Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel

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LOVE AND POLITICS IN THE CONTEMPORARY SPANISH AMERICAN NOVEL

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK


BY ANÍBAL GONZÁLEZ

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS, AUSTIN

COPYRIGHT © 2010 by the UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2010 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper).

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA González, Aníbal. Love and politics in the contemporary Spanish American novel / Aníbal González. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-292-72131-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Spanish American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Sentimentalism in literature. 3. Politics and literature. I. Title. pq7082.n7g666 2010 863'.64093543—dc22 2009028217

CONTENTS

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION

vii From Testimonial Narrative to the New Sentimental Novel: Barnet and Poniatowska 1

ONE

Patriotic Passion: Isabel Allende’s Of Love and Shadows 40

TWO

Love or Friendship? Tarzan’s Tonsillitis by Alfredo Bryce Echenique 62

THREE

FOUR

Journey Back to the Source of Love: García Márquez’s Of Love and Other Demons 80 Recipes for Romance: Laura Esquivel, Luis Sepúlveda, and Marcela Serrano 102

FIVE

APPENDIX

The Importance of Being Sentimental: Antonio Skármeta’s Love-Fifteen and Luis Rafael Sánchez’s La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos 126 Some Spanish American Novels with Amorous or Sentimental Themes (1969–2003) 147

NOTES

149

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED

163

INDEX

173

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In his celebrated essay “Our America” (1891), after analyzing the social and political confl icts that bedeviled the Spanish American nations after their independence, José Martí offered a hopeful vision of the continent’s situation: “They tried hatred, and every year the countries were worse off. Tired of the useless hatred of book against lance, of reason against the votive candle, of city against country, of the impossible hegemony of the divided urban castes against the tempestuous but inert natural nation, they are beginning to try—almost without knowing it—love” (Letras fi eras 165). Here, as in other moments in his life and work, the Cuban patriot and modernista poet, who also called for a “war without hatred” against Spanish colonialism, tried to bring together two terms that many would regard as incompatible: politics and love. The twentieth century in Spanish America, which Martí did not live to see, postponed indefi nitely that nascent project. In the midst of the many revolutions, coups d’état, uprisings, wars of liberation, and dirty wars suffered by the continent in the past century, both political rhetoric and literary expression were often dominated by the lexicon and the images of violence, death, and destruction. However, the last thirty years have seen the development of a new current of narrative fiction in Spanish America that opposes these tendencies and, without forsaking the traditional social concerns of Spanish American literature, seeks to reaffi rm the value of individual subjectivity, of the affective life of individuals, and, more concretely, of love. With the end of the Cold War and the loss of interest

viii

Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel

in the revolutionary option, a broad segment of today’s Spanish American narrative has begun to pay increased attention to topics such as romantic love and sentimentalism which, for reasons that will be examined in this book, had been subordinated or left aside in the Spanish American narrative of prior years. The roster of the main exponents of this new sentimental modality includes authors from more recent generations as well as the major figures of the Boom period: Isabel Allende, Miguel Barnet, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Laura Esquivel, Rosario Ferré, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Angeles Mastretta, Elena Poniatowska, Manuel Puig, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Marcela Serrano, Antonio Skármeta, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among many others. Thanks to this new sentimental novel, a new repertoire of characters and situations has entered the Spanish American literary memory: the erotico-political musings of Rachel, a Cuban vaudeville dancer and singer of the 1920s; the unanswered letters in which Quiela, a Russian painter, reproaches her ex-husband, Diego Rivera, for abandoning her; the misadventures of Marito, a young Peruvian writer in love with his aunt; the passionate wanderings of Martín Romaña in Paris during the student uprisings of May 1968; the drawn-out love of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza under the yellow flag of a cholera epidemic; the kitchen recipes that become love potions in the hands of the Mexican Tita de la Garza; the amatory legend forged by a Puerto Rican bolero singer, Daniel Santos, throughout the length and breadth of Spanish America . . . Undoubtedly, the best works of the new sentimental narrative are much more than frivolous attempts to commercially exploit a subject—love— that always “sells.” Despite their superficially apolitical appearance, these novels are a clear ethical response to the ideological dogma, the social confl icts, and the political violence that marred Spanish American culture though the decades of the 1960s to the 1980s. It is also important to view them as fictional experiments that explore, through the topic of love, the power of literature to fascinate readers and to create a sense of communion and community among writers, readers, and texts. Recalling the old dichotomy of passionate love versus the love of one’s fellows, it can be said that a great many of the new sentimental novels attempt to instill in their readers the latter kind of love, a neighborly love based on a respect for “the Other.” Once again in these fictions, as in Martí’s visionary words, the Spanish American writers, “tired of useless hatred, are beginning to try love.”

Preface and Acknowledgments

ix

In the pages that follow, I will also be addressing the following questions: How does this new modality originate? What are some of its fundamental texts and authors? How is it related to its antecedents in the Boom, to the testimonial narrative, and to the tradition of literary sentimentalism in general? Since this is a recent and still ongoing phenomenon, my answers to these questions will necessarily be tentative. I hope, nevertheless, that they may serve as a useful point of departure for the discussion and analysis of this new trend in Spanish American narrative fiction. I wish to indicate from the outset that the abundance of works that can be studied from this perspective, as well as the desire to delve more deeply into the question of literary sentimentalism, has forced me to be selective in my analyses. I have centered my study on a group of ten authors whose works I consider of special relevance and interest: Barnet, Poniatowska, Allende, Bryce, García Márquez, Esquivel, Sepúlveda, Serrano, Skármeta, and Sánchez. I am acutely aware of the many other important authors I have left undiscussed, whose names and works I have listed in an appendix to this book. It is my hope that this book will be just the fi rst of many others to study this new literature of feelings that has become so influential in the Spanish American narrative of recent decades. A book about literature and feelings should fi rst and foremost express a feeling of gratitude to all who have aided its author in his task. I gratefully recognize the support of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which made it possible to begin writing this book. Heartfelt thanks must also go to the friends and colleagues whose advice and encouragement helped me to carry this project to its completion: Arturo Echavarría Ferrari and Luce López-Baralt, Stuart Schwartz and María Jordán, Carlos J. Alonso, Jason Cortés, Mercedes López-Baralt, the late John W. Kronik, Sylvia Molloy, Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, César A. Salgado, and Luis Rafael Sánchez. I owe the idea of writing this book to my friendship with one of the leading authors of the new sentimental novel, Alfredo Bryce Echenique. And speaking of even deeper affection, this book would not have been written were it not for my wife, Priscilla Meléndez, and our son, Andrés Emil, whose enveloping love, courage, and good cheer in the face of adversity give my life sustenance and meaning. Author’s note: All translations in this book are mine save where otherwise indicated.




From Testimonial Narrative to the New Sentimental Novel I N T R O D U C T I O N Barnet and Poniatowska

1 In the fi rst pages of Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón (Biography of a Runaway Slave, 1966), Esteban Montejo, the protagonist, narrator, and co-author, recalls how he never met his parents because he had been separated from them after his birth, and when he had the chance he was already a runaway and would not risk his precarious freedom in the mountains to go see them. “Because I was a runaway, I never knew my parents. I never even saw them,” he states, and adds immediately: “But that’s not sad because it’s the truth” (15). Similar thoughts are voiced less concisely by the female protagonists of two of the most influential Latin American testimonial narratives of the late twentieth century: the feisty Jesusa Palancares in Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte, Jesús mío (Here’s to You, Jesusa, 1969) and the long-suffering Rigoberta Menchú, co-author with Elizabeth Burgos of Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (I, Rigoberta Menchú, 1985). Jesusa, with her prickly personality, keeps her readers at arm’s length: “Now stop fucking. Go away. Let me sleep” (316). Rigoberta, for her part, transforms her personal suffering into a reason for joining the revolutionary struggle: Well, there I was between these two things—choosing him or my people’s struggle. And that’s what I chose, and I left my compañero with much sadness and a heavy heart. But I told myself that I had a lot to do for my people and I didn’t need a pretty house while they

2


lived in horrific conditions like those I was born and grew up in. . . . My life does not belong to me. I’ve decided to offer it to a cause. . . . So the only road open to me is our struggle, the just war. The Bible taught me that. (226, 246) Forged in the midst of the Latin American political and social controversies of the sixties and seventies as a supposed vindication of individual and subjective experience, testimonial narratives had neither time nor inclination to lament personal sorrows nor to concern themselves with love.1 In this, however, the testimonial genre differed little from the narrative mode it implicitly criticized and for which it aspired to substitute, the Boom narratives of the 1960s. The Boom novels, with their formal and linguistic experiments, their intellectualism, and their impersonal tendencies, could seemingly not be farther from the testimonial narrative’s emphasis on simplicity, populism, and individual experience. However, both modes shared one key trait: a strong rejection of sentimental or amorous themes. The Boom clearly sidelined the exploration and portrayal of human feelings in favor of a vast novelistic project some critics have characterized as the creation of a totalizing metaphor of Spanish America. 2 Written with an ironic perspective derived from Borges and with a broad scope that aimed to encompass—however symbolically, as in Borges’s “The Aleph”—the variegated totality of Spanish American life, novels such as Carlos Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1962), Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963), Mario Vargas Lllosa’s La ciudad y los perros (The Time of the Hero, 1963), Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967), and Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres (Three Trapped Tigers, 1967), among many others, nevertheless consigned sentimentalism to “the outskirts of literature” (to borrow a phrase from Borges himself). 3 Sentimentalism seemingly had no place in novels whose primary aims were to transplant the traits of avant-garde narrative into the Spanish American milieu and to confront the enigmas and perplexities of the continent’s cultural identity. The burning regrets of Artemio Cruz, the nostalgias and neuroses of Horacio Oliveira, the melancholy death of Rocamadour, the insecurities and confl icts of the cadets in the Leoncio Prado Academy, the solitude of the Buendías, and the amorous mishaps of the Havana “tigers” are sentimental elements that appear in these novels subordinated to greater sociocultural and aesthetic concerns, as well as to an obvious machismo, such as that unconsciously displayed by Julio Cortázar

