CARNIVALIZED DESIRE AND THE CULT OF THE FLESH: THE EROTIC ETHOS OF GROTESQUE REALISM

A thesis submitted to the faculty of A6 San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of 3G the requirements for MS the Degree UJ L I T

Master of Arts

In

Comparative Literature

by

Jon-David Wesley Settell

San Francisco, California

Fall 2015 Copyright by Jon-David Wesley Settell 2015 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Carnivalized Desire and the Cult o f the Flesh: the Erotic Ethos o f Grotesque Realism by Jon-David Wesley Settell, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in Comparative Literature at San Francisco

State University.

Assistant Professor CARNIVALIZED DESIRE AND THE CULT OF THE FLESH: THE EROTIC ETHOS OF GROTESQUE REALISM

Jon-David Wesley Settell San Francisco, California 2015

Engaging with Mikhail Bakhtin’s dual literary tropes of the carnival and the grotesque body, each a part of what he calls grotesque realism, this project traces the carnival’s revalorization of Eros, a kind of carnivalization of desire, and its ethical implications. Carnivalized desire, through its dialogization of poetic discourse, invokes becoming for the authoritative lyrical voices in Walt Whitman’s “This Compost” and Pablo Neruda’s “Caballero solo” [“Single Gentleman”]. In novelistic discourse, carnivalized desire enacts these becomings through a masochistic and highly eroticized cult of the flesh in Virgilio Pinera’s La came de Rene [Rene’s Flesh], and through the similarly cult-like and sexually charged world of John Rechy’s City o f Night. In each text, desiring bodies invoke and enact the grotesque body’s acts of becoming, in turn postulating an ethical vision of selfhood that is exuberantly incomplete, constituted by difference, and multiplicitously loving.

•ect representation of the content of this thesis.

Date TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction...... *...... 1

The Human Body in and as Discourse...... 6

Matrices of Becoming...... 10

Chapter One: Whitman and Neruda’s Desiring Bodies in Discourse...... 22

Chapter Two: Eating, Hurting, and Loving the Grotesque Body...... 47

Eating the Grotesque Body...... 50

Wounding and Wanting the Grotesque Body...... 60

Love in a Time of Becoming...... 77

Conclusion ...... 93

End Notes...... 103

Works Cited...... 105

v 1

Introduction

“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.” - Friedrich Nietzsche.

In writing, the human body takes on a discursive dimension shaped by the form of its representation. Mikhail Bakhtin, in Rabelais and his World, makes a distinction between two of these forms in European art and literature, the classical and the grotesque body. According to Bakhtin, the grotesque image of the body in literature uses laughter and parody to subvert hegemonic systems of meaning-making embodied in the “entirely finished, completed, strictly limited” classical image of the body (320). The grotesque in literature draws deeply on High Middle Age carnival traditions, where the exuberant chaos of the carnival temporarily suspends social hierarchies and class with its joyful mockery and frank treatment of the functions of the body. An ethos of change and renewal pervades the laughter and festivities of the carnival, creating a “world inside out” that asserted the “gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities” (Bakhtin 11). Eating, copulating, suffering, defecating, and giving birth, the grotesque body is the site of a downward movement in the body of degradation and renewal, a perpetual exchange between the flesh and the earth; it is a body in “the act of becoming” (317). In the gay relativity of the carnival, the grotesque body gives birth to a corporeal semiotics that is fleshy, porous, and subject to a perpetual cycle of birth, growth, death, and regeneration. 2

The origins of the carnival can be traced to the Roman Saturnalias (Bakhtin 7), riotous ritual festivities in honor of Saturn, god of fertility, regeneration, and liberation.

These traces linger in the carnival time of the High Middle Ages, when feasting and pleasuring, self-parody, bisexuality and cross-dressing, obscene language and gestures, and the masking and shifting of identities created a material cosmology centered on the regenerative forces of life and the unbounded creativity of working people (Stam 93).

The space and time of carnival draws on its Saturnalian roots to invert the religious cosmology of the Church and its idealization of “all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract,” grounding itself in a material cosmos of flesh and earth in chaotic and perpetual exchange. Bakhtin describes the material lower bodily stratum, “that is, images of the human body with its food, drink, defecation, and sexual life” (18), as central to this carnival cosmology. Oaths and billingsgate, obscene jokes about the functions of the body, and self-parody all form part of a culture of folk humor in literature that he calls

“grotesque realism,” based on the degradation of “all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract.” In grotesque realism, Bakthin traces a carnival spirit and folk heritage that he identifies as carnivalesque, contained “not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed”

(19). Through the exuberant chaos of carnival and a cosmology grounded in degradation and the material functions of the body, grotesque realism in Bakhtin’s formulation voices the creative, regenerative force of ordinary working people. 3

Desire and pleasure are at the heart of this carnival cosmology, part of the revalorization of Eros central to the camivalesque (Stam 94). Bakhtin coins the term camivalization to describe the “defeat through laughter” of the “official conceptions of hell and purgatory,” punishment for verboten desires and pleasures. He argues that the camivalesque marshals humor, parody, and the image of the grotesque body to overcome the fear and “mystic terror” engendered by the “official Christian point of view” (395). I adapt his term to describe a similar process in the grotesque imagination of desire, what I will call the camivalization of desire. As a term, carnivalized desire is intended to bridge

Bakhtin’s dual tropes of carnival and the grotesque body, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix

Guattari’s re-conceptualization of desire as positive and productive. I use the term in an attempt to describe the creative, regenerative force that propels the grotesque body’s “act of becoming” in its discursive deployment in literature.

In this investigation, I will argue that carnivalized desire overwhelms the repressive force of what Bakhtin calls the “correct” word, or authoritative discourse, through the erotic congress of grotesque bodies in the literary imagination. In subsuming authoritative discourse, carnivalized desire invokes the grotesque body’s “act of becoming,” a move with considerable ethical and political implications. As a first step toward exploring these implications, I situate my concept in relation to Bakhtin’s camivalesque and Rosi Braidotti’s ethics of nomadic subjectivity, before briefly moving to position it within contemporary discourse on desire. Throughout this work, carnivalized desire’s invocations and enactments will be examined in diverse literary 4 texts linked by grotesque realism, with an eye toward an answer to the age-old question of the uses of literature. In the first chapter, I take up Bakhtin’s invitation to explore the revival of grotesque realism in early modernity with a comparative analysis of camivalized desire and its transformative effect on an authoritative lyrical voice in two poems about grotesque bodies by Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda. In the second chapter, I turn my focus to the study of two strikingly different cults of the flesh, each a modern Saturnalia linked by the grotesque body. Carnivalized desire for the material lower bodily strata of young male protagonists lies at the center of each cult’s material cosmology, carnivalesque inversions of the religious cosmology of the Church. We will see this in Cuban writer Virgilio Pinera’s absurdly anthropophagic 1953 novel, La came de Rene [Rene’s Flesh] and in US writer John Rechy’s sexually revolutionary 1963 novel, City o f Night. Taken together, these texts form part of a revival of grotesque realism in the Americas.

At the heart of this work is my intention to show how camivalized desire in literature, and specifically in grotesque realism, invokes a movement toward what

Braidotti calls nomadic subjectivity, a constitution of the self that, like Bakhtin’s grotesque body, is “open to the world” (25) and always becoming. Carnivalized desire’s capacity to provoke ethical questions in readers about the constitution of the self in relation to others makes it a fruitful site for an investigation of the ethical force of literature. These particular texts are well suited for this work, since in each a transformative and revolutionary process occurs, a kind of becoming driven by desire. Desiring bodies enact these becomings, drawing on the regenerative chaos of the lower bodily stratum, its exuberant multiplicities, and the multi-voicedness of its discursive deployment.

But not all erotic writing produces the “crossing of multiplicities” that defines my use of the term becoming (Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus 239) to describe a state of incompletion, openness to the world and its multiplicity of voices, and productive exchange with difference. These erotic texts are unique in part because of their places within a historical context of radical change spanning a hundred years. Whitman’s text was written just before the US Civil War and the end of slavery, while Neruda, closely affiliated with the Communist Party, wrote during its decades-long rise to electoral victory in Chile. Similarly, Pinera’s novel was written shortly before the Cuban

Revolution, while Rechy’s was published at the start of the sexual revolution in the

1960s. I do not intend to claim that the texts sparked these radical political and social changes; instead, I explore the contributions each may have made with its invocations and provocations, and what they have to offer contemporary readers.

In the first chapter, I show how Whitman’s “This Compost” invokes becoming by subsuming a singly voiced narrator’s anxiety in the fecundity of a joyous biological and social exchange between the body and the earth. Neruda spoke at length of the influence in his own work of Whitman’s exuberant transgression of boundaries between the body and the earth; in “Caballero solo” [“A Single Gentleman”], we see echoes of Whitman.

Another kind of becoming takes place in this text for a similarly anxious and singly voiced narrator, one driven by the force of an exuberant, anarchic sexual congress of different bodies and desires. Each becoming signals the triumph of a fleshy materialism that, in the second chapter, takes form as literal and metaphoric cults of the flesh. In the two novels under consideration, we see not subsumption, but transformation, part of the grotesque body’s desire-driven invocation to become. The masochism, dark humor, and homoerotic consumption of Rene’s flesh in La came de Rene [Rene’s Flesh] initiates a becoming, part of the rites of a literal cult of the flesh. In City o f Night, a metaphoric cult of the flesh actively subverts the “correct” uses of the body as defined by the Church and

State of the text’s historical context (pre-sexual revolution US society); the consumption of male bodies and fluids in a kind of fun-filled carnival of “incorrect” sex enacts a similar becoming. Each of these grotesque bodies is in the act of becoming, and each act is fundamentally driven by carnivalized desire.

The Human Body in and as Discourse

As a discursive formation of humorous resistance to the Church and State’s approved uses of the body, the grotesque stands in stark contrast to the classical image of the body. Bakhtin, referring to the changing literary norms of the Renaissance, describes the emergence of a new official literature with “correct” literary language and a new canon of the classical body:

[Official literary language] presents an entirely finished, completed, strictly

limited body, which is shown from the outside as something individual. That 7

which protrudes, bulges, sprouts, or branches off (when a body transgresses its

limits and a new one begins) is eliminated, hidden, or moderated. All orifices of

the body are closed.... The verbal norms of official and literary language,

determined by the canon, prohibit all that is linked with fecundation, pregnancy,

childbirth. There is a sharp line of division between familiar speech and “correct”

language. (.Rabelais 320)

In this formulation, an official literary language that privileges the classical body and its

idealized, “correct” forms marginalizes difference as embodied in concealed “sprouts and bulges” rather than as the open orifices of the grotesque body. In this official discourse

lies an implicit judgment: speak and write correctly, without reference to the shameful

functions and irregularities of the body, and be approved. Speak and write of the

grotesque, and be censured, disapproved, declasse. Official language insulates the

classical body as a discursive formation from the chaos of the world and its vast field of

difference. The literary representation of the grotesque body, in contrast, contains the

potential for the voices of people with ordinary lives and ordinary bodies to emerge in

comic, carnivalesque resistance to “correct” language and its discourse of authority.

Bakhtin describes this effect as dialogic (multi-voiced and in dialogue), part of a

carnivalization of language and literature that has lingered discursively long after the

dispersal of carnival traditions; it reflects, he claims, the multi-voicedness of folk culture

that has resisted official, correct language for hundreds of years. 8

Bakhtin argues that the dialogic character of the carnivalesque is best found within certain kinds of novelistic discourse. The lyrical voice of poetic discourse is, according to him, primarily monologic,1 a term Bakhtin uses to describe a discourse dominated by a single voice and connected to a singular view of the world: “the language of the poetic genre is a unitary and singular Ptolemaic world outside of which nothing else exists and nothing else is needed” (Dialogic 286). Monologism, in this view, leads to the closure of the self to the world through the use of “correct” language that instantiates a hieratic authority; Bakhtin will go on to call this part of an “authoritative discourse.”

In “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin develops this concept of authoritative discourse:

The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own;

it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us

internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it. The authoritative

word is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt

to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers. Its authority

was already acknowledged in the past. It is a prior discourse.. . . It is given (it

sounds) in lofty spheres, not those of familiar contact. Its language is a special (as

it were, hieratic) language. (Dialogic 342, emphasis in text)

As an official language, authoritative discourse is “religious, political, moral; the word of a father, of adults and teachers, etc.”; it is fundamentally a discourse that seeks unity in the service of hierarchical control masked as higher truths. Correct ways of speaking and writing, correct bodies, and correct desires conspire to create authorized and unauthorized ways of being, thinking, and living; the “correct” is a hierarchy of truth determined by people in positions of power (“religious, political, moral; the word of a father”). In the classical body, we see the triumph of the correct. In the literary imagination, the classical body is part of a discursive formation of sameness, closure, and completion that embodies a self/other dynamic wherein the self is same and the other is different, in permanent opposition to the self.

From this perspective, the discursive formations of the human body (the classical and the grotesque) take on a whole new dimension of critical and ethical relevance.

Writing of the “tendency to assimilate others’ discourse,” Bakhtin argues that language itself (“the words of others”) is deeply significant in processes of ideological becoming:

“another’s discourse performs here no longer as information, directions, rules, models, and so forth - but strives rather to determine the very bases of our ideological interrelations with the world, the very basis of our behavior; it performs here as authoritative discourse and an internally persuasive discourse” {Dialogic 342, emphasis in text). Authoritative discourse, like the official language of the classical body, performs a closure of meaning in its fixing of ideological consciousness; like the correct word, this discourse authorizes and forbids, accepts and rejects, includes and excludes. Internally persuasive discourse, in contrast, reflects the multi-voicedness of the world that primordially preceded the authoritative word; it invokes the opening of the self to the different perspectives and voices of others (“others’ discourse”). Learning to reject 10 authoritative discourse is a process of self-awareness grounded in the responsibility of the self to the other, what Bakhtin calls an ideological becoming shaped by internally persuasive discourse. Bakhtin’s ethical self is one who transgresses the boundaries of authoritative discourse to engage in dialogue with others, learning to adopt and adapt the other’s discourse so that it becomes “half-ours and half-someone else’s” (Dialogic 345).

As discursive formation, the grotesque body in literature is often the site for this becoming. As Bakhtin notes, the literary representation of the regenerative chaos of the grotesque body enacts becoming: “The grotesque body, as we have often stressed, is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world” (317). The grotesque body, never complete and always becoming, subverts through self-parody and laughter the classical ideal of complete, perfect bodies; it is an internally persuasive discursive formation.

Matrices of Becoming

I have so far argued that grotesque realism laughingly invites us to become the

mature subjects of Bakhtin’s dialogic world through the internally persuasive discourse

of its grotesque bodies. Braidotti, writing of a materialist theory of becoming, locates

desire at the heart of this constitution of the self, noting that “the construction of a

thinking subject cannot be separated from that of a desiring subject: affectivity and

intellectuality grow together in such a way as to make it difficult to separate reason from 11 the imagination” (71). Bakhtin’s mature subject is what Braidotti calls the nomadic subject: it is a self in perpetual exchange with others, whose meaning and identity shifts nomadically through the opening of the self to difference. In grotesque realism, desire in the broadest sense propels this nomadic subject formation.

At the same time, the grotesque body (bizarre, ugly, deformed, or lewd) hardly seems at first glance to be a likely locus of an ethically productive desire. Exaggerated and obscene sex acts, messy and disgusting feasting, mischievously and humorously described scenes of defecation: each of these functions of the human body was raucously celebrated in the folk humor traditions of carnival. Today, these copulating, defecating, eating, and sneezing bodies belong firmly to the realm of lowbrow humor, with its fart jokes and dirty sexual innuendos. But through humor, these images continue to satirize

“the bourgeois conception of the completed, atomized being” (Bakhtin, Rabelais 24) and the “aesthetics of the beautiful as conceived by the Renaissance” (29). The grotesque

image stirs derision and disgust at the same time as it provokes desire, as Patrick West

notes in his work on psychoanalytic theories of desire in language: “[the grotesque] is

that which simultaneously repulses and attracts us” (245). By unabashedly representing

unapproved, “ugly,” and taboo uses of the body, these images repel and attract, offering

tantalizing glimpses of the verboten.

Repulsion and attraction are tightly bound in a rhythmic exchange, as Friedrich

Nietzsche points out in The Will to Power, for without displeasure, there would be no

pleasure, and without disgust, no attraction (371). Between these seeming antinomies lies 12 what Braidotti calls a positive difference, one that, in the construction of the nomadic subject, is both constitutive and desired. Positive difference, a crucial concept here, challenges the notion of difference as part of a binary system linked through negation to sameness. For Braidotti, positive difference operates as and/and instead of either/or. In her formulation of what she calls a sustainable modern subjectivity, Braidotti elaborates a model of subjectivity composed of matrices of becoming. Like Bakhtin’s grotesque body

(“constantly open to the world”), her nomadic subject transgresses what she calls the dialectical interconnection between Self/Same and Other/Different and its subsequently negative positioning of difference:

They are two positively different others or sames, de-linked from the dialectical

interconnection ... the Other is a matrix of becoming in his or her own right, and

it generates a new kind of entity on which the same actually depends for their own

self-definition. What matters is what occurs in the in-between spaces, the

intervals, the transitions between their respective differences ... the unfolding of

positive difference. (72)

This positive difference unfolds matrices of becoming both within and without the grotesque body. Difference in the grotesque body is seen in the changing textures of the body in copulation, in the introduction and expulsion of difference through its orifices, and in conception, pregnancy, and birth, to name only a few examples. Unlike the classical body with its excised sprouts and growths, it is both constitutive and regenerative, part of the “inverted cosmology” of constant flux and chaotic exchange 13 between the earth and flesh. The nomadic subject, like Bakhtin’s grotesque body, opens itself to the world and the voices of others through a constant shifting of meaning and being - it is a fundamentally nomadic ontology that embraces difference as constitutive of the self; for without difference, in this model, there can be no self. As a constitutive element of subjectivity, difference is as desired as it is necessary.

