonor.

Although it does not have an original epigraph like the one in El ángel de Sodoma, the narration of La juventud is followed by an epilogue in which Hernández-Catá admonishes the reader not to judge Aurelio for his misfortune, his sexual indiscretions, and lost youth: “Y a los hombres que desde el interior de sus viviendas, acariciados por las blanduras del bien vivir, juzgan en una sola frase no precedida de reflexión las acciones de los que combaten en la batalla…, a esos nada. La moral es como las lamparillas de aceite, que sólo sirven para alumbrarnos cuando estamos dormidos” (275).4 In other words, upholding a self-righteous sense of morale serves no purpose if one closes one’s eyes to its light, misguided by the expectation that it will dissipate the darkness of inactivity on its own, regardless of our efforts to carry it as a guiding star through life’s quandaries.

As shown above, inversion becomes much more than just a reference to a taboo subject about gender and sexuality. It is the nucleus of a plethora of contested ideas, meanings, and values that are equally inverted and that are expounded in the texts and paratexts of Hernández-

Catá’s novels. That subject matter, that “eso” consisting of inverted concepts and ideas, is the focus of the next two chapters. By way of critical analysis, I would like to show how that “eso” refers to both sexual inversion and its portrayal in El ángel de Sodoma and La juventud as a repository of a number of equally inverted meanings and values regarding normalcy and difference, tradition and modernity, and the pressures of family and societal duty on human will and desire. In turn, I read both novels as an attempt to address sexual inversion as revelatory of the ambiguous and hypocritical ethical and moral fabric of 19th and 20th century Euro-American

4 “And to the men that from their houses, caressed by the weak loftiness of the good life, judge in a phrase, unprecedented by reflection, the actions of those that go to battle…, to them, nothing! Morality is like little oil lamps that only serve to illuminate us when we’re asleep.” This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 10 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate. societies and of the individuals that struggle to negotiate its deception and fatalism. I use the word negotiate because as Muñoz points out in his book:

Disidentification is the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; […] this ‘working on and against’ is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance. (11-12)

As I hope to demonstrate, Hernández-Catá works from within the dominant ideology in order to destabilize it from the perspective of the individual who resists, but that is unable to disentangle itself from, various modes of marginalized identifications. In other words, sexual inversion in Hernández-Catá’s texts is not only a descriptor for sexual practices among marginalized identities in societies in Euro-America at the turn of the 19th century, but also a corollary to the contradictory, antithetical, paradoxical—inverted—discourses and ideologies that inform such practices and norms as instituted and propagated at the time by influential actors in transnational/transatlantic territories of Euro-America. As such, the veiled, concealed, euphemistic, or tacit treatment of sexual practices discussed earlier in both novels can justifiably be read as the catalysts for a re-vision of the inverted subject. As Molloy points out in her comments about Wilde: “The pose opened up a space in which the male homosexual was seen; he became a subject and was represented and named” (Molloy 146).5 A subject that is both a signifier for sexual phenomena and for an identity that is constantly negotiated amidst equally universalizing and ambiguous systems of manipulation and individual ambivalence.

When Love in Lord Douglas’s poem sighs and says, “Have thy will, / I am the Love that dare not speak its name,” it seems as if he is giving the other man who shames him the freedom to claim love as only existing between a male and female, however, the young boy still reasserts

5 Wilde prosecutes the Marquess for accusing him of being a sodomite, however, evidence surfaces during that trial that begin to confirm Wilde’s same-sex liaisons. He is tried two more times and convicted. This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 11 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate. who he is—Love! It may be the kind of love that hides out of fear of retribution but that is unwilling to completely relinquish its sense of self to one that is alien to its being; it disidentifies.

To a certain degree, the affirmation of anonymity In the chapter that follows, we will see how this self-assertion is replicated in the protagonist of El ángel de Sodoma and the manner in which the interpellation of “that which dare not speak its name”— that naming that calls and produces the subject—in fact emboldens Hernández-Catá’s resolve to expose it and then redirect it back to when it was unnamed and unfettered by monopolizing constraints. In fact, Hernández-Catá never uses the word inversion, homosexuality, invert, or homosexual in his texts, ergo relinquishing his own prejudices to the ineffability, irreducibility, and ambiguity of the tragic life of an angel.

