Sarduy Avec Lacan: the Portrayal of French Psychoanalysis in Cobra and La Simulacio´N

Sarduy avec Lacan: The Portrayal of French Psychoanalysis in Cobra and La simulacio´n

rube´n gallo princeton university

his essay will explore the relationship between Severo Sarduy and Jacques TLacan—a pairing that most readers might find odd and discordant. One was a mischievous Cuban writer known for his wild novels about transvestites and campy women; the other, a severe French intellectual famous for his extraordi- narily complex psychoanalytic writings. Sarduy was born to a humble family in the provincial town of Camaguëy; Lacan, to an elegant couple of haute bourgeois Parisians. One was known for drinking cocktails at the Cafe´ de Flore, on Saint Germain des Pre`s; the other for teaching seminars on castration, transference, and the phallus at the university. One published novels with titles like Pa´jaros de la playa; the other, academic articles devoted to ‘‘The gaze as objet petit a’’ and ‘‘The function of the ‘I.’’’ Could these two writers have anything in common? Despite their extremely different styles, Sarduy and Lacan crossed paths several times during the height of Structuralism, and they influenced each other’s work. As I will argue in this essay, Sarduy developed a serious dialogue with Lacan and his psychoanalytic concepts in his novels and essays. Although most scholarship on Severo Sarduy mentions the fact that he was an avid reader of Jacques Lacan (see, for example, the texts by Montero, Gonza´lez Echevarrıá, and Ma´rquez), no one has provided a detailed account of how the Cuban novelist read and transformed the work of the French analyst. In this essay I propose to undertake such a project by focusing on two works, a novel and an essay: Cobra (1971) and La simulacioń (1981). After identifying the key allusions to Lacan and Lacanian concepts in these two works, I will argue that Sarduy was one of the most original readers of the French analyst, because his work proposes a radical, new model for interpreting many of the analyst’s theoretical formulations. Severo Sarduy arrived in Paris in 1960 after receiving a scholarship from the newly formed Cuban government to study at the Ećole de Beaux Arts in Paris. Shortly after his arrival, he met the man who would be his lover for the rest of his life: François Wahl, an editor at the French publishing house E´ ditions du Seuil, who introduced Sarduy to the stars of Parisian intellectual life in the 1960s, including Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, and other members of 36 Revista Hispańica Moderna 60.1 (2007)

Tel Quel, the avant-garde journal that played a crucial role in the development of structuralist thought. Sarduy also met Jacques Lacan, who had an especially close relationship with E´ditions du Seuil: Wahl had spent the six years between 1954 and 1960 in analysis with Lacan, had attended most of his weekly seminars first at Sainte Anne and later at the Ećole Normale Supe´rieure, and it was he who convinced the analyst—who had such an aversion to putting his ideas in writing that he referred to publishing as ‘‘poubellication’’(Roudinesco 471)—to gather the selection of lectures, conference papers, and seminars in the famous volume released in 1966 under the title Ećrits (419). During the mid sixties Wahl worked very closely with Lacan correcting, edit- ing, and annotating the essays that were to be included in E´ crits. It was an intense collaboration, and during these years Sarduy was constantly exposed to Lacan’s ideas and also to his eccentricities. Wahl remembers that the analyst would call him at all hours, sometimes waking him up in the middle of the night to discuss a new idea or ask him for advice with a text (Wahl, ‘‘Severo’’ 1485; Gallo 52)— nocturnal interruptions that Sarduy did not appreciate. Through his lengthy collaboration with Wahl, Lacan, too, was exposed to Sar- duy’s ideas and to his literary and cultural interests. It was probably Sarduy, an enthusiast of Spanish poetry, who introduced the analyst to the works of Luis de Gońgora, the baroque Spanish poet. Reading Gońgora made such an impression on the analyst that once, when a reader complained that his ideas were too complex, he responded by saying that his work was indeed difficult to the point of making him a ‘‘Gońgora of psychoanalysis!’’ (Lacan, E´ crits 467). Wahl remembers that Lacan had a deep affection for Sarduy. Once, during an analytic session, as Wahl told Lacan about a nearly fatal car accident he and Sarduy had suffered during a vacation to Tangiers in 1968 and recounted how they held hands while the car spun in the air, the usually cold analyst was moved to tears. As Wahl told historian Elisabeth Roudinesco,

Ce fut un accident miraculeux. Tout est parti en l’air et nous nous en sommes sortis indemnes. Pendant l’accident, Severo m’a pris la main d’une certaine fac¸on, tendre et protectrice, et quand j’ai raconte´ cela a` Lacan, il s’est mis a` pleurer: «Dieu sait que je ne crois pas au pathos amoureux, dit-il, mais cette histoire me fend le cœur.» (Roudinesco 420)

[The accident was a miracle. Everything went up in the air but we came out of it unharmed. During the accident Severo took my hand in a certain way that was tender and protective, and when I told this to Lacan he started crying: ‘‘God knows I don’t believe in romantic pathos, but this story melts my heart.’’]

Roudinesco cites this episode in her biography of Lacan to show that he had a soft spot for gay men, but we can also interpret it as evidence that Sarduy occupies a crucial place Lacan’s life as the only man who ever made him cry. If Sarduy made a deep emotional impression on Lacan, Lacan’s ideas left an gallo, Sarduy avec Lacan 37 even deeper mark on Sarduy. Lacanian concepts appear not only in his essays an theoretical writings, but also in his novels, which reproduce the diagrams, technical terms, and charts that made Lacan’s teaching famously difﬁcult. Some of the most intriguing references to the work of Lacan appear in Sarduy’s Cobra (1972) and La simulacio´n (1981), two works that reveal a deep engagement with French psychoanalysis.

Cobra

Sarduy’s first references to Lacan appear in Cobra, his third novel, published in 1972 and translated into French by Philippe Sollers. Cobra is an experimental and hallucinogenic text depicting a campy world of drag queens and gender- bending characters who emerge out of a ‘‘Lyrical Theater of the Dolls’’ to prance around the world. It combines the neo-baroque language of a Lezama Lima with the theoretical concepts of the Tel Quel group, including Lacanian terminology. Early in the novel, for instance, the narrator announces that Eustaquio, an In- dian man who lives among the drag queens in the Lyrical Theater of the Dolls, ‘‘ha puesto entre pareńtesis sus vehıćulos soma´ticos’’; for the benefit of those who missed the psychoanalytic innuendo, Sarduy adds: ‘‘Aunque para el placer bastan los bordes—Lacan se lo explico´ un dıá—poco disfruta de los suyos el as del ramillete’’ (27). As François Wahl has explained (1485), one of Cobra’s most explicit references to Lacan can be found in the character of Ktazob, an elusive doctor known for performing sex-change operations. Halfway through the novel, Cobra and her sidekick embark in search of Ktazob, a difficult quest, since no one knows how to find him. La Cadillac, another drag queen from the ‘‘Lyrical Theater of the Dolls,’’ warns Cobra that finding the doctor will be a nearly impossible task. Ktazob, she tells her, is

[C]omo una carta robada que la policı´a no encuentra porque esta´ expuesta sobre la chimenea, como el nombre del paı´s entero, que nadie ve en el mapa, Ktazob se oculta en lo ma´s visible, en el centro del centro. (99)

