Reading Transgression in Ricardo Palma's Tradiciones En Salsa Verde

Reading Transgression in Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones en salsa verde

elisabeth l. austin virginia tech

The limit and transgression depend upon each other for whatever density of being they possess. —Michel Foucault, ‘‘A Preface to Transgression’’

eru’s nineteenth-century history exemplifies the hopes and the disappoint- Pments of the postindependence era in Spanish America. The mid-century discovery and excavation of vast quantities of guano1 on the Chincha Islands energized Peru’s previously agrarian economy, opening up the possibility of bringing the country into a modern world that had left the Andean region behind. However, the guano industry was first sold to British and then to French interests, leaving Peru with little discernible benefit from its mineral riches, economic or otherwise. Soon afterward, Peru’s southern saltpeter-laden coastlines were lost to Chile in the War of the Pacific (1879–83), provoking a profound national anxiety regarding Peruvian power and identity within the modernizing Americas. In the context of such cultural unease and economic stagnation in the late nineteenth century, Peruvian writer Ricardo Palma’s (1833–1919) many series of tradiciones both articulate and challenge Peru’s nationalistic and historical narratives.2 Palma continues to be best known as the author of the Tradiciones, amusing vignettes of Peru past and present, although his extensive oeuvre also includes historical and linguistic treatises and poetry, along with varied collaborations in several periodicals. The Tradiciones mix history and fiction, featuring themes that vary from general human interest to colonial anecdotes to humorous political critique. Greatly popular in their day, the Tradiciones ran in newspapers in various

1 Guano was a natural source of nitrates for fertilizer and gunpowder, which made it highly valuable. However, it was not an easily renewable resource since it had taken hundreds of years to build up the Chincha guano deposits. 2 Flor Marıá Rodrı´guez-Arenas provides an overview of Palma’s life and work along with a critical bibliography in her ‘‘Historia editorial y literaria’’ and ‘‘Bibliogafıá’’ included in Julio Ortega’s edition of the Tradiciones peruanas. Christopher Conway’s introduction to the trans- lated Peruvian Traditions offers an overview of the author’s life and political reception, as well as a select critical bibliography at the end. Jose´ Miguel Oviedo’s monograph Genio y figura de Ricardo Palma presents a bibliography of early Palma criticism.

...... 18630$ $CH1 10-28-14 08:51:09 PS PAGE 127 128 Revista Hispańica Moderna 67.2 (2014) cities throughout Latin America and were later republished in collections from 1872 to 1910. Today, Palma’s Tradiciones are considered a staple in most literary anthologies and are taught as examples of Romantic costumbrismo and nation- building narratives following the model of Benedict Anderson’s ‘‘imagined communities.’’3 This is not the case, however, with Palma’s Tradiciones en salsa verde (TSV). Unlike the Tradiciones described above, the title of the TSV invokes the color green to mark the colloquial Spanish-language association of that color with a ‘‘dirty’’ or salacious tone. These are short narratives in the tradicioń style that were not published during the author’s lifetime but rather distributed to select friends. The copy of TSV that has been reproduced is one that was typed and given to a friend, don Carlos Basadre, by the author in 1904. Duke University owns this version of the text, which was not published until 1973, and which now exists principally online and in a few hard-to-find print editions. The delay in publishing Palma’s TSV most likely reflects a lingering prudishness with regard to the content itself, or perhaps a reluctance to complicate the image of Palma as an author by adding these off-color tradiciones to the more wholesome nationalistic pantheon of his Tradiciones Peruanas. These concerns may also have influ- enced the paucity of criticism written on these texts.4 Palma’s ‘‘green’’ tradiciones are very similar in tone and style to the many series of tradiciones that he published in his lifetime, but as their colored title suggests, they reveal intimate glimpses of historical and imaginary people in urban and rural settings where genitals are uncovered on the street and bedroom business is discussed out-of-doors. As is the case with his better-known tradiciones, some characters are historic figures such as independence-era heroes Simoń Bolı´var and Antonio Jose´ de Sucre, and others are the faceless objects of burlesque comedy. The world described by these narratives is somewhat idealistic: military conflict is a thing of the past, and clergymen and schoolmasters mete out social rather than moral judgments. Accordingly, although most characters receive their just deserts by the end of these tales, this is not always the case: protagonists are often (but not always) rewarded or punished for their actions, and this incon- sistency makes these tradiciones more playful and less didactic in feel. Wit and audacity are generally rewarded alongside the more conventional social mores and gender roles, but sometimes perspicacity trumps social niceties when these qualities come into conflict.5 The TSV push well past the limits of polite literary

3 Anderson describes the nation-building potential of shared experiences of reading as resulting in an ‘‘imagined community,’’ a group of readers who discover—and imagine— their shared interests as they are reflected and reinforced through their choice of reading material. Anderson suggests that newspapers, for example, identified regional communities and their topics of common interest in Latin America before independence (62). 4 Studies published on the TSV include prologues by Alberto Rodrı´guez Carucci and by Francisco Carrillo and Carlos Garayar, articles by Enrique Anderson Imbert, Daniel Reedy, Flor MarıáRodrı´guez-Arenas and Luis Chambilla Herrera, and a brief overview in Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela’s Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones: Illuminating Gender and Nation (65–67). These studies mainly focus on the sexual themes (Anderson Imbert and Reedy) and the language and humor (Carucci, Carillo and Garayar, Rodrı´guez-Arenas) that permeate the TSV. Chambilla Herrera performs a Bakhtinian reading, and Vera Tudela examines history and gender throughout Palma’s Tradiciones. 5 See, for example, ‘‘Pato con arroz’’ and ‘‘La cena del capitań.’’