Chapter One. Performing Disidentifications of Inversion in El ángel de Sodoma

As stated previously, Alfonso Hernández-Catá was a Cuban diplomat, journalist, and cosmopolitan writer who lived through Spanish rule in the Americas, the occupation of Cuba by the U.S., and the independence movements in Latin America. At the time that he writes El ángel de Sodoma, published in Madrid in 1928, he had already established himself as a well-known writer of short stories to the likes of Horacio Quiroga, Edgar Allen Poe, and Rudyard Kipling.

And although his novels were not as popular, El ángel de Sodoma became a bestseller once it hit the market. Its success was clouded, however, due to the repressive dictatorships of Gerardo

Machado in Cuba and Miguel Primo de Rivera in Spain, as well as to the sexual reforms and eugenics movements that were taking place in Euro-America at the time. It hasn’t been until recently that the novel has sparked some interest, particularly of critics in queer studies, and especially due to recent reprints of the text by Letras Cubanas in 2009 and by Verbum last year. This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 12 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.

The story, in broad strokes, is about 18-year-old José-María Vélez-Gomara. After his parents die—the mother from illness and the father by suicide—José-María is left to take care of the house and the finances of the family, marry his two sisters, Amparo and Isabel-Luisa, and get his brother Jaime through nautical school. Aside from the elderly Captain Bermúdez Gil, who becomes their unofficial guardian, the town itself is counsel to the family as some sort of chorus typical of the Greek drama. As a result, José-María takes a job as a banker and is recognized everywhere he goes. Meanwhile, his brother goes abroad and returns accompanied by a woman tamer of beasts and other members of a traveling circus. Upon Jaime’s insistence, José-María begrudgingly accompanies him to the circus’s show. José-María struggles to turn his gaze from the muscular male tamer of beasts and is awakened to a desire that he painstakingly hides from his brother. From that moment, he goes through a psychological and emotional trajectory filled with antitheses of turmoil, clarity, repression, and pleasure as he tries to come to terms with the closures and possibilities of a newfound and growing desire for the same sex. He tries to make sense of his condition and wonders whether it is a congenital degeneration or a curse. In a quest for answers, he walks into a library and reads a scientific manual, prompting him to perform heteronormative behaviors in order to pass as heterosexual.

On the one hand, he unassumingly tries to smoke and build muscle through extreme exercise. In his room, he takes down the crucifix of a naked Jesus and he attempts to rid himself of the female part of his name. In order to appear more heteronormative, he unsuccessfully goes to bed with a prostitute and has a platonic relationship with a girl that does not lead to anything and ends abruptly. On the other hand, the feminine aspects of his behavior and personality are heightened throughout the story. For example, as a child he socialized mostly with girls, played with dolls, and avoided playing aggressive games with boys. His mother doted over him, which This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 13 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate. then translated to his motherly care for his siblings, or as the text calls it, the role of “la madrecita.”

In addition to his same-sex desire and androgynous demeanor, there are scenes in which his sisters and him share an incestuous gaze. However, they don’t act upon it since José-María strives to maintain his honor as new head of household and that of his sisters’ through marriage.

Once they are wed and Jaime has gone off to engage in contraband abroad, José-María realizes that it’s his turn to live his life. He goes to Paris under a different name in order to flee from provincial responsibilities and revel in the city’s nightlife. While in his hotel room, he beholds in a mirror the image of his body wrapped in women’s clothing and in a moment of discovery, he realizes that his condition is not a pathological one but that he simply is who he is because he was born that way: “¡Así soy! ¡Fuera falsa virtud, fuera vergüenza de mostrarme según me hicieron!” (178).6 After this declaration of self-affirmation, he meets a man at a bookstore and they organize a rendezvous at a metro station. Before their encounter, however, José-María receives a letter at the hotel from his boss announcing the death of his brother Jaime, the urgent need for his return to work, and his obligation to family duty. A turning point in the plot, he’s caught between his sexual autonomy and the pressures of the social establishment. He goes to the metro station where he was scheduled to meet the male suitor, but before their tryst, he decides to throw himself to the tracks of an incoming train, simulating, like his father, an accidental suicide.

El ángel de Sodoma is not the first text in which Hernández-Catá treats sexual inversion.

