EROS GALVANIZED: CRITICAL INTERSECTIONS OF EROTICISM AND POLITICS IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURES OF THE AMERICAS
Rebecca Garonzik
A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature (Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Literatures).
Chapel Hill 2018
Approved by:
Juan Carlos González Espitia
María DeGuzmán
Emilio del Valle Escalante
José Luis Venegas
Jessica Wolfe ©2018 Rebecca Garonzik ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ii ABSTRACT
Rebecca Garonzik: Eros Galvanized: Critical Intersections of Eroticism and Politics in Contemporary Literatures of the Americas (Under the direction of Juan Carlos González Espitia)
My dissertation explores the intersection of the erotic and the political in twentieth and twenty-first century Latin American and Latina/o literatures. My project is invested in a particular iteration of the erotic that flows from, yet also extends beyond the realm of sexual activity, appearing as the creative, life-affirming, libidinal energy animating our ideals and actions. The works I analyze pair this iteration of the erotic with pressing political concerns, depicting how this libidinal energy has the potential to be cathected in the political arena as affective investment in politics.
My dissertation takes a historical approach, first turning its attention to the intersection of eroticism and politics in the socially engaged Latin American texts of the 1960s through the
1980s by writers such as Julio Cortázar, Gioconda Belli, and Eduardo Galeano. My project traces the origins of this literary coupling to the combined influence of Latin American socialism and the New Left, demonstrating how this confluence of political movements worked to incorporate the erotic into an affectively-attuned understanding of political struggle. It then explores the same pairing in the Latina/o literature of the 1980s, showing how Gloria Anzaldúa identifies
Latinas’ sexuality as the locus of their politically subversive potential. Turning to contemporary works, my project analyzes the concomitance of the erotic and the political in Latin American texts written in the 1990s and beyond, including works by María Lourdes Pallais, Alan Pauls, and Iván Thays. It reveals how these novels draw on this intersection in order to critique the
iii political culture surrounding the Latin American socialist movements of the previous decades and to problematize the question of political engagement. Lastly, my dissertation examines works of contemporary Latin American and Latina/o literatures by Patricio Pron, Cherríe
Moraga, and Paul Martínez Pompa that reformulate and revitalize the intersection of eroticism and politics, applying it to pressing social issues such as environmental racism and neoliberalism. My project argues that these contemporary expressions of the erotic offer readers an alternative to the demoralization and paralysis of the current neoliberal Stimmung , pointing the way toward a renewed investment in the politics of participative democracy.
iv To my parents
v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are many people who have stood by me on this journey whom I would like to thank. I am extremely grateful to each of my committee members: Juan Carlos González Espitia,
María DeGuzmán, Emilio del Valle Escalante, José Luis Venegas, and Jessica Wolfe. Thank you for reading my dissertation with such care and discernment and for providing me with such helpful feedback both individually and during my defense. Your incisive suggestions have reinvigorated me and given me new enthusiasm for continuing to do this work. I am also exceedingly grateful to Laura Halperin for serving on my committees and for her perceptive comments on my dissertation chapters. Laura, thank you for always reading my work with such thoughtfulness and attention to detail; I truly appreciate it. And to Oswaldo Estrada: thank you for being such a wonderful friend and mentor.
I would also like to thank my friends and family members. To my incredible friends
Aviva, Sarah, Stacy, Christine, Marta, Gale, María, and Bethany, as well as other dear friends from over the years: thank you for always encouraging me and for being there when I needed a hug, some guidance, or a good laugh. To my family, especially Darron, Tarryn, D.J., Morgan,
Porter, Patrick, Mercedes, and Aunt Barb: I am so grateful for your love and support. To Jelmer: thank you for helping me get through the conclusion, and for being my funny, caring, and insightful partner.
To Juan Carlos: being your advisee has been, by far, one of the most intellectually stimulating and personally rewarding experiences of my life. Thank you for being my best reader; for always making time to help me puzzle through difficult questions; for laughing with
vi me; and for never doubting that I was capable of this—even when I might have been a bit doubtful myself. You are a brilliant director, a devoted mentor, and a wonderful friend. No matter where life takes me next, it will all have been worth it because I got to work with you.
And now, most importantly, to my parents. As we know, life isn’t always easy, but you have been there for me through it all. Thank you for loving me, for supporting my goals and dreams, and for believing in me against all odds. You are the best parents a woman could ask for, and I am so lucky to be your daughter.
vii TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES ...... ix
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
CHAPTER 1: “LOVING IN THE WAR YEARS”: POLITICS AND THE EROTIC IN THE SOCIALLY ENGAGED LATIN AMERICAN AND LATINA/O LITERATURES OF THE 1960s, 70s, AND 80s ...... 22
CHAPTER 2: RETHINKING POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT IN POSTWAR LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE...... 80
CHAPTER 3: THE REVOLUTIONARY EROTIC REVITALIZED...... 140
CONCLUSION ...... 206
WORKS CITED ...... 228
viii LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Mural by la Brigada Ramona Parra on the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center...... 217
Figure 2. Mural by la Brigada Ramona Parra on Sebastopol Street on the corner of Santa Rosa in San Joaquín, Chile...... 219
ix INTRODUCTION
As often as not, it seems to be assumed that man has his being independently of his passions. I affirm, on the other hand, that we must never imagine existence except in terms of these passions (Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality , 12).
Under the pure, lifeless / surface of the Sea / of Thought swims a great / gray whale . . . carrying / a calf, a great gray whale / about to breach (María Meléndez, “An Argument for the Brilliance of All Things,” 10).
Neoliberalism, as an economic paradigm that by its very definition transcends the realm of economics, has had a profound impact on the contemporary social and political landscape of the Americas. 1 Founded on the a priori claim that “free markets lead to ‘spontaneous order’” and the related theory that governments should assist markets in creating this order, since the 1970s neoliberal policies have worked to undermine the boundaries between economic and political thought and institutions, putting the latter in the service of the former (Peet 73). 2 At the same time, due to the implementation of ‘roll-out’ neoliberalism, in which “sub-national partnerships
[have been] encouraged to deliver on nationally or, increasingly, supranationally set priorities and goals,” neoliberalism has also served to increase the level of political and economic interdependence between the regions of this hemisphere by an unprecedented degree (Birch and
Mykhnenko 7). Despite the profound impact of neoliberalism in Latin America and on Latinas/os
1 While neoliberalism should not be taken as the only factor shaping the contemporary American political landscape, its influence has been nothing short of a sea change.
2 I concur with Kean Birch and Vlad Mykhnenko in defining neoliberal theory as “an ideological project based on abstract concepts . . . that assumes market efficiency and therefore underpins a re-conceptualization of the state’s role in the economy . . . to new forms of governance underpinned by a ‘logic of competitiveness’” (5-7; my emphasis). Although the practice of neoliberalism has been far from hegemonic, resulting in the production of different economic systems in different parts of the world, the ideological precepts underlying these diverse manifestations are highly consistent.
1 in the U.S., the disillusionment associated with the decline of leftist/socialist projects in Latin
America and the U.S. has rendered earlier/modernist forms of socially engaged literature largely outmoded, leaving critics to question the ability of writers and intellectuals to meaningfully address the problematics of neoliberalism in their work. 3 In contrast, the 1960s, 70s, and 80s in
Latin America and among Latina/os in the U.S. saw a relative deluge of socially committed literature, one directly tied to the utopian political projects of that time. In these socially committed literatures, the discourse of the erotic plays a central role, functioning as a multi- valenced expression of transgression, life affirmation, communion, and continuity. However, with the foundering of these utopian political projects over the past few decades and the corresponding transformation of socially committed literature, the erotic has ceased to manifest itself in these literatures in the ways the readership was used to. 4 Consequently, critics have been slow to identify and assess the presence of the erotic in the last two decades of Latin American and Latina/o literature and its ongoing role in this literature’s critical discursive articulations. In this study I examine the characteristics and aftereffects of a corpus of texts of contemporary
Latin American and Latina/o literature published in the 1990s and beyond in order to show the way in which the discourse of the erotic continues to reverberate in these literatures, often appearing as an integral component of critiques of neoliberalism. Before addressing the intersection between eroticism and politics that one finds in contemporary Latin American and
Latina/o texts, I will clarify my definitions of these terms and provide a brief history of the
3 Neoliberalism’s integration of previously separate social spheres (namely the economic and the cultural) means that neoliberalism also often eludes prior modes of resistance and critique. Frederic Jameson is perhaps the most well-known critic to mourn the incongruity of the political and the postmodern.
4 For more on the transformation of socially committed literature, see Jean Franco’s The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War , Aníbal González’s Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel , and Ana Patricia Rodríguez’s Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures.
2 intersection between eroticism and politics in the socially committed Latin American and
Latina/o literature of the 1970s and 80s in order to provide a reference point for its transformed presence in contemporary literature.
The Erotic as it Appears in Relation to Politics
Cuanto más hago la revolución, más ganas tengo de hacer el amor; cuánto más hago el amor, más ganas tengo de hacer la revolución (Carlos Fuentes, Los 68: París-Praga- México , 30).
Mi amor no es amor de uno solo/sino alma de todo/lo que urge sanar (Silvio Rodríguez, “Por quien merece amor”)
As I have already suggested, the intersection of eroticism and politics that appears in contemporary Latin American and Latina/o literatures with regard to neoliberalism is one that both emerges from and alludes to the relationship between eroticism and politics in the socially engaged Latin American and Latina/o literatures of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and part of the significance of this trend in contemporary literature owes itself to this referential quality. Thus, although the primary focus of this study is the way in which the intersection between eroticism and politics appears in contemporary Latin American and Latina/o literatures, in order to illuminate the full significance of this trend I will need to begin by clarifying its antecedents in the socially engaged literature of the 70s and 80s so as to then show how these antecedents have been both perpetuated and transformed in the work of contemporary authors.
Although, to many, a study of the intersection between eroticism and politics might at first seem surprising if not unfounded, the pairing of political ideals with the erotic is actually one whose history is as old as civilization itself. Part of the reason that people might initially be taken aback by the association of eroticism and politics is that, in contemporary discourse, the term ‘erotic’ is often used to mean simply ‘sexual,’ (and sometimes even ‘pornographic’), and is
3 rarely associated with areas of life other than intercourse and other overtly sexual activity. 5
Moreover, as Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jaspar and Francesca Polletta demonstrate in Passionate
Politics: Emotions and Social Movements , an understanding of the role that affect plays in political movements—which I will demonstrate is one of the most significant components of this
iteration of the erotic—until very recently had been strikingly absent from sociological studies of political movements and of politics in general. 6 However, if one looks to ancient texts such as the
Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh —notably the first written text in recorded history—one will find the pairing of eroticism and politics, wherein the political is infused with erotic energy. 7 As
one might assume, texts like the Epic of Gilgamesh precede the split between body and spirit that
emerged with Judeo-Christianity, when sex and sexuality had not yet acquired the taboo status
5 In The History of Sexuality , Foucault explores the way in which our contemporary understandings of sex and sexuality have been shaped by the development of sexuality as a scientific discourse. In this framework, “sexuality [is] defined as being ‘by nature’: a domain susceptible to pathological processes, and hence one calling for therapeutic or normalizing interventions; a field of meanings to decipher; the site of processes concealed by specific mechanisms; a focus of indefinite causal relations; and an obscure speech ( parole ) that [has] to be ferreted out and listened to” (68). As Foucault explains, “the society that emerged in the nineteenth century . . . [thus] set out to formulate the uniform truth of sex. As if it suspected sex of harboring a fundamental secret. As if it needed this production of truth. As if it was essential that sex be inscribed not only in an economy of pleasure but in an ordered system of knowledge. Thus sex gradually became an object of great suspicion; the general and disquieting meaning that pervades our conduct and our existence, in spite of ourselves; the point of weakness where evil portents reach through to us; the fragment of darkness that we each carry within us: a general signification, a universal secret, an omnipresent cause, a fear that never ends” (69).
6 Writing in 2001, Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta explain that while emotions were “once at the center of the study of politics,” they have “led a shadow existence for the last three decades, with no place in the rationalistic, structural, and organizational models that dominate academic political analysis” (1). Instead, “social scientists portray humans as rational and instrumental, traits which are oddly assumed to preclude any emotions” (1). They later explain that even prior to the 1970s when emotions did make up a greater part of the study of politics, “the portrayal of emotions at the core of academic treatments of protest was flawed in many ways. In one tradition, emotions came directly from crowds, having little to do with individuals’ own lives and goals. . . . In the other, emotions were primarily emanations from individual personality conflicts—a legacy of Freudian psychology—rather than responses to the environment. . . . Most of all, the actual stuff of politics—moral principles, avowed goals, processes of mobilization, strategizing, the pleasures of participation—was absent” (4).
7 In The Epic of Gilgamesh it is the ruler Gilgamesh’s distinctively erotic relationship with his companion Enkidu that enables him to become a benevolent ruler of his people and to value the good of his kingdom over his own desire for immortality. Here the erotic is used to promote or further the successful realization of the polis , and the persistence of the city of Uruk appears as a microcosm of the erotic continuity of existence.
4 they bear today and thus still formed an important part of sacred/religious ritual—not to mention being themselves much more fluid. These texts are thus able to capitalize on the life-affirming potential of eroticism in a way that we see taken up by Latin American and Latina/o authors in their politically oriented works. Thus, while one could argue that the version of eroticism that appears in these authors’ works is a very particular iteration of the erotic, it is also one that is true to timeworn understandings and applications of eros .8 I will now outline the basic theoretical framework of this iteration of the erotic as it appears in the socially-engaged Latin American and
Latina/o literatures of the 1970s and 80s, and which continues to operate in the works of contemporary Latin American and Latina/o literature that I analyze.
I understand this particular iteration of the erotic as a quality of uninhibited corporeally- based action, often related to but not limited to sexual activity, characterized by a joyful awareness of life and being alive—what I will from now on refer to as sense of “aliveness.” 9 In its intersection with the political, this iteration of the erotic takes on several different inflections, all of which contribute to the cultural formation that I am working to describe. As one would envision, an integral aspect of the erotic is a marked celebration of sex and sexuality and of the unique sense of aliveness that can emerge from this intimate and rarified component of human experience, due in part to the fact that it involves very particular physiological and psychological
8 While the connection between eroticism and politics has not yet received the critical attention that it should, neither has it gone entirely unnoticed by scholars of Latin American literature. Citing the Marquis de Sade’s La philosophie dans le boudoir as his example, in Sacred Eroticism: Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski in the Latin American Novel , Juan Carlos Ubilluz asserts that “since the beginning of modernity the erotic novel has been inextricably linked to politics in the larger sense of the word: i.e., in the sense of articulating a social organization that befits or shapes mankind’s affective disposition” (310). He goes on to argue that “Bataille’s eroticism stands as the libidinal substratum of the political subject’s revolt from ideologies that place ideals above human existence” (310).
9 I have taken this term from Mark Leviton’s interview of Esther Perel, “A More Perfect Union: Esther Perel on Intimacy, Infidelity, and Desire in Long-Term Relationships.” The term is Perel’s. In that it involves a level of awareness, “aliveness” is more than a purely emotional state—it contains a reflective impetus that is important to its use in these literatures.
5 states. 10 However, in this iteration of the erotic, sex and sexuality appear as one among many potential sites of aliveness, albeit an especially fertile one. In this iteration of the erotic, aliveness can also emerge in relation to other aspects of life, including spiritual experience, artistic creation, and political action. This broader philosophical significance of eroticism appears in
Audre Lorde’s theory of a politicized, woman-centered erotic in her groundbreaking essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” 11 In “Uses of the Erotic,” Lorde defines the erotic as “an assertion of the life-force of women” and “creative energy empowered,” as well as “depth of feeling,” and the “sense of satisfaction and completion” that we may experience in relation to
“our various life endeavors,” (i.e. “dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea” (55, 54, 57). For Lorde, “the erotic is not a question of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing” (54-5). Here, as in the texts I analyze, the erotic transcends its limited associations with sex and sexuality to stand as the creative, life-affirming instinct that is the basis for all of our ideals and actions, of which sex and sexuality are an integral and particularly intimate part. Moreover, Lorde’s definition of the erotic emphasizes self-awareness since, for Lorde, to experience the erotic is to experience “a measure of the joy which [one knows oneself] to be capable of feeling, a reminder of [one’s] capacity for feeling”
10 In Death and Sensuality Georges Bataille explores the philosophical structure of the erotic sexual act, arguing that “the whole business of eroticism is to strike to the inmost core of the living being, so that the heart stands still. The transition from the normal state to that of erotic desire presupposes a partial dissolution of the person as he exists in the realm of discontinuity. . . . The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives. . . . [and in their] individual personalities” (Bataille 17, 24).
11 Audre Lorde is a renowned Black feminist scholar whose work appears alongside that of Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Feminists of Color , which has long been recognized as one of the foundational/generative texts of third wave feminism. I have chosen to foreground Lorde’s conceptualization of the erotic as it most closely approximates the iterations of the erotic that appear in the works of socially engaged Latin American and Latina/o literature in this study.
6 (57). The iteration of the erotic that appears in the texts I analyze share in this reflective impetus,
the details of which I explore below. 12
In Latin American literature this iteration of the erotic—the erotic of life—is rooted in the
sacred and reflects what Juan Carlos Ubilluz describes in Sacred Eroticism: Georges Bataille
and Pierre Klossowski in the Latin American Erotic Novel as a “desire for an intimate relation to
the world” (11). 13 This desire can be perceived in elements of the cultural and religious
syncretisms that characterize the region—many of which themselves contain currents of erotic
mysticism—as well as in Latin American intellectuals’ receptivity to the writings of philosophers
like Bataille, Klossowski, and Marcuse, all of whom place erotic mysticism at the center of their
writing and thought. 14 The same is true of this iteration of the erotic in Latina/o literature, which
draws on the spiritual myths and iconography of the Mexica goddesses, as well as on the
writings of U.S. third world feminist theorists like Lorde. This spiritual dimension, while not
always explicit in the intersections between the erotic and the political in the socially engaged
Latin American and Latina/o writings of the 70s and 80s, consistently undergirds the component
of life-affirmation found in these works.
12 As those familiar with the philosophical writings of Herbert Marcuse will be aware, there are many parallels one could draw between the conceptualization of the erotic that Lorde formulates in “Uses of the Erotic” (1978) and Marcuse’s prospective theory of libidinous work relations in Eros and Civilization (1955). Like Lorde’s understanding of the erotic, Marcuse’s theory of non-repressive sublimation envisions a civilization in which people’s libidinous energy is cathected in their work, and in which the work that people perform corresponds to their “freely developing individual needs” (201). Also like Lorde’s understanding of the erotic, Marcuse’s conceptualization of eros involves a reorientation of the libido “from sexuality constrained under genital supremacy to eroticization of the entire personality” (201).
13 Ubilluz’s own study is centered around the impact of Klossowski and Bataille on the erotic novels of twentieth century novelists Julio Cortázar, Juan García Ponce, Salvador Elizondo, and Mario Vargas Llosa.
14 Due to this variety of cultural influences, it would be difficult to specify one particular source for the erotic of aliveness in the socially engaged Latin American literature of the 1970s and 80s. Rather, the erotic of aliveness that one finds in this literature springs from a diverse cultural seedbed of indigenous, African, and European sources, and its inflection varies depending on which of these sources is emphasized most heavily in a given text.
7 Another way of conceptualizing the erotic as it appears in relation to the political in the texts I analyze is as “affective investment,” which, as Lawrence Grossberg defines it in We Gotta
Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture , largely resembles
Lorde’s theorization of the erotic (Grossberg 83). According to Grossberg,
affect identifies the strength of the investment which anchors people in particular experiences, practices, identities, meanings and pleasures, but also determines how invigorated people feel at any moment of their lives, their level of energy or passion. . . . [I]t is in their affective lives that people constantly struggle to care about something, and to find the energy to survive, to find the passion necessary to enact their own projects and possibilities. (82-3)
Affective investment is analogous to this iteration of the erotic in that it is not inherently linked to any particular system of thought or ideology; like the erotic “is not a question of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing” (Lorde 54-5). The erotic as affective investment can be understood as the level of personal conviction people allow themselves to feel for their chosen beliefs, which then directly impacts the amount of energy and attention people are willing to give to the fulfillment of those beliefs. 15 However, as Grossberg also stipulates, “the relationship between the planes of ideology and affect is itself historically articulated” (86). In other words, although it is pure excess, in its relation with particular beliefs and/or systems of thought, the erotic/affective investment has a historical shape that can be mapped and studied. 16 I read the presence of the erotic in relation to the political in these socially
15 Although I will not make much direct use of Freudian theory in this study, the connection between the erotic and affective investment is further supported by the fact that, in psychoanalysis, cathexis, which Freud’s theorizes as an investment of libido, later came to denote “the process of investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea” (Hall, Calvin S. A Primer of Freudian Psychology . New York: Mentor, 1954).
16 For a similar assessment of the role of emotions in politics, see Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta, page 13. For Grossberg, “affect is the missing term in an adequate understanding of ideology, for it offers the possibility of a ‘psychology of belief’ which would explain how and why ideologies are sometimes, and only sometimes, effective and always to varying degrees” (82). Nietzsche makes a similarly motivated call for a ‘history of the passions’ in The Gay Science .
8 engaged works of 1970s and 80s Latin American and Latina/o literature as discursive articulations of the specific relation of affective investment to socialist politics at this particular moment in history. These can also be understood as articulations of Stimmung in the
Heideggerian sense. Jonathan Flatley offers a concise definition of Heidegger’s Stimmung in
Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism , explaining it as “a certain mode of attunement” or collective historical mood that facilitates our affective attachments, making it possible for affect to function in particular ways at a particular historical moment (21).
According to Flatley, through Stimmung “certain objects in the world come into view in a particular way, certain persons (or social formations) appear as friends and others as enemies, and some kinds of actions present themselves that might otherwise not even come into view”
(23). Heidegger’s concept of Stimmung is a useful framework for conceptualizing the degree to which our shifting thoughts and feelings in relation to politics and political movements are historically situated, and guided by affect as well as by reason. As Flatley stipulates, “more often we make our judgments about the world as if they were rational, sensible, not determined by something as subjective as mood,” although we often retrospectively ascribe decisions subsequently deemed faulty to mood, (little ‘m’), as a way of dismissing or downplaying the thought processes that went into making those particular decisions (22). The concept of
Stimmung asserts the degree to which reason and affect are always imbricated in decision- making and embedded in particular historical circumstances. Moreover, Stimmung is also important in that it constitutes the gateway to engagement with a literary audience; as Flatley argues, “any aesthetic practice, if it is to reach an audience, must be able to attune itself with that audience’s mood” (24). If an aesthetic practice succeeds in attuning itself with Stimmung , it is then that an adjustment or transformation of Stimmung through said aesthetic practice becomes
9 possible, since “this catching sight of ourselves in the Stimmung we are in is, in itself, the evocation of another Stimmung , one in which Stimmung and those with whom we share it have become themselves objects of interest and attachment” (24). The iterations of the erotic in relation to politics in the socially engaged works of Latin American and Latina/o literature of the
1960s, 70s, and 80s appear as both manifestations of, as well as attempts to generate a particular
Stimmung —a particular mode of affective engagement with socialist politics at this specific moment in history.
As I mentioned earlier, these iterations of the erotic in relation to politics in the socially engaged works of 1970s and 80s Latin American and Latina/o literatures are themselves variously inflected. For example, in certain texts, the use of the erotic can be read as an attempt to represent the affective dimension of politics in literature—to corporealize the experience of affective investment vis-à-vis the political and thus make it accessible to the reader. However, in the writings of women writers such as Lorde, Gioconda Belli, Cherríe Moraga, and Gloria
Anzaldúa, which locate the source of affective investment in women’s sexuality and in the female body, the erotic element is much more than a representational tool; instead erotic sexuality appears as the locus or source of the erotic energy that then permeates other aspects of a woman’s lived experience. As I will demonstrate, both of these inflections of the erotic help to perpetuate and sustain each other within the larger cultural formation that I describe, and both contribute to the residual presence of the erotic in critiques of neoliberalism in contemporary
Latin American and Latina/o literature.
As is true of both Lorde’s definition of the erotic and Grossberg’s definition of affect, the erotic also represents quality of life—and, in relation to the political in the texts I analyze, it reads as the degree of aliveness or ‘joy in living’ that life has to offer under a given political
10 system. As Georges Bataille asserts in his well-known theorization of the erotic in Death and
Sensuality , the notion of life that appears in relation to the erotic is not individual life, and it stands in contrast to the clinical interest in regulating life that is the object of biopolitics and biopower. 17 Rather, the notion of life that appears in relation to the erotic in these texts is life as affective experience, or life as it is lived. As Grossberg explains in We Gotta Get Out , “affect is loosely tied to what we often describe as the ‘feeling’ of life. . . . [It] operates across all of our senses and experiences, across all the domains of effects which construct daily life. Affect is what gives ‘color,’ ‘tone’ or ‘texture’ to the lived” (81). Thus, when we speak of ‘quality of life’ in relation to the erotic we are not speaking of bio-markers but rather of the quality of lived experience. 18 As such, the intersection between the erotic and the political in these texts asserts the imbrication of our affective experience of life and the political systems we use to give it form. 19 Herein lies the importance of the reflective impetus of the erotic as Lorde describes it because, in so far as the erotic corresponds to the quality, or degree of aliveness, of particular experiences, it also serves as a barometer for the quality of life as a whole. As Lorde explains in
“Uses of the Erotic,” the erotic serves as “a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep
17 In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, Michel Foucault coins the term ‘bio-power’ to refer to the development that “brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge- power an agent of transformation of human life” (143), and he coins the term ‘bio-politics’ to refer to the “entire series of interventions and regulatory controls ” that have a hand in the workings of bio-power (139). He further explains that “the disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed. The setting up, in the course of the classical age, of this great bipolar technology . . . characterized a power whose highest function was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through” (139). Foucault understands the development of sexuality as an object of study as a key component in the development of bio-power.
18 This is not to suggest that there is not a significant correlation between bio-markers and quality of life, only that this valence of quality of life is not what the erotic is primarily concerned with.
19 In this sense the erotic resembles the “the primacy of sensory experience” that Davide Panagia explores in The Political Life of Sensation , wherein the senses are used “to discern the quality of material life, including the materiality of human interaction” (144).
11 and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible” (57; my emphasis). In other words, in providing us with a new experience of aliveness, the erotic works to denaturalize our habitual ways of perceiving—to shake us out of our complacency regarding experiences that are emotionally deadening. As such, the erotic functions as something of a touchstone. It becomes
a lens through we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning in our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, not the merely safe” (Lorde 57).
Returning to its earlier elaborations, in the socially engaged literature of the 1970s and
1980s the erotic thus appears in relation to both the process and outcome of political engagement. In relation to the outcome of political engagement, the erotic often appears as a celebration of moments of aliveness in the present that simultaneously serve as points of contrast for the poor quality of life suffered under a repressive political system, as well as metaphors for the quality of affective experience anticipated once a more just political future has been achieved. At the same time, in many of these texts, engagement in politics also appears as an erotic activity in and of itself, since the erotic here often points to the sense of aliveness that comes through political engagement—through being actively and passionately, (affectively), involved in the political realm. 20
The intersection between eroticism and politics in the Latin American context is in fact representative of a larger cultural phenomenon, one that can be viewed as a reflection of the
Stimmung of that particular place and time. In Latinamericanism after 9/11 , John Beverley identifies the “cultural superstructure” of the armed struggle in Latin America as one of the
20 Recent interest in the relationship between affect and politics in the social sciences is evident in works such Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements , edited by Goodwin, Jaspar, and Polletta (2001).
12 characteristics of the movement that distinguishes it from socialist movements in other parts of the world, describing the extent to which the concerns of the struggle permeated literary and cultural production, including the Brazilian cinema novo , the Colombian teatro de creación colectiva , the Cuban nueva trova , and the poesía militante from many different regions of Latin
America (105). The intersection between eroticism and politics that appears in the Latin
American literature of the 1970s and 80s is an integral part of this “cultural superstructure,” and one that is representative of and very much bound up with that era’s “spirit of hope for change”
(Beverley 105). In Latin America, the propagators of this intersection between the erotic and the political include Gioconda Belli, Ana María Rodas, and Ana Istarú in Central America; Carlos
Fuentes in Mexico; and Cristina Peri Rossi, Luisa Valenzuela, Julio Cortázar, Eduardo Galeano, and Diamela Eltit in the Southern Cone. 21 In a context marked by the armed struggles of
Nicaragua and Guatemala, as well as by the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone,
Bataille’s understanding of the erotic as an “assenting to life up to the point of death,” as well as an “assenting to life even in death [as] a challenge to death” has a special resonance (11, 23). In texts such as Luisa Valenzuela’s “De noche soy tu caballo,” Eduardo Galeano’s Días y noches de amor y de guerra , and Gioconda Belli’s La mujer habitada and Línea de fuego , the erotic appears as that which infuses these countries’ political struggles with meaning—the erotic, or life force, as the liberated antithesis of the oppression the revolutionaries are fighting against. Among the Latin American writers, the Nicaraguan Gioconda Belli’s work is particularly emblematic of the intersection between eroticism and politics that I will trace, and also contains strong parallels to the work of Latina/o writers in the U.S.
21 The pairing of eroticism and politics also appears in the political writings of Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaragua), whose fusing of politics and sensual, natural imagery may have also influenced the work of Gioconda Belli.
13 As a young woman Belli participated in the Sandinista rebellion, and her writings address her political commitment to this revolutionary cause, while also exploring her unique role as a woman in the Sandinistas’ revolutionary struggle. Línea de fuego , Gioconda Belli’s book of poems celebrating the Sandinista rebellion, is both a politically subversive text, in that it celebrates the realization of social change through armed conflict, and, at the same time, a feminist text, in that it grounds this work of social change in the eroticism of the female body. As
María Salgado indicates in her article on Belli’s poetry collection, Línea de fuego , Belli’s brief, exclamatory, and highly sensual poems draw on the renaissance poetic tradition of the courtly knight fighting to bring honor to his lady and his country, and inverts this poetic structure, resituating it in the voice of the female lover/country which is also that of the female guerrillera .
In Belli’s reconfiguration of this renaissance tradition, “la imagen polarizada de la descorporeizada pareja patriarcal” ‘the polarized image of the disembodied patriarchal couple’ is replaced by “la más corporal y humana estampa de la erótica y solidaria pareja fundacional del
Sandinismo” ‘the more corporeal and human figure of the erotic and solidary foundational couple of Sandinism’ (Salgado 17). Thus, in Belli’s poetry, woman shifts from being a passive, virginal, and often disembodied figure, to a physical, sexual being, active in both the expression and the execution of the revolutionary struggle.
Within this redefined framework, Belli elides the concepts of erotic passion and passion for the revolutionary ideals motivating the Sandinistas ’ efforts, so that the sexual act appears as a reflection of the revolutionary struggle, and the revolutionary struggle is infused with the passion of the sexual act. Moreover, while Belli celebrates the connection between eroticism and sexuality in her poems, she does not limit the domain of the erotic to sexual activity. Instead, as
Elena Grau-Lleveria affirms in her article on Línea de fuego , for Belli “el amor es arma contra la
14 opresión: es el deseo dionisiaco que vence a la muerte, a la desesperación” ‘love is a weapon against oppression: it is the Dionysian desire that defeats death, defeats despiar’ (51). For example, in “Ah, Nicaragua,” Belli uses the language of eros to describe the passion that exists between the nation and the Sandinista guerrillera. In doing so, Belli conveys the sense that the
Sandinista Revolution is not only a strategic political endeavor, but also a courageous act of love.
In her poetry, the erotic is also that which we experience when we engage with others in collective political action; according to Grau-Lleveria, “erótico es todo aquello que le permite [a
Belli] sentir la comunión, aunque sea momentánea, con ‘otros’ y es a la vez una forma de conocimiento y liberación subjetiva. Este es el marco ‘social del erotismo en Belli” ‘the erotic is all that which permits Belli to feel communion, even if it is momentary, with ‘others’ and it is at the same time a form of knowing and subjective liberation. This is the social structure of the eroticism in Belli’ (47).
As I will demonstrate in chapter one, the relationship between the erotic and the political that appears in Belli’s work is also characteristic of the work of other Latin American authors writing during this time period. Moreover, many of the more salient themes of Belli’s work are evident in the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, largely considered the doyens of
Latina feminism in the United States and co-editors of This Bridge Called My Back , one of the generative texts of the women of color movement, or third world feminism. Despite the lack of direct influence between Belli and Anzaldúa and Moraga in terms of their poetics, these feminist writers and philosophers, (also writing in the 80s), demonstrate a similar interest in the erotic power of women and of the female body, and in its latent potential as a tool of political action. 22
22 It is likely that Anzaldúa and Moraga were directly influenced by Lorde’s conceptualization of the erotic in “Uses,” given that she was also one of the leading philosophers of the women of color movement and also a contributor to This Bridge Called My Back , which was published in the same year. Also, despite any direct literary
15 This is especially clear in Anzaldúa and Moraga’s respective adaptations of the political and spiritual potential of Mexica goddesses and their spiritual iconography. Whereas Belli’s pairing of eroticism and politics emerges from within the context of armed conflict in Central America,
Anzaldúa and Moraga adopt this same pairing in order to combat the intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, and sexuality faced by Latinas in the United States. In Chicana Sexuality and
Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art , Debra J. Blake explains that
critiquing the devaluation of Mexican female cultural figures and, by association, all Chicanas in historical, cultural, and literary representations is one focus of Chicana writers’ works. Others include identifying U.S. neocolonialism, the sexism of the Chicana/o civil rights movement, the ethnocentricity of second wave feminisms, and institutionalized sexism, heterosexism, racism, and classism in the Catholic Church. (85)
By drawing on the goddesses Coyolxauhqui, Coatlicue, and Coatlalopeuh—all highly erotic figures of Mexica spirituality—to construct “transformative subjectivities” for Latina women,
Anzaldúa and Moraga locate the spiritual and politically subversive potential of Latinas in the sensuality of the Latina body (Blake 91). 23 As in the politically charged poetry of Gioconda
Belli, in Anzaldúa and Moraga’s writings the eroticism of the Latina body signifies as both physical sexuality as such and as the source of Latinas’ power to fight against intersecting
influence between Belli and Anzaldúa and Moraga, these Latina philosophers, like other Latina/o writers and scholars, were especially attuned to and supportive of the Sandinista struggle. For a more detailed exploration of this topic, see chapter five of Ana Patricia Rodríguez’s Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures (2009).
23 In Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios , Moraga explains that the most common feminist interpretation of the myth of Coyolxauhqui, the Aztec moon goddess, is that she attempted to kill her mother and thus prevent the birth of her brother, the sun god, Huitzilopotchtli, in order to disrupt the onset of “slavery, human sacrifice, and imperialism” (147). Having failed in her attempt, she was killed and dismembered by her brother. In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza , Anzaldúa reads Coatlicue, the Mesoamerican Serpent goddess who gave birth to Coyolxauhqui and Huitzilopotchli, as emblematic of the “fusion of opposites: . . . life and death, mobility and immobility, beauty and horror” (69). According to Anzaldúa, Coatlicue was divested of Coatlalopeuh, the component goddess of Coatlicue representative of sexuality, by the Spaniards as part of their attempts to dominate the Aztecs (49). Both Coatlealopeuh and Coatlicue are integral to Anzaldúa’s theory of “mental nepantilism [sic]” or “ mestiza consciousness” (Anzaldúa 100, 102).
16 oppressions and to enact lasting social change. 24 Thus, in Anzaldúa and Moraga’s writings, as in
Belli’s poetry, the politically subversive potential of female sexuality reverberates on both an
individual and a collective level—at the level of individual Latinas’ identity and subjectivity, as
well as at the level of collective agency and political action. The widespread influence of Moraga
and Anzaldúa among Latina/os writers and scholars has meant that the intersection between the
erotic and the political that appears in their work has formed part of the cultural superstructure
among Latina/o writers in the U.S. as well—particularly among Latina writers such as Ana
Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Aurora Levins Morales, and Rosario Morales, who wrote and continue
to write in the spirit of This Bridge .
Returning now to the Latin American context, the late 1980s and early 1990s in Latin
America witnessed a number of monumental political changes, including the fall of the Berlin
Wall, leading to the ‘Special Period’ in Cuba, the so-called ‘transition’ from military
dictatorships to democratically elected governments in the Southern Cone, and the weakening of
socialist projects in Nicaragua and El Salvador. 25 These political changes, most notably the
24 Moraga summarizes this notion in her groundbreaking theoretical text Loving in the War Years : “Women of color have always know[n], although we have not always wanted to look at it, that our sexuality is not merely a physical response or drive, but holds a crucial relationship to our entire spiritual capacity. Patriarchal religions —whether brought to us by the colonizer’s cross and gun or emerging from our own people— have always known this. Why else would the female body be so associated with sin and disobedience? Simply put, if the spirit and sex have been linked in our oppression, then they must also be linked in the strategy toward our liberation” (Moraga as quoted in Blake 87). In her book chapter on Chicana theorists’ use of Mexica goddesses in their philosophical writings, Blake argues that “Anzaldúa’s writings, and those of other Chicana feminists, reiterate Audre Lorde’s uses of the erotic as empowering creative energy, profound knowledge, and political action” (91).
25 For more on the fraught nature of the so-called ‘transitions’ to democracy in the Southern Cone, see Idelber Avelar’s The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (1999), in which he offers the following argument: “The end of dictatorships [in the Southern Cone] cannot, from the perspective I advance here, be characterized as a transitional process. As was implicit in my critique, the real transitions are the dictatorships themselves . . . . ‘It was the dictatorship that made the transit from State to Market, a transit euphemistically designated as ‘modernization.’’ . . . ‘Transition to democracy’ meant nothing but the juridical- electoral legitimation of the successful transition carried out under the military” (58-9).
17 weakening of socialist projects in Central America and the dramatic influence of U.S. sponsored dictatorships in the Southern Cone, left the door open to the advancement of neoliberalism in
Latin America, a system that has had profound effects, not only on economic and political structures in the region, but also on systems of thought/collective thought in both Latin America and the U.S. As I have already indicated, these changes meant that, by the mid-90s, the intersection of the erotic and political ceased to appear in Latin American and Latina/o literature in the same ways that it had before, as writers were now writing from and addressing themselves to readers in a very different Stimmung .26 However, due to the pivotal role of the erotic in the socially-engaged cultural superstructure of the 1970s and 80s as part of that era’s “spirit of hope for change” (Beverley, Latinamericanism 105), as well as the cherished place it still holds in collective cultural memory, the erotic continues to harbor lasting significance as a marker of quality of life in relation to politics and political systems, and a valuable instrument of critique in relation to contemporary neoliberal politics and culture. Thus, rather than leading to the total erasure of the intersection of eroticism and politics in Latin American and Latina/o literatures, as previous criticism has suggested, these economic, political, and philosophical changes have instead provoked a change in the site and the inflection of the intersection of eroticism and politics in these literatures.
The first chapter of my dissertation, “‘Loving in the War Years’: Politics and the Erotic in the Socially Engaged Latin American and Latina/o Literatures of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s,” provides a detailed overview of the intersection between eroticism and politics as it characterizes
26 As I demonstrate above, in the socially engaged literature of the 1970s and 80s the erotic appears in relation to the political as a celebration of moments of aliveness in the present that simultaneously serve as points of contrast for the poor quality of life suffered under a repressive political system, as well as metaphors for the quality of affective experience anticipated after a more just political future has been achieved. In many of these texts, the erotic also points to the sense of aliveness that comes through political engagement—through being affectively involved in the political realm.
18 much of the politically-oriented literature of the 70s and 80s in Latin America and among
Latina/o writers in the U.S. For my theoretical framework of the erotic, I continue to draw on the writings of Audre Lorde, as well as those of Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Herbert Marcuse. In this chapter, I analyze four texts: Julio Cortázar’s El libro de Manuel , Gioconda Belli’s Línea de fuego , Eduardo Galeano’s Días y noches de amor y de guerra , and Gloria Anzaldúa’s
Borderlands: La frontera . I read the presence of the erotic in relation to the political in these socially engaged works as literary representations of the specific relation of affective investment to socialist politics at this particular moment in history. Within the larger structure of my dissertation, this analysis of the intersection between eroticism and politics in literature and popular culture from the 1970s and 80s serves to delineate the original characteristics of this literary and cultural phenomenon, thus acting as a reference point for its transformed presence in contemporary literature.
The second chapter of my dissertation, “Rethinking Political Engagement in Postwar
Latin American Literature,” examines three texts that problematize the issue of affective investment in politics, particularly as this relates to the armed struggle and its aftermath. I begin by analyzing María Lourdes Pallais’s La carta and Alan Pauls’s La historia del llanto , both of which reflect critically on the leftist political movements of the 60s, 70s, and 80s and the political cultures surrounding those movements. La carta , a testimonial novel, is the story of a former guerrillera who becomes disillusioned with the armed struggle and satirizes her own affective/erotic investment in that struggle. In the novel, Pallais draws on the literary pairing of eroticism and politics in order to critique what the text presents as the flagrant contradictions between the erotic ideals of the revolution and its less than ethical means of achieving those ideals. In La historia del llanto , Pauls critiques, not the revolution itself, but the heightened
19 affective investment in politics that characterized the political culture of the 60s, 70s, and 80s in
Latin America, depicting it as sentimental and overblown, and as a form of cultural capital. I then explore Iván Thays’s Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro , which, on the diegetic level, allegorizes the contemporary literary turn away from political engagement and toward the private sphere.
For the third chapter of my dissertation, “The Revolutionary Erotic Revitalized,” I examine four works published in the 1990s and 2000s in which the erotic once again appears in relation to politics as a symbol of life affirmation. I explore the way in which the intersection of eroticism and politics figures in Patricio Pron’s El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia , despite the foundering of the utopian Latin American political projects with which this fusion of eroticism and politics was initially associated. I also analyze the way that the intersection of eroticism and politics figures in two Latina/o texts, Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and
Saints and Paul Martínez Pompa’s My Kill Adore Him , and how these texts work to create a transcontinental imaginary between the political struggles in Latin America and those of
Latinas/os in the United States. Lastly, I consider the way that Martínez Pompa’s My Kill Adore
Him utilizes the literary pairing of eroticism and politics to address the abatement of political engagement in contemporary neoliberal U.S. society. I demonstrate how he relates this abatement of political engagement in the U.S. to the exploitation and abuse that female workers experience at the hands of their employers in Mexican maquiladoras , or sweatshops. By drawing on the legacy of the erotic in the socially engaged Latin American literatures of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, these texts make manifest the political consciousness supposedly abandoned by contemporary writers. By pointing to the absence of the erotic from contemporary society, these texts suggest that, at this point, there are more questions than answers regarding political
20 alternatives to neoliberalism, and that the path to a more just political future is still in the process of being imagined and cultivated. The future is no longer one that appears just beyond the revolutionary horizon, as it did in the 60s, 70s, and 80s; but instead one that will require changes beyond our current ability to envision. Nevertheless, these works also clearly document the degree to which our collective desire for political justice still lingers—that, in addition to the disenchantment with politics, as well as the cynicism and complacency that so many have found to characterize the Stimmung of our current historical moment—in contemporary literature there is also an ongoing awareness of the connection between politics and intimacy, and a push for the kind of political change that would lead to a more just and more erotic political future.
21 CHAPTER 1: “LOVING IN THE WAR YEARS”: POLITICS AND THE EROTIC IN THE SOCIALLY ENGAGED LATIN AMERICAN AND LATINA/O LITERATURES OF THE 1960s, 70s, AND 80s 27
‘Todo hay que volver a inventarlo, polaquita, y el amor no tiene por qué ser una excepción’ (Julio Cortázar, Libro de Manuel , 260). 28
El verdadero erotismo es el compromiso con la vida y su disfrute en todas sus diferentes manifestaciones (Gioconda Belli in Solanes 132). 29
In this chapter I will demonstrate the extent to which an intersection between socialist politics and an erotics of liberation formed part of the political culture in Latin America in the
1960s, 70s, and 80s, and among Latina/o writers in the 1980s. In my introduction I define the erotic as a quality of uninhibited corporeally-based action, often related to but not limited to sexual activity, characterized by a joyful awareness of life and being alive, as well as the creative, life-affirming instinct that is the basis for all of our ideals and actions. Within the cultural superstructure of political and social movements such as the Montoneros movement in
Argentina, the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, and the U.S. Third World feminist movement, the erotic appears as that which infuses these struggles with meaning—the life force, or the liberated antithesis of the oppression these movements are fighting against. 30 On an even
27 I have borrowed the phrase “loving in the war years” from the title of Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios .
28 “‘Everything has to be invented all over again, Polonette, . . . love has no reason to be an exception’” (Rabassa 263). All English translations of quotes from Libro de Manuel are taken from Gregory Rabassa’s translation of the novel as A Manual for Manuel . All other translations are mine unless I indicate otherwise.
29 ‘The real eroticism is in one’s commitment to life and to enjoying life in all of its different manifestations.’
30 I use the term ‘cultural superstructure,’ as John Beverley does in Latinamericanism After 9/11 , in order to suggest the formative relationship that existed between the liberation movements of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s and many of the
22 broader scale, in the socially engaged Latin American and Latina/o literatures of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the erotic appears in relation to the political as both a reflection of, as well as an attempt to generate a particular Stimmung —a particular mode of affective engagement with regard to politics at this particular moment in history. 31 While, for the purposes of performing this type of broad cultural/historical analysis, it is useful to think of a single, overarching intersection between eroticism and politics that characterizes this time period, in my introduction I also indicate that the iteration of the erotic that appears in the socially engaged Latin American and
Latina/o literature of the 1970s and 80s is inflected in different ways in different Latin American literary texts, as well as between Latin American literature and U.S. Latina/o literature. In this chapter I will trace the unique intersections between socialist politics and the liberatory erotic in the Latin American literature and culture of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, as well as in the Latina/o literature of 1980s, revealing what these various intersections hold in common as well as the ways in which they differ. By delineating the variously inflected yet interrelated manifestations of this literary and cultural phenomenon, I will demonstrate the breadth of its cultural influence, thus helping to explain its residual presence in contemporary Latin American and Latina/o literature. I will begin by addressing the intersection of eroticism and politics in the socially engaged Latin American literature of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
cultural articulations that emerged during the same period. Of course not all of the cultural articulations created during this period supported the liberation movements or even addressed these movements in any discernible way. However, given the number of cultural articulations that did engage with these liberation movements, it is reasonable to argue that these movements had a significant impact on much of the cultural production of the period and to refer to the cultural articulations that engaged with these movements as a cultural superstructure.
31 For details see my introduction in which I outline Jonathan Flatley’s treatment of Heideggerian Stimmung as a collective historical mood that facilitates our affective attachments. As Hubert Dreyfus explains in Being-in-the- World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 1 , for Heidegger, Stimmung “can refer to the sensibility of an age (such as romantic), the culture of a company (such as aggressive), [or] the temper of the times (such as revolutionary)” (169).
23 As I mention in my introduction, the intersection between the erotic and the political appears as a vital element of popular culture in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s in Latin America. The role of the erotic within Latin American popular culture has a complex history, as, to a certain extent, this iteration of the erotic is culturally specific and linked to the unique cultural and religious syncretisms that characterize the region, as well as to the specific variant of socialism that emerged in Latin America during this time. 32 This Latin American iteration of socialism was ideologically distinct from socialism’s other historical variants. As John Beverley asserts in
Latinamericanism After 9/11 ,
one of the things that was most original and attractive about the armed struggle in Latin America was precisely that it portended a new form of socialism that would have differed from the Russian and Chinese models—already perceived as deeply problematic . . . —on the one hand, and West European social democracy, still deeply tied to colonialism and imperialism, on the other. In the Cuban Revolution in its glory days, before it became heavily dependent on the Soviet Union, or in Allende’s strategy of a democratic ‘Chilean road to socialism,’ or in the rural ‘liberated zones’ of this or that region of Colombia or northeastern Brazil, or in the Sandinista experience in Nicaragua, with all its ambiguities and contradictions, what was being gestated were uniquely Latin American forms of socialism. (103-4)
As I will demonstrate throughout this chapter, this “uniquely Latin American” form of socialism had a defining impact on the development of the region’s political culture in general and on the formation of the erotics of liberation in particular (103). At the same time, the nature of this iteration of the erotic is also linked to other aspects of the region’s political culture, which was itself shaped by the confluence of liberation movements taking place at this time in a number of different places around the world. In addition to the Latin American armed struggle, these movements include the student movements of the New Left in Europe, the Civil Rights and
32 I have addressed the impact of Latin America’s cultural and religious syncretisms on this iteration of the erotic in my introduction. For even more on this topic, see Juan Carlos Ubilluz’s Sacred Eroticism .
24 feminist movements in the United States, anti-colonial struggles in Africa, and the Cultural
Revolution in China. This confluence of liberation movements led to a period of great intellectual and ideological exchange between these diverse political cultures, among which the
Latin American armed struggle and the student movements of the New Left had a particularly formative mutual impact. As Estela Cédola explains in Cortázar: El escritor y sus contextos ,
la New Left (Nueva Izquierda) . . . tuvo enorme influjo no sólo en la izquierda tradicional sino también en las costumbres y en la mentalidad generales, tanto en Europa como en el continente americano conformando esta cultura política de masas . . . [En América Latina] se leían Marcuse y Debray o Mao Tse Tung cuyas obras se difundieron con la misma velocidad que en Italia o Francia, al mismo tiempo que la producción local era muy apreciada en Europa ya que el futuro revolucionario estaba puesto en el tercer mundo. (19, 15)
the Nueva Izquierda (New Left) . . . had an enormous impact, not only on the traditional left, but also on the general customs and mentality in Europe as well as on the American continent, forming this political mass culture . . . [In Latin America] they read Marcuse and Debray or Mao Tse Tung, whose works were disseminated with the same speed as in Italy or France, at the same time that local [Latin American] writing was very appreciated in Europe since the revolutionary future was positioned in the third world. 33
This process of intellectual and cultural exchange, along with the pronounced impact of the armed struggle itself, led to the formation of an intellectually rich and ideologically variegated leftist political culture in Latin America, as well as to the formation of a unique historical mood, or Stimmung . It was from this diverse leftist political culture, rather than from any one particular source or reference, that the erotics of liberation would emerge. In this chapter I will delineate several of the key sources that initially helped to shape this iteration of the erotic in Latin
America, beginning with the respective philosophical writings of Herbert Marcuse and Ernesto
33 While, as Cédola asserts, “puede parecer una simplificación el homologar los conflictos de ambos continentes [Europa y América del Sur],” ‘putting the conflicts of each of these continents [Europe and South America] on the same level may appear to be an oversimplification’—and, of course, it would be grossly inaccurate to argue that these conflicts were in any way identical—at the same time, “la guerilla latinoamericana—en Argentina y Uruguay por lo menos—no se entiende sin el sustrato ideológico que estamos analizando” ‘the Latin American armed struggle—in Argentina and Uruguay at least—cannot be understood without the ideological substrate that we are analyzing here’ (15).
25 Che Guevara. I will then show how this iteration of the erotic proliferated within the socially engaged Latin American literature of the 1970s and 80s, in a way that can only be explained by its pervasive presence within the larger political and cultural milieu.
If, as I have mentioned, the Latin American armed struggle and the student movements of the New Left had a mutually formative impact on each other, perhaps the most influential thinkers of each of these respective movements were Ernesto Che Guevara and Herbert Marcuse.
While in many ways markedly different—most notably in the relative emphasis that each one places on cultural revolution versus class struggle—their writings also contain certain distinctive parallels, including a pronounced emphasis on the role of subjectivity and affect within the political process. To a certain extent, this emphasis on subjectivity and affect is one that already figures in the early philosophical writings of Karl Marx, from which both Guevara and
Marcuse’s writings evolved. 34 It is this earlier Marx’s interest in subjectivity that leads him to argue that under capitalism, man is estranged from everything that gives life meaning—man is
“separated from his work, separated from his life activity, separated from his own products, separated from the material world, and separated also from his fellow-men” (Jha 544).
According to Marx, this estrangement stems from man’s need, in a capitalist society, to exert himself as an individual—that is, as over and against other men—and thus to deny his true nature as a “‘species-being . . . a being that treats the species as its own essential being’” (Marx as quoted in Jha 544). For this distinctly humanist Marx, the ultimate goal of communism is “‘the complete return of man to himself as a social . . . being,’” which he equates with both liberating
34 Both Marcuse and Guevara ground their respective philosophies in Marxist thought, and were particularly inspired by Marx’s earlier works. As Maurice Cranston indicates in his foreword to The New Left , “the Marx these writers [of the New Left] follow is not so much the economist, the later Marx, the author of Das Kapital , but rather Marx the sociologist, the author of the early philosophical manuscripts. Their Marx is, like themselves, a ‘Hegelian’ of sorts, a metaphysician, neither a positivist nor a scientific determinist. Their Marx is the philosopher of alienation” (7).
26 man from his alienation and restoring men to their ideal condition as “true men—men in all their personal human dignity” (Marx as quoted in Jha 548). In Marx’s understanding, to be communist is thus not to manipulate or distort one’s subjectivity for the sake of mind-numbing conformity, but to finally discover one’s true self through the realization of the self as a social entity.
In keeping with these components of early Marxist thought, both Marcuse and Guevara demonstrate a similar preoccupation with man’s subjective experience, and both locate the nexus of this experience in man’s relationship to his work. Moreover, both Guevara and Marcuse make it clear that the ultimate goal of revolution is not only economic equality, but also a radical moral and spiritual transformation that would bring man closer to his ‘true’ nature, as well as to other men. As I will demonstrate, this distinct emphasis on subjectivity and affect in relation to politics is why we can now understand Marcuse and Guevara’s respective theoretical texts as prolegomena to the intersection between the erotic and the political in the political culture of the
60s, 70s, and 80s in Latin America. Here I will analyze the writings of both of these thinkers as prolegomena to this iteration of the erotic, while keeping in mind its subsequent evolution within the larger political culture. To be clear, my objective here is not to demonstrate that Guevara was directly influenced by Marcuse’s thought (or vice versa), but rather to show that Marcuse and
Guevara, as respective doyens of the New Left and the Latin American armed struggle, shared similar philosophical concerns—the relationship between the individual and the communal, and the role of subjectivity and affect in the political process. I will then show how these concerns also figure in the iteration of the erotic that appears as part of the Latin American political culture of the 1960s, 70s, 80s, in which the respective philosophies of both of these thinkers had been absorbed.
