UNCANNY INFLUENCES:

FREUD, , AND THE LITERARY USES OF PARANOIA

BY

GEOFFREY SHULLENBERGER

B.A., SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE, 2001

M.ST., OXFORD UNIVERSITY, 2004

A.M., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2009

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AT BROWN

UNIVERSITY

PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

MAY 2012

© Copyright 2012 by Geoffrey Shullenberger

This dissertation by Geoffrey Shullenberger is accepted in its present form by the Department of Comparative Literature as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date ______Esther Whitfield

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg

Date______Stephanie Merrim

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______Peter Weber

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CURRICULUM VITAE

Geoffrey A. Shullenberger was born in Northampton, Massachussetts on May 20, 1979. He earned a B.A. in Literature from Sarah Lawrence College in 2001, an M.St. in European Literature from Oxford University in 2004, and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 2009. He received the Alfred Spaulding Cook Essay Prize in Comparative Literature in 2007, and was awarded a Tinker Field Research Grant for research in Argentina in 2010. His scholarship examines modern Latin American literature and culture in a transnational context. He has published articles in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and Romance Studies. He currently teaches at Monterey Peninsula College in Monterey, California.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My dissertation director, Esther Whitfield, provided exemplary support and guidance at every stage of this project. Esther has been an inspiring mentor throughout my graduate career, and her expertise, patience, and generosity have seen me through on many an occasion. Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg was gracious enough to become part of this project late in the game and has been an invaluable guide on the treacherous intellectual terrain of . Stephanie Merrim’s intellectual rigor, demanding standards, and attention to detail are as remarkable and salutary as her good humor and generosity. I am also indebted to Brown faculty: to Nicolás Wey-Gómez, for leading me into unimagined realms; to Ken Haynes, for being challenging and supportive in equal measure; and to Dore Levy, for kindness in dark times; and to teachers who shaped my thinking, reading, and writing at earlier stages, especially Jim Reed, Tony Phelan, Danny Kaiser, Ilja Wachs, Roland Dollinger, Fred Smoler, and Walter Schneller. The Department of Comparative Literature has given me exceptional support throughout my studies, and I am especially grateful to Charlie Auger and Carol Wilson-Allen, who keep the ship afloat. Brown’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and The Tinker Foundation provided generous funding for a highly fruitful research stint in Argentina and Uruguay in 2010; special thanks go to Susan Hirsch at CLACS.

Many people have enriched my life over the past seven years and beyond. Comp lit colleagues provided unflappable solidarity and excellent company: in particular, Nora Peterson, Greg Baker, Susan Solomon, Signe Christensen, Derek Wong, and Yumi Tanaka. Other friends helped make Providence a real community: special mention goes to Dánisa Bonacic, Glenn Rawson, Marília Scaff Rocha Ribeiro, Guilherme Ribeiro, Marimar Patrón, Kurt Wootton, Julia Garner, Luca Prazeres, Joe Bush, Daniella Wittern, Teresa Villa-Ignacio, Robert Newcomb, Niki Clements, Andrew Peterson, and Michael Stewart. Farther afield, I am thankful for the friendship and conversation of Sean Francis, Nick Nelson, Rachel Eley, Amanda Cadogan, Michael Esveldt, and Tom Boylston. I am very fortunate for my family: Bill Shullenberger, Shannon and Perry Mihalakos, Doris Lowry, Jay Alexander, Lynn Bengston, and Dave Riegel have all provided encouragement, inspiration, and support in various forms; Paul Shullenberger, Peter Hawkins, and Sheila MacAvey have also been there from the beginning. I am also immensely grateful for my second family, especially Patty Hatch, Zoë Whittle, and Louisa Hare. Finally, Charlotte Whittle’s love, companionship, brilliance, humor, imagination, and strength have made this and everything else possible.

I dedicate this dissertation to the memory of three extraordinary people whose influence on everything I do I will never have any about acknowledging: Sam Potts, Benson Whittle, and Bonnie Shullenberger.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION Influence, Authority, Paranoia: Latin American and Psychoanalytic Models 1

CHAPTER ONE The Paranoid Apprentice: Horacio Quiroga’s Poe-etics of Persecution 45

CHAPTER TWO Borges “by Lacan”: Cultural Antagonisms and Paranoid Agency in Modern Argentina 100 CHAPTER THREE Romancing the Influencing Machine: La invención de Morel and the Psychoanalysis of the Machine Age 155

WORKS CITED 203

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INTRODUCTION

Influence, Authority, Paranoia: Latin American and Psychoanalytic Models

“My nerves are influenced by the rays to vibrate according to certain human words; their choice therefore is not subject to my own will, but is due to an influence exerted on me from without.” -, Memoirs of my Nervous Illness

“Platón dijo que los poetas son amanuenses de un dios, que los anima contra su voluntad, contra sus propósitos, como el imán anima a una serie de anillos de hierro.” -Jorge Luis Borges, “El escritor argentino y la tradición”

Borges’s “Subaltern Sublime”

In “La flor de Coleridge,” an essay published in the 1952 collection Otras inquisiciones, Jorge Luis Borges examines the recurrence of a literary image across a heterogeneous set of texts. His meditation begins with an obscure fragment by

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which he translates as follows: “Si un hombre atravesara el

Paraíso en un sueño, y le dieran una flor como prueba de que había estado allí, y si al despertar encontrara esa flor en su mano . . . ¿entonces, qué?” (639).1 Borges’s interest in the fragment appears, at least initially, to center less on the flower motif itself than on the textual network constituted by its repetition. He details its reappearance in H.G. Wells’s

The Time Machine, in which the protagonist brings back a flower as the only proof of his voyage into the future. Although Borges refers to the flower motif in Wells’s novel as

1 This and all subsequent quotations from works by Borges are from his Obras completas unless otherwise indicated.

1 “la segunda versión de la imagen de Coleridge” (640), he tells us that Wells “desconocía el texto de Coleridge” (640). In light of the absence of a genetic relationship, the functioning of the textual network connecting Coleridge and Wells turns out to replicate the fantastic logic of the texts themselves – the logic, that is, by which an entity, be it a flower or a literary image of a flower, may travel inexplicably between two spaces between which no form of transit can be traced. The flower, traditional symbol of organic life and proliferation, becomes in the two texts and in the promiscuous transit between them an impossible, undead simulacrum of itself, no longer obedient to recognizable laws of filiation.

The exposition of a network of recurring textual elements serves here, as in many other essays in Otras inquisiciones, as evidence for a view that Borges states explicitly in the book’s epilogue: “el número de fábulas o de metáforas de que es capaz la imaginación de los hombres es limitado” (775). The motifs, images, and metaphors contained in this finite set, Borges proposes, travel indiscriminately between texts and recur in potentially infinite variations. In this account of literary production, the individual writer figures as little more than an involuntary conduit of the utterances of an anonymous generative entity to which Borges refers as “el Verbo” (alluding to the gospel of John) or “el Espíritu” (citing Paul Valéry), or simply “la literatura.” As with the image of the flower, this idea turns out to be subject to the logic that it describes, since it is itself one of the motifs whose repetition, in texts by Valéry, Emerson, and Shelley, it claims to explain. In the epilogue of Otras inquisiciones, Borges describes this logic as

“pantheist,” but the stance he is describing is interchangeable with what, in many other places in his oeuvre, he calls “idealism.” In the key ficción “Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius,”

2 the “idealismo total” (435) of the inhabitants of Tlön entails a view of literature identical to that promulgated in Otras inquisiciones: “En los hábitos literarios también es todopoderosa la idea de un sujeto único. Es raro que los libros estén firmados. No existe el concepto del plagio: se ha establecido que todas las obras son obra de un solo autor, que es atemporal y es anónimo” (439). This “idealist” framework permits the literary critics of Tlön to engage in fantastical attributions and tracings of influence that closely resemble those undertaken by Borges himself in his literary essays.

Harold Bloom, who judges Borges “a profound student of literary influence”

(Western 432), has placed Borgesian “idealismo” in a simultaneous relation of continuity and contrast with his own idiosyncratic approach to literary power relations. Specifically,

Borges’s “realization that all literature is plagiarism” (439) and concomitant understanding of each text as a tense revision of a prior text make the Argentine author a crucial point of reference for Bloom’s model of literary influence. Conversely, Bloom’s application of ’s Oedipal model of intergenerational rivalry to relationships between texts and authors sets him at odd with Borges, who favored a model of literary tradition as a “continuity . . . one vast poem and story composed by many hands through the ages”

(437-438). The latter view obviously leaves little room for Freudian power struggles, and

Bloom, with reference to the essay “Los precursores de Kafka” (also in Otras inquisiciones), identifies a limitation in Borges’s unwillingness “to see that polemic and rivalry guide the creation of the precursor” (437). He links this resistance directly to

Borges’s lifelong hostility toward psychoanalysis, stating that “Borges’s distaste for

Freud . . . may help to illuminate his stance toward literary tradition” (437). In Bloom’s assessment, “[a] dread of what Freud called the family romance and of what might be

3 termed the family romance of literature condemns Borges to repetition, and to idealization of the writer-reader relationship” (438). From the vantage point of Bloom’s agonistic theory of influence, Borges’s attempted “detachment from cultural tangles”

(438) represents a disavowal of the most provocative implications of the model of literary production outlined in his essays and ficciones. At the same time, precisely in his overt hostility to psychoanalysis, Borges participated in a struggle over influence of the sort he refused to acknowledge. Bloom traces the contest between the claims of literature and the claims of psychoanalysis back to the tensely productive relation between Freud and

Shakespeare: “Shakespeare [was] Freud’s hidden authority, the father he would not acknowledge . . . misreading Shakespeare’s works was not enough for Freud; the threatening precursor had to be exposed, dismissed, disgraced” (349). Bloom’s reading suggests that precisely in his relation to Freud, Borges turns out to be engaged in an unwitting repetition of Freud’s antagonistic relation to his major literary precursor.

Bloom’s quasi-Freudian critique of Borgesian literary idealism inadvertently echoes a line of attack directed by Argentine Lacanian leftists against Borges and the entire prestigious coterie surrounding the literary magazine Sur between the 1950s to the 1970s. Oscar Masotta, frequently regarded as the “fons et origo”

(Derbyshire 11) of Lacan’s highly productive reception in Argentina, dedicated an incendiary 1956 essay to indicting the conservative ideology (which he dubs

“antiperonismo colonialista”) of Borges, Victoria Ocampo, and their circle.2 Masotta

2 I should clarify that Masotta, in 1956, was more aligned with Sartrean than with Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and that his influential promotion of Lacan’s ideas began in earnest in the early 1960s. The terms of his critique of Borges and Sur, however, did not change significantly as his theoretical priorities shifted, and

4 lambastes above all “la hemorragia de espiritualidad del grupo Sur” (Conciencia 129), and identifies Sur’s literary “spiritualism” as an attempt to “salvar a las elites de la irrupción de las masas en la historia” (129) by positing the serene continuity and universality of high culture. From the standpoint of Masotta and his collaborator and fellow Lacanian Germán García, the self-fashioning of the Sur group as an “elite de la sabiduría” (García, Psicoanálisis 96) standing aloof from history (hence their aversion to

Marxism), mass politics (hence their aversion to Perón and Peronism), and sex (hence their aversion to Freud), has converted them into de facto apologists for reaction. In their derogatory insistence on the terms “espíritu” and “espiritualidad” to characterize the ideology of their opponents, Masotta and García concur with Bloom’s critical reading of

Borges’s proclaimed “idealismo.” “Espíritu,” as we saw above, occupies a prominent place in the lexicon of Borgesian “pantheism,” appearing, via Valéry, as one of the terms used by Borges in Otras inquisiciones to name the “universal author” responsible for all literary works. In the assessment of Masotta and García, the idealist of the universal author functions as an appeal on the part of a self-identified elite to a dehistoricized, inert tradition available only to initiates.

Crucially, Masotta’s attack on Borges and Sur overlaps with his equally forceful polemics against the theories of C.G. Jung, the only psychoanalytic theorist who won favor with Borges and his circle. Masotta defines Jung, like Borges, as an “idealista,” since “[t]oda teoría que intente hacer una relación analógica entre las formas del inconsciente individual y las formas del inconsciente colectivo, pensando que hay

Massota’s friend and collaborator García’s 2005 essay on Sur echoes Masotta’s early essay on a number of salient points. Philip Derbyshire addresses the continuities of Masotta’s intellectual trajectory in “Who Was Oscar Masotta?”

5 arquetipos, es idealista” (131), and characterizes Jungian theory in terms that foreground its affinities with Borgesian literary idealism: “Si veo ciertas formas y las entiendo como manifestaciones de una verdad preexistente, esto es la base de todo sistema idealista. En todo sistema idealista, el espíritu ya está constituido y la historia es la manifestación de ese espíritu” (Lecturas 133). The antidote proffered by Masotta and García is a model of the transmission of cultural authority that, like Bloom’s, foregrounds the Freudian

“family romance” of Oedipal rivalry. Masotta draws this contrast in terms that echo his allegations against the ahistoricism and elitism of the Sur group: “En la interpretación junguiana, se asciende hacia los arquetipos y la relación sexual se disuelve. En Freud, la interpretación apunta hacia la relación primitiva sexual en la triangulación edípica” (131).

Freud himself offers a succinct account of this hermeneutical principle in his literary essay “The Theme of the Three Caskets”: “we do not share the belief of some investigators that were read in the heavens and brought down to earth; we are more inclined to judge . . . that they were projected onto the heavens after having arisen elsewhere under purely human conditions” (515). In categorical opposition to the

Jungian-Borgesian “interpretación [que] va de lo bajo a lo alto,” Masotta promulgates a

Freudian model that “va de lo alto a lo bajo” (130).

The critiques of Borges advanced by Bloom and Masotta, despite the differences of context, register, and purpose that separate them, have in common the allegation of a concealed “Oedipal” substrate of literary production disavowed in the Argentine author’s

“idealismo.” Extending the lines of inquiry just adduced, this dissertation elaborates and interrogates a set of “Oedipal” strategies endemic to modern Latin American literature’s obligatory negotiations with metropolitan regimes of cultural authority. When read with

6 these strategies in , I will argue, a fantastical account of influence like the one offered in “La flor de Coleridge” may be read as a fraught, if veiled, intervention in the very “cultural tangles” that Bloom and Masotta believe Borges to have sidestepped. My opening synopsis of Borges’s essay deployed terms like “promiscuous,” “indiscriminate,”

“uncanny,” and “undead” in order to point toward a vividly paranoid vision of disruptive contamination and unauthorized invasion, a vision partly concealed by Borges’s serene rhetoric of “panteísmo,” “espiritualidad,” and “idealismo.” I would like to propose that far from comprising, as Borges would have it, an idiosyncratic disposition common to certain otherwise disparate writers across history, the “literary paranoia” shaping the account of influence offered in “La flor de Coleridge” constitutes a historically situated response to the conditions authorizing or deligitimizing literary production in Latin

American cultural space. Although my opening focus has been on the canonically central work of Borges, I will trace the adoption of “paranoid” stances through several key texts and moments in modern Latin American literature that occupy territories adjacent to

Borges’s treatments of influence. The literary version of paranoia under consideration here, as I will insist throughout this dissertation, comprises a set of related strategies for negotiating, interpreting, and articulating the double binds of influence posed by a contested regime of cultural authority.3

3 Because it functions as a productive response to the cultural panorama out of which it emerges, in the sense of accompanying and propelling definitive shifts in Latin American literary production, what I am calling “literary paranoia” should be viewed in illuminating contrast with the primarily demystifying paranoid impulses diagnosed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” in a wide array of contemporary critical and theoretical practices. Such a contrast relies on a partial distinction between the (for the most part narrative) uses of paranoia documented here and the assertion of paranoia as a uniquely valid hermeneutic and therefore an end in

7 As should be evident, I am using paranoia as a way of talking about, in Eric

Santner’s words, “the subject’s dependency on tradition in the widest possible sense, on the transmission of symbolic power from the outside – from institutions, from authorities, from ancestors” (141). In a psychoanalytically informed study of the cultural politics of paranoia, Santner has detected at the core of the delusional universe of Daniel Paul

Schreber, the subject of one of Freud’s case studies, a shattering anxiety about the processes by which subjects achieve a symbolically mediated identity by means of

“investiture” in a social network. Schreber’s delusional universe, Santner argues, illustrates the consequences of a characteristically modern crisis in which the overarching structures of symbolic authority become, to use a phrase favored by Slavoj Zizek,

“stained with enjoyment” (Plague 13 et passim). When contaminated by an obscene remainder, institutional authority loses its capacity to project a serene, uncontestable universality, and reappears as a hostile, overbearing antagonist: to be exact, as the persecutorial regime of illicit authority that is the trademark of paranoid delusions. Both

Santner and Zizek have emphasized the crucial place of paranoia, understood in these terms, in the psychoanalytic account of the Oedipal mechanisms by which authority is sustained and transmitted across the social order – the same mechanisms whose driving antagonisms are central to both Bloom’s and Masotta’s critiques of Borges. For psychoanalysis, paranoid delusions signal a “breakdown in the transfer of symbolic capital” (Santner 139) mobilized by the Oedipal regime of succession, but also tend to enact the “hallucinatory repair” of that regime through an elaborately distorted

itself. As Sedgwick herself observes, “powerful reparative practices . . . infuse self- avowedly paranoid critical projects,” just as “paranoid exigencies . . . are often necessary for nonparanoid knowing and utterance” (Touching 129)

8 simulacrum of the structures permitting symbolic investiture.4 The persecutorial malevolence attributed to authority figures in the delusional world foregrounds violent antagonisms that would normally be covered over. In this sense, then, we may read

Bloom and Masotta as proposing a “paranoid” revision of Borges’s apparently idealized account of literary influence.

The conjunction of the paranoid and the literary I am pointing to in Borges’s work and beyond accords with the key position occupied by the act of writing in psychoanalytic accounts of paranoid determinism, a prominence evident in the suggestive remark of : “The discursive products characteristic of the register of paranoia usually blossom into literary productions, in the sense in which literary simply means sheets of paper covered with writing” (S III 177). As characterized in the earliest psychoanalytic studies of the psychoses by Freud and his disciple Victor Tausk, the paranoid subject experiences him- or herself as the involuntary receptacle of a compulsive barrage of thoughts, language fragments, and images, and inhabits a world dominated absolutely by an obscure, vast power which may take the form of a human conspiracy, a god or gods, or, in the particular class of delusion examined by Tausk, an

“influencing machine” which “serves to persecute the persecute the patient and is operated by enemies” (186). In a section of his book that juxtaposes Schreber’s delusional universe with the fictional worlds of Kafka, Santner coins the term “subaltern sublime” to describe the posture of the paranoid subject as a repository of “the mechanical reproduction or registration of signifiers” (75). The “strange intermediaries”

4 According to this account, then, “paranoid” strategies in fact necessarily converge with “reparative” ones, to return to Sedgwick’s terminology.

9 identified by Santner both in Schreber’s memoirs and Kafka’s writings (the latter, of course, are a frequent point of reference for Borges), in serving as mere conduits of discourse, “mediate the transfer, the conversion of meaningless, physical causes – the rote repetition of dead letter – into ideal, symbolic effects” (76).

Paranoid motifs, often in conjunction with the act of writing, dominate many of

Borges’s best-known ficciones. To name some of the most obvious instances: the protagonists of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” find themselves and their world to be the victims of the inexorable machinations of secret conspirators who contaminate the world through the fantasies they disseminate in an encyclopedia; the heroes of “La muerte y la brújula” and “El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan” discover their destinites to have been charted in advance according to obscure signifying mechanisms; while the fates of the residents of Babylon are decided by the arbitrary drawings of a lottery controlled by

“la Compañía,” descibed by the narrator as a “tenebrosa corporación” (460). My proposals regarding literary paranoia make clear that such elements, contrary to Borges’s own claims, serve more than a decorative purpose in the construction of an aesthetically compelling, self-contained literary world. Rather, moving from “lo alto” to “lo bajo,” I want to suggest that they point to the logic of literary production – and therefore of the mechanisms of cultural authority that underwrite it – within which Borges is situating his own fiction.5 We glimpsed the contours of this logic in “La flor de Coleridge,” and find

5 Daniel Balderston has offered a strikingly different but complementary reading of Borges, by way of a more literal turn to “lo bajo.” Focusing on the Argentine author’s frequent and tense allusions to the “lower bodily strata,” and in particular to feces, latrines, the rectum, and male anal intercourse, Balderston detects a pervasive “association of writing to fecal ‘production’” in Borges’s work: “the frequent presence of an Other, almost always male, almost always locked in some sort of phallic combat with

10 it in other Borgesian representations of writers as unwittingly and involuntarily channeling fragments of a vast, impersonal discourse. In the well-known essay “El escritor argentino y la tradición,” a direct intervention in the “cultural tangles” of his time and place, Borges approvingly attributes a radically deterministic model of literary creation to Plato: “Platón dijo que los poetas son amanuenses de un dios, que los anima contra su voluntad, contra sus propósitos, como el imán anima a una serie de anillos de hierro” (273). In its context in “El escritor argentino,” the paraphrase of Plato forms part of Borges’s critique the voluntarist assumptions of literary nationalists. However, it accords more broadly with a “paranoid” stance that, as I will argue throughout this dissertation, corresponds to a broader logic characteristic of the modern Latin American cultural sphere in general and Argentine literary space in particular.

The only mention of Freud in all of Borges’s published work, which appears in the brief “Anotación al 23 de agosto de 1944,” reveals that the Argentine author glimpsed an affinity between his own insistent emphasis on the subject’s heteronomy and the psychoanalytic account of the unconscious. Reflecting on current events and speculating that Hitler may have, against his own conscious intentions, been collaborating in his own defeat by the Allied armies, Borges asks rhetorically: “¿no ha razonado Freud y no ha presentido Whitman que los hombres gozan de poca información acerca de los móviles

the protagonist, suggests that the fecal dialectic is ‘fecal’ only because it involves (phantasmatic) anal penetration. The fecal ‘production’ that is writing (for Borges, in this account) is the result of male-male impregnation, an impossibility for human biology but certainly not for the human imagination. And the phobic site of writing is the rectum” (“‘Fecal Dialectic’” 40). Given the importance of “homosexual panic” to the classic Freudian interpretation of Daniel Paul Schreber’s paranoia as well as to Santner’s and Sedgwick’s revisions of Freud, Balderston’s reading dovetails with several of my arguments and interpretations here. The resonances will become more explicit in the discussion of Schreber, Quiroga, and masculine literary succession in Chapter One.

11 profundos de su conducta?” (727). The paranoid invocation, familiar from the examples already adduced, of the radical exteriority and unavailability of the mechanisms determining an individual’s conduct here coincides directly with the psychoanalytic hermeneutic of suspicion elsewhere ignored or disparaged by Borges. As Liliana Heer and J.C. Martini Real comment in a minute analysis of the “Anotación,” Borges’s allusion nevertheless “platoniza a Freud” (2); that is, Borges absorbs the Freudian unconscious into his own recognizably idealist framework.6 I would add that, by placing

Whitman’s name before Freud’s and by claiming that Whitman first intuited what Freud later reasoned, Borges reasserts the primacy of literature over psychoanalysis even as he appeals to Freud’s authority to make his argument. The remark, then, dramatizes the question of the relative authority of literary and psychoanalytic discourses. Literature and psychoanalysis come together, for Borges, in their parallel attempts to represent the sublimely inaccessible authority ultimately underwriting human thought and action.

Similarly, the purpose of my “Oedipalizing,” “de-Platonizing” reading of Borges is not to use the theoretical models of paranoia furnished by psychoanalysis as a metalanguage for interpreting homologous literary manifestations, but rather to juxtapose two nearly contemporary bodies of writing in which the problematic modern implications of influence and authority come into play in comparable forms and generate cognate, if frequently divergent, strategies of reading and writing. Following the work of Santner and Zizek as well as that of David Trotter and John Farrell, all of whom effectively read a

6 As Balderston notes, Borges elsewhere in his work similarly “platonizes” Whitman: “In Whitman’s case, no reference is made to the homoerotic elements in Leaves of Grass, and the man is turned into a kind of monk who presides over the rites of democracy as a chaste and almost disembodied celebrant” (“‘Fecal Dialectic’” 35).

12 variety of early twentieth century European discourses about paranoia as parallel responses to a general breakdown of the mechanisms which accord symbolic power across the social order,7 I will argue that the deployment of paranoid motifs in modern

Argentine fiction comprises a response to a particular set of historical circumstances conditioning cultural production. The intersections of this body of texts with areas of psychoanalytic writing evince parallel engagements with specific manifestations of a broader modern crisis of cultural legitimacy. While drawing on the models of cultural history just mentioned, I would like to initiate a dialogue between psychoanalytic models of authority and influence and several authoritative accounts of modern Latin American literary and cultural discourse, particularly those of Ángel Rama,

Beatriz Sarlo, Roberto González Echevarría, and Carlos Alonso. These and other critics use recognizably “Oedipal” structures, in which an ambivalent relationship to cultural authority plays a crucial shaping role in the development of an autonomous identity, to chart the particular path taken by modern Latin American literature. My case for the productivity of paranoia as a metaphor for the literary procedures characteristic of modern Latin America aims to render more explicit the “Oedipal” logic operative in the dominant models of Latin American literature and culture. The conjunction of literary and psychoanalytic treatments of paranoia will supplement this effort by bringing into view, via the psychoanalytic emphasis on what Mladen Dolar has called “the uncanny

7 David Spurr, surveying several studies of the role of paranoia in early twentieth century culture, argues that “[i]n recent years, paranoia has become nothing less than a paradigm for the reevaluation of modernism and modernity” and roots the cultural and literary importance of paranoia in “the need [of artists and writers] to establish the symbolic capital of their talent in the absence of any real legitimating authority or institution” (178).

13 dimension pertaining to the very project of modernity” (“‘I Shall’” 23), the unsettling surplus produced by an “Oedipal” insertion into the modern as it manifests itself in the field of literature.

The work of all of the authors I will consider here belongs fully or partially to a specific place: Buenos Aires, widely considered to be one of the principal centers of diffusion of cultural and literary models for all of Latin America, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. The critical consensus suggests that the modern Latin

American literary system emerged principally out of this place and in this period, with

Borges himself usually occupying the central role in such narratives of development. In literary historian Gerald Martin’s account, for instance, “Borges . . . is the cardinal figure for any assessment of the evolution of Latin American literature from a regional- cosmopolitan dichotomy to a persuasive universal identity, without whom no nueva novela writers could have emerged” (121). Instead of attempting to tell this story in its entirety, I will undertake readings of texts in which variations on the paranoid narrative motifs inherited largely from foreign sources of literary and cultural influence evince the shifting configurations of literary space in which the texts participate. In all the texts under analysis, the development of paranoid strategies of negotiation with foreign cultural models and national regimes of literary prestige intersects with and shapes the project of literary universality alluded to by Martin. Through close attention to these negotiations, I will engage directly with what has at times been regarded, somewhat paradoxically, as the derivative and belated character of precisely those areas of Latin

American literary and cultural production also considered the most modern and modernizing (a phenomenon evident, for instance, in Borges’s characteristic reliance on

14 examples from Coleridge and Wells in “La flor de Coleridge”). Indeed, Borges, Silvina

Ocampo, and Adolfo Bioy Casares unapologetically present their important collaborative project, the Antología de la literatura fantástica, as a vast literary import enterprise, emphasizing the unfashionable, decidedly non-avant-garde genres of fantasy and detective fiction, while at the same time understanding themselves to be undertaking a radical renovation of Latin American letters.8 I will argue here that in all of the materials under consideration, modernity and derivativeness are inextricable, and that the most powerfully modernizing features of the texts become legible only through a detailed consideration of their appropriations of particular inherited models.9

8 Likewise, in his prologue to Bioy’s 1940 novel, Borges writes of this import enterprise in a frankly celebratory tone: “La invención de Morel (cuyo título alude filialmente a otro inventor isleño, a Moreau) traslada a nuestras tierras y a nuestro idioma un género nuevo” (12) [“The Invention of Morel (whose title alludes filially to another island-based inventor, Moreau), brings to our lands and our language a new genre”].

9 Michael Johns has situated the “imported modernity” (74) of Buenos Aires cultural elites within the larger patterns of consumption engendered by Argentina’s export-based economic model. In essence, Johns argues, those who profited from the export of foodstuffs to used their capital in large part to buy European culture. Building on Johns’s analysis as well as Sarlo’s conception of “peripheral modernity,” Andrew Lakoff asserts that “the creative adaptation of modern forms, constrained by Argentina’s decentered position in global scientific, economic, and cultural systems, has characterized its distinctive form of cosmopolitanism . . . [I]deas and techniques from elsewhere took new form and meaning given the contingencies of the milieu” (852). It should be added (as suggested above) that from the late nineteenth century on, Buenos Aires became one of the nodal points of the Latin American literary system – a center from which models were generated and diffused to the rest of the continent and beyond as well as a site of reception and accumulation of foreign influences. To use Pascale Casanova’s terminology, even as it remained a “dominated” space vis-à-vis the Parisian “Greenwich Meridian” of literary production, Buenos Aires has also functioned as a “dominant” literary space and therefore a regional “literary capital,” as evidenced by its repeated capacity to attract innovative writers seeking consecration or recognition, beginning with Rubén Darío in the 1890s and fully in evidence, as we shall see, with Horacio Quiroga in the early 1900s. In the era of Borges, as I discuss in a later chapter, the prestige of the

15

Anxieties and Geopolitics of Influence

Borges’s “subaltern sublime” sets forth a paranoid logic of literary production that, to use one of Bloom’s terms, “contaminates” early twentieth century Latin American literature and culture. To offer a more graphic rendering of how the paranoid logic I am pointing to in Borges’s work responds specifically to the problem of literary influence in modern Latin America, I will now make the improbable move of turning to “El crimen del otro,” a 1903 story by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga. I call this move improbable, first, because Borges and his associates regarded Quiroga as an insignificant writer, and second, because most scholars of Quiroga’s work have dismissed this story, along with the rest of the eponymous collection in which it appears, as an eccentric piece of juvenilia in which the aspiring Uruguayan author’s slavish imitation of Poe reaches a grotesque extreme. These dismissals have entailed a blindness to the fact that the story is itself about precisely what critics view as its principal defect: the oppressive presence of

Poe as a literary model. That is, Quiroga did not simply write a story influenced by Poe – he wrote a story influenced by Poe about being influenced by Poe. In doing so he anticipated, albeit with strikingly different results, Borges’s “paranoid” reflections on the nature of literary influence.10

journal Sur and of Victoria Ocampo’s literary salon exercised a great enough magnetism to attract a panoply of major European cultural luminaries to the city.

10 As a Uruguayan who migrated to Argentina to seek his literary fortune, Quiroga was a doubly peripheral figure. The two major trajectories of his early career provide a nice illustration of the magnetic force exercised by the literary center on the literary periphery in “world literary space” (Casanova 82): in 1899, after his first publications, Quiroga traveled to (Casanova’s “world capital” of literary space), but returned to Uruguay

16 After adopting the typically nervous and shifty voice of a Poe story, the narrator of Quiroga’s “El crimen del otro” explicitly details his own obsession with Poe’s writings: “Ese maldito loco había llegado a dominarme por completo; no había en la mesa un solo libro que no fuera de él. Toda mi cabeza estaba llena de Poe, como si la hubieran vaciado” (108). Here and throughout the story, the narrator’s descriptions of his complete subordination to Poe’s influence also subsume into their frame of reference the conditions of the genesis of the story, which is an undisguised rewriting of Poe’s “The

Cask of Amontillado.” Poe figures as the narrator’s “mediator,” to use René Girard’s term – the subject upon whose his own desire is modeled, and therefore an object of intense admiration and of violent envy – and exercises a destabilizing power over him, especially through the story the narrator most admires: “The Cask of Amontillado.” In the latter Poe text, the narrator Montresor, apparently motivated by his rival Fortunato’s greater wealth and social status, sadistically murders him by burying him alive in his cellar. In Quiroga’s story, the narrator’s rivalry with his friend – also, bizarrely, named

Fortunato – revolves instead around their mutual obsession with Poe. Having evidently decided that, by way of a descent into madness, Fortunato has achieved a superior intimacy with Poe’s work, he concludes that the only way to regain the upper hand is to

“hacer con Fortunato lo que Poe hizo con Fortunato” (117). In the final part of the story, the narrator essentially surrenders his agency to Poe, allowing his every move to be

in disappointment after four months; in 1902, after the publication of his first book Los arrecifes de coral, he moved to Buenos Aires, where most of his subsequent work would be published. Even after Quiroga established himself in the far North of Argentina (and, within the nationalist/regionalist paradigm of a later cultural moment, converted the authenticity of this peripheral space into a source of symbolic capital [on this move, see Alonso, Spanish 1-37]), his reputation and income depended on the connections he had developed in the burgeoning Buenos Aires publishing industry.

17 scripted according to “The Cask of Amontillado,” and finally, like Montresor, luring his rival into his cellar and burying him alive. In the story’s concluding scene, the narrator repeats verbatim Montresor’s words in the final dialogue of Poe’s story, and the plane of narrative and the plane of narration converge in a fantasy of absolute identification with the literary model. The narrator fulfills his earlier stated wish – “me hubiera dejado cortar con gusto la mano derecha por escribir esa maravillosa intriga” (109) – but becoming Poe does turn out to entail a concomitant self-mutilation, on display both in the narrator’s final avowed “locura” and in the text’s formal disfigurement. Through the consummation of his desire, the narrator’s consciousness becomes a prolonged citation, just as the latter sections of the narrative lapse into near exact transcriptions of “The Cask of Amontillado.” Here as in the radically distinct universe figured forth in “La flor de

Coleridge” and other essays, the only avenue of literary production open to the narrator and author involves a literary version of Freud’s Wiederholungszwang11: in Santner’s phrase, the “rote repetition of dead letter” (76).

By portraying his literary model, Poe, as object of murderous envy, agent of persecution, and choreographer of the narrator’s madness, Quiroga gives particularly acute expression to some of the main concerns surrounding “influence” in modern literature, concerns that are obviously central to Bloom’s critical enterprise, but are also evident both in Borges’s essay and in the polemics Masotta directed against Borges and

11 This literary compulsion to repeat, it is important to observe, operates at two levels, which we might identify as that of énoncé and that of énonciation. At the first level, the narrator/protagonist pursues a trajectory from the conscious imitation of Poe as a literary model to the unconscious compulsion to model his actions after those of Poe’s protagonist Montresor. At the second level, the story’s representation of the narrator’s highly literary madness ironizes the narrative’s own radically imitative status by identifying it with the narrator’s evident .

18 his clique. According to the overview offered by the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, while up until the late eighteenth century influence had been regarded as “a beneficent and necessary corollary of creative genius . . . routinely addressed and acknowledged, romantic poetry and poetics instead stress originality, taking the latter to be the direct opposite of the former” (605). In recent decades, influence has been a problematic category for literary scholars as much as for writers, and critics have developed various strategies for addressing the relationships indicated by networks of literary borrowing, repetition, and allusion without relying on traditional models of literary heredity. Since the 1970s, the prestige enjoyed by terms like “textuality” and

“intertextuality,” posited as non-hierarchical alternatives for framing the problems of filiation and affinity between texts, has to a large extent marginalized the use of the term

“influence.” On the other hand, a prominent current of Anglo-American criticism, exemplified by Walter Jackson Bate’s The Burden of the Past and the English Poet and

Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, has retained influence as a central interpretive category, but reconceived the intergenerational literary relationship it names as a fraught struggle with origins rather than a salutary apprenticeship.12 Both Bate and Bloom emphasize the paralyzing inertia of literary priority and paradoxically locate the creative potential of modern literature precisely in the contradiction it stages between the writer’s desire for originality and his or her sense of belatedness.

12 René Girard’s psychoanalytically informed but idiosyncratic account of “mimetic desire,” and specifically his demonstration of how the modern novel simultaneously conceals and reveals the fundamental role of the model or mediator as the basis of desire, resonates with Bate’s and Bloom’s foregrounding of unequal literary rivalries as a principal motor of modern literary production. I will return to Girard in my discussion of Horacio Quiroga in the next chapter.

19 The critical vicissitudes of influence exhibit notable parallels with the dominant accounts of modern Latin American literature and culture that have been elaborated over the course of the twentieth century. Indeed, although the term does not appear with great frequency in the authoritative statements on the subject, influence has been arguably the central problem confronted by both producers and critics of modern Latin American literature, marked as the region’s cultural identity has been by an ongoing dependence on foreign models. In one of the more ambitious historical accounts of modern Latin

American literature, Ángel Rama’s Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (1982), the situation of the moden Latin American literary producer closely resembles that of the modern poet, as described by Bate, who is continually forced to ask “the nagging questions, what is there left to write? and how, as craftsmen, do we get not only new subjects but a new idiom?” (7).

In Rama’s account, three “vertebrales conceptos” drive the agenda of Latin

American literature from its inception: “independencia, originalidad, y representatividad”

(19). All of these, not coincidentally, correspond to three fundamental values of modern literature first articulated fully in the romantic period – the same values, in fact, that underwrote the romantic devaluation of influence.13 Referring explicitly to The Burden of the Past and the English Poet, Rama (12, n. 2) suggests that the situation of modern

Latin American culture as a whole represents a variation on the situation attributed by

Bate to the modern English poet whose “loss of self-confidence as he compares what he

13 As Roberto González Echevarría argues, “Modernity as crisis is a romantic anxiety of origins whose sources are romantic . . . Literature as a concept and Latin America as an entity are both creations of modernity” (4).

20 feels able to do with the rich heritage of past art and literature” (6-7) powerfully conditions his creative enterprises. However, in the arc of Latin American literary history that Rama traces, “el deseo de independizarse de las fuentes primeras” – i.e. the

“suntuosas literaturas de España y Portugal” (11) – was shaped in a specific way by the contradictory pressures of a postcolonial and neocolonial condition of cultural dependency. “Casi desde sus comienzos,” Rama argues, “[las letras latinoamericanas] procuraron reinstalarse en otros linajes culturales, sorteando el ‘acueducto’ español . . . sin percibir [Francia e Inglaterra] como las nuevas metrópolis colonizadoras que eran”

(11). He continues:

El esfuerzo de independencia ha sido tan tenaz que consiguió desarrollar, en un continente donde la marca cultural más profunda y perdurable lo religa estrechamente a España y Portugal, una literatura cuya autonomía respecto a las peninsulares es flagrante . . . por haberse emparentado con varias literaturas occidentales en un grado no cumplido por las literaturas- madres . . . Dicho de otro modo, en la originalidad de la literatura latinoamericana está presente, a modo de guía, su movedizo y novelero afán internacionalista. (12)

Rama argues that the uneasy coexistence of Iberian languages and cultural traditions with modern European and U.S. influences embraced by cosmopolitan elites as well as a wide array of autochthonous regional cultures has engendered an ongoing struggle between competing claims to cultural authority. The specific features of the Latin American

“anxiety of influence” and the highly varied formulations of “independencia, originalidad, y representatividad” proposed by literary intellectuals respond to the continent’s heterogeneous and fragmented cultural heritage.

José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel and Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Calibán, well- known polemical essays which might serve as bookends for the “heroic period” of a

21 prolonged twentieth century struggle over cultural identity, offer a vivid index of the particular characteristics of the problem of influence in Latin American literary space.

The peripheral, economically and culturally dependent status of Latin America is the starting point for both of these attempts to offer a broad and normative account of a distinct Latin American culture. The very fact that both essays deploy figures from

Shakespeare’s Tempest as their central emblems of continental cultural identity is itself a telling symptom of what Rama calls the “afán internacionalista” endemic to Latin

American letters. In Ariel, Rodó outlines a pedagogical project premised on an embrace of the beneficent civilizing influences of classical Western aesthetic traditions, identified primarily with ancient Greece and modern . At the same time, his rhetoric is driven by an anxiety about the increasing geopolitical hegemony and concomitant cultural sway held by the : “en nombre de los derechos del espíritu, niego al utilitarismo norteamericano ese carácter típico con que quiere imponérsenos como suma y modelo de civilización” (88). Thus, Rodó’s project for Latin American identity involves a selective appeal to the authority of particular foreign models in order to deligitimate other outside influences. Fernández Retamar, although he frames his essay as a repudiation of Rodó’s and devotes much of the text to fulminating against “colonial” writers including Rodó and Borges for their recourse to foreign cultural models, does not ultimately diverge from Rodó’s basic strategy of selective incorporation of foreign influences, and indeed explicitly concedes the necessity of some reliance on outside sources: “¿Cómo podríamos prescindir de Homero, de Dante, de Cervantes, de

Shakespeare, de Whitman – para no decir Marx, Engels, o Lenin? . . . ¿Cómo proponer robinsonismo intelectual alguno sin caer en el mayor absurdo?” (40).