He also addresses it in La juventud de Aurelio Zaldívar, published in 1911, albeit in a more subordinate way, and in the novella, El sembrador de sal (1923). At that time, several authors had already addressed this topic in their writings, such as Brazilian author Adolfo Caminha in O

6 Queue Lady Gaga: “I’m on the right track baby, I was born this way!” This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 14 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.

Bom-Crioulo (1895), Spanish writer Ángeles Vicente García in Zezé (1909), and Marcel Proust in À la recherche du temps perdu (France, 1913-1927). Notwithstanding, what the texts of all these authors reveal is that sexual inversion was not a monolith. The very coupling of the term inversion with the term sexual, along with the English coining of the term homosexuality in

1892, points to the fact that efforts to rationalize and linguistically constrict a cultural reality involving a plethora of gendered and sexed bodies, affects, meanings, and values were well underway.

Inversion, defined as “a turning inside out,” “a reversal,” or “a turning contrary to,” dates back to the middle of the 16th century. Since its initial uses in the 19th century, this definition was extended to sexual inversion, that is, the reversal of masculine and feminine behaviors, which included homosexuality. David Halperin points out that the term homosexuality usually referred to sexual object choice while sexual inversion denoted a number of practices that deviated from conventional gender roles. Nevertheless, Sigmund Freud and other sexologists, physicians, criminologists, and intellectuals in general, conflated the meanings of the terms. For as Halperin makes clear, “Throughout the nineteenth century…sexual preference for a person of one’s own sex was not clearly distinguished from other sorts of non-conformity to one’s culturally defined sex-role” (15). El ángel de Sodoma illustrates this conundrum seeing that the meanings of both terms are mixed in the text, and that José-María experiences them simultaneously. At the same time, there was a clear notion of acceptable sexual practices that were delineated by the social and physical sciences under the gender role binary, and that all fell under the vocabulary of sexual inversion and homosexuality in a value system of sameness versus difference.

Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, coauthors of Sexual Inversion (published in English in 1894), starkly disagreed with the use of homosexuality to describe very complex This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 15 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate. phenomena. According to Ivan Crozier, their book was the first study to combine “the political motivations of homosexual rights activists…with a detailed assessment of European and

American sexology” (1). I suggest that El ángel de Sodoma mediates these two avenues as a way of showing the effects of discursive contention. I argue that Hernández-Catá’s text performs discursive practice and is instrumental to the veiled authorial voice and narrator who break the fourth wall and invite its readers to engage in a dialogue on, and peer into the experience of, gender and sexual construction and identification as illustrated by the life of José-María. As such, I interpret the novel as both a performed and performative gesture that Hernández-Catá makes by producing a dialectic of cultural discourse on the meaning and value of sexual inversion that is not only fictional but actual with regard to the psycho-social constitution of the modern subject as a repository of discourses on gender and sexuality at the turn of the 19th century. My interpretation, as based on performance and performativity, hinges on the polyphony and polysemy of the main narrative and paratexts of the novel, which I move to describe now in further detail.

The first edition of El ángel de Sodoma was published as a paperback in Madrid by

Mundo Latino in 1928, with 199 pages comprising the main text. The front cover (image a), featuring a title that is clearly an ironic twist to the Old Testament story of Sodom and Gomora, is followed by the inner flap of the dust jacket and a bookplate that reads, “From the Library of

Havelock Ellis” (image b). This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 16 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.

(a) Front cover of the first edition (b) Front inner flap and bookplate

These features are followed by the first title page under which can be found the first dedication of the novel, and it reads: “A Havelock Ellis con la admiración de A. Hernández-Catá” (see below).

(c) First dedication

This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 17 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.

Following is the second title page and a list of Hernández-Catá’s previous works (image d). It shows that La juventud de Aurelio Zaldívar had gone through four editions and other works through five or six reprints, in addition to the promotion of his forthcoming homage to José

Martí, Mitología de Martí (1929). These details indicate two important facts: (1) Hernández-Catá was well-versed in sexological literature and knew of Ellis and Symonds’s efforts to not only decriminalize homosexuality but also to portray it as normal and natural and (2) he shared

Martí’s philosophies on justice and equality for the marginalized, therefore his penchant for featuring such figures in most of his fiction, all of which is taken even further in the first epigraph discussed earlier in the preface.