27 Herbert Marcuse delivers his response to the problem of social repression in Eros and
Civilization (1955), in which he blends Marxist thought and Freudian philosophy to arrive at his theory of a non-repressive, erotic society. Marcuse’s interest in subjectivity is thus evident in this reworking of Freudian thought. In his philosophical framework, Marcuse argues that the repressive forces that Freud claims are necessary to the very structure of civilization, and which
Freud defines as the ‘reality principle,’ are in fact surplus repressive forces needed to sustain a capitalist economy. According to Marcuse, these basic repressive forces, “enforced by the need for sustaining a large quantum of energy and time for non-gratifying labor, perpetuate the de- sexualization of the body in order to make the organism into a subject-object of socially useful performance” (199). However, Marcuse also asserts that, having achieved a surplus economy, it is no longer necessary to maintain the same level of repression since, rather than constituting part of an inevitable reality principle, the surplus repression that exists in a capitalist economy characterizes what Marcuse calls the ‘performance principle,’ which is only “the prevailing historical form of the reality principle” (Julka 18). The objective, then, is for man to arrive at a new historical form of the reality principle through a change in his subjectivity, as, according to
Marcuse, such a change in man’s subjectivity could facilitate a change in his social relations and, by extension, a change in the very structure of civilization itself. For Marcuse, the means to do this lie within the imagination and the libido. According to Marcuse, by relaxing the repression of his sexual instincts, man can regain access to his intrinsic libidinous energy and channel that energy into his work and all of his relationships, thereby creating a new reality principle and the basis of a new, non-repressive society. In Marcuse’s words:
Non-repressive order is possible only if the sex instincts can, by virtue of their own dynamic and under changed existential and societal conditions, generate lasting erotic relations among mature individuals. We have to ask whether the sex instincts, after the elimination of all surplus-repression, can develop a ‘libidinal rationality’ which is not
28 only compatible with but even promotes progress toward higher forms of civilized freedom. (199)
Marcuse thus identifies eros as the catalyst with the potential to transform society and to
“generate” new, more civilized and equitable relationships among men. Like Audre Lorde’s conceptualization of eros in “Uses of the Erotic,” which I discuss in my introduction, Marcuse’s conceptualization of eros involves a reorientation of the libido “from sexuality constrained under genital supremacy to eroticization of the entire personality” (201). For Marcuse, the unleashing of eros would thus allow man to realize himself more fully through increasingly erotic social relations and increasingly erotic and imaginative labor, in which man’s libidinous energy would be cathected in his work, and in which the work that he performed would correspond to his
“freely developing individual needs” (201). In such a society, the transformation of affective relations would thus lead to the transformation of social, economic, and political relations, as
“the work relations which form the base of civilization . . . would be ‘propped’ by non- desexualized instinctual energy,” and “the altered societal conditions would . . . create an instinctual basis for the transformation of work into play” (214-5). In Marcuse’s philosophy, eros thus performs the role that is more often accorded to agape . Marcuse defends his conflation of eros and agape by turning to the Greeks, writing that
The notion that Eros and Agape may after all be one and the same—not that Eros is Agape but that Agape is Eros—may sound strange after almost two thousand years of theology. Nor does it seem justifiable to refer to Plato as a defender of this identification—Plato who himself introduced the repressive definition of Eros into the household of Western culture. Still, the Symposium contains the clearest celebration of the sexual origin and substance of the spiritual relations. . . . There is an unbroken ascent in erotic fulfillment from the corporeal love of one to that of the others, to the love of beautiful work and play . . . and ultimately to the love of beautiful knowledge. . . . Spiritual ‘procreation’ is just as much the work of Eros as is corporeal procreation, and the right and true order of the Polis is just as much an erotic one as is the right and true order of love . The culture-building power of Eros is non-repressive sublimation: sexuality is neither deflected from nor blocked in its objective; rather, in attaining its objective, it transcends it to others, searching for fuller gratification. (211; my emphasis)
29 For Marcuse, then, sexual love and love for humanity appear as largely equivalent, with greater freedoms in the realm of sexuality leading to the formation of a more generous and loving society and culture.
Given the centrality of the erotic to Marcuse’s philosophy, as well as the level of cultural and ideological exchange known to exist between the European New Left and the Latin
American armed struggle, it would be easy to attribute the presence of the erotic in the Latin
American political cultural of the 60s, 70s, and 80s directly to Marcuse. However, things are not so simple. If one turns to Ernesto Che Guevara’s El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba ‘Socialism and the New Man’ (1965), the essay in which Guevara delineates his foundational concept of the
‘new man’ of the Cuban revolution, one finds a discourse that, while never directly mentioning the erotic or libidinous energy, is nonetheless very similar to that of Marcuse. In fact, one could even argue that the process of transformation that Guevara describes as necessary to arrive at the
‘new man’ of the revolution is in many ways analogous to the process required to produce a non- repressive society in Marcuse’s philosophical framework. 35 More importantly, Guevara adds to this iteration of the erotic two crucial elements that are not as clearly developed in the work of
Marcuse, namely, an understanding of the experience of the social as personally transformative, and an awareness of the undeniable connection between politics and affect. Thus, in order to fully understand the unique iteration of the erotic that appears as part of the Latin American
35 In addition to the relative emphasis that each of these thinkers places on cultural revolution versus class struggle, one of the principal differences between Marcuse and Guevara is the order in which they envision these changes to occur. Whereas Guevara foresees the revolution facilitating subsequent moral and cultural changes, Marcuse argues that the moral and cultural changes he prescribes must take place prior to the armed struggle. As K. L. Julka asserts in “Herbert Marcuse’s Messianic Humanism: Politics of the New Left,” Marcuse “subscribes to the views of cultural revolutionaries that a ‘revolution in perception’, a radical change in consciousness, is the ‘first step in changing social existence’” and that, if “taken up after the revolution, attempts at transforming society would be infructuous” (19).
30 political culture of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, one must consult both the ideology of the armed struggle as well as that of the New Left.
One of the critiques most frequently leveled against socialism as a political project is that it is homogenizing and anti-individualistic. In light of these criticisms, Guevara’s essay, El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba , constitutes an attempt to address the role of the individual within the revolution—to reconcile the movement’s economic and social goals with the experience of individual man. In his essay, Guevara asserts that the individual not only has a role to play within the revolution, but that the individual’s subjectivity and affect are indispensable components of the revolutionary project. This assertion is part of what distinguishes Guevara’s writing from classical Marxist thought and what brings it closer to both Marx’s earlier works and to the philosophy of Marcuse. Moreover, Guevara’s attention to the pivotal role of subjectivity and affect in the political process are what make him one of the primary philosophical sources for the erotic as it appears in the cultural superstructure of the armed struggle.
In El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba Guevara turns a critical eye to the question of man’s subjective experience. Like both Marx and Marcuse, in his essay Guevara defines the prevailing problem of contemporary society as man’s alienation, asserting that “la última y más importante ambición revolucionaria . . . es ver al hombre liberado de su enajenación” ‘the ultimate and most important revolutionary ambition . . . is to see man liberated from his alienation’ (29). 36 Also like Marcuse, Guevara foresees man’s freedom from alienation resulting in an increased capacity for self-expression and in a more organic—perhaps even erotic— relationship to his labor, writing that the revolution will lead to “la reapropriación de su naturaleza a través del trabajo liberado y la expresión de su propia condición humana a través de
36 All translations of Guevara’s El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba are mine unless otherwise indicated.
31 la cultura y el arte” ‘man’s reappropriation of his nature through liberated work and the expression of his own human condition through culture and art’ (30). However, whereas
Marcuse locates the catalyst for the transformation of man’s subjectivity within the imagination and the libido, Guevara locates it in man’s realization of his true nature as a social being.
Building on Marx’s understanding of man as a “‘species-being,’” whose true nature is to be with
“the whole of mankind” (Marx as quoted in Jha 544), Guevara argues that man’s becoming aware of his social nature will amount to “su realización plena como criatura humana, rotas todas las cadenas de la enajenación” ‘his full realization as a human creature, with all the chains of alienation broken’ (30). Thus for Guevara, as for Marx, to become socialist is not to manipulate or distort one’s subjectivity, but to finally discover one’s true self. Man’s new awareness of himself as a social being will be realized primarily through his work, which, rather than as a means of survival, he will perform as “una cuota por el cumplimiento del deber social” ‘an installment for the completion of the social commitment’ (31). However, Guevara envisions this performance of labor as more than a mindless fulfillment of each man’s obligation to society; he views it as a means of attaining access to one’s true self through the realization of the self as a social being. For Guevara, “el hombre, en el socialismo, a pesar de su aparente estandarización, es más completo; a pesar de la falta del mecanismo perfecto para ello, su posibilidad de expresarse y hacerse sentir en el aparato social es infinitamente mayor” ‘man, despite his apparent standardization, is more complete within socialism; despite the lack of a perfect mechanism, his ability to express himself and to make himself present in the social apparatus is infinitely greater’ (29). According to Guevara, in the socialist system of labor, man
32 empieza a verse retratado en su obra y a comprender su magnitud humana a través del objeto creado, del trabajo realizado. Esto ya no entraña dejar una parte de su ser en forma de fuerza de trabajo vendida, que no le pertenece más, sino que significa una emanación de sí mismo, un aporte a la vida común en que se refleja. (31)
will begin to see himself reflected in his work and to understand his human magnitude through the object he has created, through the work he has realized. This will no longer entail losing a part of himself in the form of sold labor-power, which no longer belongs to him, but will instead constitute an extension of himself, a contribution to the shared life in which he is reflected.
The relationship between man and his socially committed labor that Guevara describes here is highly reminiscent of both Marcuse’s vision of libidinously-stimulated labor and Lorde’s vision of personally-fulfilling, erotic activity. For Guevara, unlike the socially alienated labor performed in capitalist society that results in man’s depletion, the socially committed labor that the revolutionary performs will allow him to give of himself and, in giving of himself, to understand his true nature. Thus, in seeing himself reflected in his labor, alienated man will undergo a transformation of his subjectivity, thereby becoming the ‘new man’ of the revolution, in a process that echoes, if not mirrors, the formation of a non-repressive, erotic society in
Marcuse.
Another component of Guevara’s essay that ultimately feeds into the Latin American erotics of liberation is his assertion that “el revolucionario verdadero está guiado por grandes sentimientos de amor” ‘the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love’ (48). In this essay Guevara encourages his fellow revolutionaries to idealize their love for the people and
“hacerlo único, indivisible” ‘to make it unique, indivisible’ (48). Guevara thus identifies not only subjectivity, but also affect as an important aspect of the revolutionary endeavor. For Guevara, it is this love, or agape , that is the motivating force behind revolutionary action, as he asserts that
“todos los días hay que luchar porque [sic] ese amor a la humanidad viviente se transforme en hechos concretos, en actos que sirvan de ejemplo, de movilización” ‘we have to fight everyday
33 so that this love for living humanity is transformed into concrete acts, in acts that serve as examples, as mobilization’ (49). In addition, just as Marcuse promotes eros as a means of alleviating the repressive forces in society, in El socialismo y el hombre Guevara promotes “el amor a los pueblos” as way to keep revolutionaries from becoming overly dogmatic or authoritarian in their approach—“para no caer en extremos dogmáticos, en escolasticismos fríos, en aislamiento de las masas” ‘so as not to fall into dogmatic extremes, cold scholasticisms, or isolation from the masses’ (49).
By delineating the connection between politics and affect, Guevara’s essay transcends a limited, dualistic understanding of politics as motivated primarily by reason and intellect, and instead celebrates the way in which our political beliefs and actions are grounded in our individual, affective experience. Moreover, by establishing a connection between politics and love, Guevara lays the groundwork for the intersection of the erotic and the political in the cultural superstructure of the armed struggle. Clearly, the love that Guevara refers to in his essay is not romantic love or the erotic sexuality that one finds in Marcuse, but rather agape —“[el] amor a los pueblos” and “a las causas más sagradas” ‘love for the people’ and ‘the most sacred causes’ (13). Nevertheless, by identifying “el amor” as a necessary component of the formation of the Cuban new man, Guevara pairs love and political action in a way that will be taken up by subsequent artists and intellectuals in their cultural and discursive articulations. Whereas, in El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba , ‘el amor’ is clearly an asexual love, in later discursive articulations this difference between erotic love and love for the people is not so clearly defined—or, rather, erotic love and love for the people are conflated within a larger erotics of liberation and aliveness that bears the impact of both Guevara’s and Marcuse’s thought.
34 To summarize, the revolutionary erotic that appears as part of the Latin American political culture of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s cannot be attributed directly to either Marcuse or
Guevara but shares components of each of their intellectual theorizations. Given that the revolutionary erotic emerged from a political culture that had absorbed the writings of both of these thinkers, it makes sense that this iteration of the erotic shares many variables with each of their respective philosophies. In this iteration of the erotic one finds a pronounced emphasis on the social (or the communal), as well as an emphasis on sexual liberation. Also, many of the texts in which this iteration of the erotic appears also depict processes of transformation that allude to the process of transformation involved in the formation of the revolutionary ‘new man’ in
Guevara, as well as to the process of erotic liberation in Marcuse. Within these processes of transformation, the characters’ performance of socially-engaged labor—especially politically- motivated labor—tends to figure as a profound experience of the social, as well as a distinctly erotic experience that transforms their understanding of themselves and of their relationships with others. Finally, in many of these texts the characters’ political actions appear motivated by
“great feelings of love”—a love which frequently figures in their personal and intimate relationships as well as in their political activity. In the iteration of the erotic that appears in these texts, there tends to be no clear distinction made between personal, intimate, and even sexual love and the “amor a la humanidad” that Guevara praises in his pivotal essay. In fact, it more frequently appears that the characters’ love for the people and for the revolution tends to inform or spill over into their expressions of intimate and sexual love, while, at the same time, their daily activities become infused with erotic energy (or what Marcuse refers to as “non- desexualized instinctual energy”) (214). This amalgam of intimate love and love for humanity is highly reminiscent of the conflation of eros and agape that Marcuse delineates in Eros and
35 Civilization and appears as a defining feature of many of these texts. I will now take a closer look at Julio Cortázar’s Libro de Manuel (1973), a novel in which this iteration of the erotic is especially pronounced.
Julio Cortázar’s Libro de Manuel
Más que nunca creo que la lucha en pro del socialismo latinoamericano debe enfrentar el horror cotidiano con la única actitud que un día le dará la victoria: cuidando preciosamente, celosamente la capacidad de vivir tal como la queremos para ese futuro, con todo lo que supone de amor, de juego y de alegría. . . . Lo que cuenta, lo que he tratado de contar es el signo afirmativo frente a la escalada del desprecio y del espanto, y esa afirmación tiene que ser lo más solar, lo más vital del hombre: su sed erótica y lúdica, su liberación de los tabúes, su reclamo de una dignidad compartida en una tierra ya libre de este horizonte diario de colmillos y de dólares (Julio Cortázar, Libro de Manuel , 8). 37
As both Steven Boldy and Carolina Orloff indicate in their respective studies of
Cortázar’s work, although Libro de Manuel is often referred to simply as Cortázar’s ‘political’ novel and associated with his support for the Cuban revolution, both the novel itself and the circumstances surrounding it are actually much more complex. Written following the notorious
Padilla case, Libro de Manuel is a reflection of both Cortázar’s commitment to the Cuban revolution, as well as his frustrations with the revolution and his own personal vision of what the revolution should have become. 38 Within Libro de Manuel Cortázar employs the erotic as a
37 “I believe more than ever that the struggle for socialism in Latin America should confront the daily horror with the only attitude that can bring it victory one day: a precious, careful watch over the capacity to live life as we want it to be for that future, with everything it presupposes of love, play, and joy. . . . What counts and what I have tried to recount is the affirmative sign that stands face to face with the rising steps of disdain and fear, and that affirmation must be the most solar, the most vital part of man: his playful and erotic thirst, his freedom from taboos, his demand for a dignity shared by everybody in a land free at last of that daily horizon of fangs and dollars” (Rabassa 4-5).
38 In 1971, Herberto Padilla, a Cuban poet and essayist formerly perceived as a staunch supporter of the revolution, was imprisoned for expressing views that were deemed counterrevolutionary. To be specific, Padilla had published an essay in which he praised a novel that the regime considered counterrevolutionary (Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres ), and criticized another novel (Lisandro Otero’s Pasión de Urbino ) that had been praised by the regime. In addition, Padilla had published a volume of poetry, Fuego de juego , in which he was openly critical of the revolution and in which he celebrated the importance of the individual voice—a viewpoint that was perceived as antithetical to the political commitment required of a revolutionary writer. When over eighty Latin American and European intellectual allies of the revolution, including Cortázar, wrote to Fidel Castro demanding Padilla’s release,
36 means of addressing social issues within the revolution, particularly the issue of authoritarianism.
As is clear from the Padilla case, despite the revolutionary movement’s interest in ending economic oppression, it often perpetuated other forms of oppression against women, gays and lesbians, and ethnic minorities, as well as against artists and intellectuals whose views ran contrary to the movement’s orthodox political doctrine. While the movement’s leaders made concerted efforts to purge it of anything that was perceived to threaten its success or contradict its policies, not all artists adhered to these guidelines. In the cultural realm, artists and intellectuals sought to expand the revolution beyond its own, internally established limitations— to transcend the false dichotomy between class issues, and those of gender, race, and sexual identity. For these writers and artists, Guevara’s discourse of the ‘new man’ served as not only a defining revolutionary emblem, but also as a point of departure; if the revolution necessitated a
“new” man, who and what might (s)he be? As I will demonstrate, for Julio Cortázar, the erotic formed a significant part of the answer to that question.
Cortázar’s novel, published the same year as the coup d’etat that overthrew Salvador
Allende’s social democratic government in Chile, narrates the daily lives of an eclectic group of
Latin American political activists living in France as they plan the kidnapping of a Latin
Castro gave a speech in which he accused those intellectuals of being “seudoizquierdistas” (“pseudo-leftists”) and “liberales burgueses” (“bourgeois liberals”) and asked them to disassociate themselves from the revolutionary cause, pleading, “‘No nos defiendan, compadres, por favor, no nos defiendan.’ ‘No nos conviene que nos defiendan’” (“‘Don’t defend us, friends, please don’t defend us.’ ‘Your defense is not helpful to us’”; Castro in “Documentos. El caso Padilla” 119-20). Cortázar, who was greatly dismayed by both Padilla’s imprisonment and Castro’s pronouncement, sent a response in the form of a prose poem to the director of Casa de las Américas, which was subquently published as “Policrítica a la hora de los chacales.” In his poem, Cortázar denies Castro’s request, writing that “Precisamente ahora cuando / Se me pone en la puerta de lo que amo, se me prohíbe / Defenderlo, / Es ahora que ejerzo mi derecho a elegir, a estar una vez más y / Más que nunca / Con tu Revolución, mi Cuba, a mi manera” (“Just now when / I am shown to the door of what I love, I am banned from defending it, / It is now that I exercise my right to choose, to stand once more and more than ever / With your Revolution, my Cuba, in my own way”; Cortázar in “Documentos. El caso Padilla” 128). Thus, in “Policrítica a la hora de los chacales,” Cortázar reaffirms his commitment to the revolution as well as his intellectual freedom—his intention to write for the revolution from his own individual perspective, despite Castro’s perception that his writing was counterrevolutionary.
37 American ambassador in order to compel the release of fellow political activists imprisoned
around the world. 39 A work of pastiche and ironic reflexivity, the novel’s composition is depicted within the text itself; the “manual for Manuel” is a sourcebook that the members of la Joda compile for the son of two of its activist members.40 Intended as both a historical reference-text as well as a political and philosophical guide, the manual contains news articles in Spanish,
French, and Portuguese documenting the political protests of the period and the corresponding acts of suppression by military forces, as well as transcribed interviews of victims and perpetrators of torture, and charts enumerating statistics regarding the U.S. military’s involvement in Latin America. The manual also contains an account of the members of the
Joda ’s activities—their everyday conversations and musings as well as their more overtly political endeavors—documented by el que te dije , the unidentified narrator of the text and one
of several possible stand-ins for Cortázar himself.41 It is these activities that make up the bulk of
the novel and in which one finds the characters’ personal reflections, which function as political
and philosophical metadiscourses within the body of the text. Whereas, in Rayuela , the
metadiscourse that Cortázar incorporates is one primarily concerned with writing and literature,
39 The character whom the members of the Joda kidnap is referred to in the text as: “el encargado de la coordinación de asuntos latinoamericanos en Europa” ‘the person in charge of the coordination of Latin American affairs in Europe’ (329; Rabassa 331).
40 “La Joda” is the name that Cortázar assigns to his particular group of political activists. Literally it translates as both “the gag” or “the prank,” as well as “partying” or “screwing around;” (in his translation Rabassa renders it as “the Screwery”). Thus, while, on the one hand, “la Joda” can be read in the sense of something innocuous—as something that is no more than a joke—it also carries with it the sense of something that continually provokes you, as well as of the ludic sensibility that Cortázar framed as part of the erotic.
41 The name el que te dije translates as “the one I told you about” and functions within the text as an ever-present reminder of the level of subversive activity that occurred within and around the armed struggle. It suggests the political need to conceal this particular character’s identity, either from repressive government officials, or from other political activists who might view this character’s note-taking activities as counterrevolutionary. It may also be a playful way of suggesting that this character is a stand-in for the author. As other critics have suggested, both Andrés and Lonstein appear as other possible author surrogates.
38 in Libro de Manuel Cortázar uses the dialogues between his characters as a space to grapple with political philosophy—of how to undertake the revolution, which aspects of society the revolution should address, and how to construct a new society once the revolution has been achieved.
One of the characters’ central preoccupations in the novel is how to avoid the tendency toward authoritarianism that has threatened to overtake so many revolutionary movements. 42 In
Libro de Manuel the force that Cortázar’s characters turn to in order to mitigate this tendency toward authoritarianism is the erotic. Different scholars have indicated different potential sources for the eroticism in the novel; whereas Ubilluz credits Bataille’s “sacred eroticism” (3), Boldy and Estela Cédola point to the erotic Marxism of Marcuse, and Cédola in particular indicates the larger political culture surrounding the student movements of 1968, in which Marcuse’s philosophy of an erotic “sociedad no represiva” ‘non-repressive society’ (17) played a central role. Rather than attributing Cortázar’s vision of the erotic to a single source, I read it as one manifestation of the erotics of liberation in the political culture of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and as a reflection of the unique Stimmung that characterized this particular historical period. As an intellectual living in France in 1968, Cortázar was likely very familiar with the political culture of the New Left, which had absorbed the writings of both Herbert Marcuse and Che Guevara, and, as Ubilluz demonstrates, Cortázar was acquainted with Bataille’s theorization of the erotic as well. 43 All of these influences come together in Cortázar’s treatment of the erotic in Libro de
Manuel , in which, like the “rosas blindadas” ‘armored roses’ in the novel’s paratext, he melds the erotic political culture of the New Left with the militancy and class consciousness of the
42 Again, the protagonists’ interest in this topic is most likely informed by Cortázar’s own experience with the Padilla case.
43 See Ubilluz, Boldy, and Cédola for details.
39 Latin American armed struggle (8; Rabassa 4). 44 Despite the novel’s mixed reception when first published—both on the part of intellectuals and artists for whom it was too politically targeted, and that of revolutionaries for whom it wasn’t politically targeted enough—Libro de Manuel stands as a literary precedent for the role of the erotic within the political culture of the socialist movements in Latin America.
One of the ways in which the erotic figures in Libro de Manuel is as sexual liberation, which, as I have demonstrated, is a significant part of the formulation of the erotic in the political culture of 1968, as well as in the respective philosophies of Marcuse and Bataille. Along the same lines as Marcuse’s valorization of the libido in Eros and Civilization , in their conversations the characters in the novel celebrate the idea of sexual liberation and express the need to eradicate sexual taboos, as well as the need to do away with sexual repression in general. We see this attitude with regard to sex and sexuality in relation to one of the newspaper articles gathered for Manuel’s manual. The article, titled “Crimen de homosexuales; El movil: Los celos”
‘Homosexual Crime; Motive: Jealousy,’ which delineates the murder of a gay man in Argentina, makes use of a slew of homophobic terms and stereotypes, including the notion that the murder was more likely the result of a lover’s quarrel than a hate crime (320; Rabassa 321). 45 As Susana,
Manuel’s mother, pastes the article into her son’s manual, Patricio, his father, explains that, within it, “no solamente hay instrución lingvística [sic] sino un montón de tristezas latinoamericanas, viejo, tanta cosa por liquidar” ‘not only is there linguistic instruction but a
44 As I have suggested, the fusion of Marcuse and Guevara that appears in Libro de Manuel was most likely also present in the political culture of the New Left, in which the writings of both of these thinkers formed a significant part of the theoretical apparatus.
45 The full title of the article is “Era garzon [sic], y se llamaba Manolo González; Crimen de Homosexuales; El movil: Los celos” ‘He was a waiter and his name was Manolo González; Homosexual Crime; Motive: Jealousy’ (320; Rabassa 321).
40 whole mess of Latin American sadness, old man, so many things to be liquidated,’ and urges
Susana, “Pegalo, Susanita, pegalo con lágrimas, vieja, todavía estamos lejos del día en que un recorte parecido parecerá un cráneo de neanderthal o algo por el estilo” ‘Paste it in, Susana, paste it in with tears, girl, we’re still far from the day when a clipping like this will look like a
Neanderthal skull or something of the sort’ (319; Rabassa 320). This instance of homophobia thus appears within the text as an essential part of Manuel’s education and as one of the many social inequities that the revolution must address.
Another example of la Joda ’s orientation toward sex and sexuality appears in the group’s eccentric philosopher friend, Lonstein’s, defense of masturbation to el que te dije . In this dialogue, Lonstein claims that the taboo against masturbation, or onanism, is one of the many forms of oppression that the revolution must overcome if it is truly interested in enacting social change. In his prolonged debate on the subject, Lonstein asserts that
la Joda, para darte un ejemplo a mano, se propone como una empresa de liquidación de fantasmas, de falsas barreras, con toda ese vocabulario marxista que a mí me falta pero que vos ahora mismo agregarás mentalmente a la enumeración de errores y lacras sociales y personales que hay que liquidar, y si es así yo entiendo que debo aportar una contribución paralela, porque defender la legitimidad del onanismo no solamente vale por eso, que no es gran cosa en sí, sino porque ayuda a las otras muchas fracturas que hay que practicar sensaltro en el esquema del ántropos. (224)
the Screwery, to give you an example at hand, has set itself up as an enterprise for the liquidation of phantoms, of false barriers, with all that Marxist vocabulary that I lack but which you right now are probably adding mentally to the enumeration of social and personal errors and scars that must be liquidated, and if that’s how it is I understand that I must make a parallel contribution, because defending the legitimacy of onanism is not only worthwhile for that reason, which is nothing great in and of itself, but because it helps the many other fractures that one must practice solo in the whole scheme of anthropos. (Rabassa 226) 46
46 In spite of his criticisms of la Joda , Lonstein is also very much involved in the group; as el que te dije recognizes “Lonstein estaba más al tanto de la Joda de lo que hubiera podido imaginarse dada su tendencia iconoclasta y a veces francamente reaccionaria” (105). It is he who cares for Manuel when la Joda kidnaps the ambassador.
41 From this dialogue it is clear that Lonstein views masturbation as not only a means of pleasuring himself, but also as an act of integrity and self-knowledge reflective of a deeper level of honesty and self-awareness necessary for the revolution to realize its goals—for Lonstein, to practice onanism is “[mirar] . . . de verdad la cara que [te] propone el espejo de cada mañana” ‘[to look] the truth in the face, the one every morning’s mirror offers them’ (226; Rabassa 229). To reclaim one’s right to practice onanism is thus to assert one’s right to know oneself intimately and to reclaim the dignity of this particular sexual act. 47 Moreover, here, as in Marcuse’s theorization of an erotic non-repressive society, the liberation of the libido appears as the psychological shift that will serve as a gateway to other social changes—“[que] ayuda a las otras muchas fracturas que hay que practicar sensaltro en el esquema del ántropos” (224). As Boldy argues, for Lonstein
“sexual liberation . . . is thus not just a luxury of the revolution, but a necessary condition to its lasting success” ( The Novels 165-6).
Sexual liberation thus appears within Cortázar’s novel as a prerequisite of the revolution.
However, sexual liberation in and of itself is not the only component of the erotic that the characters in Libro de Manuel promote as an essential part of the revolutionary ethos; rather, as in Eros and Civilization , in Libro de Manuel the process of erotic transformation that the characters envision involves a reorientation of the libido “from sexuality constrained under genital supremacy to the eroticization of the entire personality” (Marcuse 201). The erotic
47 Lonstein’s defense of onanism in particular is noteworthy in that masturbation represents the first, and perhaps the most fundamental act of self-indulgence. Unlike most sexual practices, which involve two or more people and in which the focus tends to be on sharing pleasure with another person as well as experiencing pleasure oneself, when practicing onanism, one is, by definition, only concerned with one’s own personal pleasure. In this sense one could view onanism as a profoundly individualistic and even bourgeois act—certainly as one that runs counter to a political structure in which all self-interest must be sacrificed for the good of the group. Therefore, by including the taboo against onanism among “la enumeración de errores y lacras sociales y personales” that the Joda must overcome in order to realize its goals, Lonstein joins Guevara and Marcuse in suggesting that any future project of the social must not disregard the role of individual and his or her personal/intimate needs, not to mention the role of desire itself (224).
42 transformation that these characters foresee is thus one that will lead to great freedom in the realm of self-expression and thought, as well as in that of sexuality and sexual practices. This broader vision of eroticism and of its wide-reaching implications is evident in el que te dije ’s interior monologue in which he contemplates the connection between the type of language used by revolutionary leaders and the type of political systems that they tend to establish once in power. In this passage Cortázar establishes a complex dialogue between Guevara’s discourse of the revolutionary new man and Marcuse’s erotics of liberation, in which we can see the intricate fusion of eros and agape that I have described above.
As I have already mentioned, and as Boldy also asserts, one of the functions that is proposed for the erotic in Libro de Manuel is to deter the “recurrence of repressive structures in society after the revolution” (Boldy, The Novels 185). In his interior monologue el que te dije identifies Marcos’s way of speaking as a reflection of the erotic nature of his personality, and as an indication that he would be less likely to revert to an authoritarian form of governance were he to attain political leadership. To this end, el que te dije clearly distinguishes Marcos’s manner of speaking from that of the other members of la Joda , as well as from that of his historical predecessors, whose rigid political discourse el que te dije views as indicative of their authoritarian political tendencies:
¿Qué haría Marcos si los azares de la Joda lo llevaran un día a ser eso que las tabletas asirias llamaban jefe de hombres? Su idioma corriente es como su vida, una alianza de iconoclastia y creación, reflejo de lo revolucionario entendido antes de todo sistema; pero ya Vladimir Ilich, sin hablar de León Davidovich y más de este lado y este tiempo Fidel, vaya si vieron lo que va del dicho al hecho, de la calle al timón. Y sin embargo uno se pregunta el porqué de este pasaje de un habla definida por la vida, como el habla de Marcos, a una vida definida por el habla, como los programas de gobierno y el innegable puritanismo que se guarece en las revoluciones. (88)
What would Marcos do if the fortunes of the Screwery were to raise him up one day to be what the Assyrian tablets called a leader of men? His everyday language is like his life, a mixture of iconoclasm and creation, a reflection of what is revolutionary being
43 understood ahead of any system; but there is already Vladimir Ilich, not to mention León Davidovich and closer to this side and this time Fidel, they certainly saw what went between word and deed, street and power. And still you wonder about the motives of that passage from a speech defined by life, like Marcos’s speech, to a life defined by speech, like government programs and the undeniable puritanism that lurks in revolutions. (Rabassa 85)
From this passage it is clear that, just as Lonstein views onanism as a reflection of personal
integrity and self-awareness, el que te dije views Marcos’s erotic manner of speaking as a
reflection of Marcos’s integrity, as well as his openness to alterity and his sense of alliance with
the common man. 48 In addition, by describing Marcos’s way of speaking as “un habla definida por la vida,” el que te dije not only characterizes Marcos’s speech as free from taboos; he also
associates Marcos with a ludic, life-affirming eroticism—a manner of speaking and thinking that
is in touch with the ever-changing flux of human existence (88). 49 This becomes even clearer as el que te dije ’s monologue continues, as he enters into dialogue with Guevara’s iconic essay:
Preguntarle a Marcos alguna vez si va a olvidarse del carajo y de la concha de tu hermana en caso de que le llegue la hora de mandar; mera analogía desde luego, no se trata de palabrotas sino de lo que late detrás, el dios de los cuerpos, el gran río caliente del amor, la erótica de una revolución que alguna vez tendrá que optar . . . por otra definición del
48 In this passage we see Cortázar’s belief in the importance of language to the revolutionary enterprise—especially the importance of erotic language. Cortázar speaks to this question of language further in his “Clases de literatura,” in which he declares, “Mi segunda intención, y era una intención expresa, está contenida en varios diálogos de Libro de Manuel : el tema del lenguaje obsoleto, muerto, que arrastra el peso de los tabúes y que precisamente en el terreno erótico es donde se nota más. Mi intención al escribir esos pasajes era por un lado que tenía que escribirlos porque eran un momento de la vida de los personajes, pero la segunda intención era llevar al ánimo del lector la noción de que a él también le está dado liberarse de tabúes mentales en todos los planos, no sólo en el político o en el histórico sino también en el más íntimo y más personal, porque si no se libera de esos tabúes no habrá hombre nuevo”
‘My second intention, and it was an explicit intention, is contained in the various dialogues of A Manual for Manuel : the question of dead, obsolete language, that drags the weight of taboos and that is most noticeable in the realm of the erotic. My intention in writing these passages was, on the one hand, that I had to write them because they were a moment in the life of the characters, but my second intention was to give the reader the sense that he, too, is allowed to free himself from mental taboos on all levels, not only on the political or historical level, but also on the most intimate and personal level, because if one doesn’t free oneself from these taboos there will be no new man’ (Julio Cortázar, “Octava clase: Erotismo y literatura,” 255).
49 By describing both Marcos’s life and his way of speaking as “una alianza de iconoclastia y creación,” Cortázar highlights the role of the creative individual within the process of social change (88).
44 hombre; porque en lo que llevamos visto el hombre nuevo suele tener cara de viejo apenas ve una minifalda o una película de Andy Warhol. (88; my emphasis)
He must ask Marcos if he’s going to forget his shit and his your sister’s twat someday in case the time for leadership should arrive; a simple analogy, of course, it’s not a matter of dirty words but what throbs behind them, the god of bodies, the great hot river of love, the eroticism of a revolution which someday will have to opt for . . . a different definition of man: because from what we’ve seen, the new man tends to take on the face of an old man as soon as he sees a miniskirt or an Andy Warhol movie; 88; my emphasis (Rabassa 85; my emphasis) 50
In this passage we clearly perceive both el que te dije ’s critique of the authoritarian tendencies within the armed struggle, as well as his belief that taking a more erotic approach—a more flexible, grounded, and open approach—to governance could have the potential to curb these tendencies. By referring to this erotic element of the armed struggle as “el gran río caliente del amor,” as well as “la erótica de una revolución,” el que te dije alludes to Guevara’s assertion of the connection between politics and affect in El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba , in which
Guevara frames love as a means to offset repressive tendencies within the revolution. However, whereas Guevara’s text focuses only on “el amor a los pueblos,” or agape , el que te dije ’s claim about Marcos’s discourse incorporates the notion of eros and sexuality as further antidotes to these repressive tendencies, echoing the function of the erotic as it appears in Marcuse. By creating a metadiscourse for el que te dije that resonates with both Guevara and Marcuse’s texts,
Cortázar elides the concepts of agape and eros in Libro de Manuel so that, within the novel, these two appear as one and the same. Moreover, in asserting this role for eroticism within the armed struggle, Cortázar both revises and reasserts Guevara’s discourse of the revolutionary new
50 Cortázar’s is not the only text in which the erotic is used to offset authoritarianism; as Arturo Arias asserts in “Gioconda Belli: la magia y/(d)el erotismo,” in Belli’s La mujer habitada “el erotismo, marginalizado de las prácticas discursivas de la novela centroamericana, confronta aquí las rigideces ideológicas que informaron el anterior discurso, generando una fusión entre vitalidad erótica y vitalidad política” ‘eroticism, marginalized from the discursive practices of the Central American novel, here confronts the ideological rigidities that informed the previous discourse, generating a fusion of erotic vitality and political vitality’ (314).
45 man, advancing Marcos as the iconic example of the new , new man—the erotic new man who will work to liberate people, not only from social and economic oppression, but also from their own internal oppression—the repression of their true, erotic nature.
It is important to note here that, in asserting the importance of eroticism, Cortázar does not frame erotic liberation as more important than the goals of the armed struggle, or as something that must occur prior to economic and political liberation, but rather as an essential component of “la lucha en pro del socialismo latinoamericano” ‘the struggle for socialism in
Latin America’ (8; Rabassa 4). For el que te dije (and, ostensibly, for Cortázar as well), the erotic is not just a marker of cultural revolution, but is instead an essential part of economic and political liberation—it is “the great hot river of love” with the potential to propel the revolution forward, the vital force moving within the revolutionary enterprise. This understanding of eroticism as intrinsic to the revolution is also intrinsic to the novel itself, as it is what motivates el que te dije to keep his account of la Joda ’s members’ daily activities (232). When Lonstein critiques el que te dije ’s narrative endeavor, complaining to him that “vos una vez más te salís del contexto y proyectás los fatos de la Joda a por lo menos la Argentina” ‘once more you’re leaving the context and you’re projecting the facts of the Screwery onto Argentina at least,’ el que te dije responds that “mucho más que eso, . . . los proyecto a la idea misma de la revolución”
‘much more than that, . . . I’m projecting them onto the very idea of the revolution’ (232;
Rabassa 235). 51
51 El que te dije himself expresses some bewilderment with regard to his endeavor, telling Lonstein that “no estoy nada calificado para hablar científicamente de nuestras carencias, insolvencias y archisuficiencias, no soy ni siquiera un loco oracular como Wilhelm Reich o un precursor del carajo como Sade o José Martí, . . . cada vez me da la impresión de que . . . en el fondo está mal lo que hago y que por ejemplo la libido no es tan importante para nuestro destino, etcétera; pero recojo el birome, le saco las pelusas y vuelvo a escribir” ‘I’m not at all qualified to talk scientifically about our lacks, insolvencies, and archsufficiencies, I’m not even an oracular madman like Wilhelm Reich or a goddamned precursor like Sade or José Martí, . . . each time I get the impression that . . . underneath it all
46 El que te dije is not the only character in the text who celebrates this notion of eroticism as not-separate-from the armed struggle; both Marcos and Lonstein vocalize this same idea at other points in the narrative. While neither of them refers to eroticism as explicitly as el que te dije does, their pronouncements are also clearly centered around the issue of eroticism, in the sense of both intimate relations and life-affirming activities. For example, in the following dialogue, which occurs after Ludmilla and Marcos have had sex for the first time, Ludmilla believes that Marcos has suggested that they wait until after la Joda is successful to start a relationship. Here Marcos corrects her misunderstanding as follows:
—No, polaquita . . . nosotros no podemos esperar como has podido ver, y está bien que no hayamos esperado. ¿Por qué esa manía de andar dividiendo las cosas como si fueran salames? Una tajada de Joda, otra historia personal . . . Y no es así, un salame también se puede comer a mordiscones, sin cortarlo en tajaditas, y te diré que hasta es más sabroso porque el gusto del metal arruina el del burro. (239)
No, Polonette, . . . we can’t wait, as you’ve seen, and it’s good that we didn’t wait. Why that mania for going around slicing things up as if they were salami? One slice of Screwery, another of personal history . . . And it’s not that way, a salami can also be eaten by bites, without dividing it into slices, and I’ll tell you that it’s even tastier because the taste of the metal ruins that of the donkey. (Rabassa 242)
Similar to el que te dije , who aspires to be the same “en la esquina y en la cama” (232), through this salami analogy Marcos expresses his desire for a more organic and unified connection between his revolutionary activities and his personal, intimate life. It is clear from this analogy that Marcos views both his revolutionary endeavors and his intimate life as equally a part of his life —or the salami—and believes that the tendency to separate the personal from the political— to “cortar [el salame] en tajaditas”—ends up detracting from life’s richness (239). Marcos even goes so far as to assert that “esta noche, nosotros dos, todo eso también es la Joda” ‘tonight, the
what I’m doing is bad and, for example, the libido isn’t that important to our destiny, etc.; but I pick up the pen, I pick off the hairs, and I start writing again’ (233; Rabassa 236-7).
47 two of us, this is all the Screwery too’ (239; Rabassa 242), thus describing intimate life as a significant and meaningful part of the revolution itself, as el que te dije does earlier in the text.
Marcos’s use of this ‘salami’ analogy to express this concept serves as an example of “el idioma corriente [de Marcos]”—of Marcos’s “habla definida por la vida” that el que te dije describes above (88). As el que te dije claims, Marcos’s use of such a quotidian, even domestic, analogy itself reflects his impetus not to extract the revolution from the rest of life, nor to extract the rest of life from the revolution. Of course, this use of quotidian metaphors to address profound, philosophical topics is nothing new in Cortázar, for whom this is a customary stylistic practice. However, in Libro de Manuel , this formal element takes on another level of significance as it serves to underscore the connection between the personal and the political in the novel—between political ideals and everyday existence. Cortázar’s use of these types of analogies and references, as well as his use of humor throughout the text, associates Libro de
Manuel with the kind of “iconoclastia y creación”—“[la] sed erótica y lúdica” ‘[the] playful and erotic thirst’ that Cortázar viewed as necessary to revitalize the armed struggle (88, 8; Rabassa
5).
The final example of this theme that I will explore from Cortázar’s novel appears in the passage on Lonstein’s phosphorescent mushroom, which emerges in Libro de Manuel as both a metaphor for the erotic, as well as a metonym of the erotic society that the revolution should be working to achieve. For Lonstein, this mushroom—a “lapsus prolapsus igneus ”—is a source of great pride and not a small degree of fixation, as he brings it up again and again throughout the text (180). To the question of the status of Lonstein’s mushroom as a metaphor for the erotic, one could argue that there are clear literary parallels between Lonstein’s interest in onanism as a revolutionary practice and his fascination with his ‘mushroom,’ which Cortázar describes as a
48 “vertical cilíndrico violáceo/cabezón pero no demasiado/inevitablemente fálico tópico/fosforeciendo débilmente bajo/el estímulo verdoso fotofílico” ‘purply vertical cyclinder
[sic]/bigheaded but not too much/inevitably topically phallic/weakly phosphorescencing [sic] under/a stimulus greenish photophilic’ (180; Rabassa 182), and whose growth Heredia (another
Joda participant) compares with “lo que me pasa a mí cuando veo una buena minifalda” ‘what happens to me when I see a good miniskirt’ (182; Rabassa 184). In addition, the Joda ’s act of going to Lonstein’s apartment in order to watch his mushroom glisten in the moonlight closely resembles the kinds of pagan rituals performed by practitioners of erotic mysticism. 52 If one accepts Lonstein’s phallic mushroom as a metaphor for the erotic, it is clear that Lonstein also considers the erotic to be an intrinsic part of the revolutionary endeavor, as he explains to el que te dije that “cosas como la luna llena, . . . mi hongo que crece y las menores que evaden de un reformatorio, andá a explicarles a tipos como Gómez o Roland que también eso puede ser la
Joda” ‘‘things like the full moon, . . . my mushroom that grows and juvenile girls who escape from a reformatory, go try to explain to guys like Gómez or Roland that that can be the Screwery too’’ (106; Rabassa 105). 53 This relationship between Lonstein’s mushroom and the revolution appears even more clearly the night that la Joda assembles in Lonstein’s apartment in order to see the mushroom glow. As Oscar, another Joda participant, notes in free indirect discourse, this
52 In Sacred Eroticism , Juan Carlos Ubilluz establishes Cortázar’s familiarity with the “sacred eroticism” of Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski, who themselves founded the Collège de Sociologie, a “community of knowledge dedicated to the study of past and present manifestations of the sacred,” and Acéphale, a “secret and ritualistic pagan society” (10). As Steven Boldy asserts, in its fullest incarnation eros represents “the tendency towards complete oneness with the world” ( The Novels 186), and, according to Ubilluz, followers of erotic mysticism take part in this sort of nature-based rituals “for the sake of re-experiencing an intensity that [has] been lost in the process of individuation/socialization” (27). As such, this incident in the text may be an allusion this and other nature-based spiritual groups and practices.
53 Here, again, Cortázar distinguishes between Marcos and the other more stereotypically dogmatic members of the Joda.
49 strange, fungi-centered gathering ends up serving as a sort of sacred rite prior to the Joda’s kidnapping of the ambassador:
Era realmente como una ceremonia, Oscar se apretó contra Gladis que se dormía dulcemente de pie como un caballito, encendió un cigarillo a respetuosa distancia del hongo y se dijo que desde ese momento hasta el viernes . . . las cosas iban a andar rápido y calientes, en todo caso el hongo y Lonstein y la condescendencia más bien extraña de Marcos no le molestaban, al contrario, había como una alianza inexplicable pero no menos sensible, un encuentro momentáneo y por eso quizá [sic] precioso de tantas cosas divergentes o que muchos creían divergentes, Gómez por ejemplo, el hombre de acción que se sentía perdiendo el tiempo, o Heredia que se torcía de risa, pero a Oscar le hacía bien ese absurdo con luz verde y mediciones al milímetro. (181)
It really was like a ceremony, Oscar drew close against Gladys who was softly sleeping on her feet like a pony, he lighted [sic] a cigarette at a respectful distance from the mushroom and said to himself that from this moment on until Friday . . . things were going to be fast and hot, in any case the mushroom and Lonstein and Marcos’s rather strange condescension didn’t bother him, on the contrary, there was a kind of alliance that was inexplicable but felt nonetheless, a meeting that was momentary and therefore perhaps precious because of so many diverse things or things that many people thought diverse, Gómez for example, the man of action who felt like he was wasting his time, or Heredia twisting with laughter, but it was good for Oscar, this absurdity of a green light and millimeter measurements. (Rabassa 183-4)
As Oscar observes, in this strange, almost surreal, ceremony we see the coming together of the personal, the political, and the erotic—of “tantas cosas divergentes o que muchos creían divergentes”—which, as Oscar suggests, are in fact not divergent at all (181). As was the case in
Lonstein’s defense of onanism, el que te dije ’s celebration of Marcos’s iconoclastic speech, and
Marcos’s own salami analogy, here the mystical erotic and the political are not depicted as two separate spheres, but as ones that are necessarily intertwined.
In this passage we also see a clear link between the experience of the erotic and the experience of the social. A large part of Oscar’s sense of the significance of this ‘ceremony’ is not only that it brings together so many different issues/concerns, but that it brings together individuals with such divergent interests and perspectives, among whom the erotic serves to
“irrigate the social bond” (Ubilluz 315). In describing this gathering as “una alianza
50 inexplicable” ‘an inexplicable alliance’ (181; my translation), Oscar registers the degree to which this moment in the text represents an experience of unity in diversity, as well as of “eroticism’s opening of the subject to alterity” (Ubilluz 311). As such, this mystical moment that Oscar enjoys comes not only from the act of watching the mushroom, but also from a profound experience of the social, which is itself a key variable in Cortázar’s conceptualization of the erotic.
Again, it is important to note that Cortázar does not promote this kind of erotic experience as an alternative to the armed struggle, but rather as a necessary component of the fight for economic and political liberation that is already underway. This understanding—that the revolution is in fact incomplete without the erotic—appears in Lonstein’s insistence during this mystical ritual that “no se debe perder de vista del hongo, vos me entendés” ‘‘You shouldn’t lose sight of the mushroom, . . . you understand me’’ (182; Rabassa 185). El que te dije responds to
Lonstein’s assertion with some thoughts of his own:
(. . . Marcos lo había entendido desde un principio, desde la llegada de Lonstein a la Joda, de lo contrario el rabinito no hubiera tenido acceso a algo que en la praxis le iba demasiado grande), . . . En esa comedia idiota había acaso como una esperanza de Marcos, la de no caer en la especialización total, conservar un poco de juego, un poco de Manuel en la conducta. (182-3)
(. . . Marcos had understood it from a starting point, from the entry of Lonstein into the Screwery, otherwise the little rabbi wouldn’t have had access to something that in practice was getting too big for him), . . . In that idiotic comedy there was perhaps something like a hope for Marcos, that of not falling into total specialization, preserving a bit of play, a bit of Manuel in his conduct. (Rabassa 185)
This passage reads as a continuation of el que te dije ’s previous appraisal of Marcos’s speech.
Here again we see that, among various members of the Joda, the erotic—here metonymized as
Lonstein’s erotic mushroom—is viewed as a safeguard against entrenched modes of thinking and linked to the virtues of imagination and creativity—this time to the playfulness and innocent
51 wonder of childhood represented in the figure of Manuel. As el que te dije continues, the erotic emerges as not only as necessary component of the revolution itself, but also as a metaphor for the kind of future society that Marcos and Oscar are fighting for. Here we see that, according to el que te dije , men like Marcos y Oscar are involved in the armed struggle in order to be able to bequeath to children like Manuel this erotic vision of the future:
Capaz que tipos como Marcos y Oscar . . . estaban en la Joda por Manuel, quiero decir que lo hacían por él, por tanto Manuel en tanto rincón del mundo, queriendo ayudarlo a que algún día entrara en un ciclo diferente y a la vez salvándole algunos restos del naufragio total, . . . la superfluidad de ciertas hermosuras, de ciertos hongos en la noche, de lo que podía dar todo su sentido a cualquier proyecto de futuro . (183; my emphasis)
It could even be that types like Marcos and Oscar . . . were in the Screwery because of Manuel, I mean that they were doing it for him, for every Manuel in every corner of the world, trying to help him so that someday he would enter a different cycle and at the same time saving for him a few remains of the total shipwreck, . . . the superfluousness of certain things of beauty, of certain mushrooms in the night, by means of which he could give complete meaning to any future project . (Rabassa 185; my emphasis)
For Marcos and Oscar, it is the erotic—the pale, unearthly beauty of “ciertos hongos en la noche”—that gives meaning to their vision of a just future society and that inspires them to believe that this future is possible (183). In order to be able to create such a society, both Marcos and Oscar know that they must not lose sight of the erotic even as they carry out the armed struggle, or that “había que estar con el rabinito a la hora de pasar al ambiente para ver el hongo”
(183).
Although in their analyses of the erotic in Libro de Manuel critics have tended to highlight the influence of Herbert Marcuse and the political culture of the European New Left, within the novel itself the connection between the erotic and the political appears as part of a distinctly Latin American sensibility. This designation of the erotics of liberation as part of a
Latin American sensibility is particularly evident in el que te dije ’s description of himself as a writer. As I have previously established, in keeping an account of the Joda ’s members’ daily
52 activities, el que te dije is also writing about the intersection between the erotic and the political—or “[proyectando] [los fatos de la Joda] a la idea misma de la revolución” (Cortázar
232). As such, el que te dije ’s complaints about what he is writing also speak to the way in which he perceives this intersection between the erotic and political, and, even more specifically, to the way that he perceives his own portrayal of the erotic new man. When he laments that “me siento tan pampeano, tan peludamente criollo con mi mate a las cuatro y mi literatura llena de palabrotas y de parejas encamadas entre paréntesis, siempre por encima o por debajo de la asunción final de otra vision del hombre” ‘I feel myself so much a pampa person, so damnably
Spanish-American with my mate at four o’clock and my literature full of dirty words and couples in bed in parentheses, always above or below the final assumption of a different vision of man’
(234; Rabassa 237), el que te dije aligns this vision of an erotic new man with a culturally- specific Latin American sensibility and identity. In truth, the erotics of liberation does stand out as a distinctly Latin American concept because of its theoretical hybridity. 54 Although it would be reductive to argue that the erotics of liberation is an idea that could have only developed in
Latin America, or that it is in any way intrinsically Latin American, at the same time there are certain aspects of Latin America’s intellectual and literary history that make it a likely place for this ideologically hybrid concept to have emerged and taken root. Some of the attributes that
Boldy identifies as part of this intellectual legacy are “a deeply embedded eclecticism, and a very literal interpenetration of utopia and possibility,” as well as a “[fertile] ‘irreverance’” towards the
54 El que te dije alludes to the hybridity of his project when he admits that “le tengo una envidia bárbara a los novelistas puros o a los teóricos marxistas o a los poetas de escogido temario, incluso a los erotólogos aprobados por el establishment, los que tienen piedra libre como el viejo Miller o el viejo Genet, esos que dieron su empujón y ganaron la puerta de la calle y ya nadie puede atajar aunque los prohiban en un montón de países” ‘I’ve got a terrible [envy] for pure novelists or Marxist theoreticians or poets with a strict agenda, even the erotologists approved by the establishment, those who have carte blanche like old Miller and old Genet, the ones who gave their shove and reach [sic] the street door and no one can hold them back any longer even though they’re banned in a whole lot of coutries’ (234; Rabassa 237).
53 piety/seriousness of European themes due to being in a hereditary, yet “marginal” position vis-à- vis European culture ( The Novels 193). As such, although el que te dije ’s association of the erotics of liberation with Latin America is here voiced as a complaint, this passage also reverberates within the text as a hope that the hybridity and “eclecticism” of Latin America’s intellectual history and culture will provide a propitious nesting-ground for the intersection between the erotic and the political (Boldy, The Novels 193).