This initial description of Ktazob contains several references to Lacan: like the psychoanalyst, Sarduy’s character is a famous doctor who has become somewhat of a myth: everyone talks about him, but there are different—and often contra- dictory—accounts about his ideas and his clinical practices. Like Cobra and her friend, many patients embarked on complicated journeys in the hope of meeting Lacan and being accepted as analysands. But the most obvious hint that Ktazob might be a stand-in for the analyst comes when La Cadillac compares the elusive doctor to ‘‘una carta robada,’’ using the title of one of Lacan’s most famous papers: the ‘‘Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’,’’ a reading of Edgar Alan Poe’s story and a text that Lacan considered so important that he chose it as the open- ing text for his E´ crits. Poe’s ‘‘The Purloined Letter’’ revolves around the elusiveness of a stolen docu- 38 Revista Hispańica Moderna 60.1 (2007) ment: an army of policemen searches for it to no avail, until a brilliant detective finds it and reveals that all along it had been hidden in plain sight. Lacan read Poe’s story as an allegory of psychoanalysis: an exercise designed to help analysands find that which they cannot see—the workings of the unconscious—even though it is placed in front of their eyes. Like the hero of Poe’s tale, the psychoanalyst is a detective who solves the mystery and makes visible what seemed doomed to remain invisible. Lacan was so passionate in his reading of Poe’s ‘‘Purloined letter’’ as a metaphor for psychoanalysis that Jacques Derrida once wrote an article titled ‘‘Le facteur de la ve´rite´’’ accusing the analyst doing vio- lence to Poe’s text by forcing it into the mold of analytic concepts and ignoring the complexity of its literary devices.1 In this brief reference to the ‘‘Seminar on the ‘Purloined Letter’,’’ Sarduy suggests an analogy between Lacan and the stolen letter. The analyst had argued that ‘‘The Purloined Letter’’ was a metaphor for analytic work; Sarduy alters the terms slightly and turns ‘‘the purloined letter’’ into a metaphor not of analysis but of the analyst whom everyone wants to see (but very few people are lucky enough to actually meet). By setting up the purloined letter as a metaphor for Lacan, Sarduy suggests an even more mischievous reading: one of the most sur- prising aspects of Poe’s story is that we never get to actually read the contents of the letter—we follow the twists and turns of the drama and get to the end of the tale without ever finding out what the missive actually said. Lacan was fascinated by this aspect of Poe’s letter, and he saw the concealment of the message as a proof of the primacy of the signifier, which can circulate and lead to elaborate plots regardless of its actual content. Extending this chain of associations, Cobra suggests that the master’s Ecrits are a form of purloined letter: a text that circulated widely and gave rise to countless melodramatic plots but whose contents no one had actually read. Despite the author’s fame, the meaning of Lacan’s texts—like the contents of the purloined letter—remains inscrutable. Here Cobra seems to reinforce the myth of Lacan as an impenetrable theoretician whose baroque texts remain inaccessible even to his most faithful followers. There are several other aspects of Ktazob that evoke the figure of Lacan: Kta- zob is a cigar-smoking dandy: ‘‘tenıá el pelo plateado, era adicto a las vin˜etas villaclarenãs de Partaga´s y a los a´rboles de subordinados’’; he wears ‘‘un sue´ter negro, apretado [ . . . ] lentes; pupilas de palomo’’ (105); like the father of psychoanalysis he smokes a cigar, and, like certain infamous analysts, Ktazob displays an unusual cruelty toward the patients who come to him. His treatment of Cobra and Pup includes burning, gagging, hanging, and other forms of unusual punishments—examples of the ‘‘pain, torture, and defilement’’ that Rene´ Prieto has identified as key concerns in Sarduy’s writings (Prieto 136). At one point, the doctor throws Pup into a barrel of ice and suspends Cobra from the ceiling:

1 Derrida’s essay, in turn, generated impassioned responses by other critics. Most of the resulting texts—along with Poe’s original story—were compiled by Muller and Richardson in The Purloined Poe. gallo, Sarduy avec Lacan 39

Vamos a tener que sumergirla durante nueve dıás en un barril de hielo y atragantarla con sustancias pasivas, y a usted, Cobra, sus- penderla por el mismo tiempo al techo con una mordaza de trapecista para que pueda alcanzar las revoluciones requeridas, y mantenerla a sangre de puerco fresca, a ver si ası´ obtenemos al menos una corres- pondencia biunı´voca que nos permita, llegado el momento de la in- tervencioń, y si la enana blanca ha sido lo suficientemente debilitada, soldańdola a una placa de amianto, canalizar correctamente el curso del dolor. (Cobra 108–9)

Ktazob continues to apply these baroque tortures—while pontificating in pseudo-scientific jargon—until ‘‘Cobra cayo´ deshuesada, un lıó de ropa sucia, plana sobre el piso’’ (110). This caricature of Ktazob as a heartless and cruel physician who conducts sadistic experiments on his patients recalls the portrait of Lacan painted by some of his fiercest critics: a cold analyst, more interested in equations and diagrams than in the wellbeing of his patients; a narcissistic and self-obsessed man who treated his analysands as guinea pigs. From the early years of his practice, Lacan was a controversial therapist, and his unorthodox experiments with the analytic frame were harshly criticized by the Freudian orthodoxy. One of Lacan’s most contentious innovations was the ‘‘short’’ or variable-length session, which went against one of the fundamental rules of Freudian teaching. Freud had insisted that analytic sessions always last fifty minutes, and that they should be marked by a strict regularity, conducted every day of the week at the same time, at the same place, and in the same manner. Lacan, in contrast, argued that analysts should have the freedom to vary the time and length of sessions. According to Roudinesco, Lacan spent an aver- age of half an hour with each patient, though as his fame and his fee increased his sessions shrunk to minimalist consultations lasting no more than a few minutes. The short session became such a controversial affair that in 1963 the Inter- national Psychoanalytic Association expelled Lacan from its ranks, an affair that the analyst denounced as an ‘‘excommunication’’ (Roudinesco 339–40). Critics argued that Lacan’s short sessions—like Ktazob’s experiments—made patients suffer. Roudinesco has described how by the late seventies the short sessions had become an ‘‘analysis degree zero’’ that left his patients wandering about his consulting room like zombies and waiting for their turn in a crowded waiting room:

Lacan prit l’habitude de ne plus donner des rendez-vous a` heure ﬁxe et l’appartement de la rue de Lille se transforma en une sorte d’asile ou` chacun circulait parmi les revues d’art, les livres, et les collections. (500)

[Lacan stopped giving appointments at ﬁxed hour and his apartment on rue de Lille became an asylum of sorts in which patients wandered among art magazines, books, and the collections of objects.] 40 Revista Hispa´nica Moderna 60.1 (2007)

Ktazob’s sadistic treatment of Cobra brings to mind another scandal that tar- nished Lacan’s practice: the suicides of many of his patients and trainees. In 1965 Lucien Sebag, one of his analysands, committed suicide. Others followed suit, and in the mid seventies Juliette Labin, one of Lacan’s own trainees and an analyst of the EFP (the break-away psychoanalytic society which he founded after his expulsion from the IPA), poisoned herself (Roudinesco 400; 494). Lacan had a higher rate of patient suicides than any other analyst in France, and many of his critics saw a connection between his experimental practice and the sad fate of many of his analysands: they painted him as a cold, uncaring analyst, unable to relate to patients on a human level. They myth of Lacan as a detached clinician has inspired many literary portraits, including a scathing passage in Philippe Sollers’ Femmes (1983), where the analyst appears under the guise of a character named Fals (as in ‘‘false,’’ a comment on the status of his therapeutic techniques):

Il avait des histoires a` dormir debout avec ses colle`gues, ses e´le`ves, les institutions, les journaux [ . . . ] On l’accusait d’un peu tout; charlatanisme, trafic d’influence, utilisation tordue du transfert, sor- cellerie, drogue, chantages, suicides [ . . . ] Il faut dire que son entre- prise e´tait agiteé [ . . . ] Inte´ressante a` observer en tout cas [ . . . ] E´minemment romanesque [ ...](89)

[He had endless conﬂicts with his colleagues, his students, schools, newspapers [ . . . ] He was accused of just about everything: being a con artist, conﬂicts of interest, manipulating the transference, witch- craft, drugs, blackmailing, suicides [ ...]Hisprofessional life was quite agitated [ . . . ] But interesting to observe [ . . . ] Very novelistic.]

