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, eco- nomic 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 narra- tives.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 Marı´a Rodrı´guez-Arenas provides an overview of Palma’s life and work along with a critical bibliography in her ‘‘Historia editorial y literaria’’ and ‘‘Bibliogafı´a’’ 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 Hispa´nica 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 com- munities.’’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 tradicio´n 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 nation- alistic 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 Simo´n 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 Marı´aRodrı´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 capita´n.’’ ................. 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 nation- alistic 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 hetero- sexual, 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 homo- sexual 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. Sa´nchez Prado emphasize the multiplicity and fluidity of notions of masculinity from the nineteenth century, and propose that masculinities were more accu- rately 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 per- ceived 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.