Carnal Inscriptions: Spanish American Narratives of Corporeal Difference and Disability (New Concepts in Latino American Cultures)

New Concepts in Latino American Cultures A Series Edited by Licia Fiol-Matta & José Quiroga Ciphers of History: Latin American Readings for a Cultural Age by Enrico Mario Santí Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America: Against the Destiny of Place by Jacqueline Loss Remembering Maternal Bodies: Melancholy in Latina and Latin American Women’s Writing by Benigno Trigo The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism: Reading Otherwise edited by Erin Graff Zivin Modernity and the Nation in Mexican Representations of Masculinity: From Sensuality to Bloodshed by Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity by Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond Essays in Cuban Intellectual History by Rafael Rojas Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing by Damián Baca Confronting History and Modernity in Mexican Narrative by Elisabeth Guerrero Cuban Women Writers: Imagining a Matria by Madeline Cámara Betancourt Other Worlds: New Argentine Film by Gonzalo Aguilar Cuba in the Special Period: Culture and Ideology in the 1990s edited by Ariana Hernandez-Reguant Telling Ruins in Latin America edited by Michael J. Lazzara and Vicky Unruh

New Directions in Latino American Cultures Also Edited by Licia Fiol-Matta & José Quiroga New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone by Raquel Z. Rivera The Famous 41: Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, 1901 edited by Robert McKee Irwin, Edward J. McCaughan, and Michele Rocío Nasser Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture & Chicana/o Sexualities edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, with a foreword by Tomás Ybarra Frausto Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature by Gustavo Perez-Firmat Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations edited by Doris Sommer Jose Martí: An Introduction by Oscar Montero New Tendencies in Mexican Art: The 1990s by Rubén Gallo The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries edited by Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics, and Politics by Idelber Avelar An Intellectual History of the Caribbean by Silvio Torres-Saillant None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era edited by Frances Negrón-Muntaner Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé The Portable Island: Cubans at Home in the World edited by Ruth Behar and Lucía M. Suárez Violence without Guilt: Ethical Narratives from the Global South by Hermann Herlinghaus Redrawing the Nation: National Identity in Latin/o American Comics by Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste and Juan Poblete

Carnal Inscriptions Spanish American Narratives of Corporeal Difference and Disability

By Susan Antebi

carnal inscriptions Copyright © Susan Antebi, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin‘s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-61389-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: June 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. Cover photograph: “Two-headed” by Espartaco Palma. Mural fragment from Hospital de Jesús, Mexico City. Creative commons. http:// www.flickr.com/photos/esparta/2564137936/ Portions of chapter one appeared in Disability Studies Quarterly, fall 2005, reprinted here with permission of editors. A partial version of chapter three appeared in Hispania 88.5 (2005): 267–77, reprinted here with permission of editors. Figure 4. Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña as “Two Undiscovered Amerindians.” Courtesy Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and courtesy of the artists. Figure 6. Shiki Nagaoka photograph © Ximena Berecochea.

For my parents, Joseph and Joanna Antebi

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction

1

1

Caliban and Coney Island: Corporeal Difference in the Crónicas of José Martí and José Juan Tablada

13

2

“La doble y única mujer”: The Doubled Bodies of Pablo Palacio and Jorge Velasco Mackenzie

49

3

Corporeal Difference as Ethnicity

79

4

Performance and Revenge

107

5

Photographic Fictions and Corporeal Geographies

141

6

Gabriela Brimmer: Enabling Testimonio

171

Afterword

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Notes

205

Works Cited

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Index

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Acknowledgments

When I began work on this book, I thought I was writing about freaks and monsters in Spanish American narrative. At some point, I began to understand that the book was, in fact, about disability in these contexts. The process of writing and rewriting these chapters has begun to teach me to sort out the crucial differences between disability and the notion of freakishness; I hope that reading it may do the same for others. Disability, according to my reading, need not define absolute differences among individual people in terms of their supposed (lack of ) conformity to a predetermined norm. Instead, the notion of disability is largely determined by social context and might actually impact human interaction of every kind, reminding us that no one is completely “able-bodied” and, for example, that a book cannot be written alone but depends on the collaboration, assistance, advice, and support of many. This book is the result of a number of years of research and writing, as well as ongoing dialogues, both within and beyond formal academic spaces in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Riverside, California, and in Mexico City and Quito, Ecuador. The writing of Carnal Inscriptions would not have been possible without the generous guidance of my former dissertation adviser, Doris Sommer, and committee members, Luis Fernández-Cifuentes and Rachel Adams. Funding for the research and writing of this project at the doctoral stage was provided in part by a grant from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. I am also grateful to Sander Gilman for his useful readings of earlier versions of my work, especially Chapter 3, and to others at the School for Criticism and Theory seminars during the summer of 2002 for helping me to think about corporeal difference at an earlier stage in this project. I would especially like to thank my colleagues in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), for their kindness and for their contribution to a productive and vibrant intellectual space. My graduate students in a

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fall 2004 seminar also contributed to this project through their critical readings and discussion of several texts analyzed in the book. Earlier versions of several chapters were presented as conference papers or lectures at the Harvard University Humanities Center, at UCR’s Department of Dance, at meetings of the American Comparative Literature and the Latin American Studies associations, and at conferences organized by University of California-Mexicanistas. I am grateful to fellow panelists and audience members for their questions and feedback, and especially to Viviane Mahieux, Wanda Rivera-Rivera, Juan Pablo Lupi, Dan Russek, Tim McGovern, Sara Poot-Herrera, Juan Bruce-Novoa, and Maite Zubiaurre. Some portions of Chapter 1 appeared as an earlier version in the Disability Studies Quarterly. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published in Hispania. I am grateful to the editors of both journals for permission to republish these segments. I also thank my colleague, Jim Parr, for his generous assistance with the permission process. Parts of this book were researched and written during a five-month teaching leave at the Center for Ideas and Society at UCR, with partial funding from the Ford Foundation. Conversations with members of my research groups at the center challenged my thinking and allowed me to work through the ideas presented in this book. I am particularly grateful to Freya Schiwy for her reading of my book proposal, as well as earlier versions of Chapters 1 and 5 and her assistance with images; to Alessandro Fornazzari and Juliette Levy, who read and commented on a version of Chapter 1; to Carole-Anne Tyler and David Herzberger, who read and critiqued earlier versions of my book proposal; to Derek Burrill for his generous reading of my manuscript; and to Michael Foster for his advice on Chapter 5. I also thank Janet Walker, Julie Rajan and Helen Asquine Fazio for their helpful input on earlier versions of chapter 5. My former UCR colleague John Ochoa provided invaluable insight into the world of first-time book publishing, as well as mentoring. Some of my research was conducted at the Fondo Reservado at the Biblioteca José Vasconcelos in Mexico City, with funding from the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United Staes, and from the University of California Regents. I would like to thank the librarians at the Fondo Reservado and my friend and fellow researcher, Roberto Ornelas Herrera. I am grateful to David Toscana, Mario Bellatín, and Naief Yehya for their helpful correspondence, and to Ximena Berecochea, Coco Fusco, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña for photo permissions. I thank Espartaco Palma for providing the cover art, Randy Maile for his help and expertise with Photoshop, and Tony Jardin at Intellicolor Photo Lab

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for quick and careful printing. Thanks also to Daniel Smith and Barbara Economon at the Walker Art Center, to Steve Engerrand and staff at the Georgia Archives, and the staff at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. My editor, Luba Ostashevsky, and editorial assistant, Colleen Lawrie, patiently answered my questions and guided this project forward. I thank Matt Robison, Rosemi Mederos, and Daniel Constantino for their assistance with the copyediting process. Many people contributed to the process of writing this book in less direct ways, through their encouragement, personal and intellectual support, friendship, and generosity. I wish to thank Abdón Ubidia and Gladys Jaramillo Luzuriaga, who read my work many years ago and, more recently, encouraged me to pursue my goals and, of course, sustained me through a few upheavals. Scott Miller, my yoga teacher, also taught me about writing and always asked me questions during difficult poses. Laura Cueva-Miller and the many others who continue to create a yoga community in Riverside kept me (sort of ) balanced throughout this project. I am grateful to Lynda Warren for listening, to Piya Chatterjee for her creation of the “Mentoring Spaces for Women Faculty” group, to Mary Tregoning for her encouragement, and to Sergio Rivera-Ayala for his patience. It is to my family that I express my deepest thanks: to William Antebi for being an extraordinary big brother; and to Erin and Zoe Antebi, my newest family members. In appreciation of their unfailing encouragement, sense of humor, and loving support, this book is dedicated to my parents.

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Introduction Algo en la oscuridad le rozó la frente ¿un murciélago, un pájaro? En la cara de la mujer que le abrió la puerta vio grabado el horror, y la mano que se pasó por la frente salió roja de sangre. [In the obscurity, something brushed by his forehead: a bat, a bird? On the face of the woman who opened the door to him he saw horror engraved, and the hand he wiped across his face came away red with blood] —Jorge Luis Borges, “El sur” (“The South”) Ese repugnante cuerpo sarmentoso retorciéndose sobre su joroba, ese rostro abierto en un surco brutal donde labios, paladar y nariz desnudaban la obscenidad de huesos y tejidos en una incoherencia de rasgos rojizos . . . era la confusión, el desorden, una forma distinta pero peor de la muerte. [The loathsome, gnarled body writhing on its hump, its mouth a gaping bestial hole in which palate and nose bared obscene bones and tissues in an incoherent cluster of reddish traits, was chaos, disorder, a different but worse form of death]. —José Donoso, El obsceno pájaro de la noche (The Obscene Bird of the Night)

What does it mean to speak of the marked, disabled, or “different” body in the contexts of Latin American literary discourse? What is at stake in the representation and reading of such a body? This book insists on the particularity of represented bodies in literature as ultimately irreducible to overarching metaphors—such as the metaphors of monstrosity and otherness that proliferate in Latin American literary and critical traditions. I argue that disability plays a significant role in narrative, even in instances when we as readers may have failed to notice it. Familiar metaphors of the body do not tell the whole story; thus, an exclusive critical emphasis on such metaphors will diminish or obscure the varied functions and effects of disability and corporeal difference in the text. This book aims to read both through and beyond common literary tropologies of the unusual body and to elaborate a critical framework relevant to a contemporary cultural politics of disability.1

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Yet metaphors and other literary artifices of the texts to which they belong are sticky creatures, as Borges’s narrator in “El Sur” would have to realize. The apparently seamless continuity between an expression of horror on the woman’s face and the presence of blood on the viewer’s hand suggest that the disfigured body is naturally inseparable from the responses it provokes, that it is real rather than imagined or socially determined. The woman’s face shows horror “engraved,” as if from an external source. As readers, we imagine the bloody face of a man as this source, but we might also suppose that the origin of the extreme reaction lies elsewhere or even that the look of horror, as described in the text, actually generates an image of disfigurement that we would otherwise be unable to conjure. Likewise, José Donoso’s horrifyingly formless image of a recently born child becomes emblematic of a vertiginously empty genealogical and novelistic project. The repetition of the same passage, word for word, several chapters later, seems to insist upon this point, as if repetition could resolve the asymmetry and absence of the represented body in the text. In a related sense, as David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have argued, “the disabled body [ . . . ] offers narrative the illusion of grounding abstract knowledge within a bodily materiality. If the body is the other of the text, then textual representation seeks access to that which it is least able to grasp” (64). Corporeal difference in my readings suggests this familiar conundrum of textual grasping and material specificity through critical encounters between commonplace metaphors of the marked, monstrous, or different body and moments of resistance to their expected meanings. Thus, for example, the freak-show performer of José Martí’s “Coney Island,” discussed in Chapter 1, seems to represent the generalized, metaphorical monstrosity of U.S. mass culture, vis-à-vis the exiled Latin American intellectual, yet the same “freak” figure is a singular outsider who refuses integration into the supposed homogeneity of urban life. Textual performance operates here through inconsistencies or gaps in the overarching metaphors that purport to collapse corporeal difference with ethnic, cultural, and gender differences, or with identity as generalized otherness. Such gaps in the textual signification of disability also suggest Ato Quayson’s concept of “aesthetic nervousness”: “What ensues and can be discerned in the suspension, collapse, or general short-circuiting of the hitherto dominant protocols of representation that may have governed the text . . . even when the disabled character appears to be represented programmatically, the restless dialectic of representation may unmoor her from the programmatic location and place her elsewhere

Introduction

3

as the dominant aesthetic protocols governing representation are shortcircuited” (26–27). It is not that disabled bodies in the text refuse all meaning, but rather that such bodies continue to perform further, future significations and to challenge predetermined metaphors and their sociopolitical consequences. By considering the specificity of what bodies in literature may mean and how they mean it, I seek to approach disabled bodies as both performing subjects and represented objects, as socially determined identities and active, ongoing intercorporeal processes, and to situate disability as central to corporeal representation in Latin American narrative. Carnal Inscriptions thus participates in the contemporary disability studies– inflected debate on disability as minority identity versus an open-ended system of decategorization, or as a destabilization of identity politics, as Lennard Davis has described. In the contexts of Latin American literary and critical traditions, this debate will necessarily shift as it engages the specificities of ongoing (post) colonialist histories and transcultural encounters between texts and bodies. The Spanish American narratives analyzed in this book interrogate a trajectory of historically crucial reference points, from the period of Spanish conquest through the twentieth century, marking out pathways through which a series of national, ethnic, regional, and individual identities are both constructed and dislocated via the metaphorical use of flawed, impaired, or unusual bodies. From Caliban’s repetitive curse to Gabriel García Márquez’s pig-tailed infant to Pablo Palacio’s twoheaded woman, the unusually figured body generally has something to say, and more often than not, an audience finds in this body a site of potential identification or rejection. The history of such sites frequently corresponds to Latin American colonial and postcolonial histories, and hence to particular moments of interaction between distinct geopolitical spaces—between Latin America and its Others. This book therefore posits encounters between geographic and culturally marked locations, through histories of circulating bodies and narratives. Readings move between Latin America and the United States, Ecuador and Spain, Lima and the Amazon rainforest, Mexico and Japan, freak shows and television talk shows, photography and written narrative, Hollywood film and testimonio. In each case, disabled or unusual bodies point toward a geopolitically determined history through which corporeal difference has acquired its conventional meanings and, at the same time, challenge and diversify such meanings through unexpected juxtapositions of texts, bodies, and disciplinary traditions.

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I approach the bodies figured in these narratives in relation to a dual history of exploitation and resistance: to the colonialist legacy of Europe’s encounter with its “New World,” perhaps most familiarly exemplified through the figure of Caliban—as a monstrous Other—and to the far more recent phenomenon of ethnographic spectacles, freak shows, and similar forms of entertainment, which from the late nineteenth century onward became a significant mode of engagement between United States’ mass culture and its Others. While Caliban frequently has been read as a trope of alterity in Latin American contexts, the figure of the freak typically forms part of U.S. cultural history. Yet, in fact, both figures play significant roles in the literature to be analyzed here; both originate from beyond and in tension with Latin American regions, and both inflect literary production and performance from within and beyond Latin America. The intersection of these histories mimics a critical encounter between two general modalities of reading corporeal difference—one based in the notion of monstrosity as figurative site for the proliferation of meanings and the generation of collective identities-as-alterities and the other construed through emphasis on the specificity of material bodies and their individual histories. This book seeks to imagine a meeting point between these two discourses. The first approach is generally bound to interventions from Latin American cultural and literary studies, while the second is typical of many current humanities-based approaches to disability studies. The formulation of intersections between the two will be crucial to reading articulations of disability in Spanish American literary contexts, as well as to the ongoing reformulation of approaches to corporeal difference, inflected by historicized, transnational perspectives. The binary I have outlined here is not, however, an absolute one, as the following anecdote begins to demonstrate. In the introduction to her 2000 edited volume on performance art in the Americas, Coco Fusco describes a curious accident, through which she inadvertently created the title for the book. While browsing in her dictionary, she selected the expression “corpus delicti,” meaning, “the material substance such as a body or a victim in a murder, upon which a crime has been committed” (2). The book, however, ended up with the title Corpus delecti, or, “the body that derives or incarnates pleasure,” thanks to Fusco’s “capricious memory” (3). Not to be caught in an apparent error, Fusco rapidly juggles the terms through which bodies and meanings circulate in Latin American and transnational contexts. Thus, reference to an ongoing (post) colonialist history of violence inflicted upon human bodies switches into

Introduction

5

the evocation of an erotic, exotic, stereotyped Latin American body. Both meanings, it turns out, are relevant to the performance art pieces included in Fusco’s book and to the history of corporeal difference and performance within and beyond Latin America. Fusco’s felicitous error and subsequent sleight of hand inscribing the search for a title to her book underscore a central dynamic at work in many recent critical approaches to the “problem” of the body, its differences, and its metaphors. The body, we might tend to imagine, is a real thing, a material object, a piece of flesh, a recipient of actions and effects; as such, no text can contain or distribute it. Still, without circumventing this persistent notion, bodies are actors, hence “doing things,” communicating, incarnating pleasure, as does a metaphor, or Fusco’s anecdote. In this sense, the question of the body’s metaphorical history and function also suggests the structure of performance through which language and bodies accrue significance because of what they do rather than what they are. This linkage is useful to the argument of Carnal Inscriptions, since it allows readings to cross from the space of textual body metaphors toward that of the live performing body as well as from predetermined body identities toward the ongoing production of new intercorporeal encounters. The cultural weight of metaphors of monstrosity and corporeal difference in Latin American and Latin Americanist contexts stems in part, as I have suggested, from a textual history of Caliban as Europeanized projection of racial otherness. The monster here is not a body as such, but rather an open site, a space for the construction and negotiation of individual or collective identities. Critical work on the colonial period, such as studies by Carlos Jáuregui and Michael Palencia-Roth, illustrates the role of the crónica de indias in the construction of metaphorical monstrosity and its ties to the notion of cannibalism. Yet later evocations of the monster as metaphor, beginning in the late nineteenth century, will be of particular interest to the project of this book. The period marks the rise of the freak show in U.S. mass culture and the increasing importance of the United States as a political and economic force in Latin America; both of these factors would impact the significance of the represented body in Latin American literary contexts in the decades to come. The late nineteenth century is also the crucial period of nation-building and of the formation of collective social identities in Latin America and thus coincides with an increasing circulation of cultural metaphors—such as the figure of Caliban—through which such identities could be cemented. In addition, the industrialization of the period would determine an increase in

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work-related accidents and resulting disabilities in both Latin America and the United States. In 1900, just two years after Spain’s loss of its last colonial territories to the United States, José Enrique Rodó published his celebrated Ariel, in which Caliban is figured as the materialistic and menacing United States, while Ariel represents the more idealist and spiritual Latin American intellectual. José Martí, whose work will be discussed further, had also depicted the United States as monstrous in earlier texts, undoubtedly implying the flip side of this characterization: that Latin America had long been viewed by colonial powers, such as Spain, Great Britain, and now the United States, as a space of monstrosity. In 1971, Fernández Retamar continued the circulation of metaphorical bodies with his Calibán: Apuntes sobre la cultura de nuestra América, in the context of the Cuban revolution. This time, Caliban embodied the role of the oppressed masses of Latin America in the wake of colonial exploitation and ongoing Yankee imperialism. Ariel retained the status of the intellectual, now with the mission of allying with the less privileged masses to work for social justice and Latin American solidarity. These crucial signposts in Caliban’s history demonstrate the extent to which the significance of monstrosity and corporeal difference in Latin American contexts stems from the circulation of geopolitically conditioned metaphors, as frequently reflected in Latin Americanist scholarship.2 In contrast, humanities-based approaches to disability studies, generally in a U.S. academic context, have tended to emphasize the historical and material specificity of the body, in studies of freak shows and ethnographic spectacles, as well as in literary criticism.3 My emphasis on the history of the freak show, known primarily as a phenomenon of U.S. mass culture, may strike the reader as curious within the context of a project anchored in readings of Spanish American literature, for the most part, dating from the late twentieth century. The term “freak” is unavoidably problematic here, since it evokes a primarily anglophone history of the performance and display of unusual bodies. Yet the freak show and modes of corporeal representation akin to the performance of freakishness nonetheless surface in these texts, although often in altered, dislocated, and defamiliarized forms, from José Martí’s and José Juan Tablada’s encounters with Coney Island to Bellatín’s insistent erasure of his protagonist’s purportedly giant nose, among other instances. At various points in the research and writing of this project, I found myself attempting to explain the relevance of the U.S. freak show in Latin American literature. Ironically, during my final revision of the

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manuscript, I came across the newly published novel Chiquita by Cuban author Antonio Orlando Rodríguez, winner of the 2008 Alfaguara Prize. The novel, based on a true story, documents the life of Espiridiona Cenda, otherwise known as “Chiquita,” a Cuban woman measuring twenty-six inches in height, who traveled to the United States in the late nineteenth century and became a successful vaudeville and freak-show performer. While Cenda’s career as a performer is perhaps not surprising, given the public fascination with freak shows during this period, the fact that a partially fictional recreation of her life should win an important literary prize today suggests that links between freak-show history and U.S.-Latin American relations will continue to warrant further study. My analyses of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century narratives posit freakishness as an ongoing discourse through which the cultural and political stakes of corporeal difference and representation are renegotiated yet remain inseparable from the transnational dynamics of earlier freakshow history and its underpinning global economy. In addition, scholarship on the history of the freak show, particularly since the 1990s and often informed by a disability studies perspective, has shown that exploitation of so-called freaks often blurred the line between disability and racial or ethnic difference so that people of colonized countries and racial minorities of the United States were displayed as freaks and as not quite human; hence, they were figured as disabled. In the meantime, people with cognitive disabilities were displayed as members of exoticized foreign races. This aspect of the history of the freak show and ethnographic spectacle makes explicit the link between the social construction of the disabled body in U.S. contexts and the racialization of corporeal difference as demarcation of national boundaries.4 While recent critical work in disability studies and freak show history has emphasized the materiality of the body, as discussed above, this approach is complicated by the fact that disability too may be considered an artifice, constructed by mainstream societal responses to impaired or unusual bodies, as much of the disability studies scholarship in the past two decades has also argued. In his classic text from 1990, Michael Oliver cites a twofold definition, one that clarifies his distinction between bodies and their social contexts: Impairment lacking part of or all of a limb, or having a defective limb, organism or mechanism of the body; Disability the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which takes no or little account of people

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who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from the mainstream of social activities. (11)

As Quayson has noted, however, the categories of impairment and disability may become difficult to separate, especially when the social circumstances of war, poverty, and global capitalism are seen to cause an increase in people with impairments (3). In addition, conventional understanding tends to collapse the two models into one so that disability is naturalized as an integral aspect of the body. Hence, the social existence of the disabled person, whether disadvantaged or simply marked as radically different, appears to be a logical extension of that person’s impairment or corporeal difference. The dilemma suggested here is not far afield from Judith Butler’s widely disseminated notion of the performativity of gender, through which gender categories become naturalized as inseparable from the bodies they name through acts of interpellation. Yet the structure of performativity at once opens toward the possibility of renaming bodies, and hence critically unpacking identity categories. In the case of disability, performance and theories of performativity allow for a renegotiation of perceived ties between bodies and their social contexts. The interdisciplinary encounter between disability studies and performance studies points toward a contested space in which the question of disability as identity is debated. As Petra Kuppers notes, “Disability as a social category is not the same as race or gender, but it shares important aspects with these ways of knowing difference” (5). She problematizes the notion of a materially present body underpinning identity, yet upholds the specificity of disability as identity, and as a “strategic name” (7). Similarly, in the introduction to their recent edited volume on disability and performance, Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander outline the encounters between the two disciplines, focusing on the “social-construction model of disability” within which “disability is a disjuncture between the body and the environment” (8), as well as the “minority model” that “extends the social-construction premise that disability is a mutable category by self-consciously crafting a new disability identity” (8). In partial contrast to these models, Davis has argued for an unmooring of disability as identity category and, ultimately, of identity politics in general, through what he terms “dismodernism.” He writes, “The dismodern era ushers in the concept that difference is what all of us have in common. That identity is not fixed but malleable. That technology is not separate but part of the body. That dependence, not individual independence, is the rule” (Bending Over 26). Davis’s unpacking of disability as the presumed site of fixed

Introduction

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identity here lends itself to a reading of disability as performance, and hence as open to practices through which new and shifting identities may be articulated. My readings similarly consider the poiesis of encounters between disability and performance, while at once negotiating the ongoing histories that have defined and located disability as corporeal presence and politically charged site. Carnal Inscriptions engages the dilemmas of disability as representation, performance, and identity, through attention to the histories of identity categories, such as those of Caliban and the freak show, as discussed above, and through readings that problematize these identity narratives. These readings approach and destabilize prescripted categories via a series of four interrelated focal points: 1. Simultaneous attention to fixed or redundant meanings, such as those dependent on a history of monstrosity as metaphor, and to ambivalent openings toward multiple or indeterminate meanings points toward a critical reworking of body-identity taxonomies. 2. The inclusion of both canonical and noncanonical texts allows the book to destabilize and “disable” the parameters through which a literary corpus of work has come to be defined as canonical in the Latin Americanist critical tradition. By reading marginalized texts in juxtaposition with more familiar ones, I argue that readers acquire greater flexibility with which to transcend the preestablished currency of corporeal metaphor. My own metaphorization of canonical—hence normalized—literature as forming a hegemonic corpus, in tension with excluded or peripheral texts, serves to underscore the additional significance of this project, as an approach to reformulating the conditions through which the Latin American literary tradition and its criticisms may be articulated. 3. Emphasis throughout this book on the performance of disability, as in the context of the freak show, in combination with the performativity of language, allows for a questioning of preestablished divisions, as when performative verbal descriptions cross the line between spectatorship and staged performance or when language highlights its own uncertain grip on the bodies it attempts to depict. 4. Disability, although irrevocably tied to histories of identity politics, exploitation, and corporeal markings, is not limited to a fixed essence or identity but, instead, operates through intercorporeal processes by which meanings are constructed and bodies gain access to the worlds they inhabit and create.

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The book follows a partially chronological structure, through readings of narrative and performance from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first century, yet emphasizes relatively recent cultural production overall. The first two chapters focus on encounters between metaphors of corporeal difference and material bodies, in transnational contexts among the United States, Latin America, and Spain. These chapters highlight texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thus providing a historical context to the tropology of the body that will continue to operate in the fiction to be discussed in subsequent chapters. Chapter 1 enacts a backward glance to the U.S. freak show’s heyday of the late nineteenth century. I address the spectacle through the eyes of two Spanish American exiled writers, José Martí and José Juan Tablada, whose newspaper chronicles include references to freak-show style entertainment. Here, textual emphasis on the materiality of the performing body jars with the figurative quality of the exiled writer’s production of meaning, while the literary construction of Spanish American identities alters the contours of reading the freak body and its social history. Chapter 2 moves forward in literary history to look at Ecuadorian writer Pablo Palacio’s avant-garde treatment of corporeal difference in his story “La doble y única mujer.” Palacio incorporates an indirect link between corporeal difference and cannibalism in his short story, through the figure of “singular, double,” female, conjoined twins, whose bodies mutually incorporate one another and refer metaphorically to an Ecuadorian elite consumption of European culture. Jorge Velasco Mackenzie’s 1983 “El caballero de la mano en el pecho” incorporates and rewrites Palacio’s, through citation and historical referencing, adding a metaphorical layer to the problem of the double from Palacio’s text. Velasco’s gesture of inscribing a new story onto and through the bodies of Palacio and his character(s) both extends the original text’s metaphorical bind, and at the same time subverts the self-referentiality of the body, by retroactively grounding both texts in a newly imagined geopolitical framework, troubling the contours of the marked body and allowing it to tell a new story of a hypothetical transatlantic alliance. Following these first two chapters, the book shifts in focus toward works of the late twentieth century. The next three chapters focus on the dilemma of the body’s truth, presence, and “real” identity, through references to fraud in freak-show history, photographic representation, and the structure of performance, as well as through attention to the ongoing racialization of corporeal difference. Chapter 3 focuses on junctures between corporeal difference and ethnicity in two novels, Mario Vargas

Introduction

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Llosa’s 1987 El hablador and David Toscana’s 1998 Santa María del Circo. My reading looks at the implied presence of riddles in these narratives of corporeal difference and the ways in which riddles point toward, or away from, an answer to the uncertainty of the body’s meaning. The combined perspective offered by these texts allows for an approach to corporeal difference in Spanish American narrative that is both specific to regional, historical contexts and unhinged from the grid of metaphors that would align bodies with predetermined meanings. Chapter 4 looks at contemporary transformations in the structure of body riddles, following from the dynamic established in Chapter 3, this time in the context of recent works in narrative and performance by New York-based Mexican writer Naief Yehya and performance artists Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Fusco. Readings of Yehya’s “La gente de látex,” a representation of television talk shows and Gómez-Peña’s and Fusco’s “The Couple in the Cage” performance and video of a staged ethnographic spectacle suggest that these texts address the problem of the efficacy of radical performance, in contexts determined by both public desire for truth and the banalization of difference. This challenge takes place through a “performance of revenge” in which the revelation, or the obscuring of the body, jars with viewers’ and readers’ expectations, and thus highlights the sites of injustice and exploitation through which marked or flawed bodies frequently have been represented. Chapter 5 continues the previous chapter’s analysis of potentially falsified representations of the body, through a reading of Mexican writer Bellatín’s 2001 novel, Shiki Nagaoka, una nariz de ficción. Here, the use of photography as accompaniment to the written word combined with a refusal to fully reveal images of the body suggests a structure of voyeurism akin to the freak show’s incitement of audience desire for a view of the body in question. Bellatín’s text sets up a dialogue with a history of cultural and political relations between Japan and the West, and inserts itself in a trajectory of cultural knowledge and exchange between Latin America and East Asia, thus upsetting the Eurocentric conventions of the East–West dyad. The game of false clues leads neither to the body behind the fiction, nor to an endless deferral of meaning, but rather interrupts our familiarity with the geopolitical histories that have frequently defined the role of corporeal difference in textual representation. In Chapter 6, emphasis on disability politics as context for my analyses of corporeal difference in Spanish American narrative comes more fully to fruition, as I engage with texts that have already impacted cultural discourse on disability and the rights of people with disabilities in

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Mexico. This chapter looks at intersections between disability and cultural production, analyzing the testimonial work Gaby Brimmer (1979), written collaboratively by Gabriela Brimmer and Elena Poniatowska, and the film Gaby, a true story, directed by Luis Mandoki. Gabriela Brimmer was a Mexican writer of Austrian-Jewish descent who had cerebral palsy and communicated primarily with her left big toe on a typewriter or an alphabet chart. I read the disability politics of the film and the text as a critical juncture between privately experienced corporeality and corporeal difference and the sociopolitical contexts upon and through which the body appears, communicates, and makes an impact. Rather than only emphasizing the limits of corporeal representation in text and photograph, and the impossibility of unmediated access to the truth—a topic of debate surrounding the genre of Latin American testimonio and highlighted throughout Carnal Inscriptions—I pay attention to prosthetic relationships between body and text, as well as between one body and another, or a body and itself. By focusing here on intercorporeality, I seek to reconfigure the politics of corporeal truth in narrative and, once again, to underscore the importance of the mutual contributions that disability studies and Latin American cultural studies–informed readings can make to one another. In sum, Carnal Inscriptions aims to situate disability as central to contemporary readings of Latin American cultural production. By working through the literary tropologies that have both limited the meanings of corporeal difference in narrative and released figurative bodies into circulation and production, this book points toward the ongoing entanglement of metaphor and disability as intrinsic to a Latin American and Latin Americanist literary tradition. Yet the readings in the chapters that follow look beyond conventional dilemmas of representation in order to foreground marked bodies as both socially and materially determined, engaged in open-ended, intercorporeal processes of performance, and finally, as inseparable from the worlds they continue to create.

CHAPTER 1

Caliban and Coney Island Corporeal Difference in the Crónicas of José Martí and José Juan Tablada Coney Island’s Spanish American Scenes Among the thousands of daily visitors to late nineteenth-century Coney Island, the exiled Cuban journalist José Martí paused before the displays of the fifty-cent museums, momentarily captivated by the outrageous and unbelievable quality of the spectacle before him: “monstruos humanos, peces extravagantes, mujeres barbudas, enanos melancólicos, y elefantes raquíticos, de los que se dicen pomposamente que son los elefantes más grandes de la tierra” (Crónicas, 135) [human freaks, preposterous fish, bearded ladies, melancholy dwarves, and stunted elephants, grandiloquently advertised as the largest on earth] (“Coney Island,” 318). A nearly endless stream of fascinated, curious spectators with money to spend would ensure the lucrative success of such freak shows and related operations throughout the United States, particularly from the second half of the nineteenth to the first two decades of the twentieth century. But here, the display is perceived through the eyes of a foreigner, who, wishing to distinguish himself from the throng, repeatedly reminds the reader of his outsider status. As Martí famously wrote in the same essay, in reference to differences between Spanish America’s and United States’ cultures: “Aquellas gentes comen cantidad; nosotros clase” (139) [such people eat quantity; we, quality] (321). Several decades later, the Mexican poet and journalist José Juan Tablada would similarly elicit the complicity of his readers in his own description of the Coney Island freak-show spectacles: “con el legítimo escepticismo de nuestra vieja estirpe, pues tú y yo, lector, somos hijos del milenario Anáhuac, y Moctezuma, antes que Coney Island surgiera del mar como una Venus chata y mercader, tenía bufones, enanos y corcovados, casas de

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fieras y jardines botánicos” (1926, 3) [with the legitimate skepticism of our ancient lineage, for you and I, reader, are sons of the millenary Anahuac; and long before Coney Island rose out of the ocean like a common, commercial Venus, Montezuma had jesters, dwarves and hunchbacks, caged beasts and botanic gardens].1 What are José Martí, brilliant orator, poet, and martyr for the cause of Cuban independence, and José Juan Tablada, Mexican poet and japonista, who took refuge in the United States because of his opposition to the Mexican revolution, doing in the same place? Apparently their paths would have crossed—but for a time lapse of some forty-five years—at the scene of a Coney Island freak show. This chapter juxtaposes the discursive projects of the two writers in the midst of a shifting Coney Island scene. It also posits an imaginary encounter between the live performance of corporeal difference and the literary construction of individual and collective identities, or between literary acts of “enfreakment,” and freak-show spectacles.2 Within this reading, the notion of a live displayed body must account for the perspectives that surround and contribute to it, while corporeality as metaphor must also refer back to the material bodies and histories that have helped make it possible. It is not that a real body will finally emerge from the debris of figurative language; after all, our access to bodies is inevitably discursive. Rather, an encounter between particular modes of literary discourse and critical approaches to corporeal spectacle will create a site for their mutual interrogation and reconfiguration. This juxtaposition thus proposes a transcultural space through which to read disability and corporeal difference in the contexts of crucial moments in both Spanish American literary history and cultural identity formation and the history of U.S. freak shows and mass culture. What roles might disability and corporeal difference play in the literary construction of Spanish American identities in exile vis-à-vis the looming figure of the United States? And how might the literary discourses of these two radically different Spanish American texts contribute to a reading of the performing body and its history? While Martí and Tablada both provide evidence of potentially having witnessed spectacles of corporeal difference commonly known as freak shows or sideshows, forms of entertainment now widely familiar to scholars of disability studies and United States cultural history in general, these Hispanic narratives at once resist participation in the growing body of freak-show knowledge. Resistance, as nonbelonging, takes place here not only through the emphatic rejection of U.S. popular culture, but also through adherence to Spanish American literary discourses that at once

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exceed the boundaries of the corporeal spectacle, yet barely resist its lure. The intersection of literary discourse with the interpretation of spectacle here will imply a retroactive adjustment to reading the contours of each. At the time of the publication of Martí’s “Coney Island” in 1881, the freak show was relatively new to the New York beach resort.3 Yet, similar shows already played an important role in U.S. mass culture through venues such as the dime museum, the carnival, and the circus. In the context of Martí’s descriptions, brief references to the fledgling freak show contribute to an atmosphere of seemingly endless amusement and spectacle, a larger than life “quantity” that consistently opposes and jars with the Spanish American writer’s construction of cultural identity as “quality.” It is in this sense that the freak show figures, albeit indirectly and negatively, in this moment of construction of a fin-de-siècle Spanish American literary and cultural identity. Julio Ramos describes Martí’s rhetorical strategies in “Coney Island” as constructed according to a binary through which the subject interpellates the Spanish American community as “we,” in opposition to a North American “they.” The collective, virtual “we” thus frames the seemingly uncontainable proliferation of modern mass culture depicted in the “North American scenes,” as “they”—its object of representation. As Ramos states, “Such is the grounding gesture of Latinamericanism” (Divergent Modernities, 211). Yet, reimagining this opposition through attention to the intersection between literary discourse and the history of corporeal difference will complicate Martí’s classic reference to quantity and quality and will question the place of the body with respect to this discursive binary. By the time of Tablada’s writing in 1926, the Coney Island freak shows had enjoyed dramatic success and expansion and were already in partial decline (Bogdan, Dennett), yet the institution of the freak show maintained its status as a U.S. cultural icon, continuing to evolve well into the twentieth century.4 In both Martí’s and Tablada’s texts, descriptions of these spectacles of corporeal difference jar with the writer’s sensibility, yet they continue to invite a second look. Details of the show and its performing bodies, along with other descriptions of North American society, would thus come to life once again for a Spanish American readership, far removed from the shores of Coney Island and the bizarre worlds of entertainment they represented. What is the freak show—though perhaps only a minor detail—doing in the midst of these newspaper chronicles? What happens when literary discourses crucial to the construction of Spanish American cultural identities encounter the freak body of U.S. popular entertainment? The polar

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opposition between the elite, disembodied voice of the writer-spectator and the vulgar materiality of the bodies he encounters might seem to provide a classic backdrop to readings of such transcultural encounters. Here, the United States inhabits a site of metaphorical monstrosity of gross material culture and monumental size, body and flesh to the Spanish American writer’s voice and spirit. Yet the performance of corporeal difference in these chronicles also muddies the binary dividing “quantity” from “quality.” The writers’ enjoyment of corporeal otherness through predetermined metaphor encounters resistance, as when the freak’s body adheres neither to the category of monstrous U.S. mass culture nor to the Spanish American exiles’ construction of their own far-from-carnal cultural identities. At the same time, through their textual performances of corporeal and cultural differences, these chronicles shift the terms through which the freak body appears and creates meaning. Neither the performing body, nor the literary tropes that pretend to situate it will remain intact from the encounter. The Spanish American modernism in which Martí, and later Tablada, would participate, through poetic and journalistic production, already implied radical contradictions, as Susana Rotker has shown, between “vulgar reality and the desire for eternity” (8) and between a rejection of capitalist values and a fascination with the material goods, cultural refinement, and luxury these goods could provide. The writers’ ambivalent relationship to materialism and to the modern materiality of culture, in this sense, finds an ideal sticking point in figures such as that of the freak-show performer or those of exuberant bodies and machines that readily lend themselves to physical evocation. The modernist writers’ fascination with philology, as discussed by Rotker and at greater length by Aníbal González, also suggests the problem of language as a material object, in opposition to a more autonomous literary language.5 Regarding this dynamic, both critics cite Martí: En las palabras hay una capa que las envuelve, que es el uso: es necesario ir hasta el cuerpo de ellas. Se siente en este examen que algo se quiebra, y se ve en lo hondo. Han de usarse las palabras como se ven en lo hondo, en su significación real, etimológica, y primitiva, que es la única robusta, que asegura duración a la idea expresada en ella. (qtd. in González 40) [Words have a layer that envelops them, that is usage: it is necessary to get down to their bodies. Something is broken in this examination, and depth is revealed. Words must be used as they are seen in this depth, with their

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real etymological and primitive signification, which is the only one that is robust, that assures that the idea it expresses will last.] (qtd. in Rotker 9)6

This relationship to language is still an ambivalent one, caught between the assurance of an ontological grounding and the modernists’ rejection of rationalism combined with a desire for freer, less systematic signification. Both Martí and Tablada enact the dilemma of the modernist cronista, drawn to the vivid descriptive possibilities of extraordinary displayed bodies and machines, yet consistently mindful of literature’s distancing quality. Figurative language, as when Martí describes roads seen from a distance as “alfombras de cabezas” (137) [carpets of heads] (320), makes explicit the physical separation between the writer and the bodies he describes and at the same time, borrows from the material, visible quality of the scene in order to give substance to the narrative. Viewed from this perspective, the writers’ ambivalent evocations of freak-show spectacles and similarly dynamic or shocking scenes are consistent with a Spanish American modernist negotiation of language’s slippery and evolving materiality. The freak show, and the extraordinary bodies associated with it, however, also belong to the history of corporeal difference in U.S. mass culture, and increasingly today, to a critical history of disability and its cultural representations. In this sense, the textual bodies of the crónicas necessarily intersect with cultural and material histories to which they cannot claim full access. Situating Martí and Tablada with respect to freak-show scholarship and disability studies perspectives allows the uncertain materiality of modernist language to encounter a new set of problems. Specifically, the question of the objectification and potential agency of displayed bodies and the effects of representation on the lived experiences of bodies—elements crucial to disability studies debates and to historical approaches to the freak show—now enter the framework of a transnational encounter between disparate discursive traditions and between literature and spectacle. Similarly, histories and theories of the freak show are brought into new focus here via their incorporation into a Latin American literary tradition in which corporeal difference both highlights language’s materiality and often points to the historical inflections of the trope of monstrosity.

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FREAK SHOW PERFORMANCE

In the context of U.S. freak shows, such as those witnessed by Martí and Tablada, the disabled or otherwise different body tends to take on the burden of preinscribed meanings, but it also makes possible the alteration or reinvention of those meanings through performance as repetition.7 Freakishness, according to these terms, whether through live spectacle or narrative representation, might be said to operate through a dual condition, one that offers both the limitations of predetermined modes of representation and the potential reappropriation of these modes, through the seemingly infinite opportunities for performed embodiment. This notion of performance suggests a temporal axis, through which change takes place in relation to prior categories of meaning. Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s now classic performance piece and video, “The Couple in the cage,” discussed in Chapter 4, functions through a version of this dual condition; the artists’ performing bodies consistently refer to the tradition of ethnographic spectacle, yet they alter both the details and the framework of this mode of spectacle so that the work becomes a critical approach to racism and a laboratory for contemporary audience responses. The Spanish American modernist crónica enacts a particular relationship to temporality, in its evocation of an instantaneously transmitted present.8 Martí’s and Tablada’s narratives call forth their visions of displayed objects, crowds, and curiosities, from the above-cited “human freaks, preposterous fish, bearded ladies, melancholy dwarves . . . ” (Martí 319) to “chinos equilibristas y luchadores japoneses” (Tablada 3) [Chinese tightrope walkers and Japanese wrestlers] among other scenes, and thus participate in the temporal structure of performance as repetition. The chronicle enacts a scene to which the Spanish American readership would not otherwise have access, and in doing so, necessarily shifts the potential meanings of that scene and of the bodies on display. Whatever the writers and the hypothetical U.S. audience may have seen of the performance or scenario is no longer available, replaced now by a circulating newsprint version of its highlights. Repetition here thus opens a split between two distinct moments of performance, the spectacle as a meaning-producing cultural event and the translation and resituation of the event in a Spanish-language newspaper text. Yet the efficacy of the chronicle depends on the “live” quality of the performance and hence on a partial erasure of this split. A similar ambivalence underpins the negotiation of the relationship between material objects, described in the text, and the figurative language

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that subsumes these objects into a greater discursive whole.9 Textual bodies, like the live performing bodies to which they refer, both purport to tell the whole story and depend on prior performances—or discursive underpinnings—in order to mean otherwise. The crónica goes to work on the textual problem of temporality, and thus demonstrates an intimate engagement with the structure of performance, as particularly evident in the case of Martí. Indeed, several years later, Martí would enact the scene of another ethnographic spectacle, the Paris exposition of 1889, but this time making explicit the intended readership of the text, dedicating it to los niños de América [the children of America]. I refer of course to a text from Martí’s “La edad de oro,” published as a magazine in 1889 and eventually as a book. Martí’s narrative evokes the color, movement, and dazzling variety of the scenes he witnesses as he passes from pavilion to pavilion. Although his audience is supposedly comprised of children in this case, the text conjures its images to the present in a manner somewhat akin to texts of the North American scenes. The following image of the Eiffel Tower might remind the reader of Martí’s 1883 “Brooklyn Bridge”: “Allá abajo la gente entra, como las abejas en el colmenar; por los pies de la torre suben y bajan, por la escalera de caracol, por los ascensores inclinados, dos mil visitantes a la vez; los hombres, como gusanos, hormiguean entre las mallas de hierro” (Edad de oro, 15–51) [There below the people enter like bees into a hive. They ascend and descend by way of the Tower’s feet, by the spiral staircase, by the inclined elevators, two thousand visitors at a time. Like worms the people swarm within the iron network] (On Education, 288). “La exposición de Paris” is nonetheless more explicit in its performative gestures, as permitted by the child-centered writing style: “Ya estamos al pie de la torre” (152) [And now we are at the bottom of the tower] (290); “¡Oh, no hay tiempo! Tenemos que ir a ver la maravilla mayor” (163) [We have no more time! We must go to see the greatest marvel of them all] (296). Also explicit here is the performance of the speaking subject’s inclusion in a collective identity: “nosotros, niños de América” (158) [we children of America] (294). Of course, the visit to the exposition would be incomplete without the evocation of freak-show style entertainment: “Los aissauas, que son como unos locos de religión, se sacan los ojos y se los dejan colgando, y mascan cristal, y comen alacranes vivos” (168). [The Aissawas, who are like religious fanatics, gouge out their eyes and leave them hanging, and chew on glass, and eat live scorpions] (300). Perhaps curiously, when writing for children, Martí reveals and highlights his performative strategy: “Y eso vamos a ver ahora, como si lo tuviésemos delante

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de los ojos. Vamos a la Exposición, a esta visita que se están haciendo las razas humanas” (144). [And it is this Exposition that we are going to see now, as if it were before our eyes. We are going to the Exposition, to see the visit which the races of man are paying each other] (282). The youthful readership is reminded here of the supposed separation between text and world, even as a “let us pretend” rhetoric is undermined by scenes that insist on happening here and now. The more experienced readers of “Coney Island” and other North American scenes apparently need no such reminders, perhaps—ironically—favoring the opportunity to perform the role of the unwitting, infantilized spectator caught in the seemingly unique and irrepeatable quality of the present moment. The dual condition of repeat performance at once implies the related, though certainly not identical, double-bind through which corporeal difference is construed as either minoritizing or universalizing.10 Within this second opposition, freakishness is either a fixed category, inseparable from the specific group of bodies it designates, or a mode of expression in which anyone can participate, and in which all bodies have a stake. Unlike the notion of performance as repetition, in its reliance on a temporal axis, this second opposition suggests a spatial model. The universalizing mode allows for the articulation of difference from multiple sites, and the addition of contrasting points of reference, all of which may exist simultaneously. In contrast, the minoritizing pole insists on more precisely delineated identity categories, so as to focus on the specificity of difference. In the Bakhtinian carnival, which “does not know footlights” (7), any participant might take on a monstrous role, whereas in the freak show, it is less likely that a “normal” spectator will cross the line demarcated by a pit or a platform, to join the ranks of the freak performers.11 The relatively recent inclusion of disability as a category of identity alongside the more widely familiar rubrics of gender, class, race, and ethnicity has productively complicated debates on the minoritizing-universalizing opposition. According to an argument that is at once applicable to discussions of gender, race, and many other identity-categories, an exclusive emphasis on the universalizing pole risks undermining the specificity of the freak or disabled body. Yet consideration of this side of the question allows for a productive re-elaboration of identity categories, as recent disability studies scholarship has also argued.12 Tablada’s rhetorical move of associating the Coney Island freaks with Montezuma’s collection of anomalies purposively makes light of both groups of freaks and of the particular histories of each. The text suggests a

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universalizing strategy in that Tablada immediately claims access to the world of the U.S. freak show through his knowledge of Mexican freaks. Apparently, the narrative voice seems to assume, Tablada’s Mexican readership would similarly know about corporeal difference as part of a cultural birthright. The fact that Tablada’s reference probably comes from his reading of Hernán Cortés’s account of the conquest of Mexico further demonstrates how the writer’s self-inclusion in a national literary tradition combines with his approach to corporeal difference.13 Montezuma’s freaks, like the Coney Island performers, work in Tablada’s text to shore up an opposition between “us” and “them,” that is, Latin America and the United States. Tablada grounds himself in a generalized discursive history of identity and alterity, and not in the historical contextualization of the specific bodies to which he refers. Despite the obvious limitations of the universalizing gesture, whether read through a Bakhtinian notion of carnival or as exemplified here via Tablada’s recognition of the freaks, the expanded flexibility of identity categories becomes unavoidable as soon as the history of perceived corporeal difference is refracted through more than one text and through competing viewpoints. It allows Tablada to strategically undermine the uniqueness of the Coney Island scene and to inscribe the same scene with a history that both he and his readers can claim. In Martí’s and Tablada’s texts, where radical difference as otherness becomes a condition of spectatorship—through the eyes of the writer in exile—and of freak-show performance, the reappropriation of spectacle works through the construction of an elite, disembodied Spanish American self, in opposition both to the freaks on the platform and to the unruly, apparently gullible, masses consuming the show. According to this model of reappropriation, the performed narrative of spectatorship questions and adjusts the freak show’s preestablished meaning, just as a given instance of live performance, according to the temporal model outlined above, might allow the freak to mean otherwise. Yet the promising cultural work these texts thus appear to perform is at once bound up in an inevitable shifting of identity categories, following the universalizing-minoritizing binary. In unmooring the freak from his or her contextual specificity, via discursive interventions that insist upon their own identities as alterities, Tablada and Martí at once translate the dilemmas of corporeal difference and freakishness to those of Spanish American discursive identity formation—and vice versa. Reading Martí and Tablada in light of U.S. freak-show history, disability politics, and Spanish American discursive identities thus suggests a combination

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of the temporal and spatial oppositions. The multiple inflections of the reading replay, and readjust the contours of the performances presumably witnessed by the two writers, just as Martí and Tablada’s textual incorporations of Coney Island scenes already shift and reinvent the significance of the displayed bodies—hence the narrative performance and its critical productivity depend upon a grounding in chronology. At the same time, the articulation of the Spanish American exiles’ perspectives on the Coney Island scenes simultaneously expands the field of discussion, as additional categories of identity must now find their places with respect to the scenes of performed corporeal difference. Here, performance as temporal repetition combines with an expanded discursive terrain upon which the colliding parameters of culturally diverse identity formations are continuously mapped. The narrative performance of spectatorship takes up the risks and productive possibilities of freak-show temporality, while at once engaging in the ongoing determination of the show’s boundaries. The meaning of the show, and the determination of who participates and under what conditions, thus remain radically open for debate and renegotiation. TEXTUAL CORPOREALITIES

Both Martí and Tablada participate in the textual representation of corporeal difference in their newspaper chronicles, as well as in the construction of a collective Latin American identity, in opposition to their visions of U.S. culture and politics. The textual performance of authorial identity as alterity thus coincides with the literary recreation of performing bodies. This double performance is at once an encounter between metaphorical differences and the more literalized depiction of bodies and objects. My insistence here on the uncertain juncture between the figurative and the literal, or between metaphors of monstrosity and explicit descriptions of freak-show scenes, points not only to the particular role of this dilemma in the context of Spanish American modernist writing but also to the more generalized problem of the body-text dynamic in literature, or simply put, the relationship between word and body. Boiling down this structure of representation to its bones reveals both its simplicity and insistent opacity. As David Wills has written, “It is an old and naïve question, one that has been both raised and repressed by the whole contemporary inquiry into the sign as articulation between word and thing” (135). Yet the role of the body, in particular the different or disabled body, as producer and sustainer of cultural meaning through

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textual representation, performance, or other media has also specifically occupied critical attention from disability studies scholarship, as well as from studies of freak-show history. These approaches shed relevant light on Martí’s and Tablada’s Coney Island contexts as part of an imaginary retroactive encounter between the world of the freak show and the evolving, print-based construction of Spanish American cultural identities. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s elaborations of the concepts of narrative prosthesis and metaphorical opportunism suggest that the relationship between text and disabled body tends toward a form of exploitation: “The knee-jerk impulse to interpretation that disability has historically instigated hyperbolically determines its symbolic utility. This subsequent overdetermination of disability’s meaning turns disabled populations into the vehicle of an insatiable cultural fascination” (61). Through the corporeal metaphor, the disabled or otherwise different body may easily become a stand-in for more abstract notions of the human condition, as universal or nationally specific; thus the textual (disembodied) project depends upon—and takes advantage of—the materiality of the body. Scholarship on particular modes of U.S. freak-show entertainment has frequently focused on the cultural work to be performed by the representation of corporeal difference or freakishness in specific sociohistorical contexts. Robert Bogdan’s now classic study of the freak show insists on unpacking differences between the physical realities of so-called freaks and the shifting modes of presentation and social institutions that construct the idea of the freak. Perhaps curiously, his concluding chapter features a “freak encounter,” the description of the author’s personal meeting with Otis “The Frog Man,” framed as a response to a protest against the freak show at the New York State Fair. Bogdan writes, “The job of those who want to serve people known as disabled should be to get behind the scenes, to know them as they are, not as they are presented” (279). Tangible details, such as Otis’s surroundings and the lunch he was preparing, as well as a description of his personal history with direct quotations from Otis himself, ground the story of the freak performer, much as the genre of Latin American testimonio (discussed in my reading of Gaby Brimmer in Chapter 6) seems to gain substance from the voices of its interlocutors, yet these details also allow for a questioning of divisions between literary representation and its purportedly external referents. The reader’s textual access to the “real” behind-the-scenes Otis serves both to tease out the split between freak-show representation and the life of the disabled performer and to offer one more layer to the show—an invitation to a private viewing.

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In a similar sense, James W. Cook’s more recent work on P. T. Barnum’s use of fraudulence in staging freak-show exhibits focuses on the specific historical events and social tendencies that contributed to the context of particular exhibits. Thus Barnum’s evolving choices in the modes of presentation of his What is it? exhibit correspond to a similarly evolving U.S. racial politics in the decades preceding the Civil War. Cook is concerned with the lack of available information on the lives of the performers who played the role of nondescript, or What is it?, and emphasizes, as does Bogdan, the separation between the performers’ lives and bodies and the meanings these bodies helped to produce in the context of Barnum’s shows. Yet the central focus here is the ambivalence enacted by the spectacle and the ways in which this ambivalence effectively supported the shifting racial ideologies over several decades of the nineteenth century. Curiously, in this case, the enfreaked body’s role as producer of meaning is based not on a strategy of essentializing racial or corporeal differences, but rather on the openness of performed meaning, at least when such openness coincides with a particular ideological imperative. Each of these critical texts engages in a renegotiation of the semiotics of corporeal difference, severing what might have seemed to be the irrevocable nature of ties between performed or textual meaning and material body. The scholarly text critically reiterates the freak show’s construction of meaning, or the literary text’s ephemeral grasp on corporeality, and in this sense performs the possibility of rewriting the body-text—or bodyfreak show—relationship. Textual corporeality remains bound here to a dynamic of both exploitation and reclaimed agency; thus further repetition of the dilemma is not foreclosed. Martí’s and Tablada’s texts, taken together, offer their own version of freak-show history, and of the role of corporeal difference in narrative. Certainly, it may be argued that to the extent that the texts rely on the evocation of vivid details—bodies, machines, immense displays of material wealth, impressively modern cityscapes—in order to sustain readers’ interest, they participate in a precarious dynamic, whereby textual fixation on the tangibility of represented objects belies words’ inability to contain the bodies they evoke. The dilemma reflects both the modernists’ desire for the materiality of language, in accordance with González’s analysis, and the more generalized literary problem noted by Mitchell and Snyder that “textual representation seeks access to that which it is least able to grasp” (64). In addition, the grounding of collective identity and alterity through the use of corporeal metaphors, as when the monstrosity of the north’s teeming humanity runs counter to the far less tangible spirit of the

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Latin American writer in exile, points to the centrality of body imagery and to the symbolic utility of such images in these texts. Unpacking the opportunistic quality of the texts’ body-use pulls the reader in at least two directions. The juxtaposition of the crónicas with the critical texts mentioned above reveals how these literary texts—like many others—elide the specificity of the performing body, while borrowing from the meanings that the body appears to project at particular historical moments. At the same time, Martí’s and Tablada’s evocations of corporeal difference as monstrous participate in the reflection and production of a Latin American tropology of monstrosity, historically linked to the figure of Calibán and to the colonial historiography of the Americas. Caliban’s Tropology Early colonial figurations of monstrosity in the Americas return repeatedly to the cannibal. Cannibalism, as Michael Palencia-Roth has written, becomes “the particular New World signifier for monstrosity,” thanks to its role in both Christian theology and classical teratology (40). The cannibal, and later versions of its Shakespearean anagram, Caliban, thus come to occupy the place of the monstrous body, as partially constructed by the European colonizers’ cultural traditions and imagination. Whether the victim of colonialist and racist violence, the oppressing agent of victimization, or the subject of a radical subversion of the same oppression, Caliban frequently suggests the metaphorical role of the body in the construction of Spanish American identities. The monstrosity of Caliban’s cultural trajectory also functions specifically through its conduit to metaphor. Here, it is not merely that corporeal difference creates meaning or anchors meaning through material form, but rather in this case, the monstrous itself sits at the axis of identity and alterity through which bodies seem to insist on their transcendent, tropological status. Monstrosity, as the inevitability of metaphor, comes to signify the dynamic of “New World” identities and alterities, in part because the Spanish conquerors never actually discover the monstrous bodies to which they refer. Thus Columbus mentions hearing of “oneeyed men and other men with dog-heads who ate men,” but, much like the abundant gold to which Columbus endlessly referred, the monsters remain largely out of sight.14 These absent bodies, and the sites of absence they repeatedly conjure, will continue to figure prominently in the emergence of a Spanish American discursive identity in relation to Europe, and eventually to the United States.