Julia Kristeva painted a similar portrait of the maıˆtre a` penser in Les Samouraı¨s (1990), her roman a` clef about Parisian intellectual life in the sixties and seventies. Lacan appears in the novel as Maurice Lauzun, a narcissistic intellectual who puts his mistress above his patients and his work. ‘‘Cet homme n’a jamais e´te´ aime´ et il croit que c’est normal,’’ observes one of the characters about Lacan- Lauzun (206). [This man has never been loved and he considers this normal]. A similar portrait of Lacan as a sadistic doctor appears in Mexican novelist Jorge Volpi’s El fin de la locura (2003), a novel about intellectual life in Mexico and France during the 1960s: ‘‘Para sus crı´ticos, Lacan se asemejaba ma´s bien a una serpiente, la encarnacioń de la fatuidad y la sevicia’’ (86). Not everyone, however, agrees with these negative assessments of Lacan’s clinical practice. Some of his patients, especially the ones who worked with him before his astronomical rise to fame, have portrayed him as a caring analyst. Georges Bernier, who was Lacan’s first patient and underwent an analysis that lasted from 1933 to 1939, recalls him as engaged and sympathetic. Lacan had, writes Bernier,

une manie`re a` la fois de fusionner avec le patient, de ne pas analyser le transfert, ou d’e´changer avec lui des livres, des objets, des ide´es, et gallo, Sarduy avec Lacan 41

aussi de se´parer radicalement le domaine du divan de celui de l’ami- tie´. (Roudinesco 115)

[He had a way of becoming one with the patient, of not analyzing the transference, or of exchanging with him books, objects, ideas, while also keeping a strict separation between the patients and friends]

And even Roudinesco concedes that even if it is true that Lacan had a higher rate of suicides among his patients, there was a simple explanation: the master took many patients who were severely depressed or suicidal—patients most other analysts would have turned away (400). In some ways, Lacan was a more caring analyst than those who followed the IPA’s ordinances to the letter: he, for example, accepted homosexuals as trainees at a time when the Parisian chapter of the IPA would not (297). Sarduy’s Ktazob is much closer to the negative image of Lacan as a cold clinician than to the more positive portrait painted by Bernier. Franc¸ois Wahl remembers that Sarduy found the name for this character during a trip to Morocco: Ktazob means ‘‘penis slasher’’ in Arabic, and Sarduy chose this nickname ‘‘because he believed that Lacan did to all of us what Ktazob does to Cobra’’ (Gallo ‘‘Severo’’ 52). There is another reference to Lacan in the same scene, when Ktazob explains to Cobra that he has the powers to ‘‘transfer’’ pain away from her and onto to a third character and, to demonstrate his point, he puts a ﬂame to his patient’s hand, telling her:

Si yo, por ejemplo [ . . . ] le quemo a usted una mano, el ardor puede pasar, digamos a esa enana que espera en la antesala. Si su concentracio´n, ergo si la transferencia del dolor es correcta, puedo hasta arrancarle un diente o trucidarla sin que experimente la menor molestia; la receptora, he´las, caera´ redonda, atravesada por espasmos inexplicables. (106)

This scene reads like a lighthearted parody of the notion of transference, which Lacan considered so important that he called it ‘‘one of the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis’’ in his eponymous 1964 seminar. In psychoanalytic theory, transference denotes ‘‘the process through which unconscious desires are actualized [ . . . ] within the frame of the analytic relationship’’ (Laplance and Pontalis 492), the classic example being the patient’s tendency to fall in love with his or her analyst during the course of the treatment. In his seminar Lacan argued that ‘‘le transfert est la mise en acte de la reálite´ de l’inconscient [transference is the enactment of the reality of the unconscious]’’ (Four Fundamental Concepts 164). Freud believed that transference—the patient’s investment of affects in the figure of the analyst—was one of the most useful tools for the analytic process: the analyst becomes a blank screen onto which the patient projects all sorts of emotions, from love to hate, and the analytic frame provides a setting to examine and understand the genesis of these affects. Lacan was very interested in the 42 Revista Hispańica Moderna 60.1 (2007) concept of transference, and one of his justifications for the short session was that by having the freedom to terminate the session at any point, the analyst could ‘‘punctuate’’ the meetings. By stopping the session at a specific point in the patient’s speech, the analyst could provoke intense emotions—including anger, frustration, and other manifestations of negative transference that could then be analyzed in the next session. Ktazob’s experiments with transference seem to parody Lacanian therapeutic methods. Unlike the Freudian concept of transference, which involves only patient and analyst, Ktazob’s transference involves the doctor, his victim, and a third figure played by the dwarf. Ktazob tells Cobra she will not feel a thing because all the pain resulting from the extravagant tortures will be ‘‘transferred’’ to the third. This reads like a reference to Lacan’s obsession with the concept of ‘‘le tiers,’’ [the third], an ‘‘other’’ whose presence is unsuspected by the patient but whose eventual discovery alters the dynamic between analyst and analysand—an idea developed in the ‘‘Seminar on the ‘Purloined letter’’’ and in other texts. Like Lacan, Ktazob is fascinated by the concept of transference; like Lacan, he experiments with novel ways of unleashing intense affects in his patients. And if Lacan’s critics argued that many of his methods, including the short session, made his patients suffer unnecessarily, Sarduy makes Ktazob into an insatiable sadist. The doctor is a mad scientist who treats his patient Cobra as a guinea pig, burning her, binding her, even extracting her teeth. According to his enemies, Lacan used unorthodox clinical procedures that only aggravated his patients’ suffering—thus the rash of suicides; in a similar vein, Ktazob’s experiments with ‘‘the transference of pain’’ fail, leaving Cobra a bloody wreck. Readers might object that this interpretation makes too much of Sarduy’s use of the word ‘‘transferencia.’’ After all, this is a term used in everyday language that does not always have psychoanalytic connotations. Like the English ‘‘transfer,’’ ‘‘transferencia’’ can refer to any number of financial or real-estate transac- tions. It could be a mere coincidence that Ktazob uses the term for his sadistic experiments with Cobra and Pup. Sarduy’s description of Ktazob’s transferential experiments, however, makes explicit the connection to psychoanalysis in general and to Lacan’s theories in particular: the language—and the diagram—used in this section are taken right out of The Seminar. Consider the following passage from Cobra describing the transference:

Un Instructor I ejercitara´ al sujeto S para que aprenda a emitir los dardos caústicos; otro al chivo emisario para que no ofrezca resisten- cia. Ası´ el alterador A podra´ ejercer su fuerza modeladora sobre el Sujeto para convertirlo en Sujeto prima, fuerza cuyo vector lancina- nte padecera´, en este caso, la alteradita que esta´ alla´ afuera, transfor- mada, por la terapia aleccionante, en receptora o´ptima (a) prima. Todo es representable por el gra´fico de la mutacioń: Diamante. (107)2

2 The reader will notice that the narrator neglects to mention one of the terms in the graph—‘‘I de a.’’ In the French version of Cobra Sarduy ﬁlled this minor gap by explaining that, in addition to the instructor S who will deal with Cobra, ‘‘un autre instructeur, I’, our mieux institutrice’’ will handle the dwarf. gallo, Sarduy avec Lacan 43

Immediately following this description, Sarduy inserts the following graph into his novel:

Figure 1: ‘‘Diamante’’ from Cobra, 107.

This figure is one the most interesting references to Lacan’s Seminar in Sar- duy’s novel. Lacan was fascinated by science, and he was an avid reader of trea- tises on pure mathematics. He was especially drawn to highly theoretical constructs, like rings, sets, and knots, and to the diagrams and graphs used to illustrate these concepts. One of his most original—and wildest—contributions to psychoanalysis consisted in proposing to find correspondences between the domains of psychology and mathematics, between psychic phenomena and alge- braic schemas. Lacan borrowed many of his theoretical terms from the language of abstract algebra: he spoke of ‘‘fields,’’ ‘‘functions,’’ ‘‘schemas,’’ ‘‘variables,’’ and ‘‘equations.’’ On some occasions Lacan’s fascination with mathematical language led to results that bordered on the absurd, as some of the more elaborate diagrams featured in Ecrits show. In his essay ‘‘On the Possible Treatment of Psychosis,’’ for instance, Lacan uses the diagram reproduced in Figure 2 to illustrate the ‘‘the structure of the subject in a psychotic process’’: The diagram itself reads like the work of psychotic, an irony that was not lost upon Lacan, who commented that ‘‘this schema participates in the excess that characterizes every formalization that presents itself through intuition’’ (E´ crits 571). Lacan’s critics interpreted his obsession with diagrams as a symptom of his aloofness to human emotions: since the analyst was much more at home in the abstract universe of mathematical constructs than in the messy world of affects, 44 Revista Hispańica Moderna 60.1 (2007)

