René Prieto is Professor of Foreign Languages and Literature at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of Miguel Angel Asturias’s Archaeology of Return.

Body of writing

Figuring desire in Spanish American literatureBy Ren Prieto

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2000 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-2451-5

Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………………ixIntroduction……………………………………………………………………………………11 Julio Cortzar’s perpetual exile……………………………………………………………….172 More than meets the I: Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s La Habana para un Infante difunto…………………753 The excremental vision of Gabriel Garca Mrquez…………………………………………………1014 The degraded body in the work of Severo Sarduy…………………………………………………..1355 Rewriting the body: renewal through language in the work of Rosario Castellanos……………………..1736 The body of pleasure in Tununa Mercado’s Canon de alcoba………………………………………….213Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………..240Notes………………………………………………………………………………………….255Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………275Index………………………………………………………………………………………….285

Chapter One

Julio Cortzar’s perpetual exile

* * *

Como los elatas, como San Agustn, Novalis presinti que el mundo de adentro es la ruta inevitable para llegar de verdad al mundo exterior y descubrir que los dos sern uno solo cuando la alquimia de ese viaje de un hombre nuevo. -Julio Cortzar, quoted by Fernando Ainsa

What makes Julio Cortzar’s short stories perplexing and disturbing at the same time? Why is it we grasp the gist of his plots but feel befuddled by the outcome of his stories, as if taking the train but letting slip its destination? Bewildered by characters who vomit rabbits, and tigers that prowl around country estates, are we conscious, when reading “Letter to a Young Lady in Paris” or “Bestiario,” of not getting to the heart of the dramas this resourceful author portrayed throughout his life?

Intuitive to the core, Cortzar seldom knew what would show up in his notepad; “Bestiary” and Hopscotch were composed in one fell swoop, for instance, as if internally dictated (Vargas Llosa, A Writer’s Reality, 46). Cortzar wasn’t just intuitive; he was downright possessed. From the time he started publishing, he felt the personal obsessions that haunted him stemmed “neither from a conscious nor a rational plane” but rather, “from down under … from within” (Prego, La Fascinacin de las Palabras, 40, 38). The demands made by these obsessions were so peremptory that he felt he needed writing as much as writing needed him as a vehicle to express itself. It was a form of cleansing or, as he once told Omar Prego, a kind of “self-therapy” (182). However, since according to Cortzar poets are ” ‘possessed’ by the magnetic forces of the collective unconscious and … manifest in [their] writings ‘archetypal themes and figures,'” he could connect with readers directly while engaging in self-therapy (Ana Hernndez del Castillo, Keats, Poe, and the Shaping of Cortzar’s Mythopoesis, 4). This is why we can find his cryptic scenarios disturbing even when we are not fully conscious of their portent.

Their portent was, from the start, a private matter. By that I mean that if, by his own avowal, his writing was made up of obsessions stemming from within, the essence of Cortzar’s art was, plain and simple, personal experience transformed into fiction. This is far from apparent because the biographical elements that inform his work are not at all transcriptions of daily events (as they are for, let us say, the Mario Vargas Llosa who writes Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter), but are drawn from a part of himself that was well cloistered. The concealed elements were then recast into cunning scenarios that screened the sources that inspired them. The anecdotal level of his stories is so captivating, in fact, that few readers become aware of that other, highly private level without which, as we shall see, it is impossible to understand his work.

Fortunately, like Theseus entering the labyrinth, Cortzar left a thread that can be followed to the wellspring from which his stories flow, although, because he wrote to exorcise the monsters that haunted him, the “wellspring” was more akin to a festering pool of anxiety than to a clear fountain. Cortzar manifested this anxiety through a small number of obsessive images or motifs that he labeled figuras. It is through these figuras-hands, tunnels, dark holes, breathing disorders, and a handful of animals-that we can penetrate to the primary level from which Cortzar’s stories issued.

The network of figuras in any given story is so complex and mesmerizing, however, that we frequently fail to reach the embedded content that Cortzar has so artfully masked. We know he pictured dark tunnels and breathing disorders, for instance, but we don’t know why. In fact, so far we don’t even understand how the figuras dovetail into one another to create a symphony of perfectly orchestrated parts. Cortzar’s master plan remains enigmatic because, to borrow his own words, the “point of contact in which every discordant element can finally become visible as a spoke in a wheel” is still unfathomed (Libro de Manuel, 8).

Into the labyrinth

Cortzar gave us the thread leading into his personal labyrinth in a groundbreaking interview with Evelyn Picn Garfield. “Hands have always been an obsession of mine,” he told Picn in 1973, “already in the first pages I ever wrote hands play an extremely important part. I was very young when I wrote that piece I later included in Ultimo Round, I think it’s called ‘Estacin de la mano'” (it is actually in La vuelta al da en ochenta mundos) (Picn, Cortzar por Cortzar, 110). “Estacin de la mano” (“Station of the Hand”) is the story of a man who sees a hand fly through his window one day. After befriending the hand he begins to fear it until, sensing it is no longer trusted, the hand flies away, never to return.