Difference and desire interact productively and rhythmically in each of the texts under consideration here. Whitman and Neruda’s monologic narrators anxiously swat away the percolating force of a multitude of distasteful desires, the desires of others', the main characters of Pinera and Rechy’s homoerotic novels struggle against a similarly taboo (and fundamentally different or other) desire for the grotesque body. Writing about

Deleuze’s affirmation of difference in his vision of the postmodern subject, Braidotti notes that, “[for him], the ‘other’ is not the emblematic and inevitably vampirized mark of alterity - as in classical philosophy ... It is a moving horizon of exchanges and becomings, towards which the non-unitary subjects of post-modernity move, and by which they are moved in return” (71). Deleuze envisions positive difference as an otherness that is not just complementary, but inextricably and productively bound to our concept of self; it is part of Bakhtin’s mature self s “half-another’s, half-ours” discourse.

For Braidotti, this vision of otherness is central to her concept of nomadic subjectivity, part of an ethically productive exchange and becoming between the self and the other.

Otherness, as a concept of relational difference, finds unique expression in queemess. As a word, queer connotes atypical, different sexual desires and gender 14 expressions; it contains both a threat to sameness and a promise of becoming different.

Etymologically, the meaning of the word can be traced to difference. Roget’s English

Thesaurus lists the following synonyms, among others, for the word: strange, funny, peculiar, bizarre, uncanny, freakish; unconventional, unorthodox, unfamiliar, abnormal; puzzling, perplexing, baffling; the antonym is given as “normal.” The word itself defies categorization, moving between its position as a pejorative term that describes sexual and gender difference in the sense of unhealthy abnormality, and, within sexual and gender minorities, a term of political resistance that embraces difference as positive in its defiance of heteronormative categories of meaning, being, and desiring. In each iteration, the term illustrates the shifting limits of language and representation, much like the grotesque body’s orifices signify “openness to the world,” the transgression of boundaries, and regeneration. Judith Butler notes this in her article, “Critically Queer”:

“If the term queer is to be the site of a collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings, it will have to remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior usage” (19). In the anti-identitarian aspects of queerness that Butler describes, the word itself becomes, part of a continual transformation and transgression of boundaries, meaning, and identities. Desire in this becoming is central: queerness centers on different, non-heteronormative desires and fluid identities.

Because of the centrality of desire in these processes of transformation and transgression, I will use the terms becoming, and, where specifically useful, becoming- queer, drawing from Bakthin, Deleuze, and Braidotti to describe the shifting of conceptions of subjectivity, away from a polarizing self/other relationship and toward a nomadic subjectivity that embraces difference as complementary and constitutive.

Similar in many ways to Deleuze’s psychoanalytic concept of becoming-animal in its ontological de-territorializing (severing meaning from social, political, and cultural contexts) and re-territorializing (attaching meaning to new contexts), I use the terms becoming and becoming-queer to describe a process of subjectival de-mooring from fixed identities and stability, a dismemberment of the whole body and its rebirth as fleshy parts that resist definition.

In grotesque realism, carnivalized desire propels this becoming in a kind of ontological movement beyond the boundaries of the self and toward the other (and back again). Speaking similarly of the transformative force within the grotesque body, Gaurav

Majumdar in an article on aesthetics as ethics describes this force as a “jolt.” Like the gay relativity of carnival, the jolt of the grotesque upends social relations and temporarily suspends rank and authority, invoking a becoming with enormous ethical potential. He writes that the grotesque body in literature “does not merely acknowledge [the voices of others], but in its very form, it accommodates the other ... showing an inclusiveness, the presence of difference on its own body, a capacity for transformation, and a welcome to alterity” (36). The literary representation of the grotesque body invites readers to explore the contours of its becoming; in its incompletion, its bizarre excrescences, and its cyclical life force (conception, growth, death, rebirth), we come face to face with an embodiment 16 of difference and the fluidity of the self as subject. This accommodation of difference is, according to Majumdar, sparked by the jolt of the grotesque; such an aesthetic invokes

“an ethics that mirrors its endless emigration and immigration across ‘feeling consistent with itself” (49). In the literary representation of the inconsistency and change of the grotesque body, sameness itself is upended, along with the authoritative linguistic regime that derives its power from the exclusion of those determined to be too different, too other. An “endless emigration and immigration” of meaning opens the self to infinite variety and fecundity, making room for the multiple voices of others - the self can become “half-ours and half-someone else.”

Carnivalizing Desire: Toward an Erotic Ethos

Like Majumdar, I locate a rich ethical potential in this dialogizing of the self invoked by the internally persuasive language of the grotesque body; the force of camivalized desire is part of the “jolt” of the grotesque. I intend to add to his work on the ethical promise of the grotesque by focusing on the revalorization of Eros in the literary representation of the grotesque body, and specifically in the movement between the erotic and disgusting. Sigmund Freud conceptualizes the pleasure principle and the death drive as opposing forces, offering one way to make sense of these links between desire and disgust, most often linked to the death drive. David Lomas notes this in his work on surrealism, psychoanalysis, and subjectivity: “That which incites disgust, the disgusting, 17 is another one of the presentations of the death drive” (175). But in desire for the grotesque body, it becomes clear that these drives are not antinomal.

The grotesque body provokes in each of these texts a strange attraction rooted in disgust and desire and stimulated by laughter and parody. To begin to unravel the seemingly oppositional positions of these forces, I make use of Nietzsche’s conceptualization of these drives. He links them to the Will to Power, and calls the drives not opposites, but parallel “rhythms” (371); in this way, the constant movement between pleasure and pain, between desire and disgust, forms a rhythmic part of the cycle of life, site of perpetual exchange and movement between fertility and reproduction, and vegetable and mineral states. This rhythmic process mirrors in many ways Bakhtin’s concept of the fecundity of the grotesque body.

Nietzsche conceptualizes these rhythms as part of a primary driving life force in humans, a kind of self-overcoming deeply linked to a positive vision of power. In Anti-

Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari turn away from the traditional psychoanalytic conceptualization of desire as a negative Oedipal force emanating wildly from the Id, mediated by the Ego, and controlled by the Superego. Instead, they seek to bridge

Nietzsche’s concept of power as life force and Freud’s similar positioning of the libidinal impulse by re-conceptualizing desire as a positive, productive force. I draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s re-conceptualization to situate the desiring grotesque bodies of these texts within an ethically productive cycle of regeneration, chaos, and constant becoming. 18

The exuberantly productive and different desires in each of these texts stands in clear opposition to what has been described as the “dominant traditions of Western thought since Plato”: desire as lack, an absence and longing for the other that is inherently negative (Moss 175). Recall Jacques Lacan’s dual formulations of desire as lack: “le desir est la metonymie du manque a etre” [“desire is the metonymy of the lack of being”] (251) and “le desir de l’homme est le desir de l’Autre” [“man’s desire is the desire of the Other”] (300). Karmenlara Seidman attempts to link this conceptualization of desire and the camivalesque, arguing that “the drive towards excess in Carnival performances is an indulgence seeking fulfillment that is actually metaphysical, and nearly unfulfillable. The performed excesses are expressions of the desire to apprehend or reach the absolute Other, the ultimate infinitude of desire” (19). To conceptualize desire as a lack of being, a “nearly unfulfillable” longing for the Other, moves desire into the realm of the negative through its focus on perpetual absence and “infinitude.” Lacan’s lack acknowledges, much like the perpetually deferred meaning within a chain of signifiers, the anxious impossibility of desire: what is wanted is what is not present, what is absent, what will always be absent. In this sense, desire becomes intimately linked to what can be taken away (through symbolic castration) or what can never be (through the incestual impulse).

Michel Foucault in The Care o f the Self traces this negative movement in the history of sexuality, noting the increasing politicization and eroticization of the body: “A whole corpus of moral reflection on sexual activity and its pleasure seems to mark, in the 19 first centuries of our era, a certain strengthening of austerity themes. Physicians worry about the effects of sexual practice, [and] unhesitatingly recommend abstention” (235).

Desire acquired, as a consequence, a patina of shame, one that Freud would go on to link to the incestual impulse. If, as Freud asserts, desire at its core is incestual, then it stands to reason that desire must be repressed, despite the unconscious imperative for it to be released. Such a conflict leads to the sublimation of desire in aggression, war, hysteria, and clinical pathologies. Like me, Braidotti turns to Deleuze and Gauttari to formulate a vision of positive, productive desire, one that propels the self toward nomadic subjectivity and away from a “negative vision of desire”:

Adopting Nietzsche’s figurative style of speech, Deleuze (D+G 1980 [in 1000

Plateaus]) dubs as slave morality Lacan’s negative vision of desire, his

metaphysical notion of the unconscious as the black box of deep ‘inner’ truths,

and the emphasis on castration and lack. He prefers to posit the unconscious in

terms of displacement and production, and desire as affirmation. (71)

The lack, as a force negativized by social and psychic repression, invites repression, pathology, aggression, what Deleuze and Guattari call a “slave morality” of fear, anxiety, and obedience to cope with the threat of the destabilizing force of desire.

Deleuze and Guattari list the lack among the “three errors concerning desire”

{Anti-Oedipus 111). They go on to note that, “from the moment lack is reintroduced into desire, all of desiring production is crushed, reduced to being no more than the production of fantasy.” For Deleuze and Guattari, negative desire is linked to the Oedipal 20 complex, a “sham image” they call “the bait, the disfigured image by means of which repression catches desire in the trap” (Anti-Oedipus 116). The Oedipal complex arises, they argue, from the social and economic need to repress desire within the nuclear family structure, which they argue to be particularly useful for capitalist economies in its ongoing production of workers “already Oedipalized” and ready to submit to hierarchies of power and production. By disfiguring desire in this way, desire can be displaced and repressed, making the nuclear family into an “agent of repression” that maintains the structures necessary for the perpetuation of bourgeois ideological hegemony.

While desire-as-lack contains a dangerous potential for social and psychic repression, positive, productive desire is dangerous in a very different way:

Every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question

the established order of a society: not that desire is asocial, on the contrary. But it

is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without

demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what some revolutionaries think, desire

is revolutionary in its essence - desire, not left-wing holidays! - and no society

can tolerate a position of real desire without it structures of exploitation,

servitude, and hierarchy being compromised. (116)

Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is dangerous precisely because of its inherently productive nature; in this sense, it contains the potential to produce the very becoming

Bakhtin describes at the heart of the grotesque body: “Eating, drinking, defecation and other elimination ... all these acts are performed on the confines of the body and the outer world, or on the confines of the old and new body” (Rabelais 317). Each of these acts, from copulation to consumption, is driven by productive, at times uncontrollable desire: the desire to eat, defecate, copulate, and so on, involves a wanting that produces this becoming. In grotesque realism, this wanting is a carnival wanting, one shaped by a revalorized Eros that revels in the materiality of the body. In the grotesque body’s constant movement between the old and the new, desire is a productive and positive force that itself becomes carnivalized in the joyful exuberance of the carnival. To trace this carnivalization and its subsequent ethical invocations, I turn now to Whitman and

Neruda’s grotesque realist poetry. 22

Chapter One: Whitman and Neruda’s Desiring Bodies in Discourse

In Nuevas odas elementales [New Elemental Odes], published in 1956, Neruda includes a poem titled “Oda a Walt Whitman” [“Ode to Walt Whitman”]:

Toque una mano y era

la mano de Walt Whitman:

pise la tierra

con los pies desnudos,

anduve sobre el pasto,

sobre el firme rocio de Walt Whitman.

[I touched a hand and it was

Walt Whitman’s hand

I walked the earth

barefoot

I walked on the prairie on the firm dew

of Walt Whitman. (Rumeau 51)]

A rhapsody to Whitman’s influence on Neruda, the poem proclaims a direct link to

Whitman; he is in the earth Neruda treads, the air he breathes, and the dew under his bare feet. Neruda calls him his American “camerado,” mirroring Whitman’s use of the word to mean both comrade and companion (Rumeau 48).2 What leads Neruda, fondly called the people’s poet, to identify so strongly with one of the leading figures of American romanticism? The language he uses to describe his affinity for Whitman offers key clues: 23

Si mi poesia tenia algun significado, es esa tendencia espacial, ilimitada, que no

se satisface en una habitation. Mi frontera tenia que sobre pasarla yo mismo [...]

Otro poeta de este mismo continente me ayudo en este camino. Me refiero a Walt

Whitman, mi companero de Manhattan (“Viviendo con el idioma” [1973], as

cited by Peter Earle 193).

(If my poetry has any meaning, it is that spatial tendency, without limits, not

satisfied in a room. I had to pass beyond my own borders, alone.... Another poet

from this continent helped me along this road. I’m referring to Walt Whitman, my

comrade from Manhattan.3)

Neruda’s need to “pass beyond” borders and boundaries frequently finds satisfaction in rich, often grotesque, descriptions of the body and its functions in similar ways to

Whitman; this lies at the heart of Neruda’s affinity with Whitman. This transgression of corporeal boundaries takes place in the literary imagination of the grotesque body, with its downward movement, ugly excrescences, and chaotic biological and social exchange, in a kind of joyful opening of the body and the self to the world.

For Whitman and Neruda, transgressing the limits of the body and opening it to the world was an erotically charged event; in imagining encounters with other bodies both natural and human, they often turned to acts of love. Bakhtin describes the act of love as a core function of the grotesque body and its opening of the self, part of the carnival’s revalorization of Eros. Depictions of copulation, pregnancy, birth, and, in the body’s return to vegetable and mineral states, the promise of regeneration, celebrated the 24 victory of life and “the historic, progressing body of mankind” (Rabelais 367). In

Whitman’s poem “This Compost,” published in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, the

“diseas’d corpses” within the earth form part of an erotic cycle of regeneration marked by licking, penetration, conception, and renewal. In “Caballero solo” [“Single Gentleman”], a poem Neruda wrote between 1925 and 1931, the copulating bodies of young, working class men and women enact a similar cycle. Neruda’s poem is a carnival of sexuality, a carnal feast of fools, where a single gentleman is ironically positioned as a monologic, narrating voice. The same phenomenon occurs in Whitman’s poem, where a monologic voice describes a fear of the “foul meat” of the earth and the sea and its desire to “lick my naked body all over” (391). The monologic voice of the narrator in each poem struggles against the exuberance of a chorus of voices unmuted by carnivalized desire, the dialogizing force in both Neruda and Whitman’s grotesquely realistic poems.

In this chapter, I undertake a comparative analysis of these two texts to show how carnivalized desire in poetic discourse enacts the “dialogic illumination” Bakhtin locates within the polyphony of Dostoevsky and Rabelais’s novelistic discourse. He writes:

In Dostoevsky’s world all people and all things must know one another and know about one another, must enter into contact, come together face to face and begin to talk with one another. Everything must be reflected in everything else, all things must illuminate one another dialogically... . What is necessary for this is carnival freedom and carnival’s artistic conception of space and tim e.... A carnival sense of the world helps Dostoevsky overcome gnoseological as well as ethical solipsism. A single person, remaining alone 25 with himself, cannot make ends meet even in the deepest and most intimate spheres of his own spiritual life, he cannot manage without another consciousness. One person can never find complete fullness in himself alone. {Problems o f Dostoevsky’s Poetics 111, emphasis in text)

In both poems, this dialogic illumination, a kind of ethical consciousness provoked by meaningful engagement with others, takes place through a chorus of desiring bodies in erotic congress. By comparing the way that camivalized desire drives different incarnations of polyphonic, carnivalesque freedom, I hope to show how these writers’ different projects of conceptualizing selfhood work to “overcome gnoseological as well as ethical solipsism.” In this way, erotic writing about grotesque bodies raises rich ethical questions about the nature of the self/other relationship at the same time as it proposes a model of postmodern subjectivity, what Braidotti calls the nomadic subject, constituted by desire and perpetually made and re-made in polyphonic exchange with others.

Whitman’s poetry has been described as polyphonic by many critics, among them

Michael Shapiro and Gilles Deleuze (Shapiro 194), while Bakhtin attributes a carnivalesque multi-voicedness to Neruda’s work {Rabelais 46). In Whitman’s poetry, this chorus of other voices belongs largely to nature; in Neruda, however, they are the voices of other desiring bodies. In “This Compost” and “Caballero solo,” the voice of the poet is ironically situated - fearful, anxious, but on the verge of transformation vis-a-vis a productive desire situated among the excess of carnival. Carnivalized desire drives this movement toward Bakhtin’s mature self, a nomadic subjectivity that is “half-ours, half- 26 another’s.” In the erotic opening of the grotesque body to the world through its open orifices and the introduction of an/other into the body, these narrators are provoked into becoming, a “verb with a consistency all its own” (Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus 239).