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Although Martí’s text predates Rodó’s 1900 Ariel, in which the United States is figured as a materialist Caliban in opposition to a spiritually elevated, Latin American Ariel, the Cuban writer’s emphasis on monstrosity in his “North American Scenes” defines his participation in the construction of otherness through corporeal metaphor. Martí situates himself “inside the monster,” and from here, he confronts his uncertain proximity to the imperialist—and calibanesque—Other.15 Tablada’s position, as we will see, is far more ambivalent vis-à-vis the Coney Island scene he describes, yet in this case as well, U.S. capitalist enterprise and mass culture as monstrous ground the opposition between “us” and “them.” More recent critical approaches to the figure of Caliban, particularly in the context of debates emerging from Roberto Fernández Retamar’s crucial 1971 essay, “Calibán: apuntes sobre la cultura de Nuestra América,” indicate the complexity inherent in the processes of articulating and unraveling nexuses between the metaphorical body—now frequently the malleable symbol of postcolonial or subaltern otherness—and the materiality of a given body. As Ricardo Kaliman notes, Retamar’s materialist position, emphasizing “el análisis concreto de una situación concreta” (139) [the concrete analysis of a concrete situation].16 reflects a commitment to the specificity of marginalized communities and subjects. Along the same lines, Caliban-informed Latin Americanist scholarship often grounds its discourse in the materiality of particular subaltern sectors and practices. Thus, for example, Sara Castro-Klarén’s reading of Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 “Manifesto Antropofágo” concludes with recourse to an ethnographic study of a contemporary indigenous (Araweté) group, and its notion of cannibalism. The subalternist position articulated here depends upon the data collected in the ethnographic study as an explicit counterpoint to Oswald de Andrade’s literary, and more metaphorical, approach to the cannibal; ethnographic data in this sense complicates and strategically undermines the Western logic of identity and alterity inherent in the construct of antropofagia. Or, in a similar sense, Silvio Torres-Saillant’s approach to the figure of Caliban insists on the specificity of Caribbean (rather than generally Latin American) history and literature (25), and finally proposes a model of analysis termed “tidalectics,” borrowed from Kamau Brathwaite, based on the movement of the ocean tide, as a line of flight from the confines of a Western dialectic (51). These readings show the consistent dilemma of tropological distance, even—or especially—when material specificity is at the crux of the argument. Retamar’s “Calibán,” after all, is not concerned with the problem of corporeality, but rather with the possibility of collective agency and

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political resistance. “Calibán” leads the reader to an exploration of Retamar’s materialist thinking and its potential repercussions with respect to the particularities of multiple “concrete situations,” but not necessarily to any given body. This, of course, is the whole point, lest we forget that Caliban is “an inaccessible blankness circumscribed by an interpretable text” (Spivak 118).17 If Caliban can be said to occupy the site of Latin American corporeal difference, this difference is aporetic by definition; to claim otherwise would suggest the foreclosure of the calibanesque as a potential collective agency. This imperative undoubtedly represents a conflict with the notion of attention to a given and presumably individual body. The inevitable elision of the particular body—via evolving textual corporealities—nonetheless allows for a retracing of its disappeared history. Thus, metaphors of monstrosity rehearse the structure of colonial historiography and its absent cannibal-body, but in more recent critical contexts, they point toward the dynamic articulated by Retamar himself when he reflects on the infamous question put to him by a European journalist: “Existe una cultura latinoamericana?” (Calibán 79) [Does a Latin-American culture exist?] (Caliban and Other Essays 3)18 Following the initial interchange, Retamar reclaims Caliban in a textual performance of identity and in a sense, gives his colonialist European audience exactly what it usually asks for: a representation of Latin American identity as monstrous other. Yet Caliban, it turns out, cannot be radically other since his colonialist interlocutors will immediately recognize the figure as one of their own creation. According to this conventional dynamic of mimicry, Caliban’s power of reappropriation derives from the precision with which he takes on the figurative body and the name demanded of him. Retamar’s gesture emerges from a long history of metaphorical monstrosity and calibanesque rhetoric, yet it effectively defines the conditions through which tropology has frequently negotiated corporeal difference in Latin Americanist discourse.19 The absent body remains in suspension because of its role in a relentless and familiar double bind. And still, if Caliban’s tropology retains an evolving relevance and agency, as in the above-cited critical texts, it does so through a prolonged departure from historically specific aporia and a signaling toward potential articulations and effects, by and upon real communities and bodies. Martí’s and Tablada’s textual encounters with U.S. freak show performance intersect both Caliban’s discursive trajectory and the well-documented history of these shows. The crónica passes through the tropology of monstrosity, yet in doing so engages its writer as the unsuspecting audience of a live freak show. The spectacle becomes irresistible temptation,

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in part because its structure fails to entirely coincide with the polarity of the exiled writer’s relationship to preestablished metaphors of difference. These texts thus engage and participate in performances of corporeality, eventually altering the textual conditions of both the literalized representation of freakishness and metaphor as symbolic utility. The hypothetical articulation of these crónicas at the crossroads of Caliban’s tropology and the performance of corporeal spectacle allows for a rereading of both histories and for a retroactive model through which to consider the transcultural construction of corporeal difference. In order to allow this construction to take place, I now turn to a closer look at the texts of the crónicas. José Martí: Spectatorship as Performance Martí’s “Coney Island” exemplifies the Cuban writer’s ambivalent fascination with U.S. mass culture as opposed to his vision of Spanish America. The opening lines of the crónica immediately ground the ensuing descriptions of leisure and material abundance in more somber reflection: “En los fastos humanos, nada iguala a la prosperidad maravillosa de los Estados Unidos del Norte. Si hay o no en ellos falta de raíces profundas . . . eso lo dirán los tiempos” (Crónicas 133). [In human affairs, nothing equals the marvelous prosperity of the United States of the North. Whether or not deep roots are lacking in them . . . this is what the times will tell] (“Coney Island” 318). Judgment of the potentially shallow quality of the United States will be momentarily suspended here, at least in gesture. It is clear, however, that a cautionary tone will continue to hang over the images of grandeur and prosperity that come to characterize Martí’s vision of the New York beaches. Martí’s references to the freak show, though brief, demonstrate a provocative duality, consistent throughout the text, between the subject’s rejection of and adherence to the scenes he describes. In a similar manner, the distanced position of the exiled subject slips insistently toward the materiality of an urban mass culture that is both incorporated and resisted. Martí writes of “esos caminos que a dos millas de distancia no son caminos, sino largas alfombras de cabezas” (137) [these roads that from a two-mile distance are not roads but long carpets of heads] (320); and later, “parecen desde lejos como espíritus superiores inquietos, como espíritus risueños y diabólicos que traveseasen por entre las enfermizas luces de gas” (140) [From afar these places seem like restless higher spirits, laughing and diabolical spirits that pass through the morbid gaslights]

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(322). The dramatic perspective afforded by the position of exile, “from a two-mile distance,” both creates and enhances the impression of proliferating humanity and wealth. The writer’s repeated separation from the scenes he recreates thus emphasizes his initial rhetorical stance vis-à-vis the United States, yet at the same time, it binds him irrevocably to Coney Island’s conditions of monumentality and awe. Martí’s transformative metaphors function through the glittering materiality of the Coney Island scene, caught here between higher spirit and morbid gaslight—or between elevated, rhetorical distance and the teeming humanity that populates the images. Julio Ramos eloquently addresses Martí’s use of such metaphors in terms of a “will to distance,” and a “slippage from the literal to the figurative”; thus for Ramos, Martí’s project is to control the heterogeneity of the urban flow (208). Yet if we are to imagine the scene at the juncture between literary discourse and a material history of this urban flow, Martí’s encounter with the Coney Island scene also suggests a textual performance momentarily caught in the materiality of referents it cannot fully transcend. Rejection and attraction, according to this newly imagined scene, thus combine through the text’s figurative transformation of material referents; yet most importantly, transformation remains partial, unresolved. Something always remains beyond the writer’s control. These are the ambivalent grounds of Martí’s fleeting descriptions of corporeal spectacle. The inevitable, literal remainders of figurative discourse are exemplified in this text by the particularity of surprising anecdotes, the remarkable incongruity of scenes never before witnessed. The freak show, among such Coney Island scenes, draws the speaking subject into the crowd, yet only partially engages the parameters of his insistent interrogation. By the same token, literary discourse here admits only a partial control of the urban flow, fuel for further repulsion and fascination. A similar ambivalence will condition the speaking subject’s positionality vis-à-vis many of the scenes he describes. Martí, the exiled Spanish American, sees through the freak show’s misrepresentation and exploitation of the people and animals it displays, as in the above cited lines. And in fact, his words suggest a reciprocal engagement between, on one hand, misrepresentation or fraudulence and, on the other, exploitation or cruelty. He is quick to uncover the deception at the root of the spectacle. Thus the elephants’ “stunted” size belies their promotion as “the largest in the world,” (318) while at once implying the animals’ substandard health and living conditions. And the dwarfs, in Martí’s view, project only their own melancholy, rather than inspiring the enjoyment of the curious spectator, so

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that the performers’ unhappiness results in the viewer’s sense that he has been defrauded. Later in the text, Martí continues his critique of Coney Island spectacles, this time in more explicit terms: “Con grandes risas aplauden otros la habilidad del que ha conseguido dar un pelotazo en la nariz a un desventurado hombre de color que, a cambio de un jornal miserable, se está día y noche con la cabeza asomada por un agujero hecho en un lienzo esquivando con movimientos ridículos y extravagantes muecas los golpes de los tiradores” (139) [Others applaud the skill of someone who has succeeded in bouncing a ball off the nose of an unfortunate man of color, who, in exchange for a paltry day’s wage, stands day and night with his head poking out through a piece of cloth, dodging the pitches with ridiculous movements and extravagant grimaces] (321).20 Here Martí adds to the extensive documentation of the performed enfreakment of racial difference, which was common practice in this period. At certain moments, the unhappy condition of the freak performer appears somewhat comparable to that of Spanish Americans in exile (such as Martí) as he himself describes, “Es fama que una melancólica tristeza se apodera de los hombres de nuestros pueblos hispanoamericanos que allá viven, . . . se sienten como corderos sin madre y sin pastor, extraviados de su manada; y, salgan o no a los ojos, rompe el espíritu espantado en raudal amarguísimo de lágrimas, porque aquella gran tierra está vacía de espíritu” (138) [It is well known that a sad melancholy steals over the men of our Hispanoamerican people who live here . . . they feel like lambs with no mother or shepherd, lost from the flock; and though their eyes may be dry, the frightened spirit breaks into a torrent of the bitterest tears, because this great land is devoid of spirit] (320). As exile and observer, Martí undercuts the euphoria of the Coney Island ambience, of which the freak show is a fundamental element, by revealing its fraudulent and cruel representations, and by identifying with the outsiders—although only partially—rather than with the masses, thus both subverting and redefining the dynamics of the performance. Identification, however, works indirectly—or obliquely in Martí’s text—for although the melancholic and marginal status of the freak does evoke the exile’s similar position, as described above, the freak, unlike Martí, functions in the text as a staged body, visible to the speaking subject and to other viewers of the scene. While Martí, as narrator, performs his outsider’s status through the observation and evocation of cultural difference, the freak, on stage and in the text, performs embodiment itself as the fundamental prerequisite of all difference. The evocation of the freak show would seem to dovetail with

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Martí’s depiction of the horrifying carnality of the Coney Island masses at leisure, standing in partial opposition to Martí’s elite, abstract, disembodied, Spanish American narrative presence. Yet the freak at once stands out from the crowd as a figure of possible identification for the exile, against a backdrop of supposed homogeneity. Martí’s brief depiction of spectacle reframes the problem of the writing subject’s ambivalent relationship to material referents. In this case, the performing body as explicit example does not simply jar with Martí’s metaphor-driven discourse. In addition, the body witnessed in live spectacle interrupts the binary of “quantity” and “quality,” as it can fully adhere to neither category, and thus hypothetically interrogates the narrative formation of an emergent Spanish American selfhood. Martí’s postulated division between quantity and quality, or between the North American crowd and the subject of exile, is further complicated by consideration of Coney Island and U.S. culture at this historical juncture. The Coney Island that Martí encountered in 1881was still at the relatively early stages of its development into what would become the United States’ “undisputed capital of amusement at the turn of the century” (Kasson 28). In the late 1870s, developers had constructed lavish hotels and a railway service, as well as restaurants and other facilities; yet it would not be until 1895 that a new system of ambitious amusement parks, as well as a space of respectable entertainment for a heterogenous public, would make Coney Island famous on a national level. During the 1870s and 1880s, the Coney Island scene was at a crucial point of transition, still stigmatized by its reputation for harboring prostitution, gambling, con artists, pickpockets, yet increasingly popular with a broader mainstream social sector, thanks to increased accessibility and to the growth of a variety of amusement options. Cultural histories of Coney Island have focused on its role in the transition of U.S. mass culture from gentility and refinement toward a greater freedom and heterogeneity that would eventually incorporate multiple social sectors. Yet, at the time of Martí’s writing, the transition was in its early stages; in fact, during this period, Coney Island was known as “Sodom by the Sea,” under the administration of local politician John McKane, until his arrest in 1894 (Kasson 34). In this sense, while Martí may indeed have encountered something of a cross-section of U.S. society in his research for this “North American scene,” Coney Island was, at this stage, still marked—from a mainstream social perspective—as a space of the unsavory, the transgressive, and the dangerous.21 In addition, although freak shows were enjoyed by a broad sector of the population, and even

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considered appropriate family entertainment, in large part thanks to the efforts of P. T. Barnum earlier in the century, the dime museums of New York’s Bowery during this period catered primarily to a working-class immigrant population (Bogdan 35). If the freak show witnessed by Martí appeared to participate in the construction of an opposition between homogeneity and radical alterity, as a comfort to a society already threatened by immigration, industrialization, and overall cultural transformation, it is at once remarkable that the audience, as well as much of the crowd to which Martí refers in these scenes, still represented the fringes of a transforming U.S. society. The “quantity” mentioned by Martí in opposition to a Spanish American “quality” does perhaps prophesize the impending evolution of mainstream U.S. culture, yet for an 1881 Coney Island, much of this display was marked by uncertain transformation, specifically by an immigrant population with no guarantee of social or economic integration into the new society. “Coney Island indeed helped to displace genteel culture with a new mass culture,” writes Julio Ramos, citing from Kasson’s history of Coney Island. For Ramos, this new mass culture, and its implications for the displaced or compromised role of U. S. intellectuals, serves as a point of contrast to Martí’s critical position as Latin American intellectual subject in opposition to the culture industry (22–22). Yet here, Kasson is in fact referring to a later Coney Island, following construction of its three major amusement parks, some twenty years after Martí published his crónica. Rather than a new mass culture reflective of an overarching national imaginary, the Coney Island of 1881 inhabited the outskirts of society, a foreshadowing of further changes to come. The ambivalence of this shifting cultural scene is reflected in Martí’s ambivalent engagement with U.S. material culture. Not only does the freak stand out from the crowd, in a manner similar to the distanced role of the exile or immigrant, as I have suggested, but also the “quantityeating” crowd itself remains in a space of uncertainty, scarcely beyond the conditions of fragmentation and exile. Like the Coney Island freak shows of the early 1880s, Martí’s text performs a notion of U.S. mass society—one that had yet to emerge—in a negotiated opposition to figures of exile, immigration, and difference. Martí’s metaphor of a unified and monstrous United States underpins and sustains the incomplete cultural work of the freak show, while at the same time the slippery materiality of Coney Island bodies—those of both performers and spectators—gives substance and sustenance to Martí’s figurative language. Martí’s text projects an asymmetry that would continue to structure the work of the

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Figure 1. Brilliant Luna park at night—Coney Island, New York’s great pleasure resort. The glittering lights of this Coney Island park, from a photograph taken two decades after the publication of Martí’s text, suggest the unfolding of his prophetic vision of U.S. mass culture. New York: Underwood & Underwood, Publishers c1904. Photographic print on stereograph card. Reproduced from the collections of the Library of Congress.

freak show, for the crowd—regardless of its social makeup, whether in the 1880s or decades later—must necessarily fail to conform to the predetermined contours of a national citizenry. Yet, the radical disparity between Martí’s and the freak show’s prophetic construction of a quantity-eating mass culture and the fragmentary reality of Coney Island’s social marginality in the 1880s serves to highlight the marginalia of the crowd itself. The Coney Island crowd of 1881 thus occupies an uncertain space with respect to Martí’s text, as both the figurative projection of a more normative mass culture to come and an unruly grouping of bodies that fails to conform to the dictates of its own contemporary society (see figure 2). This crowd, therefore, indicates the slippery nature of Martí’s corporeal metaphors and those of the freak show, caught between broad categories of representation and material particularity that defies such categories. And the crowd, like Martí’s subject of exile, finds itself oscillating between performance and spectatorship. Martí’s idealized construction of a Spanish American cultural scene, in opposition to U.S. mass culture (“Such people eat quantity; we, quality” [321]) suggests the explicitly metaphorical vision of monstrosity he evokes in lines such as the following: “como monstruos que vaciase toda su entraña en las fauces hambrientas de otro monstruo, aquella muchedumbre colosal,

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Figure 2. Crowds at Coney Island. This early twentieth century photograph conveys the relative heterogeneity of the public at leisure. Reproduced from the George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress. July 5 (year unknown).

estrujada y compacta se agolpa a las entradas de los trenes que repletos de ella, gimen, como cansados de su peso” (140) [Then like a monster emptying out its entrails into the ravenous jaws of another monster, this immense crush of humanity squeezes onto trains that seem to groan under its weight] (322). Here, Martí’s construction of the New York monster does not rely on a particular anomalous or racialized body (as would the freak show in its Coney Island context), but instead, it relies on an overall impression of U.S. urban mass culture and modern technology, the backdrop against—and within—which the exiled Cuban speaks. The train tracks, concludes Martí, “atraviesan, como venas de hierro, la dormida Nueva York” (140) [crisscross the slumbering city of New York like iron veins] (322). Thus the monster, as if any doubt remained, becomes the city itself, proliferating with machines and boisterous, pleasure-seeking crowds. This machine-run city, impressive in its scale and efficiency, reflects awe-inspiring advances in transportation engineering. But in the same gesture, these decidedly nonhuman machines reveal their entirely organic entrails—the mass of humanity they carry. This fusion

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of metal and flesh becomes “monstrous” where one form melds into another, where the train, seemingly pure machine, unveils its teeming human underside—or vice versa. Monstrosity here depends upon metaphor. The machine as a monster, symbolic of U.S. technological prowess and advancement, suggests the looming imperialist threat to Spanish America’s future. At the same time, this train’s cargo, an overwhelming mass of humanity, runs parallel to the train itself, as a synonymously monstrous figure of the growing and threatening population in the North. Yet the vision is most horrifying when the two “tracks” slip into one another, when the abstraction of machine as human monster is literalized through the entrails that are at once the train’s inner mechanism and the carnal embodiment it both contains and signifies. Martí’s vision of the train reveals the paradox underpinning his depiction of the United States as monstrous other, for the metaphor upon which this notion of monstrosity depends immediately becomes literal at the station platforms where a reciprocal symbolism between man and machine gives way to a more shockingly palpable symbiosis—the inseparability of the organic and the mechanical (train and human cargo)—as a monstrous cyborg avant la lettre. Just as man and machine, for Martí, refuse to keep their distance from one another as reciprocal signifiers of each other’s monstrosity, so the status of metaphor itself cannot remain clean of the horrifying literal carnality to which it points. Metaphorical fusions of machinery and organic life, as well as fascination with modern technology as such, occur repeatedly in Martí’s work, as in his well-known chronicle of the inauguration of the Brooklyn Bridge. As in “Coney Island,” here the slippage between the mechanical and the human coincides with the revelation of corporeality as monstrous. Martí writes, “Y los creadores de este puente, y los que lo mantienen, y los que lo cruzan, parecen, salvo el excesivo amor a la riqueza que como un gusano los roe la magna entraña, hombres tallados en granito, como el puente” (Crónicas, 147) [And the creators of this bridge, and those who maintain it, and those who cross it seem—but for the excessive love of wealth that gnaws at their intestines like a worm—men carved out of granite, like the bridge itself ] (Selected Writings, 141). While the phrase seems to oppose the impenetrable granite of the bridge to the horrifying intestinal flesh-asworm, the juxtaposition at once creates a jarring link between the bridge and the gnawing worm. The intestinal worm, like the human cargo of the Coney Island train, invades the imagery of the sentence, paradoxically transforming granite to flesh and flesh to bridge. Similarly, Martí

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describes aspects of the bridge’s construction in explicitly fleshly terms: “aquellos cuatro cables paralelos, gruesos y blancos, que, como serpiente en hora de apetito, se desenroscan y alzan el silbante cuerpo de un lado del río” (150) [those four colossal boa constrictors, those four parallel cables, thick and white, which uncoil like ravening serpents, lifting their sibilant bodies from one side of the river] (143). This language might be said to suggest the violent encounter between technology and the “subjectivity of images” (Rotker 142) or the will to a modern and fragmentary “machine of style” (Ramos 182). In either case, however, both violent imagery and stylistic innovation depend here on the distinctly organic, volatile expression of monstrous machinery. In the late nineteenth century, industrialization and technological advances would radically transform people’s relationships to their bodies. As Henri-Jacques Stiker describes in his groundbreaking History of Disability, the age of work-related accidents is also the age of rehabilitation, and of the prosthesis, accompanying the notion that errors can be fixed, the missing can be replaced, the poor raised up, the immigrant assimilated (12–29). By extension, the notion of rehabilitation suggests the imperative to assimilate, as well as an underlying social anxiety that complete rehabilitation and assimilation will not in fact be possible. Similarly, as Rosemarie Garland Thomson has written, the culture of industrialization includes a reliance on machines, which often replace human bodies, and to which bodies and schedules are made to conform. In the same period, the freak show provides a kind of reassurance, as the freak’s body paradoxically upholds a culture of conformity and sameness (Freakery, 11). While Martí’s text makes no specific reference to disability, his strikingly organic metaphors of machinery repeatedly suggest the fusion of human bodies with mechanical, prosthetic extensions, or the replacement of the former by the latter, and point to both a fascination and an anxiety underpinning the overlap between bodies and prostheses. A similar combination of fascination and anxiety seems to be at work in Martí’s “Un rostro rehecho,” published in the same year as “Coney Island.” In this case, a German servant girl is submitted to a series of plastic surgery operations in which the skin of her arm is grafted onto her face in order to make her beautiful. As Martí notes, “la hermosura es un derecho natural” [beauty is a natural right] and “La naturaleza tiene sus aristócratas” (Crónicas 311) [Nature has its aristocrats],22 since the girl was willing to undergo such suffering in order not to be ugly. Here, the surgery patient symbolically transcends her status as immigrant and servant, both because the “natural right” of beauty suggests social equality

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and because her particular bravery makes her an aristocrat. In this sense, Martí’s text participates in what Stiker would call a “raising up” of the poor and an assimilation of the immigrant. The fact that these “operations” are part of a discourse of rehabilitation is made manifest through their intersection with surgical operations intended to fix the body, to make it natural and beautiful. In “Coney Island,” the dual, oscillating quality of monstrosity as metaphor, and as metonymy, viewed through the figure of the train, operates similarly to the staging of the freak show in Martí’s narration. For in each case, the apparent distance between the disembodied and the corporeal unfolds. The text performs its monstrosity at the points where the train, as rapidly moving signifier, grinds to a halt and transfers meaning and inertia to the human meat it spews forth, and when the freak, through Martí’s eyes, evokes the metaphor of corporeal U.S. mass culture, as well as the singularity of the detached and rejected outsider, ambivalently situated between voice and body. In both instances, then, metaphor encounters a refusal, or stumbling block. The figurative quality of the train is muddied by the literality of its human entrails. And the freak-show spectacle promises to uphold the opposition of identity and alterity, voice and body, yet fails to deliver when its unexpected specificity—through the performances of “an unfortunate man of color,” “melancholy dwarves,” and even of, “una dama que . . . elabora curiosas flores con pieles de pescado” (138) [a lady who . . . creates curious flowers made of fish skins] (321)—interrupt the city’s overarching monstrous flow. In addition, while Martí depicts himself at a safe distance from these unruly masses, it seems he cannot avoid lingering at the freak-show platform, although with a sharply critical eye. It is here, before the spectacles of the freak show that a monstrous U.S. population purportedly seeks out its corporeal, racial, and cultural others, cohering against the extreme differences it recognizes but continuously rejects. The gesture, performed by Martí, of constructing the U.S. urban masses as his own monstrous other thus becomes irrevocably bound up in the fear and pleasure of selfrecognition that contributes to the dynamic of the freak show. Martí’s text unveils and subverts the exploitation of the freak show, but at the same time, it suggests an enigmatic link between the marginalized body on the platform and the monstrosity of the U.S. urban masses, both caught—in the narrative—between literalized and abstracted identities. The body and performance of the Coney Island freak leave their mark on Martí’s text, yet the manner in which this freak participates in the forging of cultural identities (“we” and “they”) remains uncertain here. The

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freak is neither the equivalent of the monstrous pleasure-seeking masses, which (paradoxically) reject racial and corporeal difference, nor an ideal figure of identification for the Spanish American exile, who retains his role of distanced, culturally privileged, and disembodied observer. It is from the peripheral space of narrative performance, shifting between prescripted metaphor and the body’s refusal of meaning, that the freak asserts his or her presence. By at once obliquely participating in the construction of a monstrous other and refusing direct identification with the textual symbols of self or other, Martí’s freak performs a preliminary interrogation of the category of monstrosity and its imagined opposite—the emergent Spanish American self. In the context of the Coney Island freak show, as depicted here, the freak appears through the larger audience’s construction of a body as object on display. Yet through Martí’s eyes, this same freak acquires a more dynamic role, one that dramatically reveals the New York audience’s own monstrous participation in the scene, as well as the Cuban’s ambivalent status as not-so-disinterested observer. In partially unraveling these precarious and shifting roles structuring Spanish American-U.S. relations as a self-other dyad, Martí’s text inevitably participates in a history of metaphorical bodies and of monstrosity as a shifting category through and against which collective identities are forged. Yet, the freak-show scene at Coney Island and the monstrous organicity of the train suggest the insistent dilemma of performed corporeality as a rupture to the framework of metaphorical bodies. Through the productivity of this corporeal rupture, Martí’s freak in the text offers a rereading and an interrogation of the notion of corporeal monstrosity as metaphor, and as an overarching construct of identity formation in Spanish American cultural history. “The Mirror of a People”: P. T. Barnum and José Juan Tablada Readers of José Juan Tablada’s description of Coney Island and of the figure of P. T. Barnum will perhaps be reminded of Martí’s earlier response to the Coney Island spectacles, as discussed above. Yet, while Martí’s distance from the scenes he describes is partially grounded in melancholy and in a nostalgic longing for home and for Spanish American cultural identity, Tablada is far more willing to enter and engage with the circus scene and to demonstrate a detailed reporter’s knowledge of Barnum’s lucrative enterprise. In this sense, Tablada’s textual project, although initially distant and dismissive of the Coney Island spectacles, creates the

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impression of an intense proximity between the literary language of the newspaper chronicle and the live experience of the show. Tablada’s perspective oscillates between that of a sideshow barker, through exclamations that both announce and evoke each act, and a more descriptive, detailed vision. He refers to Joyce Heth, billed as former slave of George Washington; to Jenny Lind; to General Tom Thumb, “el más famoso de los enanos” [the most famous of dwarfs]; and to the Fiji mermaid, “mujer con peludo rostro simiesco, pecho mujeril, largas uñas de letrado chino” [woman with a hairy monkey face, womanly chest, long nails of a learned Chinaman]. Yet, the figure of Barnum himself apparently provokes the most wonder and awe: “¡Phineas Taylor Barnum . . . Barnum el universal . . . Barnum el único!” (1926, 3) [Phineas Taylor Barnum . . . Barnum the universal . . . Barnum the unique!]. If Martí’s vision of U.S. mass culture was in fact a projection of the dominant mass culture to come, rather than a realistic picture of cultural norms in 1881, Tablada’s text marks a similar historical disparity with respect to the Coney Island scene he might have witnessed. Specifically, Tablada’s repeated references to P. T. Barnum in this 1926 text are an evocation of Barnum’s legacy, rather than a direct description of Barnum and his shows. The text avoids mentioning the fact that Barnum died in 1891. The performers mentioned by Tablada represent Barnum’s greatest successes and were largely responsible for making him famous. Joyce Heth, for example, was Barnum’s first act, which debuted in 1835; the so-called feejee mermaid and General Tom Thumb appeared on stage in 1842; and Jenny Lind first toured with Barnum in 1850.23 The idea that all of these performers would appear together, one after the next, as part of a Coney Island show clearly stems from Tablada’s imagination and not from a specific historical scene he could have read about, let alone witnessed in person. Tablada’s description is based on nostalgia; his fascination with the historical figures he evokes is so strong as to transform itself into a direct evocation of their presence. “Así evoco a Barnum en una de estas cálidas tardes veraniegas” (3) [I evoke Barnum on one of these hot summer afternoons], writes Tablada, reminding the reader that the showman’s glory days are over. Yet, his descriptions at once suggest that this past becomes an immediate present: “sedente en su trono fantástico y con vistoso uniforme de gran gala, pasa el famoso y más notorio de los enanos, el mismísimo general Tom Pounce” (3) [sitting on his fantastic throne, dressed in fanciest uniform, the most famous and notorious of all dwarfs, the self-same General Tom Thumb, passes by]. Each of Barnum’s legendary performers appears here as if part of a circus parade, despite

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the fact that these particular shows no longer existed. In fact, it is perhaps the vanished quality of the spectacle that serves here to heighten the text’s performative appeal. By the first decade of the twentieth century, Coney Island had indeed grown to become an emblematic center of the new U.S. mass culture, in large part thanks to the development of three major amusement parks (Kasson 87). Thus, Martí’s vision came to fruition, as Coney Island culture developed into the rule, rather than the exception, for an evolving U.S. society. Yet, writing in 1926, Tablada was already witnessing a decline in what was once an entertainment capital. For by the 1920s, as Kasson notes, “The rest of the culture was catching up . . . radio and movies made amusement ubiquitous, and the movies in particular presented elaborate, convincing illusions at a price Coney Island could not match. From great amusement park spectaculars, Coney came to rely more and more on the sideshows that had been its stock-in-trade before Steeplechase, Luna, and Dreamland were built” (112). Tablada’s evocation of an absent Barnum thus reflects the overarching nostalgia that could be considered symptomatic of Coney Island culture in the 1920s; sideshows were in full swing, yet at once pointed backward to a distant heyday still ripe with future promise for the development of the entertainment industry. Paradoxically, the return to the site-specific Coney Island sideshow suggests the foreclosure of Barnum’s legacy as well as the perpetual celebration of his triumphs. Tablada’s list of the displayed human spectacles includes references to “Chinese curiosities, Chinese tightrope walkers and Japanese wrestlers,” as cited above. Here, the exotic mode of ethnographic spectacle dovetails with Tablada’s own well-known fascination with East Asia, thus blurring the line between a detached and critical observation and participation in the scene. The performance of the crónica takes place through the persuasive voice of print media that at once critically undermines its own ability to educate and entertain. For Tablada, Barnum is both “el grotesco espejo—como los de Coney Island, tu ínsula—en que se mira el Tío Sam cuando ríe!” (3) [the grotesque mirror—like those of Coney Island, your island—in which Uncle Sam sees himself when he laughs] and an astute, self-promoting entrepreneur: “sus alas eran de papel, de un papel milagroso, de papel de periódico!” (3) [His wings were of paper, a miraculous kind of paper: newspaper!]. Tablada’s ambivalent fascination with the power of print media (in which he participates through his weekly column) is reflected in another of his crónicas, where he describes a U.S. journalist as both a “cantor del

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capitalismo” [cantor of capitalism] and “autor de jaikais periodísticos” (1931, 3) [author of journalistic haikais]. The reference to haikai should be read as a celebratory one given that Tablada wrote numerous haikai in Spanish and considered himself to be responsible for the introduction of this poetic form to the Spanish language (Tablada 1932). It is through such gestures of performative mirroring that Tablada’s newspaper texts allow for a rereading of the lines dividing performance as spectacle (as in the Coney Island scene) from the self-reflexivity of performative language. Tablada criticizes both this journalist (Brisbane) and Barnum, for their complicity with crude capitalist enterprise, but at once admires both figures enough to stand in the place of each, at least momentarily, via the experience of textual persuasion. Journalistic expertise and apparent ease of transition from one cultural context to another allow Tablada to effectively—and literally—translate between the world of Coney Island and that of his Mexican readership, or from live, Anglophone public spectacle to Spanish language print media. Occasionally, however, Tablada’s enthusiasm ruptures the transition, as when he bursts into English and then translates himself, “America is liked to be fooled [sic]. (A Norteamérica le place ser engañada”) (1926, 3). Whether the error originated with Tablada or at the newspaper’s printing is difficult to determine. In either case, the moment of spontaneous translation in an otherwise strictly Spanish text coincides here with the governing principle of freak showmanship, namely, fraud. As Robert Bogdan makes explicit in his study of freak-show history, deceptive practices in the name of profit were commonplace throughout the freak show’s heyday and beyond. For writers such as Martí and Tablada, however, fraudulence specifically dovetails with cultural difference, offensive taste, and exploitative northern neighbors. The grotesque fun-house mirror and its distortion of the human image at once embodies Barnum and, as Tablada makes clear, the spirit of the United States as a people. Based on the freak-show performers included in Tablada’s description, and more specifically on his assertion that “America likes to be fooled,” it seems logical to infer that Tablada had access to Barnum’s 1855 autobiography or to similar documents. As Barnum states in his text, “The public appears disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived” (qtd. in Cook, Arts of Deception 16). Those familiar with Barnum’s history, and that of the freak show and dime museum, would certainly recognize this statement as central to Barnum folklore, as well as to the basic structure of such shows. By inserting a version of the statement into his own text, Tablada allows this message further circulation

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and at the same time takes on Barnum’s voice as his own. The trick is an obvious one; to the extent that readers recognize Tablada’s journalistic sleight-of-hand, they are compelled to go along with both his critique and his celebratory repetition of the scene. Tablada at once attacks Barnum and makes himself over in the showman’s image; thus readers too can enjoy this double deception, both amused at the gullible U.S. public and willing to submit themselves—at least partially—to the same trap by recognizing on some level that here Tablada and Barnum are one and the same. Tablada’s fascination with the scenes he witnesses appears to stem not so much from the particular cases of corporeal difference he describes, but rather most strongly from the power of deception and the sleight-ofhand techniques that seem equally effective in live spectacle and textual performance. The figure of Barnum is not tied to a specific embodiment but is instead described as “the mirror of a people” (Tablada, 1926, 3), one that distorts reality and hence is conveniently represented here as a Coney Island mirror. Corporeal difference, via Barnum and Tablada, thus functions as a false, albeit temporary, image, one which is equally accessible to all who pay the entrance fee and which deceives all who willingly take part in the game—those who like to be fooled. In extending Barnum’s freak show to the adjacent fun-house mirrors, Tablada seems to suggest that corporeal difference is an open, transparent category, perhaps so familiar to most spectators that they would opt to try it for themselves without fear or risk of losing their fundamental normalcy. Indeed, the mirrors, like freak-show spectacles, simply affirm normalcy in relation to its polar opposite. The ease with which freakishness could be tried on and discarded might be said to parallel Tablada’s vision of barnumesque capitalism, as the distorted mirror image of a laughing Uncle Sam. Yet, not everyone is equally fooled by the mechanism: “Barnum es para nosotros los latinos la personificación del anuncio estruendoso en las vastas empresas profanas” (3) [Barnum is for us, Latinos, the personification of the vast, profane enterprise’s booming advertisement]. This advertisement, as Barnum, and as distorting mirror, simultaneously organizes a consuming citizenry, temporarily confounds visual observation, and offers the category of corporeal difference so as to immediately oppose it with a return to normalcy, as soon as subjects turn away from the mirror to rediscover their newly normalized bodies. Tablada, however, straddles the line of deception, noting that “Latinos” see through Barnum’s distortions. The ideal audience is, once again, comprised of those who like to be fooled, and failure to participate means exclusion from Barnum’s lucrative U.S. market. The implicit participation of Tablada’s Hispanic

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readership in the deception takes place when readers join Tablada in his attack on Barnum yet at the same time accept—perhaps willingly—the playful fusion of the two men. If Tablada is yet another distorted reflection of Barnum, deception is carried one step further; in this sense, exclusion from the market becomes instead a reconfiguration of this market’s defining boundaries. As Lennard Davis has written, in reference to representations of disability in eighteenth and nineteenth century English novels, bourgeois capitalism’s positive, functional image depends upon the ideological fantasy of the norm (96). Normalcy, however, is not a static feature in narrative, but instead, it must be achieved as the culmination of struggles based on conflicts of ethnicity, race, gender, socio-economic class, and disability. Conflict resolution, or cure, is endlessly rehearsed in these novels in order to maintain the fantasy of normality. Davis writes, “All these cures are placebos for the basic problem presented to capitalism and its ideological productions in the form of modern subjectivity; which dons the form of the normal, average citizen protagonist—that bellcurve-generated, fantastic being who reconciles the promise of equal rights with the reality of an unequal distribution of wealth” (99). Tablada’s Coney Island mirror, as vision of Barnum, and as reflection of the U.S. Other, suggests a similar dynamic of bounded oppositions between normality and freakishness. In this case, the genre of the newspaper chronicle does not allow for a progressively developing narrative “cure,” as is the case in the novel. Instead, disease and cure must be represented instantly, as immediately interchangeable extremes. The sudden appearance of the fun-house mirror fulfills this function; the audience pays to exchange normalcy for aberration, and vice versa. Thus through the act of payment, the audience is fooled, for the difference that was promised always reverts to sameness, revealing the fundamental deception underlying the distorting mirror, yet the entry fee is—of course—not returned. The deception of the freak show itself clearly parallels the mechanism of the distorting mirror, as Tablada’s text suggests; it is the mirror held up to the people, through which mass normalcy is (falsely) confirmed through constructed images of corporeal difference (see figure 3). Tablada’s emphasis on corporeal difference, envisioned here through the momentarily distorted body image emblematic of Barnum’s capitalism as mass fraud, thus cannot offer the cure that would (temporarily) reconcile inequalities of wealth and privilege with the promise of normalized corporeality. Instead, the instantaneous quality of the mirror image—and of the brief newspaper chronicle—accelerates the process

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Figure 3. The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth . . . The Peerless Prodigies of Physical Phenomena & Marvelous Living Human Curiosities. Barnum and Bailey’s circus included displays akin to freak shows, in which categories of racial and cultural difference blurred into those of congenital anomaly and extraordinary ability. This image includes a homogenous throng of white, well-dressed spectators. Cincinnati & New York: Strobridge Litho. co., 1899. Reproduced from the collections of the Library of Congress.

by which normality and aberration are polarized and made equivalent. Tablada, as authorial voice, becomes similarly polarized, shifting rapidly between equivalence and opposition to the figure of Barnum. In an earlier chronicle, Tablada also makes reference to the figure of Barnum, although in an entirely different context. In this case, the topic is a 1912 Paris exhibition of prints by the Japanese artist, Utamaru. In the 1912 text, Tablada expressed disappointment at what he found to be local ignorance of Japanese art, describing the Parisian tendency toward the extreme adoration of any new “autor o una obra o un estilo” (Los días y las noches de París, 125) [author, work, or style] that should happen to be praised by some fashionable journalist. Such extreme cultish fascination is due, he says, to the unscrupulous efforts of certain “barnums,” a reference to P. T. Barnum and his ability to profit from fooling the masses. Tablada’s critical view of the Parisians extends to his reflections on the Parisian art collectors’ problematic relationships to their possessions. The “exquisitos talismanes” [exquisite talismans], he writes, are “contemplados por sus bizcos poseedores con un ‘ojo de vidrio’” (126) [contemplated by their cross-eyed owners with a “glass eye”]. In the meantime, Utamaro, the Japanese artist whose exhibition Tablada describes, “vuela sobre el vicio espeso de este París, como una ave de paraíso” (131) [flies above the thick vice of this Paris, like a bird of paradise]. The cross-eyed

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vision of the object, as if through a glass eye, suggests an inability to see correctly, and thus to adequately admire the work of art. True clarity of vision, as might be obtained from Utamaro’s bird’s eye view perspective, is denied the Parisians, here caught in their fog of local vice. The collectors, according to Tablada, are more concerned with the commercial value of the pieces they own, as a reflection of their personal self-worth, than with the aesthetic quality of the works. Yet, perhaps the figure of the glass eye, and the cross-eyed vision it suggests, might function not merely as the Parisian collectors’ misreading of the object but also as the grounds for an alternative, Tabladian position with respect to the art object and its place of origin. In fact, the “glass eye” through which Tablada refers to the art collectors comes from another source. As he states, “un ‘ojo de vidrio’, como acaso diría ese admirable sintetizador con alma de japonés: Jules Renard” (126) [a “glass eye,” as Jules Renard, that admirable synthesizer with a Japanese soul would say]. Strangely, then, the glass eye itself stands out as the “exquisite talisman,” here worthy of the writer’s—and the collector’s—contemplation. Thus the object, or mode of critique, is also a collectible. The dynamic at work here is similar to the one structuring Tablada’s position with respect to the barnumesque mirror. In each case, the object of critique, whether the glass eye or the mirror, each of which enables a distorted view, becomes by the same token a celebrated, fascinating object, allowing for a uniquely critical vision of the cultural scene; the viewer’s position becomes inextricably tied to the presentation of his object. Thus the oscillating movement between criticism and fascination is at the same time an ambivalent slippage between self-reflexivity and straightforward antagonism. Tablada’s oscillating position in both scenes, at once vociferously critical of the grotesque mirror, or the glass eye, and the people each reflects, and seduced by the power of print media behind Barnum’s enterprise and by the beauty of the poetic, glass-eyed vision, might be seen as symptomatic of the author’s shifting political position. Tablada took on varied political allegiances throughout his career. He was among the middleclass Mexican intellectuals who supported and benefited from Porfirio Díaz’s regime, thanks in part to a policy of openness to U.S. investments. Tablada’s later exile to New York was conditioned by the fall of Victoriano Huerta, a military dictator he had criticized but later supported. Writing from New York, Tablada made frequent, bitter references to the Zapatistas’ sacking of his home in Coyoacán, Mexico. And despite his earlier opposition to the Mexican Revolution, his tactical journalism allowed him to win the support of President Venustiano Carranza, who offered

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him a diplomatic position (Sheridan 1992). But most significant in the case of the 1926 text is the manner in which opposition coincides with equivalence, both in Tablada’s position as critic-participant and in the scenes of corporeal difference he chooses to represent. Tablada’s (and Barnum’s) duplicitous position as narrator becomes, in this sense, inseparable from the fictitious duality structuring the relationship between normality and difference. The Coney Island fun-house mirror, evoked here as the figure of Barnum himself—via Tablada—conjures the repeating dilemma of postmodernist incursions into identity categories such as disability and ethnicity. According to such a reading, the ease with which sameness and difference appear to slip into one another in the mirror scene, and with which Tablada’s attack on fraudulent practices at once becomes a flirtation with fraudulence, highlights the critical limitations of the oscillating model. Presumably, if deception cannot be clearly pinpointed, corporeal difference and the specificity of its history will be rapidly subsumed into a broad vision of fraudulent spectacle as a symptom of mass culture. Tablada’s project certainly participates in this version of spectacle; yet, without overcoming the risks that the model implies, he takes advantage of his jarring cross-cultural position in order to highlight the disruptive role of foreign print media in the Coney Island context. The asymmetry of the relationship between discourse and spectacle again suggests the ongoing problem of the symbolic utility of corporeal difference, whereby the body functions as useful and subservient to an overarching metaphorical purpose. Here, however, the problem of textuality centers specifically on the dizzying velocity of the production and distribution of newspaper and the correlation between this defining quality of modernizing print media and the instantaneity of freak show and distorting mirror mechanisms, as described above. The particularity of Tablada’s insertions into these mechanisms relies upon the seductive power of fraudulence and speed and also on moments when the textual translation of corporeality disrupts the otherwise seamless processes through which difference and homogeneity are reflected. As in the case of the glass eye, Tablada’s aesthetics of oscillation here suggests both the risk of an indifferent equivalence between self and other and a startling interruption to this continuum through a focus on its fault lines, or on the material objects by which it operates.

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Mirrors and Metaphors Unlike in Martí’s “Coney Island,” where the U.S.-Spanish America binary grounds the use of monstrosity as metaphor, while setting the stage for the incursion of literalized freak-show corporeality, Tablada’s figure of the “mirror of a people” confounds self-other divisions through performative gestures that elide fixed classification. If Martí’s freak interrupts the metaphor of monstrosity through the problem of a carnality that belongs neither to “us” nor to “them,” Tablada’s mirror reflects a version of corporeal difference insistent on its reversion to textual performance and translation. It is the sheer speed of newspaper production and circulation that allows Barnum’s enterprise to take flight on “newspaper wings,” in Tablada’s terms, and thus to enact a lucrative mass deception. Tablada similarly relies on the power of print media to suggest a version of embodiment that can be in two places at once. As I have described, Tablada’s emphasis on fraudulence coincides with his cross-cultural, erroneous self-translation: “America is liked to be fooled.” In the Spanish version, however, “America” becomes “North America,” the detail suggests that Spanish Americans, unlike their northern neighbors in this case, do distinguish the part from the whole. At the risk of merely translating from body to textual metaphor, Tablada’s narrative will remind readers that discursive cross-cultural difference, here instantly produced and disseminated as newsprint, necessarily adjusts the contours of corporeality as live spectacle. The newspaper text performs its version of Barnum’s show, replicating the model of fraudulence in its act of translation, but in so doing, it shatters the mirror of corporeal difference as normalcy, pointing instead to those who will not recognize Self and Other as symmetrically reversible reflections. The seemingly incongruous appearance of the freak-show spectacle in José Martí’s “Coney Island” and its interruption of the dynamic frequently defined by monstrosity as metaphor of radical cultural difference suggests the relevance of contemporary disability studies’ perspectives in readings of Martí’s text. In an opposing, complementary sense, José Juan Tablada’s textual replication of performed corporeal difference, through cross-cultural print media, points to the importance of recognizing discursive interrogations of preinscribed models of freak performance—such as the example of Barnum’s mirror. Tablada’s Spanish American discursive model, in its close familiarity with freak-show characters and modes of performance, suggests that freak-show history, while necessarily informed today by disability studies’ perspectives, must also account for textual

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sources which, although not fully incorporated into the spectacle, nonetheless intersect with and challenge the parameters by which corporeal difference is enacted and written. To be sure, neither of these textual models escapes the problematic usage of freak corporeality as otherness, even when the self-other dyad is called into question and the absence of an effective solution to a familiar dynamic of discursive and material exploitation hardly seems surprising. The appearance of the freak in the space of these Spanish American journalistic texts creates a jarring effect and, as I have suggested, does potentiate a renegotiation of distinct disciplinary modes of reading both material corporeality and metaphors of alterity. The juxtaposition of Spanish American literary discourse and embodied freak-show spectacle must ultimately fail to fully account for the elision of the freak as materiality. Yet, the particular modes of elision revealed by Martí and Tablada nonetheless point beyond the conditions of their discourses, toward a critical position through which the freak might begin to constitute both the material conditions of performed corporeal difference and an embodiment open to the slippery metaphors and shattered mirrors of transcultural encounter.

CHAPTER 2

“La doble y única mujer” The Doubled Bodies of Pablo Palacio and Jorge Velasco Mackenzie Troubling Offspring Mi vientre está contrapuesto a mi vientre de ella. Tengo dos cabezas, cuatro brazos, cuatro senos, cuatro piernas, y me han dicho que mis columnas vertebrales, dos hasta la altura de los omóplatos, se unen allí para seguir—robustecida—hasta la región coxígea. [My belly is opposite from my belly of hers. I have two heads, four arms, four breasts, four legs, and I have been told that my vertebral columns, two at the height of the shoulder blades, join there to continue—fortified as one—to the coccygeal area.]1 —Palacio, “La doble y única mujer”

Thus the unusual protagonist of Ecuadorian writer Pablo Palacio’s 1927 short story, “La doble y única mujer,” describes her physical condition to the curious reader. Unlike the texts of Coney Island’s literary visitors, addressed in the previous chapter, Palacio’s work does not enact an explicit encounter with a freak show but, instead, ponders the conundrum of corporeality, through the voice of a character whose ambiguously double and individual body defies categorization and makes her the victim of social ostracism. The concept of disability, defined as “the disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organisation which takes no or little account of people who have physical impairments and thus excludes them from the mainstream of social activities” (Oliver 6), emerges in this story through the protagonist’s evocations of a discriminatory society. At the same time, the figure of the double, or twin, epitomizes the literary problem of corporeal representation. As described in the previous chapter, José Martí’s and José Juan Tablada’s literary encounters with the freak show demonstrate the limitations of text and metaphor

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vis-à-vis the bodies that language evokes but cannot fully materialize. Palacio’s double body similarly hovers between symbolic representation and a symmetrical, contained dualism that points to nothing beyond itself—a fully saturated presence. As an outward looking figure, the double body is the emblem of all duality, suggesting familiar oppositions between mind and body, spirit and matter, or self and other. Yet the two heads also represent one another in perfect reciprocation, foreclosing any potential external points of reference. Unlike the classic figure of the doppelgänger, which may appear and disappear, the double, or twin body, threatens the symbolic order of the paternal, since its unwavering, self-reflectively affirming presence seems to do away with the need for an absent referent. According to Jean-Joseph Goux’s argument on forms of value in his reading of Marx and Freud, “the father becomes the sole reflecting image of all subjects seeking their worth” (17). In the case of the double body, however, each half reflects its other with greater accuracy than any father could.2 Still, in its literary representation, the double body continues to struggle with the ambivalence of its potential symbolic functions; despite this body’s apparently self-reflexive symmetry, readers will inevitably interrogate it for further meanings, asking it to tell a different story. In this text, the model of disability suggested by the doble y única mujer parallels the literary and symbolic dilemma of the fantastical double body; each enacts a critically strategic impasse, pointing to the shortcomings of societal, familial, philosophical, and linguistical structures. Rather than the realistic representation of a person with a disability, the story would perhaps be better described as the evocation of a “monstrous double,” in accordance with René Girard’s reading of symbolic exchanges between self and other, as exemplified in studies of the ritual use of masks and rites of possession (164–66). Yet the use of monstrosity in Palacio’s work, in fact, allows the narrative to uphold its own disability politics. The story negotiates a series of absurdly restrictive symbolic and social structures through the “double-bind” of a discourse, which has no absolute place in them. The narrative emphasis on corporeality, at the same time, evokes the material conditions underpinning these structures and highlights the restrictions placed upon bodies that do not conform to social dictates. According to this argument, the “monstrous double” (as discursive site) becomes inseparable from the “disabled body” (as lived social condition), which together offer a critical strategy for reading corporeal difference. In this chapter, my reading of doubles and doubling in narrative juxtaposes Palacio’s “La doble y única mujer” with his compatriot Jorge Velasco Mackenzie’s 1983 short story “El caballero de la mano en el pecho.”

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Corporeal difference in these texts subverts the conventions of paternalistic state and family structures, most explicitly through ambivalent attacks on the father figure. At the same time, the dual quality of the protagonists’ bodies and perspectives offers a space for reflection on the double bind of self-reflexive critique. Palacio’s conjoined twin(s) play a metaphorical role in Velasco’s story, which incorporates and rewrites elements of the earlier story in a radically altered setting. This critical juxtaposition partially repeats the strategy employed in Chapter 1 in which an encounter between two disparate literary visions of Coney Island and the history of the freak-show spectacle recontextualize each narrative and suggest a newly configured space for reading disability and corporeal difference. In the present chapter, the juxtaposition of two stories, of distinct historical periods and approaches to the representation of the body, allows each to mean otherwise, within an imaginary transhistorical framework. Within this double reading, the specificity of historical context is both underscored and ruptured, when the 1927 text gives way to a 1983 reframing. Focus on the representation of the disabled body moves between a critical grounding in the political and economic conditions surrounding the production of the text and a rereading open to the retroactive fictionalization of bodies and their stories. This partial alignment of chronologically distant texts insists upon a reading of corporeal difference and disability as a provocative reentanglement of flesh and fiction. Ecuadorian literature has generally not enjoyed the same level of international fame and readership as would be the case for some other national Latin American literatures, perhaps most notably those of Mexico and Argentina. The marginalization of national literature, perhaps primarily due to economic and political factors, is not unique to Ecuador, yet it does beg the question, why Ecuador? Why Palacio? Palacio has, in fact, received more recent Latin American and international critical attention, as evidenced, for example, in Wilfrido Corral’s critical edition of his complete works. Yet as a highly experimental, avant-garde writer, Palacio was marginalized and misunderstood within Ecuador in contrast to the Ecuadorian social realists, his contemporaries, who achieved broader recognition and success. Palacio’s role as a radical and urban avant-garde writer, with transnational ties to the growing cosmopolitan culture of Latin American literary production, jarred to some degree with his local Ecuadorian cultural context that would come to be primarily dominated by social realist sensibilities. These conditions situate Palacio in an ironic, doubly marginalized periphery. In addition, Palacio’s syphilis and subsequent mental illness would eventually lead to his increased social isolation,

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cutting short his literary production, as well as his life. Reading Palacio’s work as an approach to corporeal difference and disability in Latin American literature therefore allows for a reconsideration of the processes through which the margins and center of a contested literary corpus take up their positions. Velasco’s reclaiming of Palacio, through direct reference to “La doble y única mujer,” evokes his generation’s resurgent interest in the writers of the vanguardia.3 In addition, his homage to the earlier writer, through incorporation of Palacio’s text into a new story, mimics the classic vanguardista gesture of antropofagia, or cannibalism, typically construed as a subversive Latin American mimicry of European cultural production through the metaphor of swallowing. Yet by situating his story in Spain, with Ecuadorian characters, including reference to the absent Palacio, Velasco shifts the subversive dynamic of antropofagia toward one of homage. While Palacio’s text presents an attack on the figure of the father and on the paternalistic structures of his society and its economic and political conditions, Velasco’s text cannot fully repeat this gesture. For in the act of paying homage to a literary forefather, the narrative necessarily resuscitates the paternal figure. These juxtaposed texts thus offer a double movement, vis-à-vis the problem of paternity and corporeal difference. In Palacio’s story, the body of the female protagonist(s) displaces and threatens the authority of symbolic paternal law. In contrast, Velasco’s text shifts the focus toward the materialized body of the father. I read Palacio’s and Velasco’s stories through a combined approach, borrowing from the work of Goux and that of Elizabeth Grosz. Taken together, these narratives suggest a model of genderless matter and a strategy for resituating the disabled body in political geography and history. “La doble y única mujer,” like the characters in many of Palacio’s short stories, displays unique qualities—defined as pathological—which contribute to the violent and biting social critique implicit in the work of fiction. The intertwined representations of reproduction and monstrosity may also remind readers of Horacio Quiroga’s classic story, “La gallina degollada,” (translated as “The decapitated chicken”) first published in 1909. In this story, a young couple successively gives birth to four boys, of which the youngest two are twins. In each case, the child is born with a healthy and normal appearance but, after about twenty months, goes into convulsions and awakens the next day “profundamente idiota.” The couple finally succeeds in producing an intelligent female child. However, the parents’ hopes are dashed when the four brothers, imitating the servant’s butchering of a hen, kill their younger sister, presumably with the same

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knife used by the servant. Parental anxiety increases throughout the story as husband and wife blame one another for having caused the degeneracy of their children. Yet the brothers also rupture parental reproductive logic by taking after one another through perfect imitation, thus seeming to bypass the possibility of a prior explanation for their “idiocy.” Effect becomes fatefully indistinguishable from cause, just as each brother is a likeness of the others. In the logic of doubling, pathology itself becomes indistinguishable from the process of perfect replication. Yet while Quiroga’s work suggests the influence of naturalism and the scientific positivism of the late nineteenth century, Palacio’s interest in pathology functions in the unique context of Ecuador’s avant-garde aesthetics of the late 1920s.4 In both texts, however, the figure of the twin, and in particular, the case of conjoined, or Siamese, twins, imply a threat to the father. Marc Shell has argued, these are the only human beings who are undoubtedly related to one another, with a physical bond to prove it. All other kinship ties, most notably the father–son relationship, become increasingly suspect in contrast to this double model.5 Such a form of extreme pathologized doubling occurs in “La doble y única mujer,” embodied in the protagonist(s), whose unique predicament is partially rooted in her troubled relationship to her parents and—linked to these problematic ties—the suggestion of inherited disease.6 Palacio’s story thus takes further the model of monstrous reproduction observed in “La gallina degollada,” while at once giving monstrosity a primarily feminine focus. The avant-garde Siamese twins’ perfect kinship mocks the role of the parent. In addition, conjoined twins deny the economic logic that would otherwise allow objects of equivalent value or identity to stand in for one another, since they must always be simultaneously present as part of the same whole. Palacio’s character undermines paternal authority in her literal relationship to her father and to her distorted and distorting position within a structure of (pseudo) idealist philosophy, with reference to thinkers whom Palacio also took on in his critical writing. The critique enacted by this text, and by much of Palacio’s work, also acquires its bite in relation to the sociopolitical context in which it first appeared—the Quito society of 1927. Palacio’s work confronts a paradox—one hardly unique to this moment and place—described by María del Carmen Fernández in terms of a disassociation between local economic reality and intellectual elite culture.7 Fernández contextualizes her reading of Palacio’s critique in a history spanning from the Alfareada, or revolution of 1895, to Ecuador’s avantgarde of the late 1920s. The liberal revolution, an attempt to modernize

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the Ecuadorian state, succeeded in the institution of new laws to reduce the power of the church but failed to create effective economic reform. Instead, the revolution ultimately consolidated alliances between an emergent bourgeoisie and a feudal aristocracy (467). As a later variation on this paradox of form and content, the workers’ movement, strikes, and subsequent massacres of 1922 to 1923 would suggest to the young writers of the period that neither their avant-garde verses nor the earlier modernista poetry could express the reality of the massacred workers (477).8 A 1925 military coup installed an ostensibly leftist government, which would modernize state institutions and lead to the founding of the Socialist Party in 1926, yet would fail to produce political stability or an effective redistribution of wealth. Palacio’s fiction and his socialist writing appear in this context of transition as sharply critical and mocking of elite bourgeois culture yet insistent on the paradox of the bourgeois writer’s self-observant and privileged insider position.9 At the same time, Palacio’s work is often read in contrast to the codes of representation typically employed by Ecuadorian writers of realismo social, or those of the novela de la tierra. In some cases, critical reception has been explicitly negative, as in the following excerpt from Edmundo Ribadeneira: A lo largo del relato ecuatoriano, desde el inicio decisivo de “A la Costa,” toda la producción nacional está animada por un aire de familia inconfundible, por un algo indudablemente propio, que es, justamente, lo que le identifica y le hace reconocible en términos geográficos y humanos. Menos las novelas de Pablo Palacio, que no tienen parentesco entre nosotros. (135) [Throughout the history of Ecuadorian fictional narrative, from the decisive beginning marked by “A la costa,” all of our national literary production is animated by an unmistakable feeling of family, by something undoubtedly our own, which is, quite rightly, what identifies it and makes it recognizable in geographic and human terms. Except for the novels of Pablo Palacio, which have no kinship among us] (my translation).