Barnet and Poniatowska

3

in his notorious distinction (which he would later disavow) between “macho readers” and “female readers” (Rayuela, 452–454). However, there soon arose in the late sixties and throughout the seventies a new group of younger writers who have come to be known as the “Post-Boom.” The difference between the two groups is not exclusively chronological; it is also evidenced in their interests, themes, and techniques. This group includes writers as diverse as the late Reynaldo Arenas, Manuel Puig, and Severo Sarduy, as well as Isabel Allende, Miguel Barnet, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Elena Poniatowska, Luis Rafael Sánchez, and Antonio Skármeta, among others. All of these authors have tended to reject the massive narratives of the “total novel” and have instead engaged in a critique of the ideological principles of that modality from various perspectives, ranging from the extreme avant-garde (in the works of Arenas, Sarduy, and more recently, Diamela Eltit) to that of more conventional narrative forms such as the testimonial novel, the new historical novel, detective fiction, and what I would call the new sentimental novel. Amongst this somewhat confusing variety of narrative approaches, the two most influential and long-lasting, in my view, have been the testimonial and the sentimental narratives. Testimonial narrative predominated from the late sixties through the early eighties, driven by the revolutionary fervor and the political struggles taking place in Spanish America, including events such as the right-wing coup against Salvador Allende in Chile, Argentina’s “dirty war,” the civil war in El Salvador, and the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Nevertheless, today the testimonial genre has entered a decline. As George M. Gugelberger points out, testimonial narrative “clearly seems to have lost the energy to significantly alter institutional discourses. The critical discourse focused on testimonio is moving on to other topics. The icon has been unmasked as another fetish” (17). In my view, the critical “unmasking” of testimonio is a result (and not the cause) of the gradual loss of importance suffered by the testimonial genre by the end of the 1980s. By then, testimonial narrative began to be displaced by a wide range of sentimental and amorous narratives whose popularity grew as Spanish America was undergoing processes of political “redemocratization” and economic “globalization” encouraged by the neoliberal policies then in vogue. With the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the loss of interest in the revolutionary option, there arose in Spanish America a concern with healing and rebuilding of not only confl ict-ravaged political and economic systems but also entire communities as well as individual souls.

4


Following the lead of precursor texts such as Canción de Rachel (Rachel’s Song, 1969) by Miguel Barnet, the list of new sentimental narratives grew longer toward the last two decades of the twentieth century, encompassing novels such as El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1976) by Manuel Puig, Querido Diego, te abraza Quiela (Dear Diego, 1978) by Elena Poniatowska, Tantas veces Pedro (So Many Times Pedro, 1978) and La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña (The Exaggerated Life of Martín Romaña, 1985) by Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Las batallas en el desierto (Battles in the Desert, 1981) by José Emilio Pacheco, De amor y de sombra (Of Love and Shadows, 1984) by Isabel Allende, Maldito amor (Sweet Diamond Dust, 1986) by Rosario Ferré, Arráncame la vida (Mexican Bolero, 1988) by Angeles Mastretta, La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos (The Importance of Being Named Daniel Santos, 1988) by Luis Rafael Sánchez, Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate, 1989) by Laura Esquivel, Love-Fifteen (1989) by Antonio Skármeta, Amor propio (Self-Love, 1991) by Gonzalo Celorio, and Nosotras que nos queremos tanto (We Who Love Each Other So Much, 1997) by Marcela Serrano, among many others. In turn, the strong attraction of this new narrative mode soon made itself felt in works by several of the Boom’s “masters,” such as Mario Vargas Llosa’s La tía Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1977), the late Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s La Habana para un infante difunto (Infante’s Inferno, 1979), Carlos Fuentes’s Diana, o la cazadora solitaria (Diana, the Goddess Who Hunts Alone, 1994), and the so-called “amorous triptych” of novels by Gabriel García Márquez: Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1981), El amor en los tiempos del cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera, 1985), and Del amor y otros demonios (Of Love and Other Demons, 1994). It should be pointed out immediately that this “return to love” is not an exclusively Spanish American phenomenon. A similar tendency has occurred in other Western countries. For instance, in France during the 1970s and 1980s a wide variety of writers and theorists published works that proclaimed and often exemplified a return to the sentimental language of lovers: A Lover’s Discourse (1977) by Roland Barthes, The Post Card (1980) by Jacques Derrida, Elemental Passions (1982) by Luce Irigaray, Tales of Love (1983) by Julia Kristeva, and The Wisdom of Love (1984) by Alain Finkielraut, among others. The newly democratic Spain of the post-Franco years also experienced an increase in narrative works that exalted subjectivity and sentimental-


5

ism above the simplifications of political ideologies. In his essay “Narrativa española y posmodernidad,” José María Pozuelo Yvancos remarks on the “predominance of privacy” in postmodern Peninsular narrative, while María Mar Langa Pizarro notes in another study “the reappearance of an amorous thematics in a Neo-Romantic style” in the works of authors such as Jesús Ferrero, Eduardo Mendoza, Inma Monsó, and Javier García Sánchez (87). To Langa Pizarro’s list one should add two other important names: Javier Marías, with works such as The Man of Feeling (1986), Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me (1995), and his 1979 translation into Spanish of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy; and Rosa Montero, with Crónica del desamor (Chronicle of Love Lost, 1979), Amado amo (Beloved Master, 1988), and Pasiones (Passions, 1999). In the United States, critic Wendy Steiner has observed “a shift in taste toward a kind of fiction that was pioneered by contemporary women writers” and has remarked that “if the post-modern period opened with metafictional fi reworks, it closes with the extraordinary commonplace of love” (19). Among the many examples that could be cited are recent works by two important authors linked to the political left and the artistic avantgarde in this country: the Neo-Romantic novel The Volcano Lovers (1999) by the late Susan Sontag and the book of essays by bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2000).4 Undoubtedly, the turn toward love in the Post-Boom novelists has been motivated by a variety of factors. To the sociopolitical ones I have mentioned there may also be added the rapid growth in the Spanish American reading public and the desire of both authors and publishers to produce more accessible and readable works. Significantly, the Post-Boom gave prominence, perhaps for the fi rst time in Spanish American literary history, to female novelists, from the Chileans Allende and Serrano to the Mexicans Poniatowska and Mastretta, among others. Exploring as well as criticizing the tendency to link sentimentalism with the feminine, these writers, along with their male colleagues, from Barnet and Bryce Echenique to Skármeta, have centered a great many of their works on the mysteries of love and passion. Another factor more linked to aesthetic considerations may be the one given by Barthes as a rationale for his own turn toward sentimentalism in A Lover’s Discourse: the wish to carry out a “transgression of transgression.” Barthes points out how the modern literary tradition after the Avant-Gardes “transgressed” or violated the codes of Romanticism and post-Romanticism by exalting eroticism over love, psychoanalysis over the

6


study of passion, and in general favoring objectivity and impersonality over subjectivity (Fragmentos 191–195). “Historical inversion:” Barthes states, “it is no longer sexuality that is indecent; it is sentimentality, censored in the name of what is ultimately nothing but another morality” (Fragmentos 193; Barthes’s emphasis). Love and sentimentality had become embarrassing, almost obscene notions for the modern tradition. The return to them would thus be a new sort of violation of the dominant aesthetic codes. This is certainly what the Post-Boom narratives do with regard to their precursors in the Boom and the testimonial narrative. Barthes’s example serves additionally as a reminder that this return to sentimentalism is not limited to heterosexual desire, but is also strongly indebted to a neoplatonic tradition that encompasses homosexual love. Although heterosexuality seems to prevail among the characters and situations of the new Spanish American sentimental novels, homosexuality is by no means rejected as a legitimate form of love. Consonant with these novels’ frequent critique of machismo, all varieties of love are treated with respect. To the social, market, and aesthetic motives for the turn to sentimentalism yet another one may be added, of a philosophical nature: It is the ethical questioning of the relation between writing and violence. As I have argued elsewhere, there is in Western literature a pervasive tendency toward what I have called “graphophobia,” that is, the fear and distrust of the written word (Killer Books 2–24 and ff.). This attitude arises, in my view, from an ancient linkage between writing and violence. The age-old association of writing with power, with control, and with the idea of the figurative “cutting” or mutilation of the body has led many writers to reflect on the apparent complicity between writing and evil. In turn, the historical circumstances of the arrival of alphabetical writing to the Americas in the midst of the violent conquest and colonization of the New World have made the bond between writing and violence somewhat more visible in Spanish America than in other places. Throughout twentieth-century Spanish American literature, in authors as varied as Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, and Gabriel García Márquez, one may observe a tendency to reflect ever more urgently, and in a more radical way, about graphophobia and its effects. Such reflections have led in turn to attempts to “redeem” literature from its associations with violence. The turn toward love and sentimental themes may well be seen as the most daring and far-reaching of these attempts, for one of the aims of the new sentimental fiction is precisely to explore the “other face” of writing—


7

its benevolent, seductive, and vital face—which leads authors to write, in García Márquez’s words, “for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which is perhaps the human state that most resembles levitation” (Doce cuentos peregrinos 18–19). Ironically, two of the texts that signal most tellingly the beginning of the new sentimental narrative in Spanish America—Miguel Barnet’s Rachel’s Song and Elena Poniatowska’s Dear Diego—were written by two authors who are also credited with giving rise to the contemporary Spanish American testimonial narrative. However, before discussing the origins of the new sentimental novel in these two works, it is necessary to explain what I mean by “sentimental” and to reflect at some length about the link between love and writing presupposed by this new narrative.