Speaking about Whitman at the University of Chicago in 1965, Jorge Luis Borges imagines how Whitman would welcome these multiplicities: “He thought, ‘I will have to write a poem, a poem of democracy, that is to say, a poem where there shall be no central hero, or rather the central hero shall be everybody, ‘Everyman,’ to use the old name”

(710). He goes on to note how “for the first time in the history of poetry, a man is talking about the act of love. He’s not being bashful or daring about it” (716). Borges talks of having first read Whitman in 1917, when he was 18 years old, and “since then I have not reread Walt Whitman. I have not reread him because Walt Whitman has become a part of myself’ (711).

Both Neruda and Borges lay claim to Whitman’s legacy. Borges points to, among other things, Whitman’s frank treatment of the act of love as a major turning point in US and Latin American poetics. He argues this is because “[he was] working out a new pattern. Whitman thought of the past as being feudal. He thought of all previous poetry as mere feudalism” (710). Bakhtin takes a similar position toward poetry, arguing that poetic discourse is a “unitary and singular Ptolemaic world outside of which nothing else exists and nothing else is needed” (Dialogic 286); for Bakhtin, the lyrical voice of the poet is monologic, feudal and authoritative in its “official” literary language. 27

At the same time, Bakhtin acknowledges the possibility of a dialogized poetic discourse in Rabelais and His World, locating within Neruda’s work a “new and powerful revival of grotesque realism ... related to the tradition of realism and folk culture [that] reflects at times the direct influence of carnival forms, as in the work of

Neruda” (46). Neruda’s work has already been extensively cited as an example of

Bakhtin’s realist grotesque in poetic discourse, as Manuel Jofre notes in his article linking

Bakhtin and Neruda (72). While Bakhtin’s project in Rabelais was the literary origins of grotesque realism in the writing of Renaissance authors like Miguel Cervantes and

Francois Rabelais, he invites scholars to explore its revival in early modern literature. I take up this invitation here as part of my investigation into the force of carnivalized desire in grotesque realist literature.

The poetry of Walt Whitman, much like Neruda’s, is an important part of this revival of the grotesque, specifically in the dialogizing force of the grotesque body. This by itself is not a particularly new insight. Shapiro makes a similar point about the dialogic force of Whitman’s poetry, calling Bakhtin’s “restriction of dialogics to novels ... unfair to poetry and to Whitman specifically.” He goes on to cite Deleuze, who wrote that

“Whitman’s poetry offers as many meanings as there are relations with its various interlocutors: the masses, the reader, States, the ocean” (Shapiro 194). In light of how

Whitman’s poetry “break[s] the hegemony of the lyric voice,” as Shapiro convincingly argues, it is hardly surprising to discover that Neruda was one of Whitman’s most famous interlocutors. A lifelong Communist Party member, Neruda’s 1950 magnum opus, Canto 28

General, boldly attempted to disrupt European cultural hegemony. Taken together, camivalized desire in each author’s discursive formation of the grotesque body sheds new light on the carnivalesque’s re-valorization of Eros, its own disruption of hegemony, and the shift in subjectivity that it invokes.

Neruda, according to Delphine Rumeau’s work on the influences of Whitman on

Neruda’s poetry, “considered Whitman as a pioneer, as the poet who opened the door for

American poetry. One of the things Neruda focuses on is what he calls ‘Whitman’s vital lesson’: his embrace of the world, of the whole world” (48). Rumeau describes the profound impact of Whitman’s poetry on Neruda, noting the images of Whitman hanging on the walls of Neruda’s homes in Chile, the odes to Whitman in poetry and his public speeches, and his avid collecting of editions of Leaves o f Grass (47). Whitman’s unabashed and lyrical eroticism embraced the earthiness of the human body and its cosmic connections to the whole world; his work is a clear antecedent of the democratic eroticism of Neruda’s poetry.

Writing about the eroticized body in Whitman’s poem, “I Sing the Body Electric,”

Martha Nussbaum notes:

Traditional metaphysicians, [Whitman] suggests, do not know “the curious

sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body”; or, if

they do, they have aggressively eliminated it from their accounts of human love.

And they hasten, too, in their different ways, to disengage their art from the sense

of bodily weight conveyed in this bulky line, with its awkward human grace.... 29

All our acts are bodily acts, and all our art is naked meat, and all our sympathy is

blood. (110)

Nussbaum points out that Whitman’s engagement with the “naked meat of the body” opposes traditional philosophical conceptualizations of desire as negative and the body as subordinate to the head. In the erotic representation of the downward movement of the body (eating, copulating, defecating, decaying, and conceiving) and its perpetual biological and social exchange with the earth, Whitman’s eroticized bodies presage

Bakhtin’s conceptualization of the radical, democratizing potential of grotesque realism.

In Neruda, the “touch of Whitman’s hand” is felt in the erotic congress of the grotesque bodies of ordinary people that fill his poetry.

Whitman found inspiration among the chaotic cacophony of bodies and spaces in his native Manhattan; the chaotic exchange of nature and bodies in his native Chile similarly inspired Neruda. David Wall, writing about contemporary prose descriptions of

Manhattan in the 1850s, when Whitman lived there, argues that these visions contain the

“dominant tropes of the carnivalesque - deformity, disproportion, oaths and obscenity, and mocking laughter - invoked in order to situate the unruly lower orders irredeemably beyond the margins of civilized life” (524). He goes on:

It is a “fetid” world “knee-deep in filth,” filled with “human swine,” “bleary-eyed,

idiotic, beastly wretches,” and “abandoned women of the lowest grade.” The

social and geographical formation of the city, then, becomes the spatial 30

embodiment of the individual physical body of the low Other, both of which are

discursively structured as “grotesque.” (524)

The grotesque in this contemporary prose description of Whitman’s Manhattan, as Wall notes, is used to marginalize the low Others of the city; this would appear to contradict

Bakhtin’s assertion of the subversive power of the representation of grotesque bodies and

“the dominant tropes of the carnivalesque.” And yet, many of Whitman’s poems exalt

Wall’s “fetid world,” as we see in his joyous paean to Manhattan, “Mannahatta”: “A million people—manners free and superb—open voices / —hospitality—the most courageous and friendly young men” (485). For Whitman, the voices of a million people,

“free and superb—open voices,” make the city his: “My city!” It is precisely the low voices of the others of the city that Whitman exalts; they are part of him, as he is part of them.

I return to Wall to note the similarities between the fetid world of Whitman’s

Manhattan and Bakhtin’s grotesque body: “Like the vulgar intemperate bodies of the prostitutes, drunks, immigrants, Negroes, and Jews, the city too ‘swallows’ and ‘vomits,’ for, taken together, the social body of the city and the physical bodies of the lower orders threaten the collapse of the categorical imperatives of bourgeois ideology” (524). In

“This Compost,” the earth “draws off all the foul liquid and meat” (390), swallowing and vomiting the social and physical bodies of the city, a becoming that the anxious voice of the narrator and interlocutor affirms when he asks, “Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses / within you?” 31

This anxiety takes form as a fear of the earth in the poem’s first stanza:

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,

I withdraw from the still woods I loved,

I will not go now on the pastures to walk,

I will not strip my clothes from my body to meet my lover

the sea,

I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to

renew me. (390)

An abnegation takes places here, one linked, as we will soon learn, to the narrator’s fear of the “foul liquid and meat” interred in the earth and sea. Whitman calls the sea his lover, one awaiting his naked body; similarly, he writes of touching his flesh to the earth as he would “other flesh.” Despite the narrator’s anxious fear of corruption and the disgust it provokes in him, the eroticism of these lines performs a tentative desire-driven elision of flesh and earth, and of the body and the sea. Carnivalized desire produces this rhythmic movement between wanting and fearing, lust and disgust. It will, by the end of the poem, overwhelm the narrator, afraid and anxious, startled by his desire to walk, afraid to strip his clothes from his body, disgusted but strangely allured by the thought of touching his flesh to the putrid earth and its rotting interred bodies.

In the poem’s first stanzas, the narrator conceives of his desire as a negative force in a voice tinged with fear and anxiety similar to the hysteria Freud links to repressed

(incestual) desire: “Something startles me where I thought I was safest.” As a kind of 32 negative desire, it impels his abnegation, like an act of repression. The voice is a monologic one, a single voice speaking fearfully. I pause here to note that the monologic voice, much like the Greek monologos from which the word is derived, speaks alone; the voice controls and suppresses what Bakhtin argues to be the inherent dialogism of the natural world. Wielding monologic discourse like a shield, Whitman’s narrator represses his desire to meet his lover, the sea, and refuses to embrace the earth; he is protecting the unity of the self from a vast world of other voices. We see this in the language itself. In the second-person narrative form of address used in the first two stanzas, the narrator addresses himself to a familiar other throughout the text, at times incredulous (“How can you be alive you growths of spring?”) and at times accusing (“Where have you disposed of their carcasses?”). He addresses himself to this other that scares him and threatens the safety of his unified self; fear, abnegation, disgust, and incredulity surge in his repeated questions to an/other familiarly addressed as “you.” And yet, the narrator speaks of his

“lover the sea,” of his desire to press his flesh to the earth. His repression of that desire is tremulous and unsteady; though the grotesque body, rotting and bleeding, scares him, at the same time it calls to him and invites him to love it. In this sense, his monologic discourse - his own voice that accuses and defends - controls this engagement with others and protects him from their grotesque bodies.

In light of the politicization of the body in Western philosophy and, as Foucault points out, the “increasing recommendation of abstention” from sexual practices (235), it is not surprising to find that the desire he represses is a desire for the grotesque body: 33

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?

Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?

Where have you drawn off their foul liquid and meat?

I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am

deceiv’d,

I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade

through the sod and turn it up underneath,

I am sure I shall explore some of the foul meat. (390)

This monologic lyrical voice purposefully excludes the multiple voices that, as Bakhtin has argued, erupt dialogically in novelistic discourse. It is, like a monologue, a form of direct address, a lyrical voice controlled authoritatively by the “I” of the text and directed toward a “you” whose voice in these first two stanzas we cannot hear. So far, then,

Bakhtin’s argument that poetic discourse is primarily monologic appears to be borne out.

And yet, the erotic draw of the sea and the earth undermines the narrator and overwhelms his repressive act. As he speaks of pressing into the earth with his spade, his productive desire begins to overcome the (hysterical) fear that his spade might “explore some of the foul meat”; it is hardly necessary to point out the psychosexual symbolism of plowing the earth with his “spade.” In this way, the text metaphorically links death and birth to natural processes of decomposition and fertilization, a dialogic double act of dual contraries held together in the grotesque body. 34

Renewal is weakly restrained by the negativized desire acting on the monologic narrator’s voice. This weak restraint, what I earlier called an abnegation, happens in the final line of the first stanza, when the narrator refuses to find renewal in the earth as he does in the body of another: “I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to / renew me.” But to refuse to find renewal in both spaces acknowledges the possibility of doing so. As Deleuze and Guattari note, the repression of desire reflects its erotic potential: “if it is prohibited, it is because it is desired” (Anti-Oedipus 114).

This barely repressed possibility of renewal connects the body to the earth in a cycle of regeneration. Driven by the force of productive desire, this renewal initiates a penetration of the narrator’s monologic voice. This penetration continues and is developed throughout the poem, taking form in the buds and sprouts that push through the “fetid world” of the poem:

Behold this compost! behold it well!

Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—Yet behold!

The grass of spring covers the prairies,

The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,

The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,...

Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk—the lilacs bloom in the door-yards;

The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.

(390) 35

In this carnival of fecundity, these multiple protuberances, themselves a kind of language of nature, are birthed by the productive potential of desire to renew and regenerate, a potential acknowledged in the narrator’s refusal to embrace the earth. The erotic potential is only briefly contained by abnegation, similar to the ways in which desire is negativized and sublimated by psychic repression, only to re-emerge in distorted and displaced forms or as pathology. We see hints of that distortion in the narrator’s fear that digging may uncover “foul meat.”

Ultimately, this desire is both consummately productive and productively uncontainable, as the regeneration at the heart of the poem shows. Bakhtin notes this regenerative potential when he calls the grotesque body “a body in the act of becoming.”

In the rotting bodies the narrator fears, we see a process of becoming:

What chemistry!

That the winds are really not infectious,

That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea

Which is so amorous after me,

That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body with

its tongues,

That all is clean forever and forever ... (391)

This fecundity of the earth and the body parallels what Bakhtin locates in the literary representations of the lower bodily stratum and its regenerative functions. For Bakhtin, this constant becoming and renewal was a source of infinite possibility and vitality, one 36 with the potential to suspend and subvert social and political hierarchies: “Man, properly speaking, is not something completed and finished, but open, uncompleted” (364).

Bakhtin’s mature subject, “man, properly speaking,” transgresses the boundaries of authoritative discourse with its correct words and ways of being to engage in dialogue with others, dispensing with hierarchy to become part of the collective voice of the people.

In Whitman’s poem, productive desire propels the narrator toward a similar becoming grounded in the grotesque body. Nussbaum notes Whitman’s recognition of this “political significance of this recuperation of the body” in “I Sing the Body Electric”:

“Have you ever loved the body of a woman? / Have you ever loved the body of a man? /

Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and times all over the earth?” (118). As Nussbaum notes, the desiring body is for Whitman the basis of human equality. We begin to see here the potential of camivalized desire in literature to transform the monologic voice and, in so doing, invoke a movement toward nomadic subjectivity with its promise of equality through positive difference.

I have thus far described the productive force of these desiring bodies as camivalized because it enacts the fecundity of becoming on physical and natural bodies, much in the way Bakhtin envisions the function of the carnivalesque. As a force, camivalized desire subverts the closure of the classical body and its monologic lyrical voice, opening the narrator’s body to the different voices of natural others and inviting social and biological exchange between people and nature, and between the self and the 37 other. This becoming opposes the closure of meaning and the subsequent silencing of the voice of the Other/Different that occurs in the privileging of the Self/Same; the richness of human difference and the equal value of every person inhere within the productive chaos of constant exchange and regeneration. Within the fecund world of camivalized desire, the (becoming) buds and sprouts of nature and the tongues of the sea take on a carnival character that counteracts the fearful, anxious monologue of the narrator. Note that Whitman describes the sensation of submersion in the sea as being licked by tongues.

The personification of the sea as a lover with multiple tongues deploys nature as a camivalesque counterweight, with multiple tongues suggesting multiple voices. In the erotic licking of the narrator’s naked body, these tongues and their multiple voices eat away at the anxious fear driving the narrator’s monologic discourse. In this sense, then, we see the political potential of the grotesque body, “basis of human equality,” to subvert the monologic discourse of the narrator, of negativized desire, and more broadly, of the authoritarian power of “correct” discourse on ways of being and loving.

We have seen thus far how Walt Whitman’s grotesque bodies and his embrace of carnivalized desire are part of Bakhtin’s revival of the realist grotesque, with all of its revolutionary political potential. This revival continues with Neruda, whose “Oda a Walt

Whitman” (“Ode to Walt Whitman”) similarly references the poet’s body and the bodies of nature. Recall how he touches Whitman’s hand and feels him in the dew under his feet; in this sense, Neruda enacts a Whitmanesque exchange between the body and the earth. 38

In “Caballero solo” (Single Gentleman”), we can trace the evolution of this revival of the grotesque realist in the Americas, and the role of carnivalized desire within it. In Neruda’s poem, desire acts on the grotesque bodies of young, working class men and women in both a productive and a subversive sense, producing through desiring the regeneration and constant becoming that emerges through literary representations of the lower bodily stratum. I described “Caballero solo” earlier as a carnival of sexuality, a carnal and polyphonic feast of fools. Much like the narrator in “This Compost,” the single gentleman is ironically positioned as a monologic voice “licked by the tongues” of carnivalized desire. The text subtly satirizes the speaker’s alienation from a chorus of desiring bodies, a “collar de palpitantes ostras sexuales” (68) [“necklace of throbbing sexual oysters” (69)]. Although this single and singly voiced gentleman, alone in his solitary residence, resists these exuberantly polyphonic, “throbbing” voices of the enemy, the productive force of desire subsumes his voice much like the buds and shoots of spring in Whitman’s compost pile. Recall our earlier discussion of Bakhtin’s monologic voice, one he describes as a discourse dominated by a single voice and connected to a singular view of the world. In this sense, the narrator’s voice is fundamentally monologic, as a single voice besieged by the voices of others, enemies surrounding his lonely closed world. Fearful, anxious, and defended by the authoritative force of his monologic voice, the narrator is ironically situated on the verge of a transformation made possible by carnivalized desire: 39

Losjovenes homosexuales y las muchachas amorosas,

y las largas viudas que sufren el delirante insomnio,

y las jovenes senoras prenadas hace treinta horas,

y los roncos gatos que cruzan mi jardin en tinieblas,

como un collar de palpitantes ostras sexuales

rodean mi residencia solitaria,

como enemigos establecidos contra mi alma,

como conspiradores en traje de dormitorio

que cambiaran largos besos espesos por consigna. (68)

[The homosexual young men and the amorous girls,

and the long widows who suffer from delirious insomnia,

and the young wives thirty hours pregnant,

and the raucous cats that cross my garden in the dark,

like a necklace of throbbing sexual oysters,

they surround my solitary residence,

like enemies established against my soul,

like conspirators in night clothes,

who had exchanged long, thick kisses by command. (69)]

The single gentleman besieged and surrounded by “palpitantes ostras sexuales”

[“throbbing sexual oysters”], describes them as enemies and conspirators. Notably, these enemies besiege him not with guns or rocks, but with carnivalized desire - their weapons 40 are “largos besos espesos [long, thick kisses],” deployed on command in an atmosphere of raucous carnival revelry. In light of what Deleuze and Guattari call the revolutionary potential of desire and its explosiveness, it makes sense to call these desiring bodies

“enemies.” The bodies give voice to an unrepressed desire (note the “jovenes homosexuales”) that threatens the structures of psychic and social repression. These voices are the enemies of repressed desire, “conspiradores” [“conspirators”] that surround and, as the poem progresses, subsume the monologic narrator’s voice: “Los atardeceres del seductor y las noches de los esposos / se unen como dos sabanas sepultandome” (70)

(“The twilights of the seducer and the nights of the spouses / unite like two sheets burying me” [71]). These voices, overheard from the balcony of the single gentleman’s lonely home, bury him under sheets and “eternamente me rodea” (“eternally surrounded

[him]”).