As history has shown, Latin America did in fact prove to be a fertile nesting ground for the erotics of liberation. While in other regions, such as Europe and the United States, 1968 was not only a climactic year but also a swan-song year for the New Left, in a significant portion of
Latin America the liberation movements that began in the 1960s went on well into the 1980s— most notably the Sandinista Revolution and other related movements in Central America. In
Latin America, the erotics of liberation continued as part of these movements’ political culture, emerging as part of songs and images, as well as in literary texts. I will now show how the erotics of liberation continued to evolve and proliferate in the Latin American political culture of the 1970s and 80s by providing an analysis of its presence in Gioconda Belli’s Línea de fuego
(1978) and Eduardo Galeano’s Días y noches de amor y de guerra (1978). I will then move to explore a similar literary and cultural phenomenon that emerged among Latina writers in the
1980s in the United States.
Gioconda Belli’s Línea de fuego
Yo creo que es lo más hermoso de la experiencia revolucionaria, cuando vos empezás a sentir que formas parte de un colectivo que tiene los mismos ideales, y en el caso de Nicaragua fue muy especial: porque éramos muy jóvenes y veníamos todos de una experiencia dictatorial muy dura y esa manera de soñar tan desproporcionada era muy hermosa, porque uno no tenía vergüenza de soñar en común y la confianza en la posibilidad de la victoria, viéndola ahora desde estos tiempos, me llama la atención la fe
54 que teníamos en que era posible y por eso precisamente fue una de las cosas más hermosas (Gioconda Belli in Solanes 128). 55
One of the most prominent manifestations of this intersection between politics and the erotic appears in the work of the Nicaraguan poet and novelist Gioconda Belli. As a young woman Belli participated in the Sandinista Revolution, and the work she published during this time registers her commitment to Sandinismo from a decidedly woman-centered perspective. In
Línea de fuego , her second volume of poetry published in 1978, Belli celebrates the realization of social change through armed conflict, and, at the same time, grounds this work of social change in eroticism and, in particular, in the erotic potential of the female body. 56 As María A.
Salgado indicates in “Erotismo, cuerpo y revolución en Línea de fuego de Gioconda Belli,” in these poems Belli draws on the renaissance poetic tradition of the courtly knight fighting to bring honor to both his lady and his country. However, rather than depicting woman as the virginal, passive, and often symbolic recipient/spectator of male valor, in Línea de fuego Belli inverts this poetic structure, resituating it in the voice of the female lover/country which is also that of the female guerrillera . Thus, as in Belli’s own experience, in her poems the poetic voice is that of the guerrillera who fights alongside her male counterparts to usher in a more equitable future for her country and its people. In addition, unlike the platonic relationship between the knight and
55 ‘I believe that this is the most beautiful thing about the revolutionary experience, when you start to feel that you form part of a collective group that has the same ideals, and in the case of Nicaragua it was very special: because we were very young and we all came from a very difficult experience of dictatorship and this way of dreaming so disproportionately was very beautiful, because one wasn’t embarrassed to dream with others and to have confidence in the possibility of victory, looking back on it now from these times, I am struck by the faith that we had that it was possible and precisely for this reason it was one of the most beautiful things [about the revolutionary experience].’
56 As Salgado indicates, Belli’s work was particularly innovative because, although other notable Latin American women poets had previously published works exploring women’s subjectivity through “el discurso del cuerpo” ‘the discourse of the body,’ hers was the first to use this women-centered corporeal discourse to address the experience and perspective of la guerrilla (7).
55 his lady depicted in renaissance poetry, the relationship that exists between the guerrillera and the nation in Belli’s poetry is a markedly erotic relationship—one in which the passion the guerrillera feels for her country is what fuels her commitment to fight.
For example in “Ah, Nicaragua,” the female speaker sings a song of praise to her lover, the nation, which, in a reversal of common practice, is clearly figured as male. Throughout the poem, the poetic voice extolls her lover’s physical attributes with the repeated phrase “me gusta”
‘I like’ (26). 57 However, being that, in this poem, the speaker’s lover is Nicaragua, the physical attributes that she describes are in fact aspects of the national landscape/geography corporealized and rendered in highly sensual language. 58 For instance, early in the poem, the poetic voice exclaims that “me gusta tu calor y cómo reverbera el sol en tus / caminos. / Me gusta tu enorme pecho verde y erizado / donde oigo tronar magma y volcanes” ‘I like your heat and how the sun glistens on your roads. / I like your enormous green and bristly chest / where I hear magma and volcanoes boom’ (26). Here, “[el] calor” ‘[the] heat’ that the poem praises can refer to both the warmth of her lover’s body as well as to the warmth of Nicaragua’s tropical climate; “tu enorme pecho verde y erizado” ‘your enormous green and bristly chest’ evokes both the image of
Nicaragua’s lush and verdant landscape as well as that of a large, masculine torso. Moreover, in case there is any doubt as to the underlying nature of the relationship between Nicaragua and the poetic voice, Belli adds that “me gusta esa manera en que me has poseído, / llenándome de grama, de dolor y de risa / de los pies hasta el pelo” ‘I like the way that you’ve possessed me, /
57 All translations of the poems in Línea de fuego are mine unless otherwise indicated.
58 This interweaving of human intimacy and the sensual dimension of the natural world is a signature theme of Belli’s that reappears throughout her written works.
56 covering me with grass, with pain and with laughter / from my feet up to my hair’ (26). 59 This sensual description of Nicaragua’s natural beauty, and particularly the speaker’s affirmation that the country “[la] [ha] poseído” ‘[has] possessed [her],’ suggests a relationship that goes far beyond national affiliation; it paints a picture of a profoundly personal and erotic relationship between two ardent lovers. By utilizing the language of eros to convey the passion that exists between the nation and the poetic voice, Belli implies that the Sandinista Revolution is more than
‘just’ a political endeavor; rather, it is an act of love that one undertakes for a person that one knows intimately. 60 As the speaker proclaims in the poem’s final lines, “Yo estoy con vos, mi
Nicaragua / mi hombre / con nombre de mujer!” ‘I am with you, my Nicaragua / my man / with a woman’s name!’ (26). Thus, like many of the poems in this volume, this erotic love poem reads as a sensual homage to her country, as well as an expression of the affective dimension of the
Sandinistas’ struggle.
As demonstrated above, the poems of Línea de fuego are innovative in that they reimagine the armed struggle from a woman’s perspective and as a distinctly erotic act.
However, as alluded to in my analysis of “Ah, Nicaragua,” the overall impact of Belli’s women- centered poetry goes beyond the insertion of the female subject into a historically patriarchal occupation and literary tradition; instead, by “feminizing” the revolution, Belli’s poems are also able to get at a dimension of political struggle that is frequently lost, which is the connection
59 The eroticism of Belli’s poetry extends to their phrasing and style; as Candide Carrasco asserts in “Gioconda Belli: Cartografía del erotismo,” in Belli’s poems “las palabras se ensartan, una tras otra, llevadas por una energía interna, una poesía desbocada como un caballo sin riendas, sobre la cual el lector cabalga sin respiración” ‘the words roll along, one after another, carried by an internal energy, a runaway poetry like a horse without reins over which the reader gallops breathless’ (32).
60 As Carrasco affirms, in Belli’s works, “el compromiso político . . . proviene de las sobras de la expansiva capacidad de amar y de soñar” ‘the political commitment . . . comes from the surplus of the expansive capacity to love and to dream’ (39).
57 between political struggle and one’s personal/intimate life. 61 In addition, it is not just her own intimate life that Belli captures here—or the intimate life of the lone guerrillera . Rather, as
Salgado asserts, by constructing a poetic voice “que se mueve entre el comunitario nosotros . . . y el subjetivo y distintivamente diferenciado yo” ‘that moves between the communal we . . . and the subjective and distinctively differentiated I,’ Belli allows the female guerrillera to speak for her country’s people and to address the nation’s larger, collective mood, as well as her own personal affective experience.
This aspect of the volume comes across clearly in “Hasta que seamos libres,” a poem which, like “Ah, Nicaragua,” features “la metáfora del cuerpo como geografía” ‘the metaphor of the body as geography’ (Carrasco 33). However, unlike “Ah, Nicaragua,” in which the gender roles are more directly inverted, in this poem the poetic voice is that of the guerrillera who is herself taking on the geographical features of her beloved country; the poem begins “Ríos me atraviesan, / montañas horadan mi cuerpo / y la geografía de este país / va tomando forma en mí”
‘Rivers run through me, / mountains pierce my body / and the geography of this country / starts taking shape in me’ (11). As we soon learn, it is her love for her country’s people that has inscribed her nation’s geography onto the landscape of her flesh, transforming it into a fertile planting ground for the revolution; as the speaker describes, this love “[le] [hace] lagos, brechas y quebradas, / tierra donde sembrar el amor / que [le] está abriendo como un surco, / [llenándole] de ganas de vivir / para verlo libre, hermoso, / pleno de sonrisas” ‘[covers] [her] [in] lakes, breaches, and gullies, / land to plant the love / that is opening [her] like a furrow, / filling [her] with the desire to live / to see it free, beautiful, / full of smiles’ (11). The love that Belli refers to
61 In “La poesía erótica de Gioconda Belli: Tradición y alteración,” Elena Grau-Lleveria asserts that, in Línea de fuego , Belli “presenta . . . un concepto de estética y ética con una alteración esencial: la revolución se ‘femeniza’” ‘presents . . . an aesthetic and ethical concept with one essential alteration: the revolution is ‘feminized’’ (51).
58 here—which, later in the poem, she equates with “deseos de justicia” ‘longing for justice’— echoes the “amor a los pueblos,” or agape , that Guevara promotes as the affective motor of the revolution in El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba (Belli 11). However, by situating “el amor a los pueblos” in the erotic subjectivity of the female guerrillera , in this poem’s first verse Belli conflates this love-for-the-people with the erotic drive of the female warrior, as well as with the erotic pulse of the natural world.
In the poem’s second verse, Belli extends this fusion of eros and agape even further by shifting the poetic voice from that of the particular “yo” ‘I’ to the communal “nosotros” ‘we’ of the Nicaraguan people—refiguring ‘el amor’ as the shared experience of political struggle. Belli realizes this shift from ‘I’ to ‘we’ by having the speaker express the desire to radiate the love she feels beyond the confines of her own physical body, writing “Quiero explotar de amor / y que mis charneles acaben con los opresores / cantar con voces que revienten mis poros / y que mi canto se contagie; / que todos nos enfermemos de amor, / de deseos de justicia” ‘I want to explode with love / and for my shrapnel to bring an end to the oppressors / to sing with voices that burst my pores / and for my song to become contagious; / that we all become sick with love,
/ with longing for justice’ (11). Here it is as though, in expressing her desire to “explotar de amor” ‘explode with love,’ the speaker in fact transmits her love to the Nicaraguan people, inseminating them with their own desire for liberation. From this point on in the poem, the poetic voice remains that of the communal ‘we,’ and the energy and force of its revolutionary love becomes an affective tidal wave, overwhelming the nation’s oppressors. The communal voice asserts that
un corazón tan grande como el nuestro / resiste las más crueles torturas / y nada aplaca su amor devastador / y de latido en latido/va creciendo, / . . . ensordeciendo al enemigo / que . . . lo ve brillar en todas las miradas / lo va viendo acercarse / con el empuje de una marea gigante / en cada mañana en que el pueblo se levanta / a trabajar en tierras que no
59 le pertenecen, / en cada alarido de los padres que perdieron a sus hijos, / en cada mano que se une a otra mano que sufre.
a heart as large as ours / resists the cruelest of tortures / and nothing allays its devastating love / and from heartbeat to heartbeat / it keeps growing, / . . . deafening the enemy / . . . who sees it shining in all the faces / who sees it coming closer / with the force of a giant wave / each morning that the people get up / to work on land that does not belong to them, / in each cry of parents who lost their children, / in each hand that clasps another hand that suffers. (12)
In this passage Belli not only addresses the link between the people’s suffering and their desire for liberty and justice, but also the link between the political struggle itself and the affective energy fueling that struggle. Here Belli uses the term ‘love’ to refer to the emotional strength needed to overcome great suffering in order to continue to imagine and fight for political change.
In Belli’s poetry, it is the force of this erotic drive that will eventually vanquish the enemy—that
“lo irá arrollando todo / y no quedará nada / hasta que no se ahogue el clamor de nuestro pueblo / y gritos de gozo y victoria / irrumpan en las montañas” ‘will go on annihilating everything / and nothing will remain / until the cry of our people cannot be drowned out / and the shouts of joy and victory / will burst into the mountains’ (12). However, as Belli envisions it, at that point the liberatory impulse will not cease, but rather continue—extending to the rest of Latin America, and even to those who have already given their lives in the political struggle. Belli writes that, in that moment of ecstatic victory, “iremos a despertar a nuestros muertos / con la vida que ellos nos legaron / y todos juntos cantaremos / mientras conciertos de pájaros / repiten nuestro mensaje / en todos / los confines / de América” ‘we will go wake up our dead / with the life that they bequeathed us / and together we will sing / while choirs of birds/repeat our message / in all / the farthest confines / of America’ (12-3).
This final image of choirs of birds spreading the Sandinistas’ message throughout Latin
America speaks to the extent to which the Sandinistas’ struggle to liberate the populous from an
60 oppressive dictatorship had political relevance, not only in Nicaragua, but in many dictatorial environments throughout the Americas. While each Latin American country’s political history is obviously different and complex, they also share certain similarities—most notably the issues of dictatorship and the exploitative influence of the United States—that have made it so that the political and cultural struggles of each country resonate beyond their particular national borders, to the extent that one could argue for a shared Latin American culture of political struggle, in addition to the distinct political cultures of each individual nation. For this reason, Gioconda
Belli’s vision of an erotic “amor a la humanidad”—or an erotic agape —is one that finds parallels beyond the Sandinista Revolution; it is a vision that has played a significant role in the larger culture of political struggle in Latin America.
This notion that the Latin American struggles for social justice in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s were motivated by a shared experience of erotic agape —what Cortázar refers to as “el gran río caliente del amor” (88), and Belli as “un corazón tan grande como el nuestro” (12)—is one of the central parallels uniting these two texts, both of which are clearly drawing on the discursive legacy left by Guevara. Another parallel between Línea de fuego and Libro de Manuel is the way in which both texts push against the boundaries of traditional conceptions of revolutionary, socialist behavior. Libro de Manuel does this through its constant allusion to safeguarding individual liberties, including those of sexual orientation and ideological difference. Línea de fuego also pushes against these boundaries by depicting the revolution from a woman’s perspective and as an erotic—even sexual—act. In bringing together the goal of socialist equality with these other, more liberal objectives—the rights of women, gays, and lesbians and freedom of speech—these two texts offer us a fusion of the different political issues being championed at that time and a reflection of the diversity of the larger political culture.
61 Eduardo Galeano’s Días y noches de amor y de guerra
—Esta muchacha tiene el alma toda desparramada. . . . Se precisa música para rejuntarselá (Eduardo Galeano, Días y noches de amor y de guerra , 97). 62
Another seminal writer whose works form part of the larger legacy of political struggle in
Latin America, and whose writings also address the intersection between the erotic and the political, is the Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano. While Galeano is best known for his book
Las venas abiertas de América Latina ‘The Open Veins of Latin America ’ (1971), in which he provides a sweeping history of the United States’ economic exploitation of the region, all of his writings have circulated widely within Latin America. One of Galeano’s works in which the intersection between eroticism and politics is most clearly discernible is Días y noches de amor y de guerra , which, like Belli’s Línea de fuego , was first published in 1978. Making use of his signature collagist style, in Días y noches , Galeano addresses the rise of military dictatorships throughout Latin American’s Southern Cone and the impact that these dictatorships had on everyday life in Argentinian, Uruguayan, Brazilian, and Chilean civil society. In an effort to combat the dictatorships’ suppression of information, Galeano dedicates much of his text to documenting the abuses of civil and political rights—in particular, the disappearances and acts of torture committed as part of these dictatorships’ repressive political strategies—, as well as the role of the United States in supporting and perpetuating these military regimes. Amidst these more journalistic accounts one also finds passages that work to convey the psychological impact of the dictatorships. For example, in a short section titled “Sueños” ‘Dreams,’ Galeano blends the cosmic and the corporeal in an effort to render a particular affective experience, writing, “al
62 “‘The soul of this girl is scattered all over’ . . . ‘Music is needed to gather it all together again’” (Brister 84). All English translations of quotes from Días y noches de amor y de guerra are taken from Judith Brister’s translation of the text as Days and Nights of Love and War .
62 girar los cuerpos va girando la cama y giran el cuarto y el mundo. ‘No, no—me explicás creyéndote despierta—. Ya no estamos ahí. Nos mudamos a otro país mientras dormíamos’” ‘as our bodies turn, the bed turns and the room and the world turns. ‘No, no,’ you explain, thinking you are awake. ‘We are no longer there. We moved to another country while we slept’’ (31;
Brister 31). In this passage we are exposed to the disorientation and trauma produced by the military regimes, as well as the related phenomenon of self-imposed exile.
In Días y noches de amor y de guerra , Galeano thus employs this juxtaposition of journalistic accounts with more intimate and imagistic passages in order to produce both a historical record of the dictatorships, as well as an affective portrayal of societies in great distress. However, Galeano’s text is not only focused on documenting the repressive impact of the dictatorships, but is also equally invested in depicting the many erotic events and actions that stand in contrast to the repression of the regime and thus function as acts of resistance, as well as signs of hope for a more liberated future. Most of the events that Galeano describes, like the quotidian vignettes that Cortázar depicts in Libro de Manuel , are ones that take place within the home and involve simple daily tasks and rituals: eating dinner, listening to music, making love. 63
For this reason, many of the acts depicted in these anecdotes may at first appear small and insignificant in comparison with the sweeping repression of the military regimes. However, by identifying the work of resistance implicit in these domestic acts, Galeano points to the deeper connection between our affective and our political lives—suggesting that it is precisely within these intimate and erotic acts that the flame of resistance arises and has the potential to animate our larger political realities.
63 This is likely one of the reasons behind Sandra Cisneros’s assertion, in her foreword to Brister’s translation of Galeano’s Días y noches as Days and Nights of Love and War , that she loves Galeano’s books because he writes “like a woman” (16).
63 An example of one such account appears in the passage titled “ Calella de la Costa, Junio de 1977, para inventar el mundo cada día ” ‘Calella de la Costa, June 1977: To Invent the World
Each Day,’ in which Galeano describes a day spent at home with his partner and all of the simple daily activities that occupy them in their time together (197; Brister 162):
Charlamos, comemos, fumamos, caminamos, trabajamos juntos, maneras de hacer el amor sin entrarse, y los cuerpos se van llamando mientras viaja el día hacia la noche. Escuchamos el paso del último tren. . . . Es medianoche. Nuestro trencito propio desliza y vuela, anda que te anda por los aires y los mundos, y después viene la mañana . . . Se te sale por la cara una luz limpia y el cuerpo te huele a mojadumbres. . . . Contamos las horas que nos separan de la noche que viene. Entonces haremos el amor, el tristecidio. (197)
We chat, we eat, we smoke, we walk, we work together, ways of making love without entering each other, and our bodies call [to] each other as the day travels toward the night. We hear the last train pass. . . . It’s midnight. Our own little train slips and flies, travels along through airs and worlds, and afterward morning comes . . . Your face radiates a clean light and your body smells of love juices. . We count the hours that separate us from the night to come. Then we will make love, the sorrowcide. (Brister 162)
Given the simplicity of the activities that Galeano describes in this passage, it would be easy to dismiss this fragment as merely a passing interlude unrelated to the political components of the text, were it not for Galeano’s illuminating subtitle, “para inventar el mundo cada día” ‘To
Invent the World Each Day’ (197; Brister 162). With this subtitle, Galeano alludes to the degree to which, in a context of extreme political repression—in which “la alegría es un delito de alta traición” ‘joy is a crime of high treason’ (198; Brister 163)—, all of the simple tasks of daily life take on a much greater significance, particularly when carried out with a sense of joy and love.
In a context in which friends and loved ones can be captured without warning, often never to be seen or heard from again, to approach the day with a sense of purpose and creativity is an act of great resilience; it is to invent the world as one would envision it to be rather than the way that
64 those in power would claim that it is. In this passage the erotic forms the basis of this couple’s process of self-invention; we see the way that the erotic component of their relationship wends its way around and through their other daily activities, expressing itself as much in their walks and conversations as in their love-making. These activities appear as erotic acts in their own right, or “maneras de hacer el amor sin entrarse” ‘ways of making love without entering each other’ (197; Brister 162). Moreover, in this passage, as in the passage titled “Sueños” cited above, Galeano fuses the cosmic, the corporeal, and the oneiric in such a way that we are made to perceive this couple’s eroticism as a dimension of the cosmic cycles of the earth. The erotic constitutes the materia prima of the world they have created for themselves; it is “[la] luz limpia” ‘[the] clean light’ of his partner’s face and “[el olor] a mojadumbres” ‘[the smell] of love juices’ of her body that marks the onset of the day. 64 As such, in this passage, the erotic is shown to possess a mystical, almost transcendent power, such that by the time that Galeano describes the couple’s act of love making, in the last line, as “el tristecidio” ‘the sorrowcide,’ we as readers have already been made to experience this function of eroticism within the text. In this and other passages throughout the Días y noches , the erotic thus appears as the affective fabric that enables people to survive and to continue to function with joy and purpose in countries distorted by regimes of terror.
In this sense, the purpose of the erotic that Galeano depicts in Días y noches clearly aligns with the purpose of the erotic that Cortázar portrays in Libro de Manuel when the diverse members of la Joda gather at Lonstein’s apartment to watch his phosphorescent mushroom
64 The level of descriptive detail that Galeano employs to describe the sensory aspects of their lives works to further this effect. For example, his description of “el aroma . . . [del] café sabroso, humoso, [y] recién hecho” ‘the smell [of the] tasty, steamy, freshly made coffee’ and of his partner, from whose face “se [le] sale una luz limpia” ‘radiates a clean light’ and whose body “[le] huele a mojadumbres” ‘smells of love juices’ enables the reader to enter into this alternate, erotic world that this couple has created and to feel some of its warmth.
65 gleam in the night. It is the notion of the erotic as a sense of “aliveness” (Perel), and it relates to
Lorde’s conception of the erotic as “creative energy empowered” and as a person’s “depth of feeling” when performing a given act (55, 54). In this passage in Libro de Manuel , el que te dije asserts that the erotic experience of observing Lonstein’s mushroom is an important component of what revolutionaries like Marcos and Oscar are fighting for—that it is experiences like this one, “la superfluidad de ciertas hermosuras” ‘the superfluousness of certain things of beauty,’ “lo que podía dar todo su sentido a cualquier proyecto de futuro” ‘by means of which he could give complete meaning to any future project’ (183; Rabassa 185). While Cortázar emphasizes the importance of this aspect of the erotic for the future, Galeano focuses on its importance for the present, showing how this sense of beauty, wonder, and aliveness is necessary in order to endure systems of oppression—how the erotic can enable people to maintain a sense of hope and possibility despite seemingly insurmountable odds.
The erotic orientation toward life and politics that I have explored in Días y noches de amor y de guerra , Línea de fuego , and Libro de Manuel was a constitutive part of the Stimmung of hope and possibility that characterized the 1960s, 70s, and 80s in Latin America, animating not just the leftist political movements themselves but also everyday acts of resistance. The final text that I will examine in this chapter, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New
Mestiza , reveals a similar orientation toward politics in the Latina/o literature of the 1980s.
While not representative of the Stimmung of an entire region, the intersection of the erotic and the political in Anzaldúa’s work illustrates a significant trend among Latina feminist writers that has had a lasting impact on contemporary Latina/o writing and critical thought.
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Snakes, víboras ; since that day I’ve sought and shunned them. Always when they cross my path, fear and elation flood my body. I know things older than Freud, older than
66 gender. . . . Like the ancient Olmecs, I know Earth is a coiled Serpent. Forty years it’s taken me to enter into the Serpent, to acknowledge that I have a body, that I am a body and to assimilate the animal body, the animal soul (Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera , 48).
[T]he heart in my cunt starts to beat. . . . And I am not afraid (Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera , 73).
The final text that I will examine in connection with the intersection of eroticism and politics in the political culture of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s is Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La
Frontera: The New Mestiza . As I mention in my introduction, although scholars have yet to establish a direct literary influence between Latina writers and Latin American writers during this era, Latina authors writing in the 1980s combine the erotic and the political in ways that clearly resonate with the intersection of eroticism and politics appearing in the Latin American political culture of the time. 65 This is less due to any direct influence between Latin American and Latina writers and more to a common understanding of sexuality as more than a mere biological phenomenon. As I have indicated earlier in this chapter, some Latin American writers like Cortázar were greatly influenced by the work of the New Left theorist Herbert Marcuse, who argued that relaxing the repression of man’s sexual instincts—giving free reign to man’s libidinous energy—was the key to the transformation of his social, economic, political relations.
Marcuse—and, by extension, writers like Cortázar—thus viewed sexuality and the sexual instincts as intrinsic to broader systems of health and wellbeing. Latina writers of the 1980s— themselves theorists of U.S. third world feminism—conceived of women’s sexuality in a very
65 It is largely accepted that, as Debra J. Blake asserts in her incisive work on Chicana writers and artists, Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art , “Mexican (or any Latin American) women’s writing, with the exception of Castellanos and Sor Juana, did not inspire or inform Chicanas” (74). It is very likely, however, that Latina/o writers were influenced by the political sentiments expressed in Latin American popular music, such as the songs of Mercedes Sosa and of the Nueva trova movement in Cuba. There is evidence for this in the fact that Anzaldúa used the opening verse of Silvio Rodríguez’s song “Sueño con serpientes” for the epigraph to her chapter “Entering into the Serpent.”
67 similar way, holding it to be central to a woman’s agency and, in particular, to her political and spiritual capacity. As I will demonstrate, these theoretical parallels surrounding sexuality between the New Left and U.S. third world feminism laid the groundwork for the intersection of eroticism and politics to arise in both Latin American and Latina literatures.
In addition to the theoretical parallels between their respective conceptualizations of sexuality, another important connection between Latin Americans and Latinas/os during the
1980s lies in the extent to which Latinas/os, among them Latina/o writers and intellectuals, rallied around leftist Latin American political causes—perhaps most pointedly that of the Central
American civil wars. In Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories,
Literatures, and Cultures , Ana Patricia Rodríguez devotes a chapter, “The War at Home:
Latina/o Solidarity and Central American Immigration,” to covering these endeavors—what she describes as “a vanguard transnational solidarity culture and literature by Latinos/as and Central
Americans in the United States, which challenged the occluded history of U.S. imperialism and
U.S. Latino/a sociopolitical activism in the hemisphere” (131). Among other ventures, she mentions the many courses, programs, and publications at San Francisco State University devoted to exploring Central American history, culture, politics, and migration. These ventures did not occur in a vacuum but were instead propelled by “the needs and interests of a highly diverse Latino population in the San Francisco Bay Area that was becoming politicized by the wars in Central America” (138). According to Rodríguez, one of these programs, La Raza
Studies, “[combined] Chicano Movement and U.S. Third World ethnic identity politics with
Central American revolutionary sensibilities and community-based practices,” and, as a result,
“[shaped] generations of U.S. Latino/a scholar-activists such as Ricardo Salinas of the Latino performance troupe Culture Clash, the Salvadoran poet Martivón Galindo, the Chicano film
68 scholar Sergio de la Mora, and a number of filmmakers, artists, and educators working throughout the United States” (138).
Rodríguez also describes the ways in which certain Latina/o writers personally contributed to the political struggles in Central America, later producing novels and poetry inspired by these experiences. Ricardo Vargas, a Latino poet born in Nicaragua and raised in the
United States, returned to Nicaragua as an adult to serve as a combatant in the Sandinista
Revolution. Afterwards, he wrote the poetry collection Nicaragua, yo te canto, besos, balas y sueños de libertad ‘Nicaragua, I Sing to You, Kisses, Bullets, and Dreams of Freedom .’ The
Chicana novelist Graciela Limón participated in a delegation that investigated the military-led killing of six Jesuit priests, along with their housekeeper and her daughter, in El Salvador.66 She subsequently published the novel In Search of Bernabé about two brothers, one a colonel in the military and the other an aspiring priest turned guerrilla fighter. Another Chicana novelist,
Demetria Martínez, formed part of the Sanctuary Movement in New Mexico that worked with newly arrived Central American refugees, and was later indicted for “aiding and abetting ‘illegal aliens’” (140). She went on to write the novel, Mother Tongue , about a young Chicana who, through her work with a similar sanctuary-type movement, meets and falls in love with a
Salvadoran refugee.
Other noted scholars besides Rodríguez have done work on these and other Latina/o writers whose texts narrativize the Central American civil wars and Latina/o involvement in and around those wars. In her chapter on Mother Tongue in War Echoes: Gender and Militarization in U.S. Latina/o Cultural Production , Ariana E. Vigil conceives of the protagonist, María’s, activist work with Salvadoran refugees as what she refers to as “decolonial love” (92).
66 This incident also appears in Cherríe Moraga’s play Heroes and Saints , which I discuss in chapter three.
69 According to Vigil, “decolonial love . . . involves the investigation of the self alongside another and in relationship to larger communities and processes” (93). Through her efforts, María “is able to incorporate aspects of her experience and identity as a Chicana into a social, political, and personal position in which she recognizes her place as a North American in relation to El
Salvador and Salvadoran survivors” and “[enacts] a glocal identity whereby she incorporates aspects of her personal history into her political consciousness and activism” (93). Writing about another of Graciela Limón’s works, Erased Faces , about a Chicana photojournalist who becomes involved in the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, scholar María DeGuzmán addresses the extent to which Limón’s novel transcends national borders—thereby undermining standard parameters for a Chicana/o text. DeGuzmán stipulates that “not only does [ Erased Faces ] transport its Afro Chicana protagonist southward outside of U.S. territory, but, furthermore, it dedicates most of the novel to experiences in Chiapas, not the United States” (242). She goes on to argue that this work of relocation “shifts the center of gravity of the exploration of Chicana/o and, by extension, Latina/o imagined and lived experience beyond the boundaries of the continental United States and ideologically expands . . . what can be considered to be part of
Chicana history and culture” (242). While, as Rodríguez pointedly observes, in many of these texts the Chicana/o, or Latina/o, solidarity worker is at center stage rather than the Latin
Americans they interact with, these works nonetheless stand as early manifestations of Latina/o efforts to create a hemispheric alliance with Latin American political struggles, which critically informs Latina/o texts featuring the intersection of eroticism and politics.
The fusion of politics and the erotic of aliveness that I have identified in Libro de
Manuel , Línea de fuego , and Días y noches de amor y de guerra also appears especially clearly in the work of U.S. third world feminist writers and philosophers Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga,
70 whose respective anthropological and personal re-evaluations of the Mexica goddesses and their spiritual iconographies reveal the radical political implications of these erotic female deities. 67
The political issues that Anzaldúa and Moraga address through their respective works are, not surprisingly, in many ways different from those that appear in the works of the Latin American writers I have explored thus far. For example, whereas the Latin American writers I have included above consider the intersection of eroticism and politics in relation to the socialist movements throughout Latin America, as well as in relation to the dictatorships in the Southern
Cone, Anzaldúa and Moraga adopt this same pairing in order to address the intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, and sexuality faced by Latinas in the United States. These differences between Latin American and Latina/o texts owe much to the distinct social and political realities of Latinas/os and Latin Americans, (which are two extremely diverse populations in and of themselves), as well as to the unique histories of each of their respective literary disciplines. However, despite the clear and important distinctions between these two groups of writers, there are also many striking similarities between Latin American and Latina/o writers in the way that they understand the intersection between eroticism and politics and in the implications that they foresee this intersection having for modes of political empowerment. In order to shed more light on some of these parallels, I will now look more closely at Anzaldúa’s elaboration of the intersection between eroticism and politics in her personal and anthropological study of the Mexica goddess Coatlalopeuh in Borderlands/La Frontera —specifically in the chapters “Entering into the Serpent” and “ La herencia de Coatlicue /The Coatlicue State.”
67 As Blake asserts, “among all the Chicana writers, a primary aspect of their religious vision includes the refiguring of spirituality as erotic —a passion experienced in body and soul—that has been lost in Western religions’ split of the mind and body” (87).
71 In “Entering into the Serpent,” Anzaldúa introduces the reader to the Mexica goddess
Coatlalopeuh or “She who has dominion over serpents” (49). Given the thematic similarities between Anzaldúa’s work and those of the Latin American writers I have addressed, it is noteworthy that these texts contain parallels on a structural and stylistic level as well—especially in relation to the works of Cortázar and Galeano. All of these texts—Bordersland/La Frontera , as well as Libro de Manuel and Días y noches de amor y de guerra —are made up of brief fragments, as opposed to the longer, ostensibly more cohesive chapters that tend to organize more traditional works. Perhaps the greatest similarity lies between Borderlands and Días y noches : although, despite its inclusion of newspaper clippings, Cortázar’s Libro de Manuel is still clearly a novel, both Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and Galeano’s Días y noches de amor y de guerra more fully elude generic definitions, integrating a productive mixture of historiography, sociopolitical analyses, and personal insights and vignettes. As I will demonstrate in relation to
Anzaldúa’s work, this structural/stylistic approach is particularly appropriate when dealing with the intersection between the erotic and the political because it enables these authors to explore the connections between their own personal, and often intimate, experiences and the larger sociopolitical and historical contexts that inform their lives. 68 In the case of Borderlands , by providing a constant back and forth between prose and poetry—between analyses of social and historical processes and her own personal experiences and reflections—Anzaldúa enables us to see into the intimate, psychological impact of colonial and neocolonial realities, and to understand why sexual and spiritual liberation are important for the liberation of Chicanas/os as a people.
68 As I have shown, this organic link between the individual and the broader collective is one that the writers whose works I analyze in this study turn to the intersection between the erotic and the political in order to explore.
72 Anzaldúa begins “Entering into the Serpent” with a scene from her childhood: a memory of going to use the outhouse in the “predawn orange haze” and stepping on a giant black snake sliding across the kitchen floor (47). Her mother’s warning not to use the outhouse at night so that a snake won’t crawl up into her vagina—“No se te vaya a meter algo por allá ”—and the obvious sexual implications of this warning serve as the textual jumping-off point for Anzaldúa’s analysis of the Mexica goddess Coatlalopeuh and the way in which the changes in the significance of Coatlalopeuh and other Mexica goddesses parallel changes in the understandings of and approaches to female sexuality in Mexican and Chicana/o culture (47). As Anzaldúa explains, in the section titled “ Coatlalopeuh , She Who Has Dominion over Serpents,”
Coatlalopeuh is herself descended from a much more ancient Mesoamerican deity, the creator goddess Coatlicue. Anzaldúa interprets Coatlicue, who gave birth to Coyolxauhqui and
Huitzilopotchli, and whose name literally translates as “Serpent Skirt,” as emblematic of “the contradictory” forces in life, which Anzaldúa also describes as the “fusion of opposites: . . . life and death, mobility and immobility, beauty and horror” (69). When the male-dominated Azteca-
Mexica took control of Mesoamerican cultures in which Coatlicue had been worshipped, they divided Coatlicue into what they perceived as her positive and negative aspects and continued to worship only the ‘positive’ aspects of Coatlicue in the form of the “good mother” goddess,
Tonantsi (49). She explains that, when the Spanish conquered the Aztecs, they divided the creator goddess still further, divesting her of Coatlalopeuh: the serpent aspect of her make-up linked to female sexuality, and rebranding her with the Spanish name Guadalupe. As Anzaldúa writes,
After the Conquest, the Spaniards and their Church continued to split Tonantsi/Guadalupe . The desexed Guadalupe , taking Coatlalopeuh , the serpent/sexuality, out of her. They completed the split begun by the Nahuas by making la Virgen de Guadalupe/Virgen María into chaste virgins and Tlazolteotl/Coatlicue/la
73 Chingada into putas ; into the Beauties and the Beasts. They went even further; they made all Indian deities and religious practices into the work of the devil. (50)
In this passage, Anzaldúa elucidates the connection between the westernization of Coatlicue and her de-sexualization, revealing the way in which these practices were linked in the process of
Spanish colonization and used together to invalidate indigenous forms of knowledge/ways of knowing (59). Reflecting further on the work of de-sexualization carried out by ‘Western’ religions, Anzaldúa writes that “the Catholic and Protestant religions encourage fear and distrust of life and of the body; they encourage a split between the body and the spirit and totally ignore the soul; they encourage us to kill off parts of ourselves. We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal; intelligence dwells only in the head” (59). Much like the Latin American writers whose works I have analyzed above, Anzaldúa rejects the Cartesian split, revealing the way in which this hierarchicization of mind over body has been instrumental to insidious and powerful colonial processes that brutally circumscribe the range of human understanding and experience—especially those ways of knowing connected to our bodies and our sexuality. For
Anzaldúa, as for Cortázar, Bellí, and Galeano, these erotic ways of knowing are closely tied to the work of imagination and to our capacity for spiritual experience. As Anzaldúa explains,
The other mode of consciousness facilitates images from the soul and the unconscious through dreams and the imagination. . . . White anthropologists . . . are fascinated by what they call . . . the participation mystique of the mind that says the world of the imagination—the world of the soul—and of the spirit is just as real as physical reality. In trying to become ‘objective,’ Western culture made ‘objects’ of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing ‘touch’ with them . This dichotomy is the root of all violence. (59; my emphasis)
In “ La herencia de Coatlicue /The Coatlicue State,” Anzaldúa conveys the efficacy of this colonial process by examining her own subjective experiences—reflecting on the sense of alienation she felt as a child with regard to her body and her sexuality, and the way in which this learned sense of alienation made it difficult for her to love and accept herself. Specifically, in the
74 section “El secreto terrible y la rajadura,” Anzaldúa conveys the way in which this socially- conditioned refusal to acknowledge and accept her sexuality made her feel as though something evil and terrifying lay coiled inside of her—hiding inside the very core of her being. Describing herself as a child and adolescent, she writes that, “she has this fear that when she does reach herself turns around to embrace herself a lion’s or witch’s or serpent’s head will turn around swallow her and grin” (65). In the section “Nopal de castilla,” Anzaldúa again connects her own personal experience of alienation and lack of self-trust back to that experienced by Chicanas/os on a larger social level as a result of colonial and neocolonial policies and practices, revealing the way in which these policies and practices are often internalized by colonized peoples as a sense of inferiority and self-loathing. As she explains,
As a person, I, as a people, we, Chicanos, blames ourselves, hate ourselves, terrorize ourselves. Most of this goes on unconsciously; we only know that we are hurting, we suspect that there is something ‘wrong’ with us, something fundamentally ‘wrong.’ In order to escape the threat of shame or fear, one takes on a compulsive, repetitious activity . . . to keep awareness at bay. (67)
In this passage, Anzaldúa reveals the way that colonization and neocolonization as political processes operate on a psychological level to weaken colonized people’s identity and sense of self. Rather than being ‘merely political,’ Anzaldúa exposes colonization/neocolonization as a deeply personal and intimate experience, showing that precisely therein lies its pervasiveness and efficacy.
According to Anzaldúa, given the intimacy of the colonial/neocolonial process, any attempt to effect political change for Chicanas/os must address this question of Chicana/o subjectivity, in order to begin to heal this maligned sense of self. For Anzaldúa, reconnecting with the goddesses Coatlalopeuh and Coatlicue and their historical meanings can serve as an opportunity to construct what Debra Blake refers to as “transformative subjectivities” for Latina
75 women—to reaffirm the connection between mind, body, and spirit that was severed by colonialism, and that these Mexica goddesses so powerfully represent (Blake 91). As such, embracing the significance of these Mexica goddesses provides an opportunity not only to reclaim a forgotten historical identity, but also to reclaim the erotic and spiritual potential that these goddesses embody, to recognize this potential in the eroticism of their own bodies, and to wield this potential in political, as well as personal, endeavors. As Cherríe Moraga asserts in
Loving in the War Years , for Latina women, embracing the erotic significance of these goddesses has the potential to evoke both a “spirituality which inspires activism,” as well as a “politics which [moves] the spirit—which [draws] from the deep-seated place of our greatest longings for freedom—[gives] meaning to our lives” (130).
Anzaldúa powerfully illustrates her own process of opening herself up to a connection with the Mexica goddess Coatlicue , or “entering into the serpent,” in the final section of “ La herencia de Coatlicue / The Coatlicue State,” titled “That Which Abides.” After describing her own reluctance to accept and acknowledge the physical, sexual, and animal parts of herself, she allows us to see into the moment when permits herself to connect with these aspects of herself through an experience that she terms the Coatlicue state. Despite her reluctance to engage with what she calls her “animal self,” and what I will suggest is also her erotic self, Anzaldúa also looks to this repressed part of her as the source of her greatest strength. It is the part of her that she recognizes as “[her] inner self, the entity that is the sum total of all my reincarnations, the godwoman in me I call Antigua , mi Diosa , the divine within” (72). Anzaldúa’s hesitance with regard to entering into this erotic, Coatlicue state appears as a fear of relinquishing control—a fear of losing access to the “limited conscious mind” when the “divine within” her emerges (72).
Nevertheless, Anzaldúa submits herself to the experience, importuning Coatlicue to “take this
76 lever-shaped handle with needles that measure the temperature, the air pressure, danger. You hold it for a while. Promise to give it back. Please, Antigua ” (72).
While, to a certain extent, Anzaldúa figures the experience of entering into the Coatlicue state as an act of possession, she also makes it clear that Coatlicue is something other that is also already a part of herself—that Coatlicue already resides within her. Thus, rather than being taken over by an exterior/foreign body, being taken over by Coatlicue implies obtaining access to “the animal, the alien, the sub- or suprahuman, the me that has something in common with the wind and the trees and the rocks, that possesses a demon determination and ruthlessness beyond the human” (72). Moreover, this act of self-surrender is not limited to a mental experience; rather, it is one of bodily transformation. Anzaldúa experiences this act of giving herself over to the will of the goddess as sensual physical sensation:
Suddenly, I feel like I have another set of teeth in my mouth. A tremor goes through my body from my buttocks to the roof of my mouth. On my palate I feel a tingling ticklish sensation, then something seems to be falling on me, over me, a curtain of rain or light. Shock pulls my breath out of me. The sphincter muscle tugs itself up, up, and the heart in my cunt starts to beat . . . . I collapse into myself—a delicious caving into myself — imploding, the walls like matchsticks softly folding inward in slow motion. (73; my emphasis)
While the series of physical sensations that Anzaldúa describes here as part of her transformation are too varied to ascribe to a particular end-state, two aspects of her description particularly allude to the goddess Coatlicue . One of these is the feeling that she has another set of teeth in her mouth—perhaps a serpent’s fangs, which seems to suggest the arrival of Coatlicue ’s serpent’s head. The other is the notion that “the heart in [her] cunt starts to beat” (73). On the one hand, this “[beating]” in her cunt is a clear indication that Anzaldúa is highly aware of her sexual organs and, perhaps, even aroused. At the same time, by referring to the blood pulsing through her cunt as a beating “heart,” this description effectively relocates the center of Anzaldúa’s body
77 from the heart in her chest cavity to the pulsing in her sexual organs, thus emphasizing the centrality of the erotic to the experience of the Coatlicue state, and evoking the strong sexual significance of Coatlicue herself.
These transformative physical sensations pave the way for Coatlicue ’s arrival, which is myth-like—almost biblical—in intensity, breaking through centuries of colonial and neocolonial thought and practices to dispel Anzaldúa’s shame and fear and bestow her with a renewed sense of strength and empowerment. As Anzaldúa describes,
I see oposición e insurrección . I see the crack growing on the rock. . . . releasing la Coatlicue . And someone in me takes matters into our own hands, and eventually takes dominion over serpents—over my own body, my sexual activity, my soul, my mind, my weaknesses and strengths. Mine. Ours. Not the heterosexual white man’s or the colored man’s or the state’s or the culture’s or the religion’s or the parents’ . . . And suddenly I feel everything is rushing to a center, a nucleus. All the lost pieces of myself come flying . . . , magnetized toward that center. Completa . (73)
As is clear from this description, in opening herself to the influence of the goddess Coatlicue ,
Anzaldúa undergoes an existential metamorphosis, the result of which is a transformed experience of her own subjectivity. Whereas, previously, there were aspects of her identity and consciousness that Anzaldúa had feared to acknowledge—especially those related to her sexuality—, upon entering the Coatlicue state, Anzaldúa’s experience of her subjectivity is defined by an all-encompassing experience of wholeness. To clarify, the wholeness or completeness that Anzaldúa mentions here should not be confused with homogeneity or sameness, but—as would be clear from a more exhaustive reading of the text—instead represents the ability to navigate and attend to all the disparate parts of her self, as well as the sense that these disparate parts of her can exist together despite their contradictions. Completeness here constitutes wisdom and self-acceptance as opposed to feelings of wrongness, shame, or inadequacy—as opposed to a sense of alienation from the various parts of the self . Anzaldúa’s
78 transformed subjectivity also includes an embodied sense of empowerment. She writes that
“something pulsates in my body, a luminous thin thing that grows thicker every day. Its presence never leaves me. I am never alone. That which abides: my vigilance, my thousand sleepless serpent eyes blinking in the night, forever open. And I am not afraid” (73). This sense of courage and empowerment that stems from the erotic energy of the Coatlicue state is one that Anzaldúa encourages other Chicanas to embrace, as she believes that it will enable them advocate for themselves and for other Latinas/os as they fight to overcome the debilitating effects of neocolonization. 69
Like the erotic in the works of Cortázar, Belli, and Galeano, the eroticism in Borderlands is one that facilitates political and social engagement, inspiring its adherents to act in the service of their ideals and to invest in the promise of a better future. As I have already demonstrated, in
Latin America and among Latinas/os in the U.S., this erotic Stimmung prevailed throughout the
60s, 70s, and 80s. However, by the early 1990s in Latin America, this erotic, socially engaged mindset was no longer the predominant political or authorial orientation. Instead, having suffered through dictatorships and civil wars, Latin American writers in the 90s began to question the advisability of this kind of social engagement and critique the erotic political culture of the previous decades. In the next chapter I will engage with these later texts, tracing the shift in
Stimmung that occurred between idealistic, utopian era of the 60s, 70s, and 80s and the increasingly skeptical and conservative era that followed.
69 Another passage in Anzaldúa’s text that touches on the intersection of eroticism and politics is her discussion of queer identity in “Half and Half” and “Fear of Going Home: Homophobia.” Here, Anzaldúa draws on folk conceptions of queer people as half male and half female—“mita’ y mita ’”—to argue that being queer involves an experience of overcoming duality (41).
79 CHAPTER 2: RETHINKING POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT IN POSTWAR LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE
Since the widespread leftist wave of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, there have been sweeping social and political changes in the Americas, including the fall of the Berlin Wall leading to the
‘Special Period’ in Cuba, the so-called ‘transition’ from military dictatorships to democratically elected governments in the Southern Cone, the weakening of socialist projects in Nicaragua and
El Salvador, and the spread of neoliberalism throughout the entire hemisphere. 70 As is always true when epochal shifts occur, these social and political changes have both shaped and been shaped by parallel changes in affect, or Stimmung , all of which is also born out in cultural production, including works of contemporary Latin American and Latina/o literature. In Latin
American literature, a central component of this epochal shift from the leftist wave of the 60s,
70s, and 80s to the neoliberalism of the 1990s, has been the shift in people’s affective relationship to the political, which, in my introduction, I addressed as part of the intersection of eroticism and politics. In this chapter I broach these historical, literary, and affective shifts by examining three texts that problematize the issue of affect and political engagement, particularly as it relates to the armed struggle and its aftermath. I start by analyzing María Lourdes Pallais’s
70 During the leftist wave, a large percentage of Latin Americans embraced Marxism as a revolutionary ideology. As John Charles Chasteen explains in Born in Blood and Fire , “quite simply, Marxism made persuasive sense to Latin American nationalists bent on dismantling neocolonialism. The Marxist view of capitalism, highlighting class exploitation, seemed an apt description of Latin American history. . . . [and] [i]n the 1950s, Marxism was an exciting intellectual force associated with nationalist struggles for decolonization and self-determination around the world” (260). This became even more the case after the success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, which served as a model for other communist and socialist movements throughout the region. By neoliberalism I not only refer to the preeminent system of economic policy and its seemingly endless economic and political machinations on the world sphere, but also to the ideology that has accompanied these economic machinations and upon which they rely for popular support.
80 La carta (1996) and Alan Pauls’s Historia del llanto (2007), both of which reflect critically on affective investment in the leftist political movements of the 70s and 80s and in the political cultures surrounding these movements. I then explore Iván Thays’s Un lugar llamado Oreja de
Perro (2008), which addresses the issue of affective engagement in the Peruvian postwar context, allegorizing the contemporary literary turn away from social engagement and toward the private sphere. 71
One of the greatest social and political changes that brought an end to the leftist wave of the 60s, 70s, and 80s in Latin America was the defeat of the armed struggle, the dates of which vary by country and region. In the Southern Cone, the defeat of the armed struggle took the form of the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 and the installation of right-wing military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. In Central America, the armed struggle came to a close much later, with the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990 and the peace negotiations between the governments and the guerrillas in Guatemala and El Salvador. In Latin America, the end of the armed struggle ushered in a period of disillusionment among the political left, both in relation to the setbacks to the left’s goals and ambitions and as a result of the devastating level of violence that the armed struggle entailed. The violent clashes between leftist organizations, (such as the Sandinistas, the FMLN), and the so-called counter-terrorist military forces involved the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians—most of whom were members of the disenfranchised indigenous populations the leftist organizations claimed to be fighting for. This breach between the utopian ambitions of the left and the horrific outcome of many of these violent struggles, especially those that took place in Central America, generated a process of reappraisal
71 Here I am speaking of the internal armed conflict between the Peruvian government and militant groups such as the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement.
81 surrounding these leftist political movements, as well as a sense of ambivalence/skepticism among many members of the left regarding the feasibility of utopian political programs in general. 72 In Latinamericanism After 9/11 , John Beverley describes the way that the armed struggle is widely regarded in Latin America as “a kind of romantic adolescence . . . prone to excess, error, irresponsibility, and moral anarchy,” while “the biological and biographical maturity of the generation of the sixties represented by our role and responsibilities as parents and professionals corresponds to the hegemony of neoliberalism and political redemocratization of the 1980s and 90s” (99). As Beverley asserts, this “coming-of-age narrative,” which he refers to as the “paradigm of disillusion,” is evident in the work of well-known scholars like the
Argentinian intellectual Beatriz Sarlo and in popular films like Amores perros .73 The texts that I explore in this chapter also engage in this process of reappraisal, honing in on the particular affective relationship to politics that characterized these leftist political movements and was born out in the literary pairing of the erotic and the political.
María Lourdes Pallais’s La carta
In her novel, La carta , María Lourdes Pallais employs the literary pairing of the erotic and the political in her critique of the armed struggle in Nicaragua and of the political culture surrounding the Sandinista National Liberation Front. As a postmodern text, the novel even
72 In addition to the defeat of the armed struggle in Latin America itself, the Latin American left has been further demoralized by the end of the Cold War and the demise of socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Jorge Castañeda addresses this intercontinental dynamic in Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War , writing that “for all of these political movements and ideological currents in Latin America, the collapse of socialism . . . signified the erasure of the reference point with which the left had lived for more than half a century,” as well as “the left’s framework for conceiving of an alternative to Latin America’s current state of affairs” (244-5).
73 In an article titled “Kirchner actúa como si él fuera un soberano” in La Nación (7/22/2006), Sarlo writes, referring to the armed struggle, that “muchos sabemos por experiencia que se necesitaron años para romper con estas convicciones. No simplemente para dejarlas atrás porque fueron derrotadas, sino porque significaron una equivocación” (Sarlo). In Amores Perros , the central character in one of the film’s three vignettes is a former guerrilla fighter who returns repentant and apologizes to his daughter for having abandoned her to act on his convictions.
82 engages in this critical practice at the level of structure, self-consciously adopting the testimonial form in order to deconstruct it from within. As Werner Mackenbach asserts in “De exclusiones e inclusiones: tres aproximaciones a la novela La carta , de María Lourdes Pallais” ‘Of Exclusions and Inclusions: Three Approaches to the Novel The Letter by María Lourdes Pallais’ “el libro de
María Lourdes Pallais es paradigmático de toda una tendencia de la literatura centroamericana contemporánea, especialmente de la que se sirve, desde inicios de los años noventa, del testimonio como recurso narrativo, en la medida en que lo libera de su dogmatización” ‘María
Lourdes Pallais’s book is paradigmatic of a whole tendency of contemporary Central American literature, especially of that which, since the early nineties, uses testimony as a narrative resource/technique, to the extent that it liberates it from its dogmatization’ (212). According to
Mackenbach, in this literary tendency “las formas narrativas testimoniales se desatan de su compromiso simbiótico con el discurso revolucionario, con los proyectos utópicos” ‘the testimonial narrative forms are unleashed from their symbiotic engagement with revolutionary discourse, with utopian projects,’ and, in the case of La carta , the form is used ironically to challenge the idealized way in which the armed struggle has been portrayed in more classical testimonial texts (212). 74
In the novel, the protagonist, Claudia, reflects on her experience as member of the Latin
American revolutionary left in a letter she writes to her former lover and liaison, Antonio, from inside a detention center in Conway, South Carolina where she has been detained on treason charges not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In her letter to Antonio, Claudia is especially
74 By ironically adopting the testimonial form to structure her text, Pallais takes part in an intellectual tendency that John Beverley, in “¿Existe un giro neoconservador en Latinoamérica hoy?,” dubs the neoconservative turn, and which is characterized by “un rechazo generalizado a la autoridad . . . de una ‘voz’ y experiencia subalterna o popular” ‘a generalized rejection of the authority . . . of a subaltern or popular ‘voice’ and experience’ and “del proyecto de la izquierda latinoamericana de los años 60 y 70, y en especial (pero no sólo) de la lucha armada” ‘of the project of the Latin American left of the 60s and 70s, and especially (but not only) of the armed struggle’ (34-5).