2 To understand the nature of literary sentimentalism one must turn to literary history, and in particular to the vogue for sentimentalism that occurred in late-eighteenth-century European narrative. It is true that love and the affects have been associated with lyric poetry since antiquity, and that in Hispanic narrative prose of the fi fteenth and sixteenth centuries there exist so-called “sentimental novels” that may be considered precursors of eighteenth-century sentimentalism: among others, Cárcel de amor (Love’s Prison, 1492) by Diego de San Pedro, Grisel y Mirabella (1495) by Juan de Flores, and Celestina (1499) by Fernando de Rojas. Nevertheless, the ideological background of these works is quite different from that of the eighteenth-century works that bear the same name, and their resemblance is mostly due to their shared use of the themes and the rhetoric of courtly love. 5 In fact, the adjective “sentimental” only begins to be used in its modern sense during the mid-eighteenth century, in connection with an aesthetic modality that had its fi rst great flowering in Europe during that century and that in the field of the novel gave rise to works such as Pamela (1741) by Richardson, Tristram Shandy (1767) and A Sentimental Voyage through France and Italy (1768) by Sterne, La nouvelle Heloïse (1761) by Rousseau, The Man of Feeling (1771) by Mackenzie, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) by Goethe, and Les liaisons dangereuses (1782) by Laclos, among many others.6 The aesthetics of eighteenth-century sentimentalism are largely based on the moral philosophy of British thinkers as diverse as Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, the Earl of Shaftesbury, and David Hume. For Hobbes in

8


his Leviathan (1651) and Smith in The Wealth of Nations (1776), humanity is irremediably fallen and sinful, and self-centeredness and the desire for power are the principal forces that move people in their daily affairs. Conversely, Shaftesbury and Hume believe that human beings have an inner moral sense by means of which they organize their perceptions of the outside world. It is this moral sense which produces a natural tendency toward benevolence, philanthropy, and social harmony. Eighteenth-century sentimental narrative dramatizes the clash between these two visions of humanity by means of the struggle of its benevolent, virtuous, and sensible protagonists in the mold of Shaftesbury and Hume with a self-centered, scheming, and utilitarian society like that seen by Hobbes and Smith. Notions such as that of Freud’s unconscious are, of course, alien to eighteenth-century sentimental fiction. In its characters’ psyche nothing is hidden, and that which is not expressed does not exist. Thus, not only do sentimental protagonists openly express their emotions, but they do so in an exemplary way, as models of virtue and goodness. They often suffer the blows of an indifferent or hostile society, and their suffering is displayed as a lesson in humane sensibility and a moral imperative to be compassionate. The typical sentimental protagonist—whether male or female—is most often represented as a fragile, friendly, and trusting individual. Their story is usually set in a context of family and affective relations that are characterized by their instability. Although they may be wayward and lonely individuals, sentimental protagonists are not antisocial beings. To the contrary, they are always in search of love and compassion. They therefore place the highest possible value on whatever few ties of affection they have been able to establish, be they of kinship, love, or friendship. In economic matters, whether by aristocratic scruples or by ideological conviction, sentimental protagonists are anticapitalists. When they have money, they give it away to their friends or spend it on humanitarian works; when they do not, they retire to live in the country, to cultivate their garden like Voltaire’s Candide. Needless to say, although eighteenth-century sentimentalism requires bodily expression by means of tears, trembling, laughter, and so on, sexual passion is usually avoided as it generates emotions that are too wrenching—such as jealousy—that can act against the feelings of sympathy and benevolence. The language of eighteenth-century sensibility seeks to avoid irony at all costs, since it aims to provoke in the reader the same emotions it portrays. This explains its tendency to describe in minute detail the characters’ feelings and the gestures that accompany them. This tendency often


9

creates an extreme and involuntarily humorous disparity between bodily gestures, which are usually instantaneous and fleeting, and the torrent of words with which the narrator attempts to describe them. Exclamation signs, parentheses, textual lacunae, and typographical aberrations of various sorts are among the many resources used by sentimental authors in their attempt to supplement the insufficiency of writing to convey feelings: recall, for example, Tristram Shandy’s use of black and marbled pages (33–34, 183–184). In general, the trope of anacoluthon predominates in the rhetoric of sentimental fiction. Richard Lanham defi nes it: “Ending a sentence with a different grammatical structure from that with which it began. Both a vice and a device to demonstrate emotion and, Dupriez reminds us, an affair of conversation rather than written utterance” (10). Anacoluthon, says Barthes in his essay on Chateaubriand, “is simultaneously a rupture in sentence structure and the starting point of a new meaning. It is to begin anew when one has not yet fi nished” (“Chateaubriand” 158). By means of this trope the narrator fl irts with incoherence and brings in digression and narrative perspectivism with the aim of drawing the reader into the complexities of the sentimental situation. A good twentieth-century example, as well as a fi ne description of the trope, is evidenced in the meditations of Pedro Balbuena, the protagonist of Bryce Echenique’s second novel, Tantas veces Pedro: When feelings remain, the story never ends. Whatever the outcome may be, the story never ends. . . . My stories, Sophie, my own stories seem to be always giving me new energy and they even begin again and they end again, it all depends to whom you’re telling them or who asks you to tell them, or the state you’re in when you start telling them to yourself again. (66) The use of anacoluthon in the sentimental novel’s discourse leads us to one of the fundamental ideological problems of this type of fiction, which was fi rst explicitly manifested in the eighteenth-century sentimental narratives. Michael Bell defi nes the problem thus in Sentimentalism, Ethics, and the Culture of Feeling (2000): “The circular logic of eighteenth-century sentiment is that, even as it used fictional means, it constantly sought to deny the category of the fictional” (28–29). Sentimental novels were fictions, and they were received as such by their readers; nevertheless, an important part of their attractiveness lay in the belief that these novels pro-

10


duced real feelings in their readers, or at least placed them in contact with a true emotional experience. As Bell points out, in the English tradition of the sentimental novel there was a strong tendency to insist on the “truth” of the feelings that were fictionally represented in novels and to reflect on how those feelings could be converted, in the reader’s mind, into a posture of moral sympathy or emotional identification (43–49). Nevertheless, the eighteenth-century debates about the importance of feelings in public life, about the difference between sentimentalism and sentiment, and about sentimental fiction’s effectiveness in provoking benevolent actions by its readers, took a new turn during the mid-nineteenth century, when authors such as Charles Dickens began to deal with the ontology of feelings in a new way. As Bell observes: Rather than being entangled in literalistic views of moral psychology, as was the case with the initial understanding of sentiment, nineteenth-century writers could see its forms and rhetoric not just as an outdated but as a largely literary fashion, or more precisely as a set of emotional tropes ambiguously placed between psychological mechanisms and literary conventions. Hence, without necessarily resolving the intrinsic antinomies of moral sentimentalism, they could see it with a different kind of detachment and turn its now familiar tropes into an analytic means of insight into the elusiveness of moral feeling. Above all, Dickens’ quite overt sense of fiction, and his play of humour, highlight the unwittingly fictive and rhetorical nature of sentiment itself. (127) In their return to the sentimental tradition, today’s Spanish American narrators display an attitude very similar to Dickens’s as Bell describes it: Bryce and Skármeta, for example, who write humorous and self-conscious fiction, recognize that sentimentalism is a rhetorical mode and that it is, therefore, fictional, but they also regard it as the best way to analyze affective life. Moreover, these and other writers also fi nd in the sentimentalism of popular culture and the mass media a widely shared code that makes it easier to communicate with their readers. It is clear, however, that although sentimental fiction usually centers on love, not all sentimental narratives deal with amorous feelings in the same way. At least since the mid-nineteenth century, there have been narratives that deal with love in an ironic fashion. These narratives—from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1829) to Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education (in