Carnivalized desire is the force surrounding and subsuming the narrator. I have so far alluded to its productive potential in the text, specifically in its power to surround, engulf, and transform. Earlier, I described a similar force behind the polyphony of

Whitman’s poem. In Neruda’s poem, camivalized desire unmutes the polyphonic chorus of textual voices embodied in the desiring bodies outside the narrator’s home; this becomes clear in the final stanza’s dark surrounding and engulfing of the narrator that, grotesquely, resembles a womb-like embrace. Copulation, conception, birth, death, and renewal, all functions of the grotesque body, converge in a final narrative transformation that invokes the nomadic subjectivity of Bakhtin’s mature subject. 41

Fernando Alegria, writing about Whitman and Neruda’s use of the body in poetry, notes the principle of enumeration at work in both poets’ oeuvre. Neruda, according to

Alegria, expands on Whitman’s “bare enumeration to express a materialistic exaltation of

[the] body” (90). Neruda’s poem uses enumeration in an attempt to decipher the chaos engendered by the near-infinite possible combinations of desiring bodies made possible by carnivalized desire. In an environment that is unmistakably carnivalesque, the desiring bodies of humans and animals are described as “este gran bosque respiratorio y enredado

/ con grandes flores como bocas y dentaduras / y negras raices en forma de unas y zapatos” (70) (“this great respiratory and entangled forest / with huge flowers like mouths and teeth / and black roots shaped like fingernails and shoes” [71]). Reminiscent of carnival masks and the playful carnivalesque distortion of reality, these desiring bodies become a breathing, interlinked forest of limbs and roots and flowers that surround the narrator in his fearful and anxious solitude. Much like “This Compost,” the text joins bodies and earth to “securely surround” the narrator; like a cycle of decomposition and regeneration, desire in its most carnivalesque form overwhelms and subsumes the narrator’s monologic voice.

In contrast to Whitman’s poem, these voices do not penetrate the earth and lick the body; instead, they engulf and surround, breathing and, in a sense, thickening the air that the narrator breathes. A sense of suffocation lingers at the end of this poem, as the breathing forest and its tangled roots securely surround the narrator. And denied air, the monologic voice cannot speak. In this sense, the carnivalesque roar of desiring bodies 42 outside the narrator’s solitary residence overwhelms the solitary gentleman; these voices are those of desiring bodies, copulating animals, and the fecund natural world, a polyphonic chorus that speaks over the narrator’s fear and anxiety. A lack that represses and is repressed, his negativized desire is subsumed in the downward movement of the grotesque body (from “unas” [“nails”] to “zapatos” [“shoes”]) by a carnivalized desire of productivity, chaos, and regenerativity. Neruda’s enumeration in this text radically spans human, animal, plant, and mineral worlds, locating desire firmly within a carnivalesque cacophony. In this cacophony, we finally recognize the narrator liberated from negativized desire and securely surrounded, womb-like, by the carnivalized desire he has struggled to repress; it is as if he were about to be re-bom.

In a transformative and revolutionary process, these desiring bodies enact a grotesque becoming, as the lower bodily stratum’s copulation, masturbation, birth, and consumption mingle with blood, mouths, teeth, nails, and a thinly veiled allusion to throbbing genitalia, “palpitantes ostras sexuales” (“throbbing sexual oysters”). Simon

Williams, writing about desire and bodily disorders, argues that the human body is a site for transgression performed through the breaking or crossing of “corporeal boundaries.”

These transgressions, he argues, are performed by the productive nature of desire, excess, and the subversive potential of the lower bodily stratum (60). Similarly, in her work on

Samuel R. Delany’s softcore gay porn novel, The Mad Men, Mary Catherine Foltz argues that the uses and re-organization of the body through copulation and “perversities” allows for the radical deconstructing of subjectivity, with the grotesque acting as a 43 deconstructing agent, pointing towards the ways in which “desire for waste [shows us] a pleasurable way to interact with that which we may previously have deemed abject” (54).

I add to Foltz’s work to point out these “pleasurable interactions,” through the camivalization of desire, include the other and her voice, excluded by the tautological closure of authoritative discourse. While this discourse discards her voice like a kind of waste, camivalized desire for the grotesque body opens the self to the multiplicity of others’ voices.

Williams and Foltz’s analysis is largely borne out in the final lines of Neruda’s text, as corporeal transgression (the narrator is securely surrounded, like a tight embrace) and waste in the grotesque form of “negras raices en forma de unas y zapatos” (“black roots shaped like fingernails and shoes”) seem to deconstruct the narrator’s monologic subjectivity in an act of metaphoric violence richly symbolic of both the promise of liberation and the threat to what Walls calls the “categorical imperatives of bourgeois ideology.” In Neruda’s text, these grotesque bodies reject closure and sameness, as represented in the solitary gentleman’s fear and disdain of the desiring bodies of others outside his fortress-like home, in favor of a transgressive, boundary-crossing openness to difference and the multiple voices of “ordinary people,” the others of authoritative discourse. Camivalized desire drives these corporeal transgressions; similarly, this desire is at the heart of the “perversities” (recall the poem’s opening words about homosexual young men) that surround the voice of the solitary gentleman. In this sense, then, 44 negativized desire has been subsumed in the exuberant excess of the image of the grotesque body and in the carnivalized desire that embraces it.

Neruda and Whitman, in these texts, enumerate the grotesque body in a cyclical staging of conception, birth, death, and regeneration. In both texts, desire acts on these bodies as a transgressing and potentially liberating force. Nussbaum notes that for

Whitman’s America, “the flaw that for him lies at the heart of hatreds and exclusions, is a horror of one’s own softness and mortality, of the belly exposed to the sun; the gaze of desire touches that, and is for that reason to be repelled” (119). The horror at which

Whitman recoils is negativized desire. Note that Nussbaum refers to “the gaze of desire,” which in Lacanian terms describes the perpetual manque of the mirror stage. If desire is carnivalized, however, then the gaze of desire can become a powerful productive force.

She goes on to argue that, “over against this flawed America, Whitman sets the America of the poet’s imagination, healed of self-avoidance, fear, and cruelty, and therefore able truly to pursue liberty and equality” (119). Thus we find in Whitman’s poetry a vindication of the potential for poetic discourse to exhibit Bakhtin’s carnivalesque polyphony, with all of its revolutionary potential and with carnivalized desire as its driving force. In Neruda’s poetics, Whitman’s democratic impulse is propelled forward by the same vision of desire, with the anarchic force of the people’s carnival behind it; in the work of Whitman and Neruda, we find evidence of a full-fledged revival of grotesque realism. 45

The political and ethical implications of this revival resound today. In the January

2015 edition of Harper’s, Emily Witt writes about Neruda’s buried body. As part of an investigation into his death several days after the violent coup that overthrew Salvador

Allende’s democratically elected Marxist government, Neruda’s body was exhumed to investigate possible foul play. Witt goes on to describe Neruda’s lifelong commitment to economic justice and his membership in the Communist Party. As Witt notes, it is common in Chile to say that Neruda died of a broken heart (38). She quotes from

Neruda’s Canto General to tell us how he had asked to be buried in Isla Negra, his small coastal home in Chile:

Let the gravediggers pry into ominous

matter: let them raise

the lightless fragments of ash,

and let them speak the maggot’s language.

I’m facing nothing but seeds,

radiant growth and sweetness.4 (44)

In imagining his death, Neruda recalls the potency of the grotesque body, drawing on his

American camerado’s elision of earth and body. He envisions gravediggers “speaking the maggot’s language” of regeneration and rebirth. There is a certain radical equality in the literary representation of the lower bodily stratum: everyone sneezes, eats, copulates, and defecates. If these same people make hierarchies of power and economic production, then other people can unmake them. Each of these voices becomes equal in the image of the grotesque body, and here lies its radical potential. Even the maggots are voiced, part of

Whitman’s natural polyphonic chorus. Much like the camivalized desire that drives this regenerative cycle and embraces the image of the grotesque body in all of its bleeding, rotting, rutting resistance, Neruda anticipates “radiant growth and sweetness” in the fecundity of the earth. In death, he becomes Whitman’s Everyman: part of the earth, licked by the tongues of the sea, belonging like everyone “to the immortal people who create history” (Bakhtin 141). 47

Chapter Two: Eating, Hurting, and Loving the Grotesque Body

“But it is always odd to discover the ways in which desire fuels the systems of the world.” - Samuel R. Delany, The Mad Man

In Whitman’s poem, natural voices amorously invoke becoming; in Neruda, the erotic congress of desiring bodies makes this invocation. In Virgilio Pinera’s 1953 novel

La came de Rene [Rene’s Flesh] and John Rechy’s 1963 novel City o f Night, carnivalized desire enacts becoming. The young men at the center of these novels have much in common with the singly-voiced speakers of Whitman and Neruda’s poems: they are anxious, disgusted by flesh, and loyal to “all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract.”

Like these speakers, they will be surrounded by carnivalized desire; unlike the poems, however, their objectification sparks a transformation of subjectivity that can be traced in each novel.

In La came de Rene, this transformation occurs through Rene’s unwilling leadership of a revolutionary group fighting ostensibly for the right to consume chocolate. Rene soon discovers that chocolate has little to do with the group’s struggle, and that they believe only in the “choque de una carne con otra” (208) [“collision of flesh against flesh” (235)]. He will pejoratively call the group a “culto de la carne” (167) [“cult of the flesh” (183)]. For our young protagonist whose flesh becomes an object of desire for the adherents of this cult, learning to suffer masochistically is key to his eventual transformation. In Rechy’s City o f Night, an unnamed young man unwittingly enters a similar cult of the flesh centered on the sexual worship of the bodies of young men like him. Like Rene, this young man initially resists, but unlike him, he will at times 48 feverishly rush towards the cult-like worship of male flesh. In both novels, these cults of the flesh invert from spiritual to material the religious cosmology of the Church and State of the novels’ historical contexts; within this material cosmology, camivalized desire overwhelms disgust and anxiety with a lusty, comic exuberance.

Writing about the literary imagination of yet another cult of the flesh, masochism,

Gilles Deleuze asks, “What are the uses of literature?” (15). He goes on to note that the names of the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch “have been used to denote two basic perversions [sadism and masochism], and as such they are outstanding examples of the efficiency of literature.” Each author imagines through fiction sex acts and sexualities so different from officially sanctioned ways of loving and desiring that they transgress the boundaries of language to describe and represent them. In this way, the literary imagination efficiently creates new signifiers to create a system of signified sex acts (masochistic or sadistic), imagining and writing the unspeakable.

Deleuze, who rejects the categorization of Sade and von Sacher-Masoch’s novels as pornographic, alludes to this efficiency in his use of the term “pomological,” in the sense of sex-studying, to describe these novels. As he notes, “pornological literature is aimed above all at confronting language with its own limits, with what is in a sense a non-language (violence that does not speak, eroticism that remains unspoken)” (22). As pornological literature, Sade and von Sacher-Masoch’s texts “confront language with its own limits” in describing sex acts and ways of loving so different that they are unspoken and unspeakable. Deleuze’s term can be productively applied to La came de Rene and 49

City o f Night. Like Sade and von Sacher-Masoeh, these deeply erotic novels confront the limits of language in their representation of unspeakable desires.

And yet, these novels do more than study sex or confront the limits of language.

As novels of carnivalized desire centered on the grotesque body and its functions, they map out a discursive transformation of subjectivity. In Whitman and Neruda’s poems, carnivalized desire invokes this transformation (“Behold this compost!”); in these two novels, we imagine what this invocation is asking us to become.

In this chapter, I move beyond the invocation made by carnivalized desire to examine the ways in which it fosters the imagination of what Braidotti has called nomadic subjectivity. Moving nomadically in worlds turned upside down, fleeing the flesh at the same time as they pursue it (or are pursued by it), the protagonists of these two novels defy the cult of the flesh in their flight and subvert the law in their submission. Carnivalized desire moves the protagonists of these two novels outside the laws of Church and cult, and outside those of the State and its resistance movements.

Carnivalized desire provokes this movement, one with deep ontological implications, by introducing difference into the grotesque body. To explore these implications, I will focus on showing how carnivalized desire in grotesque realist literature propels the self into contact with the other in three ways: through literal and metaphoric anthropophagy; through another’s pain and suffering; and through love for the other. These desires

(eating, hurting, loving)5 define a carnival cosmology that lies at the heart of the cults of the flesh in each novel; each desire centers on a function of the grotesque body. 50

Eating the Grotesque Body

Eating, one of the most important functions of the grotesque body, is a central motif of Pinera’s novel; in the sense of oral copulation and the consumption of male fluids, it is also a major theme of Rechy’s. In the opening scene of La came de Rene

[Rene’s Flesh], the inhabitants of the novel’s unspecified country and time stand in line at the butcher’s shop after days without meat, staring longingly at the piles of meat in the display cases. Almost to a person, they revel in the scent of coagulated blood and the sight of chunks of animal flesh hanging from hooks in the ceiling. The scene opens with

“senoras elegantes y mujeres del pueblo, criadas, jovencitas” (10) [“elegant ladies and women from the villages, maids, young girls” (4)], mingling in excitement reminiscent of the moments before the start of a carnival. The narrator describes the day as such: “Es, por asi decirlo, un dia de fiesta nacional” (10) [“It is, as it were, a national holiday” (4)].

Rene remains unmoved by the glistening sides of meat; in fact, the sights and scents of bloody flesh nauseate him, and he faints. The son of a man with “un marcado gusto por la carne” (10) [“a pronounced taste for the flesh” (4)], he has been sent to the butcher’s to continue his slow but methodical induction into a cult of the flesh, one in which his father plays a leading role. In this first scene of the novel, Rene overcomes his repulsion and obtains several pounds of meat “con lamento de animal herido” (17) [“with the wounded cry of an animal” (12)]. The novel will conclude, tellingly, with Rene being measured by a different kind of butcher, who notes with pleasure that he has, just like in 51 the opening scene, gained several pounds of flesh. Rene runs from the cult of the flesh, though he eventually surrenders and offers his body without resistance. In contrast, the unnamed “Youngman” from Rechy’s City o f Night runs both away from and towards a different kind of cult of the flesh, one more like a carnival of fleshy consumption; in this case, the consumption of the human body through copulation, oral sex, and the exchange of fluids.

In grotesque realism, eating and feasting signal a riotous celebration of the cycle of life, as represented in humorous scenes of consumption, digestion, and defecation. In the scenes of Gargantua farting, burping, and swallowing whole animals in Rabelais’s novel La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel [The Life o f Gargantua and Pantagruel],

Bakhtin locates a subversive power to interrupt the closed, complete, and idealized perfection of the classical body, and in so doing, to destabilize authoritative discourse. He describes this function of the grotesque body as its “most distinctive”:

The most distinctive character of the grotesque body is its open, unfinished

nature, mostly fully revealed in the act of eating where the body transgresses its

limits. The encounter of the man with the world, which takes place inside the

open, biting, rending, chewing mouth, is one of the most ancient, and most

important objects of human thought and imagery. Here man tastes world,

introduces it into his own body, makes it part of himself. . . . Man’s encounter

with the world in the act of eating is joyful, triumphant; he triumphs over the 52

world, devours it without being devoured himself. The limits between man and

the world are erased, to man’s advantage. (281)

In La carne de Rene, the act of eating, and specifically eating meat, is intimately linked to

Rene’s refusal to surrender to the cult of the flesh. He is disgusted and terrified by meat:

“Le horroriza cuanto sea carne descuartizada y palpitante. Un cadaver no le causa mayor impresion, pero la vista de una res muerta le provoca arqueadas, despues vomitos y termina por echarlo en la cama dias enteros” (10) [“Butchered, throbbing flesh horrifies him. A corpse doesn’t make the least impression on him, but the sight of a dead steer provokes him to nausea, then vomiting, and finally leaves him bedridden for days at a time” (4)]. At the same time, his absurdly violent disgust for meat (corpses, unlike

“throbbing flesh,” cause no impression on him) is deeply comic, as he trembles and turns pale when confronted by it. Rene’s fainting, picking at plates of meat, and his ridiculously delicate constitution belie the description of him as a “semi-dios griego” (11)

[“Greek demi-god” (11)], making him from the very start of the novel a parody of the classical body. This becomes even funnier when we recall that the novel was written in

Argentina, a country well-known for its people’s voracious production and consumption

of meat. But this fear of meat contains a deeper and richly carnivalesque meaning.