83 critical of her own affective investment in the movement’s political ideals, and, like the writers of the 60s, 70s, and 80s whose works I explored in my first chapter, Pallais’s narrator describes this affective investment in politics as an erotic relationship. However, in her writings Claudia takes exception to what she perceives as the many contradictions that exist between the erotic spirit of the revolutionary movement and its ends-justify-the-means approach to deceit and violence, leading to a utilitarian view of human relationships and human life. In contrast to the work of writers like Gioconda Belli, Pallais questions the legitimacy of the revolutionary movement by pointing to the incongruity between the erotic vision within the cultural superstructure of the Latin American left, and the methods that it used in the armed struggle. In this sense, as I mentioned previously, Pallais makes use of the testimonial form in order to separate it from the ideals with which it has typically been associated, as well as from its status as a representational, nationalist text. At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, Pallais’s adoption of this form also enables the text to function as a highly representative portrait of the position of the intellectual left in Latin America, and of the way the discourse surrounding the armed struggle has shifted since the decline of these movements. 75 Moreover, by structuring her narrative as a letter to her former comrade, who functions as a metonym for the revolutionary project as a whole, Pallais figures the novel as a broad appeal to the Latin American left, to reconsider both the methods it used to try to bring about its political ambitions, as well as the ideology behind those methods.
75 Mackenbach makes a similar assertion, writing that “en el hecho mismo de renunciar a una postura y persistir sobre la perspectiva individual e individualista de la protagonista—sin tener la necesidad de referirse a eventos de la historia latinoamericana reciente o incluso sin llegar a ubicar el argumento en un espacio definido—la autora logra articular una alegoría del lugar del intelectual comprometido en la América Latina de los años noventa” ‘in the very act of renouncing herself to a position and holding onto the individual and individualist perspective of the protagonist—without having the need to refer to events of recent Latin American history and without even coming to locate the plot in a clearly defined space—the autor is able to articulate an allegory of the place of the commited intellectual in the Latin America of the nineties’ (212).
84 As Mackenbach argues in the same piece, La carta “también puede ser leída como respuesta a . . . La mujer habitada (1988) de Gioconda Belli” ‘can also be read as a response to .
. . The Inhabited Woman (1988) by Gioconda Belli’ (208). As in La mujer habitada , and Línea de fuego , which I analyzed in chapter one, in Pallais’s La carta , the corporeal state of the female protagonist serves as a metaphor for the political health and well-being of the nation. However, whereas the bodies of the poetic voice of Línea de fuego and of Lavinia in La mujer habitada are bodies of notable sensuality and fertility, Claudia’s body in La carta is a body in decline. Once as young and nubile as Lavinia, Claudia’s youthful days have come to an abrupt close; this is in fact how she opens her letter to Antonio, (and thus how Pallais’s novel begins):
Traigo las malas noticias que dejan las huellas del tiempo por todos lados. Ya todo lo mío es pasado, es hora muerta. Dejé de ser aquella mujer-pájaro veloz de piernas ágiles y perfectas, aquella mujer-muñeca zanquilarga del más escueto cuerpo, de muslos escurridos, de pequeños y erguidos senos con pezones ásperos, rugosos, casi violetas, aquella mujer-águila capaz de perfectas piruetas. . . . En mi pelo, ya no se agitan mariposas ni se atropellan luciérnagas. . . . Cuando me peino puños de hebras frágiles, huérfanas de raíces, se amontonan en los dientes de un peine mugroso de plástico, se desprenden del cuero cabelludo. . . . y se esfuman sin dejar ni la más débil sombra del otoño en el piso de mi celda donde supongo se confunden con el polvo. (9)
I bring the bad news that time’s tracks leave all around. Already everything that was mine is past, is dead time. I ceased to be that swift bird-woman of agile and perfect legs, that leggy doll-woman of the skimpiest body, of narrow-hipped thighs, of small and upright breasts with rough, wrinkled, almost violet nipples, that eagle-woman capable of perfect pirouettes. . . . Butterflies no longer move to and fro in my hair, nor do fireflies stumble there. . . . When I comb my hair, handfuls of fragile strands, orphaned of roots, accumulate in the teeth of a filthy plastic comb, detach from my scalp. . . . and vanish without leaving the faintest shadow of autumn on the floor of my cell where I suppose they blend into the dust.
Lest we miss the erotic overtones in this corporeal metaphor, Claudia drives this point home, writing, “mi vientre se perdió en mi vagina dentro de un infinito espacio sin sombras ni estallidos” ‘my belly got lost in my vagina inside of an infinite space without shadows or explosions’ (10). She soon reveals the reason for her sudden deterioration; in addition to her
85 physical imprisonment, Claudia declares that she is imprisoned by love, “presa de un amor” (10).
However, Claudia quickly clarifies that the love holding her captive is not romantic love, nor love for any one other individual, but rather the love that appears in Guevara’s “El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba”—that particular blend of eros and agape that I have identified as a distinct characteristic of the political culture of the 1970s and 80s in Latin America. As Claudia explains,
“presa soy de un amor que se creía diferente, importante, generoso, un amor que se creía colectivo, que se jactaba de abarcar a todos los oprimidos, a los injustamente maltratados, a todos los humildes de la tierra” ‘I am the prisoner of a love that believed itself to be different, important, generous, a love that believed it was collective, that boasted of taking in all the oppressed, the unjustly mistreated, all the meek of the earth’ (11). For a period of time, it was her belief in erotic, revolutionary love that enabled Claudia to achieve the state of personal satisfaction and fulfillment that corresponded with the beauty and vitality of her earlier physical form. As she declares,
el universo subterráneo que tú me regalaste, camarada Antonio, lo trastocó todo. Después de conocerte me embriagué con el exquisito reto del titán que lucha por convertirse en orgulloso ángel vencedor. . . . Te conocí, camarada Antonio y me liberé de la indiferencia para caer en la pasión de un sueño que se creía dueño del amor absoluto, de la revolución y de la fantasía. . . . hasta hace poco, fue una tremenda maravilla que gozé, de la que me atraganté, con la que respiré sabores únicos, sin ahogos ni bostezos, sin reparos importantes y con aún menos vaivenes. (13)
the subterranean universe that you gave me, comrade Antonio, upset everything. After meeting you, I got drunk on the exquisite feat of the titan that fights to become a proud conquering angel. . . . I met you, comrade Antonio, and I freed myself from indifference to fall into the passion of a dream that believed itself to be the master of absolute love, of revolution and fantasy. . . . until recently, it was a tremendous wonder that I enjoyed, that I choked on, with which I breathed unique flavors, without breathlessness or yawning, without major qualms and with even fewer fluctuations.
From the way in which Claudia describes her affective life as a revolutionary, it appears as a form of peak experience, similar to the descriptions of the revolutionary erotic in Libro de
86 Manuel , Línea de fuego , and Borderlands: La Frontera , and one that opened her up to previously unexplored states of being. Claudia writes that “antes de conocerte, camarada Antonio, en mis rutinas era a veces fría, a veces arrogante, casi siempre distante, nunca romántica ni erótica, menos aún soñadora” ‘before meeting you, comrade Antonio, in my routines I was sometimes cold, sometimes arrogant, almost always distant, never romantic or erotic, and even less a dreamer’ (13). Moreover, as a revolutionary, Claudia not only attains access to these previously unexplored experiences, but also achieves a sense of aliveness that appears larger than life itself, writing that “en ese entonces, . . . tenía el pelo frondoso, muy negro, muy largo, me brillaba con los dardos que tenía en vez de ojos . . . mi caminar destellaba truenos, mi respiro era nítido, mi sonrisa de fuego y mi cuerpo de bronce” ‘at this time, . . . my hair was lush, very black and very long, it gleamed with the darts I had instead of eyes . . . mi walk flashed with thunder, my breath was clear, my smile fiery and my body of bronze’ (14).
Claudia’s political commitment thus allowed her to experience a sense of purpose and connection that she had not been able to realize in her life as an ordinary citizen, and this newfound state of well-being sustained her completely until she was incarcerated. However, as a prisoner in the J. Reuben Long Detention Center in Conway, South Carolina, Claudia has lapsed back into her former state of indifference—into the way she habitually experienced life prior to her politicization. She describes this transition for us as follows:
No sé cuándo, pero un buen día sentí renacer en mí esa pasividad huraña, remota, secretamente divertida, un tanto cínica que, hasta que tú [Antonio] apareciste en mi vida, me había permitido observarlo todo a una sabia distancia, sin inmiscuirme más de lo estrictamente necesario en esa bagatela vulgar, desordenada, chata, insípida y molestamente ruidosa que es el mundo. (17)
I don’t know when, but one fine day I felt reawaken in me this remote, hermit-like, secretly pleasurable, somewhat cynical passivity that, until you appeared in my life, had allowed me observe everything from a wise distance, without interfering more that
87 strictly necessary in this vulgar, disorganized, short-sighted, insipid, and annoyingly noisy trifle that is the world.
As the text progresses, we learn that Claudia’s shift in perspective is related to the contradiction that she perceives between the revolution’s claim that its professed belief in agape is the ideal motivating its goals and actions, versus the violent and at times seemingly traitorous methods that it has used to realize those goals. Along these lines, we later learn that Claudia’s involvement in the revolution has made it possible for Antonio and his comrades to kill her uncle—her mother’s beloved brother—as well as Claudia’s own boyfriend, Steven. However, even more than her struggle over the death and suffering of loved ones that her revolutionary involvement has facilitated, Claudia is most shaken by what she perceives as the revolutionaries’ hypocrisy and opportunism—that in the face of the defeat, the revolution’s leaders are willing to abandon their goals and system of beliefs in order to compromise with the enemy. As Bernie,
Claudia’s lawyer, explains,
sucede que el capitalismo parece haber triunfado, que están despareciendo las fronteras económicas y las ideologías, que . . . las guerrillas—al menos sus líderes—se quieren integrar a este sistema de supuesta libertad para el individuo y democracia para las mayorías, donde el capitalismo y las leyes del mercado mandan y donde el estado no es árbitro de todo y de todos, quieren consumir, competir, . . . quieren ser parte de ese sistema que ahora ofrece dialogar con los países pobres, que les ofrece asistencia financiera si se portan bien. (37)
it so happens that capitalism appears to have triumphed, that the economic borders and ideologies are already disappearing, that the guerrillas—at least their leaders—want to fit themselves into this system of supposed freedom for the individual and democracy for the masses, where capitalism and the laws of the market are in charge and where the state is not the arbiter of everything and everyone, they want to consume, to compete, . . . they want to be part of this system that now offers to dialogue with the poor countries, that offers them financial assistance if they behave themselves.
We can see the impact that her fellow revolutionaries’ willingness to abandon their beliefs has on
Claudia in the novel’s final scene, in which Claudia catches sight of Antonio walking down the street with Dick, the man who interrogated her when she was first imprisoned, and talking as if
88 they were “viejos amigos” ‘old friends’ (157). In this moment Claudia is compelled to approach them. She fantasizes about going into the bar that they have entered and “saludar [a Antonio], como quien se encuentra con un viejo amigo . . . , decir[le] tranquilamente, hola, soy Claudia,
Antonio, y a [Dick], qué tal, a usted también lo conocí un día, ¿se acuerda de mí?, reír[se] los tres, claro, hola, Claudia, la famosa Claudia, . . . la vida es como un pañuelo de lino” ‘greeting
[Antonio], the way you meet up with an old friend . . . , telling [him] calmly, hello, I’m Claudia,
Antonio, and to [Dick], how are you, I also met you one day, do you remember me?, the three of us laughing, of course, hello, Claudia, the famous Claudia, . . . life is like a linen handkerchief,’ but something inside her prevents her from doing so—from behaving, as they are, “como si nada hubiese pasado” ‘as though nothing had happened’ (158). Claudia turns away from them and wanders aimlessly through the city, then returns hours later having finally decided to approach the men, but by that time they have left the bar. As she leaves, “finalmente [puede] pegar un enorme grito que tenía atrofiado desde hacía años, . . . un grito agudo, seco, de una sola nota,” ‘I could finally let out a huge scream that had been atrophied for years, . . . a piercing, dry, one- pitched scream,’ and, as she asserts, “Y Nadie se dio cuenta” ‘and Nobody noticed’ (158).
For Claudia, whose involvement in the revolution led her to sacrifice everything— including the life of the man who loved her—the apparent complicity between Dick and Antonio causes her to question the legitimacy of the revolutionary project itself. It leads her to ‘discover’ that the ideas motivating the revolution were no more than constructs with no underlying truth value—“que las ideas son frágiles como las escamas de los peces y que mueren paralíticas, atrapadas en sistemas, instituciones y dogmas que sólo sirven para ordenar el conjunto caótico que es, a fin de cuentas, nuestra humanidad” ‘that ideas are fragile like fish’s scales and they die paralyzed, trapped in systems, institutions, and dogmas that only serve to organize the chaotic
89 grouping that is, in the end, our humanity’—and to conclude that the revolution itself was no
more than a contingency—“lo tuyo, camarada Antonio, que una vez—repito—creí eras mi
hermano, fue una contingencia” ‘your [agenda], comrade Antonio, who I once—I repeat— believed to be my brother, was a contingency’ (28). Claudia relativizes her own participation in
the revolution, declaring that “para mí Nadie, el culpable casi siempre es una víctima del
torbellino chato del mundo y el enemigo, casi siempre es un simple extraño que habla en otra
lengua” ‘for me, Nobody, the guilty party is almost always a victim of the flat whirlwind of the
world, and the enemy is almost always a simple stranger that speaks another language’ (108).
She also psychologizes her revolutionary involvement, attributing her desire to become active in
such a cause to her inability to appreciate the beauty and sublimity of ordinary, quotidian life
(108). 76 As such, rather than the peak experience that it once constituted, Claudia now views her revolutionary involvement as that of an “acartonado títere” ‘stiff, lifeless puppet,’ and her defense of revolutionary love as an incredible “banalidad” ‘banality’ that she arrived at for her own, private reasons (10, 18). 77 To this end she declares, “Mi decisión fue personal, lo mismo
que mi convicción, ambas fueron de mi propiedad e ingenio . . . Quizás fue mi único momento
76 Regarding her decision not to marry her first boyfriend, Michael, Claudia writes, “¿Por qué no quería casarme con Michael, con alguien?, al menos para conocer la intimidad de quienes en el mundo viven tantas contiendas, . . . ¿por qué no podría afirmar, como la Rhoda de la Woolf, que ‘las cosas más tiernas y las más sencillas que se han dicho se dijeron en la habitación del ático… mientras la tetera hervía’ ?” ‘Why didn’t I want to marry Michael, or somebody, at least to know the intimacy of those in this world who live so many struggles, . . . why couldn’t I affirm, like Woolf’s Rhoda, that ‘the most tender and simple things that have been said were said in the attic room … while the tea boiled’ ?’ (93).
77 Here Claudia also acknowledges her upper-class origins, which mirror those of the majority of the leaders of the armed struggle: “yo –Nadie– no pertenecía a las masas, apenas entendía eso del proletariado, el mundo sin clases era como un gran delirio, pero apenas conocía la pobreza, ese fenómeno que me rodeó, detrás de las ventanas de los carros de aire-acondicionado, desde niña” ‘I –Nobody– didn’t belong to the masses, I barely understood this proletariat thing, the world without classes was like a great crazy dream, but I barely knew poverty, this phenomenon that surrounded me, outside the windows of air-conditioned cars, since I was a child’ (101-2). This class disparity between the leaders of the armed struggle and the masses that it presumed to defend is one of the many criticisms that it has received.
90 de honestidad, cuando descubrí que lo que me empujaba no era otra cosa que mi destino, el de
Nadie” ‘My decision was personal, the same as my conviction, both were of my ownership and ingenuity . . . Perhaps it was my only moment of honesty, when I discovered that what compelled me wasn’t anything other than my destiny, that of Nobody’ (101-2). 78
Claudia’s conclusions with regard to the revolution reflect Beverley’s assertion that the armed struggle is widely perceived as “a kind of romantic adolescence” ( Latinamericanism 99).
One can observe this same perception in Claudia’s assessment of Antonio’s role in the revolution, as she tells him, “Simplemente lo hiciste con la impunidad del niño que juega con el adulto que le nace dentro pero que todavía no domina” ‘You just did it with the impunity of a child that plays with the adult that grows inside of him but that he still does not control’ (51).
Claudia’s new view of the revolutionary ideology, as well as of the revolution itself, also mirrors the ideological and historical relativisms that have emerged as unintended consequences of postmodernist thought. Claudia herself alludes to the generalization of this mental framework towards the end of her letter, written after she has been released. As she asserts,
Tampoco me fue difícil comprobar que el mundo efectivamente había cambiado aún más de lo que Bernie me había anticipado porque poco leí los diarios que me llegaban. No estoy segura de qué forma ha cambiado, pero sé que no es el mismo, como si de pronto . . . el mundo se hubiese convertido en una enorme nube donde todo es difuso, donde la gente funciona como autómata bajo techos invisibles y paredes movibles, donde el piso puede desaparecer en cualquier momento pero nadie se cae nunca al vacío. (155) 79
78 In having Claudia refer to herself as “Nadie” ‘Nobody,’ Pallais in one sense figures her text as the polar opposite of testimony and its status as a genre in which the individual functions a representation of the collective, “[desconstruyendo] este nuevo mito de la unidad entre el individuo y las masas” ‘[deconstructing] this new myth of the unity between the individual and the masses’ (Mackenbach 211). At the same time, by virtue of the fact that we tend to read novels as representative of larger social realities and not as radical singularities, this same technique suggests that Claudia’s story—the story of the leftist intellectual’s disillusionment with radical politics—is one that has been left untold—is in some ways untellable—and as such is the story of “Nadie.”
79 Claudia’s description of the prison is also very similar to the way in which she perceives the world post- revolutionary involvement; of the prison she writes that “aquí somos todas huellas borrosas de muchas espirales que giran sin brújula en un mismo círculo sin fondo, somos todas caricias imperceptibles, títeres disecados . . . uñas atrapadas en puños cerrados, somos siempre ecos congelados, destellos de violencia” ‘here we are all blurred traces
91 Neither was it difficult for me to confirm that the world had really changed even more than Bernie had warned me about because I read little of the newspapers that came. I am not sure in what way it has changed, but I know that it isn’t the same, as though suddenly . . . the world had become an enormous cloud where everything is diffuse, where people function like automatons beneath invisible roofs and movable walls, where the floor may disappear at any moment but where no one ever falls into nothingness.
Having become critical of her own revolutionary involvement, Claudia adopts nihilism as her new ideological framework. One perceives this new, nihilistic perspective quite markedly in
Claudia’s description of a fantasy she has while still in prison. It is a fantasy of escape—not escape from prison—but from her own earthly existence and from her former status as a revolutionary activist. In this fantasy she imagines herself taking flight and “[volando] yo como
Nadie más allá del sol” ‘[flying] like Nobody beyond the sun,’ and then arriving
a una isla que [le] lucía obscena, donde miles y miles de seres y de rostros [le] aturdían de voces, de arena, de semen, de azufre, empañaban [sus] alas de vidrio con besos ahumados de mierda, ensuciaban [su] vestido negro con tinta de humo y finalmente [se] esfumaba, nunca había existido, era Nadie, no dejaba una sola huella y no importaba. (20)
at an island that seemed obscene, where thousands and thousands of beings and faces bewildered [her] with voices, with sand, with semen, with sulfur, they coated [her] glass wings with kisses tinted with shit, they dirtied [her] black dress with ink made of smoke and finally [she] vanished, she had never existed, she was Nobody, she didn’t leave a single trace and it didn’t matter.
Claudia’s fantasy speaks to both the sense of obligation that she had experienced in her role as a revolutionary, with thousands and thousands of squalid beings and faces clamoring for her assistance, as well as the way in which her indifference to them ultimately provides her with a sense of relief. Here again we see the association between eroticism and revolutionary activity, as well as its absence when revolutionary activity comes to an end; in reflecting on her fantasy,
of many spirals that spin compass-less in the same bottomless circle, we are all imperceptible caresses, stuffed puppets . . . nails trapped in closed fists, we are always frozen echoes, nonviolent explosions’ (18). While it may be the experience of being imprisoned that has brought her to this perception of her surroundings, it is one that she does not appear to reserve for imprisonment but generalizes to the wider world and to her experience of life itself.
92 Claudia writes that she “imaginaba que así eran, que así debían ser los ángeles, . . . sin sexo, sin vientre, sin pene, sin tener que hacer el amor, sin luchar por nada, porque nada importa, porque
Nadie entiende” ‘imagined that that is how angels were, that that is how angels should be, . . . sexless, belly-less, penis-less, without having to make love, without fighting for anything, because nothing matters, because Nobody understands’ (20). If, for Claudia, the erotic is linked to aliveness and revolutionary action, the absence of the erotic denotes a realm that is free from the pressures of purpose and meaning. This renunciation of the erotic is the sacrifice that Claudia makes in order to survive in post-revolutionary, neoliberal society. As she herself declares, “Ya no siento angustia. Creo que perdí la dimensión profunda del océano que antes me bañaba hasta el ahogo. . . . ya no extraño lo vital de mi garbo, ni siento nostalgia por mis cabellos muertos, logré adaptarme y estoy bien, con el alma como si no la tengo” ‘I don’t feel anguish anymore. I think I lost the deep, ocean-like feeling that used to cover me till drowning. . . . I no longer miss the vitality of my poise, or feel nostalgia for my dead hair, I succeeded in adapting and I am fine, with my soul as though I don’t have one’ (155).
In this self-evaluation that Claudia makes towards the end of the novel we can perceive the full complexity of Pallais’s text. If, as I have previously asserted, the novel’s epistolary structure allows it to serve as an appeal to the Latin American left and as a critical reappraisal of the armed struggle, Pallais’s description of her protagonist’s renunciation of the erotic enables La carta to also register a critical reflection—if not a full-on critique—of post-revolutionary, neoliberal society—a society in which the angels live “sin tener que hacer el amor, sin luchar por nada” ‘without having to make love, without fighting for anything’ and people with their souls
“como si no [las tienen]” ‘as though [they don’t have them]’ (20, 155). These images of soul-less people and of complaisant, de-sexed angels suggest the degree to which, survival in neoliberal
93 society entails an evisceration of self. Moreover, it points to the fact that, in the wake of the armed struggle, people—especially leftist intellectuals—became reluctant, if not unwilling, to engage in radical politics/the political process and, as such, the extent to which the link between politics and affect was called into question.
Alan Pauls’s Historia del llanto: un testimonio
In Historia del llanto , Alan Pauls also draws on the literary pairing of eroticism and politics in order to critique the connection between politics and affect in Latin American popular culture in the years following the armed struggle. However, whereas La carta addresses the experience of a former sandinista , Pauls’s Historia del llanto presents the subjectivity of its young protagonist as a metonym for his generation of Argentinians—those who were too young to participate directly in the armed struggle but were raised in the surrounding political and cultural milieu. Also like Pallais’s La carta , Pauls’s novel engages in a critique of testimony, but does so via different means. Whereas La carta self-consciously adopts the testimonial form in its entirety, only deviating from its conventions in terms of its content, Pauls’s novel, whose full title is Historia del llanto: un testimonio , refers to itself as a testimony but departs radically from the classic testimonial structure. Steven Boldy describes Pauls’s distinctive narrative style in “De lo real incomprensible a la ficción en dos novelas de Alan Pauls e Iván Thays” ‘From the
Incomprehensible Real to Fiction in Two Novels by Alan Pauls and Iván Thays,’ writing that
Pauls’s sentences
son largas, complejas, proustianas casi: articulan una fina pero mordiente ironía dentro de sus antítesis y sinuosidades barrocas. La primera persona es transmutada en una tercera, una voz lúcida, irónica e implacable, que se adhiere a la desconcertada conciencia del protagonista en cada época de su vida. No hay un presente sino una serie de presentes admirablemente inmediatos, una simultaneidad seductora pero engañosa en el sentido de que encubre a la vez que enfatiza el cambio, la pérdida, el tiempo. (330)
94 are long, complex, almost proustian: they articulate a refined but biting irony within their antitheses and baroque sinuosities. The first person is transmuted into a third—a lucid, ironic, and implacable voice that adheres to the bewildered conscience of the protagonist in each era of his life. There is no present but rather a series of admirably immediate presents, a simultaneity that is seductive but tricky in the sense that it conceals at the same time that it emphasizes change, loss, time.
However, the outcome of Pauls’s approach is largely the same as that of Pallais; as Ana Peluffo asserts in “Emoción, afectividad y sentimiento en la construcción del pasado setentista”
‘Emotion, Affect, and Feeling in the Construction of the Seventies,’ through its incarnation as
(anti)testimony “la novela de Pauls da una versión íntima y privatizada de la historia que cuestiona desde un énfasis en la miniatura, lo pequeño y lo mínimo, la sacralidad monumental del recuerdo” ‘Pauls’s novel provides an intimate and privatized version of history that questions, from an emphasis on the miniature, the small and the minimal, the monumental sacredness of memory,’ and the sacredness of the memory of the 1970s in particular (178). The novel also functions as a sort of temporally non-linear Bildungsroman as the protagonist undergoes something like an inverted sentimental education or a political and emotional de- programming. As Franklin Rodríguez writes in “La política de la distancia en la narrativa de
Alan Pauls y Jorge Volpi” ‘The Politics of Distance in the Fiction of Alan Pauls and Jorge
Volpi,’ “en las tres décadas que engloba esta narración anunciada como testimonio, desde los cuatro años hasta los treinta aproximadamente, lo vemos instruirse y luchar contra sus convicciones políticas” ‘in the three decades that this story announced as testimony encompasses, from approximately age four to age thirty, we see him broaden his mind and fight against his political convictions’ (25).
In terms of its plot, Historia del llanto is the story of an unnamed protagonist whom we first encounter as a child living with his divorced mother and her parents during the Argentinian military dictatorship. Over the course of novel, we see how the protagonist tries to connect
95 affectively to the experience of the armed struggle—which in Argentina was carried out by the
Ejército Revolucionario Peronista (ERP) and the Montoneros, among other groups. We also observe the way in which both the protagonist’s personal history, as well as the social and political context in which he is raised leads him to idealize, even fetishize, pain and suffering—
“el dolor” ‘pain’—over happiness because of the sense of intimacy onto which pain can serve as a window—or as the text explains,
desde muy temprano ha sentido la relación profunda que hay entre la cercanía, cualquiera sea, y el dolor: todo lo que hay de álgido en el hecho de que entre dos cosas, de golpe, la distancia se acorte, desaparezca el aire, los intervalos se eliminen. Ahí él brilla, brilla como nadie, ahí él encuentra su lugar. (20) 80
from very early on he has felt the profound relationship that exists between closeness of any kind, and pain: everything that is pivotal in the fact that between two things the distance suddenly shortens, the air disappears, the pauses are removed. There he shines, he shines like no one else, there he finds his place.
However, in the protagonist’s case, this search for intimacy through a heightened awareness of and sensitivity to pain actually serves as a means of distancing himself from the painful emotional reality of his own life—from the void created by his parents’ emotional neglect. Thus, for the protagonist, intimacy, which the protagonist refers to as “Lo Cerca” ‘The Closeness/That
Which is Close,’ paradoxically functions as a form of mediation, or fiction, that keeps his own inner world at bay. In the narrator’s words,
¿Cuánto tarda en darse cuenta de que en él es al revés, de que ya en ese él . . . primero está la ficción y después la realidad, pálida, lejanísima? . . . Él, la ficción, la usa al revés, para mantener lo real a distancia, para interponer algo entre él y lo real, algo de otro orden, algo, si es posible, que sea en sí mismo otro orden. . . . Todo sea para no estar cerca . (73; my emphasis)
80 Within the novel the recurring image that comes to signify the protagonist’s celebration of the connection between pain and intimacy is that of the tips of his little-boy fingers rubbed raw on the picture of an octopus painted on the surface of his community pool, which serves as a metaphor for the “adelgazamiento de la membrana que debería separar el interior del exterior” ‘thinning of the membrane that should separate the inside from the outside’ (15).
96 How long does it take for him to realize that in him it is reversed, that already in him fiction is first and then reality, pale, very far off? . . . He uses fiction the other way around, to keep the real at a distance, to impose something between himself and the real, something of a different order, something, if it is possible, that is in itself a different order. . . . Anything so as not to be close .
In addition to providing him with a means of escape or deferral from his own reality, the protagonist’s unusual sensitivity to pain enables him to claim the undivided attention of his otherwise disinterested father. Upon recognizing his son’s unusual proclivity for emotion, the protagonist’s father encourages the protagonist’s emotional outpourings and brags to his friends of his son’s striking ability to listen. Because of the way his father celebrates these qualities, the protagonist tends to exaggerate them in his father’s presence; as the narrator describes:
Difícil como siempre saber qué es causa y qué efecto, pero él, esa capacidad extraordinaria que tiene de llorar ante el menor estímulo, dolor físico, frustración, tristeza, la desgracia ajena, incluso el espectáculo fortuito que le presentan en la calle mendigos o personas mutiladas, tiene la impresión de que sólo la pone en práctica, incluso de que la posee, así, lisa y llanamente, cuando su padre está cerca. Lejos en otros contextos, la vida con su madre, por ejemplo, o con sus abuelos, o sin ir más lejos la vida escolar, tan pródiga en crueldad, humillación y violencia . . . hay que infligirle un daño inhumano para arrancarle una lágrima. (30)
Difficult as always to know what is cause and what effect, but he, this extraordinary ability that he has to cry at the least provocation, physical pain, frustration, sadness, other’s misfortune, including the chance spectacle that beggars or crippled people in the street present, has the impression that he only puts it into practice, that he only even has it, like that, evenly and fully, when his father is nearby. [When he is] [a]way in other contexts, life with his mother, for example, or with his grandparents, or, without going any further, school life, so lavish in cruelty, humiliation, and violence . . . you have to inflict on him some inhumane harm to get him to shed a single tear.
From this description it is clear that the emotion the protagonist expresses in front of his father is more of an act that he performs rather than a real index of his emotional life, and that it functions as a strategy for meeting other unmet emotional needs. As the text explains, the protagonist
“considera las lágrimas como una especie de moneda, un instrumento de intercambio con el que
97 compra o paga cosas” ‘considers tears like a kind of currency, an instrument of exchange with which he buys or pays things’ (32).
This critical exploration of the pragmatics of emotional expressions is something that appears again in the protagonist’s response to a singer of protest songs that his father takes him to see at a local bar. From the beginning the protagonist is repelled by the singer-songwriter and his “cabeza enrulada” ‘curly-haired head,’ his “anteojos de miope” ‘nearsighted glasses,’ and his
“mameluco blanco que lleva puesto, uno de esos ‘carpinteros’ . . . que usan no los carpinteros, . .
. sino las mujeres embarazadas, las maestras jardineras y los actores” ‘white overalls that he has on, a pair of those ‘carpenter’s overalls’ . . . that carpenters don’t wear, . . . but rather pregnant women, kindergarten teachers, and actors’ (43). Pauls’s use of free indirect discourse gives us access to the protagonist’s perceptions of the event—such as his perception of both the singer- songwriter’s political engagement and the content of his songs as manipulative opportunism, as well as the way in which the clandestine nature of the concert functions as a form of cultural capital. 81 However, despite his rejection of the singer-songwriter, the protagonist cannot help but recognize himself in the words of one of the singer’s songs:
Vamos, contame, decime / Todo lo que a vos te está pasando ahora / Porque si no, cuando está tu alma sola, llora / Hay que sacarlo todo afuera / Como la primavera / Nadie quiere que adentro algo se muera / Hablar mirándose a los ojos / Sacar lo que se puede afuera / Para que adentro nazcan cosas / Nuevas, nuevas, nuevas, nuevas, nuevas . (46)
Come on, tell me, tell me / Everything that is happening to you right now / Because, if not, when your soul is alone, it cries / We have to get it all out / Like springtime / No one wants something to die inside / Let’s talk looking into each other’s eyes / Get out what we can / So that inside new things are born / New, new, new, new, new .
81 As the narrator puts it, “de entrada tenía la impresión, no sabe si agradable o desagradable, de estar participando no de un acto ilegal, . . . sino de un acontecimiento híbrido, mucho más perturbador, en el que ‘lo clandestino’, quizá para no asustar y no perder del todo sus prestigios, ha aceptado confundirse con ‘lo exclusivo’” ‘from the beginning he had the impression, he doesn’t know if agreeable or disagreeable, of participating not in an illegal act. . . . but in a much more disturbing hybrid event, in which ‘the clandestine,’ perhaps so as not to frighten and to lose all of its prestige, has agreed to mix itself with ‘the exclusive’’ (37).
98
While the narrator never identifies him as such, it is clear from these lyrics, which are from the song “Soy pan, soy paz, soy más,” that the singer-songwriter is in fact Piero De Benedictis, known simply as Piero. Upon hearing these words the protagonist realizes that, like himself,
Piero is a master of cultivating intimacy; “comprende hasta qué punto si es artista de algo, . . . es precisamente eso, un artista consumado de la cercanía, alguien que nada conoce mejor que el valor, el sentido, la eficacia de la proximidad y sus matices, y comprende al mismo tiempo la ambivalencia verdaderamente genial de ese abrazo intempestivo” ‘he understands to what extent, if he is an artist of anything, . . . it is precisely this, a consummate artist of closeness, someone who knows better than anyone the value, the meaning, the effectiveness of closeness and its nuances, and at the same time he understands the truly brilliant ambivalence of this ungodly embrace’ (51-2). Upon recognizing this similarity between himself and this man that he despises, the protagonist becomes uncomfortably aware of the extent to which this predilection for cultivating intimacy is his own raison d’être. However, even as the protagonist comes to abhor this tendency in himself and tries to suppress it, he is never fully able to do so. As such, hearing the song becomes “el gran acontecimiento político de su vida” ‘the great political event of his life,’ and its words become the soundtrack to his own instincts. 82
82 Here Pauls extends his ironic adaption of testimony and its representational function, as the narrator asserts that “si tuviera en ese momento que elegir algo en el mundo que hable de él, algo que lo nombre y que él no pueda eludir por más que quiera, . . . él eligiría tres versos de la canción que el cantautor de protesta estrena esa noche, tres versos que, más que afectarlo . . . parecen en rigor salir de él mismo, salir y sin viajar, . . . volverse audibles en boca del cantautor, según ese milagro del credo populista por el cual el autor de todo . . . es el pueblo, es decir el público” ‘if, in this moment, he had to choose something in the world that speaks of him, something that designates him and that he cannot evade as much as he might want to, . . . he would choose three lines of the song that the protest singer debuts that night, three lines that, more than moving him . . . seem really to come from within him, to come from him and, without travelling, . . . to become audible in the mouth of the protest singer, according to that miracle of the populist creed by which the author of everything . . . is the people, that is to say the audience’ (44-5).
99 The protagonist’s perception of Piero is worth examining further because it will give us insight into his perception of the connection between politics and affect in that particular era’s political culture. As the narrator explains, Piero’s work can be divided into two distinct eras. The first is when Piero
irrumpe, imponiendo de un día para el otro su leve acento italiano, su campechanía, la humanidad empalagosa de canciones que cantan en un suave dialecto de calle de clase media, la sencillez y la pureza de valores que a fuerza de estar a la vista se han vuelto invisibles, y se vanaglorian en secreto de todo lo que nos impide reconocerlos, incluso todo lo que los condena a desaparecer, porque es precisamente la suerte trágica que corren esos valores perdidos la que les da a las canciones el eco melancólico que les permitirá conmover, extorsionar, seguir cosechando adeptos. (37)
bursts onto the scene, imposing from one day to the next his slight Italian accent, his down-to-earthness, the sickeningly sweet humanity of songs that he sings in a pleasant middle class street dialect, the simplicity and purity of values that, as a result of being in plain sight, have become invisible, and boast in secret of everything that prevents us from recognizing them, including everything that condemns them to disappear, because it is precisely the tragic fate that these lost values face that which gives these songs the melancholy echo that allows them to move, to extort, to keep gathering followers.
The second is when
más tarde, a tono con la época, el cantautor decide revestir la humanidad de sus canciones con la capa de agresividad, crispación y denuncia que exigen para pasar sin problemas de la industria de lo sensible al mercado político , y llama a desalambrar la tierra o a expropiar los medios de producción con el mismo tono próximo, cómplice, confidencial, con que hasta entonces celebra el milagro cotidiano de un chaparrón, invita al bar a la chica que ve todos los días en la parada del colectivo o contempla envejecer a su padre en una ensoñación piadosa. (37; my emphasis)
later on, in sync with era, the singer-songwriter decides to coat the humanity of his songs with the layer of aggression, exasperation, and denunciation that is required to pass without difficulty from the industry of sensitivity to the political market , and he calls for unfencing the land or expropriating the means of production with the same close, complicit, confidential tone with which, until then, he celebrates the everyday miracle of a rainstorm, invites the girl that he sees every morning at the bus stop to the bar, or contemplates his father age in a pious daydream.
This description of Piero’s artistic production takes up the narrative’s earlier, more general problematization of emotional expression and focuses it specifically on the way in which the
100 Latin American political culture of the 1970s and 80s paired affect and political concerns in its cultural production. While the song’s lyrics make it clear that the singer-songwriter in question is in fact Piero, the fact that the narrator always refers to him as ‘el cantautor’ suggests that Pauls also means for him to stand in for other singer-songwriters of his era. As Franklin Rodríguez observes, here Pauls “cuestiona el elemento político de estas canciones y de las comunidades políticas progresistas donde dominó lo cercano, donde la Nueva Canción latinoamericana era un elemento importante” ‘questions the political component of these songs and the progressive political communities where closeness ruled, where the Latin American New Song was an important element’ (27). Other prominent musicians that appear as part of this trend are
Mercedes Sosa, Victor Jara, León Gieco, Silvio Rodríguez, Pablo Milanés, and Alfredo
Zitarrosa. The protagonist’s cynical evaluation of Piero as an artist who “[reviste] la humanidad de sus canciones con la capa de agresividad, crispación y denuncia que exigen para pasar sin problemas de la industria de lo sensible al mercado político,” and of his songs as ones that “se vanaglorian en secreto de todo lo que nos impide reconocer [los valores perdidos]” echoes the text’s portrayal of the protagonist’s focus on pain as fetishistic and self-serving and suggests that
Piero’s political engagement is no more than an attempt to appeal to the demands of a politically- engaged marketplace (37). As Peluffo asserts, “a través de un cantante popular feminizado . . . , el protagonista critica una forma de ‘exhibicionismo emocional’ populista que emblematiza el sentimentalismo falso y contagioso omnipresente en el clima afectivo de esta generación” ‘by way of a feminized popular singer . . . the protagonist critiques a form of populist ‘emotional exhibitionism’ that emblemizes the false and contagious sentimentality omnipresent in the affective climate of this generation’ (184).
101 We see this same problematization of expressions of political emotion in the scene that describes the envy and rancor the protagonist feels toward an older friend who cries openly while watching the military’s attack on el Palacio de la Moneda in Santiago, Chile on September 11,
1973, the day that Salvador Allende is deposed. The narrator explains that, because of the extent of his friend’s emotional investment in politics, the protagonist has always felt like an inferior— like a “farsante que repite en un lenguaje débil, plagado de reflejos automáticos y fórmulas de segunda mano, todo lo que de labios de su amigo parece brotar en la lengua natural de la verdad”
‘fraud that repeats in a feeble language plagued with automatic reflexes and secondhand formulas everything that seems to flow from his friend’s lips in the natural language of truth’
(84). By contrast, his friend seems to have easy fluency in “[el] idioma último o primero de los sentimientos” ‘[the] last or first language of feelings’ (85). Thus, watching his friend have such a powerful emotional reaction to this political event that he can only respond to analytically, the protagonist begrudges his friend’s ability to cry:
envidia el llanto, lo incontenible del llanto y todo el circo a su alrededor , los lagrimales rojo sangre, las erupciones de rubor, los accesos de hipo que sacuden a su amigo, la saña desconsolada con que se refriega las manos, el modo en que cada tanto se cubre la cara para ahogar, quizá para estimular , una nueva racha de lágrimas. Pero más que nada envidia lo cerca que su amigo está de las imágenes que lo hacen llorar –tanto que diría que roza la pantalla con la punta de la nariz, la fachada en llamas del Palacio de la Moneda con la frente, las columnas de humo que brotan de las ventanas con sus labios inflamados, a tal punto que él . . . empieza a preguntarse si una lágrima . . . no podría electrocutarlo si hiciera contacto con la pantalla del televisor. (85-6; my emphasis)
he envies the tears, the irrepressibility of the tears and all of the circus around them , the blood-red lacrimals, the flushing of the face, the fits of hiccups that shake his friend, the inconsolable fury with which he rub his hands, the way in which every so often he covers his face to muffle, maybe to encourage , another burst of tears. But more than anything he envies how close his friend is to the images that make him cry –so close that he would say he grazes the screen with the tip of his nose, the façade of the Palacio de la Moneda in flames with his forehead, the columns of smoke that rise from the windows with his swollen lips, to the point that he . . . begins to ask himself if a tear . . . could electrocute him if it made contact with the television screen.
102 As we can see from this passage, on one hand the protagonist envies his friend’s emotional connection to the event and wishes he could cry himself. At the same time, he calls the legitimacy of his friend’s emotions into question—referring to the act of crying as a “circo”
‘circus’ and questioning whether his friend hides his face in his hands so as to muffle his tears or so as to bring himself to cry harder. Thus, even as the text registers the protagonist’s desire to join in his friend’s outpouring of emotion, by having the protagonist point to the performative nature of emotion, the text also undermines our understanding of emotion as “el idioma último o primero”—that is, as the ultimate language or arbiter of truth (85).
Although the protagonist is unable to cry at Allende’s deposal, he is able to respond affectively to political incidents at other points in the text. In these moments, the text itself mirrors the protagonist’s questioning of the legitimacy of affective responses to politics by portraying the protagonist’s experience of political emotions as in keeping with the fetishization of pain and suffering that he engaged in as a child. We see this sort of fetishistic response to pain in the protagonist’s interaction with a woman that he refers to as the “erpia”—a former member of the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo with whom he has a brief affair years after Allende’s deposal (100). 83 When watching her get out of bed one day, the protagonist notices and reaches out to touch a scar on his lover’s body—we are not told exactly where it is located, but given the response his touch elicits in her, it might be a c-section scar. At the feel of his fingers on her
83 The Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (People’s Revolutionary Army) was the armed wing of the communist Partido Revolucionario de Trabajadores (Workers’ Revolutionary Party). Its goal was to launch a communist revolution, and it used urban guerrilla warfare tactics in its campaigns. The ERP began fighting in 1969 against the military dictatorship led by Juan Carlos Onganía and continued its activities until the group was decimated by the Argentine Army during the military dictatorship led by Jorge Videla. The derogatory designation “erpia,” which, as the protagonist’s lover explains, was given to the members of the ERP by their jailers, is a play on words with ‘arpía’ or ‘harpy’ (100). Here Pauls is very likely alluding to the monsters of Greek mythology with a vulture’s body and a woman’s face who were known for kidnapping and mutilating people.
103 skin, his lover bursts into tears. The protagonist’s response to her tears is quite pronounced; as the narrator explains,
es tal el trance en el que lo hunde la comunión del llanto que le importa poco, durante los cinco días que vive, come, bebe, baila, se saca fotos en los fotomotones del subte y duerme con ella, no poder penetrarla, no poder acabar nunca adentro de ella, no poder gozar ni escucharla gozar. Piensa: ‘No me toca a mí entrar; me toca estar cerca.’ Piensa: ‘Hacerse uno con el dolor es volverse indestructible.’ (100; my emphasis)
the trance into which the communion of crying submerges him is such that it matters little to him, during the five days that he lives, eats, drinks, dances, takes pictures in the subway photo booths, and sleeps with her, that he is not able to penetrate her, that he is not ever able to come inside of her, that he is not able to feel pleasure or to hear her feel pleasure. He thinks: ‘I can’t be inside; I have to be close.’ He thinks: ‘ To become one with pain is to become indestructible .’
From this passage we can see that, for the protagonist, his lover’s pain represents a heightened emotional state on par with sex—and not with just any sex, but with the heady, all-consuming sex of the start of a new relationship. And his attention to her pain is not born of a desire to be compassionate and understanding of what she is going through, but rather to inhabit her pain as a form of peak experience. For the protagonist, the torture his lover endured at the hands of her jailers—inhabiting the memory of that torture—provides him with a means of distancing himself from his own emotional experience—of feeling “indestructible” ‘indestructible’—suggesting that the protagonist’s response to the plight of the erpia, much like his response to seeing beggars in the street, has more to do with satisfying his own unmet emotional needs than responding selflessly to hers (100). Moreover, the text’s suggestion that partaking in her pain would render an emotional experience on par with sex seriously troubles our standard conception of what it means to have an emotional response to political trauma—presenting it as something fetishistic and self-serving rather than as an act of real empathy or genuine concern.
The same can be said of the final passage I will examine, in which the protagonist comes upon a photo of the body of a montonera riddled with bullets in the pages of La causa
104 peronista .84 Much like his experience communing with the pain of his scarred lover, for the protagonist, reading La causa peronista represents a peak experience and one that ventures into the realm of the sexual. As the narrator explains, “la inminencia de una cita de amor sin duda no lo encresparía tanto como lo encrespa la víspera de la aparición de cada nuevo número de La causa peronista con sus tipografías erráticas, su gráfica de pasquín, . . . sus relatos de triunfos sindicales, tomas de fábricas, copamientos, sus fotos de héroes, de mártires, de verdugos” ‘the immanence of a romantic date would doubtlessly not send him into such a tizzy as the night before the appearance of each new issue of La causa peronista , with its erratic font, its tabloid graphics, . . . its tales of union victories, factory takeovers, occupations, its photos of heroes, martyrs, and hangmen’ (116). In a subsequent passage, the narrator elaborates on the sexual nature of his response to the peronist magazine:
Tiembla, se le seca la boca, el corazón se le acelera. ¿Es política eso? ¿Es sexo? No es la acción, no es sólo la ilusión de sumarse, comprando la revista, a la clandestinidad de la guerrilla montonera . . . —no es eso lo que lo excita así, lo que lo aísla en esa especie de microclima febril, a la vez insalubre y embriagador, en el que los ardores que experimenta de muy chico, cuando descubre en un tomo de la enciclopedia Lo Sé Todo las viñetas que reproducen las escalas más sublimes de Hércules . . . fermentan ahora en un mismo caldo con los que le despiertan los portentos de la lucha revolucionaria . . . y los que lo estremecen algunas mañanas en que se finge enfermo para quedarse en casa y desde la cama oye cerrarse la puerta de calle, . . . señal que no hay obstáculos que se interpongan entre él . . . y las revistas pornográficas que el marido de su madre esconde en el armario del dormitorio. . . . Ya no es estar cerca, no, lo que lo pone al límite de sus fuerzas. Es la inminencia de leer. (118-9)
He trembles, his mouth turns dry, his heart races. Is this political? Is it sex? It isn’t the action, not the illusion of joining, by buying the magazine, the clandestinity of the montonera guerrilla force . . . —it isn’t this that excites him this way, that insulates him in a kind of feverish microclimate, which is at the same time nasty and intoxicating, in which the heat that he feels from the time that he is very little, when he discovers the vignettes that reproduce the most sublime proportions of Hercules in a volume of the encyclopedia Lo Sé Todo . . . now ferments in the same stock with the heat that the
84 The Montoneros were an Argentine urban guerrilla group made up of leftist supporters of Juan Domingo Perón who fought to establish a socialist state. They formed around 1970 and continued their activities until the group was wiped out during the military dictatorship led by Jorge Videla.
105 wonders of the revolutionary struggle awaken in him . . . and that which courses through him some mornings when he plays sick in order to stay home and hears the front door shut from his bed, . . . the sign that there are no obstacles between him . . . and the pornographic magazines that his mother’s husband hides in the bedroom wardrobe. . . . It is no longer being close, no, that which puts him at his wit’s end. It is the immanence of reading. By describing the sense of eager anticipation that protagonist feels before reading La causa peronista as a form of sexual excitement, the text alludes to and simultaneously interrogates the connection between eroticism and politics that functioned as part of that era’s political culture.
As opposed to the revolutionary erotic that both Cortázar and Belli celebrate in their respective texts as an indispensable component of revolutionary action, in this passage, the sexual excitement that Pauls’s protagonist experiences before reading La causa peronista appears as the same as that which he feels as he anticipates flipping through his stepfather’s hidden porn magazines. Whereas the feelings of excitement and aliveness that the subjects of Cortázar’s and
Belli’s texts experience arise in relation to participating directly in what they perceive as a worthy political cause, the excitement that Pauls’s protagonist feels comes from the act of consuming a political publication as though it were a porn magazine or a dime store novel, with its typical illustrations “de héroes, de mártires, de verdugos,” and the sense of titillation that such consumption can provide (116). Through this comparison, Pauls once again troubles our understanding of political engagement, positing other, less noble motivations for investing in political activity.
This problematization becomes even clearer as the protagonist encounters the photo of the murdered montonera, which appears as though it were a Penthouse pin-up photo, “sobre una doble página cualquiera, abierta al azar de su voracidad” ‘over a two-page spread, opened to the fate of his lust’ (121). The narrator distinguishes the montonera’s photo from pornography while still figuring it as such, writing that “es la primera mujer real que ve desnuda en su vida – . . . no
106 cuenta la negra con el sexo afeitado de Penthouse” ‘it is the first real women that he sees naked in his life – . . . the black woman with the shaved vagina from Penthouse doesn’t count’ (121).
Despite this distinction, the protagonist fantasizes about having a sexual encounter with the woman in the image, much as one would while reading a porn magazine. The notion that the image of the montonera’s dead body “no sólo [desnudo] sino [baleado], [sucio] de tierra, como si, ya muerta, la hubieran arrastrado boca abajo por el terraplén del destacamento militar” ‘not only [naked] but [bullet riddled], filthy with dirt, as though they had dragged her already dead body face down through the embankment of the military detachment’ would provoke a sexual response in the protagonist is troubling enough in and of itself (121). However, the full significance of this moment in the text requires a bit of backstory: not long after viewing the photo the protagonist realizes that the montonera, whose name is Silvia, is none other than the male neighbor who cared for him as a child when his mother went on social calls—an effeminate cross-dressing soldier who showed him the kind of maternal concern and intimacy that his own mother failed to provide, taking the protagonist into his/her home and comforting him whenever he was sad or sick. 85
Before coming across his/her photo in La causa peronista and realizing that this slender soldier was actually a clandestine montonera, the protagonist has considered accusing him/her of
85 In one particularly telling incident in which the protagonist is overtaken by an attack of nausea in the elevator of his family’s apartment building, the narrator explains that “no es su madre que toma las riendas de la emergencia, más preocupada, siempre, por el aspecto social de la situación, la vergüenza ante el vecino, la reacción que el enchastre del hall provocará sin duda en el encargado del edificio, . . . sino el vecino militar, que no vacila en poner en peligro el planchado perfecto de sus pantalones y, arrodillándose junto a él, . . . lo sujeta con delicadeza de las axilas y lo insta a seguir, a vomitar otra vez, todas las veces que hagan falta, dice, hasta aliviarse del todo” ‘it’s not his mother who takes charge of the emergency, more worried, always, by the social aspect of the situation, the embarrassment in front of the neighbor, the reaction that the mess in the hall will no doubt provoke in the building manager, . . . but the military neighbor, who doesn’t hesitate to endanger the perfect ironing of his pants and, kneeling beside him, . . . holds him with delicacy under the armpits and encourages him to continue, to vomit again, as many times as are necessary, he says, until he gets it all out’ (78-9).
107 abuse, but hasn’t, given that the only thing he could think of to denounce was the soldier’s tendency to “[rozar] las yemas de los dedos [del protagonist] como si le midiera el grosor de la piel, el grado de erosión que los sábados en Pretty Polly o New Olivos le infligieron, la distancia que separa en su cuerpo el exterior del interior, el umbral del dolor” ‘rub [the protagonist’s] fingertips as though measuring the thickness of his skin, the degree of erosion that the Saturdays in Pretty Polly or New Olivos inflicted on him, the distance that separates the outside from the inside in his body, the threshold of pain’ (111). At this earlier point in the novel, the protagonist’s motivations for accusing the soldier of abuse are unclear; it is not until the protagonist uncovers the soldier’s true identity that we see that the protagonist’s impulse to denounce the soldier stems from a desire to ‘be contemporary’—to have some kind of intimate claim to the soldier and to the particular political drama of the period. As the narrator describes,
“Ya no llora. Siente una congoja seca, áspera, como si una espátula lo raspara por dentro. Es simple: no ha sabido lo que había que saber. No ha sido contemporáneo. No es contemporáneo, no lo será nunca. Haga lo que haga, piense lo que piense, es una condena que lo acompañará siempre” ‘He does not cry anymore. He feels a dry, rough angst, as though a scraper were scraping him from the inside. It’s simple: he has not known what there was to know. He has not been contemporary. He is not contemporary, he will never be. Whatever he does, whatever he thinks, it is a sentence that will always be with him’ (124). Even the knowledge of the montonera’s true identity is not enough to provide the protagonist with the sense of political relevance that he lacks. As such, after discovering the montonera’s identity, the protagonist’s desire for political relevance is so strong that he not only fantasizes about having denounced the montonera, but about having really been sexually abused by her. Having realized that Silvia, the montonera, is none other than “[el] vecino de Ortega y Gasset, el militar . . . que le ha cantado al
108 oído” ‘[the] neighbor from Ortega and Gasset, the soldier . . . that has sung in his ear,’ the protagonist asks himself
qué habría sido de él, qué vida tendría, si la comandante Silvia lo hubiera tocado, si en vez de limitarse a ofrecerle el tazón de sopa le hubiera acercado una mano a la cara y metido dos dedos en la boca, si le hubiera hundido la lengua y explorado el lado de adentro de los labios, las encías, las paredes carnosas de la boca, si en vez de tenerlo ahí parado, con alfileres entre los labios y el centímetro alrededor del cuello, lo hubiera obligado a meterle una de sus manitos de niño abandonado hasta el fondo último, húmedo, de la concha. (124)
what would have become of him, what life would he have, if Commander Silvia had touched him, if instead of limiting herself to offering him a bowl of soup she had brought her hand to his face and stuck two fingers in his mouth, if she had stuck her tongue in and explored the inside of his lips, his gums, the fleshy walls of his mouth, if instead of having him stand there, with pins between his lips and the measuring tape around his neck, she had made him stick one of his little abandoned child’s hands all the way to the wet depths of her cunt.