11

its 1869 version)—seek to avoid the codified sentimental gestures I have just described, although the analysis of passionate feelings continues to be their primary concern. The new sentimental narrative in Spanish America, as will be seen throughout this book, wavers between these two extremes: an eighteenth-century-style sentimentalism motivated by “philanthropic” impulses (to use an eighteenth-century term) and an ironic though no less subjective view of the effects of amorous passion. Barthes’s observations about the rhetoric of sentimentalism lead also toward more general questions about the relationship between love and language (whether spoken or written) in the discourse of sentimental narrative. We are so used to thinking about love as one of the archthemes of literature, almost as an end in itself, that it is difficult to conceive that amorous topics could be vehicles for other, no less fundamental concerns of literary writing. Nevertheless, this is indeed what happens in a good number of works from the modern and postmodern literary tradition. As one example among many, one might recall the use of love as a symbol for the union between Spirit and Nature in Romantic philosophy and poetry, as studied by M. H. Abrams in Natural Supernaturalism (1971).7 Looking back at the classical tradition, the dialogues of Plato, particularly Phaedrus and the Symposium, insistently connect discussion about the essence of love with language and writing.8 In the modern and postmodern periods there is an increasingly intense return to this pairing of love and communication. For argument’s sake, I would like to make a rather sweeping statement: All amorous writing presupposes that love and language (including written language) are fundamentally linked, and that both depend on one another in order to exist. In fact, the link between love and systems of representation has become a commonplace notion in works dealing with love in a variety of disciplines. In the social sciences, for example, sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s book Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy (1986) studies love as “a generalized symbolic medium of communication” (18), while anthropologist William Jankowiak, in his introduction to the anthology Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? (1995), states: “In general, the existence of romantic love can be recognized in the perceived specialness of another individual. It is based on the intense feelings for another, feelings of immense and complex psychological depth that need to be cultivated and renewed. It is an intimacy most readily observed . . . in shared stories, adventures, thoughts, and time spent together” (5). From a psychoanalytical perspective, Julia Kristeva observes in Tales of

12


Love that “love has become the privileged literary space of the passion of signs constituted by their literary condensation and polyvalence” (18), and Judith Butler, in her essay “Desire,” points out that “desire is always to some degree displaced in (and by) language” (370). In the realm of philosophy, José Ortega y Gasset in his Sobre el amor (On Love, 1939) discusses extensively Stendhal’s essentially semiotic and literary theory of love as a “crystallization” (278–333). In recent years, Octavio Paz’s reflections on love, collected in essays such as “El más allá erótico” (The Erotic Beyond, 1961) and books such as La llama doble: amor y erotismo (The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, 1993), have been widely disseminated in the Hispanic world. Paz, who regards eroticism as a system of signs, offers the most explicit version of his thesis in “El más allá erótico”: Imitation does not aim to simplify but to complicate erotic play, thus accentuating its nature as a form of representation. . . . Man imitates the complexity of animal sexuality and reproduces its amusing, terrible, or ferocious gestures because he wishes to return to the natural state. At the same time, that imitation is a game, a form of theater. . . . Man wants to go out of himself—to be always outside his self. Man wants to be a lion, an eagle, an octopus, an ant, a mockingbird. We miss the creative import of such imitation if we do not realize that it is a metaphor: man wants to be a lion without ceasing to be man. That is to say: he wants to be a man but he behaves like a lion. The word like—an image by comparison— implies both the distance between the two terms, man and lion, as well as the will to abolish them. The word like is the erotic game itself, the cypher of eroticism. (185–186; Paz’s italics) In many of the recent Spanish American sentimental novels, the link between love and writing is often clearly mediated by eroticism conceived as a code, as a system of signs and signals. Love arises in these narrations from communication by means of erotic signs that may at fi rst be nonverbal but that move quickly to the sphere of spoken or written language. Writing in many of these contemporary sentimental novels appears not as a simple palliative for the absence of the loved one, but as an activity that shares in the visual, sensorial nature of eroticism: it is another form of erotic gesturing. My understanding of writing coincides in general with that proposed


13

by the late Jacques Derrida in works such as Of Grammatology (1967) and Dissemination (1972), which views the act of writing as a differential activity in time as well as space. To elaborate further at this point seems superfluous, since this is already such a familiar notion. Instead, I believe it is more important to explain the view of love that serves as my point of departure for this book. This view focuses less on the ontology of love (a question that is still, and will probably continue to be, debated and debatable) than on a typology of amorous experience which has led to the formulation of two opposing concepts of love in the Western tradition. In developing these ideas, I have drawn inspiration from Denis de Rougemont’s classic work L’amour et l’Occident (Love in the Western World, 1956), whose continued relevance has been shown by María Rosa Menocal in her book Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (1994).9 Based on a detailed commentary of the myth of Tristan and Isolde, De Rougemont holds that the modern idea of love derives from the notion of “courtly love” found in medieval Provençal lyric poetry. This, in turn, is nourished by obscure religious sources—among others, the Manichaean and Catharist sects—for whom love was a way to achieve transcendence by freeing the soul of its fleshly prison and imbuing it with the “infi nite desire” to unite with the divinity (61–82). This “divinization” of love as eros by the troubadours tends to glorify passion, that is, the suffering produced by amorous desire, since it is through suffering that the soul is freed from the flesh in order to be united with the divine. This is a fundamentally egotistic conception of love, since the mystical union can only occur between the individual soul and God. The love object, the beloved, fulfi lls in eros only an instrumental function; it is simply a means to achieve union with the divinity. Obstacles to the lovers’ amorous union play a paradoxical role in the economy of eros, since the greater these impediments are, the greater the suffering, and the greater also is the spiritual purification that is the ultimate goal of the lovers (50–55). Nevertheless, for De Rougemont the notion of love as eros has always existed in a tense relationship with another concept of love, that of Christian agape. In this concept, through the incarnation of Christ the spirit descends into matter and becomes one with it, mixing the material with the spiritual, the human with the divine (67–69). Love as agape is opposed to the passion of eros, since its ultimate goal is achieving the communion of the faithful, the love of neighbors, instead of the individual soul’s union with God. Bringing heaven down to earth, agape also discards the idea of suffering as a means of reaching transcendence, since it assumes that contact with the

14


divinity is a gift that God freely gives to humanity. The model for agape is the institution of marriage, the link between two beings who love each other equally, without one being superior to the other (311–315).10 If we consider eros and agape as metaphors of two kinds of writing, we see then that eros is associated with a notion of writing (and, by extension, of reading) as an arduous and oppressive activity that is linked to suffering and is affl icted by disjunction, distance, and violence. Writing and reading, in this view, are moved by the perpetually excited as well as perpetually impeded desire of achieving transcendence (whether of intellect or spirit, it matters little). Writing and reading would be in this sense profoundly passionate activities, with a passion moved by the promise that at the end transcendence will be reached as union with a collective or universal knowledge. On the other hand, the idea of writing as agape emphasizes the communicative aspects of reading and writing and regards the text as a successful mediator and link between writers and readers. Agape does not see writing as problematical (or only to a lesser extent) and underscores instead those elements that simplify the search for the text’s meaning: the evocation of orality, acceptance of the conventions of literary genre, personification, and verisimilitude, among many others. The text’s meaning is easily—almost didactically—discovered. Reading and writing then become instances of the atemporal experience of “happy love” which, as De Rougemont points out, “has no history” (15), and is a joyful state of grace in which writers and readers share the experience as equals. In an essay that paved the way for the revalorization of sentimentalism by today’s literary criticism, “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History” (1978), Jane P. Tompkins, like Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse, attacks the modernist or avant-garde notion of literature, for which “works whose stated purpose is to influence the course of history, and which therefore employ a language that is not only unique but common and accessible to everyone, do not qualify as works of art” (Tompkins 84; Tompkins’s italics). Instead, Tompkins proposes that “the work of the sentimental writers is complex and significant in ways other than those which characterize the established masterpieces” (84). She further adds that, to understand the power these fictions had in their time, today’s readers must “set aside some familiar categories for evaluating fiction—stylistic intricacy, psychological subtlety, epistemological complexity—and to see the sentimental novel, not as an artifice of eternity answerable to certain formal criteria and to certain psychological and


15

philosophical concerns, but as a political enterprise, halfway between sermon and social theory, that both codifies and attempts to mold the values of its time” (84–85). Tompkins’s comments about a nineteenth-century U.S. text are, in my view, just as pertinent to the new sentimental narrative of Spanish America of the late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst centuries. The contemporary Spanish American writers’ interest in sentimentalism, rather than stemming from an egotism or self-centeredness that turns its back on the world, arises instead from the desire to keep making visible the connection between narrative fiction and its sociohistoric and cultural circumstances. In particular, the tension between eros and agape found in this new narrative may also be understood as a debate between two different concepts of writing’s social function. That debate is visible from the start in two of the main texts that I consider to be at the origins of the new Spanish American sentimental narrative: Rachel’s Song and Dear Diego. As we shall see, Barnet and Poniatowska dismantle in their respective works the referentiality, the truthclaims, and the ethical Manichaeanism of testimonial narrative. They achieve this by intensifying still further the subjectivism and sentimentalism latent in testimonio (although often repressed, as we saw in Rigoberta Menchú’s quote) and by further emphasizing the problems inherent in linguistic, literary, and artistic representation in general. It is not by chance that the protagonists of these two works are associated with written language (in Rachel’s case, with a variety of theatrical and poetic texts, and in Quiela’s with the letters she writes to Diego) as well as with visual forms of representation such as theater and painting. These works also openly explore Octavio Paz’s view of eroticism as a system of signs, as a kind of proto-art, but, most importantly, they put to the test the transgressive capacity of sentimentalism, as Barthes conceives it, as well as Tompkins’s notion of “sentimental power.”