In an article on the codification of homosexuality as grotesque in Pinera’s work,

Ana Garcia Chichester points out “among other taboos connected to the homosexual

perspective ... is that of anthropophagy” (302). She notes that in Pinera’s short stories, he

plays a “semantic game” between the two meanings of the word carne (flesh and meat) to 53 create what she describes as an ambiguity at the heart of La came de Rene, “[Pinera’s] most personal testimony regarding homosexual panic” (303). The “game” makes the literal consumption of came that opens the novel a metaphor for the consumption of

Rene’s body, as the guerilleros of “la causa de chocolate” [“the cause of chocolate”] insist that he submit his own flesh to a “descuartizacion” [“butchery”] not unlike that of the sides of beef hanging in the butcher’s shop. Similarly, this wordplay imbues the phrase “carne palpitante” [“throbbing flesh”] with sexual meaning. Games and game- playing are integral parts of the “gay relativity” of carnival time; between Rene’s parody of the classical body, the semantic game play between meat and flesh, and the playful homoerotic allusions to devouring a young man’s body (the book is, after all, titled La came de Rene), the text sets the stage for desire’s camivalization.

This camivalization becomes explicit when Rene’s flesh begins to harden in resistance to the school of the flesh, in a scene of torture by licking: “Volvio a sacar la lengua y la emprendio con la nariz, que a los dos o tres pasadas se file hinchando y enrojeciendo. Cochon lamia de arriba abajo, lo que provocaba violentos estornudos en

Rene” (97) [“He stuck his tongue out and started on Rene’s nose. After two or three passes, his tongue began to swell and get redder. Swyne was licking from top to bottom, which made Rene sneeze violently” (97)]. Licking and sneezing, consumption and expulsion are each functions of the grotesque body; in this scene, they are both disgusting and hilarious. As we imagine the fat tongue of Swyne, a dwarf described grotesquely in the text, sliding over Rene’s hardening flesh, the implicit reference to oral sex is hard to 54 miss. Rene’s sneeze and the dwarfs sticky saliva are disgusting elements of this strange scene of desire. The grotesque humor of the scene mediates the disgust and the desire; readers are invited to laugh at the absurd image of a prostrate Rene, Christ-like, being licked by the fat tongue of Swyne.

Later, the best student in the school, an upperclassman, will be part of the large group of students called to “soften” Rene’s hardening flesh through licking: “Roger lamio profundamente la frente de Rene. Movio la cabeza con aire de duda. Paso la lengua por los labios del rebelde. Volvio a mover la cabeza. - ^Que pasa? - pregunto Cochon ansioso. - Petrea - se limito a responder Roger” (103) [“Roger licked Rene’s forehead profoundly. He shook his head in doubt. He passed his tongue over the rebel’s lips. He shook his head again. ‘What’s wrong, Roger?’ Swyne asked. ‘Hard as a rock’ (104)]. As he touches Rene’s lips and licks his body, he notes that Rene has become “hard as a rock.” In a scene reminiscent of a Saturnalian orgy, the licking continues for hours, as the students disrobe and continue their licking of Rene’s flesh, eventually drinking alcohol poured on his body, feasting on meat, and urinating and vomiting. Rene resists all of these absurdly funny attempts to soften his flesh and metaphorically open his body to “la causa” and the world. Like the fearful speakers in Whitman and Neruda’s poems, Rene will cling to a religious and spiritual cosmology that spurns the material world until the very end.

Desire for Rene’s flesh fuels this humorous opposition of the classical and grotesque bodies. Pinera’s text points to a carnivalesque conceptualization of desire and 55 the body whose principal constitutive element is change and difference, not stasis and sameness. In his refusal to submit to education by licking, Rene marks his difference from the others in the cult of the flesh, much as he marks his difference in his refusal to eat came. We see this throughout the novel as Rene’s flesh grows progressively harder and harder, only softening by the end of novel after submitting to the homoerotic cult of the flesh; in this sense, the text playfully alludes to the hardening and softening of the male body, to erections and oral sex, to effluvia in the “cause of chocolate,” and to jouissance in submission, in a sexual cycling of the body that is, according to Bakhtin’s formulation, fundamentally grotesque.

Rene’s resistance to the cult of the flesh and the hardening of his body embodies the opposition Bakhtin describes between the aesthetic representation of the classical

(closed, perfect, idealized) and grotesque (open, chaotic, constantly becoming) body.

Significantly, throughout the novel Rene will be confronted with scenes of the classical body made grotesque through the addition of arrows, blood, lashings, and so on. In a picture book given to him by his first sex partner, Dalia, his father transforms the classical images of male and female bodies by removing the women entirely and defacing the male figures with Rene’s face and grotesque tortures: there will be a scene of Rene as

St. Sebastian (one of the earliest gay icons known for his Apollonian beauty) pierced by arrows, and of Rene skinned alive. The defacement of the classical body will be repeated when, in his room at the school of suffering, Rene encounters a life-sized plaster statue of himself as Christ on the cross, with “la risa de una persona satisfecha” (61) [“the laughter 56 of a contented man”(57)] on his face. Each image’s defacement reflects a carnivalesque parody of the classical body. In the scene of licking and feasting on Rene’s body, the

“encarnacion de un semi-dios griego” (11) [“the living incarnation of a Greek demi-god”

(11)], a similar defacement of the classical body transpires, a kind of corporeal

Saturnalia.

For Bakhtin the representation of the grotesque body is deeply rooted in the self- mocking humor of folk culture. A refusal to acknowledge particular functions of the grotesque body (in this case, consumption, digestion, and defecation) obfuscates working people’s “essential relation to life, death, struggle, triumph, and regeneration.” For, as he points out, “if food is separated from work and conceived of as a private event... nothing is left but a series of artificial, meaningless metaphors” (282). Importantly, Rene not only refuses to eat carne', his body hardens and turns cold, like a classical sculpture of a Greek god, defying the softness of the flesh and its openness to the world through the mouth and other orifices. Rene’s obstinate hardness is ultimately a refusal to acknowledge the fleshiness of his body; similarly, his disgust for carne is a metaphorical flight from the cult of the flesh. Rene seeks out the “artificial, meaningless metaphors” of a classical aesthetics that denies the flesh to privilege a hierarchy of reason and authority.

Yet, by the end of the novel, Rene submits to the homosocial world of la causa and its consumption of carne, even allowing himself to be weighed in a closing scene reminiscent of the text’s opening in the butcher shop. In submission, Rene becomes the 57

“carne palpitante” [“throbbing flesh”] in the butcher’s shop that so disgusted him; his flesh is, by the end, similarly available for consumption.

These disgusting scenes of torture, feasting, and licking are as absurdly funny as they are weirdly erotic. Humor and parody defeat the disgust engendered by the fat tongue of Swyne and the urinating, vomiting boys licking Rene’s body; in this sense, what Bakhtin calls the “complete liberty” of laughter is an integral part of the carnivalization of desire. Laughter mediates the grotesque otherness of men licking other men’s bodies. Laughing, the homoeroticism and sexual difference of these scenes becomes less threatening to heteronormativity while simultaneously subverting it through the language of pomological literature, a form of writing the unspeakable. As Bakhtin notes, “fear is the extreme expression of narrow-minded and stupid seriousness, which is defeated by laughter.... Complete liberty is possible only in the completely fearless world” (47). Laughter gives readers permission to acknowledge that, all along, Rene’s flesh was the object of our desire; we too have been feasting on his carne.

In Rechy’s text, eating and ingesting the body is an explicitly sexual act, unlike the implicit homoeroticism in the metaphoric anthropophagism of Pinera’s text. In City o f

Night, the protagonist, an unnamed Youngman, leaves his rural home to travel, nomad­ like, through urban underworlds of illicit homosexual sex in public places. In these “cities of night,” the bodies of young men are purchased and sold, like carne, for the sexual gratification of older men not unlike the teachers and leaders of the cult of the flesh in La carne de Rene [Rene’s Flesh]. Youngman quickly becomes a hustler, selling his body to 58 older men and, eventually, giving his body freely, as part of a carnival cosmology where the bodies of young men are the objects of worship. Desire, not money, propels

Youngman through this carnival feast of oral and anal copulation:

I felt myself in a constant state of highness - and I no longer sought out either the

joints of maryjane or the pills: senses on pinpoint as if I were drunk without

liquor. And what I was high on was the furious unsurfeited search. Now the

subterfuge that I did it only for money - even though, as early as New York

(especially when the act was executed in public places), I had not adhered to it -

began to disappear. It was now a matter of numbers. (219)

Similar to the symbolic and sexually charged consumption of Rene’s flesh that occurs throughout that text and, finally, implicates its readers, in City o f Night readers are led through an unflinching description of hundreds of sexual encounters, each a kind of consumptive act (oral copulation’s swallowing of male fluids, and anal copulation’s ingestion of male fluids). In this way, the text invites the reader to participate in a carnivalesque feast of taboo sex acts that, by the end of the novel, has afforded

Youngman an intoxicating sustenance (“constant highness”) through the introduction of literally hundreds of different bodies into his mouth and others’. Not surprisingly,

Bakhtin attributes a triumphant force to eating: “In the act of eating, as we have said, the confines between the body and the world are overstepped by the body: it triumphs over the world, over its enemy, celebrates its victory, grows at the world’s expense” (283).

This is an obvious point for Rechy’s Youngman, whose voracious sexual consumption of 59 male bodies in public and private spaces parodies and openly resists the law, in this case, police and “vice cops.” Throughout the novel, authoritative discourse as represented by the police will be mocked through the grotesque body, as cops are sexualized, seduced, and consumed themselves.

For Rene, submission to the cult of the flesh and its privileging of the consumption of came represents a similar triumph grounded in parody, subversion, and resistance. “La causa de chocolate,” is, notionally, a revolutionary organization, the raison d’etre of what he dismisses as a cult of the flesh; and yet, by virtue of its dedication to chocolate (not justice, not equality, not wealth or fame), la causa parodies revolution, the law, and even subversion itself; readers, much like Rene, are dared not to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. In both cases, consumption (of came, chocolate, or male bodies and fluids) represents an opening of the body and a transgression of its confines through the mouth; carnivalized desire is at the heart of each of these acts of consumption.

In La came de Rene, carnivalized desire propels this transgression of the body on two levels: textually, as Rene himself is licked and masochistically tortured into a curiously powerful submission to a homoerotic cult of the flesh more about the “choque de una came con otra” (208) [“collision of flesh against flesh” (235)] than chocolate or dissidence; and on a meta-fictive level, as the reader is invited to participate in a metaphoric and strangely liberating consumption of his flesh, through reading his body - we hold it in our hands, since the book is named after him. In City o f Night, feast-like 60 sexual consumption, particularly oral sex, is a central motif of the novel. Eating, then, one of the most important functions for Bakhtin of the grotesque body and a literal and metaphoric motif of both novels, is a force for introducing, expelling, and introducing again difference into the body. It is also a force driven by desire: desire to take sustenance, to live, to thrive. The literary representation of this function of the grotesque body, through its self-parody and literal consumption of difference, is an erotic invitation to become.

Wounding and Wanting the Grotesque Body

This corporeal transgression, however, occurs not only through eating or copulation; as the picture book of Rene’s body shows, transgression of the body’s boundaries can quite literally occur through torture and the piercing (or flaying) of the skin. In these texts, desire is masochistically entwined with the suffering of the tortured body. Masochism is implicit in La carne de Rene and explicit in City in Night. David

Sigler, writing about the literariness of masochism in the philosophy of Deleuze and

Lacan, notes that “Sacher-Masoch teaches readers to love the mark of the signifier, and the disruption of narrative, as erotic accessories. What one really learns from Sacher-

Masoch is how to read for pleasure.... Sexual enjoyment in the novel [Venus in Furs] springs from acts of reading” (193). I turn our attention first to La carne de Rene, where this phenomenon is what I argue to be an explicit function of the novel. The metaphoric consumption of Rene’s body is signaled6 with a table of contents that reads like a menu in 61 a restaurant: “La carne ehamuseada” [“Scorched Flesh”], “La carne perfumada”

[“Perfumed Flesh”], and “La carne de gallina” [“Goose Flesh”]. The final chapter even makes the mouth water: “Tiema y jugosa” [“Tender and Juicy”]. At the same time as readers are promised these carnal delights, Rene’s flesh is being systematically tortured and abused. In an act of reading that mirrors a masochistic encounter, readers endure the painfulness of Rene’s torture, empathizing with the hapless young man’s seemingly unending torture, while awaiting the pleasure that comes both with the end of the novel and his complete submission to the flesh. The act of reading is, in this case, like a masochistic contract: it promises to deliver great pleasure after a duly stipulated period of pain. Laughter in both texts mediates between the grotesque (in this sense, the torture of one’s body and the sexual functions of the lower material stratum), the disgusting, and the erotic; this comic mediation, however, reflects a subversive impulse.

Ana Serra, writing about the novel’s masochistic “morality” (itself a kind of contract), notes the presence of “a masochistic code of behavior which is built on the basis of the inversion or displacement of the patriarchal code of behavior, that is a set of prescriptive morals which men design and impose on themselves and which destroys them” (486). She goes on to note, “Pinera himself stated that he had written this novel

‘with shreds of his own flesh,’ and indeed the text is permeated by physical pain, fear of torture and mutilation, and, above all, anger.” The novel can be painful to read, by design: Rene’s school motto is “Sufrir en silencio” (57) [“Suffer in silence” (53)]; and, as the headmaster tells him on his first day in the school, “Hay que sufrir para aprender” 62

(58) [“One must suffer in order to learn” (53)]. Reading about Rene’s suffering has the potential to produce a meta-fictive suffering, as the body of our Greek demi-god is systematically abused. At the same time, Rene’s situation as an unwilling defender of la causa, and a young man being asked to endure unspeakable pain and humiliation in the defense of his people’s right to consume chocolate, is as absurdly funny as it is disturbing.

In City o f Night, masochism makes a much briefer appearance in a single series of scenes with a masochist character who will be brutally mocked by Youngman.

Masochism in this text is not a narrative frame, which I attribute to the fact that Rechy’s text is not, like Pinera’s, one of implicit homoerotic desire unfettered by submission to punishment and pain. Instead, it reflects the near-infinite forms of desire that the grotesque body can contain and produce. For this reason, Rechy’s work has been considered a precursor to queer theory, through a “queer imagination [that] finally leads to the most radical questioning and denormalizing of a heterosexist epistemology”

(Libretti 161). In this sense, the series of scenes in which Youngman experiments with masochism reflects the richly diverse forms desire can take when unleashed from the confines of censure and prohibition. Take, for instance, this scene, where Youngman tries and quickly rejects an invitation to participate in a masochistic contract:

And then, burying his finger into the collar of his shirt to exhibit a tiny

chain on which dangles an “M,” he announced proudly: “Do you know what that

means? It means Im a masochist. It means I adore pain.” ... [after Youngman 63

refuses to hurt the masochist] “I feel cheated, then,” he said. “Not because of the

money - but because I somehow expected so much of you.... Wont you ... let

me ... Idolize you?” he said slowly. “Won’t you be brutal?”

I have always been repelled by pain, either inflicting it or receiving it.

Why then did I feel a dart of excitement at the man’s words? (294)

Despite his repulsion, Youngman “feels a dart of excitement”; in this sense, the text depicts disgust and desire, like pleasure and pain, as rhythmic exchanges. Like the disgust provoked by the reading of scenes of torture of Rene’s flesh (recall the licking of his flesh by the fat tongue of the dwarf, Swyne), readers here are given permission, like

Youngman, to feel “excitement” at the thought of being brutal, despite revulsion or fear of pain.

The pairing of pleasure and pain startles Youngman (like a “dart”) as much as it disgusts and attracts him; for readers, these pairings are part of a jolt of the grotesque that invites us to think differently about these affective states and the possibility of their inter­ relatedness. In an unusual passage7 from Will to Power, Nietzsche uses pain, or

“displeasure,” and a particular function of the lower material bodily stratum (specifically, copulation) to challenge the categorization of pleasure and pain and, by extension, desire and disgust, as antinomies:

This is the case, e.g., in tickling, also the sexual tickling in the act of coitus: here

we see displeasure at work as an ingredient of pleasure. It seems, a little hindrance

that is overcome and immediately followed by another little hindrance that is 64

again overcome - this game of resistance and victory arouses most strongly that

general feeling of superabundant, excessive power that constitutes the essence of

pleasure. The opposite, an increase in the sensation of pain through the

introduction of little pleasurable stimuli, is lacking; for pleasure and pain are not

opposites. (371)

According to Nietzsche, pain and pleasure and, similarly, desire and disgust, work in a

“rhythmic sequence” that “arouses most strongly that general feeling of superabundant, excessive power that constitutes the essence of desire.” That he should choose to use the body in coitus as an example indicates the potency of the representation of the lower material bodily stratum in undermining the classical binary of pleasure/pain. Deleuze and

Guattari, whose re-conceptualization of desire as a positive, productive force draws extensively from Nietzsche’s concept of the Will to Power, combine Nietzsche’s locating of power as a primary human drive with Freud’s similar positioning of desire.8 Most important here is the concept of a rhythmic sequence of pleasure/pain and desire/disgust that can be located in the grotesque body. For, as Nietzsche goes on to argue, without pain there can be no pleasure, and without repulsion, no attraction.

Writing about desire, disgust, and the grotesque body, Adam Komisaruk asks whether the representation of pain in literature constitutes a “sensory arrestment or a liberation, a severance of the subject’s relationship to his/her own body or a sealing of that relationship” (30). Deleuze, in an essay on masochism titled “Coldness and Cruelty,” engages with this question through a critical reading of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 65

Venus in Furs. As he notes, Theodore Reik “deserves special credit” for enumerating the four basic characteristics of masochism: fantasy, disavowal, suspense, and persuasion

(75). At the start of this chapter, I described masochism as a contract (pain in exchange for pleasure). Deleuze notes this, writing that “it is curious that Reik, no less than other analysts, neglects a fifth factor which is very important: the form of the contract in the masochistic relationship.” Because a contract can be willingly entered into, and is made by agreement between parties, it is fundamentally different from a law, though as

Deleuze points out the underlying impulse of the contract is toward the creation of a law.