From the text, it is unclear exactly how the protagonist believes having been sexually abused by
Silvia would have changed his life, or why it would have given him a greater claim to the political events of the period; however, such questions are ultimately beside the point. 86 The fact that the protagonist’s desire for historical relevance is so strong that child sexual abuse springs to his mind as a desirable means of attaining this relevance reveals the extreme psychic and emotional significance that historical and political relevance occupies in his life, and thus stands as the novel’s most disconcerting condemnation of political emotion. For the protagonist, not only does being historically relevant appear as a replacement for psychic and emotional intimacy, expressions of emotion in relation to political events appear as the only sanctioned site of emotional expression in a quotidian context that otherwise has no use for the complex
86 It may be that the protagonist believes that if he had accused the soldier of sexual abuse he could have prevented her death, or simply that he wants to be able to lay claim to the same level of abuse and trauma that other leftists endured during this period.
109 vicissitudes of emotional life. 87 In framing the protagonist’s desire for historical relevance in these terms, Pauls intimates that not only was the political drama of the 70s given excessive historical, political, and emotional weight, but that people’s desire to empathize and/or resonate with the events of this period may not be a true expression of the events’ significance but instead stem from other, more personal desires. 88 Historia del llanto ultimately suggests that the emotional response to the events of the period, and the kind of cultural and social capital that these events have been accorded, should be held to greater scrutiny. This distrust of emotional engagement in political events is also readily discernable in Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro , a novel by the Peruvian author Iván Thays, which, in turning away from the political, offers instead a return to the apparent sanctity of the private sphere.
Iván Thays: Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro
In recent years, one of the most heated debates surrounding contemporary Latin
American literature has been the question of novelists who followed the Boom of the 1960s and who identify with and/or have been identified as part of the schools Crack and McOndo . Both
Pauls’s and Thays’s work could be characterized as part of the literary “generación Crack ,” in which, as Franklin Rodríguez asserts, “la opción de la distancia . . . se destaca en parte debido a la dificultad de imaginarse una acción realmente colectiva y de eliminar la larga sombra, tanto de izquierda como de derecha, forjada por la lucha armada y los conflictos sectarios” ‘the option of
87 This point also appears in the protagonist’s interaction with a character that the protagonist refers to as “[el] oligarca torturado” ‘the tortured oligarch’ (56). In this scene, the protagonist is raving about a woman he has fallen in love with at a dinner party and the oligarca torturado approaches him and whispers in his ear, “ Eso porque vos nunca estuviste atado a un elástico de metal mientras dos tipos te picaneaban los huevos ” ‘ That’s because you were never tied to a metal box-spring while two guys shocked your balls with a cattle prod ’ (56).
88 Of course, Pauls’s critique is a bit overly-simplistic in the sense that our motivations for doing things are almost always multi-faceted—frequently combining altruism and self-interest. Thus people’s desire to resonate with the events of the period is most likely the result of personal desires coupled with, (rather than in place of), more ‘genuine’ interest and concern.
110 distance . . . stands out in part due to the difficulty of imagining a really collective action and of eliminating the long shadow, both on the left as on the right, forged by the armed struggle and the sectarian conflicts’ (25). The question has been raised as to whether these writers, by veering away from stylistic techniques held to be sacrosanct during the Boom years—la novela total and el realismo mágico —and embracing fragmentation and individuality have discarded the defining elements of Latin American literature, to the point that their writing can no longer be considered as such. In this regard, at the level of plot, Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro is a text that demonstrates a turning away from social commitment and toward an increased focus on the personal and the private as an alternative to engagement in social issues. At the same time, Iván
Thays’s use of various forms of intertextuality in the novel blurs the boundaries between
Macondo and McOndo, integrating contemporary stylistic techniques—such as references to other countries and cultures—with echoes of the voice of canonical Latin American author Juan
Rulfo. Drawing on the theories of Néstor García Canclini and Mikhail Bakhtin, I show that the dialogic nature of Thays’s novel is such that it speaks to the conditions of social and economic disparity as they exist specifically in Peru, while also addressing the issue of political violence throughout the world and the universal theme of human loss. Through this dialogic and multivalent approach, Thays attempts to bridge the divide between the individual and the social as well as the local and the global, ultimately gesturing to the possibility of an erotic re- engagement with the political future.
Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro is the story of a journalist from Lima who is assigned to cover the visit of President Alejandro Toledo to Oreja de Perro, a ghost town in the heart of
Ayacucho. While there, the president is scheduled to launch a social assistance program in response to the findings of La comisión de la verdad (The Truth Commission) regarding the
111 political violence of the 1980s. The focus of the novel, however, centers around the journalist’s own personal history and his interactions with the people he meets in Oreja de Perro before the arrival of the president. Over the course of the novel we learn that the protagonist’s son Paulo has recently died of epilepsy and that his wife Mónica has also left him. These experiences have left him feeling lost and displaced and without a clear sense of what he wants from life or his future. As the protagonist waits for the president’s arrival and attempts with no success to write a letter to his wife, he develops several unorthodox relationships: with Jazmín, a young pregnant woman from Ayacucho; with Jazmín's self-appointed bodyguard, Tomás; and with Maru, a striking yet psychologically imbalanced young anthropologist. When the time comes for the protagonist to leave Oreja de Perro, he considers bringing Jazmin with him to Lima, or starting a relationship with Maru upon his return. At the same time he still maintains a shred of hope that his wife will come back to him and that they will somehow be able to resurrect their marriage.
However, at the very end of the novel when the protagonist is again in his apartment in Lima, he seems to finally accept the finality of his loss and to begin the difficult process of remembering and healing.
Much has been made of the idea, evinced by pieces such as Alberto Fuguet’s
“Presentación del país McOndo” ‘Presentation of the Country McOndo’ and Jorge Volpi’s “El fin de la narrativa latinoamericana” ‘The End of Latin American Fiction,’ that writers from the
McOndo generation, such as Iván Thays, want to annihilate the old guard of the
Boom generation, in a full-scale rejection of literary precedents. 89 Rather than viewing this rejection as another swing of the pendulum of literary inclinations and interpreting the writing of
89 According to Volpi, “la gran tarea de los escritores de América Latina de la primera mitad del siglo XXI consiste justamente en completar este necesario y vital asesinato” ‘the great task of Latin American writers from the first half of the twenty-first century consists precisely of completing this necessary and vital assassination’ (Volpi 42).
112 the McOndo generation as simply a new creative boom in the history of Latin American literary production, critics have gone so far as to question whether or not these more recent writings are truly Latin American. Criticisms leveled against the writers of the McOndo generation tend to focus on their interest in individual as opposed to national identity, their decided rejection of guiding ideological viewpoints, and their use of international settings, as well as local settings within their texts. The concern among critics of these contemporary writers is that, by focusing on the experience of the individual—often that of middle and upper-class urban dwellers—these writers have gone against the tradition of la literatura comprometida and have abandoned their role as creators and guardians of Latin American history and identity.
These concerns are not, in fact, unfounded. Writers of the McOndo generation have been adamant in their refusal to speak for the marginalized members of their societies as well as in their firm belief that their writing will not change the world. However, taking this to mean that these writers are not at all interested or invested in the social reality of their countries is to over- step the issue (Estrada 18). 90 Instead, what one finds in the work of McOndo writers, in attempting to move away from the type of unfiltered ideological agendas that characterize Boom literature, is that these writers frequently convey a strong sense of discomfort and ambivalence vis-à-vis an involvement in politics.
These authors are committed to painting what they perceive as a more realistic picture of the social and economic diversity that exists in their countries, believing that, while their critics may argue that “lo latinoamericano es lo indígena, lo folklórico, lo izquierdista” ‘the Latin
90 “As the moral conscience of the nation, the writer has made the claim, in the words of Pablo Neruda, that through his or her voice shall speak those who have no voice of their own. Today, we prefer that such an obligation be merely an option for the writer. . . . It is . . . a matter of one’s not attempting to legitimize himself or herself by speaking for others who have not designated them as spokespersons for anything” (Paz Soldán 18).
113 American is the indigenous, the folkloric, the leftist,’ to the writers of the McOndo generation,
“vender un continente rural cuando, la verdad de las cosas, es urbano . . . [les] parece aberrante, cómodo e inmoral” ‘selling a rural continent when, in the truth of the matter, it is urban . . . seems aberrant, lazy, and immoral [to them]’ (Fuguet 15-6). If Néstor García Canclini is correct in stating in La globalizacion imaginada that “los cambios globalizadores han modificado la manera de concebir la cultura” ‘globalizing changes have transformed the way of understanding culture,’ McOndo writers have taken up these globalizing changes by integrating them into the images of culture that they depict in their writing (61). As opposed to the magical realism that we find in Macondo and in other texts that focus on Latin America’s rural history, the realism of contemporary Latin American writers lies in demonstrating the extent to which their countries have been affected by globalization. To cite Alberto Fuguet’s statement of poetics, “Presentación del país McOndo”: “Nuestro país McOndo es más grande, sobrepoblado y lleno de contaminación, con autopistas, metro, TV -cable, y barriadas. En McOndo hay McDonald’s, computadores Mac y condominios, amén de hoteles cinco estrellas construidos con dinero lavado y malls gigantescos” ‘Our country McOndo is bigger, overpopulated, and full of pollution, with highways, subways, cable TV, and shanty towns. In McOndo there are McDonald’s, Mac computers, and condominiums, plenty of five-star hotels built with laundered money, and gigantic malls’ (15). Despite criticism to this effect, the globalization that we find in McOndo is not an unproblematic, idealized globalization, in which “todos los miembros de todas las sociedades podemos llegar a conocer, ver y oír a los otros” ‘all of the members of every society can get to meet, see, and hear each other’ (Canclini 65), but globalization as “un conjunto de procesos de homogeneización y, a la vez, de fraccionamiento articulado del mundo, que reordenan las diferencias y las desigualdades sin suprimirlas” ‘a group of processes of
114 homogenization and, at the same time, of articulated division of the world, that reorganize the differences and inequalities without eliminating them’ (49). The rigor and complexity of
McOndo writing lies in describing a reality in which the same degree of media and technology saturation as that found in the United States or Europe exists alongside extreme poverty and disenfranchisement, as well as the age-old issue of racism that has existed in Latin America since before la conquista .
As previously mentioned, another common criticism of McOndo writers surrounds their use of international settings rather than focusing strictly on Latin American localities. However, the novels of contemporary Latin American authors that employ international settings or references should not automatically be assumed to sidestep Latin American issues and concerns.
As Edmundo Paz Soldán indicates in his article on the McOndo generation—aptly titled
“Between Tradition and Innovation”—McOndo writers’ use of international references
does not imply escapism or a flight from the cruel vicissitudes of our history or from the brutal neoliberal presence, nor does it mean turning one’s back on local reality. The journey is in search of other geographies and other themes, allowing one, moreover, to return to what is ours with a freer perspective. (18)
García Canclini’s assertion about the hermeneutical needs of globalized society offers another potential explanation for contemporary Latin American writers’ use of international settings in their texts:
Narrar historias en tiempos globalizados, aunque sea la propia, la del lugar en que se nació o se vive[,] es hablar por otros, no sólo contar lo que existe sino imaginarlo fuera de sí. También por esto se vuelven importantes las metáforas, que explican el significado de algo por comparación con lo diferente. Contamos historias y empleamos metáforas porque[,] al hablar de lo que tenemos[,] queremos referirnos a otra cosa, porque participar en cualquier mercado—de alimentos, de dinero, de imágenes—es como disparar a un blanco que se mueve. (52)
Telling stories in globalized times, even if it is your own story, that of the place where you were born or live[,] is speaking for others, not only telling what exists but also imagining it outside of itself. That is also why metaphors become important; they explain
115 the meaning of a thing by way of comparison with something different. We tell stories and use metaphors because[,] when talking about what we have[,] we want to allude to something else, because participating in any market—of food, of money, of images—is like shooting at a moving target.
Particularly in times of globalization, contemporary Latin American writers are turning to international settings and references for metaphors of their own local realities. To return to the question of la literatura (no) comprometida , the fact that writers of the McOndo generation are no longer interested in writing with a clear political agenda, or in speaking for the voiceless of their nations, does not mean that they are not interested in depicting and grappling with the challenges facing their societies. As Oswaldo Estrada argues in his article on recent Peruvian literature: “Si en lo que más diferencian los nuevos narradores peruanos de sus antepasados es, como afirma [Alonso] Cueto en una entrevista, en que ya no piensan que la literatura va a cambiar el mundo, ‘eso no significa que no pueda dar cuenta de él’ (Escobar Ulloa 12)” ‘If what differentiates the new Peruvian novelists from their forebears is, as [Alonso] Cueto affirms in an interview, that they no longer think that literature is going to change the world, ‘this does not mean that they cannot shed light on it’ (Escobar Ulloa 12)’ (Estrada 142). Writers of the
McOndo generation have continued to take stock of their world through recourse to a variety of literary styles and techniques.
Iván Thays’s Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro , while clearly a McOndo novel, is noteworthy in that it calls into question many of the dichotomies seen to exist between Boom literature and the literature of the McOndo generation, as well as other dichotomies viewed as common preoccupations in Thays’s works. The title of the novel shines a spotlight on the novel’s rural setting in the Andes; however, the actual space of the novel shifts back and forth between
Oreja de Perro and Lima, and also includes a wide variety of international references. While some of the intertexual references in the novel could be dubbed high cultural references, many
116 are references to movies and other forms of popular culture. 91 Similarly, while there exists a preoccupation with writing that could be interpreted as a form of metafiction within the text, (the protagonist struggles to write a letter to his wife), this instance could just as easily, and perhaps more meaningfully, be interpreted as a metaphor for the impossibility of coming to terms with certain kinds of loss. 92 As is characteristic of Thays’s writing, the “introspective voice” of this novel spends a great deal of the narration reflecting on and analyzing his own past (Paz Soldán
17). At the same time, the principle action of the novel, the Peruvian government’s response to the political violence of the 1980s, serves as more than a mere foil for the protagonist’s introspection. While there is only a circumstantial and not a causal link between the protagonist’s story and that of the victims of the political violence whom we meet in the novel (Jazmín and
Tomás), there are larger themes that unite them. Finally, while the novel is highly “realistic” in that in employs the kind of “virtual realism” characteristic of McOndian texts, Thays surprises us by resurrecting the ghosts and specters of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and by peppering his novel with many of the same kinds of highly symbolic images that appear in Rulfo’s works.
Thus, while, in Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro , Iván Thays gives us a novel that clearly belongs to the world of McOndo , it is also one that undermines many of the criticisms of that world, revealing that McOndo is not as far from Macondo as one might have thought.
In order to address this array of dichotomies, I begin my analysis of the novel by examining Thays’s use of Bakhtinian techniques: heteroglossia and the chronotope of the carnival, in order to illustrate the issues of economic disparity, racism, and political violence
91 Roberto Ruz has criticized Iván Thays’s writing as being elitist. See his chapter on Thays: “Iván Thays: Postmodern Peruvian Narrative of ‘High’ Culture” in Contemporary Peruvian Narrative and Popular Culture: Jaime Bayly, Iván Thays, and Jorge Eduardo Benavides .
92 Nelson Ricardo Ramírez has identified metafiction as a totalizing discourse within Thays’s text.
117 within contemporary Peru. I explore Thays’s use of dialogic intertexts to convey the diversity of contemporary Peruvian identity and experience, while simultaneously repeating certain themes: death, abandonment, and futility, which echo throughout the novel as representative of a shared national reality. I then explore the way in which Thays’s use of international literary references, while serving to elucidate the perspective of his protagonist, also highlights the universality of his themes by linking his text to similar narratives from other parts of the world. I conclude by analyzing what I have identified as Rulfian images in the text: the flies, hills, dogs, drunks, women, ghosts, and silences which serve as an ever-present reminder of the political violence in
Peru, as well as universal symbols of human suffering and loss.
Although it contains only one intradiegetic narrator, Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro is a dialogic novel in which the distinct realities of characters of different races and socioeconomic levels within Peruvian society are juxtaposed through the author’s use of dialogue. To cite
Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination ,
Dialogue itself, as a compositional form, is in novels inextricably bound up with a dialogue of languages . . . The plot itself is subordinated to the task of coordinating and exposing languages to each other. The novelistic plot must organize the exposure of social languages and ideologies, the exhibiting and experiencing of such languages: the experience of a discourse, a world view and an ideologically based act, or the exhibiting of the everyday life of social, historical and national worlds or micro-worlds . . . In a word, the novelistic plot serves to represent speaking persons and their ideological worlds. (365)
The Dialogic Imagination , in which Bakhtin asserts that “the novel must represent all the social and ideological voices of its era . . . the novel must be a microcosm of heteroglossia” (411; my emphasis), is a text that, for obvious reasons, has been the theoretical go-to guide for the Boom ’s novela total , whose precise aim has been a “full and comprehensive reflection of its era”
(Bakhtin 411). Not surprisingly, the aim of McOndo writers, in an attempt to break away from the literary precepts of the previous generation, has been that of cutting the strict bonds of
118 association between literature and nation” by rejecting the Boom’s totalizing imperative (Paz
Soldán). 93 However, this shift away from the social has not been complete within all McOndian texts since, in Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro , we find Thays’s use of heteroglossia—not in order to create a totalizing representation of its era, but in order to address the issues of racism, political violence, economic disparity, and profound incommunication within contemporary
Peruvian society. Thays does this using dialogue to expose his reader to the different
“languages”—and, by extension, realities—of each of the novel’s primary characters: Jazmín,
Tomás, Maru, Scamarone, who inhabit different social “micro-worlds” within the larger
“national world” that is contemporary Peru (Bakhtin 365).
One of the dialogues in which these issues come across most clearly is that which occurs between the protagonist and Tomás, who approaches the main character in order to warn him of the dangers of associating with Jazmín. The protagonist responds to Tomás’s initial warning,
“No te acerques más a Jazmín” ‘Don’t go near Jazmín again’ (107), with complete and total derision —the same derision that we see in his classification of Jazmín and other indigenous people as “chola/cholo” ‘injun’: “Bueno, pero ahora yo tengo algo también importante que decirte: ¿por qué mierda crees que me interesa tener contigo una conversación? ¿O sólo quieres hacerme perder el tiempo?” ‘Alright, but now I have something important to say to you, too: why the hell do you think I am interested in having a conversation with you? Or do you just want to waste my time?’ (107). When the protagonist continues to dismiss Tomás’s message, suggesting that Tomás is only interested in keeping him away from Jazmín because he is in love with her,
Tomás answers with the contempt that he feels as a campesino for limeños : “No sé qué
93 Thays’s self-proclaimed project is that of demonstrating “la problemática del individuo” ‘the problems of the individual’: “hacer un arte poética de la individualidad” ‘making an ars poetica of individuality’ (Diegner and Morales Saravia 195-6). In this sense his poetics is extremely similar to that of Alan Pauls.
119 frustración dices o estás hablando, pituquito, pero no te metas. Es por tu bien. Tu sigue tu vida no más, como quien dice tu vida de pituco, y déjanos en paz” ‘I don’t know what frustration you mean or are talking about, city boy, but don’t get involved. It’s for your own good. You just go about your business, your city boy business, as they say, and leave us in peace’ (107). In the lines that follow, we see the protagonist’s lack of understanding of the true danger in his involvement with Jazmín, which is emblematic of the ignorance shared by the majority of limeños during the
1980s as to the extent of the political violence going on outside of the capital. The protagonist asks:
¿Y quién me amenaza entonces? . . . Tú sabes quién. ¿O no te ha contado? ¿Qué tenía que contarme? Entonces no sabes nada. Más razón pues para que la dejes en paz. Mejor que no sepas nada. No te acerques. (107)
And who is threatening me then? . . . You know who. Or hasn’t she told you? What should she have told me? Then you don’t know anything. All the more reason for you to leave her alone then. It’s better for you not to know anything. Don’t go near her.
On the one hand, Tomás refuses to tell the protagonist the details of Jazmín’s situation in order to protect him; at the same time, the protagonist’s complete lack of insight into what could be the danger of getting involved with Jazmín angers and astounds Tomás, particularly when the protagonist threatens to denounce him for harassment, claiming that “Así soluciono yo mis problemas” ‘That’s how I solve my problems’ (108). Tomás responds with: “Me dices que te amenazo y tú me amenazas con llamar a la policía. Se nota que no sabes nada de nada. Ése es tu problema, es el problema de todos en este país, nadie sabe nada. ¡Y me amenazas con los rayas
120 encima! 94 . . . No sabes qué cosa dices. No sabes nada” ‘You tell me I’m threatening you and you threaten me with calling the police. It’s clear you know absolutely nothing. And besides that you threaten me with los rayas ! . . . You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know anything’ (108). This small soliloquy from Tomás serves as a window onto the novel’s larger context, which is the government’s use of bureaucratic solutions to respond to the deaths of almost 70,000 people during the years of political violence, as well as the role of the police—the so-called counter-terrorist forces—in these deaths, and suggests that this so-called peace had not fully removed the threat of retaliation. Later in the novel we learn that the father of Jazmín’s child is a soldier and that it is likely that she was raped, (or, at the very least, coerced into sleeping with him). Similarly, Jazmín’s mother was taken from her home—ostensibly for questioning—and was raped and tortured by her captors. Thus, the irony of the protagonist’s threat to denounce Tomás for harassment lies in the ineffectiveness of the police—or anyone else—to protect rather than harm Jazmín and her mother, and the ineffectiveness of the government as a whole to address the crisis of terrorism and state-sponsored violence in Peru.
Given what happens to Tomás toward the novel’s conclusion, it is clear that he is correct in asserting that those who would trust the arrival of President Toledo or the findings of La
Comisión de la Verdad to resolve the injustices and cure the animosities still palpable within
Peruvian society clearly “no [saben] nada” ‘[know] nothing’ (108).
In addition to the formal juxtaposition of languages that necessarily occurs within the framework of the novel, Thays also uses the chronotope of the carnival/public square in order to bring characters of varying orientations and socioeconomic levels into contact with each other.
94 “Los rayas” is a colloquial term for a special branch of the Peruvian police, known as la Policía de Investigaciones del Perú .
121 Commenting on the novels of Dostoevsky, Bakhtin relates the chronotope of the public square to that of the threshold, defining it as “the main places of action . . . where crisis events occur,” as well as a space that is “illuminated by . . . [a] spirit of carnival and mystery'” (249). The public square in Oreja de Perro, in which the townspeople, military, police, anthropologists, and journalists congregate to await the arrival of president Toledo, creates the ideal scenario in which to contrast these varied sociopolitical orientations, as well as to highlight the tension and animosity that exists between them. It is here that we are able to observe the disparity between the limeños , whose raucous behavior indicates a clear sense of entitlement and privilege, and that of the campesinos , who, “con tantos militares y policías . . . prefieren estar en sus casas a esta hora” ‘with so many soldiers and policemen . . . prefer to be in their homes at this hour’ (130).
The young anthropologists’ discussion of clothing brands and “partidillos [de] playstation” ‘little
Playstation games’ appears in stark contrast with the narrator’s description of the town drunks, whose omnipresence is indicative of the town’s poverty: “No parecen borrachos recientes, lo son pertinaces, es probable que hayan estado ahí desde hace meses, o años, y seguirán estándolo después de que nos vayamos” ‘They don’t seem like recent drunks, they’re persistent drunks, it’s likely they‘ve been here for months, or years, and they’ll still be here after we leave’ (140,
130). 95
It is also in the public square that we are made aware of the animosity between these groups: as the limeños socialize loudly, a group of soldiers observes them “con curiosidad, con envidia, con resentimiento, con desprecio, incluso con ganas de participar . . . No tienen vergüenza en mirar fijamente y mantener la sonrisa congelada” ‘with curiosity, with envy, with
95 This is an obvious yet noteworthy intertextual reference to Juan Rulfo’s classic short story “Luvina.”
122 resentment, with scorn, even with a desire to participate . . . They are not ashamed of staring and keeping a frozen smile’ (130). 96 As often occurs in carnivalesque spaces, some of the pre- existing hierarchies between these various social classes are dissolved—in the square the limeños meet the town’s director and accompany him to his home for a performance of llaqta maqta .
However, the tensions between these groups never fully dissipate and actually come to a head on the day of the president’s arrival when, as more and more campesinos assemble to receive compensation for the loss of their husbands and family members, a furious military official pours out his anger toward the campesinos onto one of their dogs: “Un perro amarillo, flaco y con la espina dorsal expuesta como la de un pez, se cruza en su camino. El militar le grita que se largue y luego . . . le lanza una patada en las costillas que lo levanta del suelo y lo arroja unos metros más allá. El perro aúlla de dolor” ‘A thin, yellow dog with its spine exposed like that of a fish crosses his path. The soldier yells at it to leave and then . . . he gives it a kick in the ribs that lifts it off the ground and hurls it a few meters away. The dog howls in pain’ (181). After giving the dog another kick that removes a piece of its flesh the soldier makes known the true target of his animosity: “¡Perro de mierda!, grita el militar. ¡Serranos de mierda! Si creen que se van a salir con la suya, que me van a cagar a mí, a mí, están jodidos. Yo he matado terrucos como ustedes con las manos, ¿oyeron? La reconchadesumadre si piensan que me van a cagar a mí” ‘Piece of shit dog!, yells the soldier. Piece of shit mountain-dwellers! If you think that you’re going to get away with this, that you’re going to screw me over, you’re fucked-up. I’ve killed terrorists like you with my hands, you hear me? Your mother’s cunt if you think you’re going to screw me over’ (182). Like Tomás’s claim regarding the limeños ’ ignorance, the truth of this military
96 This “sonrisa congelada” is another chilling reference to the role of the military in the political violence of the 1980s.
123 official’s threat becomes apparent with Tomás’s murder at the hands of the military. Contrary to the government’s wishes, any kind of reconciliation between the military and the victims of the political violence is far from immanent, and, as the narrator asserts in the novel’s opening, the words that make up the name of La Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación are in reality no more than “aburridas palabras” ‘boring words’ (15).
El sufrimiento, pensó, debería pesar algo, debería tener un peso específico propio, debería ser visible como mineral por lo demás inexistente, un valor inmutable en el que se habrían almacenado los cadáveres, la sangre, las heridas, las enfermedades, las humillaciones, y que quedaría en los campos de batalla, las cárceles, los lugares de ejecución y los hospitales, un monumento que no significaría lo mismo siempre y en todas partes. (Cees Nooteboom as qtd. in Thays; 148)
Suffering, he thought, should weigh something, should have a specific weight of its own, should be visible like an otherwise inexistent mineral, an immutable value in which the cadavers, the blood, the illnesses, the humiliations would have accumulated/been stored, and that would remain on the battlefields, in the prisons, the execution chambers, and the hospitals, a monument that would not mean the same thing at all times or in every place.
Although in a 2007 interview with Britt Diegner and José Morales Saravia, Iván Thays has claimed that what most interests him is “la problemática del individuo” ‘the problems of the individual’ and that “nunca [habla] sobre las cuestiones sociales o políticas” ‘he never [talks] about social or political issues’ (195, 198), in Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro , Thays seems to have found a way of simultaneously addressing these two seemingly disparate terrains. Setting aside the obvious socio-political context of the novel previously discussed, one notes that even the novel’s most strikingly individualistic passages speak to a broader, collective experience of loss and disillusionment. While the protagonist himself is deeply conflicted over the death of his four year old son and the subsequent departure of his wife, and while these individual concerns occupy long passages within the novel, these individual experiences of abandonment and loss are also reflected back to him in the lives of others whose stories he recounts and in the lives of the people he meets in Oreja de Perro. Within the novel, these stories function as another form of
124 intertextuality—a series of dialogic intertexts that, while they do not share a causal relationship, are related thematically, to the point that they become metaphors of each other, and of the overriding sense of disillusionment felt throughout Peru. Thus, while in this novel, as in others,
Thays undoubtedly succeeds in his aim to “hacer un arte poética de la individualidad” ‘make an ars poetica of individuality’ (Diegner and Morales Saravia 196), in doing so, he gives us a series of reflecting images of suffering that, while they each have “un peso específico propio” ‘their own specific weight,’ also accumulate to build a fragmented whole that gestures toward an unremitting collectivity (Nooteboom). When read against the grain, the presence of collectivity in Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro is just as strong as that of individuality.
The first of these stories, or intertexts, to which we are introduced and which serves as both a metaphor of and a point of contrast for the other stories that we encounter throughout the novel is that of the economist who loses his memory after killing his wife and child in a fatal car accident. This man, like the protagonist and the other people with whom he interacts over the course of the novel, is irremediably fragmented. The first time the protagonist visits the economist, he admits that, for this man, “incluso recordar [su] nombre es difícil” ‘even remembering his name is hard’ and that, for this reason, the nurses have written it on his cast
“con una letra enorme: Mario” ‘in huge letters: Mario’ (52). When the protagonist visits him a second time, the economist assures him that “las cosas que sucedían luego del accidente las recordaba sin mayores problemas” ‘the things that happened after the accident he remembered without any trouble’ (77); however, he forgets that he has already told the protagonist his name and proceeds to inform him that his name is Gabriel. Moreover, the economist, Mario/Gabriel, admits that he is only able to function by following the strictest of routines: “Cada cosa tiene que hacerse a la misma hora y de forma idéntica al día anterior. Basta con que algo falle, lo que sea,
125 que no se encuentre en la bodega la misma marca de pasta de dientes o que el chofer se demore por un embotellamiento en la carretera, para que el día sea nulo” ‘He has to do each thing at the same time and in the same way as the previous day. It’s enough for one thing to go wrong, anything, that the grocery store doesn’t have the same brand of toothpaste or that the driver is delayed by congestion on the highway, for the day to be ruined’ (80). Unlike the other characters in the novels, the economist has freed himself from “la espía [de] la memoria” ‘the spy [of] memory’ and thus appears to have been able to move on with his life; he passes his time translating Shakespearean poetry and learning Chinese (81). However, at the same time he has no center—nothing to hold him together if his routine collapses, and nothing that will enable him to ultimately reconstruct his existence by coming to terms with his loss. As the narrator affirms later in the text, “el antónimo ideal de la memoria” ‘the ideal antonym of memory’ is not amnesia, but rather “la imaginación, fantasear, hacer ficcion” ‘the imagination, fantasizing, making fiction’ (178).
The second character to whom we are introduced is Mónica, the protagonist’s ex-wife, whose life has been irrevocably marked by the loss of her father, who left Mónica and her mother when Mónica was still a girl, and whose leaving, according to the narrator, was “la gran ruptura de su vida” ‘the great rupture of her life’ (41). Over the years she has kept alive his memory and the hope of finding him again by holding onto his red Mercedes Benz. The protagonist shares the following image of his wife: “Muchas veces me he imaginado a Mónica escondida en aquel closet. Una muchacha hermosa de piernas dobladas esperando que la llegase a rescatar su padre en un Mercedes Benz rojo. Aquel padre que nunca pudo encontrar” ‘I have imagined Mónica hidden in that closet many times. A beautiful girl with her knees to her chest waiting for her father to come rescue her in a red Mercedes Benz. The father that she could never
126 find’ (47). The extent to which the departure of Mónica’s father has affected her is evident in that, while she makes great strides to avoid her mother’s fate: “empezó a ahorrar todo lo que podía” ‘she started saving as much as she could’ and “estudiaba por las tardes” ‘she studied in the afternoons,’ she also falls into self-destructive patterns, such as infidelity and drug use (46).
The other women in the text with whom the protagonist develops relationships—Jazmín and
Maru—each in her own way resembles Mónica, and the protagonist is drawn to them for precisely these reasons. Like Mónica’s father, Jazmín’s mother disappeared from her life when she was eleven and, for a time, Jazmín’s only desire was to see her again. Like Mónica, Maru dabbles in drugs and promiscuous sex and hopes not to wind up like her mother. However, while it would be easy to explain the presence of Jazmín and Maru in the text as the protagonist’s attempts to replace Mónica, these women are the ones who seek out the protagonist, rather than the other way around. It is as if the protagonist’s pain is a magnet that draws to him those who share a similar fate.
Of course the character within the novel to whom we are most exposed, and who thus appears as the most fragmented, is the protagonist himself, who has remained “encerrado” ‘shut away’ in the death of his son Paulo and the ending of his marriage (95). 97 As the protagonist refrains from telling Maru: “Mira, esto que ves aquí, yo, soy un fragmento, un pedazo. No puedo ir al cine, no puedo tomar nada con una chica, ni un café, ni una cerveza. Tengo un hígado, tengo aún alguna muela, probablemente un corazón, y podría seguir enumerando porque soy una acumulación, no un todo” ‘Look, what you see here, me, I am a fragment, a piece. I can’t go to the movies, I can’t get a drink with a girl, or a coffee, or a beer. I have a liver, I still have a molar
97 Perhaps the most beautiful, and the most non-sexually erotic, passages in the novel are those in which the protagonist describes his relationship with his son, Paulo, calling him “aquel tierno asteroide” ‘that tender/affectionate asteroid’ (13).
127 or two, probably a heart, I could keep listing things because I am an accumulation, not a whole’
(71). Throughout the text, the protagonist’s stream of consciousness narration makes it clear to us that, like Mónica, who smiles “al vacío” ‘into space’ (47), or Jazmín, who appears with “una sonrisa estática, de labios estirados, que apenas puede ocultar la soledad, la tristeza” ‘a static smile, with wide-stretched lips, that can barely hide the loneliness, the sadness’ and who sometimes “se [va] muy lejos” ‘[goes] very far away’ (133, 144), the protagonist is also completely lost and alone, and without the erotic current that used to give his life meaning. The fragmented structure of the novel serves to reflect and accentuate the fragmentation and isolation of the protagonist in that it, too, often appears as “una acumulación,” rather than a whole (71). At the same time, through the use of repeating images, such as Paulo’s accumulation of toys that resembles a common grave—“los cofres de juguetes de su habitación . . . repletos de brazos, piernas e incluso cabezas sin dueño” ‘the toy chests in his room . . . filled with arms, legs, and even heads without an owner’ (86)—or the vacant, reflecting smiles of Mónica and Jazmín,
Thays presents us with an experience of suffering—a marked absence of the erotic—that transcends individuality. As such, when Jazmín wonders, “bueno, me imagino que encontrar un gorrión muerto no tiene nada que ver con encontrar un perro muerto flotando en el aire con la piel arrancada, lleno de moscas y la boca negra mostrando los dientes, ¿no?” ‘well, I suppose that finding a dead sparrow has nothing to do with finding a dead dog floating in the air with its skin stripped off, covered in flies and its black mouth baring its teeth, no?’ we can respond that, while these two versions of suffering and death may each have different, specific meanings, or consistencies, there is also something that they share (136). 98
98 This image is a clear allusion to the Shining Path’s threatening practice of killing dogs and hanging them from lampposts.
128 In the interview with Diegner and Morales Saravia mentioned above, Thays makes reference to “cierta cosa depresiva que a veces hay en mis libros” ‘a certain depressive something that is sometimes in my books,’ claiming that it is due to his having been influenced by the writing of Juan Carlos Onetti (192). However, when asked later in the same interview
“¿qué significado tiene para usted el contexto peruano?” ‘what meaning does the Peruvian context have for you?’ (199), Thays responds with the following insight:
Creo que la primera parte de mi obra representa algo que yo he vivido . . . representa eso que yo sentía, la idea de que no existe futuro . . . que no existe patria como un cobijo, como un decir: ‘Bueno, es mi patria y yo finalmente voy a morir por defenderla’. No. Mi patria era un montón de militares gobernando, un montón de terroristas destruyéndola y la policía destruyendo al terrorismo. No hay idea de patria, ni de futuro, ni de conciencia de identidad nacional. Eso es, creo yo, lo que me ha heredado a mí la literatura. Si no fuera por la literatura yo ahora sería un joven que estaría intentando ganarse la vida en Miami, o intentando vivir en otro país. Pero no es porque uno quiera irse a otro país para luego volver acá y mejorar, es que acá uno no ve futuro. . . . Antes pensaba que eso era algo muy personal, pero ahora lo entiendo como algo social. . . . Hemos sido golpeados por la misma ola. (199-200)
I think the first part of my work represents something that I have lived . . . it represents what I felt, the idea that there is no future . . . that there is no nation as refuge, like the way people say: ‘Well, it’s my country and in the end I’ll die to defend it.’ No. My country was a whole lot of soldiers governing, a whole lot of terrorists destroying it and the police destroying the terrorism. There is no notion of country, or of the future, or of an awareness of national identity. This is, I believe, what has given literature to me. If it weren’t for literature right now I’d be a young man who would be trying to make a living in Miami, or trying to live in another country. But it’s not because you want to go to another country to come back here later and make things better, it’s that you don’t see any future here. . . . Before I thought that this was something very personal, but now I understand it as something social. . . . We’ve all been pummeled by the same wave.
It is this Stimmung —the perceived absence of a national future—that undermines the possibilities of erotic reawakening, and that we recognize as readers when confronted with the tales of the characters within Thays’s novel. 99 Thays effectively constructs such a Stimmung by
99 The Stimmung that Thays depicts here stands in stark contrast to the erotic Stimmung of 60s, 70s, and 80s that I explored in my first chapter. Whereas the historical mood of the twenty-first century Peru that Thays portrays in Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro is characterized by meaninglessness, fragmentation, and loss, that of the 60s, 70s, 80s
129 offering us a cast of characters whose stories, although they represent different social and economic backgrounds, subtly repeat and interact textually—causing their experiences of suffering and loss to echo throughout the text. While the fragmented structure of Thays’s novel is diametrically opposed to that of a novela total , through its very fragmentation Un lugar llamado
Oreja de Perro conveys the sense of the absence of a national future, which, as Thays affirms, is not only personal, but also collective and historical.
Me ha tomado una hora y un poco más escribir la crónica sobre Oreja de Perro. Todo está ahí: Toledo, los helicópteros, los perros, las mujeres, las moscas, los cerros, el silencio. (207)
It’s taken me an hour and a little more to write the article on Oreja de Perro. Everything is there: Toledo, the helicopters, the dogs, the women, the flies, the mountains, the silence.
Quién lo iba a decir, la explicación de la vida en el manual de un electricista: cuando una luz se apaga, una luz se enciende en otro mundo. En China, por ejemplo. O en Estambul. O en la habitación del costado. Sí. Alguien empieza a vivir mientras nosotros estamos a oscuras, esperando a que nos toque turno de estar iluminados. En fin, supongo que bajo la penumbra también existe una vida. (199)
Who would have said it, the explanation of life in an electrician’s manual: when one light goes out, another light turns on in another world. In China, for example. Or in Istanbul. Or in the bedroom next door. Yes. Someone begins to live while we are in the dark, waiting for it to be our turn to be illuminated. In short, I suppose that in the shadows there is also life.
Thus far I have discussed several of the dialogic aspects of Un lugar llamado Oreja de
Perro , including Thays’s use of heteroglossia and the chronotope of the carnival to illustrate the
in Latin America was characterized by wholeness created through the sense of a shared utopian objective. Despite the political challenges that remained to be overcome, people’s faith in the potential realization of systems of equality and social justice provided them with a sense of direction and purpose that itself resulted in feelings of fullness or plenitude. This feeling of wholeness is the same that Lorde describes in her theorization of the erotic and that Grossberg alludes to in his explanation of affective investment—the erotic as the sense of investment which “determines how invigorated people feel at any moment of their lives, their level of energy or passion” (Grossberg 82).
130 issues of racism, political violence, and economic disparity in Peruvian society, as well as his use of dialogic stories or intertexts to convey a common experience of suffering, loss, and the absence of a collective national future. In this final section, I will address Thays’s use of literary intertextuality, including intertextuality with the writings of Juan Rulfo, to create a continuum between both the local and the global and the historic and the symbolic, in a text that gestures toward universality.
One of the most striking aspects of Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro is the sheer number of intertextual references that it contains, many of which are international. While one of the functions of these references is to contribute to Thays’s portrait of the protagonist as a globalized and fragmented subject, they also serve to connect themes that appear in the novel with similar themes and passages in texts from other parts of the world. This strategy of shifting the space of a novel from the local to the global—or, to borrow the language of Horacio Costa, “el redimensionamiento cósmico de lo regional” ‘the cosmic redimensioning of the regional’—is a technique of concientización that appears in many politically engaged novels, such as those of
Eduardo Galeano, and whose aim is to convey that the specific historic and cultural reality being illustrated is not an isolated case, but rather just one of many similar situations that form part of a larger human experience and which should therefore resonate on a global/universal level (230).
In Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro , we find the epigraph cited above from Dutch author Cees
Nooteboom, in whose work Thays finds the same absence of national identity and future: “la búsqueda de la patria en otros lugares” ‘the search for one’s country in other places’ that he has identified as a social condition in Peru and also conveys in his own texts (Diegner and Morales
Saravia 200). When describing his state of mind immediately following the death of his son, the narrator of Oreja de Perro references the Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe’s intertextual use of
131 French poet Apollinaire. And in order to capture the kind of evolutionary growth needed for the protagonist to move forward following his son’s death, Thays utilizes an anecdote from Diderot:
Leo una anécdota que me impresiona profundamente: en medio de la recolección de datos para su Enciclopedia [Diderot] entrevistó a un ciego de nacimiento que solía utilizar sus brazos para ver el mundo. Diderot le pregunta: ¿Qué haría si Dios le permitiera ya no ser ciego, que le cumpliera el milagro de poder ver por primera vez? El ciego contesta: Si pudiera pedir un milagro, pediría brazos más largos. (209) 100
I read an anecdote that moves me deeply: in the middle of gathering information for his Encyclopedia [Diderot] interviewed a man blind from birth who was accustomed to using his arms to see the world. Diderot asks him: What would you do if God allowed you not to be blind anymore, if he gave you the miracle of being able to see for the first time? The blind man answers: If I could ask for a miracle, I would ask for longer arms.
By drawing upon these international literary references in order to explain and animate the experience of his protagonist, Thays takes his reader on a miniature world tour, thereby emphasizing the extent to which the protagonist’s experience of suffering and his need for healing/renewal is universal and collective as well as specific and individual.
Perhaps the most significant literary reference within the novel is the intertextual dialogue that it sustains with the work of Juan Rulfo. Although Rulfo’s name is never actually mentioned within the text, Thays alludes to Rulfo’s writing through the omnipresence of death and through the poetic/symbolic nature of certain images: the flies, hills, dogs, drunks, women, ghosts, and silences, which echo the images found in Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and the stories in El llano en llamas . Perhaps the clearest and most prevalent image of death within the novel is that of the flies that inhabit the silence and solitude of the town, like the dog’s ear that it is named for:
100 I read this quote from Diderot as the expression of a desire not only to see the world more clearly through the means one knows best, but also as the expression of an erotic desire to hold or embrace the world more fully.
132 “Lo peor de Oreja de Perro es el silencio. Un silencio cargado de moscas” ‘The worst thing about
Oreja de Perro is the silence. A silence heavy with flies’ (14). Not long after, the narrator describes the flies in more detail: “La soledad de Oreja de Perro es mala consejera, sus moscas son unas musas gordas y sin gracia. Sólo saben hacer ruido, aumentan la sensación de encierro”
‘The solitude of Oreja de Perro is a bad adviser, its flies are fat and graceless muses. They only know how to make noise, they add to the feeling of seclusion’ (37). And finally:
Desde esa ventana veo enrojeciéndose las puntas de los cerros y las aéreas nubes desplazándose por encima de ellas, muy bajas, como si fueran a pincharse y explotar. Explotarán las nubes, sí. Y el sonido final será ese zumbido de moscas. (22)
From this window I see the mountaintops reddening and the aerial clouds moving around above them, very low, as if they were going to prick themselves and burst. Yes, the clouds will burst. And the last sound will be this buzzing of flies.
These sensations of unremitting silence and entrapment echo the atmospheric qualities that one finds in Pedro Páramo and “Luvina,” which Rulfo’s narrator describes as “un lugar moribundo donde se han muerto hasta los perros y ya no hay quien le ladre al silencio; pues en cuanto uno se acostumbra al vendaval que allí sopla, no se oye sino el silencio que hay en todas las soledades”
‘a crumbling place where even the dogs have died and there is no one left to bark at the silence; since as soon as you get used to the gale that blows there, you don’t hear anything but the silence that lies in all solitudes’ (156).
A final image from Rulfo that haunts Un lugar llamado Oreja de Perro is that of ghosts, or specters, which recall the ghosts that inhabit Pedro Páramo ’s Comala. It is significant that in
Thays’s novel, however, these images of ghosts exist not only within Oreja de Perro, but also within the protagonist’s life in Lima, serving to emphasize the link between these two localities in spite of the distance that separates them and the protagonist’s assertions that they have nothing
133 in common. 101 As the protagonist affirms toward the end of the novel regarding his own future,
“Mónica no vendrá del mismo modo como yo jamás escribiré una carta en respuesta a su carta.
Lo que teníamos que decirnos ya se ha dicho. Hemos hablado en el lenguaje de los espectros.
Nos hemos convertido en espectros. . . . Y ahora ésa es toda, absolutamente toda la realidad en la que debo aprender a vivir” ‘Mónica won’t come just as I will never write a letter in response to her letter. What we had to say to each other has already been said. We have talked in the language of ghosts. We have become ghosts. . . . And now this is all, absolutely all the reality in which I should learn to live’ (211). In Thays’s use of the image of ghosts we recognize the
“irreverence” toward classics such as Rulfo that Edmundo Paz Soldán encourages in “Between
Tradition and Innovation”: “Oreja de Perro se ve desolada, casi espectral. Pero no hablemos de espectros: prohibidas las metáforas de fantasmas” ‘Oreja de Perro looks desolate, almost ghostly.
But let’s not speak of ghosts: metaphors of phantoms are forbidden’ (130). At the same time, the fact that Thays makes such thorough use of Rulfian images also conveys the idea that, even within the works of the McOndo generation, there is an understanding that writers like Juan
Rulfo “are our classics, upon whom we do not allow dust to settle, for we give them renewed meaning with each reading of their work” (Paz Soldán 17). Iván Thays’s Un lugar llamado
Oreja de Perro is a work that, through its multifaceted, dialogic, and multivalent approach, not only gives new meaning to Latin American classics such as those of Juan Rulfo, but also forces us to reconsider the dichotomies that we have erected between Comala and McOndo, and between the definitions of social, individual, and universal literature.
101 One of the protagonist’s notes in his journal reads as follows: “ Increíble: hace tan solo unas horas que salí de Oreja de Perro y me parece que pasaron mil años, tantos que no tengo nada que ver con ese sitio ni con nada de lo que pasó . . . ” ‘Incredible: it’s only been a few hours since I left Oreja de Perro and it seems like a thousand years have gone by, so many that I no longer have anything to do with that place or with anything that happened . . .’ (189).
134 To conclude, I want to look back to the final scene from the novel, in which the protagonist chooses not to reach to Maru or Jazmín or Mónica in favor of spending time reflecting on and hopefully coming more closely to terms with his son’s death. In this scene, the protagonist literally removes himself from a highly symbolic movie set outside his apartment building onto which he has stumbled by accident. As the narrator describes:
Frente al departamento hay un gran tumulto. Miro por la ventana y los veo armando luces, tomando posesión del espacio, jalando cables. Van a filmar algo. No veo actores. Demasiado movimiento, los técnicos se mueven de un lado a otro, discuten entre ellos. Además, cada vez hay más curiosos que se van formando en círculo alrededor de los equipos. (208)
There is a big commotion in front of the apartment. I look through the window and I see them setting up lights, commandeering the space, installing cables. They are going to film something. I do not see actors. Too much movement, the technicians move back and forth, they argue amongst themselves. Besides that, there are more and more onlookers who are gradually forming a circle around the equipment.
The movie set presents us with a clear mirroring of the scene of the arrival of President Toledo in
Oreja de Perro and the dynamics there that the narrator has previously described, as well as with a metaphor for the protagonist’s relationships with the three women in his life. At one point as he is waiting hopefully for his ex-wife to come back and watching the scene take place below his window, the protagonist accidentally launches himself onto the set; “Sin darme cuenta he abierto la ventana y he sacado casi todo el cuerpo por ella. De pronto, el director para la escena. Nadie se mueve. Me quedo mirando qué ha occurido durante unos minutos, sin darme cuenta de que ahora todos me miran a mí” ‘Without realizing it I have opened the window and stuck almost my whole body out. Suddenly, the director stops the scene. No one moves. I keep looking at what has happened for several minutes, without realizing that now everyone is looking at me’ (210).
135 In this awkward and confusing confrontational moment, as the “técnicos me miran expectantes”
‘the technicians look at me expectantly’ and “algunos curiosos me señalan y ríen,” ‘some of the onlookers point at me and laugh’ the protagonist realizes that, just as he has no place on the movie set, he has no a place in the lives of the women with whom he has developed romantic relationships (210). As the narrator informs us, the protagonist “[piensa] en Maru. [Piensa] en
Jazmín” ‘[thinks] about Maru. [He thinks] about Jazmín’ and asks himself honestly, “¿Realmente quiero salvar a Jazmín? No, no quiero hacerlo. Ni siquiera la conozco, no sé quién es, no soy responsable de ella” ‘Do I really want to save Jazmín? No, I don’t want to do it. I don’t even know her, I don’t know who she is, I am not responsible for her’ (211).
This question of whether or not the protagonist really wants to save Jazmín can be read as the text’s most overt question about the role of the writer in the aftermath of the armed struggle, to which the text responds with the inward impulse of the Crack/McOndo generation. This writer-protagonist does not wish to save Jazmín, this text’s figure of an indigenous victim of the armed struggle—nor does he wish to save Maru, the intellectual/anthropologist; as the protagonist/narrator explains it, “cambian los cuerpos sobre la cama, cambian ligeramente las palabras de deseo o amor que se dicen sobre la cama. Pero ciertamente no cambia nada” ‘the bodies in the bed change, the words of desire or love that are said in bed change slightly. But nothing really changes/certainly nothing changes’ (211). He realizes that he doesn’t even really wish for his ex-wife Mónica to return, and that, in the same sense that he will never write her a letter in response to hers, she will also never return to him. In this passage, it is as though the protagonist is asserting that the erotic relationships of the 1970s and 80s which he was scrambling to recapture through his relationships with Jazmín and Maru will never be reinstated and that all that remains is for the writer to “[esperar] detrás de la cortina, desde donde nadie me
136 ve y no molesto ni interrumpo la continuidad de nadie” ‘[wait] behind the curtain, where no one sees me and I don’t disturb or interrupt anyone’s continuity’ (210).
However, rather than choosing just to wait, the protagonist decides to turn inward and to focus on himself and his relationship with his deceased son; as he asserts “ahora ésa es toda absolutamente toda la realidad en la que debo aprender a vivir” (211). Paulo, the cherished lost son, in this context, represents the loss of illusions, the loss of hope to which everyone, but in this particular case, writers and other proponents of the armed struggle must have necessarily succumbed in its aftermath. Thus, Thays’s prescription for readers, as well as other writers like himself is to take time to come to terms with this loss and heal from it. As the narrator tells us, the protagonist chooses to “[abandonar] la ventana” ‘[leave] the window’ and “[darse] una vuelta por la sala, intentando acostumbrar[se] a ese nuevo silencio. . . .” ‘[take] a walk through the living room, trying to get used to this new silence. . . .’ (212). As the text describes, the protagonist “de pronto, [siente] ganas de estirar[se] como si despertara de un sueño. Por primera vez en mucho tiempo [se despereza], [estira] los brazos y [suelta] un quejido de placer”
‘suddenly, [feels] like stretching as though he were waking up from a dream. For the first time in a long time [he stretches out], [he stretches] his arms, and [let’s out] a sigh of pleasure’ (212).
The protagonist chooses to make time to remember his son and to honor this memory—to
“[llevar] una colcha, [coger] un libro y [dormir] en la sala. . . . Como cuando Paulo era pequeño y se despertaba en la madrugada” ‘[bring] a quilt, [grab] a book, and [sleep] in the living room. .
. . Like when Paulo was little and woke up in the early morning’ and the protagonist “lo cargaba y le daba vueltas esperando a que se durmiera. Y muchas veces el amanecer [les] cogió a los dos tirados en el sofá. Nos gustaba mirar el amanecer” ‘carried him and walked him in circles waiting for him to fall asleep. And many times daybreak caught us both lying on the couch. We
137 liked to watch the sunrise’ (212). In choosing to commemorate his son in this way, we see him mapping out a return to a lost or previously absent state of well-being, one marked by a significant, and long-awaited “quejido de placer” ‘sigh of pleasure’ (212).
This concluding passage within the text would at first seem to suggest, as critics such as
Aníbal González have argued, that a sense of beauty and well-being for leftist intellectuals is to be found only in turning away from politics to more intimate concerns. However, as much as this might at first appear to be the case, the protagonist does not choose to close the curtains and shut out the world around him; instead he plans to “[ir] por una manta, [hacer] un poco de café, [leer] un libro y [quedarse] dormido en el sofa, con las cortinas abiertas” ‘[go] get a blanket, [make] a little coffee, [read] a book, and [fall] asleep on the sofa, with the curtains open’ and, as a result,
“mañana [despertar] con las primeras luces” ‘[wake up] tomorrow at first light’ (212). Within the text, this leaving open of the curtains signals a willingness to re-engage with the world following a necessary period of mourning and self-reflection—of coming to terms with the recent past.
Thus, rather than foreclosing the possibility of a return to the social-engagement of the 60s, 70s,
80s, Thays’s novel intimates a return to social engagement, of an eventual renewed effort to conceive of and embrace the world, as the Diderot’s blind man put it, with “brazos más largos”
‘longer arms’ (212).