Figure 2: Schema I, from Lacan, Ecrits, 571. his only way to deal with feelings was by transforming them into charts and equations. In Les Samouraı¨s Julia Kristeva features a psychoanalyst named Romain Bresson who, like Lacan, is too intellectual for the good of his patients. She describes him as follows: ‘‘Bresson ne dit rien de vraiment humain et ses travaux sont bourre´s de sche´mas et de diagrammes commente´s dans le langage technique de la chimie du cerveau’’ (170) [Bresson does not say anything that is really human and his work is packed with schemas and diagrams annotated in the technical language of brain chemistry]. The same could be said about Sar- duy’s Ktazob, though his position is much more extreme: his theories and diagrams are designed to inﬂict as much pain as possible on Cobra and Pup. The diamond schema featured in Cobra is not merely a reference to Lacan’s mania for drawing complicated diagrams. It is actually a radical rewriting of one of the analyst’s most famous constructs: Schema L. The terms included in Kta- zob’s diagram—’’A,’’ ‘‘I,’’ ‘‘S,’’ and ‘‘a’’—are borrowed from this Lacanian schema, ﬁrst introduced in 1955 and later republished in E´ crits as an appendix to the ‘‘Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’.’’ In Lacan’s Schema L (reproduced in Figure 3), ‘‘A’’ stands for the Other (the ‘‘grand Autre’’), S for the subject

(also represented as ES, the ‘‘Subject of Enunciation’’), I for the Imaginary regis- ter, and a’ for the ‘‘specular other.’’3 Ktazob’s Diamond is a radical revision of schema L. The mad doctor keeps all of Lacan’s terms but gives them altogether different meanings: A becomes ‘‘el Alterador,’’ ‘‘the Alterer,’’ a double of Ktazob, who will direct the complex procedure required to ‘‘alter’’ Cobra’s sexual identity; ‘‘I de S’’ represents ‘‘the In- structor,’’ who will teach Cobra (the Subject S) how to behave during the

3 Lacan deﬁnes the terms of Schema L in ‘‘Introduction du grand Autre’’ (284–86). gallo, Sarduy avec Lacan 45

Figure 3: Jacques Lacan, Schema L, from Ecrits, 53. procedure. A second Instructor identified as ‘‘I de (a)’’ will do the same for Pup, the dwarf who is represented in the graph by an ‘‘(a),’’ which in this case stands for ‘‘la alteradita que esta´ alla´ afuera.’’ This is a subversive rewriting of the ‘‘objet petit a’’ (usually represented by a lowercase ‘‘a’’ or ‘‘(a)’’), one of the most abstruse Lacanian concepts, which the analyst repeatedly refused to define. In Sarduy’s novel, the notation ‘‘a’’ no longer stands for a theoretical construct, but for ‘‘la alteradita,’’ which sounds like the name of a drag queen and is entirely attuned to the camp spirit that animates the novel. Sarduy once said that the idea for the novel came to him at the beach, after hearing a disheveled transvestite recounting the death of one of her friends (‘‘La Cobra,’’ she exclaimed mourn- fully, ‘‘murio´ en jet sobre el Fujiyama’’) [Cobra died on a jet over Mount Fuji] (Wahl 1483). Sarduy thus camps up Lacan’s venerable schema L. He also turns it on its head quite literally: to construct his Diamond, he made a horizontal incision through the middle of Lacan’s schema L (an appropriate procedure for the work of a thinker who insisted so much on the importance of castration) and flipped the two resulting triangles to form a rhombus (or a diamond, as Sarduy calls it). But perhaps Sarduy’s most original intervention was his decision to animate Lacan’s Schema L, by transforming the analyst’s variables—I, S, and A—into colorful characters that sing, dance, and ask questions about Ktazob’s ‘‘operation,’’ as we see in the following passage from Cobra:

Alterador—¿Y si lo toma´ramos como un juego, Instructor de Cobra—como algo irreversible: Alterador—un sonido que se repite? Instructor de Cobra—El hombre es un haz: ni sus elementos, ni las fuerzas que los unen tienen la menor realidad. Alterador—Cobra, te adentras en el estado intermedio: cielo vacıó las cosas, Instructor de Cobra—inteligencia nı´tida, vacuidad transparente Alterador—sin lı´mites ni centro. Instructor de Cobra —Conceńtrate. Has aprendido a desviar el dolor. Lućido. Te presento a la prueba. Pup—¿Que´ van a hacerme con ese astrolabio? (113–14) 46 Revista Hispańica Moderna 60.1 (2007)

S, I, and A are no longer abstract ﬁgures but real characters who participate in the carnavalesque castration of Cobra and Pup. In addition to Dr. Ktazob’s Diamond schema, there is another passage in Cobra that pokes fun at Lacan’s taste for mathematical notation. Early in the novel the narrator describes the relationship between Cobra and the dwarf Pup as follows:

Podrıámos, formalizańdola hasta lo matema´tico, representar como sigue la relacioń entre ambos personajes:

Pup2 ס Cobra o bien (͙Cobra (53 ס Pup

In the same passage, Sarduy introduces another dwarf he describes as the ‘‘re- duction’’ of La Senõra, the brothel’s madam, who lacks a proper name and is always identified as ‘‘͙de Senõra.’’ Suzanne Jill Levine has argued that these delirious square roots play on Derrida’s theories of signification, but I read them as a parody of Lacan’s obsession with the language of mathematics (Levine 123– 24). Sarduy’s application of the square-root to his characters brings to mind a passage in Ećrits in which Lacan defines the signifier as ‘‘that which represents the subject for another signifier’’ and offers the following equation:

S (Signiﬁer) (s (enunciation ס s (signiﬁed)

Following this equation, Lacan writes that S, the signifier, could be represented ,since it is ‘‘unspeakable.’’ If we plug this value into the above equation ,(1מ) by the signified equals the square root of minus ’’1מ͌ ס the result would be ‘‘s one (819). Here Lacan was playing with words and with an important concept in abstract mathematics, where the square root of minus one is represented as ‘‘i,’’ an imaginary number—and, as we know, the concept of the ‘‘imaginary’’ played a crucial role in Lacan’s theories: the Imaginary was one of the ‘‘three registers,’’ along with the Real and the Symbolic. Inspired by Lacan’s play with square roots, Sarduy invented the characters of ͌Cobra and ͌de Senõra: there characters are shrunk versions of Cobra and La Senõra, and he thus describes them as square roots of the original women. Later in the novel, in the chapter ‘‘A Dios dedico este mambo,’’ we find an even more -If Lacan com .(85) ’’3/2 ס Pup (ס/ם) Cobra ם .outrageous equation: ‘‘Sra puted the square root of psychoanalytic concepts, Sarduy applied the same operation to his characters. Both writers play with the defamiliarizing effects produced by inserting a highly technical mathematical notation into a literary or psychoanalytic text. Sarduy’s play with Lacanian schemas is not entirely at odds with Lacan’s sensi- bility. Lacan had a sense of humor about his own obsession with mathematical gallo, Sarduy avec Lacan 47

figures, as we saw in his gloss to the outrageous schema of psychotic subjectivity presented in Schema I. Some of his schemas, functions, and even terms were visual puns designed to make his audience laugh. To represent castration, for ␸,’’ a notation which despite itsמ‘‘ instance, the master chose the expression highly technical appearance, is simply a minus sign followed by a visual depiction of a male organ—a graphic illustration of the subtraction of a penis (Four Funda- mental Concepts 89). Unfortunately most of Lacan’s disciples—including his intellectual and legal heir, Jacques-Alain Miller—did not inherit his mischievous sense of humor, and many of them have advanced a rather humorless reading of Lacanian schemas and texts—a procedure that flattens them out and strips them of all the subversive humor with which the analyst invested them.4 Rou- dinesco has argued that this tendency, combined with an ever-increasing rever- ence towards the figure of the master, has culminated in ‘‘the transformation of Lacanian discourse into a miracle box for messianic sects’’ (439). In contrast to the solemnity with which Miller and others read the seminars, Sarduy’s Cobra stages a reading of Lacan’s schemas that is most Lacanian in spirit. If the analyst took mathematical figures out of their original scientific context and mischievously inserted them into his own texts—to the horror of some scien- tists who accused him of violating the rules of mathematical operations (Sokal 25–39)5—, Sarduy prolongs the game by taking Lacan’s schemas out of context and incorporating them into his novels. His is a perfect recreation of Lacan’s working process, and the analyst probably would have enjoyed Sarduy’s literary games. So far it would appear that Sarduy’s treatment of Lacan was quite lighthearted: he caricatured the venerable analyst in the figure of Ktazob; he parodied the master’s algebra and his highly technical vocabulary; and he transformed Lacan- ian schemas—whom many of his disciples have apotheosized into an oracular demigod—into a campy parade of drag queens. These jocular gestures are in agreement with Roberto Gonza´lez Echevarrıá’s assertion that Sarduy—like many of his peers in the seventies who suffered from an ‘‘exhaustion of theory’’ was more interested in ‘‘Lacan’s Joycean style (his neologisms, puns, and linguistic rituals) than in his theories’’ (214). But not all of Sarduy’s references to Lacan are as lighthearted as the Ktazob chapter in Cobra. The Cuban writer also engaged in a serious dialogue with La- canian concepts, most notably in his essay La simulacioń, a work that has received scant attention and that, as I will argue in the rest of this essay, is the most Lacanian of his writings.