22 Both Ariel and Calibán have definite origins in specific geopolitical crises: in

Rodó’s case, the atmosphere of political pessimism and anti-U.S. sentiment that followed the defeat of in 1898, and in Fernández Retamar’s, the beleaguered state of the

Cuban Revolution in the early 1970s, a period in which the support of many of ’s international literary and intellectual allies was beginning to wane. The unrelenting presence of geopolitics as a backdrop for Latin American cultural discourse may partially account for why, despite their insistence on a situation recognizably akin to that described in the major critical accounts of literary influence, the most prominent statements of Latin

American cultural criticism have been remarkably sparse in their use of the latter term.

The Princeton Encyclopedia points out that in earlier periods, “influence had referred to the stars and later became associated with the exercise of power” (605). Although the original political force of “influence” remains implicit in its use in literary contexts, since it “relates the imitation of earlier writers to the power that such writers exert on the tradition” (Princeton Encyclopedia 605), it lost, over time, its explicit connection to power relations, and more specifically ceased to foreground the unequal status of the

“influencing” and the “influenced” (Bloom, Anxiety 26-7).

The near absence of influence from the vocabulary of the more comprehensive accounts of Latin American literature, therefore, follows predictably from the relative depoliticization of that term in modern literary studies, where its sphere of application has characteristically been limited to the supposedly autonomous arena of the arts. Since

Latin America’s driving about the imitative, derivative status of its cultural products respond to a condition of post-colonial or neo-colonial dependency, the term may not be seen to capture the complex web of power relations in which the rhetorical

23 performances making up Latin American literature are caught. Two important accounts of modern Latin American literary culture, Roberto González Echevarría’s The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature (1985) and

Carlos Alonso’s The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in

Spanish America (1998), have therefore used an alternative term, “authority,” to talk about the structures and relationships I have been discussing. The two terms are obviously not exactly equivalent, since “authority” names the source of cultural models rather than the process by which cultural models are transmitted. Moreover, it does so in a manner which renders more explicit the hierarchical structure of the relationship between the originator of the literary model and the recipient of that model.

González Echevarría’s book investigates the varied uses of the “concept of culture” as “an ideology that gives meaning to Latin American literature” and as “a source of authority on various levels, ranging from pronouncements by cultural institutions . . . to the work of the most revered essayists, critics, and scholars concerned with the issue of both national and continental identity” (8). He argues that Latin

American elites have derived their claims to authority from an ideology of culture imported from the nineteenth century European bourgeoisie, in which literature has the function of speaking on behalf of a collective, and in the process of doing so articulates and performs the identity of that collective. The predicament of dependency that underlies Latin American literature’s assertions of its own authority inaugurates a permanent and defining crisis, a crisis which gives that literature its characteristic features:

24 there is a causal link between the issue of national identity and the dependency relationship between the emerging Latin American bourgeoisie and Europe. The idea of literature is a Western bourgeois idea. Why does there have to be a literature in the way that it exists in Europe if Latin America is different and unique, as the ideologists of culture insist? My assumption is that the drama at the core of Latin American literature results from the impossibility of answering this question satisfactorily. The new self that must express itself must do so in a language that is already burdened with old concepts and stories. The new self and the new literature are that struggle, not its desired result. (12)

Thus, González Echevarría asserts, Latin American literature comes into being as a

“process of simultaneous dismantling and self-constitution” (10) and its characteristic

“themes all deal with the issue of Latin American literature’s own legitimacy and uniqueness, that is to say, with the very possibility of a Latin American literature” (9).

The very terms that are used to articulate autonomy and autochthony are themselves drawn from the repertoires of other traditions, and therefore turn out to be symptomatic of the lack of that which they claim to exemplify and perform.14

Alonso offers a related and complementary account of the contradictions of cultural authority in Latin America. Like González Echevarría, Alonso analyzes the strategies by which the avatars of Latin American cultural discourse have claimed authority to speak for and about the collectives they claim to represent. Whether or not his title entails a deliberate allusion to Bate’s The Burden of the Past, the contrast between the two titles may help illuminate the Latin American variation on the generalized modern “anxiety of influence.” The implicit narrative of Bate’s title assumes a linear temporality in which the accumulated authority of the past weighs heavily upon the possibility of creation in the present. Alonso’s title, in contrast, evokes a present that

14 Readers may detect, in González Echevarría’s (and Alonso’s) assertions, echoes of one of the seminal statements of deconstructive criticism: “A literary text simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode” (de Man 138-9).

25 is at odds with itself because of the spatializated subtext of the ostensibly temporal designation “modernity,” as viewed from the peripheral perspective of Latin America. In

Alonso’s account, late colonial creole elites adopted a “master plot of futurity” (10) in their struggle against what they perceived as the backwardness of Spain and Spanish rule.

The elevation of Spain’s allegedly more modern and enlightened geopolitical antagonists

(France and England) to the status of an survived past the end of the colonial period in an ongoing “self-identification of the new countries with modernity” and an

“ideological and rhetorical commitment to the discourse of modernity . . . by Spanish

American intellectuals and cultural creators” (18-19). However, the spatialized “myth of

Modernity” rendered this identification problematic by positing

metropolitan foci out of which the modern emanated and which by means of a rippled and delayed expansion through time and space would eventually transform the material and cultural orders of those societies that languished in the outer confines of the system – if only they were fittingly receptive to its beneficent effects. (19)

In Alonso’s account, then, Latin American cultural discourse claims authority for itself by recourse to an ideology which divests it of that authority by placing Latin America at the receiving end of modernity. In the writings he discusses, Latin American writers attempt to situate themselves as active subjects in a process whose guiding ideology identifies them as passive receptacles of the forces of modernization. Modernity functions, therefore, as a source of authority and a threat to it: “the rhetoric of Modernity constituted both the bedrock of Spanish American cultural discourse and the potential source of its most radical disempowerment” (23).

For Alonso, the just described comprises the basic condition of possibility of modern Latin American literature, the characteristic tendency of which is a

26 “swerve away from itself, a movement that nonetheless constitutes the foundation of its own authority” (37). This strategy, he continues,

is reminiscent in its creative potential and its enabling capacity of the Lucretian concept of the clinamen: the deviation or swerve from the expected that nonetheless makes possible the beginning of the shaped world. In the Spanish American text this clinamen represents both a search for discursive authority and the mark of the impossible rhetorical predicament from which it springs. (37)

Clinamen, then, names the repertoire of strategies by which the Latin American text establishes a distance from the framework that allows it to become articulate in the first place. Notably, clinamen is also the name Harold Bloom gives to the first of his

“revisionary ratios”: the techniques by which modern poets negotiate an anxiety-ridden relationship to literary models or precursors. Specifically, for Bloom clinamen is synonymous with what he calls “misprision” or “misreading”:

Poetic Influence . . . always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say the main tradition of Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, wilful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist. (30)

The close parallel between Alonso’s and Bloom’s deployments of clinamen need not collapse the distinct predicament of the Latin American writer into the general situation of modern literature as a whole. It is my contention, rather, that the analysis of the specific forms of acknowledgement of and deviation from literary models found in pivotal modern Argentine texts will permit us to identify features specific to that body of literature and at the same time allow us to scrutinize unexpected intersections with an apparently unconnected area of modern writing: psychoanalysis, and more specifically

27 the psychoanalytic account of paranoia, an account which Bloom, incidentally, has linked directly to his own “antithetical” poetics.15

Paranoia and the Representation of Authority

The foregoing discussion has introduced a polarity of two versions of influence and authority that have circulated widely both in the discourse of Western literary criticism and in what Alonso calls Latin American “cultural discourse.” The first version, identified on one hand with pre-romantic (classical) aesthetics and on the other hand with the cosmopolitan ideology of certain Latin American cultural elites, views both authority and the influences that emanate from it as positive civilizing forces, components of a necessary and beneficent process of cultivation. The second views these elements as hostile, colonizing presences which have the effect of disempowering those in the subordinate position and hinder the achievement of independence and originality.

We may detect in the different critical positions I have just summarized variations on the assertion that modern literature, in general and in its Latin American version, has flourished above all by way of an anxious but productive oscillation between receptive and hostile attitudes towards influence and its sources, whether that influence emerges from “within” (from a tradition or arbiter of prestige perceived as local or autochthonous) or from a colonial or neocolonial metropolis.

15 “With mordant eloquence, Lacan keeps assuring us that the ego, every ego, is essentially paranoid . . . Lacan’s conviction is certainly true if by the ego we mean the literary ‘I’ as it appears in . . . the last three hundred years” (Bloom, Agon 100-1). I will return to this connection in the next chapter.

28 While these readings tend to emphasize the productive part of this equation – the manner in which the conflict between “sender” and “receiver” of influence generates new discursive possibilities for the “receiver” – I would like to focus instead on what we might think of as the uncanny remainder of the transaction, on view in both Quiroga’s “El crimen del otro” and Borges’s “La flor de Coleridge.” Freud defines the uncanny, das

Unheimliche, as “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar” (Uncanny 124). As one commentator has glossed

Freud, the uncanny is “simultaneously the intimate kernel and the foreign body . . . located where the most intimate interiority coincides with the exterior” (Dolar 6). In different ways, Quiroga and Borges reimagine the intertextual relationships that make up literature – the same relationships which are the focus of perfectly conventional accounts of the history of literature as a progressive filiation – as bizarre forms of unregulated bodily and psychological invasion, in which the truth of each text is outside of itself.

Whereas in “La flor de Coleridge,” influence emanates from a vast, impersonal, inaccessible order called “la literatura” and in “El crimen del otro,” the literary model

Poe plays the role of sadistic, coercive double to both author and protagonist, in each case the text registers an unrepresentable presence of the violating exteriority out of which it was born. Both texts revolve around an impossible attempt to represent in narrative form the sublime, or uncanny, source of their own literary authority – which, to paraphrase

Alonso, also threatens to be the source of their most radical disempowerment. In this sense, beyond the evident contrast between the tormented, frantic tones of Quiroga’s narrator and the serene equanimity of Borges’s essayistic voice, the two fictional models

29 of influence we have considered so far both foreground the traumatic dimension of the authority exercised by the literary model that accords prestige and legitimacy.

The problem of representing a simultaneously enabling and debilitating authority manifests itself acutely in the phenomenon Eric Santner has called the “splitting of paternal agency,” discussed extensively in some of Freud’s most important writings. In his well-known interpretation of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann,” central to the essay on the uncanny cited above, Freud introduces the notion of a divided “father imago” in order to account for the series of male authority figures who feature in the persecution fantasies of Hoffmann’s protagonist, Nathanael. On one side of the split is the malign, sadistic Coppelius, who reappears subsequently as Coppola, responsible for torturing the young Nathanael, causing his father’s death, and pursuing him throughout his adulthood. On an irreconcilable reverse side, according to Freud, is the kindly, nurturing father of Nathanael’s childhood, some of whose benign features resurface in the figure of Professor Spalanzani. Freud proposes that “[Nathanael’s] father and Coppelius represent the father-imago, which, owing to ambivalence, is split into two opposing parts: the one threatens him with blinding (castration), while the other, the good father, successfully intercedes for his sight” (Uncanny 160). When the child proves incapable of reconciling his positive affective bond with the father with the hostility provoked by the fear of castration, Freud asserts, he solves the problem by fracturing the father into two separate individuals, one the object of affection and admiration, the other a terrible castrator who inspires hostility and fear. The splintering of the father also features prominently in Freud’s analysis of Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of my Nervous

Illness in “Psychoanalytic Remarks on an Autobiographically Described Case of

30 Paranoia.” In Schreber’s delusions, Freud argues, the “father imago” appears distributed among a collection of figures who participate actively or passively in the elaborate conspiracies centered around Scheber himself. Schreber attributes the active agency behind his persecution both to the ineffable manipulations that God himself has directed at his person, and to the more immediate intrusions and interferences of Flechsig, the chief psychiatrist at the institution where Schreber was confined for much of his adult life. Schreber’s cosmology, elaborated mainly in chapters 1 and 2 of his Memoirs, further splits the figure of God between Ariman, the obscenely overbearing “lower God” who colonizes Schreber’s body and mind, and Ormuzd,16 the distant, negligent “upper

God” withdrawn from human affairs.

With regard to Schreber’s proliferation of father substitutes, Freud comments that

“[s]uch splitting is absolutely characteristic of paranoia . . . paranoia causes the condensations and identifications that have been undertaken in the unconscious to devolve once more” (Schreber Case 39). Freud’s language here foregrounds his important assumption that the non-psychotic subject’s “normal” production of a single, unified father imago is itself the consequence of a series of condensations and identifications which, presumably, mask the fundamentally ambivalent attitude of the subject toward the father or authority figure. He argues that delusional systems like

Schreber’s develop in response to the tendency of love for the representative of paternal authority to oscillate towards its opposite. The forceful assertion of these contradictory

16 Schreber derived his divine names from Zoroastrian cosmology, which is of course known for its binary “splitting” of divinity into benign and evil aspects.

31 psychic forces results, in Freud’s account, in the attribution of malign, persecutory intent to previously admired authority figures:

Having studied a series of cases of delusion of persecution, I, and also others, have developed the impression that the relationship of the patient to his persecutor can be solved according to a simple formula. The person to whom the delusion ascribes such great power and influence and in whose hands all the threads of the conspiracy are brought together is, if given a specific identity, the same one as was of no less importance for the emotional life of the patient before the onset of the illness . . . The emotional importance is projected in the shape of an external power, the tone of the emotion turned into its opposite; the individual now hated and feared as a result of his persecution was once loved and admired. The persecution established by the delusion serves above all to justify the patient’s emotional transformation. (Schreber Case 31-2)

In Freud’s account, the formation of the delusion of persecution is secondary to a prior symptom – that is, the paranoid individual’s “emotional transformation” vis-à-vis the authority figure – and serves an interpretive function in relation to that symptom. The delusional aspect of the paranoid symptoms therefore follows upon an unresolved primordial ambivalence towards the father/authority figure, a deadlock whose origins

Freud elaborates in narrative terms in what we might call the foundational fiction of

Totem and Taboo.

In this well-known work of speculative anthropology, Freud argues that

“emotional ambivalence – that is, the simultaneous existence of love and hate towards the same object – lies at the root of many important cultural institutions” (194). In order to make this case, he introduces from Darwin the notion of the original human social unit as a primal horde in which “a violent and jealous father keeps all the females for himself and drives away his sons as they grow up” (175). In order to account for the transition from this arrangment to the strictly exogamous regulation of kinship relations observed

32 by anthropologists in primitive societies, Freud proposes that at some point, the younger males banded together to kill the primal father and thus obtain access to the women he has been monopolizing. Subsequently, however,

The tumultuous band of brothers were filled with the same contradictory feelings we can see at work in the ambivalent father-complexes of our children and our neurotic patients. They hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual ; but they loved and admired him too. After they had got rid of him, had satisfied their hatred and had put into effect their desire to identify themselves with him, the affection which had all this time been pushed under was bound to make itself felt. (177)

The surviving male members of the primal horde are thus the first to suffer, so to speak, from the “anxiety of influence.” When they consummate their identification with the father in their ritual consumption of his corpse after the murder, their dilemma becomes evident: the fulfillment of their desire is haunted by the continued presence, in death, of the being who was both source and antagonist of that desire. Freud traces all of the fundamental institutions of human social life to the need to negotiate the founding ambivalence generated by this dilemma, asserting that “the beginnings of religion, morals, society, and art converge in the complex” (Totem 194). Examined in light of the speculations of , Freud’s claim that the delusions of persecution comprise a retroactive attempt to account for contradictory attitudes towards paternity/authority indicates a prior malfunctioning, in the paranoid subject, of the normative processes of social integration which emerged precisely in order to channel and organize these attitudes into socially sanctioned forms. The delusion functions above all as an attempted compensation for a radical breakdown of socialization, and therefore of meaning as such. As Slavoj Zizek observes, “the paranoid construction is . . . an

33 attempt to heal ourselves, to pull ourselves out of the real ‘illness,’ the ‘end of the world,’ the breakdown of the symbolic universe, by means of [a] substitute formation” (Looking

Awry 19).

Jacques Lacan, in his readings of Schreber’s own text and of Freud’s reading of it, ties the mechanism of paranoia directly to a thwarted integration into the symbolically regulated human social unit. As we have seen, Freud claims that the surviving males of the primal horde developed the fundamental institutions of primitive social life – the taboo and totemism – in response to their murder of the primal father. The regulation of kinship relations repeats and universalizes the father’s prior prohibition of access to women, while totemic rites commemorate the father while displacing his memory onto the totemic figure as the protector and overseer of the group. Expanding upon this argument, Lacan argues that the shift from the real, oppressively present father to the symbolic father, whose continued spectral presence is regularly acknowledged in ritual and whose rule is perpetuated in a variety of institutional forms, accomplishes the latter’s installation as the basis of the law. For Lacan, the Name-of-the-Father – the

French homophonic play nom-du-père/non-du-père foregrounding the ultimate identity of the symbolic transfiguration of the father and the prohibitive injunction of the – stands as the privileged “fundamental signifier.” It organizes the social field by orienting the functioning of the symbolic order or “Other,” and thus accords individuals places in the social network by assigning names, organizing kinship relations and social hierarchies, and generating a system of rules and prohibitions (Evans 119).

Lacan traces the pathogenesis of paranoia to what he calls the primordial foreclosure (Verwerfung) of the Name-of-the-Father. If the latter is not only a privileged

34 signifier but rather the “point of origin of symbolization” (Lacan, S III 46) as such, its non-integration into the subject’s universe disables the symbolic organization of the subject concomitant with integration into social life. For Lacan, therefore, paranoid delusions constitute a “mechanism that makes what has got caught up in the Verwerfung

– that is, what has been placed outside the general symbolization structuring the subject – return from without” (Lacan, S III 47). In other words, they comprise attempts to repair the disorder produced by the absence of the term structuring the field of signifiers into a coherent “big Other.” Lacan describes the process as follows:

It is the lack of the Name-of-the-Father in that place which, by the whole that it opens up in the signified, sets off a cascade of reworkings of the signifier from which the growing disaster of the imaginary proceeds, until the level is reached at which signifier and signified stabilize in a delusional metaphor. (Écrits 207)

It is in this sense that paranoia is, to return to Zizek’s term, a “substitute formation,” by which the organizing principle that has been foreclosed from the symbolic returns “from without” in the form of delusions. The structures of these delusions systematically mimic those characteristic of the process of integration into the symbolic order, the incompletion of which in a given subject occasioned their emergence in the first place: “[the paranoiac] attempts to restore an order, which we shall call a delusional order, around this

[perplexity]. He does [this] in a way that . . . is not unrelated to the primitive phenomenon itself” (S III 53). It follows from this model of paranoia that the paranoid subject and the “normal” subject – the one who, in the Freudian model, passed successfully through the Oedipal complex by achieving identification with the father – turn out to resemble each other quite closely. Hence the “exemplary character” (S III 28) of paranoia for Lacan: by generating an exaggerated and distorted version of the

35 symbolic universe, it renders palpable the structures of alienating identification that make possible the symbolic integration of subjects in general. As Shuli Barzilai notes, for

Lacan “[a] kind of madness is the basic ground for the emergence of our consciousness as socially defined and socially constructed” (114).

The paranoid “anxiety of influence,” as registered, for instance, in the Schreber memoirs, displays what might initially seem to be contradictory features. On one hand, the paranoiac experiences, involuntarily, a constant, apparently meaningless and chaotic barrage of random phrases, verbal fragments, and images. On the other hand, he or she posits the existence of an all-encompassing order, a centralized, unitary force pulling the strings and manipulating humans like puppets. In Lacan’s model, these two features figure as two linked aspects of the same predicament. The first evidences the breakdown of signification as a result of the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father organizing the symbolic function, while the second corresponds to the subject’s attempt to compensate for this breakdown by asserting an organizing principle where one is absent – or rather, experiencing the violent assertion of one from without. As Zizek glosses the Lacanian account,

The most common feature of this kind of ingenious “paranoid” story is the “Other of the Other”: a hidden subject who pulls the strings of the great Other (the symbolic order) precisely at the points at which this Other . . . produces an effect of meaning by means of a senseless contingency, beyond the conscious intention of the speaking subject . . . This “Other of the Other” is exactly the Other of paranoia: the one who speaks through us without our knowing it, who controls our thoughts, who manipulates us through the apparent spontaneity of jokes . . . The paranoid construction enables us to escape the fact that “the Other does not exist” (Lacan) – that it does not exist as a consistent, closed order – to escape the blind, contingent automatism, the constitutive stupidity of the symbolic order. (Looking Awry 18)

36 The two contrasting elements of the delusion – the apparently random, nonsensical components that pervade the delusional world and its thoroughly ordered, controlled aspect – thus turn out to be the complementary halves of the paranoid system of meaning.

One registers the malfunctioning of a symbolic order that is not effectively quilted together, in which signifiers appear to circulate haphazardly and indiscriminately, while the other tries to restore order through the compensatory assertion of an overbearing, colonizing overseer of that order.

In his essay on the uncanny, Freud confronts the problem of how to interpret literary motifs and structures recognizably akin to psychotic delusions. Many commentators have pointed to the deficiencies of Freud’s reading of Hoffmann’s text as a prolonged treatment of the consequences of . In general, his interpretations bypass the specific features of “Der Sandmann” – especially its complex narrative structure – and treat it instead as an avenue of access either to the psyche of the author (Hoffmann) or the protagonist (Nathanael). In this sense, Freud inaugurated a tendency that would continue for decades in psychoanalytic literary criticism. However,

Neil Hertz and Eric Santner have offered productive alternatives to simply discarding

Freud’s admittedly problematic reading. Both have focused on the “transferential dynamics” of Freud’s writings: that is, in Santner’s words, “the ways in which texts provide opportunities for their writers to act out or, ideally, work through some of the very issues animating the subject matter of the text” (Santner 19). Hertz uses Freud’s evident “misprision” of “Der Sandmann” to consider how the problem of “literary priority” – “the wish to be original, the fear of plagiarism, the rivalry among writers”

(296) – manifests itself in Freud’s text. In Hertz’s reading, the question of Freud’s

37 “anxiety of influence” (318) vis-à-vis the Hoffmann text also encompasses his fraught relationship with his disciple Victor Tausk (to whose work we will turn in a later chapter), who committed suicide in 1919, the same year that Freud composed “The

Uncanny.” Hertz notes that the story of these two men’s interactions “ends up sounding remarkably like [Hoffmman’s story] with Tausk playing the role of Nathanael and Freud in the role of the Sandman” (314). In other words, the unresolved ambivalence Freud places at the center of Nathanael’s delusional father-complex also implicates Freud’s literary relationship to Hoffmann, the precursor whose text seems to anticipate some of his own arguments, and his professional relationship to Tausk, a devoted would-be son and heir whose psychological collapse, likely the result of his Oedipally charged relationship with Freud, uncannily echoes central aspects of Nathanael’s story.

Santner approaches Freud’s engagement with the Schreber memoir in similar terms, showing how Freud’s deteriorating relationships with some of his disciples and his awareness of parallels between Schreber’s delusions and central tenets of his own thought inflect his reading of Schreber’s text. Drawing on the Lacanian account of paranoid delusions as systematic attempts to fill a destabilizing hole in the symbolic order, Santner reads Schreber’s paranoid world system as responding to a broader “crisis of symbolic investiture” affecting, in particular, the legal and medical institutions with which his life was closely entwined. Freud’s interest in Schreber, in turn, responds in part to an ongoing crisis of authority within the psychoanalytic institution itself: “At the time Freud was at work on the Schreber case he was himself involved in a series of ‘fiduciary’ failures, challenges to his role as the one who . . . authorizes the speech of others as that of legitimate representatives of psychoanalysis” (26). Like Hertz, Santner addresses the

38 problem of “literary priority” as it inflects Freud’s writings as he highlights the psychoanalyst’s repeated confrontations with “Schreber’s unwitting contributions to , a contribution that produced for Freud no small degree of what I have called, following Bloom, anxiety of influence” (22). Therefore, he adds, “[t]he transferential dimension of Freud’s passionate involvement with the Schreber material . .

. concerns . . . questions of originality and influence, questions pertaining to the transfer of knowledge and authority in the very domain that Freud was staking out as his own”

(21). The purpose of revealing the numerous points of intersection of Freud’s readings with his contemporary professional and personal circumstances is not, then, primarily biographical. Rather, for both Hertz and Santner, such convergences demonstrate the ways in which psychoanalysis participated in and found itself subject to the dynamics of authority it described and theorized.

The readings that make up this dissertation proceed from the premise, implicit in

Hertz’s reading of Freud and outlined more directly in Santner’s study, that paranoia occupies a prominent position in modern literature and in psychoanalytic theory because both areas of of writing must perpetually confront the problem of their own legitimacy and authorization. David Trotter, like Santner, has linked paranoia and the interest it held for writers and intellectuals to the same processes of literary consecration and professionalization that mark the period of Latin American cultural modernization under examination here. In Paranoid Modernism, Trotter reads paranoia and its various literary and cultural uses as manifesting the pressures of a broader reorganization of the mechanisms of circulation of symbolic capital, a process he designates the

“professionalization of society.” I quote at length from Trotter’s introduction:

39 During the nineteenth century, the status the upwardly mobile professional classes sought for their expertise was the status of a ‘magical power’: a status previously or otherwise afforded to qualities such as wealth or warlike valor. They did not always find it. Sometimes, when they did not find it, they made it up. Paranoia is a delusion of magical power . . . The writers who will concern me wrote about professional identities under extreme pressure. They were themselves, as professional writers confronted by a rapidly developing literary marketplace, under extreme pressure. So they wrote about madness, and they went a little mad themselves. I want to suggest that the literary experimentation by means of which they hoped to achieve a degree of magical power can be understood as a psychopathy of expertise. (7-8)

In a distinct but related manner, Santner reads the two classic texts of fin de siècle paranoia, Schreber’s Memoirs of my Nervous Illness and Freud’s case study on Schreber, as cognate responses to a “crisis of symbolic investiture” in which the “social acts . . . whereby an individual is endowed with a new social status and a role within a shared linguistic universe” (Santner, “States” 205) cease to function effectively in the face of “a kind of uncanny surplus of power and influence secreted by [the sites and resources of symbolic legitimation]” (My Own 61). In Santner’s analysis, both Schreber’s and

Freud’s accounts of paranoia dramatize “a fundamental impasse in [the subject’s] capacity to metabolize [the] performative [of symbolic investiture], to be inducted into the normative space opened up by it” (“States” 206). My remaining chapters will consider how the “anxieties of influence” that circulate between literature and psychoanalysis in twentieth-century Argentina fit into the narrative of pervasive and permanent institutional crisis elaborated in different ways by Trotter and Santner.

Each of my three chapters offers a detailed case study in what I am calling literary paranoia. Rather than attempt a comprehensive survey of this phenomenon, I present its

40 basic coordinates through close scrutiny of three crucial moments of its articulation in modern Latin American, and especially Argentine, literature and culture. In response to the surprising distance that has generally separated literature and psychoanalysis in modern Argentina despite their parallel prominence as points of concentration of cultural production, each of my chapters enacts an unimagined encounter between literary and psychoanalytic texts that attempts to foreground the uncanny redoublings of each in the other. My readings at times participate in the characteristically paranoid redoublings they describe, insofar as they draw upon the unsuspected flows and involuntary repetitions – what Emily Apter has called the “delirious systematicity” – of the paranoid narrative and interpretive repertoire in order to render the implications of its literary and psychoanalytic uses more vivid.

The first chapter establishes the early work of the Uruguayan Horacio Quiroga as a crucial space of anticipation of the more canonically central Borges’s paranoid strategies of literary negotiation. The overtly clinical deployments of paranoia in

Quiroga’s early fiction, I show, respond to the problematic relation of modern Latin

American writers to a regime of cultural authority that simultaneously underwrites and undercuts their literary efforts. Psychoanalytic models of paranoia propose that when overarching structures governing the distribution of symbolic capital – in Quiroga’s case, those established by Spanish American modernismo – enter into crisis, their defining mandates, instead of simply receding, may return in the form of the overbearing agencies of surveillance, harrassment, and persecution represented variously in Quiroga’s work.

The stories “El crimen del otro” and “Los perseguidos,” when read in these terms, offer an eccentric testimony to the cultural transition in which, by all accounts, Quiroga

41 participated in his transit from the decorative, exaggeratedly decadent topics of his modernista period to the verbally economical and thematically regionalist mode typical of much of his later work, embodying in his own career the shifts in literary production which characterized the first forty years of Spanish American twentieth century. My reading establishes an extensive set of correspondences between the fictional deployment of paranoia and the “paranoid” strategies developed by a writer whose peripheral position in the world literary system turns the literary models from which he draws legitimacy into

“the potential source of . . . radical disempowerment” (Alonso 23).

The second chapter situates the basic structures of “literary paranoia” in modern

Argentine culture by way of a consideration of the convergences and divergences of literature and psychoanalysis, of “Borges” and “Lacan,” in twentieth century Argentina.

I focus on these two figures because of their indisputable centrality and canonicity in the processes of accumulation of symbolic capital that reinvented Argentine and Latin

American culture in the twentieth century. Tracing a network of obscure, half-buried references linking the literary discourses of Borges and the circle surrounding the journal

Sur to Lacanian psychoanalysis, both as promulgated by Lacan and as adopted by

Argentines like Oscar Masotta in the 1960s, I argue that the practitioners of literature and psychoanalysis in and beyond Argentina recapitulate a cluster of tensions regarding illegitimacy and originality that is ultimately endemic to the relation between these two areas of writing. I then attempt to locate the practices I am calling literary paranoia within the broad-based struggles surrounding cultural identity that shaped Latin

American literary production throughout the first half of the twentieth century. I accomplish this in part by showing that “literary paranoia” parallels psychoanalysis in its

42 implicit attitude toward the processes that accord and perpetuate institutional authority.

For one, I argue that Borges’s much-remarked preference for the fantastic mode emerges primarily out of his attempt to represent the fantastic basis of the cultural system in which he must operate, and in this sense dovetails with Freudian interest in the literary

“uncanny” as an illustrative locus of Oedipal malfunctioning. Moreover, and with special attention to the story “La muerte y la brújula,” I attempt to illuminate the historical and polemical substrate of Borges’s repeated treatment of Jewishness, which served as a major point of reference, cultural borrowing, and source of legitimacy for his literary project. As I demonstrate, even as Borges “claimed” Jewishness as part of a larger attempt to legitimize his enterprise, Jewishness stood as a major object of paranoid suspicion regarding newly emergent Freudian psychoanalysis among the nationalists with whom Borges found himself in repeated conflict throughout much of his writing career.

Through a juxtaposition with the paranoid nationalist discourses with which they competed in contests over cultural hegemony, I reveal Borgesian fantasy and Freudian psychoanalysis as literary practices that delineate the structure of the paranoid hermeneutic in which they also incur.

The third chapter focuses on Borges’s friend and collaborator Adolfo Bioy

Casares’s machine age romance La invención de Morel (1940). With the hidden complicity I have established between Borges and psychoanalysis in mind, I read Bioy’s novel against the grain of Borges’s dehistoricizing and overtly anti-“psychological” prologue. Taking a brief detour through several of Quiroga’s later cinematically themed stories, I examine the uneasy role of modern technologies of representation in early psychoanalytic theories of psychosis. I demonstrate that the same anxious engagement

43 with passivity and heteronomy that shapes the reflections of Freud, , and Hanns

Sachs on the proliferating technological prostheses of the twentieth century likewise draws Quiroga’s cinematic fictions into the same cluster of concerns that drive his earlier treatments of paranoia. My examination of these parallel elaborations of the stance of paranoid spectatorship sets the stage for a detailed reading of Bioy’s novel as a paranoid revisionist rendering of the elite narratives of Latin American modernization that Carlos

Alonso has dubbed the continent’s “master plot of futurity.” Critiquing Borges’s influential characterization of La invención de Morel as an anti-“psychological” and therefore counter-modern text, I detect in the peculiar bifurcation of the narrator’s consistently paranoid attitudes and the hallucinatory “peripecias” that occupy center stage in the narrative a delusional reconstitution of the fundamental social structures of Latin

American literary production. Paranoid spectatorship, which I link to the psychotic implications of modern mimetic technologies in Quiroga’s fiction and early psychoanalytic theory, stands in Bioy’s novel as an intratextual representation of the productive literary attitude toward influence I characterize as “paranoid” throughout this dissertation.

44

CHAPTER ONE

The Paranoid Apprentice: Horacio Quiroga’s Poe-etics of Persecution

“Poe might thus be said to have a literary case history, most revealing in that it incarnates, in its controversial forms, the paradoxical nature of a strong poetic effect: the very poetry that, more than any other, is experienced as irresistible has also proved to be, in literary history, the poetry most resisted, the one that, more than any other, has provoked resistances.” – Shoshana Felman

“Volver a Poe significa una regresión y un acto de barbarie cultural. El curso lógico de la historia literaria indica un proceso diferente, de asimilación y olvido . . . Poe significa Baudelaire, que implica de algún modo a Mallarmé, quien a su vez supone a Valéry. Después de Valéry, es difícil volver con provecho a Mallarmé, menos aun a Poe . . . Quiroga, pues, comete esta digresión, muy nuestra por otra parte. ” – Noé Jitrik, Horacio Quiroga: Una obra de experiencia y riesgo (1959)

“Esta edición no es sólo un homenaje sino una genealogía literaria, porque todos somos descendientes de Edgar Allan Poe. Somos Poe & Cia.” – Jorge Volpi and Fernando Iwasaki, introduction to Edgar Allan Poe, Cuentos completos: Edición comentada (2008), translated by Julio Cortázar, with prologues by Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa

The Poe Complex

The second and third quotations above date from fifty and one hundred years, respectively, after the publication of the stories by Horacio Quiroga that are the main subject of this chapter. While both Jitrik and Volpi/Iwasaki invoke literary genealogies originating in the same figure, Edgar Allan Poe, the stark contrast between their evaluations of his relevance to Latin American letters recapitulates the tension between the enabling and the disempowering force of literary models. For Jitrik, writing in 1959,

45 the dependence of an early twentieth century Latin American writer like Quiroga on the early to mid-nineteenth century author Poe constitutes a somewhat embarrassing reminder of what has often been considered the perennial backwardness of Latin

American letters, as exhibited in the delayed reactions of writers to developments in the literary metropolis. The fact that, fifty years later, two prominent contemporary Latin

American novelists could “volver a Poe” in the manner of a celebratory affirmation of origins, free of the anxieties of influence evinced by Jitrik’s remarks, might be read as a predictable indication of “post-boom” Latin American literature’s much greater confidence in its assured place in global literary space. I would like, however, to resist situating these two revealing remarks in a clear diachronic sequence leading from literary dependence to literary independence. Instead, I want to suggest that these two versions of Poe as literary father form part of a synchronic repertoire of sometimes contradictory propositions and attitudes which manifest themselves in varying degrees and combinations across twentieth century Latin American literarature as a whole as well as within the work of particular writers and groups of writers. Jitrik’s discomfort with Poe’s formative presence in the work of the early Quiroga, as we shall see, echoes Quiroga’s own anxiety of influence. Meanwhile, Volpi and Iwasaki’s celebratory invocation of ancestry repeats, in broad strokes, that of Rubén Darío one hundred years earlier in the essay collection Los raros (1905), where Poe appears as “Ariel hecho hombre” (22), the glorious precursor of the Latin American writer’s resistance against the spirtual impoverishment of U.S. culture.

Viewed in this way, the constant and ambivalent presence of Poe as a literary model and precursor takes the form of what I will call a “complex.” In The Language of

46 Psycho-Analysis, Laplanche and Pontalis provide several overlapping definitions of this term, of which three stand out for their relevance here. The first is “[a]n organised group of ideas and memories of great affective force which are either partly or totally unconscious” (72). The familial metaphors structuring the remarks on Poe quoted above inflect them with a commensurate affective dimension. Volpi and Iwasaki, for instance, adopt the stance of proud “descendientes,” beaming with affection as they acknowledge an admired ancestor in a quasi-ceremonial fashion appropriate to the paratextual space in which their declaration appears. Such a conveyance of affect relies, in turn, on a second dimension of the “complex” as elaborated by Laplanche and Pontalis: its function as “[a] relatively stable arrangement of chains of association” (73). Poe, to use Jitrik’s own term, “implies” a chain of other signifiers in both passages, more specifically a sequence of filiations comprising a literary genealogy: Poe-Baudelaire-Mallarmé-Valéry; Poe-

Cortázar-Vargas Llosa/Fuentes-Volpi/Iwasaki. Jitrik’s deployment of the term

“barbarie” unleashes another chain of associations, linking the “Poe complex” to the perennial Latin American topic of “civilización y barbarie” inaugurated by Domingo

Faustino Sarmiento. Conversely, Volpi and Iwasaki’s characterization of the harmonious all-male genealogy as “Poe & Cia” draws their commemorative enterprise even further into the semantic orbit of the literary “boom” also figured synecdochically by the names

Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, and Fuentes. The commercial metaphor turns Poe into the founding father of a thriving transatlantic import-export business. The genealogical chains of association adduced above render palpable a third and related definition of

“complex” as a “basic structure of interpersonal relationships and the way in which the individual finds and appropriates his place in it” (Laplanche and Pontalis 73). Jitrik and

47 Volpi/Iwasaki imagine literature as a patrilineal descent in which the relationship to predecessors enables or disables each writer with a recognizably “Oedipal” ambivalence.

The most comprehensive account of the origins what I am calling Latin American literature’s “Poe complex” appears in John Englekirk’s 1934 monograph Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature, which remains the authoritative source study for Poe’s influence on Spanish and Spanish American writers. Englekirk’s assessment of the modernista reception of Poe is worth quoting at length:

It was in the years 1886-1890 that Julián del Casal of Cuba, José Asunción Silva of Colombia, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera of , and the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, then in Chile, were destined to feel Poe’s influence. Their contact with Poe was a dual one, since they came to know him not only through his own work but also through the media of the French poetic schools that were so imbued with Poe’s esthetics. They are the precursors of the literary movement in Spanish America that was officially born with the publication of Darío’s Azul in 1888. Among the universal poets whose art drew these Hispanic innovators into the realms of modern thought and expression, Poe ranks among the very first . . . Poe, deified by the Nicaraguan as one of “los raros,” was to fertilize the intellect and imagination of Central and South America more than any other American author. Almost all of the followers of Modernism were directly or indirectly influenced by Poe. (146)

Poe, as already mentioned, was the first of the “aristócratas del espíritu” to receive

Darío’s homage in his 1905 essay collection Los raros, and the name “Poe” came to stand as nothing less than a privileged synecdoche for the modernista ideology of literature.

Ángel Flores, once again with recourse to the metaphor of paternity, remarks that “los

Modernistas, como los franceses, adoptaron a Edgar Allan Poe como padre espiritual. Lo poesco, con todos sus horrores, crueldades, y misterios, se constituyó en la quintaesencia misma de la nueva estética” (8). Poe’s dual association with France and with the

Americas, his fulfillment of the promise of French consecration of American literary

48 efforts, and his vaunted prefiguration of the struggle of the modernista poet against crass

Anglo-American commercial values all contributed to his unique prestige in fin de siècle

Latin American literary circles.

The work of the North American writer therefore comprises an essential component of what Flores describes as the “clima poesco-Modernista” (8) of Quiroga’s earliest literary apprenticeship. Accordingly, Poe’s name has figured prominently in all of the major critical assessments of Quiroga, a wayward son of modernismo who broke with the conventions of that movement and ultimately elaborated an idiosyncratic regionalism as his characteristic literary mode. Quiroga’s early writings, unmistakably marked by his modernista environment, sometimes come across as little more than a catalogue of fin-de-siècle decadent commonplaces. In one dominant critical narrative,

“Poe” is therefore shorthand for the literary milieu that marks Quiroga’s early work as imitative, derivative, and artificial, and signifies everything that Quiroga had to transcend in order to achieve literary maturity. As we saw above, in the estimation of Noé Jitrik, the initial impact of Poe on Quiroga is mainly an index of “una involución en el interior del modernismo” (131). Flores, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, and a number of other critics concur with Jitrik in regarding Quiroga’s early devotion to Poe as a “digresión” (Jitrik

131), an embarrassing detour in his development as a writer.