...... 18630$ $CH1 10-28-14 08:51:09 PS PAGE 128 austin, Transgression in Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones en salsa verde 129 themes and language (Carillo and Garayar 7), and their most consistent offense is the transgression of the prim social rules of an era that prohibited any mention of bodies or sexuality.6 Although the content of these naughty tradiciones—which I will analyze in this study—is somewhat amusing in itself, this essay principally focuses on the reading public that Palma brings into play throughout the texts. While the Tradi- ciones are generally read as celebrating Peruvian citizenship in the robust nationalistic and patriarchal tradition of strong, intelligent men and their virtuous wives and daughters, his TSV purposefully address and create a different sort of reading community: a male readership that communicates an overtly heterosexual, erotic masculine identity that challenges the prudish prohibitions against open displays of sexuality and human carnality. For although heterosexuality is undisputedly part of a culturally dominant identity construct from the Conquest through the twentieth century in Spanish America, Palma’s TSV challenge the accepted boundaries of heterosexual normalcy by openly displaying sexuality. This text does this during a time when almost all sexuality was hidden from view, an attitude that, according to Sylvia Molloy, arose in reaction to modernista decadence and its association with effeminacy and homosexuality (199). As a result, Molloy comments that ‘‘[o]ne of the results of turn-of-the-century homosexual panic has been the near-total suppression of the male body from Latin American literature’’ (199). As the ‘‘normal’’ male body became hidden from public view, so did its functions and desires, culminating in sexuality being reduced to an abstraction, as Robert Ellis also notes (13). Palma’s TSV reveal the sexuality that was becoming prudishly abstract at that time, adopting a pose of difference while simultaneously enacting the writing subject’s position of white heterosexual privilege. Ana Peluffo and Ignacio M. Sańchez Prado emphasize the multiplicity and fluidity of notions of masculinity from the nineteenth century, and propose that masculinities were more accurately represented as constant negotiations (7) or a circulation of discourses (13) than simplistic binomials. Accordingly, constructions of masculinity at the turn of the century were embedded in the unfixed discourses of class and race, and—as always—of power. As Palma’s and other texts from this period demon- strate, portrayals of masculinity were not uniform or predictable: indigenous peoples were often depicted as effeminate to reflect cultural assumptions of racial inferiority (Ellis 11), but African Americans were represented as danger- ously masculine, perhaps to justify their use as slaves (12). The culturally negoti- ated ideas of ‘‘normal’’ masculinity in nineteenth-century Spanish America had to navigate such extremes, distancing themselves from effeminacy and the perceived sexual deviance of homosexuality while avoiding the hypermasculinity of races (such as the African American) marked as bestial in their strength.

6 For an overview of the gender expectations of the era, see Nancy LaGreca’s Rewriting Womanhood (1–21). Eric Berkowitz presents a history of pornography and its punishment during this epoch in Europe and the U.S. (360–89), and Sylvia Molloy addresses the silences caused by gender discomfort in late nineteenth-century Spanish America (199). See also Ana Peluffo and Ignacio Sa´nchez Prado’s Entre hombres for a series of studies of masculinity within different contexts during this era.

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While Palma’s writing subject does not claim difference in terms of class or race, throughout the TSV it poses as transgressive because overt representations of sex and displays of desire were not accepted in public discourse during the late nineteenth century. Indeed, Palma cultivates an image of social difference as a means of creating a special reading community through the circulation of these texts. One of the most interesting aspects of Palma’s TSV is that they construct gender outside of (but not separated from) traditional nationalistic gender discourse, in this case through a privately visible erotic heterosexual subjectivity. This approach diverges significantly from prevailing paradigms of nineteenth-century social and political power structures in Spanish America, such as A´ ngel Rama’s claims in La ciudad letrada,7 which posit that power and influence flow from and through nationalistic texts that consolidate class, race, and gender. Texts like Palma’s TSV provide us with the opportunity to theorize the diversity of reading publics outside of nation-building paradigms in Spanish America, and in doing so we may replace oversimplified conceptions of subjectivity formation with more nuanced ideas. If we abandon for a moment our conditioned association between reading publics and nationalism (following Anderson), and between romantic texts and nationalism in Spanish America (following Doris Sommer),8 texts residing in the margins of the nineteenth-century canon can help us trace more subtly the multiple spaces and private reading publics of the past. As we rethink the connections between textual production and cultural change in the past, it is important that we acknowledge but do not restrict our- selves to paradigms such as Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Rama’s ciudad letrada. Rama’s concept of the ciudad letrada describes a generally Foucauldian power matrix that enmeshes writing and writers with politics and power in Spanish America, wherein the means of communication transmit power between the creators and consumers of written culture—subjects and agents who are by definition creole within the Spanish American context.9 Rama sees this web of power as established with the Conquest and solidified throughout the colonial period, the nineteenth century, and into the modern period. This concept of an elite ‘‘ciudad letrada,’’ a city of letters located within the urban centers of culture and power that paternalistically conducts business above the heads of hoi polloi, intersects neatly with Ju¨rgen Habermas’s idea of the ‘‘public sphere,’’ a theory born of European history that is nonetheless frequently invoked as a metaphor for the central role of the press in the development of Latin American social structure in the nineteenth century. Habermas describes the development of a ‘‘public sphere’’ in post-Enlightenment Europe, a place of rational and critical exchange by the educated public in spaces (such as coffee shops and salons)

7 Rama proposes the existence of a ‘‘lettered city,’’ or the transhistorical social and political power of the creation and dissemination of texts in La ciudad letrada (1984). 8 Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions proposes that romantic allegory was used as a nation-building tool in nineteenth-century novels. 9 Here I refer to the socioeconomic status of ‘‘creole,’’ deﬁned by education and power, rather than imagined European heredity, which is the traditional designation of that group. See Bushnell and Macauley, as well as Chasteen, among others.