The political changes that I have discussed in this chapter—most notably the weakening of socialist projects in Central America and the dramatic influence of U.S. sponsored dictatorships in the Southern Cone—have left the door open to the advancement of neoliberalism in Latin America, a system that has had profound effects, not only on economic and political structures in the region, but also on collective thought in both Latin America and the U.S. These changes meant that, by the mid-90s, the intersection of the erotic and political ceased to appear in
138 Latin American and Latina/o literature in the ways that I have analyzed in the first chapter, as writers were now writing from and addressing themselves to readers in a very different
Stimmung .102 However, due to the important role of the erotic in the socially-engaged cultural superstructure of the 1970s and 80s as part of that era’s “spirit of hope for change” (Beverley,
Latinamericanism 105), as well as the significant place it still holds in collective cultural memory, the erotic continues to harbor lasting power as a marker of affective health in relation to politics and political systems, and a valuable instrument of critique in relation to contemporary neoliberal politics and culture. In the chapter that follows I will provide an in-depth analysis of neoliberalism, as well as its development and impact in Latin America and the U.S., in order to situate the ways in which contemporary Latin American and Latina/o writers are responding to the impacts of neoliberalism in their work.
102 As I demonstrate above, in the socially engaged literature of the 1970s and 80s the erotic appears in relation to the political as a celebration of moments of aliveness in the present that simultaneously serve as points of contrast for the poor quality of life suffered under a repressive political system, as well as metaphors for the quality of affective experience anticipated after a more just political future has been achieved. In many of these texts, the erotic also points to the sense of aliveness that comes through political engagement—through being affectively involved in the political realm.
139 CHAPTER 3: THE REVOLUTIONARY EROTIC REVITALIZED
The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need—the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment (Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 55).
In contrast to the previous chapter, in which I investigated works that critiqued the Latin
American political culture of the 60s, 70s, and 80s and the erotic Stimmung that characterized it, in this final chapter I examine Latin American and Latina/o works published in the 1990s and beyond that seek to revitalize the Stimmung of this earlier era in order to use it to address contemporary political concerns. One of the most pressing of these concerns is the economic system of late capitalism, or neoliberalism, which—like all economic systems—reaches beyond the realm of pure finance to intercept the minds and bodies of contemporary people. The two
Latina/o works that I analyze in this chapter, Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints and Paul
Martínez Pompa’s My Kill Adore Him , grapple with the way in which neoliberalism has further oppressed already marginalized Latina/o populations and call on the erotic spirit in order to confront and resist these neoliberal effects. In addition, both Moraga and Martínez Pompa allude to the common imperialist power dynamics at the heart of issues such as the Central American civil wars and the working conditions of maquiladora workers and migrant farmworkers, presenting the erotic as the means to create a shared culture of resistance between these diverse political struggles. The Latin American text that I explore, Patricio Pron’s El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia , also seeks to recover the erotic spirit of the previous era—in this case as a means of overcoming the depressive and nihilistic Stimmung left in the wake of the
140 Argentinian dictatorship and the neoliberal period that followed. In this chapter I will show how, unlike the Latin American authors featured in my second chapter, in El espíritu de mis padres ,
Pron finds something worth redeeming in the political culture of the previous decades, thereby putting his work more on par with contemporary Latina/o works like those of Martínez Pompa and Moraga. However, before delving into my analysis of the texts, I will first define what I mean by ‘neoliberalism’ and provide a general overview of its development and impact in Latin
America and the U.S. so as to more easily chart its affective and ideological indices in these writers’ works.
Following David Harvey, I understand neoliberalism as a broad but distinctive set of economic policies that have emerged from “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade,” and in which “the role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices” (2; my emphasis). Neoliberal theory holds that “privatization and deregulation combined with competition . . . eliminate bureaucratic red tape, increase efficiency and productivity, improve quality, and reduce costs, both directly to the consumer through cheaper commodities and services and indirectly through reduction of the tax burden” (Harvey 65). Many of the social and economic outcomes of neoliberalism are part of what is often innocuously referred to as globalization and praised as a contemporary phenomenon characterized by increased global awareness, national interdependence, and cultural circulation. While there may be reason to praise certain aspects of globalization, (particularly from a micropolitical standpoint), this same global phenomenon has a more insidious side, as the
141 byproduct of a set of highly exploitative economic policies and practices, the results of which range from poverty and unemployment to political violence and murder.
As Harvey and other scholars of neoliberalism demonstrate, the ideological building blocks of neoliberalism first arose in the late 1930s among liberal intellectuals seeking to devise an alternative to the collectivist planning of the economy, which they feared would lead to totalitarianism. 103 As Daniel Stedman Jones explains in Masters of the Universe , this anti- collectivist impulse was a response to the rise of a wide range of collectivist movements and policies emerging at that time, including “the onset of Nazi and communist totalitarianism,” as well as “New Liberalism, Progressivism, [and] the New Deal” (329). Neoliberalism is grounded in Friedrich Hayek’s theory that “free markets lead to ‘spontaneous order’” (Peet 73), as well as the related theory that “governments play an important role [in the economy] as the guardian of
‘free markets’” (Birch and Mykhnenko 3). 104 In other words, neoliberal theory views the free market as both a naturally self-regulating mechanism, and as the central regulatory mechanism for the well-being of society. As such, in neoliberal theory, the market is accorded a place of preeminence, and whatever political regulations exist are put in place in order to protect the freedom of the market rather than to protect the rights and welfare of citizens. In the 1970s, elevated levels of unemployment and inflation raised questions about the advisability of maintaining the relatively high degree of government economic and social intervention that had been adopted in the 1960s, setting the stage for neoliberals to introduce policies that did away with social programs. The 1980s and 1990s saw a veritable surge of neoliberalization in the form
103 The meeting at which the term ‘neoliberalism’ was first coined took place in 1938 in Paris and was organized by Louis Rougier (Birch and Mykhnenko 3).
104 In 1947, economists who subscribed to Hayek’s views formed the Mount Pelerin Society, an intellectual network that has been instrumental in the spread of neoliberalism worldwide.
142 of economic policies such as Thatcherism and Reaganomics, as well as in the form of trade policies adopted by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade
Organization, and as a component of NAFTA. The so-called “‘structural adjustment’ policies’” practiced within these programs and institutions include “tax reform, trade liberalization, privatization, deregulation, and strong property rights,” all of which are intended to improve society by enabling the market to regulate itself (Jones 8). 105
Despite glowing, often utopian, claims about the power of neoliberal economics to improve standards of living for society as a whole, in practice neoliberal policies have rarely, if ever, had the broader restorative impacts they were predicted to have. In A Brief History of
Neoliberalism , following Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, Harvey in fact argues that the assertion of neoliberalism’s ability to improve living standards by increasing economic productivity is in reality no more than an intricate attempt to conceal its promoters’ true interest in restoring class power. 106 What is irrefutable is that neoliberal economic practices have had profoundly detrimental effects on developed and developing countries alike, consistently
working to reduce social programs, increase economic disparity, and augment the political and
economic influence of the upper class.
105 These trade policies are outlined by British economist John Williamson in his 1989 Washington Consensus, an early, ‘authoritative’ account of contemporary neoliberal policy in relation to Latin America.
106 Harvey interprets the widespread upper class support for the advancement of neoliberal policies during the 1970s as a response to the rise of socialist and communist parties on the global sphere that threatened the power of these economic elites. He thus concludes that the economic disparity that tends to follow the application of neoliberal policies is not an unintended side effect of these practices, as it has frequently been explained, but rather the principal raison d’être of an economic system intent on restoring the power of the upper class. He finds that “redistributive effects and increasing social inequality have in fact been such a persistent feature of neoliberalization as to be regarded as structural to the whole project. . . . The theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has, I conclude, primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal” (Harvey 16, 19). Another possible indication of this is that neoliberal policies and practices rarely if ever constitute pure applications of neoliberal theory; in fact, neoliberal practices often directly contradict neoliberal theory, featuring regulations that curtail market ‘freedoms’ in order to support the interests of businesses and financial elites.
143 In Latin America, rather than freeing countries from their debt and leading to economic growth and prosperity, the neoliberal policies advanced by the IMF and World Bank with the support of the US Treasury have led to increased levels of disparity, as well as economic instability and greater dependence upon these international/US organizations. The IMF operates by providing loans to Latin American countries in exchange for their adoption of neoliberal policies and practices, such as increased financing. When these policies and practices result in additional financial crises, as they have on various occasions in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina,
Venezuela, and Uruguay, the IMF and the World Bank have required these countries to extend their neoliberal policies and practices, as further neoliberalization is consistently touted as the cure-all remedy for economic problems. 107 These neoliberal policies and practices, which include the privatization of national industries and gutting of social welfare programs, have stripped countries of their national assets and further disenfranchised already marginalized populations.
Meanwhile, the benefits of neoliberalization have consistently gone to the wealthiest sectors of the population, as well as to foreign corporations, which are able to exploit the labor force and the natural resources in developing countries with fewer regulations and tariffs. 108 Thus, rather than stimulating broad economic growth, the real “universal tendency” of neoliberalization has been to serve the interests of the rich, while “[increasing] social inequality and [exposing] the
107 Harvey writes that “by 1994 some eighteen countries (including Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and Uruguay) had agreed to deals that forgave them some $60 billion in debt. The hope of course was that this debt relief would spark an economic recovery that would permit the rest of the debt to be paid off in a timely way. The trouble was that the IMF also saw to it that all the countries that took advantage of this modicum of debt forgiveness . . . were also required to swallow the poison pill of neoliberal institutional reforms. The peso crisis in Mexico in 1995, the Brazilian crisis of 1998, and the total collapse of the Argentinian economy of 2001 were predictable results” (75).
108 Harvey writes that “the real secret of US success [in the 1990s] was that it was now able to pump high rates of return into the country from its financial and corporate operations . . . in the rest of the world. It was this flow of tribute from the rest of the world that founded much of the affluence achieved in the US in the 1990s” (93).
144 least fortunate elements in any society . . . to the chill winds of austerity and the dull fate of increasing marginalization” (Harvey 118).
These economic and political impacts of neoliberalization would not have been possible without a particular set of ideological and cultural changes that worked to make these economic and political practices appear necessary and even natural. Drawing on the work of Gramsci,
Harvey addresses this aspect of the hegemonic rise of neoliberalism in his chapter “The
Construction of Consent,” in which he argues that in order for neoliberalism to hold sway as it has, it has had to become part of our commonsense way of perceiving life and the world. As
Harvey explains:
What Gramsci calls ‘common sense’ (defined as ‘the sense held in common’) typically grounds consent. Common sense is constructed out of long-standing practices of cultural socialization often rooted deep in regional or national traditions. It is not the same as the ‘good sense’ that can be constructed out of critical engagement with the issues of the day. Common sense can, therefore, be profoundly misleading, obfuscating or disguising real problems under cultural prejudices. . . . In seeking to understand the construction of political consent, we must learn to extract political meanings from their cultural integuments. (39-40)
Our commonsense neoliberal mode of perception touches upon many different facets of life— from our views on work, health, and education, to leisure time and our personal relationships— and it is evident in the watchwords of contemporary discourse. In exchange for greater ‘personal responsibility’ with regard to meeting needs such as healthcare and education, neoliberalism promises greater ‘flexibility,’ ‘personal freedom,’ and ‘individual choice,’ assuring us that, as long as we apply ourselves, all the good things in life can be ours. As do all elements of commonsense discourse, these watchwords impact us at the level of feeling and affect, as well as that of belief. As Ana del Sarto argues in “Globalización, violencia y afectividad,” “el incólume mandato del imaginario global [y neoliberal] nos interpela a través de ese sentimiento de libertad y autonomía, capaz de convencernos de la posibilidad de personalizar cada uno de los aspectos
145 que nos constituyen” ‘the invulnerable command of the global [and neoliberal] imaginary interpolates us through this feeling of freedom and autonomy, capable of convincing us of the possibility of personalizing each one of the aspects that constitute us’ (76). 109 As such, this discourse contributes to the formation of a highly individualistic, and often foolishly optimistic worldview—one which enables us to “sentirnos todopoderosos y capaces de transformarnos a voluntad más allá de las diferencias socio-económicas” ‘feel all-powerful and capable of transforming ourselves at will regardless of socio-economic differences’ (del Sarto 76-77). What this discourse does not address—the “political meaning” that it conceals—is that, with the removal of social programs, meeting our basic needs becomes more and more difficult, leaving less and less time and income for most people to capitalize on the ‘flexibility’ and ‘freedom’ that neoliberal discourse promises (Harvey 40). 110
Another fundamental component of neoliberal ‘common sense’ is the centrality of consumption in neoliberal culture, and the high degree of commodification that is both its cause and its effect. Drawing on the work of Baudrillard, Bauman, Harvey, Hardt and Negri, Marcuse, and Žižek, in “La función de los afectos en la economía político-libidinal,” Abril Trigo provides an incisive analysis of this component of neoliberalism, which he refers to as “el régimen de acumulación global, flexible y combinado” ‘the system of combined and flexible global
109 All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
110 Of course this is even more the case for those on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, for most of whom social mobility has become a dream of the past. Tony Judt speaks to this impact of increased economic disparity in neoliberal countries in Ill Fares the Land , writing that “the consequences [of immoderate inequality] are clear. . . . [I]n contrast to their parents and grandparents, children today in the UK as in the US have very little expectation of improving upon the condition into which they were born. The poor stay poor. Economic disadvantage for the overwhelming majority translates into ill health, missed educational opportunity and—increasingly—the familiar symptoms of depression: alcoholism, obesity, gambling and criminality. The unemployed or underemployed lose such skills as they have acquired and become chronically superfluous to the economy. Anxiety and stress, not to mention illness and early death, frequently follow” (14-5).
146 accumulation’ (39). Within this new “economía político-libidinal” ‘political-libidinal economy’
(39), products—and, by extension, product consumption—take on a symbolic and affective value that extends beyond their value as objects; as Trigo explains, “las mercancías valen en tanto signos y los signos en cuanto mercancías” ‘merchandise are valuable as signs, and signs are valuable as merchandise’ (43). This slippage between the product and the symbol/sign is what has enabled so many different aspects of contemporary life to take on monetary value; as Trigo asserts, in this system “todo lo que se produce e intercambia (objetos, servicios, cuerpos, sexo, información, entretenimiento, vida) tiene un valor simbólico-afectivo y es por ello traducible al más absoluto de los signos, el dinero” ‘everything that is produced and exchanged (objects, services, bodies, sex, information, entertainment, life) has a symbolic-affective value and is thus translatable to the most absolute of all signs: money’ (43). Moreover, this conflation of product and sign is what allows consumption to occupy the place of importance that it has in neoliberal culture, since in this framework “no se consumen objetos, sino imágenes, símbolos, sentimientos que nos dicen cuánto valemos y quiénes somos” ‘one doesn’t consume objects, but rather images, symbols, feelings that tell us how much we are worth and who we are’ (Trigo 43).
Finally, this same conflation is what enables the reach of market forces in neoliberal society to go relatively unnoticed even as it continues to expand; as del Sarto argues, in neoliberal culture
“[la] influencia [del capital] se diluye tanto que simula desaparecer, aunque termine colándose con la misma fuerza arrasadora en lo más íntimo de nuestra vida” ‘the influence of capital becomes so diluted that it seems to disappear, even as it ends up slipping into the most intimate parts of our lives with the same devastating force’ (76).
The predominance of this “political libidinal” economy has profound implications for political life (Trigo 39). Through the previously described conflation of product and sign,
147 consumption has been able to usurp the affective role that older ideologies and national identities occupied within the social imaginary of pre-neoliberal culture, providing consumer-subjects with a substitute for the pleasures of identification and belonging. At the same time, this hegemonic conflation of identity and consumption, meaning and monetary value, has made it exceedingly difficult to identify and act in ways that transcend this system of value; as del Sarto affirms; “es la abstracción de esta forma signo-mercancía la que resume y rezuma, sintetiza y deja ver, la violencia sistémica hoy en día, ya que es ella quien despoja a los cuerpos de toda subjetividad creativa como posibilidad humana de producir un valor alternativo al monetario” ‘it is the abstraction of this sign-merchandise form that summarizes and exudes, synthesizes and reveals the systemic violence of today, since it is that abstraction which deprives bodies of any and all creative subjectivity, which is our chance as humans to produce an alternative to monetary value’
(77).
Returning now to neoliberalism’s economic and social impacts, the first text I will examine in this chapter, Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints , deals with one of the many loci of exploitation under late capitalism: that perpetrated by the agribusiness empire against migrant farmworkers in the U.S. Heroes and Saints is especially concerned with the impact of pesticide use and pesticide drift on farmworker communities and the agricultural industry’s lack of attention to this issue. As Gwen M. Pfeifer indicates in “Pesticides, Migrant Farm Workers, and
Corporate Agriculture: How Social Work Can Promote Environmental Justice,” neoliberal policies have thoroughly permeated the agricultural industry and are linked to agribusiness’s use of pesticides, as well as its practice of hiring and exploiting farm-workers from Latin America.
She writes that “within the neoliberal capitalist model, with its cost-benefit system, both humans and the environment are considered resources to be used to produce the least expensive product
148 possible in order to increase corporate profits (Edwards, 2011)” (175-6). In this neoliberal equation, the impact of pesticides on farmworkers and the environment is inconsequential when compared with the profits to be made through their continued application. She also argues that
neoliberal capitalism plays a significant role in the increased demand for undocumented immigrants and the continuation of a marginalized workforce. Agriculture in the United States is highly industrial and is controlled by a small number of corporations. These larger corporations place demands on growers, who simultaneously perpetuate low wages and poor working environments for the sake of profit (Benson, 2008). . . . Harrison (2008b) argues that farm-worker [sic] vulnerabilities are not simply by-products of this system but, rather, are intentional strategies that promote industrial agriculture. (181)
Moreover, the fact that many migrant farmworkers are undocumented makes it so that corporate agriculture will never be held accountable for the harmful effects of its farming practices. In this next section, I will show how Moraga addresses the neoliberal system of agriculture in her work and how she conceives of the erotic as both a means of contesting these injustices and as a point of resonance between such U.S.-based struggles and anti-imperialist political struggles in Latin
America.
Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints
The nationalism I seek is one that decolonizes the brown and female body as it decolonizes the brown and female earth (Cherríe Moraga, The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry , 150).
Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints takes as its subject a migrant farmworker community and the birth defects and cancer that many of its children have developed due to pesticides in water they drink and in the soil where their pregnant mothers worked. The events of the play, set in the fictional town of McLaughlin, California in the San Joaquin Valley, are based on the true story of the migrant farmworker community in McFarland, California and the pesticide-related illnesses that many of its children developed in the ten-year period from 1978 to
1988. The affliction suffered by this community was the stimulus for the United Farm Workers’
149 1988 grape boycott and Cesar Chávez’s thirty-six-day fast, which Moraga references in the play.
The play also portrays the beating of a female organizer, Amparo, during a protest march, which mirrors the beating of the renowned activist Dolores Huerta during a press conference. As Linda
Margarita Greenberg asserts in “Learning from the Dead: Wounds, Women, and Activism in
Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints ,” “these layers of the verifiably real in a fictional form enable the play to perform rich and multivalent understandings of community and social protest”
(178). To elaborate, Heroes and Saints ’ pointed engagement with these factual events of environmental racism and social protest not only brings these events to life for viewers unfamiliar with the history of McFarland, it also creates productive links and resonances between the nascent Queer Aztlán that Moraga depicts in the play and the powerful work of social justice already being undertaken in the Chicana/o community.
Heroes and Saints ’ central character is Cerezita Valle, a young woman born without a body who becomes the leading figure of social protest in the drama of the play. It is in the figure of Cerezita that we most clearly see the pairing of the erotic and the political in Heroes and
Saints , as she is distinctively marked by both her precocious political awareness and her budding sexuality. In Moraga’s play, there is a particular emphasis on the body as the nexus of eroticism and politics. In Heroes and Saints , the body is the site at which both political resistance and erotic sexual activity find their expression, and it is through these activities that Cerezita can fleetingly inhabit the body she has been denied.
Cerezita’s name, which literally translates as “little cherry,” carries multiple meanings: it is a reference to the fruit the farmworker’s harvest, as well as to the character’s “little round cherry face,” which forms the whole of her anatomy ( Heroes and Saints 93). As Greenberg points out, the name “Little Cherry” also calls to mind the name of the author and the colloquial
150 term for female genitalia, thus highlighting the character’s budding sexuality and her heightened connection to the erotic. As Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano indicates in The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherríe Moraga , Cerezita’s last name, Valle, is a reference to the San Joaquin Valley in which the play takes place and to whose natural landscape Cerezita directs our attention in the play’s final scene.
Cerezita is a liminal character who bridges the boundary between sinner and saint, the political and the spiritual, the human and the divine. One first acquires a glimpse of this in
Moraga’s “Notes on CEREZITA” in the stage directions for the play:
CEREZITA is a head of human dimension, but one who possesses such dignity of bearing and classical Indian beauty she can, at times, assume nearly religious proportions. (The huge head figures of the pre-Columbian Olmecas are an apt comparison). This image, however, should be contrasted with the very real ‘humanness’ she exhibits on a daily functioning level . (90)
Moraga’s description of Cerezita’s appearance as a reflection of “ classical Indian beauty ” and like “ the huge head figures of the pre-Columbian Olmecas ” emphasizes her link to the
Chicanas/os’ indigenous past and to the indigenismo that Moraga identifies as an important component of the Chicano nationalist movement (90).111 Moraga’s assertion that Cerezita “ can, at times, assume nearly religious proportions ” also prefigures her role as both saint/Virgen and sacrificial Christ-character (90). This figuration is also evident from the lighting in the opening scene of the play in which Cerezita comes upon the body of a dead child hanging from a miniature cross in the grape vineyard. As Cerezita pauses, “transfixed by the image of the crucifixion,” “the sun suddenly explodes out of the horizon, bathing both the child and
111 In The Last Generation , Moraga writes that “to make alliances with other nationalist struggles taking place throughout the country in the late sixties, there was no room for Chicano ambivalence about being Indians, for it was our Indian blood and history of resistance against both Spanish and Anglo invaders that made us rightful inheritors of Aztlán” (154).
151 CEREZITA” in light (92). The notes assert that “CEREZITA is awesome and striking in the light” and that “the crucified child glows, Christlike” (92). This opening scene mirrors images of the Virgin Mary witnessing Jesus’s crucifixion in which both Mary and Jesus are surrounded by glowing halos, thus figuring Cerezita as like the mother of Christ. Cerezita’s presentation as a syncretic mixture of Christian and indigenous iconography thus foreshadows her performance as la Virgen de Guadalupe to mobilize the members of her community in protest against the death of its children.
Cerezita greatest distinguishing physical feature is her lack of a body—a lack that contains multiple valences. Its most immediate valence is as a marker of the impact of environmental racism on the Chicana/o community. Cerezita’s portrayal as a young woman with no limbs or torso presents the egregious effects of the agribusiness empire’s actions to the audience in a way that is impossible to ignore. Because Cerezita’s ability to survive as only a head is highly improbable, the materiality of her body registers as symbolic—she appears as the personification of McLaughlin’s communal suffering. In addition to this immediate significance,
Cerezita’s body-less head is also a nod to the character of Belarmino in the Chicano playwright
Luis Valdez’s foundational play The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa . First produced in 1963,
Valdez’s play, as David Román explains in “Latino Performance and Identity,” is a work that depicted “the political urgency of Chicano nationalism” at the outset of that political movement
(432). By including such an overt reference to The Shrunken Head in Heroes and Saints , Moraga points to the ongoing relevance of the Chicano nationalist movement to the contemporary issues faced by the Chicano community despite the movement’s gradual decline during the 1970s and
152 its virtual disappearance by the time of her play’s world premiere in 1992. 112 In Heroes and
Saints , Moraga envisions a revitalized and reformed Chicano nationalist movement that would advocate for the rights of all of its members – the rights of women and gays and lesbians as well as those of heterosexual males.
In addition to providing this link to the Chicano nationalism of Valdez’s play, Cerezita’s lack of a body is also a radical symbolic expression of the cultural repression of Chicanas’ sexuality. As Moraga herself explains in “Art in America, Con Acento,” Cerezita’s condition
is the condition of the Mexicana woman. We have no body to be. There is no body to inhabit between the polarized figures of La Virgen de Guadalupe and La Chingada. Cerezita is not a lesbian, but a lesbian sensibility has created her. The lesbian Chicana writer insists on the reclamation of our colonized female body. She sees the liberation of Chicana sexuality as intimately tied to the liberation of nations. (159)
As Gloria Anzaldúa does in Borderlands/La Frontera , in this piece, Cherríe Moraga links the repression of female sexuality in Chicana/o culture to the figures of la Virgen de Guadalupe and
La Malinche/La Chingada and the virgin/whore dichotomy that these cultural figures represent.
As Anzaldúa explains in Borderlands and as I detailed in chapter one, both la Virgen de
Guadalupe and La Malinche are derivations of the Azteca-Mexica mother goddess, Tonantsi.
Upon colonization by the Spanish, Tonantsi was divested of her sexual potential and adapted into the virginal figure of Guadalupe, while her sexuality was re-ascribed to La Malinche, the female figure of cultural betrayal. As a result of this process of cultural syncretism, the Mexicana woman was left with no positive figure of female sexuality to worship or emulate, instead being confined to one of these two constricting cultural roles. In Heroes and Saints , Cerezita’s
112 In “Art in America, Con Acento,” Moraga writes that “the cultural nationalism of the Chicano movement still resonates for me today: the Chicano’s identification with our indigenous antecedents, our refusal to recognize the ‘capricious’ political boundaries imposed by the U.S. government” (157). In The Last Generation , she writes, “for me, ‘El movimiento’ has never been a thing of the past, it has retreated into subterranean uncontaminated soils awaiting resurrection in a ‘queerer,’ more feminist generation” (148).
153 presentation as only a head stages this cultural work of desexualization in the most extreme way possible, reflecting the way that desexualization results in a radical alienation from the body as a whole. 113 In addition, by choosing to present the Chicana’s desexualization in the figure of a young woman suffering from profound birth defects caused by pesticide poisoning, Moraga links
Cerezita’s desexualization to other forms of oppression inflicted upon the Chicana/o people, gesturing to her assertion that “the liberation of Chicana sexuality [is] intimately tied to the liberation of nations” (159). In what follows, I will demonstrate how Moraga incorporates the discourse of the erotic and the realization of Chicana sexuality into a broader treatment of the
Chicana/o body and the need for its liberation from environmental racism, as well as other forms of subjugation and injustice.
As it states in the “Notes on CEREZITA,” despite her characterization as one whose
“dignity of bearing ” allows her to “ assume nearly religious proportions ,” Cerezita is also a “ very real ” human teenager with a burgeoning sexual desire (90). However, the fact that Cerezita is a young woman without a body—without the physical organs that we normally associate with puberty—makes her sensuality and her longing for sexual experience all the more poignant and pronounced. 114 We are first given a sense of Cerezita’s sexuality in the words that she utters into a tape recorder before meeting Father Juan for the first time: “It is so, he came to meet her seeking the purity of nature he’d lost. He sought baptism in the fire of her original desire” (101).
113 At the same time, one might also argue, as Joanna L. Mitchell does in “Haunting the Chicana: The Queer Child and the Abject Mother in the Writing of Cherríe Moraga,” that “the absence of Cerezita’s body, contradictorily, makes her female sexuality all the more intensely manifest for being concentrated in the head, ‘a red little round cherry face’ that brings to mind both the tongue (to which the dialogue and stage directions repeatedly draw attention) and the erect clitoris (which cannot be literally present, given Cerezita’s bodilessness)” (215).
114 As Yarbro-Bejarano indicates, “by representing Cere as only a head, Moraga makes it impossible for spectators to read this woman onstage as the ‘thing itself,’ as the female body whose sexualization is both ‘natural’ and transparent. Instead, Cere stages her own body, reclaiming subjectivity, sexuality, and political agency in the process” (74).
154 In speaking of her “original desire,” Cerezita alludes to her all-too-human sexual passion and to the role that it will play in her interactions with Juan. This statement also establishes Cerezita as a prophetic figure—one gifted with special powers of vision and insight who can intuit things before they happen. Cerezita’s prophetic utterance inverts Father Juan’s and her roles and characterizes sexuality as form of blessing rather than as something to be denied and extirpated.
Rather than seeking out Cerezita in order to provide her with absolution for her original sin, Juan looks to her to help him restore an aspect of himself that he has stifled through lack of use—an aspect of his nature that is pure in the sense that it is natural. Cerezita’s prophecy at this early point in the play foreshadows the relationship that will develop between them as the play progresses.
Another site where we witness Cerezita’s interest in sexuality is in her conversations with her brother, Mario, and her desire to hear about his sexual exploits. During one of their early dialogues when Mario is on his way out of the house, Cerezita implores him to “tell [her] the story about the Mayan god before [he] goe[s]” (104). Mario proceeds to describe an interaction with his cousin Freddie in which Freddie ends up standing at the foot of Mario’s bed and calling him “‘Mijo’” (105). In his relation of the anecdote, Mario focuses the sensuality of Freddie’s body, including details like the “little twitch in the side of [Freddie’s] jaw that would pulse whenever he got excited or upset or something,” and Freddie’s shirt “kinda sticking to him from the sweat he’s worked up on the dance floor” (104-5). As Mario tells the story, Cerezita repeatedly interrupts him to prod him along and remind him of details that he has missed, and it is clear that she knows this steamy story by heart. It is evident from this conversation that
Cerezita lives vicariously through Mario’s sexual endeavors and longs for sexual experiences of her own—a longing that she will attempt to fulfill through her encounters with Father Juan.
155 The first erotic interaction between Father Juan and Cerezita occurs the second time he visits her. 115 After discussing a protest scheduled for the next day that Cerezita’s mother will not allow her to attend, Cerezita abruptly asks Father Juan to touch her hair, telling him, “it’s not gonna hurt you. I’m normal from the neck up” (107). After Juan compliments her hair’s smoothness, Cerezita explains the way that her hair helps to satisfy her burgeoning desire for sensual touch, telling him, “I like it, too . . . sometimes just spin my head around and around so I can feel it brush past my cheeks. I imagine it’s what those Arab women with the veils must feel like . . . all those soft cloths secretly caressing their bodies” (107). 116 When Juan acts surprised that she would think of something so sensual, Cerezita tells him, “Give me a break, Padre. All
I’ve got is this imagination. . . . And a tongue” (107).
Cerezita’s description of her tongue in this scene is key to understanding the complex interplay of the erotic and the political in Moraga’s play, as it is the scene in which Moraga most clearly grounds the erotic and the political in the physical body. As a young woman born without arms or legs, Cerezita relies upon her tongue “to do the job of . . . hands . . . turning pages, picking up stuff, scratching an itch, pointing” (108). Moraga thus establishes Cerezita as one whose tongue is especially adept; as Cerezita herself asserts “[my tongue’s] got the best definition I bet in the world, unless there’s some other vegetable heads like me who survived this valley” (107-8). Cerezita then directs Juan to look up ‘tongue’ in the dictionary and together they recite the list of corresponding definitions, thereby presenting the audience with a variety of
115 In my use of the term ‘erotic’ here, I am referring to its more traditional meaning as something related to sexuality. However, as I will demonstrate, this traditional significance of eroticism and the meaning of eroticism that I have developed in this thesis will end up converging over the course of Moraga’s play.
116 This image of Cerezita’s hair as akin to Arab women’s veils forms part of a series of reflecting images throughout the play that bring together themes of visibility/invisibility, sensuality and numbness.
156 different valences for this unifying metonym. Through the varying definitions of ‘tongue’ that
Juan and Cerezita recite, Moraga suggests that the heightened abilities of Cerezita’s “most faithful organ” may extend beyond its capacity to “do the job of [her] hands,” identifying
Cerezita as uniquely suited to speak on behalf of her people (107, 108). In addition, Juan and
Cerezita’s list of definitions for ‘tongue’ brings together different attributes of Cerezita’s persona, suggesting that these attributes are in some way connected, and grounding them in the physicality of her distinctive anatomy.
The first attribute of the tongue that Juan reads addresses the role of the tongue in producing taste; as Juan recites, it is “‘a fleshy movable process of the floor of the mouths of most vertebrates that bears sensory end organs and functions especially in taking and swallowing food’” (108). Like her tongue’s dexterity, the sensory abilities of Cerezita’s tongue are heightened, providing her with a sort of extrasensory perception through taste. We have seen this quality of Cerezita’s tongue earlier in the play, in the scene in which we hear her first spoken lines. Scene three opens on the Valle kitchen where Cerezita is watching Yolanda breastfeed her daughter, Evalina. Cerezita reminisces about her own experience of breastfeeding, saying
I remember the first time I tasted fear, I smelled it in her sweat. It ran like a tiny river down her breast and mixed with her milk. I tasted it on my tongue. It was very bitter. Very bitter. . . . I stopped drinking. I refused to nurse from her again, bit at her breasts when she tried to force me. . . . But imagine my sadness, my longing for the once sweetness of her nipple” (95).
Taken literally, as the play suggests that we do, this passage suggests that the heightened sensory abilities of Cerezita’s tongue enabled her to perceive her mother’s emotion from the sweat on her mother’s breasts. In addition, through these lines of dialogue, Moraga sets up a parallel between the pesticides and fear, figuring both as contaminants that taint natural substances and disrupt natural phenomena. In The Last Generation , Moraga identifies fear as an obstacle to the
157 formation of a new Chicano nationalism, writing that “a new Chicano nationalism . . . requires a serious reckoning with the weaknesses in our mestizo culture, and a reaffirmation of what has preserved and sustained us as a people. I am clear about one thing: fear has not sustained us. Fear of action, fear of speaking, fear of women, fear of queers” (174). Moraga’s choice of the word
‘sustain’ here allows her assertion about fear and Chicano nationalism to resonate with
Cerezita’s lines in Heroes and Saints . Taken together, these passages imply that the fear that
Cerezita perceived mixed with her mother’s breast milk is not only her mother, Dolores’s, individual fear, but also these larger cultural fears that thwart the realization of a new and more vital Chicana/o movement. Moreover, the parallel that Cerezita’s lines establish between fear and pesticides suggests that fear is just as damaging to the Chicana/o people as the pesticide poisoning that is killing their children.
Constantly blending the literal and the symbolic/poetic, the transcendent and the mundane, Moraga nests Cerezita’s prescient lines regarding the Chicano community’s fears within a dialogue between Cerezita and her sister, Yolanda. While Cerezita uses the topic of breastfeeding to speak of her mother’s fear, Yolanda stays in the realm of the literal and the economic, declaring, “Formula is expensive. Breastfeeding is free. Healthier, too. I’ll do it until
Lina doesn’t want it no more” (95). The irony of this statement, of course, is that the pesticide poisoning that Yolanda is exposed to makes it so that her breast milk is not, in fact, healthier for her child. This passage thus alludes to yet another way in which the neoliberal agribusiness empire violates migrant farmworkers: by making it unsafe for them to engage in one of the most basic of human functions—breastfeeding—and thus making them pay for something that they used to do for free. This violation also impinges on the realm of affect—by making it unsafe for
158 women to breastfeed their children, neoliberal agribusiness disrupts the emotional bond formed between mother and child during lactation.
The other instance in which Cerezita’s sense of taste figures prominently is during her erotic encounter with Father Juan in the play’s second act. As Father Juan is kissing her, she tells him that she wants to give him oral sex by saying, “I want to taste you, Juan. . . . I want the ocean in my mouth” (140). By highlighting the sense of taste in these two disparate scenes,
Moraga underscores the commonality between breastfeeding and erotic sexuality as corporeal acts. In so doing, Moraga nests Cerezita’s interest in sex and sexuality within a larger treatment of the body and its faculties, emphasizing the fact that the erotic is tied to one of many natural bodily functions.
The remaining definitions of ‘tongue’ that Juan and Cerezita recite prefigure both their erotic encounter and Cerezita’s mytho-political monologue at the end of the play. In addition to the role of the tongue in producing taste, the following definitions emerge: ‘tongue’ as “‘the power of communication through speech,’” “‘[an] ecstatic usually unintelligible utterance accompanying religious excitation,’” and “‘the charismatic gift . . . of ecstatic speech,’” which
Juan enthusiastically dubs “the gift of tongues!” (108). These definitions reaffirm the prescient quality that we have seen in Cerezita earlier in the play and point to the characterization of
Cerezita’s final monologue as divinely inspired. The sexual component in Juan and Cerezita’s list of definitions is more subtle and appears through Moraga’s use of tone and gesture rather than in the definitions themselves. One can perceive this component of the erotic in the following exchange:
159 CEREZITA: ‘d: the cry of a hound in sight of game—used especially in the phrase,’ italicized . . . ( Suggestively ) ‘to give tongue.’ (She pants like the hound .) JUAN: C’mon, now. CEREZITA: Be a sport, Padre. . . . JUAN: ‘3: to articulate,’ parenthetically, ‘notes by’ . . . ( He hesitates .) CEREZITA: Yes? . . . JUAN: ‘By tonguing.’
Cerezita’s playfully sexual mimicry of the panting hound and Father Juan’s nervous hesitation around the word ‘tonguing’ identify the tongue as a sexual organ and foreshadow Juan and
Cerezita’s sexual encounter, in which Cerezita’s tongue plays a prominent role. In addition, by placing both erotic “tonguing” and “ecstatic speech” under the domain of Cerezita’s tongue,
Moraga suggests that these two uses of her tongue are connected, a pairing that will appear again in Juan and Cerezita’s subsequent encounter. 117
The final definitions that Juan and Cerezita recite allude to Cerezita’s relationship with her mother, Dolores. In addition to the above definitions of ‘tongue,’ Juan and Cerezita also define the terms ‘tongueless’ as “‘lacking the power of speech’” and ‘tongue-tied’ as
“‘disinclined or . . . unable to speak freely’” (109). Dolores is the representative figure of
Catholic conservatism in the play and the character who most noticeably prevents Cerezita from speaking freely. As Greenberg asserts, “Dolores is not an active critical reader on her own, but relies on dominant interpretations of disability, illness, sexuality and power” (173). Dolores is exceedingly protective of her daughter and goes to great lengths to make sure that she is shielded from the public eye for fear of how people will respond to her disability. 118 She is also in denial
117 Yarbro-Bejarano argues that “this fusion of sex and speech in one organ recalls Moraga’s reconstruction of the lesbian body in Loving . . . , lending the ‘tongue’ scene between Cere and Juan the lesbian sensibility available in all her published work, and further troubling the borders between lesbian, gay, and heterosexual” (74).
118 Dolores’s cloistering of Cerezita ties into larger themes of visibility and invisibility in the play, such as the invisibility of the entire migrant farmworker community to the rest of the American populace. The play touches on this in a conversation between Juan and Mario, in which Mario says, “When I was in high school, I used to set out
160 of both Cerezita’s political awareness and her developing sexuality. In an early dialogue between
Amparo, Dolores, and Yolanda, her other daughter, Amparo tells Dolores that a television crew wants to speak with Cerezita. When Dolores asks why, the following exchange takes place:
YOLANDA: Cere knows, ‘amá. DOLORES: Cerezita don’ know nothing. YOLANDA: She sees. DOLORES: She sees nothing. ( To JUAN:) She looks out the window all day, nomás. What can she see? (99) 119
The same contradiction exists between Dolores’s perception of her daughter’s innocence and
Cerezita’s actual sexual development. When Father Juan is visiting the Valle home for the first time and asks if Dolores would like for him to hear Cerezita’s confession, Dolores responds,
“What sins could a girl like her have, Padre? She was born this way. Es una santa. We should pray to her, I think” (100-1). 120 Later in the play, Moraga incorporates Dolores’s repression of
Cerezita’s political involvement and her denial of Cerezita’s sexuality into the same scene. In scene nine, Dolores first forbids Cerezita from looking out the window to watch the protestors passing out pamphlets about the pesticide problem. She then finds one of Mario’s anatomy books on the floor and, seeing that Cerezita has been looking at pictures of genitalia, she reprimands her, telling her, “Jus’ cuz you don’ got a body doesn’ mean you can’t sin. The biggest sins are in
there in those fields, smoking, watching the cars go by on 99. I’d think about the driver, having somewhere to go. . . . He was always a gringo. And he’d have one arm draped over the steering wheel and the other around the back of the seat and it’d never occur to him that anybody lived there between those big checkerboard plots of tomatoes, strawberries, artichokes, brussels sprouts, and . . . ,” and Father Juan finishes his sentence: “Grapes” (114).
119 Cerezita greater powers of perception and insight mean that she can in fact ‘see’ a great deal from the little that she is exposed to. This is evident from the soliloquy that Cerezita gives following her mother’s question: “The sheep drink the same water we do from troughs outside my window. Today it is an orange-yellow color. The mothers dip their heads into the long rusty buckets and drink and drink while their babies deform inside them. Innocent, they sleep inside the same poison water and are born broken like me, their lamb limbs curling under them. . . . I watch them from my window and weep” (99).
120 In addition to Dolores’s underestimation of Cerezita’s sexual development, in her assertion we also see the traditional equation of saintliness with sexual purity, an equation that Moraga’s play ultimately undermines.
161 the mind” (113). Cerezita brings their argument back to her desire to become involved in the work of political resistance taking place in her community, pleading, “Give me a chance, ‘amá.
If nobody ever sees me, how will I know how I look? How will I know if I scare them or make them mad or . . . move them? If people could see me, ‘amá, things would change,” to which
Dolores responds, “No, hija. Dios es mi testigo. I’ll never let nobody look at my baby that way”
(113). By weaving Dolores’s repression of Cerezita’s political involvement and her denial of
Cerezita’s sexuality together, Moraga underscores the sense that Cerezita’s sexual and political desires are part of the same erotic thrust. Moreover, by embodying these two forms of repression in the same representative figure of the church, Moraga suggests that the church’s sexual repression and its suppression of political struggle are part of the same pacifying impulse—an archaic vestige of its colonial legacy.
The other character in the play who is also a representative of the Catholic Church and its role in Chicana/o culture, is, of course, Father Juan. Father Juan is in fact tied to different inclinations within the church—its role, on the one hand, as a source of repression, and, on the other, as a source of resistance and liberation. In terms of the former, within the play, Father Juan appears as the living embodiment of repressed sexuality. In a conversation with Cerezita in scene ten, in which Cerezita asks him why he became a priest, Father Juan tells her that it was “because of the fabric” (115). He explains further: “Yes. Literally the cloth itself drew me to be a ‘man of the cloth.’ The vestments, the priest’s body asleep underneath that cloth, the heavy weight of it tranquilizing him” (115). 121 From this statement, Father Juan appears as a passive figure who is
121 This function of fabric as a suppressant stands in direct contrast to the role of fabric that Cerezita ascribes to Arab women’s veils, (and, by extension, to her hair), as “soft cloths secretly caressing their bodies” (107). However, rather than actually “tranquilizing” his sexuality, the priesthood seems to have made Father Juan’s sexual desires all the more pronounced (115). From Father Juan’s first appearance in the Valle home we are made aware of his sexuality, as Father Juan’s eyes follow the shirtless Mario as he leaves the room.
162 drawn to religion only for its ability to subdue his sexual impulses. However, in his political involvement with the migrant farmworker community, and particularly with Cerezita, Juan also personifies a more active and empowered version of the Catholic Church—one that more closely resembles the practice of liberation theology in Central America. We can see Father Juan’s appreciation for the links between Christian theology and the fight for social justice in his religious interpretation of Cesar Chávez’s fast. As he tells Cerezita, “Six months ago, that’s the very thing that brought me here . . . to the Valley. . . . The union’s fast. I saw this newspaper photo of Cesar Chávez. He had just finished a thirty-three-day fast. He looked like a damn saint, a veritable Ghandi. Even the number was holy. Thirty-three” (114). Father Juan’s understanding of this connection between Christian theology and the fight for social justice is what prompts him to take part in the crucifixions that Cerezita organizes among the children of McLaughlin. 122
For Juan and Cerezita, their shared political activism, which, at least for Father Juan, is rooted in his religious beliefs, both constitutes an act of eroticism and serves as foreplay to their sexual encounter. After spending hours with Cerezita and being impressed by her conviction and unique perspective, Juan decides to help her with her political protest. The night that they engage sexually, Juan comes to Cerezita’s house to collect Evalina’s body to add to the row of miniature crucifixions in the vineyards. Juan is exhilarated by the act of participating in this radical form of political protest and the impact he imagines his actions will have on the lives of the residents of
McLaughlin. Cerezita, in turn, is drawn to his exhilaration and to the way that this political action has transformed him. As he excitedly removes supplies from his duffel bag, showing them to Cerezita, she tells him, “Do you know how beautiful you are? . . . I’ve never seen you like
122 Each time a new child in McLaughlin dies due to pesticide poisoning, Cerezita and her little assistants hang the body from a tiny cross and stand it in the grape vineyards as a form of protest.
163 this. You’re almost glowing” (138). In Cerezita’s description of Father Juan, Moraga utilizes religious language to convey to her audience that Juan is having an erotic experience. By invoking images of saints surrounded by celestial light to describe a man enjoying the erotic experience of political participation, Moraga creates a distinct confluence of eroticism, religion/spirituality, and politics that represents an alternative to the repressive aspects of religion constricting the Chicana/o community.
We see this same confluence of religion, politics, and eroticism in Cerezita’s eroticization of the political activism of Jesuit priests in El Salvador. Earlier in the play we hear on Cerezita’s radio that six Jesuit priests who were active opponents of the rightwing ARENA party were found murdered with their housekeeper and her daughter in San Salvador. After Cerezita tells
Juan that he is “almost glowing,” she asks him, “If the Jesuits died as priests, does that make them saints?,” to which Juan responds, “They’re martyrs, heroes. They spoke out against the government” (138, 139). Cerezita then wonders about the role of the housekeeper and her daughter who were murdered alongside the priests, asking “Did the housekeeper and her daughter? . . . Speak out against the government?” (139). When Juan tells her that he doesn’t think so, she agrees, saying,
I don’t either. It wasn’t their job. I imagine they just changed the priests’ beds, kept a pot of beans going, hung out the sábanas to dry. At least, the housekeeper did and the girl, she helped her mother. She did the tasks that young girls do . . . girls still living under the roof of their mother. And maybe sometimes one of the priests read to the girl, maybe . . . he taught her to read and she . . . fell in love with him, the teacher. . . . Touch my hair, Juan. (139)
By presenting Cerezita’s fantasy of an intimate relationship between the Jesuit priest and his housekeeper’s daughter as a prelude to her sexual encounter with Father Juan, Moraga figures the political situation in El Salvador as an erotic referent, further underscoring the relationship between the erotic and the political in her play. This fantasy, in which the relationship Cerezita
164 imagines between the housekeeper’s daughter and the Jesuit priest mirrors her own relationship with Father Juan, enables Cerezita to further identify her struggle for safe living conditions in
McLaughlin with the political struggle in El Salvador and to project the role of hero and teacher onto her chosen lover. However, in their actual physical encounter, Father Juan does not live up to this role, nor their encounter to the fantasy she has conceived.
The beginning of the erotic encounter between Father Juan and Cerezita is balanced and mutual. Juan fingers Cerezita’s hair and caresses her cheek with his hand. He kisses her repeatedly and she moans louder and louder, experiencing the pleasure she cannot feel with her body through her mouth and her tongue. At this point Juan’s face “ takes on a distanced look ”
(140). Cerezita tells Juan that she “[wants] to taste him” and that she “[wants] the ocean in her mouth,” but Juan pulls away from her, moving around behind her and “[ bringing ] her head against him, his fingers tangled in her hair ” (140). As Juan uses Cerezita as a prop with which to satisfy himself, “[ digging ] his pelvis into the raite ” and “[ pulling ] her head deeper into him ,”
Cerezita tries desperately to get him to come back around and engage with her—pleading with him and “[ pulling ] at his shirt with her teeth ” (140). Juan finally comes to orgasm, then grabs his bag of supplies and runs out, leaving Cerezita calling after him.
As Moraga herself has suggested, this dynamic in which Cerezita’s sexual desire is left unsatisfied presents the audience with a powerful allegory for the erasure of female sexuality within Chicana/o culture. Cerezita’s physical deformity makes this erasure all the more profound in that, for Cerezita, the desire to experience sexual pleasure represents the desire to feel as though she has a fully functioning body and a fully realized sense of self. Cerezita indicates this in a postmortem with Father Juan when, by way of explanation for his behavior, he tells her, “It shouldn’t have happened. I’m a priest, Cere. I’m not free. My body’s not my own” (144). To
165 this, Cerezita replies, “It wasn’t your body I wanted. It was mine. All I wanted was for you to make me feel like I had a body because, the fact is, I don’t. I was denied one. But for a few minutes, a few minutes before you started thinking, I felt myself full of fine flesh filled to the bones in my toes. . . . I miss myself. Is that so hard to understand?” (144). Taken allegorically, the fact that the denial of Cerezita’s sexual fulfillment results in a denial of her physical body reflects the way in which the desexualization of Chicanas results in a radical alienation from the
Chicana body as a whole. 123 Moreover, in Cerezita’s declaration that she misses herself, Moraga gestures to the connection between sexual fulfillment—the experience of this heightened aspect of the physical body—and a fully actualized subjectivity/sense of self. Moraga also speaks to this connection in her groundbreaking theoretical text Loving in the War Years :
Women of color have always know[n], although we have not always wanted to look at it, that our sexuality is not merely a physical response or drive, but holds a crucial relationship to our entire spiritual capacity. Patriarchal religions —whether brought to us by the colonizer’s cross and gun or emerging from our own people— have always known this. Why else would the female body be so associated with sin and disobedience? (Moraga as quoted in Blake 87) 124
In this passage, Moraga intimates that the rejection of Chicana sexuality is actually a repressive tactic inherited from the colonizers and thus a self-immolating mechanism at work within
123 Although Cerezita’s sexual desires are left unfulfilled by Father Juan, Moraga presents an alternative to this patriarchal male/female dynamic in the relationship that exists between the secondary characters Doña Amparo and Don Gilberto. Within the play, Doña Amparo functions as both a foil for Cerezita’s mother, Dolores, and as a tribute to Marta Salinas and Dolores Huerta. She is an outspoken activist who leads a protest against the school board for failing to provide safe drinking water for the community’s children and who is subsequently fired from her job for “[setting] a bad example” for the other workers (117). Her husband, Don Gilberto, is Moraga’s incarnation of an alternative form of masculinity. Rather than trying to repress his wife, Don Gilberto is proud of her activism and reinforces her efforts. For example, when, before the protest against the school board, Amparo tells him, “I think I got the cold feet, Berto,” he responds, “Pues, warm ‘em up quick. You got all this gente here esperándote. . . . ¡Adelante, mujer!” (111). In a later exchange, after Amparo has had surgery after being beaten during a protest to boycott the sale of grapes, Don Gilberto voices his support for her “pasión,” as this applies to both her political conviction and her sexual ardor (135).
124 This claim, that Chicana sexuality is linked to their “spiritual capacity” echoes Audre Lorde’s understanding of the erotic “an assertion of the life-force of women” (55).
166 Chicana/o culture. In denying Chicanas unrestricted access to their sexuality, Chicana/o culture inhibits the erotic capacity of its female population, thus undermining its own spiritual, political, and erotic potential. In Cerezita’s final appearance as la Virgen de Guadalupe, Cerezita lays claim to this latent erotic potential and employs it in the service of her community.
The continued pairing of eroticism and politics in Cerezita’s last performance as la
Virgen de Guadalupe is highly complex. In one sense, in choosing to adopt the form of la Virgen de Guadalupe, Cerezita seems to be capitulating to her mother’s vision of her as indelibly pure and virginal. Cerezita’s portrayal of la Virgen as Moraga describes it in her stage directions is strikingly thorough and conveys a strong sense of saintliness and self-abnegation:
A brilliant beam of light has entered the room and washes over CEREZITA . She is draped in the blue-starred veil of La Virgen de Guadalupe. Her head is tilted slightly toward the right, her eyes downcast in the Virgin’s classic expression. . . . The raite is covered in a white altar cross with the roses of Tepeyac imprinted upon it. . . . The light, brighter now, completely illuminates CERE ’s saintlike expression and the small cross. (144)
Cerezita has even asked the children who dress her as la Virgen her to cut her hair—formerly her most sensual feature and that which provided her with her only means of self-pleasure. 125
Dolores, in turn, interprets Cerezita’s shorn hair as a “sacrificio” that Cerezita, la Virgen, has made for her people (145). In this sense, one could argue, as Yarbro-Bejarano does, that, in taking on the appearance of la Virgen de Guadalupe, Cerezita “renounces the sexual dimension of the erotic. . . . [sacrificing] the body she could have had through sex to become the tongue and the image of a community’s political struggle” (74- 5). In this interpretation, Cerezita’s performance as la Virgen appears as a mere tactic—or, as Yarbro-Bejarano asserts, “Cere’s
125 In addition to Cerezita’s comparison of her hair to Arab women’s veils “secretly caressing their bodies,” in scene nine of act one we see her “[ tossing ] her hair around, trying to feel it against her cheeks ” (107, 112).
167 strategic transformation into the Virgen de Guadalupe communicates the powerful constraints of gender on the body: to be a hero, Cere must become the saint her mother wants her to be”
(75). 126 At the same time, from the point of view of the audience who has seen that Cerezita is not the chaste virgin her mother believes her to be but instead an extremely sensual young woman brimming with sexual desire, Cerezita’s transformation into la Virgen de Guadalupe also has the potential to reinvest the figure of la Virgen with Cerezita’s sexual and erotic energy, bringing her closer to the sensual Mexica goddesses from which she evolved. 127 Indeed, Cerezita is not a passive Virgen who remains silent and withdrawn, but rather an active Virgen who speaks out on behalf of her people. Moreover, in her final monologue as la Virgen, Cerezita encourages her community to reconnect with the “Madre Tierra,” a telluric female deity who is also neither passive nor virginal (148).