Despite this, the contract moves away from institutions and hierarchies of power.

Masochism plays a central role in La came de Rene; the “form of the contract” in the text will help us situate masochism as a form of carnivalized desire acting on the grotesque body. Rene does not, in any typically masochistic sense, submit willingly to the torture of his body and the school of suffering to which his father sends him. In fact, he refuses this contract until the very end of the novel. Rene resists, constantly and actively, until eventually he learns the lesson of masochism - that willful suffering can also be resistance. Wrisley, writing about the value of suffering in Nietzsche’s philosophy, argues that “suffering can be given a meaning, we can answer the question “Why do I suffer?” with, “I suffer, not as a punishment, but in order to become better and stronger...

Suffering is not to be endured as a deserved punishment, but embraced because it is pregnant with possibilities for growth and power” (n. pag). The “pregnant possibilities” of suffering are what, by the end of the novel, Rene comes to accept through submission. 66

In his final submission to “la causa,” the pregnant possibilities of suffering become clear. In the text, the guerrilleros who claim Rene as their new leader seek the freedom to consume chocolate. At the same time, none of the fighters actually drink or even care to consume chocolate; they have simply formulated a contract with their pursuers, through “la santa causa del chocolate.” The absurdity of the struggle for chocolate parodies both the guerrilleros and the law. In this sense, it brings to mind

Deleuze’s remarks on the subversive humor at the heart of masochism: “The masochistic ego is only apparently crushed by the superego. What insolence and humor, what irrepressible defiance and ultimate triumph lie hidden behind an ego that claims to be so weak” (124). The fighters for the cause of chocolate, so ostensibly weak in their constant flight from battle, conceal a triumphant zeal for defeating the law as laid out by their opponents.

But as Rene eventually learns in a conversation with an old fighter for la causa, the fight for chocolate ended long ago:

El fondo de la cuestion no es el chocolate. Nunca se alabara bastante esta

infusion. El chocolate se presenta ante la carne con mirada implorante, con ojos

arrasados en lagrimas y le dice: «estoy en peligro mortal, salvame, los enemigos

me acosan. No olvides que salvandome te proporcionas lo que mas anhelas en

esta vida, tu propia perdition. Se que estas deseosa por ser bianco de balas y

cuchillos». Y con sonrisa chocolatesca da un salto y se escuda tras la carne, que al

momento cae segada en fior por los seguidores. (206) 67

[At the bottom of all of this is not chocolate. Never can such an odorous infusion

be praised highly enough. Chocolate looks at the flesh with an imploring gaze,

eyes bathed in tears, and says: ‘I’m in mortal danger. Save me. Don’t forget that if

you save me, I will offer you what you most desire in this life: your own

perdition. I know you long to be a target for bullets and knives.’ And with a

chocolatey smile, it leaps and shields itself behind the flesh, which is cut down in

its prime a moment later by the pursuers. (233)]

In this scene, Deleuze’s concept of the masochistic contract and Nietzsche’s formulation of suffering as growth intersect productively, particularly in terms of the fostering of a nomadic subject that is our focus. Take, for instance, the chocolatey contract these revolutionaries enter into, one that compels them to resist an institution (a government that oppresses its people by forbidding the consumption of chocolate). While the prohibition of chocolate is itself a law, interestingly, Pinera’s text takes care to point out that the defenders of chocolate never consume it, while those who prohibit it, drink it in secret. The humor of the situation, in the revolutionaries’ manufactured zeal and the prohibitionists’ guilty desire, makes their struggle ridiculous and subversive in ways that parallel masochism.

As I alluded to earlier, Deleuze points out that “the specific impulse underlying the [masochistic] contract is towards the creation of a law, even if in the end the law should take over and impose its authority upon the contract itself.” This differs substantively from sadism, which he argues is propelled towards the creation of an 68 institution that seeks “the degradation of all laws and the establishment of a superior power that sets itself above them” (77). In this sense, masochism is unique in that it both creates and subverts law: “The law now ordains what it is what it was once intended to forbid; guilt absolves instead of leading to atonement, and punishment makes permissible what it was intended to chastise” (Deleuze 102). In the case of la causa, the defense of chocolate is a contract that, perversely, guarantees the suffering of its defenders and their ultimate demise. For the prohibitionists (who drink chocolate in secret), their guilt for breaking the law is discharged through their contractual obligation to suffer pain and bodily harm in the defense of the law. As we have learned, chocolate was never “el fondo de la cuestion” [“at the bottom of this”]; instead, both groups long for the pain and suffering of penetration by “balas y cuchillos” [“bullets and knives”], adding a rich layer of psychosexual irony. In the contract to defend (and prohibit) chocolate, these men become free to be penetrated as often and as much as they choose. Their suffering in this way becomes pregnant with other possibilities: for penetration, for Rene’s body, or for the satisfaction of other “guilty pleasures.” In the eroticization of pain and suffering, masochism’s relation to carnivalized desire becomes clear. With humorous insolence, masochism subverts the law and upends social relations; it eroticizes the opening of the body through dismemberment, flaying the flesh, and bleeding, functions of the grotesque body tied to death and regeneration.

Rene ultimately joins with these men in their suffering, making his submission to the cult of the flesh one of subversion of the law, power through the contract, and 69 pleasure in bodily pain and dismemberment. Nomad-like, he will run from this submission until the very end. After this encounter with the old man, Rene will take refuge in a cemetery; this is his final retreat. In fleeing the flesh, he seeks out the comfort of the dead, of flesh that is no longer “tierna, ardiente, jugosa” (209) [“tender, passionate, juicy” (236)]. This refuge, though, is a temporary one, for Rene is living - and his flesh is tender and juicy. Even in the cemetery, the grotesque body is at work, decomposing and returning to the earth as part of the cycle of life. From the cemetery, Rene will leave to join la causa, in yet another staging of the fecundity of the grotesque body.

Rene leaves the dead flesh of cemetery to return to the throbbing flesh that is the real focus of the la causa. In his return, we see a confluence between Deleuze’s enumeration of the other features of masochism (disavowal, suspense, fantasy) and

Bakhtin’s grotesque body, site of the subversion of reason. As Deleuze notes, “Disavowal is a reaction of the imagination, as negation is an operation of the intellect or of thought..

.. Nor is disavowal in general just a form of imagination; it is nothing less than the foundation of imagination, which suspends reality and establishes the ideal in the suspended world” (128). In the text, despite its absurdity, la causa functions to suspend reality and establish a battle for chocolate that, ultimately, contractually permits the attainment of an ideal; in this case, the masochistic abuse and subsequent pleasuring of the guerrilleros’ flesh. Similarly, Rene, as the leader of la causa, becomes the literal

“incarnation” of their ideal, one seen in the erotic undertones of Rene’s hardening and softening flesh. This is clear from the start, when, as mentioned earlier, Rene is described 70 as the “encarnacion9 de un semi-dios griego” (11) [“the living incarnation of a Greek demi-god” (11). In this way, the eroticization of Rene’s classically ideal body occurs ironically through its wounding and dismemberment, like the ritualized violence of the carnival, in turn initiating a cyclical sexual hardening and softening of his flesh. His classical body, worked over by carnivalized desire, becomes grotesque; like all becomings, it is cyclical and changing, permanently impermanent.

Itself a kind of carnivalization of desire, the masochistic violence that propels

Rene’s becoming takes place in a carnival-like atmosphere of humorous mockery (of

Rene, the two opposing forces, la causa, and so on), suffering, and pleasure. Deleuze links masochism to humor and rebellion; and indeed, they lie at the heart of the masochistic tortures and misadventures that plague Rene. Sigmund Freud has described humor as “not resigned, [but] rebellious,” as Michael Billig notes in his article on the language of humor. “Jokes, like dreams and slips of the tongue,” Billig writes, “bear the traces of repressed desires. Sexual and aggressive thoughts, which are forbidden in polite society, can be shared as if they are not serious. Humor then becomes a way of rebelling against the demands of social order” (452). Rene’s tortures are gruesome and violent, and yet absurd and sexually charged, like the attempt to “soften” his hardening flesh by licking. Deleuze argues that masochism transgresses the law, for “You must not do that” changes through the masochistic contract into “You have to do that!” He goes on to note that “the masochist is insolent in his obsequiousness, rebellious in his submission; in short, he is a humorist, a logician of consequences” (89). Desire lies at the heart of this 71 rebellion, since the consequences are a punishment that makes way for the guiltless satisfaction of sexual desire. Deleuze points to Lacan’s conceptualization of the law as being the same as repressed desire (85); it bears noting that at the time of this novel’s publication in Argentina in 1952, homosexuality was against the law, making the law particularly unjust for queer people. Not surprisingly, Rene will ask the old man from la causa about not just the law (for we already know chocolate is against the law), but justice:

- Pero digame: £no se toma en cuenta la justicia?

- No hay justicia, jefe, solo hay carne - concluyo Salirse de los

limites de la carne significa caer en el vacio y en la anfibiologia. No se

haga ilusiones. Solo hay el choque de una carne con otra carne. (208)

[“But tell me: don’t you take justice into account?”

“There’s no such thing as justice, chief. There is only flesh,” the

old man continued. “To go beyond the bounds of the flesh is to fall into a

conceptual vacuum and amphibology. Don’t build up your hopes. All that

exists is the collision of flesh against flesh.” (235)]

Here Rene begins his final submission to the cult of the flesh, one that in true masochistic fashion also represents a triumph over the law. By submitting, Rene enters into a contract to “suffer in silence” for la causa. Accepting such a contract, however, implies that Rene also has the power to withdraw and reject it. For Rene, ultimately there is no Right, no final law; there is only the collision of the flesh and the infinite possibilities it sparks. 72

Following Deleuze’s formulation, in the deferral of guilt and the acceptance of punishment, Rene finds a different kind of justice based on the guiltless satisfaction of homoerotic desire that masochism, in defiance of the law, makes possible.

Amidst these confluences of pleasure and pain, hard and soft, flesh and spirit, the reader’s desire becomes itself masochistic, as suffering alongside Rene’s tortures defers the final pleasure of his submission (and the end of the novel). Daniel Balderston notes this, as he locates within Pinera’s work an aesthetics of the grotesque that has a unsettling capacity to terrify and amuse the reader: “Si la vida cotidiana se percibe en los relatos de

Pinera como amenaza, la respuesta no es en ellos una exaltation de la existencia cotidiana, sino del arte, cuyo poder es el de detener la angustia, de detenerse en la angustia” [“if ordinary life is perceived in Pinera’s work as a threat, the answer to that threat is not an exaltation of ordinary existence, but of art itself, whose power is to detain anguish, and to linger in that anguish”10] (175). Rene constantly flees threats, and his body is relentlessly tortured. At the same time, the text uses humor, absurdity, and irreverence to invite readers to “linger” masochistically, alongside their hero. Like

Nietzsche’s example of the displeasure provoked by tickling during coitus, laughter and sorrow, like pleasure and pain, are invoked when Rene’s flesh is electrocuted, tickled, pinched, stabbed, and licked. But why bother detaining ourselves in the “anguish” of reading La came de Rene? Perhaps a different kind of contract, the agreement between a reader and a text, is at play here. 73

For those readers who finish the novel, they have continued to read, lingering in

Rene’s anguish, fulfilling a kind of literary contract that forms part of what Balderston calls the power of art itself. Serra, in her article on masochism as morality, arrives at a similar conclusion:

For the reader, Rene’s Flesh is profoundly disturbing and unsettling: the rhetorical

effect of the text is parallel to that of the Law of the Flesh, it constitutes an

aggression. And yet, once one has read the novel and been the object of its

aggression, one wants to go back to [it], this time truly enjoying one’s pain. (489)

While I heartily disagree with her position that the novel as a bildungsroman “calls all men to wound themselves, to learn to withstand pain and renounce bodily pleasure,” she is correct in that the novel functions as an aggression, with the reader as masochistic object. I suspect that, much as Deleuze argues that pleasure flows after the discharge of guilt through punishment, for readers of La carne de Rene, a similar mechanism is at work.

The promise of additional pounds of his flesh for us to eat, and the ending of the experience of reading (a similarly consumptive act), invite us to feel a note of pleasure among the other emotions the scene might provoke. Flesh in the text is marked for our consumption, like the menu-esque table of contents and the picture book of images of

Rene’s body posed in different scenes of torture (50 [44]). I noted earlier that arrows and penetration mark flesh in one scene reminiscent of St. Sebastian, with Rene surrounded by hundreds of arrows aimed at his body. The third image shows Rene skinned alive, his 74 flesh glistening like a rack of butchered meat. Rene’s horrified “reading” of these scenes of torture mimics our own reading of scenes of Rene’s torture, in a meta-fictive move that initiates a shifting representation of the subject; notably, desire and the grotesque body

(eating, licking, bleeding) enact this shift, like a disruption. Sigler, writing about the literariness of masochism, points out that masochism “produces something at the level of language that disrupts the libido, producing instead a pure difference necessary for the masochistic relationship” (205). This difference manifests in the masochistic contract, where, for example, one person will receive pain and suffering, and another will be directed to inflict it.

As Sigler notes, the masochist is “someone who introduces desire into an entirely different system”; the picture book itself, with its leaves tom out and its images of handsome young men defaced with marks, bruises, and arrows, narratively depicts the introduction of difference. For readers, the picture book’s brutal transformation from sultry soft-core pom to hard-core masochistic fantasy mimics Rene’s, as he transforms from statuesque Greek demi-god to, by the end of the novel, pounds of throbbing flesh for our consumption.

In Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, masochism’s literariness emerges in a similarly meta-fictive way, as the narrator describes being given (and subsequently reading) a manuscript that describes a masochistic relationship (151). Sigler writes,

“Sacher-Masoch teaches us to read suprasensual erotics as a carefully orchestrated network of desire, dependent upon narrative fiction, which makes intrinsically plural the 75 subjects that it fixes in place. Masochism is a network rather than a crisis of any one subject’s desire” (207). In its careful negotiation of pain and pleasure through the contract, and its narration of fantasy and the world of imagination, masochism’s literariness becomes clear. For Lacan and Deleuze, he notes, the masochist has “a confidence in ‘the glory of a mark,’ both a world completely and possibly enveloped by signifiers and ‘the mark [of the rod] on the skin’” (192). In La came de Rene, we see the importance of signifiers and “the mark of rod” in an early scene where Rene is initiated into the cult of the flesh through branding and marking his buttocks; the picture book, too, shows his skin covered in marks, each a signifier of pain and suffering erotically transposed, like a network of desire, on the classic beauty of his body.

And yet, came itself is a network of desire that spans those who love meat, those who love Rene’s tender flesh, participants on both sides of la causa, and, crucially, the reader eagerly consuming his narrative flesh. In this sense, consumption (another core function of the grotesque body) becomes a masochistic act. Rene metaphorically resists consumption, in his disgust for meat, and literally in his refusal to submit his body to “la causa,” seeming in this way to defy masochism through a refusal to participate or, per

Deleuze, agree to a contract. But by the end of the novel, Rene submits to pain and the cult of the flesh, sealing the masochistic contract that has been in the making since the start of the novel. At the same time, as readers, we are being invited contractually to consume Rene’s flesh without breaking the contract by refusing to finish the novel. In 76 turn, we can derive pleasure through “lingering in the anguish” and the text’s implicit eroticism.

In the text, Rene’s body is licked, tortured, and, finally, weighed for consumption like the toothsome slabs of carne in the opening scene at the butcher’s. His body, by the end, is “solo carne de tortura” (226) [“nothing but flesh for torture” (255)]. Carnivalized desire, taking the form of masochism, has softened Rene’s hardened flesh. Like the grotesque body that Bakhtin calls “a body in the act of becoming” (317), his body changes from hard to soft, and in the erotic implications of consuming his “carne palpitante”(10) [“throbbing flesh” (4)], hard again; provoked by carnivalized desire,

Rene’s flesh becomes. As an erotic corporeal cycle of resistance (growth that hardens carne) and submission (consumption, digestion, and evacuation that softens carne) situated in a context of self-mocking humor and pleasure, Rene’s becoming flesh enacts the fecundity of the grotesque body, eating, copulating, digesting, defecating, and renewing. This fecund cycle opens his body to the world and his own becoming. By the end, Rene has become nothing more than flesh; at the same time, his flesh is a “network of desire,” interconnected through the functions of the grotesque body, cycling between hard and soft, constantly becoming. Provoked by carnivalized desire, Rene’s flesh becomes the skin for a nomadic subject who subverts the law, comically and exuberantly engages with difference, and creates his own fleshy justice; his becoming offers readers one path among many toward nomadic subjectivity. 77

Loving the Grotesque Body

Following Deleuze, I have so far argued that the “literariness of masochism” can provoke a becoming through the breaking of identities and the forging of diffuse ones, similar to the function of the grotesque body. In City o f Night, as Kevin Arnold points out, “the sex act for Rechy is not about pleasurable, arbitrary bodies in contact, but a specific and particular masculine body” (126). In this way, the hard masculinity eroticized in Rechy’s text is deeply linked to the hardening and softening of Rene’s flesh, for there is a similar becoming at work in City o f Night.