If such assessments link Poe to what is widely regarded as Quiroga’s period of literary immaturity, a second dominant critical tendency offers an almost diametrically opposed evaluation of the Poe-Quiroga connection. Gustavo San Román provides the following summary of Quiroga’s general reputation: “Quiroga is best known as a writer of carefully crafted short stories that direct the reader firmly and economically towards an

49 often unexpected dénouement” (919). As San Román points out, celebratory accounts of

Quiroga’s narrative art tend to confine themselves to “endorsing the author’s own views on the craft of writing” (919; cf. Alonso 115). Quiroga’s reputation as a master craftsman of the short story, in other words, owes a great deal to the effective publicity he carried out on his own behalf in the form of programmatic articles on composition, the most famous of these being the “Decálogo del perfecto cuentista.” In this pithy list of rules for the aspiring short story writer, Quiroga outlines what he claims to be the basic principles of his art, most importantly narrative and verbal economy and unity of action oriented towards a surprising end. Although Quiroga’s advocacy of an economical, action-driven narrative style may be interpreted as part of his larger repudiation of the sumptuously decorative, adjective-laden mode of his earlier modernista writings, Poe remains fully in the picture. In addition to being the first of the “maestros” in whom

Quiroga claims, in the first of his commandments, the writer must “cree[r] . . . como en

Dios mismo,” the North American writer was himself the author of programmatic statements on composition strikingly similar to Quiroga’s. The most famous of these is

“The Philosophy of Composition,” which shares with Quiroga’s manifestos an organicist emphasis on the “unity of effect.” In other essays on the craft of writing, Quiroga traced the genesis of his economical poetics of the short story to the strict word limits imposed by his editors at the Buenos Aires magazine Caras y caretas, which published many of his early stories (Alonso 112-13). But as Carlos Alonso points out, this story of origins is somewhat evasive “when offered as an explanation of a lesson that Quiroga had in fact learned from Poe’s commentaries on the poetics of the short story, which in turn summarized romantic ideas about the organicity of the literary work” (113). Poe

50 therefore casts his shadow as much over Quiroga’s highly regarded later work as over his widely dismissed early writings.

In what is probably the most comprehensive treatment to date of “Poe en

Quiroga,” Margo Clantz has endeavored to reconcile Poe’s apparently conflicting roles as counter-model and as model in the Uruguayan author’s development. In the process, she offers a reassessment of “El crimen del otro,” which was in fact the second of two undisguised rewritings of Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” published by Quiroga early in his career.17 Critics prior to Clantz showed little but scorn for these early efforts.

Rodríguez Monegal, for instance, judges “El crimen del otro” to be “laborioso y al cabo ininteresante,” worthy of consideration only “por lo que no tiene de Poe” (Genio y figura

48). Jitrik concurs, extending his condemnation to the entire first ten years or so of

Quiroga’s production: “Nada relevante queda de ese período, salvo quizá la dificultad de abandonarlo y acercarse libremente a otros modos de literatura” (131). Clantz, responding to these verdicts, accepts that “El crimen del otro” “no es en verdad un cuento logrado,” but argues that “su mérito se halla en otra parte: Quiroga trabaja deliberadamente para aprender los métodos de Poe en la práctica literaria misma” (97).

Rather than a mere “calco” (Flores 8) of Poe, as Flores asserts, “El crimen del otro” is in

Clantz’s reading “una especie de exégesis narrativa de lo que debe ser un cuento de Poe”

(97). Therefore, she claims, “es un cuento clave porque nos revela un proceso: la necesidad interna de Quiroga de definir los elementos estructurales que integran la

‘composición’ de un cuento de Poe” (100). Clantz thus requalifies Quiroga’s early

17 The first, “El tonel de amontillado,” appeared in Quiroga’s first published book, Los arrecifes de coral (1901).

51 imitations of Poe as crucial exercises, formally deliberate enough to be consistent with the resolute mastery projected by his later manifestos.

This chapter will consider how scholarship’s evident need to neutralize the presence of Poe as anything other than a source of formal dicta might emerge out of cues in Quiroga’s own writings. Instead of simply considering the work of the North

American author as a historical component of the young Quiroga’s literary milieu, I will regard “Poe” as a libidinally charged object of the paranoid anxieties that drive the narratives of two important stories from his early period: “El crimen del otro” and “Los perseguidos.” To make this argument, I consider the features these two stories share with the famous near-contemporary case of paranoid psychosis recounted in Daniel Paul

Schreber’s Memoirs of a Nervous Illness, and with Freud’s equally well-known psychoanalytic study of Schreber’s book. I have already discussed Eric Santner’s reading of Schreber’s and Freud’s texts as responses to a “crisis of symbolic investiture” in which the “social acts . . . whereby an individual is endowed with a new social status and a role within a shared linguistic universe” (Santner, “States” 205) cease to function effectively.

Quiroga’s participation, as an aspiring writer in the early years of the twentieth century, in a sequence of obligatory rites of passage of the modernista literary regime, renders this framework relevant to an understanding of his early writings. These rites include his founding of a literary magazine, the Revista de Salto, and a literary club, the Consistorio del Gay Saber,18 in Uruguay, his ill-fated trip to Paris in 1900, his publications of highly

18 Rodríguez Monegal characterizes this group as “un incipiente laboratorio poético, el primero y más importante del Modernismo uruguayo” (“Una historia” 59).

52 imitative works in the dominant literary modes of modernismo,19 and his apprenticeship to Leopoldo Lugones, the most prominent Argentine modernista. This sequence of rites of passage does not merely form the background to Quiroga’s early writings, since it is in fact one of the subjects represented in these writings, which themselves form part of

Quiroga’s troubled insertion into the sanctioned spaces of literary production.

Quiroga’s early stories acutely register, to borrow Santner’s formulation, “a fundamental impasse in [the] capacity to metabolize [the] performative magic [of symbolic investiture], to be inducted into the normative space opened by it” (206). The paranoid imaginary elaborated in “El crimen del otro” and especially “Los perseguidos” constitutes a multi-layered narrativization of this impasse, in which the homosocial milieu of modernista literary cosmopolitanism becomes a space of persecution, terror, and madness. This space displays many of the features Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has identified with the sub-genre of “paranoid gothic,” a term she uses to describe the large body of nineteenth century narratives that manifest a on masculine persecutors.

The characteristic plots of “paranoid gothic,” she remarks, “might be mapped almost point for point onto the case of Dr. Schreber: most saliently, each is about one or more males who not only is persecuted by, but considers himself transparent to and often under the compulsion of, another male” (91). Poe’s work furnished Quiroga with numerous models of this kind of narrative, of which two will be of greatest importance to us here:

“The Cask of Amontillado” and “William Wilson.” In “El crimen del otro” and “Los

19 Of Quiroga and the other members of the Consistorio, Rodríguez Monegal observes that “les resultaba difícil resistir el crudo gesto de la trascripción poética” (“Una historia” 59).

53 perseguidos,” “Poe” himself, in virtue of his prestige as a literary model, becomes invested with the anxiety that pervades Poe’s stories about masculine persecution.

Quiroga’s rewritings of Poe’s “paranoid gothic” therefore serve as narrative recontainments of the pressures of succession within the claustrophobic masculine genealogies of modernismo.

“El crimen del otro”: The Mirror Stage

In “On : An Introduction,” Freud offers a jarringly forthright assertion of the “rationality” of paranoid delusions:

Patients of this sort complain that all their thoughts are known and their actions watched and supervised; they are informed of the functioning of this agency by voices which characteristically speak to them in the third person (‘Now she’s thinking of that again,’ ‘now he’s going out’). This complaint is justified; it describes the truth. A power of this kind, watching, discovering and criticizing all our intentions, does really exist. Indeed, it exists in every one of us in normal life. (559)

Freud justifies this claim with recourse to what he calls (at this stage of his thought) the

“ideal ego” or “ego ideal.” The latter entity, he argues, both takes the place of and perpetuates in disguise the narcissistic self-regard in which the still unsocialized infant directs a large share of fundamentally at him- or herself. Although installation in increasingly complex strata of the social order gradually forces individuals to relinquish this initial narcissistic posture, even upon reaching maturity they are “not willing to forego the narcissistic perfection of . . . childhood” (558). The development of the “ego ideal” offers the individual the opportunity to displace residual narcissistic libido onto a fictional entity: “when, as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgment, so that he can no longer retain that

54 perfection, he seeks to recover it in the form of an ego ideal” (558). The ideal functions as a “compromise formation” in which the subject’s narcissistic impulses survive by taking account of the demands issued by the intersubjective network extending outward from the family. As Freud explains, “what prompted the subject to form an ego ideal . . . arose from the critical influence of his parents, to whom were added . . . those who trained and taught him and the innumerable and indefinable host of all the other people in his environment” (559). Thus, although the ego ideal is fundamentally an alienated double of the subject, the particular forms and features it assumes correspond to the externally imposed standards drawn from the milieu of the subject’s induction into social life. The claim that paranoid persecution fantasties “describe the truth” alludes to the existence of an internalized agency of surveillance “which performs the task of seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal is ensured” (559) by monitoring from within the subject’s adherence to externally prescribed norms. Freud later came to designate this agency the “superego.”

Freud makes clear that, despite his description of primordial self-love as “ego- libido,” no ego pre-exists the formation of the ego ideal: “a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed” (547). The process of socialization by which the subject becomes an integrated individual, in other words, paradoxically relies on the mobilization rather than the elimination of the radically anti-social instincts of narcissism. For related reasons, the individual’s continued internal regulation of his behavior in accordance with the demands of society depends on the

“libido of an essentially homosexual kind” (559) directed towards the regulatory agency of the ego ideal, the subject’s estranged mirror image. The internalized surveillance

55 organ called “conscience” turns out to be nothing more or less than the critical agency overseeing the subject’s disguised “homosexual” self-love. From this vantage point, the rationale behind Freud’s insistence upon the inextricability of homosexuality and paranoia becomes evident. On the basis of the observation that “most cases of paranoia display an element of megalomania,” he argues in the Schreber study that in paranoia

“the stage of narcissism . . . has been reached once more” (61), and more specifically that the “backward step from sublimated homosexuality to narcissism provides the element of that is characteristic of paranoia” (62). As the paranoid subject’s “homosexual libido” withdraws from the alienated ego ideal and shifts back into a primary, radically antisocial form of self-love, the internalized surveillance regime instituted along with the ego ideal takes on the appearance of a persecutory, invasive exterior force. Or as Freud states the matter, the paranoiac’s “revolt against this ‘censoring agency’ arises out of the subject’s desire (in accordance with the fundamental character of his illness) to liberate himself from all these influences, beginning with the parental one, and out of his withdrawal of homosexual libido from them. His conscience then confonts him in a regressive form as a hostile influence from without” (559).

Recent commentators, while critical of certain aspects of Freud’s association of paranoia with a “regressive” homosexual desire, have engaged productively with his claim that the normative insertion of individuals into the (normatively heterosexual) social order feeds parasitically on “homosexual libido.” Sedgwick, for one, in hypothesizing “the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual” (1) – a continuum that is, of socially sanctioned and socially prohibited relations “between men” – extends and revises Freud’s claims, arguing that the

56 patriarchal regime of compulsory heterosexuality finds its disavowed basis in

“homosocial desire,” understood as “the affective or social force, the glue” (2) which binds males together in the hierarchically structured relations of exchange around which the social order is organized. Santner, commenting on Freud’s Schreber study, similarly argues that while “the very procedures of investiture that inserted Judge Schreber into a powerful homosocial elite would have exposed him to the chronic threat of homosexual panic,” this latter threat

was only one of the chronic breakdown products of symbolic power and authority in Schreber’s Germany . . . Schreber experienced what threatened his rights/rites of institution under a number of ideological signs: as a feminization not always reducible to homosexualization; as the threat of contamination by machine-like, depersonalized linguistic operations; as the prospect of ‘Jewification’ . . . (My Own 55)

My earlier observations about the patrilineal literary genealogies issuing from Poe suggest the pertinence of such accounts to the homosocial framework of literary succession dominant in the milieu of Horacio Quiroga’s initiation as writer. With this context in mind, it will be possible to consider how the formal peculiarities and problematic intertextual borrowings of a story like “El crimen del otro” might transpose into narrative a phenomenon not dissimilar to the regressive malfunctioning of the alienating structures of the “ego ideal,” as described by Freud.

Both Emir Rodríguez Monegal and Gustavo San Román have noted the intensely homosocial narrative elements common to a large number of Quiroga’s early stories.

Rodríguez Monegal, performing a kind of “wild psychoanalysis,” roots the persecution anxieties on particularly powerful display in “Los perseguidos” in a specific episode of

Quiroga’s early life: his accidental killing of his close friend and fellow member of the

57 Consistorio del Gay Saber, Federico Ferrando. Suggesting that Ferrando had become a kind of persecutory Doppelgänger or “alter ego” for the young writer, Rodríguez

Monegal hypothesizes that subsequent to his friend’s death “Quiroga tal vez sintió entonces que había querido esa muerte . . . tal vez creyó que Ferrando era la víctima propiciatoria del fracaso literario de su primer libro . . . el estímulo brutal que él necesitaba para arrancarse de una tierra, su tierra, que se había convertido en insoportable” (60). This speculative account recapitulates certain commonplaces of the

Freudian account of individual psychic development, postulating in effect that only the violent rupture which tore Quiroga out of his narcissistic-homoerotic “dual relation”20 with Ferrando permitted him to achieve maturity as a writer. Rodríguez Monegal does not, however, attempt to map this process onto the formal dynamics of Quiroga’s early fiction, and instead proposes the Ferrando incident as a source of the narrative material involving masculine persecution. San Román, meanwhile, offers a sociologically and historically informed picture of the unease attending masculinity in the fin-de-siècle

Uruguay in which Quiroga came of age. He characterizes the latter’s fictionalized paranoid delusions of “men being pursued by men” as “responses to prevailing conceptions of relationships between men and women, and between men” (919). For San

Román, Quiroga’s literary portrayals of paranoia comprise only one acute manifestation of a broader crisis afflicting the dominant regime of “male bourgeois values” (927) of the society in which it appeared. He therefore reads Quiroga’s texts as expressions of masculine anxiety homologous to a variety of other contemporary phenomena, including

20 Lacan, reworking Freud’s model of the relation to the “ego ideal,” uses this term to describe the relation between the narcissistic ego in formation and its specular counterpart (Evans 49-50; Copjec, “Anxiety” 53).

58 an increased sensitivity among men to insults regarding virility and the enshrinement of new legal measures against homosexual acts.

Attention to such backgrounds undoubtedly sheds a certain amount of light on the genesis of a text like “El crimen del otro.” The text ties together a number of more or less identifiable biographical referents from Quiroga’s late adolescence in Montevideo,21 most importantly his attempts to write stories in imitation of Poe22 and his friendship with and accidental killing of Ferrando, in all likelihood the model for the narrator’s friend and victim Fortunato. However, the story’s intrigue revolves precisely around the problematic status of any such referents in light of the radical conflation of the literary and the autobiographical that takes place within its narrative development. This conflation, indeed, stands as the narrator’s main source of anxiety as he both seeks and resists his own “Poe-ification.” In this sense, by using biography or history as a master code for deciphering the repeated motif of masculine persecution in Quiroga’s early writings, San Román and Rodríguez Monegal neglect the fundamentally literary character of the masculine anxieties dramatized in these texts.

As discussed in an earlier chapter, the paranoid structures of “El crimen del otro” are articulated through Quiroga’s redoubled effort to write in the style and manner of Poe about the desire to write in the style and manner of Poe. The resulting overdetermination of the plane of narrative and the plane of narration refracts the perspective of a narrator

21 The eponymous collection containing “El crimen del otro” appeared in 1904 in Buenos Aires, but its details set it clearly in the Uruguayan capital (see Leonardo Garet’s comments in Quiroga, Cuentos completos 114. n. 24).

22 See “El tonel de amontillado” in Los arrecifes de coral (1902).

59 who experiences the coercive sway of the literary model as a form of bodily and psychological invasion. Lacan, glossing the Freudian account of narcissism, comments that “the ‘ideal-I’ . . . situates the agency known as the ego . . . in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual” (Écrits 4; emphasis mine).

Quiroga’s narrator’s direct experience of his own transmutation into alienating fictional structures perversely literalizes the originary fictionalization of the self described by psychoanalysis. The narrator’s “ideal ego” is none other than Poe, whose “Cask of

Amontillado” furnishes a basic mold for the narrative. The metamorphosis of Poe into an omnipotent persecutor therefore has a precise formal correlate in the alienating narrative elements and structures from Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” that colonize the text of

“El crimen del otro.”

In his explanation of the mechanism of mimetic desire in fictional narrative, René

Girard observes that “[t]he subject is torn between two opposite feelings toward his model – the most submissive reverence and the most intense malice” (10). Girard’s statement describes the attitude of Quiroga’s narrator with considerable exactitude.

Precisely as a function of his fanatical devotion, the latter also characterizes his literary idol Poe as a persecutor and antagonist. He complains in the second paragraph, in the midst of explaining his total immersion in Poe’s writings, that “[e]se maldito loco había llegado a dominarme por completo” (108). He repeats the verb “dominar” somewhat ambiguously when referring to the mastery he himself claims to have achieved through incessant rereadings over Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” a story which he also describes as “una cosa íntima mía”: “dominaba todo el cuento, pero todo, todo, todo”

(109). Since the text leaves unclear the subject of the verb form “dominaba,” which

60 grammatically may function as either the first or third person imperfect, the sentence might therefore equally be translated “I dominated the whole story” or “the story dominated everything.” In fact, the two possible meanings amount to the same thing, since the narrator’s claim to have memorized every detail of the text merely offers a further index of the complete scripting of his consciousness by Poe’s “dead letter.”

Meanwhile, the language of surveillance in the subsequent sentence, in which the narrator continues to boast about his memorization of “The Cask of Amontillado” (“Ni una sonrisa por ahí, ni una premura en Fortunato se escapaba a mi perspicacia” [109]), reveals his fascination with the panoptic gaze he attributes to the author and his envy-driven attempt to identify himself with that gaze.

In later sequences of the narrative, the portrayal of Poe as a persecutory mastermind becomes more explicit. As he details his friend Fortunato’s descent into madness (as a direct consequence of reading Poe at the narrator’s incitement), the narrator depicts the latter as a mere puppet of Poe, stating, for instance, that “a Poe puédese sensatamente atribuir atribuir ese insólito afán de Fortunato” (109) and referring to Poe as the “causa de sus exageraciones” (115). Likewise, the narrator’s apparent conflations of Poe with the narrators of his stories, as when he refers to “la hora en que

Poe llevó al altar . . . a lady Rowena Tremanión” (110) or “lo que Poe hizo con

Fortunato” (117), appear to posit a paranoid theory of the author as a hidden force behind the action of his stories, manipulating the characters like marionettes. The narration and action of “El crimen del otro” reflect this understanding of authorship as behind-the- scenes manipulation. Over the course of the story, the narrator and Fortunato both

61 become increasingly subject to a kind of blind automatism as intertextual referents drawn from “The Cask of Amontillado” assume a kind of uncanny agency.

The first stage of the invasion of the story by the world of Poe’s story, of course, is the appearance of Fortunato himself, just after the narrator has recounted his sadistic pleasure in the demise of Poe’s character Fortunato in “The Cask of Amontillado.” The triad uniting the narrator with Poe and and Fortunato, though recognizable from Girard’s model of mimetic rivalry, evinces a breakdown of Girard’s important distinction between

“external mediation” and “internal mediation”:

We shall speak of external mediation when the distance is sufficient to eliminate any contact between the two spheres of possibility of which the mediator and the subject occupy the respective centers. We shall speak of internal mediation when this same distance is reduced enough to allow these two spheres to penetrate each other more or less profoundly. (9)

For Girard, the relationship between Don Quijote and Amadís de Gaula furnishes the locus classicus of external mediation. Because the literary mediation of this relationship means that “there can be no contact whatsoever” (72) between protagonist and mediator, there can also be no violent rivalry between them. Conversely, such rivalry is the necessary consequence in cases of “internal mediation,” in which the subject and the mediator occupy the same place and desire the same objects. In “El crimen del otro,” Poe himself, although a distant, textually mediated, and hence “external” mediator, becomes the object of a violent envy more appropriate to “internal mediation”: “envidiaba tanto a

Poe que me hubiera dejado cortar la mano por escribir esa maravillosa intriga” (109).

Fortunato initially enters the story as a means of resolution of this deadlock, offering a more adequate object for the aggression generated by the narrator’s impossible rivalry with Poe and serving as a foil whose weakness of character and literary insensitivity seem

62 to confirm by contrast the narrator’s total identification with the object of his idolatry.

Upon initially reading Poe to Fortunato, he reports that the latter showed little interest:

“me escuchó . . . a una legua de mi ardor” (109).

The narrator’s repeated and increasingly emphatic attempts to distance himself from Fortunato bear all the hallmarks of the rivalry of internal mediation as described by

Girard: “As the distance between mediator and subject decreases, the comprehension becomes more acute and the hatred more intense. It is always his own desire that the subject condemns in the other without knowing it” (73). As he describes Fortunato’s seduction by the work of Poe and descent into madness, the narrator repeats the same language he initially used to characterize his own behavior, referring to Fortunato’s

“entusiasmo” (110; cf. 109) “desequilibrio” (110; cf. 109) and “desborde de gestos y ademanes” (110; cf. 108). But whereas he initially compared his own “ardor” for Poe’s writings favorably to Fortunato’s apathetic indifference, the latter’s “franco entusiasmo”

(110) now becomes an object of his spite and envy. The more Fortunato becomes his double, the more the narrator insists on their non-resemblance. He explains his

“superioridad” (114) by confirming his own identification with Poe and associating

Fortunato with Poe’s characters: “en un cuarto donde estuviéramos con Poe y sus personajes yo hablaría con éste, de éstos, y en el fondo Fortunato y los héroes de las

Historias extraordinarias charlarían entusiasmados de Poe” (111). While the narrator’s self-differentiation depends on his own alignment with Poe, imagined as a concealed puppet-master, as opposed to Fortunato and his characters, the objects of Poe’s manipulation, his language here (“hablaría con éste de éstos . . . charlarían entusiasmados de Poe”) suggests instead the symmetry of mirror images.

63 The narrator’s attributions of his own prior qualities, as faults, to Fortunato also signal an anxious compensatory attempt to maintain the vanishing boundary between the literary and the extra-literary. Thus, peculiarly, if the coincidence between the name of

Fortunato and that of the character in “The Cask of Amontillado” cannot but appear to the reader an uncanny intrusion of Poe’s fictional world into the space of the narrative, the narrator himself declines to read it in this way, remarking only that “[e]sta circunstancia de que mi amigo llevara el mismo nombre que el del héroe del ‘Tonel de

Amontillado’ me desilusionó al principio, por la vulgarización de un nombre puramente literario” (109). This sudden resistance to the conflation, through names, of literary and the non-literary space generates a peculiar contrast to his previous declaration that the world of “The Cask of Amontillado” was now so “familiar” to him that he “leía ese cuento sin nombrar ya a los personajes” (109). The border he attempts to establish soon breaks down, since “en el calor del delirio” inspired by reading Poe’s tale to Fortunato, he recounts that he “le llamaba a él mismo Montresor, Fortunato, Luchesi, cualquier nombre de ese cuento” (109). The interchangeability of his friend’s name and those of various characters from Poe’s tale discloses the disavowed transitivity that characterizes the narrator’s relationship to his friend and to Poe’s characters.

We saw above that the narrator imagines the perspective of the author as a panoptic gaze and presents Poe’s characters as the author’s unwitting puppets and victims. Hs desire to situate himself on the side of the author and Fortunato on the side of the characters concords with his increasingly sadistic behavior towards his friend, first manifested in the “tibia fiebre de azuzarle” (111) that leads him to issue bizarre, nonsensical statements in order to precipitate Fortunato’s descent into madness. The

64 narrator’s desire to manipulate Fortunato replicates an earlier description of his obsession with “Poe”’s murder of Fortunato’s literary namesake in “The Cask of Amontillado”:

“pasé más de cuatro horas leyendo ese cuento con una fruición en que entraba mucho de adverso para Fortunato” (109). He later repeats the term “fruición” again to describe his sensation after murdering Fortunato according to the formula of Poe’s story (119).

Noting the narrator’s identical attitude to Poe’s character Fortunato and to his friend of the same name, San Román describes the relationship between the narrator and his friend as one of homoerotically charged domination and submission:

The narrator’s stance is clearly sadistic. Of all the tales by Poe, he prefers the one in which the protagonist dominates another . . . His pleasure at the of Poe’s Fortunato becomes mingled with the anticipation of the suffering he will inflict on his own acquaintance . . . This pleasure is centered on the submission of Fortunato . . . The narrator’s aim to dominate Fortunato is both explicit and obsessive. He plays games with Fortunato . . . and in fact takes an active part in encouraging his victim’s madness. (929)

San Román misses the crucial point that the relationships encompassed by the narrator’s homerotic sadism are all explicitly literary ones: the relationship between the aspiring writer and his literary model, between author and text, between reader and text. We have seen that the narrator describes both himself and Fortunato as “dominated” by Poe, and characterizes his own relationship to the “The Cask of Amontillado” and its characters as one of “domination.” Likewise, from the story’s beginning, where the narrator draws his friend into his own obsession with Poe, to its end, in which he lures Fortunato to his death with the promise of a volume of Poe’s stories, reading (Poe) mediates the relationship between the narrator and Fortunato.

65 The story’s climax, in which the two protagonists reenact the deadly final scene of

“The Cask of Amontillado,” appears to confirm the narrator’s paranoid vision of Poe as his malign persecutor. Despite his emphatic attempts to associate himself with Poe and

Fortunato with Poe’s characters, the narrator has, no less than his friend, become one of the latter – specifically, Montresor, the narrator of “The Cask of Amontillado.” His actions have effectively been “plotted” from without by a compulsion of which he remains unaware, despite his previous descriptions of Poe’s “influence” in precisely these terms. He does, however, conclude the story by tentatively conceding his own “locura”

(“no sería extraño que yo a mi vez estuviera un poco loco”) and thus also acknowledging the resemblance to his murdered friend he previously seemed at pains to deny. Having

“[hecho] con Fortunato lo que Poe hizo con Fortunato,” he has achieved, according to his own criteria, his desired identification with the author of “The Cask of Amontillado,” at the price of subordinating his own agency entirely to that of “Poe.” His plotting of his friend’s death replicates the mechanical scripting of his own action according to the action of “The Cask of Amontillado.” By transposing the relationship of masculine rivalry described by Girard into the terms of a literary relationship of influence, Quiroga collapses Girard’s separate spheres of external and internal mediation. In “El crimen del otro,” the antagonisms between subject and model figure above all, to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Zizek, as “an allegory of the intersubjective conditions of [the story’s] process of production” (Enjoy 67, n. 45). The paranoid narrative scenario allegorizes, that is, the the story’s implicit “scene of writing.”

According to the logic we have just delineated, the “otro” of Quiroga’s title, the true author of the crime, can be no one other than “Poe” himself. Since the narrator

66 cannot directly acknowledge his alienated agency within the narrative, Quiroga consigns this truth to the paratextual space of the title. The use of the term “otro” to indicate the subject’s disavowed heteronomy indicates that “El crimen del otro” offers something like a literary version of Lacan’s “mirror stage.” It is in this sense, in fact, that the story is not simply, as most commentators have concluded, an immature work, but rather a work which theorizes, in narrative form, literary immaturity. In Lacan’s well-known reformulation of Freud’s theory of narcissism, the mirror serves as the emblematic instrument of the alienating “specular relation” by which the ego in formation jubilantly anticipates its own desired completeness in the image of its own double. Although its privileged form is the mirror image, the role of the semblable who becomes the model for the ego’s desire may be assumed by any individual in whom the burgeoning ego precipitously misrecognizes itself in its desired form. The mirror stage, Lacan states in terms close to Girard’s, “tips the whole of human knowledge into being mediated by the other’s desire” (Écrits 7). Such mediations, as we have seen, constitute the narrative material of “El crimen del otro” and at the same time describe the dynamics of influence and imitation underlying its rewriting of “The Cask of Amontillado.”

For Lacan, an alternation between identification and aggression of the sort we have observed in the narrator’s relationships to Poe and Fortunato comprises an essential component of the specular dynamics which constitute the ego. Joan Copjec provides a succinct explanation of the essentially paranoid structure of the relationship to the world established through these transactions: “the formation of the subject’s own ego from an image at a distance, an image of another, makes identification an alienation of the subject from itself, [and] structures all human knowledge as paranoid” (“Anxiety” 53). The

67 Lacanian model, in other words, renders more palpable Freud’s remarks about the

“rationality” of paranoid delusions. Because the ego only comes into being through the specular relation with the other as mediator of desire,

the ego is itself by another, and sets itself up in a duality internal to the subject. The ego is this master the subject finds in an other, whose function of mastery he establishes in his own heart . . . there is an ego in him that is always in part foreign to him, a master implanted in him. (S III 93)

Aggressivity stands as the necessary corollary of this predicament, “a tension correlated with the narcissistic structure of the subject’s becoming” (Écrits 23), because the reassuring confirmation of the self in the other entails the colonizing intrusion of the self by the other, an ambivalent process we have been able to trace through the narrative of

“El crimen del otro.” Harold Bloom has observed the parallel between Lacan’s account of ego formation and his own account of the literary anxiety of influence: “Lacan keeps assuring us that the ego, every ego, is essentially paranoid . . . Lacan’s conviction is certainly true if by the ego we mean the literary ‘I’ as it appears in . . . the last three hundred years” (“Freud” 100). Lacan’s formulation of the double bind of the mirror stage captures concisely “Poe”’s dual function as decisive literary model for Quiroga’s story and antagonistic presence within the text: “And where is this master? Inside?

Outside? He is always both inside and outside” (Lacan, Écrits 93).

The degeneration of the narrator’s subjection to his literary “master” Poe into the sadistic and ultimately murderous relationship to Fortunato stages a violent collapse of what Girard calls the external mediation of desire into the suffocating claustrophobia of internal mediation. We should observe, transposing Girard’s terms into Lacan’s, that the passage through the mirror stage requires the violent rivalry of internal mediation both as

68 a necessary phase of subject formation and as a permanent substrate of the ego. Since the latter never escapes the “armor of an alienating identity” (Écrits 6) assumed through imaginary capture in the specular counterpart, as Copjec notes, “the subject’s narcissistic relation to the self is seen to conflict with and disrupt other social relations”

(“Orthopsychic” 60). The passage into something resembling Girard’s external mediation is only made possible by a further alienation: the assumption of the “Name-of- the Father,” discussed at length in the previous chapter. Lacan explains: “Oedipal identification is thus the identification by which the subject transcends the aggressiveness constitutive of the first subjective identification . . . [i]t constitutes a step in the establishment of . . . distance” (Écrits 24). The alienating identification of the mirror stage “turns the I into an apparatus to which every instinctual pressure constitutes a danger,” and therefore “maturation is henceforth dependent on cultural intervention”

(Écrits 7).

Conversely, the psychotic Verwerfung of the Name-of-the-Father entails “the impossibility of assuming the realization of the signifier ‘father’ at the symbolic level”

(Psychoses 204). Paranoia, therefore, invests the subject’s relation to symbolic structures of authority with the aggressivity and rivalry characteristic of the imaginary dual relations of imaginary identification. In Schreber’s elaborate narratives of his persecution by God and by Flechsig, his psychiatrist, the imagos of these and other representatives of symbolic authority are projected back into the hostile dynamics of specular identification:

“The subject’s relationship to the world is a mirror relation . . . these two characters, that is, God, with all that he implies, the universe, the celestial sphere, and on the other hand

Schreber himself, literally decomposed into a multitude of imaginary beings” (S III 87).

69 In Lacan’s account, Schreber’s paranoid fragmentations of the father figure merely reveal what “is permanently elided, veiled, domesticated in the life of a normal man” (S III 87): an explosively hostile internal/imaginary mediation underlying every apparently harmonious external/symbolic mediation. We have seen that Poe was nothing less than the “symbolic father” of literary production in the immediate environment that produced

Quiroga’s early writings. In this sense, “El crimen del otro,” by presenting Poe not as the beneficent sponsor of the young writer’s efforts but as a spectral double, antagonistic rival, and malign puppeteer, exposes an obscene hidden logic of literary apprenticeship.

The same paranoid logic remains in force in “Los perseguidos,” widely regarded as an early document of Quiroga’s literary maturity.

Persecution and the Art of Writing

According to the standard assessment of Quiroga’s literary trajectory, “Los perseguidos” belongs to “la transición que va del escritor decadente al profesional”

(García, “Horacio Quiroga”). The second half of the first decade of the twentieth century, as the scholarly consensus would have it, witnessed Quiroga’s gradual abandonment of the immature, derivative aesthetics he initially absorbed from modernista models in favor of the autonomy, professionalism, and fine craftsmanship he later codified in manifestos like the “Decálogo del cuentista perfecto.” By the time Quiroga published “Los perseguidos” in 1908, his work had begun to appear regularly in a number of prestigious Buenos Aires publications. The most crucial of these venues was the weekly magazine Caras y caretas, described by Josefina Ludmer as “la enciclopedia cultural de la globalización de fin de siglo, la revista masiva de la Cosmópolis,

70 internacional y local” (250). Quiroga’s initial contributions to Caras y caretas and other journals did not immediately signal a radical break with the conventions of modernismo.

In general, though, he began to display a greater eclecticism in terms of subject matter, moving outside the catalogue of decadent topics that had characterized his early work, and replaced the decorative flourishes of his first writings with a condensed, action- driven syle. As mentioned previously, he would frequently claim that the strict word limits imposed by his editors at Caras y caretas played a pivotal role in his formal evolution.

Some of the salient characteristics of “Los perseguidos” reflect the modernization of Quiroga’s literary practice as well as his assumption of a more central place in the literary system of the era. The story lacks the blatantly citational quality that “El crimen del otro” shares with many of the other texts from the collection of that name as well as the earlier Los arrecifes de coral. “Los perseguidos” makes no allusions to prior literary works nearly as explicit as those that pervade “El crimen del otro.” Its structure does not directly replicate that of a model text, and the characters are recognizable denizens of contemporary Buenos Aires rather than grotesque caricatures of Poe characters.

Although, as we shall see, “Los perseguidos” does draw on the nineteenth-century tradition of Doppelgänger narratives and on stock gothic motifs, Quiroga’s extensive and detailed portrayal of the urban environment of Buenos Aires to some extent disguises the story’s indebtedness to these sources. In contrast to the rudimentary portrait of

Montevideo in “El crimen del otro,” the meticulously detailed treatment of Buenos Aires in “Los perseguidos” includes extensive and frequent references to actual streets and

71 locations, as well as detailed descriptions of street scenes featuring commercial establishments and technologies of urban modernity like automobiles and streetcars.

“Los perseguidos” displays many of the same qualities that made Caras y caretas such an important publication and such a crucial vehicle of Quiroga’s accession to a more prestigious status in Latin American literary space, and this is not only because both story and magazine showcase the burgeoning modernity of Buenos Aires. Like Caras y caretas, Quiroga’s story “[m]ezcla la ciencia, la literatura . . . y el periodismo . . . Mezcla realidades y ficciones” (Ludmer 251). The journalistic component of the generic mixture constituting “Los perseguidos” consists in the extensive incorporation of recognizable local referents with proper names, lending the story certain characteristics of an urban chronicle. Meanwhile, many commentators have taken the striking appearance, in the first sentence of the story, of the proper name of prominent homme de lettres Leopoldo

Lugones as an attempt to establish the veracity of the quasi-autobiographical dimension of the narrative (Rodríguez Monegal). At the time, though, the use of Lugones as a fictional character functions as a sign of specifically literary prestige. During Quiroga’s early career, Lugones stood at the forefront of Argentine modernismo and indeed, according to Beatriz Sarlo, “occupied the centre of the [Argentine] literary system”

(Borges 36; cf. 23). By including Lugones in the story as the narrator’s host and patron,

Quiroga both claims authority for his text by proxy and directly represents the literary environment within which the story was produced. A final important element of the story’s generic admixture is its portrayal of the contemporary discourses and institutional

72 contexts of .23 Throughout the story, the characters talk incessantly about insanity and the insane, and the final scene takes place in an asylum and briefly features a psychiatrist as a character. Abnormal psychology, along with other areas of science dealing with the unusual and the eccentric, was a topic of curiosity for the urban readership of the period, in part because of its perceived pertinence to widespread anxieties about criminality, decadence, and degeneration (Plotkin, Freud 15-16).24

In other respects, though, “Los perseguidos” sits uncomfortably with the production Quiroga directed at Caras y caretas and other popular magazines. Most obviously, it lacks the formal qualities that came to characterize his writing in the

“transitional” period leading up to the publication of Cuentos de amor, de locura, y de muerte (1917). It is significantly longer than most of his prior or subsequent narratives, its action is diffuse and repetitive, and it lacks the clear endpoint that he proclaimed to be the sine qua non of an effective short story. Given the eccentric position of “Los perseguidos” within Quiroga’s development, it is worth observing that although the story was written and published during the “transitional” period of his writerly

23 In the first decade of the twentieth century, Argentine psychiatry was positivist in ideology and closely associated with criminology (García, Entrada 78-91; Plotkin, Freud 15-19). Psychiatrists concerned themselves with identifying the causes of criminality, alcoholism, and madness in aid of sweeping projects of social reform, and their efforts became a major focus of attention among elites from several intersecting intellectual spheres. As Andrew Lakoff has demonstrated, José Ingenieros, the dominant theoretician of psychiatry and criminology, maintained close links with the same modernista literary circles in which Quiroga operated; likewise, writers including Rubén Darío gathered regularly with psychiatrists and criminologists at the Argentine National Institute of Hygiene directed by Ingenieros’s teacher José María Ramos Mejía (Lakoff 848-851).

24 Quiroga was by no means the only author who attempted to appeal to this popular fascination. Lakoff documents the extensive interactions between psychiatry and literature that form the backdrop of Quiroga’s story, stating that “not only were poets inspired by case reports but case reports could also become works of literature” (850).

73 professionalization, the constellation of autobiographical referents that appear in the story associate it with a somewhat earlier period of Quiroga’s life. The story’s action explicitly occurs prior to Quiroga’s 1903 trip to the Chaco with Lugones (“Esto pasaba en junio de mil novecientos tres” [141]), and therefore also prior to the 1904 publication of the collection El crimen del otro (Quiroga, Cuentos 141, n. 24).

“Los perseguidos” also recapitulates certain features of “El crimen del otro,” to the extent that it could be interpreted as a rewriting of that story. Gustavo San Román has documented the parallels in the two stories’ treatments of masculine persecution and of the homoerotic, sadistic dynamics of male rivalry. Focused as he is on the homoerotic

“dual relations” between the narrators of the two stories and their counterparts, Fortunato and Díaz Vélez, San Román does not observe the additional homology between the role of Poe in “El crimen del otro” and the role of Lugones in “Los perseguidos.” The action of each story unfolds within a masculine triad composed of the narrator, an actual literary figure, and the narrator’s double and rival (narrator-Poe-Fortunato in “El crimen del otro” and narrator-Lugones-Díaz Vélez in “Los perseguidos”). Although Lugones appears in

“Los perseguidos” as a character rather than as a spectral persecutor, he personifies, no less than “Poe” in “El crimen del otro,” the symbolic authority of literature and serves as the institutional guarantor of the text’s place in the literary system. A remark by Ángel

Flores with reference to Quiroga’s later flight from Buenos Aires to the Misiones region, suggests the partial equivalence of “Poe” and “Lugones” in the space of Quiroga’s literary initiation: “Lugones, Poe y un breve y decepcionante viaje a París . . . terminan por echarle de la ciudad e ir a refugiarse a la selva” (9). Flores’s comment encapsulates, albeit in inverted chronological sequence, three crucial, and troubled, rites of passage of

74 Quiroga’s early career: his disastrous 1900 trip to Paris, the tribulations of which are recounted in the posthumously published Diario de un viaje a París, his imitations of Poe in El crimen del otro, and his period of apprenticeship to Lugones in Buenos Aires.

Commensurately, the drama of “Los perseguidos,” no less than those of the Diario and

“El crimen del otro,” circulates around an anxiety-generating proximity to the source of literary capital, for which the triad “Paris/Poe/Lugones” would be an accurate figuration.

Although it responds in part to Quiroga’s increasingly extensive deployment of scientific discourses and motifs, the crucial role played by psychiatric discourse in “Los perseguidos” also has an antecedent in “El crimen del otro.” In the latter story, the narrator and Fortunato discuss madness incessantly even as they descend into it, generally in the citational mode that dominates the story. References to “la locura,” that is, are usually references to the madness of “Poe” and his stories, and the word “locura” itself is of more interest as a literary signifier, as when the narrator and Fortunato dispute at length how many times it appears in Poe’s “Ligeia,” than in the context of the scientific discourse of psychiatry. In “El crimen del otro,” as we saw, “la locura” is a radically transitive quality, circulating constantly between Poe, the narrator, and

Fortunato, and figures explicitly as a delirium of literary influence. More specifically, it is a quality coterminous with being or reading “Poe,” as suggested when the narrator asks his friend: “Qué efecto cree Vd. que le causaría a un loco la lectura de Poe?” Fortunato responds: “Lo probable es que todos creyeran ser autores de tales páginas. O simplemente, tendrían miedo de quedarse locos” (115). As Fortunato’s reply suggests, the condition of madness also entails its own simultaneous denial. He repeats the same point elsewhere in the story: “La locura también tiene sus mentiras convencionales y su

75 pudor. No negará Vd. que el empeño de los locos en probar su razón sea una de ellas”

(112). The narrator’s performance turns out to be a prolonged exercise in the “mentiras convencionales” of madness, following the formula provided by Poe’s stories. Talking about madness and being mad are inseparable, since each carries the other as its consequence, and the contagion of “la locura” is the same contagion to which one is exposed by reading “Poe.”