Palacio’s failure to conform to the dictates of the Ecuadorian literary family, as imagined by Ribadeneira, in fact, highlights the avant-garde writer’s uniquely conflicted critical position with respect to the constructs of family, nation, and literature. In this sense the critic’s precision is astonishing, though perhaps unintentional. A more recent and positive scholarly evaluation of Palacio’s work effectively points to the same paradoxically

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iconoclast tendency: “Su escritura crea un centro ‘otro,’ en torno del cual se constituye; se vuelve excéntrica, se coloca en los márgenes de lo canónico” (Manzoni 449) [His writing creates an “other” center, around which it constitutes itself; it becomes eccentric, it situates itself in the margins of the canonical] (my translation). This is certainly the case in the “La doble y única mujer,” since the body of the woman, or women, literally requires a readjustment of grammatical, moral, physical, and social codes—to name just a few of the structures her narrative throws into disarray. “La doble y única mujer” Initially, Palacio situates the origin of the woman’s condition within the discourse of the once-popular theory of “maternal impressions.” According to this belief, a pregnant woman can influence the development of the fetus she carries by looking at strange animals, images of monsters, or people with disabilities. Traditionally, the concept of maternal impressions assigns fault to the mother for any undesirable birth.10 In the case of Palacio’s story, however, the mother shares her guilt with her “friend,” a doctor who told her strange stories and brought her “dangerous” drawings to look at. The reader may, of course, doubt the “honrada amistad” that supposedly existed between the mother and doctor. However one reads this passage, the role of medicine in human reproduction comes under sharp ridicule here, since the doctor himself is partly the cause of the condition that the daughter will eventually lament. Here then, guilt shifts from the mother to the “father,” who ironically takes his place in a lineup of masculine authority figures (the doctor, the commissary, and the bishop), all of whom had to interrogate the mother before the bishop could absolve her. The text thus provides a critical model of reproduction, in which the doctor, as father and figure of authority, simultaneously propagates pathology, guilt, and absolution as mutually dependent factors in an ongoing system of replication. Palacio’s text also enacts an explicit violence upon the presumed father of the doble y única mujer, in part because his paternity is thrown into question, both by his wife’s relationship with the doctor and by his threatening double daughter. The father’s death by suicide is described as if his daughter were at least indirectly at fault. And from the beginning, the father–daughter relationship is fraught with animosity. On learning of his wife’s delivery of conjoined twins, the father insulted and beat her, “tal vez con la misma justicia, más o menos, con la que asiste algunos

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maridos que maltratan a sus mujeres porque les dieron una hija en vez de un varón como querían”(37) [perhaps with more or less the same justice with which some husbands mistreat their wives, because they gave them a daughter instead of the son they wanted]. Here, the fact of being born with a disability is equated with being born female. In this sense, woman’s condition is inherently characterized by duplicity and irresolvable contradiction, a view Palacio would critique in his discussions of the inequalities of men and women in his society.11 Despite the father’s suicide, which pleases his daughter, his violent presence has not been eradicated from her life. The paternal figure will continue to resurface as an uncertain, lingering sense of guilt, inseparable from the protagonist’s discussion of her body. In the final lines of the story she describes a purplish growth on the lips of “yo-segunda” and responds with horror: “Mis labios están aquí, adelante; puedo hablar libremente con ellos . . . ¿Y cómo es que siento los dolores de esos otros labios? Esta dualidad y esta unicidad al fin van a matarme . . . Desde que nací he tenido algo especial; he llevado en mi sangre gérmenes nócivos” (42) [My lips are here before me; I can speak freely with them . . . And how is it that I feel the pain of those other lips? This duality and this singularity will kill me in the end . . . Ever since I was born I’ve had something special; I have carried noxious germs in my veins]. Similarly, just before killing himself, her father had stated, in reference to his daughter, “Este demonio va a acabar por matarme” (38) [This demon will end up killing me]. In echoing her father’s lines, stated immediately before his death, the narrator positions herself, again, at the vortex of a cycle of self-destruction, which she carries in her blood but which, at the same time, constructs her as the guilty party. The indecision, or hovering between one and two, expresses itself in the double, single girl who criticizes her father and then begs forgiveness, and again in the symptom of a disease that causes the part to poison the whole, making “yo-segunda” guilty of the death of both “yo-primera” and herself. The reproductive nature of this pathology is heightened in this final description in which the growth on the “other” lips clearly suggests a venereal disease, perhaps a figuration of the syphilis of which Palacio himself was a victim and which can easily be passed from parent to child. The reproductive pathology, both described and embodied by this woman, is constantly displaced from child to parent, as from one of the double woman, or one set of lips, to the other. The critique offered by this female figure, however, is not merely of the father himself or of his role as parent. The doble y única mujer’s unusual use of language also points to the

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further implications of this critique in which the father figure looms even larger within the political, economic, and philosophical models suggested by her arguments. As the story begins, she immediately encounters the conflicts of her own duality, as she initially describes herself as one woman, but in language suggesting an image of conjoined twins. From the beginning, the character’s experience of resistance takes place through a confrontation between the confines of the body and those of language, giving rise to startling and conflicting moments of self-expression. I repeat the quotation from the beginning of this chapter: “Mi vientre está contrapuesto a mi vientre de ella. Tengo dos cabezas, cuatro brazos, cuatro senos, cuatro piernas, y me han dicho que mis columnas vertebrales, dos hasta la altura de los omóplatos, se unen allí para seguir—robustecida—hasta la región coxígea” (33). Here, in particular, the awkward shift from the plural verb “se unen” to the singular adjective “robustecida” shocks the reader’s expectation of grammatical coherence, just as the image of two vertebral columns fusing into one disturbs expectations of anatomical “normality.”12 The narrator continues this line of critique, emphasizing the grammatical problems generated by her unusual case: Aquí me permito, insistiendo en la aclaración hecha previamente, pedir perdón por todas las incorrecciones que cometeré. Incorrecciones que elevo a la consideración de los gramáticos con el objeto de que se sirvan modificar, para los posibles casos en que pueda repetirse el fenómeno, la muletilla de los pronombres personales, la conjugación de los verbos, los adjetivos posesivos y demonstrativos, etc. (33) [I would like to take this opportunity here, insisting upon my earlier clarification, to ask forgiveness for all the errors I will commit. Errors which I bring to the attention of the grammarians so that they may serve to modify, in possible cases in which the phenomenon might repeat itself, the dependency upon personal pronouns, the conjugation of verbs, possessive and demonstrative adjectives, etc.]

In asking her reader’s forgiveness, the narrator is actually performing a subtle relocation of blame, from herself and her unusual condition to the grammatical system within which she is obliged to express herself. The “muletilla,” both a kind of crutch and a catchword or linguistic dependency, is therefore assigned not to the woman’s bodily difference and subsequent special needs, but rather to language itself, “disabled” by its regulatory insistence on personal pronouns and specific conjugations.

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The protagonist’s words reveal disability to be a socially and linguistically constructed category rather than a fixed material condition. This approach to corporeal difference, while familiar in contemporary disability studies, is nonetheless radical in the context of 1920s Ecuador. While twins whether or not conjoined are frequently perceived as two subjects, la doble y única mujer insists on her unity as an individual. For this reason, she refers to herself as “yo-primera” and “yo-segunda,” and argues throughout the text that she is, in fact, one rather than two, despite her double appearance and despite the difficulty of explaining her unusual condition, especially in conventional language. The unity of this self, as she describes it, originated in a struggle between “yo” and “ella.” This occurred when the narrator first learned how to walk. Each half of the unit “yo-ella” attempted to go in front, but since “yo” was physically stronger than “ella,” “yo” triumphed and thus became “yo-primera” now followed by a submissive “yo-segunda.” The narrator presents the fact of this initial struggle as proof of her unity, since, as she argues, if she were a dual being, each brain would have followed a separate impulse, one to lead and the other to follow, with no struggle. It was instead because both brains received the same single command (to go in front) that the initial struggle ensued. Unity was established when one part triumphed definitively over the other. And yet, as the narrator again insists, she uses this example not to suggest an initial duality of the self, but rather to emphasize a finally perfect unity: “He aquí la verdadera razón que apoya mi unicidad. Si los mandatos cerebrales hubieran sido: ‘Ir adelante’ e ‘Ir atrás’, entonces sí no existiría duda alguna acerca de mi dualidad (34–35) [This is the real reason that supports my unity. If the cerebral commands had been: “go forward” and “go backward,” then indeed there would be no doubt about my duality]. Her difficulty in sustaining this reasoning seems to further emphasize the conflicted nature of her dual and singular condition. Hers is a counterargument to that of the “teratologists,” “que han nominado a casos semejantes como monstruos dobles y que se empecinan, a su vez, en hablar de éstos como si en cada caso fueron dos seres distintos, en plural, ellos” (34) [who have called similar cases double monsters and who insist on speaking of these as if in each case they were two distinct beings, in plural, they]. Of course, the conflict between unity and duality is far from resolved by this assertion and continues to dominate the text at increasing levels of frustrated oscillation. This occurs because of the necessity of distinguishing between “yo-primera” and “yo-segunda” and, at the same time, affirming them as parts of a single whole—and a whole with a center. Yet

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this supposed center cannot really be described in terms of a specific location, since it corresponds neither to “yo-primera” nor to “yo-segunda.” The difficulty the doble y única mujer faces, in trying to describe her condition using expressions and concepts that have never before taken such a case into account, become at once her opportunity to undermine such language and concepts, as when she attempts to locate this “center”: “Hay entre mí—primera vez que se ha escrito bien entre mí—un centro a donde afluyen y de donde refluyen todo el cúmulo de fenómenos espirituales, o materiales desconocidos” (36) [There is between myself/to myself—the first time the expression has been written correctly—a center from which and toward which flows all the accumulation of unknown spiritual and material phenomena].13 This reference to a center, frustrated by its ambivalent position between “yo primera” and “yo segunda,” is at the same time a jab at the apparent lack of logic in the expression “entre mí” as it is commonly used. The narrator’s critique extends from syntax and grammar to philosophy, upon describing the condition of her “center”: Verdaderamente, no sé cómo explicar la existencia de este centro, su posición en mi organismo . . . Esta dificultad, . . . sé que me va a traer el calificativo de desequilibrada porque a pesar de la distancia domina todavía la ingenua filosofía cartesiana, que pretende que para escuchar la verdad basta poner atención a las ideas claras que cada uno tiene dentro de sí, según más o menos lo explica cierto caballero francés. (36) [Truly, I don’t know how to explain the existence of this center, its position in my organism. . . . This difficulty, . . . I know it will cause me to be labeled as unstable, for despite the distance naïve Cartesian philosophy still dominates, claiming that in order to listen to the truth it is enough to pay attention to the clear ideas that each one has inside himself, more or less according to the explanation of a certain French gentleman.]

Such tongue-in-cheek explanations and critiques of selected philosophers occur throughout Palacio’s work, both in this text and elsewhere. A similar situation arises several pages later, in the narrator’s description of the special chairs she sits in. These chairs lack backrests, since each half of the doble y única mujer functions as the back of the other half. For this reason, unless she is sitting in one of the chairs, no one can see that it is a chair: “parece que le faltara algo. Ese algo soy yo que, al sentarme, lleno un vacío que la idea ‘silla’ tal como está formada vulgarmente había motivado en ‘mi silla’ . . . la condición esencial para que un mueble mío sea mueble

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en el cerebro de los demás, es que forme yo parte de ese objeto” (39) [It seems to be missing something. That something is me, which when I sit, fills a void which the idea “chair,” as it is commonly formed, had caused in “my chair” . . . the essential condition for a piece of my furniture to be furniture in the minds of others, is that I form part of that object]. The narrator’s chair thus undercuts the conventional or “vulgar” idea of a chair, for it clearly is missing an important element of the common chair. More significantly, this unusual chair only takes on its true identity once the narrator sits in it. In this sense, the seated body not only completes the material structure of the chair but also sets in motion the idea of the chair, an idea that remained distorted and uncertain until the bodily presence of the sitter defined it. This sequenced description of the doble y única chair inverts the Platonic opposition between idea and matter, and thus corresponds to Palacio’s views on idealist philosophy, as expressed in his nonfictional writings. These few texts, published in the 1930s, outline brief philosophical histories and argue in favor of a dialectical-materialist approach, while at once attacking socioeconomic inequalities between men and women.14 Palacio’s particularly emphatic attack on Platonic idealism clarifies the decidedly materialist views operating in his fiction as well and reveals a backdrop to the doble y única mujer’s radical, conflicted position. In his essay “Sentido de la palabra Realidad,” Palacio paraphrases Plato’s notion of “the world of ideas” as perfect and real in contrast to “the world of things” as mere fantasy and immediately dismisses Plato’s argument as a contradiction: Y como lo más perfecto es lo racional, el único mundo verdaderamente perfecto y real es el mundo de las ideas, que está separado del mundo de las cosas. Ahora bien, sólo este mundo tiene el ser perfecto; nuestro mundo, el de lo sensible, es simplemente copia, fantasía. . . . ¿Habréis leído alguna vez más grande mezcla de contradicciones? (221) [And as the most perfect is that which is rational, the only truly perfect and real world is the world of ideas, which is separated from the world of things. Now, only this world has the perfect being; our world, that of the perceptible, is only a copy, a fantasy . . . Have you ever read a greater mix of contradictions?]

This text seems in keeping with the spirit of “La doble y única mujer,” as discussed thus far, since both works are relentless in their denial of idealist logic. The threat to the father’s paternity, implied in the conjoined

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twins’ very existence, parallels the character’s explicit critique of idealist philosophy. As Goux has argued, Marx’s notion of the “economic-cell form” as the equation of value between two commodities, one relative, the other equivalent, suggests the psychoanalytic relationship between self and other or, more specifically, father and offspring. According to this reading, the father, the Platonic idea, and money as abstracted exchange value become mutually synonymous terms of symbolic authority and regulation (16–21). Goux further insists on a feminine grounding to materialism in philosophy, noting that both Plato and Aristotle oppose female matter to male form, or idea, in their use of the metaphors of conception and the embryo (213–17). In this sense, Palacio’s double-bodied woman functions as simultaneous attack on the father, on idealist philosophy, and on the economics of 1920s Ecuador in its rigidly entrenched class differences. Yet the corporeal experience described by Palacio’s character(s) in this story is not reducible to a direct articulation of Palacio’s philosophical views. Instead, the body of the woman, or women, adamant in its refusal to adhere to one or two points of view, exerts its own reversal of Platonic idealism. In throwing the double weight of her body into the argument, the doble y única mujer personalizes the discussion, suspending her judgment of materialist logic. Rather than merely reflecting the views of her author, the woman lives them in the flesh and thus clarifies their potential limits and contradictions. The doble y única mujer takes on the one versus two dilemma, as I have suggested, as she interprets her own body for perplexed readers and observers. At the beginning of the story, she states, “Mi espalda, mi atrás, es, si nadie se opone, mi pecho de ella” (33) [My back, my backside, is, if no one opposes, my chest of hers]. This is the first indication of the particular bodily difference this woman experiences; yet it is combined with an ironic condition, “if no one objects,” or, in a more literal translation, “if no one opposes.” The problem is obviously that “someone” does, of necessity, oppose but that someone is “ella,” or “yo-segunda,” physically inseparable from the speaker. Either of the two sides of the woman could technically be making this statement, and in either case, the other would presumably “oppose” it. Opposition takes place both in the physical sense, since the two sides of the woman are positioned back-to-back, and in the sense of a disagreement, for the sentence defines “ella” as the backside of “yo,” hence as secondary. Presumably, neither half will fully agree to such secondary status, since to do so would imply a fundamental difference within the organism, a separation between the two thought

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processes. This is impossible because the narrator insists that these processes are one and that any idea arising in one brain arises identically and simultaneously in the other. The narrator’s subversion works, in this case, not only through her assertion that she is one, rather than two, but at the same time because her body and her language make the one versus two distinction increasingly difficult to establish. In discussing the existence of her “center,” she notes her own incapacity to explain such a center and, at the same time, her advantage over others in this situation, since she can “correctly” use the expression “entre mí.” The inexplicable center does not apparently fit the body of this woman and immediately upsets the balance that would otherwise appear to structure her two halves in perfect opposition. The doble y única mujer has no place in the Cartesian thought she describes here, except as a kind of unbalanced anomaly. Yet strangely, from this precarious position “between herself,” the narrator is able to observe and to situate herself ironically with respect to a structure that apparently excludes her. The strategic position of disability here thus works by highlighting the precarious, absurd, or impossible quality of discursive structures. Palacio’s ironic attacks on figures such as Descartes, here and in his other works of short fiction, do not suggest a direct critical reading of canonical philosophers. Instead they function as a biting commentary on the bourgeois Ecuadorian society of the period, on those who might absorb and unquestioningly accept the most trivialized and condensed versions of the classics, and then recirculate such ideas at social gatherings. He similarly criticizes the generalized fascination with everything European at the expense of an understanding of, or interest in, the nation’s political and economic problems. The doble y única mujer forms part of this privileged society, as her own bizarre reference suggests, when she gives an absurdly specific example of the process of her memory function: “¡Ah! el señor Miller, aquel alemán con quien me encontré en casa de los Sánchez y que explicara con entusiasmo el paralelógramo de las fuerzas aplicado a los choques de vehículos” (36) [Ah! Mister Miller, that German who I met at the Sánchez’s house and who enthusiastically explained the parallelogram of forces applied to automobile crashes]. This, she claims, is the type of phrase that might come from the mouth of “yo-segunda” in response to “yo-primera’s’” faltering attempts to remember an obscure incident. It also gives an indication to the reader that the doble y única mujer moves in the elitist circles of the bourgeois class, thus highlighting Palacio’s own double bind as ambivalent member of the class he most vehemently criticizes.

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The reference to Descartes in the story also helps to situate Palacio’s critique within the context of his readings of major philosophers. The caricature of Cartesian philosophy here expresses the absurdity of a generally accepted hierarchy subordinating body to mind, when the narrator demonstrates its impossible application to her own unique case. The idea of knowledge as clearly rooted in the mind’s dominion over body and nature fails Palacio’s narrator, since, as she puts it, she is unable to explain her “center” or even to define it as entirely material or spiritual. She thus succeeds neither in separating her mind from her body, nor in establishing this mind as superior and fully controlling of the body. Instead, the two are inevitably mixed together and meld into one another, for the “center” is identified in terms of its (impossible) physical location, and its function in unifying the doble y única woman’s subjectivity. Despite this frustrating ambiguity, the woman’s body persists in its own version of a binary split, at once mirroring and denying the philosophically and economically based conventions that have organized her world into dualistic structures. The body negotiates binary oppositions, paradoxically reiterating and problematizing them. In this sense, la doble y única mujer’s position suggests a feminist philosophy of the body, in accordance with Grosz’s account of corporeality as antiessentialist embodied subjectivity, transcending dualisms, such as “the private or the public, self or other, natural or cultural, psychical or social, instinctive or learned, genetically or environmentally determined” (23). Grosz constructs her analysis in partial contrast to the Cartesianist philosophical tradition’s insistence upon the opposition between mind and matter. Patriarchal thought within this tradition has commonly associated the feminine with the corporeal, and the masculine with the abstract or conceptual; Grosz’s work seeks to reconceive a notion of the body as nondichotomous and not reducible to the biological, or to one sex. This notion of corporeality suggests an intersection with Goux’s reading of the limits of what he calls a “paterialist historicity” where “the matter of dialectical materialism, for the first time, can be said to be neither feminine nor masculine, to have no gender, to be worked by contradictions that cannot be sexualized” (242). Yet Goux, unlike Grosz, insists on the passage through a mediating paternal law as access to a utopic matter. Palacio’s doble y única mujer, as fictional embodiment of her author’s philosophical position, points both to the dynamic and contestatory trajectory of Goux’s materialist history and, beyond this schema, to Grosz’s feminist corporeality. Palacio’s fictional “daughter” extends and manipulates the arguments of the author’s essays to reveal the ambivalence of a gendered and fleshly philosophy. In

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giving voice to his philosophical interests and beliefs through fictional characters, Palacio shifts the debate toward the material limitations of lived experience. The doble y única mujer embodies the writer’s thoughts, yet diverts their emphasis by dwelling upon the embodiment of thought as such. Rewritings The double, feminine body is also emblematic of Palacio’s uncertain position, as both rejected and contained by a hypothetical Ecuadorian “literary family” and both within and beyond the logic of an authorial argument. The impasse of the double body defies, yet also invites interpretation, much as David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have argued is the case in literary representations of disability. Yet in this case, textual dependency on corporeal difference seems particularly ironic, because the text articulates a materialist argument, even while borrowing from the metaphors of a represented body to sustain the illusion of materiality in discourse. The double bind is seductive, as evidenced by numerous critical interpretations of Palacio’s text. If such readings run the risk of reducing the double body to a malleable metaphorical function, devoid of material specificity, they nonetheless also offer the promise of productive resignification. New versions of the story, like Palacio’s character herself, point both within and beyond the contours of a presumed originary body. Michael Handelsmann, for example, reads Palacio’s character as a double metaphor. This character expresses, on one hand, the impossibly divided position of women in 1927 Quito, caught between traditional society’s demands and their personal desires for fulfillment. Handelsmann refers to feminist intellectual pioneers such as Zoila Ugarte Landívar and Aurora Estrada y Ayala as possible models for Palacio’s split character (10). Palacio’s character also represents, for Handelsmann, the irrevocably divided condition of the homosexual. This second reading is based on Palacio’s use of the term “hombres”: “Yo no sé lo que sería de mí de estar constituida como la mayoría de los hombres; creo que me volvería loca” (17) [I don’t know what would become of me if I were made like the majority of men; I think I would go crazy] (my translation).15 Handelsmann cites parallel conditions of oppression and conflicted identity affecting both women and homosexuals in 1927 Quito, concluding that the doble y única mujer serves as a metaphor for both. He adds, in passing, that the same character might also suggest a hermaphrodite. In conclusion, he speculates on this “hybrid” woman as a “border identity”

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and as a form of legitimization of the mestiza nation, perhaps suggesting a version of Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of border mestizaje as hybrid. Handelsmann’s emphasis, in his 1995 article, on the hybrid as a figure through which to contest repressive, typically nationalistic politics of homogeneity, reflects his willingness to reclaim Palacio’s character for the purposes of late twentieth-century critical debates on Latin American and feminist identity politics, as well as an adherence to celebratory hybridity. The critic remaps Palacio’s double body onto his own examples of binary dilemmas, those of the woman, the homosexual, and the border identity. This strategy nonetheless does point back to the insistent double bind of Palacio’s dually embodied character, ambivalently both within and outside the lived experience of a double body, within and beyond contextual specificity. An alternative reading of this text, by the Ecuadorian novelist and critic Abdón Ubidia, describes yo-primera as Palacio, and yo-segunda as his mother. Since Palacio was an illegitimate child, rejected by his mother for this reason, each comes to signify the shame of the other, as emphasized in the lines cited by Ubidia: “Me han obligado a cargarme mi duplicación” (282) [I have been obliged to carry my own duplication] (my translation). Unlike Handelsmann’s, this reading takes the “singular” character of the double woman, not as a metaphor for a broad web of further possible meanings, but as the literary embodiment of one of the defining crises of the author’s life history. Also important here is the observation that Palacio’s illegitimacy and his syphilis are two sides of the same coin, so that the author’s body and his personal history and social status become nearly inseparable (273). If, as I have argued, the body of conjoined twins presents an affront to the possibility of affirming a legitimate paternity, then following Ubidia’s reading of the fusion of yo-primera and yo-segunda as the mother-child bond could, in turn, be read as an image of biological, embodied revenge upon the father who has denied legal legitimacy to mother and child. Yet beyond these critical evocations of Palacio’s character, the doble y única mujer has also been resuscitated by the contemporary Ecuadorian writer Velasco Mackenzie, who inserts the figure into his own 1983 short story “El caballero de la mano en el pecho.” Velasco’s story, read in juxtaposition with Palacio’s, creates an extension and a reworking of Palacio’s singular and subversive move, incorporating pieces of the body of the original text into the new version, which becomes at once a twin, cannibal, and ambivalently subversive offspring and assumes the risks that such redoubling entails. A similarly ambivalent dynamic may be at

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work whenever literary texts borrow—implicitly or explicitly—from their predecessors. Yet here, Velasco specifically raises the stakes that Palacio’s double body suggests, by adding a doubled text to an already doubled character and by explicitly politicizing these doubles through a transatlantic and transhistorical encounter. This juxtaposition of texts demonstrates the ongoing—however contested—importance of Palacio’s work within contemporary Ecuadorian literature and cultural history and once again highlights the efficacy of the monstrous double, in its dynamic role as figure of both subversion and alliance. Velasco’s rewriting of Palacio’s double figure also returns the reader to the relentless problem of this body’s uncertain grounding in materiality, its entrapment in a discursive conundrum. The deliberate decontextualization of the body highlights its prior condition as always already suspended between symbolic function and fleshly experience. Without circumventing this dilemma, Velasco’s text proposes a new fictionalization of the doble y única mujer, open to both the conditions of Palacio’s text and an imaginary, extratextual and performative history of characters’ and writers’ bodies. Velasco’s story takes place in Madrid and centers around the encounter between the caballero, a sickly local, who, as the story’s title suggests, never removes his hand from his chest, and four Spanish American tourists. The narrator evokes Palacio’s story as he describes the two women of the group: “[ . . . ] Ana y María, o mejor AnaMaría, como decíamos cuando las mirábamos juntas, pegaditas espalda con espalda, como la doble y única mujer de ese cuento de Pablo Palacio, leído tan lejos y escrito hace tanto tiempo” (42) [Ana and María, or better AnaMaría, as we said when we saw them together, glued back-to-back, like the double and singular woman of that story by Pablo Palacio, read so far away and written so long ago].16 Throughout the story, the narrator continues to reflect on the perceived connection between the two women and on Palacio’s text: “No sé por qué, el argumento del cuento de Pablo Palacio seguía jodiéndome; fui recordando pedazos, párrafos enteros mientras todos callaban: ‘mi espalda, mi atrás, es, si nadie se opone, mi pecho de ella’; parecía que lo estuviera leyendo” (42) [I don’t know why, the plot of Pablo Palacio’s story kept bothering me; I was recalling pieces, entire paragraphs while everyone else was quiet: “my back, my backside, is, if no one opposes, my chest of hers”; it was as if I were reading it]. In the meantime, another unusual body confronts the tourists, that of the caballero, who approaches the group of two men and two women who are drinking in the Parque El Retiro early in the morning. The initial

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encounter is apparently spurred by the caballero’s desire for a drink. While the interchange is friendly, the distance between the parties remains clear and unavoidable, as when the Spaniard asks, “¿De dónde son? Robin se puso en guardia, hubiera querido tenerlo al pie de un árbol, hacer de Guillermo Tell y tumbarle la manzana de la cabeza, pero erró el flechazo y la respuesta se clavó en el centro de la frente: sudamericanos, dijo” (42) [Where are you from? Robin put up his guard; he would have liked to have him at the foot of a tree, be like William Tell and knock the apple from his head, but the shot missed its mark, and the answer hit the center of the forehead: South Americans, he said]. Not surprisingly, given the title, the story focuses on the question of why the caballero persists in keeping his hand at his chest. Initially, this strange manner causes the narrator to wonder if they should trust him, and to speculate on whether he might be a spy, a thief, or a poet “que guarda la pluma como una arma en el chaleco” (41) [who keeps his pen like a weapon in his vest]. Eventually he simply asks, “¿Por qué diablos lleva usted la mano en el pecho?” (46) [Why the hell do you keep your hand at your chest?]. The reply makes the listeners, and reader, witnesses to the violent death of the caballero’s father, shot down in the Plaza Mayor, presumably during or just prior to the Spanish Civil War. This explanation radically interrupts the previous narrative style of the text, “como un corto en el cinematógrafo” (47) [like a cut in a film]. It is the only moment in which the Spaniard speaks more than a few words at a time, and the transition is obvious, both for the shocking details of the scenario he describes and for the particular language employed by the father’s attackers. As the caballero explains, his father died with one hand clutching his chest, and for this reason, his son promised to keep his own hand in the same position: “La mano es por el día . . . como una penitencia” (48) [The hand is for the day . . . like a penance]. Here, the narrator intervenes: “Y el día de hoy fue el día de ayer, dije, metiéndome de golpe en un juego verbal. Sí, respondió, el de su muerte; después habló de la promesa, de los años y los días que pasaría con la mano en el pecho” (48) [And today was yesterday, I said, instantly joining in the word play. Yes, he responded, that of his death; then he spoke of the promise, of the years and the days that he would keep his hand at his chest]. The anecdote leads to a sense of alliance between the tourists and the caballero, particularly in the final scene, when the group walks together:

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Las dos parejas y el caballero adelante, como en una marcha en que la concurrencia desparrama por la Plaza Mayor y desde una calle lateral fluye más gente y hay gritos, bacinazos y todo el mundo tiene los brazos alzados, como ahora nosotros las manos en el pecho. Sin que importe el invierno ni las lejanías, los tragos bebidos, las dobles y únicas mujeres con las que uno se mete en la cama antes de dormir hasta el mediodía. (48) [The two couples and the caballero in front, like a march in which the crowd spills out into the main plaza, and more people flow in from a side street, and there are shouts, the beating of pots and pans, and everyone has their arms in the air, like us now with our hands at our chest. And it doesn’t matter about the winter, the distance, all the drinks we’ve had, the double and singular women with whom one goes to bed before sleeping until noon.]

This imagined scene of demonstration or protest in the Plaza Mayor seems to invoke the site of the father’s death, recreating the solidarity of the resistance movement in which the fallen hero once presumably participated. Here, the tourists join the caballero in his performed disability, “como si fuera manco” (48)[as if he were one-handed], despite that they are a long way from home and perhaps far too young to remember the “día de ayer,” which their penitence memorializes. The conjoined twins of Palacio’s story are another far-away, long-ago reference, a link, at least in the narrator’s mind, between the moment he recounts his trip to Spain and his native Ecuador, between the present day and the era of Palacio’s literary, intellectual, and political activity, approximately 1925 to 1938. The juxtaposition of this strange, Spanish caballero, whose hand only appears to be glued to his chest or perhaps hidden from view where it was severed, with the two female tourists, who only appear to be physically joined at the back, invites a reading of these back-and-forth movements, between the 1980s and the 1920s and 1930s, Spain and America, and between the doubled body and the meanings it might suggest. In addition, the title of the story, “El caballero de la mano en el pecho,” refers the reader to an even more distant past and paternity, to El Greco’s well-known painting of the same title. For this reason, the paternal figure of Velasco’s story also evokes the paradigmatic image of the sixteenth-century Spanish hidalgo. Reference to Spain’s colonial past also serves briefly as a framework for the encounter between the South American tourists and the local Spaniard. The narrator describes his internal reaction when his friend reveals their foreign origin to the Spaniard: “Evoqué América en todo su continente, pensé

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en Colón hincado, en Rodrigo de Triana gritando tierra a la vista, todo de un golpe, como el examen que le rindiera a mi maestra de sexto grado en la escuela municipal donde estudié” (43) [I evoked the whole American continent, I thought of Columbus kneeling, of Rodrigo de Triana shouting “land ho,” all at once, like in the test my sixth grade teacher gave me in the public school where I studied]. The Spaniard seems to exert an infantilizing effect on the narrator here. The experience of explaining oneself, in this case, to a figure who suddenly and absurdly becomes the emblem of a colonizing power, and the living embodiment of a history lesson, inverts the narrator’s gaze back upon himself so that he appears to himself through the eyes of his interlocutor. At the same time, through his own, now uncanny eyes, the narrator becomes the self-conscious child, repeating his lesson at the command of a schoolteacher. The encounter thus generates a brief instance of autoscopy in which the subject sees himself from the outside or, in other terms, observes his own double. Double Text The encounter suggests a sense of alliance but also a profound asymmetry, a “today” that is, and is not, “yesterday,” an instant friendship only partially cemented through a shared bottle. Similarly, the son’s gesture mimics that of his dying father but cannot replicate it, implying a fragile and uncertain unity. This oscillation evokes the doble y única mujer’s precarious position in Palacio’s text, while it also repeats the earlier text’s dilemma of the double as caught between gestures of subversion and repetitive acquiescence. Such apparent uncertainty is of course symptomatic of many versions of the literary figure of the double, as reflected in critical approaches ranging from Homi Bhabha’s reading of mimicry to Girard’s notion of rivalry. In this case, the characters in Palacio’s and Velasco’s stories enact their doubled quality, in part by glancing nervously between Europe and America. Yet in each instance the distance between continents collapses, as Velasco’s tourists find themselves face-to-face with a textbook Spaniard and the doble y única mujer describes the elite and europeanized quality of her social world. Here the specular relations between metropolis and former colony enact a rearrangement of the transatlantic map. Through this imaginary folding, oppositional encounters become sites of ambivalent fusion, as potential victims appear to become complicit in the threats that confront them. According to this reading, doubleness risks enacting conditions of redundant balance and stability that allow no possibility

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for change, while a minor shift of inflection transforms repetition into mockery and subversion. The efficacy of the gesture is, apparently, always uncertain. Yet in the juxtaposition of Palacio’s and Velasco’s texts of doubling, the impossible and retroactive quality of the authors’ encounter—via their characters—shifts the impasse toward a new space of fictionalization, beyond the repetitive grounds of a predetermined narrative. This fusion of America with Europe, past with present, in an enigmatic, drunken encounter, reveals the split positions of both tourists and locals. Doubling occurs here, not as a prescripted Latin American mimicry of the Spaniard, but as the embodiment of a newly imagined dialogue between characters and, more specifically, between Palacio and the Spanish caballero’s father. The mise en scène of Velasco’s story superimposes a narrator obsessed with Ecuadorian fiction of the 1920s and 1930s upon a somewhat imaginary 1980s Madrid, complete with its standard tourist highlights. The narrator’s self-construction through the eyes of the enigmatic Spaniard and through his internal monologues quoting Palacio both fuses and divides these two semi-imaginary figures of historical authority, leaving the narrator himself suspended somewhere in the balance. The dobles y únicas mujeres of Velasco’s story, of course, reflect this ambiguously divided condition. These women, not quite conjoined yet not quite separate from one another, allow for a strategy of oscillation, as does the caballero, between two and one, performance and corporeal “reality.” The back-and-forth motion both links and severs the ties between one party and another, one text and another, creating an asymmetrical model for alliance through ongoing distortion. The resistance through doubling that takes place in Velasco’s text works through a refusal to adhere to the fixed limitations of geographic and temporal distance. There is no trite expression of political unity and friendship here, but rather a strangely ambivalent encounter, a performative grafting of body parts and temporalities, a solidarity that rehearses its own asymmetries yet remains impossibly balanced between here and there, then and now, one and two. If these two stories share the common feature of describing perceptions of corporeal difference, it is also the link between the two that highlights that difference and, in turn, creates a strategically joined double text. This joining takes place when Velasco’s narrator directly cites lines from Palacio’s text, thus incorporating segments of one textual body into another. Such textual phagocytosis, or cannibalism, occurs through the narrator’s internal monologue, as when he quotes Palacio: “mi espalda, mi atrás, es,

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si nadie se opone, mi pecho de ella” (33). The structure of the text within the text, emphasized by the narrator’s assertion, “parecía que lo estuviera leyendo” (42), is compounded by the theme of the cited text, namely, the double body of the woman, or, the bodies of the conjoined twins. If one twin, “yo-primera,” dominates, as we have seen, through the authority of her self-assigned title, then one might read her “twin,” or “yo-segunda,” as partially incorporated into her body, half-cannibalized but still visible to the viewer of the body’s surface. The notion of twinship, whether twins are actually conjoined or merely share the space of a single womb becomes irrevocably tied to the concept of cannibalism. Hillel Schwartz details this link in his book The Culture of the Copy in a discussion on the “myth of the vanishing twin.” This myth is perhaps best expressed in a passage Schwartz cites from Michel Tournier’s novel, Gemini: “Every pregnant woman carries two children in her womb . . . but the stronger will not tolerate the presence of a brother with whom he will have to share everything. He strangles him in his mother’s belly and, having strangled him, he eats him, then comes into the world alone, stained with that original crime, doomed to solitariness and betrayed by the stigma of his monstrous size” (Schwartz 20). According to Schwartz, Tournier took his inspiration from medical studies that suggested that “twin-material” could be absorbed into the body of the surviving fetus. In the case of the doble y única mujer, such extreme “cannibalism” has not taken place, yet the figure of the double body, in which one side is the stronger and dominant, reflects a similar pattern of competition and partial absorption where two women (“yo” and “ella”) become one (“yoprimera” and “yo-segunda”). In Velasco’s story, the partial absorption of the elements of one text into another is performed with sufficient selfconsciousness to allow for the appearance of clear lines demarcating the points where Palacio’s text protrudes from the surface. This obviously not only takes place at moments of direct citation but also when the narrator thinks about Palacio and his story and compares “AnaMaría” to the doble y única mujer. The cannibalism implicit in the doble y única mujer and in the juxtaposition of Palacio’s and Velasco’s texts suggests the theme of Latin American avant-garde antropofagia as a metaphor for cultural borrowings, or absorption, especially between the Americas and Europe. Palacio participated more explicitly in this tradition, with his story “El antropófago” appearing in the same collection with “La doble y única mujer.” The recycled theme of the double woman in Velasco’s story also recirculates this notion of

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cannibalism, producing links between stories of different eras, as well as a partial absorption (or cannibalism) of one into the other.17 The cannibalistic backdrop to this intertwining of texts and histories also sheds further light on the violent imperatives structuring the mechanisms of doubling. This subversive violence works not only through the rivalry inherent in twinship, as in the “prenatal” example above, but also as an attack on the father or other figure of authority. In the case of Velasco’s text, cannibalistic absorption of an earlier writer’s words occurs as an instance of copying and is thus both threat and homage to this father figure. The figure of the cannibal in Latin American cultural history, as discussed in Chapter 1, points to a history of tropological substitution and absence, as well as to a departure from this absence, a signaling toward the material specificity of communities and subjects. Velasco’s indirect reference to the discourse of antropofagia evokes avant-garde writers’— most obviously Oswald de Andrade’s—incorporation of the cannibalizing gesture as a creatively subversive technique, while at once indicating the complexity of the cannibal’s broader history. In addition, Velasco’s text, in combination with Palacio’s, at once begs the question of the critical efficacy of the cannibalistic gesture as a mode of rewriting the body of the doble y única mujer, years later and far from home. Does this particular instance of citation and evocation add to or detract from Palacio’s textual politics and his character’s critical negotiation of double corporeality as disability? Velasco’s incorporation of Palacio’s work reiterates and expands upon the family psychodrama of the doble y única mujer. In this case the familial bonds extend between Spain and Ecuador, as well as between two generations of characters and writers, thus suggesting the underpinning of a transatlantic imitative model. Imitative cannibalism, as the Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz would suggest in a 1986 text, may share some of the same problems as the application of Derridean or Foucauldian theories to Latin American realities. Questioning and ultimately undermining hierarchies between so-called originals and copies, as Schwarz describes, might appear to relieve Latin American national imaginaries of an implied backwardness. The Latin American bourgeois imitation of European models would no longer indicate servility or inadequacy, according to a structure now free from a tyrannical imperative to originality. Yet, as Schwarz emphasizes, the dismantling of the original-copy hierarchy still fails to account for the historical and class-determined specificity of Latin American imitative relationships with Europe (6–7).18

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Palacio’s doble y única mujer, as I have noted, appears to be a member of a privileged class. In the story, European cultural influence emerges through brief reference to a German friend and through an emphasis on a philosophical tradition that the protagonist largely rejects and mocks. Yet the imitative model of transatlantic cultural cannibalism is also deflected onto the double body of the woman herself, according to the model of asymmetrically self-consuming conjoined twins, described by Tournier and Schwartz. The consumption of the Other, typical of discourses of antropofagia, becomes instead a self-consuming body, insistent upon its own materiality, rather than on an unattainable, absent, and originary model. Velasco’s text, in juxtaposition with Palacio’s, provides an alternative reading of the double and cannibalizing body and text, one that remains aware of political history in its creation of a radically precarious corporeal alliance. In this case, “cannibalism” occurs not as the colonized’s absorption and attempted subversion of a metropolitan model but as the staged resuscitation of one Ecuadorian writer by a second, decades later and far from home. The new text underlines the repeating pitfall of the doubling gesture, which threatens to trap its protagonists in a disempowering equanimity, postponing distinctions between here and there, then and now, us and them. But in the same movement, Velasco’s double maintains a scene of performed political alliance, transcending historical and geographical reality while remaining faithful to Palacio’s politics, as well as to his literary “singular” doubling strategies. Rather than undoing or overlooking the historical specificity of colonialist and class-based oppression grounding the conditions of imitation, Velasco proposes a rewriting of this history and imitation through a restructuring of the lines dividing metropolis from colony, and father from children. In this case the father figure may be the Ecuadorian Palacio, as well as the Spanish hero, while the roles of the children are similarly played by those of each nationality. Velasco’s textual cannibalism emerges through a partially resisted homage paid to Palacio, in the lines his narrator can’t get out of his head. Like the Spaniard’s martyred father, Palacio becomes an emblematic father figure, at once a source of inspiration, and a compulsion to repeat his memorable gestures, whether real or fictional. The hesitant alliance between the caballero and the tourists is forged through a parallel between these paternal figures and, at the same time, through the enactment of violence inflicted upon them. In this case, the violence inherent in the relationship between doubles, or twins, is deflected momentarily onto a father figure who bears these blows and thus prolongs his sons’ continuous rivalry and unity.19 Palacio’s story emphasizes the specifically female body of the doble

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y única mujer, and Velasco resuscitates the same figure through reference to his predecessor’s work and through the brief evocation of two female characters, Ana y María (or Anamaría). The uncertain guilt of the “children” oscillates between assuming and denying responsibility for an everpresent paternal death. Along the same lines, the Spanish and Ecuadorian “fathers” are joined in an imaginary alliance, performed retroactively by their children. The asymmetry and fragility of this alliance are emphasized by the displaced role of the women whose inseparability reflects both the narrator’s literary fantasy of a double-bodied woman and his own body’s inability to forge the temporal and geographic bridge he desires. The juxtaposition of these texts also highlights the uncertain role of the father’s corporeality, situated somewhere between his rivaling offspring. Thus, rather than strictly emphasizing female bodies as counterpoints to masculine authorial discourse, both texts also point to the question of the father’s body. In Palacio’s story, the reader learns of the father’s death by suicide, while Velasco creates a Spanish father figure whose violent martyring will be reenacted by his son, as well as by the Ecuadorian characters who appear on the scene. As I have described, Palacio’s female character explicitly reiterates parts of her author’s (or “father’s”) viewpoints, as shown through comparison of the short story with Palacio’s philosophical writings. At the same time, the protagonist shifts her author’s philosophical focus via her uniquely and doubly embodied experience. Finally, it is the body of the father himself that heightens the tension of Palacio’s role in Velasco’s doubled narrative. Both texts throw the question of paternity into an uncertain oscillation. In the case of Velasco’s story, the death of the father is both singular and final, as historically marked fact, and endlessly repeated through the gesture of his son with his hand at his chest. The Ecuadorian visitors extend this kinship by imitating the son’s gesture, thus entering the game of alternately suspending and terminating the filial bond. The violent polarity of ambivalent kinship thus works as an unexpected bridge between two continents and distinct historical moments. And rather than a transatlantic model of direct imitation, the text enacts a combined structure, suggesting both violence to a historically distant father figure, and the evocation of the father as disabled, corporeal presence. A return to the body of the father allows for a reconfiguration of the paternal role, asymmetrical to the authoritarian polarity of the father–offspring dyad, as well as to the opposition between metropolis and colony. For Goux, beyond the limits of a “paterialist historicity,” we find woman as utopic matter, as distinct from the maternal (242–44). Yet in the combined texts

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of Palacio and Velasco Mackenzie, it is also the father’s reconfigured body that ultimately challenges paternal law. The new image of a paternal corporeality in this case depends upon Velasco’s geographic and historical bridging and, indirectly, on Palacio’s role in a retroactively imagined and performed history. Resuscitations While the alliance Velasco’s text performs between Palacio and the leftist resistant groups of the Spanish Civil War is imaginary, it is not particularly far-fetched. Palacio was politically active as founding member of the Ecuadorian Socialist party during his career as writer and professor of philosophy. His experimental, avant-garde style might easily have linked him to European and international literary and artistic movements of the same period, many members of which in turn allied themselves with the Republican cause toward the start of the war. But in fact, despite Palacio’s political activity within Ecuador, no evidence suggests his direct involvement with any Spanish political or literary movement or group. Unlike many other Spanish American avant-garde writers, he did not specifically identify himself with international artistic movements, although he did publish some of his work in magazines outside of Ecuador. By the mid-1930s, Palacio had largely abandoned his literary career in favor of his duties as professor of philosophy, as well as his political activity and essays. Although he remained active as a professor until his institutionalization in 1940, the clear onset of his mental instability occurred one year after the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. From here his mental health deteriorated, perhaps due to an advanced case of syphilis, leading to his death in a psychiatric hospital in 1947.20 Writing in 1947, Carlos Manuel Espinosa paid homage to Palacio in an essay titled, “Un hombre que murió dos veces” [A man who died twice]: Estremece pensar cómo pudo resistir tantos años de doloroso martirio un cuerpo de tan fina y endeble estructura como el suyo. Pablo Palacio fue el caso de un hombre que murió dos veces. Hay una triste coincidencia en este punto, en cuantos han escrito sobre la prematura desaparición del escritor inolvidable. Primero fue la sombra turbia que nubló la claridad de su mente en los instantes en que era más potente su actividad creadora. Pablo Palacio sufrió entonces su primera muerte. Su muerte espiritual, más cruel que la otra. Murió, en plena juventud, para la literatura, para la filosofía, para la lucha. Después ya no fue vida la suya. (47–48)

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[One trembles to think how such a fine and weakly structured body could have resisted so many years of painful martyrdom. Pablo Palacio was the case of a man who died twice. There is a sad coincidence on this point, in all who have written about the premature disappearance of the unforgettable writer. First came the dark shadow that clouded the clarity of his mind when his creative activity was the most potent. Pablo Palacio then suffered his first death. His spiritual death, more cruel than the other. He was dead, in the prime of his youth, to the worlds of literature, philosophy, and struggle. After that, his was not a life] (my translation).

The first of Palacio’s “two deaths” was due to mental health problems, although as Espinosa implies here, the onset of mental illness may, in fact, have overlapped with the period of Palacio’s most brilliant literary production. The mid-1930s also spelled the end of Ecuador’s vanguardia movement, initially signaled by the 1930 publication of Los que se van, by Joaquín Gallegos Lara, Enrique Gil Gilbert, and Demetrio Aguilera Malta, and the subsequent rise of social realist literature in Ecuador (Robles, “El anhelo,” 175). The same essay by Espinosa includes a 1933 letter from Palacio to Espinosa, in which the former defends his 1932 novel, Vida del ahorcado, from Lara’s social realist critique. This period, incidentally, coincides with the political volatility and violence leading up to the start of the Spanish Civil War, and thus perhaps, as Velasco’s text implies, with the final days of the fictional caballero’s martyred father. Espinosa’s essay emphasizes the circumstances of Palacio’s “double death,” combining a nostalgic and poignant tone with a celebration of the writer’s achievements. The essay also includes part of an epistolary exchange that took place between the two men, regarding the possible publication of Vida del ahorcado in Spain. As Espinosa explains, “Le indiqué que acaso alguna editorial española, con la que yo mantenía relaciones, podía incorporarla en su plan de publicaciones”(49) [I mentioned to him that perhaps some Spanish publishing house with which I had contact could include his novel in its publication plans], yet adds, “El libro de Pablo Palacio no pudo ver la luz en España” (51) [Pablo Palacio’s book never appeared in Spain]. The fact that Palacio’s work was not published in Spain appears here in the context of a melancholic reference to the writer’s “two deaths.” Espinosa’s narration of the might-have-been, therefore, implicitly links Palacio’s illness with the death of the Ecuadorian vanguardia at the hands of social realism, with the author’s failure to publish in Spain, and hence to establish intellectual ties with that country and, finally, with Palacio’s alienation from his native Loja: “Palacio no regresó más a su tierra natal” (53) [Palacio never returned to the land

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of his birth]. In Espinosa’s essay, the series of losses does not serve to diminish Palacio’s image as a successful and acclaimed writer but, on the contrary, to augment his prestige via access to the melancholic and, in turn, to increase the reader’s sense of loss. Here, the writer’s potential ties to Spain are cut short by undetermined circumstance, while in the same instance his political compromise is effaced—as Espinosa implies—due to mental health problems. In fact, in the same letter in which Palacio discusses the possible fate of his novel in Spanish publishing houses, he makes ironic reference to Espinosa’s political activity in his native Loja: “Ustedes han estado haciendo la revolución, pillos. Cuando triunfen, me avisan. Antes no, porque yo soy un hombre ocupado” (50). [You rascals have been making a revolution. When you triumph, let me know. But not before, because I’m a busy man]. Palacio, as a doubly dead writer, occupies a unique place in Ecuadorian literary history, both buried for his failure to conform to national expectations of political compromise (as understood by the social realists) and repeatedly resuscitated as a uniquely talented vanguardista of international and national prestige whose radical politics refused the limitations of prescripted models. Velasco’s resuscitation of Palacio occurs in this context and, more specifically, thanks to the sociopolitical concerns of many writers of Velasco’s generation who looked to the vanguardia for inspiration. Yet Velasco’s story does not merely celebrate Palacio as a writer and intellectual but, in this case, is particularly concerned with the body of the writer, as juxtaposed with that of the doble y única mujer, as well as with those of Velasco’s own fictional characters.21 Emphasis on writerly and paternal corporeality indicates a return to the initial dilemma of the doble y única mujer, caught ambivalently between the materiality of her unique body(ies), and the expression of her author’s politics and philosophy. Yet focus on the body of the writer here unmoors this apparent separation, as body and father are collapsed into one at the new scene of authorial presence. Palacio’s reconfigured body also implicitly transcends the limitations of gender, as well as the imperative to duality, as authorial presence becomes one with the presence of the doble y única mujer.22 The story that Velasco creates in resuscitating the doble y única mujer is, of course, a hypothetical, literary one, the rewriting of a reality cut short and diverted by Palacio’s deteriorating health and increasing insanity. Velasco slides, in his story, from the apparently literal double monstrosity of Palacio’s text toward a performative gesture, a textual redoubling of the corporeal double. The Spanish caballero is not, of course, his father, nor is his hand truly pinned to his chest, and AnaMaría are not physically

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attached, even if they speak in one voice. Palacio’s intellectual or literal participation in the Spanish Civil War and his Ecuadorian readers’ subsequent pride in this collective past are similarly and necessarily imaginary. The efficacy of Palacio’s and Velasco’s now-fused gestures of doubling lies in the regeneration of sociopolitical crisis, as a crisis and a political allegiance capable of performing themselves both as and beyond a given text or a given body. Palacio’s absence from the scene of transatlantic solidarity is refigured as the double body of his doble y única mujer and as her (and his) syphilis and mental illness that cut their stories short. Ironically, this double figure, now marked by the strategically performed disability of the Spanish caballero’s hand at the chest, reappears years later in a scene of commemoration, allowing a critically active role for Palacio at the site of a political crisis and heroic resistance he would never actually experience in the flesh.

CHAPTER 3

Corporeal Difference as Ethnicity Body Riddles Stories of corporeal difference often present the reader with some kind of riddle. Why is the caballero’s hand so persistently pinned to his chest? How and why does Pablo Palacio’s La doble y única mujer both reflect and trouble her author’s philosophical obsessions? What purpose do such conundrums serve within the project of a given text? As David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have argued in their analysis of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, Oedipus’s disability, the result of the pinning of his ankles in infancy, allows him to solve the sphinx’s riddle, since he can link his own limp to the image of a man who walks with a cane (Mitchell and Snyder 61). Disability here provides the personal mark that binds Oedipus’s actions to his past, as well as the metaphorical link between individual story and overarching symbolism, “humanity’s incapacity to fathom the dictums of the gods” (62). Thus the classic riddle of the sphinx turns out to be the riddle of disability in narrative par excellence. In a similar sense, as discussed in Chapter 2, the caballero’s enigmatic gesture of pinning his hand to his chest, as if he were one-handed, creates the riddle that ultimately joins Jorge Velasco Mackenzie’s text to Palacio’s and attempts to resolve the dilemma of corporeal difference that is both metaphorical and insistent on its own materiality. I emphasize the attempt rather than an actual resolution here, since the story of disability presented in Chapter 2 maintains this dilemma in suspension, as a hypothetical bridge among texts, bodies, and discursive sites. The implicit narrative of the freak show traditionally has borrowed from the structure of riddling. As the infamous title of P. T. Barnum’s What Is It? spectacle, described in Chapter 1, suggests, indeterminacy both defers meaning and invites the viewer to engage the show by positing her own

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answers. In many cases, the cultural work of the freak show is bound up in the riddle, and hence in the demand for a meaning. For example, Coco Fusco’s account of Maximo and Bartola, microcephalic twins from El Salvador who were displayed as “the last of the Ancient Aztecs” throughout the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century, clarifies the function of the spectacle. The show explicitly equated unusual disability with racial otherness; significantly, initial success of this particular show followed on the heels of the United States’ annexation of a large part of Mexico (Fusco, English is Broken, 47). In this case, the answer to the riddle of the displayed body’s meaning is frighteningly simple and irrevocably tied to an ongoing history of racist politics. Similarly, the literary representation of corporeal difference frequently highlights a history of stereotypes that conflate disability or deformity with particular ethnicities, races, and cultures.1 Yet performance, whether in literature or spectacle, tends to rely upon the juncture between the riddle’s indeterminacy and the body’s seemingly insistent meaning, as would be the case in the What Is It? spectacle. Similarly, in the case of Palacio’s doble y única mujer, the performance of doubleness relies upon the repeating conundrum of a body that is paradoxically both self-explanatory, self-contained, and more than meets the eye. Natanael, a circus “midget” in Mexican novelist David Toscana’s Santa María del Circo, approaches a similar conundrum when he states, “Si no fuera por mi estatura, nadie se daría cuenta de que soy un enano” (6) [If it weren’t for my height, no one would know I’m a midget] (2).2 The statement causes the midget to become the butt of other characters’ jokes, as it is altered and repeated in different contexts throughout the novel. A variety of unusual bodies stand out in this novel, thanks to the text’s attention to physical detail and to its evocation of freak-show and circus history. References include General Tom Thumb, a famous midget who worked with Barnum; Lucía Zarate, a Mexican midget, reputedly the world’s smallest ever at 2 kilos; and Eugen Sandow, performing body builder and “strongman.” Yet as Natanael’s line makes evident, the unique differences of body and character transcend the obvious level of physical description. What, then, is the condition to which he refers, and why does corporeal difference here demand answers that character and text cannot, or will not, fully explain? Critical approaches to corporeal difference have frequently emphasized the body’s malleable narrative functions. As Rosemarie Garland Thomson writes, “Never simply itself, the exceptional body betokens something else, becomes revelatory, sustains narrative, exists socially in a realm

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of hyper-representation. Indeed the word monster—perhaps the earliest and most enduring name for the singular body—derives from the Latin monstra, meaning to warn, show, or sign, and which has given us the modern verb demonstrate” (Freakery 3). And for Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “any kind of alterity can be inscribed across (constructed through) the monstrous body, but for the most part monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual” (7). The uncertain position of the body in narrative allows for the elaboration of a story, the seductive possibility of a definitive conclusion; it is, above all, a means to continue speaking or, in the context of showmanship, a way to keep the entry fees flowing. Emphasis on the seemingly open-ended quality of the nexus between body and meaning risks overlooking the specificity of histories that have collapsed the two into one. On the other hand, an insistence upon irrevocable corporeal meanings will tend to repeat the gestures through which alterity is fixed according to predetermined visible (racial, ethnic) characteristics. This, apparently, is the dilemma Natanael faces when he attempts to define—or to avoid defining—his identity in terms of his body’s physical features. To state that being a midget is far more than a matter of height would suggest that physical features are only secondary, optional elements within a more complex identity or, perhaps on the contrary, that extremely short stature as specifically corporeal identity is so pervasive that it, in fact, infiltrates and defines every aspect of the self, as primary, inescapable fact. Does the body define the self, or does the self manifest physical characteristics that occasionally reveal—or appear to reveal—an otherwise enigmatic identity? The question points to ongoing debates in identity politics that have been particularly significant in the disability studies scholarship of recent years. Lennard Davis describes the destabilization of identity categories, such as race, ethnicity, gender, and disability, in the context of the recent history of science and postmodernism, and argues for a “dismodernism” in which “identity is not fixed, but malleable” (Bending Over 26). Yet many activists and scholars from the disability studies and disability rights movement do affirm the importance of disability as a political and social category. As Simi Linton writes, “I am not willing or interested in erasing the line between disabled and nondisabled people, as long as disabled people are devalued and discriminated against, and as long as naming the category serves to call attention to that treatment” (13). In the case of the scene described above, however, the question comes down to how, exactly, a given identity may be claimed, whether via visible, corporeal markers or otherwise. For

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Linton, citing Carol Gill, “claiming disability” as identity requires that one “present himself/herself to the world at large as a disabled person” (13). Toscana’s character fulfills this requirement, yet the novel also complicates the identity equation suggested by enigmatically both denying and insisting upon the body’s meaning as more than meets the eye. The hypothetical dilemma of Natanael’s family origins and ethnicity, as I will argue in this chapter, parallels this same ambivalent structure. In contrast, characters in Mario Vargas Llosa’s El hablador seem to have no qualms about associating corporeal difference with a specified ethnic identity. Saúl, a Peruvian ethnologist who studies the indigenous Machiguengas and eventually becomes an hablador, or storyteller, among them, is half-Jewish. As the narrator speculates about Saúl, Creo que su identificación con la pequeña comunidad errante y marginal de la Amazonía tuvo algo que ver—mucho que ver—, como conjeturaba su padre, con el hecho de que fuera judío, miembro de otra comunidad también errante y marginal a lo largo de su historia, una paria entre las sociedades del mundo en las que, como los machiguengas en el Perú, vivió insertada pero no mezclada ni nunca aceptada del todo. (233) [I believe that his identification with this small, marginal, nomadic community had—as his father conjectured—something to do with the fact that he was Jewish, a member of another community which had also been a wandering, marginal one throughout its history, a pariah among the world’s societies, like the Machiguengas in Peru, grafted onto them, yet not assimilated and never entirely accepted.] (243)3

Saúl is also explicitly defined throughout the novel by a large red birthmark that covers half of his face. Thus, the half-Jew is at once half-marked and eventually half-indigenous by association, since in becoming an hablador, he must join the Machiguenga society, yet his ethnicity and cultural heritage will inevitably limit his identification with the group. As if to underscore the half-and-half message even further, the narrative oscillates consistently, chapter by chapter, between the voice of Saúl’s classmate in Lima and that of an indigenous hablador. The juxtaposition of the work of a relatively young novelist from northern Mexico with a novel by one of the leading figures of Latin America’s literary Boom, as an approach to the dilemma of corporeal difference and ethnic identity in the text, implies a comparative look at historicized modes of Latin American novelistic production. While such an approach

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is not my primary intention, one might certainly consider a broader context of shifting tendencies in the representation of corporeality, from the Boom to the present. The hypothesis that some major texts of the Boom and thereafter tend toward a relentless process of self-erasure in which the subject confronts a history that both frames and denies the subject’s place, and its embodiment, echoes the structure I emphasize here in my reading of El hablador.4 Yet rather than ascribing fixed tendencies to the literary production of given generations, I focus on the particularities of these two novels as such to elaborate a critical strategy that might operate beyond the confines of temporal and national boundaries. The difference in narrative strategies between these two texts highlights a central dilemma of corporeal difference and ethnicity in narrative, whereby a possible equation between the two elements is either insistently emphasized or simultaneously insinuated and avoided. Specifically, the juxtaposition of the two novels allows for an oblique approach to the figure of the Jewish body in narrative in which Jewishness rehearses both a hypercorporeal and an ambivalently delineated status. I do not aim to read these novels as Latin American–Jewish texts, nor to argue for a fundamental Jewishness of their plots, styles, or structures. Evidently, neither Vargas Llosa nor Toscana has identified himself as a Jewish writer, nor even as a writer particularly engaged with Jewish traditions, history, or faith. In reading the protagonists of both novels as Jewish, I examine the productively flexible nexus of corporeality and ethnicity through which the textual body may continue to insist on shifting its potential meanings. This chapter is therefore founded on a critically useful, though unprovable hypothesis, namely, that Natanael, the protagonist of Toscana’s novel, is of crypto-Jewish origins. While Vargas Llosa requires little introduction, Toscana is a younger writer, often classified as part of the Narrativa del norte. He was born in Monterrey, and many of his novels take place in small-town, semidesertic landscapes of northern Mexico. The publication of his novels, such as Estación Tula, Santa María del Circo, Duelo por Miguel Pruneda, El último lector, and El ejército iluminado, over the last decade has earned him national and international recognition, as well as several important prizes and recent inclusion in the infamous Generación del Crack.5 Explicit representations of corporeality and disability appear in several of Toscana’s novels, from vividly described circus fenómenos [freaks] featured in Santa María del Circo to the obsessively detailed attention to cadavers in Duelo por Miguel Pruneda to the central roles played by cognitively disabled