Like Cerezita’s performance as la Virgen de Guadalupe, the sermon that she gives in the play’s final scene is highly complex and requires some parsing. In order to better understand
Cerezita’s parabolic discourse, it is helpful to look to Moraga’s “Art in America, Con Acento,” as well as “Queer Aztlán: The Re-formation of the Chicano Tribe” in The Last Generation:
Prose and Poetry , in which Moraga elaborates on several of the ideas introduced in Cerezita’s speech. In “Queer Aztlán,” Moraga advocates for the resurgence of a revitalized and reformed
Chicano nationalism, “a new nationalism in which la Chicana Indígena stands at the center , and heterosexism and homophobia are no longer the cultural order of the day” (150; my emphasis).
126 Greenberg comes to a similar conclusion, writing that “in performing la Virgen de Guadalupe, Cerezita enacts a saintliness that sacrifices her private self and sexuality—despite her lack of a body, Cerezita clearly understands herself as a sensuous and desiring being (140) and must lay those desires to the side in order to become la Virgen for the communal good” (177).
127 In contrast with her earlier assertion, Greenberg also writes that “[Cerezita’s] performance” as la Virgen de Guadalupe “does not rearticulate passivity since her staged sexuality resists reinscription of pure saintliness” (181).
168 In “Art in America, Con Acento,” Moraga writes that “Chicana is not the mere naming of one’s racial/cultural identity, but it is a politic, a politic that refuses integration into the U.S. mainstream, a politic that recognizes that our pueblo originates from, and remains with, those who work the land with their hands , as stated in ‘El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán’” (157; my emphasis). Both of these concepts—the primacy of land as a source of identity and sustenance, and the indigenous and female character of the new Chicano nationalist movement that Moraga envisions—are strongly reflected in Cerezita’s speech.
Just as Cerezita dresses as la Virgen de Guadalupe in order to command her community’s attention, Cerezita begins her speech by using Catholic references in order to ease her audience toward her message. Cerezita opens her sermon by prompting her listeners to “put [their] [hands] inside [her] wound” in a way reminiscent of Jesus’s appeal to St. Thomas. By invoking this religious language at the beginning of her sermon, Cerezita creates a communion-like atmosphere and invites her listeners to join her in a more “intimate” and spiritual rhetorical space
(Greenberg 176). 128 After inviting her audience to “put [their] [hands] inside [her] wound,” she begins to describe a Native community, which she refers to as the “miracle people” (148). She tells her listeners that “inside the valley of her wound, there is . . . a miracle people” and that in
[the] “pueblito” where the miracle people live, “the river runs red with blood” (148). Within
Cerezita’s sermon, the color red represents the strength and vitality of the miracle people and their connection to the earth; “it is the same color as the river that runs through their veins, the
128 As Yarbro-Bejarano points out, “the opening of Cere’s final speech captures the play’s hybrid crossing of the feminine Virgin and the masculine ‘body of Christ’: ‘Put your hand inside my wound’ (148). While visually embodying La Virgen, Cere’s words evoke those spoken by Christ to St. Thomas encouraging him to have faith in the miracle of redemption by touching the wounds left by the crucifixion. As the congregation unites in the mystical body of Christ by partaking of the host, the people come together as a collective political force through Cere’s embodiment of their struggle” (78).
169 same color as the sun setting into the sierras, the same color of the pool of liquid they were born into” (148). At the same time, red also symbolizes the sacrifice and suffering the miracle people have endured in order to reap a good harvest—an effort which “still [bears] no fruit” (148). The miracle people’s inability to procure a healthy crop is due to the poor quality of their land; as
Cerezita explains, theirs is a land “where bread is a tortilla without maize, where the frijol cannot be cultivated” (148). Cerezita thus alludes to the land-based struggles faced by so many indigenous communities, as well as the relevance of these struggles for a revitalized Chicano nationalist movement. 129
She continues by contrasting the land of the miracle people with that of her community in
McLaughlin, saying, “But we, we live in a land of plenty. The fruits that pass through your fingers are too many to count—luscious red in their strawberry wonder, the deep purple of the grape inviting, the tomatoes perfectly shaped and translucent” (148). However, she then adds,
“And yet, you suffer at the same hands” (148). Cerezita thus connects the pesticide-related illnesses faced by the community of McLaughlin to the fruitlessness of the valley of the symbolic miracle people, using this image of barrenness and infecundity as a metaphor for
McLaughlin’s dead and disabled children, as well as a way of tying the environmental racism faced by her community to the land-based persecution of Native peoples. In the conclusion of
Cerezita’s sermon she expands this kinship network even further, proclaiming, “You are
129 In “Queer Aztlán,” Moraga writes that “the primary struggle for Native peoples across the globe is the struggle for land. In 1992, 500 years after the arrival of Columbus, on the heels of the Gulf War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the entire world is reconstructing itself. No longer frozen into the Soviet/Yanqui paradigm of a ‘Cold’ and invented ‘War,’ Indigenous peoples are responding en masse to the threat of a global capitalist ‘mono-culture’ defended by the ‘hired guns’ of the U.S. military. Five hundred years after Columbus’ [sic] arrival, they are spearheading an international movement with the goal of sovereignty for all Indigenous nations” (168). She later adds that “if the material basis of every nationalist movement is land, then the reacquisition, defense, and protection of Native land and its natural resources are the basis for rebuilding Chicano nation. Without the sovereignty of Native peoples, including Chicanos, and the support for our land-based struggles, the world will be lost to North American greed, and our culturas lost with it” (170).
170 Guatemala, El Salvador. You are the Kuna and the Tarahumara. You are the miracle people too, for like them the same blood runs through your veins. The same memory of a time when your deaths were cause for reverence and celebration, not shock and mourning” (148). Here, in addition to linking the Chicana/o community of McLaughlin to specific Mexican and Central
American indigenous groups, Cerezita also relates the injustices perpetrated by the “agribusiness empire” in McLaughlin to the U.S.-backed civil wars in Central America, thereby aligning herself with “a particular anti-imperialist politics . . . in the Latin American context” and extending the parallel between these two conflicts established earlier in the play (Jacobs 100;
Libretti 143). The centrality of this alliance appears in the fact that the play’s title can be seen to emerge from Cerezita’s earlier questions about the political activism of the Salvadoran priests— the suggestion being that Cerezita, in speaking out on behalf of her community, has chosen to follow in the path of these Central American heroes. 130 As Greenberg indicates, this aspect of
Cerezita’s sermon “enables politicized connection through communal histories of pain that transcend this particular Chicano/a community and extend across borders throughout Latin
America” (164). This aspect of her sermon also reflects Moraga’s own understanding of the need to extend the purview of Chicano nationalism to address the needs of the growing U.S. Latina/o population, many of whom are refugees from the U.S.-backed Central American wars. As Ana
Patricia Rodríguez explains in Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories,
Literatures, and Cultures , in “Art in America, Con Acento” Moraga asserts that “what was once a U.S.-based, Chicano-centered, anticolonial struggle would have to transform itself into
130 Cerezita asks, “If the Jesuits died as priests, does that make them saints?,” to which Juan responds, “They’re martyrs, heroes. They spoke out against the government” (138, 139).
171 hemispheric transnational, transfronterista Latina/o alliances, embracing Central America in its
[sic] imaginary” (Rodríguez 153).
By bringing together the plight of Guatemala and El Salvador and that of Chicana/o farmworkers, Moraga not only alludes to the common economic system underlying these two tragedies, she also suggests that these communities manifest a similar spirit of resistance—that which I have defined as the revolutionary erotic. It is in the closing words of her sermon that
Cerezita most strongly invokes the erotic, urging her community to overcome their fear and embrace the “Madre Tierra” (148). Having asserted that the miracle people “are not afraid because they are used to the color red,” Cerezita assures the members of her community that they can be equally courageous, telling them “you are the miracle people because today, this day, that red memory will spill out from inside you and flood this valley con coraje” (148). 131 Earlier in the play, in a dialogue between Don Gilberto, Amparo, and Juan, Moraga establishes a connection between ‘coraje’ and sexual desire. In this dialogue, which takes place after Amparo has been beaten by police and her spleen removed by a Chinese surgeon, Moraga playfully intimates that bravery and the erotic are linked—that a woman who is highly courageous and politically active would also be likely to have a strong sex drive:
DON GILBERTO: El Doctor Fong . . . es un Chino ¿sabes? He says que the spleen is the part of the body que ‘stá conectado con el coraje. JUAN: It’s the place of emotion, of human passions. AMPARO: Pues, that policia got another thing coming if he think he could take away mi pasión. ¿No viejo? DON GILBERTO: Yeah, she already been trying to pull me on top of her in the wheelchair. She gonna bust her stitches I tell her. (135)
131 This declaration also refers back to Cerezita’s description of tasting her mother’s fear in her sweat when breastfeeding and subsequently refusing to nurse.
172 This dialogue subtly informs Cerezita’s mention of ‘coraje’ in her sermon, as well as her description of the “Madre Tierra” in the lines that follow: “You are the miracle people because today, this day, that red memory will spill out from inside you and flood this valley con coraje.
And you will be free. Free to name this land Madre . Madre Tierra. Madre Sagrada. Madre . . .
Libertad. The radiant red mother . . . rising ” (148; my emphasis). Unlike la Virgen de
Guadalupe—who, as Moraga herself tells us in “Queer Aztlán,” “represents the Mexican ideal of
‘la madre sufrida,’ the long-suffering desexualized Indian mother”—the indigenous earth mother that Cerezita calls upon in these final words of her sermon is neither “desexualized” nor “long- suffering” ( The Last Generation 157; Heroes and Saints 148). While Cerezita does not specifically state that the Madre Tierra is erotic, the language she uses to describe this deity—
“red ,” “radiant,” and “rising”—connotes passion and libidinousness, as well as bravery and freedom. Cerezita thus utilizes the image of la Virgen de Guadalupe as a means of obtaining her community’s attention in order to remind them of a much older female deity whose power emanates at least in part from her sexuality. 132
Again, to grasp the fuller meaning behind Cerezita’s words it is helpful to turn to another passage from “Queer Aztlán,” in which Moraga asserts the predominant role of women in advocating for the environment:
The earth is female . It is no accident then that the main grassroots activists defending the earth, along with Native peoples, are women of all races and cultures. . . . These are the mothers of East Los Angeles, McFarland, and Kettleman City, fighting toxic dumps, local incinerators and pesticide poisoning, women who experience the earth’s contamination in the deformation and death occurring within their very wombs. . . . We do not control how we produce and reproduce, how we labor and love. And how will our lands be free if our bodies aren’t? (172-3)
132 As Yarbro-Bejarano indicates, “in Heroes , religion provides the vehicle for a vision of an alternative syncretic practice fusing activism and spirituality that complements the text’s critique of institutional Catholicism” (76).
173 In this passage, Moraga establishes a clear tie between the fight for environmental protection and the fight for women’s rights. She makes this connection even clearer in the lines that follow, expanding the significance of the term “land” to include the domain of women’s bodies:
Land remains the common ground for all radical action. But land is more than the rocks and trees, the animal and plant life that make up the territory of Aztlán or Navajo Nation or Maya Mesoamerica. For immigrant and native alike, land is also the factories where we work, the water our children drink, and the housing project where we live. For women, lesbians, and gay men, land is that physical mass called our bodies . Throughout las Américas, all these ‘lands’ remain under occupation by an Anglo-centric, patriarchal, imperialist United States. . . . As a Chicana lesbian, I know that the struggle I share with all Chicanos and Indigenous peoples is truly one of sovereignty, the sovereign right to wholly inhabit oneself ( cuerpo y alma ) and one’s territory ( pan y tierra ) (173; my emphasis)
In this passage, Moraga asserts that the territory of her new Queer Aztlán in need of liberation is not only the colonized Native land of the North American Southwest, but also the repressed sexuality and subjectivity of women, lesbians, and gay men. Returning to Heroes and Saints , while Cerezita never directly states that the land that she refers to is that which Moraga describes in the above passage, Cerezita’s description of the “radiant” “Madre Tierra” and her own characterization as a young woman who longs to experience her sexuality in order to fully inhabit her physical and spiritual body gesture to this broader definition of land as “ cuerpo y alma ” as well as “ pan y tierra ” (173). 133
The final aspect of Cerezita’s sermon linking it to the erotic is the fact that, for Cerezita, uttering these words constitutes an act of spiritual healing much like her sexual encounter with
Father Juan. Before Cerezita gives her sermon, she beseeches her mother to allow her to leave the house, saying, “You tie my tongue, ‘amá. How can I heal without my tongue?” (147). Just as,
133 Another passage in the play that suggests this is Mario’s assertion that the various scourges plaguing the Chicano community are “interactive systems of domination that affect Chicanos”: “Raza’s dying everywhere. Doesn’t matter if it’s crack or . . . pesticides, AIDS, it’s all the same shit” (Yarbro-Bejarano 70; Heroes and Saints 141).
174 in her sexual encounter with Father Juan, Cerezita briefly uses her tongue, her “most faithful organ,” to experience the fullness of her sexuality and subjectivity—her “[self]”—, in speaking to the members of her community, Cerezita uses this same erotic organ to experience the fullness of her spiritual and political potential, thereby healing her cloistered spirit (108, 144). In so doing, Cerezita also begins to heal her community, bringing them together as an inclusive
“familia” and freeing them from constraints of their own fear and dejection in order to perform a truly radical act of protest (122).
While, in one sense, the conclusion of Heroes and Saints is triumphal—in that Cerezita succeeds in rousing her community to action—the last few lines of the play suggest that this action will not be without its cost. After Cerezita finishes her speech, she accompanies Father
Juan as he carries Evalina’s tiny crucified body out into the vineyard. After they have moved offstage, presumably into the vineyard, sounds of a helicopter are heard overhead followed by the sound of machine gun fire. While here one can only imagine what has happened to Father
Juan and Cerezita, if one reads Moraga’s Watsonville: Some Place Not Here , one quickly learns that Cerezita was indeed killed by the agricultural corporation. Moraga thus chooses to end her play with the reminder that any successful act of resistance is most likely to be met with retaliation and attempts at further suppression. The next text that I will analyze, Pron’s El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia , explores what happens when a repressive power’s response to militant activity, such as Argentina’s military dictatorship, is so thorough and far-reaching that it succeeds in stifling the spirit of resistance even among future generations.
Pron’s novel attempts to recover some of the lost erotic Stimmung , or spirit of resistance, of his parent’s generation while also portraying the seemingly insurmountable challenges to such a
175 recovery—challenges that make it so that this purported goal of his novel may have to occur beyond the pages of the text.
Patricio Pron’s El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia
Me pregunté qué podía ofrecer mi generación que pudiera ponerse a la altura de la desesperación gozosa y del afán de justicia de la generación que la precedió, la de nuestros padres. ¿No era terrible el imperativo ético que esa generación puso sin quererlo sobre nosotros? (Patricio Pron, El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia , 179). 134
Patricio Pron’s El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia is a self-begetting novel, which, in The Self-Begetting Novel , Steven Kellman describes as “an account, usually first-person, of the development of a character to the point at which he is able to take up his pen and compose the novel we have just finished reading” (3). 135 One of the characteristics of self- begetting novels is their self-reflexivity, as the narrator ponders the writing of the novel—how he will approach it and of what it will consist. The title of El espíritu emerges from one such self- reflexive/metafictional instance in the fourth and final section of the text, in which the narrator declares his motivation for writing the novel and, presumably, what it will address:
Mientras pensaba todo esto de pie junto a la mesa del teléfono vi que había comenzado a llover nuevamente y me dije que iba a escribir esa historia porque lo que mis padres y sus compañeros habían hecho no merecía ser olvidado y porque yo era el producto de lo que habían hecho, y porque lo que habían hecho era digno de ser contado porque su espíritu, no las decisiones acertadas y equivocadas que mis padres y sus compañeros habían tomado sino su espíritu mismo, iba a seguir subiendo en la lluvia hasta tomar el cielo por asalto. (186)
134 “I wondered what my generation could offer that could match the exuberant desperation and thirst for justice of the preceding generation, our parents’. Wasn’t it a terrible ethical imperative that generation unintentionally imposed on us?” (Lethem 191). All English translations of quotes from El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia are taken from Mara Faye Lethem’s translation of the novel as My Father’s Ghost is Climbing in the Rain . All other translations are mine unless I indicate otherwise.
135 Kellman continues: “Like an infinite recession of Chinese boxes, the self-begetting novel begins again where it ends. Once we have concluded the central protagonist’s story of his own sentimental education, we must return to page one to commence in a novel way the product of that process – the mature artist’s novel, which itself depicts the making of a novel. . . . The final line, as in Finnegans Wake , returns to the beginning” (3).
176 As I thought all this, standing beside the telephone, I noticed it had started to rain again, and I told myself I would write that story because what my parents and their comrades had done didn’t deserve to be forgotten, and because I was the product of what they had done, and because what they’d done was worthy of being told because their ghost—not the right or wrong decisions my parents and their comrades had made but their spirit itself—was going to keep climbing in the rain until it took the heavens by storm. (Lethem 198)
While not in any way sexual, the spirit that the narrator refers to here is the spirit of affective engagement in politics that I have shown to be an aspect of the erotic. Based on this passage, and particularly given the fact that a phrase from this passage appears as the title of Pron’s work, one might assume that a large portion of the novel would be about this erotic spirit and “lo que [sus] padres y sus compañeros habían hecho” ‘what [his] parents and their comrades had done’ as members of the peronist organization Guardia de Hierro prior to the rise of the Argentine dictatorship (186; Lethem 198). 136 However, while the narrator briefly summarizes the organization’s history in two of the many segments that make up the text, he never provides more detailed accounts of his parents’ activities as members of the organization. Instead, the bulk of the text is overwhelmed by three overlapping themes: the protagonist’s attempts to understand his father by following his father’s pursuit of two missing persons, Alberto and Alicia Burdisso; the protagonist’s repression and recovery of his own childhood memories of the dictatorship; and the protagonist’s decision to write the novel itself. This marked contradiction between what the narrator proclaims his text to be about and what it actually addresses gestures to an alternate layer of meaning in the text, conveying the way in which both the legacy of the dictatorship and the contemporary Argentinian Stimmung continue to overshadow memories and representations
136 As Norma Kaminsky indicates in “Trauma nacional, amnesia personal en El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia , de Patricio Pron” ‘National Trauma, Personal Amnesia in My Father’s Ghost is Climbing in the Rain , by Patricio Pron,’ both the novel’s title and the passage above refer to the poem “I Fellowed Sleep” by Dylan Thomas, “que trata de un viaje onírico a los antepasados muertos” ‘that deals with a dreamlike voyage to his dead ancestors’ (13).
177 of the political movements that preceded the dictatorship. However, the fact of the novel’s title and the presence of this passage within the text also speak to a latent/as yet unrealized desire in contemporary Argentine literature to regain access to the erotic spirit of the political movements of the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s so as to be able to use it for the country’s future.
At the level of plot, El espíritu is the story of a man’s return to Argentina from Germany in order to be with his dying father. Upon returning to his childhood home, in his father’s study he finds a folder full of documents detailing the search for Alberto Burdisso, a sixty-year old man who has gone missing from the narrator’s father’s hometown of El Trébol. Upon further investigation, the protagonist learns that Alberto Burdisso is the brother of Alicia Burdisso, an intimate friend of his father whom his father had initiated into political activism and who was kidnapped and disappeared during the military dictatorship. The protagonist comes to the conclusion that, in following Alberto’s disappearance, his father had somehow ultimately been seeking his lost friend Alicia, in the same way that the protagonist is seeking to better understand his father by following his father’s search. Upon reaching this conclusion, the protagonist decides to allow himself to access his own memories of growing up as the child of activists during the dictatorship, memories that he had previously suppressed beneath high doses of psychiatric medications. The protagonist also determines that he will write the novel we see before us, in the self-begetting sense I have described above.
As Pron himself admits in the novel’s epilogue, the text is highly autobiographical mixed with “una gota de ficción” (198). Like the novel’s protagonist, Pron was born in Rosario,
Argentina the year prior to the military coup d’état. His parents were also both journalists and, like his protagonist, Pron lived in Germany for a number of years before returning to Argentina upon his father’s hospitalization. As Pamela Tala asserts in “Migración, retorno y lenguaje en la
178 narrativa latinoamericana de hoy: El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia de
Patricio Pron,” by incorporating this degree of autobiography into his narrative, Pron “[está] desafiando los límites del género narrativo, escribiendo de una manera que la crítica argentina
Josefina Ludmer ha llamado la ‘ficción/no ficción’ (Ludmer 2010), lo que complejiza la interpretación: ¿cómo tenemos, cómo tiene que leer la crítica literaria estas narraciones, tremendamente referenciales, que difuminan el límite de la ficción?” ‘is testing the limits of the narrative genre, writing in a way that the Argentine critic Josefina Ludmer has called the
‘fiction/nonfiction’ (Ludmer 2010), which complexifies interpretation: how should we, how should literary criticism read these tremendously referential stories that blur the limit of fiction’
(119). This element of autobiography, or “no ficción,” adds another layer of complexity to our understanding of El espíritu as a self-begetting novel since, in one sense, it would be easy to reason that the novel is nothing more than an autobiographical description of Pron’s coming upon his father’s search for Alberto Burdisso and choosing to write an account of it. At the same time, within its many self-reflexive/metafictional passages—(which themselves fall outside of the genre of autobiography)—the novel moves away from this understanding of its content as somehow given, instead constantly questioning its ability to tell the story upon which it has embarked.
This questioning is clear from the novel’s very first segment, in which the narrator addresses the child’s desire to discover who his/her parents were by retracing their footsteps. The narrator begins by describing his visits to a psychiatrist in Germany and the memory loss rendered by the drugs this psychiatrist prescribed. As the narrator explains, this memory loss has meant that “el recuerdo de esos años —por lo menos el recuerdo de unos noventa y cinco meses de esos ocho años— es más bien impreciso y esquemático” ‘what I remember of those eight
179 years—at least what I remember of some ninety-five months of those eight years—is pretty vague and sketchy’ (11; Lethem 3). The narrator tells us that, at one point, he returned to the psychiatrist’s office in an attempt to understand this period of his life, but then came up with a list of reasons why this attempt would be futile: “después consideré que tendría que haber pedido cita previa, que el psiquiatra no debía recordarme de todas maneras, y que además, yo no tengo curiosidad sobre mí mismo realmente” ‘then I thought I should have made an appointment, that the psychiatrist wouldn’t remember me anyway, and besides, I’m not really all that curious about myself’ (12; Lethem 4). Instead, the narrator reasons that, years later, one of his future children might make this visit in order to more fully understand who he was. The narrator then proclaims that all children are the detectives of their parents and, simultaneously, undermines that proclamation. He asserts that
los hijos son los detectives de los padres, que los arrojan al mundo para que un día regresen a ellos para contarles su historia y, de esa manera, puedan comprenderla. No son sus jueces, puesto que no pueden juzgar con verdadera imparcialidad a padres a quienes se lo deben todo, incluida la vida, pero sí pueden intentar poner orden en su historia, restituir el sentido que los acontecimientos más o menos pueriles de la vida y su acumulación parecen haberle arrebatado, y luego proteger esa historia y perpetuarla en la memoria. Los hijos son los policías de sus padres, pero a mí no me gustan los policías. Nunca se han llevado bien con mi familia. (12)
Children are detectives of their parents, who cast them out into the world so that one day the children will return and tell them their story so that they themselves can understand it. These children aren’t judging their parents—it’s impossible for them to be truly impartial, since they owe them everything, including their lives—but they can try to impose some order on their story, restore the meaning that gets stripped away by the petty events of life and their accumulation, and then they can protect that story and perpetuate it in their memory. Children are policemen of their parents, but I don’t like policemen. They’ve never gotten along well with my family. (Lethem 4)
By proclaiming that “los hijos son los detectives de los padres,” in one sense, the narrator is foreshadowing his own role within the novel as his father’s detective, who will seek to elucidate the intricacies of his father’s life (12). At the same time, by asserting that “los hijos son los
180 policías de sus padres pero a mí no me gustan los policías. Nunca se han llevado bien con mi familia,” the narrator is also suggesting that he will not fully fulfill this function—that it is in some way undesirable for him to do so. Thus from the novel’s very opening we are primed for a story that will both shed light on the life of the narrator’s father and, simultaneously either refuse or fail to reveal everything, leaving some aspects of his father’s story undisclosed.
Another aspect of the novel that can be seen to allude to the incompleteness of the narrator’s story is the epigraph from Jack Kerouac prior to the novel’s first section, which reads,
“[. . .] the true story of what I saw and how I saw it [. . .] which is after all the only thing I’ve got to offer ” (9). In one sense, by asserting that what follows is a “ true story ,” this passage points to the autobiographical nature of the text and its basis on actual events—the narrator’s discovery of and investigation into his father’s search for Alberto Burdisso (9). However, by also admitting that “what I saw and how I saw it . . . is after all the only thing I’ve got to offer,” the passage also indirectly alludes to the fact that the narrator’s account of his father’s political past may be incomplete or fractional, due to the fact that he was not there to witness it. The narrator also speaks to this aspect of the text in segment nineteen of section three, in which the protagonist begins to view the documents he has discovered in his father’s office as material for a novel that his father wants him to write, reflecting that “yo tenía los materiales para escribir un libro y que esos materiales me habían sido dados por mi padre, que había creado para mí una narración de la que yo iba a tener que ser autor y lector, y descubrir a medida que la narrara” ‘I had the material for a book and that this material had been given to me by my father, who had created a narrative in which I would have to be both the author and the reader, discovering as I narrated’ (144;
Lethem 154). In coming to the conclusion that he is to write this story, the narrator simultaneously questions his ability to do so effectively, asking himself the following: “qué
181 hubiera pensando [mi padre] de que yo escribiera un relato que apenas conocía, que sabía cómo terminaba —era evidente que terminaba en un hospital, como terminan casi todas las historias— pero no sabía cómo comenzaba o qué sucedía en el medio ” ‘what my father would have thought of my writing a story I barely knew; I knew how it ended—it was obvious it ended in a hospital, as almost all stories do—but I didn’t know how it began or what happened in the middle ’ (145;
Lethem 154-5; my emphasis). What the narrator really wants to ascertain is, as he expresses it,
“¿Qué había sido mi padre? ¿Qué había querido?” ‘What had my father been? What had he wanted?’ (145; Lethem 155). Within the text, this desire is never fully realized. Instead, the narrator is left to pursue his father’s story “en las historias de otros como si yo fuera el coyote y
él el correcaminos y yo tuviera que resignarme a verle perderse en el horizonte dejando detrás de sí una nube de polvo y a mí con un palmo de narices” ‘in the stories of others as if I were the coyote and he the roadrunner and I had to resign myself to watching him fade into the horizon, leaving behind a cloud of dust, the wind taken out of my sails’ (145; Lethem 155).
This description of the narrator’s father as the roadrunner and of himself as the coyote hints at the text’s overall structure as a mise en abyme .137 In seeking to know “¿Qué había sido
[su] padre? ¿Qué había querido?” the narrator has nowhere to turn except to his father’s own search process, which is in fact a search for someone other than the person his father really wants to find. 138 The narrator speaks to this aspect of the novel and to the futility of his father’s search after he has finished reading all of his father’s documents dealing with Alberto Burdisso’s case:
137 Tala also refers to the quality of mise en abyme in Pron’s work, but does so in reference to its language rather than its plot (132). Other critics have commented on this same aspect of the novel, calling it a game of mirrors.
138 By including, verbatim, many of the documents that he finds in his father’s file on Burdisso, the narrator asks the reader to embark upon this journey with him.
182 Una vez más, me pregunté por qué mi padre había participado en la búsqueda de aquel hombre asesinado y por qué había querido documentar sus esfuerzos y los resultados que éstos no habían arrojado, . . . Tuve la impresión de que mi padre no había estado buscando realmente al asesinado, que éste le importaba poco o nada; que lo que había hecho era buscar a la hermana, restituir allí y entonces una búsqueda que ciertas circunstancias trágicas . . . le habían impedido llevar a cabo en el mes de junio de 1977, . . . cuando el hermano desapareció pensé, uno de los últimos vínculos que lo unían a la mujer se había roto, y precisamente por ello carecía de sentido buscarlo, puesto que los muertos no hablan, no dicen nada desde las profundidades de los pozos en que son arrojados en la llanura argentina. (129-30) 139
Once again, I wondered why my father had participated in the search for that murdered man, why he’d wanted to document his efforts and the results that they’d failed to produce, . . . I had the impression that my father hadn’t really been looking for the dead man, who meant little or nothing to him; that what he’d been doing was searching for the sister, picking up a search that certain tragic circumstances . . . had kept him from carrying out in June 1977, . . . when the brother went missing, I thought, one of the last bonds linking my father to the disappeared woman was broken, and precisely because of that it made no sense to search for him, given that the dead don’t talk, they say nothing from the depths of the wells they’ve been thrown into out on the Argentine plain. (Lethem 138)
The narrator continues by comparing his father to “un insecto en el aire oscuro y caliente de una noche de verano” ‘an insect in the dark, hot air of a summer night’ who is “dispuesto a arrojarse una y otra vez contra la luz que lo encandilaba hasta caer rendido” ‘willing to throw himself again and again at a light that dazzled him until he collapsed from exhaustion’ (130; Lethem
139). In this sense, the narrator’s father’s search—and, to some extent, that of the narrator—are infinitely deferred; instead what they lead back to is the devastation of the dictatorship and the
139 This same sense of futility and infinite recession comes across in the narrator’s description of a photo of Alicia Burdisso that he has found among his father’s files: “Si se posee una copia digital de la fotografía, como es el caso, y ésta es ampliada una y otra vez, como lo ha hecho mi padre, el rostro de la mujer se descompone en una multitude de pequeños cuadrados grises hasta que la mujer, literalmente, y detrás de esos puntos, desparece” ‘If you have a digital copy of the photograph, as I do, and if you enlarge it again and again, as my father did, the woman’s face breaks down into a multitude of gray squares until the woman literally disappears’ (140; Lethem 149).
183 way in which its impact on Argentine society has obscured the history of the political movements that preceded it and precluded the memories of that era from being passed down. 140
The narrator, as author, does include one segment—number nineteen of section four—in which he refers to his parents’ stories and those of his parents’ friends about their activities as members of Guardia de Hierro. In this passage, the narrator does not narrate these stories in detail but instead refers to them in passing; for example, he mentions
el recuerdo, imaginario o real, de que [su] padre alguna vez [le] había contado que él había estado acreditado como periodista en el palco en el que supuestamente iba a hablar Perón a su llegada a Ezeiza, ésta es la parte real del recuerdo, y de cómo, al comenzar el cruce de disparos, se escondió tras el estuche de un contrabajo en el foso destinado a la orquesta, en la que quizá sea la parte imaginaria del recuerdo. (175)
The memory, real or imagined, of my father telling me that he had a press pass for the box where Perón was supposedly going to speak when he arrived at Ezeiza (this is the real part of the memory), and that, when the crossfire began, he hid behind the case of a double bass in the orchestra pit (in what might be the imaginary part of the memory). (Lethem 187)
Instead of lingering over these memories of his parents’ stories of their political involvement, the narrator focuses much more on the incongruence between his parents’ commitment to social justice—their erotic spirit—and the spirit of the era in which the narrator was raised. Describing the aftermath of his parents’ participation in Guardia de Hierro, the narrator writes,
mis padres continuaron a su manera: mi padre siguió siendo periodista y mi madre también, y tuvieron hijos a los que les dieron un legado que es también un mandato, y ese legado y ese mandato, que son los de la transformación social y la voluntad, resultaron inapropiados en los tiempos en que nos tocó crecer, que fueron tiempos de soberbia y de frivolidad y de derrota. (168)
my parents continued in their own way: my father stayed a journalist, as did my mother, and they had children to whom they passed on a legacy that is also a mandate, and that
140 As Geoffrey Maguire asserts, in “Bringing Memory Home: Historical (Post)Memory and Patricio Pron’s El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia (2011),” “the works of many of this generation,” including El espíritu , “emphasize the breakdown of family narratives through the rupture of a generational heritage and thus problematise [sic] the ‘already resolved’ issues of testimonial coherence” (212).
184 legacy and mandate—of social transformation and struggle—turned out to be unsuited to the times we grew up in, times of pride and frivolousness and defeat. (Lethem 178-9)
The dictatorship and the subsequent failed democracies have meant that the narrator and his parents have inhabited two very different Stimmungs , or historical moods, which has in turn impacted the way they view their country and the concept of political engagement.
As I discussed in my introduction, Jonathan Flatley provides a useful overview of
Heidegger’s concept of Stimmung in Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of
Modernism , defining it as “a kind of affective atmosphere . . . in which intentions are formed, projects pursued, and particular affects can attach to particular objects” and which is “shaped by the concrete historical context in which we coexist” (19). Our Stimmung —or the Stimmung we are in—at any given point is a historical phenomenon which colors our individual perspectives and our collective sense of possibility. Here Flately explains,
as Baudelaire writes of the boredom enveloping his readers, . . . we might talk about the way an audience was attuned to a Detroit Tigers baseball game in 1967, the kinds of emotional energies that were collectively available because of the rebellion (or so-called riots) that had recently occurred in Detroit, or indeed of the Stimmun g that allowed for the rebellion to get going in the first place, . . . In each instance, certain objects in the world come into view in a particular way, certain persons (or social formations appear as friends and others as enemies, and some kinds of actions present themselves that might otherwise not even come into view. But we may speak of and seek to analyze in each case the Stimmung that made some events possible and others not. Any kind of political project must have the ‘making and using’ of mood as part and parcel of the project; for, no matter how clever or correct the critique or achievable the project, collective action is impossible if people are not, so to speak, in the mood . (23)
As the narrator of El espíritu asserts, the kinds of emotional energies available to his parents’ generation were very different from those available to him and his contemporaries, who grew up amidst the terror and brutality of the dictatorship—“como si en el pasado [hubieran] vivido en un país con . . . una bandera que fuera un rostro descompuesto de espanto” ‘as if in the past [they] had lived in a country called fear with a flag that was a face filled with dread’ (163; Lethem
185 173). In a subsequent segment, the narrator elaborates on the quality of this Stimmung and its implications for his generation’s orientation toward political engagement. The narrator starts by comparing the defeat of his parents’ generation to the year-long march undertaken by an army of
Greek soldiers who, having failed in their attempt to install Cyrus the Younger to the throne of
Persia, were thus forced to traverse four thousand kilometers of enemy terrain before reaching friendly territory. According to the narrator, “para comprender las dimensiones reales de lo que nos sucedió a nosotros habría que imaginar que ésta” ‘to understand the true dimensions of what happened to us I would have to imagine that it,’ the Greek’s march of defeat,
hubiese durado varias decenas de [años], y pensar en los hijos de aquellos soldados, criados en la impedimenta de un ejército derrotado que atraviesa desiertos y picos nevados de un territorio hostil, con el peso inevitable de la derrota y ni tan siquiera la compensación del recuerdo de un período en el que la derrota no era inminente y todo estaba por ser hecho. (179)
lasted several dozen years, and I would have to think of those soldiers’ children, raised among the instruments of a defeated army who had crossed the deserts and snowy mountain caps of a hostile territory, burdened with the inevitable weight of defeat and without even the comfort of the memory of a period in which defeat wasn’t imminent and everything was still to come. (190-1)
For the narrator, he and the other men and women raised under the scourge of the dictatorship are like these children of the defeated Greek soldiers in that they never had the chance to experience “un período en el que la derrota no era inminente y todo estaba por ser hecho”—what one might also describe as the erotic spirit/ Stimmung of their parents’ era. They have no recourse to the memory of this Stimmung to sustain them or to fuel their political involvement now that the dictatorship has passed. Along these lines, the narrator asks himself:
¿Qué podía yo hacer con ese mandato [de la transformación social]? ¿Qué iban a poder hacer con él mis hermanos y todos aquellos que yo iba a conocer después, los hijos de los militantes de la organización de mis padres pero también los de los miembros de las otras organizaciones, todos perdidos en un mundo de desposesión y de frivolidad, todos
186 miembros de un ejército derrotado hace tiempo cuyas batallas ni siquiera podemos recordar y que nuestros padres ni siquiera se atreven a mirar de frente todavía? (178) 141 What could I do with that mandate [of social transformation]? What could my brother and sister do with it, and what about all the others I would later meet, the children of the militants in my parents’ organization, but also those of members of other organizations, all lost in a world of dispossession and frivolity, all members of an army defeated long ago whose battles we can’t even remember and our fathers don’t even dare to face? (Lethem 190)
This sense of inherited defeat also colors the narrator’s view of his country, resulting in a sense of disassociation and “desposesión” (178). In an early segment, as the protagonist is flying home to Argentina and reflecting on his scant memories of his father, he remembers his father driving his family to different Argentine provinces “en procura de que encontráramos en ellas una belleza que a mí me resultaba intangible, siempre procurando darle un contenido a aquellos símbolos que habíamos aprendido en una escuela que no se había desprendido aún de una dictadura cuyos valores no terminaba de dejar de perpetuar” ‘in an attempt to show us their beauty—a beauty I found hard to grasp—always trying to give meaning to those symbols we learned in a school that had yet to cast off a dictatorship whose values it continued to perpetuate’
(18-9; Lethem 11). Just as the beauty of the Argentine countryside eludes him, the narrator is unable to feel any sense of attachment to his country’s flag. In describing the flag, he describes this feeling of estrangement and its roots in his country’s recent history:
podía dibujar . . . una bandera que era celeste y blanca y que nosotros conocíamos bien porque supuestamente era nuestra bandera, aunque nosotros la hubiéramos visto ya tantas
141 When the narrator describes his world as one of “frivolidad,” he also alludes to the political and economic systems that were put into place following the dictatorship, which built upon the neoliberal policies developed during the dictatorship itself (178). Pron speaks to this in his interview with Silvina Friera: “La generación de nuestros padres participó de un esfuerzo colectivo valioso que resultó incomprensible para los que vinimos después, que fuimos criados en la década de los ’90, que fue una continuidad del proyecto político y económico de la dictadura; una década de frivolidad y de estupidez muy dolorosa para quienes considerábamos como finalidad de la sociedad otras cosas distintas que el éxito individual y económico” ‘Our parents’ generation participated in a valuable collective effort that turned out to be incomprehensible for those who came afterwards, who were raised in the decade of the 90s, which was a continuation of the political and economic project of the dictatorship; a decade of frivolousness and stupidity that was very painful for those of us who considered the purpose of society to be things other than individual and economic success’ (“Este libro no se propone ofrecer respuestas”).
187 veces antes en circunstancias que no eran realmente nuestras y escapaban por completo a nuestro control . . . : una dictadura, un Mundial de fútbol, una guerra, un puñado de gobiernos democráticos fracasados que solo habían servido para distribuir la injusticia en nombre de todos nosotros y del de [sic] un país que a mi padre y a otros se les había ocurrido que era, que tenía que ser, el mío y el de mis hermanos. (19)
you could draw . . . a flag that was sky blue and white, which we knew well because it was supposedly our flag, although we had seen it so many times in circumstances that weren’t really ours, completely beyond our control . . . : a dictatorship, a soccer World Cup, a war, a fistful of failed democratic governments that had served only to allocate injustice in all of our names and in the name of a country that my father and others thought was, had to be, mine and my brother’s and my sister’s. (Lethem 11-2)
As Kaminsky argues, one could also interpret the narrator’s choice, while in Germany, not to have his own apartment and to sleep on the sofas of friends and acquaintances as a reflection of this same “ausencia de patria” ‘absence of country’ which characterizes the Stimmung of his generation (9). Over time, the narrator realizes that it is also his generation’s Stimmung that has propelled him to leave Argentina for Germany and to over-medicate himself in an attempt to forget his past: “Entendí también que no había sido la intoxicación producida por las pastillas la que había ocasionado la incapacidad para recordar los eventos de mi infancia, sino que habían sido esos mismos hechos los que habían provocado mi deseo de intoxicarme y de olvidarlo todo”
‘I also realized it hadn’t been the pills that caused my inability to remember the events of my childhood, but rather those very events themselves that had provoked my desire to self-medicate and forget everything’ (165; Lethem 176). 142
Despite this Stimmung of estrangement and unprecipitated defeat which has so severely impacted his personal character formation, the narrator determines to write his father’s story, viewing it as “una tarea política, una de las pocas que podía tener relevancia para mi propia
142 Some of the details of this period that the narrator remembers include not being allowed to invite friends to his house, being forbidden to repeat any of the things he heard at home, being told to always walk against the direction of traffic and, if ever kidnapped, to drop the nametag with his name and telephone number that he wore to the ground and to scream his own name as loudly as he could.
188 generacion” ‘a political task, one of the few with relevance for my own generation’ (184; Lethem
196). It is from this determination that the novel takes its title, as we see again in the quote I have cited above:
me dije que iba a escribir esa historia porque lo que mis padres y sus compañeros habían hecho no merecía ser olvidado y . . . porque lo que habían hecho era digno de ser contado porque su espíritu, no las decisiones acertadas y equivocadas que mis padres y sus compañeros habían tomado sino su espíritu mismo, iba a seguir subiendo en la lluvia hasta tomar el cielo por asalto. (186)
I told myself I would write that story because what my parents and their comrades had done didn’t deserve to be forgotten, and . . . because what they’d done was worthy of being told because their ghost—not the right or wrong decisions my parents and their comrades had made but their spirit itself—was going to keep climbing in the rain until it took the heavens by storm. (Lethem 198)
This mission, to tell what his parents and their contemporaries did as members of Guardia de
Hierro and, in so doing, to resurrect their erotic spirit, is one that the narrator shares with Pron himself. In an interview with Silvina Friera regarding the novel, Pron asserts that
Los supuestos derrotados de la historia, la generación de mis padres, introdujeron cambios sociológicos y políticos sin los cuales la sociedad argentina sería inconcebible. Creo que era el momento de pensar si algo del espíritu del proyecto político de mis padres era pertinente y merecía ser rescatado. (“Este libro no se propone ofrecer respuestas”)
Those who were supposedly defeated, my parents’ generation, introduced sociological and political changes without which Argentine society would be inconceivable. I believe it was time to think about whether something of the spirit of my parents’ political project was pertinent and worthy of being rescued.
However, before delving into the story of his parents’ political engagement, both Pron and the narrator must come to terms with their own Stimmung and the way in which this Stimmung has prevented both the narrator and his father from reclaiming this political legacy. It is this story— not so much the story of his parents’ erotic spirit, but the story of the narrator’s struggle against
189 his own Stimmung —that we read in the pages of El espíritu .143 The narrator himself intuits something of the discrepancy between the story he set out to write and the story he has actually written, writing:
A veces pienso también que quizá yo no pueda nunca contar su historia, [la historia de su padre], . . . si esto es verdad, si no sé contar su historia, debo hacerlo de todos modos para que ellos se vean compelidos a corregirme y hacerlo con sus propias palabras, para que ellos digan las palabras que sus hijos nunca hemos escuchado pero que necesitamos desentrañar para que su legado no resulte incompleto. (190-1)
Sometimes I also think that perhaps I can never tell this story, [his father’s story], . . . if that’s true, if I don’t know how to tell the story, I should do it anyway so that they feel compelled to correct me in their own words, so that they say the words that as their children we have never heard but that we need to unravel to complete their legacy. (Lethem 203-4)
Similarly, in the same interview with Friera, Pron asserts that El espíritu “no se propone ofrecer respuestas sino interrogantes” ‘does not propose to offer answers but instead questions’ (“Este libro no se propone ofrecer respuestas”). In this sense, what the novel expresses is a desire for his parents to tell their story by sharing his own and, in so doing, to learn “cuánto de todo aquello”— how much of [his parents’ political experience]—“es pertinente aquí y ahora” ‘is pertinent here and now’ (Pron, “Este libro no se propone ofrecer respuestas”). In the meantime, the text paints a compelling portrait of Pron’s generation’s Stimmung —the spirit of fear that those raised during
143 Another aspect of the narrator’s inability to tell the story of his parents’ generation could be due to his conflicted view of their efforts. In one sense the narrator feels dismayed that his own generation will never be able to achieve the same level of commitment and self-sacrifice as his parents’ generation. At the same, he is also profoundly critical of what he sees as the short-sightedness/foolishness of his parents’ endeavors, writing, “¿De qué otra manera estar a su altura que no sea haciendo como ellos, peleando una guerra insensata y perdida de antemano y marchando al sacrificio con el canto sacrificial de la juventud desesperada, altiva e impotente y estúpida, marchando al precipicio de la guerra civil contra las fuerzas del aparato represivo de un país que, en sustancia, siempre ha sido y es profundamente conservador?” ‘How else could we measure up if not by doing as they did, fighting a senseless war that was lost before it began and marching into slaughter to the sacrificial chants of disaffected youth, arrogant and impotent and stupid, marching to the brink of civil war against the forces of the repressive machinery of a country that, in essence, is and always has been [profoundly] conservative’ (180; Lethem 191-2). The phrase: “cuyas batallas . . . nuestros padres ni siquiera se atreven a mirar de frente todavía” ‘whose battles . . . our fathers don’t even dare to face’ also seems to imply that, according to the narrator, his parents’ generation has not yet critically engaged with their own history of political protest (178; Lethem 190).
190 the era of the dictatorship are haunted by and from which they have yet to emerge. To this end,
El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia ends with the following passage:
A veces también pienso en mi padre junto al pozo donde fue encontrado Alberto José Burdisso y me imagino estando a su lado. Mi padre y yo entre las ruinas de una casa a unos trescientos metros de un camino rural poco transitado . . . y los dos contemplando la boca negra del pozo en el que yacen todos los muertos de la Historia argentina, todos los desamparados y los desfavorecidos y los muertos porque intentaron oponer una violencia tal vez justa a una violencia profundamente injusta . . . A veces nos recuerdo a mi padre y a mí deambulando por un bosque de árboles bajos y pienso que ese bosque es el del miedo y que él y yo seguimos allí y él sigue guiándome, y que quizá salgamos de ese bosque algún día. (192)
Sometimes I also think about my father beside the well where Alberto José Burdisso was found, and I imagine myself standing next to him. My father and I amid the ruins of a house some three hundred meters from an isolated country road, . . . both of us contemplating the black mouth of the well in which lie all the dead of Argentine history: all the defenseless and underprivileged; those who died trying to oppose a deeply unjust violence with a possibly just violence . . . Sometimes I remember wandering with my father through a forest of low trees, and I think that forest is the forest of fear, and he and I are still in there, and he keeps guiding me, and perhaps we’ll get out of the woods someday. (Lethem 205)
Both Pron’s novel and Moraga’s play thus address the role that fear plays in damping down the erotic spirit of resistance and preventing people from fighting to achieve social justice. The next text that I will address, Martínez Pompa’s My Kill Adore Him , reveals that fear is not the only emotion that squelches activism—that the complacency brought on by neoliberal consumption can be just as effective. 144 In his poetry collection, Martínez Pompa draws on the erotic to convey the extent to which consumerism has taken the place of both erotic sexuality and political engagement in contemporary neoliberal society, especially in the developed world—effectively precluding us from developing an erotic involvement in politics, as well as in our intimate lives.
Paul Martínez Pompa’s My Kill Adore Him
144 Pron refers to the neoliberal period in El espíritu de mis padres as “tiempos de soberbia y de frivolidad y de derrota” (168).
191 An empty wallet will rise. Speak. How they exhaust systems. Despite the blurred other, the ache might be real. Something she could pick up. Across the border, nothing I can imagine (Paul Martínez Pompa, My Kill Adore Him , 64).
In his second full volume of poetry, My Kill Adore Him , Martínez Pompa grapples with the contrast between the way in which we in the U.S. experience neoliberalism and the way in which neoliberalism is lived by Mexican maquiladora workers laboring in the free-trade zones on the other side of the U.S./Mexico border. In his writing, Martínez Pompa uses the realm of sexuality as a lens through which to explore the ideological, social, and affective shifts that have accompanied the North American Free Trade Agreement in both of these countries, as well as the powerful yet largely hidden social ties that this agreement establishes between them. On the one hand, in the poems of My Kill Adore Him , Martínez Pompa utilizes images of commodified or non-life-affirming sexuality as a means of allegorizing our affective withdrawal from politics under late capitalism, as well as the neoliberal financialization of human life. At the same time, the poet’s use of sexuality is more than simply allegorical; instead, in his poems sexuality appears as the particularly vulnerable site through which the commodified messages we receive from the larger society permeate our intimate lives and our psyches. By exploring the impacts of
NAFTA in these two countries through the lens of sexuality, the poet creates an affective bridge between the ideological, social, affective impacts of neoliberalism on consumers in the United
States and its concurrent, while by no means parallel, impacts on maquiladora workers in
Mexico.
The poet addresses these issues most directly in the fourth and final section of his collection, pointedly titled “While Late Capitalism.” In contrast, the poems in the first two sections of Martínez Pompa’s collection, respectively titled “A Lesson in Masculinity” and “City of Broken,” explore what is means to grow up and live as a Mexican American man in the
192 United States. These poems appear to be largely autobiographical; they are narrated in the first person and depict moments of adolescence and young adulthood, including incidents of racism, police brutality, poverty, and violence. In the poems of the third section, “The War on Poets
Goes On,” Martínez Pompa grapples with a variety of issues confronting Latina/o poets and other writers—from the maddening expectation that all Latina/o writers be fluent in Spanish despite repressive English-only school programs, to the questionable ethics of writing about violence and other political subjects, to the way in which Spanish-speaking language and culture have been exoticized and appropriated by the U.S. publishing industry, while social issues facing the majority of Latinas/os in America are too-often left unaddressed. In this section, we are given insight into the significance of the title, “My Kill Adore Him,” as the poet juxtaposes instances of psychological death with those of “adoration”: contrasting discrimination against Latinas/os with the way in which iconic aspects of Latina/o culture are exoticized and commodified in U.S. consumer culture.
Given the more immediate nature of the topics in these earlier sections, it would be easy to dismiss the poet’s reflections on political economy in “While Late Capitalism” as an unrelated albeit intriguing detour, a minor foray into a distant reality that is admittedly “nothing [he] can imagine” (64). However, Martínez Pompa has left us subtle textual clues to the contrary—from the last line of the final poem which echoes the last line of the first, (the collection’s first and last poems, “Film Strip” and “MyKillAdoreHer,” end with the words “anything we could imagine” /
“nothing I can imagine” respectively), to the volume’s title “My Kill Adore Him,” which is a variation on the title of the final poem “MyKillAdoreHer,” and its chilling play on words,
(“MyKillAdoreHer” is close to the English pronunciation of maquiladora , which is the Spanish term for the labor-intensive factories located in the free-trade zones). Even the cover art, a
193 painting of a bomb-pop popsicle melting sticky red, white, and blue onto a linoleum floor, alludes to the poem “The Physics of Crime”—in which Martínez Pompa reflects upon the disproportionately high mortality rate among Latina/o youth—while also gesturing to the unstable and at times nefarious significance of the American flag here and throughout the world.
Through these textual clues, Martínez Pompa urges his readers to make the connection between the impact of neoliberalism in Mexico and the social issues facing Latinas/os in the U.S., implying that many of these social issues facing Mexican Americans and other Latinas/os are themselves reflections of larger geopolitical structures of inequality functioning on a hemispheric, if not a global, scale. In addition, the poems of gender-identity formation in “A
Lesson on Masculinity,” in which Martínez Pompa illustrates the competitiveness, cruelty, homophobia, false bravado, and shame often involved in becoming a man in America, prepare the reader for his sardonic treatment of sexuality in “While Late Capitalism.” This textual structure enables readers to understand the hyper-masculine rhetoric of neoliberal consumerism and consumption that the poet depicts in “While Late Capitalism” as merely the latest, most commodified chapter in his education in U.S. masculinity.
In “While Late Capitalism” Martínez Pompa deals directly with the infiltration of neoliberal consumer ideology into the realms of sexuality and subjectivity, as well as the way in which this consumer ideology ends up distancing us from what Hardt and Negri refer to as the
“sense of life and the desire for creativity” (23). In order to address this notion of the “sense of life and the desire for creativity,” Martínez Pompa draws on the concept of the erotic: the conflation of sexual energy and creativity seen in Freud’s concepts of sublimation and the libido, as well as in the philosophies of thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse and Audre Lorde. As I addressed in my introduction, in her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Lorde
194 defines the erotic as “an assertion of the life-force of women” and “creative energy empowered,” as well as “depth of feeling,” and the “sense of satisfaction and completion” that we may experience in relation to “our various life endeavors” (55, 54, 57). I also addressed the way in which the erotic functions as a metaphor for affect, where, to cite Lawrence Grossberg, affect is
“the strength of the investment which anchors people in particular experiences, practices, identities, meanings and pleasures, but also determines how invigorated people feel at any moment of their lives, their level of energy or passion” (82-3). In the poems of “While Late
Capitalism,” Martínez Pompa introduces the concept of the erotic to convey the extent to which consumerism and market culture have taken the place of the affective investment in contemporary U.S. society—effectively obscuring our ability to bring passion and enthusiasm to our daily life endeavors.
The poet addresses this contemporary deficit in an especially striking way in the second poem of “While Late Capitalism,” titled “Erectile Miss,” in which he utilizes the concept of the erotic in presenting sexual dysfunction as a metaphor for writer’s block. But not just any writer’s block—the writer’s block that Martínez Pompa portrays in “Erectile Miss” is the particular creative paralysis that afflicts artists and intellectuals within the hegemony of the neoliberal marketplace. The poem begins as follows: “How dare you dis my erectile / dysfunction. / It’s much too hard / to maintain/this cheap word play / -er when Donald’s trumped / up the entire cityscape” (50). Martínez Pompa’s clever use of word-play—with near constant references to the penis and erections—make this poem’s meaning feel almost overdetermined, thus bringing home the irony and hopelessness of the contemporary artist’s situation. We even see this word-play around the term “word play-er” itself. On the one hand, the streetwise voice of “Erectile Miss” is the voice of a player—a man known for his sexual prowess and one who should, theoretically,
195 have no difficulty getting “hard.” But our speaker is not just any player—he is instead a “word play/-er,” or a poet, lacking in inspiration. As the poetic voice himself tells us, “the problem is / my head, ya prick, / these loins aren’t on / fire” (50). Within the poem, the term “word play/-er” somehow also refers to the speaker’s penis/erections, which Donald Trump’s overdevelopment has made it “too hard / to maintain.” As such, in lamenting the dysfunction of his word play-er, the poetic voice fuses the decline in his sexuality with that of his creative drive, both of which he has been unable to sustain within the context of neoliberalism.