By drawing upon contemporary psychiatric discourse, most specifically José

Ingenieros’s 1903 study La simulación de la locura (Lakoff 863-64),25 “Los perseguidos” situates “la locura” in a somewhat different semantic orbit. At the beginning of the story, the narrator describes an evening at the home of Lugones and their “charla amena, como es la que se establece sobre las personas locas. Días anteriores aquél había visitado un manicomio; y las bizarrías de su gente, añadidas a las que yo por mi parte había observado alguna vez, ofrecían materia para un confortante vis a vis de hombres cuerdos”

(125).26 Whereas in “El crimen del otro,” references to madness invariably entail literary references (to Poe), here the narrator takes as a starting point his and Lugones’s first person observations of “las personas locas,” mediated through contemporary medical discourses and institutions. Discussion of madness initially appears as the province of the two “hombres cuerdos” who cultivate an amateur interest in psychiatry. The implicit literary subtext of the conversation, given that it is a conversation between two writers,

25 Ingenieros argued in this book that numerous instances of madness were in fact cases of feigned or simulated madness that responded to the adaptive instinct to avoid punishment. For a detailed discussion of the relation of Quiroga’s story to Ingenieros’s theories, see Lakoff 863-67.

26 Citing this passage, Lakoff notes that “an insane asylum [was] not an unusual destination for young poets [of] the period” (864).

76 suggests the decorative use of madness and science as subjects for fiction, such as was put into practice by Lugones in his collection of stories Las fuerzas extrañas (1906) and was not atypical for Buenos Aires modernista writers, many of whom read psychiatric journals and attended lectures and seminars on psychopathology (Lakoff 850).

Insofar as it anchors the discussion of madness in a stabilizing scientific metalanguage and its associated institutions, the space constituted by the narrator’s conversation with Lugones therefore stands in stark contrast to the world of “El crimen del otro,” in which “Poe”/literature and madness become indistinguishable from the outset of the narrative. The arrival of Díaz Vélez and the departure of Lugones disrupts the serenity of the scene and throws its clear distinction between “locura” and “cordura” back into crisis. In his first appearance, Díaz Vélez generates a disorienting mis-en- abîme precisely by re-aligning fiction and madness, commenting on his own condition as

“loco perseguido” by inventing “la ficción de un amigo perseguido” who, in turn, comments on his own condition: “comentaba él mismo su caso con una sutileza tal que era imposible saber qué pensar, oyéndolo . . . Pasó de este modo tres meses pavoneando sus agudezas psicológicas” (126). Through Díaz Vélez’s intervention, the initial space of distanced reflection gives way to a world much more like that of “El crimen del otro,” in which madness becomes indistinguishable from its own metalanguage and articulates itself entirely through delirious fictions. The story, in this respect, constitutes a narrative response to its primary psychiatric source text, Ingenieros’s Simulación de la locura, which aims above all at a precise delineation of true madness from its simulacra.

Quiroga’s portrayals of an uncontrollable transitivity between madness and second-order observations about madness find a surprising echo in Freud’s

77 Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographically Described Case of Paranoia, his study of

Schreber’s memoirs. Schreber’s persecution delusions involve a complex cosmology in which “divine rays” are used by his persecutors, including his psychiatrist Flechsig, to manipulate his thoughts and actions. In the final section of the study, Freud notes the similarities between psychoanalytic theory of libido and Schreber’s fantasy of “divine rays”: “Schreber’s ‘rays of God,’ composed of a condensation of solar rays, nerve fibres and spermatozoa, are in fact nothing other than the libidinal investments, concretely represented and projected outwards” (Schreber Case 66). He adds:

these and other details of the formation of Schreber’s delusion sound almost like endopsychic perceptions of the processes that I have assumed here to be constitutive for the understanding of paranoia . . . It will be for posterity to decide whether there is more delusion in the theory than I might like, or more truth in the delusion than others are today willing to believe. (66)

Freud’s insistence on the “truth” in Schreber’s “delusion” fits squarely within a larger critique of the treatments to which Schreber was subjected by the Saxon psychiatric establishment of his time. He criticizes the mishandling of Schreber’s illness in psychiatric institutions and suggests on several occasions that Schreber has achieved a more subtle understanding of his condition than his psychiatrists, since he comprehends on some level the reality of the unconscious: “[p]sychiatrists should learn a lesson from this patient and how in spite of all his delusion he makes an effort not to confuse the world of the unconscious with the world of reality” (34).

The mode of psychiatry dominant in both Quiroga’s Argentina and Freud’s and

Schreber’s Europe proceeded from the assumption “that the origins of all mental illness could be discovered in the morphology of the brain or of the central nervous system, and

78 that disorders had to be treated accordingly” (Plotkin 16). Schreber’s imagined persecutor Flechsig, in fact, was one of the best known and most influential scientists to insist on the “purely physical causes of mental illness” (Santner 70; cf. Kittler 295-98).

Freud’s contrarian insistence on the value of the “endopsychic perceptions” of the patient as a kind of allegorical description of the mechanisms that produce delusions receives further elaboration in in Lacan’s later remarks on Schreber: “here is someone who has penetrated, in a more profound way than is given to the common lot of mortals, into the very mechanism of the system of the unconscious” (S III 31). Lacan extends Freud’s argument to claim that the “very system of the delusional” may therefore “provide us with the elements of its own understanding” (S III 31).27 Freud’s willingness to recognize parallels between the language of madness and the language of psychoanalysis only extends so far. After observing the similarities between Schreber’s cosmology and his own theories, Freud reassures the reader that he nevertheless did not base his theory on Schreber’s ideas: “I am able . . . to call on a friend and expert in the field to bear witness that I developed the theory of paranoia before the contents of Schreber’s book came to my notice” (66). Freud’s protestation, however, lends his text a further

27 By most accounts, the value Freud placed on the patient’s speech and perceptions led to an initially cold reception for psychoanalysis in the positivist world of Argentine psychiatry. Germán García, for instance, argues that the “confianza en la biología” that dominated psychiatric thought “impid[ió] comprender el psicoanálisis” (84). However, Mariano Plotkin argues that José Ingenieros, the influential author of Quiroga’s main psychiatric source text for “Los perseguidos,” proved a partial exception to this consensus and thereby helped set the stage for a more positive view of psychoanalysis as positivism waned in later decades: “Although Ingenieros opposed psychoanalysis in principle, his interest in hypnosis and psychotherapy and his writings on sexual pathology and hysteria . . . generated and at the same time responded to an interest in topics that came close to psychoanalysis. His discussions of psychotherapy promoted the idea that the mental patient had to be heard. In other words, the patient’s discourse had a meaning; it should not be dismissed as delirium” (Freud 21).

79 resemblance to Schreber’s, as Santner observes: “Freud’s somewhat anxious claim not to be, as it were, one of Schreber’s epigones . . . is reminiscent of one of the central themes of Schreber’s psychotic fantasies, namely a confusion about and concern with the originality of his own thoughts, thought processes, and language” (My Own 21). Santner argues that the “transferential dimension to Freud’s passionate involvement with the

Schreber material . . . concerns . . . questions of originality and influence, questions pertaining to the transfer of knowledge and authority in the very domain that Freud was staking out as his own” (My Own 21). He shows that the various defections and rebellions that afflicted the psychoanalytic movement in the period of Freud’s involvement with the Schreber material had created a “state of emergency, meaning a state of emergence, of coming into being as well as crisis” (My Own 25, emphasis in text), and that this background provides an essential context for reading the anxieties driving Freud’s interest in paranoia.

Santner’s equation of “emergence” and “emergency” indicates the relevance of the fictional treatment of paranoid symptoms in “Los perseguidos” to the pressures of consecration attending Quiroga’s period of literary self-fashioning. No less than was the case in “El crimen del otro,” the process of emergence into authorized literary space entails an emergency in which the source of the writer’s authority takes on an uncanny proximity which lends it the appearance of a hostile, invasive force. The deployment of a discourse of quasi-psychiatric objectivity in the first scene of Quiroga’s story must be read intertextually as a preemptive assertion, contra “El crimen del otro,” of the non- resemblance of “literatura” and “locura.” The remainder of the story narrates a series of frustrated attempts to maintain paranoia as an object of literary representation rather than

80 allowing it to become coterminous with literary expression itself. Thereby, the story endeavors to contain the emergency of literary emergence put on display in “El crimen del otro.” The narrator’s tortured relationship with Díaz Vélez, simultaneously paranoid subject and object of the narrator’s paranoia, figures forth and enacts these efforts.

“Los perseguidos,” like “El crimen del otro,” represents within the narrative the process of literary initiation of which it forms part. The first scene situates the narrator, as was the case in “El crimen del otro,” in a position of literary apprenticeship by juxtaposing the nameless first-person voice with a proper name connoting literary prestige. The story’s first sentence, “Una noche que estaba en casa de Lugones . . .”

(125) echoes the statement “Poe era en aquella época el único autor que yo leía” (108) in

“El crimen del otro.” However, in the latter story, as we saw, the figure of Poe instantly takes on an oppressive proximity despite the intertextually mediated character of Poe’s presence. In contrast, and despite their physical proximity in the story’s opening scene, the narrator of “Los perseguidos” and Lugones enjoy a reassuring distance from one another. The physical boundary separating the two “hombres cuerdos” from the “mal tiempo” outside materializes the distance and objectivity that also characterizes their discussion of “las personas locas,” safely contained in “manicomios.” The narrator insistently situates himself and Lugones as equal partners in intellectual companionship, referring to their “charla amena” as a “confortante vis a vis” (125). The violent rivalry implicit in the relationship with the model, immediately at the forefront in “El crimen del otro,” is here initially displaced onto the storm outside: “la lluvia arreció de tal modo que nos levantamos a mirar a través de los vidrios. El pampero silbaba en los hilos, sacudía el agua que empañaba en rachas convulsivas la luz roja de los faroles” (125). The

81 inequality of status separating the nameless narrator, a stand-in for Quiroga when he was still a minor writer, from his prestigious host, whose name would be familiar to readers, similarly finds only an indirect representation in the narrator’s passing reference to his own relative physical infirmity: “Lugones tenía estufa, lo que halagaba suficientemente mi flaqueza invernal” (125). The harmonious homosocial relationship of symbolic exchange foregrounded in the initial encounter between the narrator and Lugones epitomizes precisely the dimension that is lacking throughout “El crimen del otro.”

The first appearance of Díaz Vélez interrupts the “confortante vis a vis,” and the narrator’s subsequent interactions with Díaz Vélez radically invert all the central terms of the relationship encapsulated in the “charla amena” with Lugones. Díaz Vélez literally emerges out of the storm: “Dada, pues, la noche, nos sorprendimos bastante cuando la campanilla de la calle sonó. Momentos después entraba Lucas Díaz Vélez” (125). (The narrator subsequently continues to associate Díaz Vélez with the storm: “En la primera noche de lluvia, fui a lo de Lugones, seguro de hallar al otro” [129].) The previous displacement of the tempestuous excess of masculine relations onto the outside falls apart with the entrance of Díaz Vélez as a kind of human figuration of the storm itself, and the narrator’s first conversation with Díaz Vélez actualizes everything that was excluded from his conversation with Lugones. The reassuring verbalization of madness in the

“charla amena” gives way to the “silencio” provoked by the “terrible mutismo” (126) of the intruder. The subsequent conversation between the narrator and Díaz Vélez reiterates the previous conversation with Lugones “sobre las personas locas,” but with a kind of obscene supplement: the object of the conversation is a participant in it rather than at a safe distance from it. Accordingly, the language of the text enacts a disruptive collapse

82 of énoncé and énonciation when Díaz Vélez speaks of persecution anxiety with “una sutileza no común en el mundo” and then proceeds to detail the case of someone suffering from that condition who likewise “comentaba . . . su caso con una sutileza tal que era imposible saber qué pensar” (126). The conversation itself also brings about in both of its participants the unprovoked suspicion that is its topic. When the narrator asks a question, he reports, “Díaz se puso serio y me lanzó una fría mirada hostil” (127). The narrator himself is soon infected with his interlocutor’s abrupt hostility: “es endiabladamente sutil su Díaz Vélez” (128), he remarks to Lugones.

The predominance of the verbal register characterizes the narrator’s relationship to Lugones throughout the story. His interactions with the latter always occur, as in the first scene, at his home, and always take the form of conversations, and Díaz Vélez is generally the object of these conversations (129, 137, 141). In contrast, the visual register dominates the scenes in which Díaz Vélez appears, and visual cues organize all of the narrator’s confrontations with his adversary. The opening description of Díaz

Vélez tracks in cinematically to focus on his eyes, which will remain his dominant feature throughout the story: “Su ropa negra, color trigueño mate, cara afilada y grandes ojos negros, daban a su tipo un aire no común. Los ojos, sobre todo, de fijeza atónita y brillo arsenical, llamaban fuertemente la atención. Peinábase en esa época al medio y su pelo lacio, perfectamente aplastado, parecía un casco luciente” (126). The tense chiaroscuro of the passage renders Díaz Vélez’s notable features as simultaneously opaque and translucent. His black clothes, hair and eyes, trap the narrator’s attention, but the “brillo” and “fijeza” of his eyes and the “casco luciente” of his hair, which stands as an uncanny prosthetic extension of his gaze, also emit a powerful glow. The narrator’s

83 subsequent reflection on his first encounter with Díaz Vélez returns to their exchange of gazes in order to draw an implicit contrast with his previous interaction with Lugones:

Lo que recordaba de [Díaz Vélez] era la mirada con que me observó al principio. No se la podía llamar inteligente, reservando esta cualidad a las que buscan en la mirada nueva, correspondencia – pequeña o grande – a la personal cultura – y habituales en las personas de cierta elevación. En estas miradas siempre hay un cambio de espíritus . . . Díaz no me miraba así. Me miraba a mí únicamente. (128; emphasis in text)

The reference to a “cambio de espíritus” between “personas de cierta elevación,” through a partial echo of the “confortante vis a vis entre dos hombres cuerdos,” alludes to the narrator’s relationship to Lugones, in which the shared symbolic dimension of “cultura” and “inteligencia” mediates all sensory contact. The removal of this mediation unleashes a series of simultaneously eroticized and aggressive visual interactions between the narrator and Díaz Vélez, as “Los perseguidos” transposes the anxiety-ridden structure of rivalry already examined in “El crimen del otro” onto the register of the gaze.

Their remaining confrontations perpetuate the aggressive “mirror stage” logic of rivalry discussed in relation to “El crimen del otro,” but the mirroring consistently possesses a far more literally scopic character. In one of the narrator’s street encounters with Díaz Vélez, the two literally behave as mirror images of each other “A los pocos metros pisé con fuerza dos o tres pasos seguidos y volví la cabeza; Díaz se había vuelto también. Cambiamos un último saludo, él con la mano izquierda, yo con la derecha, y apuramos el paso al mismo tiempo” (135). In contrast to the narrator’s accounts of his various visits with Lugones, where he never offers even a minimal physical description of

Lugones or of his house, all the scenes involving Díaz Vélez feature an overwhelming abundance of visual detail. Upon first beholding Díaz Vélez, the narrator already, to use

84 his own terms, “lo devora con los ojos” (137): “Me fijaba detalladamente en su cabeza, sus codos, sus puños un poco de fuera, las arrugas transversales del pantalón en las corvas, los tacos ocultos y visibles sucesivamente” (130). When Díaz Vélez returns his gaze, the encounter takes on an oppressively unmediated quality: “Vi sus ojos de arsénico fijos en los míos. Entre nuestras dos miradas no había nada, nada” (134). The narrator’s repetitive catalogues of the physical details of his friend’s appearance respond to this oppressive immediacy with a brutal dismemberment: “Tuve un momento de angustia tal que me olvidé de ser él todo lo que veía: los brazos de Díaz Vélez, los pelos de Díaz

Vélez, la cinta del sombrero de Díaz Vélez . . . (130). At the same time, the individualized details separated out by his devouring gaze acquire an erotic charge: “Al bajar la cabeza al reloj, vi rápidamente que la punta de la nariz le llegaba al borde del labio superior. Irradióme desde el corazón un ardiente cariño por Díaz” (131). Díaz

Vélez’s eyes become at one point the object of a brutal fantasy of penetration: the narrator feels “ganas locas de . . . hundir los dedos rectos en los dos ojos separados de

Díaz Vélez” (132).

The disarticulations of visual detail extend beyond the visual exchanges between the two protagonists. The narrator’s descriptions of the urban spaces that form the backdrop of the narrator’s frenetic pursuit of Díaz Vélez frequently assume a similar form. The enumerations of the individuals and objects that populate the streets of Buenos

Aires serve on several occasions to block the progress of the narrative precisely at the moments of tension that precede the narrator’s encounter with the object of his quest:

Cuando lo distinguí ya había sacado yo el pie de la vereda. Quise contenerme pero no pude y descendí a la calle, casi con un traspié. Me di vuelta y miré el borde de la vereda, aunque estaba bien seguro de que no

85 había nada. Un coche de plaza guiado por un negro con saco de lustrina pasó tan cerca de mí que el cubo de la rueda trasera me engrasó el pantalón. Detúveme de nuevo, seguí con los ojos las patas de los caballos, hasta que un automóvil me obligó a saltar. Todo esto duró diez segundos, mientras Díaz continuaba alejándose. (129)

Several quasi-photographic freeze frames like this one situate the narrator’s pursuit of

Díaz Vélez within a visual field chaotically flooded with fragmentary pieces of urban space that invade and destabilize the tense narrative sequence with apparently haphazard detail. However, such enumerations also infect the visual field with the persecutory gaze that binds the narrator to Díaz Vélez. The “negro con saco de lustrina,” in particular, possesses the same eerie combination of blackness and lustre we previously saw associated with Díaz Vélez and his simultaneously brilliant and opaque “mirada.” In a scene that occurs slightly later, the narrator, in the midst of following Díaz Vélez through the streets apparently without being observed by the latter, suddenly feels that he is being observed from all sides:

Estoy seguro que más de diez personas me vieron. Me fijé en tres: Una pasaba por la vereda de enfrente en dirección contraria, y continuó su camino dándose vuelta a cada momento con divertida extrañeza. Llevaba una valija en la mano que giraba de punta hacia mí cada vez que el otro se volvía. La otra era un revisador de tramway que estaba parado en el borde de la vereda, las piernas bastante separadas . . . El otro sujeto era un individuo grueso, de magnífico aporte, barba catalana, y lentes de oro. Debía haber sido comerciante de España. (131)

Just at the moment the narrator believes himself to be perfectly concealed from view, the barrage of visual detail evokes a panoptic world of individuals and objects which both absorb and reciprocate the invasive surveillance of the two “perseguidos.”

In “El crimen del otro,” the panoptic gaze belonged explicitly to the story’s literary “master,” Poe. Poe’s successor, Lugones, is curiously absent from the scenes of

86 voyeurism and pursuit that compose the central section of the narrative. Indeed, a taboo seems to prevent Lugones and Díaz Vélez, whose relationships to the narrator are contrasted through drastic alternations between the verbal and visual registers, from occupying the same physical space throughout most of the unfolding of the narrative. In the opening scene, Díaz Vélez initiates a conversation with the narrator only when their host leaves the room: “Díaz se mantuvo aparte del ardiente tema . . . Por eso cuando

Lugones salió un momento, me extrañó su inesperado interés” (126). Subsequent to this moment, Lugones and Díaz Vélez never appear together in the story. Despite Lugones’s reference to Díaz Vélez as “un individuo terrible” (127), a curious link exists between them, one which the narrator never attempts to explain. When Díaz Vélez first arrives at

Lugones’s house, he has come with a particular purpose: “Habló a Lugones de ciertas chancacas que un amigo le había enviado de Salta” (126). These sugar cakes mediate all of the interactions between Díaz Vélez and Lugones. The next time the narrator visits

Lugones in search of Díaz Vélez, he states: “Supe por Lugones que había estado en su casa, llevándole las confituras – buen regalo para él” (129). Later, in a note the narrator receives from Díaz Vélez, the latter writes: “Si ve a Lugones, dígale que me han mandado algo que le va a interesar mucho,” which the narrator automatically interprets as meaning that “Díaz le ofrecía más chancacas” (137). Díaz Vélez’s gifts to Lugones lend their relationship a dimension completely absent from the narrator’s interactions with

Lugones. A supplementary object of exchange connected metonymically to the narrator’s tense, eroticized interactions with Díaz Vélez, the sugar cakes index a dimension of Lugones that remains inaccessible to the narrator. In a telling disavowal,

87 the narrator passes over the unexplained fact of Lugones’s relations with Díaz Vélez without any comment.

The gifts of sugar cakes find a peculiar parallel in the story’s implicit treatment of

Díaz Vélez as a gift from Lugones to the narrator. The repeated use of possessive pronouns prior to Díaz Vélez’s name provides the clearest signal of this transaction.

After his first meeting with Díaz Vélez, the narrator refers to the latter, addressing

Lugones, as “su Díaz Vélez” (128). Towards the end of the story, Lugones echoes this formulation in reverse, talking to the narrator about Díaz Vélez as “su Díaz Vélez” (137).

The shift in the referent of the deictic “su” corresponds to a subtle shift that occurrs in the homosocial triad, also visible in the altered trajectory of the sugar cakes. After their first encounter, Díaz Vélez sends sugar cakes to the narrator through Lugones (129). Later,

Díaz Vélez informs Lugones through the narrator that he has “algo que le va a interesar”

(137), which the narrator surmises to be more sugar cakes. The reconfiguration of the the narrator, Lugones, and Díaz Vélez corresponds to the alteration in the circuit of exchange mediated by the sugar cakes by which the narrator becomes the intermediary figure between Lugones and Díaz Vélez.

Meanwhile, although Lugones remains absent through most of the story’s action, a number of passages indirectly posit him (as with Poe in “El crimen del otro”) as a hidden force orchestrating the encounters between the two “perseguidos” behind the scenes. At one point, when the narrator lapses into involuntary repetition of his antagonist’s name, he remarks: “ – Dí-az Vé-lez – repetí con la misma impresición extraña a toda curiosidad, como si una tercera persona invisible y sentada con nosotros hubiera intervenido así” (133). Since there are only three characters in the story, the

88 vague reference to a “tercera persona” necessarily invokes Lugones, on some level, as the third party in the conversation whom the narrator regards as an invisible participant in the interaction. Commensurately with this implication, Lugones’s posture in the story frequently appears to be more complex than initial appearances suggest. For instance, although absent from the room during the first conversation between the narrator and

Díaz Vélez, Lugones later reveals that he was eavesdropping from the other room: “Es muy inteligente in sus buenos momentos. Ya lo habrá notado porque oí que conversaban” (127). Subsequent conversational cues serve to incite the narrator’s curiosity about his new acquaintance: “Interesante el individuo, ¿eh?” (128). Later,

Lugones expresses repeated amusement as a distanced spectator of their interactions, laughing whenever the narrator mentions his interactions with Díaz Vélez to him (129,

137).

The nature of Lugones’s curiously manipulative “gift” of Díaz Vélez to the narrator finds some elucidation in the later sequences of the story, in which the narrator distances himself from Díaz Vélez and returns to Lugones’s house on several occasions.

During his visits, Lugones and the narrator use the latter’s interactions with Díaz Vélez as a pretext for elaborating fictions: “en cinco minutos de especulación a su respecto hicímosle hacer a Díaz un millón de cosas absurdas” (137). After Díaz Vélez’s mental breakdown and internment in an asylum, the narrator reports that he again returned to his friend’s house and recounted the entire story of his interactions with their mutual acquaintance: “fui a almorzar con Lugones y contéle toda la historia – serios esta vez”

(141). Díaz Vélez, then, serves specifically within the literary relationship of symbolic exchange between Lugones and the narrator as a pretext for a production of narrative.

89 The intensity and fruitfulness of this production stands in contrast to the bland sterility of the two men’s initial “charla amena.” In this sense, the transaction by which Lugones

“gives” Díaz Vélez to the narrator allegorizes Quiroga’s literary apprenticeship itself, the insertion into a sanctioned space of literary production which is the enabling condition of

“Los perseguidos.” But as with “El crimen del otro,” literary initiation is not reducible to the symbolic transfer of authority through identification with a model – rather, the story emerges precisely at the point at which the relation with the model takes on an oppressive, annihilating proximity and can no longer be contained within the terms of the opening scene’s “confortante vis a vis.” Díaz Vélez himself, as well as the exotic sugar cakes whose constant but largely unremarked circulation between the three men functions as signifier of the uncomfortable excesses of homosocial exchange, stand in for “the psychotic kernel that serves as a support for (symbolic) reality” (Zizek, Looking Awry

35). That is to say, the elements which initially seem to disrupt the first scene’s harmonious symbolic exchange turn out to be the necessary but disavowed supplements of literary consecration, facilitating and structuring the initiatiory process implicit in the narrator’s relations with Lugones.

Nomen and Taboo: William Wilson/Díaz Vélez

Lucas Díaz Vélez figures as the disturbing remainder of the literary apprenticeship portrayed in and enacted by “Los perseguidos,” materializing the disavowed reverse side of the narrator’s harmonious homosocial bond with Lugones. He assumes this dimension, however, according to a repertoire of inherited motifs which allow the unsettling surplus represented by his presence to take on a recognizable

90 fictional form. It is here that Poe, the problematic patron of “El crimen del otro” and of

Quiroga’s literary career more generally, reenters the scene. As we saw, in “El crimen del otro,” the gradual colonization of the text by formal and referential materials drawn from “The Cask of Amontillado” blocks the desired accession to literary autonomy in a redoubled manner. On the plane of narrative, the intrusion of “Poe” converts the narrator into a kind of automaton, while on the plane of narration the text becomes little more than a mechanical transcription. In “Los perseguidos,” in contrast, Quiroga’s recourse to a precursor text by Poe, “William Wilson,” permits the emergency of literary emergence that stands at the story’s center to be distilled into the inherited nineteenth-century form of the Doppelgänger narrative. The relation of “Los perseguidos” to the Doppelgänger tradition might not be immediately apparent. In the classic Doppelgänger texts, including

“William Wilson,” the persecutory double shares the protagonist’s name and is literally physically identical to him. Moreover, in many cases, the appearance of the

Doppelgänger marks the irruption of a patently supernatural narrative logic – for instance, in the early German horror film, “Der Student von Prag,” taken as the paradigmatic case of the double in Otto Rank’s 1914 study, the protagonist’s twin and persecutor emerges out of a mirror. The relationship between the narrator and Díaz

Vélez in “Los perseguidos” lacks both of these characteristic elements, and initially seems to replicate the basic patterns of Doppelgänger fiction only through the basic motif of persecution by a male adversary. Nevertheless, Quiroga inserts “Los perseguidos” into the “paranoid gothic” genealogy of Doppelgänger fictions by way of a series of oblique allusions to Poe’s major contribution to that tradition, “William Wilson.”

91 The most obviously allusive sequence in “Los perseguidos,” which nevertheless displays none of the citationality of “El crimen del otro” in its appropriation of material from Poe, coincides with the culminating moment of the two antagonists’ mutual pursuit.

In a nighttime scene whose hallucinatory aspect does not allow the reader to discard the possibility that it is a projection of the narrator’s mind, Díaz Vélez enters the narrator’s home and pronounces his first name: “Y luego, al rato, sus pasos avanzaron por el patio.

Se detuvieron en mi puerta y el intruso quedó inmóvil . . . Y luego, después de una larga pausa: ‘¡Horacio!’ ¡Maldición! ¿Qué tenía que ver mi nombre con esto? ¿Con qué derecho me llamaba por el nombre?” (137). This is the first and only time that the narrator is given any name in the course of the story, and the name, notably, coincides with that of the story’s author. The narrator’s violent reaction to the intruder’s utterance renders explicit the silent taboo that prevents his name from appearing elsewhere in the story, even as the names of Lugones and Díaz Vélez appear repeatedly. The violent reaction elicited in the narrator by the mere calling of his name echoes a pivotal moment in Poe’s story. When the second William Wilson, a former school companion of the narrator, commits the first of the series of aggressive intrusions into the first William

Wilson’s – that is, the narrator’s – life that will repeatedly disrupt the latter’s increasingly audacious criminality, the the first Wilson recounts their confrontation as follows: “he strode up to me, and, seizing me by the arm in a gesture of petulant impatience, whispered the words ‘William Wilson!’ in my ear . . . Ere I could recover the full use of my senses he was gone” (278).

Quiroga’s reuse of Poe’s scene of interpellation points to a more extensive network of indirect allusion uniting the two stories through their shared foregrounding of

92 names. The violent impact of the act of naming in the two scenes examined above attains a more concrete significance if we observe that, in both “William Wilson” and “Los perseguidos,” the drama of persecution pivots crucially around names and naming, and specifically around a taboo applied to names that finds its most acute expression in the passages cited. The opening sentences of “William Wilson” give an ambiguous initial formulation to the taboo surrounding the name shared between the narrator and his antagonist, the name which also gives the story its title: “Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appelation” (271-2). The name “William Wilson,” in other words, stands in as a substitute for another name whose “unparalleled infamy” (272) renders it anathema.

Notwithstanding this claim that the pollution of his name stems from its association with his reprehensible actions, the narrator subsequently provides a further and somewhat divergent explanation for his avoidance of his real name: “notwithstanding a noble descent, mine was one of those everyday appelations which seem, by prescriptive right, to have been, time out of mind, the common property of the mob. In this narrative I have therefore designated myself as William Wilson, – a fictitious title not very dissimilar to the real” (274). He later reiterates this rationale in greater detail:

I had always felt aversion to my uncourtly patronymic, and its very common, if not plebeian praenomen. The words were venom in my ears, and when, upon the day of my arrival, a second Wilson came also to the academy, I felt angry with him for bearing the name, and doubly disgusted with the name because a stranger bore it, who would be the cause of its twofold repetition. (276)

The phrase “twofold repetition” would appear to be redundant unless we note the name

“William Wilson” is already repetitive, in that the first name and surname begin with the

93 same syllable and share the same bisyllabic structure with a trochaic accent. However, both the repetitions in the name “William Wilson” and the repetitions of the name

“William Wilson” occasioned by the appearance of the second William Wilson merely activate the implicit iterability of the name as such. By virtue of their status as a

“shifers,” names paradoxically mark the individual as individual precisely by stamping him or her with an interchangeable and transferable social identity. As the statements quoted above illustrate, the fact that a name is, by its very definition, “common property of the mob,” lends it an unsettling quality for the first William Wilson. The particular semantic implications of the name “William Wilson” (=“Will, son of Will”) lay bare the function of the name as a carrier of paternal authority across generations and therefore a sign of the inessential, evanescent character of that authority – a situation whose ambivalent dynamics bear strong parallels to those of literary citation and allusion.

Names feature no less prominently in the tense interactions at the center of “Los perseguidos.” We have observed already that the story foregrounds the proper name

“Lugones” at the outset in much the same way that “El crimen del otro” foregrounded

“Poe” – like “Poe,” “Lugones” simultaneously connotes the institutional sanction the story assumes for itself as a literary text, while at the same time orienting the story’s action around a referent in the immediate circumstances of its production and publication.

In contrast, the narrator remains decidedly nameless within the story, his surname passed over in silence and his first name only emerging in the story except for the scene discussed above where Díaz Vélez summons him as “Horacio.” Despite divergent circumstances – Quiroga’s two antagonists do not, like Poe’s, share a name – the

“nomenophobia” provoked by Díaz Vélez’s illicit act of uttering “Horacio” echoes that

94 which the appearance of the second William Wilson causes in Poe’s protagonist.

Tellingly, a few lines after the utterance of “Horacio,” the name taboo is reinstated when the narrator quotes Díaz Vélez’s letter to him as addressed to “Mi estimado X” (137).

Naming taboos also punctuate the narrator’s sequence of encounters with Díaz Vélez.

When recounting their introduction, he remarks: “Según costumbre, Lugones nos presentó por el apellido únicamente, de modo que hasta algún tiempo después ignoré su nombre” (126). The narrator’s initial lack of a first name for his acquaintance corresponds to the threateningly unmediated intimacy that characterizes their relations from the outset. The tension surrounding names subsequently manifests itself in the narrator’s frenetic alternation between three versions of Díaz Vélez’s surname: “Díaz

Vélez” (“Díaz Vélez prometióle enviar modos para ello” [126]), “Vélez” (“Vélez habló poco” [126]), and “Díaz” (“Díaz habló poco” [127]). The narrator’s frantic interactions with his antagonist on several occasions display a fixation on the latter’s name, as when he begins murmuring repeatedly: “’Dí-az Vé-lez’ . . . ‘Dí-az Vé-lez’” (133). His interlocutor’s indifference seems to entail a recognition of the utterance as a ritualized incantation rather than a summons: “Díaz no se volvió a mí, comprendiendo que no lo llamaba” (133).

The triplication of the components of the antagonist’s name (“Lucas Díaz Vélez”) lends it an uncontainable excess, especially in contrast with the sparse formality of

“Lugones” and the near total absence of the narrator’s name from the narrative space.

The three components of the name also mirror the triadic structure of relations between its bearer, the narrator, and Lugones. Furthermore, the initially unknown and largely unmentioned first name “Lucas” echoes, in its first syllable and final phoneme, the

95 surname of Lugones, who, as we saw earlier, in the entire course of the narrative only appears once in the same place as Díaz Vélez. The name “Lucas Díaz Vélez” replicates something of the excessive, repetitive phonetic and rhythmic pattern of “William

Wilson.” The repeated trochaic accent of each of its three components and the threefold repetition of the final phoneme “s” – which, significantly, functions in Spanish as a plural ending – make the name seem to spill out of itself. Moreover, the homonymic associations of the two surnames (“Díaz”=“días,” “Vélez”=“velo”/“velar”) echo the chiaroscuro of the physical descriptions of their bearer. The phonetic qualities and semantic suggestiveness of the name itself, in other words, materialize the unsettling surplus embodied by Díaz Vélez. As with “William Wilson,” though, the ritualized, phobic interactions of the narrator with his own name and the name of his antagonist suggest that the peculiar excesses that adhere to a name like “Lucas Díaz Vélez” bring to light an uncanny dimension belonging to names and naming in general.

Both Freud and Otto Rank discuss names and the traditional taboos pertaining to them in direct conjunction with their investigations of the uncanny qualities of

Doppelgänger narratives. For Freud and Rank, phobias regarding names and the terror inspired by the appearance of the double belong to a larger complex of anxieties surrounding paternity and succession, in which fear of shadows, effigies, and representations in general also figure. In the following passage, Rank synthesizes succinctly these apparently disparate cultural phenomena and renders explicit their relevance to the stories just discussed, by way of an explicit mention of Poe:

Attached to this belief [in the uncanny power of the shadow] is another superstition, associated with the rebirth of the father in the son. Savages who believe that the soul of the father or grandfather is reborn in the child

96 fear, according to Frazer, too great a resemblance to his parents. Should a child strikingly resemble his father, the latter must soon die . . . In European culture the belief is still retained that if two offspring of the same family bear the same name, one must die. We recall here the same “nomenophobia” in Poe’s “William Wilson.” (52)

The sequence of paternal succession encapsulated in the name “William Wilson” and the paternal function assumed by Lugones as the patron and guarantor of the narrator and the story itself demonstrate the direct link, in both stories, between names and the authority that accords to the subject a position in the social order. In order to elucidate the uncanny implications of this relationship, we should recall the Freudian-Lacanian dialectic of narcissism, which finds a kind of literary equivalent in “El crimen del otro.” In Freud’s and Lacan’s accounts, the projection of the ego ideal in the mirror image possesses at once a reassuring and a threatening aspect. While specular identification covertly allows the perpetuation of the circuit of narcissism, it also assumes a threatening aspect by way of the alienating exteriorization of the self that this perpetuation necessarily entails.

In “The Uncanny,” Freud explains the uncanny qualities of the Doppelgänger in similar terms. “[T]he ‘double,’” he argues, “was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego” (136). He offers as instances of the genesis of the double out of

“primitive” cultural practices the production of funereal fetish objects representing the deceased and the belief in the eternal soul (“probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first

‘double’ of the body” [136]). Subsequently, Freud continues, “[w]hen this stage [of primary narcissism] has been surmounted, the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes an uncanny harbinger of death” (136). This assessment of the emergence of the double replicates the structures used to account for the transitivity that permits the ego ideal, the essential mediating term of the subject’s

97 social integration, to become a feared persecutory agency in the delusions of paranoid patients. In the Freudian account, all of the alienating externalizations of identity required by the process of socialization possess the same uncanny potential to generate a terrifying antagonism by materializing the radical exteriority of the most intimate kernel of the self. A related assessment of the uncanny dimension of names gives impulse to the “nomenophobia” on display in both “William Wilson” and “Los perseguidos.”

“William Wilson” explicitly narrates the repeated failure of the process of socialization. The story’s narrator, the first William Wilson, vacillates between remorse and boastfulness as he recounts his refusals to subordinate himself to hierarchical structures of authority. In his family home, he recalls near the outset of the story, “my voice was a household law; and at an age when few children have abandoned their leading-strings, I was left to the guidance of my own will, and became, in all but name, the master of my own actions” (272). William Wilson’s imagined autonomy can only exist “in all but name” insofar as it signals precisely his refusal to assume a name and to be inserted thereby into the larger networks of authority implied by that assumption.

Similarly, the disturbance of the first William Wilson’s “supreme and unqualified despotism” (274) at the school by the arrival of the second William Wilson seems to emerge from the mere fact of his sharing and thereby bringing attention to his name than from any actions, since “Wilson’s rebellion . . . was in truth acknowledged by none but myself” (274). As the passages cited above demonstrate, the literal refusal to assume a name manifests the broader failure of the standard rites of initiation to integrate William

Wilson – first in the familial context, later in that of educational institutions, and later in the entry into society at large. Such a reading illuminates the otherwise obscure scene of

98 interpellation cited earlier, and reveals moreover why the function repeatedly assumed by

Wilson’s double and persecutor is simply to remind him that he has a name.

Quiroga’s drama of persecution revolves no less than Poe’s around the problem of assuming a name. The name that cannot be uttered within the narrative space, however, is the same name that accompanies the title of the text “Los perseguidos” in published form: “Horacio Quiroga.” The placement of the latter name in its appropriate paratextual position manifests precisely its insertion into the sanctioned space of literary production, for which Lugones, as patron and overseer of that space, serves within the narrative as a privileged synecdoche. I have argued here that this insertion, and the concomitant assumption of a symbolic mandate issued by the institution of literature, constitutes the starting point for the fictions of “El crimen del otro” and “Los perseguidos,” both of which ultimately dramatize their own conditions of possibility or impossibility. The simultaneously enabling and destabilizing deployments of the names “Poe” and

“Lugones” correspond to the dual ontological status of these two names and therefore index the alienating force of the stamping of the name of the author as a carrier of literary capital. Poe in particular, in this sense, fulfills a curious dual function in the troubled initiatory rites represented by Quiroga’s early production. On one hand, as the literary model and signifier of surplus literary prestige, his name functions as precisely that which is oppressive, intolerable, mortifying about the assumption of authorship as the assumption of a name. On the other hand, Quiroga’s inheritance from Poe furnishes the materials by which the anxieties of literary consecration find narrative formulation.