3 Miguel Barnet’s Rachel’s Song was published in 1969, shortly after the success of Biography of a Runaway Slave. By then, the process of bureaucratization and state control of Cuban literature begun by Fidel Castro in 1962 with the creation of the UNEAC (the Cuban National Writers’ and Artists’ Union) had reached its culmination. No less important is the fact that there had also taken place, from 1964 to 1966, a harsh repressive

16


campaign against Cuban homosexuals.11 In the literary sphere, some of the most significant and experimental works of postrevolutionary Cuban literature had already been published, including Carpentier’s El siglo de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral, 1962), Lezama Lima’s Paradiso (1966), Arenas’s Celestino antes del alba (Celestino Before Dawn, 1967), Sarduy’s De donde son los cantantes (Where the Singers Are From, 1967), and Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres. Biography of a Runaway Slave had been quickly exalted as the prototype of the “new” revolutionary literature, which showed a less nostalgic attitude toward the immediate prerevolutionary past than some of the previously mentioned works and aspired to rewrite Cuban history from a revolutionary perspective by offering “the history of people without history.”12 Esteban Montejo, the centenarian runaway protagonist of Biography of a Runaway Slave, was seen as a sort of allegory or incarnation of the Cuban revolutionary spirit, a bridge linking Cuba’s historical present with an underground tradition of rebelliousness. Some statements by Barnet made it seem as if this work would be the beginning of a series of testimonial novels in which Barnet would present, in Fernando Ortiz’s phrase, “the human elements of Cubanness,” that is, a gallery of “social types” representing the various strata of Cuban culture: the blacks, Spaniards, Chinese, and women.13 However, in practice the projected series immediately changed course with the publication of Rachel’s Song, a work that exceeds Barnet’s original anthropological or ethnographic scheme. Rather than examining the life of a “typical” Cuban woman (if there were such a thing), the work centers on the life story of a chorus girl from a notorious vaudeville theater in Havana named El Alhambra. Moreover, as Andrew Bush points out, “while Rachel is white, her Hungarian mother and German father leave her a racial curiosity in Cuba, and . . . this European parentage and her Biblical name raise the possibility of a Jewish background” (162). Rachel’s own work as a chorus girl and singer not only underscores her atypical nature, but also distances her from the testimonial genre’s truth-claims, linking her instead to the dubious and labyrinthine milieu of the theater. If the identity of the narrator in Biography of a Runaway Slave is already problematical, in Rachel it turns into a Borgesian abyss of reflected images, symbolized in the text by the recurrent metaphor of the mirror (to which I will return later).14 Furthermore, as Barnet indicates in his prologue to the text, “Rachel” is not a “real,” unique, existing individual as Esteban Montejo was, but is in fact a composite character based on


17

interviews with various chorus girls who worked at the Alhambra (Rachel 9). The work also breaks with Runaway Slave’s fi rst-person monologue by incorporating other voices that often explicitly comment on or reply to her statements. In this sense, although compared to the Boom novels Rachel’s Song is easier to read, compared to Runaway Slave it is a more formally complex text. Partly due to this greater formal complexity, most critics have regarded Rachel’s Song as a more unequivocally “literary” text than Biography of a Runaway Slave.15 However, the most profound break between Rachel’s Song and the model of testimonial narrative embodied in Biography of a Runaway Slave lies precisely in the former’s emphasis on sentiment. This emphasis can be seen not only in Rachel’s overt reflections on this issue (“Caruso cried, and all of Cuba cried along with him—that’s how sentimental my country is,” 115) but in her own personality and in the often melodramatic circumstances she experiences. And this happens in spite of Barnet’s attempts to distance his text ironically from the figure of Rachel by means of the critical comments voiced by other characters in the book that interrupt Rachel’s monologues like the chorus in a Greek tragedy—among them, Esteban Montejo himself (58–59). In my view, the turn to sentimentality in Rachel’s Song arises from this novel’s introduction—albeit discreetly—of a theme that will reappear time and again in all of the works of the new Spanish American sentimental narrative: the theme of postrevolutionary fatigue or disillusionment. It is a disillusionment that leads, in turn, to a return to intimacy, to subjectivity, to the exploration of love as an alternative means of social change, and even as a form of therapy for souls worn out by years of struggle and renunciation.16 Moreover, this return displays a nostalgia for idealized views of interpersonal relations and, more concretely, of the amorous experience. In a great many of the new sentimental novels—and, as will be seen, in Rachel’s Song itself—such views are symbolized by means of the often stylized evocation of the themes and topics of courtly love and the tradition of medieval chivalry. The presence of medieval themes in a twentieth-century Spanish American novel should not be surprising; it is already commonplace to point out that the rich repertoire of terms and attitudes about love produced by the courtly love tradition has served as the main source for amorous discourse in the Western world. The Cuba to which the elderly Rachel returns in her memories is largely that of the fi rst decades of the Cuban Republic (approximately from 1902 to the 1920s), a period of Cuban history notorious for the direct interven-

18


tion of the United States in the country’s internal affairs and for the social and political corruption evidenced during the presidential regimes of José Miguel Gómez, Mario Menocal, and Alfredo Zayas, which gave rise in the end to the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado.17 To a great extent, that Cuba symbolized the defeat of the high ideals of moral purity embodied by the modernista poet and leader of Cuba’s independence, José Martí. Martí often expressed these ideals in his poetry, speeches, and political writings by means of chivalric metaphors and phraseology, as can be seen in the following excerpt from his article “El tercer año del Partido Revolucionario Cubano: el alma de la revolución y el deber de Cuba en América” (The Cuban Revolutionary Party’s Third Year: The Soul of the Revolution and Cuba’s Duty in America), published in the newspaper Patria in 1894: In the balance-beam of America lie the Antilles, which, if enslaved, would be merely a pontoon for an imperial republic’s war against the jealous and superior world that is getting ready to deny it its power—a mere advance post of the American Rome . . . . The new life of the redeemed Antilles must not be composed lightly, but with a century-long awareness. We must assume such great human responsibility with august respect. We will either reach great heights because of our noble aims, or we will sink to great depths because we did not understand those aims. It is a world that we are trying to balance: it is not just two islands [Cuba and Puerto Rico] that we are trying to liberate . . . . An error in Cuba would be an error in America; an error in all of modern humanity. Whoever rises up today with Cuba rises for all time. She, our holy fatherland, imposes upon us the need to be singularly reflexive; to serve her, in this difficult and glorious hour, fills us with dignity and majesty. This extraordinary duty strengthens our heart, guides us like a fi xed star, and will shine like a beacon from our graves. (Letras fi eras 117–118) “Let others love wrath and tyranny,” said Martí in his “Oración de Tampa y Cayo Hueso” (Speech at Tampa and Key West). “Cubans are capable of love, which makes freedom everlasting” (Letras fi eras 79). Rachel’s Cuba is, instead, a nation that has suffered the deep disillusionment of seeing a period of epic and bloody struggle end up becoming like a farce similar to those performed by the bufos of the Alhambra Theater due to the U.S. intervention and political corruption. The moral vacuum produced by such a disillusionment is then fi lled up with the symbols and


19

the rhetoric of the return to the self, to the culte du moi, and, in general, to an egotism with a markedly erotic slant. Rachel’s discourse, as will be seen, mixes up the commonplaces of courtly love and medieval chivalry evoked in the oratory and the modernista poetry of José Martí with fleshly desires, frivolity, and lower-class tastes. The meaning of this novel’s title, Rachel’s Song, becomes clearer and richer in this context. Rachel’s “song” is undoubtedly the “swan song” of a whole epoch as well as the “siren song” of a demimondaine who remains fascinating and seductive despite all the ideologically driven attempts to censor her, but it is also the story of Rachel’s life. This story is presented as a “song” or cantar about Rachel, in the sense in which the term appears in the medieval Song of Roland and the Cantar del Mío Cid, that is, as a degraded and vulgar version of the texts of epic chivalry, as well as of the texts of courtly love. In turn, the language adopted by this cantar is closest to that of a genre of popular music that originated during the same years when Rachel was beginning her career in vaudeville: the bolero. Defi ned by some as “a love song with rhythm,” the bolero is the sentimental genre par excellence in Spanish American music, and it originated precisely in Cuba in 1885 with the song “Tristezas” (Sadness) by the composer from Santiago de Cuba José (Pepe) Sánchez. Curiously, the popularity of the bolero began to grow after Alberto Villalón, a disciple of Sánchez, presented the musical review “The Triumph of the Bolero” in 1906 in the same Alhambra Theater with which Rachel is associated.18 The bolero-like aspect of Rachel’s text is certainly linked to the “vulgarity” she wishes to repress, but it is also one of the vehicles through which Rachel learns the metaphors and images of the courtly love tradition. Considering that Rachel’s Song was published in 1969, during the Cuban Revolution’s tenth anniversary, following the Revolution’s “epic phase,” and when the Revolution had clearly become, at least for the intellectuals, a repressive phenomenon, it would not be too venturesome to suppose that this novel posits a parallelism between the sense of disillusionment of the fi rst decades of the Cuban Republic and the wrenching experiences suffered by artists, intellectuals, and members of socially marginalized groups such as homosexuals during the fi rst decade of the Revolution. Castro’s Cuba at the end of the 1960s, which had grown ever more dependent on the Soviet Union, was, like the Cuban Republic of Estrada Palma (Cuba’s fi rst president) and his successors, a project that was doomed to failure, largely due to the abandonment of the fundamentally nationalist ideals of the 1959 Revolution. It is in this sense that Rachel’s Song,