La simulacio´n

La simulacio´n was ﬁrst published in French as La Doublure in 1981; the Spanish version followed a year later. The essay deals mostly with art and artists, from

4 See, for example, the rather humorless essays about The Four Fundamental Concepts col- lected in Reading Seminar XI. 5 In Impostures Intellectuelles, his controversial attack against structuralism, Sokal writes ‘‘les mathe´matiques de Lacan sont si fantaisistes qu’elles ne peuvent jouer aucun roˆle fe´cond dans une analyse psychologique se´rieuse’’ (38). 48 Revista Hispa´nica Moderna 60.1 (2007)

Holbein to Warhol, and argues, as Gonza´lez Echevarrıá has pointed out, that there is a ‘‘drive to simulate’’ in addition to the drives (the libido, the death drive) identified by psychoanalysis (215). Most critics have read the book as the last volume of a trilogy that also includes Escrito sobre un cuerpo (1969), and Barroco (1974), since all three books deal with similar phenomena: the baroque, the ‘‘hypertelic,’’ and the relation between eroticism and aesthetics. But La simulacioń differs from the two earlier essays in one crucial aspect: whereas Escrito sobre un cuerpo and Barroco contained chapters devoted to Gońg- ora and Lezama Lima, to ellipsis and hyperbaton, La simulacioń deals almost exclusively with visual phenomena. The book is divided into three sections— ‘‘copia/simulacro,’’ ‘‘anamorfosis,’’ and ‘‘trompe l’œil’’—, each analyzing a different kind of trick that vision can play on the subject. Sarduy considers these three forms of illusion ‘‘hypertelic’’; like baroque ornamentation, they constitute an excess, an extravagant expenditure. The questions Sarduy analyzes in La simulacioń are extremely close to those treated by Lacan in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, one of his most famous and influential seminars, given in 1964 and published under the same title in 1973. Lacan devoted most of this seminar to discussing visual phenomena, and he spent many sessions analyzing the tricks played by vision on the subject. He wanted to debunk the Cartesian ideal of a subject who is the master of knowledge by highlighting the subject’s many blind spots. Vision was so important for Lacan that he argued that the gaze is a drive, a powerful force that often works in mysterious and unconscious ways. The similarities between La simulacioń and The Four Fundamental Concepts are striking: both works deal with vision and its effects on the subject; both arrive at similar conclusions (Lacan argues that the gaze is a drive; Sarduy that there is a drive to simulate); both analyze a series of visual puzzles that includes anamorphoses, trompe l’oeil,6 transvestism,7 and mimetism;8 both cite the same sources: Roger Caillois as the authority on mimetism and Jurgis Baltrusaitis as the expert on anamorphoses;9 and both point to the same sixteenth-century painting— Holbein’s The Ambassadors—as the perfect illustration of their theories of vision.10 But how are we to interpret these similarities between La simulacioń and The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis? Why did Sarduy establish a dialogue with this specific seminar? And how did the Cuban writer portray the analyst’s teachings? To answer these questions, I will now turn to one of the concepts that is central to both La simulacioń and The Four Fundamental Concepts: anamorphosis.

6 Lacan discusses anamorphosis in chapter four of The Four Fundamental Concepts; Sarduy in ‘‘Anamorphosis,’’ the second section of La simulacioń. Lacan examines trompe-l’œil in ‘‘What is a Picture?’’ chapter 9 of The Four Fundamental Concepts, and Sarduy in the third section of La simulacioń. 7 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts (107); Sarduy, La simulacioń (1269–70). 8 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts (98–100); Sarduy, La simulacioń (1269–70). 9 Lacan cites Caillois in The Four Fundamental Concepts (100–08); Sarduy in La simulacioń (1267–70). Lacan refers to Baltrusaitis in The Four Fundamental Concepts (88); Sarduy in La simulacioń (1277–80). 10 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts (85–89); Sarduy, La simulacioń (1275–77). gallo, Sarduy avec Lacan 49

Anamorphosis

The painting technique of anamorphosis became popular in the sixteenth century. In its most basic form, it consisted of depicting images that changed shape according to the angle from which they were observed. A typical anamorphic image appeared distorted from a certain angle but looked right when observed from a different position. The most famous example of anamorphic painting is Holbein’s The Ambassadors, painted in 1533, which depicts two diplomatic envoys—Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve—flanking a cabinet containing various scientific instruments, including a globe and an astrolabe. The composition seems like an ordinary realistic portrait except for one curious detail: a mysterious abstract shape, a kind of formless blob, that hovers between the legs of the two ambassadors. But this shape looks abstract only when the viewer stands directly in front of the painting; as soon as he changes position and observes it from an oblique angle (a position from which the test of the painting will no longer be readable)—, the mysterious figure reveals itself to be a skull. In his Anamorphoses—a work that was fundamental for both Lacan and Sar- duy—Jurgis Baltrusaitis reads The Ambassadors as a subversion of the Cartesian ideology embedded in perspectival painting. At a time when one-point perspective was emerging as the dominant model in European painting, anamorphic experiments constituted a form of rebellion. Baltrusaitis points out that one- point perspective went hand-in-hand with the Enlightenment project: inspired by Descartes, men aspired to know everything and to see everything, and perspectival vision emerged as a trope for this new primacy of reason. Anamorphic experiments, in contrast, subvert this illusion of mastery: they force the viewer to confront his own limitations, his inability to understand, his incapacity to ever see the entire picture. Baltrusaitis considers anamorphosis not only a ‘‘technical curiosity’’ but also a ‘‘a powerful mechanism of optical illusion and a philosophy of artificial reality’’ (5). During the 1960s and 1970s, French thinkers from Lacan to Foucault privi- leged anamorphosis as a trope that exposed the illusory nature of Cartesian subjectivity: standing in front of an anamorphic painting, the subject discovers that he is master neither of knowledge nor of vision. In this respect anamorphosis is the structural opposite of the panopticon: if the panopticon represents the culmination of an Enlightenment drive for power and knowledge, anamorphosis showcases the failure of this totalizing ambition. Lacan and Sarduy were both fascinated by Holbein’s The Ambassadors, and they focused their texts on the significance of the mysterious skull hovering between the legs of the two envoys. The reading of this work presented in La simulacioń responds almost word for word to Lacan’s discussion of the same painting in The Four Fundamental Concepts. Lacan offers the following commentary on The Ambassadors

Now, in The Ambassadors [ . . . ] what do you see? [T]hat figure, which the author compares to a cuttlebone and which for me suggests rather [ . . . ] Dali’s soft watches, whose signification is obviously less phallic than that of the object depicted in a flying position in the 50 Revista Hispańica Moderna 60.1 (2007)

foreground of this picture. [ . . . ] Holbein makes visible for us here something that is simply the subject as annihilated [ . . . ] (Four Funda- mental Concepts 88)

Compare this commentary to Sarduy’s reading of The Ambassadors in La Simula- cio´n:

[ . . . ] concha marina, nacarada y huesoide, tangencial en el primer plano de Los Embajadores de Holbein [ . . . ] O se trata de un hueso de sepia, una nave espacial o´sea, un reloj blando de Dalı´—segu´n Lacan—; la evidente referencia marina evoca en todo caso el barroco manuelino: viajes, oriente, esferas armilares, anclas y cueredas. (1275)

Sarduy sees The Ambassadors through the lens of Lacan’s Seminar. But why were Lacan and Sarduy so interested in Holbein’s skull? And how does Sarduy elaborate on Lacan’s reading? To answer these questions, we should delve deeper into the question of how the two thinkers approached anamorphosis.