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children (“cinco niños retrasados mentales” [sic]), who attempt to recapture the state of Texas for Mexico in El ejército iluminado. The setting of Santa María del Circo is an abandoned mining town originally known as Sierra Vieja, in the desert of Zacatecas, a region that shares historical and topographical characteristics with Toscana’s native Nuevo León.6 The novel evokes the region’s Jewish and converso history as inextricably bound to the sociocultural weight of persistent marks of ethnic difference—however indeterminate those marks might prove to be. Seymour B. Leibman writes of the colonial history of crypto-Jews in Nuevo León as impacted by relative freedom from molestation by the Inquisition, as the Holy Office was less effective in areas distant from Mexico City. “This freedom lasted for over 100 years and contributed to Jewish assimilation. Many of the leading families that are now Catholic or Protestant are descended from the crypto-Jews who came to Monterrey, Linares, and other towns beginning about 1640” (292). Although Toscana did not intentionally create Natanael as a Jewish character, crypto-Jewish history undoubtedly marks the landscape of the region as a repeating mode of alterity beneath the surface of effective assimilation. As Toscana has stated in regard to Santa Maria del Circo, “A Natanael no lo veo como judío, pero vivo en una tierra fundada por judíos conversos (mentirosamente conversos), por eso es natural que haya esta mezcla judío-católica” (Re: Santa María del Circo) [I don’t see Natanael as a Jew, but I live in a region founded by converted Jews (falsely converted), so it’s natural that there is this Jewish-Catholic mix] (my translation). Jewish or partially Jewish identity often cannot be proven in contexts of crypto-Jewish history and assimilation, while in many instances antiSemitism continues to create resistance to projects of potentially unearthing a “tainted” history. And even in cases in which genealogy can be proven, the results may or may not be significant. As the Brazilian-Jewish writer Moacyr Scliar points out, “De qualquer forma, a condicao judaica nao depende de uma analise, de DNA. Resulta de um sentimento de pertenencia” (26) [In any case, the Jewish condition does not depend on DNA analysis. It comes from a feeling of belonging] (my translation). Yet in situations of extreme anti-Semitism, supposed racial markers of Jewishness come to the forefront. Such is the case in the decades following the Jews’ expulsion from Spain or “voluntary” conversion to Christianity. The Inquisition continued to persecute converted Jews, perhaps under the suspicion that they continued their Jewish religious practices in secret, or for economic reasons, since their property could then be confiscated. But as Benzion Netanyahu claims, racism was the strongest reason: “The

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marranos, who were all offspring of Jews, retained the racial makeup of their forebears. Hence ethnically they were what they (or their ancestors) had been before their conversion to Christianity; in other words, they were Jews” (982). Still, as riddles of corporeal difference teach us, proving a final answer to identity questions may not be the point. I do not propose to “prove” the Jewishness of text, character, or writer by any means; instead, I read Santa María del Circo as if it were a Jewish text, narrated by a crypto-Jewish protagonist. In contrast to El hablador in which Saúl’s Jewishness is inseparable from his characterization and from descriptions of his body, Santa María del Circo opens toward a reading of corporeal difference based in an ambivalent refusal of delineated ethnic boundaries. In a sense, this dual reading rehearses the question of a Latin American– Jewish literature as such. As Saúl Sosnowski has written, As we join terms such as Latin American and Jewish with a hyphen we are struck by its implications: They conform to different historical and political realities and, above all, to different public perceptions of what each should mean. Associations to the commonality of definitions of Latin America are just as inappropriate as the perceptions of the Jew that appear in all too many Western literary characterizations. Within the mainstream of Western discourse, and until very recently, both Jewish and Latin American conveyed the notion of the outsider, of the troublesome presence that incommodated with his awkwardness, his resilience, and his tacit accusations against wrongdoers. With varying degrees, admittedly, these are images of refusal: refusal against odds of survival, against historical complacency, against peaceful acceptance of repression. (298)

Here, an implied reading public is surprised at the hyphenation of two supposedly distinct groups and realities, while at the same time, a series of generalized perceptions eventually conflates the two categories. Within this posited Western, mainstream context, both Jews and Latin Americans are outsiders, liminal figures who struggle to survive and who suffer as victims at the hands of a majority. And in the case of Latin American and Spanish-speaking contexts in general, as Ilán Stavans has argued, until the early twentieth century publication of Alberto Gerchunoff ’s The Jewish Gauchos, literature by Jews in Spanish did not tend to celebrate Jewishness, hence the publication of openly Jewish, Spanish texts is a relatively recent phenomenon.7 In Vargas Llosa’s text, it is not the generic Latin American, but rather the Machiguenga that figures as oppressed outsider, partially equivalent

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to the Jewish Saúl. In Toscana’s novel, Natanael conforms to the notion of the outsider, the survivor, the image of refusal, yet the question of his identity is left hanging in the balance. “If it weren’t for my height, no one would know I’m a midget” seems to imply that the speaker might also claim an identity that has no visible signs. If people generally recognize identity using only the clues of physical appearance, the flipside to this supposition is that any identity lacking a visible, corporeal manifestation will never be recognized as such. Natanael effectively accuses his listeners of only paying attention to the obvious, the surface. In the equation of identity, we are left with only the hyphen itself, an equation cancelled on both sides, for neither the body nor the hidden features to which it might point truly defines the speaker. A hypothetical “Jewish reading” of the character would fill in the blanks, coding the ambivalent structure of body-as-identity within the historically defined contours of Jewishness, through readings of both anti-Semitism and of Jewish law. Yet the provisional nature of Jewishness here serves to underline the forced quality of many associations between bodies and identities. A hypothetical Jewishness, as I will propose in the following section, allows the body to tell its riddle without foreclosing an openness to other, future meanings. Santa María del Circo For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or any thing superfluous, Or a man that is brokenfooted, or brokenhanded, Or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken. —Leviticus 21:18–20

These lines from the Old Testament, God’s instructions to Moses, prohibit those with specific corporeal differences from making offerings to the Lord. They are also bitterly cited by Natanael, the circus midget of Toscana’s novel: “Porque ningún varón en el cual haya defecto se acercará; varón ciego o cojo, o mutilado, o sobrado, o varón que tenga quebradura de pie o rotura de mano, o jorobado, o enano, o que tenga nube en el ojo, o que tenga sarna o empeine, o testículo machacado” (246–47) [No man who has any defect shall approach: a blind man, or a lame man, or he who has a disfigured face, or any deformed limb; or a man who has a broken foot or broken hand, or a hunchback or a dwarf; or one who has a defect in his eye or ezcema or scabs or crushed testicles]. Santa María del Circo

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describes the lives of several circus performers after the circus owners, the Mantecón brothers, have an argument and decide to go their separate ways, dividing performers, animals, and other property into two groups. Don Ernesto, apparently the dominant brother, claims most of the valuable items and performers, including the elephant, the clowns, and the trapeze artists, leaving don Alejo with a pig, an overweight strongman, a midget, and a bearded lady, among others. Upon arriving at an abandoned town, these leftover performers decide to remain there, putting an end to their nomadic existence. Although he disagrees with the decision, don Alejo is outnumbered and retires to the tent with his one-time performing pig. The rest of the group names the town “Santa María del Circo” and goes about the process of defining the town’s history, and their own jobs and identities. Both biblical and Mexican history resonate in the novel, generally in tragicomic or parodied form. After the separation of the circus into its two “tribes,” each led by one brother, readers are left to follow the fate of the less fortunate group as it struggles to define itself as a community. This process will include the assignment of various professions by a system of lottery. The characters also imagine themselves in comparison to the founders of a new nation, reflecting on the importance of having a history. As Mágala, the journalist, explains, “Es importante tener relatos; es lo que nos da derecho a pisar un suelo y tener un nombre. . . . Quizás hubo una época en la que un montón de indígenas podía encontrar un águila devorando una serpiente y decir aquí es, aquí nos quedamos a crecer y multiplicarnos; pero hoy cada pedazo de tierra tiene dueño” (105) [It’s important to have stories—they are what give us a right to walk the earth and have a name. . . . Maybe there was a time when a bunch of Indians could find an eagle devouring a snake and say, “Here, we’ll stay here to grow and multiply.” But today every piece of land has an owner]. Such reflections, as well as debates on the importance of the statue in the town’s plaza and names of the streets, create a humorous, frustrated dialogue among these struggling and rejected artists, described in terms of their unusual bodies and the histories they cannot quite manage to recreate. The absurdity of the lottery system is reflected in the roles it assigns the characters, from soldier to journalist to knife-sharpener. Such professions and identities seem irrelevant to the desperate situation in which the performers find themselves, and yet the newly created roles help to establish the basis of the community and of the characters’ interactions, however dysfunctional these prove to be. The lottery also mimics an election in which all citizens may participate, yet the outcome is arbitrary, resulting

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only in the farcical assumption of roles, a façade for a deeper and unchanging political reality. These new roles, in combination with the characters’ preexisting histories, identities, and bodies therefore suggest the ambivalence of characters’ positions as both predetermined and malleable, as well as both integral to and excluded from the national and local histories they attempt to recreate. One character, in fact, proposes the lottery as a preferable alternative to democratic elections, while a second links the notion of chance to corporeal difference: “Nada es tan azaroso como el nacimiento y cualquier madre acepta lo que le toca. . . . Para ejemplo basta el enano. Su madre pudo parir a Mozart y en cambio se conformó con el lagarto que le salió” (88). [Nothing is left more to chance than birth, and every mother accepts what she gets. . . . [Nathaniel’s] mother could have given birth to Mozart and instead, she settled for the lizard that came out] (73). The body and, in this case, the concept of monstrous birth determine the identity and the future of the individual—by chance. Yet emphasis on the factor of chance at the same time suggests a possible separation between body and identity, troubling the notion of the body as bearer of absolute, unequivocal meaning. Use of the lottery partially accomplishes this separation, by allowing each marginalized, disenfranchised circus performer a metaphorical second birth, and hence the opportunity to redefine the relationship between his or her body and the meanings it suggests. The body of the midget here becomes disturbingly emblematic of the novel’s hovering between predetermined meaning and chance, between inclusion and exclusion from collective history.8 Natanael, generally mocked by the other performers both for his physical appearance and the extravagant stories of his family history, now takes on the role of town priest, thanks to this system of the lottery. Thus, the most ridiculed individual ironically becomes the one who should technically be the most worthy of respect. Of course, Natanael is still a midget and is, for the most part, still treated with scorn, despite that his status allows him to quote heavily from the Bible (and to display his preference for the Old Testament). Natanael will also use his authority as priest to dialogue with his absent father. His citation of the lines from Leviticus is, in fact, a repetition of the words his father once used to attack him for his physical difference. Throughout the novel, the protagonist returns to stories of his family history, both recent and ancestral, often questioning his own place as midget, hence anomaly, in a long line of (semi) illustrious ancestors. These stories, told to Natanael by his father and combined with cruel attacks on the child for his physical insufficiency and implied shame to

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the family line, now become for the adult midget a means of interpreting his own body and identity with respect to this history. By revealing the history of the violence inflicted on his body by his father as linked to the father’s repugnance with his inexplicably different offspring, Natanael also suggests a reinterpretation of that difference, irrevocably tied up with the mark of the father. In emphasizing the grotesque nature of that mark, Natanael both insists on his birthright and mocks the father who would have denied him his lineage. The midget’s story becomes a repositioning of his own body and authority in the family’s history, as well as in the text of the novel, and a questioning of the often unspoken and excluding criteria holding that line together. This novel contains multiple references to Old Testament prohibitions and to the midget’s ambiguously concealed family history, potentially indicative of a crypto-Jewish past. The name Natanael is of Old Testament origin, meaning literally “gift of God,” unlike the more eccentric, circus style names of the other performers, such as Mandrake, Balo, and Hércules. The midget, however, affirms that his name means “happy new year,” as he was born on the first day of the year: “En ese momento había millones de borrachos en el país y seguro cualquiera de ellos se asomó por la ventana, y al presenciar el parto dijo: ‘Y le pondrás por nombre Natanael, que quiere decir feliz año nuevo’. Ella pensó en un ángel y nunca quiso contrariarlo, temerosa del castigo” (32) [At that moment there were millions of drunks all around the country, and one of them peered in through the window and upon witnessing the birth, said, “And you shall call his name Nathaniel, which means Happy New Year.” [Nathaniel’s mother] thought it was an angel and didn’t want to upset him, fearful of the punishment] (25). The parodic evocation of the nativity scene emphasizes the problem of naming. The midget, as we learn, was originally to have been called Fernando VIII; thus, the change indicates a break in the family tradition of adopting kings’ names. As his father notes, “Debería asumir su papel de fenómeno, de bestia, de error en la fórmula, del que sin duda es y será el más desgraciado de los Porcayo” (33) [He should assume his role of freak, beast, mistake of nature. He is and always will be the most unfortunate of the Porcayos] (26). The name Porcayo suggests puerco, or pork, indicative of a humorous reference to Jewish dietary prohibitions. Yet the midget’s narration informs the reader that the family, in fact, had changed its name from Olaguíbel y Ruiz. The story, beginning in the late seventeenth century and recounting Natanael’s ancestors’ emigration from Spain, evokes a potentially converso context, although without explicit reference. “Sin importar la ruina posterior y los cambios

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de nombre, siempre habría la posibilidad de volver a esos tiempos cuando salíamos a la calle con la frente en alto, la palabra instruida y el bolsillo a reventar” (26) [Despite the subsequent downfall and name changes, there would always exist the possibility of returning to the days when we would go out into the street with heads held high, educated words, and our pockets overflowing] (19). And as if to continue the tradition of renaming, other characters repeatedly insist on alternative stage names for Natanael, such as Dwarfonio, El cíclope de Liliput, Enanoski, or Micromán. Name changing in Jewish and converso history frequently reflects a desire for assimilation or fear of anti-Semitism. In this novel, naming takes on a humorous tone, yet still points to the problem of ambivalent genealogy and personal identity, consistently pinned to the violent relationship between father and son. In another variation on crypto-Jewish referencing, the plot of the novel focuses curiously on the figure of the circus’s performing pig, on its rotting meat as possible food source for the hungry troupe, and on don Alejo’s erotic interest in the animal, as well as on explicit associations between Natanael and the pig. References to the pig are hypothetically indicative of a barely concealed “Jewish question.” Toscana chooses to use the word marrano, for pig, throughout his novel, although the Spanish language offers several alternatives. Marrano is a word of Arabic origin, originally meaning “forbidden thing.” Since pork is generally considered a forbidden meat for observant Muslims and Jews, marrano took on the double meaning of both pork and Arab or Jew (Alatorre 210). In general, marrano functioned in its earlier history as a derogatory term, referring especially to Jews who converted to Christianity but continued their Jewish religious practices in secret. At the same time, the term marrano was also used among Jews as an indication of “undying loyalty to the Jewish people,” despite the adverse circumstances in which many Jews were forced to live (Laikin Elkin, Jews of Latin America 22).9 Thus, the word in its origins effectively captures a dual image of Judaism in an anti-Semitic context. In contemporary usage, the word does not necessarily point to these origins, yet in Toscana’s novel, the repeated insertion of the term into Old Testament texts serves to highlight the dilemma embedded in its earlier meanings. Toward the end of the novel, after the circus pig has died, the performers are feasting on its meat because there is little else to eat in the area. Yet Natanael alone abstains from eating. He does not partake of the meat, he explains, because of the necessary distance between himself, as town priest, and the common people: “Mi jerarquía exige distancia entre ellos y

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yo” (245) [My position in the hierarchy demands distance between them and me] (207). In his monologue, Natanael substitutes Old Testament offerings, such as bullock and ram with pork. The biblical citation reads as follows: “Also thou shalt take of the ram the fat and the rump, and the fat that covereth the inwards, and the caul above the liver, and the two kidneys, and the fat that is upon them, and the right shoulder; for it is a ram of consecration” (Exod. 29:22). Similarly, Natanael states, “Anden hijitos míos, coman su marrano, sáciense. Tomen la grosura y la cola y la grosura que cubre los intestinos, y la grosura del hígado y los dos riñones, y la grosura que está sobre ellos, y la espaldilla derecha, porque es marrano de consagración” (244) [Go on my children, eat your pig, have your fill. Thou shalt take of the pig the fat, and the fat tail, and the fat that covereth the inwards, and the caul above the liver, and the two kidneys, and the fat upon them, and the right thigh, for it is a pig of consecration] (207). The use of the pig as consecrated meat transforms the text into a comical, blasphemous version of the original, with Natanael assuming the voice of God, as quoted by Moses, when he makes commandments to the children of Israel. As in the original term marrano, here the use of the pig works in two directions. In the context of the Old Testament passages cited by Natanael, the derogatory implications of the term oppose its potential exaltation as sacred meat. Similarly, the midget himself straddles the dual role of self-aggrandizement and self-deprecation, largely through a contrived dialogue with his absent father or with a thinly disguised crypto-Jewish past. In another comical scene, the association between Natanael and the pig becomes explicit, showing once again a potentially offensive ambiguity connecting Jew to pig. Don Alejo, who had engaged in sexual activity with the pig, finds himself alone after its death and unsuccessfully solicits the dwarf as a replacement: La tarde anterior se había saboreado cuando vio a Natanael en el traje de vellorín y la lengua de fuera; percibió con placer que además de su baja estatura, el pobre enano padecía una fealdad que le daba a su rostro facciones animales, casi porcinas. Se recostó en el piso de la iglesia junto al confesionario y señaló su pezón derecho.—Gózame—dijo. (277) [The previous afternoon, (don Alejo) had relished the sight of Nathaniel dressed in the velveteen robe with his tongue sticking out. He was pleased to see that not only was he short, but the poor midget was so ugly that his facial features resembled an animal’s, a pig’s. Don Alejo lay down on the

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floor of the church next to the confessional and pointed to his right nipple. “Enjoy me,” he said.] (234)

In this case and elsewhere, repeated insistence on the figure of the pig slips constantly between references to food, sexuality, distorted religiosity, and family history. In a particularly violent scene from the beginning of the novel, Natanael relates the story of how his eye was injured when he was a child. As the midget explains, his father once became angry with him and tried to beat him with the spoon from the pot of beans. The spoon accidentally went into the child’s eye and cut out a piece of it, which was lost: “Mi padre se encabronó conmigo y tomó el cucharón de los frijoles para darme una tunda, y yo de imbécil, por querer ver cómo me pegaba, dejé los ojos bien abiertos hasta que el cucharón se me incrustó en el izquierdo. Me lo tajó como si fuera un huevo duro” (5) [My father got pissed off at me and he picked up the ladle for the beans so he could give me a thrashing. And I, idiot that I was, curious to see how he was beating me, left my eyes wide open until the ladle sank into my left eye, slicing it just like a hard-boiled egg] (1). Later during dinner, the father asked if the beans had bacon in them, and on receiving his wife’s negative reply, went to spit in the sink. The missing eyeball, therefore, suffers an even more repulsive transformation after falling into the pot of beans. First, it is taken as bacon, in the father’s mouth, already perhaps a disgusting concept. Then, because it is not bacon, it must be something even worse—a fragment of the son’s now doubly damaged body. Mention of bacon, or the absence of bacon in the pot, forms part of the larger chain of references to the problem of the pig and its meat, hypothetically indicative of a barely concealed “Jewish question.” With this in mind, the problem of possible bacon in the pot might be read as a reference to a coding of gentile, as opposed to Jewish cuisine. A remarkably similar reference of this type is found in Francisco de Quevedo’s El Buscón. The narrator of this text relates how, when he was a child, his master used to feed him and the other boys poorly, adding only a piece of bacon to the pot for an unspecified reason. As one editor points out, bacon would have been used in this case as proof of a non-Jewish identity and the maintenance of the household’s honor.10 Toscana’s dinner table scene evokes Quevedo’s picaresque novel, reinscribing its contextual trappings of mistreated, hungry children and a code of honor partially grounded in anti-Semitic fear. According to this code, the midget’s father incriminates himself through his reaction to the “bacon” but is doubly trapped upon realizing the truth behind the flesh in

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his mouth. The opening scene of this novel, besides suggesting the family’s Jewish past, also creates a link between the extraordinary body, born as a midget, and the mutilated body, damaged by the father. As in Elaine Scarry’s discussion of Old Testament texts, wounding reenacts creation or reproduction, and both serve to confirm the paternal or divine power behind the scene of transformation.11 In Toscana’s novel, the traumatic moment of the body’s mutilation becomes an initiation for the child, into family life and history, as well as a secondary birth. In addition, the event works as a reference to circumcision, also the cutting of the child’s body, according to the religious laws of the father, while a Freudian interpretation would see castration as the threatening, absent referent. If one emphasizes crypto-Jewish referents in the text, both the birth of the child and his later wounding by the father might be read as errors or aberrations from sacred law; yet such monstrous marks could not sustain religious belief, at least not in an orthodox manner. Thus, life as a one-eyed midget, scorned by his own father, would intertwine with the conflicting experience of displaying or disguising a Jewish family heritage. Natanael’s narration of the eye anecdote assigns further significance to this mutilation by binding the story into a broader account of his illustrious family and its place in Mexican history. At the beginning of the novel, the midget decides to reveal some information about his past to the rest of the group: “Les contó que uno de sus antepasados había sido presidente de la República y les explicó cómo perdió la vista del ojo izquierdo” (5) [He told them that one of his ancestors has been the President of the Republic, and he also explained how he had lost the sight in his left eye] (1). His circus companions, however, show little interest in the dwarf ’s ancestral ties to the presidency, preferring to focus on mocking his unusual body, and on trying to invent a humorous stage name for him. This narrative of selfinsertion in Mexican history, juxtaposed with the depiction of a mutilated body, highlights a central dilemma for the characters of Santa María del Circo. The characters, defined by unusual bodies, nomadic lifestyles, and precarious socioeconomic conditions, continually seek inclusion in a narrative of Mexico, projected through partially imagined histories. However, repeated attempts to belong, whether to the circus, to Mexico, or to a specific history or community, lead only to a recurrent sense of rejection. Identity and belonging paradoxically reveal themselves most clearly when marked by instances of exclusion. Such is the case, for example, when the midget and the bearded lady attempt to create a circus act together, called “el hombre que se negó a nacer” [The Man Who Refused to be Born] (240). Barbarela lifts her skirt and positions Natanael upside down, with

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his head emerging from between her legs. This proposed act asserts the identities of the midget and the bearded lady as human but not quite human. Natanael’s protruding head suggests, as does the title of the act, a man who refuses to be born yet, nonetheless, exists on the stage, halfway out of his mother’s womb. As only half born, the midget cannot be fully adult or even fully human; likewise, the almost mother of such a creature cannot be fully female. On viewing this erotic demonstration, the circus owner casts the midget and the bearded lady out of the circus, and the novel ends, leaving these characters suspended in a deserted landscape, as performers without an audience. Inclusion in written history works through an emphasis on the body’s unusual characteristics, identified by loss or lack. As one character explains, in reference to a statue in the plaza, Si Barbarela quiere imponerle el nombre de Timoteo de Roncesvalles al tipo de la estatua, necesita decirnos quién es este personaje, dónde luchó, qué cargo ocupó, por qué es importante para nuestra población . . . si le faltaba el pulgar izquierdo; tú sabes, esas idioteces: si tenía una o cien mujeres y si alguna vez su caballo lo salvó de morir. (106) [If Harrieta wants to call the man in the statue Timoteo de Roncesvalles, she needs to tell us who that person was, where he fought, what position he held, why he is important for our people . . . if he had lost his left thumb and, you know, silly things like if he had one or one hundred women, and if his horse ever saved his life.] (89)

The body, represented by a statue, oscillates between positions of exaltation and degradation, absence and presence. Finally, the possible lack of the left thumb defines and highlights the heroic figure more than any reference to his hypothetical conquests. Exaggerated attention to the missing body part will also remind readers of President Santa Anna’s notorious missing leg and the ceremonial burial he insisted on staging for the lost limb. Reference to this historical anecdote surfaces briefly in Toscana’s narration, within the midget’s monologue of his own family history, linking personal to national and collectively resonant history through the repeatedly evoked scene of glorified dismemberment. The unusual characteristics of Natanael’s body, compounded by the accident to his eye, simultaneously inscribe him in a national history of such broken bodies and in a partially disguised Jewish lineage. Yet in both cases, this body occurs in the fault lines of traditions that both require and

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exclude it. Much of the midget’s narration in the novel evokes this paradoxical position of his body—and of other characters’ bodies—in relation to broader Old Testament and historical narratives. And the body’s precarious position, in fact, allows Natanael to shift his own role in the scenes he narrates and, ultimately, to question the rigidity of ties between bodies and meanings. In Natanael’s retelling of the story of his eye, whether or not other characters choose to believe him, his mutilated eye actively gets revenge on his father by finding its way into his mouth in the guise of a piece of bacon. The extraordinary body, in conjunction with the story it repeatedly tells, presents itself as living proof of this act of revenge, equating revenge with the flesh of the eye that has committed it. Old Testament wounding confirms belief, providing proof of a power behind the law, and an impetus to obey it, just as the father’s wounding of his son’s eye in this novel suggests an imposed submission to the law of the father. Yet, in the story, the structure binding violence to belief goes awry when the flesh of the wound reacts, as if with a life of its own, transforming itself into abominable meat. This surreptitious transformation violates the father’s law and, at the same time, disgraces the father by revealing the hidden weight of this law in his family lineage. Such a violently underhanded move, performed by a supposedly inanimate scrap of flesh, supersedes the violence of the original cutting of the eye, providing a pleasurably grotesque, if surreal, punch line to the midget’s story. The logic binding the midget’s eye to an imaginary scrap of bacon, and to the genitalia indicative of both circumcision and castration, also includes the figure of the egg, mentioned in an initial comparison at the moment of the accident. Roland Barthes’s reading of Georges Bataille’s Histoire de L’oeil incorporates a similar series of objects: eye, egg, sun, and testicle. In “La metaphore de l’œil,” two basic metaphoric chains, one of solids and the other of liquids, eventually break into one another, through the use of phrases, such as “casser un œil” and “crever un œuf ” (243). The shift from metaphorical to metonymic associations disrupts the reader’s expectations, as poetic imagery becomes direct substitution. Yet while Bataille’s text transgresses primarily through a surrealist and erotic destructuring, Toscana’s scene evokes the problem of a crypto-Jewish history underpinning the cut of the eye, hence the ambivalent associations between a damaged body and its ethnic identity, resistant flesh and paternal law. In this distorted story of wounding, the reactive flesh of the mutilated body repositions itself, now occupying the authoritative and traditionally

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disembodied site of an abstract law—as flesh made Word. Like the God of this biblical law, the flesh demands belief but not in God. The midget instead asks his listeners to believe his story of revenge and, therefore, to believe in the marked flesh itself as the power behind his narrative. This flesh wounds or offends those who come in contact with it and, in this sense, maintains a structure of belief that distinguishes between purity and defilement. But in addition, the midget’s tale of his own flesh suggests that such belief can simultaneously work as a disruption to the supposed authority behind violent laws. The flesh situates itself both within and outside the Father’s Law, an ideal position from which to reveal its contradictions and to distort the workings of its power. This uncooperative flesh challenges the rigidity of the divine and paternal Word, just as the midget’s enigmatic, wounded body within the novel both stands for the story of the character and his family lineage, and refuses to submit to these confines of representation. The monstrous body fulfills its role of meaning, revealing, and sustaining narrative, in Garland Thomson’s terms (Freakery 3), yet the limitations of the narrative of family history are bound up in the body’s meaning in its refusal to reveal itself as the absolute answer to a riddle. The scene of the midget’s “circumcision” of the eye becomes the reiteration of relationships between body and text, defilement and purity, which may be said to underpin much of Old Testament law.12 Although the deformation of the midget’s eye is not literally a circumcision, it repeats associations between the mark as process of purification—as the separation of clean from unclean—and the same mark as irreversible deformity. Natanael, in repeating his father’s quote from Leviticus, excludes himself from full participation in the rites of the Temple and, symbolically, from inclusion in his family lineage and community. And yet the cutting of the eye, a mark of distortion continuous with the corporeal difference of the midget, is at once, paradoxically, a sign of inclusion in this same community, through the indirect reference to circumcision. Similarly, the moment of circumcision, of a boy’s initiation into the Jewish tribe, simultaneously marks him as member, one who belongs, and as Jew, hence outsider in the eyes of a non-Jewish world. Particularly in the historical context of the persecution of Jews, such a mark leaves the Jewish, or potentially Jewish, body in a curious double bind. While Jewish law opposes defilement to purity and registers this division on its male bodies, anti-Semitism conflates defilement and monstrosity with Jewishness. The often ambivalent role of the Jewish body as both stereotype of monstrous Otherness and barely identifiable, hence threatening

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difference or outward projection of self-loathing, has been documented in studies of the history of the Jews and of anti-Semitism (Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred). Toscana’s scene of wounding, then, is emblematic of the violent paradox of the Jewish body in history. The paradox, as I have suggested, is tied here to the characters’ dilemma in relation to a Mexican history that defines them through their bodies and through exclusion. The novel, in this sense, links the Jewish body’s double bind to a binary specific to a narrative of Mexico, and to a group of disenfranchised, banished citizens. In addition, the scene of the eye offers specific agency to the damaged body in relation to the perpetrator of the violence—the father—as well as a readjustment of the lines dividing the son’s victimized flesh from his father’s wounding hand. The father—source of family history, nationalist pride, and Old Testament authority—attempts to define his son’s body in terms of these prescripted meanings. Yet this body takes on meaning only to question its contours, to reveal a paternal, textual inability to contain marked flesh. And the novel, in turn—through this repeated violence— highlights the limits of its own textual authority with respect to the bodies it purports to depict and to inscribe with meaning. Jewish Difference What, then, is the critical efficacy of attention to the ambivalent position of uncooperative flesh in this text? The scene of damage to the midget’s eye, and its underlying symbology of circumcision as castration, opposes defilement to paternal law yet leaves the opposition in constant suspension. The dilemma here points back to the uncertainty of the relationship between corporeal difference and ethnic identity, in this case, Jewishness. In Julia Kristeva’s reading of anti-Semitism, through analysis of both the work of French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline and of the text of Leviticus, the opposition remains similarly suspended: “Jewish monotheism is not only the most rigorous application of the Unicity of the Law and the Symbolic; it is also the one that wears with the greatest assurance, but like a lining, the mark of maternal, feminine, or pagan substance” (186). The “lining” that Kristeva refers to will also include various forms of impurity, such as certain foods, menstrual blood, leprosy, and physical defects (99–103). For Kristeva, then, impurity (corporeal difference) will never be autonomous of the (Jewish) Law defining its borders; similarly, potential subversion of this law remains caught up in its workings.

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In the case of Toscana’s text, the argument implies an impasse, to the extent that one insists upon an unwavering Jewishness at the root of the text.13 Yet, as Sander Gilman has argued, rather than advocating a “kernel of profound meaning” underlying both anti-Semitic stereotypes and Jewishness, one must interpret particular symbolic associations, such as the relationship between circumcision and the fear of castration, according to their sociohistorical contexts. For Gilman, the proposed sterilization of blacks in Weimar Germany suggests a parallel to the extermination of the Jews under the Nazis; both correspond to an overarching discourse of eugenics. Thus, fear of castration in this case is more accurately read in terms of a very real threat of extermination at a particular historical moment and not as a deeply rooted link to the tradition of circumcision itself (Gilman, Self-Hatred 9–10). The complexity of this line of flight from an absolute answer to the conundrum of corporeal difference as identity also stems in part from diverse historical and literary constructions of Jewishness. As Gilman describes, Jewishness tends to become all the more obvious when the Jew attempts to assimilate into non-Jewish society (The Jew’s Body 175). Yet, paradoxically, this same Jewishness is codified through specific physical characteristics. Gilman writes, “The Jews’ disease is written on the skin. It is the appearance, the skin color, the external manifestation of the Jew that marks the Jew as different” (172). Although in this case Gilman refers primarily to documentation from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany and Austria, the vision of the Jew as member of an “ugly race,” victim of a pathological condition, occurs in numerous contexts, well into the twentieth century. The double condition of this reading of a constructed Jewishness as simultaneously marked and unmarked, included and excluded, defined through the body and beyond all physical signs, parallels the structure at work in Toscana’s novel, whereby Natanael, figured as monstrous body, interrogates the narratives that both exclude him, marking him as other, and offer him terms on which to speak. In this novel, corporeal difference functions as the outward sign of otherwise hidden, crypto-Jewish roots and the body’s refusal to submit to any such codification of meaning. In Vargas Llosa’s novel El hablador, Saúl is similarly caught in a dual position but one that is literally “written on the skin,” in the form of a red birthmark covering half of his face. However, the explicit exteriority of Saúl’s Jewishness in this text provides a counterpoint to the hypothetically crypto-Jewish backdrop in Toscana’s novel. In El hablador, the emphatic metonymy between half-marked face

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and half-Jewish identity extends to include an identification with the indigenous Machiguenga people, among whom Saúl eventually goes to live.14 This triple, circulating substitution evokes a specific history of the racist conflation of Jewish and indigenous as categories of alterity. As Judith Laikin Elkin has noted, instances of confusion in sixteenthand seventeenth-century manuscripts between the terms indio and judío, “mirrored actual confusion in European minds between Indians and Jews” (“Colonial Origins” 135). She also cites Diego Durán, a sixteenthcentury Dominican missionary who noted certain similarities between the two groups, such as “the sacrifice of children, the eating of human flesh, the killing of prisoners of war, all of these being Jewish ceremonies” (134–35). In evoking and highlighting this history, Vargas Llosa’s novel inscribes its marks irrevocably on Saúl’s body. In Toscana’s novel, on the other hand, correspondences between circumcision and “self-castration,” between Jewish identity and corporeal difference, and between the damaged eye and the chain of metonymic references it releases—genitalia, bacon, egg—need not indicate absolute positions. These links operate via metonymy but simultaneously as metaphor; they are both processes of direct substitution and imaginative associations. Within my reading, Natanael’s role is once again that of a hyphen at the center of an uncertain equation. While the scene of the eye, Old Testament citations, and references to family history, to the pig, and to pork all support a crypto-Jewish reading of this character in the text, none of the evidence is explicit enough to reach a final answer—that is, to prove a definitive solution to the riddle. The contextual reality of northern Mexican history underpinning the “Jewish question” in this text is, ironically, that Jewish roots here are impossible to prove. In this sense, the body’s interrogation of the authoritarian marks that seek to define it transcends the repetitive duality of Law and defilement, by insisting on the incomplete quality of the body–identity equation. El hablador Saúl’s condition as both half-Jew and half-Machiguenga, via his affinity for the tribe, appears in the text of El hablador through the emblem of the birthmark on his face. The mark underlines and enacts a reductive logic, whereby one identity category comes to stand for and replace another and, at the same time, creates a snare in the process of substitution by critically revealing its inherent xenophobia. The question of Saúl’s Jewish identity and that of his birthmark are grating issues for the narrator, even

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from the earliest pages of the novel. When Saúl is describing the problem of the survival of the Machiguengas, the narrator is actually thinking about the birthmark the whole time. He wonders if Saúl’s birthmark and indigenous culture, both equally incomprehensible to the average spectator, incite parallel reactions from most Peruvians, thus explaining Saúl’s affinity for the Machiguengas. But, as Saúl himself puts it, “De repente, ser medio judío y medio monstruo me ha hecho más sensible que un hombre tan espantosamente normal como tú a la suerte de los selváticos” (30) [Being half Jewish and half monster has made me more sensitive to the fate of the jungle tribes than someone as appallingly normal as you] (28–29). Here, it is not so much Jewish ethnicity or corporeal difference that defines Saúl as different from others. Instead, his ambiguous, halfand-half condition, repeatedly invoked in the novel, best describes his position. The birthmark is specifically symptomatic of Saúl’s ambivalent relationship to the Machiguengas and to the Jewish community, neither rejected by the group nor fully accepted as one of them. Saúl explains early in the novel that Machiguenga children born with any kind of physical abnormality are killed by their mothers. He immediately makes the connection to his own distinguishing mark, thus marking himself, once again, as a sacrificial figure or reject of the tribe: “Yo no hubiera pasado el examen, compadre. A mí me hubieran liquidado” (22) [I wouldn’t have passed the test, pal. They’d have liquidated me] (25). This passage locates Saúl as a self-consciously monstrous figure, embracing a society that, in other circumstances, would view him as an outcast and destroy him. Although he knows that, as an outsider to the tribe, he is in no danger from the Machiguengas, he still recognizes a symbolic rejection, one that will never be taken to its ultimate consequences but which, nonetheless, appears to continually repeat itself through the image of his birthmark. Similarly, this rejection occurs constantly in Saúl’s interactions within mainstream society in Lima, as the focal point of his every encounter with unfriendly strangers. In both societies, Saúl, the half-Jew with a marked face, embodies the outcast. But because this ambiguous figure plays his role so effectively, he will never be literally cast out, but instead will have to remain present, so as to reiterate, through his visible presence, the element that could have been destroyed. Thanks to this oscillating position, Saúl’s figure appears to regenerate negative images of both Jewish and indigenous peoples, each linked to corporeal difference, and to undermine this imagery, by illustrating that it is as arbitrary as a birthmark—yet perhaps just as difficult to erase.

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The specificity of Saúl’s double difference partially opposes the cryptoJewish enigma posed by Natanael in the text of Toscana’s novel, as when he points out that being a midget might mean more than meets the eye. As I have suggested, this opposition allows for a critical reading of nexuses between corporeal difference and ethnic identity in Spanish American cultural contexts, in this case, tied to the question of Jewishness in the text. The juxtaposition of these two texts and characters is particularly revelatory when understood through the lens of the scapegoat mechanism, as a structure through which to interpret modes of persecution in historical and literary texts. This figure of the scapegoat, of course, demands a return to the Old Testament, and the text of Leviticus describes its role in some detail: And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat. And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the Lord’s lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering. But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat; shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness . . . And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness: And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness. (Lev. 16:7–22)

Unlike other sacrificial animals featured in Leviticus, these two goats function as uniquely abstract substitutes for one another, with no apparent logic to distinguish between the symbolic equivalents. The dead goat, in its material presence at the moment of sacrifice, embodies testimony of the scapegoat’s existence, somewhere in the desert, beyond the people’s field of vision. Similarly, the scapegoat, as unseen abstraction, carries the dead goat’s burden, as well as that of all who have sinned, beyond the physical corpse, as offering, to an undetermined, shifting area of the wilderness. In his reading of the scapegoat mechanism, René Girard makes a distinction between the “scapegoat of the text (the hidden structural principle)” and the “scapegoat in the text (the clearly visible theme)” (Scapegoat 119). In the first case, the persecutors believe in the guilt of their victim and the justice of their action, while in the second, the text reveals “scapegoat” as an abstract category, one that any common “goat” could fill. The figure of the scapegoat, in both its biblical version and its cultural

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manifestations, as studied by Girard, thus depends on a dual structure, encompassing both an act of violence and the recognition of the arbitrary nature of that act. The scapegoat is fundamental to Girard’s reading of mimetic violence in which antagonists become doubles of one another at ever-increasing levels of opposition. The community then substitutes a single victim for all possible enemies (Violence and the Sacred 79). Girard notes that the theory of the scapegoat is particularly applicable to the persecution of the Jews throughout history, as he refers throughout The Scapegoat to a fourteenth-century French text in which Jews are blamed for the plague. Girard’s notion of the scapegoat suggests both a mechanism for community reconciliation and a brutal, “primitive” structure, which the Gospel shows to be arbitrary violence: “In future, all violence will reveal what Christ’s passion revealed, the foolish genesis of bloodstained idols and the false gods of religion, politics, and ideologies. The murderers remain convinced of the worthiness of their sacrifices. They, too, know not what they do and we must forgive them” (Scapegoat 212). Scapegoats, for Girard, tend to be minority figures; often, they are disabled or represented as monsters, as is the case in his analysis of the Oedipus myth and of Sophocles’s text. As literary and cultural critic, one’s ability to see the difference between the two versions of the scapegoat—that is, between “hidden structural principle” and “clearly visible theme”—also suggests one’s distance from the scene and level of participation in a violent act. However, in this case, relative distance and the ability to transcend the literal actually become matters of salvation and ultimate faith. In the context of reading disability in narrative, Girard’s interpretation of the scapegoat via Christ’s passion, or vice versa, implies that the difference between a broad notion of abstract corporeality, and the particularity of a given body, actually corresponds to the distinction between those who have received the “glad tidings” and those still in the shadows of supposed ignorance. The same opposition, of course, suggests that careful readers will recognize arbitrary discrimination and victimization when it occurs rather than experiencing the “justice” of the violence through the eyes of the perpetrators. In Vargas Llosa’s novel, the scapegoat mechanism operates in concordance with Girard’s analysis. The hovering birthmark, which both explicitly inscribes difference and emphasizes its own symbolic, open-ended quality, points to the theory and imperative outlined by Girard: societies require a scapegoat to resolve their conflicts yet must learn to transcend violence by looking beyond the scapegoat’s specificity—to see it as

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a placeholder and thus to end the cycle of mimetism and victimization. Toward the end of El hablador, the narrator loses touch with Saúl and is unable to confirm rumors that his friend has gone to Jerusalem. However, other evidence, recounted in the first pages of the novel, suggests that Saúl’s pilgrimage was not to Israel but to the Peruvian Amazon. At the beginning of his account, the narrator flashes forward to his trip to Italy, where he visits an ethnographic gallery exhibit and discovers a photograph of a Machiguenga hablador. Although the face of the photographed figure remains in the shadows, the narrator is convinced from its height and posture that it must, in fact, be Saúl. This photograph, the narrator’s inspiration for the story he then tells, expresses the ambivalence of the scapegoat mechanism, as visual proof of its subject’s “true” identity and an obscuring of the one physical feature that would remove all doubt, that would finally equate the outsider with the mark on his face, the halfJewish Saúl with the hablador, and the body with the text that attempts to tell its story. The photographed birthmark, now in the shadows, tempts the reader with the hope of a glimpse but, by the same token, affirms the impossibility of full revelation and highlights the slippage between the ephemeral mark and the identities and meanings weighing it down. The hablador, as photographed body, not only assumes Saúl’s identity, but also retains the status of an abstract placeholder, the deliberately shadowed performance of a resolution to the narrator’s personal and Peruvian identity crisis. The photograph, which at once is and is not Saúl, expresses both a unique identity and personal journey of transformation and the repetition of a generic mark of alterity that takes its place in the predetermined structure of privileged center and neglected peripheries. Few, if any, readers will doubt, however, that the shadowy, photographed figure is indeed Saúl; the novel’s tightly knit structure of overdetermined clues scarcely offers alternatives. We can be comfortable in our hunch about the real identity of the subject, because the narrator who witnesses the photography exhibit at the beginning of the novel bears the brunt of any uncertainty for us. It becomes clear that, at least for his purposes and within his vision, the hablador is none other than Saúl. Curiously, then, the text seems to have it both ways, by retaining the specificity of an answer to the riddle of corporeal difference as identity and, at the same time, insisting upon the arbitrary quality of the alterity in question. The reader’s ability to see the difference, by looking beyond the literality of the Jewish question, creates a Girardian position, mediated by a Gospel that separates the reader from the marked body and from the Jew.

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In the broader context of this novel, Saúl’s birthmark and his Jewishness are key to the narrator’s—as well as readers’—understanding of the conflicts between dominant and minority cultures in Peru. As Doris Sommer has aptly described, the face-to-face encounter between Peru as nation and its Machiguenga Other implies a choice, between the extermination and assimilation of indigenous groups and an “endless but intimate stand-off ” between Peru and the Other (269). Such a standoff requires the survival of this Other, just as the scapegoat mechanism depends upon the continued existence of one of the symbolic goats, still wandering somewhere in the desert. The Girardian scapegoat structure allows Vargas Llosa’s narrator an abstract resolution to Peru’s “indigenous question,” by marking Saúl’s body as answer to the riddle of Jewishness.15 This structure insists upon a body that cannot be approached, and at once suggests that the literary lesson about the discursive nature of the body is, in fact, a Christian lesson. In addition, the figure of a body that solves the riddle while retaining an abstract, functional quality, blurs the body’s particularity and limits its ability to transcend the structure of the original riddle. In Vargas Llosa’ novel, the textual representation of the ethnographic photograph mimics the figure of the birthmark. Each creates the illusion of a visible, tangible body, a substance behind suggested meaning, and denies the reader access to that body. This strategy critically reveals the contrived nature of presupposed links between bodies and the stories they appear to tell (or, in other words, points out patterns of racism) but, at the same time—and in a more troubling sense—insists upon an abstract body and the symbolic task upon which this body goes to work. At the moment of indecision when shadows blur the identifying birthmark, when the body of Saúl is both photographic image and narrated account, the marked body retells the violent history of its inscribed meanings. However, the structured contours of this body’s symbolic functions leave little space for future renegotiation. It is in this sense that a counterreading of Toscana’s text and its hypothetically crypto-Jewish body offer an expansion on the limitations of the scapegoat model in El hablador. Like Saúl’s marked face, Natanael’s body and identity tend to operate through a dualism, in which the midget’s eye both is, and is not, bacon, and being a midget both is, and is not, more than meets the eye. Both bodies correspond to Moira Gatens’s notion of “corporeal sacrifice”: “Admission [into the political body] always involves forfeit. From the original covenant between God and Abraham—which involved the forfeit of his very flesh, his foreskin—corporeal sacrifice has been a constant

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feature of the compact. Even the Amazons, the only female body politic that we ‘know’ of, practiced ritual mastectomy” (23). And in each case, the mark of inscription that binds the body to the group also becomes the line that divides this body from the same group, denying it full belonging and participation. However, in the case of Santa María del Circo, the nature of the group, collective or tradition to which the protagonist might belong, remains uncertainly defined. The circus troupe seeks and fails to establish inclusion in a Mexican historical and political tradition, as evidenced in references to the lottery as form of election or to the abandoned town as glorious site of civic pride. Exclusion from circus and freak-show history is more radical still, as don Alejo mourns his financial losses and his inability to follow in the footsteps of giants such as Barnum (Toscana, Santa María 171). Natanael’s attempts to inscribe himself in a glorious family history alternate with his scorn and denial of his ancestry. The potentially crypto-Jewish underpinnings to this genealogy appear to solve the riddle of identity, difference and exclusion, yet, unlike in El hablador, Jewishness is never named or confirmed here. Finally, the explicit detail of circulating body parts retains its particularity, because the symbolic substitution of flesh for history remains hypothetical, as both metonymy and metaphor. While the figure of the Girardian scapegoat, as evident in the structured riddle of Saúl’s body and identity, pries open and interrogates a racist history of freak-show style correspondences between physical characteristics and ethnicity and culture, strict adherence to this model fails to account for modes of corporeal difference not previously defined within the expectations of the riddle. The fact that Toscana’s version of corporeal differences opens toward histories of the freak show, Mexican politics, and crypto-Jewish identity, without depending on any of these categories as a final solution to the dilemma of the body’s meaning, allows for an unraveling of ties between categories of corporeal difference and prescripted meaning. In this sense, the two novels, together, point to the ongoing critical task of formulating discourses of disability and bodily difference, specific to Latin American contexts and unhinged from the historically charged grid of metaphors structuring relationships between monstrosity and normality, bodies and texts.

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CHAPTER 4

Performance and Revenge The mainstream bizarre has effectively blurred the borders between pop culture, performance, and “reality.” The new placement of other borders, between audience and performer, between the surface and the underground, between marginal identities and fashionable trends is still unclear. —Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Ethno-Techno Quería vengarme, pero en este negocio la venganza es un lujo que uno no puede darse [I wanted to avenge myself, but in this business revenge is an unaffordable luxury].1 —Naief Yehya, “La gente de látex”

Performativity and the Mainstream Bizarre In the so-called global era, radical performance artists, whose work is often defined through its use of the human body, are left without a medium. Or perhaps on the contrary, they have all too much to work with. As Gómez-Peña has described, mainstream cultural production is now so saturated with extreme images of violence and sex, as well as the revelation of what were once considered transgressive behaviors and bodies, that the work of performance artists risks merely blending into the “mainstream bizarre.” As suggested in the previous chapter, the riddle of corporeal difference in many narratives of disability, and in the structure of the traditional freak show, operates primarily through the reader’s or spectator’s desire for access to the truth—that is, to the solution of the riddle. If riddles point to a history of the racist categorization of bodies, Mario Vargas Llosa’s and David Toscana’s novels together shift the ground from which a given body might interrogate such categories. Yet in the contemporary culture to which Guillermo Gómez-Peña refers, the space

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of potential interrogation seems to have narrowed; radical difference and marginal identities are commodified, and the “authentic” slides into hip simulation. The bodies of the “mainstream bizarre” tell no riddles, for apparently their representations leave nothing unrevealed and are quickly replaced by others of equal or greater shock value. What, in fact, might be the difference between “real” corporeal difference and mere surface simulation, or between radical politics and trendy posturing? Does it have something to do with the difference between real “freaks” and actors, those who perform roles that require them to adopt temporarily freakish personae? My use of scare quotes here should alert the reader to my insistence on the performed quality of freakishness, as well as that of other identity categories. This reading follows Judith Butler’s classic notion of performativity, “not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, as that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains” (Bodies That Matter 2). Yet Butler’s work also emphasizes that discourse’s production of effects does not offer a singular or fixed outcome, and includes instances of counterhegemonic performativity (Excitable Speech 160). In reference to Derrida’s notion of the performative, she writes, “The force of the performative is thus not inherited from prior usage, but issues forth precisely from its break with any and all prior usage. That break, that force of rupture, is the force of the performative, beyond all question of truth or meaning” (Excitable Speech 148). Yet what are the terms and efficacy of a “force of rupture” in the context of contemporary live spectacle, performance, and its textual representations in cases where, as Gómez-Peña has noted, we may no longer be able to distinguish between the marginal as figure of resistance (“real”) and the fashionable as motor and effect of a globalized economy (“mere performance”)? My readings of the work of Gómez-Peña and of the New York-based Mexican writer Naief Yehya address this question, through the dual mechanism of performance and revenge, or “performative revenge,” the topic of the current chapter. George Yúdice has argued that the performativity of identity categories is a structure to some degree specific to U.S. culture, society, and history, one that does not translate unconditionally into Latin American contexts. Yet performative identities turn out to be right at home in the world of Miami-based television talk shows, in performance art of the U.S.Mexican border, and in literary interpellations of such cultural production. This is hardly to suggest that these contexts of performance equalize differences between claimed identities and enacted roles. The difference

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between a disabled person and an actor who plays a disabled character on television or in film is hardly a minor one; it points to the reality of a proliferation of disability narrative on stage and screen, combined with a relative lack of opportunities for disabled actors (Kuppers 12).2 Recent scholarship on critical intersections between disability and performance and between their corresponding fields of study has frequently focused on the thorny question of disability and impairment as identity. As Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander write, “To think of disability not as a physical condition but as a way of interacting with a world that is frequently inhospitable is to think of disability in performative terms—as something one does rather than something one is” (10). Jim Ferris, who uses a social construction model of disability to distinguish it from impairment, points out provocatively, “Disability obscures the blurry lines that separate fiction and art from real life. Is disability ‘fictional,’ or is it ‘real’?” (56). Yet, as Petra Kuppers asks, “How can we give up these stable categories [of disability and nondisability] without denying the existence of current realities of oppression, division, subjugation and exclusion? What do these explosions of stable positions of difference, of clear distinctions between disabled and non-disabled with their attended social consequences, mean for disabled performers?” (51). In a recent performance titled “Crip Cop,” activist and performance artist Lezlie Frye explores such questions, as she parodies the policing of identity borders that determine who counts or doesn’t count as authentically disabled, and suggests parallels to the more literal policing of national borders.3 In many contemporary television talk shows and in talk show-related texts—such as those by Yehya, which often feature the representation of corporeal difference—the divisions between real and simulated identities, radical politics, and surface spectacle are frequently difficult to perceive. In other words, any stable positions of difference seem to have been exploded already. Yet apparently, the uncertainty is sometimes simply intended to be part of the “fun” rather than part of a critical approach to identity, performance, and disability. This is the reality that Gómez-Peña and his performer colleagues of La pocha nostra troupe (or “laboratory”) grapple with: how can one create an effective politics of performance, without blurring into just another spectacle for consumption? (GómezPeña, Ethno-Techno 52). What is the difference between the counterhegemonic performativity of stereotyped identity that might allow word and body to break, “with any and all prior usage,” and the consumable spectacle of the “mainstream bizarre”? What happens to the displayed

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body in the balance of this uncertainty? And what is the efficacy of such uncertainty in the contexts of performance and disability politics? The “performance of revenge,” which I refer to in this chapter, operates within the ambivalent space between “mere” performance and “reality.” I focus here on readings of work by Yehya, such as his 1996 “La gente de látex,” and Gómez-Peña’s performances, with particular attention to his notorious 1992 “The Couple in the Cage” project with Coco Fusco. “La gente de látex” concerns characters that perform freakishness for television audiences on a talk show circuit. That is, the gente de látex [latex people] are actors who take on the roles of participants on daytime television talk shows. In contrast to the actors are the fenómenos [freaks], who, according to the narrator, simply appear as themselves and receive no payment, thus threatening those who perform for a living. The standard roles on such programs include, as is well known by those familiar with the talk show format, individuals whose behavior, attitudes—and sometimes bodies— mark them as highly unusual and often socially marginalized. Many of Yehya’s other stories dwell similarly on television talk shows and on the blurred line between on and off screen realities, while his critical work has focused on topics such as pornography, the conflicted role of the body in cyberculture, and intersections between war and mass media. Overall, his work negotiates popular visual culture and often situates itself at the uncertain line between criticism and pleasurable consumption. Gómez-Peña and Fusco’s “The Couple in the Cage” marks a similarly tenuous division between the performed and the “authentic.” In this performance, Fusco and Gómez-Peña posed as “undiscovered aborigines” in a cage and were exhibited in museums and public spaces in the United States, Britain, Spain, Australia, and Argentina. The piece was intended as a satire of the ethnographic freak shows typical of the late nineteenth century, especially popular in the United States. In such shows, people of colonized countries were presented as freaks, often alongside “human oddities,” such as hermaphrodites, giants, and dwarfs. The spectacle took an unexpected turn when many audience members took the “aborigines” at face value. Some expressed outrage at the dehumanizing practice of caging human beings, while others enjoyed the opportunity to observe the supposedly primitive people. Of course, many spectators were aware of the parodied nature of the performance, leaving them with a still broader range of options of how to engage the multiple realities of which they too formed a part. Although no longer working as a team, both Fusco and Gómez-Peña continue to be recognized as performance artists and theorists, with stakes in the intersecting realms of radical activism and art,

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pedagogy, and the theoretical exploration of racial, ethnic, gendered, and border identities. Gómez-Peña’s work has also incorporated significant use of the Internet as an interactive space through which to explore public reactions and beliefs, especially those of a U.S. Anglo–mainstream public when faced with stereotyped images of Mexican and Chicano identities. The documentation of such projects raises serious questions about the functions and objectives of self-consciously performed identity. At what point does critique risk giving way to the repetition of offensive gestures? As some of my students noted, when discussing Gómez-Peña’s “Temple of Confessions” interactive project, “Not all of us [Latinas] are like that.” Was this a misunderstanding of the irony in Gómez-Peña’s revelation of commonplace and offensive gestures toward minorities in the United States? Or was it instead a sense that the artist’s act of giving voice to racist fantasies simply promotes these fantasies into increased circulation? However one answers the question, the problem is close to the one GómezPeña grapples with when he speculates on performance art’s role with respect to the “mainstream bizarre”: what is the difference, and where is the risk in drawing an increasingly fine line between these categories? If Yehya’s fiction draws readers uncomfortably close to the viewing position of the mass audiences regularly consuming banal and exploitative media, “The Couple in the Cage” as well as other performance projects similarly risk collapsing differences between critical art and racist, voyeuristic freak shows. Thus, projects that intersect with the “high culture” tradition of performance art as well as those that refer to more popular genres may operate through the provocative gesture of the crossing of lines between genres and between conventional and unexpected roles of spectators and performers. Unlike other critical approaches to “The Couple in the Cage” project, my reading focuses in particular on the archival footage incorporated into the video and on the performativity of this material. The video uses film clips and stills of early freak shows and related spectacles in order to perform its own notions of embodiment and authenticity. In a similar sense, Yehya’s fiction plays an active role in destabilizing the reader’s notion of television talk shows and the bodies these programs supposedly represent through live performance. In both cases, and similarly to scenarios analyzed in Chapter 1, bodies perform difference not only through live spectacle but also—and especially—through a textual performativity that troubles divisions between the roles of performative text and performing flesh. This division echoes Diana Taylor’s dual concept of the archive and the repertoire, although I pay particular attention to the fault lines of the

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boundary between the two, through emphasis on the active and disruptive role of the textual (archival) body. In positing an opposition between the “performed” and the “real,” even as I barricade the terms with increasingly tenuous quotation marks, I enter into what Yúdice, in his reading of Butler, has termed a “fantasy,” that a viable contestatory politics could stem from performative force that reiterates and reinterprets the law (60–61). For Yúdice, “U.S. ‘alternativity’ is part of the system . . . Two or three generations of artists, activists, and academics have endeavored to stake out a space for alternatives that necessarily exist as such within fantasy as much as within legality” (59). This fantasy, upon which Yehya’s texts and Fusco and Gómez-Peña’s projects go to work, underpins the dual structures of performance and revenge. Performative revenge operates here through the repetition of a series of defined gestures, borrowed from histories of the freak show and similarly exploitative spectacles. Performers’ imitative actions testify to a history of the spectacle of corporeal difference, while at once pointing to the limits of this history where the body refuses to appear. Yet fantasy, in my reading, rather than a limitation on the efficacy of alternatives, stakes out its grounds for separation from an exploitative history, both through and beyond the terms that this history could imagine. Through the gesture of performative revenge, the stereotyped alterity of corporeal difference in relation to a norm loses credibility, even as the fantasy of what appeared to be the object of the avenger’s desire—the real body, the proof of violence—fails to fully materialize. Or as Jonathan Bate has written, “Performance creates belief that everything is performance; or rather acknowledging the theatricality of revenge kills the credibility of the law” (281). The ambivalent opposition between simulation and reality, enacted role and “natural” identity, is not unique to the contemporary culture of the television talk show, nor to the context of performance art described by Gómez-Peña. For continuous with the same dilemma, the history of the freak show and related spectacles, including displays of disability, demonstrates the crucial role played by a dynamic of total or partial fraudulence, coupled with claims of authenticity. This tradition has continued in television talk shows; similarly, both genres have at different points negotiated an ambivalent relationship between displays intended to shock and projections of social respectability. Yehya’s fiction and “The Couple in the Cage” performance draw on these binary dynamics; thus, their performativity works through a structure of opposition, a supposition that at least someone in the audience believes in a difference between

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truth and falsehood and that audience members will be shocked if the performance goes too far. A counterhegemonic performativity works in these cases, it might be argued, because of the presence of such oppositions, even when they become more difficult to identify. In his more recent work, however, Gómez-Peña emphasizes that these structures have shifted significantly since the early to mid-1990s; apparently, no one is shocked by anything any longer, and the public’s desire for an underlying truth or meaning has been replaced by a vapid, indifferent consumption of whatever appears at the surface. For Gómez-Peña, as for many scholars, September 11, 2001, effectively marks a radical shift. In part, the change has to do with the “mainstream bizarre” becoming unfashionable, as Otherness threatens order and safety (Ethno-Techno 272). At the same time, however, Gómez-Peña’s notions of corporate multiculturalism and the mainstream bizarre dovetail with critical readings of 9/11 as the ultimate spectacle. As Slavoj Žižek writes, “The image entered and shattered our reality (i.e., the symbolic coordinates which determine what we experience as reality).” (16) While us versus them oppositions become more pronounced, there is, at the same time, a symbolic collapse in which the division between “our” lived reality, and the spectacle of otherness, loses coherence; extreme, radical violence as “fantasmatic apparition” interrupted the contours of the West’s reality.4 The corporate multiculturalism, through which images of Rigoberta Menchú and César Chávez come to market Apple computers (GómezPeña 49), and the mainstream bizarre, which makes a freak out of everyone, from Aryan supremacists to the “Serial sniper” to Noam Chomsky (49–50) would probably exist with or without the legacy of 9/11. Yet it is interesting to note the degree to which Žižek’s vision of the West’s shattered reality sheds light on Gómez-Peña’s reading of the dilemmas of twenty-first-century performance. In this context, the Other is radically outside, even as its image enters and transforms the structure that appears to exclude it. Similarly, in the case of the mainstream bizarre, otherness—as radical positionality—nonetheless becomes increasingly fused into a homogenizing sociocultural context. The texts considered in this chapter predate 9/11, as well as GómezPeña’s work on the mainstream bizarre. In this earlier moment, differences between authenticity and fraud, reality and fantasy, are nonetheless still ambiguous; these projects tend to focus the readers’ or viewers’ attention on the problem of locating such differences, just as Gómez-Peña’s recent writing has called for an interrogation of the mainstream bizarre.