99

CHAPTER TWO

Borges “by Lacan”: Paranoid Agency and Cultural Antagonisms in Modern Argentina

“En el sueño hay formas que se repiten, quizá no hay otra cosa que formas.” -Jorge Luis Borges, Otras inquisiciones (1952)

“Que haya una estructura que se repite es una cosa, y otra cosa es lo que estoy diciendo, que existen formas que se encarnan en distintas manifestaciones . . . si veo ciertas formas y las entiendo como manifestaciones de una verdad preexistente, esto es la base de todo sistema idealista. En todo sistema idealista, el espíritu ya está constituido y la historia es la manifestación de ese espíritu . . . En cambio, la teoría psicoanalítica no encuentra ahí el fundamento. Es precisamente lo que hay que disolver, según la teoría psicoanalítica.” -Oscar Masotta, Lecturas de psicoanálisis (1975)

“Los ‘congresos’ lacanianos a los que Masotta se refiere hablan de una cierta parodia de los encuentros entre Freud y Fliess: esta referencia supone que sin la transferencia de trabajo no existe alianza posible con el descubrimiento del psicoanálisis: ‘El nombre de “congreso”’ – escribe Masotta – ‘para identificarnos con Freud en tiempos en que el psicoanálisis no era institucional. Por lo mismo: y lo dijimos en nuestro primer congreso. Esta designación no carece para nosotros de humor.’” -Germán García, La entrada del psicoanálisis en la Argentina (1978)

Symmetrical “Nullibieties”

The Villa Ocampo, located in the affluent Buenos Aires suburb of San Isidro, was the primary residence of prominent Argentine writer and publisher Victoria Ocampo and the focal point of twentieth-century Latin America’s most famous literary salon. During the five decades in which Ocampo made it her home, the Villa received visitors as eclectic as Igor Stravinsky, Aldous Huxley, and Le Corbusier, and was frequented by

Ocampo’s close associates in the Argentine literary world of the period, most notably

100 Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Now a UNESCO heritage site, the house contains numerous memorabilia attesting to friendships with the major figures of the modern artistic and intellectual elite, including autographed volumes from figures ranging from André Malraux to Virginia Woolf to Rabindranath Tagore.

The presence in the Villa Ocampo library of four works bearing the inscription of

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan might be seen as merely offering further testimony to Victoria Ocampo’s broad circle of acquaintance among the vanguard of twentieth century European culture. A survey of Ocampo’s epistolary corpus reveals that she met

Lacan during a 1930 trip to Paris that also brought her into contact with Cocteau, Le

Corbusier, and others. She recorded her impressions of the young psychiatrist in several letters to her sister Angélica. She makes note of Lacan’s “energía desaforada,” and indicates that she found him increasingly “intolerable” as their acquaintance developed.

In one letter, she refers to him as having “sueños napoleónicos de poderío” (Cartas 24).

Beyond these letters, the four signed works in the Villa Ocampo library offer the only surviving testimony to this fleeting and little-remarked acquaintance.

In the broader context of Argentine culture, however, Lacan stands out among the many illustrious Europeans who contributed signed volumes to the Villa Ocampo’s collection. In contemporary Argentina, the stature of the school of psychoanalysis Lacan pioneered equals or even overshadows the longstanding prestige of Victoria Ocampo and her circle. In a recent and comprehensive historical study of psychoanalysis in

Argentina, Mariano Plotkin notes that Argentina “vies with France for first place in the number of Lacanian analysts” (Freud 1) and “is today one of the world centers of

Lacanian practice” (226). Because of this “special relationship” between Argentina and

101 Lacanian psychoanalysis, Plotkin notes, “Spanish is now one of the official languages of the Lacanian movement” (226). The Bonaparte reference that appears in Ocampo’s description of Lacan therefore entails an unanticipated irony. To the extent that Lacan and his school have achieved any Napoleonic foreign “conquests,” they have occurred primarily in the cultural sphere once presided over by Victoria Ocampo.

Notwithstanding their acquaintance, Lacan’s “conquest” of Argentina occurred not only without Ocampo’s assistance, but in spite of her systematic and apparently deliberate neglect of his subsequent career. In the words of an Argentine psychoanalyst who has traced the complete trajectory of their acquaintance, “Las décadas siguientes premiaron la ambición napoleónica de [Lacan]. Todo parece indicar que su amiga no siguió de cerca esa apoteosis. La ausencia de Lacan en las páginas de Sur lo corroboran”

(Tendlarz 3). Between 1932 and 1976, Lacan sent Ocampo personally signed copies of four of his major publications, each containing a fondly affectionate dedication; one addresses its recipient, in Spanish, as “Victoria, mujer única del siglo.” We may safely speculate that Lacan was operating with some awareness of Ocampo’s sphere of influence in the world of Spanish language letters, largely the product of her control of the prestigious journal Sur. As Amy Kaminsky has observed, “Ocampo and her literary magazine Sur were . . . critical players in the development of Argentina in the consciousness of the creators of European high modernism . . . Victoria Ocampo must be acknowledged as a pivotal figure in the construction of Argentina in the global imaginary” (70). Published by Ocampo and her closest associates between 1931 and

1992, Sur had as one of its missions the dissemination of major European intellectual and cultural trends in Argentina and Latin America. Had Ocampo chosen to provide a venue

102 for any of Lacan’s work, it would have been certain to reach a wide audience of Spanish- speaking literati, but neither Sur nor the publishing house associated with it published any work by or about Lacan, nor did Ocampo use her influence to seek publication in Spanish for any of Lacan’s writings.

Recent studies by Mariano Plotkin and Hugo Vezzetti have shown that psychoanalysis became a pervasive point of reference in Argentine culture as early as the

1930s, and continued to expand its influence into both elite and popular spheres in

Argentina over the subsequent four decades. Its initial arrival in the Southern Cone nearly coincided with the publication of Quiroga’s “Los perseguidos,” one of the earliest fictional treatments of contemporary Argentine psychiatry: “the first mention of psychoanalysis in a scientific forum in Argentina” (Plotkin, Freud 13) occurred in a 1910 lecture by Chilean physician Germán Greve, which gave a positive account of Freud’s theories. Later watershed moments in the Argentine acceptance of psychoanalysis also proceeded in parallel with some of the literary developments that germane to this study.

The Argentine Psychoanalytic Association (APA) was formally established in 1942, two years after the publication of Bioy Casares’s La invención de Morel and the Antología de la literatura fantástica, edited by Borges, Bioy, and Victoria Ocampo’s sister Silvina, and two years before the first edition of Borges’s Ficciones (1944) (Plotkin, Freud 44-69).

By the time this institutional consecration occurred, both Plotkin and Vezzetti assert, psychoanalysis had already attained a strong foothold in popular consciousness.

In spite of these parallel chronologies and cognate enterprises, one glaring exception to the ubiquity of psychoanalyis in modern Argentine culture was Sur, the most consequential and long-lived cultural organ of twentieth century Argentina. In this

103 regard, Ocampo’s neglect of Lacan forms part of a consistent pattern of indifference to

Freud and the lines of thought and practice he initiated. In an essay dedicated to the relationship between Sur and psychoanalysis, Argentine psychoanalyst and historian

Germán García identifies only six brief articles published on Freudian topics during the entire sixty-one years of existence of the journal (Psicoanálisis 105). Moreover, throughout the thirty-three year operation of the Editorial Sur, Ocampo and her associates oversaw the publication of only one book associated with Freudian psychoanalysis,

Theodor Reik’s El masoquismo y el hombre moderno. Ocampo’s close associate Jorge

Luis Borges for the most part shared this reticent indifference, but he occasionally also voiced a hostile aversion toward Freud and his school.

Plotkin provides a more equivocal assessment than García of the relationship between the Sur circle and psychoanalysis, observing that the publication “did discuss

Freud and psychoanalysis on several occasions,” but treated it “more as a curiosity, a new system of thought . . . fashionable in Europe” (37). Plotkin does not, however, take adequate account of the conflict between the Freudian and Jungian schools, and his commentary therefore ignores the fact that Sur writers’ affection for the theories of apostate analyst Carl Gustav Jung was closely linked to a hostility to Freud. Borges lauded Jung at different times as having a “wide and hospitable mind” (Burgin 109) and as “más distinguido” than Freud (qtd. in García, Psicoanálisis 103). In a late interview, similarly, Borges stated that he had “always been a great reader of Jung” (Burgin 109).

Jung was also, as Plotkin notes (37), an acquaintance and correspondent of Victoria

Ocampo, and was the only writer associated with psychoanalysis who enjoyed general favor with the wider circle associated with Sur. In stark contrast with her evident lack of

104 interest in Lacan’s work, Ocampo personally arranged the 1934 publication of Jung’s

Tipos psicológicos in a translation by Spanish avant-garde writer Ramón Gómez de la

Serna. In the preface to that edition, Jung expresses “rendida gratitud a Victoria Ocampo por el desvelo admirable que ha puesto en la publicación de la presente obra” (qtd. in

García, Psicoanálisis 95). The Editorial Sur subsequently released Spanish translations of two other works by Jung, in 1961 and 1967.

García has offered a polemical reflection on what may have repelled the Sur group about (non-Jungian) psychoanalysis, in which he reiterates the fundamental terms of Oscar Masotta’s combined critique of Borgesian and Jungian “idealismo.” In his essay on psychoanalysis and Sur, García argues that Ocampo and her associates saw as their main project the cultivation and perpetuation of an “elite de la sabiduría” (96) dedicated to disseminating the values of aesthetic freedom and autonomy. Proceeding from this perspective, they regarded Freud’s “hermeneutic of suspicion” as degrading to the achievements of high culture in its alleged reduction of all human activity to the workings of the unconscious sexual drives. Thus, García notes, one of the few articles on Freud published in Sur tellingly refers to the “innegable vulgaridad” (103) of the Viennese doctor’s ideas, echoing Borges’s assessment of Freud as a “charlatan” and a “kind of madman . . . laboring over a sexual obsession” (Burgin 109). Jung met with approval among the writers associated with Sur because his model of the unconscious avoids reading the products of high culture as epiphenomenal expressions of libidinal impulses: it proceeds, in Masotta’s phrase, “de lo bajo a lo alto” (Lecturas 130). Another dismissive remark by Borges clarifies this contrast: “In the case of Freud, it all boils down to a few rather unpleasant facts” (Burgin 109). In the Jungian version of

105 psychoanalysis, conversely, art and literature retained the independence and dignity the

Sur group attributed to them.

García’s account of the hostility of Ocampo, Borges and their circle toward

Freudian psychoanalysis proceeds out of one of the common lines of attack directed against the prestigious Sur group by left-wing Lacanians (García among them) beginning in the 1950s. In a blistering 1956 polemic directed at the magazine and some of its main contributors, Masotta describes Sur as “algo así como la vedette encargada de exhibirse rodeada de los mejores ‘espíritus’ argentinos”; the result, he complains, is an “hemorragia de espiritualidad” (Conciencia 129). “[Q]ué es lo que se entiende en Sur por espíritu?”

Masotta asks rhetorically, and then parrots what he regards as the ideology of the magazine and those who produce it: “Espíritu, arte, moral, ciencias: es necesario salvar a las elites de la irrupción de las masas en la historia. Salvar a las elites es salvar al

Hombre” (Conciencia 129). From the vantage point of Masotta and García, the sheer scandal Freudian psychoanalysis evidently represented for the “elites de la sabiduría” surrounding Sur was one major source of its power as a force for cultural renovation.

Given this confrontational background, it is unsurprising that in the work of Oscar

Masotta, the work of Borges enjoys an absence symmetrical with the absence of Freud and Lacan from the literary orbit of Sur. In an extensive and eclectic oeuvre in which, in addition to the exposition of Lacanian theory, Masotta weighs in on most of the major themes and figures of Argentine politics, literature, and culture, Borges stands as a curious lacuna, appearing only in the occasional passing reference.28 However, anecdotal

28 For instance, in an essay otherwise dedicated to asserting that “los críticos del grupo Sur son malos críticos,” Masotta calls Borges “un caso bastante interesante,” mainly in so

106 evidence suggests that Masotta understood his systematic avoidance of Borges as a principled stance that concealed a more complex relationship to the famous author.

Germán García recalls: “Cuando le sugerí que escribiera algo sobre Borges para la revista

Literal, me respondió que no quería abandonar su costumbre de no hablar sobre Borges.

Por supuesto, Oscar Masotta no ignoraba que la respuesta recordaba el estilo de Borges”

(“Masotta” 6). Notably, this dual attitude of avoidance and indebtedness echoes a remark from Masotta’s Introducción a la lectura de Jacques Lacan in which he invokes the tense mimeticism governing his relationship to Lacan: “ahí donde repite tal vez traiciona y . . . ahí donde transforma no es sino porque quiere repetir” (24).

García’s anecdote suggests that Masotta’s avoidance of Borges was highly

“Borgesian” in form and substance, particularly in the manner in which it foregrounds the problematic status of the precursor. Following a cue from Lacan himself, we might add that precisely in being so “Borgesian,” Masotta is also being highly “Lacanian.” In a footnote to the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” (the main subject of Masotta’s

Introducción as well as his Lecturas de Freud y Lacan), Lacan alludes to Borges’s “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins,” which had been published in French in Sartre’s magazine Les temps modernes in 1955. Borges’s works, Lacan remarks, “harmonize . . . well with the phylum of our subject” (Muller and Richardson 53, n. 7). Lacan’s initially unrequited affection for things Argentine, it appears, extended beyond Victoria Ocampo to the other most illustrious figure in Ocampo’s circle. Although the psychoanalyst does not offer any further comments on the supposed “harmony” of his work and Borges’s, we

far as Borges’s work has been positively reviewed by Jean-Paul Sartre even as the Argentine literary left has used Sartre’s theories to demean it (Conciencia 220).

107 may speculate that the latter’s insistence on the mechanical transmission of literary material according to a logic that exceeds the agency of authors would have appealed strongly to Lacan, given his infamous insistence that the signifier “writes” the subject rather than vice versa.

Moreover, a detail of Lacan’s appropriation of the Freud detractor Borges for

Freudian purposes stands in surprising continuity with the foregoing discussion. The extravagant neologism “nullibiety” – defined as “the state or condition of being nowhere”

– provides the occasion for Lacan’s fleeting but remarkable reference to the work of

Borges. Lacan uses this term to describe the peculiar ontological status of the purloined letter in Poe’s story, which the police fail to find despite a thorough search of the

Minister’s rooms: “Must a letter, then, of all objects, be endowed with the property of nullibiety: to use a term which the thesaurus known as Roget picks up from the semiotic utopia of Bishop Wilkins?” (38). Lacan deploys “nullibiety” to name one of the main properties he attributes to the signifier (for which the purloined letter serves as a quasi- allegorical stand-in): its status as the present index of an absence.

Most important for my purposes here is that “nullibiety” might adequately describe the symmetrical absences of psychoanalysis from the writings of the Sur group and of Borges from the work of Masotta – both of them absences marked by a simultaneous disavowed presence.29 John Irwin detects in Lacan’s footnote on

“nullibiety” an “originality anxiety” (446) with regard to the work of Borges, and

29 García, using the Lacanian term “exitmacy” (a conflation of “intimacy” and “interiority” that attempts to render Freud’s concept of “das Unheimliche” [see Dolar, “‘I Shall’” 4-5]), has made a similar equation: “La extimidad . . . de Oscar Masotta [se resuelve] en una ubicuidad similar a la de Jorge Luis Borges” (Psicoanálisis 226).

108 specifically finds in Lacan’s reading of Poe’s “Purloined Letter” a deep and complex indebtedness to Borges’s rewriting of Poe in “La muerte y la brújula” and other stories:

“Lacan’s reference to the Wilkins essay may indeed represent the return of a repressed content, the resurfacing of Lacan’s sense of how much his own reading of ‘The Purloined

Letter’ either owed directly to, or was anticipated by, Borges’s reading/rewriting of Poe’s story” (446). Irwin’s remark resonates with a number of other discussions of the tense relations between the competing claims to authority made by literary and psychoanalytic texts. Along similar lines, Shoshana Felman has proposed literature as the “unconscious of psychoanalysis” (Writing 261), Harold Bloom posits Shakespeare as the precursor- father whose legacy Freud must disavow even as he parasitically appropriates it, and Neil

Hertz reads Freud’s analysis of the father-complex at the center of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s

“Sandmann” as a redoubled commentary on his troubling literary debts to Hoffmann.

The overt antagonisms documented above have by and large kept the literary sphere we associate with Borges and that connected with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis – both crucial elements of twentieth century Southern Cone cultural history, particularly in terms of the region’s productive relations with European cultural models – at a distance from each other. The foregoing discussion suggests that the mutual avoidance of Argentine literature and psychoanalysis and the symmetrical

“nullibieties” this avoidance has produced are symptomatic of the “influence anxieties” governing both as a consequence of their shared engagement with the processes that accord legitimacy to a discourse and its practitioners. In this sense, I would argue, the simultaneous flourishing and the hostile or indifferent interactions of these two crucial areas of accumulation of symbolic capital in modern Argentina stem from their

109 overlapping interrogations of the fraught dynamics of authority in a peripheral cultural space.30

The confrontation of psychoanalysis and literature just proposed may serve to reorient a longstanding scholarly discussion of the body of literature to which Borges

30 In a recent article on the work of Oscar Masotta, Philip Derbyshire foregrounds parallels between Masotta and the work of Borges and others associated with Sur in terms compatible with my own approach here. He regards both as “cultural symptom[s] whose writings may be read as forms of reading from the periphery” and posits that “Masotta’s trajectory . . . exemplifies the dilemmas of a peripheral intelligentsia in relation to metropolitan theoretical production” (11). Derbyshire fruitfully roots the theoretical preoccupations that emerge from Masotta’s engagement with Lacan (as well as with Sartre and others) in his locus of enunciation as a theoretician, stating that his “choice of themes constantly refers back to Masotta’s own existential and historial position and maps out a particular instance of intellectual dependency” (11). Masotta, he notes defined his primary task as the divulgation of important theoretical trends for an Argentine audience: “the close reading of texts . . . produces an existential and professional identity that was always threatened with dissolution because of its conjunctural illegitimacy (a predicament common to the intellectuals of Argentina)” (16). His source of legitimacy as an intellectual disempowered him at the same time, by making him into a mere conduit of words that come from somewhere else. “Such questions,” as Derbyshire notes, “underpin much of Lacan’s work” (16), and therefore the theoretical objects of discussion are redoubled back into and reflect on the position of the theoretician. Masotta’s stance vis-à-vis Lacan resembles the Lacanian subject’s stance vis-à-vis the signifier: “Masotta, as intermediary, is occupied by the letter, the signifier – Lacanian theory – yet can do no more than bear it, utterly incapable of manipulating it, since the signifier speaks the subject” (20). For Derbyshire, Masotta’s use of Lacan thus ends up reiterating the colonial positionality he critiqued elsewhere in the work of Borges and the Sur group. In electing “to make the intellectual into the bearer of a truth that originates elsewhere,” Derbyshire proposes, “Masotta paradoxically repeats Sur’s gesture even as he attacks it” (12). Masotta, by this account, ends up trapped in the deadlock of neo-colonial subordination to European culture that he began his career denouncing: “mimicry is one solution to the problem of a self-constituted intellectual periphery to its supposed centre, a relation that marks a constant trope of Argentine culture through the twentieth century. We might consider this to be a form of colonialism at the level of theory . . . Masotta registered this problem in his critique of Sur,” but because his “transmission of Lacan was restricted to exegesis,” he can only “map out a particular instance of intellectual dependency” (11). Derbyshire’s critique repeats the familiar claims of what we might call “cultural dependency theory” exemplified in Fernández Retamar’s attack on Borges as a “típico escritor colonial” (52).

110 (like Bioy Casares and Quiroga) is generally understood to belong at least in part: the

“fantastic.” Since the publication of Freud’s essays on Hoffmann and Wilhelm Jensen and Otto Rank’s study of the Doppelgänger, psychoanalytic interpretations have featured prominently in the body of criticism surrounding fantastic literature, but the legitimacy of these interpretations has come under frequent fire on the grounds that psychoanalytic readings inappropriately pathologize authors and texts. Conflicts surrounding the special relationship between these two areas of writing therefore generally center on the same question that has animated my entire discussion: the relative authority of psychoanalysis and literature in relation to each other. I have drawn on the work of several critics who claim that the writings of psychoanalysts like Freud, Lacan, and Masotta evince an

“influence anxiety” vis-à-vis their debts to literary texts. As embodied by Shakespeare

(in Bloom’s account), Hoffmann (in Hertz’s), or Borges (in Irwin’s), “literature” assumes the status of a simultaneously enabling and disempowering precursor for the psychoanalysis pioneered by Freud and Lacan. Conversely, attempts to accord psychoanalysis the authority to speak about literature have provoked parallel anxieties among those scholars determined, like Ocampo, Borges, and their circle, to preserve the autonomy of the latter field.

Exemplifying the agenda just described, Tzvetan Todorov, in his 1970 study The

Fantastic, attacks the psychoanalytic tendency to translate “internal” literary elements into the terms of “external” psychological ones (150), and categorizes psychoanalytic criticism as an “extrinsic” approach inimical to a true “poetics” focused on the operations of the literary text itself. For Todorov, pychoanalysis illegitimately assumes an authority to speak about literature and explain literary texts by translating them into its terms. A

111 similar conviction has informed a number of influential readings of the Latin American appropriation of the fantastic genre.31 For instance, in a book dedicated to codifying the

Latin American “neo-fantastic” as practiced by Borges, Julio Cortázar and others, Jaime

Alazraki advocates an “intrinsic” criticism based on “análisis de las estructuras imanentes y no ya impuesto desde el exterior” (129) and seconds Todorov’s dismissals of the critical tendency towards translation of literary texts into any metalanguage, psychoanalytic or otherwise (127 et passim). With regard to Todorov’s and Alazraki’s admonitions, it is appropriate to repeat ’s assertion that “the recurrent debate opposing intrinsic to extrinsic criticism stands under the aegis of an inside/outside metaphor that has never been seriously questioned” (123). I would add, however, that since this “inside/outside” metaphor occupies a privileged place in the paranoid imaginary, scholars who deploy it find themselves drawn into the same anxious invocations of illegitimate, invasive, overbearing figures of authority that comprise the common paranoid inheritance of (fantastic) literature and psychoanalysis. Engaged as they are with stipulating the precise dimensions of the territory shared between these two fields, such scholars assume into their own discourse a characteristically paranoid concern with establishing and defending boundaries from unauthorized intrusions from without.

In Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, Rosemary Jackson accuses Todorov of neutralizing the subversive force of fantastic writing by denying its imbrication with psychoanalysis. She asserts that fantastic literature “deals so blatantly and repeatedly

31 As Daniel Balderston has demonstrated, a great deal of scholarship on Borges in particular has been dominated by an “irrealist” emphasis that reads his texts as self- enclosed “aesthetic systems” (Out 2-4).

112 with unconscious material that it seems absurd to try to understand its significance without some reference to psychoanalysis” and argues that Todorov’s dismissal of psychoanalytic readings “is bound up with his neglect of political or ideological issues . .

. For it is in the ‘unconscious’ that social structures and norms are sustained within us”

(6). Jackson’s allegation that Todorov’s literary purism falsifies the essential relations of domination and conflict disclosed in literary texts resembles some of the criticisms we have seen advanced by Bloom, García, and Masotta against Borges’s literary idealism and the related interpretive schema of Jung. However, although her argument helpfully foregrounds the emphasis on the traumatic transmission of structures of authority shared in psychoanalytic and fantastic writing, Jackson repeatedly precipitates the recontainment of the “subversive” textual elements she identifies precisely by resolving them into a psychoanalytic metalanguage, much in the manner that Todorov castigates. In the following passage, for example, Jackson absorbs a heterogeneous set of literary signifiers into the orbit of a single psychoanalytic signified: “From the basic pull towards entropy derive many of the thematic clusters of the fantastic, from obsessions with death, cannibalism, animism, to graphic depictions of changes of form” (81). The very terms which ostensibly pose a challenge to structures of authority are here revealed to be expressions of a determinate desire (“the basic pull towards entropy”) which, in

Jackson’s account, admits relatively clear conceptualization through the authoritative psychoanalytic account of the death drive.32 In asserting the authority of psychoanalysis to speak about literature, Jackson simultaneously conceals the challenges literature has

32 The “death drive,” as Jane Gallop has shown, is one of the slipperiest signifiers in psychoanalytic thought (98-104).

113 repeatedly posed to psychoanalysis, perhaps most evident in the “influence anxieties” literary texts have produced in psychoanalytic writers from Freud to Lacan to Masotta.

Meanwhile, and beyond his apparently categorical dismissals, some of Todorov’s statements on psychoanalysis suggest an alternative model whose implications accord with several of the claims I have advanced. In the final chapter of his study, Todorov asserts that “psychoanalysis has replaced (and thereby made useless) the literature of the fantastic” (160), not by explaining it away, but by appropriating its themes: “the themes of fantastic literature have become, very literally, the themes of the psychoanalytic investigations of the past fifty years” (161). Similarly, he speaks of “parallels” (161) between the interpretations offered by psychoanalysis and the narrative functions of the fantastic text, stating that “[t]he psychoanalyst’s attitude . . . is analogous to that of the narrator of a fantastic tale in asserting that a causal relation exists between apparently unrelated facts” (162). Todorov’s assertion, in turn, involves a “paranoid” operation comparable to the one it describes, insofar as it posits a causal relationship between literary and psychoanalytic discourses but leaves the precise causal terms of that relationship somewhat inscrutable. Contrary to his own statements elsewhere in the text, then, Todorov presents fantastic literature and psychoanalysis as relating to each other not as an object of study to a metalanguage but as modes of writing which display overarching formal similarities to one another and operate in overlapping discursive spheres. Similarly, I am here attempting to read psychoanalytic critical texts and case studies as belonging to an area of writing which developed in part out of a complex intertextual dialogue with fantastic literature (beginning with Freud’s essay on Hoffmann and Otto Rank’s The Double). In accordance with Shoshana Felman’s distinction

114 between “application” and “implication” (“An application implies a relation of exteriority between the two fields in question; implication, by contrast . . . a relation of interiority”

[Writing 261]), I read Latin American deployments of fantastic narrative not as an imaginative substitute for the second-order discourse of psychoanalysis, but as a cognate, apposite literary praxis. Both areas of writing, I claim, mobilize what I have called a paranoid account of influence in response to the functioning and malfunctioning of contested regimes of symbolic authority.

Borgesian Fantasy and the Delirium of Literary Capital

In what are, to my knowledge, the only existing studies of the geopolitics of literary paranoia, Patrick O’Donnell and Emily Apter have both scrutinized the frequent deployment of paranoid motifs in postwar U.S. fiction. For both, the paranoid modes of representation exploited by writers like Pynchon, Gaddis, Mailer, and DeLillo register the panoptic fantasies of the hegemonic Cold War-era U.S. imaginary. In these typically epic-scale experimental novels, O’Donnell argues,

the representation of paranoia in the artificial plots of fiction can, indeed, be seen as a site where epistemology and ideology meet. As a way of knowing, paranoia is a mode of perception that notes the connectedness between things in a hyperbolic metonymizing of reality. It can be conflated with – is the mirror image of – the more blatant monolithic and incorporative aspects of ‘late capitalism’ . . . as a ‘world system.’ (182)

For Apter, similarly, the novels’ “delirious aesthetics of systematicity . . . held in place by the paranoid premise that ‘everything is connected’” formulate in narrative terms a broader cultural fantasy of “one-worldedness,” which “envisages the planet as an extension of paranoid subjectivity vulnerable to persecutory fantasy, catastrophism, and

115 monomania” (366). In O’Donnell’s and Apter’s readings, literary paranoia enacts the fantasies engendered out of the hegemonic standpoint of a dominant literary space.

Through its imaginary identification with the hegemonic political and economic structures in which it is enmeshed, this body of fiction threatens to assert itself as an

“intractable literary monoculture that travels through the world, absorbing ”

(Apter 374). The reading of Latin American literary paranoia I am proposing complements O’Donnell’s and Apter’s. Like them, I read paranoid motifs as registering the centripetal and centrifugal pressures of global literary space. However, whereas in the novels they examine, the dominant system’s totalizing fantasies of knowledge and control generate a destabilizing delirium in which that system’s own fundamental alienation from itself comes to the surface, my analysis is concerned instead with the strategies by which a dominated literary space, as a recipient of literary models from the dominant space, uses the unsuspected connections, uncontrolled flows, and “delirious systematicity” of the paranoid imagination to reorder the hierarchical relationships of the transnational cultural system.

Pascale Casanova’s sociologically oriented account of global literary dynamics provides a broadly applicable model of the diffuse, shifting system of power relations within which literary production, reception, and circulation take place in the modern world. In particular, her work examines the broader institutional context of the complex transnational networks in which peripheral cultural spaces like Argentina are enmeshed.

As she demonstrates, the world literary system, no less than global political structures and financial markets, is hierarchical and stratified, and moreover possesses its own semi- autonomous geopolitics: “The key to understanding how this literary world operates lies

116 in recognizing that its boundaries, its capitals, its highways, and its forms of communication do not completely coincide with those of the political and economic world” (11). Although the operations according literary prestige overlap with the systems governing the political and economic spheres, Casanova insists that they possess their own dynamics and their own institutional distribution, which encompasses forms of state power such as ministries of culture and universities as well as private entities like publishing houses, foundations, and prize committees. She argues that this specific set of linked structures, mechanisms, and institutional contexts governs the global literary system and permits the circulation of prestige in the form that she designates “literary capital,” which she defines as “both what everyone seeks to acquire and what is universally recognized as the necessary and sufficient condition of taking part in literary competition” (17). In these terms, we would have to understand Villa Ocampo, Sur, and

Borges and Bioy’s landmark publications in the early 1940s as notable and adjacent sites of a kind of “primitive accumulation” of literary capital in modern Argentina.

Literary capital should not be mistaken for a real, tangible entity. Rather, paradoxically, it exists only as a product of the consensus that, in turn, enables the functioning of the institutions that allow its circulation:

The existence . . . of this literary capital . . . is therefore possible only by virtue of the very belief that sustains it and of the real and tangible effects of this belief, which supports the functioning of the entire literary world. All participants have in common a belief in the value of this asset . . . Literary capital so surely exists, in its very immateriality, only because it has . . . objectively measurable effects that serve to perpetuate this belief. (17)

When a writer is consecrated through the requisite mechanisms – publications, prizes, public homages, and so on – the recognition he or she obtains depends entirely on a tacit

117 acceptance on the part of the relevant actors of the validity of these mechanisms, but this acceptance itself relies on the conviction that the mechanisms simply measure a quality intrinsic to the writer’s work. , whose analyses of “symbolic capital” form the basis of Casanova’s account, calls this circular logic of institutional power

“performative magic.” Institutions, Bourdieu argues, function by way of an enabling misrecognition of performative acts of designation as constative recognitions of objectively existing qualities. The universal formula of institutional acts and processes of investiture, then, is: “become what you are” (Bourdieu, Language 121). The institution consecrates by retroactively attributing as essential the qualities adduced to justify the consecration. Only the successful functioning of the appropriate institutions enables the circulation of symbolic – in this case, literary – capital, but this successful functioning relies, in turn, on a belief that these same institutions are inessential and secondary terms, merely recognizing and naming the qualities that they in fact call into existence.

Casanova highlights the intrinsic inequalities of literary space, determined as its geography is by the uneven distribution of capital, and more importantly of the institutions dictating its distribution, among different national and regional entities. She partitions the literary world into “dominant and dominated literary spaces,” according to the relative accumulation of literary capital achieved in particular places and by particular languages and traditions, although she clarifies that “it is not sufficient to imagine a binary opposition [of the dominant and the dominated] . . . . One would do better to speak of a continuum, for the many forms of antagonism to which domination gives rise prevent a linear hierarchy from establishing itself” (83). Writers inhabiting “dominated” literary spaces have developed a repertoire of strategies in response to the unfavorable

118 disposition of the institutionally determined system of power relations which determines their possibilities for recogition. These strategies, Casanova argues, form the basis of significant literary innovations which in turn contribute to the remapping of literary space: “literary dependence favors the creation of a range of solutions that writers from dominated countries have both to reinvent and to defend in order to create modernity, which is to say to change the structure of the world of letters” (178). Although the individual cases she examines demonstrate a wide variety of “solutions,” Casanova’s schema allows for a basic generative typology:

Two great families of strategies supply the foundation for all great struggles within national literary spaces. One is assimilation, or integration within a dominant literary space through a dilution or erasing of original differences; on the other differentiation, which is to say the assertion of difference, typically on the basis of a claim to national identity. (179)

It should be evident that these two strategies, and the various ways in which they might be productively combined, correspond partially to the receptive and hostile attitudes to foreign cultural influence exemplified, respectively, by José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel and

Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Calibán.

Another of the best-known contributions to the debate between “assimilation” and

“differentiation” in the Latin American context is Borges’s 1932 essay “El escritor argentino y la tradición,” which might be read as a kind of manifesto for the project of cultural renovation through bold eclecticism undertaken by Borges, Ocampo, and their circle. An initial reading of the essay in terms of Casanova’s categories might produce the impression that it is an impassioned defense of the strategy of “assimilation.” Borges, after all, declares that “nuestra cultura es toda la cultura occidental” (272) and “nuestro

119 patrimonio es el universo” (274) while rejecting forcefully “la idea de que los escritores deben buscar temas de sus países” (270). Likewise, it is tempting to read Borges’s assertion that “los argentinos, y los sudamericanos en general” are in a privileged position to “manejar todos los temas europeos . . . con una irreverencia que puede tener, y ya tiene, consecuencias afortunadas” (273) as a celebration of the particular form of freedom available to the peripheral writer through the path of literary assimilation. Reading

Borges as an “assimilationist,” Retamar polemicizes that the Argentine author is “un típico escritor colonial” whose writing is “un museo . . . donde se reúnen las creaciones que no son de allí” (52).

The limitation of this reading is that rather than taking sides in the debate between

“assimilation” and “differentiation,” Borges in fact dismisses it altogether as a “una apariencia, un simulacro, un pseudo-problema” which is, in fact, simply “una forma contemporánea y fugaz del eterno problema del determinismo” (273). Arguments about national literary traditions replicate the problem of determinism insofar as they attempt to organize a collection of heterogeneous – in this case literary – events into a predictable sequence of causes and effects occurring within a recognizable order. Nationalists identify particular literary features as responding to and proceeding from their belonging to a national tradition, but in doing so they arbitrarily privilege certain features of given texts at the expense of others and retroactively project necessity onto a configuration assembled by accumulated contingencies. Thus, Borges argues, “[t]odo lo que hagamos con felicidad los escritores argentinos pertenecerá a la tradición argentina” (272), but such a datum only gains importance in the first place once one makes the arbitrary move of privileging nationality as a central criterion of literary classification.

120 Moreover, rather than celebrating the Argentine writer’s eclectic bricolage as a space of literary freedom, Borges ridicules literary freedom in general as a delusion premised on the “error de suponer que las intenciones y los proyectos importan mucho”

(273). As a retort to this error, he presents the writer, more or less in the same terms as in

“La flor de Coleridge,” as a kind of automaton whose efforts are directed by an inscrutable order indifferent to individual intentions and desires. He cites Plato, in a passage quoted previously, to precisely this effect: “Platón dijo que los poetas son amanuenses de un dios, que los anima contra su voluntad, contra sus propósitos, como el imán anima a una serie de anillos de hierro” (274). It is crucial to note, however, that even though the “voluntad” and “propósitos” of the author may be irrelevant in a final sense, they do not cease to form part of the paranoid writing-machine imagined by Plato.

Similarly, while Borges’s essay seems at times to dispense with the dichotomies of universal and national, cosmopolitan and regional as the insertion of texts into arbitrary, improvised orders, the alternative, in which the writer fully acknowledges and assumes the status of unwitting puppet of an order beyond any possible comprehension, appears to render the fabrication of artificial organizing codes like nationality a necessary and enabling misrecognition.

Borges’s fantastic logic of literary production, in its insistence upon the simultaneously arbitrary and necessary function of the organizing codes of nationality and tradition, echoes Casanova’s description of the circular premises of literary capital.

As we saw, Casanova asserts that a consensus regarding the neutrality and universality of a given distribution of literary prestige masks the essential function of particular institutions (institutions like Sur and the Editorial Sur) as the instruments of the

121 circulation of literary capital, which only accrues to literary objects in response to the consecration such institutions may grant or withhold. Rather than simply revealing the arbitrary, contingent status of institutions and the distorting frameworks they disseminate to naturalize their consecrating function in the transmission of literary prestige, both

Casanova and Borges imply that the “symbolic violence” driving this operation is finally irreducible. Along similar but avowedly Freudian lines, Slavoj Zizek contends that an

“undistorted view [of ]” would in fact falsify the fundamental truth of that reality by bypassing “the real of social antagonism, the unsymbolizable traumatic kernel that [finds] expression in the distortion of reality” (“I Hear You” 117). Borges’s vividly paranoid representation of the writer as “originally decentered, part of an opaque network whose meaning and logic elude [him]” (Zizek, “I Hear You” 117), foregrounds precisely the dimension of coercive, invasive force concealed in the (nationalist, regionalist, cosmopolitan, or avant-garde) symbolic configurations used to project necessary causal relations onto contingent, antagonistic cultural configurations.

The milieu out of which “El escritor argentino” emerged witnessed significant and complex shifts in the circulation of literary capital, to maintain Casanova’s terminology, in Latin America, shifts in which Borges, Ocampo, and the circle surrounding Sur played an important part. Previous scholarship has characterized the transformations of the period in terms recognizable from Casanova’s account of the

“antagonistic forces” shaping world literary space: “opposed to the centripetal forces that strengthen the autonomous and unifying pole of world literary space . . . are the centrifugal forces associated with the national poles of literary space – the forces that work to divide and particularize by essentializing differences” (109). Rama, for instance,

122 describes the period up to approximately 1910 as a “período internacionalista” or

“período modernizador” (14) in which the predominant literary center of gravity for Latin

America was European and especially French. He argues that this configuration subsequently gave way to a “período nacionalista y social” (15), lasting from approximately 1910 to 1940, in which a distinct set of thematic and formal concerns come to dominate literary production. In general, he asserts, though not without major exceptions, writers in the latter period showed a greater interest in local and national themes and settings. This development corresponds in part to the emergence of large urban middle classes in numerous Latin American countries, whose demand for local cultural products fueled the explosive growth of publishing in a number of capital cities, especially Buenos Aires (Rama 15-17; Sarlo, Modernidad 13-29). In terms of the shifting emphases accorded to Rama’s previously discussed criteria, “independencia, originalidad, representatividad,” the period witnessed a reorientation in which an earlier emphasis on “independencia,” exemplified by the modernista project of achieving literary modernity, autonomy, and recognition, especially by importing the formal practices of modern French verse (Jrade 12-25), receded in favor of a growing concern for

“representatividad.” The emergent literary mode of the period, Rama argues, demanded that literature respond directly to the question of national identity: “quedó estatuido que las clases medias eran los auténticos intérpretes de la nacionalidad, conduciendo ellas . . . al espíritu nacional, lo cual llevó a definir nuevamente la literatura por su misión patriótico-social” (16). In Argentina, such tendencies in literature corresponded to the rise of corporatist nationalism in politics, a trajectory that culminated in the electoral victory of Juan Domingo Perón 1946.

123 Borges’s contrarian attitude toward the national question and hostility toward the nationalist political and cultural agenda in Argentina, as articulated in “El escritor argentino y la tradición” and in his many attacks on Perón and his followers, have encouraged many critics to situate his work outside the general tendencies toward national differentiation and social engagement predominant in the period. Thus, Rama locates Borges’s work of this period within a competing current of “narrativa cosmopolita que . . . se adaptó rápidamente al impacto vanguardista” (49), and which stood in stark contrast, aesthetically and ideologically, to the “telluric” and social realist novels of the

‘20’s and ‘30’s. Rama’s bipartite schema of a “pugna de regionalistas y vanguardistas”

(21), however, does not address the notable features that distance Borges’s mature literary practices from the contemporary projects of the avant-garde. As Beatriz Sarlo argues, “[e]l espíritu de ‘lo nuevo’ está en el centro de la ideología literaria y define la coyuntura estética de la vanguardia. Este eje de diferenciación la enfrenta . . . con

Lugones y el modernismo” (Modernidad 95). As I will have occasion to examine in greater detail in the next chapter, Latin American indebtedness to the foreign literary models favored by Borges, including fantastic and science fiction narrative as well as detective fiction (all especially exemplified by the work of Edgar Allan Poe), has its origins in the latter half of the nineteenth century33 and already occupies a prominent position in the literary repertoire of modernismo.34 Indeed, the conventions drawn from

Poe, Maupassant, and other authors belonging to these currents already exhibit definite

33 See Morillas Ventura, ed., El relato fantástico rioplatense en el siglo XIX.

34 See e.g. Dolores Phillipps-López, ed., Cuentos fantásticos modernistas (Madrid: Cátedra, 2003).

124 signs of exhaustion in Horacio Quiroga’s belated attempts to join the modernista banquet in the first decade of the twentieth century – a fact, as we shall see, of which Quiroga himself was painfully aware – and as Sarlo argues, the models offered by writers like

Lugones had become quaint or even reactionary by the 1920’s, and served primarily as a point of differentiation for the early Borges and the other major innovators of that period.35 The centrality of the fantastic tale in the literary projects of Borges and Bioy

Casares in the 1930s and 1940s thus suggests more than a little deliberate anachronism.