Youngman, the unnamed central character of the novel, begins his engagement with the queer underworld he calls “cities of night” as a hustler, where hard, masculine flesh was a prized commodity; the text will explore the tensions between “hard” or butch men who love other men but call it hustling, and the feminine “softness” of gay men, or queens. Brad Epps, writing about grotesque bodies and the space of the subject, notes this tension in the writing of Reinaldo Arenas, a contemporary of Pinera who was also incarcerated for his homosexuality in post-Revolutionary Cuba. In writing about his experience, Arenas makes ample use of the grotesque in describing his fellow inmates:

“his fellow prisoners [are] shrill, vulgar, weak, and unbearably campy queens ... ‘they’ are submissive, absurd, and disgraceful, ‘corrompiendolo todo, hasta la autentica furia del que padece el terror’ [‘cheapening and corrupting everything, even the authentic rage of the man who suffers terror’]” (49). In many ways, this description fits the representation 78 of Rene, ultimately “submissive, absurd, disgraceful,” and yet, deeply erotic with hardening (and softening) flesh his torturers and readers are eager to consume.

Rechy makes a similar textual move in City o f Night, with his Youngman who despises the “campy queens” who pay him for the use of his body and temporary love. At the same time, Youngman achingly desires their bodies and this sexual exchange, in yet another kind of love. But unlike Rene’s subversion of the law through masochistic submission, Rechy’s characters openly defy the law, through billingsgate, bodily transgression and transformation, and acts of sexual love linked to the functions of the grotesque body. The hardening and softening of Youngman’s flesh as he travels between these cities of night is explicitly sexual, linked not to metaphoric consumption and masochism but to other forms of camivalized desire that enact becoming. Youngman will start the novel as an outcast, anxious and afraid; desire will transform him from outcast to outlaw.

In an interview with Debra Castillo, Rechy describes his textual move away from representations of the outcast and toward the figure of the outlaw: “‘Outcast’ suggests a cowering exile, victimized, defeated. ‘Outlaw’ suggests defiance, an acceptance of being

‘outside the law.’ It carries an implication that the law itself may be wrong, therefore to be questioned, overturned. Oh, yes, let’s face it, the ‘outlaw’ is a romantic figure” (113).

Rechy’s concern with the outlaw extends to his use of language, which breaks with convention in purposeful ways, incorporating street slang and obscenity, similar to the billingsgate of the carnival. But even on a structural level, his use of language is defiant. 79

In the textual citations that follow, note Rechy’s omission of apostrophes, the abundance of dashes and ellipses, and similar signs of a defiance of convention coded within his language, like a system of signs within signs. Written into the text itself is a language of the grotesque body; it refuses to submit to an official language that persecutes and excludes difference, especially queerness.

In the novel’s opening sentence, Rechy ascribes a modern carnival character, with all of its rich potential for subversion and defiance, to this world of sexual difference:

“Later I would think of America as one vast City of Night stretching gaudily from Times

Square to Hollywood Boulevard - jukebox-winking, rock-n-roll-moaning” (15).

Throughout the novel, Youngman will describe the bars, cinemas, and streets of this queer underworld as a kind of sexual carnival. The text vividly describes queer desire, sexual practices, and generalized resistance to the encoding of heteronormatively ranked desire through official, authoritative discourse; their world is, in many ways, an essentially carnivalesque revalorization of Eros.

A scene early on in the novel demonstrates this carnivalesque character. At the start of the scene, one set in a hustler’s bar in downtown Los Angeles, an “obviously drunk” queen (an effeminate man), climbs on top of the bar, begins a striptease, and sings, “Ssssssssssssufferrrrrrrrrrrr ...” Later in the scene, the “queens” initiate a grotesque dressing down, a kind of carnival uncrowning remarkably similar to Arenas’s dismissive description of the queens in the labor camp: 80

I looked, and theres Pauline - a heavily painted queen who thinks she

looks like Sophia Loren - with a collar like the wicked queen’s in Snow White.

Miss Destiny said icily: “Pauline ... is a lowlife...prostitute.”

Trudi: “A cheap whore.”

Lola, in her husky man’s voice and glowering nearsightedly: “A slut.”

Trudi: “A common streetwalker.”

Lola: “A chippy.”

Miss Destiny: - conclusively, viciously: “A cocksucker/” (129)

The queens use a carnival language of obscenity, similar to the billingsgate Bakhtin calls an integral part of the camivalesque and grotesque realism (16). The language differs, however, in that it is hardly ambivalent or humorous: in fact, the language is “vicious.”

How can such viciousness be part of the camivalesque’s raucous humor? Part of the explanation lies in examining the context of defiance and resistance within which these queens use this billingsgate; in the viciousness, similar to the masochistic impulse, there is a cold humor that is equally subversive.

This humor is ultimately a grotesque one, grounded in the functions of the body

(copulation and consumption, in this case). It reflects an envy, a jealousy for this queen’s successful representation of femininity; her success in picking up a male hustler for a night of love is contorted, absurdly, into “prostitution.” Trading insults in this way might, like billingsgate, serve as a mechanism for fostering a sense of equality between Pauline, successful in her sexual hunting and for this reason temporarily occupying a higher rank. 81

Bakhtin calls profanities and insults like this “the unofficial element of speech ... oaths began to be considered as a certain rejection of official philosophy, a verbal protest”

(189). Most significantly for our analysis, these insults function like what Bakhtin calls a carnival “uncrowning”:

The abuse and thrashing are equivalent to a change of costume, to a

metamorphosis. Abuse reveals the other, true face of the abused, it tears off his

disguise and mask. It is the king’s uncrowning. Abuse is death, it is former youth

transformed into old age, the living body turned into a corpse. It is the “mirror of

comedy” reflecting that which must die a historic death. But in this system death

is followed by regeneration . .. therefore, abuse is followed by praise. (198)

Pauline’s “uncrowning” is followed by an insult that, curiously, reflects a pleasure that each of the queens themselves is seeking: oral copulation. By calling her a “cocksucker” as the conclusive oath they hurl towards her, they invert the negative power of the term by acknowledging what Pauline will do, and what they would like to do themselves. In this sense, we see not only the opening of the body to the world through the mouth but also the fecundity that Bakhtin attributes to abuse of this nature. Pauline is abused and decrowned, but she is then given a new crown that celebrates her sexual/consumptive success. Her carnival recrowning, in this scene, occurs through the force of camivalized desire: Pauline will be the one to go home with a young stud for the night, not the others.

Similarly, Arenas’s abuse of the “campy queens” reflects an inversion of suffering, through a return to its “pregnant possibilities,” by acknowledging and confronting 82 difference in the grotesque body. Negation of the negation, in this case, invests it with a productive power. In these darkly comic uncrownings and recrownings, we see the force of a carnivalized desire that transgresses, through the open orifices of the grotesque body, the boundaries and laws of official discourse and its heteronormatively ranked desires and loves.

Pauline, as a “cocksucker,” breaks the laws of Church and State (and their authoritative discourse) through her carnivalized desire, in turn becoming a kind of sexual outlaw. This will occur time and time again throughout the novel, as Youngman travels nomadically between cities of night; the novel is organized by “cities” and offers an enumeration of sex acts and partners, a search for love defined in hundreds of different ways. Ultimately, as a hustler who regularly insults and abuses the queens acknowledges,

“Man, you gotta admire those dam queens like Darling Dolly an them ... They sure have got guts. They live the way they gotta live... ” (164). Similar to the consumption of came in La came de Rene, Pauline will consume the body of the young male hustler. In this act of consumption, the grotesque body transgresses its limits, through the mouth and the genitals, into the fertility of “guts,” and through the death and rebirth of defecation.

Pauline’s carnival crowning, driven by an anthropophagic desire for the flesh

(“cocksucking”), is an act of becoming that continuously reflects the queer power of the outlaw.

Rechy, in the interview cited earlier, goes on to criticize those within what he calls the gay liberation movement who seek to disown the queens like Pauline and other 83

“gay stereotypes.” He explains: “That enrages me, the rejecting of those shock troops of revolution, outlawed outlaws. It was the ‘flaming queens’ who most often resisted arrest during raids, including at the Stonewall Inn” (116). In the text, the figure of the flaming queen, target of billingsgate from her peers, abused and attacked by those within the law, becomes a kind of carnival queen, a figure of immense defiance and power who is

“crowned” after thrashing a heterosexual tourist who insulted her for her “grotesque, clumsy drag”:

A queen.

A flamboyant, flagrant, flashy queen. A queen in absurdly grotesque,

clumsy drag.

But there was something else. ...

With the cigarette holder clenched between her second and fourth fingers

- the third finger, erect, supporting the holder - she aimed an unequivocal fuck-

you symbol at the world Outside - and she rasps loudly:

“Hey, world!” (395)

Pauline’s uncrowning, and this queen’s crowning, are temporary: Pauline, like the other queens, will remove her makeup and drag in the light of day and conform as best she can to heteronormativity. But in the space of carnival, Pauline defies authority and is carnivalesquely crowned for it. The crowning and uncrowning of these queens, a process of continual change and renewal, recalls the fertility of the grotesque body at the heart of the carnivalesque, a fertility based in resistance that is the “something else” of the text. 84

Outlawed desire both propels carnival acts, and is part of a carnivalized desire for the grotesque body: “And so Main Street is an anarchy where the only rule is Make It!”

(124); “it” is love in all of its different forms. Main Street in Los Angeles was, according to the text, the site of an anarchic sexual carnival, part of the “vast city of night” described in the first sentence of the text. Bakhtin ascribes to the carnivalesque an anarchic quality, similar to the anarchy of Main Street, where all is permitted. In the carnival atmosphere of Main Street’s gathering place for sexual outlaws like the hustlers and queens of the text, rules are suspended, except, critically, for one driven by the force of carnivalized desire: “Make it!”

Throughout the novel, consumption and copulation take place in carnivalesque settings. From the carnival atmosphere of Main Street to the bacchanalia of Mardi Gras, the grotesque body is represented in all of them as an object of desire. This desire propels the anarchic force of the people’s carnival, as we see in the text when, at a bar called

“The Carnival,” Youngman observes a dancing queen:

From somewhere, lured by the jungle sex sounds - a dark Latin queen rushed

frenzily onto the small clearing of the dance floor: beach-hat with lurid dyed

feathers, red polka dotted loose-sleeved blouse tied at her stomach, white

kneelength beach pants glowing purplish in the light, a gaudy gold butterfly

pinned to her hip ... Dark body gleaming, thin and sinewy, she twists, grinds -

lips parted, teeth gnashed. In convulsed, savagely rhythmic movements,

accompanied by guttural groans, she writhes the reptile body, contracts it 85

suddenly - simulating a woman’s orgasm.... More than a dance, it has been a

demand for Recognition of her mutilated sex. (280)

In the space and “gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities” (Bakhtin 11) fostered by the carnival, this queen dances towards liberation in the form of Recognition; of her sexual difference, but more broadly, of subjectivization and personhood; her dance demands this and, in the space of carnival, she “makes it.” Outside these spaces, in the daylight world of police and vice cops and an obligatory heteronormativity, this queen could never dance, not in those clothes or in that way. The queen’s body is represented as grotesque: “reptile,” “savage and guttural,” “lured by jungle sex sounds.” At the same time, her body gleams and she moves in ecstasy, propelled by camivalized desire. The space and time of carnival, for her, brings a “suspension of hierarchical rank” (Bakhtin

10); only in her case, this is also a suspension of similarly hierarchical, heteronormatively ranked desire as she asserts the primacy and potency of her own camivalized desire.

The queen’s desire for male bodies, for a gender identity that only she defines, and, ultimately, for love, goes unrecognized outside of these carnival spaces; in fact, at the time of the novel’s publishing in 1963, these desires were illegal and deeply taboo.

Excluded in this way from official discourse, the carnivalesque character of the text’s

“cities of night” does much more than accommodate her desire: the carnivalesque subsumes it, overwhelming and subverting official discourse through a desire that, in these spaces and through these grotesque bodies, is productive, positive, and ultimately dialogic in its openness to the voices of others; it is in this sense that her desire becomes 86 carnivalized. It produces for queens like her “Recognition of her mutilated sex,” as well as what Braidotti, drawing from Bakhtin, calls the unfolding of positive difference in processes of becoming (72). Differently than the invocations to become seen in Whitman and Neruda, the queen’s dance is itself a kind of chrysalis-like metamorphosis that will unfold difference as a positive force. Like Rene’s hardening and softening flesh, the queen’s grotesque body “is a body in the act of becoming,” since outside these carnival spaces she will become someone else. Her subjectivity constantly shifts and changes, nomadically; in this sense, it is a becoming-queer propelled by carnivalized desire.

Love in a Time of Becoming

According to Braidotti, these becomings and metamorphoses produce a kind of

“radical immanence” that aptly describes the queen’s own becoming:

Radical immanence: this means I want to think through the body, not in a flight

away from it. This in turn implies confronting boundaries and limitations. In

thinking about the body I refer to the notion of enfleshed or embodied materialism

... I call this the materialism of the flesh school in that it gives priority to issues

of sexuality, desire and the erotic imagination ... [one that] produces an

alternative vision of the subject. (5)

For Bradotti this alternative vision of subjectivity is nomadic, constantly shifting and becoming through the materialism of the flesh. Much like the grotesque body, her nomadic subject is open to the world and its multiplicity of voices; significantly, she 87 locates this opening in the flesh, and more specifically, within “sexuality, desire and the erotic imagination.” Through the confrontation of corporeal boundaries and unjust laws,

Youngman becomes the outlaw hero Rechy describes in his interview. Rene is a similar outlaw: he subverts “la causa,” and then, in his masochistic submission, subverts the law itself. For authors writing in a time when homosexuality was illegal in most countries, the outlaw stance of the main characters makes sense. It is a stance uniquely suited to

Braidotti’s nomadic subject, who moves between boundaries and limitations to constantly become, with desire as a constitutive force.

And yet, Braidotti will go on to ask, rightly in my opinion: what does this loss of unity, of a kind of self-immanence, imply for the subject? Much like the queen who becomes Recognized in the space of carnival, only to become male again outside,

Youngman hears a threat in the dialogic nature of carnivalized desire and the becoming it propels:

This is The Message, bright boy: Mardi Gras aint just any old carnival. Them

others got it all wrong. Im gonna tell you The Real Truth: People wear masks

three hundred and sixty-four days a year. Mardi Gras, they wear their own faces!

What you think is masks is really -... Themselves/” She seemed to be about to

spring at me, her face mere inches from mine. “Witches!” she shouted at me.

“Devils! Cannibals! Vampires! Clowns - lots of em.... And some —” she said,

relenting slightly, “just some, mind you: some - ... angels!...” Her strange

sudden laughter followed me into the street. (352) 88

Fraught with violence and danger, “devils, cannibals, and vampires,” the Youngman will, like Rene, flee from the fleshy camivalesque cities of night time and time again. For

Youngman, carnivalized desire confronts and transgresses all boundaries, from the unbearably selfless love offered to him outside the space of carnival, to the violent masochism asked of him by an older man within a carnival space of costumes and masks.

In both cases, Youngman answers, “Tm sorry,’ I repeated, ‘but this scene is nowhere!”’

(265). Braidotti argues that “the key idea here is that desire is the first and foremost step in the process of constitution of a self. What makes the entire procedure possible is the will-to-know, the desire to say, the desire to speak, to think and to represent” (71).

Similarly, Youngman, propelled by the force of carnivalized desire exerted on the grotesque body, textually represents a self in the process of becoming. Paradoxically,

Youngman flees at first towards, and then away from a scene that he desperately wants to be part of, but has been taught to be believe is “nowhere.”

Moving nomadically in worlds turned upside down, fleeing the flesh at the same time as they pursue it (or are pursued by it), carnivalized desire makes Youngman, like

Rene, into an outlaw; they defy the cults in their flight and subvert the law in their submission. As nomads and outlaws, subjects and objects of desire, they model the constitution of Braidotti’s nomadic subject. In the degradation of all that is “high, abstract, spiritual,” the grotesque body defies the authoritative discourse of the laws of

Church and State; carnivalized desire, in turn, eroticizes and embraces the rich multiplicity of human difference as a kind of internally persuasive discourse. 89

At the same time, Rene and Youngman’s flight towards and away from desire points to what Braidotti has called the threat inherent in the dissolution of the self as a

closed and complete site of meaning, a kind of self-immanence grounded in the prioritizing of the individual over the collective. Their flight reflects this fear of

dissolution, a becoming that Deleuze and Guattari describe as made up of “only relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between unformed elements, or at least between elements that are relatively unformed, molecules, and particles of all kinds.

There are only haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective

assemblages” (A Thousand Plateaus 266). The subsumption of one’s identity in a

“collective assemblage” necessarily involves others, with their diverse voices, desires, and haecceities; in this formulation, the self depends on the other for its very existence.

Acknowledging and desiring this interdependence is as frightening as it necessary.

Julia Kristeva, in Tales o f Love, describes love as “rooted in desire and pleasure”; at the same time, she will go on to write that love is “both a fear and a need of no longer being limited, held back, but going beyond. Dread of transgressing not only properties or taboos, but also, fear of crossing and desire to cross the boundaries of the self’ (6). Love,

then, born of desire and pleasure, is also a fear and a dread; in this formulation

Youngman’s fearful flight towards and away from the others who desire him, pleasure him, and would love him starts to make sense; Rene’s flight from the flesh similarly mirrors this formulation of love. Kristeva calls love “an affliction” that “we invent each time, with every necessarily unique loved one, at every moment, place, or age” (6). 90

Desire, pleasure, fear, and affliction: for Kristeva, each is a component of love, a potent

force for transgressing the boundaries of the self.