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My reading pays attention to contemporary critical views on performance and mass culture yet does not argue for a radical shift in meaning or truth-values as specifically located between the early 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century. Instead, in my analyses of Yehya’s and Gómez-Peña’s work, I borrow from both the traces of an earlier history of corporeal spectacle and a contemporary framework of the mainstream bizarre, from both an oppositional performativity and an ambiguous merging of critique and consumption. I therefore highlight these texts’ strategic engagement with a faintly disguised banality, as well as their critical claims to corporeal identity as political expression. This dual approach will emphasize the staging of the body as agent of what I describe as performative revenge. Performance and Revenge I use the terms “performance and revenge” and “performative revenge” interchangeably to suggest a critically effective juncture between the performative as agent of potential rupture and change, through language or other acts, and the theatricality of performance, which also implies a deliberate distancing or rupture between stage and world. As Andrew Parker and Eve Sedgwick have written, “In its deconstructive sense, performativity signals absorption; in the vicinity of the stage, however, the performative is the theatrical. But . . . the deconstructive ‘performativity’ of Paul de Man or J. Hillis Miller seems to be characterized by the dislinkage precisely of cause and effect between the signifier and the world” (2). Emphasis on productive dislinkage may therefore operate in a play or performance, staged or spontaneous, in everyday language use or in literary texts. Revenge, according to a Freudian reading, similarly suggests a space of disjuncture between utterances or other bodily acts and their perceived effects on the world. Revenge works within a structure of repeated intersubjective exchanges and reflects an inability to balance the books between a word and its purported, practical meaning. In one of Freud’s examples, “a girl made an attempt to murder a law-court officer who was totally unknown to her. When she was seized and questioned as to the motives of her act, she invented a story of a wrong done to her which called for revenge. There seems to be a necessity for bringing psychical phenomena on which one becomes conscious into causal connection with other conscious material. In cases in which the true causation evades conscious perception one does not hesitate to attempt to make another connection,

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which one believes, although it is false” (Standard Edition, Vol. II, 67). The incommensurability suggested here between perceived causes and effects, between an action and the structure of statements into which it is inserted, parallels that of performativity’s ambivalent dynamic of saying and doing. My reading of this parallel underscores the role of the body as central to these structures. As Elin Diamond writes, “Embodiment enjoys the same playful materiality/discourse oscillation as the word ‘performance’: embodiment is both the ‘act of embodying,’ and the ‘condition of being embodied,’ just as performance is the immediate act of doing, and the thing done” (154–55). The body, then, is both a given materiality and may depart from this apparent fixity through the infinite possibilities of embodied acts. Departure from the material body through performed embodiment also throws into question the notion that “the condition of being embodied” should exist prior to, and take precedence over, subsequent acts. In a related manner, mainstream societal blurring of the division between the categories of impairment and disability, and the subsequent naturalization of discrimination against people with disabilities, points to the importance of emphasizing radical splits between the two rather than attempting to “solve” the equation.5 Performance practices of disability may effectively pry open the perceived linkage between impairment and disability, and thus call into question the notion that impairment is the primary, primordial root of disability. Freud’s goal in treating his patients who demonstrate symptoms of a revenge instinct is to right the imbalance, through “abreaction” in which language substitutes for action and promotes catharsis (Standard Edition, Vol. II, 8). The key to solving the problem of revenge, therefore, involves providing logical links between empirical reality and deeper levels of the subconscious. In my reading of performance and revenge, however, I emphasize the body as figure of repetition and deferral. The relationship between reality and fantasy—or between ambivalently embodied acts and originary material body—is not a well-marked path between so-called problem and solution, but rather a fundamentally paradoxical one, without the surety of an underlying solution. The missed encounter between act and utterance, fantasy and reality, is the missed consummation of revenge, not in the sense of a failure to obtain justice, but instead as the repeated imperative to articulate the site and circumstances of injustice. Performative revenge here takes place as and through the body and demands an awakening to the missed encounter—as “ethical relation to the Real”—a gap between corporeal difference and the scene or text that might have contained it.6 Similarly, the gaps between impairment

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and disability, as well as between mainstream and radical notions of disability, highlight the crucial distinction between these categories and point toward the importance of ongoing efforts to locate and describe the distances between them. Revenge and performance operate jointly in “La gente de látex,” when what seems to be the reality of an off-screen relationship between the narrator and one of his co-stars, a female dwarf who goes by the name “X,”7 turns out to be one more instance of simulation, barely distinguishable from the lurid stories these actors present to the camera and to their live studio audiences. The reader’s supposedly privileged view of off-screen reality is thus subsumed into the talk show format of repeated deception, intercepted by further (false) promises of access to the truth. Here, the presumption of those who claim to see the whole truth is avenged by the body that turns out to be something else. A similar structure is at work in several of Yehya’s stories featuring the examination of talk shows and other forms of reality TV. In “Vida de casado” [married life], the narrator dreams of being a hero by making some kind of dramatic sacrifice to selflessly save others. His opportunity comes when he witnesses the filming of a talk show, as part of the live studio audience. An overweight woman who is a guest on the show laments that no man could ever love her; so he stands up, asks for the microphone, and declares that he could love and marry the woman. The catch is that this “heroic” act is, in fact, a gesture of revenge; the narrator is deeply attracted to his female friend Laura, also in the audience, who has just informed him that she is pregnant—by another man. The wedding of the narrator and the overweight woman, Ana, is filmed live on the set of the talk show and later turns out to have been a fraud. Ana goes to live in the narrator’s apartment with him but eventually dies of an internal hemorrhage, induced by diet pills. Her body ends up in a common grave or, perhaps, in a medical school (84). Apparently, no one misses Ana and life goes on as usual—except that, as the narrator notes in the final lines of the story, his relationship with his friend Laura would never be the same again. Here, revenge on the uncooperative female body of the pregnant friend materializes in the form of an obese stranger as virtual wife. The protagonist’s moment of performance, in his attempt to be a hero, takes place when he literally gets on stage and speaks on television, thus seemingly breaking the barrier between his ordinary reality—that of his conversation with his friend in the audience—and a virtual world of television in which the dream of the overweight woman is fulfilled and the ordinary man becomes a romantic hero. Yet the real revenge of the text occurs instead through the awkward

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banality of the merging of realities. Even the materiality of Ana’s body finally fails to make an impact, instead disappearing without a significant trace. Although the representation of Ana might be read as violent and misogynist, it also effectively points to the limitations of a troubling male fantasy, for the woman’s body refuses to remain within a predetermined context and refuses to conform to the narrator’s desire for a dramatic collision of flesh and screen. Ana is neither a strictly virtual television image nor a conventional flesh-and-blood character, for her emergence into the narrator’s life is marked by strange ambivalences. Their first date and their wedding are televised live, and once they live together, none of the narrator’s friends is aware of Ana’s existence, although he does tell a neighbor that Ana is his distant cousin. This is, once again, a missed encounter between the fantasy of revenge—masquerading as heroism— and the body whose presence would complete and carry out this fantasy, as a forced equivalence between the pregnant and the overweight female body. Finally, it is this body that “gets” revenge on the male protagonist by effectively performing the banalized and uncertain collapse of television with off-screen reality, as well as the awkward, hence impossible, fusion of the fantasized (socially constructed) and actualized (material) versions of the large woman. The concept of performative revenge also informs my reading of the work of Gómez-Peña and Fusco. In the case of “The Couple in the Cage,” as well as other projects, the artists make explicit their awareness of a welldocumented history of human rights abuses and of cultural and racial identities at stake in the project. And unlike Yehya’s work, which borrows from the tradition of “trash-TV,” “The Couple in the Cage” inserts itself into a chronology of both exploitative freak shows and culturally elite performance art. In a sense, revenge takes place in a conventional manner simply because some audience members are duped and exposed as racists. The ethnographer’s camera lens is turned upon those who believe themselves to be the privileged observers, making them instead into debased objects of study. At the same time, as Taylor has noted, even viewers of the video who are aware of the levels of performance taking place may come to realize that it is perhaps impossible to conceive of an ethically viable stance with respect to this project. One is either the racist consumer of the spectacle or the condescending reverse ethnographer (72–73). Performative revenge also takes place here through a structure of ambivalent access to the “truth” of what is taking place. Just as readers of “La gente de látex” are aware that television viewers get it wrong when they interpret “freaks” at face value, viewers of “The Couple in the Cage” video note the

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deception of live audience members who took the performers to be “real undiscovered aborigines.” While the video offers a critique of the empirical truth presented by early anthropologists who studied native peoples, it also repeats the anthropological gesture by revealing its own documentation of historical truths. In the end, the performing body marks the site of an impossible ethical response and of another missed encounter between facts and the staged flesh that would prove them. Significantly, as I will discuss further, it is the video’s archival sources of stills and film clips depicting the history of ethnographic spectacle that most dramatically performs a shifting of the viewer’s access to the supposed “body itself.” Morality and Authenticity The focus in both Yehya’s “La gente de látex” and “The Couple in the Cage” project on the question of the factual, or authentic as opposed to the fake, situate each in direct relation to a dynamic common to many talk shows today, as well as to the history of the talk show and of the spectacles, whether live or filmed, that preceded it. The talk show genre became popular in the United States in the late 1960s, incidentally at around the same time that the term “freak” was appropriated by leftist countercultural movements. As Patricia Joyner Priest notes, Phil Donahue’s highly successful program first aired in 1969, fueling the initial popularity of the genre (4). Books, such as Jon Dovey’s Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television and Joshua Gamson’s Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity, make the connection between freak show and talk show explicit. The history of the freak show and the more recent phenomenon of the television talk show, therefore, dovetail in their surface insistence on the authenticity of the spectacle at hand, combined with their use of fraud. The tension between the purported reality of the extraordinary exhibit and the necessary deception of the audience by the freak show entrepreneur, and in some cases by the freaks as well, became an essential motor of the spectacle, as described in Chapter 1. Entrepreneurs, such as P. T. Barnum, typically invited scientific “experts” to lend credibility to their exhibits and would challenge audiences to discover any hint of fraud in the presentation, inviting the skeptical to pull on the facial hair of the “bearded lady,” for example. Harvey Blume notes the ongoing presence of such “Barnumism” today “in those television shows where family members seem as if they were beamed directly from their kitchens to the studio where they go on screaming at each other, no less dysfunctional before a

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national audience than they were at home. The old paradigm really does live on here; the artifice of realism continues to prevail” (199). The pleasurable and profitable tension between authenticity and fraud in freak shows is perhaps best exemplified by the trademark of a popular museum franchise,“Ripley’s Believe It or Not.” Ripley’s freak-show style museum debuted at the Chicago World Fair in 1933. Ripley Entertainment, Inc. survives today, and until recently produced a television program featuring a variety of paranormal and pseudoscientific phenomena. And while the Ripley Web site does not contain early images of freaks, such as “wild men” or persons with disabilities, it still offered, at least until recently, short online “Odditorium videos” of such highlights as a man hammering nails into his nose and other examples of “novelty acts,” which might have blended easily into a sideshow lineup on a late nineteenth-century stage. The histories of both the freak show and the television talk show are marked by instances of public distaste for what have often been considered morally offensive forms of entertainment, as well as by public fascination with the divide between the authentic and the false. In many cases, such spectacles have been criticized for their supposed immorality or bad taste by religious conservatives, or by cultural elites. This is partially the case when José Martí reacts negatively to the exaggerations of the Coney Island freak show, as described in Chapter 1. Here, an opposition between “high” and “low” culture is specifically framed by the separation between the United States and its Spanish American neighbors and the disparate realities of cultural production in each region in this period.8 In other instances, objections stem more explicitly from reference to the violent history of U.S. colonialist exploitation in Latin America and elsewhere, made all the more visible through the ethnographic freak show. Fusco and Gómez-Peña clearly participate in a critique of this history and of the tradition of the freak show, which reflected it. Yet objections to particular spectacles also frequently originate in the question of authentic versus fraudulent representation. Distaste for the U.S. version of the freak show, as opposed to the more valued artistry of culturally specific circus traditions, is apparent in the Cuban Rigoberto Cruz Díaz’s 1972 testimonio, titled Muy buenas noches, señoras y señores, recipient of a mención from the prestigious Premio Casa de las Américas. The book, based on a series of interviews with performers, documents the lives and work of a group of Cuban circus artists, from 1923 to 1959. The group centers on a nuclear family unit, which, as the author suggests, turns out to be an ideal object for his proposed study:

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“Mantuvo su unidad y sus normas de organización, conducta y moral, sin grandes alteraciones durante casi medio siglo” (10) [It maintained its unity and its norms of organization, conduct, and morality, without major alterations, for almost half a century].9 In stark contrast to this idealized model, Cruz Díaz continues, “Comparecemos al enfrentamiento de algunas de estas gentes, cargadas de sanas costumbres e ideas, con un medio corrompido y traumatizado hasta la médula: el Coney Island Park y su carpa de fenómenos vivos y muertos, a donde los llevara una de las tantas crisis económicas del circo” (12–13) [We will witness the encounter of some of these people, loaded with healthy habits and ideas, with an environment corrupted and traumatized to the marrow: Coney Island Park and its tent of living and dead freaks, where one of the circus’s many economic crises would take it]. In Cruz Díaz’s incidental reenactment of Martí’s encounter with the freak show, performers from the Havana-based Coney Island Park hire members of the local Circo La Rosa to participate in their act.10 The author insists here on a fundamental difference between “we” and “they,” between the Cubans, a family business of hard-working and talented artists, and the Coney Island exploiters of public and performers, or fenómenos, alike. His primary informant for this segment of the text also points out multiple instances of fakery on the part of the Coney Island group. She reveals the inner workings of the “Caja China” in which metal spikes only appear to penetrate the performer’s body. She also describes one of the fenómenos vivos [live freaks]: “un hombre afeminado, que se colocaba sobre sus partes un aditamento de goma que representaba el pubis de una mujer . . . después de entre el pubis, extraía un pene, también de goma, que venía colocado dentro de este aditamento” (266–67). [an effeminate man, who placed a rubber attachment representing a female pubis over his private parts . . . then he pulled out a penis, also of rubber, which was connected within the same attachment]. Another informant details the Coney Island way of selling tickets in which, as a matter of course, customers are given incorrect change (Cruz Díaz 275). This practice, once customary in circuses and sideshows throughout the United States, formed part of a repertoire of fraudulent practices, on and off stage, for which circus workers became notorious.11 Yet the text later blurs the line between freak and artist. The description of fenómenos vivos includes details about the freaks’ talents and personal relationships with the Cuban narrators:

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El mutilado . . . tenía una velocidad con el pie para pintar que era asombroso. Una muchacha que se ve muy delgada en la foto es Flor Castell, ella fue la muchacha que hacía la mujer eléctrica cuando yo pasé a hacer el número de las serpientes. Esto la afectó mucho, quedó muy mal de los nervios. Después, venía la mujer gorda . . . Y era un pan, buena, tenía locura con el chiquito mío, que entonces tenía dos años. (267) [The mutilated man . . . painted with his foot with amazing speed. A girl who looks very thin in the photo is Flor Castell; she was the girl who played the part of the electric woman when I switched to doing the snake number. That affected her a lot; it really damaged her nerves. Then there was the fat woman. . . . And she was a sweetheart, anyway, she adored my little son, who was two at the time.]

This particular rewriting of the freak show as cultural exchange hardly suggests reconciliation between Martí’s “we” and “they,” however. In fact, the Circo La Rosa performers eventually leave the Coney Island group at the threat of a wage cut, finally accepting a parting gift of some poisonous snakes (283–84). Yet the Cuban version of the Coney Island spectacle does offer space to reconsider the slippery nature of the line dividing art from deception, performance from identity, and Latin American “freak” from U.S.-style exploiter, even while emphasizing a cultural boundary of “morality” dividing one party from another. The axis of hierarchical morality structuring the reception and critique of popular entertainment, from freak shows to talk shows, at times intersects the question of authenticity versus fakery, as the example from Cruz Díaz’s text suggests. In this case, the sanas costumbres [healthy habits] of the Circo La Rosa artists appear in sharp contrast to the Coney Island practices, which are primarily identified in terms of their fraudulence. In the contemporary context of the mainstream bizarre, according to Gómez-Peña’s reading of U.S. and Latin American television and related cultural scenes, the question of the morality or social acceptability of entertainment has lost much of its urgency due to the public’s saturation with extreme images of all kinds. Yet objections have not vanished overnight and continue to structure the reception of much television broadcasting in both Latin America and the United States (and between the two).12 And the transnational nature of contemporary broadcasting tends to blur and redefine the contours of objection and geographical boundaries according to which various public sectors, nationalities, and other groups position themselves.

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The relatively recent phenomenon of the television talk show in Spanish, epitomized by the success of Miami-based Univisión’s Cristina Saralegui, is frequently interpreted as a Latina version of the paradigm established by Oprah Winfrey and other U.S. anglophone celebrities of the genre.13 The Hispanic talk show, of which Cristina is one of the best examples, wildly successful in its combination of superstars, ordinary people, and self-styled freaks, is familiar to broad sectors of the Spanishspeaking population from a range of sociocultural backgrounds throughout most of the Americas (Monsiváis, Aires de familia 232–45). It bears greater resemblance to its anglophone counterpart and to the freak show genealogy of the latter than to a history of the circus or of freak shows within Latin America. Episodes of Cristina have included such themes as “concurso de traseros impactantes” [impressive rear-end contest]; “¿Será hombre o mujer? ¿Qué opina usted?” [Is it a man or a woman? What do you think?]; “Esta vieja es la amante de mi marido” [This woman is my husband’s lover]; and “Me avergüenzo de tu busto de silicono” [I’m ashamed of your silicon bust], as well as frequent appearances of Latin American and Latino/a celebrities, usually singers and models.14 A similar variety of scandal and fanfare can be found on many English-language programs of the talk show genre. What then, if anything, distinguishes the Hispanic talk show from its Anglo predecessors? To some extent, it is its combination of vociferous public reception and multinational audience, which allows it to disturb and partly redraw the national, cultural, and ethnic lines suggested by the history of exploitative entertainment from which it evolved. This is clearly the case for the popular but divisive Cristina. Because the show is available throughout Latin America and large areas of the United States, public reception, whether for or against, tends to cross national boundaries. Thus Carlos Monsiváis cites the furor from the Mexican right wing and clergy, with fragments of heated interviews between Cristina and powerful figures of the Mexican right, such as the bishop of Cuernavaca and an ex-president of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), a leading conservative party. According to Monsiváis, Voluntaria e involuntariamente, Cristina representa las fisuras crecientes de la moral autoritaria mientras garantiza a sus anunciantes que las “‘audacias” presentadas ya forman parte del repertorio social. Así, el eje del programa no son las situaciones extremas sino el reconocimiento de la nueva moral pública que, entre otras cosas, se impone sobre la vieja táctica de los silencios que son autorreproches. Y este derrumbe de inhibiciones cunde entre

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los hispanos de los Estados Unidos, de alguna manera vanguardia del comportamiento en el universo latinoamericano. (Aires de familia 242) [Voluntarily and involuntarily, Cristina represents the growing cracks in authoritarian morality, as it guarantees to its sponsors that the “audacities” presented on the show are already part of the social repertoire. Thus, the axis of the program is not the extreme situations, but rather the recognition of the new public morality, which, among other things, imposes itself over the old tactic of silences that are self-reproaches. And this collapse of inhibitions is spreading among U.S. Hispanics, who are in a sense the vanguard of behavior in the Latin American universe.]15

Spanish-language programs, such as Cristina and that of her one-time competitor Laura Bozzo, clearly share multiple reference points with their Anglo counterparts, many of which similarly play with the boundaries of the morally acceptable, however this is defined.16 In the case of the conservative Mexicans cited by Monsiváis, the “immorality” of the programming lies in its exposure of sexual intimacies that representatives of the Catholic Church in Mexico, as well as many of its followers, believe should never be made public. At certain points, however, morality or values may be identified first and foremost through a vision of national culture, as well as through church affiliation (and often the two go hand in hand). For example, Monsiváis also cites the Alianza Fuerza de Opinión Pública: “Pedimos la erradicación de las influencias extranjeras negativas en nuestra educación . . . Estamos en contra de que nos impongan conductores extranjeros que hablan mal el castellano y desprecian nuestros valores” (Aires de familia 233) [We are asking for the eradication of foreign influences in our education . . . We are against the forced imposition of foreign broadcasters who speak bad Spanish and scorn our values]. Here, the moral offense clearly originates from abroad and poses a direct threat to “nuestros valores.” Do these outsiders offend because of the sexually explicit or otherwise “trashy” content of their programming, or because they fail to speak correct (Mexican) Spanish? A second example further illustrates the uncertain line between the boundaries of morality and those of linguistically defined national identity. The following exchange takes place between the bishop of Cuernavaca and Cristina, on her show: Obispo. Mire lo que escribe Guadalupe Loaeza de un programa de usted. Chica, ¿qué tú hiciste cuando los viste juntos a tu marido y a tu hija?

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Cristina. Perdóneme, Monseñor, lo que molesta es que yo utilice la palabra chico, pero así hablamos nosotros. Obispo. El modo en que se hacen las preguntas fomenta el morbo. (Aires de familia 240). [Bishop. Look what Guadalupe Loaeza writes about one of your shows. Girl (chica), what did you do when you saw your husband and your daughter together? Cristina. Excuse me, monsignor, but what’s bothersome is that I use the word chico but that’s how we speak. Bishop. The way in which questions are posed encourages morbid fascination.]

In this case again, although the bishop is specifically critical of the sexual content of the program, the debate reveals the extent to which national and cultural differences (of language) become inseparable from the showdown between divergent notions of morality. Various coalitions of the U.S. Christian right have expressed their own angry condemnations of “trash TV,” in a manner similar to that of the Mexicans cited by Monsiváis.17 But the U.S. and Spanish American cultural histories behind the public reception, as well as the implications of critique of such programs, cannot be read as entirely parallel. Instead, they are marked by points of intersection and conflict and a geopolitically defined history of exploitation. The shift in standards of morality—for Monsiváis, the dominant, triumphant element underpinning Cristina— flows primarily from U.S. Latinos/as to Latin America, thanks in part to the television medium that helps to cement a pan-Hispanic sociocultural imaginary. The “new morality,” then, rather than the “extreme situations” presented on the show, becomes the bottom line for the Mexican cultural critic. Yet the opposing conservative morality, in its tendency to insist on dividing “us” from “them” or, specifically, Latin American “traditional” culture from U.S.-style mass media entertainment also participates in a redrawing of this very boundary dividing “us” from “them,” since in this case the offending party is a Cuban American and her followers, both Latinos/as and Latin Americans. The moral opposition mapped by Monsiváis suggests a shift in the geography that locates the offended party with respect to the offender. But beyond this, certain features of the talk show (or freak show) spectacle in its cultural context remain relatively unchanged. Today, the shows’ producers continue to profit from the public’s desire to see something strange or shocking, to see the real, “authentic” thing, or to learn that what seemed real was actually fake, or vice versa. At the same time, the

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increasing proliferation of ever-more-shocking imagery available to viewers may tend to dull the urgency of the divide between the authentic and the fraudulent. In the particular cases of “La gente de látex” and “The Couple in the Cage,” the bodies of the characters, portrayed as freaks, take the question of morality a step further, subverting the dictates that divide “good taste” from “bad,” by critically reappropriating elements from different entertainment genres. “The Couple in the Cage” subtly conflates performance art with the ethnographic freak show, a “high” with a “low” form of entertainment, yanking the moral rug from beneath its viewers’ feet, while “La gente de látex” surprises readers of literature by surreptitiously turning them into talk show viewers. The performance of revenge in each show and text also takes place through emphasis on the role of the body in performance, on the body’s disruption of the readers’ and viewers’ expectations of divisions between the authentic and the fraudulent, the real and the simulated. In each case, the body performs for an audience, in a cage or on screen, but at the same time, these projects specifically perform the ambivalent function of the corporeal as such, within and beyond the contours of a given spectacle. “La gente de látex” Yehya’s story makes explicit and exaggerates the deception at work through the talk show medium: both the studio and the television audiences are led to believe that no acting is taking place at all, that the camera simply portrays its subjects exactly as they are. The freaks, in turn, are assumed to be completely candid and willing to reveal their innermost secrets, as well as their sometimes unusual bodies. Yet, as the narrator explains early in the story, he and his colleagues, including the female dwarf he calls X, play predetermined roles and follow a script: La primera vez que trabajamos juntos, ella interpretaba a una niña de once años que había sido violada a diario durante 8 años por su padre. El papel del padre lo tenía yo . . . Yo aceptaba las humillaciones hundido en mi sillón, como explicaba mi guión. En una pausa, platiqué con X, que entonces tenía 30 años y no medía más de un metro diez, me pareció una gran profesional y una mujer atractiva e inteligente. (97) [The first time we worked together, she played the role of an eleven-yearold girl who had been raped by her father every day for eight years. I played the part of the father . . . I accepted the humiliations, sunk into my seat, as

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indicated in the script. During a break, I chatted with X, who at the time was thirty and was no taller than three-feet-seven-inches; she seemed to me to be a great professional and an attractive, intelligent woman.]

X, as the narrator repeatedly notes, is a dwarf, at least in her off-screen life. On television she is almost always cast as a child, although sometimes as a dwarf. In contrast, the narrator himself seems not to have a body at all—or, in any case, nothing to merit a physical description. His television roles include a jealous husband, a transvestite, a serial killer, and a person contacted by extraterrestrials, all roles in which physical appearance would seem to be of secondary importance to behavior and psychology. But both are professional actors, in contrast to the “real” freaks whom the narrator despises and regards as threats to his livelihood: Por ese tiempo los programas comenzaron a llenarse de fenómenos, que era como los profesionales del medio llamábamos a las personas que realmente venían a exponer sus miserias, traumas, deformidades y conflictos. Me irritaba ver a estos advenedizos que se presentaban sin cobrar a desnudar sus intimidades, haciendo apariciones patéticas y totalmente inverosímiles. (102) [Around that time the shows began to be filled with freaks, which was what we, the professionals in the field, called people who really came to display their miseries, traumas, deformities, and conflicts. It irritated me to see these upstarts who showed up for free to unveil their privacy, with their pathetic and totally unrealistic performances.]

One cannot be certain from the details of the text whether the story takes place in any specific country, such as Mexico or the United States, or to what extent it is based on a real model from the world of television talk shows. In any case, the existence of both “real freaks” and actors on contemporary talk shows, of instances of conflicts between the two groups, and of deceptive practices in which producers script supposedly spontaneous scenes have been documented as rampant, at least in the United States. And, as Joshua Gamson puts it, “A good deal of dishonesty is simply built into the way talk shows are produced” (81).18 In this sense, whether or not specific individuals on such programs can truly be considered actors is less important than the fact that the nature of this programming tends to make everyone involved into some kind of performer, more or less aware of the requirements of the role he or she is to play as “realistically” as possible. Yehya’s story of television actors continues the tradition of dissimulating authenticity and highlights a

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hierarchy of artistry, with a solid line, in the narrator’s view, dividing the talented professionals from the naively transparent “freaks.” Yet, as the narrator will eventually discover for himself, even this apparently clear line is not quite what it seems. The narrator voices the uncertainty of his role and those of the other “gente de látex” in declaring, “Me refiriré a mí mismo y a mis colegas como actores, aunque muchos se indignarán por esto” (96) [I will refer to myself and to my colleagues as actors, although many will get indignant about that]. Acting becomes a doubly performative task in this case, since its status is constantly called into question, and hence demands reaffirmation. The narrator and his colleagues are both actors performing the roles of “freaks,” and “freaks” posing as actors. These gente de látex, therefore, straddle the line between acting and direct self-exposure. The narrator actually emphasizes this line at every possible moment, only to blur or erase it through his gestures and reflections, as when he describes, “En una ocasión interpreté a un hombre que amaba demasiado los zapatos de mujer y me excité muchísimo” (99) [One time I played the role of a man who loved women’s shoes too much and I got very aroused]. The narrator undermines his own role throughout the text. He is simultaneously fascinated by X, by her acting ability, and by the tragic story she performs, and at the same time, he is unable to distinguish between X as actress and X as character. It is the narrator’s particular inability to observe the performance and reality division that causes trouble for him, in both his personal and professional lives (to the extent these are separate spheres), and also creates the dynamic that propels the story forward. The narrator is, therefore, reduced to the status of an audience member or, perhaps worse, a fenómeno, one who takes life at a uniform face value. The final blow is dealt when he is made suddenly and painfully aware of this deception, at the hands of his former lover and co-star, X. Even as he fantasizes about seeking a different profession, it has become clear that for this narrator, there is no world outside his story of the talk show circuit and no real difference in his experience between the talk show and his account of his personal life. In this collapsing of on- and off-screen worlds, the story mimics the talk show format, even though the first-person narration can only simulate the reader’s access to televised scenes. The text creates a split between television program and story, between an imaginary visual display of the confessing body and the disembodied voice that reconstructs the scene. Audience voyeurism is frustrated here by the absence of the visible body that an actual talk show would deliver and that the narrator can only

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evoke indirectly. As is the case in many narratives of disability, here too, the disabled body becomes the motor—or prosthetic device, to borrow David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s construct—by which the text propels itself forward. The reader of this text unwittingly becomes a would-be talk show viewer, superior to the studio audience by virtue of knowing the “truth” about the gente de látex’s deceptive performances yet, at the same time, potentially offended by being made to participate in such a “trashy” genre, with its precession of ever-more shocking and “authentic” revelations.19 “La gente de látex,” therefore, questions the conventionally accepted hierarchical gap between readers of literature and talk show audience members. The reader may seem to know more—and perhaps possess a higher education—than the imaginary and naïve viewing audience, yet he or she still never gets to see the actual shows the text describes, with their unusual cast of characters. In this sense, perhaps Yehya’s story even “out talks” the talk show, for here, the reader, presumed consumer of “high culture,” is twice duped: first by a textual conversion to the status of a talk show viewer and then by being subsequently denied the pleasure of a visual revelation of corporeal difference—what the show promised the text could not deliver. The figure of X embodies a renegotiation of the divisions that oppose corporeal difference to performative agency, as well as those that separate textual from televised representation. X, as it turns out, can be both a fenómeno, defined by her unusual body, and a professional, aware of the role she must play in a given moment, belying the false notion that a true freak can appear on stage simply as herself, unlike the talented artist who actually plays a role. At the same time, while the narrator at first seems to define and control X’s role in his story, she, as it turns out, has been inhabiting her own off-stage reality, one that comes into sharp conflict with the narrator’s earlier version of their relationship. The textual representation of the female body as object and spectacle makes it present to the reader yet, at the same time, fundamentally absent as the partial outline of what we might see if we had access to the imaginary television broadcasts. It is X’s transitory status in the text that allows her to highlight the modes of representation that have tended to victimize her, and to subvert such representation, by literally cheating, as the text’s conclusion reveals, on the narrator’s terms of the story. Revenge as performance of this body takes place in the uncertain passage from visual, televised representation to the seemingly distanced textual version, as well as in the restructuring of divisions that oppose extreme bodily difference to performative agency.

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For his part, the narrator has difficulty in breaking free of a given role, as when he states, “Hubo un momento en que pensé que me lincharían. Yo aceptaba las humillaciones hundido en mi sillón, como explicaba mi guión” (97) [There was a point when I thought they would lynch me. I accepted the humiliations, sunk into my seat, as the script indicated]. Here, adherence to the script and the role accompanies a fear of bodily harm. Humiliation describes both the verbal abuse that the audience inflicts on the narrator’s character in the television performance, and— the reader may suspect—the narrator’s actual feelings of humiliation in performing a despicable role and being held accountable for the repulsive actions of the character. In offering the reader this insider information on the true nature of the talk show, the narrator highlights the deception of the audience, its naiveté in believing the actors to actually be the roles they represent. But at the same time, through describing the scene to a new, reading audience, he affirms his identity as participant in the drama and enacts a new scene of confession and repeated humiliation. Here, television show and text follow parallel structures of exposing an earlier lie and stating the “real” truth. In the case of the talk show, the earlier lie was, of course, incest—a necessarily secret act—while, in the text, the lie was to have deceived the audience into believing the incest story. In each case, the fascination of the story is grounded in its absolute truth claim, made radical in contrast to an earlier falsehood and its duped subjects. The revelation of the lie provides pleasure to the audience as it is let in on the secret. But according to this pattern, each audience will eventually be punished for its voyeurism, in becoming the victim of the next deception. These repeating structures suggest both suture and fusion between a lie and the truth that dethrones it or between one lie and the next. The revenge of performance therefore works not only as the longed for synchronicity between reality and simulation but also as the repeated enactment of the line between the two. This performative repetition also corresponds to the revenge of the rape and incest victim who “confesses the truth” only to undermine the notion of truth that the listeners desired and thought they were getting. The actress may or may not be a victim herself; and her performative confession, the deceptive promise of a final answer on the screen and in the text, makes it impossible for the audience to ever know the difference. The revenge of this supposed victim is therefore grounded in the paradox of a final truth claim that denies a voyeuristic audience the evidence of a truth it desires and demands. For Yehya’s characters in the text and on the talk show, incest is presented first as a despicable act to be overcome and only later as an implicit

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desire or fantasy. The catch is, of course, that this act may never have even taken place and certainly not according to the circumstances detailed on television. X is nonetheless seen as the ideal person for the role, deeply convincing to both viewers and narrator. As a little person, X can come across as a young child, presumably with the help of makeup. At the same time, she is certainly not a child, as the narrator recognizes, but rather a mature and attractive young woman. In this sense, the fantasy of father/ daughter incest is reenacted and legitimized through the new context of the narrator’s attraction to X. While the camera rolls, he is her father and she his victimized child. During the breaks, the two are actors on equal footing, except that, for the narrator, the line between on- and off-camera was never so clear. X’s bodily difference is at once a bodily ambiguity, one that allows the narrator to portray her as simultaneously child and adult, prohibited and legitimate object of desire. In the context of the television and textual performance, she also embodies the figure of incest victim; her height might suggest perpetual childhood, suspending her, and the audience in her tragic past, while her verbal maturity and acting ability provide the staged distance that makes the story all the more convincing. The only tangible evidence of incest which carries through from the televised to the textual version of the story is the unusual body of X. The body as represented to the viewing or reading public both confirms and undermines its own truth—its scene of representation. In the case of the television program, this body has come to symbolize, for the public eye, the ambiguity of the incest story, suspended between childhood and maturity, apparent distance from and proximity to the past. The body, as child and adult, “reality” and performance, therefore becomes a mechanism of (failed) reciprocal transitions from fantasy to truth and from televised fiction to textual confession. The figure of X’s body links the structures of the text and the television program. This body also becomes the focal point of the narrator’s attention, the object of his desire, and a means of defining his own identity within the story. His description of their sexual encounters makes the reader witness to the intimate details of the scenes, in a textual version of the “tell-all TV” confession. But, as the reader eventually learns, there is more to the story and to X’s life than the narrator has so far realized. The description itself is fairly banal. X refuses to have sexual intercourse with the narrator, claiming to be a born-again Christian. They sleep in the same bed, however, and she performs a sexual favor for the narrator, at her own initiation. When he attempts to reciprocate, she rejects him. This is the extent of the narrator’s confession of what took place. The scene

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repeats itself on another occasion, in which the two spend three consecutive nights together in a motel, until X’s money runs out. The initial televised story of father/daughter incest is played out by the actors, behind the scenes, in the private space of a hotel room. The scene both mimics and departs from the incest story they had recounted in the television studio earlier that day in which X had played the role of an eleven-year-old girl, and the narrator that of her rapist father. That same evening, they end up in X’s room: “Platicamos sobre la cama un rato hasta que yo me lancé sobre ella. Sus pequeños y frágiles huesos crujieron de manera aterradora, pensé que le había roto algo, pero no pareció dolerle en lo absoluto” (98) [We sat on the bed talking for a while, until I jumped on her. Her little fragile bones cracked in a terrifying way; I thought she had broken something, but it didn’t seem to hurt her at all]. The narrator emphasizes the radical difference in body size between the two, initially assigning himself the role of violent, though unwitting, aggressor. The apparent hierarchy soon shifts, however, as X determines exactly when and how all further physical interaction will take place. More significant than X’s resistance and control here, however, is the narrator’s discovery, at the end of the story, that she is, in fact, the “puta del circuito” (102)[whore of the circuit], as another colleague informs him casually. Their relationship, apparently of emotional importance to the narrator, was for X nothing more than one in a series of brief and meaningless encounters. For the reader, this revelation may come as anticlimatic, hardly a shocking finish to the story. In fact, this new information merely confirms the tendency of the talk show genre, punctuated by its now cliché figures and plot lines. The narrator is nonetheless devastated by the news, finding himself at the center of a sucker story that should have been all too familiar to someone like him, versed in the standard tropes of his industry. Here, the narrator has not only been deceived in a personal relationship but also has, in addition, lost control of his own story. In “cheating” on her occasional partner, X becomes a body that is always elsewhere, a promiscuous and uncontrolled subject that undermines the narrator’s sense of masculine possession and, more importantly, confirms the instability of the bodily grounding or truth underpinning his story. Cheating—although the narrator and X had never established a monogamous relationship in any case—therefore takes place in a dual sense. The unusual or disabled female body appears to promise romantic possibility in the form of exclusive possession, just as the same body, within the text and on television, appears to offer proof and grounding to abstract narration and unconfirmed

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identities. Yet in both cases, the body refuses to fulfill this role or does so only to undermine it instantly and by the same token. The performative revenge played out by X in this story therefore centers on her identity as supposedly grounded in the specific characteristics of her body and in the relationship between body and text. Yehya’s story inserts itself into a contemporary tradition of tell-all TV and talk shows, characteristic of Gómez-Peña’s “mainstream bizarre,” but, in doing so, manages to dupe its consumers. X’s ambivalent embodiment simulates an off-screen reality but finally seals reader and narrator into the continuous loop of show and text. Reading and watching the story, ourselves as witnesses to the scene, we may awaken to this apparent seamlessness and to our troubling inability to locate the body within it. X’s performance is a radical refusal to equate corporeal difference with scripted story and, at the same time, a refusal to stop performing as the script is continuously rewritten. This paradox of the disabled body’s uncertain location with respect to its literary framing suggests a fracturing of the frame; hence, the performance of revenge highlights the incommensurability between the body and its stagings.20 Once Again, “The Couple in the Cage” Unlike Yehya’s fiction, Gómez-Peña and Fusco’s performance project and the subsequent film by Fusco and Paula Heredia, “The Couple in the Cage” garnered widespread attention from the mainstream media. The film has continued to inspire an outpouring of responses from academic critics. Analysis of the dual project is featured in Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire and, in fact, exemplifies the relationship between Taylor’s critical concepts of archive and repertoire. The performance project as live act takes place as embodied practice, changes with each reenactment, and requires an audience presence, thus corresponding to Taylor’s notion of the repertoire. The video, on the other hand, belongs to the archive, as a document that may form part of a larger collection of materials and is “supposedly resistant to change” (19). In a similar sense, Yehya’s fiction represents a dual structure of the live enactment of television talk shows and the filmed show as finished product. In this case, however, the fictional text as (archival) third layer is added to the dynamic and subsumes the imaginary (repertorial) television versions of the story. In both cases, one audience (of readers or viewers) laughs at the naïve gullibility of another, although even those who laugh may come to realize that they too have been duped.

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As a response to the context of the quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival in the “New World,” the artists of “The Couple in the Cage” set out with the agenda of documenting and satirizing the history of the exploitative practices of exhibiting non-Western peoples (Fusco). More specifically, the performance and video critically reflected a tradition of displaying bodily difference for a profit. Difference, in this case, is not understood primarily as disability or deformity, but rather as racial, ethnic, and cultural differences in the context of colonial and postcolonial encounter.21 Yet the display of disabled bodies is also implied here as a related practice in the history of such spectacles. Thus, a photograph of “Pip and Flip” is included in the montage (see Figure 4). These microcephalic twins were actually from Georgia but billed on their freak-show tours as “twins from Yucatan,” in the standard showmen’s conflation of disability with “exotic” or “primitive” origin.22 “The Couple in the Cage” performance, particularly in its filmed version, makes specific reference to the history of the freak show as one aspect of such exploitation. In addition, it relies on such cultural phenomena as the museum diorama and the discourse of early anthropology to make its point. At the beginning of live performances of this piece, Gómez-Peña and Fusco were led on chains to their cage by collaborators who posed as ethnographic zookeepers. Once locked inside the cage, the two would begin performing some of their “typical” activities. Gómez-Peña paced the cage or watched television while Fusco sewed, and both occasionally worked on a laptop computer. For the price of fifty cents, Gómez-Peña would tell a story in the Guatinaui language, a nonsensical imitation of Nahuatl. For the same price, Fusco would perform a dance to rap music. For one dollar, visitors could have their picture taken in front of the cage. And at the Whitney Museum in New York, Gómez-Peña partially revealed his genitals to the crowd for five dollars (Fusco, English is Broken 53). The performers chose an eclectic mix of clothing for their appearances, combining recognizable pieces of contemporary Western garb, such as Fusco’s Converse sneakers, and Gómez-Peña’s studded black leather collar and bracelets, with stereotypical “ethnic” pieces. Fusco wore a grass skirt, bikini top, and large shell necklace, along with heavy “tribal” face paint. Gómez-Peña opted for a prominent feather headdress and metallic-colored body coverings featuring geometric designs and symbols that might popularly be associated with ancient Mexican civilizations (see figure 5). The performance partially mimicked features of the ethnographic freak show. The pseudoscientific and educational emphasis suggested the practice of conflating science with entertainment, common in the late

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Figure 4. Pip and Flip, Twins from Yucatan with World Circus Side Show Coney Island, 1929. Actually, Elvira and Genelee Snow were the daughters of Robert and Lillie Snow of Hartwell, Georgia. From a copy at the Georgia Archives.

nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of the freak show and dime museum. Similarly, blurring the line between human and nonhuman animals, as when the performers were fed bananas through the bars of the cage, points to the historical referents of such famous ethnographic spectacles as Missing Links, Nondescripts, and What Is Its? These and similar roles have historically been filled by numerous performers, many of

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Figure 5. Two undiscovered Amerindians. Photograph of performance by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco, 1992. Courtesy Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and courtesy of the artists.

African or Amerindian origin, and were especially popular in the nineteenth century as living illustrations of Darwinian evolution (see Figure 6).23 For Yúdice, the performative register of “The Couple in the Cage” reflects a larger social imperative to perform identity, through and against, “a conjuncture of conditionings by the media, the market, the welfare state, and the political and juridical systems” (51). According to this reading, artists, like everyone else, have no choice but to perform and, at the same time, examine the constructed nature of identity. Yet Yúdice also takes Fusco and Gómez-Peña to task for unfairly representing their audiences: The performance is set inside a cage and the performers wear and use the most outlandish props: presumably they are primitive, but one of them watches TV and the other works on a laptop. The artists claim, nonetheless, that unsuspecting publics mistook them for real Indians, to be mistreated and demeaned. This is clearly disingenuous, for it was the artists who placed themselves in a cage and invited the public to act out the primitivist, absurd fantasy in a pomo register, including feeding them as if they were caged animals. The onlookers were thus invited to “act out” what a

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Figure 6. Two Africans (?), in costume, posed in carnival side show. This image suggests the common side show practice of conflating notions of racial difference with those of mental disability. Figure 4 presents a similar example. Created/published between ca. 1925 and 1935. Reproduced from the McManus and Young Collection; and Dr. SaintHoudini Collection, Library of Congress.

target audience would do, and when they accepted the pact—when they were cornered—they were taken for that target and labeled racist. (50)

The impossibility of an ethically adequate response to the live performance here therefore becomes a function of the artists’ deliberate setup. Following Yúdice’s argument, if audience members respond to the invitation by accepting their own predesignated roles in the performance, they are merely following a socially determined and reconstructed script. Although Taylor’s interpretation of the project differs from Yúdice’s in that she explicitly celebrates its efficacy—“Provoking this state of confusion, guilty pleasure, and genuine sadness, is, I feel, the power and the brilliance of the performance” (74)—the two nonetheless coincide in the structure of impossibility upon which they each insist. For Taylor, there is no appropriate reaction to the performance. Those who are taken in

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by the fiction are simply duped and, in some cases, inadvertently reveal their colonialist beliefs, while those who see through the simulation must choose between going along with it, hence reenacting a historically violent scenario or critiquing it and making fools—as well as ethnographic objects—out of the show’s gullible victims. Similarly, for Yúdice, the structure of the performance sets up the audience for failure. Regardless of which view one privileges here, the dynamic of performance and video leaves the audience in awkward suspension, with fingers pointing in all directions and nowhere. While this may be the inevitable double bind provoked by the project, the key to its efficacy and notoriety, the documentary quality of the video, its inclusion of archival sources in particular intercepts and further complicates the indeterminacy of the viewer’s position and his or her access to the displayed body. The parallel structures at work in both Yehya’s fiction and “The Couple in the Cage” suggest a crossing over between the performance of the repertoire and the performativity of the literary text, and the video. Although the story and the video exist as completed documents, which one may examine and reexamine, in each case, the relationship between live show and text or video allows these documents to perform a prying open and reconstituting of embodied practices. In the case of Yehya’s fiction, the text calls forth an imaginary, performed scene only to highlight its disappearance and replacement by the written version of the story. “The Couple in the Cage” video techniques of montage combine footage of anthropological studies and freak shows with scenes of the cage performance; early film clips therefore perform a simultaneous framing and undermining of their own documentary truth-value. Readers’ and viewers’ access to the “real” body is further undercut by the instability of these textual and filmic projects. Performative revenge takes place, not only through the absence of verifiably authentic exploited and recently discovered indigenous bodies, but also because the “archival” materials themselves destabilize the discursive framework through which these bodies would finally have their say. The video version of the project emphasizes the division between those who believe the fiction and those who see through it. A man in Sydney, Australia, boasts of his ability to read facial expressions and gestures and claims he is not quite convinced by what he sees, although he adds that he “might be wrong.” And toward the end of the video, we see a brief “Channel 7 Eyewitness News” segment, in which the newscaster, standing before the empty cage, tells his viewers, “Okay, so it’s not for real . . . and they are studying us more than we are studying them” (“The Couple in the Cage”). His voice adopts the standard inflection of a newscaster’s

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concluding remarks, as if to finalize the official truth and to close the chapter that was this performance, along with all of the doubts that it raised. Yet the sequence of video segments undermines this performance as well. We cannot be sure whether the news segment was borrowed from a television broadcast or simply staged by Fusco and Heredía. In either case, the figure with the microphone in the museum, posed before the cage, can hardly be taken at face value at this point in the video. In selecting this footage, the videomakers seem to insist on the ambiguity of the division between the authentic and the fraudulent. These are intrinsically unstable moments in that viewers have no way of verifying the degree to which they were constructed or to what extent they reflect an overall spectrum of public reactions to the live performance. In contrast, segments of archival footage included in the video at least appear to reflect a more fixed, historically based quality; the film’s final credits list resources such as the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin, and the Twentieth Century Fox Movietonews collection at the University of South Carolina. The work of documentation apparently solidifies the historical backdrop to the project. The performance and video are compelling precisely because they form part of an undeniable history of the colonization, exploitation, and display of non-Western people. Those who might doubt or wonder about the nature of this history have only to observe some of the archival clips: in one segment a white freak-show patron mimics the clichéd savage gestures of the “wild woman” behind bars, while the subtitle reads, “Grr!” Others reveal segments of “Wild West shows,” or of circus parades, featuring performers of African origin. A movie still showing a posed group of men bears the caption, “1930Hollywood brought ‘cannibals’ for moving picture gala.” The project clearly seeks to highlight and prove the reality of exploitative freak-show practices and their links to an ongoing history of racism and colonialist mentality. At the same time, it is precisely this notion of verifiable, empirically documented truth that the project also calls into question, by repeatedly underlining the indeterminate line between truth and fiction in the staging of the performance and in audience responses to it. Those who wish to determine whether the aborigines are “for real” or not have missed the point, or worse, have turned their colonialist gazes upon this latest object of exploration and consumption. The dilemma here foreshadows Gómez-Peña’s notion of the mainstream bizarre in which extreme corporeal spectacles and the indeterminacy of their significance leave little space for truth or message in the sphere of public performance. Yet suspension of the true or false question in this case becomes part of

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the project’s strategy, through references to both the urgency of the divide and its persistent deferral. The final archival clip of the video shows an anthropologist who had earlier described his experiences with native peoples in the “jungle mountains.” Here, he concludes with the following brief speech: “I have described these things, not to praise, not to condemn, not to compare, but simply to show them as they are” (“The Couple in the Cage”). If the video critiques the naïve empiricism of this early anthropologist, secure in the truth that his earnest note-taking purports to reflect, it at once repeats his gesture. Mimicking the anthropologist, the filmmakers reveal their own truth through or as his words. This performative gesture, as inscribed within the video as a whole, therefore oscillates between the self-conscious critique of final truth and the affirmation of historically documented truth as final. Just as from the viewer’s perspective, there is no appropriate or “correct” response to this film; the film itself remains similarly suspended between the gestures of truth and history it both claims and ridicules. The revenge of the performance and video therefore takes place through the staking of this line, the affixing of critical markers to a historical trajectory of irreconcilable relationships between bodily differences and the multiple scenes of representation they motivate. The video appears to offer itself as a transparent document, particularly through the inclusion of archival footage, which ostensibly reveals and confirms the true history of ethnographic spectacle as overt colonialism. Yet it is also the use of this footage, perhaps even more than the interviews with spectators, that particularly shifts the grounding of these bodies as empirical truth. In Yehya’s fiction, the virtual bodies of television talk show participants, supposedly hypervisual and immediately available to consumers of media, slip into a textual simulation in which access to the body is at once offered and denied. Performative revenge occurs here through the citation of mainstream bizarre television that seems to “tell all” but turns out to operate—within the text—as a series of deferred and false revelations. Finally, the textual performance makes the televised version disappear, reminding readers of its fictionality. This is not a text based on a television program, but rather a story that invents a televised scenario, performs the creation of the talk show world, and hence surreptitiously replaces the function of television, at least for the duration of the reading. In banalizing the world of television and in highlighting the uncertain divide between on- and off-screen realities, the story both collapses together and severs “real” bodies and their narratives.

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In “The Couple in the Cage” video, by contrast, the promised bodies of ethnographic history and of the mainstream bizarre are fully visible to the viewers. Yet in the end the revelation undercuts our access to a corporeal truth, for the closer we get to a full view of the facts through carefully compiled archival footage, the more this footage reveals its own citational quality. The video, like the anthropologist, “describe[s] these things . . . to show them as they are,” which means showing that nothing will be as clearly defined as the viewer might have expected or desired, or even that seeing everything clearly will lead to a guaranteed misreading. These archival sources, finally, are far from dead and unchanging texts of reference. Like Yehya’s textual evocation of television, they perform their own negotiation of the body’s truth-value, for their active presence—as Butlerian “force of rupture”—unmoors the notion that seeing should ever lead to unreserved believing.

CHAPTER 5

Photographic Fictions and Corporeal Geographies Collected Objects A faded black and white photograph featured in Mexican writer Mario Bellatín’s 2001 novel Shiki Nagaoka: Una nariz de ficción depicts a young Japanese man in profile (see Figure 7). The subject, identified as Nagaoka Shiki, a famous writer of the mid-twentieth century, is the protagonist of Bellatín’s novel, which describes Nagaoka’s life and literary work.1 Bellatín’s narration also focuses relentlessly on the topic of Nagaoka’s impressively large nose. In the photograph, however, the area of the nose has been scratched out, and a caption informs the reader that Nagaoka’s sister manipulated the image so that her brother would not be considered a fictional character and would instead retain the status of an important figure in Japanese and international literary history. Yet, despite this emphasis and despite Bellatín’s inclusion of numerous photographs supposedly depicting Nagaoka’s family, scenes from his life, and personal objects, such as shoes, clothing, calligraphy and other artwork, Nagaoka is indeed a fictional character; whether or not he ever actually existed remains undetermined and, perhaps, ultimately irrelevant.2 What difference does deliberate falsification make to the representation of the body? The question, though hardly a new one, continues to haunt Bellatín’s narrative and photographic universe, just as Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s and Coco Fusco’s projects, discussed in the previous chapter, interrogates the racial politics of spectacle through deceptive showmanship. The history of the freak show, its fraudulent practices and its geopolitics, resurfaces in “The Couple in the Cage” project, as is also the case in contemporary disability performances pieces, such as Mat Fraser’s

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Figure 7. Shiki Nagaoka photograph, by Ximena Berecochea. The caption in Mario Bellatín’s novel explains that Nagaoka’s sister manipulated the image, so that her brother would not be considered a fictional character. Copyright © Ximena Berecochea. Reprinted with permission of the photographer.

show “Sealboy: Freak,” an evocation of an early twentieth-century performer known as Sealo the Seal boy (Kuppers 31–38).3 The present chapter addresses ambivalently structured oppositions between “real” corporeal difference, specifically verified through the medium of still photography in its depictions of objects and people, and potentially false representation, tying these divisions to a geopolitical history of relationships between the “West” and the “non-West.” The structure I emphasize here builds on both the notion of the open-ended riddle, as described in Chapter 3, and the performance of ephemeral differences between live filmed image and finished text, revelation and deception, discussed in Chapter 4. Such oppositions permeate Bellatín’s work and are intimately linked in this novel to a dynamic of Orientalist collecting. The idea of the collection is exemplified here through the series of photographs, sequenced with captions as if to provide a parallel, pictorial version of Nagaoka’s story and, at the same time, to rehearse a process of verification whereby the assembled, photographed objects highlight their own alleged roles as

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sustainers of the truth and representatives of the exotic. In addition to emphasizing cultural artifacts of East Asia and other parts of the world that might not be immediately familiar to a Spanish American readership, much of Bellatín’s literary production has focused on representations of corporeal difference and disability, as is the case in Shiki Nagaoka. His 2001 novel Flores makes extended references to birth defects in children caused by the administration of a drug to their pregnant mothers. Jacobo el mutante, published in 2002, centers on the theme of the golem of Jewish legend, a human figure made from mud whose textual presence in this case emphasizes an ambivalent opposition between matter and form, or body and soul. And Bellatín’s 2003 Perros héroes features an “hombre inmóvil” [immobile man] as protagonist, who affirms that “una cosa es ser un hombre inmóvil y otra un retardado mental” (sic) (16) [it is one thing to be an immobile man, and another to be mentally retarded]. Yet unlike the texts discussed in several of the previous chapters, Bellatín’s novels do not touch directly on the history of the freak show or ethnographic spectacle in the context of U.S. cultural production or U.S.–Latin American relations. Instead, Shiki Nagaoka—like some of the author’s other works—participates in the delineation of an East–West geocultural axis, while at once troubling readerly expectations regarding this East–West division and its role in positing questions of corporeal difference and authenticity in representation. Although the text certainly evokes a history of Orientalist collecting, as part of a generalized Western colonialist practice of framing Otherness, Bellatín’s novel also points toward a history of Japanese constructions of the Western (non-Japanese) body. And through a combination of real and imaginary references, the text inserts itself into a trajectory of cultural knowledge and exchange between Latin America and East Asia, thus upsetting the conventions of the more familiar and Eurocentric East–West dyad. Bellatín’s game of false clues finally leads neither to the “real” body behind the fiction nor to an endless deferral of meaning, but rather interrogates the body– text relationship and interrupts the reader’s supposed familiarity with the geopolitical histories that have frequently defined the role of corporeal difference in that relationship. Shiki Nagaoka, along with other works by Bellatín, thus offers a unique approach to the textual representation of corporeal difference as disability, one that plays with conventions of visual iconicity and geopolitics. The figure of the nose is the central “problem” for the novel’s protagonist and for the cross-cultural histories the text interrogates. And it is primarily through images of the nose that these histories and their roles in Spanish American narrative are reconfigured.

