Ghost (Hi)Stories: Fiction As Alternative History in Brodber, Valdés, Cisneros, and Condé
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2017 Ghost (Hi)stories: Fiction as Alternative History in Brodber, Valdés, Cisneros, and Condé Kristina Suzette Gibby Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Comparative Literature Commons Recommended Citation Gibby, Kristina Suzette, "Ghost (Hi)stories: Fiction as Alternative History in Brodber, Valdés, Cisneros, and Condé" (2017). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 4228. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/4228 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. GHOST (HI)STORIES: FICTION AS ALTERNATIVE HISTORY IN BRODBER, VALDÉS, CISNEROS, AND CONDÉ A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Interdisciplinary Program in Comparative Literature by Kristina Suzette Gibby B.A., Brigham Young University, 2006 M.A., Brigham Young University, 2009 May 2017 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my family, especially my parents, who have always encouraged me and supported me in all that I do. During my time at Louisiana State University I have been privileged to know and learn from several remarkable and inspiring professors, including my committee members: Dr. Adelaide Russo, Dr. Solimar Otero, Dr. Katherine Henninger, and my wonderful committee chair, Dr. Andrea Morris. I am also immensely grateful to Dr. Pallavi Rastogi for being a friend and a mentor and serving on my general examination committee. I would also like to add a special thanks to Amy Catania, whose thoughtful peer revisions helped me to work through complex ideas and kept me motivated to write. Finally, I would like to thank Shayne for supporting me through the most challenging part of this journey. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………......... ... ii ABSTRACT…..……………………………………………………………………………......... iv INTRODUCTION Ghosts, Fiction, and Alternative Histories ………………………………………………….….… 1 CHAPTER ONE Phantom Ache: Ghosts in New World Literature ……………………………...…...................... 25 CHAPTER TWO “Anthropology of the Dead:” Ghosts, Subaltern Knowledge, and Alternative History in Erna Brodber’s Louisiana ……………………………………………………………………………..58 CHAPTER THREE Haunting and Affect: Ghosts and Nostalgia in Zoé Valdés’s Te di la vida entera and Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo: or Puro Cuento………..……………………………………………………….. 84 CHAPTER FOUR “Rêvons:” Haunting, History, and Imagination in Maryse Condé’s Victoire, les saveurs et les mots: récit ……………………………….....…..………………….…………………………... 121 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………… 159 WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………………….. 164 VITA…………………………………………………………………………………………… 172 iii ABSTRACT This dissertation analyzes the role that female ghosts play in recuperating memory and filling the gaps of official history in the following four contemporary novels: Erna Brodber’s Louisiana (1994), Zoé Valdés’s Te di la vida entera (1996), Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo: or, Puro Cuento (2002), and Maryse Condé’s Victoire, les saveurs et les mots: récit (2006). The ghosts in these novels disrupt a linear temporality and present a matriarchal mode of remembering, leading readers to reconsider the past outside of the dominant historical discourse. In this way, the novels become alternative histories that oppose the monologic historical paradigm and recuperate marginalized voices silenced by History with a capital H. The novels trouble the boundary between truth and fiction, asking the reader to consider the moral value of art. The reader is obliged to relinquish certain assumptions about history and its creation and processes in order to understand how fiction can be an alternative history. My introduction explores the historical paradigm that these novels destabilize, including a Hegelian concept of history that is based on reason. The introduction also sets up the feminist methodology that drives my analysis and presents the geographic scope of my dissertation. Chapter One explores the tradition of the ghost in the literature of the Americas, especially how ghosts confront traumatic pasts and destabilize a linear temporality. In Chapter Two I analyze Brodber’s Louisiana, which employs two female ghosts to resist hegemonic historical discourse via spirit possession. In the third chapter I discuss ghosts’ affective nature in Valdés’s Te di la vida entera and Cisneros’s Caramelo. The spirit narrators in these novels recreate memory via nostalgia and the affective nature of music. Chapter Four explores imagination’s role in filling the gaps of history through an analysis of Condé’s Victoire, whose narrator is haunted by the ghost of her grandmother and compelled to reconstruct her history. My conclusion draws out the specific iv similarities between the four novels and further explores the way in which these novels not only use the ghost figure to comment on the past, but also employ it to initiate healing within individual relationships between women. v INTRODUCTION Ghosts, Fiction, and Alternative Histories “In literature, the ghost is almost always a metaphor for the weight of the past.” —Tabitha King “Toi tu dis l’Histoire, moi je dis les histoires.” “You say History, but I say (hi)stories.”1 —Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco, 102 Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost, published in 2000, invokes the figure of the ghost in its title; however, no literal ghost appears in the narrative. Anil’s “ghost” is figurative and ambiguous; it represents victims of political killings, traumatic events, and personal disappointments that haunt the main character, Anil Tissera. Originally from Sri Lanka, Anil lives in the U.S. and works as a forensic pathologist for the Centre for Human Rights at the UN. The novel begins when Anil is called on to return to her home country and contribute to a UN human rights investigation during the Sri Lankan civil war. The war began in the 1980s and involved three main groups: the government, insurgents, and separatists. The scale and horror of the violence is summarized early in Ondaatje’s narrative: [T]he darkest Greek tragedies were innocent compared with what was happening here. Heads on stakes. Skeletons dug out of a cocoa pit in Matale. At university Anil had translated lines from Archilochus—In the hospitality of war we left them their dead to remember us by. But here there was no such gesture to the families of the dead, not even the information of who the enemy was. (11, emphasis in original) The victims’ families are not able to mourn over the physical bodies of their loved ones. They had simply disappeared. Those left behind are surrounded by uncertainty. They are uncertain of the fate of their friends and family and also uncertain of the perpetrators’ identities. All three combatant groups work in the shadows. Anil’s task is to discover the identities of the bodies that have been hidden by all sides, including the government. During her investigation, she becomes 1 Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. 1 attached to one skeleton in particular whom she names “Sailor,” a male who was recently murdered and most likely killed by the government. Sailor comes to represent the countless unknown, nameless victims of war crimes in Sri Lanka. By discovering his unique story, Anil claims a kind of justice for the thousands who have disappeared during the war. Although their names, and even the dates and times of their disappearances, are known, their bodies have not been found. They have become ghosts whose absence haunts the nation, requiring an investigation into the past that will not remain “buried.” They are revenants, returning, in a way, from death to demand justice. The novel’s title, though not referring to a specific ghost, establishes haunting as a theme to address political and traumatic history. The effectiveness of Ondaatje’s figurative “ghost” reinforces the literary value of the ghostly figure. There are numerous literary works that invoke figurative and literal ghosts to address many of the themes established in Ondaatje’s novel, including trauma, effaced history, and marginalized characters. This dissertation specifically analyzes the role of female ghosts in four novels from the Americas, namely Erna Brodber’s Louisiana (1994), Zoé Valdés’s Te di la vida entera (1996), Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo: or Puro Cuento (2002), and Maryse Condé’s Victoire, les saveurs et les mots: récit (2006). The female ghosts in these novels recuperate memory and inspire female authorship which produces the novels themselves. In this way, the novels confront the official history which is often, to borrow Derrida’s term, phallogocentric in that it privileges the masculine in the making of meaning. As redeemers of memory, and as maternal figures, the female ghosts establish a matriarchal lineage of knowledge opposed to the patriarchal hegemony in history and in literature. These novels assert a matriarchal mode of remembering and writing that does not necessarily follow a patriarchal and linear temporality. 2 The writing is playful, imaginative, and—through