Lacan and Anamorphosis

Lacan discusses The Ambassadors in the chapter on ‘‘Anamorphosis’’ in The Four Fundamental Concepts, which examines how this painting tricks the viewer, forcing the subject to renounce his claims to omniscience and mastery. He is especially interested in the tension between the two men and the floating shape, between the perspectival and the anamorphic images. Lacan argues that the ambassadors are surrounded by objects that ‘‘are all symbolic of the sciences and the arts’’ (88), representing the triumph of Enlightenment discourses. The anamorphic figure, on the other hand, contains a skull, a figure that, like a vanitas, introduces the symbol of death into the field of vision. The painting is thus haunted by the specter of mortality and human shortcomings. Like the purloined letter in Poe’s story, the skull can easily be missed by viewers, even though it occupies the most conspicuous place in the painting. ‘‘All this,’’ writes Lacan,

shows that at the very heart of the period in which the subject emerged and geometral optics was an object of research, Holbein makes visible for us here something that is simply the subject as annihilated—annihilated in the form that is, strictly speaking, the imag- ␸]) of castration, which for usמ)] ined embodiment of the minus-phi centers the whole organization of the desires through the framework of the fundamental drives. (88–89)

Lacan concludes that The Ambassadors ‘‘is simply what any picture is, a trap for the gaze’’ (89). The Ambassadors is a perfect illustration of Lacan’s theory of subjectivity: like gallo, Sarduy avec Lacan 51 many thinkers of his generation, Lacan rebelled against the legacy of the Enlight- enment by debunking the Cartesian ideal of a subject that could master the world through reason alone. The Lacanian subject, in contrast, is never the master in his own home, and is constantly confronted by insufficiencies and lacks. Like the viewer of The Ambassadors, the Lacanian subject must come to terms with his inability to ever grasp the entire picture, and this shortcoming emerges as an allegory of human limitations and human mortality. As Lacan writes, The Ambassadors ‘‘reflects our own nothingness in the figure of the death’s head’’ (92). Lacan also saw The Ambassadors—and all other visual traps for the subject—as a metaphor for the analytic situation: the patient arrives to the consulting room thinking he sees everything and knows everything (or conversely that the analyst sees everything and knows everything, that he is the sujet suppose´ savoir [Four Fundamentals 230]) and it is only after shifting his perspective that he discovers an allegory of his shortcomings—at the center of this experience there is a void, a great unknown. Like the viewer standing before The Ambassadors, the analysand is subjected to tricks, illusions, and deceptions.

Sarduy and Anamorphosis

In La simulacioń, Sarduy offers a reading of The Ambassadors that closely follows Lacan. Like Lacan, Sarduy rejected the Enlightenment ambition for an omni- scient and omnipotent subject. If Lacan was drawn to all tricks that exposed the subject as incomplete, Sarduy gravitated to baroque figures—from Gońgora’s poetics to geometral ellipses—for similar reasons. Like the baroque tropes he explored in his other essays, Holbein’s The Ambassadors cannot be reduced to a single interpretation: it is a painting that frustrates the viewer’s desire for unity with its multiplicity of perspectives and meanings. If Lacan believed that the anamorphic skull made visible ‘‘the subject as annihilated,’’ Sarduy argues that this shape gives the viewer a glimpse of mortality.

[U]na vez el sujeto desplazado, situado al borde de la representacioń [ . . . ] la concha marina se convierte en una calavera. Vanidad de la representacioń: falacia de la imagen y futilidad de las embajadas. Lo que preside y se superpone en el primer plano de los retratos y de los emblemas—naturaleza muerta astrono´mica y musical—la calavera, es el sı´mbolo de lo impermanente y efı´mero de su misioń, la muerte que lo clausura en lo ilusorio de toda representacioń. (1275–76)

‘‘La pulsio´n de simulacro,’’ concludes Sarduy, ‘‘en Los Embajadores, emblema´tica- mente, se desenmascara y resuelve en la muerte’’ (1276). Interestingly it is Sarduy and not Lacan who spells out the relation between The Ambassadors and psychoanalysis: Standing in front of The Ambassadors, Sarduy writes the viewer acts like the psychoanalyst, who must shift his position in order to perceive the hidden meaning behind the apparently rational surface: 52 Revista Hispa´nica Moderna 60.1 (2007)

La anamorfosis y el discurso del analizante como forma de oculta- cio´n: algo se le oculta al sujeto—de allı´ su malestar—que no se le revelara´ ma´s que gracias a un cambio de sitio. El sujeto esta´ implicado en la lectura del especta´culo, en el desciframiento del discurso, preci- samente porque eso que de inmediato no logra oı´r o ver lo concierne directamente en tanto que sujeto. (1276–77)

Analyzing a patient is a process akin to viewing The Ambassadors: just like the painting contains a mysterious figure, so the patient’s speech is marked by slips of the tongue and other parapraxes—elusive ‘‘figures’’ that can only be interpreted by shifting perspectives: ‘‘las repeticiones, faltas, infatuaciones, olvidos y silencios del analizante, dirań al lector hacia dońde desplazarse, al objeto de que´ fantasma substituirse, con que´ sitio del sujeto en el fantasma concluir’’ (1275– 76). Sarduy and Lacan both identify the same three traits in the painting: first, a multiplicity of meanings that vary according to the point of view, thus debunking the fantasy of a Cartesian subject who is the master of knowledge; second, the presence of death as a central figure in the painting; and third, the painting as a metaphor for psychoanalysis, a process that requires both patient and analyst to shift perspectives in order to decipher the mysterious figures that punctuate their discourse.

Epistemological anamorphoses

Even though Sarduy is entirely in agreement with Lacan’s reading of The Ambas- sadors, he develops a theory of anamorphosis that departs from The Four Funda- mental Concepts. Both Lacan and Sarduy referred to Holbein’s painting as the most famous example of visual puzzles, but they then move on to present anamorphosis as an allegory for other phenomena not necessarily tied to visual images. It is at this point that their paths diverge. One of Lacan’s chief interests in The Four Fundamental Concepts was to ﬁnd analogies between seeing and knowing, between vision and reason. He liked anamorphic images because they tricked the subject’s ability to see, and he would be equally drawn to other phenomena that complicated the subject’s ability to know. In his seminar, Lacan proposes several examples of what I propose to call ‘‘epistemological anamorphoses’’—logical paradoxes that challenge the subject’s mastery of knowledge in the same way that the skull in The Ambassadors challenges the subject’s mastery of vision. These are intellectual games that trick the intellect in the same way that anamorphic paintings trick the eye. Lacan includes several examples of epistemological anamorphoses in the section on ‘‘Analysis and Truth’’ in The Four Fundamental Concepts. He discusses, for instance, a famous logical paradox. I say ‘‘I am lying’’: am I lying or telling the truth when I make this statement? If I am lying when I say ‘‘I am lying,’’ then the statement is a lie, so I am not lying, and thus I must be telling the truth: thus by lying I end up telling the truth. If, on the other hand, I am not lying when I say ‘‘I am lying,’’ then the statement is true, and since it declares the words ‘‘I am gallo, Sarduy avec Lacan 53 lying’’ to be a lie, then I am not really lying but telling the truth. Regardless of whether I lie or tell the truth when I say these words, I always end up telling the truth [ . . . ] by saying ‘‘I am lying.’’ Though the argument seems logical enough, we know that one cannot claim to be lying and telling the truth at the same time—our reason has been tricked, just like our eye before Holbein’s skull (139). In the same section, Lacan presents another example of an epistemological anamorphosis, this time a joke taken from Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. The joke, as Freud tells it, is as follows:

Two Jews meet in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. ‘‘Where are you going?’’ asked one. ‘‘To Cracow,’’ was the answer. ‘‘What a liar you are!’’ broke out the other. ‘‘If you say you’re going to Cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?’’ (115)