The potential reasons for the poet’s writer’s block within neoliberalism’s corporate climate are varied. As many scholars of neoliberalism have observed, one of the hallmarks of late capitalism is the emphasis that it places on the individual as the sole arbiter and manufacturer of her own destiny. In studying depression as a public structure of feeling within neoliberal society, scholars Christine Ross and Ann Cvetkovich each identify neoliberalism’s extreme emphasis on individualism as one of the social phenomena contributing to the prevalence of depression in our contemporary affective landscape. Drawing on the work of sociologist Alain Ehrenberg, Cvetkovich argues that “the discourse of [clinical vs. political] depression emerges in response to the demand that the self become a sovereign individual defined by the ability to create distinctive projects and agendas” and that “those who fail to measure up to this demand through lack of will, energy, or imagination are pathologized as depressed” (12). As Ross asserts, the over-emphasis on individualism has negative impacts on the concept of creativity itself, which, in the neoliberal context, becomes “the display of required creativity (the rule of self-creation), which is endemic to neoliberal contemporary subjectivity and may well be one of the reasons for its depressiveness” (92-3; my emphasis). Within this social and ideological climate of “required creativity,” the role of the poet becomes almost
196 mechanistic—that of a “cheap word play/-er,” or a jukebox, made to spit out rhyme and meter upon request. In this context, when the poet/word-play machine fails to produce, it inevitably appears broken or dysfunctional.
However, the creative paralysis that Martínez Pompa depicts in “Erectile Miss” has additional, more culturally-specific reasons for being. As scholars of neoliberalism have also observed, another hallmark of this economic and political paradigm is the way that it has managed to integrate any and all social and cultural production into its market logic, and used this cultural production to further its own ends. This has been particularly true for Latina/o culture, which, as Kristy Ulibarri points out, marketers have found a way to transform into a kind of brand—thus enabling them to sell aspects of Latino/a culture, including Latina/o literature, as so many exotic, new commodities. Martínez Pompa speaks to this phenomena in an earlier poem in My Kill Adore Him , appropriately titled “Commercial Break.” The poem reads as an add- campaign for “Pretty White Poetry,” an agency that specializes in selling meaningless Latina/o- sounding vocabulary to white writers to make their poems sound more exotic. It begins:
Are your images insufficient? Is your diction bland? Are you tired of writing poetry that simply does not work? If you answered yes to any of these questions, consider what a Mexican can do for you. . . . Here at Pretty White Poetry, we have an inventory of Mexicans in all shades of brown. Need an authentic-indigenous tone? Try our mud- brown, Indian Mexican. Your audience will taste the lust in Montezuma’s loins as they devour your lines. (44)
Within this market-driven climate, there is great pressure to conform to pre-set, market-based conceptions of Latinidad, and, as such, the role of the Latina/o writer becomes less that of expressing personal and cultural truths than that of meeting consumers’ expectations for cultural spice. (As the poetic voice of “Commercial Break” asserts, “even Hispanic poets sprinkle our
Latin Lingo into their writing” (44)). In addition, this commodification enables the mainstream market to coopt and thus contain the threat of difference that Latina/o and other minority cultures
197 might otherwise represent. As the poem promises, “Pretty White Poetry deals exclusively with docile, safe language. Our words are edgy, but never make liberal white readers uncomfortable— that means more publishing opportunities for you!” (45).
It is this commodification of Latina/o literature that Martínez Pompa speaks to through the concluding metaphor of “Erectile Miss”: “The problem is / my head, ya prick, / these loins aren’t on / fire. My boners / ship from Canada / in a child-resistant / vial but have you seen / what happens/to chorizo / once it’s cooked?” (50). As with his earlier reference to Donald
Trump, by declaring that his “boners ship from Canada in a child-resistant vial,” the word play- er situates his own writing—his boners—within the context of neoliberalism—or, more specifically, within the context of NAFTA—and amidst the consumer culture that this context implies. Moreover, the poet’s suggestion here that he can still get hard with the help of Canadian
Viagra but that the results of this medically-induced arousal just aren’t the same alludes to what is lost through the commodification of Latina/o literature. By conforming to the neoliberal market’s demand for marketable Latina/o culture, the poet’s writing—his metaphorical penis— has completely disintegrated—it has lost its potential to challenge or stir his readers and become devoid of any real passion or vitality. 145 Through the poem’s conclusion, Martínez Pompa thus implies that both sexuality and creativity under neoliberalism can only ever be pathetic simulations of erotic passion.
The idea of simulation as a central facet of neoliberal existence is one that Martínez
Pompa explores in other poems of “While Late Capitalism” as well, most particularly in the poem “Political Plasma,” in which he speaks to the way in which the entertainment industry functions as a cultural stand-in for the erotic in neoliberal society—that is, as a source of
145 Unlike other sausage, when cooked, Mexican chorizo separates into little pieces resembling ground beef.
198 simulated stimulation that eclipses our desire for political engagement and creativity. In
“Political Plasma” Martínez Pompa addresses the effects of the mass media on both political conviction and eroticism. Here it is useful to consider the following reflection from Lawrence
Grossberg’s We Gotta Get Outta This Place on the role of affect in politics: “Affect identifies the strength of the investment which anchors people in particular experiences, practices, identities, meanings, and pleasures. . . . it is in their affective lives that people constantly struggle to care about something, and to find the energy to survive, to find the passion necessary to imagine and enact their own projects and possibilities” (82). In “Political Plasma,” Martínez Pompa suggests that part of the effect of media bombardment is to destroy a person’s affective resolve to take political action. Thus, for the poetic voice, it is “convenient to forget my political shtick / with a
63-inch plasma hung over / my head an empty space on the wall / plugged with what you wish you had” (55). Martínez Pompa uses enjambment so that, here, the plasma TV hung over the poetic voice’s head makes him feel as though he is hung over, his head ostensibly plugged. For the poetic voice, the TV represents “a gargantuan / shindig of channels a distraction in / surround sound” which “speaks so I don’t have to waive my right to rent appliance art” (55). Channeling distraction rather than political focus, the TV speaks so that the speaker does not have to, and the distraction that the TV represents causes the poetic voice to unwittingly “waive [his] right[s]”
(55). 146 In the poem’s last lines: “I boost / my lackluster libido with a dream / machine that is always turned on,” the poet suggests that in the absence of political conviction, eroticism is also lacking, or “lackluster” (55). Like the “boners / [shipped] from Canada” in Erectile Miss,” this
146 Moreover, as a rental, the speaker’s TV represents an extreme version of temporary and fake ownership. As with buying things on credit, when renting appliances, the experience of ownership exists as an ephemeral and false illusion.
199 TV “dream machine” works to “boost” the poetic voice’s libido to produce the virtual effect of political conviction “deprived of its substance” (Žižek 11).
In this sense Martínez Pompa’s poetry resonates with Slavoj Žižek’s assessment of contemporary society as a society defined by the phenomena of virtualization. Among other instances of virtualization in contemporary culture, Žižek cites “virtual sex as sex without sex, the doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare,
[and] the contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration, that is, as politics without politics” (11). According to Žižek, this phenomena of virtualization has the tendency to result in a kind of “ideological numbness” (9), as well as in a sense of distancing from the “Real of the body,” both of which appear as central preoccupations in Martínez
Pompa’s poetry and which I have identified as an absence of the erotic (10). However, the effects of virtualization do not stop there; rather, as Žižek explains, “what happens at the end of this process of virtualization . . . is that we begin to experience ‘real reality’ itself as a virtual entity”
(11).
It is this even more insidious consequence of virtualization that Martínez Pompa takes up in his last poem of neoliberalism, “MyKillAdoreHer” (60). The poem’s title is a chilling play on the Spanish word “ maquiladora ,” which is the Spanish term for the manufacturing plants in the free trade zones, and it alludes to the exploitation and abuse that this predominantly female workforce is known to suffer at the hands of their employers. The poem consists of five sections, the first four of which capture the experiences of four different women and reveal the financialization of human life endemic to the free trade zones. The final section is a collage of phrases taken from the previous four, which brings these women’s experiences together and
200 addresses the way in which we tend to perceive these experiences from our geographically and financially distant vantage-point in the U.S.
The first section of MyKillAdoreHer establishes the extent to which maquiladora workers are expected to perform as machines and in which any deviation from this mechanical performance is grounds for termination. In this section, Lucia [sic], a worker in a garment factory, is fired from her job because, “[having broken] the machine twice in one week,” she is viewed as “no longer automatic” (60). The manager’s implication is that, like the sewing machine, Lucia is somehow broken or dysfunctional—“her stitches are crooked and once another seamstress found Lucia’s ‘lost’ sewing patterns in the trash” (60). However, upon being fired,
Lucia “[puts] on her best disappointed face” as the security guard escorts her to the door (60).
The fact that Lucia must feign her disappointment suggests that her termination is in fact her own small act of resistance against a system rigged against her—an escape from the “rows of itchy throats [and] bowed heads” that populate the factory. The only problem with this act of resistance is that, as the manager points out, the maquiladora “[gives Lucia] work” and “puts money in [her] pocket” (60). By engineering her own termination, Lucia is also leaving herself without a source of income in an environment in which there are few other employment options, making her escape only a Pyrrhic victory.
In the second section, another maquiladora worker, Elena, grows delirious with fatigue while dressing Miss Piggy dolls, whom she imagines “spit at her” (61). Her job is to “grab Miss
Piggy, pull gown over snout, fasten two tiny buttons, grab another” (61). The poem describes the severe toll that this minute, repetitive task takes on Elena’s body and her consciousness: “With each doll, Elena’s hands grow stiffer. Her feet grow heavy as the concrete below. Dolls spit at her, or maybe this is imagined, but the ache in her legs might be real. . . . After standing for
201 hours, the room begins to blur. Her mouth opens like an empty wallet as naked dolls march on”
(61). Hypnotized by the repetition, Elena becomes alienated from reality and from herself.
Standing with her mouth open as though in a complete stupor, she has been emptied out—robbed of her ability to think clearly and to identify with her own pain. By contrast, the dolls that she works on represent the complete opposite of strenuous labor. As cheaply-made bodies of molded plastic, these dolls represent recreation—pure fun—, as well as excess—they are frivolous items mindlessly bought and easily discarded. In addition, as both a true diva and a true consumer, there is perhaps no greater symbol for the American capitalist ideology than Miss Piggy. By documenting Elena’s suffering on the assembly line, this poem reveals the sinister origins of what we in the U.S. believe to be innocent fun—showing the loss of liberty that occurs on one side of the border in order to feed the rapacious demand for diversion on the other. Moreover, the fact that this loss of liberty occurs as Elena is dressing the dolls, and thus engaging in the same behavior as the American children who will acquire them, showcases the true irony of the situation. What the American children will experience as an activity of enjoyment and pure pleasure for Elena constitutes its dissolution, as, “with each doll, [her] hands grow stiffer” (61).
The third section features the burning “lungs of girls” who have undergone detox treatment after “[sucking] air thick with sulfuric acid” (62). Like Moraga’s Heroes and Saints , this stanza presents neoliberalism as it is experienced in the body as medical symptomatology:
“headaches, blurred vision, diarrhea” (62). For these girls, as for Cerezita, the experience of neoliberalism is synonymous with the insidious effects of toxins—“acetone working past unfiltered exhaust systems and through their livers” (62). Moreover, like the characters in
Moraga’s play, these girls have no choice but to continue to subject themselves to these working conditions, and “most return to work despite doctor’s orders” (62). Even worse, the poetic voice
202 implies that, in the end, the maquiladora is where they most belong, declaring that “back inside, the tin roof and their steady perspiration remind them they’re still alive—together one breathing, burning machine” (62). It is as though the bodies of these girls have been coopted so that their sole purpose and function is to provide their labor—with no regard for its impact on their health or their wellbeing. In this sense, it is as though they have become a part of the factory itself—a living machine made up of imperiled human bodies. Moreover, the girls have grown so used to this status that they are unable to recognize their own existence outside of their place inside the factory. It is only having returned to work, safely inside the maquiladora, that “the tin roof and their steady perspiration remind them they’re still alive” (62).
The fourth section suggests that the only thing worse than working in the maquiladora is when the maquiladora shuts down. While, the previous day, one could hear the “unsynchronized rhythm of coughing girls tethered to well-lubed motors,” today, “there’s nothing but . . . lint & dead machines” and “the sound of layoffs & profit margins” (63). Here Martínez Pompa uses the
‘&’ symbol to emphasize the corporate nature of the closure—the fact that, as the manager tells the workers, “the decision was made across the border” and that there is nothing to be done. For the corporate heads in the United States who made the decision to close the maquiladora, it was no more than another nondescript production site—a factory easily relocated to another country with an even cheaper labor force. Celia, a maquiladora worker witnessing the closure, desperately envisions the lint-filled factory where she worked “caught inside a tiny globe.
Something she could pick up. Shake” (63). In this fantasy, Celia expresses the desire to overturn the hierarchies of power that subordinate workers in Mexico to the whims of businessmen in the
U.S., shaking them like a tiny snow globe and thereby rearranging them into more equitable power relations.
203 In the poem’s final section, Martínez Pompa offers his readers a textual version of this imagined snow globe by weaving fragments of each of these vignettes together into a jolting stanza that magnifies the violence found in each of the previous sections. Alluding to the sexualized violence of the Ciudad Juárez femicides, as well as to the impunity existing around those deaths, this stanza mimics what one would imagine it to feel like to watch a snuff pornography film:
A perpetual conveyor, he patrols her mouth. The sound of unfiltered white. Breathing margins. The task: grab Elena’s hands. Pull. Fasten. He also offered crooked patterns. Put money in her hair. That Lucia broke. Was evidence enough? Molded vision as a refrain. An empty wallet will rise. Speak. How they exhaust systems. Despite the blurred other, the ache might be real. Something she could pick up. Across the border, nothing I can imagine. (64)
In this last section of “MyKillAdoreHer,” the decline of the erotic that we observed in the earlier poems of “While Late Capitalism” finally ends in its polar opposite: thanatos, or the death drive.
In this stanza, we see that, in a context in which the only thing that matters is financial reasoning, or the voice of “an empty wallet,” “evidence” is insufficient to bring about any kind of real change. Moreover, the last two lines of the poem mark the lacunae that exists between the suffering depicted in the poem and our ability to comprehend that suffering, which we are more likely to experience as one more virtual reality on our T.V. screens. Through what is in effect a textual snow globe of fragmented factory parts, Martínez Pompa conveys how the aforementioned process of virtualization enables consumers in the developed world to be informed of the traumatic experiences of maquiladora workers, yet remain largely inured to the emotional toll of these experiences and to the relationship this trauma has to the material conditions of our own lives. In so doing, we can continue to perceive this social and historical atrocity, as Martínez Pompa describes it here, as “nothing I can imagine” (64).
204 Fortunately, there is a difference between the common indifference that the poem depicts and the impact of the poem—the work that the poem does. By marking the distance between the reality—or the ache—of the ‘other’ and our ability to comprehend and empathize with her suffering, Martínez Pompa brings us one step closer to an awareness of our own “ideological numbness” and the possibility of breaking through it (Žižek 9). Upon seeing ourselves reflected in “MyKillAdoreHer” and the other poems of this collection, we are forced to come to terms with the devastating impacts of the neoliberal system of production and our own implication in that system. While there is still a long way to go from this basic act of recognition to a full revitalization of the erotic Stimmung of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, if we can begin to truly appreciate our own role in the story of late capitalism, we will have moved one step in the right direction.
The works that I have analyzed in this chapter—Moraga’s Heroes and Saints , Pron’s El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia , and Martínez Pompa’s My Kill Adore Him — all point the way toward revitalizing the erotic Stimmung of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, without overlooking the challenges to be encountered in the process. From culturally ingrained sexism and homophobia, to inherited defeatism, to neoliberal indifference and complacency, these works honestly depict the barriers to reengaging with the erotic Stimmung of the past, while still suggesting that this kind of reengagement is possible. In my conclusion, I move beyond an analysis of literature to reveal the way in which the revolutionary erotic is being reimagined in other kinds of media and in other areas of language and culture. In so doing, I gesture toward the extent to which the revolutionary erotic still permeates Latin American and Latina/o understandings of politics and political resistance, despite the time that has elapsed and the changes that have occurred since its high point in these cultures.
205 CONCLUSION
The question that remains to be answered is what the current status of the revolutionary erotic in Latin American and Latina/o literatures and cultures is, and where it might continue to manifest itself in the future. In the second and third chapters I described the contemporary
Stimmung that has accompanied the rise of neoliberalism in Latin America and in the United
States and demonstrated how writers have both evidenced this historical mood in their work and also written against it, encouraging their readers to resist its pernicious influence. One could argue that the influence of neoliberalism has been mitigated in the last fifteen years by the election of leftist governments throughout Latin America—a trend known in scholarly circles as the “pink tide,” and which is now waning as countries turn back toward the right. However, despite this political trend, at the literary level, Latin American writers have not resumed the overtly utopian political attitudes seen in the socially-engaged literature of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, when the pairing of eroticism and politics was at its height. In contrast, as I have indicated, contemporary Latin American authors have taken a much more skeptical view of politics, and many of them continue to grapple with the history of the leftist wave, attempting to produce an honest reckoning of its short-sightedness and failings. However, as I have also shown, amidst these skeptical reckonings with the past, one also finds works like Pron’s El espíritu de mis padres , which, despite its critical appraisal of the leftist wave’s failings, also seeks to reconnect with its erotic spirit, recognizing this affective attitude toward politics and political engagement as something worthy of being rescued. As I revealed in my analysis of Pron’s work, the members of his generation are not yet prepared to fully embrace the erotic spirit of their parents’
206 generation, as many of them are still concerned with processing the retaliation against the leftist wave—which, in the Southern Cone, appeared in the form of the dictatorships—and the long- lasting/far-reaching social and psychological consequences of these events. Nevertheless, by endeavoring to open up a dialogue between his generation and that of his parents, in which his parents and other former activists/militants can share their perspectives and motivations for becoming involved in the armed struggle, Pron’s text manifests the impetus to reclaim the erotic orientation toward politics of the 60s, 70s, and 80s and to harness it for the country’s future.
Similar to the move away from utopian narratives in Latin American literature, since the
1960s, there has been a shift in Latina/o literature from the overtly politically-engaged, anticolonial literature of the Civil Rights era to the subtler migration narratives of the 1990s. 147
Some scholars, like the anticolonialist Juan Flores, have characterized these newer narratives as wantonly apolitical and assimilationist, and argued that they are only intent on conforming to market-driven standards of universality. 148 However, other scholars, such as Raphael Dalleo,
Elena Machado Sáez, and Urayoán Noel, contend that while Latina/o literature has undergone many shifts and transmutations since the nationalist, anticolonial era of the 1960s, contemporary
Latina/o literature upholds the Civil Rights era’s legacy of political-engagement, but does so via different means. 149 As I have shown in my analysis of Martínez Pompa’s My Kill Adore Him , one of these means of contemporary political engagement is self-critique. In lamenting the way
147 For more on this shift, see Raphael Dalleo and Elena Machado Sáez’s The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature .
148 See Flores’s chapter “Life Off the Hyphen: Latino Literature and Nuyorican Traditions” in From Bomba to Hip Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity .
149 Dalleo and Machado Sáez assert that “Post-Sixties Latino/a writers are indeed reinvesting hope and possibility in their work, imagining a place for a new progressive politics while remembering the Sixties as a past wherein such possibilities were both opened and closed” (175).
207 in which neoliberalism has led to a decline in his own political involvement and awareness—to a state of political impotence, as it were—, Martínez Pompa invites his readers to engage in a similar process of self-appraisal and to renew their political engagement and conviction.
In addition to the contemporary literary manifestations of the intersection of eroticism and politics that I have explored thus far, this intersection continues to reveal itself in other realms of contemporary art and culture. In what remains of this conclusion, I will engage with some of these other fields in order to demonstrate the extent to which the concept of the revolutionary erotic continues to operate in contemporary Latin American and Latina/o political thought and cultural production. In so doing, I will show that, while the revolutionary erotic may have become less prevalent in contemporary Latin American and Latina/o literature, its influence on these contemporary cultural and political landscapes is far from over. Instead, the revolutionary erotic still has an important role to play in the political future of Latin America and that of Latinas/os in the U.S.
One of the areas in which the intersection of politics and the revolutionary erotic still appears is in contemporary Latin American political discourse. The example of this discourse that I will analyze comes from the 2009 Peruvian political convention, “Repensar la política desde América Latina: cultura, estado y movimientos sociales” ‘Rethinking Politics from inside
Latin America: Culture, State, and Social Movements,’ and, more specifically, from the round table discussion, “Perú en el escenario continental: sobre colonialidad, violencia y la izquierda”
‘Peru in the Continental Context: On Coloniality, Violence, and the Left.’ The central question put to the members of the round table is, “[¿] cuáles son las posibilidades para la construcción de un Perú mejor, más justo, equitativo, democrático y solidario, así como cuáles son los desafíos para las personas y organizaciones que quieren contribuir a ello[?]” ‘What are the possibilities
208 for the construction of a better Peru—one that is more just, equal, democratic, and solidary—as well as what are the challenges for the people and organizations that want to contribute to it?’
(305). In responding to this question, two of the participants: Edmundo Murrugarra and María
Ysabel Cedano, articulate a conception of the relationship between eroticism and politics that very closely resembles the vision of the erotic found in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera ,
Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic,” and Moraga’s Loving in the War Years .150 Like Anzaldúa,
Murrugarra critiques the way in which Spanish colonization supplanted indigenous communities’ holistic understanding of the relationship between the mind and the body, instead imposing a reason-centric vision of human thought. 151 He writes that, in this paradigm, “todo lo demás—las cosas del cuerpo, como diría el poeta—, son desvalorizadas y despreciadas” ‘everything else— things of the body, as the poet would say—, are devalued and looked down upon’ (309). In addition to denouncing the Spanish’s imposition of the Cartesian split, Murrugarra also points to the extent to which the European conception of politics is that of an activity removed from other areas of life, writing that “la política, en el esquema europeo, es una actividad muy especializada, alejada de algunas dimensiones humanas como los sentimientos, los gustos, la imaginación”
‘politics, in the European framework, is a very specialized activity—one that is cut off from some human dimensions such as feelings, tastes, and the imagination,’ and that, in its European iteration, “la política es restringida al ámbito del Estado como aparato burocrático de coacción”
‘politics is restricted to the environment of the State as a bureaucratic system of coercion’ (307).
150 Edmundo Murrugarra is a Peruvian leftist intellectual and one of the founding members of the Vanguardia Revolucionaria ‘Revolutionary Vanguard ,’ a Peruvian Marxist political party established in 1965. María Ysabel Cedano is a Peruvian lesbian socialist and feminist activist and the director of DEMUS (Estudio para la Defensa de los Derechos de la Mujer ‘Study for the Defense of Women’s Rights’).
151 Whereas Anzaldúa identifies this conception of the relationship between mind and body in the worldview of the Mexicas, Murrugarra points to it in the worldviews of Andean indigenous groups.
209 In the same way that the European mind-body dualism supplants the indigenous understanding of mind-body synergy, Murrugarra argues that this European theorization of politics as an isolated activity displaces an indigenous conception of politics that he describes as “el sincretismo de las dimensiones humanas en todas las actividades” ‘the syncretism of the human dimensions in all activities’ and as “la carnavalización de la vida” ‘the carnivalization of life’
(307). Within this syncretism of human dimensions, Murrugarra includes “las dimensiones productiva, religiosa, lúdica, artística y erótica de lo humano” ‘the productive, religious, playful, artistic, and erotic dimensions of the human’ and he points to Andean celebrations such as “la fiesta de La Candelaria en el altiplano puneño” ‘the feast of Candelaria in the Puno Region’ and
“la fiesta de San Juan en la Amazonía” ‘the feast of San Juan in the Amazon region’ as living embodiments of this erotic carnivalization (308). 152 He argues that one of the reasons the traditional Peruvian left, (la Izquierda Unida), was unsuccessful is that, in adopting a European conception of politics, it failed to take into account and address these other dimensions of life.
For this reason, “no echó raíces profundas en nuestros pueblos y culturas” ‘it didn’t grow deep roots among our people and cultures’ (308). 153 In addition to the weakening of the leftist state as a result of neoliberalism, Murrugarra credits the political mobilization of the indigenous communities as that which finally brought an end to this traditional/hegemonic version of the left. He posits that it is the influence of these communities that will revitalize and transform the left so that it is more in tune with the values and needs of all of its constituents. Like Anzaldúa’s
152 Murrugarra’s understanding of politics resonates strongly with Lorde’s assertation that “the dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is also false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic – the sensual – those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared” (56).
153 Murrugarra asserts that, by contrast, the Indo-American iteration of socialism developed by José Carlos Mariátegui did incorporate the indigenous appreciation for the relationship between politics and other areas of life. However, this version of socialism was not sustained after his death.
210 Coatlicue state, this new iteration of the left would “poner en agenda y hacer visibles todas las dimensiones de lo humano. Dimensiones que la modernidad occidental despreció, arrinconó o sepultó de acuerdo con los modelos platónico y judeocristiano dominantes” ‘advocate for and make visible all of the dimensions of the human. Dimensions that western modernity scorned, discarded, or buried according to the dominant platonic and Judeo-Christian models’ (310).
For her part, María Ysabel Cedano also calls for an eroticization of politics, defining the erotic as “energía potente de vida” ‘powerful/enabling life-energy’ (335). She also explicitly echoes Moraga’s astute summation that there is an important reason why the Catholic Church and other western religions have sought to divest women of their sexuality, writing
suele pensarse en la energía como relacionada a la electricidad, al petróleo y al gas, pero por algo la historia de las instituciones como la Iglesia ha sido la historia de la expropiación de esa fuente de energía, por la cual cada uno de nosotros(as) podríamos poder tener más capacidad creadora y de goce, contracorriente de un sistema que castra dichas capacidades e instala el padecimiento como forma de vida, quitando el deseo y esperanza, la belleza y la felicidad. (335)
one tends to think of energy as related to electricity, to oil and gas, but there is a reason why the history of institutions like the Church has been the history of the expropriation of this source of energy, through which each one of us could be able to have a greater capacity for creativity and pleasure, against the grain of a system that castrates said capacities and establishes affliction as a way of life, taking away desire and hope, beauty and happiness.
It is beyond the scope of this project to ascertain whether Murrugarra and Cedano had access to the writings of Anzaldúa, Moraga, or Lorde, or to what extent, if any, the writings of these U.S. third world feminists have permeated socialist and feminist discourses in Latin America.
However, the similarities between Anzaldúa, Moraga, and Lorde’s theorizations of the erotic and
211 its implementation by these contemporary Latin American political activists is striking and speaks to its ongoing vitality in the contemporary Latin American political landscape. 154
Another arena in which one can observe the ongoing presence of the intersection of eroticism and politics is in contemporary Latina/o theoretical writings, such as Chela Sandoval’s
Methodology of the Oppressed (2000). In Methodology of the Oppressed , Sandoval puts the work of theorists of color, such as Frantz Fanon, Lorde, Anzaldúa, and Moraga, in conversation with (canonical) Western theorists such as Frederic Jameson, Roland Barthes, and Michel
Foucault—at times, as in the case of Fanon and Barthes, showing these Western theorists to have been strongly influenced by the work of theorists of color and by the social and political movements occurring in communities of color around the world. Sandoval argues that the theorists of U.S. third world feminism writing in the 1980s, such as Lorde, Anzaldúa, and
Moraga, successfully generated a new oppositional orientation that she refers to as differential consciousness. Unlike the other oppositional orientations that she lays out—the equal-rights form, the revolutionary form, the supremacist form, and the separatist form—, all of which require their followers to adhere to a particular ideological standpoint, the differential form of consciousness and social movement enables its practitioners to take on and move through each of the preceding oppositional orientations as the situation calls for. 155 She describes the differential mode of consciousness as “like the clutch of an automobile, the mechanism that permits the
154 There does exist a known pattern of intellectual exchange between Latin American scholars and decolonial studies scholars in the U.S. One scholar who overtly brings together the work of third world feminist theorists, like Anzaldúa and Moraga, and that of the Peruvian decolonial scholar Aníbal Quijano is María Lugones in her work on the coloniality of gender.
155 For example, whereas, in the equal-rights form, “oppositional actors argue for civil rights based on the philosophy that all humans are created equally,” in the supremacist form, “the oppressed not only claim their differences, but they also assert that their differences have provided them access to a higher evolutionary level than that attained by those who hold social power” (56, 57).
212 driver to select, engage, and disengage gears in a system for the transmission of power,” and explains that “when enacted in dialectal relation to one another and not as separate ideologies, each oppositional mode of consciousness, each ideology-praxis, is transformed into tactical weaponry for intervening in shifting currents of power” (58). Moreover, as evidenced by the racial, class, and sexual diversity of the third world feminist movement, this flexible, tactical approach toward oppositional ideologies can enable what Sandoval refers to as “global transcultural coalitions for egalitarian social justice,” wherein groups with different ideological orientations are able to take these differences in stride and join forces to enact social change
(64). 156
Having laid out her theory of differential consciousness, Sandoval goes on to develop what she describes as a “hermeneutics of love in the postmodern world” (136). In order to arrive at this method of understanding, Sandoval draws on Barthes’s theory of “‘falling in love’” as he outlines it in Incidents , The Pleasure of the Text , and A Lover’s Discourse . Similar to Anzaldúa’s concept of la facultad , which is a mode of seeing that “causes a break in one’s defenses and resistance” and “takes one from one’s habitual grounding, causes the depths to open up, causes a shift in perception” (61), Barthes’s asserts that “the language of lovers” can move us beyond the realm of normative discourse—“can puncture through the everyday narratives that tie us to social time and space, to the descriptions, recitals, and plots that dull and order our senses insofar as such social narratives are tied to the law” (Sandoval 140-1). Sandoval explains that, according to
Barthes, “the act of falling in love can thus function as a ‘punctum,’ that which breaks through social narratives to permit a bleeding, meanings unanchored and moving away from their
156 In the same way that, in Libro de Manuel , Cortázar suggests that the erotic can be used to mitigate authoritarian tendencies in the socialist revolution, in Methodology of the Oppressed , Sandoval argues that differential consciousness can prevent oppositional orientations from turning into repressive dominant ideologies.
213 traditional moorings — in what, Barthes writes, brings about a ‘gentle hemorrhage’ of being
(12)” (141). Sandoval then relates Barthes’s theory of falling in love to what I have identified as the erotic in the work of thinkers such as Guevara, Anzaldúa, and Moraga. Sandoval claims that these thinkers “similarly understand love as a ‘breaking’ through whatever controls in order to find ‘understanding and community’” (140). She explains that in their works, love
is described as ‘hope’ and ‘faith’ in the potential goodness of some promised land; it is defined as Anzaldúa’s coatlicue state, which is a ‘rupturing’ in one’s everyday world that permits crossing over to another. . . . These writers who theorize social change understand ‘love’ as a hermeneutic, as a set of practices and procedures that can transit all citizen subjects, regardless of social class, toward a differential mode of consciousness and its accompanying technologies of method and social movement” (140).
By putting Guevara, Anzaldúa, and Moraga’s concept of love in conversation with Barthes’s theory of falling in love and relating these concepts to her own theory of differential consciousness, Sandoval is attempting to revitalize the political dynamism of the erotic in order to address the exigencies of the post-modern, neoliberal age. Her work recognizes the parallels between the writings of these Latin American and Latina theorists and asserts the relevance of their conceptions of the 1960s and 80s to the contemporary era. In so doing, Methodology of the
Oppressed gives renewed meaning to Guevara, Anzaldúa, and Moraga’s theorizations of the erotic, showing how their writings hold lasting value.
Thus far I have shown how the intersection of eroticism and politics continues to present itself in contemporary Latina/o theory and contemporary Latin American political thought. In addition to these more cerebral manifestations, the pairing of the erotic and the political also continues to play a significant role in other aspects of Latin American popular culture. Two modes of cultural production in which one can see the ongoing influence of the erotic and the political are street murals and popular music. I will first explore the persistence of this pairing in
214 the murals of the Chilean Brigada Ramona Parra, and then in the song “Latinoamérica” by the
Puerto Rican musical group Calle 13 ‘13 th Street.’
The Brigada Ramona Parra is a communist art organization that was formed in 1968 at the Sixth Congress of the Communist Youth of Chile. The muralists—most of them students, workers, and peasants—named their organization after Ramona Parra, a young communist activist who was killed in the Plaza Bulnes Massacre in 1946. 157 The group’s initial goal was to promote the candidate of the communist Popular Unity Party—first, Pablo Neruda and later,
Salvador Allende. During this time, la Brigada worked clandestinely, painting at night and under great time pressure to avoid arrest. Once Allende won the presidency in 1970, the cultural program of the Popular Unity party commissioned them to paint murals commemorating the government’s successes. It was during this period, working in relative safety and with government funding, that la Brigada developed their signature style.
When Pinochet seized control of Chile in 1973, la Brigada ceased its activities and many of its members went into in hiding or exile. They remained inactive until 1980, when la Brigada again took up its brushes and paint cans, this time to denounce the dictatorship. According to
“Pintaremos hasta el cielo: Colectivo Brigada Ramona Parra” ‘We will Paint until We Reach
Heaven: The Brigada Ramona Parra Collective,’ with the fall of the dictatorship in 1990, the group questioned whether or not to continue painting, wondering if its interventions were still necessary with the return to democracy. However, la Brigada soon realized that many of the repressive policies of the dictatorship—for example, its neoliberal economic policies—were perpetuated by the democratic governments that came after. Thus, they chose to remain active and continue painting to this day.
157 Over time, la Brigada grew to consist of roughly one hundred and fifty local chapters throughout the country.
215 The ongoing activity of this collaborative political art organization is representative of the lasting presence of the intersection of the erotic and the political at the grassroots level in Chile.
Both the resolute political messages of the group’s images and the organization’s collective character are in keeping with what I have described as the erotic, socially-engaged Stimmung of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Today there are still many local chapters of la Brigada Ramona Parra throughout the country, some of which are officially aligned with the Communist Party and others of which are not. A number of these local chapters have pages on Facebook, on which they post photos of the murals they have painted, as well as information about related social and political events. 158
Many of la Brigada’s contemporary murals, such as those of Allende, Víctor Jara, and
Violeta Parra, celebrate the legacy of these social activist figures and suggest the relevance of their efforts to the neoliberal present. Others, such as the 2012 mural on the Gabriela Mistral
Cultural Center, address contemporary social and political issues, such as the need for free, quality education, the nationalization of Chile’s copper industry, the rights of Chile’s indigenous communities, and the need to protect the nation’s natural resources from overexploitation. 159
158 The description of the Facebook page for “Brigada Ramona Parra Coronel-Lota” ‘The Coronel-Lota Brigada Ramona Parra’ reads “Somos la Brigada Muralista Ramona Parra! Acercamos el arte a nuestras calles, denunciando las injusticias y convocando a los vecinos! ÚNETE!” ‘We are the Muralist Ramona Parra Brigade! We bring art to our streets, denouncing injustices and summoning our neighbors! JOIN US!’
159 In May of 2015, la Brigada traveled to The Hague to paint a mural in support of Bolivia’s demand for a waterway to the Pacific Ocean. This mural, which features a condor flying freely over the waterway, and an indigenous figure reaching out his hands to receive the gift of a small paper boat, conveys the group’s desire to overcome the long held conflicts between Chile and Bolivia in the interest of building regional solidarity.
216
Figure 1. Mural by la Brigada Ramona Parra on the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center. GAM: Centro de las artes, la cultura y las personas. Web. 9 July 2018.
Most of la Brigada’s paintings are characterized by bright rainbow colors and figures with prominent facial features, and adorned with the star of the Chilean flag. Far from the dour, monochromatic propaganda posters associated with other communist regimes, this playful, festive iconography is consistent with the celebratory tone that I have identified as part of the revolutionary erotic and have described in works such Julio Cortázar’s Libro de Manuel and
Gioconda Belli’s “Hasta que seamos libres.” One could even argue that, through their vibrant colors and uplifting images, la Brigada’s murals effectively carnivalize the city—making it into an increasingly ludic public space. 160 (Where one expects to find the drudgery of gray, cement
160 Here we are reminded of the passage from Libro de Manuel on Lonstein’s phosphorescent mushroom, in which Cortázar’s characters assert the importance of beauty and spontaneity to the revolutionary cause: “Capaz que tipos como Marcos y Oscar . . . estaban en la Joda por Manuel, quiero decir que lo hacían por él, por tanto Manuel en tanto rincón del mundo, queriendo ayudarlo a que algún día entrara en un ciclo diferente y a la vez salvándole algunos restos del naufragio total, . . . la superfluidad de ciertas hermosuras, de ciertos hongos en la noche, de lo que podía dar todo su sentido a cualquier proyecto de futuro ” (183; my emphasis).
217 walls, one is instead encounters rainbow images of guitars, doves, and suns). In so doing, the murals suggest that engaging in political activism can also be a ludic experience. One of la
Brigada’s signature slogans, “Con la alegría de luchar” ‘With the Joy of the Struggle,’ explicity points to this affective dimension of political engagement—the erotic sense of joy and purpose that can come from championing a political cause. The rainbow of colors of this mural further convey this sense of joy and purpose—the “alegría” proudly proclaimed in the slogan. It is as though the very act of striving for social justice has made them resplendent—that, in fighting for a better future they have become brightly colored, vivid, and more beautiful. The fact that these figures’ upturned faces are depicted against a blue sky and above tiny houses also imparts the impression of flight—of soaring above the city below—reminding one of the titular line from
Pron’s novel, “[el] espíritu [de mis padres y sus compañeros] . . . iba a seguir subiendo en la lluvia hasta tomar el cielo por as alto” ‘[the] ghost [of my parents and their comrades] . . . was going to keep climbing in the rain until it took the heavens by storm’ (186; Lethem 198). Like
Pron’s parents, the spirit of the people depicted in this mural is climbing in accordance with the strength of their conviction—they are climbing toward the promise of justice and equality, and they will not be deterred.
“It could even be that types like Marcos and Oscar . . . were in the Screwery because of Manuel, I mean that they were doing it for him, for every Manuel in every corner of the world, trying to help him so that someday he would enter a different cycle and at the same time saving for him a few remains of the total shipwreck, . . . the superfluousness of certain things of beauty, of certain mushrooms in the night, by means of which he could give complete meaning to any future project ” (Rabassa 185; my emphasis).
218
Figure 2. Mural by la Brigada Ramona Parra on Sebastopol Street on the corner of Santa Rosa in San Joaquín, Chile. Photo by Felipe Burgos Álvarez. Web. 9 July 2018.
La Brigada’s murals also place a strong emphasis on collective action. One can see this reflected in the mural on the Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center which features individual figures representing each of the different causes being promoted—for example, a miner representing the nationalization of Chile’s copper industry and a student representing free, quality education (Fig.
1). Each of these stoic individuals is surrounded by many uplifted arms—the arms surrounding the miner brandish picks and mallets like swords, and those surrounding the student wield books and pencils. These many arms raised as if going into battle convey a strong sense of collectivity—that many people are working together to achieve these goals—, as well as a sense of resolve—that they will not easily back down from the fight. One could also argue that la
Brigada’s rainbow colors convey the theme of unity in diversity. In the mural featuring the slogan “Con la alegría de luchar,” each strand of the five figures’ hair and each segment of their faces is painted a different color (Fig. 2). This polyphony of color conveys the sense that each of
219 these figures in fact represents many people—of different races, backgrounds, and creeds—and that all of these diverse individuals are united in their desire for a brighter, communist future.
The placement of these murals on the streets where passersby cannot help but see them regularly makes it so that erotic Stimmung of the 1960s, 70s, 80s has an unavoidable presence in contemporary Chilean culture. Their placement on the streets—amidst the everyday comings and goings of the city—also conveys to observers the sense that the work of the communist party is still going all around them, although they might not immediately perceive it. The reception of la
Brigada’s murals is no doubt mixed—some must surely recoil at the ongoing presence of communist propaganda in their midst. Nevertheless, these murals make it so that the neoliberal
Stimmung of contemporary Chile is not uniform but is instead punctured by vestiges of the older political culture.
The final contemporary example of the intersection of eroticism and politics that I will explore is Calle 13’s 2011 song “Latinoamérica” ‘Latin America.’ The Puerto Rican band Calle
13 is a hip-hop group made up of the stepbrothers René Pérez Joglar and Eduardo José Cabra
Martínez. They first attained widespread popularity with their 2005 album “Calle 13” and have gone on to win twenty-one Latin Grammy Awards and three Grammy Awards. Two of these
Latin Grammys were granted for their song “Latinoamérica”—winner of both Record of the
Year and Song of the Year. In “Latinoamérica,” the group builds on the legacy of the Nueva
Canción protest songs, proclaiming the singular beauty, talent, and resiliency of Latin America and its people and its refusal to be exploited by the agents of imperialism. 161 Both the song itself and its accompanying music video warrant critical analysis, as both mirror elements of the
161 One thinks of such songs as Leon Gieco’s “Sólo le pido a Dios” ‘I Only Ask of God’ and Armando Tejada Gómez and César Isella’s “Canción con todos” ‘A Song with Everyone’ as sung by Mercedes Sosa.
220 literary intersection of eroticism and politics and thus harken back to the socially-engaged
Stimmung of the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
One of the central themes explored in both the lyrics and the music video for
“Latinoamérica” is the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of the Latin American people. The video starts by pointedly foregrounding Latin America’s indigenous population—a population, as Murrugarra asserts, whose unique and pre-existing social and political constructions were often overlooked by the Latin American left. It opens with Pérez Joglar and Cabra Martínez walking uphill along a dirt road in the Andes towards a tiny wooden radio station. The image of them approaching the station is overlaid with the dj’s broadcast announcing Calle 13’s live studio performance of “Latinoamérica” in Quechua and Pérez Joglar thanking him, also in
Quechua. The choice to open the video in this Andean radio station, as opposed to in a radio station in Calle 13’s native Puerto Rico, establishes a strong sense of regional interconnectedness that is pursued throughout the song and the video—providing what amounts to a visual and lyrical rendition of Martí’s “Nuestra América.” 162
The song itself begins with very simple and understated percussion that simulates the rhythm of a heartbeat (a simulation made overt by the image of a heart pumping in time with the beat in the music video). Similar to Belli’s “Hasta que seamos libres,” the first-person poetic voice—the beating heart—of “Latinoamérica” is both that of a people and that of the entire region. This sense of the poetic voice as both that of the region and of its people is underscored by the music video’s constantly circulating images of racially and ethnically distinct Latin
Americans—first facing themselves in the mirror in an act of self-recognition— and then
162 In his essay “Nuestra América” ‘Our America,’ José Martí advocates solidarity between the countries of Latin America in order to be able to resist the United States’ subordinating influence.
221 walking across Latin America’s diverse landscape and engaging in a variety of activities, including work, recreation, and religious worship. When listened to in tandem with these images, the poetic voice becomes that of all of these people, as well as that of the landscape they are traversing. The song’s hip-hop genre also lends itself to this cosmic representation of Latin
America in that it enables Pérez Joglar to structure the song as a list of many distinct attributes and elements that characterize the region, and to tie these together to form a whole.
Like Martí’s “Versos sencillos” ‘Simple Verses’ and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,”
“Latinoamérica” is a song of identity and self-pride written in a testimonial mode. With lines like the song’s opening lyrics, “Soy/Soy lo que dejaron/Soy toda la sobra de lo que te robaron” ‘I am/I am what they left/I am all that’s leftover from what they stole from you,’ “Latinoamérica” focuses on both the fact of Latin America’s exploitation by the Spanish and Portuguese and then by the U.S., as well as Latin America’s resistance to such exploitation—declaring, ‘I am what was left behind, what endured.’ 163 In testifying to this endurance, much like Belli’s Línea de fuego , the song celebrates the majesty and durability of Latin America’s diverse landscapes,
asserting, “La espina dorsal del planeta es mi cordillera” ‘The backbone of the planet is my
mountain range,’ “[Tengo] La nieve que maquilla mis montañas” ‘[I have] The snow that adorns
163 Later in the song, Pérez Joglar specifically refers to the United States’ role in Operation Condor: “Operación Cóndor invadiendo mi nido/Perdono pero nunca olvido, oye” ‘Operation Condor invading my nest/I forgive but I never forget, listen.’ According to The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World , Operation Condor was “a top- secret arrangement among South American military intelligence agencies, formally launched in 1975 . . . It was a highly sophisticated system of command, control, intelligence, and exchange of prisoners, formed to control opposition to member governments. . . . According to archives discovered in Paraguay in 1992, Operation Condor operations were responsible for over fifty thousand murders, thirty thousand ‘disappeared,’ and four hundred thousand incarcerations from 1974 to 1978” (516-17). The full extent of the United States’ involvement in Operation Condor has yet to be determined, in part because the CIA and the Pentagon have been unwilling to declassify key records. However, it is clear that “at the least the United States supported and may have provided resources to some operations” (516-17). Moreover, some scholars, such as J. Patrice McSherry, argue that the U.S. played a much larger role in the operation—that “Operation Condor was a top-secret component of a larger inter-American counterinsurgency strategy—led, financed, and overseen by Washington—to prevent and reverse social and political movements in Latin America in favor of structural change” (208).
222 my mountains,’ and, later, “Soy el mar Caribe que vigila las casitas/Haciendo rituales de agua bendita” ‘I am the Caribbean sea that watches over the little houses/Doing rituals of holy water.’
The song suggests that, just as Latin America’s natural beauty has withstood repeated plunder by imperial forces, so has the Latin American’s physical body, and that part of what has allowed the
Latin American body to withstand such plunder is its synchrony with the natural world. Pérez
Joglar sings, “mi piel es de cuero por eso aguanta cualquier clima” ‘my skin is made of leather which is why it withstands any weather’ and celebrates “las muelas de mi boca mascando coca”
‘the molars of my mouth chewing coca’ and “mis pulmones respirando azul clarito” ‘my lungs breathing clear blue.’ Like the erotic drive of Moraga’s Cerezita, which flourishes despite her impaired physical state, the poetic voice’s resolute corporeality appears as an extension of the natural landscape and, like the natural landscape, it stands in defiance of the threat of repression. 164
The song’s emphasis on Latin Americans’ synchrony with nature appears especially clearly in a sequence of images in the music video that appear toward the end of the song. We first see the real feet of a child standing on the roots of a tree. Then the image shifts to an animation, presumably of the same tree, portrayed as a woman, whose foliage is her leafy-green hair. This tree goddess plants a seed in the ground at her feet which immediately turns into a beating heart—thereby harkening back to the beating heart featured at the beginning of the song—and then an infant, both of which are depicted as being still inside the earth. The camera then zooms in on the infant’s eye, suggesting that we are seeing into the infant’s future, and we
164 The multitudinous images of active Latin American bodies in the music video further underscore these lyrics. Moreover, the song suggests that both the Latin American landscape and the Latin American people have not only been able to survive but to thrive, producing “una viña repleta de uvas” ‘a vineyard replete with graphes’ and “versos escritos bajo la noche estrellada” ‘verses written beneath the starry sky.’
223 are then faced with the image of the same real child whose feet we saw at the beginning of the sequence now standing on a tall tree stump and resolutely raising his arms into the air as though he himself were a tall, strong tree. This sequence of images, which depicts the Latin American child born into the earth and emerging from the earth yet still connected to it, is highly reminiscent of Moraga’s discourse of the miracle people in that both texts emphasize their people’s harmonious relationship with the natural world and suggest that this relationship is a source of strength and courage that will allow them to resist oppression. 165
All of these themes come to a head in the song’s chorus:
Tú no puedes comprar el viento Tú no puedes comprar el sol Tú no puedes comprar la lluvia Tú no puedes comprar el calor Tú no puedes comprar las nubes Tú no puedes comprar los colores Tú no puedes comprar mi alegría Tú no puedes comprar mis dolores You cannot buy the wind You cannot buy the sun You cannot buy the rain You cannot buy the heat You cannot buy the clouds You cannot buy the colors You cannot buy my happiness You cannot buy my pain
Having equated Latin America with the natural world, here, Calle 13 insists that this Latin
America—which is the natural world—is one that cannot be bought or sold. In so doing,
165 As I describe in my third chapter, Moraga’s Heroes and Saints concludes with the protagonist, Cerezita’s, sermon about the miracle people, a Native community whose insufficient harvest symbolizes both the land-based struggles of certain indigenous communities in Latin America and the environmental racism experienced by her own community in the U.S. The benefit of Latin Americans’ harmonious relationship with the natural world also comes through in the following lyrics: “el jugo de mi lucha no es artificial/porque el abono de mi tierra es natural” ‘the juice of my struggle is not artificial/because my land’s fertilizer is natural.’ Lastly, in having the chorus sung by two older female vocalists, Afro-Peruvian Susana Baca and Afro-Colombian Totó la Momposina, who are both dressed in long, flowing robes, the song alludes to the presence of a telluric female goddess like the tree goddess featured in the sequence described above, suggesting that the voice of the Americas is both maternal and feminine.
224 “Latinoamérica” both condemns and resists the conditions of neocolonization inflicted on the region by U.S. and European corporations that have taken advantage of neoliberal market reforms and deregulation to displace national competitors and to exploit the region’s natural resources. Singing of the wind and the rain, the sun and the clouds, the song moves beyond the landscape to the elements—to that which clearly surpasses any external power’s ability to purchase or control. Among these entitites that defy exploitation, the song includes “mi alegría” and “mis dolores”—that is, the lived experiences and inner lives of the Latin American people.
By asserting that the joy and pain of Latin Americans cannot be purchased/is not for sale,
“Latinoamérica” gestures to the complexity and richness of each Latin American’s inner life—to the fact that each person has a story and that the truth of this story is in a sense greater/more powerful than the financial weight of any U.S. corporation. The music video works to further emphasize these lyrics with a sequence of close-up images of Latin Americans of different ages and ethnicities looking unblinkingly into the camera. This sequence of images of different Latin
American faces, which appear at the end of the song as the orchestra swells behind them, conveys a powerful sense of strength and steadfastness—as though accompanied by the iconic line “we shall not be moved.” By allowing the viewer/listener to look directly into each individual’s eyes—and thus to metaphorically perceive their life experience—these images visually echo the song’s message that Latin America is a region of survivors and that Latin
Americans’ existential lives are not and will never be defined by neocolonial powers.
When taken together—the lyrics, which conclude with the assertions “Aquí se respira lucha” ‘Here we breath the struggle,’ “Vamos dibujando el camino” ‘We go drawing the way forward,’ and “Aquí estamos de pie” ‘Here we are standing;’ the images of Latin Americans going about their lives with joy and purpose; and the music underscored by the rhythm of the
225 beating heart—“Latinoamérica” conveys the sense of a strong erotic drive animating the entire region. The song suggests that it is this erotic force that has enabled Latin Americans to survive, and even thrive, in the face of U.S. imperialist endeavors, and that will enable them to build a more equitable future for future generations.
It is particularly intriguing to consider the political orientation of “Latinoamérica” in light of Calle 13’s other musical production. The group has released other songs with equally strong political messages, such as “Querido FBI” ‘Dear FBI’ and “Pa’l Norte” ‘To the North.’
However, Calle 13 is also known for extremely misogynistic numbers such as “Atrévete-te-te”
‘Be Daring,’ which, with lyrics such as “Súbete la minifalda hasta la espalda” ‘Lift your miniskirt up to your back,’ blatantly objectify women. Thus, one would not necessarily expect them to champion some of the same ideas as U.S. third world feminist scholars. One possible interpretation of this apparent contradiction is that they are gaming the neoliberal market-based system. By producing traditional hip-hop songs like “Atrévete-te-te,” they have won widespread popularity, giving them an international platform from which to launch their more critical, political messages, which might otherwise reach only a small, local fan base. Another possibility is that, as artists, they are simply complex individuals who feel entitled to voicing seemingly incompatible perspectives—to being both misogynistic and politically left at the same time.
Whatever the reason, what this contradiction denotes is that, as scholars, we shouldn’t lose faith in the persistence of the revolutionary erotic, but instead be aware that it may emerge from unexpected, even problematic, sources and that we should be ready to engage with it there as well.
One might ask how we should read these contemporary cultural manifestations of the revolutionary erotic given that they are out of keeping with the contemporary neoliberal
226 Stimmung . On the one hand it would be easy to dismiss these expressions of the erotic as mere instances of nostalgia—and in fact they do evoke a longing for the political and cultural climate of the 60s, 70s, and 80s when a new era of freedom and equality seemed right around the corner.
Yet these contemporary expressions of the erotic are not wistful or melancholy—they do not present the revolutionary erotic as a relic of the past never to be revisited. Instead, these - contemporary expressions of the erotic—the works of literature analyzed in chapter three, as well as Murrugarra and Cedano’s political discourse, Sandoval’s theory, la Brigada’s murals, and
Calle 13’s music—meet people where they are and point the way toward a renewed investment in the politics of participative democracy. As they did in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, these manifestations of the revolutionary erotic offer people an alternative to the complacency and indifference—or demoralization and paralysis—of the contemporary neoliberal Stimmung —and, seen through them, a brighter, more equitable, and socially just future one again seems possible.
This brighter future may not come suddenly via revolution as people expected it to in the 60s,
70s, and 80s—that route has been sufficiently exhausted and shown to have horrendous, unforeseen consequences. Yet while people continue to have hope for this brighter future and continue to work toward its realization, positive social change will continue to take place and the revolutionary erotic will live on.
227 WORKS CITED
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