(d) List of previous works and second title page

If we recall from the epigraph, Hernández-Catá compares the sexual invert to irises and water lilies that pathetically make an effort to blossom their unblemished leaves despite their This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 18 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate. rotten roots. He repeats this metaphor when referring to José-María: “Hasta su turbación al esquivar o sostener algunas miradas de hombres, en la calle, tomaba sentido pleno, de acusación.

¡La madrecita alabada por todos era un monstruo, un lirio de putrefactas raíces!” (65, my emphasis) (see image e below).

(e) The first epigraph.

In this first half of the novel, we get a very good sense of what is at play in José-María’s characterization and constitution as a subject: a troubled youth whose ambivalence toward his same-sex desire brings him guilt and straddles the contradictory impressions that society has of him versus his own. The conceptual inversion of wholeness (pleno) and fragmentation

(acusación), and of his social repute versus an internalized notoriety of bestial dimensions, is juxtaposed with the questioning of his masculinity and the inversion of gender roles. However, This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 19 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate. this is not an attempt to indicate that society did not play a role in his internalized repression, rather his own psychological response to his surroundings in relation to what he feels inside.

Hernández-Catá conveys this very poignantly all the while constructing a narrative that is in conversation with itself. It incites the reader to vicariously partake in José-María’s dramatic story through self-reference and self-reflection. In addition to identifying with the character through psychological introspection, the lily with rotten roots as a paratextual reference in correlation with the main text drives the idea of identification and reader participation further into the performative realm. In other words, how can we think the way in which Hernández-Catá writes about a writer who tells his friend, in an epigraph about writing, that he will indeed write about

“eso” and then do so via novel writing that is auto-referential and that explicitly and implicitly invites the reader? There are various dimensions of performance here that need to be unpacked, especially in regard to what comes next in the book.

After the epigraph, the second dedication to the novel is shown and it reads: “A Gregorio

Marañón” (image e).

(e) The second dedication. This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 20 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.

Gregorio Marañón (1887-1960) was a Spanish historian and physician who replicated Freud’s theories expounded in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in his own version, Tres ensayos sobre la vida sexual (Three Essays on Sexual Life). In it, he argues that humans develop as bisexual beings, but that one sex, either male or female, must eventually predominate, and although he advocated for the decriminalization of homosexuality, he still considered it a pathological illness and the existence of sexual inversion in the human as an abnormality.

Turning to the next page, we’re given a second epigraph, which is an explicit biblical reference that introduces the main narrative, and it reads: “Y acercose Abraham y dijo: ¿Destruirás por igual al inocente y al impío? El juez de toda la tierra, ¿será injusto? Génesis 18.”7 Again, there’s a questioning here of the ethics of, and moral justification for, marginalization through the intertextual performing of Scripture.

(f) The second epigraph.

7 “And Abraham drew near, and said, ‘Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? … Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 21 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.

Hernánez-Catá’s responds to Abraham’s plea to God by beginning the novel immediately after this epigraph, emphasizing the antithetical, paradoxical, and contrived nature of his aesthetic in playfully sarcastic and ironic way (see image f):

La caída de cualquier construcción material o espiritual mantenida en alto varios siglos constituye siempre un espectáculo patético. […] Y si su derrumbamiento final no puede ponerse, por ejemplo, junto al romántico de la de Usher, es, sobre todo por las particularidades al par vejaminosas y heroicas del postrero de sus varones, lo bastante rico en rasgos dolorosos para sacar de su egolatría o de su indiferencia, durante un par de horas, a algunos lectores sensibles. (11-12)8

Readers did, in fact, respond. After becoming a bestseller, a second edition of the novel was published the following year in Madrid, again by Mundo Latino, and it includes the same content from the first with a few notable changes. The front cover mentions a new 31-page prologue by Marañón and a 17-page epilogue by Luis Jiménez de Asúa (1889-1970), a Spanish criminologist who shared the same views as Marañón with regards to the pathological nature of sexual inversion (image g).

(f) Front cover of second edition.

8 “The fall of any material or spiritual structure held in high esteem for many centuries is always a pathetic spectacle. […] And, if its final demolishment could not be placed, for example, at the side of the romantic of Usher, it is rich enough—above all else by the simultaneously vexing and heroic idiosyncrasies of the oldest of its boys—to remove in painful strokes some sympathetic readers from their obsessive egotism or indifference for a couple of hours.” This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 22 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.