...... 18630$ $CH1 10-28-14 08:51:10 PS PAGE 130 austin, Transgression in Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones en salsa verde 131 that existed outside the purview of government control (33). This public sphere represented an intellectual meeting place for the (almost always) elite, educated public that maintained a special relationship with print culture, a medium that allowed the growing bourgeois class to reflect upon itself and confirm its own subjectivity (54). The role of print culture with regard to subject formation within Habermas’s public sphere underscores the perceived power of print media that, as Rama argues in La ciudad letrada, becomes the vehicle of social and political hegemony. This evokes the potential of texts to perform as conduits for social subjectivity and imagination, which is Benedict Anderson’s premise in Imagined Communities. Anderson’s study posits the power of print media, including newspapers, periodicals, and novels (29–30, 62–63), as the catalyst for national imagination through which a community may conceive of its own coherence simply through reading and being aware of the existence of fellow readers (34–35). And yet, as John Charles Chasteen argues in the introduction to Beyond Imagined Communities, Anderson’s chapter on the print media’s influence on Spanish American independence movements at the beginning of the nineteenth century does not reflect the history of that period: François-Xavier Guerra (13), Tulio Halperıń Donghi (35), and Rebecca Earle (27) sustain that print media flourished and had a much greater cultural influence in Spanish America after the struggle for independence had begun, not before. Nonetheless, despite the historical inaccu- racies that mark Anderson’s understanding of Spanish American independence, Chasteen concludes that Anderson’s concept of the ‘‘imagined community’’ remains powerful with regard to Spanish America: ‘‘no one had explored the national imagination as provocatively as Anderson’’ (xxi). Considering the potential power of Anderson’s ‘‘imagined community’’ and the social and political varieties that might exist within such imaginings, Michael Warner’s notion of publics and counterpublics presents a compelling lens through which to conceive of the relationship between Spanish American texts and reading subjects. Warner’s idea of ‘‘publics’’ includes the multiple and shifting notions of community, relationships, attention, space, time and address (65–117). Warner proposes that the subsets of ‘‘publics’’ are ‘‘subpublics’’ (117) and that their cultural complements are ‘‘counterpublics’’ (118–20), groups that read against hegemonic culture rather than conform to it (119). Therefore, while Warner’s conception of a ‘‘public’’ implies that a group reads more or less in accordance with paths traced by cultural norms, ‘‘counterpublics’’ read against the culture perceived as normative. Significantly, Warner’s categories acknowledge the potentially infinitely fractured nature of social communities, while they also recognize the multiplicity inherent in the composition of publics. As we use these ideas to describe communities of readers, Warner’s concept of the counterpublic recognizes that reading can go both with and against the grain of conventional or normative public discourse, that readers are diverse, and that they exercise agency as readers and social subjects. Not all reading takes place within the same circumstances, naturally, and not all readers choose to read the same texts. While paradigms like Anderson’s recognize the power of a group identity that can grow through the shared experience of reading the same text, Warner’s nuanced ideas of publics, subpublics, and counterpublics allows for the

...... 18630$ $CH1 10-28-14 08:51:10 PS PAGE 131 132 Revista Hispańica Moderna 67.2 (2014) recognition of the variety of texts and readings that can form a multiplicity of communities, imbricated and separated at any one time. Warner’s flexible paradigm for reading publics and counterpublics is especially apt for analyzing Palma’s TSV. For, being an assorted collection of fragmen- tary tales, and possibly existing in various different forms,10 the texts of the TSV could be read in multiple ways: some as narratives of desire, others as humorous critiques of Peru’s economic and political anxiety rendered through the metaphorical matrix of gender-power-social relations. On a more basic level, they could also be read as stories that were simply ‘‘dirty’’ for their time—sexual in theme and crude in tone. Even though they are written from a position of social privilege, they employ forbidden language and address topics that fall outside of the social norm for masculinity. As they give voice to forbidden details of male sexuality, these texts create a space for a community of transgressive readership by narrating a sexuality deemed ‘‘out of place’’ (following Tim Cresswell) by that society. That is, even though their heterosexual identity does not threaten the status quo, these tradiciones represent a performance of masculinity that was nonetheless prohibited within its cultural-historical context. While Warner uses examples of men performing femininity, Palma’s TSV perform masculinity within a culture that suppressed sexuality almost entirely; therefore, their focus on transgressive moments of open sexuality both reveal the contingency of social norms with regard to sex and subsequently recruit their readers into a counterpublic (following Warner’s definition) that performs masculinity through the act of reading.11 Both reading transgression and transgressive reading simultaneously constitute and actively reinforce the imagined bonds within this public, making it function as a counterpublic that reads culture from a marginalized perspective (118–20), in this case the open performance of masculinity. The counterpublic that Palma cultivates throughout these texts challenges the repres- sive nature of popular cultural discourse with regard to sexuality, and this counterpublic is actualized in the moment of reading, transgressive exactly when it reads the TSV. Each text of the TSV narrates an event that shows male sexuality to be ‘‘out of place,’’ a concept that Cresswell uses to describe transgressions, or ‘‘moments of crisis in the flow of things’’ (21) that mark infractions against the established social order.12 While he explores incidents of transgression in order to address questions of space and place, Cresswell emphasizes that transgressions—actions