In response to the apparent marginality of Borges’s preferred literary genres in a cultural panorama dominated by nationally oriented regionalismo, socially and politically engaged realism, and cosmopolitan, formally experimental vanguardismo, critics have elaborated several alternative ways of integrating the paradoxical dependence of the continent’s most influentially innovative group of writers upon somewhat unfashionable literary models. María Vitarelli has summarized some of these attempts, grouping them into “la postura determinista [que] encuentra el origen de esta copiosa literatura fantástica en una carencia del medio social que predispondría el cultivo de una ‘fantasía compensatoria’” and “aquellas posturas que ven en la narrativa fantástica una literatura de la transgresión, que pretende cuestionar un status quo dado” (109). Beatriz Sarlo offers one variation on the latter option, reading Borges as practicing, in the apparently escapist mode of fantasy, an oblique form of political and social critique:

35 “Borges was extremely hostile to modernismo and to Lugones . . . The elimination of Lugones was one of the tasks to which Borges, with great conviction, applied his critical irony” (Sarlo, Jorge Luis Borges 23-4). However, Borges frequently expressed admiration for Lugones’s collections of fantastic tales. See, for example, his prologue to Bioy Casares’s La invención de Morel.

125 Borges always withdrew from an open discussion of contemporary politics in his literature, yet the question of the ways in which order imposes itself upon human communities can be found woven into the fabric of his plots. Indeed, he is examining the ideological and cultural conditions of society even as he outlines imaginary worlds which legitimately belong to the purest tradition of fantastic literature. (Jorge Luis Borges 81)

For Sarlo, Borges’s meticulous construction of fantastic orders of alternative reality responds, no less than realist forms of fiction, to a political and social imperative – albeit an ultimately conservative one – which aims to “disturb reality not through representation but through contradiction or divergence” (80). Jean Franco, on the other hand, has read the persistence of the fantastic in Latin America in a manner closer to the model of

“fantasía compensatoria” outlined by Vitarelli:

Realism and naturalism have produced few good novels in Spanish America. Reality is too complex and bizarre, society too dispersed, for the Balzacian style to be successful. On the other hand, certain writers who used fantasy and allowed the imagination free play came nearer to a true picture of society. Indeed, from Modernism onward, there had been a tradition of fantastic writing . . . If fantasy literature had a flickering but persistent life, the same cannot be said of the psychological novel, of which there were few outstanding examples. (301)

In Franco’s analysis, reminiscent of Marshall Berman’s account of the “modernism of underdevelopment” (Berman 172-248),36 the fantastic serves as a substitute for inherited

European genres of social critique by providing a more adequate rendering of a social order whose dimensions, since they do not correspond to those of the metropolis, cannot be captured by its dominant modes of representation. For both Sarlo and Franco, then,

36 Berman’s focus is on nineteenth century Russia, which he argues “wrestled with issues that African, Asian, and Latin American peoples would confront at a later date” (175). Basing his argument on the Russian literature of the period, he asserts that “in relatively backward countries, where the process of modernization has not yet come into its own, modernism, where it develops, takes on a fantastic character, because it is forced to nourish itself not on social reality but on fantasies, mirages, dreams” (235-6).

126 the fantastic genre operates in the Latin American context as a kind of eccentric realism which registers the impact of rapid political and technological modernization through its formal distortions rather than through a more transparently mimetic approach to contemporary reality.

The arguments just summarized, although they recapitulate to a certain extent the

“irrealist” approach to Borges that has been dismantled by Daniel Balderston in Out of

Context, all present the deployment of specific genres as responding to some degree to particular social and political dynamics. In a distinct but partially complementary manner, I am suggesting that modern Latin American borrowings of features of the

“fantastic” and related European genres constitute an interrogation of the cultural politics of literary borrowing itself. Put differently, the paranoid narrative motifs characteristic of

Poe and other nineteenth century literary models function in the work of Borges, as well as Quiroga, Bioy, and others, primarily as a way of addressing the pressures exercised by the literary center on the literary periphery. The literary models adopted by the authors under consideration here initially traveled to Latin America as a function of the French vogue for Poe and his avatars in a period in which Paris dictated the tastes of most Latin

American literary elites. The uses of fantastic, gothic, and related motifs examined here emerged out of the decline of the dominant literary system of the modernista period and reached their peak in the contested environment, riven by a variety of competing claims to cultural authority, in which literary production took place subsequently. The textual practices I am dubbing paranoid constitute a particular formal response to the antagonism between the “centrifugal” pull of cosmopolitan integration and the “centripetal” pull of local autonomy. Although the texts I examine here have frequently been identified with

127 the cosmopolitan pole of narrative in the period in which they appear, they are united not by an uncritical identification with this pole, but rather by an engagement with the fundamental deadlock driving the antagonism between cosmopolitan and regionalist modes: what Bourdieu would call the symbolic violence underwriting the circulation of literary capital.

As Casanova argues, the successful functioning of the institutions which enable the meaningful production, reception, and consumption of literature relies on a certain circularity, based on a prior, broadly accepted consensus about the arbitration of literary value. In a period dominated by antagonistic appeals to different sources of cultural authority, the consensus weakens and splinters, and the contingency of any given configuration of institutional power permitting and structuring literary production and reception becomes glaringly apparent. This, I would submit, is one of Borges’s major points in “El escritor argentino y la tradición”: literature appears and circulates in subjection to the organizing forces of genre and tradition, Borges concedes, but the particular shapes it assumes at a given moment have no necessity beyond the rhetorical frames used to legitimize particular modes according to the dictates of a particular institutional disposition of literary space. The terms used to assign it a particular meaning – “Argentine literature,” but also “Espíritu” and whatever other categories might be used to accord prestige and belonging to a particular group of texts – retroactively project an essential order on a configuration that might equally be organized around alternative coordinates. What remains is the sheer “performative magic” by which literary capital, in and through the institutional forms which allow its circulation, both results from and reproduces a consensus among producers and consumers of literature

128 that its accumulation in particular places and to particular authors and texts corresponds to essential qualities belonging to them. In using paranoid fictional devices – most crucially, what I have called (following Santner) the “subaltern sublime” – to bring into view this “real of social antagonism” that animates competing articulations of cultural identity, Borges converges with the fundamental psychoanalytic emphasis on “the unsymbolizable traumatic kernel that [finds] expression in . . . distortions of reality”

(Zizek, “I Hear You” 115).

The textual examples examined so far in this dissertation bring into view the uncanny presence of influence, represented as an unsymbolizable line of force. In

Quiroga’s “El crimen del otro,” the relationship to Poe, the most conventional imaginable literary model in the modernista milieu, ceases to be mediated by the symbolic refractions of the dominant literary order of the period and takes on an asphixiating proximity. A parallel dynamic presents itself, however, in Borges’s rather different but equally jarring practice of removing literary materials from the cultural codes which normally serve to stabilize their meanings, and reinserting the same materials into a sublime, radically inhuman order embodied perhaps most memorably in his Library of Babel. In both of these examples, manifestations of literary paranoia call forth the “undead” dimension of the structures of cultural authority organizing the distribution of literary capital; the dimension that, as with the primal father of Freud’s myth, is never fully symbolized, integrated into a coherent symbolic universe, but rather must always stand as the remainder which it once escapes and constitutes its order. The paranoid literary practices

I am attributing to Borges comprise a set of negotiations with the unsettling presence of the source of literary authority when the latter appears as a Doppelgänger, as both the

129 organizing principle of a text’s meaning and its threatening, overbearing antagonist. In this regard, they orchestrate an interrogation of authority closely parallel to that advanced in an area of writing from which, as I have demonstrated, Borges consistently attempted to distance himself: psychoanalysis. The remainder of this chapter will accordingly treat

Borgesian and Freudian fictions of identity as one another’s alienated Doppelgängers.

Borges’s Jewish Uncanny and the Psychoanalytic Other

To offer a more detailed account of how Borgesian fantasy may be read as a paranoid figuration of the antagonisms animating a contested cultural field, I will now turn to “La muerte y la brújula,” a story Borges deemed his most accomplished representation of modern Buenos Aires, despite its evidently fantastic dimensions and paucity of obvious contemporary and local referents: “pese a los nombres alemanes o escandinavos, ocurre en un Buenos Aires de sueños” (483), he explains in the preface to the second part of Ficciones, published in 1944. Describing the story in “El escritor argentino” as “una pesadilla en que figuran elementos de Buenos Aires deformados por el horror de la pesadilla” (270), Borges locates his success in capturing “el sabor de las afueras de Buenos Aires” (271) precisely in the “deformations” imposed by an elaborately fictionalized and highly stylized portrayal of the city: “porque me había abandonado al sueño, pude lograr, al cabo de tantos años, lo que antes busqué en vano”

(271).

Borges’s claim possesses an obvious resonance with a basic principle of Freudian interpretation: namely, that the fantastic deformations of reality by the “dream-work,” as well as the parallel distortions of speech in slips and jokes, offer access to truths about the

130 subject unavailable to introspection. In Zizek’s formulation, “the very distortion and/or dissimulation is revealing: what emerges via the distortions of the accurate representation of reality is the real, that is, the trauma around which social reality is structured” (115).

Viewed in these terms, “La muerte y la brújula” discloses a Buenos Aires that is less a concrete locale than a dizzyingly conflicted space of circulation of symbolic capital, a space in which psychoanalysis itself turns out to figure importantly, albeit as what Freud would call part of the text’s latent content.

“La muerte y la brújula” also comprises Borges’s most elaborate attempt to

“double” the analytic detective genre developed by Edgar Allan Poe,37 and it therefore forms part of the productive modern Latin American reception of Poe, a crucial factor in the continent’s widespread cultivation of the fantastic. The previous chapter addressed the “Oedipal” cultural politics of literary dependency that shaped that reception; for what remains of this chapter, I will focus on how the literary games and borrowings at the center of “La muerte y la brújula” both intervene in and represent, in transmuted form, the confrontation of cosmopolitan and nationalist frameworks of cultural identity that also provides the occasion for “El escritor argentino y la tradición.” Precisely in undertaking this intervention, I will show, the story gains a surprising significance within the history of tense interactions between literature and psychoanalysis.

John Irwin has previously linked “La muerte y la brújula” to the negotiations of literary and psychoanalytic authority performed in the readings of “The Purloined Letter”

37 This enterprise of literary “doubling” is the main subject of Irwin’s The Mystery to a Solution.

131 by Lacan, Derrida, Barbara Johnson, and other interlocutors.38 Specifically, Irwin argues that the ludic alternation between the numbers three and four that serves as a central pivot of the story’s development anticipates one of the main threads of the debate between

Lacan, Derrida, and Johnson, who frame their discussions of psychoanalytic interpretation and literary resistance around the numerical undecidabilities built into

Poe’s narrative. Recalling Lacan’s allusion to Borges in a footnote to the “Purloined

Letter” seminar, Irwin speculates that “if Borges’s story was instrumental in evoking

Lacan’s seminal reading of ‘The Purloined Letter’ then this would be a . . . measure of how much his rewriting-as-interpretation formed the ultimate basis for the strongest current readings of the Dupin tales” (442). Examining the repeated reliance of interpreters on the same numerical elements of Poe’s story central to Borges’s literary

“doubling” of it in “La muerte y la brújula,” Irwin concludes that Borges’s

“reading/rewriting of [Poe] in his own detective stories . . . is so strong that it has become normative for our own reading of Poe” (442) as filtered through Lacan, Derrida, Johnson, and their successors.

In advancing this argument, Irwin is himself participating in the “numbers game”

(Irwin 4-5) he attributes to the interpreters of Poe just enumerated: in Irwin’s phrasing,

38 See Muller’s and Richardson’s The Purloined Poe. Johnson summarizes the debate as follows: “In all three texts [‘The Purloined Letter,’ Lacan’s Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’ and Derrida’s critique of Lacan’s reading of Poe, ‘The Purveyor of Truth’], it is the act of analysis which seems to occupy the center of the discursive stage, and the act of analysis of the act of analysis which in some way disrupts that centrality. In the resulting asymmetrical, abyssal structure, no analysis . . . can intervene without transforming and repeating other elements in the sequence, which is not a stable sequence, but which nevertheless produces certain regular effects” (Muller and Richardson 213-14, emphasis in text).

132 this “game” consists of “trying to be one up by adding one to the opponent’s numerical position, as Derrida does in playing the number four to Lacan’s three” (7). “Is it possible,” Irwin asks in relation to Johnson’s reading, “to interpret ‘The Purloined Letter’ without duplicating in the interpretive act the reversal-into-the-opposite inherent in the mechanism of seizing the letter as described by the tale?” (7). In positing Borges’s “La muerte y la brújula” as the “repressed” (445) source of Lacan’s seminar – which we may regard as an attempt to establish psychoanalytic dominion over Poe’s text – Irwin appears to answer his own question in the negative, since his gesture effects a reversal of Lacan’s reading of Poe by establishing the parasitic dependence of a psychoanalytic text on a literary one and thereby reasserting the priority of the literary. In addition to pitting each interpretation against a previous one in a sequence of evens and odds, the critical

“numbers game” mapped out and participated in by Irwin repeatedly enacts a conflict between the claims of literature and the claims of psychoanalysis, with Lacan’s reading of Poe attempting to establish the authority of the latter over the former, and Derrida’s reading of Lacan’s reading of Poe dedicated mainly to disputing the legitimacy of that authority. If Irwin scores a victory for literature in establishing Lacan’s debt to Borges, I would like to even the score by focusing on how several of the story’s most prominent features draw it into the orbit of what we might call Argentina’s “Freud complex.”

A stark dichotomy marks the representation of Jews and Judaism central to “La muerte y la brújula.” The story begins with the murder of an elderly Talmudic scholar, which functions as the primordial trauma from which the story’s central conflict unfolds.

The rabbi’s death intrigues detective Erik Lönnrot, who we are told “se creía un puro razonador” (499). Lönnrot, in seeking “una explicación puramente rabínica” (500) of the

133 crime, immerses himself in mystical Hasidic theology, “dedicado a estudiar los nombres de dios para dar con el nombre del asesino” (501) and dismissive of “las meras circunstancias, la realidad (nombres, arrestos, caras, trámites judiciales y carcelarios)”

(504). As should be evident, Lönnrot’s posture throughout the story closely resembles

Borges’s own “idealism.” It functions as a kind of reassuring paranoia by deflecting agency onto a vast but ultimately “symmetrical” (503) and therefore unthreatening divine power. Lönnrot’s theological fixation, however, blinds him to the Jewish criminal conspiracy orchestrated by the gangster Red Scharlach, whose ultimate and unique goal is Lönnrot’s own destruction. Lönnrot thus turns out not to have been paranoid enough: his “idealism” has prevented him from becoming aware of his own implication in the dynamics he is attempting to elucidate. In this regard, his destiny resonates curiously with the revisionist and “paranoid” account of the origins and nature of Judaism offered by Freud in Moses and Monotheism. The rabbi’s death, as point of origin of Borges’s narrative, figures as the equivalent of the primordial murder of Moses, the act out which

Freud claims that the Jewish ethical and intellectual vocation emerged. Lönnrot, in his meticulous scholarly fidelity to what he regards as the rabbi’s mystical purity of vision, advances in what Freud calls “Geistigkeit” (a term suggestive of both intellectuality and spirituality) but simultaneously becomes trapped in a series of catastrophic repetitions of the initial brutal crime, and is ultimately drawn into the violence himself. Like Freud’s

“historical novel,” Borges’s fiction points ambiguously to a secret violent substrate of the

Jewish “Geistigkeit” it idealizes.39

39 We have no evidence of whether Borges ever read Moses and Monotheism, but we may assume that he was aware of the existence and basic premise of Freud’s last book:

134 To illuminate the significance of Jewish subject matter in the story’s simultaneous recapitulation and ironization of what Borges refers to elsewhere in his oeuvre as

“idealism,” it is crucial to consider the place of Jews and Judaism in Borges’s larger enterprise of literary self-fashioning. The Jewish subject matter deployed in “La muerte y la brújula” forms a crucial part of the eclectic repertoire out of which Borges constructed his fictional worlds.40 Taken collectively, Borges’s extensive borrowings from comprise a large part of the collection in his literary “museo [de] cosas que no son de allá” (52), to recall Retamar’s formulation. As I have already indicated, Borges’s infatuation with Jewish traditions resembles the curiosity of his protagonist Lönnrot, in its emphasis on the intellectual puzzles offered by elaborate numerologies, polyvalent symbolism, and a sublime, ineffable deity. On the other hand,

Borges also claimed a more intimate relation to Judaism, avowing at various points both a literal and metaphorical kinship with the Jews. As he discusses in his 1934 essay, “Yo, judío,” he frequently speculated about his own possible Jewish descent and attempted

(without success) to identify any Jews in his family tree. He continued to allude later in life to his probable Portuguese Jewish ancestry on his ’s side (see e.g. Burgin

228). In “La muerte y la brújula,” he gives one of the Jewish victims of the murders a last name (Azevedo) effectively identical to his mother’s family name (Acevedo).

the prominent Buenos Aires publisher Losada released a Spanish translation of Moses in 1939, only a few months after it came out in German. Sur – not usually given to enthusiasm for Freud – even published a brief note in June of that year announcing the book’s appearance. Rubén Gallo has recently offered an illuminating account of the reception of Moses in Mexico and the rest of the Spanish-speaking world (81-110).

40 See Aizenberg’s The Aleph Weaver for a thorough treatment of the Jewish dimension of Borges’s work.

135 Meanwhile, in a separate but related effort, Borges refers at numerous points in his writings to Jews as practicing in an ideal form the prerogatives of a peripheral culture, which, he claims, may borrow at will from more dominant cultures without feeling fully invested in them – prerogatives he believes that Argentine and Latin American writers may also enjoy. Thus, in “El escritor argentino,” he states that Jews “sobresalen en la cultura occidental, porque actúan dentro de esa cultura y al mismo tiempo no se sienten atados a ella por una devoción especial . . . Creo que los argentinos, los sudamericanos en general, estamos en una situación análoga” (272-73). He reiterates the same claim in a

1978 interview: “[a Jew] is not tied by any form of loyalty or especial tradition, which allows him to innovate in science and the arts. In that sense, to be an Argentine offers an advantage similar to that of the Jew” (qtd. in Stavans, “Comment” 10).

Judaism and Jewishness thus serve Borges in multiple ways as sources of literary authority. Jewish tradition, history, and theology furnish subject matter to stories ranging from “La muerte y la brújula” to “Emma Zunz,” “El milagro secreto” and “Deutsches

Requiem.” While Borges’s assertions of his own Jewish ancestry would justify these borrowings as a legitimate inheritance, his claim of an affinity between Jews and Latin

Americans as liminal subjects capable of plural cultural affiliations establishes a rather different claim on the Jewish materials he deploys: an Argentine non-Jew writing

“Jewish” stories, he seems to suggest, is in a position analogous to the Jew who, he asserts, may “act within” a given culture without “any special devotion.” Borges appropriates Jewish culture, the logic of an Argentine-Jewish affinity implies, on the basis of the same intimate non-intimacy with other cultures he attributes to the Jews and presents as their principal advantage in cultural and intellectual activities.

136 Freud had a term for the quality I have just glossed as “intimate non-intimacy”:

“das Unheimliche,” the uncanny, the site where “the most intimate interiority coincides with the exterior” (Dolar, “‘I Shall’” 6). Borges is not unique in representing the Jewish relationship to culture and tradition in terms of an irreducible liminality, but he is somewhat unusual in valuing such cultural Unheimlichkeit so positively. In a discussion of the “Jewish Uncanny,” Susan Shapiro has demonstrated the deep resonances of

European anti-Semitic discourse with the motifs of gothic fiction that supply much of the material considered in Freud’s “Das Unheimliche”: “The Jewish Uncanny represents the

Jew(s) as spectral, disembodied spirits lacking a national home and, thus, as unwelcome guests wandering into and within other peoples’ homes, disrupting and haunting them”

(65). Following Borges’s cue, Amy Kaminsky has extended a comparable logic to the position of Argentina as “Europe’s uncanny other,” describing a popularly held “sense that Argentina is both like Europe and deeply different from it, a paradox we can understand in light of Freud’s theory of the uncanny as that which meshes the familiar and the unknown” (52). Argentines and Jews, then, turn out to be each other’s

Doppelgängers by virtue of a symmetrical uncanniness that, Borges claims, legitimizes their engagement in cultural borrowing. In asserting a typology of identities uniting

Argentines and Jews, Borges’s “Jewish uncanny” reiterates the anti-Semitic allegation of liminality but converts it into a reassuring trope of Argentine self-affirmation. Borges, in other words, attributes the same qualities to Jews and Judaism that his erstwhile political nemeses do, but subjects these qualities to a kind of “transvaluation”: Jewish liminality, mimicry, and simultaneous capacity for similarity and difference all become traits that the Argentine writer should embrace.

137 This harmonious picture of a productive and beneficial doubling, along with the remarkably hospitable version of the Unheimlich it entails, involves a politically significant reversal of the literary conventions on which Borges draws at numerous points in his work, not least in “La muerte y la brújula.” In the gothic narrative tradition to which much of Borges’s fiction is indebted, the encounter with the double, as with other manifestations of the uncanny, almost invariably signals impending catastrophe. As

Mladen Dolar observes a propos of Otto Rank’s comprehensive study of the

Doppelgänger motif: “one meets one’s double, a Doppelgänger, someone exactly like oneself, and the result is the very opposite of jubilatory self-recognition: one is inexorably heading for a disaster” (“At First Sight” 136). In the widespread anti-Semitic discourse that permeated Argentine culture in the 1930s and 40s, the “uncanny Jew” figured as precisely this kind of threatening double, whose presence indicated a catastrophic threat to a harmonious collective identity. Borges repudiates this widespread paranoid fantasy in several essays dating from this period, prompted not least by the fact that he was himself the frequent target of smears from the nationalist press. In fact, he wrote the aforementioned essay “Yo, judío” in response to a right-wing publication, El

Crisol, attempting to “out” him as a Jewish “foreigner”; in “Yo, judío,” he replied by taking this allegation as a compliment.

Borges’s antipathy toward the extreme nationalists also surfaces in his fictional worlds, although usually in an oblique manner. Indeed, as John Irwin notes, “clearly one of Borges’s aims in the tale is to satirize the anti-Semitism of his Christian homeland in the context of contemporary European events” (59). One of the few unequivocally contemporary Argentine references in “La muerte y la brújula” is the brief mention of a

138 newspaper that has issued a commentary on the series of murders being investigated by

Lönnrot: “Ernst Palast, en El Mártir, reprobó ‘las demoras intolerables de un pogrom clandestino y frugal, que ha necesitado tres meses para liquidar tres judíos’” (503).

Though Palast’s name is evidently German, the newspaper’s name is in Spanish (as compared to the names of hotels, streets, and other locales in the story, which are mainly

French, and the title of another newspaper mentioned in the story, which is in Yiddish), and its histrionic title and (parodically treated) exhortation to anti-Jewish violence lend it an unmistakable resemblance to real Buenos Aires publications like El Crisol.

Furthermore, “Ernst Palast” is an obvious Germanization of the name of Ernesto Palacio, a right-wing polemicist, journalist, and historian who was a former collaborator of Borges on the literary journal Martín Fierro prior to his conversion to extreme nationalism; in the

1930s and 1940s, Palacio contributed to nationalist journals like La nueva república and

Nuevo orden (Rees 286).

As distant as the tawdry world of right-wing nationalist propaganda may seem from the intellectual puzzles that propel the main narrative of “La muerte y la brújula,” several aspects of the story magnify the importance of Borges’s passing reference to El

Mártir. The main events of the narrative, after all, turn out to have been a sophisticated campaign of deception orchestrated by a Jewish criminal conspiracy against a nominally

Christian representative of the law and the state. The mastermind of this conspiracy, the

Jewish “pistolero” (503) Red Scharlach, is clearly the Doppelgänger of Borges’s protagonist Erik Lönnrot, as Irwin has explained:

Lönnrot and Scharlach are, of course, doubles of each other, as their names indicate. In a note to the tale Borges says, “The end syllable of Lönnrot means red in German, and Red Scharlach is translatable, in

139 German, as Red Scarlet” . . . in Swedish the word ‘lönn’ is a prefix meaning “secret,” “hidden,” or “illicit.” Thus Lönnrot, the secret or hidden red, pursues and is pursued by his double Red Scharlach (Red Scarlet), the doubly red. (30)

The appearance of this Jewish Doppelgänger clearly signals Lönnrot’s demise in a manner consistent with the gothic formula: the mirror play of the color red in the antagonists’ names finds a final repetition in the “fuego,” fired from Lönnrot’s own gun, that eliminates Lönnrot in the story’s final word. Significantly, Scharlach triumphs over his adversary through an invasive act of mimicry, in that he traps Lonnröt by “doubling” what the latter takes to be his most intimate (“secret” or “hidden”) thought processes.

In “La muerte y la brújula,” the “Jewish uncanny,” elsewhere drastically reimagined by Borges as an occasion of mutual Jewish-Argentine recognition, appears in a narrative form that restores its threatening, destabilizing overtones, albeit in a highly stylized and largely dehistoricized manner. In its portrayal of a hidden Jewish conspirator overturning the social order and undermining the power of its appointed upholders through an intricate campaign of deception and mimicry, the story replicates the same paranoid master narrative propagated in cruder forms by Borges’s nationalist nemeses. The anti-Semitic fantasies propagated by the right-wing Buenos Aires press therefore obtain a simultaneous metonymic and metaphorical presence in Borges’s text: while they appear as an object of ridicule in the overtly preposterous quotation from El

Mártir, they also subtend the text at a more subtle level in so far as the tale of Lönnrot’s demise realizes, as if in a distorted mirror image, nationalist anxieties about imagined

Jewish subversion.

140 The polyvalent allusions to widespread anti-Semitic fantasies just documented gain a further significance in light of another paranoid narrative Borges proposed but never brought to fruition. In a 1921 letter to Spanish ultraísta Jacobo Sureda, Borges reports on a plan to “urdir una novela fantástica en colaboración” with Macedonio

Fernández and other friends. The projected novel would narrate a conspiratorial attempt to “provocar una neurastenia general en todos los habitantes de Buenos Aires y abrir así camino al bolchevikismo” (Cartas 15). In an article examining the virulent hostility to recently imported Freudian psychoanalysis among Argentine nationalists, Federico

Finchelstein observes that although Borges “could not have foreseen that anyone would envision such a conspiratorial plot as an actual threat to the nation . . . [the deliberate dissemination of mental disorders among the Argentine populace] was exactly the threat that a group of anti-Semitic and right-wing nationalists and fascists identified (even pointing to Borges himself as a conspirator in this plot)” (77). Borges’s imaginative prescience in this instance strengthens the supposition of an intersection between the paranoid imaginary of his fictional worlds and that operative in a widespread political discourse he frequently abjured. Moreover, Finchelstein’s remarks allow us to glimpse in

Borges’s uncanny anticipation of nationalist fantasies a logic comparable to that driving the antagonism of Lönnrot and Scharlach in “La muerte y la brújula”: that is, Borges

“doubles” and thereby anticipates the terms of nationalist narratives, but in doing so he becomes implicated in the antagonism he is attempting to represent, and indeed becomes an object of the same kind of paranoid suspicions that both figure within and shape his fictional worlds.

141 Borges’s fictional suggestion that a “general neurasthenia” could be used as an instrument of socio-political subversion brings into view a further surprising connection with nationalist anxieties about Jewish subversion, in this case related to the unease

Borges expressed elsewhere regarding the claims of Freudian psychoanalysis. Both

Finchelstein and Mariano Plotkin demonstrate that the ambience of cultural polarization that subtends stories like “La muerte y la brújula” as well as essays like “El escritor argentino” also pivotally shaped the Argentine reception of psychoanalysis. As Plotkin observes, psychoanalysis entered into the popular imagination, and into political and cultural discourses, in the same period in which “[t]wo clear political and cultural sides . .

. became defined in the Argentine cultural fabric: one liberal-progressive, the other nationalist-Catholic” (54). Even as it attained prominence and popularity across the

Argentine social spectrum in the course of the 1920s and 30s, Freudian psychoanalysis came under suspicion from the burgeoning nationalist sector, not least because of its strong association with foreigners, and more specifically, with Jews and Judaism.

Finchelstein argues persuasively that “[t]he response of Argentina’s anti-Semitic proponents to Freudian psychoanalysis exposes central dimensions of Argentine nationalism” (79). The Argentine Catholic right, whose interpretation of national identity and history became increasingly influential in the years following the quasi-fascist general José Uruburu’s military coup in 1930 and achieved near hegemony with the rise of Juan Domingo Perón, “viewed Freudian psychoanalysis as a threat to the nation” (94).

In Finchelstein’s account, right-wing Catholic anxieties regarding psychoanalysis resonate uncannily with the proposed content of Borges’s early planned novel:

“According to this group [of nationalists and fascists], the Jews both epitomized a

142 collective and also plotted to gain control of the country by spreading this disease. Within this plot, Freudian psychoanalysis was both a means and an end” (77).

They claimed, in other words, that psychoanalysts and those sympathetic to Freudian ideas were attempting to enervate the Argentine nation by spreading precisely the neuroses they claimed to be treating. The result, they asserted, would be a nation of neurotics beholden to foreign control, exercised in part through the “brainwashing” practices of psychoanalysis.

To comprehend such apparently outlandish anxieties, Finchelstein notes, it is crucial to observe that “[s]exuality was central to Jewish stereotypes put forth by the anti-

Semitic right” (94). Sander Gilman and Eric Santner, among others, have examined the sexualized dimension of anti-Semitic discourse in the European context. In Gilman’s assessment, “[t]he linked dangers of sexuality, syphilis, and madness were constantly associated with the figure of the male Jew” (61). Santner, who explores the impact of these widespread prejudices on the genesis and initial reception of Freud’s theories, states: “Freud’s paradoxical situation was, in a word, this: How could someone who occupied the structural position of the symptom offer authoritative knowledge about the cure?” (116). Operating from a set of antipathies borrowed from European xenophobes,

Argentine right-wingers interpreted psychoanalysis precisely as a symptom of the sexual depravity they attributed to Jews. Indeed, as Finchelstein shows, they frequently

“theorized that Freudianism was no more than a cover for Jewish physical tendencies”

(110).

Discussing the widely circulated theories of the anti-Semitic Catholic priest

Virgilio Filippo, whose articles and books denouncing psychoanalysis “played an

143 important role in introducing Freud to the Argentine public” (110), Finchelstein emphasizes Filippo’s conviction that “Freud’s obsessions were related to the sexual of the Jewish physiological constitution – his own included” (98).

Psychoanalysis, for Filippo, was both the product of a sexually deranged mind and an instrument for Jewish assault on the refined, orderly spirituality of the Catholic political and social order. He understood Freud, essentially, as “advocating the pagan principles of the carnal and the corporeal” (101) and attempting to impose his own degraded sexuality on Christian civilization. He therefore “considered the sexual contamination of the Argentine race a central aspect of the Jewish plot to dominate the country” (88).

Despite Borges’s contempt for the nationalist right and vociferous repudiations of anti-Semitism, his occasional but harsh statements on psychoanalysis concur on several major points with the ideas of Filippo and other right-wing opponents of psychoanalysis.

At the most basic level, both interpret the latter as a pansexualist doctrine rooted in the

“sexual obsessions” of Freud, a “charlatan” and a “madman” – I have just quoted

Borges’s words, but they could just as easily have been Filippo’s. On one level, this limited area of agreement between Borges and his nationalist enemies is unsurprising, considering that “[p]ansexualism – the belief that sexual instincts are the basis of all human activities – was a significant aspect of the Argentine medical and psychiatric interpretation of Freud” (Finchelstein 94) and was amplified in the popular reception of

Freud. Promoters of psychoanalysis as well as detractors, expert practioners as well as popular expositors, all contributed to the prominence of the “pansexualist” understanding of Freud’s theories in Argentina. Finchelstein notes that Filippo derived many of his ideas about Freud from the popular serial publication Freud al alcance de todos, which

144 began publication in 1935. The author of these books, who wrote under the pseudonym

Dr. J. Gómez Nerea, was in fact Alberto Hidalgo, an avant-garde poet and one-time friend and collaborator of Borges (Plotkin 43; Vezzetti 183-184). In what Filippo must have read as a confirmation of his worst fears about sexually corrupting force of psychoanalysis, Gómez Nerea celebrates Freud’s alleged pansexualism as an avenue of escape from rigid Christian moral teachings (Vezzetti 183-245).

The subject matter of “La muerte y la brújula” entails a further indirect allusion to anti-Semitic anxieties about Jewish sexuality in its focus on Jewish organized crime, embodied in the figure of Red Scharlach. Kaminsky, who has documented the longstanding hold of the Buenos Aires Jewish underworld on the global literary imagination (138-157), demonstrates that most literary representations of Jewish-

Argentine gangsters revolve around their involvement in the so-called “trata de blancas” or “white slave trade.” Although, Kaminsky implies, Borges only offers a “laundered”

(124) version of this widespread motif, the association between Jewish organized crime and the “almost mythic status of the Argentine trata de blancas” (139) had a powerful hold on the popular imagination of the period and would have been a likely subtext of

“La muerte y la brújula” for its contemporary readership. In an extensive study of the

Zwi Migdal, a prominent Argentine-Jewish crime organization, and its popular representation, Nora Glickman notes that although “prostitution in Argentina was not primarily a Jewish business,” it became identified in the public imaginary as a

“principally Jewish activity” (2-3).

Jewish organized crime therefore became an object of prurient curiosity as well as a target for anti-Semitic propagandists. Virgilio Filippo, the right-wing priest and

145 opponent of psychoanalysis, issued indictments of Jewish pimps and slave traders that promote the same fear of Jewish sexual contamination apparent in his attacks on Freud’s alleged pansexualism. Filippo “viewed prostitution, and particularly pimping, as exclusively Jewish occupations . . . Filippo reiterated the nationalist and anti-Semitic comisario Julio Alzogaray, who had, in his own work, depicted . . . ‘the abominable figure of the Jewish procurer of white women.’ For Alzogaray, the Jew was the sole practitioner of this activity” (Finchelstein 88). As Finchelstein explains, Jewish psychoanalysts and Jewish criminals served parallel functions in the paranoid imaginary of Argentine anti-Semitism. Nationalists like Filippo and Alzogoray presented both groups as co-conspirators in a vast plot to undermine public order and national cohesion by sexual means.

Although Borges’s representation of Scharlach in “La muerte y la brújula” lacks the overt sexual qualities popularly attributed to Jewish criminals, the central confrontation between Lönnrot and Scharlach does mobilize certain tropes recognizable from what Eric Santner calls the “anti-Semitic cultural archive” of modernity. As

Santner explains, the ideas of Viennese polymath Otto Weininger are crucial for any understanding of the sexualized and “Oedipal” dimensions of transnational modern anti-

Semitism that we have seen to be so prominent in Argentine nationalist discourse.

Specifically, Weininger’s widely disseminated argument “that Jews and Jewishness are saturated with a . . . sensuality impeding the (Kantian) faculties of theoretical and practical reason from attaining the levels of sublime abstraction proper to them” (Santner

109) crucially framed subsequent representations of Jewishness in both elite and popular spheres. For Weininger, in Santner’s reading, “Jewishness” was ultimately a “name for

146 the metaphysical man brings upon himself by commingling the purity of his theoretical, moral, and aesthetic callings with the base needs and desires of material, embodied existence” (109). Within such a framework, closely related to that informing the anti-Semitic, anti-Freudian discourses explored by Finchelstein in the context of

1930s Buenos Aires, the Jew becomes a privileged object of paranoia on the part of elite groups anxious about the corrosion of their legitimacy in a public sphere riven with conflict and crisis.

Viewed from the perspective of Weininger’s quasi-Kantian framing of

Jewishness, the contest between the self-proclaimed “puro razonador” (499) Lönnrot and his tormentor, the “Dandy” Red Scharlach, assumes a significance not entirely evident in the absence of the ideological background provided by Santner. Scharlach’s nickname,

“el Dandy,” invests his figure with the connotations of sensuality, effeminacy, and decadence associated with that word, which stand in clear counterpoint to the mandates of “pure reason” ostentatiously pursued by Lönnrot throughout the story. Such a contrast between the story’s two antagonists, as Irwin points out, reiterates the terms of the contest between the rationalist Dupin and the sybarite Minister in Poe’s “Purloined Letter.” But if, as Irwin asserts, “[Lönnrot and Scharlach] are specifically coded as Christian and Jew”

(59), Weininger’s influential articulation of the key anti-Semitic themes of the period permits a reading of “dandyism” and Jewishness as complementary signifiers of a sensuality that undermines the aesthetic and interpretive idealism promulgated by Borges and his avatar Lönnrot. While the unfolding of Borges’s narrative proceeds in parallel with the “sublime abstractions” of Lönnrot’s reasoning, leading to his conclusion that “la explicación de los crímenes estaba en un triángulo anónimo y en una polvorienta palabra

147 griega” (503), Scharlach’s appearance in the final sequence of the story reveals that “algo más efímero y deleznable” (505) furnished the hidden substrate of the crimes: they were in fact motivated by a fierce desire for revenge prompted by Lönnrot’s capture of

Scharlach’s brother and by the castrating “bala policial en el vientre” (506) inflicted on

Scharlach himself. The symbolic material used to entrap Lönnrot in a kabbalistic labyrinth was in fact “dado por el azar” (506) in a series of contingent events, retroactively transfigured onto a “spiritual” plane and assigned the meanings Lönnrot had taken as their essential truths.

Scharlach’s final re-framing of the story’s main events, then, brings about a shift of perspective from the characteristically Borgesian “idealismo” espoused by Lönnrot to a hidden narrative sequence more closely resembling the violent rivalries of Oedipal

“family romance,” which the initial idealistic version of events had served to mask even as it drew Lönnrot back into the web of antagonisms it concealed. The story of Lönnrot’s undoing, although it closes with a partial restoration of the “idealist” version of events in its implication of an eternally repeated struggle, recalls the basic terms of Borges’s discomfort with psychoanalysis: Scharlach’s explanation of the story’s events degrades the sublime abstractions pursued by the “puro razonador” Lönnrot by reducing them to “a few unpleasant facts,” much as Borges alleged Freud wished to do to all human phenomena. Viewed in this manner, “La muerte y la brújula” may be read as a piece of self-parody as well as an elaborate mockery of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists whose anxieties about psychoanalysis and sexuality Borges partially shared.

Given the absence of explicit anti-Semitism from Borges’s negative assessment of

Freud, his emphasis on the reductionism of Freud’s allegedly pansexual framework has

148 somewhat more in common with a critique of Freud popular among more moderate intellectual sectors in Argentina than with right-wing attacks on psychoanalysis. French

Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who lectured in Buenos Aires in the 1930s and corresponded with a number of Argentine intellectuals, exemplifies this more even- handed critique in his influential characterization of psychoanalysis as a “radical sensualism of the sexualistic tendency” that fails to account for “the higher activities of the human being” (qtd. in Finchelstein 100). While this line of criticism shares with virulent nationalist anti-Freudianism a tendency to emphasize pansexualism and pathologize Freud himself, it does not incur in the “anti-Semitic . . . Argentine fascist and

Catholic vision of sexual abnormality” (110) documented by Finchelstein, and therefore accords quite closely with the indictments of Freudian “vulgaridad” advanced by Borges and the group surrounding Sur. Whereas nationalists politicized psychoanalysis by defining it in terms of the general cultural conflict that, for them, divided Argentina between national wholeness and foreign infiltration, Borges’s allegation that Freud wished to reduce the “higher activities of the human being” to “a few rather unpleasant facts” forms part of a consistent stance in favor of the independence of art and culture not only from sex but also, and more importantly, from the vicissitudes of contemporary politics.

Ironically, the most prominent Argentine psychoanalysts of the period concurred with Borges and his circle in this regard, in that they attempted to keep at a distance from the political struggles of the moment by insisting on the purely scientific nature of their practices. As Plotkin explains, the concern for intellectual autonomy shared by Borges and the Sur group and the psychoanalysts who would found the Argentine Psychoanalytic

149 Association became especially urgent in the atmosphere of the 1930s, a decade in which universities and public cultural institutions became highly politicized due to burgeoning nationalist political clout. The right-wing military government that took power in 1930 immediately took measures to limit the autonomy of the universities, and the ascent of

Perón in the 1940s led to a more complete infiltration: “After 1943 and throughout the

Perón era . . . the government made strenuous efforts to use the universities to promote its own cultural, political, and ideological agenda” (Plotkin 56). In a period in which “the radicalization of politics forced intellectuals to take sides” (54), Plotkin argues, “the APA

. . . became perceived as a place where the cultural and scientific spheres could preserve some autonomy” (58) and became part of a “network of educational and cultural institutions . . . institutions that derived their legitimacy in part from their lack of association with public institutions” (57-58). Cosmopolitan intellectuals like Borges and

Ocampo participated in the same broad network of autonomous institutions in which the

APA attempted to ensconce itself, and the literary intellectuals of Sur and the psychoanalysts of the APA sought legitimacy for their pursuits on similar grounds. In attempting to subtract themselves from the nationalist consensus of the period, Borges and his contemporaries in the psychoanalytic community attracted comparable opprobrium and suspicion, since their rhetoric of neutrality and cosmopolitanism stood in an obviously antagonistic relation to the central narrative being used to structure an account of cultural totality by the ascendant political and cultural movements of the moment.

