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

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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 Camagu¨ey; 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 sev- eral 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 Echevarrı´a, 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 simulacio´n (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 E´cole de Beaux Arts in Paris. Shortly after his arrival, he met the man who would be his lover for the rest of his life: Franc¸ois 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 Hispa´nica 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 E´cole 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 E´crits (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 Go´ngora, the baroque Spanish poet. Reading Go´ngora 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 ‘‘Go´ngora 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 occu- pies 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, techni- cal 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 pare´ntesis sus vehı´culos 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 dı´a—poco disfruta de los suyos el as del ramillete’’ (27). As Franc¸ois 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 Hispa´nica 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 analy- sands 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 psycho- analyst is a detective who solves the mystery and makes visible what seemed doomed to remain invisible.
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