10 The version of the text that was published comes from one preserved copy, although others potentially may have existed in alternate forms. 11 Gonzalo Portocarrero develops the idea of transgression in Peru through Palma’s Tradi- ciones, linking transgression and its ‘‘democratization’’ with colonial and criollo history. 12 Cresswell interrogates out-of-place-ness and transgression in order to better understand the structure of rules and ideologies that deﬁne geography and the meanings we impose upon spaces (1–10). He notes, ‘‘transgression . . . serves to foreground the mapping of ideology onto space and place, and thus the margins can tell us something about ‘normality’’’ (9). Cresswell develops his theory within the spaces of contemporary U.S. and British culture, but the patterns of human behavior he describes are not limited to these contexts. In the case of the TSV we must take into account the conservative nature of gender roles, as well as how gender played into national identity within late nineteenth-century Peru, to understand how Palma’s texts transgress these norms by performing visible masculinity.

...... 18630$ $CH1 10-28-14 08:51:10 PS PAGE 132 austin, Transgression in Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones en salsa verde 133 or events that are considered ‘‘out of place’’—are not necessarily meant to be so but are the effect of their reception (23).13 The moments of transgression that are narrated in Palma’s TSV are represented as everyday, happenstance occurrences, slips of decorum that reveal the normalcy of the sexuality that is repressed by social custom. That is, the narratives represent heterosexual masculine sexuality as natural14 but as appearing out of place within the pietistic, enforced modesty of the late nineteenth century. Palma’s counterpublic is therefore formed around the common experience (as represented within these narratives) of visible masculine sexuality being perceived as socially transgressive. Social transgression is the leitmotif of the TSV, and the act of reading such scenes of transgression encourages the reader to enter into the contrary pose of the texts. The counterpublic stance is first initiated through the selectivity of the TSV’s circulation, which is not published but rather distributed by hand. This public is necessarily small: Palma only distrib- utes his manuscript to friends he knows will be sympathetic to (and amused by) the ‘‘dirty’’ words and themes they contain. In addition to this public’s awareness of its small size and selective membership, the stories themselves represent a series of crude jokes based upon the assumption that masculine sexuality is normal, and that society’s expectations are out of place with respect to the ordi- nary nature of sex and bodies. Reading narratives that reinforce the natural status of male sexuality despite the social prohibition against such language and themes, Palma’s public positions itself squarely against the grain of cultural expectations and normative behaviors. In this regard, the readership of Palma’s TSV is quite accurately described by Warner’s counterpublic because it purposefully does not seek to represent the ‘‘general or dominant public’’ and because it ‘‘is not merely a subset of the public but constituted through a conflictual relation to the dominant public’’ (118). That is, Palma’s private publication is not simply a specialty journal (such as the magazine Field and Stream, to borrow Warner’s example [117]) but one that defines itself and its readership as a more open-minded crowd than the average public, contrasting explicitly with the society ‘‘que se escandaliza no con las acciones malas sino con las palabras crudas’’ (Palma, TSV 12). There is an element of elitism here as Palma specifies that ‘‘son muy pocos los que, en la intimidad de amigo a amigo . . . conocen [las Tradiciones en salsa verde]’’ (12). This is a select group. The TSV ’s title and accompanying letter of presentation announce that they are intended to be read only by an audience of the author’s choosing, a community of intimate male friendship located outside of the public gaze. As I men- tioned previously, the copy of the TSV that has been preserved is a typewritten

13 For Cresswell this emphasis on reception versus intention distinguishes transgression from resistance, the latter representing action that intends to threaten the cultural status quo (22–23). While he writes from the perspective of human geography, Cresswell posits a crossover between the cultures of geography and textuality: ‘‘we are constantly engaged in acts of interpretation’’ (13). 14 With the exception of ‘‘Matrı´cula de colegio,’’ this collection puts forward a restricted, traditionally heteronormative notion of sexual ‘‘normalcy,’’ reﬂecting the limitations of the sexual/social ethics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

...... 18630$ $CH1 10-28-14 08:51:11 PS PAGE 133 134 Revista Hispańica Moderna 67.2 (2014) manuscript that was given to don Carlos Basadre as a birthday present in 1904. These sixteen stories were not intended for publication: Palma stipulates, ‘‘estas hojitas no estań destinadas para la publicidad’’ (12). The author writes that he did not publish the TSV precisely because he wanted to avoid the scrutiny of the public who ‘‘se escandaliza no con las acciones malas sino con las palabras crudas.’’15 Moreover, Palma warns Basadre not to extend this circle incautiously: ‘‘conf[ıó] en que tendra´ usted la discrecioń de no consentir que sean leı´das por gente mojigata.’’ Palma’s gift is therefore not only the tales themselves but also an initiation into this select counterpublic of readers that considers itself to be more sophisticated, worldly, and insightful than the general public. At the end of his brief letter to Basadre, Palma continues his critique as he comments tersely that ‘‘[l]a moral no reside en la epidermis,’’ intimating that nineteenth- (and early twentieth-) century social rules would be unable to accept the skin revealed by these frankly sexual stories. At the same time, this statement criticizes the shallowness of such social judgments, suggesting that society focuses on appearances of propriety rather than moral character. While this comment appears to be intended as a critique of society’s skin-deep perception, it also provides a justification for Palma’s decision to withhold them from publication due to his own apprehensions regarding their reception. This statement reveals that Palma was anxious about the stories’ potential effect on his reputation, con- cerned with preserving the literary façade that he offered the world. His declara- tion that ‘‘[l]a moral no reside en la epidermis’’ reminds the reader that what is at stake here are social impressions and not the moral fiber of the reading or writing subject. During an era when the exemplary content of fiction was considered to be of supreme importance (Unzueta 119–21), Palma here prompts his readers to remember that naughty themes were not immoral, only socially prohibited: malum prohibitum versus malum in se. This comment at the end of Palma’s letter signals to the contemporary reader that, though the author reiterates that the stories are not immoral, they were considered out of place in the literary sphere of that era. However, despite the fact that Palma decided not to publish the stories in a newspaper or include them in one of his collections of Tradiciones, they were not totally private. Rather, as they were typed up and given to friends, they created a small circuit of readers that encapsulates Warner’s idea of a ‘‘public.’’ Warner explains, ‘‘the notion of a public enables a reflexivity in the circulation of texts among strangers who become, by virtue of their reflexively circulating discourse, a social entity . . . the idea of a public is motivating, not simply instrumental. It is constitutive of a social imaginary’’ (11–12). Thus described, this public, the community of readers into which Basadre is initiated, may indeed function as an Andersonian ‘‘imagined community’’ in the sense that Basadre does not know his fellow readers but may imagine that there are other friends who read and laugh over the texts. While Anderson’s idea of the imagined community works as a nation-building force that creates a common identity across social and geographical distance, this community of readers is self-described as small and intimate, a private men’s club

