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February 24, 2017 Dear Readers, What Follows Is a Working Draft Of 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 Please do not cite or circulate.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 1 Preface: “The Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name” 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.
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