The book is not signed by Hernández-Catá, and instead of being followed by the epigraph on

“eso,” the publication information is followed by Dr. Marañón’s prologue, thus replacing

Hernández-Catá’s subversive epigraph with a symbolic retaking of authority by a morally driven and scientifically bias essay. In order to make up for the loss, the epigraph citing Genesis 18 is moved from the opening page of the main narrative to its own page before it. As a result, the narration is bookended by the scientific and legal discourses of Marañón’s prologue and Jiménez de Asúa’s epilogue, therefore setting the tone of the novel’s reception and what in their opinion should be its “proper,” heteronormative, interpretation. The fear of censorship was a factor that perhaps motivated these changes. For this purpose, Hernández-Catá probably dedicated El ángel de Sodoma to Marañón in order to make a novel with such a controversial subject more amenable to a relatively conservative public. On the same token, the new paratextual format of the second edition makes his previous efforts to destabilize heteronormativity and patriarchy more noteworthy. In order to visualize better the differences (in italics), I offer a comparative look at the sequence of book parts in both editions:

First Edition Second Edition Front cover announcing Marañon’s prologue (1) Front cover and Jiménez de Asúa’s epilogue (2) Bookplate from Havelock Ellis’s library (3) First title page and signed dedication to First title page (not signed by Hernández-Catá) Havelock Ellis (4) Second title page with previous works by Second title page with previous works by Hernández-Catá Hernández-Catá (5) First epigraph on “eso” Marañón’s prologue (6) Second dedication to Gregorio Marañón Dedication to Gregorio Marañón Second epigraph from Genesis 18 in its own (7) Second epigraph from Genesis 18 and separate page before the beginning of the beginning of novel; invitation to readers novel (8) Main text of the novel Main text of the novel (9) Colophon Epilogue by Jiménez de Asúa Index

This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 23 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.

Butler describes the performative as “this relation of being implicated in that which one opposes, this turning of power against itself to produce alternative modalities of power, to establish a kind of political contestation that is not a ‘pure’ opposition, a ‘transcendence’ of contemporary relations of power, but a difficult labor of forging a future from resources inevitably impure” (241). As such, performativity is a process that presents an economy of sameness that elicits a moral and political responsibility to the experience and meaning of difference and otherness. As Philip Auslander suggests, performative resistance is brought about precisely by not accommodating itself to political thought “but by challenging the processes of representation itself, even though it must carry this project by means of representation” (31).

Hernández-Catá resists the symbolic domain of his time upon writing about the peripheral and ostracized other. In turn, El ángel de Sodoma departs from a place of conceptual and discursive inquiry that is carried out by the performative deconstruction of sexual inversion with which the protagonist struggles.

The entire novel is framed to invert the disparaging meaning and value of sexual inversion by performing the same discursive techniques and turning them contrary to themselves via performative deconstruction. It can be argued that this is just a function of fictional writing.

On the contrary, it is a function of the handling of historically contingent discourses in dialogue with a work of fiction in which narrow veins of resistance run against signification and its essentializing implications. The characters in Hernández-Catá’s narrative equally demonstrate this resistance through a performance of the body, the site of an ambiguous complicity and ambivalent confrontation with monolithic discourses and hegemonic practices. Hernández-Catá’s characters are marked by this idea in their response to their own social environments. And while

José-María does not live out his desires, Hernández-Catá delivers on his promise to extract the This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 24 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate. pure essences out of the detritus of his protagonist’s tumultuous struggle. And he does so by making his character perform a discourse of sexual inversion that is eventually inverted through the character’s self-affirmation and narrative innovation.

Works Cited

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Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter. New York, Routledge, 1993.

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Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Limited Inc., Evanston, IL, Northwestern UP, 1988.

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Ellis, Havelock and John Addington Symonds. Sexual Inversion: A Critical Edition. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

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-----. La juventud de Aurelio Zaldívar. 2nd ed. 1911. This draft is solely for the purposes of the Workshop on Latin Concepción, Ebenezer 25 America and the Caribbean. Please do not cite or circulate.

-----. La juventud de Aurelio Zaldívar. New ed. Madrid: Renacimiento, 1914.

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