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The photographed collection featured in Shiki Nagaoka inevitably evokes the repeating trope of the museum display, as well as literary interpellations of collecting typical of late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Western museum culture and Orientalism. As Barbara Black describes in her study of Victorian era museums, “The museum, with its powers of reproducibility, can obscure the distinction between authentic and sham,” however, “Victorian museums depended on the assumptions of nineteenth century literary realism, on the fidelity to circumstantial evidence and empirical data (seeing is believing) that makes a culture avow, ‘This is how it really happened’” (38). In her analysis of Edward FitzGerald, as collector and “translator” of Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyát, Black links the nineteenth-century “cultural enterprise” of collecting to a domestication of the exotic. Citing FitzGerald, she writes, “Does the thought ever strike you, when looking at pictures in a house, that you are to run and jump at one, and go right through to some behind-scene world on the other side?” (51). The tension between here and there (or East and West) becomes, in Black’s reading, fundamental to FitzGerald’s gestures of collecting and translating (66), as well as to his negotiation between the originality and authenticity of the appropriated text or object and its transmissibility and reproduction. The structure of the museum display reflected here also parallels that of popular variants of museum culture, such as the freak show or dime museum, with their similarly constructed oppositions between fact and fiction, as described in Chapter 4. In this sense, museums and collections maintain a unique relationship to cultural constructions of corporeal difference, participating in processes of definition, categorization, and display, which ultimately determine the body’s contextualized meaning, both within and beyond the halls of the exhibit or the pages of the book.4 For Timothy Mitchell, late nineteenth-century museums and related spectacles, such as Orientalist Congresses and World Exhibitions, reflected and produced a global colonial order, the “truth” of which would depend on “the peculiar distinction maintained between the simulated and ‘the real,’ between the exhibition and the world” (7) (see figure 8). Edward Said’s Orientalism similarly posits direct links between Western hegemony and “a complex Orient suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum” (7). It should be noted here that Said’s reading of Orientalism (and that of many other critics), in its primary focus on relations among the Middle East and France and Great Britain, must be carefully distinguished from approaches to East Asia as axis of the Orientalist construct and, in addition,

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Figure 8. Louisiana Purchase Exposition—Old Cairo—Exhibition on the “Pike” This image from a Cairo exhibition at the Saint Louis World Fair demonstrates the structure of museum display as integral to the depiction of an imaginary East. A sign on the wall next to the ticket booth reads: “Streets of Cairo, with its merchants, jugglers, jesters, fire-eaters, camels and donkeys riding, performing monkeys and goats and its 100 booths, is now to be seen in all its real life . . . ” Philadelphia: C. H. Graves, c1904 Reproduced from the collections of the Library of Congress.

that a Spanish American role in the Orientalist dynamic will necessarily alter the contours of the so-called West versus non-West divide. Yet the trope of collecting might also be said to figure in an East Asia–based version of Orientalism, as analyzed by Araceli Tinajero in her study of Spanish American Modernist Orientalism. As Tinajero writes, “Y ciertamente, durante el modernismo, la presencia del Oriente repetidamente se manifestó a partir de objetos como un búcaro, un pergamino, un florero, un grabado, una figura de porcelana” (27) [Certainly, during modernismo, the presence of the Orient was repeatedly manifested through objects, such as a water-jug, a manuscript, a vase, an engraving, a porcelain figure] and further, “los artefactos . . . connota[n] una suerte de trayectoria, un desplazamiento que invita a contemplar paisajes y transcender fronteras culturales a partir de la presencia de objetos de arte” (27) [artifacts . . . connote a kind of trajectory, a displacement that invites one to contemplate landscapes and to transcend cultural borders through the presence of art objects.]5 Although Mitchell’s work, like Said’s, focuses on a model

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of Orientalism grounded in the history of Anglo-French hegemony and representation of the Middle East, it may be added here that the Paris Exhibition of 1900, operating through a similar structure of representation, allowed the French public their first view of Japanese culture, through exhibits of gardening, traditional art, and theater (Tanabe 101). The evolving truth structure of spectacle, determined through the tradition of the museum display and the history of the freak show and photography depends, as I have suggested, on a dynamics of simulation and falsification and is rooted in the dual histories of colonialism and imperialism. Similarly, the history of film and, later, that of television, as discussed in the previous chapter, participate in the straddling and exploitation of the line between categories of the authentic and the fraudulent. Jon Dovey notes a surprising parallel between the “regime of truth” of late nineteenth-century entertainment and that of a century later. He compares the classic case of fakery in early cinema in which two former vaudeville entertainers falsified film documentation of the 1898 Battle of Santiago Bay with a fake 1996 television documentary on the Cali drug cartel, which showed smugglers bringing heroin into London. The effective truth-value of the first example stems from an atmosphere of imperialist ambition and nationalism, according to Dovey. Because the filmmakers missed the actual battle in Cuba, they recreated it upon their return to New York, “with a delightful arrangement of cardboard cut-out boats floating on an inch-deep ocean, with tiny gunpowder charges and an office boy blowing cigar smoke over the tabletop set” (6).6 The film was a huge success. As one of the filmmakers writes, “With nationalistic feeling at fever pitch we set out to photograph what the people wanted to see.”7 For Dovey, the truth-value of such examples of early cinema can be explained by a combination of factors including the economics of film production, a political atmosphere of “imperialist ambition,” and intersections between mass media and vaudeville entertainment as a public source of information (7). Yet the argument does not extend to suggest that patrons of nineteenth-century film naively believed what they saw to be real; instead, as Tom Gunning emphasizes in reference to trompe l’oeil paintings, magic theater, and cinema, the idea of illusion itself was the main attraction.8 In the second case, the “truth” of the documentary might be said to depend upon public anxiety about the danger of international crime. The story that the Colombians were smuggling heroin into London was entirely fake, and the “drug smugglers” interviewed for the film were actors, according to journalists who uncovered the scandal (Dovey

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9–10).9 Dovey directly compares this case with that of the Battle of Santiago Bay, pointing in each example to explanations rooted in a “regime of truth” tied to the economics of film and television production and distribution. However, Dovey fails to highlight the fact that each of these cases concerned a fabricated story in which a region of Latin America became the site of danger, excitement, and international threat. The filmed spectacle could effectively arouse the fear of its viewers while, at the same time, containing the danger through the allied discourses of powerful military, police intelligence, and the indestructible eyewitness camera. Just as the freak show often displayed exoticized members of foreign cultures or minority races, staged in frameworks far from their supposed places of origin, these films document distant worlds, straddling the line between public imagination and the promise of truth. In a similar sense, divisions between the familiar and the unfamiliar, frequently projected onto a geopolitical axis opposing the West to the East, have historically corresponded to oppositions between framed representations and unmediated “realities,” as in late nineteenth-century World Fairs and Exhibitions in which contained, close-at-hand images pointed to distant and exoticized points of reference.10 In late twentieth-century film and television, as well as late nineteenth-century examples of cinema and other spectacles, the line between the real and the fraudulent commands viewer attention because it is applied to a realm of the exotic. As Robert C. Allen writes, in reference to the 1898 film, “The motion picture could give the middle-class patrons of vaudeville theatres visual images to attach to the odd-sounding names of places where American soldiers were fighting and provide faces for the nameless, dark-skinned enemies, whose alleged atrocities made banner headlines” (136). In a parallel sense, contemporary Western media representations of warfare in Iraq—and elsewhere—have tended to maintain a symbolic separation between the spectacle of distant, simulated violence and everyday (Western) reality, while rehearsing the threat of a rupture between the two. The freak show of the late nineteenth century also provided a mainstream public access to the unfamiliar, through a tantalizing mode of “truth-telling,” one that also implied a shifting of what would pass for the truth. This history suggests the ongoing significance of corporeal difference in spectacle and related modes of representation, as inseparable from ambivalent truth-value. Spanish American forms of Orientalism, collecting, and museum display—while undoubtedly tied to the dynamics of representation and power analyzed by Said, Mitchell, Black, Dovey, and many others—also

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imply greater complexity, since, as Tinajero has described, both Spanish American and East Asian (or “Oriental”) subjects may occupy the position of exotic or marginalized (3).11 The resultingly ambivalent exoticization emerging from the Spanish American–Oriental dyad will be of particular interest in the further analysis of Bellatín’s text, its representation of bodies, and its use of the collecting gesture. Shiki Nagaoka layers diverse modes of representation, combining elements of the family photograph album, the museum collection or catalogue, the literary biography, and the folktale anthology. The intrigue of the novel emerges from this montage through the dual figures of corporeal difference and ethnic and cultural differences between Japan and the West. As fictional biography, the text offers its readers the story of both the life and literary work of Nagaoka, intertwining the two and questioning the boundaries between lived experience and the written word. These boundaries also blur through emphasis on the extraordinary quality of the protagonist’s nose, as made evident in the novel’s opening lines: “Lo extraño del físico de Nagaoka Shiki, evidenciado en la presencia de una nariz descomunal, hizo que fuera considerado un personaje de ficción” (11) [The strangeness of Nagaoka Shiki’s physique, evidenced by the presence of an enormous nose, resulted in his being considered a fictitious character]. The nose figures as central to Nagaoka’s work as a writer, as we learn that it is the subject matter of many of his texts, as well as crucial to particular incidents in his life. As the reader later learns, Nagaoka not only receives critical acclaim for his literary work but also specifically for his large nose, which is viewed by some as symbolic of the positive influence of foreign ideas in Japan, although by others as a bad omen (32–33). The final segment, or appendix, of the novel appears with the title, “Dos narraciones clásicas sobre el tema de la nariz” (81) [Two classic narrations on the theme of the nose]. The first of these is an anonymous thirteenth-century text, and the second a short story, dated 1916, by the Japanese writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke. Clear parallels between events in the life of Nagaoka and the episodes described in these stories seem to inscribe the novel in a trajectory of Japanese nose-centered texts, while nonetheless highlighting the obvious linguistic and cultural divide between this Mexican novel and the Japanese texts and traditions it references. Descriptions of Nagaoka’s literary work emphasize his knowledge of foreign languages and his interest in translation, combined with a curious rejection of any foreign literary influence (Shiki Nagaoka 13). In addition, the figure of the nose becomes inextricably linked to the question of foreignness, both through descriptions of Nagaoka’s life as marked by this

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association and through references to a Japanese cultural history of the large nose as emblematic of the foreign. As the text states, “Las parteras hablaron del castigo porque, desde tiempos arcaicos, el tamaño de la nariz era la característica física más relevante de los extranjeros que a través de los siglos llegaron a las costas del país. En los grabados clásicos de la Era Meiní, por ejemplo, se aprecian, en el centro de los rostros de los invasores de las islas, descomunales apéndices colorados” (12) [The midwives (who delivered Nagaoka) spoke of punishment, for since archaic times nose size was the most significant physical characteristic of the foreigners who, over the centuries, arrived on the country’s shores. In the classic woodblock prints of the Meiji period, for example, one can discern huge red appendages in the center of the faces of the islands’ invaders].12 Although the novel does not give further information on the importance of the large-nosed foreigner in this period, readers familiar with Meiji period art will note that such representations would have been commonplace. The grotesque figure of the foreigner is generally interpreted as reflective of Japanese unfamiliarity with Westerners in this period. Following an 1853 trade agreement made by the American Commodore Mathew Perry, U.S. nationals and other foreigners would begin to arrive in Japan; however, most Japanese prior to this time would never have seen a Westerner. In the earlier history of contact among the West and China and Japan, the Caucasian nose figures as grotesque and exotic. Emphasis on the large nose in Bellatín’s novel also evokes the tengu, a large-nosed creature of Japanese folklore. Versions of the tengu would, in fact, find their way into Japanese art depicting nineteenth-century Westerners in Japan, including Commodore Perry himself.13 Yet presumably, many readers will not have studied Japanese art of any period, nor does the text make more than a passing effort to fill in the blanks. In this sense, the novel here reiterates a division between the “West” and the “non-West” as continuous with the representation of corporeal difference, while binding this dynamic to an ambivalent separation between the self-consciously fictional quality of the narrative and the truth of the referents upon which it insists. In its metonymic associations between ethnic, cultural, and corporeal differences, the novel simultaneously locates the site of truthful representation in each of these fields, while refusing to fully reveal the truths it evokes. Hence the nose itself—explicitly highlighted through repeated descriptions and photographic images—will never actually appear. In a similar sense, historical and cultural references to Japan continuously blur fact and fiction, real and imaginary characters, thwarting readers’ attempts either to ground the text through links to a verifiable history or to interpret it

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as pure fiction, sharply divided from the “real” worlds to which it points. Fascination and desire either for a glimpse of the extraordinary nose or for penetration of the historical and cultural “truths” behind the text therefore propel this narrative forward, even as the reader becomes increasingly aware that such desires will not find satisfaction here. In its emphasis on the uncertain truth and fiction divide, Bellatín’s literary production, including Shiki Nagaoka, might be situated in a trajectory of postmodern Latin American (and not exclusively Mexican) fiction, but this model of classification alone cannot fully account for the work’s complexity in relation to the combined figures of corporeal difference, the “West and non-West” division, and the gesture of collecting.14 Bellatín’s literary collecting involves the incorporation of external referents, such as photographed bodies, letters, art objects, and literary sources into the text. The clearest case of this is his inclusion of the two Japanese stories that appear in Spanish translation at the end of the novel. Although the stories appear separately, following the selection of photographs and in the manner of appendices, they are at once embedded in the fictional history of Nagaoka, as are multiple references to both Japanese and Spanish American writers and to Japanese cultural history, as in the above-cited reference to prints from the Meiji period. Collecting, then, goes beyond the use of photographs to include a mode of referencing that stakes a claim to its sources through the narrative rearrangement of textual bodies. The literary gesture of collecting insists here on its playful, self-reflective nature, unlike the collector’s “thrill of acquisition” and his desire “to renew the old world” to which Walter Benjamin refers (60), Bellatín’s collecting continuously interrogates and subverts the truth-value of source material, as when he suggests that Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s story “The Nose” was actually inspired by the life of Nagaoka, his fictional protagonist (17). With this gesture Bellatín frames Akutagawa Ryūnosuke as a fictional character within the novel yet incorporates the Japanese writer and his work, “The Nose,” as verifiable external references.15 Bellatín also inserts this shifting dynamic of collecting into a fragmentary history of twentieth-century Latin American narrative, exemplified through fictionalized but explicit references to the work of Juan Rulfo and that of José María Arguedas. Significantly, each of these writers occupies an ambivalent space with respect to the terms of the contested West– non-West debate. Each focuses on the representation of rural populations, either indigenous or mestizo, frequently figured in opposition to the privileged site of the “West”; at the same time, these canonized writers

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have become emblematic of their respective nations’ literary production as high-profile, internationalized, and hence arguably “Western.” Bellatín’s partial literary history, reassembled through these references, conceives of narrative as a form of unresolved mediation between the self and the external world, as well as between the codified authority of an already written “reality” and the contestatory potential of specific texts or bodies. In this sense, Bellatín’s gesture of literary collecting suggests a partial parallel to Roberto González-Echevarría’s notion of the “archive,” as the rewritten, erased, and contested repository of written knowledge, through and against which the Latin American novel repeatedly emerges (8).16 However, while the authority of the archive stems from its position with respect to historically specific Latin American cultural and legal traditions, the collection must repeatedly seek its contents and selfaffirmation elsewhere—perhaps the further away the better—hence its dependence here on an East–West exchange. If the archive’s renewal takes place through the continual renegotiation of its contents, redefining the boundaries between interior and exterior, tradition and subversion, the collection expands itself by incorporating and radically decontextualizing new and exotic materials, while tending toward what Susan Stewart terms “a form of self-enclosure” (151).17 I read Bellatín’s montage of texts and photographed objects and bodies—real and invented, Japanese and Latin American—as an ironic reiteration of both collecting and archival gestures. Orientalist collection and Latin American archive therefore combine here in mutual rereadings and interrogations, even as each threatens to add the other to its authoritative matrix. The West–non-West dynamic traditionally underpinning the collecting gesture appears to falter on its axis when Latin American locations, such as Mexico City, begin to surface within the “West” category. The terms “West” and “non-West”—in common usage—do not, in fact, refer to geography in a literal sense, but instead to historically defined and perceived economic, political, and cultural hierarchies between nations and regions. As a consequence, “Western” perspectives—figuring Latin America as the abstract sum of its parts—tend to place it squarely in the “nonWest”; and most edited anthologies of non-Western literatures inevitably include a section on Latin America (Biddle; King). Such conflations of literal and figurative geography, while perhaps unavoidably tied to standard terminology, nonetheless point to the doubly awkward nature of the West–non-West division by revealing the peripheral stature frequently accorded—in a sweeping fashion—to all of the “non-West” and by emphasizing the geographic inconsistency underpinning the determination of

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such stature. In other cases, nonetheless, Latin America’s claims to a nonWestern status function as a means to acquire political or cultural agency through opposition to “Western” colonialist practices. As J. Jorge Klor de Alva has written, mestizo identity may suggest for some an “embrace of the West,” as well as the fusion of races (“Colonialism and Postcolonialism” 5), while for others, the privileging of collective indigenous (read non-Western) roots, in opposition to “foreign Europeans” (6–7). In either case, the ongoing and contested political and cultural weight of mestizo identity points to the difficulty of defining Latin American histories as a (post) colonial struggle between indigenous (“non-Western”) communities and invading (“Western”) Europeans. A history of Latin American Orientalism, japonismo, and collecting foregrounds Latin America’s ambivalent positionality with respect to the West–non-West divide. But perhaps more importantly, this same ambivalence suggests the need to question in broader terms an entrenched cultural map of the world and the forced binary axis upon which it insists. Bellatín’s novel performs this geographic interrogation while undermining historically imposed parallels between oppositions defined as West or non-West and representation or reality. In this sense, the text participates—following Juan Pablo Dabove and Carlos Jáuregui’s terms—in “la imaginación recurrente del Otro y del ‘nosotros’ latinoamericanos como Otros del Occidente (anómalos, periféricos, híbridos, etc)” (18) [the recurring imagination of the Latin American Other and “we” as Others of the West (anomalous, peripheral, hybrid, etcetera)].18 Bellatín’s collected objects and bodies therefore retain their ambivalent status, included and excluded, between “Others of the West” and “the West’s Others.” Corporeal Geographies The dual emphasis on corporeal difference and East–West geocultural representation in Shiki Nagaoka corresponds to a similar orientation prevalent throughout much of Bellatín’s novelistic production. In Flores, a novel for which Bellatín won the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia, references to birth defects caused by a pharmaceutical drug clearly point toward the well-known history of the real drug commonly known as thalidomide, or contergan. Toward the beginning of the novel, the narrative makes this correspondence fairly explicit: En los años cincuenta un grupo de científicos descubrió un fármaco capaz de aliviar la depresión y las náuseas de las mujeres embarazadas. Diez años

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después se demostró que causaba serias malformaciones en los fetos si era suministrado en los primeros tres meses de gestación. Aquel medicamento provocó que por lo menos diez mil niños en todo el mundo presentaron defectos en los brazos y en las piernas. (19) [In the 1950s, a group of scientists discovered a drug that could relieve depression and nausea in pregnant women. Ten years later, it was shown to cause serious deformities in the fetus if it was administered in the first trimester. The drug caused defects in the arms and legs of children in at least ten thousand cases worldwide.]

Thalidomide, a drug that was marketed under many different names throughout the world, was, in fact, widely prescribed specifically to pregnant women who suffered from nausea, anxiety, and a variety of other ailments; the actual results were as described here in Bellatín’s novel.19 Characters from the novel include Panser, who is said to have first developed the drug, and his student, Olaf Zumfelde, who is eventually charged with examining alleged victims of the drug to see if they qualify for remuneration. As is typical in Bellatín’s novels, references to geographic locations are incomplete or not well defined. However, mention of the University of Heidelberg, where Zumfelde has an office, suffices to identify the country as Germany. The text thus establishes an additional link between the true history of thalidomide, which was developed in Germany, and the novelistic version of the story. In Flores the errors of medical science that have resulted in birth defects work within an ambivalent geography; while few specific locations are named, a map of the drug’s overall circulation and effects nonetheless emerges from the narrative. As the narrator describes, Cuando se lanzó al mercado, la fórmula fue distinta en los diferentes países en los que se comercializó. La solución que se vendió en Alemania contenía una cantidad bastante alta del producto. No ocurrió lo mismo en Estados Unidos, donde la fórmula estuvo algo diluida. A los países periféricos apenas si les tocó algo de dosis en sus productos. El científico constató que las consecuencias fueron proporcionales a las porciones consumidas. Mientras que los niños alemanes presentaron una especie de aletas en los puntos del cuerpo donde debían estar los brazos y las piernas, los nacidos en otras regiones menos favorecidos por el desarrollo tecnológico experimentaron las consecuencias de una manera bastante atenuada. (41–42)

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[When it went on the market, the formula varied in the different countries where it was commercialized. The solution sold in Germany contained a relatively high concentration of the product. The same was not true in the United States, where the formula was somewhat diluted. Peripheral countries barely received any dosage at all in their products. The scientist stated that the consequences were proportionate to the amounts consumed. While German children were born with a kind of flipper where their arms and legs should have been, the consequences for those born in regions less favored by technological development were relatively less serious.] 20

In this novel, the errors of medical science are the primary cause of a disaster resulting in worldwide cases of birth defects. From the first page, in fact, the text represents medical science in a less-than-glorious light, with the anecdote of a child’s visit to a doctor. Failing to realize that the child uses an orthopedic hand, the doctor nonetheless takes the pulse of his plastic wrist. Rather than insisting on the violent effects of faulty science in strictly black-and-white terms, however, the narrative combines the story of the pharmaceutical with other plotlines, in particular that of the so-called Kuhn twins. These are babies without arms or legs who are discovered in a shoreline cave around the same time that the thalidomide case goes on trial. The reader later learns of a version of the story in which the Kuhn twins are actually the result of incestuous relations between a brother and sister whose bodies were covered in birthmarks. In addition, Dr. Zumfelde’s assistant, Henriette Wolf, turns out to be a follower of the esoteric tradition of Ouspenky, which allows her to blend medical knowledge with religion. It is later revealed that Wolf had altered some of Zumfelde’s diagnoses of thalidomide cases so that some victims of the drug would not receive remuneration. Zumfelde sees many cases of patients claiming to be thalidomide victims whose physical characteristics are, in fact, the result of genetic mutation or other causes. The role of the doctor therefore becomes akin to that of a detective who must sort out the authentic from the fraudulent to reveal the truth from beneath the body’s visible surface.21 The negative effects of medical errors operate according to a geographic pattern in which contamination and damage originate in Western, technologically privileged areas, and proceed toward the so-called peripheries. This is made evident in the first pages of the novel, when the narrator affirms “treinta años después del veredicto, las únicas víctimas con derechos que quedan en el mundo son tal vez aquellos que estuvieron encerrados detrás del muro de Berlín” (13) [thirty years after the verdict, the only remaining victims in the world with rights are perhaps those who

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were closed off behind the Berlin wall]. The link between the pharmaceutical tragedy and the history of violently negotiated geopolitics becomes increasingly apparent as the text progresses. When the first children are born with deformities, for example, the narrator notes, “El referente más cercano fueron los niños de Hiroshima. Nuevamente apareció en el imaginario de los ciudadanos la imagen de La pietá japonesa. La figura de aquella madre y su hijo convertidos en una petunia en plena floración” (45) [The closest referent were the Hiroshima children. Once again the image of the Japanese Pietá appeared in the public imaginary. The figure of that mother and child converted into a fully flowering petunia]. Atomic energy, like pharmaceutical science, is in this context capable of producing previously unimaginable horror. Both originate elsewhere and work through processes of invasion of geopolitical and corporeal boundaries. Both are foreign agents moving west to east, or from a so-called center outward. Reference to Hiroshima here emphasizes a World War II–inflected political geography, already observable through earlier mention of the East–West German division. In addition, the detail strengthens thematic ties between this novel and Bellatín’s Shiki Nagaoka in which the context of World War II also plays an important role. In Shiki Nagaoka ambivalence surrounds the question of foreign influence on Japanese culture from the first pages, since the large nose is initially said to be a mark of the foreign, which is seen by some as beneficial to society, and by others as damaging. War, however, seems to clarify the debate: “Sólo cuando llegaron los años de guerra, se hizo evidente lo perjudical que había sido la aceptación incontrolada de ideas extranjeras” (28) [Only during the war years did it become evident how damaging the uncontrolled acceptance of foreign ideas had been]. In the postwar period, Nagaoka publishes his major work, Foto y palabra [Photograph and Word], which appears in English translation in 1953, by Life Publishing. “Ese libro . . . se ha convertido para muchos en el canto de la reconstrucción de un país” (29) [That book . . . has become for many the song of reconstruction of a country]. During the same period, in fact, photographic images of another kind of reconstructed Japan appeared in Life Magazine, as well as other U.S. periodicals. These were depictions of the so-called Hiroshima maidens, young female survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who traveled to New York’s Mt. Sinai Hospital to receive reconstructive surgery. The project was financed by private donations and received widespread publicity (Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful 353n52).22 Following the war, as

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Sander Gilman also notes, cosmetic surgery in Japan would increase in popularity due to increasingly widespread efforts to achieve more “Westernized” facial features, such as noses and eyes. If the large nose, as both Bellatín’s novel and external sources demonstrate, had long been symbolic of foreignness and especially Western culture, now cosmetic surgery itself would come to represent this external influence. The image of the damaged and reconstructed face and body is not only emblematic of the horror of war and the brutality of foreign “influence” but also of the fantasy of recompense. The juxtaposition of these two Bellatín novels, published only one year apart from one another, points to an association in each between global technologies of violence and the reproducible, photographic image. In Flores the first appearance of newborn thalidomide victims reminds viewers of Hiroshima and, specifically, of a photographic image associated with the horrific effects of the atomic bomb on human bodies. Foreign “influence” here takes the form of warfare technology and disastrous errors in pharmaceutical development and export, while the iconographic reference to Italian renaissance art simultaneously creates an astheticization of horror. In Shiki Nagaoka the war makes graphically evident the danger and damage caused by unchecked foreign influence but, at the same time, provides a context through which Nagaoka, the writer-photographer, will gain international renown for his use of imagery as a means of transforming the viewers’ understanding of reality and for his role in the visual reconstruction of Japan. The two novels also point to one another through common references to the ambivalent role of the photograph as a transnational medium for instant cultural dissemination, irrevocably bound to violent geopolitics. The role of the photograph in each case goes beyond that of straightforward iconicity toward participation in the text’s poiesis; therefore, the images both disfigure and reconstruct their subjects, as the thalidomide infant evokes a Hiroshima victim who becomes, in turn, a blossoming flower and finally an object of religious art; or the large nose, fetishized symbol of foreign influence, must both disappear from the image and become its central feature. Nagaoka’s photographs similarly suggest both the negative impact of foreign influence in the context of war and through their international circulation, the “reconstruction of a country.” In neither case, however, will the photographs serve to fully verify the presence and true characteristics of the bodies they claim to depict.

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Camara Clara Bellatín’s use of references to both real and fictitious external sources as a means to undermine fixed distinctions between truth and falsehood and to reveal the precarious status of the “authentic” suggests direct affinity to earlier Latin American writers, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, and perhaps most particularly, Salvador Elizondo (Palaversich 28). While the same tendency is prevalent in several of Bellatín’s numerous short novels, such as Jacobo el mutante and Perros héroes, in his Shiki Nagaoka the inclusion of photographs within the novel becomes particularly crucial to this unmooring of the authentic. Conventionally, photography has claimed to uphold the truth-value of the objects it represents, as undeniable proof of their existence; however, in the context of Bellatín’s text, the photograph enters a dynamic in which preoccupation with fictionality and insistence on verifiable fact become two sides of the same coin.23 Fascination with photography and photographic devices is perhaps Bellatín’s most explicit tie to Elizondo and key to the gestures of collecting and archiving in Shiki Nagaoka. In addition, texts by both writers share an emphasis on East Asia as privileged site of referentiality. Elizondo’s interests in East Asia and photography are evident in many of his works, as is the self-conscious presence of a Mallarmean legacy in which poetic truth corresponds to nothingness: “nothing will have taken place but the place,”24 a concept from which Elizondo borrows in defining his version of “el proyecto de la página en blanco” (Camera Lucida 49) [the project of the blank page]. Elizondo’s Farabeuf literally includes the photographic image to which that novel repeatedly refers, while his later work Camera Lucida focuses instead on the figure of the camera lucida or cámara clara as a literary device.25 The title inevitably suggests Roland Barthes’s text on photography, also called Camera Lucida. As Barthes writes, “It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous and funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures . . . The Photograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape [ . . . ]” (6). For Barthes, one cannot see the photograph itself, as signifier, but only the particular photographed object, invisibly fused with this signifier. The notion of a seamless continuity between photograph and referent distinguishes photography from written language, or painting, for example, in

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which signs or marks remind us of a referential distance, the unavoidable absence of the “real” object from the scene of reading or viewing. Barthes’s emphasis on photographic continuity provides one approach to reading Bellatín’s project. At first glance, the photographs of Nagaoka and of objects related to his history could be said to point to a distant world beyond the immediacy of the text. The series includes samples of Japanese calligraphy, ceramic objects, drawings, clothing, landscapes, and family portraits, all fragments of a world to which the reader apparently does not have access but which nonetheless exist, or once existed. Yet, at the same time, the portrait of the protagonist from which the area of the nose has been obliterated suggests instead that denial of access is itself the central reference point. The surface of the image is, in fact, the “real” body, here inseparable from the core of meaning such images often evoke. Most, if not all, of the other photographs contained in the novel refer in some manner to the nose. Drawings depict large-nosed people, and the ceramic recipients are identified as containers for liquids associated with treatments for the nose. The graphically absent nose therefore functions at the center of a cohesive series of objects; rather than referring primarily to a distant reality, these photographs point toward—and depend upon—the missing figure of the nose. This denial of access is, of course, only part of the story the photographs tell; Barthes, in fact, complicates his argument further by insisting on the undeniable reality of “the thing [that] has been there” (Camera Lucida 76). The temporal split, between a “certificate of presence” (87) and what has been, jars the seamlessness of the photographic surface and inevitably implies death: “Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe” (96). The disturbingly dual quality also suggests Barthes’s notion of the punctum: “It is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there” (55). Similarly, in Bellatín’s text, the absent nose does not imply a final erasure, but instead maintains an enigmatic quality, supported by the simultaneous absence and presence of the other photographed objects. In Elizondo’s interpretation, the camera lucida as writing device maintains a residual tension between the writing self and the objects with which it purports to engage. While the ambivalence underpinning this tension is similar to Barthes’s version of the camera lucida in photography, Elizondo is more particularly concerned with the subjectivity of the individual writer. The apparatus itself, as his text explains, is an instrument used to project an image onto paper so that it may be traced there:

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La imagen no se forma en la realidad sobre el papel sino en un punto situado entre el ojo y la mano del dibujante, presumiblemente en ese punto llamado “la mente” y tal vez en un punto dentro de ese punto que es o sería el foco de atención, el punto en que la inquietante perspectiva de la cámara clara se enfoca y equilibra con la del fantasma cuya imagen tratamos de apresar con el lápiz en la mano. (73) [The image is not formed in reality on the paper, but rather at a point between the eye and the hand of the draftsman, presumably at that point called “the mind” and perhaps at a point within that point that is or would be the focus of attention, the point at which the disturbing perspective of the cámara clara focuses and balances with that of the phantom whose image we try to capture, pencil in hand.](my translation)26

The concept of the cámara clara, as described here, works as the figure for a method of writing, one in which the object to be rendered or expressed hovers between its materiality and the writer’s subjectivity, which allows this object to exist. The device at once regulates a(n) “equilibrio entre la cosa, la imagen de la cosa, y la idea de la cosa” (74) [balance between the thing, the image of the thing, and the idea of the thing]. Later in the same chapter, the writer uses this technique, borrowing other literary models, texts, and objects to apply to his own cámara clara. Following his initial experimentation, he suddenly discovers his own particular model, based on the body and the nature of the experience of pain. Here Elizondo borrows an image from Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave of a shipwrecked corpse abandoned on a beach. But unlike in Connolly’s text, where the dead man functions as a projection of the writer’s transcribed self (Elizondo, Camera Lucida 77), Elizondo is especially interested in the corpse as a body and in pain. Use of the camera lucida here involves the transcription of one writer’s image to a second writer’s locus of meaning and experience (75–81). Evocations of pain as an instantaneous image bear direct reference to the earlier novel, Farabeuf, a text in which the photographic image of Chinese torture points incessantly to a puzzle with no final solution. Elizondo’s cámara clara provides a model for subject–object relations, between the text, as voice, and the external bodies it tries to contain, as in a collection. And the device simultaneously opens a dialogue with other literary texts through which these prior voices may be reinscribed and shifted to the coordinates of the new text. In other words, use of the cámara clara combines the self-enclosed mode of the collection with the archival self ’s more porous boundaries. Closure here stems from the formal constraints

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of the apparatus, locked in the metaphor of the draftsman’s unvarying method. At the same time, the individual subjectivity of the writer-draftsman allows the projected image of a prior text to appear—not directly on the page, but instead at a point in the mind. In this sense the cámara clara opens toward an “archival” mode of rewriting in which textual boundaries cannot remain intact. The gesture of collecting enacted in the pages of Shiki Nagaoka depends upon the photographic image in a very literal sense, since the inclusion of real photographs in the novel might be said to make up the collection with which the reader is most directly confronted. However, collecting and archiving still take place here through the literary device defined by Elizondo as a cámara clara—that is, by a process of capturing and representing an object as neither fully external nor internal to the self. This cámara clara device, a particular strategy of intertextuality, therefore relativizes the position of the represented object and threatens its ontological status. Use of the cámara clara takes place in Bellatín’s novel through an intimate relationship between the body and writing, as well as between Japanese and Latin American sources, whether real or invented. The novel refers to a text by Nagaoka titled Photograph and Word (29), as mentioned above. We then learn of the text’s great impact on an international level. Ozu Kenzo claims to have borrowed from the book’s aesthetics for his film An Autumn Afternoon.27 And further afield, the book has a major impact on the work of Juan Rulfo, inspiring correspondence between the Mexican writer and the Peruvian novelist Arguedas. Rulfo mentions his plans to write a “total” novel, which would require the incorporation of photographs, while Arguedas refers in his posthumous diary to the potentially powerful combination of written text and photography, as a means to expand the narrative possibilities of reality itself (Bellatín, Shiki Nagaoka 30–31).28 In sustaining parallel readings of the lives and work of the three writers, namely, Nagaoka, Rulfo, and Arguedas, Bellatín’s narrative inevitably points to a fourth figure, Bellatín himself as the absent writer. While searching for traces of the “real” author in the novel might be at best futile and at worst simplistic, correspondences between Nagaoka and the author of his supposed biography are too clearly defined to be ignored. The approach to photography upheld by Nagaoka, Rulfo, and Arguedas seems to follow Bellatín’s own approach to the medium: “Estos tres escritores Juan Rulfo, José María Arguedas y Nagaoka Shiki estuvieron de acuerdo, cada uno por su lado, en que la fotografía narrativa intenta

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realmente establecer un nuevo tipo de medio alterno a la palabra escrita y que quizá aquella sea la forma en que sean concebidos los libros en el futuro” (31–32) [These three writers, Juan Rulfo, José María Arguedas, and Nagaoka Shiki each agreed that narrative photography truly attempts to establish a new kind of medium as alternative to the written word, and that perhaps that would be the form in which books would be conceived in the future]. In addition, toward the end of Shiki Nagaoka, Nagaoka claims he is writing an essay on the relationship between writing and physical defects (41). As noted above, Bellatín himself explores this relationship in many of his novels other than Shiki Nagaoka; whether the reference here might suggest a link to Bellatín’s own use of a prosthetic hand remains open to speculation. The repeated mention of Arguedas and Rulfo in the novel, identified explicitly by their nationalities, Peruvian and Mexican, respectively, also serves to highlight Bellatín’s own ambiguous nationality. Mexican by birth, Bellatín was educated in Peru and began publishing his work there, causing him to be viewed by many as a Peruvian writer (Flores Bueno). But beyond these details, the narrative binds the figures of the three writers-as-characters together through claims that each created his own biography in his literary works and through emphasis on the troubled dynamic between representation and reality, between life and the mimetic power of writing (Bellatín 30–31). Whether or not one chooses to focus on Bellatín’s literal absence-presence in his own work, it may be argued that the structure of the novel depends upon a central and precarious subjectivity, an empty space at its core. Readings of Arguedas’s work and, in particular, of his final, unfinished novel El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo [The fox from up above and the fox from down below] often emphasize the continuity between Arguedas’s literature and his suicide, as expressions of a violently divided society and self, of an incommensurability between the written (Spanish) word and the indigenous Other it confronts or, in some cases, as a triumph over that apparent division (Cornejo Polar 311).29 In Zorros Arguedas reflects on the power and limitations of the written word, explicitly directing his thoughts toward Rulfo: “Cuando el ánimo está cargado de todo lo que aprendimos a través de todos nuestros sentidos, la palabra también se carga de esas materias . . . ¿Quién ha cargado a la palabra como tú, Juan, de todo el peso de padeceres (12) [When the mind is full of all that we learn through our senses, the word is also filled with that material . . . Who else has laden words with all the weight of sufferings . . . the way you have, Juan?].

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In Bellatín’s Shiki Nagaoka, Arguedas the character refers similarly to the relationship between the written word and the world. Here, the dilemma of representation is addressed through photography and death. As mentioned above, the “posthumous diary” (a reference to Zorros) contains musings on the potential power of photography in narrative. Later in Bellatín’s text, Arguedas’s widow tells of her husband’s message to her, shortly before his death, of the attainability of a peaceful, utopian society: “la existencia eterna en un universo poblado de palabras e ideogramas” (38) [eternal existence in a universe of words and ideograms]. Resolution therefore takes place not in a presymbolic world, but rather through an alternative vision of writing and representation—utopia as the suturing of universe and word. The narrative of Shiki Nagaoka specifies a direct relationship between the death of each writer-character and his literary work. Nagaoka himself provides the ironic exception: he was killed by two drug addicts as they tried to rob him of the money he had earned from his photography kiosk (31). Bellatín’s cámara clara therefore incorporates the figures of Arguedas and Rulfo through photography and death, a double logic of preservation, according to Barthes’s above-mentioned specifications. The writers-as-characters’ preoccupation with the slippage and fusion between words or images and referents becomes Bellatín’s means to project the two figures through his own writing, in similarly distant intimacy with respect to the textual voice of Shiki Nagaoka. The notion of the cámara clara or camera lucida, borrowed from Elizondo and from Barthes, suggests a model through which Bellatín’s text negotiates its collected and archived voices, bodies, and other objects. As Luz Elena Gutiérrez de Velasco describes, Elizondo’s Camera Lucida uses a model of intertextuality with respect to works by Valéry, Flaubert, Joyce, and others, so as to elaborate the “theme of the ‘artist and his model’” (239). In Bellatín’s novel, the cámara clara works specifically to define relative positions among the textual voice, its objects, and potential external referents while inevitably pointing to earlier histories and overtly Orientalist modes of collecting. Japonismos In much of his recent work, as well as in this novel, Bellatín constructs his narrative around referents and artifacts from foreign—especially East Asian—cultures, borrowing most notably from Chinese, Eastern European Jewish, and in this case, Japanese traditions.30 In this sense his work

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participates in a dynamic of collecting and a history of ethnographic spectacle, however untraditionally. Shiki Nagaoka in particular borrows from an evolving Latin American literary and cultural tradition of referencing the Orient through both fictionalized and historical accounts, one which both builds upon and alters the contours of a more Eurocentric West– non-West opposition. A few earlier examples from the tradition of Mexican Orientalism should illustrate this shift and point to the directions it takes in Bellatín’s work. Latin American fascination with East Asia is commonly interpreted as the result of French literary influence, particularly in readings of Spanish American modernista poetry.31 But in fact in the case of Mexico, initial direct contact with Japan dates from the early seventeenth century. Eikichi Hayashiya describes this contact as the result of the Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu’s interest in establishing commercial relations with New Spain. In 1609, following the shipwreck of the interim governor of Manila, Rodrigo de Vivero, off the coast of Japan, a Japanese ship carrying Vivero and his fellow travelers, including twenty-two Japanese merchants, departed for New Spain. Ieyasu had sent the merchants as a means to emphasize his desire for the opening of trade between Japan and New Spain. Two years after this initial attempt, a more official Japanese voyage set sail for ports in Italy, Spain, and New Spain, with the objective of furthering communication with Felipe III, the pope, and with the authorities of New Spain, and thus to obtain permission for the new trade agreement (27–28). Although these attempts were unsuccessful and Japan eventually closed its ports to the Spanish and the Portuguese in 1639, Chinese ships continued to navigate between Japan and the Philippines, thus allowing for an ongoing, albeit indirect, commercial contact between New Spain and Japan (30). In addition, information from these early contacts has allowed historians to investigate initial impressions between the Japanese, the Spanish, and the Mexicans (Tanabe; Klor de Alva). While this history does not, in and of itself, add much to an illumination of Bellatín’s work with respect to East Asia, it does provide a historical basis for readings of an East–West dynamic that might partially transcend or circumvent the expected passage through Europe. Scholars and writers, perhaps most notably the Mexican poet, chronicler, and japonista José Juan Tablada (1871–1945), discussed in Chapter 1, build upon the influence of French cultural contact with Japan while incorporating both real and hypothetical direct ties between Mexico and East Asia. On numerous occasions in his writing, Tablada refers to his plans to complete a text with the title “Aztecas y japoneses.” In one instance, for example, he refers to a

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Japanese print and states that it might have been titled “La fundación de Tenochititlán por un pintor japonés” (Hiroshigué 63) [The founding of Tenochtitlan by a Japanese painter]. Because of the perceived similarity between the print and the Mexican legend, Tablada adds that he plans to use the image for the cover of his forthcoming “Aztecas y japoneses” (64). And in his essay on Tablada’s unpublished works, José María González de Mendoza speculates that the above-mentioned text might have included details of contacts between the two countries during the colonial period (137–38). As is well known, much of Spanish American modernista poetry, including Tablada’s earlier work, bears the influence of French writers, particularly of the symbolist and parnassian poets, and many critics have interpreted what is commonly perceived as an afrancesamiento modernista of Spanish American poetry as continuous with the tendencies of “escapismo/orientalismo/exoticismo (Tinajero 9). According to this argument, a Spanish American notion of French cultural refinement would become synonymous with French-filtered access to East Asia, resulting in the imitation of a European “imaginative demonology of ‘the mysterious Orient,’” (Said 26). Tinajero problematizes this perceived fusion of French imitation and exoticism, noting the originality of Spanish American Orientalist writing.32 Regardless of whether or not one perceives elements of exoticism or imitation in the Spanish American modernistas, it is certain that by the early twentieth century, Tablada’s increasingly sophisticated knowledge of Japan would allow him to distinguish more precisely between direct and indirect knowledge of Japanese art and literature. As Atsuko Tanabe notes, the poet’s earlier “japonismo europeizante” would be replaced by a new “japonismo auténtico” (1–2). Tablada, unlike many japonista Latin American writers of his era, spent time in Japan and studied both the lives and work of Japanese artists. His knowledge of Japan allowed his work to cross the lines dividing poetry from scholarly research, as evidenced in his lyrical and well-researched tribute to the landscape painter, Hiroshigue. In this work as well, however, Tablada maintains his indebtedness to the French Orientalist scholar, Edmond de Goncourt (Hiroshigué x–xii), and thus to ongoing ties to the tradition of japonisme, marked in its earlier years by a far less rigorous approach to images of Japan (Tanabe 22). Tablada’s disdain for Parisian art collectors’ limited knowledge of Japanese art appears explicitly in a 1912 chronicle, as described in Chapter 1. Ironically, however, it was his extended stay in Paris that allowed him to gain extensive knowledge of Japanese art and culture, far more than he

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was able to glean from an earlier trip to Japan, cut short, apparently, by homesickness. Elsewhere, the writer’s criticisms of a generalized U.S. lack of appreciation of Mexican visual arts are also frequent. Throughout his writings Tablada often expressed concern about public misunderstanding of artwork and, specifically, the viewer’s inability to see the art as it is, free of false perceptions. The conflict or enigma for Tablada is perhaps located in this desire for clarity of vision, beyond exoticism, and in opposition to the obvious cultural barriers between Japan and the West, which threaten to obscure the clarity and leave the writer facing a puzzle with no solution. Elizondo identifies this opposition, citing a line of Tablada’s poetry: “Es de México y Asia/ mi alma un jeroglifo” (Elizondo, “Imagen y resonancia” ix) [Of Mexico and Asia is my soul a hieroglyph]. For Elizondo, the verse expresses both the modernist exoticism prevalent in Tablada’s poetry, at least until 1918, and the conflict between this exoticism and the barrier based in differences of perception, writing, and thinking between East and West (“Imagen y resonancia” ix). In Tablada, the search for authenticity, so crucial to his artistic and scholarly relationship with Japan, draws from an ongoing preoccupation with the visual and the precision of visible detail, whether painted or described in words. This link between the visual image as sign and the problem of true or authentic cross-cultural decipherability points to the centrality of the collecting impulse in Tablada’s work, as well as to the shifts this impulse will take in the work of later Mexican writers, such as Elizondo and, eventually, Bellatín. Conventionally, exposure of the visible connotes access to more of the truth and allows the reader to experience the spatial simultaneity of objects, as well as the overarching logic of their arrangement (Stewart 154–55), while in Bellatín’s work such apparent conduits to visible truths instead serve to problematize the iconicity of photographs and collected objects, as I have suggested. Collecting, again, may imply both the radical self-referentiality of a cohesive sequence of objects and reliance on highly structured oppositions between intimate interior and distant exterior. In Elizondo, whose work is, of course, heavily influenced by the French writers he incorporates into his model of the intertextual cámara clara, the shift in the collecting mechanism involves the potential undermining of the represented object’s truth status, along with the blurring of boundaries between textual interior and exterior. However, Elizondo’s critical interest in Tablada’s work suggests a bridge between the earlier writer’s “soul’s hieroglyph,” as visual-textual enigma, and Elizondo’s own postmodern strategies of photographic representation. That is, in Elizondo’s reading of Tablada and despite obvious differences,

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the latter’s “hieroglyph” lights the way to the former’s instantaneous photographic image of East Asia—as tortured or mutilated body—and as the core to a precarious or absent truth. Collected Bodies and Geopolitics The transition from Tablada’s quest for the “true” Japan to Elizondo’s (and Bellatín’s) dislodging of truth as a stable category is—not surprisingly— marked by French literary and critical influence, although not in a uniform manner. Thus, while for Tablada, the legacy of French japonisme works in opposition to his increasing emphasis on the lens of personal, eyewitness experience, in the cases of Elizondo and Bellatín, French poststructuralism would seem to dovetail to some degree with their literary projects. The above-mentioned case of Barthes’s Camera Lucida provides a clear example. And in Barthes’s Empire of Signs, a focus on the topic of Japan combines with Barthes’s insistence that Japan, as such, does not particularly interest him as a reality, a foreign culture to be studied and explored. It is instead the site of “the fissure of the symbolic.” Barthes’s notion of Zen becomes his metaphor for Japan as an emptying of language (4). Similarly, by locating his subversion of literary and photographic representation in the context of a (partially) fictitious Japan, Bellatín echoes Barthes’s approach to semiotics. Like Barthes, Bellatín proposes a rewriting of the relationship between text, or writing, and its supposedly external referents. Bellatín, in particular, highlights the status of foreign cultural artifacts and unusual bodies as referents that tend to trouble conventional modes of representation. His interest in creating this text and other recent works was not, he has stated, to elaborate knowledge or a vision of the cultural object, Japan, but rather to explore and create different masks and to sustain a literary world not grounded in time or place (Castañeda). Bellatín has emphasized in more than one interview that his fiction does not rely on research findings from Japan or elsewhere. Instead, Japan is a pretext through which to consider the problem of literature’s relationship to reality and the dynamic of truth and fiction. As he explains, “Trato de nunca hacer trabajo de investigación para hacer determinado texto. En mis lecturas tengo diversas cosas japonesas y en virtud de esas lecturas es que puedo escribir algo así. Pero los términos que utilizo son inventados, juego con verdad-mentira” (Castañeda) [I try never to do research in order to create a given text. I’ve read various Japanese things, and it is

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because of those readings that I’m able to write something like this. But the terms I use are invented; I play with truth-fiction]. This insistence on a lack of specific referentiality extends to Bellatín’s view of the role of the author in the text. For Bellatín, as he describes in reference to his own work, questions such as what the author really thinks, or why he wrote the book, are not particularly relevant. He points out, for example, that although he wrote a book dealing with the theme of thalidomide victims, there is no relationship between his own missing arm and thalidomide. The apparent link between the disabled writer and his novel Flores is thus merely one of many “false clues” (Flores Bueno). But in contrast, references to Japanese culture in Shiki Nagaoka do reveal a specificity that the curious reader can verify, if he or she is willing to pursue this novel’s seemingly false clues surrounding the figure of the nose, as in the example of the two short stories included at the end of the text, each identified by date and authorship.33 Because of the novel’s consistent blurring of fact and fiction, some readers would be likely to doubt the actual existence of the references, or at least to assume that there was something false about them. In emphasizing the playful dynamic between false clues and references that lead to verifiable sources, between “authentic” artifacts or bodies and the absence of evidence, Bellatín’s novel inserts itself in a cultural history of “Western” responses and strategies with respect to the East, while still incorporating its own collection of source materials. Adherence here to a dynamic of false clues and hollowed-out cores of meaning therefore does not preclude the presence of verifiable external referents. In his subversion of the colonialist trope of the collection of “nonWestern” objects through devices, such as false clues, Bellatín risks mimicking yet another supposedly Western critical approach. Perhaps, one might argue, the collection of apparently real Japanese objects surrounding the absent image of the nose is simply replaced by the collection of empty signifiers pointing to “Japan.” Without fully overcoming this risk, Bellatín’s text—emerging from the contours of its true and false, Japanese, Spanish American, and European points of reference—still demands a reading that would renegotiate the prescripted collectionist trade routes of the West–non-West. The gesture of collecting here has partially followed a historical “Western” trajectory, from a search for the authentic body to an emptying of meaning, while continually doubling back for a glance at the ambiguously false or irrelevant clues that nonetheless seem to offer some hint of the truth. This progression suggests a parallel with shifts in the history of

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the freak show and other modes of corporeal spectacle. As discussed in Chapter 4, early freak shows tended to insist on the truth or authenticity of the spectacle at hand; while within the context of Gómez-Peña’s contemporary “mainstream bizarre,” the representation of extreme bodies and behaviors primarily emphasizes the endless play of simulation. At the same time, this text inscribes itself in a specifically literary history, through emphasis on individual writers. The frequently cited postmodernist turn of the collection—and of the freak show—while undeniably present in Bellatín’s text, is therefore anchored here in the tension of referentiality, between explicit archivalist self-citations—through the incorporation of Rulfo and Arguedas—and implicit projections of Elizondo’s cámara clara, perhaps framed by the shadow of Tablada’s distant legacy. Either the singular gesture of collecting or the rigidly cyclical trope of the archive’s “unwriting” alone might threaten to endlessly recirculate the trope of absence versus presence as replacement for the “authenticity” of the non-Western or otherwise unknown Other.34 However, through a combination and cross-referencing of critical-fictional movements, Bellatín’s novel instead opens toward alternative mappings of both the non-West–West collectionist axis and the authoritarian lineages of literary influence. The unexpected juxtaposition of these histories and maps therefore allows for retroactive additions to each. The role of corporeal difference here, viewed through the figure of the nose as troubling, symbolically laden feature, functions specifically to postulate a MexicanJapanese literary-historical imaginary and to destabilize supposed ties between a given body metaphor and the maps upon which it frequently has been projected. Finally, the collected Spanish American and Japanese objects and bodies point not to originary truths, nor merely to a chain of empty signifiers, but instead to one another, and thus to an innovative geography of realities and representations. The figure of the unusually large nose in this text functions at the center of a familiar dilemma of mimetic representation. Similarly, the body of Naief Yehya’s character X as described in the previous chapter and the ambivalent image of Saúl’s birthmark, in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel, discussed in Chapter 3, draw the reader’s attention through their uncertain oscillation of absence and presence. In the case of Bellatín’s novel, the nose also works to disrupt and reimagine the geopolitical history underpinning the tradition of exoticized corporeal representation in which it figures. Yet the nose, despite its destabilizing role, is fundamentally a static image, a motionless space around which histories of literature, museum collecting, corporeal

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spectacle, and transnational trade routes situate themselves and negotiate their functions. In the following, final chapter, by contrast, I consider disability as a more explicitly active, dynamic process of the body’s engagement with other bodies, texts, and worlds through specific attention to the body as performer and producer of narrative.

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CHAPTER 6

Gabriela Brimmer Enabling Testimonio The scene takes place in a packed college classroom at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, around 1968, where a middle-aged, conservatively dressed professor lectures on theories of cybernetics and communication. His audience’s countercultural clothing and hairstyles immediately establish a radical generation gap between teacher and students. “It becomes evident,” he states, “that the world around us is experienced as a series of instructions which, as they’re communicated to us, function in a manner not dissimilar to the program of a computer. Norbert Wiener has described the world as billions of messages that are available to whomever takes interest in assimilating them. Any questions?” Several hands are raised, yet the question comes from a young woman seated in a wheelchair. She spells her message with her left big toe by pointing to the letters on an alphabet chart at the base of the wheelchair, while her maid articulates the words so that they may be understood by everyone in the room: “A computer program is designed to be utilized by a machine, but the world’s information is interpreted subjectively by each one of us.” This scene of unconventional communication is doubly striking. First, the maid as speaker functions here as replicant and voice of the pointing toe, the visible source of the message. Some of the other students become impatient with the slowed, exaggerated (machine-like) pronunciation, letter by letter, as words emerge in transmission from foot to chart to voice; however, through this precise system, the code of an otherwise silent body is cracked, or in other words, this body’s message is made transparently available, thanks to the prosthetic components of the alphabet chart and the voice of the maid. Second, the student’s resistance to Wiener’s notion of the world as objective system of available messages would seem to fly in the face of the logic of her own system of communication, as described here; without the external devices that transform her thought systematically

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into articulated words, available to all who can hear, her intellectual nexus to most of the world presumably would be less immediate. This is what the classroom scene implies, in any case. Still, the student’s gestures and facial expressions are hardly computerlike, but instead convey her intense engagement with the message she transmits. If the extraordinary left big toe has made all communication possible within the universe of this particular story, the disabled character nonetheless momentarily refuses the role of transparent spokesperson for her own system of representation. Resistance here coincides with what appears to be a conflictive encounter between two versions of the body, or between two overlapping modes of self-expression. Within this sequence of frames, an insistent, individualized subjectivity counterposes an openly shared system in which all bodies intersect with their world—and implicitly with one another—through the free assimilation of messages. The paradox driving the student’s defiant message is, of course, that individual, human subjective interpretation and expression, in this case, appear to depend upon a computerlike system, the body’s intersection with the world. This chapter focuses on this encounter, or overlap, as an approach to reading the body beyond the obstinate dilemma of mimetic representation. While several previous chapters have engaged the problem of the represented body’s oscillating absence and presence, in and beyond a given text, through accounts of body riddles, falsification, and performance, I wish to move toward an account of corporeality that also considers a version of embodiment determined by what Mark Hansen has called “mixed reality.” As Hansen describes, in a text heavily indebted to the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Emphasis falls less on the content of the virtual than on the means of access to it, less what is perceived in the world than on how it comes to be perceived in the first place. Bluntly put, the new mixed reality paradigm foregrounds the constitutive or ontological role of the body in giving birth to the world” (5). In the case of the film scene described above, the tension accrues around the question of how the “world’s information” is perceived and by whom. The students within the scene might presumably be struck here by the degree to which the young woman’s body does, in fact, “give birth to the world,” by creating a message, a piece of the world, an element available for assimilation, both for herself and for others rather than simply functioning as a tool for interpretation. And for those whose attitudes toward disability tend toward voyeurism, it may even appear that this system of access to information is more remarkable than the particular content of a given message the woman may wish to transmit. For viewers of the film as well, this particular

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scene highlights the fact—emphasized throughout—that it is only thanks to an unusual communicative system based on the dexterity of the student’s left big toe that this world, as cinematic object, “based on a true story,” has come to exist. The making of the world or the world’s messages apparently coincides with its duplication. How, and at what point here do representation and poiesis slide into one another? And perhaps more crucially, how might a mixed reality approach to such scenes of disability in communication allow for a rethinking of the role of corporeal difference within the fraught terrain of Latin American testimonio and in Latin American narrative more generally? The above-described scene is from the 1987 Hollywood film Gaby: A True Story from Mexican director Luis Mandoki. The story is based on the life of Gabriela Brimmer, a Mexican woman who had cerebral palsy and who communicated, as the scene demonstrates, primarily through the use of an alphabet chart or a typewriter, using only her left big toe. While the film garnered some international attention, particularly among the disability activist community in the United States, and received Oscar nominations, Brimmer’s story is known primarily to Mexican readership, thanks to the collaborative testimonial narrative by Elena Poniatowska and Brimmer, Gaby Brimmer, published in 1979. Following its success, Brimmer also published her own books of poetry and letters, Gaby un año después and Cartas de Gaby, and collaborated in several magazines, including most notably the Mexican feminist journal Fem. Brimmer’s work and, in particular, her collaboration with Poniatowska, form part of the testimonio genre, crucial to familiar debates in Latin American literary and cultural studies and centering on questions, such as the literary value of testimonio, and on readers’ access to politically significant truth via such texts. The corpus of texts by and about Brimmer intersects with these debates and, at the same time, focuses specifically on disability and on the narrative representation of an impaired and extraordinary body. In this sense, the figure of Brimmer suggests a meeting point between disability studies’ debates on the troubled relationship between the corporeal and the textual, and similar discussions specific to Latin Americanist testimonio, on the uncertain junctures between truth and literary representation. In both cases, arguments tend to focus on the problem of access to a represented object, whether written or filmic. Each of these areas of debate undoubtedly has been informed to some degree by a constructivist, antiessentialist paradigm or what Hansen, in reference to a 1995 text by Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank, describes in terms of a “thoroughgoing hostility to anything biological that literally

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permeated the ethos of theory—that is, of poststructuralism following its productive, if also (multiply) deformational, confrontation with homegrown feminism, race, gender, and queer theoretical enterprises” (7). In a related sense, George Yúdice has read “hegemonic postmodernism” as an aesthetic approach through which the marginalized element or other functions only as an absence, a nonexistence. The other, for Yúdice, here citing Foucault, “is that absence in the interior from which the work paradoxically erects itself ” (50). While Yúdice opposes this hegemonic postmodernism to a celebratory reading of testimonio practice, solidarity, and community building, Alberto Moreiras identifies hegemonic postmodernity, or the “aesthetic fix,” as ultimately inescapable in Latin Americanism, including testimonio criticism (213). When Elzbieta Sklodowska applies the Foucaultian notion of a “will of truth” to the testimonio debate, in contrast with Jean-François Lyotard’s reading of the differend, to ultimately question readings of testimonio as “neorealist super-genre, a model of an ‘authentic narrative’” (97), her analysis also demonstrates the repercussions of this theoretical tendency within a literary-critical application. In an opposing sense, Mitchell and Snyder, borrowing from Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Lacan, describe the role of disability in narrative as that of “the hard kernel or recalcitrant corporeal matter that cannot be deconstructed away by the textual operations of even the most canny narratives or philosophical idealisms” (49). At stake in each instance is a corporeality that will, or will not, reveal its presence through or from beyond or behind a given text. And implicit here is a denial or affirmation of a body or object, as given, hence “natural,” beyond textual discourse. The same paradigm, when brought to bear on theories of the body and its literary representations, therefore seems inevitably to lead to the impasse suggested by Tobin Siebers when he writes, “It is a prejudice of literary studies to assert either that the complexity of texts is greater than that of nontextual objects or that nontextual objects simply do not exist” (1323n1). As Hansen notes within the above-cited discussion, the outpouring of theoretical attention to the body since the early 1990s has worked both through and against the constructivist paradigm but has ultimately failed to get beyond it (6–7). Numerous texts of testimonio criticism have grappled with variants of this impasse, one which is ultimately inseparable from the impact of poststructuralism, although also particular—as Moreiras has argued—to the colonialist domination still constitutive of Latin Americanism (199). Hansen’s approach to embodiment and the digital seeks to circumvent the dilemma of corporeality, through “mixed

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reality,” as mentioned above. Rather than viewing a given subject’s agency as ultimately determined and constructed by sociocultural imperatives, in mixed reality, “coupling with the domain of social images occurs from within the operational perspective of the organism and thus comprises a component of its primordial embodied agency” (13). Thus, the organism creates or “gives birth to” its surroundings through its perception of and interaction with those surroundings. And according to this reading, the specifics of this interactive process are more important than the material characteristics of organism or world. As Merleau-Ponty writes, “I am not in space and time, nor do I conceive space and time; I belong to them, my body combines with them and includes them. The scope of this inclusion is the measure of that of my existence; but in any case it can never be allembracing. The space and time which I inhabit are always in their different ways indeterminate horizons which contain other points of view . . . Our bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of knowledge; it provides us with a way of access to the world and the object” (140). Yúdice’s analysis of Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio suggests parallels with Hansen’s reading of embodiment; both attempt to get beyond the dilemma of traditionally constructed representation through recourse to the body as centralizing focus. Yúdice writes, “‘Representation’ is not born of the exclusion of the ‘limiting otherness’ . . . but, rather, by dialogue and interaction with it . . . In contrast with the hegemonic postmodern text, in which the ‘I’ is expelled as vomit, in which the body transforms into vomit that which is expelled, separating it from nature (mother and father), thus making dialogue impossible—‘I abject myself within the same motion through which “I” claim to establish myself ’ (Kristeva 1982, 3)—Menchú’s text is, rather, a testimonial of incorporation, embodiment” (55–56). As in Hansen’s reading, here Yúdice presents a contrast between the radical, paradoxical separation through which a subject is constituted and a more accumulative, inclusive process of incorporation. In Hansen, this process involves the agency of a particular organism in syncretism with its “domain of social images,” while in Yúdice the practice constitutes the collective agency of a community. Yet in each case the critic rejects modes of political and aesthetic representation that would determine a given subject in violent tension with its contexts, in favor of a body-centered reading of agency as an ongoing practice of intercorporeality. This crucial juncture between contemporary theories of embodiment and the legacy of testimonio criticism informs my approach to Brimmer’s texts and to the productive role of disability in reading testimonio. My

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reading of Brimmer, therefore, borrows from Hansen’s work, particularly via his engagement with the theory and legacy of Merleau-Ponty. I do not fully abandon what Hansen refers to as a constructivist paradigm, however, nor the dilemma of mimetic representation that tends to accompany it and has inflected my approaches to corporeal difference throughout this book. Instead, I analyze Brimmer’s texts through a combined approach, paying attention to moments where textual or filmic representation points toward the production of intercorporeality. Thus, in the classroom scene described above, the viewer’s attention is necessarily drawn to the young woman’s extraordinary foot, as revealed knowledge and site of truth—proof behind the details of the story—yet the foot also operates beyond the role of textual object, creating ongoing conditions through which information will be articulated and assimilated. The uncertain relationship between, on one hand, the protagonist’s insistence on individual subjectivity, and on the other, the correlation between her communicative system and the professor’s notion of a computer-model communicative universe, highlights the degree to which the stakes of this scene operate outside the question of the contents of a given message. As viewers, we may choose to interpret the film as a mimetic object available for our consumption, yet this particular scene makes us aware that our assimilation of information is intensely corporeal and intimately linked to the mechanisms described and enacted on the screen. Brimmer’s texts and film, as exemplified in this scene, offer a critical window into the genre of Latin American testimonio in which they participate by shifting the focus of the debate toward a politics of intercorporeality, without abandoning the question of access to the truth behind the narrative. The story, in both film and written account, works through a mode of truth-telling, in which the startling, compelling quality of the narration stems in large part from the apparent facticity of representation. Although events and characters may be shifted or reinvented, as is particularly true in the case of the film, readers and viewers are nonetheless made aware that a “real” disabled body has made this text possible, in fact, that none of the story would exist for us at all without the movement of Brimmer’s remarkable toe. The toe and, by extension, the foot, which Brimmer counts as her “único miembro rehabilitado” (Cartas de Gaby 38) [only rehabilitated member] (my translation) works—in both Gaby Brimmer and in the film—as a metonymic device, pointing to both the disabled body as a whole and the “miraculous” overcoming of disability through communication. The same toe at once hovers between the corporeal and the textual, as the merging of body and story through mutual

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grounding (see figure 9). The hypercorporealization of narrative takes place through the toe in particular, for regardless of what one chooses to believe or at what point fact gives way to fiction, it is the toe, in its simultaneously material and idealized represented versions, that sets the story in motion. The truth function, in both film version and written text, and in general in the cluster of knowledge surrounding Brimmer as a “case” of disability, struggle, and triumph in Mexico, depends on the centrality of Brimmer’s body to her stories, since the narratives always return to this body as both source and impediment to the production of text. In this sense the body’s role in these texts evokes testimonio’s ongoing history of the renegotiation of the site of truth in relation to narrative, as I have suggested above in reference to testimonio criticism. John Beverley’s account of the case of Menchú, as essential to any reading of Latin American testimonio, is particularly useful here, not only for its insistence on the political and ethical stakes implied in the reader’s access to the subject-astruth, or the “Real,” but also for the critic’s explanation of collective resistance and struggle, fundamental to his definition of testimonio. Beverley’s argument

Figure 9. In the university classroom, Gaby Brimmer communicates using her foot on an alphabet chart, while Florencia reads out her words. This scene dramatizes a paradoxical rift between conventional and prosthetic communication systems, during a lesson on cybernetics. Gaby: A true story © 1987 Tri-Star pictures, Inc. All rights reserved.