20


despite being published early in the revolutionary period, when Cuba was still trying to “export” its revolution to the rest of the hemisphere, may be seen as one of the fi rst Spanish American texts to manifest the sort of postrevolutionary fatigue and disappointment that would give rise to the new sentimental narrative. How, then, is amorous and sentimental discourse expressed in Rachel’s Song? To which of the two categories of sentimental writing I have posited—that of eros or that of agape—could this work be assigned? I believe that, like the other new sentimental novels of which it is the precursor, Rachel’s Song displays a tense tug-of-war between the two opposing poles of sentimental writing. In this case, however, the tension leans to the side of eros. Indicative of this is the text’s strong ironic tone. Irony is the predominant trope in Rachel’s Song, because this work deals with sentiment in much the same ironic way as Stendhal and Flaubert. The discourse of Rachel’s Song deals with sentiment with a disconcerting mixture of ironic distance and enthusiasm similar to Stendhal’s De l’amour. I do not mean to say that Rachel produces in her monologue a rationalistic discourse on love, as the author of The Charterhouse of Parma attempts. Instead, even as she recounts the melodramatic and emotion-laden events of her life without shedding a tear, indeed, in a feisty and sometimes confrontational tone, Rachel the singer offers her readers a sort of master class in the use (and abuse) of sentimentalism. It is well to remember that Rachel made her living by provoking men’s desire for her, promising them an impossible union. Like Diotima in Plato’s Symposium, Rachel is a “woman who was deeply versed in this [Love] and many other fields of knowledge” (Plato 553). She is thus a master of eros, that is, of love as passion (as I have defi ned it following De Rougemont), and at the same time she is a master of the representation of passion: she is the keeper of the secrets of the “sentimental power” that writing can exert over its readers. It would seem that rather than attempting to provoke a sympathetic reaction in the reader, as writing as agape does, Rachel’s Song offers instead an ironic lesson about the erotic aspects of writing. Nevertheless, despite the text’s ironic qualities and the almost narcissistic egotism of its protagonist, there are certain elements of this work that can be associated with writing as agape: in particular, Rachel’s vitalistic attitude and her command of what one might call the rhetoric of passion. At this level, one could speak of a certain sympathy, a certain identification with Rachel, particularly between Rachel and her author, inasmuch as Rachel is a sort of prototype of the new transgression that sentimental narrative aims to achieve. The link with writing as agape is also reinforced by relatively “reader-friendly”


21

qualities of this text (despite its fragmented appearance), including its allusions to political history, journalism, and popular culture. In general terms, the story Rachel tells her readers about herself resembles at fi rst that of the heroines in the eighteenth-century sentimental novels such as Pamela, although in the end it is more of a parody of these novels, since Rachel and her mother are both far from being epitomes of womanly virtue: although not prostitutes in the strict sense, they both lead sexually free lives and seek to benefit themselves from their relationships with wealthy men. In her unsuccessful attempt to cover up her dubious origins and her way of life, Rachel presents herself, like the sentimental heroines, as a fundamentally good and noble person who struggles to survive in a hostile world: I’m a strong woman I’m not a whiner; I’ve said that, and I’ll repeat it again. I’m a woman who always knows how to come out on top. Like the buoys at sea, that boys try to sink, and—bam!—up they come again. (84) Unlike the eighteenth-century heroines, however, at the end of her story Rachel does not arrive at the safe havens of marriage and prosperity. In fact, this possibility is tragically foreclosed from the beginning, when, as a chorus girl at the Tívoli Theater, her boyfriend Eusebio, whose family had “shoe factories, sugar mills, and lots of other stuff” (19), commits suicide by slitting his throat “in front of a mirror” (23) due to his family’s unyielding opposition to his marriage with Rachel. Previously, Eusebio’s family had forced Rachel to abort her child by Eusebio: “My life went to pieces,” states Rachel. “My name dragged through the mud, and likewise his prestige, even though he was noble and a rower at the Yacht Club. It was a Greek tragedy for both of us” (23). Recalling this event later in the novel, Rachel adds: “When Eusebio, my only pure love, died, I tried to kill myself, but everything turned out the wrong way and since then I haven’t had the courage to do it. . . . After that incident, I decided to live until my days are over” (102). Although her relationship with Eusebio was, according to Rachel, “the only pure passion in my life” (19), the rest of the chorus girl and singer’s long life becomes a prolonged learning process about passion, an ironic “sentimental education” in the style of Flaubert. Never again will Rachel give in to passion herself; instead, she will provoke it in others. She will do this by means of the artifices of emotive representation, making use of a whole arsenal of codified erotic gestures that she learns partly by observa-

22


tion, but also with the help of her homosexual friend Adolfo (45–46, 64, 67–68, 84–85, 100), and which she practices in front of a mirror: I bought a mirror in Dragones Street; a standing mirror with two very beautiful columns in the ancient Greek style. I placed it in front of my bed to watch myself at all hours. On my own, I studied all the gestures and expressions an artist needs to know. I tried to smile fi rst and then to break out laughing. I cried like Mary Magdalene, smoked like an Apache; I let myself get carried away, wept, and then recited monologues I had heard from Becerra at Pous’s bululús, which was a company of traveling performers. I repeated everything I had done at the Tívoli and at the circus. I made myself better on my own. (63–64) The metaphor of the mirror has been linked since Classical antiquity to the notion of art as an imitation of reality and was revived by the aesthetics of novelistic realism in the nineteenth century, as in the much-cited epigraph to Chapter 13 of Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir: “Novel: a mirror that travels along a road” (Stendhal 95). In Rachel’s Song, however, the mirror signifies the opposite of realism. In the style of the Avant-Gardes, and of course, of Borges, the image of the mirror evokes ironic self-reflexiveness, infi nite regression, illusion, artifice, and—as in the myth of Narcissus— death, as seen in Eusebio’s suicide and in Rachel’s request that, when she dies, someone should put “a mirror on my chest. A mirror to see my face” (Canción de Rachel 121). Simultaneously practicing self-love and the codes of eroticism, Rachel adopts a view of existence that may be characterized as post-tragical. With this view she aims to immunize herself from sentimentalism, since she is, as she assures her readers, “a strong woman” (84). Her attempt to command the codes of sentimentalism goes from the virtual writing present in bodily gestures to written language itself in the theatrical scripts she memorizes, as well as in the texts that she herself writes. The latter, significantly, fulfi ll the mirror-like function of helping Rachel to train herself in the arts of sentimental rhetoric and to reinforce her self-love, her subjectivity: Those days of anguish forced me, I don’t know, told me: Pick up a paper and pencil and write. It’s not that I want to be a writer or a poet. Heavens, no!, I was far from being that, but I picked up a folder of papers and began to write some pages that later became


23

engraved in my mind from telling them to myself, just to myself, because I didn’t recite a single verse even to Alfonso. (71–72) Rachel embodies the scriptural eros I have posited based on De Rougemont’s ideas. Linked to the world of representation, to writing, cultivating her selfhood even as she keeps her emotional distance from all other people, Rachel also suffers for the sake of transcendence, although at fi rst sight her vitalistic and frivolous pose would seem to distance her from the liebestod (love-death) topic that is an integral part of the courtly love ethos (De Rougemont 46, 50–53). In fact, the novel offers a parodic version of the deaths of Tristan and Isolde and Romeo and Juliet in the episode in which Rachel, partly as a trick to make her husband Federico stop loving her, invites him to commit suicide along with her. To Rachel’s surprise, her husband accepts this proposal, and she is unable to fi nd a way out of her own scheme. As a way of saying goodbye to the world, they both decide to attend one last party, a masked ball at the Tacón Theater. There, a daring masked man pinches Rachel’s buttocks, Federico comes to her defense, and a hubbub ensues in which all three end up in the police station, putting an end to the projected suicide. “That fond wish, that dream of mine, could not be carried out,” says Rachel, “It was stopped by a vulgarity” (112–113). Rachel’s vitalism, however, reveals her links to that same “vulgarity” she claims to despise. A chorus girl and burlesque theater performer, Rachel’s profession is irredeemably vulgar to the rest of society. It is not surprising, then, that she should yearn for “another life” that is more sublime and transcendent. In this sense, Rachel’s comments on the subject of “flying saucers” and extraterrestrial beings toward the end of the novel are revealing: Anyway, this earthly life isn’t so good and isn’t really worth it. I wish they’d come in droves to pick me up and take me in that saucer to another planet in the universe, Venus, Mars, wherever, so that I could have other experiences and improve myself, because the truth is that here there isn’t anything anymore, people devour each other, they hate each other, there’s no peace, nothing. Yesterday I heard an idiot, just yesterday, saying that there isn’t any life on Mars. They’re crazy because they want to know things without reading them in books, without research. I know that over there they live like we do here, but with one eye on their brow and without eating or reading. They don’t have any trouble. Everything is happiness, lots of parties, lack of worries, going on strolls. I