15 Francisco Carrillo and Carlos Garayar see this ‘‘crudeza’’ as referring (at least in part) to the colloquial nature of the language, not entirely to the content of the stories (7).

...... 18630$ $CH1 10-28-14 08:51:11 PS PAGE 134 austin, Transgression in Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones en salsa verde 135 that does not exclude nationalistic elements, but that seems oriented toward a culture of masculinity more than any other common thread throughout the stories.16 Part of what makes the readership of Palma’s text a counterpublic is this knowledge of the existence of fellow readers who transgress social norms, a self- reflexivity that constitutes Warner’s ‘‘social imaginary’’ (12). Anderson identifies this readerly commonality as nationalistic in its potential, but Warner sees a more flexible type of community. Warner’s idea regarding counterpublics such as the readership of the TSV is that they conceive of themselves as opposing the status quo, indicating that part of this community involves the activity of reading against, a concerted undermining—via textual consumption—of the dominant social paradigm, in this case sexual prudishness and gender norms.17 The juxtaposition of what these texts represent as a preexisting ‘‘natural’’ state of masculinity with the prudish social expectation of suppressed sexuality makes for comedy of errors and manners. Each reading of these texts includes an awareness of other reading subjects participating in this reading against the grain, an activity that realizes Palma’s counterpublic. Acknowledging the counterpublic’s self- awareness, Palma, in his letter to Basadre, comments, ‘‘[a]lguna vez me revelo´ usted el deseo de tener una copia de [las TSV]’’ (12), indicating that these texts, and consequently their counterpublic, had been previously discussed. This comment further emphasizes that the gift of these texts is also an invitation to join the counterpublic. Although all of the stories present variations on the theme of masculinity out of place, the ones I analyze here depict some of the more outrageous formula- tions of this trope.18 The TSV both mimic and deviate from Palma’s other Tradi- ciones: the collection opens with four stories set during or just after the wars of independence, whose themes seem to fit into the nationalistic pantheon of many of Palma’s other short works.19 However, the humor and language crudely reveal the socially unacceptable sexual side of masculine military culture.20 These military stories valorize the martial culture of the soldiers whose masculinity is in some senses hegemonic—heterosexual and powerful. But the visibility of these soldiers’ sexuality makes them appear out of place and transgressive in the post- bellum world in which the tradiciones transpire. The humor is puerile, and these stories barely amuse the modern reader, but I imagine that their comic

16 Anne Radway has a different take on community and reading publics—she details the class associations of ‘‘middle-brow’’ reading culture. 17 Although Palma’s letter does not specify if his counterpublic includes women among its readers, I imagine that the majority of his counterpublic readers were men since the under- lying theme to many of the tales in TSV is masculine sexuality. However, this topic would not preclude women from the counterpublic, especially since Palma had a number of close friends such as writers Juana Manuela Gorriti and Clorinda Matto de Turner, both of whom challenged social gender norms in their own work. 18 Rodrı´guez Carucci offers an excellent overview of the narrative styles and historical periods that characterize the different stories in the TSV (17–24). 19 See Vera Tudela for a reading of these independence-era stories from the TSV (65–67). 20 Rodrı´guez Carucci notes that the ﬁrst two follow a narrative device used in other tradiciones whereby Palma explains the origin of a phrase or word (22–24); in the TSV these phrases are vulgar.