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focuses on testimonio’s role in debates on the aesthetic value of the literary text as “great” literature and on the ways in which testimonio has shifted the geopolitically defined contours of what counts as truth. He writes, “It is what really happened, ‘the real thing,’ truth versus lie—the Big Lie of racism, imperialism, inequality, class rule, genocide, torture, oppression—that is at stake in testimonio” (3). Yet he also warns, with a nod to Sklodowska, “We should beware of a metaphysics of presence perhaps even more here, where the convention of fictionality has been suspended” (69). These opposing reflections on the problem of testimonio as truth and as textual presence have functioned for some critics as the nucleus of the testimonio debate, linking the discussion to the question of more generalized approaches to literary representation in genres, such as autobiography, history, and novelistic fiction. Beverley’s approach to the problem of the doubled position he describes, between full presence and endlessly deferred meaning, works through recourse to moments where the Real, as traumatic kernel, “breaks through the repetitious passivity of witnessing imposed by the repression itself ” (71) as in instances of the body in pain, the emergence of the “subaltern subject of testimonio,” the creation of a jarring effect, as when Menchú describes the brutal assassination of her brother by the Guatemalan military. Adherence of such instances of the Real depends not only on the violent content of enunciation but also on their rupture of narrative logic, refusal of resolution through the structured sequence of suffering and redemption. Beverley’s complex reading of testimonio and its political function is consistently anchored through an approach to the Lacanian Real and inseparable from specific histories of repression and struggle, as in his documentation of the Menchú case and his mention of Chiapas (78). The structure and stakes of Beverley’s argument, as articulated here, shed light on both the efficacy and limitations of applying this reading of testimonio—with its insistence on the problem of truth (or the Real)—to a work such as Gaby Brimmer. My implied collapsing of two radically disparate figures, Menchú and Brimmer, creates an explicit, intentional asymmetry. The primary difference between these two figures and texts appears to derive from the political sites they occupy. Menchú relates a personal account of violence and resistance, yet her story also resonates with a broad-based political struggle, as well as with international solidarity with many struggles similar to this one. In this sense too, Menchú’s narrative corresponds with Beverley’s understanding of testimonio as typically suggesting resistance and the representation of subjects that historically have been marginalized or excluded from literature and society

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(Beverley 31).1 Brimmer’s voice certainly insists on citing and resisting the social structures that have limited the life options and social conditions of people with disabilities. For example, she documents her plans, in collaboration with a friend, to form an association for people with disabilities, based on the following three principles: 1. Que no se nos aísle ni se nos margine del mundo “normal” [That we are not isolated or marginalized from the “normal” world.] 2. Que se abran fuentes de trabajo para que podamos ser independientes económicamente, al menos en parte [That job opportunities are made available so that we can be economically independent, at least partially.] 3. Que se dé a conocer el problema de parálisis cerebral a la sociedad para exigirle al Estado nuestros derechos como cualquier ciudadano [That social awareness of the problem of cerebral palsy is raised, so that we may demand from the State our rights as equal citizens.] (Gaby Brimmer 153)2 Yet the individualized nature of Brimmer’s story, as primarily specific to her own experiences and those of people close to her, arguably does not allow for her text to resonate widely with broad-based political movements or struggles for liberation, as would be the case for Menchú’s text or for classic works, such as Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón [Autobiography of a Runaway Slave].3 Unlike Menchú’s work, which was instrumental in raising international and local support for the Guatemalan armed struggle against military repression, Brimmer’s text has had a more limited reception and less dramatic effect, although it did raise awareness of disability rights in Mexico. After Brimmer’s death in 2000, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo presented an award in her memory and created a national scholarship for disabled writers or artists in her name. The state-sponsored nature of such recognition raises the question as to whether the effects of Brimmer’s work truly maintain resistance to the political and social marginalization of racial minorities, women, and people with disabilities. It might be argued here that Brimmer’s work and the personalized contours of the struggle she outlines allow her to be easily subsumed into a hegemonic discourse of individual perseverance, triumph, and nationally sanctioned reward, leaving little space for resistance. In addition, Brimmer’s explicit literary aspirations could be said to follow a more traditional notion of the literary as an end in itself than is the case in many testimonios with more programmatic political agendas.

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As I have suggested, however, the role of corporeal difference in narrative, as supposed anchor to sites of (extratextual) truth, parallels the emphasis placed in many readings of testimonio on this genre’s implicit truth-value or truth effects. Beverley underscores this parallel through his reference to “the body in pain,” as cited above. Thus, in contrast to the apparent asymmetry noted between Brimmer’s and Menchú’s politically structured subject positions, their individual roles, with respect to testimonio’s negotiation of truth, turn out to be mutually reflective. In other words, the asymmetry of a comparison grounded in the texts’ perceived political roles and efficacy points to a collapsing together of the two figures as sites of material truth and vice versa. In creating this unusual juxtaposition, I want to emphasize its effects on our perception of the writing or speaking body. The access to truth apparently afforded by Brimmer’s body stems from the body’s impairment and unique system of communication. In the case of Menchú, truth effects derive from a similarly indirect communicative system, since the text was produced orally by Menchú and transcribed by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. In each case, a body “speaks” and, in doing so, enacts the reader’s fantasy of unmediated access to a corporeally communicated truth. Yet the transcribed production of Menchú’s text is due not to a physical impairment, but rather to her particular linguistic competence. As a Maya-Quiché, Menchú could speak Spanish (her second language) but could not write it at the time when My Name Is Rigoberta Menchú was produced and transcribed. In this sense, a matrix of ethnic difference and socioeconomic injustice produces the textual effects of corporeal and communicative difference. Brimmer, on the other hand, was literate in Spanish and English, received a college-level education, benefited from her father’s intellectual Marxist background, and spent much of her time reading and writing. These factors link Brimmer more closely to the profile of her implied readership. In addition, as Claudia Schaefer has noted, the film version’s emphasis on Brimmer’s parents’ narrow escape from the Holocaust serves to create a solidarity with U.S. middle-class audiences (the film was produced and distributed in the United States) through a model of identification with individual struggle and triumph rather than with a popular resistance movement. Differences of class and ethnicity are therefore obvious in the juxtaposition of these two testimonial writers and remain inseparable from the explicit difference of literacy. These differences may help to cement readers’ preconceived associations between Menchú’s project, as one of collective solidarity and resistance (in the fields or the streets), and Brimmer’s project,

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as one of personal struggle and triumph (on the page or in the classroom). Yet the same differences necessarily draw attention back to the body of the writer. In this sense, Menchú’s body “speaks” because of her relative illiteracy in Spanish, and the body’s message becomes one of ethnic and class marginalization. Brimmer’s communicative system is similarly rooted in her impairment, hence in a corporeal difference that is immediately apparent to readers of the text or viewers of the film. Juxtaposing these two bodies therefore underscores the way in which corporeal manifestations of class and ethnicity parallel the textual role of corporeal difference as impairment. According to this intercorporeal model, impairment and ethnicity collapse into one another, each becoming markers of corporeal difference and each contributing explicitly to the perceived truth-value of the document in question. Readers’ access (or nonaccess) to the “truth” of the text here depends on the intersection of the body and its production of meaning through reference to other bodies, even, or especially when such references reveal asymmetries or reflect the common injustices of social and literary representation. It is no longer a matter, then, of locating truth at a particular site of struggle and resistance, or as the materiality of the body, but rather of allowing for the ongoing manifestation and experience of intercorporeality, as revelatory of its own inconsistencies. As readers faced simultaneously with the speaking bodies of these two texts, we can neither approach nor avoid them, nor can we entirely locate one with respect to the other. The relationship between these two bodies, and by extension, between ethnic difference and impairment, is thus suggestive of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of reversibility, a chiasmatic relationship classically described through the figure of the right hand that touches the left. Merleau-Ponty describes the point of impossible contact, where the touched hand as object becomes active, touching subject, as an écart, a split or separation, and also uses the term in reference to relationships between distinct bodies and between the body and the world (The Visible and the Invisible 147–48). In the case of the suggested juxtaposition of Menchú and Brimmer, perhaps the separation between the two derives in part from the apparent ease with which readers may tend to approach and appropriate the disabled body and its story (encouraged by Poniatowska’s narrative) in contrast with a solidarity of respectful distance vis-à-vis the racialized and implicitly collective body that Menchú’s text—and the vast body of criticism it has inspired—calls forth. And these disparate approaches persist, even, or especially, when the differences between these speaking bodies are found to collapse into one another. To be sure, I am not advocating

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an equalization of approaches to all bodies and testimonios, but rather a reading that would pay attention to the particular characteristics and contexts of such asymmetries and to where, why, and how their relative distances intersect. Reading Brimmer’s text and film alongside Menchú’s classic work allows for an approach to intercorporeality that sheds light on the politics of testimonial narrative and that reveals corporeal relationships as intrinsic to all testimonio on some level. This approach looks beyond the situated problem of truth in narrative representation in order to highlight embodied experience as an active process rather than as a congealed condition. This initial juxtaposition also serves to highlight the unique political contexts surrounding the publication of Brimmer’s and Poniatowska’s text, which distinguish the work from Menchú’s, as well as from other classic testimonios of political solidarity, such as Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco. In addition, the focus on intercorporeality points to similarly intercorporeal relations at work within Brimmer’s text and film themselves, as I will discuss further. First, however, an account of the political and politicized perceptions of Brimmer’s narratives will be useful. As Schaefer has written, the publication of Gaby Brimmer in 1979 coincides with a period of decreased support for radical politics in Mexico by the middle and upper classes in which Mexican intellectuals are largely absorbed into state-supported networks of power and in which readers’ interest shifts from collective political causes to individual, personalized stories and struggles, as exemplified in two works by Poniatowska, Gaby Brimmer and Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela. Schaefer’s elaboration of this context, of what Carlos Monsiváis refers to as a depoliticization, effectively situates Poniatowska’s work on Brimmer with respect to Mexican and international readership in the late 1970s (Schaefer 63).4 The personalized narrative of individual suffering and struggle does not, within Schaefer’s reading, suggest the need for radical political change (83). In contrast to this period in Poniatowska’s testimonio production, her earlier La noche de Tlatelolco, based on the student protests and subsequent massacre by the police in October 1968, represents a model of solidarity with collective struggle against political injustice that is more akin to critical descriptions of testimonio’s relevance by Beverley and others. Why, one might be tempted to ask, would the question of disability emerge in testimonio only in a “depoliticized” context? This question and the manner in which Schaefer frames her reading of Gaby Brimmer, in fact, allow us to complicate the juncture between disability and the political in testimonio. In terms of the trajectory of Poniatowska’s career as

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testimonio writer-collaborator, Schaefer’s reading is revelatory. It underscores the shift between the political urgency out of which a work, such as La noche de Tlatelolco, would emerge (and win a prize) and the context of only a few years later in which such messages had apparently lost their space of resonance, in part due to a climate of fear in reaction to the police brutality of 1968. Thus, the period of the late 1970s and early 1980s in which many intellectuals were subsumed into state organizations rather than positioned against them would allow Poniatowska to explore topics and figures of supposedly less obvious political urgency, hence the personal stories of bourgeois women, such as Brimmer and “Quiela,” (Angelina Beloff ) their inner lives and private struggles, would replace the testimonio calls to solidarity of texts, such as La noche de Tlatelolco or Hasta no verte, Jesús mío. Yet a reading of Brimmer’s texts and film also suggests a different trajectory of political solidarity at work. The scene from the film, as I note at the beginning of this chapter, takes place sometime around 1968. In Cartas de Gaby, Brimmer notes that she was in her second year of high school when the Tlatelolco massacre occurred: Todavía en 1968 creía en la “ley”, el “orden”, “la justicia” y bla, bla, bla. En septiembre más o menos tuve noticia de que mi amigo Luis estaba en Lecumberri, y ahí vamos mi madre y yo a verlo. Después Tlatelolco, y la confusión entró en mi ser . . . Me rebelé, grité, fui a algunas asambleas, fuimos, sin que supiera mamá, a la “Marcha del Silencio.” (10) [In 1968, I still believed in “law,” “order,” “justice,” and bla, bla, bla. In September more or less I found out that my friend Luis was in Lecumberri prison, and my mother and I went to see him. Then Tlatelolco and confusion overcame me . . . I rebelled, I shouted, I went to some meetings, we went to the “March of Silence,” without my mother knowing.]5

The time period is significant because it reminds readers and viewers of Brimmer’s commitment as a political activist and her explicit and ongoing politicization of disability, as linked to this activism. In addition, the film suggests its own connections between the politics of the 1968 student movement and the problems of intercorporeal representation and communication that it confronts through attention to disability. The scene described at the beginning of this chapter takes place in a college communications course, where, as was noted, students study the work of Wiener, now known by many as the father of cybernetics. A later

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reference in the film informs us that the work of Marshall McLuhan is also included in the course. These two mentions, though brief, are hardly incidental to the film’s treatment of disability and its inclusion of the 1968 political climate. Wiener’s work on cybernetics, following World War II, derives from a military model of understanding computerized systems of control and organization. As N. Katherine Hayles describes, the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, held from 1943 to 1954, in which Wiener played a crucial role, defined the foundation of cybernetics in terms of “homeostatis,” an overarching theory of communication in which both organic and mechanical systems self-regulate through feedback loops. “Henceforth, humans were to be seen primarily as information-processing entities who are essentially similar to intelligent machines,” writes Hayles, although she adds that for Wiener, “the point was less to show that man was a machine than to demonstrate that a machine could function like a man” (7). The scene from the film described above sets up an explicit opposition between Wiener’s theory of cybernetics, promoted as self-evident by the conservatively dressed professor and the opposing (humanistic) view of the student, Brimmer. Immediately following this exchange, the professor refutes Brimmer, dismissing her intervention, while a classmate backs her up, and others appear to agree with their fellow students. The division of opinions adheres to a generational divide, as well as to a clearly marked division of power in the context of the classroom. The scene thus underscores this intergenerational tension as a crucial aspect of the cultural politics during the period of the 1968 student movement. In addition, the professor’s insistence on a cybernetic, militaristic communications model, in contrast to the students’ apparent adherence to individual, humanistic subjectivity, effectively captures one of the central concerns governing the climate of student resistance to university and governmental politics in this period. Monsiváis’s humorous essay on Marshall McLuhan, as a conclusion to his book, Días de Guardar, on the events of 1968 in Mexico, illustrates one aspect of this divide. McLuhan’s notion of “electronic interdependence” becomes absurd in the context of scenes described by Monsiváis. Thus, when McLuhan focuses on the totalized environment of mass media rather than on specific individuals or organizations as producer of propaganda, Monsiváis creates a parody of how this might look in Mexico, with voices of the “nation” and the “multitude” playing roles in a drama of nationalistic propaganda, which nonetheless continues to focus on individual subjective demands and postures in a ridiculous fashion (367–68).

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McLuhan’s work on technology as prosthetic extension of the human body also resonates specifically in the film. He describes electric technology as “a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism” (Understanding Media 43). A similar suggestion of the reconfiguration of human corporeality emerges in one of the final scenes of the film in which we see Brimmer’s face through a window. While she writes, we hear the sound of a typewriter; at the same time, her words appear on the screen, not in the form of conventional subtitles, but rather imitating the font of an old-fashioned typewriter. We read, “How can I scream when I can’t talk,” but evidently, the tactility of the words on the screen, along with the antiquated sound of the typewriter, gives us a far greater sense of proximity to the message and of a corporeal, tangible contact, even more than if the words had actually been screamed out. Here, the text is the body and vice versa, or, as McLuhan would title his later well-known work, “the medium is the massage.” In their description of overarching explanations behind the student movement of Paris in 1968, which has been compared to the movement in Mexico of the same year, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut refer to a struggle “more against domination and integration (against technocracy) than against exploitation” (36). This explanation appears to dovetail with the notion of resistance to an all-encompassing cybernetic model. Yet Ferry and Renaut’s work also describes a paradox: “In one sense, May [1968] was indeed a revolt of subjects against the norms, in the sense that individualism was being defended against any claims for the universality of norms. But at the same time, the hyperbolic affirmation of individuality set in motion a process that led quite predictably in the direction of the desintegration of the Ego as autonomous will, the destruction of the classic idea of the subject” (64). Returning to the classroom scene from the film, the tension Brimmer expresses, between individual subject and computerlike communication system, suggests a parallel to these highly politicized debates on the role of the subject within a given structure in the contexts of the 1968 movements. From the theoretical standpoint argued by Ferry and Renaut, the strong version of the subject will ultimately dissolve, although, paradoxically, this dissolution stems from a political moment of struggle and selfaffirmation. It may be worth noting that, in the film and textual versions of Brimmer’s story, such dissolution of the subject does not take place in the final analysis. In fact, part of Schaefer’s argument on the depoliticized

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quality of Gaby Brimmer rests on the presence of a strongly articulated, individual, bourgeois subject at the center of the text, as is also the case in Poniatowska’s Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela. Nonetheless, the film scene’s hovering between two communicative models, one insistent on individual subjectivity, the other grounded in a universalized structure of open intersections between information and recipients, points directly to one of the central debates pertinent to the climate of 1968 political culture. The film is particularly successful in linking this debate and politicocultural atmosphere to its representations of disability and corporeality. Brimmer’s use of an alphabet chart and her communicative collaboration with her maid, Florencia, in the context of the classroom, functions as both a refined model, reflective of the professor’s lesson on Wiener’s theory of cybernetics, and as an unexpected anomaly that interrupts the predictable functioning of classroom dynamics. Here, the 1968 studentsubject both dissolves and asserts herself, and does so by virtue of her disability, as defined in the classroom context. This scene therefore links the film’s themes of disability and communication to the politically charged climate of 1968 Mexico and underscores the significance of Brimmer’s active involvement in this context. Both the film and the written text ultimately suggest Brimmer’s political awareness and participation in the 1968 student movement, thus challenging the notion that the representation of disability generates apolitical, individual stories of struggle and triumph rather than political action and solidarity. The intercorporeal model suggested in the same scene through which a system of communication links Brimmer’s body to that of her maid, as Florencia’s voice describes messages transmitted by Brimmer’s foot, works to highlight the representation of ethnic difference between the two women. As described above, the juxtaposition of Gaby Brimmer with Menchú, as two embodied voices of testimonio narrative, points to radical differences between them in terms of ethnicity and socioeconomic class, as well as the political structure of the struggle articulated by each. At the same time, this apparent incongruity serves to highlight the intensely corporeal quality of the unique position each figure occupies. As a model of intercorporeality, Brimmer and Menchú together demonstrate an unbalanced symbiosis, or reversibility, between ethnic difference and physical impairment. In a similar sense, the linked figures of Brimmer and her maid, Florencia, operate in both film and text; their literal and symbolic collaboration becomes crucial to these works’ participation in the testimonio genre and to their expression of intercorporeality as an ongoing,

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open-ended mode of production of the body as subject and expression of mixed reality. In the film, the two-headed figure of Florencia and Brimmer suggests a ventriloquist act, one that parallels the testimonio model of voice substitution while at once shifting it toward a more specifically corporeal relationship and reconsidering its power dynamics. In a similar, disabilityrelated model, Gail Weiss uses Merleau-Ponty’s notion of écart to describe a prosthetic encounter between human and machine, as when Stephen Hawking speaks through a Vortrax speech device. She cites Allucquère Rosanne Stone’s analysis of this communicative scene and continues, in her own words, “According to Stone, Hawking is not Hawking without his prosthetic voice. His Vortrax is inextricably tied to who ‘he’ is in a complex, boundary-defying relationship in which the machine is the person and the person is the machine. And yet, to ask ‘who is doing the talking up there on stage?’ itself gestures toward a space of disincorporation, a virtual site that sets the terms for the reversible relationship between man and machine” (121). In this analysis, however, the Vortrax truly is a machine, whereas Florencia is a human whose role in Brimmer’s communicative system may convey a machinelike appearance.6 Words emerge from Florencia’s mouth, yet the visual representation makes clear that they transmit Brimmer’s messages, except, of course, when Florencia happens to speak her own words. This occurs in the scene following the classroom anecdote already described. As they leave the classroom, Florencia asks angrily, “Why did you make me say those things to the professor?” The statement underscores Florencia’s mechanistic function, yet insists on the idea that it is Florencia, and not Brimmer, who physically speaks in such instances.7 The film version of the story insists on the specificity of the corporeal bond between Florencia and Brimmer, through a logic of shared struggle and asymmetrical symbiosis. In an early scene, we see Brimmer as a very small child, and Florencia—then a maid in the house—attempting to feed her, in secret, late at night. This occurs apparently because Florencia has noticed the parents’ and another maid’s inability to feed Gaby effectively. As Gaby initially rejects the spoon of food by kicking it away with her left foot, Florencia devises a communication system for her. Moving the foot in one direction means “no, thank you,” she explains, and moving it in the other direction means, “yes, please.” The “miracle” of communication (or “Helen Keller moment”) occurs as the camera focuses relentlessly on the left foot, which finally signals a “yes, please,” as the child accepts the maid’s offering of food (see figure 10).

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Figure 10. The camera’s prolonged focus on the child’s foot heightens the viewer’s anticipation of a communicative sign from the uncooperative body of Gaby Brimmer, aged three. Gaby: A true story © 1987 Tri-Star pictures, Inc. All rights reserved.

The scene therefore signals Gaby’s entry into a new communicative system, as well as the initiation of a special bond between Gaby and Florencia. Upon discovering what has happened, the parents are initially enraged that Florencia has been feeding Gaby in the middle of the night, but when they realize that she has succeeded both in getting the child to eat and in teaching her to communicate effectively with others, they accept Florencia as Gaby’s primary companion and caregiver. In fact, the following scene shows Florencia, Gaby, and her mother, seated on the lawn, practicing communication with an alphabet chart. Gaby spells words on the chart by pointing to letters with her toe, under her mother’s tutelage, while Florencia simultaneously learns to write with pen and paper. Curiously, then, Gaby’s indirect access to language is mirrored by Florencia’s initial struggle with illiteracy, while it is Florencia’s voice that conveys Gaby’s words as speech. The two-headed structure of testimonio narrative here offers a shift, in that the conventionally privileged position of “speaking for” a subaltern is now occupied by a second subaltern

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figure, one whose access to the privileges of linguistic communication is still under negotiation. Ethnic and socioeconomic difference mark Florencia as separate; she is a mestiza who cannot read or write, and works as a domestic servant for a relatively well-to-do white Jewish family of recent immigrants to Mexico. The collaborative communication of these two bodies highlights their incommensurability, even as these scenes explicitly convey direct interaction between the two and define the viewer’s access to each of the bodies in terms of the other. Thus, the unique status of each appears to stem from that of her counterpart. In an earlier scene, for example, in which Florencia appears washing clothing on a patio, we hear the gossip of a neighbor’s servant who is curious about rumors of Gaby that she supposedly has no arms and her head is backward. The neighbor’s servant implicitly links this information to the fact that the family is Jewish, hence different. Florencia refuses to engage with the gossip and simply affirms that yes, the family does treat her well. This scene clearly emphasizes the circulation of anti-Semitism in which Jewishness becomes equated with corporeal difference, even as it points toward an ethical response to the scenario by using prudent silence to reveal the absurdity of crude allegations. The exchange also postulates an incipient solidarity between the mestiza and the Jew, particularly when the neighbor’s servant underscores Florencia’s outsider status by asking, “You’re new around here, aren’t you?” 8 The two-headed figure of Florencia and Brimmer, articulated through their collaborative communication system and through the film’s dependence on their symbolic, racialized symbiosis, shifts the motor of testimonio debate away from its conventional insistence on the site of a real body-subject and lived experience. Emphasis here moves toward an intercorporeal model, in which each body intersects with the other, while retaining its distinctive and separate qualities. Rather than evoking material presence and absence, this dual figure operates through an ongoing process of engagement with its exterior and with its asymmetrically mirrored selves. The relationship between Brimmer and Florencia is particularly significant in these representations, because of its parallels to the standard testimonio relationship between informant and interlocutor, as well as its transformations of that structure. Testimonio typically follows a structure of real or apparent voice substitution in which one subject speaks for or appears to speak for another. Classic examples include instances in which illiteracy or lack of direct access to means of publishing and disseminating one’s voice are the reasons for requiring a proxy of some kind—hence

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Barnet’s use of a tape recorder to capture the story of Esteban Montejo, a 105-year-old former slave in Cuba, which would later be published as Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón. Testimonio thus conjures a two-headed speaking-writing figure, not unlike Pablo Palacio’s Doble y única mujer, discussed in Chapter 2, an uncertain replicant and embodiment of the mediation process common to all written narrative. In the case of testimonio, racial and socioeconomic class differences, as well as the problematics of a potentially neocolonial power dynamic, tend to be central to the double-headed structure, as a wealth of testimonio criticism over the past few decades attests. Unlike in some testimonio texts, the double-headed figure of Brimmer and Florencia, as described in the film, does not insist on the dilemma of material absence or presence, or on competitive substitution between the two “heads,” but instead maintains a spatial separation—an écart—allowing for a dual, simultaneous presence without substitution, equivalence, or erasure. In contrast, Brimmer’s and Poniatowska’s text, Gaby Brimmer, presents its own version of the double-headed model, but this time centered on the encounter between the literary text and its object of study. The joined figures of Poniatowska and Brimmer present the reader with the dilemma of a division of labor between two bodies, as in the case of the film’s depiction of Brimmer and Florencia, but in addition here the text of the testimonio suggests an uncertain encounter between text and body in which each runs the risk of replacing the other. The names of both authors appear on the cover of the book, yet this juxtaposition immediately points to the question of the text’s origins. Is it Poniatowska who “speaks” through her hands’ contact with a conventional typewriter, or is it rather Brimmer’s voice, articulated through her left foot, that fundamentally brings the work into existence? Although the testimonio suggests a collaboration in a practical sense, the structure of the relationship between the two writers also implies competition and substitution. In this sense, the text enters the domain of the familiar Latin American testimonio debate and rehearses some of its common dilemmas: the question of supposed literary value and that of readers’ access to truth. Specifically, if we read the work primarily as Poniatowska’s faithful (mechanical) transcription of Brimmer’s words, the result will appear to some traditional critics as less than “literary.” And for some readers, this same appearance of faithful, unaltered transcription might seem to offer a more direct conduit to the material truth of the body and subject upon which the work is based. While these points are potentially applicable to any testimonio text,

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in this case the dilemma becomes central to the text’s focus on disability and on Brimmer’s body as both creator and subject matter. The structure of this encounter between textual endeavor and body-object is determined, in part, by Poniatowska’s framing of the work through a preface in her own words and through repeated reference to her own hesitation about the project. After an initial explanation of Brimmer’s medical history and struggles to overcome her disability, Poniatowska describes her initial encounter with Brimmer in mixed terms: “La primera vez que vi a Gaby, no me atreví ni a mirarla. Me desconcertaban sus espasmos . . . Sin embargo, su mirada confiada, cálida y sobre todo alegre me hicieron buscar sus ojos, apoyarme en ellos” (15) [The first time I saw Gaby I didn’t dare even to look at her. Her spasms disconcerted me. Yet her gaze, confident, warm and above all happy, made me look to her eyes, support myself in them]. The uncontrolled body, the fact of impairment, becomes most directly visible through the spasms, which in turn provoke an extreme, visceral reaction in the viewer, perhaps a nearly involuntary looking-away. The corporeal encounter is thus characterized here by a loss of control and by the uncertainty and discomfort this produces. To overcome the initial body rejection, Poniatowska turns her focus to the gaze and the eyes, a source of comfort and support for their participation in recognizable human qualities: warmth, happiness, confidence, and, as she adds, “sin la menor amargura” (15) [without the least bitterness]. The encounter takes place here through a split between disconcerting corporeality and recognizable humanity; hesitation gives way to acceptance only when attention shifts from attributes of extreme difference to those of supposed shared qualities. Poniatowska’s use of hesitation in this described encounter focuses directly on a bodily experience and works to organize the narrative of difference in terms of a separation between normal and abnormal. Her plea for the solidarity of her readers depends upon situating Brimmer’s characteristics more firmly among the supposedly normal, positive, healthy, and human. Thus, she also describes aspects of the relationship between Brimmer and her mother as “sano, sano, sano” (29) [healthy] as when the mother sticks out her tongue at her daughter, in a combination of humor and annoyance. Later in the prologue, Poniatowska continues this tactic, in a description of Brimmer that doubles as a presentation of her subject in the flesh: “¿La ven ustedes?” (34) [Do you see her?] Poniatowska asks, “una niña que les tiende a ustedes las manos y la cabeza, una cabeza llena de flores” (35) [a girl that offers you her hands and her head, a head full of flowers]. The girl represented here is “linda de cuerpo y alma” (34)

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[beautiful in body and spirit]; “Más allá de los espasmos, de los brazos inhábiles, de la silla de ruedas está una niña fuerte e inteligente” (34) [Beyond the spasms, the useless arms, the wheelchair, is a strong and intelligent girl]. Readers, presumably, might follow Poniatowska’s cue and accept Brimmer as the image-text presented to them, as beautiful where indicated, despite the troubling differences that cause initial consternation. Authorial and readerly hesitation are nonetheless built into the reaction; the distance is not one of sublime awe, but rather a minor pause that gives way to the tenderness of human recognition.9 Poniatowska’s self-reflexive, hesitant engagement with Brimmer continues in the prologue, as she describes her initial reticence in proceeding with the book, following the interviews with Brimmer and her family. Here, doubts about the project are articulated through the mouths of some of Poniatowska’s friends who point out that Brimmer’s story has nothing to do with literature and that nothing can be done, in any case, to improve Brimmer’s situation. Some even state that the Greeks used to kill disabled people so as to get rid of them (34). Poniatowska’s retroactively performed uncertainty about whether or not to proceed with the book project appears to stem here from two central issues: the fact of disability as subject matter and the literary, or less-than-literary, status of the project. In fact, these concerns are intimately bound together, in a manner that suggests a questioning of what constitutes the literary and to what degree differently marked bodies and voices may participate in that constitution. Difference refers in this case to both the constructed conditions (such as disability and race) that have historically excluded individuals and groups from participation in literary and political discourse and the notion that bodies and subjects beyond the traditional single author might play active roles in the elaboration of the text. In the prologue and the complete text of Gaby Brimmer, Poniatowska does clearly express concern for people with disabilities as a community rather than exclusively for Brimmer’s individual case. Yet hesitation here creates an intense, momentary focus on the individual, the instant of encounter with corporeal difference and the subsequent representation of the body, held up to a reading public: “Do you see her?” Hesitation is projected toward the reader, who takes up Brimmer on Poniatowska’s cue and according to her conditions. The problem of the “literary” quality of the project at hand is therefore momentarily resolved through an aesthetics of hesitation in which the beauty of the corporeal object depends upon a suspended insistence between the discomfort of difference and human recognition, the useless hands and the “head full of flowers.” Within the

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framework of this presentation, the social context of the disabled body and the disability community must also be suspended; thus, the “problem” of the literary status of the work is partially resolved, as hesitation congeals the dilemma of corporeal difference in a metaphor of artistic creation, flowering from the head. Emphasis on the literary quality of the text, as one of Poniatowska’s modes of hesitation, points back to aspects of the debate articulated by Beverley on the role of testimonio in Latin American literature and, particularly, its position with respect to Ángel Rama’s ciudad letrada [lettered city], the history of Latin American letters as consistently tied to and continuous with state and institutional power, from the colonial period through the twentieth century. If testimonio, as Beverley notes, functions as part of the lettered city (20), it has nonetheless raised questions about the aesthetic quality of what counts as literature, where conservative critics express concern that the representation of oppression and suffering comes to circumvent the standards established by “great” literature and art.10 Poniatowska’s numerous works in the testimonio genre highlight her commitment to solidarity with oppressed communities and individuals as inseparable from the act of writing. In Gaby Brimmer, on the other hand, hesitation combines with solidarity to suggest an uncertain relationship between coauthors, which is also to say between the methods and agency of the two writers. From the beginning of the narrative, readers learn of the details of Brimmer’s impairment and its particular effects on her brain and motor skills, and of her method of writing and informal communication, through use of the left big toe: “Gaby piensa BIEN y envía BIEN las órdenes pero sus células muertas no permiten que se efectúen; la orden no llega a los que podrían efectuarlos:—es decir ‘los efectores’ en términos médicos—porque los sistemas están dañados” (10) [Gaby thinks well and sends orders correctly, but her dead cells do not permit that the orders are carried out. The order does not arrive to those that could carry it out— that is to say the “effectors” in medical terms—because the systems are damaged]. Not surprisingly, we do not learn similar information about Poniatowska’s brain or her writing habits, nor would we expect to receive such information about any writer, except of course when the writer’s disability is the primary subject matter of the text. While this is obvious, the effect here, where both authors’ names appear together on the cover of the book, is to emphasize the physicality of the act of writing, and even thinking, in Brimmer’s case, and to shroud these same acts in secrecy in Poniatowska’s. Writing, we are reminded, is not conventionally seen as

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taking place through explicit attention to the use of the body, but rather through cerebral processes that translate to typed words on the page. The reader’s access to these words suggests a conduit to the abstract thinking of the writer who has produced them but not necessarily to the writer’s typing fingers. The juxtaposition of the two writers therefore sets up a radical contrast between the image of the impaired body as producer of text and the organizing writer-editor, who molds the work into its final, published form. The act of “giving voice” to the Other, as when Poniatowska transcribes and publishes the words of her interlocutors, suggests solidarity and collaboration but, in this case, also involves a reorganization of the conditions of (corporeal) textual production and content. This is not only because the work includes specific, repeated attention to Brimmer’s mode of writing, both in Poniatowska’s prologue and throughout the narrative, in letters and written conversation among Brimmer, her mother, and her maid, but also since Poniatowska necessarily appears in relation to the materiality of this writing body. In this sense, collaboration means, in addition to the participation of several voices, a division of labor in which Poniatowska operates as disembodied spokesperson, or mouthpiece, for Brimmer’s words and body. While in many examples of testimonio as the transcription of oral history, a similar substitution might be said to take place; in this case the separation is highlighted through emphasis on Brimmer’s unconventional method of communication. As in the scene from the film, in which Brimmer’s maid, Florencia, slowly articulates the words indicated by the moving toe, Poniatowska also takes on the role of assistant as double. The difference here is that Florencia’s constant, physical presence and oral participation emphasizes her corporeality, while Poniatowska’s presence as a body is minimized, filtered through her written words. Hesitation, as perceived through the framework established by Poniatowska in her prologue, works through two primary modes, as I have suggested. The first mode is a self-reflexive description of an initial encounter, a visceral reaction to corporeal difference that gives way to human recognition, thus engaging the reader in a similarly dual relationship to Brimmer as body and textual subject, between conditions of radical difference and acceptance through common ground. In the second mode, it is the literary status of the project, before completion, that determines writerly uncertainty; although, again, this technique in the prologue serves to cement the reader’s knowledge and recognition that hesitation did indeed give way to the production of text. Yet something of

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this hesitation remains, to the extent that the “literary” quality of the text may always be retroactively contested. In fact, Poniatowska has affirmed elsewhere that she does not consider Gaby Brimmer to be a literary text, and both Monsiváis and Barnet told her that they didn’t like the work (Schaefer 66). In overcoming her performed hesitation, choosing to complete the book after all, Poniatowska evokes a sense of solidarity with Brimmer: “El rostro de Gaby seguía apareciéndoseme en el asiento delantero, el del copiloto” (34) [Her face kept appearing to me in the copilot’s seat] and emphasizes her commitment to the genre of testimonio as collaborative literature. The idea that Gaby Brimmer might not qualify as fully literary points to broader debates on the genre of testimonio and its place within or outside the “lettered city.” Yet curiously, the same concern does not surface explicitly in well-known testimonial narratives by Poniatowska, such as La noche de Tlatelolco, a collaborative project in which the authorial voice subsumes itself to the multiple individual and collective expressions of Mexicans who witnessed the government massacre of student protesters in 1968, nor does literary status appear to be of obvious concern in Poniatowska’s classic testimonial novel Hasta no verte, Jesús mío, the transcribed narrative of a peasant soldadera of the Mexican revolution. Reading Gaby Brimmer close to thirty years after its initial publication and from a perspective now inevitably informed by critical work in the largely U.S.-based field of disability studies, particularly since the legislation of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, it is not difficult to note troubling aspects of Poniatowska’s use of what I call hesitation. This expanded context of reading is unavoidable in part because Brimmer’s story has been internationally mediated by a Hollywood film, which allowed far larger audiences access to the story, and because Brimmer, to some degree, already positions herself internationally, through references to her family in San Francisco, in both Gaby Brimmer and Cartas de Gaby.11 It is the wheelchair, the spasm, the disconcertingly different body that initiates hesitation, eventually giving way to admiration and human engagement, yet these “positive” reactions are still bound up in their opposition to the radical differences that amaze all the more, precisely because they exist in conjunction with endearing and recognizable qualities. Hesitation in this instance, then, suggests the classic model of disability as an obstacle to be overcome, implying individual triumph over physical challenge and, more importantly, over socially constructed versions of disability as unbreachable difference. The double-edged implication of the model is,

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of course, that only the exceptional disabled person has succeeded, while the rest of the disabled group remains in the predetermined category of stigmatized difference (Linton 17–18). In this sense, the extraordinary, “disabled individual” (extraordinary only because disabled) maintains the boundaries of desirable normalcy, in opposition to the stigmatized group that he or she must continually manage to transcend. This model tends to check efforts toward broader social or political change that would benefit the disability community; it is the individual rather than his or her lived context that is expected to make all necessary adjustments. These aspects of the text, framed by the model of hesitation I have described, are undoubtedly troubling in terms of the static and limiting notion of disability they represent. Yet Poniatowska’s hesitant framing of the project also points toward a unique approach to considering testimonio through intercorporeality. Rather than attempting to present a smooth transition between literary project and textual object or to make Brimmer’s body fully present, as if unmediated, Poniatowska’s prologue performs each stage of an awkward encounter, rehearsing the misfirings that threaten to leave the project in uncertain suspension. The use of photographs, interspersed throughout the text, creates a similarly intercorporeal effect, suggesting immediacy and the overcoming of distance between text and body but not without unexpected, jarring discontinuities. As in the case of the film, photographic representation of Brimmer’s left foot constitutes one of the most evident focuses of attention. The immediacy of the reader’s experience is partly achieved through the inclusion of a series of photographs, which tell their own story of Brimmer as body and subject. Different images focus on the infamous left foot and on the act of writing. In one, we see the base of the wheelchair, with Brimmer’s feet on top of the book My Left Foot, open to the title page. Poniatowska makes explicit the connection between Brimmer and Christy Brown, author of My Left Foot, noting that both write with the left foot, and that both experience a lack of control of the hands, a fact that makes impairment visible, in contrast with the skill with which they use their feet. The text we have in our hands exists, the narrative seems to suggest, principally thanks to the action of this extraordinary foot, in opposition to the impairment of the rest of the body. Continuity between text and foot implies a reciprocally prosthetic relationship, each one being the extension and identity of the other. But this apparently continuous reversibility shatters when the image of the foot is introduced in juxtaposition with the title of an earlier work (My Left Foot), on a similar theme. On one hand, the foot in the

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photograph confirms the extratextual existence of the same foot. Yet, on the other, the distorted mirroring between the two texts, one contained by the other, redoubles the supposed reversibility between foot and text. We are thus reminded that the two texts, like the text and the foot, exist in chronological order; their hyperrealized coexistence on the page of the photo paradoxically underscores the limits of their simultaneity. The equivalence between foot and text is disarticulated precisely when the text produces an intercorporeal image of Brimmer (a Mexican woman) and Brown (an Irish man). And, as Poniatowska reminds the reader, “No es lo mismo ser mujer que hombre, la condición masculina propicia la creación, la femenina lo impide; no es lo mismo escribir en Irlanda que en México” (22) [It is not the same thing to be a woman as it is to be a man; the masculine condition promotes creation, the feminine condition impedes it. It is not the same to write in Ireland as in Mexico]. The intercorporeal relationship between Brimmer and Brown suggested in this use of photography repeats the gesture of reversibility as écart, as one photographed body momentarily appears to become the other while remaining necessarily separate and discrete. By the same token, the fact and photographic representation of cerebral palsy does, and does not, equalize an Irish male body with its Mexican female counterpart. The scene of spatial simultaneity and impossible, reciprocal engagement between bodies reiterates the communicative models of juxtaposition of Brimmer and Florencia, Brimmer and Poniatowska, Brimmer and Menchú, and those of the speaking voice, the typing fingers, the pointing foot. The imperfect and disjointed collapsing together of these models points toward a reading of testimonio—understood as a substitutive rearrangement of voices and bodies—as inseparable from disability as intercorporeality. The Latin American tradition of testimonio, along with its links to other genres of writing, serves to clarify the stakes and points of radical separation within this reading of intercorporeality. Thus differences between figures such as Menchú and Brimmer remain politically crucial; and the hollowed, textual absence where a “real” body refuses to appear persists, in continuous negotiation with the emergence of something closer to the truth. Yet emphasis on disability and, in particular, on the spatialized, chiasmatic communicative junctures between bodies that it establishes also offers a shift in the critical terrain of testimonio. If self expression is paradoxically both separate from and continuous with an open and mechanically accessible communication code, as the film scene discussed at

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the beginning of this chapter suggests, then the sites from which multiple meanings will be produced may continue to proliferate and to function simultaneously rather than through temporally sequenced substitution. At stake, once again, is not so much our access or nonaccess to meaning and textual truth, but rather the varied and shifting characteristics of intercorporeal junctures and the worlds they both create and become.

Afterword In an epilogue to his monumental work, The Obscene Bird of the Night, José Donoso describes an accidental vision that would give rise, eventually, to his idea for the novel. In the late 1950s, the author found himself chatting with a friend on a street corner in Santiago as they waited for the light to change. In the back seat of a luxury car, he saw a well-dressed young man whose unusual body caught his attention, if only for a few seconds: Lo que percibí con escrupuloso detalle (me parece que lo estoy viendo hoy), fue un muchacho de edad indefinida, aunque ya pasada la adolescencia, magníficamente vestido—camisa de seda, traje de franela listado—, pero totalmente deforme. Era un enano, un gnomo, una criatura de feria: la cara cosida, los ojos asimétricos, la nariz estropeada, el labio leporino. (566) [What I perceived in scrupulous detail (it seems to me as if I’m seeing it now) was a boy of indeterminate age, but past adolescence, magnificently dressed—silk shirt, striped flannel suit—but totally deformed. He was a dwarf, a gnome, a circus creature: with a sewn-up face, asymmetrical eyes, damaged nose, a harelip.](my translation)

Although Donoso explains that he immediately forgot the incident, distracted as he was by his friend, he would remember it three years later when he sat down to write his novel. He began with the following lines, from which I also cite in an epigraph in the introduction to this book: Cuando Jerónimo de Azcoitía entreabrió por fin las cortinas de la cuna para contemplar a su vástago tan esperado, quiso matarlo ahí mismo: ese repugnante cuerpo sarmentoso retorciéndose sobre su joroba, ese rostro abierto en un surco brutal donde labios, paladar y nariz desnudaban la obscenidad de huesos y tejidos en una incoherencia de rasgos rojizos . . . era la confusión, el desorden, una forma distinta pero peor de la muerte. (171). [When Jerónimo de Azcoitía finally parted the crib’s curtains to look at his long-awaited offspring, he wanted to kill him then and there; the loathsome, gnarled body writhing on its hump, its mouth a gaping bestial hole

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in which palate and nose bared obscene bones and tissues in an incoherent cluster of reddish traits, was chaos, disorder, a different but worse form of death.] (The Obscene Bird of the Night 126).1

This anecdote does not so much suggest that the novel will be about extreme corporeal difference, but rather reminds the reader, once again, that literary texts often rely on such striking body imagery to sustain themselves, to ground abstraction in something jarring, tangible, and hopefully unforgettable. According to Donoso’s account, it is as if the young man’s body persisted in his memory and reasserted itself, years later, and that the writer himself was a passive receptacle for the seed of this amazing story. The materiality of the body therefore appears to give life to the more abstract process of the production of text. This extraordinary body provides the primary narrative impetus to the novel and then vanishes; yet in this book, I have aimed to show that disability and corporeal difference in the text suggest more complex entanglements of ethics, aesthetics, and unpredictable signification, and therefore require more detailed attention. Ato Quayson’s recent work on disability and representation provides a compelling approach to the dilemma of Donoso’s anecdote: “It is disability’s rapid oscillation between a pure process of abstraction and a set of material conditions that ensures that the ethical core of its representation is never allowed to be completely assimilated to the literary-aesthetic domain as such. Disability serves then to close the gap between representation and ethics, making visible the aesthetic field’s relationship to the social situations of persons with disability in the real world” (24). In Donoso’s anecdote, the purportedly extratextual vision of the disabled person, therefore, may be read as a framing device, situating disability at a literary-aesthetic threshold and troubling its boundaries. This scene and its explicit relationship to the production and theme of the novel, The Obscene Bird of the Night, might therefore remind the reader that, as Quayson emphasizes, literary models of disability are irrevocably linked to disability as lived experience, beyond the pages of the book. In writing Carnal Inscriptions, I have sought to underscore the ethical imperative implicit in this linkage. This book has approached the dilemma of the body’s literary tropology through specific emphasis on textual encounters between Latin America and its others, through readings that challenge our familiarity with how those encounters might take place, with the metaphors they suggest, and with the roles of marked or unusual bodies in the text. For this reason,

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I have emphasized a series of works and writers that do not frequently receive critical attention within the structure of a Latin American canon or supposed corpus of fundamental texts, in combination with readings of well-known works. The juxtaposition of discourses of monstrosity with those of disability is also part of a strategy aimed at suggesting an outside to the monolithic circularity of familiar corporeal tropology in narrative. By focusing on the specificity of disability in the texts and on the processes through which bodies appear and make an impact, I have sought to show that bodies create ongoing and unpredictable meanings, only partially determined by histories of the freak show, representations of the monstrous or cannibalesque, and the sociocultural processes through which differences have been interpellated as racial or ethnic markers. In addition, the variety of bodies discussed in this book and the multiple locations from which they act in themselves demonstrate the limitations of a single overarching Latin Americanist or disability studies model as approach to corporeal difference. The reading of disability is complicated here by competing or mixed definitions and implications. First, disability is determined primarily by social contexts rather than by the intrinsic nature of a given body, according to the model I have emphasized throughout this book. Yet mainstream notions of disability frequently equate it with impairment, understood as specific physical difference or defect, and in fact, the categories of impairment and disability prove difficult to separate in many cases. Literature and performance projects may reiterate or work through this uncertain equation; thus, critical approaches to the text become irrevocably impacted by the same dynamic. Pablo Palacio’s La doble y única mujer, as discussed in Chapter 2, explores this dilemma by showing how the lived experiences of corporeal duality and singularity are intimately tied to the linguistic and social structures that condition daily existence. Second, disability has become a minority identity for many activists and disability studies scholars, while others have focused on the universalizing pole of disability and sought to unmoor it from identity politics. José Juan Tablada’s encounter with U.S. mass culture at Coney Island dramatizes a key discursive location in this debate, as I suggest in Chapter 1, by offering his readers a narration of the freak show, alongside the funhouse mirrors that temporarily transform the bodies of every spectator. And third, the material specificity of the body marked as different has acquired particular significance in studies of freak show and ethnographic spectacle history, yet studies in disability and performance suggest that bodies in freak-show performance and related modes of spectacle do not

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occupy absolute sites and cannot be pinned exclusively to predetermined meanings. This is most notably the case in Chapter 4 in which Coco Fusco’s and Paula Heredia’s use of archival footage of early freak shows in their video effectively troubles the boundaries of the archive and shows that the framing of the ethnically marked, disabled, or enfreaked body remains fraught with the cumulative significations of writing and performance. In many of the texts analyzed here, disability and corporeal difference appear as inseparable from the dilemma of mimetic representation; hence, objects appear to oscillate between absence and presence in a dynamic common to all textuality but seemingly exacerbated by bodies that announce their radical differences, and thus appear to jump out from the page. Yet by focusing on the body in performance, whether on film, stage, or in written texts, my readings also move away from the notion of body as object in order to consider the shifting processes in which bodies create and negotiate their surroundings. This is particularly evident in Chapter 6, where emphasis on theories of intercorporeality and mixed reality show disability to be integral to a reading of the body in Latin American testimonio. Along similar lines, critical work on the notion of embodiment as intercorporeality and in virtual reality by scholars, such as Mark Hansen, Gail Weiss, Elizabeth Grosz, and Vivian Sobchack, will undoubtedly continue to be useful to further studies of disability and corporeal difference, especially in approaches to performance and textual practice inflected by artificial intelligence and new media, where bodies may defy traditional object contours and operate instead as open-ended poietic processes. The partially chronological progression of texts analyzed in these chapters described a series of transitions in the roles of corporeal difference in the text. The first two chapters looked at specific textual moments of entanglement between metaphor and materiality, in the contexts of Latin American engagement with colonialist and imperialist others. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 turned toward more recent cultural production, engaging with the dilemmas of simultaneously racialized and disabled bodies, the performance of disability as identity, and the question of textual or readerly access to the body as truth. Finally, in Chapter 6, I proposed a transition in the roles of disability and the body in the text by focusing on the active processes of the production of text and the combined roles of juxtaposed and intertwined bodies in these processes. This emphasis, while still grounded here in a specific corpus of texts, underscores the relevance of disability-centered critical readings to the impact of disability in social context. Literary studies in this case consider the text not only as produced

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cultural object but also as a framework through which bodies create their worlds, and disability emerges as a powerfully malleable category of meaning. In this sense, the approach also highlights the complex roles of people with disabilities and of the notion of disability as such in shaping social perceptions of difference, media representation of marked bodies, and the political agency of disability activism. Future studies of disability and corporeal difference in Latin American or Latin Americanist contexts might effectively take further into account the extraliterary sociopolitical roles of people with disabilities in specific national or regional contexts or through transnational frameworks relevant to spheres, such as immigration and international law.2 In this book, I have sought to highlight the relevance and potential impact of disability as a sociocultural category for Latin American literary and cultural studies specifically and to indicate the need for further scholarship that would also address disability in Latin America through a broader framework of cultural production, including economic and political perspectives. The interdisciplinary encounter I have proposed here considers corporeal metaphors in literature and performance as crucial to reading the marked body, its impact, agency, and ongoing construction. Disability, in these readings, is thus determined by histories of performed identities, as well as the ongoing, lived experiences of communities and individuals and, nonetheless, remains inseparable from a literary tropology of monstrosity, its well-worn contours and its fault lines.

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Notes Introduction 1. In U.S. disability studies contexts, “people first language” tends to favor terminology, such as “people with disabilities.” In Great Britain, in contrast, “disabled person” is commonly used “as a sign of shared cultural and structural oppression” (Kuppers 136n5). While for Kuppers, the two approaches are incompatible, in this book I use both, depending on the appropriateness of the expression to a given textual analysis. I insist, however, that the “disabled body” is disabled first and foremost by its social or literary context. 2. Recent sources reflecting this general approach include Elzbieta Sklodowska and Ben Heller’s edited volume, Roberto Fernández Retamar y los estudios latinoamericanos, and an edited volume by Carlos Jáuregui and Juan Pablo Dabove, Heterotropías: Narrativas de identidad y alteridad latinoamericana. 3. See, for example, Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s classic source, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, as well as David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis, cited above. 4. Lennard Davis sustains the same argument in his Enforcing Normalcy and describes how categories of class, race, physical identity, and nation are easily made to slide into one another (92).

Chapter 1 1. All translations of Tablada are mine. 2. On the notion of “enfreakment,” see Rosemarie Garland Thomson (Freakery, 10) and David Hevey (53). 3. The first Coney Island freak show opened in 1880 (Bogdan 56). Also see McCullough (Good Old Coney Island, 252). 4. Rachel Adams, unlike Bogdan, notes that forms of the freak show and cultural fascination with the freakish have, if anything, increased in visibility and popularity in the late twentieth century. 5. See González, 28. 6. Also see Martí, 196–975, xxi: 164. 7. Rachel Adams uses the term “repetition” in reference to freak show performance, borrowing from Judith Butler’s reading of gendered performance. Repetition goes beyond the concept of performed identity by introducing minor, destabilizing differences (6). 8. Both González and Rotker study this aspect of the crónica.

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9. Julio Ramos’s reading of “Coney Island” details the complexity of Martí’s shifts between the material and the figurative. 10. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (“Feminist Theory”) posits this opposition in terms of strategic essentialism versus strategic constructivism. 11. Leslie Fiedler’s work on freaks problematizes this separation at some points by showing, for example, how participants in 1960s counter-cultural movements effectively became “freaks.” 12. See Rosemarie Garland Thomson (“Feminist Theory”) and Lennard Davis (Bending Over). 13. In Cortés’s description of México-Tenochtitlan: “Tenía otra casa donde tenía muchos hombres y mujeres monstruos, en que había enanos, corcovados y contrahechos, y otros con otras disformidades, y cada una manera de monstruos en su cuarto por sí” (67) [There was another house where many monstrous men and women lived, among whom there were dwarfs, hunchbacks, and deformed; and each manner of monster had a room apart] (1: 266). 14. Palencia-Roth makes this argument in his analysis of New World “teratological theology.” 15. “Inside the monster” is also the title of a volume of Martí’s writings in English translation and is borrowed from a letter written by Martí to Manuel Mercado on May 18, 1895. My intention is not to equate Rodó’s discourse with that of Martí but to suggest the United States’ similarly calibanesque role in each text. 16. Here, Kaliman cites Retamar, from his “Nuestra América y Occidente.” 17. As Spivak continues here: “The stagings of Caliban work alongside the narrativization of history: claiming to be Caliban legitimizes the very individualism that we must persistently attempt to undermine from within.” 18. Here Retamar writes, “Pues poner en duda nuestra cultura es poner en duda nuestra propia existencia, nuestra realidad humana misma, y por tanto estar dispuestos a tomar partido en favor de nuestra irremediable condición colonial, ya que se sospecha que no seríamos sino eco desfigurado de lo que sucede en otra parte” (79) [For to question our culture is to question our very existence, our human reality itself, and thus to be willing to take a stand in favor of our irremediable colonial condition, since it suggests that we would be but a distorted echo of what occurs elsewhere] (3). 19. This is not to suggest, of course, that Caliban’s tropology is—or has been— the definitive double-bind of Latin American cultural history. Certainly, other communicative circuits disseminate knowledge and theory and thus counter the notion that a univocal Latin American expression functions only vis à vis a colonialist interlocutor. See Torres-Saillant (“La traición”) and Mignolo (Local Histories). 20. Rachel Adams also cites and analyzes this portion of the text (226). 21. Albert Bigelow Paine would later note the contrast in propriety between a late nineteenth century Coney Island and the scene he encountered in 1904: “Remembering that the Bowery used to be the worst section of old Coney, we went over there. But even the Bowery was changed,—laundered as it were,—and well-dressed, well-mannered women were walking about entirely unprotected,

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seeing the sights and enjoying the picturesque human panorama of other sightseers. Of course it was still a whirl of noise and exhibition and refreshment, but the noise was within the limits of law and order and the exhibition and refreshment were more wholesome . . . where once painted and bedizened creatures attracted half-besotted audiences with vulgarity and display” (533). 22. These are my translations. 23. For further biographical information on Barnum, see, for example, Irving Wallace, The Fabulous Showman, and James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception.