24


would give all I have to live there, even though they say there isn’t any vegetation and I love plants. . . . One has to dream. Because if this life is all there is, if everything ends here, it’s a big shit. I for one don’t feel satisfied. I want to keep on living on Mars, on Venus, wherever—wherever!—as long as I know that I won’t be staying here to feed the worms. (117–118) Reminiscent of Rimbaud’s famous dictum in Une saison en Enfer (1873): “True life is absent; we are not in the world” (Oeuvres complètes 229), Rachel’s vitalism in these passages can be clearly seen as an expression of the same desire for purification and transcendence found in the notion of love as eros. Rachel’s Manichaean view of life is evident throughout the text, in comments such as the following: “One of my character traits is that, although I’m good-natured, I’m also rancorous, I don’t forget slights. A century or two might pass, but I won’t forget those who wanted to get rid of me, just as I won’t forget, of course, those who were good” (101). In his explanation of the roots of the concept of passionate love in the Manichaean religious doctrines, De Rougemont makes observations about the role of music and song in Manichaeanism that seem to resonate in Rachel’s Song. It is worth quoting them in full: It has recently been shown . . . that the structure of the Manichaean faith was “in essence lyrical.” In other words, the nature of this faith made it unamenable to the rational, impersonal, and “objective” exposition. Actually, it could only come to be held in being experienced, and the experience of it was one of combined dread and enthusiasm—that is to say, an invasion by the divine—which is essentially poetic. The cosmogony and theogony of this faith became “true” for a believer only when certitude was induced by his recital of a psalm. So Tristan, it will be recalled, cannot state his secret, only sing it. Every dualistic—let us say, every Manichaean—interpretation of the universe holds the fact of being alive in the body to the absolute woe, the woe embracing all other woes; and death it holds to be the ultimate good, whereby the sin of birth is redeemed and human souls return into the One of luminous indistinction. We may attain to Light while here below through a gradual ascent which is achieved in the progressive death of a deliberate askesis. But the goal and the end of the spirit is also the end of limited life, of physical life obscured by immediate multiplicity. Eros, object of our


25

supreme Desire, intensifies all our desires only in order to offer them up in sacrifice. The fulfi llment of Love is the denial of any particular terrestrial love, and its Bliss of any particular terrestrial bliss. (66) Like the character of Tristan in Wagner’s opera, to whom De Rougemont alludes in the above quote, Rachel “cannot state [her] secret, only sing it.” Rachel’s song, even as it parodies the epic, also has something enigmatic about it, perhaps derived from the trobar clus tradition of courtly love, as can be seen from the novel’s fi rst sentences: This island is something big. Here the strangest and the most tragic things have occurred. And it will always be so. The land, like human beings, has its destiny. And Cuba’s destiny is mysterious. I’m not a witch, nor a gypsy, nor a card-reader, nothing of the sort; I don’t know how to read palms the right way, but I’ve always said to myself that whoever is born in this piece of land has his mission, for good or for ill. (Canción de Rachel 11) In consonance with the belle-époque ambiance of this novel, perhaps one could call Rachel by the epithet the Colombian poet José Asunción Silva coined for the Russian painter Maria Bashkirtseff, whose passionate Diary (1884) was a popular book at the end of the nineteenth century: “Our Lady of Perpetual Desire.” Rachel could also be seen as a degraded or parodic version of the “feminine Savior” of courtly love poetry (De Rougemont 90). A passage from Rachel’s Song is highly suggestive in terms of the novel’s links with the religious roots of the love-as-eros tradition: It is the story of Rachel’s recurrent dream, in which a “child dressed in white” appears silently, and after wandering around the room and handing her some scraps of paper with musical notation, “he lifts up the hairs from my brow and gives me a kiss. It’s not that the child is in love with me, because he’s a kid and kids are not into that, but when he kisses me I feel happy. It is a pure kiss” (90). This passage, with its images of purity, luminosity, and childhood, which are evocative of the poems in José Martí’s Ismaelillo (1881), also coincides with the way in which the Cathars (whose name meant “the pure ones”) visualized the moment of death for the chosen ones who had renounced the world: In the Kephalaia or Chapters of Manes, Chapter Ten tells how the elect person who has renounced the world receives the imposition of hands (among the Cathars the consolamentum, usually given at the

26


approach of death); how he thus sees that he is ‘ordained’ in the Spirit of Light; how at the last, in the moment of death, the Form of Light, which is his spirit, appears to him and consoles him with a kiss; how his angel offers him its right hand and also greets him with the Kiss of Love; how fi nally the elect person venerates his own Form of Light, his feminine Savior. (De Rougemont 90; italics in the original) Undoubtedly, Rachel’s discourse weaves together the carnal and the sublime, but it is important to underscore that this always occurs in a rhetorical and theatrical context, as part of a spectacle or representation. Rachel never stops acting, never stops performing, because that is her “essence” and perhaps her “secret”: her identity is always presented as a construct, and although postmodern theory holds this to be true of all identities, in the character of Rachel this process is laid bare for all to see. Recognizing Rachel as a construct, an artifice, a kind of sign, leads us to ask what its meaning might be, what the text may be trying to convey by means of a personified entity with Rachel’s traits. An emblematic or allegorical reading of Rachel is highly suggestive in this regard. In my view, the ambivalences in Rachel’s personality and discourse (carnality versus spirituality, frivolity versus seriousness, and even femininity versus masculinity) may be explained if we view Rachel as an emblem of writing.19 The use and abuse of woman as an emblem of writing (and of art in general) is a notorious aspect of the Western tradition that has already been explored in detail by feminist criticism. Its recurrence in Barnet’s text is consistent with the period (the early twentieth century) alluded to in Rachel’s Song, when modernista aesthetics still held sway. For this aesthetics, the equation woman=writing was a given, and was manifested in topics such as that of the femme fatale. 20 Of greater interest, however, is the type of writing Rachel stands for: the writing of eros, of passion. Rachel’s “secret” lies precisely in the link between passion and writing. As I previously pointed out, the writing of eros is based on disjunction and distance along with a perpetually excited but always unsatisfied desire to reach transcendence. If we accept the notion that desire and writing are inseparably joined, Rachel’s vitalism (which, as we have seen, is mostly the desire for another life) may also be emblematic of the potentially endless nature of writing, which is always condemned to be unable to join the object it designates, the object of its desire. There is yet another side to this view of Rachel as an allegory of passionate writing, particularly if we recall those moments in the novel when


27

Rachel transforms herself into a national allegory, into an emblem of Cuba. Such is the case when Rachel arrives in Santa Clara with the Circus “Las Maravillas de Austria” and she buys herself there a “Cuban costume” (un traje de cubana): “I dressed myself with the Cuban flag: the star on the middle of my chest and the blue stripes flowing down my arms. The typical national dress. We went out on parade, announcing: ‘There goes the Cuban Woman!’ (ahí va la cubana)” (60). Rachel blatantly assumes here—revealing its artifice in doing so—the very same role of national emblem performed by other well-known female characters in Cuban literature, from Cecilia Valdés in the homonymous novel by Cirilo Villaverde to Cuba Venegas and La Estrella in Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers. If we read the character of Rachel in this context, we see that her Platonism is not limited to the field of love. With its theatrical ambiance, its patently dialogic structure, and its detailed allusions to political events such as the 1912 Colored People’s Uprising (65–72), there is in Rachel’s Song an extended and ironic allusion to Plato’s Myth of the Cavern and to the Utopian notion of the philosopher-king explained in Book Seven of Plato’s Republic. In this context, Rachel’s Song may be seen as a cautionary tale about the use and abuse of the discourse of desire and passion for political ends. It is a warning pertinent not only to the corrupt early Cuban Republic, where, according to Rachel, “the worst problems are fi xed with drums and beer” (48), but also to the Revolutionary period, with its rhetoric of “Fatherland or Death” (Patria o Muerte), the chivalrous myth of the “Heroic Guerrilla Fighter” (el Guerrillero Heroico), its mass rallies of the people orchestrated by the government, and the histrionic and longwinded speeches of their maximum leader. In Rachel’s Song we see how Cuba, the long-desired republic, reaches its independence in 1902 as what might be called a “republic of desire,” that is, a country where the manipulation of feelings and passions by the various social sectors has played a role in its cultural and political life that is almost as important as the determinations of geography and economics. 21 In this sense, Rachel’s Song suggests that the “republic of desire” founded more than a century ago still lives on in the Revolution that tried to overcome it.