Within this milieu, Borges’s fixation on Jewishness and revisionist take on popular anti-Semitic motifs speaks directly to the position he and his literary

150 collaborators occupied in the cultural panorama of the moment, a fact evident in nationalist attempts to “out” Borges as a Jewish cultural saboteur. According to Slavoj

Zizek, the fantasy figure of the Jewish nemesis serves anti-Semitic discourse as a

“fetishistic embodiment of a certain blockage – of the impossibility which prevents the society from achieving its full identity as a closed, homogeneous totality” (Sublime 143).

As the corporatist-nationalist master narrative establishes itself, Zizek claims, it must develop strategies to mask the symbolic violence by which the particular frame it promulgates for collective identity achieves the appearance of universality. In the paranoid solution of anti-Semitic ideology, the real “internal negativity” and fragmentation of the collective, concealed by nationalist vision of an organically unified social totality, “is projected onto the figure of the ‘Jew’” (143). In Zizek’s account, then, this nationalist anti-Semitic construction of the Jew is strictly paranoid in precisely the terms outlined in previous chapters: “what is excluded from the Symbolic (from the frame of the corporatist socio-symbolic order) returns in the Real as a paranoid construction of the ‘Jew’” (143). The Jewish object of anti-Semitic paranoia, in other words, figures as the term both necessary to and excluded from the proper functioning of the socio-cultural order: the invasive, coercive force of symbolic violence that underpins the hegemony of a particular narrative of identity takes on the appearance of a debased, illegitimate, threatening impostor. This paranoid solution emerges out of the impossibility of representing the traumatic basis of the social order; the symbolic fictions it generates entail “an attempt to put a human face on the dimension of symbolic authority that is nonsymbolizable” (Santner 123) – in other words, to figure influence.

151 Borges’s larger literary project possesses multiple points of encounter with this paranoid enterprise of identity construction. As I have attempted to demonstrate, “La muerte y la brújula” reconfigures allegations of Jewish liminality, criminality, and sensuality in a manner that defamiliarizes the nationalist frame of reference and reveals the fundamental interchangeability of the (Jewish/Christian, national/foreign) antagonists pitted against each other. Returning to Borges’s claims about the success of the story as a representation of Buenos Aires, we could further argue that the story’s fundamental point is that social reality is structured like a fiction – more specifically, a Doppelgänger fiction. Thus, while the story conceals the historical confrontations that provide its background, it presents a model of the fundamental mechanisms at once driving these confrontations and animating its own oblique intervention in them. For, on one hand,

Borges found himself occupying the position of the illegitimate impostor and conspiratorial foreigner in the nationalist imaginary, a position he ironically embraces in essays like “Yo, judío,” and engages less directly in “La muerte y la brújula” and other

“Jewish” stories. On the other hand, Borges repeatedly gestures uneasily at another contemporary figure, “abjected” by nationalist discourse and Borgesian literary idealism alike: Freud. In other words, while Borges uses paranoid fictional constructions to refigure paranoia ironically, his own attitude to psychoanalysis, evidenced by his unmitigated hostility toward Freud and his never-completed projected narrative of

Argentine decline through “collective neurosis,” partakes in the widespread paranoid discourse that framed psychoanalysis as an illegitimate, debased impostor (even as the psychoanalysts of the emergent APA sought acceptance and respectability through an institutional consecration parallel to that achieved by the group surrounding Sur).

152 Nationalists, their avowed enemies among Borges’s literary circle, and Freud’s Argentine disciples shared a fundamental driving concern with the legitimacy and illegitimacy of institutions in a disruptively “polycentric” cultural arena riven by a “tension between . . . the reproduction of social normality and . . . the social exception” (Bergero 9).

In a postscript to Calibán, Fernández Retamar, attempting to nuance his earlier critique of Borges as an “escritor colonial,” refers to the latter’s “original condición calibanesca” (74). Although Fernández Retamar does not elaborate this characterization any further, some comments on Calibán by John Beverley offer a suggestive way of linking a “calibanesque” reading of Borges to the tense doubling relationship with psychoanalysis I have proposed here. In an adventurous piece of wordplay obviously inspired by Lacan’s own attachment to anagrams, puns, and homonyms, Beverley proposes the following diachronic model of the development of Latin American identity politics: “Cannibal/Caliban/By Lacan: the sequence of names configures the stages and the historical subjects of, respectively, the colonization, decolonization, and postcoloniality of Latin America” (4). Beverley argues that while “Caliban” names the active agent of identity construction who protagonizes the cultural struggles between nationalists and cosmopolitans, “‘By Lacan’ suggests instead the ‘desiring subject’ revealed in psychoanalytic theory and practice, whose sense of inner lack can never be compensated” (5) – for whom, in other words, no identity frame is sufficient to adequtely capture social reality. And yet, Beverley insists, “as Caliban arises from cannibal, By

Lacan arises necessarily from Caliban, is its perpetuation or transformation” (5).

Although Beverley’s “By Lacan” refers mainly to the specific manifestations of postmodernity in Latin American culture, the phrase serves just as effectively to allude to

153 the ambivalent complicities with “calibanesque” assertions of national and regional identity I have identified in literary and psychoanalytic discourses.

In this chapter, I have read Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis and the literary cosmopolitanism of Borges, Ocampo, and Sur as disavowed “secret sharers” in one another’s parallel enterprises of counter-institutional socio-cultural praxis. Borges’s

“literary paranoia,” I have argued, articulates a radical unease with the institutional legitimacy of his own project that situates him in the same space of contestation in which nationalist enterprises of identity production both occurred and faltered. Insofar as the hermeneutic of suspicion built into the Oedipal narrative similarly presents a substrate of crisis as the basic condition for an assertion of institutional legitimacy, such a reading of

Borges proceeds, so to speak, “by Lacan.”

154

CHAPTER THREE

Romancing the Influencing Machine: La invención de Morel and the Psychoanalysis of the Machine Age

“He who has not experienced what I have cannot form any idea in how many ways the ability to ‘picture’ has become of value to me . . . What a great joy to be able to picture again in my mind’s eye recollections of journeys and landscapes, sometimes – when the rays behave favorably – with such surprising faithfulness and true color that both myself and the rays have almost the exact impression of the landscapes I want to see again as if they were actually there.” -Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of my Nervous Illness

“To see oneself (differently from in a mirror): on the scale of history, this action is recent . . . Odd that no one has thought of the disturbance (to civilization) that this new action causes . . . Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme. But today it is as if we repressed the profound madness of Photography: it reminds us of its mythic heritage only by that faint uneasiness which seizes me when I look at ‘myself’ on a piece of paper.” -, Camera Lucida

From Paranoid Apprentice to Paranoid Spectator

One of Borges’s most important assertions of the instutional legitimacy of the collective literary enterprise in which he took part in the 1940s appears in his prologue to his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel La invención de Morel. In this brief paratext, he praises Bioy’s novel above all as a “disentimiento” from what he claims to be “el común parecer” that “aboga por la novela psicológica” and dismisses the “novela de peripecias”

(23). The “dissent” Borges attributes approvingly to Bioy entails a repudiation of what we might call the modernist consensus in favor of formal experimentation and

155 exploration of subjective states, and concomitantly privileges the construction of an

“admirable argumento” displaying “intrínseco rigor” (23-4). Borges makes one major modern novelist an explicit target of his critique: “Hay páginas, hay capítulos de Marcel

Proust que son inaceptables como invenciones: a los que, sin saberlo, nos resignamos como a lo insípido y ocioso de cada día” (23). The terms of Borges’s critique of Proust parallel those of his attack on Freudian psychoanalysis as a “vulgar,” messy, all-too- human affair, in contrast to the ideal, autonomous textual order he consistently claims to be the objective of his literary productions. Although he had little regard for the work of

Horacio Quiroga, Borges’s assertions echo the aesthetic priorities promulgated by the

Uruguayan author, who in his “Decálogo del cuentista perfecto” and elsewhere advocates an economical, formally rigorous action-driven fictional aesthetic (when noting prior examples of “obras de imaginación razonada” written in Spanish, Borges refers vaguely to “algún cuento” of Lugones, but pointedly omits Quiroga from this genealogy). Before turning to Bioy’s novel, I would like to discuss Quiroga’s revealing anticipation of some of the dimensions of Bioy’s novel tellingly neglected by Borges.41 Just as, as we have seen, Quiroga’s “El crimen del otro” and “Los perseguidos” deal explicitly with the anxieties of literary influence and succession that Borges tends to mask with a rhetoric of serene continuity, some of Quiroga’s later stories offer a starting point for reading Bioy’s

41 As Bioy’s older (by fifteen years) and more established literary patron, Borges stands in relation to La invención de Morel much as Lugones stood in relation to Quiroga’s “Los perseguidos,” as discussed in a previous chapter. To heighten the “Oedipal” dimension of this paternalistic stance of literary sponsorship, it does not seem unreasonable to assert that Borges uses his prologue to “remake” Bioy’s novel in the image of his own work, emphasizing its verbal artifice and ludic intertextuality and remaining silent on its many points of divergence from Borges’s own aesthetic priorities. The reading I offer of La invención in this chapter may be read as an account of the text’s resistances to this attempted paternal intervention.

156 novel against the grain of Borges’s dehistoricizing and idealizing framework. Despite this apparent opposition, however, such a reading brings to the surface further hidden complicities between the “paranoid” enterprise of Latin American literary emergence self-consciously presided over by Borges and certain areas of psychoanalytic inquiry.

My earlier discussion of Quiroga’s “Los perseguidos” showed that the contemporary urban world portrayed in the story becomes a panoptic space of quasi- photographic surveillance crowded with the burgeoning technologies of transnational modernity. Although the most extensive and best known part of his later fiction takes place against the backdrop of the austere hinterlands of northern Argentina’s Misiones region, a sustained fixation on technological innovation informs Quiroga’s subsequent writings even as it determined various of his other activities as an amateur inventor, chemist, and horticulturist. As Beatriz Sarlo has shown, this area of interest kept him closely attuned to the technologically driven urban culture of the period long after his retreat from Buenos Aires (Technical 13-17). We should recall in this regard that on his first trip to Misiones, alluded to explicitly in the final pages of “Los perseguidos,”

Quiroga served as photographer to a state-sponsored expedition led by Lugones.

Throughout his subsequent career, the photographic and cinematographic image, in addition to being a locus of practical intervention (Quiroga maintained a dark room in his home in Misiones), continued to be the topic of extensive literary reflection on Quiroga’s part, in both essayistic and fictional modes. Although photography figures significantly in two of Quiroga’s later short stories, “El retrato” and “Cámara oscura,” the engagement with cinema that began for him in the decade following the publication of “Los perseguidos” proved more extensive and durable.

157 Within his cultural and literary milieu, Quiroga was a pioneer in the serious attention he devoted to the new medium. Jason Borge posits that it is in Quiroga’s cinematic writings that “the ambiguous allure of Hollywood among Latin American intellectuals first received serious literary and critical treatment . . . Quiroga’s essays and stories from the end of the 1910s constitute a path-breaking critical engagement with the

U.S. film industry” (20). Quiroga’s near exclusive focus on Hollywood productions in the cinematic writings he began publishing in 1918 corresponds to the unrivalled dominance of the U.S. film industry in Argentina and neighboring countries beginning as early as 1916.42 The film-related writings originally published by Quiroga in periodicals including Caras y caretas and La Nación barely touch on the European cinema of the period. In an essay published in 1922 in the magazine Atlántida, Quiroga justifies this neglect on aesthetic grounds, arguing that European filmmakers had produced little work of importance because they failed to take into account the formal differences between the cinematic medium and the theater: “mientras el cine europeo . . . persistía en reducir el vasto escenario cinemátográfico y en torturar el largo proceso pasional hasta reducirlo a dos o tres escenas . . . los Estados Unidos comprendieron cuán distintos eran los resortes de uno y otro arte” (Arte 212). It should be evident that Quiroga’s fascination with the utter novelty of Hollywood entails a significant shift from the modernista models and preferences detailed in a previous chapter.

42 “From 1916 to 1917, Argentine import figures reveal that US cinema had almost entirely replaced its European competitors . . . By 1926, Argentina was the second largest US market outside Europe. In 1920 . . . 95 percent of screen time in South America was taken up by US films” (King 10-11).

158 The rapid growth of cinema signaled the emergence of a mass culture of entertainment whose networks of circulation and distribution circumvented the mediations of local elites and easily transgressed the carefully tended boundaries of the nation state, thereby engendering cultural forms not easily assimilated into the cultural regime policed by the official intelligentsia.43 As Jason Borge has shown, a cluster of perceived threats to the hegemony of Latin American cultural elites stamped their early reception of cinematic technologies with an unmistakable ambivalence. Literary intellectuals formed in the modernista milieu inevitably read the broad dissemination of

Hollywood cinema through the prism of the hemispheric geopolitics of cultural domination that had become acute in the period surrounding the decisive U.S. defeat of

Spain in 1898 and the construction of the Panama Canal. Thus, according to Borge, “an implicit threat of violent coercion lurked behind the United States’ expanding web of influence in the region. Hollywood, whose association with the U.S. was as intractable as its link to mass culture, therefore could not easily be represented by Latin American writers as innocent—or even independent—of the industry’s national origins” (2).

The increasing importance of cinematic and related forms of mass culture therefore engendered new variations on the double binds of cultural authority that have already been extensively discussed. Borge formulates the specific contradictions presented by the cinematic medium to Latin American writers as follows:

43 Quiroga himself remarks in an article entitled “Los intelectuales y el cine” published in the magazine Atlántida in 1922: “Los intelectuales son gente que por lo común desprecian el cine . . . Acaso el intelectual cultive furtivamente los solitarios cines de su barrio; pero no confesará nunca su debilidad por un espectáculo que su cocinera gusta tanto como él, y el chico de la cocinera tanto como ambos juntos” (Arte 286).

159 the U.S. film industry constituted a contentious sign of conflict and partial reconciliation between aesthetics and politics. On one hand, the ‘Seventh Art’ was emblematic of the technological progress and formal modernism to which many Latin American intellectuals aspired, especially those immersed in avant-garde projects ostensibly at war with the elitist conventions of the literary establishment. Yet Hollywood’s sudden arrival . . . placed writers . . . in a bind, eager as they were to emulate a medium dominated by a nation posing not just a symbolic affront to Latin American cultural and linguistic autonomy, but also a tangible threat to the region’s geopolitical sovereignty. (2)

This cultural panorama thus recapitulates, within shifted coordinates, the dynamics of

Latin American modernity outlined in the introductory chapter. In Carlos Alonso’s persuasive account of these dynamics, discussed in an earlier chapter, the “master plot of futurity” relied upon by Latin American cultural elites confers a somewhat problematic aura of authority upon them and their modernizing enterprises in so far as it demotes them to the role of passive recipients of the innovations emanating from the metropolis.

The contradictions of this scenario determine the basic coordinates of what Sarlo dubs, with reference to the Buenos Aires of the 1920s, “modernidad periférica.” Viewed from this perspective, Quiroga’s receptivity to film extends his anxious fictional interrogations of the regime of cultural authority erected under the auspices of modernismo – glossed in the previous chapter as “Poe/Paris/Lugones” – into the same period in which his literary

“professionalization” and reliance on popular periodicals for the dissemination of his work made him an active participant in the burgeoning mass media culture of the Río de la Plata region (García, “Horacio Quiroga”).

Quiroga published four stories between 1919 and 1935 in which the technologies, aesthetics, actors, and actresses of Hollywood cinema – also the subject of the large body of journalistic writing he contributed to several Buenos Aires periodicals throughout the

160 same period – play a central role. The first of the four stories, “Miss Dorothy Phillips, mi esposa” appeared in the same period as Quiroga’s earliest film reviews, a number of which he published under the pseudonym “El esposo de Dorothy Phillips.” The protagonist of that story, the Argentine cinephile Guillermo Grant, serves as a literary alter ego for Quiroga in his role as appreciative critic of Hollywood films in prominent

Buenos Aires literary venues, and shares in particular Quiroga’s fascination with the “star system.”44 Grant returns in the later stories “El espectro” and “El vampiro,” and each of his roles involves an impossible, transgressive and ultimately fatal courtship of a female

Hollywood star. Given the continuities of the dilemma presented to Latin American elites by the advent of cinema with the tensions that elicited Quiroga’s earlier struggles with “Poe/Paris/Lugones,” it is not surprising that his repeated fictional engagements with the cinema adapt some of the “paranoid” strategies initially elaborated in the context of his interrogations of modernista aesthetic models and hierarchies.

Quiroga’s four cinematically themed stories self-consciously draw the rudiments of their romantic plotlines from the conventions of Hollywood melodrama. The barrier that incites the protagonist’s desire for an impossible love object and prevents its fulfillment, however, is in effect the cinema screen itself. The stories foreground the manner in which the cinema’s dissemination from a metropolitan center of production accentuates the passive and eccentric position of the desiring spectator. Hollywood’s melodramatic conventions, in other words, serve in Quiroga’s stories to dramatize the romance of the Latin American spectator with the illusions furnished by Hollywood.

44 In addition to the story “Miss Dorothy Phillips, mi esposa,” see the vignette “Aquella noche . . .” (Arte 173-177).

161 Guillermo Grant, at the beginning of “Miss Dorothy Phillips, mi esposa,” introduces himself as follows: “Yo pertenezco al grupo de los pobres diablos que salen noche a noche del cinematográfico enamorados de una estrella. Me llamo Guillermo Grant, tengo treinta y un años, soy alto, delgado, y trigueño – como cuadra, a efectos de la exportación, a un americano del sud” (198). Here as in Quiroga’s other cinematic stories, the protagonist’s adventures allegorize the self-fashioning of the Latin American film spectator, as Borge has suggested: “While Grant looks to complete himself in the metropolis, the center to which he gravitates is not Paris, London or even New York: it is

Los Angeles. Quiroga’s film-obsessed protagonist thus seeks an eccentric North

American model through which to re-invent himself—a pursuit based less on simple opposition or emulation than integration and appropriation” (28).

Each of Quiroga’s stories involves a distinct scenario of encounter between the spectator and the onscreen object of his fascinated gaze. In “Miss Dorothy Phillips,”

Grant’s solution to the problem of his impossible cinematically mediated desire is to literally make himself a product for export, constructing his own illusory identity as a

Latin playboy to intermingle and compete with the illusions dealt in by Hollywood. In

“El vampiro,” Grant collaborates with his wealthy acquaintance Rosales in a scientific experiment with “N1 rays,” which they use to extract a desired star from the screen and reproduce her complete physical presence in the world. In “El espectro,” the self proclaimed “literary man” Grant takes advantage of the death of his friend, the

Hollywood actor Duncan Wyoming, to seduce the latter’s movie star wife, Enid. While the first story finally reveals Grant’s successful courtship of Dorothy Phillips to be no less a dream than the cinematic illusions that inspired it, in both of the latter two stories,

162 the fulfillment of desire for the spectral cinematic beauty incurs a fatal debt for the protagonist. In “El vampiro,” Grant and Rosales alike fall victim to the woman they have conjured from the screen when it turns out that she must feed on them like a vampire in order to sustain her physical existence, while in “El espectro” the dead Duncan Wyoming literally emerges back out of the screen in the flesh in order to avenge himself on Grant and Enid.

In all instances, then, the fulfillment of the desires incited by the cinematic illusion may be achieved only at the expense of the spectator’s mortification. In this sense, Quiroga’s cinematic fictions recapitulate the paranoid scenario rehearsed in different ways in “El crimen del otro” and “Los perseguidos,” in which the necessary alienation of the subject’s desire in the (literary) object entails the catastrophic loss of the subject’s autonomy and self-identity. In all four of Quiroga’s cinematically themed stories, the hallucinatory fantasies supplied by the new medium function as a trap for the subject’s gaze, luring him into the deadly structure of misrecognition activated by the figure on the screen who returns his transfixed gaze. This desired moment of reciprocity repeatedly figures as the moment in which the subject unwittingly assents to his symbolic destruction. Thus, in “El espectro,” Grant’s successful solicitation of the gaze of Enid, described as “la más divina belleza que la epopeya del cine ha lanzado a miles de leguas y expuesto a la mirada fija de los hombres. Sus ojos, sobre todo,” finds its echo in the onscreen surveillance to which the undead rival subjects the transgressing spectators: “los ojos se estaban volviendo hacia nosotros . . . a despecho de las leyes y los principios,

Wyoming nos estaba viendo” (380). In a manner recognizable from Quiroga’s

“paranoid” fictional treatments of the fatal mimetic desire underlying literary

163 apprenticeship, the desired correspondence of the gaze of the spectator with that on the screen calls forth the mortifying gaze of the persecutory rival.

Psychoanalyzing Machines

In the same period that witnessed Quiroga’s actual and fictional experiments with emerging technologies of image capture and projection, several prominent members of the first generation of psychoanalysts maintained a somewhat marginal but sustained focus on some of the same aspects of technology that evidently fascinated the Uruguayan writer. Moreover, as was also the case with Quiroga, early psychoanalytic engagements with technology repeatedly intersect with an interest in the delusional phenomena of psychosis. In part, this shared convergence emerges out of the evident correlations linking the psychic mechanism of projection, central to accounts of the hallucinations that occupy a crucial position in the symptomatology of paranoia and , to cinematic and related technologies. More broadly, however, the frequent conjunction of technology with psychosis must be situated within a broader concern with multiple forms of exteriorization of the body in the form of shadows, images, and prosthesetic objects, all of which Freud and his followers understood to participate in the crucial ideational complex surrounding castration. In general, whereas Quiroga’s journalistic and fictional writings flaunt the sheer historical novelty of the new media of representation and projection, early psychoanalytic theorists tend to draw this cluster of entities into the orbit of castration and thus to pass over the unique capacities and implications of new technologies and naturalize them within an ahistorical model of psychic development.

164 Otto Rank’s extended anthropological speculations (in The Double [1914]) on the primitive origins of modern narrative motif of the Doppelgänger feature repeated allusions to the broadly shared collective anxieties and taboos surrounding effigies, images, shadows, and artificial simulacra of the body, as well as prosthesetic extensions of the body and of body parts. It is peculiar, given these emphases, that Rank should on one hand make Stellan Rye’s 1913 horror film The Student of Prague the central case study in his analysis of the thematics and iconography of the modern Doppelgänger narrative, while at the same time never drawing explicit attention to the qualities of the cinematic medium that might make it a particularly effective vehicle for the phobias arising out of the multiplication of images of the body. Interestingly, in The Student of

Prague, the protagonist’s double steps out of the mirror in which his image is initially reflected, in a manner reminiscent of the spectral beings of Quiroga’s cinematically themed horror stories who emerge out of the cinema screen. But in spite of the extensive attention he devotes to mirrors and related visual technologies of capture and replication,

Rank, unlike Quiroga, evidently does not find the cinematic medium itself worthy of specific scrutiny.

In “The Uncanny” (1919), Freud performs a comparable evasion with regard to the technologies of replication and optical devices central to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story

“Der Sandmann,” the main object of his analysis. His critique of E. Jentsch’s prior attempt to trace the feeling of the uncanny to “’doubt as to whether an apparently animate object really is alive and, oconversely, whether a lifeless object might in fact be animate’” tends to discount the importance of the role played in the story by Olympia, the automaton with which Hoffmann’s protagonist Nathanael becomes fatally infatuated.

165 Freud thereby sidelines the entire question of “the uncanny effect produced by . . . notions of automatic – mechanical – processes that may lie hidden behind the familiar image of a living person” (135), and when, later in the essay, he returns to the subject of automata and other mechanical simulacra of the human body, he does so under the rubric of a general discussion of the death drive and the compulsion to repeat. At the same time, Freud uses the optical instruments invented by Coppola/Coppelius as a metaphor for Hoffmann’s narrative production of the uncanny when he remarks: “it becomes clear that the author wants us to look through the spectacles or the spyglass of the demon optician” (139). Freud’s metaphor is somewhat at odds with his argument against the importance of automata in the story, since in the story Coppola’s optical prosthesis is evidently responsible for Nathanael’s projections of animate being onto the mechanical doll Olympia. In demoting technologies central to Hoffmann’s story to a merely metaphorical role, Freud skirts the question of the specific relation of mechanical prostheses and other duplications and projections of the body to the effect of the uncanny.

This reticence is especially notable if we consider his additional claim that Olympia is, in effect, Nathanael’s double: “Olimpia is, so to speak, a complex that has been detached from Nathaniel and now confronts him as a person” (160, n. 2).

Freud’s disciple Victor Tausk’s “On the Origin of the Influencing Machine in

Schizophrenia” (1918/1933) follows the basic pattern established by Rank and Freud.

Although centrally occupied with the psychic weight consistently attached to machines in the delusional worlds of psychotics, Tausk ultimately bypasses the significance of the extraordinary array of heterogeneous details featured in the typical influencing machine:

“[i]t consists of boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries . . . It makes the

166 patient see pictures . . . produces, as well as removes, thoughts and feelings by means of waves or rays or mysterious forces . . . It produces motor sensations in the body [and] is responsible for other occurences in the patient’s body, such as cutaneous eruptions, abscesses, and other pathological processes” (186). After completing the exhaustive documentation of the features of these machines, Tausk somewhat abruptly takes the route of translating them into the master code offered by Freud’s interpretations of dream symbolism: “It may, therefore, be assumed that the influencing apparatus is a representation of the patient’s genitalia projected to the outer world, analogous to the machine in dreams” (190).

We saw earlier that, for Freud, the subject’s social integration requires a fundamental redirection of primary narcissistic libido. To this end, according to the model set out in “,” the projection an externalized ego ideal forges a nexus with the broader social order and thereby permits the mobilization of anti-social narcissistic investments into the construction of an effective rapport with the outside world. The early stage of this process requires the initial investment of libido in the subject’s own body, a step necessary to the construction of “ego-boundaries” and therefore of a psychic distinction between “inside” and “outside.” In Tausk’s reading, which proceeds from this Freudian model of narcissism, paranoid delusions involving complex machines directed at persecuting the subject give hallucinatory form to the regressive malfunctioning of a tenuous social identity. As the paranoid subject withdraws libidinal investments back into their originary narcissistic circuit, what previously stood as the recognition of an exteriorized self in the social order now reappears as a persecutory scheme directed against it, by way of a complex machinery

167 which represents the subject’s alienated investment in its own body as something alien and exterior. It is in this sense that Tausk’s “influencing machine” turns out to be a disguised projection of the patient’s own body, specifically the genitals: “the estranged organ . . . appears as an outer enemy, as a machine used to afflict the patient” (203).

Even as it stands as the most striking symptom of the paranoiac’s withdrawal into him- or herself, the construction of the machine simultaneously represents an attempt to repair the lost relation to the world in that it repeats the process of libidinal investment in one’s own body which must precede the construction of ego boundaries and therefore the correlative construction of an object world. Jacqueline Rose, glossing Lacan’s account of

“paranoiac knowledge,” makes the point that the paranoid “delusional metaphor” closely resembles the process of integration whose failure it signals: “since the projective alienation of the subject’s own image is the precondition for the identification of an object world, all systems of objectification can be related to the structure of paranoia”

(88). Following the same logic, Joan Copjec reads Tausk’s association of the influencing machine with the patient’s estranged body in these terms: “[t]he projection of the body becomes not the cause of paranoia but a defense against it – a delusion of reference that attempts to suture a fault, to rebuild the world from which the paranoid has withdrawn”

(“Anxiety” 56). Rose and Copjec both proceed to postulate paranoia to be a particularly relevant structure to the form and function of the cinematic medium, suggesting that the influencing machine’s ambiguities – its somewhat paradoxical combined function as a symptom and an attempt at recovery – may have more to do with the specific features and capacities of modern machines than Freud, Rank, and Tausk tend to acknowledge when

168 they draw it into a cluster of more archaic forms of bodily doubling involving phallic symbols, shadows, mirrors, and static images.

Hanns Sachs’s essay “The Delay of the Machine Age” (1933), although it emerged out of the same core circle of early psychoanalysts and the same period as the texts discussed above and relies heavily upon Freud, Rank, and Tausk, offers a somewhat distinct and historicizing approach to the role of machines in psychic life. Sachs postulates, in short, a kind of inverse correlation between the extensively documented presence of machines in the delusions of modern schizophrenic patients and the specific and notable absence of complex machines from classical Greco-Roman civilization.

Proceeding from the claim that the territorially expansive trade-oriented mode of production of the late classical world was one that would have benefited enormously from the development of machines, he asks: “what was the enigmatic power which restrained ancient man from either the discovery or the consistent utilization of machines which supplant the worker, notwithstanding that he was driven in this direction by his mathematical-technical knowledge on the one hand, and on the other by economic necessity?” (417).

Duly acknowledging the paucity of actual textual or material evidence from the classical world in favor of his hypothesis, Sachs deploys examples of the well-attested anxieties of the Romantic era regarding the massive expansion of industry in order to posit that the peoples of the classical world were inhibited by an overwhelming sense of the uncanniness of machines. In particular, he quotes from Heinrich Heine’s account of his visit to England in the throes of the industrial revolution: “’this artificial life on wheels, bars, cylinders, and a thousand little hooks, pins, and teeth which move around

169 almost passionately, fills me with horror, [and] just as the machines in England seem to have the perfection of men, the men seemed like machines’” (415).45 Sachs follows the example of Freud’s reading of “Der Sandmann” by linking the perceived uncanniness of machines to their status as “phallic symbols” (415) and therefore to their power to excite castration anxiety. On the other hand, Sachs’s very gesture of singling out of the “delay of the machine age” suggests that he attributes some special inhibiting power to machines that does not pertain to other simulacra of the human body (statues, effigies, images, mirrors) that were widespread in the classical world.

Indeed, Sachs further links the putative inhibition of ancient peoples vis-à-vis machines precisely to what he presents as classical culture’s normative regime of narcissism, which caused its denizens to “represent and ennoble [the human body] to such a height of perfect beauty” (419) and to “glorify a love-attachment between persons of the same sex” (419). For Sachs, the anthropocentrism of ancient cosmology and mythology and the emphases of ancient art distilled a shared perception of the universe in which “nature smilingly served [Man]” (422). He argues that the collective ancient aesthetic fixation on the human form comprised a particular cultural mode of regulation of the surplus narcissism that, in the psychoanalytic account, simultaneously enables and troubles human social existence. Correlative to the glorification of the human form and human abilities that followed from this worldview, Sachs submits, was a powerful inhibition against the development of “those complicated machines which, once set in

45 We should recall here, in an echo of Heine’s remarks, that in Hoffmann’s (near contemporary) “Der Sandmann,” Nathanael’s delusional humanization of the robotic Olympia coincides with a mechanization of his own behavior, as Mladen Dolar has observed: “Nathaniel . . . strangely reacts in a mechanical way: his love for an automaton is itself automatic” (“At First Sight” 144).

170 motion, do the work alone, so that . . . by the independence of their operation [they] give the impression of replacing man” (412). Thus, for Sachs, the modern schizophrenic’s elaboration of paranoid machine delusions in an equivocal attempt to combat a socially disruptive regression into narcissism finds its inverted image in the classical narcissist’s inhibition vis-à-vis the prosthetic extension of the celebrated human body into machines.

In other words, classical culture’s aversion to machines reflects in inverse form its collective affirmation of socially sanctioned forms of narcissism, much as the schizophrenic’s ambivalent psychic reliance on machines is symptomatic of a resistance to a precipitous collapse into a socially proscribed narcissism.

Although Sachs’s speculations usefully distinguish modern machine anxieties from the broader complex of phallic substitutes into which they are integrated in other

Freudian accounts, “The Delay of the Machine Age” neglects consideration of the specific areas of modern technoscientific expansion that prove particularly fruitful in the delusional elaboration of “influencing machines.” Several of the most crucial characteristics of the “typical influencing machine,” as described by Tausk, bear directly upon the arguments advanced by Rank (especially with regard to his use of cinematic examples), Freud (especially with regard to the optical devices and metaphors so important to his reading of Hoffmann’s “Sandmann”), and Sachs, without being addressed directly by any of them.

For one, in addition to being one of “those complicated machines which, once set in motion, do the work alone” (Sachs 412), the influencing machine also “makes the patient see pictures . . . the machine is generally a magic lantern or cinematograph”

(Tausk 186). Attention to the machine’s cinematic aspect offers a more specific sense of

171 the anxieties it entails than Sachs’s general argument that self-sufficient machines threaten to substitute themselves for the body. Warren Buckland, explicitly citing Sachs as a source for his argument, contends that the photographic technologies of image capture and projection pioneered in the nineteenth century “inaugurated the traumatic realization that vision and movement can be mechanized, that the human eye has been displaced as the center of power, leading to a decentering of the ego and to a crisis in identity” (221). The widespread sense that new technologies could offer “an improvement of the human eye,” Buckland claims, therefore paradoxically “led to the delay of the cinema age” (221). He concludes that only when photographic technologies were naturalized by a realist ideology for which “the image represents the permanence and universality of essences” (221) could their potential to capture the totality of movement be exploited.

Consequently, the influencing machine, like the modern cinematic apparatus that evidently serves as its inspiration, is simultaneously a substitute for the body (both because it decenters the body by usurping some of its essential tasks and because it is itself, in Tausk’s account, “a projection of the patient’s body onto the outer world” [192]) and a projector of further replicated/doubled bodies onto the world. Although in some respects less explicitly cinematic than some of the paranoid hallucinations described by

Tausk, the “fleetingly improvised men” who populate Schreber’s delusional universe unmistakably resemble the flickering, substanceless bodies “fleetingly improvised” by cinematic illusion. Furthermore, we should observe that Schreber lends a great importance to a mechanism he calls “picturing”: “In the same way as rays throw onto my nerves pictures they would like me to see especially in dreams, I too can in turn produce

172 pictures for the rays which I want them to see” (211); “the ability to ‘picture’ . . . has truly often been a consolation and comfort in the unending monotony of my dreary life, in the mental torment I suffered from the nonsensical twaddle of voices” (211). The dual role of “picturing” in Schreber’s delusional system indirectly invokes the duality we have just seen to pertain to the cinematic image machine as projector and projection of the body, and shows that this duality lends it both anxiety-generating and reassuring dimensions. In other words, the body projections of the influencing machine may become vehicles of self-affirmation like those Sachs identifies in classical culture’s simulacra of human form.

In more recent decades, film theory has performed a comparable bifurcation in its assessments of the historical and ideological dimensions of the cinematic apparatus.

Buckland’s thesis regarding the “delay of the cinema age” relies on the claim that early photographic technologies were “viewed from two opposite positions” (221). While the photographic image was “seen as an improvement of the human eye (the human eye was therefore decentered) . . . it was, secondly, seen as a naturalistic form of representation . .

. The naturalistic use of photography . . . reproduced the familiar and was therefore reassuring, rather than traumatic” (221). Joan Copjec has repeatedly criticized the tendency of film theorists to focus exclusively on this “reassuring” (and therefore ideological) aspect of the cinematic medium, which proceeds by way of a reification of a particular objectifying, naturalistic gaze as the locus of the viewer’s narcissistic identification: “film theory . . . has always claimed that the cinematic apparatus functions ideologically to produce a subject that misrecognizes itself as a source and center of the represented world.” However, she notes, “[d]espite the fact that the term misrecognition

173 implies an error on the subject’s part, the process by which the subject is installed in a position of misrecognition operates without the hint of failure” (“Orthopsychic” 67).

A previous chapter’s discussion of the mirror stage noted that, in the psychoanalytic account, the subject’s narcissistic self-affirmation in an external image always carries with it a remainder of aggressivity engendered by the disempowering externality of the object of self-affirmation. Similarly, we should locate the point of

“failure” demanded by Copjec in the cinematic machine’s role as a usurpatory substitute for the body (specifically, as Buckland argues, for the eye), which stands as the threatening obverse side of its “reassuring” function as the vehicle of identificatory confirmation of the narcissistic posture of the viewer. The simultaneous and ambivalent externalization of the body both in the machine (as an unrecognizable projection) and by the machine (in the narcissistic circuit of mirrorings engendered by its image projections) entails a dimension common to both the schizophrenic influencing machine and to the characteristic technologies of the early twentieth century whose specificity Sachs fails to take into account in “The Delay of the Machine Age.”

The intricacies of the influencing machine’s relation to the body do not end, however, with this vexing bifurcation of functions. In Tausk’s catalogue of its features, we learn that this hallucinatory apparatus “produces motor phenomena . . . accomplished either by means of suggestion or by air-currents, electricity, magnetism, or X-rays” and is

“responsible for other occurrences in the patient’s body, such as cutaneous eruptions, abscesses, and other pathological processes” (186). The machine, in other words, acts in an unmediated fashion upon the body and compromises its integrity and autonomy by making it no longer subject to the conscious control of the subject and by causing it to

174 decay, fall apart, and contract disease. This aspect of its functioning follows directly from the previous point about the annihilating negativity accompanying the narcissistic self-affirmation of the mirror image if we consider that the hallucination of corporeal heteronomy and fragmentation literalizes the anxious substrate of narcissism Lacan identifies with the image of the “corps morcelé” (Écrits 13).

It is necessary but not sufficient to attribute psychoanalysts’ vague and reductive interpretations of the machines they regarded as occupying such a crucial place in pathological symptoms to the general ahistorical bent of early psychoanalysis, its frequently noted tendency to reduce specific historical phenomena to transhistorical psychic structures. More importantly, when we see psychoanalysts anxiously circumvent the specificities of the machines that populate both the modern world and the paranoid imaginary of psychotic patients, we should recall the assertion, made by both Neil Hertz and Eric Santner in productive revisions of Freud, that psychoanalytic texts dramatize the ways in which psychoanalysis itself participates in the dynamics it describes and diagnoses. Much as paranoid symptoms are seen to disclose and suture all at once the collapse of the patient’s relation to an object world, the uncanny dimension that incites psychoanalytic interest in machines finds its recontainment in the predictable code of phallic symbolism. On a related note, John Farrell has suggested that psychoanalysis is attracted to the phenomena of paranoia because it is itself “a psychology of suspicion” and even “the master code of paranoid interpretation” (69). The reduction of the influencing machine to the status of a misplaced phallic symbol may be read in this sense as responding to an inhibition provoked by the object of scrutiny, much as Sachs

175 examines the machine anxieties of the ancient world and the Romantic era and the machine fantasies of the modern world in those terms.

Early psychoanalysts’ struggle to subordinate the machine age (more specifically the cinema age) to the master code of castration and Oedipal conflict reveals a tension in the engagement of psychoanalytic theory with the very modern world whose volatile psychic and social dynamics it so powerfully documents. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has argued that Freud and Lacan retreat from the implications of their own models when they propose, as unique sources of social coherence and stability, the very normative structures of Oedipal-symbolic identification that modernity (by their own account) has thrown into permanent crisis. Since “[modern] societies are defined by a general crisis of symbolic identifications . . . the complex kinship structures that define modern societies are accompanied by a ‘deficiency’ and a ‘narcissistic bastardization’ of the paternal figure. So how is it possible to prevent the identification with the symbolic father-phallus from being confounded with the rivalrous and homosexualizing imaginary father- phallus?” (282). Leaving Borch-Jacobsen’s question open, we may draw from the ambivalent early engagements of psychoanalysis with technology the observation that machines instantiate and materialize the anxieties of the modern “crisis of symbolic identifications.” In their simultaneous empowerment and disempowerment of the subject, and in their role as a participant in (as Buckland’s analysis would suggest) and a symptom of (as Sachs argues) the crisis of symbolic identification, machines occupy a crucial position in the modern paranoid imaginary and the psychoanalytic accounts of it.

As the discussion of Quiroga’s cinema writings already suggested, for similar reasons

176 “influencing machines” could be enlisted into the repertoire of “paranoid” strategies for negotiating the malfunctioning of symbolic authority characteristic of modern literature.