This situation leads to a paradox similar to the one found in the statement ‘‘I am lying’’: if the first passenger says that he is going to Cracow but is going to Lemberg he is lying; if, on the other hand, he says that he is going to Cracow and is actually heading there he is also lying—or at least trying to outsmart his fellow passenger. In either case he is lying. In his gloss to this joke, Freud observed that this type of joke makes us laugh because it momentarily subverts our ability to judge and our capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood. ‘‘What they [i.e. these jokes] are attacking,’’ writes Freud, ‘‘is [ . . . ] the certainty of our knowledge itself, one of our speculative possessions’’ (115). Freud locates in this joke the same mechanism that Lacan identified in The Ambassadors: a trick played on Cartesian logic. But why would these logical puzzles function as anamorphoses? I would like to posit an analogy between the listener and the viewer, between the person who hears the joke and the visitor who stands in front of The Ambassadors. In the Jewish joke there are three possible reactions to the passenger’s claim that he is going to Cracow: the first would be that of a naive listener, who takes the statement ‘‘I am going to Cracow’’ at face value and does not suspect that it could be a lie. This position would be analogous to that of a viewer who sees The Ambassa- dors and misses the presence of the skull. The second scenario involves a more astute listener who knows that the passenger is a known liar and thus the statement ‘‘I am going to Cracow’’ must be false. This corresponds to the viewer who realizes the duplicity in The Ambassadors: he sees two images, and realizes that one should not to be taken at face value. The third scenario, the one presented in the joke, goes a step further: the passenger is as astute as the listener; he knows that the listener knows that he is a liar, and that he will take the statement ‘‘I am going to Cracow’’ as a lie. The only way to outsmart him will be to tell the truth, in the hope that the other will interpret it as a lie. But the listener out- smarts the passenger by figuring out his entire charade. This final scenario corresponds to the ideal viewer of an anamorphic painting: the viewer not only realizes that the painting is duplicitous and contains a secret shape, but he also discovers that he needs to shift his position in order to grasp the elusive figure. He tries to imagine the angle from which the artist painted the figure in order 54 Revista Hispańica Moderna 60.1 (2007) to deceive his audience, and by walking in the direction of this angle he undoes the deception and is able to perceive the figure. Lacan likes these logical puzzles that I have been calling epistemological anamorphoses because for him they illustrate the complexities of the analytic situation. If a patient lies in a session, for example, the analyst realizes that by trying to deceive him the patient is in fact revealing the truth about his unconscious mechanisms. As Lacan writes, ‘‘The I am deceiving you arises from the point at which the analyst awaits the subject and sends back to him, according to the formula, his own message in its true signification, that is to say, in an inverted form. He says to him—in this I am deceiving you, what you are sending as message is what I express to you, and in doing so you are telling the truth’’ (139–40). This statement corresponds to Lacan’s own view of anamorphic paintings: by fore- grounding the subject inability’s to grasp the truth, works like The Ambassadors expose the truth about the Cartesian subject. Before considering Sarduy’s own experiments with non-visual anamorphoses, I would like to consider one final example of Lacan’s use of epistemological anamorphoses. Lacan presented his most developed discussion of logical puzzles in his ‘‘Seminar on the ‘Purloined Letter’,’’ which, as we saw earlier, Sarduy associated with the figure of Ktazob in Cobra. Poe’s ‘‘Purloined Letter’’ tells the story of a highly compromising letter that was filched from the royal apartment by a Machiavellian minister identified as D. The police have scoured the minister’s residence repeatedly, but all to no avail. Their search has been so obsessive that it borders on the absurd: as the Prefect describes it, ‘‘We searched everywhere [ . . . ] We opened every possible drawer [ . . . ] The cushions were probed with the fine long needles you have seen me employ [ . . . ] we examined the rungs of every chair in the hotel and, indeed, the jointings of every description of furniture, by the aid of a most powerful microscope [ ...]Wealso measured the thickness of every book-cover, with the most accurate admeasurement, and applied to each the most jealous scrutiny of the microscope.’’ (458–60). After several intense but failed searches, a detective named Dupin pays a visit to the minister D in broad daylight, looks around the room, and, while engaging him in conversation, discovers the letter in the most visible place in the living room: on a card-rack hanging from the mantelpiece. The letter was there for everyone to see, though it had been turned inside out, like a glove. Dupin takes advantage of the minister’s momentary distraction to seize the letter, replacing it with a facsimile before taking his leave and returning the missive to the prefect. In his seminar on Poe’s story, Lacan foregrounds the crucial role vision plays in solving the mystery of the purloined letter. He argues that the story focuses on three distinct ways of seeing the world: first, there is ‘‘the gaze that does not see anything,’’ exemplified by the police who despite their powerful microscopes and painstaking probing cannot find the letter on the mantelpiece; then there is a second gaze ‘‘that sees that the first does not see anything and makes the mistake of thinking that that which he is hiding is well concealed’’—this describes the minister D, who becomes so confident about his ruse that he has no qualms about leaving Dupin alone in the room while he goes to the window; and finally there is a third gaze that ‘‘sees that these two gazes leave the hidden object gallo, Sarduy avec Lacan 55 at the mercy of anyone who wants to help himself’’—this is the position of Dupin, who sees that the police do not see anything and also that the minister lowered his guard after seeing that the police do not see anything. With his usual sense of humor, Lacan summarizes the relationship among these three gazes by imagining the characters in question as three ostriches: the first buries its head in the sand; the second ‘‘considers itself invisible because the first has its head in the sand,’’ thus allowing a third to sneak up from behind and pluck its derrie`re (Ećrits 15–16). Lacan considered this ruse—and Poe’s tale—as an analogy of the analytic relationship: Like Dupin, the analyst sees what no one else can see and is paid hand- some sums for his investigative work (37); like Dupin, the analyst begins his investigation by putting himself in the position of the other, his patient, in order to imagine how the other sees him; and like Dupin, the analyst’s crucial intervention consists in ensuring that the letter is eventually restored to its emissary, but in an inverted form, as happens with the patient’s discourse. The moral of the tale, concludes Lacan, ‘‘is that a letter always arrives at its destination’’ (41). But how does the story of the purloined letter functions as an epistemological anamorphosis? Like Holbein’s The Ambassadors, the story concerns vision and its pitfalls. And the three gazes outlined by Lacan correspond to three ways of look- ing at an anamorphic painting. The police, who search everywhere but can’t see the letter, are like the naive viewer who becomes fascinated by the numerous scientific instruments depicted in Holbein’s painting and is seduced by the realistic composition to the point of missing the presence of the anamorphic object. The minister, who sees that the police can’t see a thing and becomes overconfi- dent, can be compared to a slightly more sophisticated viewer, who realizes that he is standing before a duplicitous painting and takes note of the two images, one figurative, the other abstract, one readable, the other impenetrable, but remains fixed and thus misses the anamorphic game. And finally Dupin, who sees that the police don’t see a thing and that the minister sees this and lets down his guard, can be compared to the ideal viewer of anamorphic paintings, who not only takes note of the duplicitous nature of the image but also notices that most viewers simply stand in front of the painting and gape at the puzzling figure—a realization that inspires him to shift his position, moving to a place from which the anamorphic image becomes readable. If Dupin had to put himself in the minister’s shoes to imagine where he would put the letter, the clever viewer has to put himself in Holbein’s position to solve the mystery of the angle from which the figure becomes visible. The minister hides the purloined letter by placing it in the most obvious place—the center of his living room—just like Holbein hides the anamorphic figure by placing in the center of the painting, a place that is so obvious that many people miss it. Lacan was so drawn to anamorphoses—both pictorial and epistemological— because they require the subject to shift his position, assume the place to the other, and imagine how the world looks from that vantage point. When confronted with The Ambassadors, the astute viewer must imagine himself in Hol- bein’s position to find the angle from which the skull becomes readable, and this is exactly what both patient and analyst must do in the therapeutic frame. The royal road to knowledge—as Lacan illustrates through his examples of the 56 Revista Hispańica Moderna 60.1 (2007)

Jewish joke, the game of evens and odds, and many other epistemological anamorphoses, including the famous ‘‘riddle of the three prisoners’’ (E´ crits 55; Rou- dinesco 237–38)—consists in projecting oneself into the place of the other and imagining how the world—including one’s self—looks from the other’s perspective. For Lacan every subject is an anamorphic ﬁgure comparable to the skull in Holbein’s painting.