...... 18630$ $CH1 10-28-14 08:51:12 PS PAGE 135 136 Revista Hispańica Moderna 67.2 (2014) charge—the scandal and the fun of the TSV—resides in their play with words, images, and subjects of discourse that were socially prohibited, a comedic practice common to this day. Further along in the collection, ‘‘El lechero del convento’’ and ‘‘La cosa de la mujer’’ are two stories that enact out of place masculinity through demonstra- ting the shock effect of revealed carnality in places where it has been prohibited. These two stories take place in a convent and on a city street, everyday spaces that heighten the social scandal of displaying one’s sexuality in public. ‘‘El lechero del convento’’ tells the story of a boorish Andalusian milk farmer and his son who sell milk to the Convent of San Francisco, on the outskirts of Lima. One day, the father is sick so the son delivers the milk in his place. In response to one of the nuns’ polite question about their cows, the teenage son gives a detailed description of what a good stud (‘‘jodador’’) their bull is. The nuns react with shock: ‘‘—¡Jesu´s!, ¡Jesu´s!—gritaron, escandalizadas, las inocentes monjitas—. Toma los ocho reales de la leche y no vuelvas a venir, sucio, cochino, ¡desvergonzado! ¡sinverguënza!’’ (TSV 44). The next day the father apologizes, but when the nuns suggest that his son is too innocent to know better, the father contradicts them with a salty description of having found his son masturbating, thus again offending the nuns who, ‘‘ponieńdose las manos en los oı´dos, echaron a correr como palomas asustadas por el gavilań’’ (45). The story ends by commenting that the nuns changed their milkman. At first glance, this tale reinforces the untouched, virtuous nature of the convent’s nuns while it makes fun of the small-town obtuseness of the lechero, creating a humorous contrast between the nuns’ pietistic avoidance of any suggestion of sex with the earthy routine of animal husbandry on a farm. Yet the nuns’ shocked reactions as they invoke Jesus, their bridegroom, as protection against the mere suggestion of sexuality conjures the image of children who place their hands over their ears to avoid knowing or thinking about sex. They are innocent doves (‘‘palomas’’) fleeing the hawk (‘‘gavilań’’), a metaphor that represents both the rude Andalusian milkman and the specter of sexuality itself, the latter an omnipresent threat to their lives of virginal abstention. As exem- plars of womanly submissiveness and abnegation, following the nineteenth- century ideal of the ‘‘ańgel del hogar,’’21 the nuns portray a tableau of willful ignorance, firmly avoiding the indelicate details of their daily milk supply. The lechero and his son foreground the pervasive nature of sexuality when the son explains that only pregnant cows lactate, and then later when the lechero denies his son’s sexual innocence. By asserting what are indeed the facts of life, these two vulgar men enact masculinity out of place. Although the father is described as ‘‘muy burdo’’ (43) and the son as ‘‘tan groserote como el padre que le engen- drara’’ (43), the ‘‘monjitas’’ who flee as doves before the hawk are equally ridicu- lous. With their fingers in their ears, the nuns enact the hypocrisy of the prudish social norm, and Palma’s counterpublic would recognize an implicit critique of those, like the nuns, who ‘‘se escandalizan no con las acciones malas sino con las palabras crudas’’ (12).

21 LaGreca provides a succinct rendering of the image of the ‘‘a´ngel del hogar’’ as a feminine ideal in Latin America (5–7).

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An intriguing detail from ‘‘El lechero del convento’’ is that when Palma’s narrator describes the lechero’s annoyance at the nun’s suggestion that his son is sexually innocent, the father’s reaction stems not from a pride in his young son’s virility but rather from his frustration with the naı¨ve suggestion that sexual innocents exist in the world. In response to the nun’s comment regarding the ‘‘muchacho inocente,’’ the narrator comments that the lechero ‘‘como yo, tenıá tirria y enemiga con los inocentones’’ (45). The use of ‘‘inocentones’’ in this context implies that it is being used ironically to hint that such ‘‘inocentones’’ are neither innocent (in terms of knowledge) nor do they lack sexual experience. When the narrative voice admits that it, like the lechero, has little patience with ‘‘inocentones,’’ it reminds its readers of the story just previous to this one, ‘‘Los inocentones,’’ which holds that (older) children cannot be innocent with regard to sex. The narrator begins ‘‘Los inocentones’’ by declaring, ‘‘[r]eniego de tales inocentones’’ (41) and reiterating at the end, ‘‘no creo en los inocentones’’ (42). The anecdote is about a mute boy who finally begins to talk at sixteen years old. When his ecstatic mother asks him what he wants, he replies, ‘‘¡Chu . . . cha!’’ The implication is that children take advantage of adults’ naı¨ve assumptions about their sexual innocence—that they only play the part of the inocentoń. The narrator’s overt skepticism regarding the existence of sexual innocents, demonstrated throughout ‘‘Los inocentones’’ and reiterated in ‘‘El lechero del convento,’’ suggests once again that Palma’s counterpublic—the select readership of the TSV—is wiser than the regular public because it knows that all crea- tures, dairy cow and teenager, lechero and nun alike, are sexual animals. The assumption that sexuality is an omnipresent normalcy, especially with regard to masculine sexuality, represents a body of knowledge that cements the counterpublic in part through a consciousness that this knowledge transgresses the social norms of the era. This critique of inocentones, furthermore, articulates a skepticism toward all of those—whether nun or child—who assert their sexual innocence. This assessment implies that such ‘‘innocents’’ are either willfully obtuse like the nuns with their hands over their ears, or slyly playing innocent for their own benefit like the mute boy who pipes up only to ask for sex. In this sense these texts model sexual cynicism for Palma’s counterpublic: they critique the dissonance between ‘‘real’’ sexuality and oppressive social codes, implying that social convention forces people to act innocent in society when in fact we are all just inocentones playing our scripted roles in hopes of secretly realizing our sexual desires. Although this critique of false innocence seems to be particularly aimed at the men whose masculinity is marked as socially out of place throughout this collection, it extends equally to both sexes. In ‘‘El lechero del convento’’ the nuns are not ignorant of sex, but they flee from any mention of it. Paradoxically, their flight is made possible by their (limited) knowledge of what they are avoiding. And at the beginning of ‘‘Los inocentones,’’ Palma scoffs at fathers who insist on the innocence of their daughters, retelling a poem about a girl who ‘‘Un dıá dijo a un mozo / a la sombra de una higuera / En no metieńdome a monja / Me´teme lo que tu´ quieras’’ (41). The poem intimates that, having chosen a path other than a nunnery, the girl is open to sex and offers herself to the boy next to her.