Chapter 2 1. All translations of Palacio are mine. 2. Marc Shell makes a related argument in his Children of the Earth. He writes, in reference to the nineteenth-century Siamese twins Chang and Eng, “The very fact of their existence opposed the otherwise universal indeterminability of kinship that threatens the ideological security of the consanguineous and national family” (6). 3. I use the terms avant-garde and vanguardia interchangeably here. 4. Leonor Fleming notes the theme of “genetic determinism” in “La gallina degollada”: “resabio del naturalismo positivista finesecular presente en algunos relatos de Quiroga” [aftertaste of the fin de siècle positivist naturalism present in some of Quiroga’s stories] (116n1). 5. “By presenting the rare case where consanguineous kinship is ascertainable, Siamese twinning emphasizes the general inascertainability of consanguineous kinship that arises from the always possible existence of changelings and foundlings” (Shell 7). 6. In referring to the twins as both one and two, I inevitably encounter the same grammatical conflicts Pablo Palacio emphasizes through the mouthpiece of his character(s). 7. María del Carmen Fernández writes of this paradox as “la de una cultura ajena y galante injertada en unos contenidos nacionales marcados por la pobreza y por la frustración” (488) [that of an extraneous and loose culture grafted onto national contexts marked by poverty and frustration] (my translation). 8. This is Fernández’s view of the history of the period, and it is echoed by many other critics. See, for example, Jorge Ruffinelli and Agustín Cueva. 9. Ruffinelli discusses Palacio’s position along these lines (156). As Fernández notes, several of Palacio’s stories appear in the radical avant-garde magazine Hélice, first published in 1926 (487). 10. The theory of maternal impressions has a long and extensively documented history. Marie Hélène Huet provides a thorough and original treatment of this topic. Also see Jan Bondeson’s work on “maternal impressions” (144–69). 11. See, for example, Palacio’s 1932 essay, “La propiedad de la mujer.” 12. Celina Manzoni makes a similar observation in her “Una estética de la ruptura.”

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13. Note that conventional use of the phrase “entre mí” translates to English as “to myself,”—that is, “Dije entre mí.” [I said to myself.] 14. See Palacio’s “Prosa No Ficticia y Traducción,” compiled in Wilfrido Corral’s critical edition, especially “La propiedad de la mujer” (199–202), “Sentido de la palabra verdad”(203–17), “Sentido de la palabra realidad” (218–32), and “Breve esquema genérico sobre la dialéctica” (233–37). 15. Note the disjuncture between the explicitly masculine “hombres” and the adjectival forms of “constituida” and “loca.” 16. All translations of Velasco Mackenzie are mine. 17. Avant-garde literary “cannibalism,” such as Palacio’s story “El antropófago,” published in Un hombre muerto a puntapies, generally takes advantage of colonial discourses of cannibalism in the texts of Cristóbal Colón, Michel de Montaigne, and many others, in order to subvert the colonizing gesture by metaphorically ingesting the (European) other. For an analysis of such colonial texts of cannibalism, see Carlos Jáuregui’s Canibalia: Canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y consumo en América Latina or his earlier article, “Saturno Caníbal: Fronteras, reflejos y paradojas en la narrativa sobre el antropófago.” 18. Schwarz does not go to the opposite extreme, as would those who argue for a national culture’s originary and creative essence, free of all imitative tendencies, but instead stresses the importance of a pragmatic, historically accurate approach to cultural production, specifically informed by a knowledge of class differences. 19. This model is suggestive of Freud’s argument in Moses and monotheism. 20. See Corral, “Cronología.” 21. Perhaps due to a combination of Palacio’s health problems and his extravagant style, many critics have, in fact, demonstrated an interest in this writer’s body. 22. Both Elizabeth Grosz and Jean-Joseph Goux highlight the notion of a genderless matter in their works cited here.

Chapter 3 1. See, for example, Noël Carroll’s essay on this topic. 2. Parenthetical page numbers refer to Patricia Duncan’s translation of David Toscana’s novel. I use the word “midget” throughout this text, in adherence to Duncan’s translation of Toscana’s term, “enano.” The term today is generally considered offensive, and “little person” has become preferable to either “midget” or “dwarf.” However, “midget” is appropriate to the context of freak-show history through which it gained currency, and which serves as a backdrop to Toscana’s novel. 3. All English language citations of El hablador are from Helen Lane’s translation. 4. Examples of such novels might include García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad and José Donoso’s El obsceno pájaro de la noche. 5. The Crack is a group of Mexican writers whose original members included Ignacio Padilla, Jorge Volpi, Eloy Urroz, Vicente Herrasti, and Ricardo Chávez Castañeda.

Notes

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6. Lee A. Daniel interviewed Toscana in March of 2002 and provides the following information on the setting of the novel: “[Toscana] revealed that Sierra Vieja is located in the state of Zacatecas. Many former mining towns are today abandoned. While writing the novel, Toscana consulted a map of Zacatecas and decided where he wanted the protagonists to travel. He chose Sierra Vieja based solely on its geographic location and Sierra Vieja became Santa María del Circo” (266). 7. Ilán Stavans writes, “The only literature by Jews in Spanish before The Jewish Gauchos is a product of marranos, crypto-Jews, and new Christians,” and adds that this literature “falsifies and misrepresents, it denies its Jewishness” (Essential 119). Stavans has written extensively on Jewish literature and identity in Spanish and Latin American contexts. See, for example, the introduction to his anthology, The Scroll and the Cross: 1,000 Years of Jewish-Hispanic Literature. 8. A similarly troubling structure is at work in Toscana’s El ejército iluminado in which cognitive disability stands for the victimized status of Mexican nationals at the hands of the United States, thanks to a history of U.S. imperialism and ongoing discriminatory immigration policies. 9. The term marrano also has been used historically to refer to Jews who converted to Christianity. Also see Seymour B. Liebman (216–18). 10. Francisco de Quevedo’s text reads as follows: “solo añadió a la comida tocino en la olla, por no sé qué que le dijeron un día de hidalguía allá fuera” (98) [Once he did put a bit of bacon in the pot because they said something in the town about his ancestry. (Jews don’t eat pigmeat)] (Alpert 77). The editor then states, “Comer carne de cerdo significaba no ser judío, por la repugnancia que judíos y conversos sentían hacia ese alimento” (98) [Eating pork signified not being Jewish, because of the repugnance that Jews and conversos felt for that food] (my translation). 11. Elaine Scarry writes, in reference to the Old Testament, “Moments in which the people have performed an immoral act . . . must be seen within the frame of the many other moments where the infliction of hurt is explicitly presented as a ‘sign’ of God’s realness and therefore a solution to the problem of his unreality, his fictiveness” (202). 12. This observation borrows from Julia Kristeva’s reading of Leviticus. 13. Similarly, the limitation to a Kristevian reading here, as Judith Butler’s analysis suggests, stems from Kristeva’s insistence on a fundamental presymbolic law, one that forecloses effective subversion. See Butler, Gender Trouble (86–91). 14. In her analysis of this novel, Doris Sommer has similarly described a metonymic relationship between Saúl’s Jewishness and his affinity for the Machiguengas (257). 15. Although many of Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels in fact approach the question of indigenous cultural survival, analysis of these works is beyond the scope of this project.

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Chapter 4 1. All translations of Naief Yehya are mine. 2. In using the term “disabled person” here, I borrow from Petra Kupper’s use of British terminology, as opposed to a “people-first language,” more typical in U.S. contexts. See Kuppers 136n5. 3. This performance took place as part of the Society for Disability Studies Conference in New York City, June 18–22, 2008. 4. “One should therefore turn around the standard reading according to which, the WTC explosions were the intrusion of the Real which shattered our illusory Sphere: quite on the contrary, it is prior to the WTC collapse than we lived in our reality, perceiving the Third World horrors as something which is not effectively part of our social reality, as something which exists (for us) as a spectral apparition on the (TV) screen—and what happened on September 11 is that this screen fantasmatic apparition entered our reality. It is not that reality entered our image: the image entered and shattered our reality (i.e., the symbolic coordinates which determine what we experience as reality)” (Žižek, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real” 16). 5. See my introduction for definitions of these categories, in Michael Oliver’s The Politics of Disablement. 6. The idea of such an awakening and of an “ethical relation to the Real” is borrowed from Cathy Caruth’s essay, “Traumatic Awakenings.” 7. The text refers to X as enana, which may be translated as either dwarf, midget, or little person. 8. Julio Ramos provides a detailed analysis of differences in the roles of culture and the public intellectual between the United States and Spanish America, as discussed in Chapter 1. 9. All translations of this text are mine. 10. As Rigoberto Cruz Díaz’s informant describes, “Se nos apareció aquí en casa la gente de Coney Island, porque se les había cumplido el contrato a una serie de artistas y les dijeron que nosotros les podíamos servir, ya que en ese momento no estábamos haciendo nada” (264). [The Coney Island people showed up here because they had fulfilled contracts with a series of artists, and had been told that we could help them, since at that time we weren’t doing anything.] 11. Also see Bogdan 87. 12. For example, public furor over Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Superbowl half-time show demonstrates an ongoing obsession with the issue of morality in television broadcasting. 13. “El formato de Cristina, muy común en la televisión norteamericana desde el éxito de Ophra Wimphrey, [sic] se funda en la masificación del talk-show, de los interrogatorios a celebridades y aspirantes a serlo” (Monsiváis, Aires de Familia 236) [The format of Cristina is very common in U.S. television, ever since Oprah Winfrey’s success, and is based on the massification of the talk show, with its celebrity and would-be celebrity interviews] (my translation). The U.S. trajectory from freak show to talk show does not necessarily translate to the contexts

Notes

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

211

of Latin American or Latino/a television and cultural history. This is because unlike in the United States, the freak show in Latin America did not enjoy the same degree of success as a popular institution, nor did it propel its entrepreneurs or performers into the limelight enjoyed by the likes of P. T. Barnum, James Bailey and Robert Ripley, and even some of the U.S. “freaks” themselves. As Julio Revolledo Cárdenas notes, only one major Mexican circus (Beas y Modelo) incorporated the freak show, beginning in 1925, and he adds that the activity did not really prosper (78). Cristina Online. 3 March 2003. http://cristinaonline.com/html/inolvidables .html. Note that this link, which included documentation of these episodes, is no longer available. All translations of Monsiváis are mine. The best known of these “offensive” programs in English is, of course, Jerry Springer. Joshua Gamson writes, in reference to the American Family Association, “The fear that certain kinds of topics would be perceived by advertisers as potentially alienating to viewers was well recognized by William Bennett and others participating in the brief mobilization to ‘clean up’ talk shows” (136). Also see Andrew Tolson’s essay on this topic. The daytime talk show, like certain earlier cultural forms that preceded it, is generally associated with socially and economically marginalized classes. As Julie Engel Manga describes, referring to 1996 Nielsen Media Research, “Approximately 80 percent of the viewing audience were female . . . with low income and lower levels of education. In addition, while in raw numbers the audience was predominantly white women, black women watched at three times the rate of white women” (5). Similarly, although in reference to a particular television network rather than to talk shows, the president of Televisa, Emilio Azcárraga Milmo declared in 1993, “En pocas palabras, nuestro mercado en este país es muy claro: la clase media popular. La clase exquisita, muy respetable, puede leer libros o Proceso para ver qué dice de Televisa” [In brief, our market in this country is very clearly defined: the lower middle class. The refined, respectable class can read books or Proceso to find out what they say about Televisa] (Monsiváis, Aires de familia 217; my translation). Here, performative revenge is akin to Ato Quayson’s concept of “aesthetic nervousness,” whereby literary representation “stumbles” when the roles of disabled characters shift unexpectedly (25). Coco Fusco writes, “Our performance was based on the once popular European and North American practice of exhibiting indigenous people from Africa, Asia, and the Americas in zoos, parks, taverns, museums, freak shows, and circuses” (English Is Broken Here 40). See Adams 30. This history is documented in several sources; see Lindfors, “Ethnological Show Business.”

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Chapter 5 1. Note that the novel’s title uses European word order, with the protagonist’s surname after his given name (Shiki Nagaoka). Yet throughout the text of the novel, the name appears as “Nagaoka Shiki,” reflecting Japanese word order. 2. Cheyla Samuelson, who interviewed Mario Bellatín in 2006, has confirmed that the author originally invented Nagaoka as a spoof and then developed the novel based on this character. 3. Mat Fraser’s show itself does not actually work through a freak-show model of fraudulent representation, but his script cites examples of spectacles in which such deception was common. 4. An interesting example of the book as replication of the museum collection is Jan Bondeson’s A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities. 5. All translations of Araceli Tinajero are mine. In their studies of Spanish American Orientalism, both Tinajero and Julia Kushigian note important limitations to the application of Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism to Spanish American contexts. Yet each borrows from Said’s analyses; Kushigian notes his emphasis on relating knowledge to power as Orientalist Western dominance (111n2) while Tinajero takes particular note of his reading of the relationship between “truth” and representations (27). In the introduction to her book, Kushigian describes Said’s Orientalism as Anglo-French and rooted in the use of power applied to representations of the Orient. She suggests that Hispanic Orientalism requires different models, due in part to a history of significant links between the Hispanic world and the Orient; she does not accept that “Orientalism will always be a collusion of knowledge and power” (2). 6. The same anecdote, with different details, is also described by Robert C. Allen. Allen refers to other episodes of cinematic “cheating” in the context of the Spanish-American War. And like Jon Dovey, Allen does not affirm whether or not the public saw through the fraud. He writes, “I am unable to determine whether vaudeville patrons accepted this film as a record of the actual event or saw through Blackton’s trickery” (138–39). 7. Here, Dovey cites Albert E. Smith (54). Similarly, Allen writes, “The SpanishAmerican war was probably the most propitious event in the early history of American cinema” (135). 8. “All three forms show that, rather than being a simple reality effect, the illusionistic arts of the nineteenth century cannily exploited their unbelievable nature, keeping a conscious focus on the fact that they were only illusions” (Gunning 117). 9. The fraud was revealed in a May 6, 1998, article in the Guardian titled “The Fake Connection,” in reference to the documentary The Connection, originally screened in October of 1996. 10. This structure is based on Timothy Mitchell’s reading of world fairs and exhibitions. 11. The characterization of Latin America as peripheral and as site of the exotic has its roots in the European encounter with the “New World,” and the colonial

Notes

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

213

history of the region, as is well known. See, for example, Mary Louise Pratt’s discussion of European natural history and its classification of human groups by geographic region (32). I would like to thank Freya Schiwy for pointing out the debates underpinning this uncertain division here, as well as for her many other invaluable suggestions and comments on an earlier version of this chapter. All translations of Bellatín are mine. I am grateful to Michael Foster for this information and also for references to original Japanese texts. Diana Palaversich has linked Bellatín’s “literary universe” with that of Jorge Luis Borges, in terms of the arbitrary quality of literary systems present in the work of each writer (27). Palaversich’s text further outlines the postmodern qualities of Bellatín’s work as a whole, contextualizing his novels through reference to Borges, Julio Cortázar, and Salvador Elizondo, but without assigning him to a chronologically defined generation of writers. Because Akutagawa Ryūnosuke died in 1927, his text “The Nose” could not have been based on Nagaoka’s life, even if Nagaoka were a real historical figure. Strictly speaking, Shiki Nagaoka is not an archival fiction, nor does it belong to the period of novelistic production to which Roberto González Echevarría refers in Myth and Archive (186, 221). Yet Bellatín’s incorporation of Juan Rulfo and José María Arguedas, as well as other figures, does allow the novel to participate in archival processes, although in an oblique manner. My reading of the collection here borrows from Susan Stewart’s work but differs slightly from her interpretation. Specifically, the collected “objects” in Bellatín’s novel hover at various points between Stewart’s notion of “context destroyed” (151) and a relationship to external referents. Note that the original Spanish version of the text specifically highlights the ambivalence of otherness as both separation and belonging. See, for example, Widukind Lenz’s 1966 article. Although many details of the narrative turn out to have a basis in extratextual scientific history, in this case, the fiction departs somewhat from available evidence on thalidomide, its international usage and subsequent effects. In fact, cases of thalidomide-related birth defects have been documented as recently as 1995 in Brazil, where the drug was prescribed to patients with leprosy. See E. E. Castilla, “Thalidomide, A Current Teratogen in South America.” The character of Zumfelde may be partially based on the German scientist Widukind Lenz, who was largely responsible for alerting the public to the dangers of thalidomide once he had hypothesized an association between the drug and a series of birth defects. Lenz also served as a witness when the case went to trial, which resulted in the remuneration of many thalidomide victims. As Friedrich Vogel writes, “Lenz essentially became the conscience of diagnostics in medical genetics” (355). Also see David Harvey Serlin’s Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America and Rodney Barker’s Hiroshima Maidens. In her study of early photography, Laura González Flores notes a similar duality between the common tendency to see photography as a system of “perfect

214

24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

Notes

iconicity” (36) and the importance of the production of illusion in both photography and related forms of spectacle. The well-known reference is borrowed from Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés.” I would like to thank Dan Russek for his suggestion of the connection between Elizondo’s Camera Lucida and Bellatín’s use of photography. The device known as a camera lucida was invented by William Hyde Wollaston and patented in 1806. “Its central feature is a prism with two reflecting surfaces at 135º, that conveys an image of the scene at right angles to the observer’s eye placed above it. The observer carefully positions his pupil, with the aid of a small viewing aperture, in such a way as to perceive the image and at the same time, to see past the edge of the prism to the drawing surface below” (Kemp 200). I refer here to the fictional characters (Ozu Kenzo, Rulfo, Arguedas) and not to their extratextual referents. It is worth noting here that Rulfo (the Mexican writer and not the fictional character) was also a photographer. His published photographs, with a selection of commentaries by major Spanish American writers, appear in Inframundo: El México de Juan Rulfo. Arguedas committed suicide in 1969 after abandoning the writing of his novel El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo. Bellatín’s novels with East Asian referents include El jardín de la señora Murakami and La escuela del dolor humano de Sechuán. I use the term modernista rather than modernist throughout this chapter, so as to distinguish this poetic tendency from Anglo-American literary modernism. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, much of Tinajero’s argument rests on the notion that Orientalism in the Spanish American context is complicated by the fact that both East Asia and America were seen as exotic sites from a European perspective. Each of these short texts within Bellatín’s novel seems to correspond to available English translations: the thirteenth-century story “The Nose” to a translation by Royall Tyler and the Akutagawa text to a translation by Glenn W. Shaw. The term “unwriting” is borrowed from González Echevarría’ reading of Arguedas’s “radical effacement of self ” (15).

Chapter 6 1. Other sources focusing on this point include Barbara Harlow, Barbara Foley, René Jara, and Roberto González Echevarría. 2. All translations of Gabriela Brimmer and Elena Poniatowska are mine. Brimmer eventually founded her own organization for people with cerebral palsy, Asociación para las personas con Alteraciones Motores (ADEPAM) [Association for People with Motor Alterations] in 1987. See Ana María Carrillo’s 1989 interview with Brimmer. 3. This point echoes Claudia Schaefer’s argument. The political impact of Brimmer’s narrative was undoubtedly conditioned by the more limited international

Notes

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

215

visibility of the disability movement at the time of publication. Although this movement has gained ground since the late 1970s, it still tends to receive relatively scant public recognition when compared with other political and social justice movements. The citation from Carlos Monsiváis is as follows: “La despolitización empieza advirtiendo el trágico destino de los muy politizados” [Depoliticization begins by warning of the tragic fate of those who are too politicized] (Amor perdido 51; Schaefer’s translation). The film is based on Brimmer’s life and borrows some information from the book Gaby Brimmer, although parts of the film do differ from Brimmer’s own written accounts. The text of Gaby Brimmer suggests that Brimmer first attended the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in 1974, or shortly thereafter. The example underscores the relevance to disability of such cyborg models of intercorporeality and points toward Donna Haraway’s classic text, also cited by Gail Weiss. In Elena Poniatowska’s testimonio work with Brimmer, in contrast, such ventriloquism does not seem to take place explicitly between Gaby and Florencia, because their voices are represented individually in a series of textual entries. The intercorporeal link between the Jewish, disabled, Gabriela and the mestiza servant, Florencia, may remind readers and viewers of the iconic Mexican figure of dual ethnic identity and disability, Frida Kahlo. Her classic 1939 self-portrait, Las dos Fridas [The two Fridas], makes explicit the division between her indigenous and European ancestry. Her self-representations and public perception have tended to identify her as Jewish on her father’s side, although this genealogy has been questioned in recent years. Schaefer notes in reference to this point, “Gaby Brimmer does the only ‘decent’ thing: on liberal humanist grounds it shows that this woman is really ‘the same as the rest of ‘us’ on the inside’” (86). Here John Beverley (68) cites from Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education, 87. As Schaefer emphasizes, Gaby Brimmer is the only work by Poniatowska to have directly inspired a Hollywood film. Schaefer speculates that the subject matter, the story of European immigrants to Mexico, and the individual struggle for communication, might be more appealing to international audiences than would more conventionally “Mexican” stories, such as Hasta no verte, Jesús mío (68).

Afterword 1. Note that these lines do not appear in the opening of the novel, but appear in a later chapter, as José Donoso also points out. 2. Examples of such region-specific studies that have begun to emerge in recent years include Soledad Torres Dávila’s 2004 Género y discapacidad: Más allá del sentido de la maternidad diferente and Carlos Andrés Gómez Acosta and Clemencia Cuervo Echeverri’s 2007 Conceptualización de discapacidad: Reflexiones para Colombia.

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Index absence and presence, 2, 25, 27, 72, 78, 94, 128, 137, 158, 161, 168, 172, 174, 189–90, 197, 202 Adams, Rachel, 205nn, 206n20 “aesthetic nervousness,” 2–3, 211n20. See also, Quayson, Ato afrancesamiento modernista, 164 African origin, 135, 136, 138 Aguilera Malta, Demetrio: Los que se van, 76 Akutagawa, Ryūnosuke: “The Nose,” 148, 150, 213n15, 214n33 Alianza Fuerza de Opinión Pública, 123 Allen, Robert C., 147, 212nn American Family Association, 211n17 Americans with Disabilities Act (U.S., 1990), 195 Andrade, Oswald de, 72; “Manifesto Antropofágo,” 26 anthropologists, 118, 133, 137, 139–40 antiessentialism, 173 anti-Semitism, 84, 86, 90, 92–93, 96–98, 189 antropofágia, 26, 52, 71–73, 208n17 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 65 Araweté people, 26 archive, 132–33, 137–40, 151, 157, 159–60, 168, 213n16 Argentina, 51, 110 Arguedas, José María, 150, 160–61, 213n16, 214nn; El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo, 161–62, 214n29 Ariel, 6, 26 Aristotle, 61

Asociación para las personas con Alteraciones Motores (ADEPAM), 214n2 assimilation, 36–37, 82, 84, 90, 98, 104 audience: ethical response of, 110–13, 118, 132–33, 135–39; freak show, 11, 18–19, 32–33, 34, 38, 42–43; TV talk show, 110, 116–19, 125, 127–30, 211n19 Auslander, Philip, 8, 109 authenticity, 108, 110–13, 118–32, 138–40, 144, 146–47, 157, 165, 168. See also deception; fraudulence; reality; truth avant-garde (vanguardia), 51–55, 71–73, 75–76, 207nn, 208n17 Azcárraga Milmo, Emilio, 211n19 Bailey, James, 211n13 Bakhtinian carnival, 20–21 Barnet, Miguel: Biografía de un cimarrón, 179, 190 Barnum, P. T., 24, 32, 38–44, 44, 46–47, 79–80, 118–19, 207n23, 211n13 Barthes, Roland, 95; Camera Lucida, 157–58, 162, 166; Empire of Signs, 166 Bataille, Georges: Histoire de L’oeil, 95 Bate, Jonathan, 112 bearded lady, 93–94, 118 beauty, “natural right” of, 36–37 Bellatín, Mario, 6, 155–67, 213n14, 214nn; Flores, 143, 152–56, 167; Jacobo el mutante, 143, 157; Perros héroes, 143, 157;

228

Index

Bellatín, Mario (continued ) Shiki Nagaoka, 11, 141–44, 142, 148–52, 155–58, 160–64, 167, 212–13nn Benjamin, Walter, 150 Bennett, William, 211n17 Berecochea, Ximena, 142 Beverley, John, 177–78, 182, 193 Bhabha, Homi, 69 Bible: gospel, 102–3; Leviticus, 86, 88, 96–97, 101, 209n12; Old Testament, 86–91, 93, 95–97, 99, 101, 209n11 birth, 88, 93–94. See also reproduction birth defects, 143, 152–56, 213n20 birthmark, 98–100, 102–4, 154, 168 Black, Barbara, 144, 147 Blume, Harvey, 118–19 body(ies): bound to group by mark of inscription, 105; collected, and geopolitics, 166–69; deliberate falsification and, 141–42; disability and metaphors of, 1–3; as figure of repetition and deferral, 115; identity and, 86–89, 99; industrialization and, 6, 36; limitations of text and metaphor and, 49–50; literary representation of, and testimonio, 174, 180–81; nexus between metaphorical and material, 26; as nondichotomous, 63; paradoxical tradition of, 94–95; “problem” of, as material object vs. performing, 5; social context of, 7–8; truth value of, 139–40; uncertain position of, in narrative, 80–81. See also corporeal difference; intercorporeality; and specific body parts and types body-mind opposition, 50, 63 body-text dynamic, 22–25, 96, 143, 173, 176–77, 185. See also textual performance Bogdan, Robert, 23–24, 41, 205n4

Bondeson, Jan: A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, 212n4 border identity, 65, 111 Borges, Jorge Luis, 157, 213n14; “El sur,” 1–2 bourgeoisie, 54, 62, 72, 183, 186 Bozzo, Laura, 123 Braithwaite, Kamau, 26 Brazil, 72, 213n20 Brimmer, Gabriela, 171–73, 175–98, 177, 188, 214–15nn; Cartas de Gaby, 173, 176, 183, 195; Gaby Brimmer, 12, 23, 173, 176, 178–98, 215nn; Gaby un año después, 173 Brown, Christy: My Left Foot, 196–97 Burgos-Debray, Elisabeth, 180 Butler, Judith, 8, 108, 112, 140, 205n7, 209n13 Caliban, 3–6, 9, 25–28, 206nn cámara clara or camera lucida, 157–62, 165, 168, 214n26 cannibalism, 5, 10, 25, 26–27, 65, 138, 201, 208n17; textual (phagocytosis), 70–74, 208n17; twins and, 71–72 capitalism, 8, 16, 26, 41–44 Carranza, Venustiano, 45–46 Caruth, Cathy: “Traumatic Awakenings,” 210n6 castration, 93, 95, 97–98, 99 Castro-Klarén, Sara, 26 Catholic Church, 54, 123 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 97 Cenda, Espiridiona (“Chiquita”), 7 cerebral palsy, 12, 214n2 Chávez, César, 113 Chávez Castañeda, Ricardo, 208n5 Chiapas, 178 Chicano identity, 111 children (offspring), 19–20, 92–93, 130; ambivalently subversive, 65–66 China, 162–63

Index

Christianity, 25, 102, 104 Christian right, U.S., 124 Circo La Rosa, 120–21 circumcision, 93, 95–98, 99 circus, 15, 80, 83, 87–87, 93–94, 119–20, 138, 211n13 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 81 collecting, 142–48, 150–51, 157, 160–69, 213n17 colonialism, 3–7, 25, 27, 68–69, 73, 110, 119, 133, 138–39, 143, 146, 152, 167, 174, 202, 208n17, 212–13n11 Columbia, 146–47, 212n9 Columbus (Cristóbal Colón), 25, 69, 133, 208n17 communicative system, 180, 184, 186–89, 197–98 Coney Island, 31–32, 33, 40, 51, 205–7nn; Martí and, 6, 13, 15–23, 26, 28–38, 119; Tablada and, 6, 13–16, 20–23, 26, 38–47; World Circus Side Show, 134 Coney Island Park (Cuban), Cruz Díaz and, 119–22, 210n10 Connection, The (TV documentary), 212n9 Connolly, Cyril, The Unquiet Grave, 159 constructivist paradigm, 173, 176 conversos, 84, 89–90, 209n10 Cook, James W., 24 corporeal difference: cannibalism and, 10; constructed normalcy through images of, 43–44; conventional meanings of, 3; East-West relationship and, 143, 148–53; ethnic, cultural, and gender differences vs., 2; ethnicity and, 10–11, 80–105, 189, 201; identity and, 81–82, 114; impairment and, 181; live performance of, vs. literary construction of identity, 14–17, 21–25;

229

mark of father and, 89, 93; materiality of language and, 17; metaphor, 23–25; minoritizing or universalizing, 20; as narrative impetus, 199–200; reading, two modalities of, 4; “real” vs. false representation, 141–69; “real” vs. surface simulation, 108; riddles and, 79–97. See also body; ethnographic spectacle; freak show; monsters and monstrosity; twins; specific body markings, parts, types, and literary forms and works corporeality, 14, 49–50, 63, 74–75, 173–82 “corporeal sacrifice,” 104–5 corpus delicti, vs. delecti, 4–5 Cortázar, Julio, 157, 213n14 Cortés, Hernán, 21, 206n13 counterculture, 118, 206n11 “The Couple in the Cage”: (performance piece), 18, 110–13, 117–18, 125, 132–40, 135, 141; (video), 111,117–18, 132, 137–40, 202 Crack, 208n5 Cristina (TV talk show), 122–24, 210–11n13 Crónica de indias, 5 crónicas, 17–19, 25, 27–28, 205n8; Martí and, 28–38; Tablada and, 40–47 Cruz Díaz, Rigoberto: Muy benas noches, señoras y señores, 119–21, 210n10 crypto-Jews, 83–86, 89–95, 98–99, 101, 104–5, 209n7 Cuba, 6, 14, 119–21, 190; Santiago Bay film and, 146–47, 212nn Cuban Americans, 124 Cuernavaca, bishop of, 122–24 Cuervo Echeverri, Clemencia, 215n2 cuidad letrada (“lettered city”), 193, 195

230

Index

cultural identity and difference, 1–2, 12–13, 15–17, 30, 37–38, 41, 117, 119, 124, 133 cybernetics, 110, 183–86 cyborg models of intercorporeality, 215n6 Dabove, Juan Pablo, 152, 205n2 Daniel, Lee A., 209n6 Davis, Lennard, 3, 8, 43, 81, 205n4; Bending Over, 81 death, 162; double, 74–76 deception: power of, 41–43, 46–47; -revelation opposition, 142; at root of spectacle, 29; TV talk show and, 116–19, 121, 125, 128–32. See also authenticity; fraudulence; reality; truth defilement-purity opposition, 96–99 de Man, Paul, 114 depoliticization, 182, 185–86 Derrida, Jacques, 72, 108 Descartes, René, 59, 62–63 dialectical materialism, 60, 63 Diamond, Elin, 115 Díaz, Porfirio, 45 dime museum, 15, 32, 41, 135, 144 disability (disabled or disfigured body): born female as, 56; conflated with ethnicities, races, and cultures, 80, 133, 136; cultural meaning of, 12, 22–23; definition of, 7–8, 49; as identity category, 3, 7–10, 20, 81–82, 201–3; impairment and, 8, 116, 201; industrialization and, 6; language as, 57–58; mainstream vs. radical notions of, 116; metaphors of, and effects beyond, 1–3; normalcy and, 43; “overcoming,” and stigmatization, 176, 195–96; performance and, 8–9, 23, 68, 109; scapegoat and, 102; social construction model of, 58, 109; terminology and, 205n1. See also

body; corporeal difference; and specific conditions disability performance pieces, 141–42 disability politics, 11–12, 21–22, 50, 173, 182–86, 203, 215n3 disability rights movement, 81, 179, 186 disability studies, 7–8, 17, 23, 47–48, 81, 173, 195–96, 201 “disabled person”: “real,” vs. actor, 109; as term, 210n2 “dismodernism,” 8, 81 documentaries, falsified, 146, 212n6 Donahue, Phil, 118 Donoso, José: El obsceno pajaro de la noche, 1–2, 199–200, 208n4, 215n1 doppelgänger, 50 double bodies, 10, 49–78, 80; textual redoubling of, 77–78; two-headedness, 3, 50, 186–91, 186–91, 194–95. See also twins double difference, 98, 101–2 Dovey, Jon, 146–47, 147, 212nn; Freakshow, 118 Duncan, Patricia, 208n2 Durán, Diego, 99 dwarfs or midgets, 29–30, 80–84, 86, 88–95, 99, 101, 104–5, 116, 125–32, 168, 208n2, 210n7 East Asia, 40, 143–45, 148, 157, 162–64, 166, 214nn East-West axis, 11, 143–48, 145, 151–52, 155, 162–67. See also Orientalism; West–non-West écart, 181, 187, 190, 197 “economic-cell form,” 61 economic reform, 54, 61 Ecuador, 3, 10, 49, 51, 53–55, 58, 61, 64–66, 68, 72–77; Alfareada revolution of 1895, 53–54; coup of 1925, 54 Eiffel Tower, 19 “electronic interdependence,” 184–85

Index

El Greco, 68 elite culture, 21, 38, 53–54, 62, 69, 73, 119 Elizondo, Salvador, 157, 165–66, 213n14; Camera Lucida, 157–60, 162, 168, 214n25; Farabeuf, 157, 159 Elkin, Judith Laikin, 99 El Salvador, 80 embodiment, 47, 173–75 “enfreakment,” 14, 24, 30, 205n3 “entre mí,” 59, 62, 208n13 Espinosa, Carlos Manuel: “Un hombre que murió dos veces,” 75–77 Estrada y Ayala, Aurora, 64 ethnicity or ethnic difference, 3, 10–11, 20, 43, 111, 133, 80–105, 180–81, 186–89 ethnographer, reverse, 117 ethnographic data, cannibal and, 26 ethnographic photograph, 104 ethnographic spectacles, 6, 11, 18–19, 40, 110, 117–19, 125, 133–40, 135, 201–2 Europe, 25, 62, 71–73; East-West dyad and, 11, 143, 163; Latin America as site of exotic and, 212–13n11, 214n32 exclusion, and desire for belonging, 93–94, 98, 100, 105 exiled intellectual, 2, 10, 21–22, 24–25, 28–31, 33, 38, 45 exotic, 143–44, 147–48, 164–65, 168–69, 212–13n11 exploitation, 4, 23–24, 29–30, 41, 112, 124, 133, 138 extermination, 98 eye(s): glass, 44–46; mutilation of, 86, 92–97, 99, 104–5 fact-fiction opposition, 144, 149–50, 157, 167–68. See also authenticity; deception; fraudulence; reality; truth false clues, 11, 143, 167

231

father (paternal power): attack on, 50–53, 55–57, 60–61, 63, 65, 68, 72–75, 96; death of, 67–69, 74, 76; incest and, 130–31; violence and mutilation by, 88–89, 92–93, 95–97 Felipe III, King of Spain, 163 female body, 52, 56–57, 73–74, 94, 116–17, 128–32 feminine-masculine opposition, 61, 63 feminism, 63–65, 173 Fem (journal), 173 Fernández, María del Carmen, 53–54, 207nn Fernández Retamar, Roberto: Calibán, 6, 26–27, 206n18 Ferris, Jim, 109 Ferry, Luc, 185, 185 Fiedler, Leslie, 206n11 film, 3, 109, 146–47 FitzGerald, Edward, 144 Flaubert, Gustave, 162 Fleming, Leonor, 207n4 Florencia (Brimmer’s maid), 186–90, 194, 197, 215n7 folktale anthology, 148 “force of rupture,” 108, 140 Foster, Michael, 213n913 Foucault, Michel, 72, 174 France, 144, 146, 163–66 Frank, Adam, 173 Fraser, Mat: “Sealboy: Freak,” 141–42, 212n3 fraudulence (falsification), 24, 29–30, 41–44, 46–47, 112–13, 118–25, 141–42, 146–47, 212nn. See also authenticity; deception; reality; truth freakishness, 7, 20, 42, 108, 110. See also “enfreakment” freak(s) or fenómenos: actors or performers vs., 108, 110, 120–21, 126–29; body of, and conformity, 36; corporeality of,

232

Index

freak(s) or fenómenos: (continued ) as otherness, 48; countercultural use of, as term, 118, 206n11; everyone made into, 113; exploitation of, and disability and racial or ethnic difference, 7; marginal status of, and exile, 30–31; term, 6; U.S. cultural history and Caliban and, 4 freak show, 3, 5–7, 9–11, 17, 24, 201; authenticity vs. fraud and, 10, 24, 41, 43, 112–13, 118–19, 146–47, 168, 212n3; Bellatín, 168; colonialism and, 146; Cruz Díaz and, 119–21; “enfreakment” and, 14; Martí and, 10, 13–15, 17–22, 24–25, 27–38, 47–51, 119; museum display and, 144; other cultures or races and, 33, 133, 147; performative art and, 110, 112, 117, 133, 137–39, 141; riddles and, 79–80; life of disabled performer, vs. representation and, 23–24; Tablada and, 10, 13–22, 24–25, 27–28, 41–48, 51, 201; Toscana and, 80, 105; TV talk show and, 118–19, 122, 210–11n13; U.S., sociohistorical scholarship on, 23; U.S.-Latin American relations and, 6–7 Freud, Sigmund, 50, 93, 114–15, 208n19 Frye, Lezlie, “Crip Cop,” 109 Fusco, Coco, 11, 18, 110–11, 141; Corpus delecti, 4–5; “The Couple in the Cage,” 11, 18, 110–12, 117–19, 132–40, 135, 202; English is Broken Here, 80, 211n21 Gaby, A True Story (film), 12, 173, 176, 183–89, 188, 194, 215nn. See also Brimmer, Gaby Gallegos Lara, Joaquín: Los que se van, 76

Gamson, Joshua: Freaks Talk Back, 118, 126, 211n17 García Márquez, Gabriel, 3, 208n4 Garland Thomson, Rosemarie, 36, 80–81, 96, 205n3, 206n10 Gatens, Moira, 104 gender, 8, 20, 43, 81, 111, 205n7 genderless matter, 52 Generación del Crack, 83, 208n5 “genetic determinism,” 207n4 geopolitics, 3, 6, 11, 141–43, 155–56, 166–69, 178 Gerchunoff, Alberto: The Jewish Gauchos, 85 Germany, 98, 153–55 Gil Gilbert, Enrique: Los que se van, 76 Gill, Carol, 82 Gilman, Sander, 98, 156 Girard, René, 50, 69, 101–5; The Scapegoat, 102 globalization, 8, 108, 144, 156 Gómez Acosta, Carlos Andrés, 215n2 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 11, 107–14, 121, 141, 168; “The Couple in the Cage,” 11, 18, 110–12, 117–19, 132–40, 135; EthnoTechno, 107, 109, 113; “Temple of Confessions,” 111 Goncourt, Edmonde de, 164 González, Aníbal, 16–17, 24, 205n8 González de Mendoza, José María, 164 González-Echevarría, Roberto, 151, 213n16, 214n34 González Flores, Laura, 213–14n23 Goux, Jean-Joseph, 50, 52, 61, 63, 74, 208n22 Great Britain, 6, 110, 144, 146 Grosz, Elizabeth, 52, 63, 202, 208n22 Guardian, 212 Guatemala, 178, 179 “Guatinaui language,” 133 guilt, 55–56, 74 Gunning, Tom, 146 Gutiérrez de Velasco, Luz Elena, 162

Index

233

Handelsmann, Michael, 64–65 Hansen, Mark, 172–76, 202 Haraway, Donna, 215n6 Hawking, Stephen, 187 Hayashiya, Eikichi, 163 Hayles, N. Katherine, 184 Hélice (magazine), 207 Heller, Ben, 205n2 Heredia, Paula, 132, 138, 202 hermaphrodite, 64 Herrasti, Vicente, 208n5 Heth, Joyce, 39 “high” vs. “low” or mass culture, 32, 111, 125, 127–28. See also mass culture Hiroshigue, 164 Hiroshima, 155–56 Holocaust, 180 homogeneity, 32, 65 homosexuality, 64–65 Huerta, Victoriano, 45 Huet, Marie Hélène, 207n10

137–39, 161, 180, 209n14, 215n8; West–non-West divide and, 150–52 industrialization, 5–6, 32, 36 Inquisition, 84 intercorporeality, 3, 5, 9, 12, 175–76, 181–83, 186, 196–98, 202, 215nn Internet, 111 Iraq War, 147 Israel, 103

idealist philosophy, 53, 60–61 identity and identity categories, 3, 7–10, 20–22, 26–27, 81–82, 87–89, 103, 108, 201–3; corporeal difference and, 81–82; disability and impairment as, 109; literary construction of, 14–17; real vs. simulated, 109; social imperative to perform, 135–36. See also corporeal difference; cultural identity; ethnicity; racial difference; and other specific categories and traits identity politics, 3, 8, 65 Ieyasu, Shogun Tokugawa, 163 immigration, 32, 36–37 impairment, disability vs., 7–8, 116 imperialism, 6, 35, 146, 202, 209n8 impurity, 96–99 incest, 129–31, 154 indigenous people, 26, 82, 85–86, 99–100, 103–4, 110, 135,

Kahlo, Frida: Las dos Fridas, 215n8 Kaliman, Ricardo, 26 Kasson, John F., 32, 40 Kenzo, Ozu: An Autumn Afternoon, 160, 214n27 Khayyám, Omar: Rubáiyáit, 144 Klor de Alva, J. Jorge, 152 Kristeva, Julia, 97, 209nn Kuppers, Petra, 8, 109, 205n1, 210n2 Kushigian, Julia, 212n5

Jackson, Janet, 210n12 Japan, 3, 11, 44–45, 148–52, 146, 155–56, 158, 160, 162–68; japonisme and, 164, 166; japonistas and, 14, 152, 162–65 Jáuregui, Carlos, 5, 152, 205n2, 208n17 Jewish ethnicity, 82–86, 89–105,143, 189, 209nn, 215n8 Joyce, James, 162

Lacan, Jacques, 174, 178 language: body and, 9; confines of, and double, 57–59, 62; as material object, vs. literary, 16–19, 24–25 Latin American identity. See Spanish American cultural identity; and specific countries Latin American-Jewish literature, 85 Latin American literary Boom, 82–83 Latinos/as, 42, 124

234

Index

left, 75, 118 Leibman, Seymour B., 84 Lenz, Widukind, 213n21 Life Magazine, 155 Lind, Jenny, 39 Linton, Simi, 81–82 Loaeza, Guadalupe, 124 Lyotard, Jean-François, 174 Machiguengas people, 82, 85–86, 99–100, 103–4, 209n14 machines, 34–36, 187 Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (1943–1954), 184 mainstream bizarre, 107, 109, 111–14, 121, 139–40, 168 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 214n24 Mandoki, Luis, 12, 173. See also Gaby, a true story Manga, Julie Engel, 211n19 Manzoni, Celina, 207n12 marginalization, 9, 26, 108, 178–79, 181 marranos, 85, 90–91, 209nn Martí, José, 10, 16, 206nn; “Brooklyn Bridge,” 19, 35–36; “Coney Island,” 2, 6, 13–38, 41, 47–50, 119–21, 206n9; Crónicas, 13; “La edad de oro,” 19–20; “North American Scenes,” 26; “Un rostro rehecho,” 36–37 Marx, Karl, 50, 61 masculine: abstract, vs. feminine corporeal, 63; authority figures, 55–56. See also father mass culture, 26, 28–29, 31–32, 46, 114 mass media, 110, 146, 184 mass or crowd, 31–35, 37 materialism, 16–17, 26, 60–61, 63 materiality, 16–17, 24–26, 29, 32–33 “maternal impressions,” 55, 207n10 Maya-Quiché people, 180 McLuhan, Marshall, 184–85 medicine, 55, 154, 156

Meiji art, 149–50 Menchú, Rigoberta, 113; My Name Is Rigoberta Menchú, 175, 177–82, 186, 197 mental illness, 51–52, 75–77, 78 Mercado, Manuel, 206n15 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 172, 175–76, 181, 187 mestizo/a, 65, 150–52, 189, 215n8 Mexican identity, stereotyped, 111 Mexico, 3, 14, 21, 41, 45–46, 51, 80, 82–84, 87, 93, 97, 105, 111, 122–24, 148, 150, 161, 163, 165, 168, 173, 177, 179, 182–83, 208n5; conquest of, 21, 206n13; Revolution, 14, 45–46, 195; student protests of 1968, 182–85 Middle East, 144, 146 Miller, J. Hillis, 114 mimetic representation, 176, 202 mimicry, 69–70 mirror, funhouse, 41–48, 201 Mitchell, David, 2, 23, 24, 64, 79, 128, 174, 205n3 Mitchell, Timothy, 144–47, 212n10 “mixed reality” approach, 172–75, 187, 202 modernism. See Spanish American modernista movement Monsiváis, Carlos, 122–25, 182, 184, 210–11n13, 215n4; Días de Guardar, 184 monster and monstrosity, 2, 4–5, 16–17, 22, 24–28, 33–38, 47, 50, 52–53, 55–56, 88, 96, 100, 201, 206nn; derivation of word, 81; scapegoat and, 102 Montaigne, Michel de, 208n17 Montejo, Esteban, 190 Montezuma, 14, 20–21 morality, 118–25, 210n12, 211nn Moreiras, Alberto, 174 Moses, 86, 91, 208n19 mother, 65, 93–94

Index

museums, 133, 144–48, 145, 168–69, 212n4 mutilation or wounding, 91–93, 95–97 Narrativa del norte, 83 nationalism, 65, 97, 146 Nazis, 98 neocolonial power dynamic, 190 Netanyahu, Benzion, 84–85 New Spain, 163 Nielsen Media Research, 211n19 non-Western people, 138–39, 142 normality-freakishness opposition, 42–44, 46 nose, 6, 141–44, 142, 148–49, 156, 158, 167, 168 novela de la tierra, 54 Oedipus, 79, 102 Oliver, Michael, 7–8 oppositional performativity, 112–14 Orientalism, 142–48, 162–66, 212n5, 214n32 Orlando Rodríguez, Antonio: Chiquita, 7 Other and Otherness, 2–5, 16, 21, 26–27, 37–38, 43, 46–48, 50, 80, 96–98, 104, 161, 168, 174–75, 194, 213n18; cannibalism and, 72–73; doubling and, 53, 58, 61–63; mainstream bizarre and, 113; Orientalism and, 143; “West” and, 152 outsiders, 85, 100 Padilla, Ignacio, 208n5 Paine, Albert Bigelow, 206n21 Palacio, Pablo, 3, 10, 49–80, 207– 8nn; “El antropófago,” 71–72, 208n17; “La doble y única mujer,” 10, 49–69, 79–80, 190, 201, 207nn; “La doble y única mujer,” resuscitated by Velasco, 52, 65–75, 77–78; “Sentido

235

de la palabra Realidad,” 60; “two deaths” of, 75–77; Vida del ahorcado, 76 Palaversich, Diana, 213n14 Palencia-Roth, Michael, 5, 25, 206n14 Paris: Japanese art and, 44–45, 164–65; student movement of 1968, 185 Parker, Andrew, 114 parnassian poets, 164 Partido Acción Nacional (PAN, Mexico), 122 pathology, 52–53, 55–57, 98 patriarchal thought, 63. See also father “people-first language,” 210n2 performance: of authorial identity, 22–25; of corporeality, and Caliban, 28; disability and, 8–10, 109; identity vs., 121; “reality” vs., 70, 110–13; repetition and, 19–20, 22, 205n7; riddle of body and, 80; as spectacle, vs. language, 41; stage vs. world and, 114. See also ethnographic spectacle; freak show; television talk show; textual performance performance art, 4, 5, 11, 107, 109–12, 117–18, 125, 132–41 “performative revenge,” 11, 108, 110, 112, 114–18, 125–40, 211n20 performativity, 8, 108–9, 115; counterhegemonic, 108–9, 113; mainstream bizarre and, 107–14 Perry, Comm. Mathew, 149 Peru, 3, 82, 100, 103–4, 161 Philippines, 163 philosophy, 59–60, 62–64, 74 photographs, 3, 10–11, 141–44, 142, 146, 148–50, 155–62, 165–66, 196–97, 213–14nn pig (pork, bacon), 90–93, 95, 99, 209n10 “Pip and Flip,” 133, 134 plastic surgery, 36, 155–56

236

Index

Plato, 60–61 Pocha nostra, La troupe, 109 politics. See disability politics; geopolitics; resistance Poniatowska, Elena: Gaby Brimmer, 12, 173, 182, 190–97, 215nn; Hasta no verte, Jesús mío, 183, 195, 215n11; La noche de Tlatelolco, 182–83, 195; Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela, 182–83, 186 postmodernism, 46, 81, 150, 165, 168, 213n14; “hegemonic,” 174–75 poststructuralism, 166, 174 Pratt, Mary Louise, 213n11 pregnant woman, 55, 71, 143, 152–53 Premio Casa de las Américas, 119 Priest, Patricia Joyner, 118 prosthesis (prosthetic), 12, 23, 36, 128, 161, 171, 177, 185, 187, 196 punctum notion, 158 quantity vs. quality, 16, 31–34 Quayson, Ato, 2, 8, 200, 211n20 Quevedo, Francisco de: El Buscón, 92, 209n10 Quiroga, Horacio: “La gallina degollada,” 52–53, 207n4 racial difference or identity, 5, 7, 20, 30, 43, 80–81, 111, 117, 133, 136, 152, 190. See also ethnicity racialization, 7, 10, 181–82, 202 racism, 18, 24–25, 80, 84–85, 105, 107, 111, 117, 138 Rama, Ángel, 193 Ramos, Julio, 15, 29, 32, 206n9, 210n8 Real, the, 116, 178, 210n6 realismo social, 54 reality, performance vs., 110, 113, 115–17, 147, 149–50. See also

authenticity; deception; fraudulence; performance; truth Renard, Jules, 45 Renaut, Alain, 185 repertoire, 111–12, 132–33 “repetition,” 2, 18, 20, 22, 70, 112, 115, 129, 205n7 reproduction, 52–53, 55–57 resistance, 4, 12, 14–15, 27, 70, 75, 108–11, 118, 178–83, 185–86, 193, 195 reversibility, 181, 186, 197 Revolledo Cárdenas, Julio, 211n13 Ribadeneira, Edmundo, 54 riddle of body, 11, 79–82, 85–86, 96, 99, 103–5, 142, 172; mainstream bizarre and, 107–8 Ripley, Robert, 211n13 “Ripley’s Believe It of Not,” 119 Rodó, José Enrique, 6, 206n15; Ariel, 6, 26 Rotker, Susana, 16–17, 205n8 Ruffinelli, Jorge, 207n9 Rulfo, Juan, 150, 160–61, 213n16, 214n27, 214n28 Russek, Dan, 214n25 Said, Edward, 144–45, 147, 212n5 Samuelson, Cheyla, 212n2 Sandahl, Carrie, 8, 109 Sandow, Eugen, 80 Santa Anna, President, 94 Saralegui, Cristina, 122–24 scapegoat, 101–5 Scarry, Elaine, 93, 209n11 Schaefer, Claudia, 180, 182–83, 185–86, 214n3, 215nn Schiwy, Freya, 213n11 Schwartz, Hillel: The Culture of the Copy, 71, 73, 208n18 Schwarz, Roberto, 72 science, 81, 118, 134–35 Scliar, Moacyr, 84 Sealo the Seal boy, 142 Sedgwick, Eve, 114

Index

self, definition of, 81 self-consuming body, 73 self-loathing, 97 self-other dyad, 38, 50–51, 57–58, 61 September 11, 2001, 113, 210n4 Shakespeare, William, 25 shame, 65, 88–89 Shell, Marc, 53, 207n2 Siebers, Tobin, 174 Sklodowska, Elzbieta, 174, 178, 205n2 Snow, Elvira and Genelee, 134 Snyder, Sharon, 2, 23–24, 64, 79, 128, 174, 205n3 Sobchack, Vivian, 202 socialism, 54, 75 socialist realism, 76 socioeconomic class, 20, 43, 180, 186–87, 189–90, 211n19 Sommer, Doris, 104, 209n14 Sophocles: Oedipus the King, 79, 102 Sosnowski, Saúl, 85 Spain, 3, 6, 10, 25, 67–70, 72, 74–78, 110, 163; Civil War, 67, 75–76, 78; Jewish expulsion from, 84, 89–90 Spanish American cultural identity, 10, 21–25, 27, 30–35, 38, 42–43, 47, 65, 67–70 Spanish American modernista movement, 16–19, 22, 24–25, 54, 145, 163–65, 214n31 Spanish-American War, 146–47, 212nn spectatorship, 21–22. See also audience Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 206n17 Stavans, Ilán, 85, 209 stereotypes, 80, 112 Stewart, Susan, 151, 213n17 Stiker, Henri-Jacques, A History of Disability, 36–37 Stone, Allucquère Rosanne, 187 student movement of 1968, 182–86, 195

237

syphilis, 51, 56, 65, 75, 78 Tablada, José Juan, 6, 10, 163, 168; Crónicas on Coney Island freak show, 13–28, 38–46, 47–50, 201; Los días y las noches de París, 44; Hiroshigué, 164; Japan and, 44–45, 163–66 Tanabe, Atsuko, 164 Taylor, Diana, 111–12, 117; The Archive and the Repertoire, 132, 136–37 technology, 35–36, 185 Televisa, 211 television: falsified documentary, 146–47; talk shows, 3, 11, 109–12, 116–32, 139–40, 210–11nn temporality, 18–22, 70, 74, 83, 158 tengu (folklore creature), 149 teratology, 25, 58, 206n14 testimonio, 3, 12, 23, 171–98, 202; Brimmer and, 173, 175–98; Cruz Díaz and, 119–21; debate over, 177–79, 190–91, 193; Menchú and, 179–82, 186; Poniatowska and, 12, 173, 181–83, 186, 190–97, 215nn; two-headed structure of, 188–90, 194–95 Texas, 84 textual performance, 2, 16–17, 19–25, 27–28, 38, 42, 47–50, 111–12, 130, 139–40, 143, 185 textual phagocytosis or cannibalism, 70–74 thalidomide, 152–54, 156, 167, 213n2n “tidalectics,” 26 Tinajero, Araceli, 145, 148, 212n5, 214n32 Tlatelolco massacre, 183 toe, 171–73, 176–77, 177, 188, 193–94, 196–97 Tom Thumb, General, 39, 80

238

Index

Torres-Dávila, Soledad, 215n2 Torres-Saillant, Silvio, 26 Toscana, David: Duelo por Miguel Pruneda, 83; El ejército iluminado, 83, 84, 209n8; Estación Tula, 83; Santa Maria del Circo, 11, 80, 82–99, 101, 104–5, 107, 208n2, 209n6; El último lector, 83 Tournier, Michel: Gemini, 71, 73 train, as monster, 34–35, 37–38 transatlantic imitative model, 72–74 Triana, Rodrigo de, 69 trompe l’oeil paintings, 146 truth, 11, 129–30, 138–40, 150, 165–68, 173–74, 176–81, 202, 212n5; “function,” 177–79; “regime of,” 146–47; “value” or “effects,” 147, 150, 180–81. See also authenticity; deception; fraudulence; reality twins: conjoined or Siamese, 10, 49–61, 65–66, 68, 70–73, 207nn; microencephalic, 80, 133, 134; “myth of vanishing,” 71; thalidomide and, 154 Ubidia, Abdón, 65 Ugarte Landívar, Zoila, 64 United States, 10, 110; Civil War, 24; East-West axis and, 143, 149; mass culture of, 2–3, 5–7, 15–17, 21–22, 28–29, 31–34, 33, 37, 39–40, 119, 121, 124; Mexico and, 80, 108, 111, 209n9; middle class audience in, 180; monstrosity and, 6, 25–26, 32, 34–35, 47. See also Coney Island unity-duality opposition, 58–59, 62, 69–70 universalizing-minoritizing opposition, 20–22 Univisión, 122 “unwriting,” 168, 214n34 Urroz, Eloy, 208n5

“us” and “them” opposition (“we” and “they”), 15–16, 21, 26, 37–38, 47, 113, 120–21, 124 Utamaru, 44–45 Valéry, Paul, 162 vanguardia. See avant-garde Vargas Llosa, Mario: El hablador, 10–11, 82–83, 85–86, 98–105, 107, 168, 209nn Velasco Mackenzie, Jorge: “El caballero de la mano en el pecho,” 10, 50–51, 65–79 violence, 4–5, 25, 36, 107, 112–13, 117, 147, 178; doubling and, 72–76; father and, 55–56, 89–90, 92–93, 95–97, 131; global technology of, 154–56; scapegoat and mimetic, 102–4 Vivero, Rodgrigo de, 163 voice substitution, 187, 189–94 Volpi, Jorge, 208n5 voyeurism, 11, 111, 128–30, 172 war, 8, 110 Washington, George, 39 Weiss, Gail, 187, 202 West: logic of identity and, 26; nonWest relationship with, 142, 144–45, 148–52, 154–55, 163, 167–68; shattered reality of, 113. See also Orientalism; and specific countries What Is It? exhibit, 24, 79–80, 135 Whitney Museum, 133 Wiener, Norbert, 171–72, 183–84, 186 “Wild West shows,” 138 “will of truth,” 174 Wills, David, 22 “will to distance,” 29 Winfrey, Oprah, 122, 210n13 Wollaston, William Hyde, 214n26 women, 56, 61, 64–65, 70, 74. See also female body; mother; pregnant woman

Index

workers’ movement, 54 World Fairs and Exhibitions, 144, 147; Chicago, of 1933, 119; Paris, of 1889, 19–20; Paris, of 1900, 146; Saint Louis, 145 World War II, 155–56, 184 Yehya, Naief, 11, 107–12, 114; “La gente de látex,” 11, 107, 110,

239

116–18, 125–32, 137, 139–40, 168; “Vida de casado,” 116 Yúdice, George, 108, 112, 135–37, 174–75 Zapatistas, 45 Zarate, Lucía, 80 Zedillo, Ernesto, 179 Zen, 166 Žižek, Slavoj, 113, 174, 210n4