Psycho-Erotic Anamorphic Writings

Like Lacan, Severo Sarduy extended the concept of anamorphosis to include non-visual phenomena. But he did not share the analyst’s passion for paradoxes or logical games, so his elaborations were of an entirely different kind. If Lacan’s reading of The Ambassadors led him to the concept of epistemological anamorphoses, Sarduy’s contemplation of the same painting culminated with his experiments in what I propose to call—in an homage to Salvador Dalı´ and his surrealist experiments with vision—‘‘psycho-erotic-anamorphic writings.’’11 The erotic implications of anamorphic phenomena intrigued Sarduy, and his discussion of anamorphosis in La simulacio´n is prefaced by the following story about the duplicitous lives led by the diplomats living in the Parisian embassy of an unnamed tropical country. During lunch, one of the diplomats working at the mission walks to the telephone, lifts the receiver, and orders some take-out. The reader ‘‘hears’’ only one side of the conversation:

Buenos dıás. Es de parte de su Excelencia. Quisiera un cafe´ con leche bien caliente, para las doce. Pero por favor, que no suceda lo del otro dıá, que enviaron el cafe´ por una parte y la leche por otra. —. . . —¿De dońde viene ese cafe´? ¿De Brasil? —. . . —¿Es fuerte? —. . . —Mejor si no tiene nada de dulce. —. . . —No la queremos. La leche de aquı´ es insı´pida, ya lo sabe. —. . . —¿A que´ hora? —. . . —Imposible. Llega el embajador sovie´tico. —. . . —Sin falta. Una taza grande y bien caliente. —. . . —¿Otra vez? Pero siempre aumentan. Que´ se le va a hacer. —. . .

11 Dalı´ coined the term ‘‘psycho-atmospheric-anamorphic objects’’ to describe the ideal surrealist creation. gallo, Sarduy avec Lacan 57

—Son los tiempos. —. . . —Adio´s. (1273)

A few days after this conversation, the unnamed country went through ‘‘uno de esos virajes zarzueleros de la historia’’ that culminated with the termination of the diplomats and their replacement by new ambassadors. The anecdote closes when the same secretary who had initiated the telephone conversation, now un- employed and furious at the outcome of events, unveils the hidden meaning of what had seemed like an apparently innocent exchange: he was not ordering coffee but requesting the services of male hustlers in a coded language. Sarduy reveals the key for the delight—or outrage—of his readers:

Lo ‘‘dulce’’ en aquella hermeneútica simplona—los blancos ‘‘leche’’; los negros ‘‘cafe´’’, etc.—, designaba las tendencias doćiles de los que fingıán, en los trasteros de las delegaciones, resignada sumisioń, go- zaban afrentas y hasta aceptaban, por un suplemento tarifado, algu- nos sopetones y escupitajos. Lo ‘‘fuerte’’, como era de esperarse, connotaba la tendencia francamente opuesta: los habıá que llegaban, cachondos y cole´ricos, con unos copetazos fosforescentes de pastis,y ya en los disimulados pasillos de servicio, distribuıán bofetadas sordas y pellizcos pasajeros a los taimados representantes de la representa- cioń. Los lugares y horas de visita—concluyo´ el afocante secretario, qui- tańdose un zapato y subiendo el pie liberado a una amanerada con- sola—correspondıán con los reales, ası´ es que no merecen mayor elucidacioń. En eso—reconocio´ aliviado—siempre fue muy correcta la agencia de gı´golos. (1274)

After this salacious story, Sarduy moves on to discuss The Ambassadors and the workings of anamorphic paintings. Even though he does not spell out the con- nections between the diplomat’s taste for rentboys and the visual puzzles de- ployed by Holbein, it is easy to see how the coded telephone conversation functions as an anamorphosis of sorts. The secretary’s speech is duplicitous: it contains two messages, and the first serves to conceal the other, just like the realistic portrait of the two ambassadors and their accoutrements distracts viewers from the uncanny shape hovering between their feet. The two images contained in The Ambassadors are polar opposites—one is figurative, the other abstract; one requires a frontal view, the other a lateral approach; one presents the triumph of reason, the other the primacy of death—and so are the two messages uttered by the secretary: one is innocent, the other perverse; one refers to liquids, the other to solid bodies; one deals with an everyday craving, the other with a sexual appetite of Sadian refinement. Sarduy’s characters inhabit a diplomatic world characterized by formal language and strict protocol—a literary version of the stern scientific atmosphere surrounding Holbein’s ambassadors—but the apparent banality of their existence is subverted by a secret affect lurking in the background: the joy of gay sex, which is Sarduy’s more upbeat version of the 58 Revista Hispańica Moderna 60.1 (2007) hovering skull. If Holbein uses anamorphosis as a vanitas, a reminder that the death drive will ultimately undo us all, Sarduy’s anamorphic game asserts the primacy of the pleasure principle and the triumph of eros. But Sarduy’s play with Lacanian anamorphoses does not stop here. There are other secret meanings lurking under the surface of the story, other shapes that become readable once we, like the viewer of Holbein’s painting, shift perspectives and find another point of view from which to consider his tale of diplomatic hustling. As astute readers—‘‘lectores de anamorphosis,’’ to use Sarduy’s term (1274)— might have realized by now, Sarduy’s little story is also a portrait of the ambassadors, a depiction of the Cuban diplomatic envoys to Paris (Sarduy never names the country, but he drops enough hints for the reader to make the inference: ‘‘la austeridad insomne de los dıás revolucionarios,’’ ‘‘la astuta pedagogıá del lı´der y los congresos multitudinarios’’ [1272]). And Sarduy’s ambassadors are an anamorphic distortion of Holbein’s Ambassadors, a playful elaboration of the painter’s ingenious creation. All the elements of the original painting are here— the duplicity, the trick played on the viewer—though in a much lighter key. Sarduy’s ambassadors are not the refined representatives of a European power but the perverse bureaucrats of a Caribbean island. Holbein’s Ambassadors have been tropicalized, and the result is a psycho-erotic-anamorphic text that, if observed from the correct perspective, evokes the figures of the famous Dutch painting. Lacan would have enjoyed Sarduy’s experiments with psycho-erotic-anamorphic writings. Indeed in The Four Fundamental Concepts the master himself con- nected anamorphosis to the object of gay male desire in an unforgettable line that would have certainly whetted Sarduy’s appetite for baroque erotic imagery. Attempting to explain the workings of anamorphoses in one of his seminars, Lacan asked: ‘‘How is it that nobody has even thought of connecting this [anamorphosis] with [ . . . ] the effect of an erection? Imagine a tattoo traced on the sexual organ ad hoc in the state of repose and assuming its, if I may say so, developed form in another state’’ (87–88). But despite the tumescence of his associations, Lacan took his theorization of anamorphic discourse in an entirely cerebral direction. Sarduy, on the other hand, turns the anamorphic figure into an affirmation of eros and not thanatos. The difference between Lacan and Sarduy as theoreticians of anamorphosis is akin to that between Dupin and the tropical diplomat: one is a rational mind entirely detached from his body; the other is an astute trickster who uses language and logic to satisfy his bodily urges. La simulacioń is a radical rewriting of The Four Fundamental Concepts, a tropicalized version of The Seminar that brings bodily pleasure to the front. If we now return to Ktazob and his diagrammatic operation, we see how the pictorial strategy at the heart of The Ambassadors operates in Sarduy’s novel. Cobra presents an anamorphic image—a psycho-erotic-anamorphic image, to be pre- cise—of Lacan’s Seminar. A mysterious figure hovers over the entire plot of the novel, one which astute readers will recognize as an oblique representation of Lacanian texts. And just like Holbein’s skull forces the viewer to see the perspec- gallo, Sarduy avec Lacan 59 tival figures in a new light, so do Sarduy’s literary ruses invite readers to consider Lacan’s seminar in a new way. ‘‘Sarduy avec Lacan,’’ the title of this essay, is a play on ‘‘Kant avec Sade,’’ one of the essays included in Ećrits. In it, Lacan argues that Kant and Sade are two sides of the same coin, two extremes of Enlightenment thought that should be read together. Kant makes us appreciate the extreme rationalism and strict organization of Sade’s writings, and Sade exposes the culture of cruelty and perver- sion in which the German philosopher lived, and which seems to be entirely absent from his writings. I want to close by making a similar argument for the need to read the Cuban novelist and the French analyst side by side. Reading Lacan alongside Cobra and La simulacioń reveals Sarduy’s deep engagement with the theory and practice of French psychoanalysis in the 1970s; and reading Sar- duy’s essays and novels alongside The Seminar offer a much-needed corrective to the solemnity with which many disciples read Lacan’s work: a mischievous game that highlights the playful, subversive, and perverse character of the analyst who called himself ‘‘the Gońgora of psychoanalysis.’’

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