“Station of the Hand” was the first of many stories in which Cortzar’s morbid obsession with hands and gloves was showcased. This obsession was no laughing matter. Cortzar confessed to Picn that whenever he was alone in a house and there was a pair of gloves sitting on a table, he could never go to sleep until he had planted a heavy object on top of them because he had the impression that “something was going to come and fill them” (Cortzar por Cortzar, 110-11). Startled by such bewildering disclosures, Picn urged Cortzar to elaborate. “Are you referring to hands”? She prodded, until he finally admitted: “Yes, hands; it must be linked to a trauma from my childhood, some macabre story of strangulation” (111).

Mention of strangulation in connection with disembodied hands reminded Cortzar of a film that deeply impressed him, The Hands of Orlac. As he explained to Picn, the hero of this film is a concert pianist who has to have his hands amputated after a train accident. Fortunately, he has a good friend who is a surgeon and can transplant the hands of a man who has just been sent to the guillotine. Neither doctor nor patient knows, however, that the guillotined man was a notorious strangler. The one who finds out-in the most horrific of ways-is the pianist’s girlfriend. While he is kissing her one day, the pianist’s hands take on a life of their own and begin wringing her neck. Continuing his line of thought at that point in the interview, Cortzar links the film’s action to his own writing: “there’s something that really grabs me in this story of a man with murderous hands,” he told Picn, “just remember all the hands that whiz to and fro in my books” (Cortzar por Cortzar, 111).

Tight squeeze

Cortzar was not exaggerating when he spoke of hands whizzing to and fro in his work. Let’s take the example of “No se culpe a nadie” (“Don’t Blame Anyone”), one of the most bewildering dressing scenarios in the history of fiction. Hurriedly putting on a sweater to be on time for a date, the ill-starred protagonist gets stuck in what is probably the wrong opening and begins to suocate under the clinging pressure of the wool over his nose and mouth. Mounting anxiety leads to utter confusion; the half-smothered hero continues to struggle in a futile eort to pull the sweater down over his head, but only succeeds in getting deeper and deeper into the engulfing wool. Short of breath, unable to see, and with his head stuck into the narrow tunnel of the sleeve, he tosses, swerves, and comes out only to be attacked by his own right hand. Drawing back into the protective embrace of the sweater, blinded and disoriented once more, he falls out of a twelfth-story window (at least this is what we are given to understand, although Cortzar pointedly avoids using the verb to fall). What we read in the last sentence is that the man “redresses himself” after cowering back into the sweater in order to “reach at last someplace with neither hand nor sweater, someplace where there is only fragrant air to envelop him, and accompany him, and caress him, and twelve stories” (Relatos, 289).

In her article on the ambivalence of the hand in Cortzar’s fiction, Malva Filer explains how their belligerence in “No se culpe a nadie” is another instance of the schizoid condition present in “Station of the Hand,” and wonders “what kind of inner conflict could be represented by this nightmare of having a part of the character’s own body attack and destroy him” (131). Filer suggests that the man with the blue pullover may have been suffering from the restrictions of a very conventional lifestyle, and the split between the hand and the body could be “a rebellion against that part of the self that had submitted to the tyranny of domestic and social duties” (131). Filer may be right; a sort of inner rebellion could be the cause of the accident. But why restrict ourselves to speculations when concrete clues regarding the story’s meaning are so liberally strewn across its pages? It is these clues that need to be considered in order to get to the bottom of what Filer calls the “inner conflict … represented by this nightmare” (131).

Filer highlights one of these clues herself when describing how the protagonist’s head “emerges from the asphyxiating pullover, only to face five black nails striking against his eyes, and pushing him into death” (131). Like “Dg” in “Station of the Hand,” the right hand in this story behaves of its own accord; it pinches the narrator’s thigh, and then “scratches him … through the layers of clothing” (288-89). The ensuing struggle, which, anatomically speaking, splits the protagonist in two, is conspicuously linked with a sense of claustrophobia and difficulties in breathing. After the protagonist feels “as if his face were flushed,” the blue wool “clings … with an almost irritating pressure to his nose and mouth, it stifles him more than he could have imagined, forcing him to take deep breaths” until, finally, “the blue envelops the wet mouth, the nostrils … and all that fills him with anxiety” (285-86). Later in the action, the sweater gets so firmly adhered to his face, that when his right hand “pulls upward he feels a pain as if his ears were being yanked off …” (287-88).

A lot of ink has flowed on the subjects of confinement and alienation in “Don’t Blame Anyone”; not enough has been written about the more dubious business of entrances and exits. The first point to make here is that in spite of the countless difficulties the stifling sweater brings with it, the hero does manage to emerge from his woolly prison and feels, if only for a moment, “the cold air on his eyebrows and forehead” (289). Absurdly, it seems, “he refuses to open his eyes although he knows he has come out, that cold substance, that delight is the outside air and he doesn’t want to open his eyes and … let himself live in a cold and different realm, the world outside the sweater …” (289).