The carnival’s revalorization of Eros frees love from the dread and fear of

transgressing these boundaries and taboos. In the camivalization of desire, love takes many forms, from the quick physical loving of anonymous copulation in “vast cities of night,” to the love of eating carne, to the love of pain and suffering, to the unbearable affliction of love that renders Dalia, Rene’s first and only lover, unable to speak. In each form, love is “invented every time”; it is part of the camivalization of desire that has been the subject of this investigation.

To speak of love in novels like these, full of suffering, pain, and sex seemingly unmoored from any sentimentality, is itself an act of subversion. Critics like Serra have called Rene’s masochistic final submission to the flesh not a different kind of love but an act of violence and a renunciation of bodily pleasure. Similarly, critics dismissed

Youngman’s sexual carnival as pornographic and repulsive (Arnold 116); love was inconceivable in these queer configurations. At the same time, following Kristeva’s formulation, love afflicts and causes suffering through the transgression of boundaries,

and through the threat that accompanies the opening of the self to another. For the nomadic subject, this makes sense: she is one who knows, despite the assurances of authoritative discourse, that she does not know; that she cannot know, and that the voices of others are as important as her own. To cultivate difference instead of sameness is an act of resistance; in this sense, it can be terrifying. Similarly, to love queerly, especially 91

in the historical context of these novels, required suffering. It was, as Kristeva writes, an affliction.

So far, I have sought to show how carnivalized desire, whether through eating, hurting, or loving, propels the grotesque body’s opening to the world, and its subversion of an authoritative discourse of repression and heternormativity that seeks sameness at the cost of difference. And while I have argued that carnivalized desire enacts becoming

(and becoming-queer) for the young men at the center of these novels, it is an impossible claim for every reader, everywhere. And so, finally, I return to Deleuze’s question: what are the uses of fleshy, erotic novels like these? Ultimately, these becomings driven by carnivalized desire offer readers a lesson in the vast potentiality of the dissolution of the unity of the self and the propulsion toward the other, similar to how masochism subverts the law and undermines guilt. In this dissolution and propulsion there is yet another possibility, one that makes room for the violent desire of the masochist and the tender selfless love of the queer young men who plead for Youngman’s love. Kristeva, speaking of love, describes the impossibility of an unchanging identity: “Indeed, in the rapture of love, the limits of one’s own identity vanish, at the same time that the precision of reference and meaning becomes blurred in love’s discourse ... Do we speak of the same thing when we speak of love? And of which thing?” (2). One lesson of the carnival, then, and its anarchic, productive desiring for the grotesque body, is that each of us speaks of different things, in love and in life. Disgust and desire, pleasure and pain: each of these rhythms moves differently in each of us. As we finish these novels, laughing, lusting, 92 crying, or shuddering, perhaps we too can say to ourselves: “And so, at last, youve acknowledged that love might be possible” (Rechy 442) - for everyone. 93

Conclusion “Let me say, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by feelings of love.” - Che Guevara

“Ours is a crisis of aesthetics,” a recent edition of the anti-capitalist magazine

AdBusters proclaims, placing the words in a semi-circle, like an emoji smile, below a blown-up image of a doughnut covered in colorful, sugary sprinkles. With cracks in the wan pink sugar coating, bright and cheerfully artificial sprinkles, and pools of grease on the dough, it is a strangely grotesque object of desire, one many of us will want and find repellent simultaneously. For AdBusters, it emblematizes a crisis of aesthetics grounded in what they call the neo-capitalist dream of perpetual abundance and consumption, one that has produced record levels of income inequality, homelessness, environmental degradation, and labor alienation. The editors go on to trace the ways in which modern and postmodern Western aesthetics have been deeply influenced by capitalism. In modernism, they cite as examples the reflection of commodity-culture in Cubism’s

“abstract planes and cultures,” and in Mondrian’s “utopian grid of abstract flows and forces.” They argue that while the Cubists systematized, Abstract Expressionism in turn reflected a growing sense of alienation and the “emptied meaning” of systematized space

(,n.pag.). The editors then use a series of visual images, a pastiche of pop art (starting with a close-up of a Lichtenstein woman crying) and ironic hipster fashion, to intimate that postmodernism is a kind of swansong of commodity-culture.

With few exceptions, according to AdBusters, these movements form critical parts of a superstructure that maintains capitalist hegemony through cultural production. Their claims are expansive, but what interests us here is their call for a new aesthetics that is 94 socialist in nature, and that “moves the spectator/participant into action” (n. pag.). They go on to cite street art and graffiti as models for this movement; such art has long been controversial, often dismissed as ugly and grotesque blemishes on classical bodies of architectural perfection.

In their call for a “new aesthetics,” the editors of AdBusters are definitely on to something: as we have seen in our survey of grotesque realist texts, there is an insurrectionary potential in aesthetics. Bakhtin, writing shortly after the Russian

Revolution, contemplates this potential from an ethical perspective in his work on the role of the author and the hero in aesthetic activity. He notes the power of aesthetics to project the self into contact with the other, in this case through the imagining of another’s pain:

Let us say that there is a human being before me who is suffering. The

horizon of his consciousness is filled by the circumstance which makes him suffer

and by the objects which he sees before him. The emotional and volitional tones

which pervade this visible world of objects are tones of suffering. What I have to

do is to experience and consummate him aesthetically (ethical actions, such as

assistance, rescue, consolation, are excluded in this case). The first step in

aesthetic activity is my projecting myself into him and experiencing his life from

within him. I must experience - and come to see and know - what he experiences;

I must put myself in his place and coincide with him, as it were. (25) 95

Bakhtin describes the projection of the self outside the boundaries of the subject and toward the other as a fundamentally aesthetic phenomenon, an experiential event like writing or reading a poem, or viewing a painting. He goes on to note the aesthetic nature of experiencing another’s pain:

But in any event my projection of myself into him must be followed by a return

into myself, a return to my own place outside the suffering person, for only from

this place can the material derived from my projecting myself into the other be

rendered meaningful. .. aesthetic activity proper actually begins at the point

when we return into ourselves, when we return to our own place outside the

suffering person, and start to form and consummate the material we derived from

projecting ourselves into the other. (26)

In this sense, Bakhtin’s conceptualization of the ethical potential of aesthetic activity concords with AdBusters and their call for a “new aesthetics” that responds to the crises of contemporary capitalism. Bakhtin describes aesthetics as the “forming and consummating” of sensations and experiences (“material”) gained from the projecting of the self into the other and back again. Aesthetic activity, seen from this perspective, deeply implicates the self as subject. Intriguingly, then, in the literary invocations and provocations to move toward a nomadic subjectivity that have been the subject of this investigation, we may find the beginning of a solution to what AdBusters calls our crisis of aesthetics. 96

I respond to their call for a new aesthetic with an even broader call for a radical restructuring of our social and economic relations, one that can occur through the

“forming and consummating” of material gained through aesthetic activity. At the core of this project has been the hope that, in turning toward the aesthetics of the grotesque body and its carnivalization of desire, we may find one path among many for restructuring these relations. Antonio Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks, describes the role of cultural labor in the maintenance of social and economic power, what he calls hegemony.

Gramsci argues that “intellectuals,” producers of the art and culture that form the superstructure, perform “the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government. “Spontaneous consent,” according to Gramsci, is given by the “great masses of the population,” the base of the superstructure, because of the historic “prestige (and consequent confidence) the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production” (673). This concept is particularly powerful because, in essence, he is suggesting that capitalism can be undermined by a “war of position,” or in other words, a shift in cultural consciousness. Viewed in this light, AdBusters’’ call for a new aesthetics begins to make sense. Like Bakhtin and Gramsci, I believe that aesthetic activity, as part of cultural labor, plays an important role in restructuring human relations.

As Bakhtin notes, aesthetic activity “forms and consummates” what we experience when we project ourselves into the other; in literature, the author imagines this projection of the self into other, and as readers, we experience this projection and reflect on it. Any decisions about what, if any, ethical moves to make come after this experience of 97 another’s world. These ethical moves are the starting point for radically restructuring human relations.

In this investigation, I have focused on four literary texts from a 100-year time period spanning the US Civil War and the end of slavery, and two different kinds of revolutions, one political (the Cuban Revolution), and one cultural (the sexual revolution in the US). Each of these texts, examples of a revival of Bakhtin’s grotesque realism with all of its vast ethical and political implications, address historical moments of radical social and political change. In these texts, grotesque realism’s opening of the body to the world, with its weed-like excrescences and “ugly” bodily functions, points to a conceptualization of human relations that is communal and egalitarian, breaking with capitalism’s hierarchical individualism.

Speaking contrastively of rhizomes and trees in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari use the concept of arborescence, or tree-like structure, to describe capitalist systems of human relations with vertical hierarchies of power, a center of power (the trunk), and inherent inequality (the smaller branches are less equal than the trunk). They contrast this with “acentered systems, finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neighbor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all individuals are interchangeable” (A Thousand Plateaus

17). Deleuze and Guattari call such a system rhizomatic. In Whitman and Neruda’s poetry, we see this rhizomatic structure unfold, with its invocations of change and becoming propelled by carnivalized desire. As a productive force, it invokes this 98 becoming through the voices of the “amorous sea” (Whitman 391), the buds and sprouts of the earth, and “throbbing sexual oysters” (Neruda 69). In the metaphoric and literal consumption of the body, the sly subversion of the masochist, and the exuberant sexual difference of the outlaw, Pinera and Rechy’s texts enact this becoming, offering a kind of map for a revolutionary re-structuring of relations. Deleuze and Guattari note the centrality of sexuality in a rhizomatic approach to human relations: “What is at question in the rhizome is a relation to sexuality - but also to the animal, to the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural and artificial - that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all manner of becomings” (A Thousand Plateaus 21). The rhizome, with its hundreds of different stems and shoots, ugly roots and beautiful outgrowths, fundamentally re-orders vertical hierarchies, as we see in epistemological examples like the “tree of languages” or literatures; in this model, there is a central trunk from which all others emerge, beholden to the center and linked through sameness. In its exuberant difference, the rhizome is an exuberantly queer phenomenon, deeply entwined with sexuality as part of the productive force of desire.

Like a rhizome that sends its shoots and buds through the earth, the camivalization of desire that occurs in grotesque realism drives a movement toward the other, in a kind of subjectival de-mooring that fosters a nomadic subjectivity. Braidotti’s formulation of the nomadic subject is fertile ground for an aesthetics that restructures human relations, specifically in its turn away from the ethos of liberal individualism at the heart of capitalism: “nomadic subjectivity critiques liberal individualism and 99 promotes instead the positivity of multiple connections.” She goes on to note the role of desire in this movement toward the formation of the nomadic subject: “it [nomadic subjectivity] also eroticizes interconnectedness, by emphasizing the role of passions, empathy, and desire as non-aggrandizing models of relation to one’s social and human habitat” (266). Carnivalized desire, as invocation and provocation, is just such a “non­ aggrandizing model” of human relations: it eroticizes not only interconnectedness, but difference, and in so doing subverts the monologic discourse of authority and power. In literature, this subversion is necessarily discursive, though its imagination of dialogic human relations and nomadic subjectivity offers a model for a rhizome-like defiance of power and hierarchy that takes the form of becoming.

Throughout this investigation, I have repeatedly invoked becoming to describe the dissolution of fixed, singular identities provoked by carnivalized desire. Deleuze and

Guattari write extensively on the sweeping potential of becoming in the re-shaping of human relations, noting how Virginia Woolf, much like Rechy, opposed the idea of writing as a person with a singular identity defined by others: “She was appalled at the idea of writing ‘as a woman.’ Rather, writing should produce a becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating men, of sweeping them up in that becoming” (A Thousand Plateaus 276).

Becoming, with its permanently changing and transitory state, is “a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogical tree ... Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, ‘appearing,’ ‘being,’ ‘equaling,’ or 100

‘producing”’(239); what produces becoming is desire and its carnivalization.

Carnivalized desire in literature is not evolutionary, but alliance-based, like the becoming it invokes and provokes: “Becoming is not an evolution ... it concerns alliance .. . There is a block of becoming that snaps up the wasp and the orchid, but from which no wasp- orchid can descend” (238). In this sense, becoming and, as I have suggested, becoming- queer, do not produce permanent states; instead, becoming-queer is a way of “crossing and impregnating,” shaping and informing a new kind of consciousness and subjectivity that is fundamentally nomadic and transitory.

I have so far focused on the ethical potential of nomadic subjectivity, specifically in its constitution by difference, its fostering of human interconnectedness and deep engagement with the other, and its rhizome-like horizontal structures of power and equality. But what exactly are the political implications of this shifting position of the self? I turn to Tim Libretti’s work on sexual outlaws and class consciousness to approach a formulation of the political potential of nomadic subjectivity. Libretti points out that

“Marx and Engels argued that the working class, as the direct object of the most fundamental form of oppression - though not the only form of oppression - and as the one class whose interests do not rest on the oppression of other classes, can create the conditions for liberating all human beings in the struggle to liberate itself’ (163).

Working people, alienated from their labor and oppressed by the accumulation of capital, and having no vested interest in oppressing other classes, are uniquely situated to

“liberate all human beings.” Similarly, sexual outlaws, hustlers, masochists, and the 101 whole world of differently loving queer people, can play a critical role in the restructuring of human relations, or what Libretti calls liberation. He notes that Rechy and other “theorists of gay liberation,” identify queer people as “the motors of history and valoriz[e] queer consciousness as the most comprehensive political consciousness because gay liberation requires the destruction of capitalism and the development of an altogether new way of life” (Libretti 163). Much as Deleuze and Guattari attribute the negativization of desire to the capitalist need for workers produced and “Oedapilzed” by the nuclear family, Libretti links the enforcement of heteronormative sexual ideology to capitalism and the maintenance of a class system. He cites James Baldwin’s work on the

“masculine ideal” in US culture that creates stifling gender and sexual paradigms1

(“cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white”) to argue for a “queer consciousness” (168) that defies these paradigms. Libretti concludes that a queer consciousness is central to “the radical imagination seeking to invent new political subjects or write new narratives of class struggle and liberation,” especially if we are seeking “a genuine blueprint for revolution.” The nomadic subject invoked and provoked by carnivalized desire is very much part of this blueprint, a kind of “new political subject.” It is an exuberant, rhizomatic outgrowth of the grotesque body that has been the site of the “radical imagination” since the inscription of carnival in the literary tradition of grotesque realism. 102

At the heart of carnivalized desire’s invocations and provocations to become is a call to shift one’s subjectivity nomadically and to revel in positive difference. What

Libretti calls a queer consciousness resonates deeply with the concept of becoming and becoming-queer, especially in the Deleuzian sense of “crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating men, of sweeping them up in that becoming.” In the discursive formation of the grotesque body, much as the author is projected toward the other in an aesthetic experience that results in a call for ethical action, reading these projections of the self outward produces a similar call for ethical decision-making. How should we treat the queer young men we read about, whose sexual appetites might disgust or enthrall, but whose search for love triggers a cognitive recognition of the vast field of difference that makes us human? At the same time, these ethical calls to action will be ineffective without a parallel call for political action: we cannot enact the fullness of an ethical engagement with Rechy’s Youngman while he is systematically oppressed. The nomadic subject straddles this confluence of ethics and politics, always becoming, propelled toward the other by carnivalized desire. During these crises of capitalism, if we turn toward our grotesque bodies, reveling in our messy imperfections and mocking the staid discourses of authority, power, and capital, we can begin the arduous labor of radically restructuring human relations. A blueprint for this revolution already exists: it is written into our grotesque bodies and carnival desires, and in the multiplicity of our love. Notes

1 In the first chapter of this investigation, I join several critics in refuting this claim, arguing that poetic discourse in the tradition of grotesque realism contains a multiplicity of voices that purposefully subsume the monologic character of the lyrical voice in

“official” literature [see Shapiro and Wall’s work for more on this],

2 As only one example, recall the first line of Whitman’s “Poem 85”: “As I lay with my head in your lap, camerado...”

3 My translation.

4 Witt provides no citation for this quote; future versions of this paper will include the original text and translator name.

5 These three forms of camivalized desire are by no means representative of the infinite forms it can take; they are, however, examples of what Deleuze calls the efficiency of literature in confronting language, and, as I intend to show, provoking a transformation in the relationship of the self to the other.

6 In the first edition of La carne de Rene, this section is included as an index. In contemporary editions in English and Spanish, the section is included as a Table of

Contents. The section can be considered a kind of menu before a meal, or as a map to a recently consumed one; in either sense, it signals a metaphorical anthropophagy.

7 Thanks to George Wrisley’s “Nietzsche and the Value of Suffering - Two Alternative

Ideals” for pointing me to this passage. 104 g • • This is discussed in detail in the previous chapter on Whitman and Neruda’s grotesque bodies.

9 Note the wordplay implicit in encarnacion [incarnation]: the grotesque can transform even the divine into carne, and eat it.

10 My translation.

11 Similar examples can be drawn from the Americas, like the valorizing of the same-sex loving macho (“active” or insertive sex partner, loosely equivalent to the term butch, and considered particularly virile) and the social shaming of the maricon (pejorative term for a passive or receptive sex partner generally presumed to be feminine) in Mexico and

Central America [see David William Foster’s work on homophobia in the Americas for more examples]. 105

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