How to Stop Worrying and Love the Influencing Machine

The cinematic apparatus at the center of Adolfo Bioy Casares’s La invención de

Morel replicates a number of the most notable characteristics of Tausk’s “influencing machines.” Most obviously, it not only “makes the patient see pictures” (Tausk 186) and hear voices, but populates the narrator’s island world with Schreberian “fleetingly improvised men” who, despite the substantiality they project to the beholder’s senses, may vanish in an instant. Like Schreber, the narrator repeatedly hypothesizes that the people who surround him are in fact “una representacion burlesca, una broma dirigida contra mi” (44). Behind the theatrical display he views as “emanating from a foreign, hostile force” (Tausk 187), he postulates the concealed machinations of figures of authority: initially, the police (44, 45, 49, 65), and later, and more accurately, the scientist and inventor Morel. Tausk remarks that the operators of influencing machines are

“predominantly physicians by whom the patient has been treated” (186), as is indeed the case with Schreber’s chief persecutor Flechsig. Although Bioy Casares’s machine does not correspond exactly to Tausk’s in this detail, his narrator does intriguingly dream at one point that “[y]o estaba en un manicomio . . . Morel era el director” (51).

Finally, and perhaps most strikingly of all, the capacity of Morel’s invention to capture a totalized, integrated image of the body and tether its movements to the operations of a projection machine entails a series of disintegrating effects on the body

177 from which the image is extracted. In the final pages of Bioy’s novel, the narrator describes his physical condition after he has allowed the machine to record him:

Casi no he sentido el proceso de mi muerte; empezó en los tejidos de la mano izquierda . . . Pierdo la vista. El tacto se ha vuelto impracticable; se me cae la piel . . . Frente al biombo de espejos, supe que estoy lampiño, calvo, sin uñas, ligeramente rosado. Las fuerzas disminuyen. (81)

Although neither the narrator nor Morel offer a scientific explanation of the fatal impact of the recording devices on the bodies they capture, Morel’s explication of the operation of his machine implies that it results from the “ondas y vibraciones” (61) harnessed to record and transmit sensations across space and time. Tausk, we should recall, notes the following effects commonly attributed to the schizophrenic’s influencing machine:

It produces motor phenomena in the body . . . intended to deprive the patient of his male potency and weaken him. This is accomplished . . . by air-currents, electricity, magnetism, or X-rays . . . It is also responsible for other occurrences in the patient’s body, such as cutaneous eruptions, abscesses, and other pathological processes. (186)

Whereas the the cumulative effect of the persecutorial manipulation of the “rays” in

Schreber’s account is literally to feminize him, the “ondas y vibraciones” harnessed by

Morel instead infantilize the narrator’s physique, leaving him “lampiño, calvo, sin uñas, ligeramente rosado.” As he views his own image locked in its eternal iterative performance courtesy of Morel’s doubling mechanism, his body becomes correlatively unrecognizable and unviable. Bioy’s coupling of the narrator’s externalized, fixed body image with images of bodily decay and disintegration recalls the “imagos of the fragmented body” (Écrits 13) that emerge, for Lacan, as the necessary obverse of the mirror stage’s narcissistic rituals of self-affirmation.

178 Additionally, Bioy echoes the paranoid-psychoanalytic renderings of narcissism and the machine age in his narrator’s references to the same “primitive” anxities about the simulacrum that occupy such a central place in Freud’s and Rank’s treatments of doubles and the uncanny. When Morel hesitates to explain to his friends and victims what is so “terrible” (76) about the image capture device he has developed and used on them, the narrator notes: “Recordé que el fundamento del horror de ser representados en imágenes, que algunos pueblos sienten, es la creencia que al formarse la imagen el alma pasa a la imagen y la persona muere” (76). He subsequently realizes that Morel’s

“escrúpulos . . . por haber fotografiado a sus amigos sin consentimiento,” rather than being “la supervivencia de aquel antiguo horror” (77), turn out to stem from the actual impact of his devices on the human body. In effect, Morel’s machine realizes in a quite literal manner what Freud and Rank regard as ancient peoples’ “narcissistic” fears of image replication (Freud, “Uncanny” 142; Rank 50-2), thus converting an apparently psychological fact into an external event.

Bioy’s novel, in other words, “objectifies” what initially appears to be a pathological anxiety and converts it into a “real” component of the fictional world inhabited by the narrator. The effects of Morel’s machine emphatically belong to the objective “peripecias” that make up the narrative rather than to the inner world of the narrator: indeed the latter suspects on several occasions that he is hallucinating Morel’s phantom beings (see e.g. 51), only to confirm repeatedly their existence. It is precisely the “objectivity” of the novel’s central enigma that elicits Borges’s encomium to Bioy’s allegedly anti-psychological approach to the construction of fiction (in his prologue, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, he contrasts La invención explicitly with the

179 “novela ‘psicológica’” prevalent in the modern era). He commends Bioy’s attention to the external events of the plot – the “aventuras” and “peripecias” that make up its

“admirable argumento” (23) – at the expense of developing the protagonist’s interiority.

Further, he implicitly links the novel’s narrative architecture to that of Morel’s machine by praising its “invención” and dubbing it an “objecto artificial” (23).46

Borges’s stark opposition of “psicología” and “peripecias” does not hold up very well, however, if we examine Bioy’s novel, as it seems to invite us to do, through the prism of the narrator’s evident paranoia – for, despite Borges’s claims for the anti- psychological quality of the novel, the narrator does possess at least a minimal psychological profile, one that corresponds in several respects to the familiar picture of the paranoid. The reader learns at the outset that the narrator is a “perseguido” (25) and

“fugitivo” (45) in flight from the “poder infernal de la justicia” (45), which he believes has victimized him unjustly. He views the modern world as a vast panoptic conspiracy bent on his destruction: “el mundo, con el perfeccionamiento de las policías, de los documentos, del periodismo, de la radiotelefonía, de las aduanas . . . es un infierno unánime para los perseguidos” (25). As mentioned above, on numerous occasions he suspects that the “intrusos” who have arrived on the island to which he as fled are nothing more than “una representación burlesca, una broma dirigida contra mi” (44), “una estratagema desmesurada” (45), or “una maniobra de la policía” (65). In a recognizably paranoid manner, he speculates that the entire world around him is an elaborate fiction conjured up to entrap him: “el mundo extraño en que andaba preocupado en los últimos

46 Alfred MacAdam and Suzanne Jill Levine have both read the scientific material in Bioy’s plots as “metaphors of textual experiment” (Levine 17). I will return to this interpretation subsequently.

180 días, mis conjeturas y mis ansias, Faustine, no habrían sido más que efímeros trámites de la prisión y del patíbulo” (49). Furthermore, in his melodramatic allusions to his planned books Defensa ante sobrevivientes and Elogio de Malthus he displays a familiarly

Schreberian fusion of an (in this instance Malthusian) apocalyptic sensibility with a rhetorically grandiose megalomania.

Furthermore, the basic narrative sequence of La invención de Morel resembles the developmental sequence of paranoid symptoms described by psychoanalysis in that it enacts the hallucinatory recovery of an object world by someone who has undergone a kind of social death. In his flight from the “infierno unánime” of the world to the “isla solitaria” (26) where the novel takes place, the narrator has performed a “total detachment of libido from the outside world” (Copjec, “Anxiety” 52), much like Schreber in Freud’s account and the paranoid patients profiled by Tausk. Copjec adds that “the subject experiences its own withdrawal of libidinal cathexis . . . as the catastrophic end of the external world” (52), corresponding to the narrator’s predictions of a Malthusian apocalypse. Like the “delusional metaphor” (Lacan, Écrits) crucial to Lacan’s account of paranoia, Morel’s machine allows the narrator to “recapture a relation to the external world” (Copjec, “Anxiety” 52) through his infatuation with Faustine, but, to borrow Eric

Santner’s formulation regarding Schreber, “this new world order ha[s] a distinctly paranoid coloration and [is] populated by persecutors” (My Own 84). The narrator may only “have” Faustine, and thereby recover an object world, by surrendering his agency to his absent rival and antagonist Morel, or more specifically to Morel’s machine. In his final euphoric state, he appears to embrace a position he explicitly describes as a loss of

181 autonomy: “Me alegra depender . . . de Haynes, , Alec, Stoever, Irene, etcétera (¡del propio Morel!)” (81).

The trajectory just described brings to the fore the narrative’s peculiar distribution of its paranoid material into the “psychology” of the narrator and the narrative content of the novel, and thereby demonstrates the untenability of distinguishing what Borges refers to as the novel’s “peripecias” from the elements of “psicología” indisputably present in it.

One one hand, the “psychological” profile of the narrator presents him as a megalomaniac and a “perseguido” convinced that all appearances conceal a plot to capture and destroy him. On the other hand, the central thrust of the narrative itself is a

“paranoid” fantasy of the totalization of the panoptic technologies of representation and transmission suggested by cinema, radio, television, and telephones which have made the world an “infierno unánime” for the narrator. Morel’s perfection of the “medios de alcance y retención” (66) comprises the ultimate panoptic apparatus, in that the body under surveillance ceases to be independent from the surveillance device. The initial anxieties of the fugitive therefore find their structural confirmation in Morel’s machinery of surveillance and capture, and the narrative turns out to be an account of how the protagonist comes to willingly assent to and participate in his own definitive capture by the panoptic machinery he intitially flees, a capture which enacts, in its bizarre manner, a kind of reintegration into the human community he has fled. Morel’s machine, in other words, brings about the return “from without,” to use Freud’s formulation regarding

Schreber, or “in the real,” to use Lacan’s, of the foreclosed social order.

In line with the notion that “it’s by way of an imaginary conflict that symbolic integration takes place” (Lacan, S III 212), the narrator’s incorporation into the

182 hallucinatory order subjected to the operation of Morel’s machine proceeds by way of passage through a kind of distorted Oedipal matrix, in which the emergence of the

“horroroso” Morel, his “enemigo” (41) interrupts his idyllic solitary enjoyment of the sight of Faustine. Nevertheless, at the beginning of his voyeuristic games with the strange visitors to the island – “este juego de mirarlos” – his attitude already combines fascination with hostility: “Miro con alguna fascinación a estos abominables intrusos”

(26). Recalling the basic dialectic of narcissism as previously outlined, the externalization of the self in the gaze implies simultaneously its narcissistic confirmation and its threatening alienation in the object. The split in the narrator’s world between his impossible infatuation with Faustine and his equally impossible hostile rivalry with

Morel dramatize this contradiction. The enigmatic gaze of Faustine becomes

“imprescindible” (40) as the locus of redirected narcissism, as Margaret Snook observes:

Before discovering the holographic nature of Faustine, the narrator is tormented by [her] inexplicable behavior, the fact that she never looks at him nor speaks to him. Her voice and gaze become fundamental to his sense of being . . . Viewed within the perspective provided by psychoanalytic theory, the narrator’s preoccupation with Faustine’s gaze and voice would indicate an infantile, regressive mode . . . an attempt to reclaim the lost partial objects and restore primordial boundlessness. (111)

The narrator’s remark, in the throes of his frustration with Faustine, that “[q]uizá Morel no sea más que un énfasis de su prescindencia de mí” (42), encourages the conclusion that Morel serves primarily as an externalized structural prohibition signifying the impossibility of this regession.

We should recall that Nathanael’s similarly voyeuristic fixation on Olympia in

“Der Sandmann” perpetuates his narcissistic fascination with the image and at the same time blinds him to the uncanny reality available to the reader – namely, that his

183 infatuation with an automaton has been orchestrated for obscure and sinister reasons by the inventors Coppola and Spalanzani. In the scene of Olympia’s dismemberment by her inventors, the violent rupture of Nathanael’s narcissitic circuit of enjoyment by the hideous “partial objects” that make up Olympia – especially her eyes – preciptates him towards psychotic break and self-destruction. Freud is right to de-emphasize Olympia as a source of the uncanny in so far as her primary role in Hoffmann’s story is to conceal the reemergence of Nathanael’s obscene surplus father, the Sandman-Coppelius. Olympia thus functions, qua mirror image, as a screen (cf. Copjec, “Orthopsychic” 54). My earlier discussion of the work of Joan Copjec and Warren Buckland suggested that a similar dynamic obtains in their accounts of cinematic narcissism, where the reassuring recognition of the sovereignty of the eye and its access to fixed essences covers over the uncanny decentering of vision performed by the cinematic apparatus.

In order to move beyond the deadlock of his narcissistic relation with Faustine, then, the narrator must reidentify himself with Morel – not the image of Morel but the gaze of Morel, embodied in his machine. Indeed, although he still entertains the

“esperanza de suprimir la imagen de Morel” (81), he explicitly exonerates the inventor

Morel at the end of the novel, as he makes the latter the object of his emulation, forgiving him even for Faustine’s death under the impact of the machine’s rays:

Pero la misma indignación me pone en guardia: quizá atribuya a Morel un infierno que es el mío. Yo soy el enamorado de Faustine; el capaz de matar y matarse; yo soy el monstruo . . . [Morel] quería a la inaccessible Faustine. ¡Por eso la mató, se mató con todos sus amigos, inventó la inmortalidad! La hermosura de Faustine merece estas locuras, estos homenajes, estos crímenes. Yo la he negado, por celos o defendiéndome, para no admitr la pasión. Ahora veo el acto de Morel como un justo ditirambo. (80)

184 As Snook comments, Morel’s actions signal a “rejection of his own limited biological role of father, and his refusal to acknowledge any ‘father’ figure of power and authority,

God or Man” and a “desire to assume the absolute role of the Omnipotent Father, the master of life and death, presence and absence” (110). While the narrator’s vandalism of

Morel’s original design through his insertion of his own image into the machine’s projected world shows up the limits of the previously absolute sovereignty of Morel’s gaze, in order to accomplish this he must essentially “duplicate . . . Morel’s attitudes and activities. [He] denounces procreation, seeks immortality through a male created rebirth, and shares the inventor’s desire for Faustine” (Snook 110-11). In that narrator’s paranoid solution, in order to succeed Morel and have any sort of access to Faustine he must both become Morel, especially by learning to manipulate Morel’s machine, and, like Morel, resign himself to becoming part of the machine’s mechanism.

Commenting on Quiroga’s cinematically themed stories, Carlos Dámaso Martínez has argued that “[por] el dilema o el enigma principal en todos estos cuentos . . . y por la problemática fantástica del mundo de lo visual, Quiroga es precursor de La invención de

Morel” (Quiroga, Arte 33). Pursuing a more Borgesian line of thought, we might claim that in La invención, Bioy “invents” Quiroga as his precursor through his elaborate revision of the scenario of paranoid spectatorship mapped out in the Uruguayan author’s earlier stories. Like Quiroga’s Guillermo Grant, Bioy’s protagonist starts out as a (Latin

American) spectator whose gaze is trapped by the illusions projected by a cinematic apparatus. Like Grant, he may find the fulfillment of the desire thus incited only by way of an annihilating incorporation into the aura projected by its mortifying rays. As we saw earlier, in “Miss Dorothy Phillips, mi esposa,” Grant’s courtship of the star who gives the

185 story its name may only come to fruition by way of his fashioning of his identity into an illusion as insubstantial as the object of his desire, while in “El vampiro,” the animating effect of the N1 rays upon the cinematically projected body has as its direct consequence the life-sapping powers of the spectral female vampire thus generated.

The final scenario of “El espectro” perhaps resembles that of La invención most closely of all. Grant has united himself with Enid, but having fallen victim to the vengeance of the spectral Wyoming, the two lovers persist in an invisible purgatory of eternal spectatorship in the Grand Splendid cinema of Buenos Aires, where they hope to capture the gaze of Grant’s onscreen rival, lure him from the screen, and thereby reenter the realm of the visible through the “espacio vivo . . . entre la Nada que ha disuelto lo que fue Wyoming, y su eléctrica resurrección” (384). Similarly, Bioy’s narrator and Faustine remain present to each other only in the eternal absence generated by Morel’s machine, but the narrator concludes by imagining “una máquina capaz de reunir las presencias disgregadas” which will allow him to “entrar en el cielo de la conciencia de Faustine”

(82). In both instances, the narcissistic lure of misrecognition engendered by the projections of cinematic illusion finds its uncanny corollary in the deadly subjection of the body to the operations of the machine, a subjection so complete that the imagined escape into plenitude must also proceed through the machine.

Quiroga’s Hollywood stories egregiously flaunt the novelty of their theme, even as they subject the exaggeratedly enthusiastic cinephile Guillermo Grant to a certain amount of mockery. In contrast, in his prologue to La invención de Morel, Borges omits almost all mention of the technological component of Bioy’s story, and avoids any allusion to its inspiration in the cinema and the other expanding technologies of the

186 period.47 Instead, as noted above, he proclaims its chief virtue to be its unfashionable neglect of “psychology” in favor of the external events of the plot, in admirable dissent from the “común parecer de 1882, de 1925, y aun de 1940 [que] aboga por la novela

‘psicológica,’ y opina que el placer de las aventuras es inexistente o pueril” (23). I have attempted to demonstrate that Borges’s dichotomy is somewhat inadequate since, upon close scrutiny, the narrative “peripecias” at the core of La invención de Morel bear a close but enigmatic relation to the narrator’s paranoid profile. Nevertheless, the point remains that Bioy takes as his literary models not the celebrated stream of consciousness techniques of Joyce and Woolf then in vogue (as compared with, say, his Argentine contemporary Leopoldo Marechal, who in the early 1940s was at work on his Joycean epic Adán Buenosayres) but the science fiction adventures of H.G. Wells and other decidedly non-avant-garde authors.

Borges’s other major claim on behalf of Bioy’s novel is that it undertakes a successful act of literary affiliation, appropriation, and modernization – the introduction

“a nuestras tierras y a nuestro idioma de un nuevo género” – by situating itself in a literary geneaology in which Borges numbers Wells, Chesterton, Kafka, and James, characterized by the cultivation of “imaginación razonada.” Borges thus ascribes to La invención de Morel a simultaneous novelty and belatedness. As if to resolve this evident tension in his evaluation, the statement that “[m]e creo libre de toda superstición de

47 In a late interview, Bioy claimed that the figure of Faustine was inspired by the silent film actress Louise Brooks. Borges’s neglect of the cinematic dimension of La invención is somewhat surprising, insofar as he was in fact an appreciative viewer of the cinema who published numerous film reviews in Sur over several decades. A number of these are anthologized in Sur 334-335 (Jan. 1974). See also Edgardo Cozarinsky, Borges y el cine (Buenos Ares: Sur, 1974) and Borges en/y/ sobre cine (Madrid: Fundamentos, 1981).

187 modernidad, de cualquier ilusión de que ayer difiere íntimamente de hoy o diferirá de mañana” (24) appears to reiterate the claim we have seen Borges make in Otras inquisiciones to the effect that apparent literary novelty generally turns out to be a variation on a limited set of motifs and images. Thus, La invención de Morel achieves novelty insofar as it effectively “renueva un concepto que San Agustín y Orígenes refutaron, que Louis Auguste Blanque razonó y que dijo con música memorable Dante

Gabriel Rossetti” (24). Here we encounter an instance of the kind of redoubling discussed in the introductory chapter as a pivotal component of Borgesian literary paranoia, since what is repeated in this textual lineage is, in fact, the motif of repetition itself.

Borges closely resembles the early psychoanalysts discussed above when he presents “the eternal return of the same” as belonging to a transhistorical stock of literary motifs: the repetitive recurrence of the motif of repetition is, of course, crucial to Freud’s account of the uncanny. Conversely, Bioy’s novel links repetition to a contemporary and historically situated fantasy of the perfection of technologies of recording and transmission. Morel achieves infinite repetition and therefore a kind of abolition of history, but only the particular circumstances of the “machine age” permit him to do so.

In this respect, the tension between Bioy’s and Borges’s versions of repetition recapitulates the vexing and ambiguous presence of the machine in psychoanalytic models of paranoia. In both instances, the consequences of technology are presented as reiterating permanent structures and motifs, but only a specific configuration of contingent historical and technological developments has brought those structures into view.

188 Certain features of the machine at the center of La invención de Morel, neglected by Borges much as psychoanalysts neglected the specificities of the machine age, nevertheless tie into the central subject of his preface: the relationship La invención establishes with modern fiction. Borges opposes Bioy’s novel, and the models he links it to, to all fiction which attempts to be a “transcripición de la realidad” (23), stating that La invención “es un objeto artificial que no sufre ninguna parte injustificada” (23).

Likewise, he contrasts the fantastic “peripecias” comprising the novel’s plot to the events of the realistic or psychologizing novel, “a los que, sin saberlo, nos resignamos como a lo insípido y ocioso de cada día” (23). Although Borges implies that Bioy wisely eschews such narrative banalities altogether, it should rather be said that he inserts, perhaps parodically, an exaggerated version of this “transcription” of an “insipid” quotidian reality right into the middle of the story, in the form of the interactions of Morel’s idle, frivolous party, recorded in precise and exhaustive detail for all eternity. Morel’s machine, in this sense, generates something a kind of parodic ideal of the sort of novel castigated by Borges in the preface. Indeed, Morel’s most vivid explanation of the functioning of his machine makes an unmistakable allusion to Proust, whose works

Borges describes as “inaceptables como invenciones” (23), when he refers to his experiments with a woman named “Madeleine”: “’Madeleine estaba para la vista,

Madeleine estaba para el oído, Madeleine estaba para el sabor, Madeleine estaba para el olfato, Madeleine estaba para el tacto: ya estaba Madeleine’” (62).

Yet if Morel’s project is in this sense linked to the novelistic models Borges counterposes to La invención, Morel simultaneously embodies the positive model of fiction proposed by Borges through his systematic obliteration of the interiority of his

189 “characters,” and through the construction of the machine itself, an elaborate “objeto artificial” no less than the novel, and one that literally registers and reflects its own artificiality in the mirrored chambers that contain its core mechanisms. In this regard,

Suzanne Jill Levine has argued that “the scientific contents of the experiments carried out are . . . metaphors of textual experiment. Morel’s machine is . . . a metaphor of the work of art” (17). I would add that Morel’s machine offers an image of resolution of the

“inventive” or “novel” side of the novel and its repetitive, intertextual, and derivative aspect. Morel’s “invention,” like Bioy’s novel in Borges’s account, is novel precisely in its capacity to cancel out novelty by perfecting a mechanism of mimetic repetition.

The dual status of Morel’s machine as model and counter-model of the novel finds definite echoes in what I have described as the “Oedipal” matrix of misrecognition passed through by the narrator in the course of the novel. Much like the reader seduced by the realist illusionism critiqued by Borges, the narrator initially misrecognizes

Faustine and Morel as “real.” That is, he blinds himself as to their artifactual character and dependency on an underlying artificial mechanism. This misrecognition places him in the deadlock of unrealizable desire for Faustine and concomitant impossible rivalry with Morel that persists through much of the novel. The narrator solicits Faustine’s gaze in the belief that her recognition of him will reconstitute the reality he has lost in his self- imposed social death: “siento . . . que si pudiera ser mirado un instante por ella, hablado un instante por ella, afluiría juntamente el socorro que tiene el hombre en los amigos, en las novias y en los que están en su misma sangre” (37).

His subsequent recognition of the mechanism behind the illusion that has so occupied him does not result in its dissolution. Rather, it causes him to reimagine his

190 relation to the illusion in a manner parallel to the novel’s ironic internalization, in the form of the machine’s operations, of the practices of mimetic transcription Borges repudiates in his preface. The narrator’s previous fantasy of wholeness and completion subsides with the emergence of a fantasy of “desdoblamiento en actor y espectador.

Estuve ocupado en sentirme en un asfixiante submarino, en el fondo del mar, en un escenario” (75). This autoscopic moment, which foreshadows the final theatrical integration of his image into the illusory projections of the machine, inaugurates the narrator’s concluding euphoric recognition of himself in his radical alienation in the machine. The recognition of himself from the outside correlates with formal distance the novel establishes from its own narrative procedures through its displacement of the production of its “plot” and “characters” onto the projections of Morel’s machine.

The paranoid narrative scenario of the novel may therefore be read as a figuration of its implicit scene of writing. The narrative, of course, contains the act of writing within it: the narrator is, even as he is immersed in the “peripecias” of the novel, a writer whose baffled attempt to literally transcribe the island’s reality proceeds in parallel with the mimetic operations of Morel’s machine. But the narrator’s basic trajectory also renders explicit an irony hidden in Borges’s preface. In seeking an escape from dominant aesthetic models, much as the narrator has sought total escape from the social order, it rediscovers those models in a displaced and distorted form insofar as the work of art at its center is Morel’s hyper-“realist” transcription device. Likewise, the flight announced by

Borges from imitation to invention results in the more perfectly self-contained economy of repetition embodied in Morel’s “invention” and in the persistent literary genealogy of the motif of “eternal return of the same.” The trajectories of both narrator and novel thus

191 follow an “Oedipal” pattern, as described by Jerry Aline Flieger: “As long as Oedipus fails to recognize the claim of the Other on a shared object of desire () . . . he is not paranoid enough . . . It is only when he recognizes his implication in the shared human field that he is able to see the truth, which wholly justifies the paranoid view”

(85). In “El escritor argentino y la tradición,” Borges invokes the traumatic structure of literary influence with the image I have described previously as Plato’s paranoid writing machine: “Platón dijo que los poetas son amanuenses de un dios, que los anima contra su voluntad, contra sus propósitos, como el imán anima a una serie de anillos de hierro.” In

La invención de Morel, the narrator’s self-subjection to Morel’s influencing machine similarly offers a way of imagining the writer as subject to an obligatory compliance with an invasive heteronomy.

Significantly, in naming H.G. Wells as one of Bioy’s literary models, Borges describes the relationship of Morel to Wells’s Moreau as “filial” (stating that the novel’s title “alude filialmente a otro inventor isleño, a Moreau” [24]). Although this remark carries the implication of a homologous relationship between Bioy and Wells, Borges’s emphasis on the two fictional inventors and their similar surnames brings into view the problematic nature of the relationship of literary paternity he invokes. As was the case with Poe’s “William Wilson,” The Island of Dr. Moreau dramatizes the traumatic impact of paternity as it narrates a catastrophic failure of filial succession. In his effort to create a new human race from scratch, Moreau uses the most brutal imaginable means to graft together a collection of grotesque, semi-humanized hybrid beings who eventually kill him and revert to their untamed animal natures. Like Freud in Totem and Taboo, Wells found

192 inspiration for the story in Darwin’s hypothesis of a primal horde ruled over by the overbearing tyrannical patriarch as the origin of the human social link.

As Margaret Snook and Suzanne Jill Levine have pointed out, both Moreau and

Morel stand in for the figure of the author imagined as the absolute point of origin of the text, just as the text finds a kind of counterpart in the islands of Wells’s and Bioy’s novels. In the tradition of literary inventors including beginning with Victor

Frankenstein, Moreau and Morel subtract themselves from the lineage of biological procreation in order to adopt a more perfect and unrivalled position as “absolute father”

(Snook 110). Both novels narrate, in different ways, the failures and ambiguities of this enterprise. Moreau, much like Freud’s mythical primal father, refuses to recognize his

“progeny” and ultimately falls victim to them. Bioy’s narrator, although he subordinates himself to Morel’s authority by allowing himself to be absorbed into the machine and doubly mortified (as corpse and as simulacrum) in the process, also compromises the self-contained order established by Morel by inserting himself as a kind of obscene supplement into the reality it projects. The succession enacted in La invención de Morel therefore involves a mutual disempowerment and loss of autonomy for both “father” and

“son.”

My introductory chapter devoted an extensive discussion to the insistent focus of

Latin American cultural discourse on origins and genealogies and its frequent deployment of metaphors of paternity. Some remarks of Roberto González Echevarría’s with regard to this cluster of themes, with specific reference to Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos, possess a partial applicability to La invención de Morel:

193 Just as the narrator-protagonist of the novel discovers that he is unable to wipe the slate clean to make a fresh start, so the book, in searching for a new, original narrative, must contain all the previous ones, and in becoming an Archive return us to the most original of those modalities . . . looking for an empty present wherein to make the first inscription . . . Because of his anxiety about origins, the narrator-protagonist’s is the quintessential Latin American story and its critical undoing . . . For instead of being relieved of history’s freight, the narrator-protagonist discovers that he is burdened by the memory of repeated attempts to discover or found the newness of the New World. (Myth 3-4)

In similarly “Oedipal” terms, González Echevarría states elsewhere that “the new self” proclaimed by Latin American literary elites “must express itself . . . in a language that is already burdened with old concepts and stories” (Voice 12). In addition to being embodied in the intertextual relationships documented by Suzanne Jill Levine in Bioy’s novel, the literary compulsion to repeat described by González Echevarría makes its appearance in La invención in the form of the repetition mechanisms of Morel’s machine and the narrator’s mimetic relationship to Morel. The central facts of his “story” – his impossible desire for Faustine and his self-mortification for the sake of eternal appearance of their union – are Morel’s before they are his; to use the Freudian formula, the entire story the narrator enacts in the course of the narrative has already been written for him on “another scene.” The “museo” in which much of the action occurs is both literally a literary archive, with its “bibliotecas inagotables y deficientes” (28), and a figurative archive of desire in which human agents are reduced to a dead stock of mechanically projected images. Bioy’s machine metaphor thus offers a distinctly paranoid version of the automatism implicit in the relationships of priority and influence described by González Echevarría with the metaphor of the archive.

194 A plethora of metaphorical and metonymic details link Morel’s island to the preponderant topics of Latin American “cultural discourse,” to use the term preferred by

Carlos Alonso for the textual space in which the continent’s collective identity has been constructed, questioned and debated. Indeed, the island scenario may be read as a version of the “Latin America” constructed in the textual debates over identity that inaugurate modern Latin American literature. Obliquely recalling José Martí’s proclamation of the fundamental struggle between “la falsa erudición y la naturaleza,”

Morel’s island instantiates the impossible nexus of an effete, deracinated, idle elite and an overwhelming natural world. In his descriptions of Morel’s party, the narrator repeatedly invokes the very qualities frequently cited by Martí and others in criticizing the mimeticism and dislocation of Latin American elites. He mocks them as “los héroes del snobismo” (34), castigates their “consumada frivolidad,” their “trajes iguales a los que se llevaban hace pocos años” (26) and their “habitaciones . . . modernas, suntuosas, desagradables” (29), and describes the architecture on the island as a “mala imitación”

(28). Even more tellingly, he remarks that Morel’s companions “hablaban correctamente francés; muy correctamente; casi como sudamericanos” (43) (just as significantly, the servants speak Spanish). The narrator’s descriptions of nature, meanwhile, echo the discourses of abundance and degeneration surrounding the natural world that extend far back into Latin America’s colonial period. He evokes, for instance, the “vegetación . . . abundante. Plantas, pastos, flores de primavera, de verano, de otoño, de invierno, van siguiéndose con urgencia, con más urgencia en nacer que en morir” (27-28), and notes at one point that the stench of rotting fish “sugiere las playas de la patria, con sus turbios de multitud de peces, vivos y muertos, saltando de las aguas e infectando vastísimas zonas

195 de aire, mientras los abrumados pobladores los entierran” (29). Similarly, in the second basement of the museum, the site of Morel’s machine, he discovers “un ambiente de nieve, como en las frías alturas de ” (30). With these homologies in mind, it is not difficult to see in the island’s three permanent structures, “museo,” “capilla,” and

“pileta de natación,” nothing less than the social order of the Latin American “ciudad letrada” in nuce, with the buildings embodying the elite institutions of knowledge, religion, and leisure.

In a manner that encourages this reading, the narrator experiences his integration into the hallucinatory social order established by Morel as a return to origins. In the novel’s final paragraphs, after he has allowed Morel’s machine to copy and thus destroy his body, he abruptly delivers a celebratory apostrophe to his Latin American “Patria,”

Venezuela, in which the details of his recollections coincide in several instances with specific features of Morel’s island. His description of “la inundación en los llanos” echoes his earlier references to the “grandes inundaciones” (32) that occur on the island, while his memory of a romantic entanglement in Venezuela becomes assimilated into his dying visions of Faustine: “tú, Elisa, entre lavanderos chinos, cada día pareciéndote más a

Faustine” (82). In the final sentences of his patriotic rhapsody, he recalls a scene of what

Eric Santner would call “symbolic investiture”: “la Declaración de Independencia que nos leía todos los 5 de Julio, en la sala elíptica del Capitolio, el imperioso Valentín

Gómez . . . confieso que después, cuando la banda tocaba Gloria al bravo pueblo . . . no podíamos reprimir la emoción patriótica, la emoción que ahora no reprimo” (82). This scene of affirmation of collective social belonging, centered on the collective recitation of the declaration of independence, echoes the language of “dependency” prominent in the

196 narrator’s previously cited description of his absorption into the machine’s regime of projection: “Me vejó la dependencia de las imágenes . . . Ahora no: entré en ese mundo; ya no puede suprimirse la imagen de Faustine sin que la mía desaparezca. Me alegra también depender – y esto es más extraño – de Haynes, Dora, Alec, Stoever, Irene . . .

¡del propio Morel!” (81). In the narrator’s integration into a new “imagined community” structured as a distorted mirror image of the one he has abandoned, the unheimlich and the heimlich have reconverged.

The Delay of the Uncanny Age

While experimenting with Morel’s machine, Bioy’s narrator initially generates only a partial simulacrum of himself: “Puse la mano izquierda ante el receptor; abrí el proyector y apareció la mano, solamente la mano, haciendo los perezozos movimientos que había hecho cuando la grabé.” He proceeds to reflect: “Esta mano, en un cuento, sería una terrible amenaza para el protagonista. ¿En la realidad, qué mal puede hacer?”

(75). The narrator’s distinction between the hypothetical (but presumably Gothic)

“cuento” he alludes to, in which the free-floating hand would be a terrible harbinger, and his “real” experience, no longer fearful because he understands the mechanism behind it, echoes an important passage of Freud’s “The Uncanny,” where the psychoanalyst insists on the need to “distinguish between the uncanny one knows from experience and the uncanny one only fancies or reads about” (154). He contends that the techniques for the

“testing . . . of material reality” (154) mastered by modern science mean that “for anyone who has wholly and definitively rejected . . . animistic convictions, this species of the uncanny no longer exists [and] will fail to arouse in him any fear” (154). In this sense,

197 Freud shares the narrator’s proclaimed stance of demystified mastery, and indeed declares elsewhere in the essay that he himself is largely unsusceptible to the uncanny.

Of course, the narrator’s distinction between “cuento” and “realidad” takes on a definite irony due to the fictional status of his locus of enunciation, and his perspective on the floating hand does not necessarily coincide with the reader’s. Surprisingly, Freud addresses precisely such a potential undecidability of the uncanny in fictional texts through a discussion of the varying effects of separate uses of the motif of the severed hand. He notes that while “[s]evered limbs, a severed head, a hand detached from the arm . . . feet that dance by themselves . . . all these have something highly uncanny about them, especially when they are credited, as in the last instance, with independent activity”

(150), they may not always have the expected uncanny connotation in literary contexts:

“the motif of the severed hand [does] not have the same uncanny effect in Herodotus’s story of the treasure of Rhampsenitus as it did in Hauff’s ‘Story of the Severed Hand’”

(158). He attributes the latter discordance to the fact that with Herodotus, the reader’s

“attention is focused not on the princess’s feeling, but on the superior cunning of the master-thief” (158). The reader thus avoids the uncanny impact of the narrative motif by adopting the thief’s perspective of technical mastery over the situation, rather than the princess’s position of baffled passive spectatorship. In La invención de Morel, by the time the narrator generates the spectral hand, he has abandoned his previous stance of mystified spectatorship and assumed a position of active manipulation by familiarizing himself with Morel’s machine. Nevertheless, at the story’s conclusion, the hand persists as an obscene remainder left behind by the narrator’s integration into the machine, disrupting the otherwise perfectly self-contained system of illusion he has created and

198 ensuring that his bodily simulacrum does not fully coincide with itself. It thus conforms to the psychoanalytic definition of the “partial object” as “that which cannot be assimilated into the subject’s narcissistic illusion of completeness” (Evans 135). The persistence of precisely such unassimilable “bad partial objects,” in ’s account of infantile narcissism, provoke the subject’s assumption of a “paranoid position.”

The repeated convergences of paranoid machine motifs in fiction, delusional symptom, and psychoanalytic interpretation suggest that the materials juxtaposed with them occupy a crucial place in the complex and diffuse, but historically specific, discourse Mladen Dolar has identified with the “specific dimension of the uncanny that emerges with modernity” (7). As Dolar notes, although

it seems that Freud speaks about a “universal” of human experience when he speaks of the uncanny, yet his own examples tacitly point to the particular historical rupture brought about by the Enlightenment . . .There was an irruption of the uncanny strictly parallel with the bourgeois and industrial revolutions and the rise of scientific rationality – and, one might add, with the Kantian establishment of transcendental subjectivity, of which the uncanny presents the surprising counterpart. (7)

For Dolar, the specifically modern uncanny emerges when it ceases to be “covered over

(and veiled) by the area of the sacred and the untouchable [and] assigned to a religiously and socially sanctioned place in the symbolic order from which the structure of power, sovereignty, and a hierarchy of values emanated” (7). The modern attempt to evacuate the uncanny by establishing transparent social relations based on certain knowledge instead inaugurates the “uncanny in the strict sense” by liquidating the uncanny’s

“privileged and excluded place (the exclusion that founded society)” (7). In a related manner, we see in both Freud’s essay and Bioy’s novel that the very gesture of technical

199 mastery that allegedly obliterates the uncanny through the procedure of “reality testing” produces an uncanny remainder that persists in an unlocalizable, free-floating form. In this reading, the extension of scientific mastery over material reality does not expel the uncanny, as Freud claims, but paradoxically produces it as a by-product; hence Freud’s difficulty in containing the uncanny by subjecting to scientific scrutiny. Dolar notes that, prior to psychoanalysis, it was primarily in fiction that this uncanny made its most notable appearances: “Popular culture, always sensitive to such shifts, took successful hold of [the uncanny] – witness the immense popularity of Gothic fiction and its aftermath” (7). He takes as his model of the modern literary uncanny Frankenstein, noted by Suzanne Jill Levine as one of the more important of the panoply of models Bioy drew upon in the textual realm encompassing the fantastic, science fiction, Gothic fiction, and romance (Levine 17). By this account, Bioy’s novel and Freud’s essay, along with

Quiroga’s stories and the texts by Rank, Tausk, and Sachs discussed above, belong to a shared genealogy.

Several scholars whose work I have discussed advance arguments closely parallel to Dolar’s regarding the historicity of paranoia. For both David Trotter and Eric Santner, the modern emergence of paranoia proceeds from the drastic reordering of social structures and accompanying shifts in mechanisms of according and transmitting authority and legitimacy. In Santner’s analysis, both Schreber’s and Freud’s accounts of paranoia dramatize “a fundamental impasse in [the subject’s] capacity to metabolize [the] performative magic [of symbolic investiture], to be inducted into the normative space opened up by it” (206). Santner reads both Schreber’s Memoirs of my Nervous Illness and Freud’s case study on Schreber as responses to a “crisis of symbolic investiture” in

200 which the “social acts . . . whereby an individual is endowed with a new social status and a role within a shared linguistic universe” (Santner, “States” 205) cease to function effectively in the face of “a kind of uncanny surplus of power and influence secreted by

[the sites and resources of symbolic legitimation]” (61). In Trotter’s account, “[p]aranoia is a delusion of magical power” linked to the efforts of “upwardly mobile professional classes [seeking] for their expertise . . . the status of a ‘magical power’: a status previously or otherwise afforded to qualities such as wealth or warlike valor” (7-8).

These accounts suggest that paranoia comes to occupy a crucial place in the modern social imaginary in that it comprises a deliriously systematic response to the enigma presented by a regime of authority which has divested itself of the mystique by which it elicited effective consent. Just as, for Dolar, the uncanny comes into its own (in literature and beyond) when it loses its designated space in the sacred and becomes untethered from ordered systems of taboo and prohibition, the characteristically modern attempt to render social relations transparent produces the uncanny as an inevitable remainder. The paranoid elaboration of fantastic regimes of surveillance, persecution, and bodily invasion emerge as “substitute formations” giving form to this remainder and covering over its traumatic implications. The machines we have observed proliferating in the modern paranoid repertoire participate in the production of the broader crisis of authority in the invasive heteronomy they threaten as they simultaneously extend and decenter the subject’s mastery. For the same reason, they serve notably in the production of the “delusional metaphors” that furnish imaginary solutions to the traumatic impact of what Adriana Bergero calls the “profound identitary dislocations” (5) occasioned by modernization in Argentina: “Modernity . . . altered so many patterns of daily life that it

201 gave rise to perplexity, hilarity, and pain, but above all to excess: an excess of social interaction, uncontainable by traditional frames and boundaries” (Bergero 7). In the midst of a period of industrialization, vertiginous expansion of the mass media, and the drastic and wide-ranging shifts in structures of cultural authority and regimes of literary prestige these developments entailed, Bioy Casares places the drama of paranoid spectatorship at the center of an ironic revision of Latin American culture’s “master plot of futurity.”

202

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