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Despite the fact that sexual mores were even stricter for women than men, the TSV suggest that active sexuality is indeed normalcy for those who are not ensconced in a nunnery. Inhibitions come with the spaces of social control, such as the convent, but women such as the girl in the inocentones poem and the willing (if resigned) wife of the last tale in TSV, ‘‘La cena del capitań,’’ are por- trayed as enthusiastic sexual partners in the privacy of the shadows and in their own homes. The captain’s wife, for example, accepts without complaint that sex with her shiftless husband is all she will have for dinner. Another tradicioń included in the collection, ‘‘La cosa de la mujer,’’ emphasizes the omnipresence of masculinity out of place by staging its moment of transgression on a public street. This tale recounts an anecdote about a ridicu- lously puffy skirt on a woman walking down the street that flips up when she trips, ‘‘quedando a espectaciońpu´blica y gratuita, el ombligo y sus alrededores’’ (34). A marquesito comes to her aid, ‘‘que no sin embeleso [la] contemplara,’’ and rights her. She complains, ‘‘¿Ha visto usted cosa igual . . . ?’’, referring to the trash on the street that made her slip. He misunderstands her question, his mind on her body, and he lustily responds with an evaluation of the appearance of her vagina: ‘‘Lo que es cosa igual, precisamente igual, pudiera ser que no; pero parecidas, con vello de ma´s o de menos y hasta pelonas, crea usted, senõra mıá, que he visto algunas’’ (35). This story presents sexuality as an everyday reality revealed by the fall that uncovers her sex to the public view. The woman sees only social embarrassment, but the unnamed marquesito—an ‘‘everyman’’ figure—notices only sex and responds accordingly: he has seen only one cosa throughout this situation, and he describes it in detail. In this instance, the woman’s faux pas brings to the surface what is normally hidden beneath layers of social decorum, a veneer as fluffy and vulnerable as her skirt: the idea that bodies are objects of desire, and that sex is foremost on the minds of humans. Of course, this knowledge inspired prohibitions of revealing attire in the first place, but in the context of the TSV these facts are marked as humorous. The stranger’s improper words and admission of sexy thoughts in a public place compound the woman’s embarrassment and create an even wider breach of etiquette than that represented by her pratfall. The marquesito is simply overwhelmed (‘‘no sin embeleso’’) as he sees the woman’s private body exposed to the air. Although she was referring to poor street sanitation, her question (‘‘¿Ha visto usted cosa igual?’’) simply ‘‘halagaba a su lujuria’’ (35). In a metaphorical sense this story points to the happenstance occurrences that allows a careful reader—like the marquesito with whom many of Palma’s readers might identify—to see through social convention to acknowledge the lusty appetites that animate human society. In this case all it took was a slippery banana peel to reveal a woman’s naked body and a man’s desire. The woman attempts to conceal her embarrassment by drawing attention to the trash on the street, but the marquesito’s masculinity is out of place (in terms of its social reception) because it makes his sexuality visible when he can focus only on the central comical/sexual event in the story. This marquesito is not one of the inocentones that both the narrator and the lechero critique so strongly, and his forthright sexuality seems to be rendered as an alternative model for masculinity despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that it is not socially sanctioned.

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Indeed, Palma’s counterpublic would note that, although ‘‘la moral no reside en la epidermis,’’ sexual appetites (like skin) reside just beneath the surface of the social customs that attempt to repress them. One last tale drawn from the collection, ‘‘Matrıćula de colegio,’’ presents a different masculine modeling that at first seems to portray masculinity in its traditional form of hirsute strength and virility, but that adds a twist that makes this story transgressive in terms of social norms even by today’s standards. ‘‘Matrıćula de colegio’’ relates the story of Italian triplets who present themselves to a schoolmaster, hoping for admittance to his academic institution. Although they look identical at the age of nine, two of them have very high, effeminate voices, while the third has a very low voice. When asked why their voices are so different, the boys reply that their mother only had two breasts from which to nurse, so the third drops the punch line, ‘‘yo mamaba el pa´jaro de mi padre . . . y por eso he sacado este vocejoń’’ (54). While this story presents rather disturbing imagery, I envisage that it was meant in a crudely figurative rather than a literal sense. What is prominent here is the suggestion that nursing, as a symbolic representation of female care and social modeling, results in emasculation as exempli- fied by the two boys whose ‘‘voz de flautıń’’ (53) marks them as girlish, ‘‘pobrecitos de voz’’ (54). After hearing them, the director comments to himself, ‘‘¡Vaya un par de maricones! ¡Lucido esta´ el bachicha con su prole!’’ (53). In contrast, the one brother who nursed on masculinity, so to speak, has a ‘‘voz de trueno’’ and seemingly incarnates normative masculinity in both body and voice. He appears to take strongly after his father, who is described at the beginning of the tale as ‘‘un genove´s como un trinquete . . . que de una culeada le clavo´ asu mujer tres muchachotes muy rollizos’’ (52–53). Following this figurative interpretation, the joke ridicules those wimpy men who are nursed at the breast and brought up as ‘‘mama’s boys,’’ and who are thereby identified as not belonging to masculine culture. However, the sexual imagery in this story lends itself to multiple interpreta- tions: on the one hand, it symbolically indicates that boys and men raised within the (feminized) norms of prudish nineteenth-century society will be emasculated like the high-voiced boys, resulting in their exclusion from the out of place masculine culture that is celebrated within this collection of stories. With the domi- nance of a prudish, feminized culture in which masculine (and, indeed, all) sexuality is consistently suppressed and perennially perceived to be out of place, the story suggests that the result is an eventual withering of manhood. Con- versely, following this same logic, if masculinity is encouraged or ‘‘nursed’’ through contact with a more masculine culture, manhood will flourish, as with the low-voiced boy. And yet such a wide-angle reading elides the disturbing image of incestuous fellatio by an infant that lies at the center of this tale. This representation as part of a potential model of masculinity is not only strange, but its incestuous and homosexual elements would seem to make it a negative example considering the hostile reception that both of those practices would have received among most of the masculine subpublics of nineteenth-century Peru.22 Given Palma’s previous