The outside air may well be a delight but, as Cortzar makes amply evident, not the sort of delight the protagonist wishes to recognize. In fact, as he sees it, the world outside the sweater’s warm embrace is “cold and different,” which is no doubt why his own body turns against an imminent exit and cowers back into the beckoning blue folds (his left hand attacks him while the right one pulls back the sweater over his neck, letting the “blue drool”-la baba azul-“envelop his face once again” [289, my emphasis]). It is at that moment, in an eort to arrive somewhere “where there is only a fragrant air to envelop him, and accompany him …,” that he falls prey to the abyss of the open window (289).

The ending of this story is perplexing and hypnotic at the same time. Cortzar induces a state of high anxiety in his readers without clarifying a single thing about his hero’s behavior. For a start, what brings on the man’s stifling anguish? Is it being engulfed by the sweater, or being forced to leave behind its tightening grip? If getting out of the suffocating embrace is the man’s goal, why does he return to the very space he struggled to leave behind? By attacking him and pulling the sweater over his neck, doesn’t it seem as if his own hand were compelling him to return? But if his body is choosing to return to the confinement of the sweater, did he dread confinement in the first place? Have we correctly interpreted what the hero dreads and what he yearns for? Might there be a connection between the confining body and the beckoning maw, between the dark enveloping folds, and the hero’s fall into the abyss?

Fur fear

Instead of answering these questions, Cortzar went on playing cat and mouse with his readers. The same ambivalent longing for confining spaces and stifling darkness we find in “Don’t Blame Anyone” resurfaces in his masterful “Cuello de gatito negro” (“Throat of a Black Kitten”) eighteen years later. As Lucho-the hero of this story-makes love to a woman he has just met in the Paris Metro, the lighted bedside lamp falls to the floor with a thundering crash; the crash causes the woman to sit “bolt upright, terrified, refusing to succumb to darkness” (Octaedro, 159). After making love, however, the couple’s terror is temporarily abated as they lay within the “great womb of night” (161). Enveloped in total darkness where one is “clumsy like an infant,” Lucho blindly searches for matches (161). On his hands and knees, letting his hands do the work his eyes are unable to carry out, he soon senses it was “even darker, it smelled of time and seclusion” (162). At this point, Dina makes a lunge for Lucho’s sexual organs and “the jerk on his genitals made him scream more out of fear than out of pain” (162). Trying to avoid her next attack, he drags himself away from the sound of her voice while doing his best to control “an asphyxiating hiccup that went on and on” (163). Adroitly, Cortzar adds to the pervasive sense of confinement by eliminating paragraphing altogether from the beginning of the aborted castration scene until the end of the story, a practice he follows in “Don’t Blame Anyone” as well. Visually speaking, the pages of both stories read as a solid textual mass that has no breaks, no visual breathing space of any kind.

Despite the encroaching darkness, confinement, and pain, there is a way out of the seemingly threatening world portrayed in “Don’t Blame Anyone,” and “Throat of a Black Kitten” however. In the latter story, the window that had been featured in the sweater saga has become a door that Lucho succeeds in reaching after skirting countless obstacles. He opens it to face “a frozen air that blended with the blood covering his lips” (163). As he emerges naked into the light, Lucho feels so cold and forlorn that he is ready to turn around and go back inside, repeatedly begging Dina, “Open up … open up, it’s already light out” (164). But it is to no avail; he is out, and must stay out. Sitting on the steps, “removing the blood from his mouth and eyes,” he thinks to himself, “she probably passed out from the blow,” adding regretfully, she “won’t open up, always the same, its cold, its cold” (164). Naked and smeared with blood as the story concludes, Lucho goes on pleading with Dina to open up and let him back in because, “if you open up,” he assures her, “we could find the way out, you saw how everything was going so well, just a matter of turning the light on and continuing to search, both of us together” (164).

Readers of this story cannot fail to be struck by Lucho’s fateful generalization: “always the same, it’s cold, it’s cold.” Why always, one wonders? Has Lucho been thrown out, naked and shivering, from so many apartments? Even more surprising, why, as in “Don’t Blame Anyone,” is exiting associated with pain and death, and not with release? Why is darkness deemed desirable and breathing hindered in both stories? Above all, how does one explain the protagonists’ struggle to return to a threatening environment? Why such determination to go back inside after getting hurt?

It could be, of course, that “Don’t Blame Anyone,” and “Throat of a Black Kitten” are nothing more than the tale of a poor wretch who falls out of a window, and of a more fortunate counterpart who ends up barely slipping away with his tail between his legs. Such cursory readings pose at least one problem for the critic, however: they fail to explain why the stories work. That is, reading only the more explicit anecdotal level does not make clear why the encroaching space portrayed by Cortzar is so profoundly anguish-producing. One can understand why the bite of a vampire or the imminent arrival of an oversized ape would frighten readers, but it is not readily evident why the personal panic button is set o with such vehemence when we read both Cortzar’s depiction of a man who almost suffocates while putting on a sweater, and the misadventures of another who ends up naked and covered with blood begging to be allowed back into a woman’s room.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Body of writingby Ren Prieto Copyright © 2000 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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