22 See Molloy, Salessi, and Ellis on the stigmatization of homosexuality in nineteenth- century Spanish America.

...... 18630$ $CH1 10-28-14 08:51:14 PS PAGE 139 140 Revista Hispańica Moderna 67.2 (2014) criticism of inocentones, his readers would assume that both the child and the father were aware of the implications of their ‘‘nursing’’ relationship; however, the suggestion of an infant’s complicity in this case seems absurd. More profoundly, the uncomfortable parallel between the three ‘‘nursing’’ situations in ‘‘Matrıćula de colegio’’ brings to the fore the artificial, constructed nature of social conventions regarding sex, gender and normalcy: breastfeeding a child is considered normal behavior, and yet other erogenous zones are abso- lutely taboo with regard to children. Although we might argue that breastfeeding is a natural human instinct that stems from our mammalian biology, Palma’s TSV suggest that other socially taboo behaviors are likewise rooted in our physiology, notably the masculine sex drive that does not conform to the spatial and social restrictions that limited any sexual manifestation in nineteenth-century culture. The story presents a startling, thought-provoking image, and as such voices a sharp critique of the constructed nature of culture and the social rules that regi- ment sex and its presentation. This reflection on culture, sex, and taboo finishes a series of stories that intro- duce their readers to the notion that the representation of masculine sexuality should not be considered culturally out of place but recognized as a fact of human biology. Although heterosexuality itself was a significant component of national identity during that period,23 the TSV are constructed around manifesta- tions of masculinity out of place, presented as a comedic undercurrent of daily life when juxtaposed with turn-of-the-century prudery. Therefore, the counterpublic of the TSV finds common ground in reading against the grain of the sexual erasure that prohibits the acknowledgment of masculine (or other) sexualities.24 While the TSV transgress social mores by laughing at the sexual nature of everyday life, some of Palma’s better-known tradiciones have crude tendencies that bring them close to the TSV.25 These occasional similarities between the TSV and a few Tradiciones illustrate Flor Marıá Rodrı´guez-Arenas’s suggestions that Palma’s Tradiciones represent in fact ‘‘la reconstruccioń de la historia no oficial del Peru´’’ (‘‘Historia’’ 394). Although both the TSV and the Tradiciones may offer alternatives to the official history of Peru, the narratives that comprise the TSV were separated based on the assumption that they would be perceived as socially transgressive, and they bring readers together in a shared snicker over the social restrictions that prohibited their publication. The cultivation of Palma’s counterpublic through the TSV raises the question of what influence, if any, the reading of a text might have within any given society. Cresswell maintains that, in contradistinction with movements of active resistance, social transgressions (such as these texts and the act of reading them) do not always effect change: ‘‘Transgressions do not form their own orders. Boundaries are critiqued, not replaced’’ (166, my emphasis). Nonetheless, critique

23 See, for example, Manuel Gonza´lez Prada’s critique of ‘‘las quejas del pecho sin viri- lidad’’ (46), or his gloriﬁcation of virility as a necessity for the liberation of Peru’s indigenous population (343) during the late nineteenth century. 24 Contemporary theory conceives of sexualities as always multiform. See, for example, Connell along with Peluffo and Sa´nchez Prado. 25 Indeed, J.A. Gato’s Bedside Anthology of Ribald Classics includes selections from both the TSV and Palma’s Tradiciones peruanas.

...... 18630$ $CH1 10-28-14 08:51:14 PS PAGE 140 austin, Transgression in Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones en salsa verde 141 implies a potential for change via transgression, as ‘‘moments of crisis’’ (21) test limits whether or not they are intended as agents of change. Foucault reminds us that ‘‘[t]he limit and transgression depend upon each other’’ (34), suggesting that these notions represent a binomial that cannot be separated either in concept or practice. Following this relationship between limitation and transgression, in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Peru it would seem that Palma’s literary transgressions both threaten and toe the line of social sexual mores. Although these tales critique prudery, social repression of sexuality might also be paradoxically strengthened by the same gestures that critique it, reinforced by the self-segregation (a reiﬁcation of the out-of-place-ness) of the counterpublic that privately enacts such critique. And yet the acts of reading against, and imagining a community that does not conform to social expectations, are powerful. Despite the fact that Cresswell dif- ferentiates transgression from resistance, he acknowledges, ‘‘within transgression lie the seeds of new . . . orderings’’ (166). This admission opens the door for another query near the end of his book as he wonders, ‘‘What happens when transgression becomes permanent?’’ (176). Indeed, freed from the limitations of reading within the canon and the ciudad letrada, we, as critics, should consider the potential power of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts that read against the grain of social and political power matrices. TSV ’s (non)publication history and cultivation of a counterpublic indicates that this power was—and continues to be—perceived as potent and real.

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