4 Nothing could be further from the “strong woman,” the energetic and frivolous demimondaine that is Rachel, it would seem, than the lachrymose

28


and submissive Quiela in Dear Diego by Elena Poniatowska. However, as Barthes’s epigraph suggests and as I hope to show here, Poniatowska’s novel follows fundamentally the same line of writing-as-eros inaugurated by Barnet’s novel. Like Barnet, Poniatowska helped to forge and defi ne the genre of the testimonial novel in Spanish America with the publication of two early works in this genre: Here’s to You, Jesusa, and La noche de Tlatelolco (Massacre in Mexico, 1971). The fi rst resembles Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave in its intention, origin, and structure: It is a fi rst-person retelling of the “life and opinions” of Josefi na Bórquez (who Poniatowska renames “Jesusa Palancares”), an elderly woman from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec who had been a camp follower and combatant during the Mexican Revolution and had ended up in a poor neighborhood of Mexico City, where Poniatowska the journalist met her, interviewed her, and decided to write a book based on their conversations. Like Esteban Montejo, the protagonist of Biography of a Runaway Slave, Jesusa impresses readers with her fierce and indomitable personality, which has remained so in spite of a life full of suffering. Also, as in Biography of a Runaway Slave, Here’s to You, Jesusa displays the attempt by an author from the upper classes to identify with a lower-class individual, seeking to better understand the foundations of her nationhood, only to find in the end that the confrontation with this individual breaks down many of the myths and prejudices held by the author and the readers about national and personal identity. From its publication, readers of Here’s to You, Jesusa were struck by the surprising and deeply critical new view the book offered of the Mexican Revolution from a woman’s perspective, and also by Jesusa’s lack of conventional Mexican nationalism: That’s why, when I was looking for work [in Mexico City], I would say: “Well, if they’re Mexicans, don’t bother giving me their address, because I’m not going there.” They may be my countrymen, but, frankly, I can’t stand them. It’s not that foreigners aren’t bossy, but they do it in another way— they’re less abusive and they don’t pry into your life . . . . (Hasta no verte, Jesús mío 245) This critical view of “Mexicanness” reaches a crisis point in Massacre in Mexico, a work that tells of one of the most serious sociopolitical catastrophes suffered by Mexico since the revolution: the killing of hundreds


29

of peaceful protestors in the Plaza of the Three Cultures in the Tlatelolco district of Mexico City, committed on October 2, 1968, by members of the Mexican Army. By means of a collage of quotes that includes everything from interviews, press clippings, poems, and other literary texts to the graffiti scrawled on the walls, Poniatowska offered what became the fi rst detailed and encompassing account of the massacre and one of the fi rst open denunciations of the cover-up engineered by the Mexican government and by a government-coopted or intimidated media. It is already commonplace to regard the Tlatelolco Massacre as the event that defi nitively ended the previously harmonious relations between a great many Mexican intellectuals and the regime of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional). 22 Massacre in Mexico is particularly relevant in this context, since the work marks a specific moment of disillusionment with the hopes and promises of the Mexican Revolution. While it is true that the revolution had been criticized from the beginning by a number of writers and intellectuals (suffice it to recall Mariano Azuela’s classic novel Los de abajo [The Underdogs, 1915]), at least until 1968 the illusion had remained that the Mexican political system, with all its faults, deserved to be supported. After Tlatelolco, that illusion could no longer be sustained, and I believe it is largely due to that sense of disillusionment that Poniatowska, like Barnet in the Cuban context, moves from the testimonial to the sentimental in Dear Diego. Notwithstanding their critique of postrevolutionary Mexico and its nationalist discourse, Poniatowska’s testimonial works (as well as many of her works of fiction and journalism) still show a strong desire to seek out the roots of Mexican identity. In Dear Diego, as will be seen, Quiela idealizes Mexico as a sort of Utopia or transcendent space. It is true, of course, that national identity has been a perennial theme of Spanish American authors, but in Poniatowska it is inseparable from her biographical background as a Paris-born daughter of French-Polish and Mexican parents, whose family took refuge in Mexico during World War II and ultimately settled there. A desire to identify with Mexico and Mexicanness is a recurrent motif in Poniatowska’s work, appearing less as an intellectual project than as a vital necessity. Poniatowska’s search for Mexicanness is most immediately seen in her stylistic penchant for mimicking orality and the traits of popular Mexican dialect. This attempt to identify with the language of the streets and to distance herself from conventional literary language is probably what leads Poniatowska to claim in interviews that, as a child, she learned Spanish

30


“with the maids . . . . In fact, until recently I still spoke using forms such as yo vie and nadiem” (García Pinto 184). Nevertheless, rendering the traits of Mexican popular dialect into a self-conscious medium such as literary writing can never be anything but a deliberate gesture. Significantly, Poniatowska states in the aforementioned interview that what fi rst drew her attention to Josefi na Bórquez was the way she talked: “I met her after hearing her talking in a communal clothes-washing basin. She really caught my attention; it was in a street near the center, in Revillagigedo street. I liked a lot how she spoke and so I looked her up” (García Pinto 181). Seeking out the speech of Josefi na/Jesusa was for Poniatowska a search for the instruments with which to forge her own identity as a Mexican and as a writer. But Poniatowska’s “linguistic populism” is merely the starting point of a broader process of recovering a Mexican popular aesthetic in all its varied forms, from the lyrics of corridos, rancheras, and boleros to syncretic religious cults (such as Jesusa’s spiritualism) and, of course, to visual arts and handicrafts. Testimonial narrative’s anthropological bent had already paved the way for such a recovery, but Poniatowska’s originality, in my view, lies in her awareness of the continuing importance of melodrama and sentimentalism in popular culture even when these were rejected by elite culture. When she writes Dear Diego, Poniatowska has already realized that Jesusa’s peculiarly aggressive stoicism is an atypical trait, a trait not shared by most Mexicans, and that what is most characteristic of Mexican (and Spanish American) popular culture is its constant reaffi rmation of “the right to weep”—el derecho de llorar, in Mexican dramatist Vicente Leñero’s humorous formulation. 23 Poniatowska deals quite directly in Dear Diego with the tension between her need to belong to a community—to experience communion, in a sense—and the no less urgent need to affi rm her individual subjectivity, her self, as a writer and as a woman. Sentimental discourse allows her to explore this situation, since the language of love and sentiment is also always moving between the extremes of shared experience—in matters of love “everyone is an expert,” as Judith Belsey reminds us (ix)—and the most intense, almost egotistic subjectivity. Dear Diego consists of a sequence of mostly fictional letters that try to recreate those sent by the Russian painter Angelina Beloff (nicknamed Quiela) to her celebrated husband, Diego Rivera, after he abandoned her in Paris in order to return to Mexico in 1920. The letters are followed by a brief third-person epilogue. Poniatowska’s main source for these letters, as she indicates in the epilogue, is The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera


31

(1963), a biography of Rivera by one of his U.S. admirers, Bertram Wolfe. Indeed, in Chapter 12 of his book, titled “Angelina Waits,” Wolfe alludes in some detail to Angelina’s letters to Diego, and even quotes extensively from them (111, 112–13, 115). Poniatowska incorporates those quotes, with some modifications, into her own text (Querido Diego 9–10, 59, 64–65, 69–70, 71). Moreover, in Chapter 6 through 11 of his book, Wolfe offers further details on Diego’s life with Angelina Beloff, and about the general context of their life in Paris, which Poniatowska also uses to recreate Quiela’s letters. At fi rst sight, Quiela resembles the suffering heroines of the eighteenthcentury sentimental novelist much more closely than Rachel, since, like Pamela or Clarissa (Richardson’s heroines), she unequivocally exemplifies goodness and nobility of character even as she withstands the blows of a hostile world and rejection from the man she loves. But the resemblance is deceptive in this case, since Quiela’s story, unlike the eighteenth-century tales, does not have a happy ending; arguably, like Rachel’s story, it lacks a defi nite ending, since Quiela remains unable to join with the object of her desire. Instead, for Quiela desire becomes an end in itself. “Lacking a response from Rivera . . . ” Claudia Schaefer points out, “Beloff’s subsequent letters are self-motivated and actually seem to respond to each other rather than to the absent lover, whose body (both literary and corporal) appears to have been replaced by the process of letter writing itself” (73). Dear Diego carries out an inversion of values similar to that proposed by Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse: “If I assume my dependency it is because for me it is a way to declare my demand: In the field of love, futility is not a ‘weakness’ or something ‘ridiculous’. It is a sign of strength. The more futile it is, the more it declares and affi rms itself as a strength” (Fragmentos 92). The novel does this by turning dependency into power and suffering into a means to achieve a superior form of knowledge. Such an inversion, which by now seems quite familiar, is only possible by means of eros and its writing. As in Rachel’s Song, Poniatowska’s novel explores the relation between writing and passion, that is, writing as eros, although in a far less distanced and ironic way than does Barnet’s text. This explains, to a certain extent, the mixed feelings Dear Diego generates in its readers, and perhaps especially in its female readers. This novel would seem to be designed to offend feminist sensibilities as well as antifeminist ones, since even readers less attuned to feminist issues may feel discomfort at the deeply servile and abject tone of Quiela’s letters to Diego. Dear Diego may be seen as the perfect illustration of Barthes’s

32


ideas about the “obscenity” of sentimentalism in the context of a literary, cultural, and political tradition based in large measure on the rejection of subjectivity and the affects (Barthes, Fragmentos 193). In this particular sense, Dear Diego would certainly be a deeply “obscene” work: Just as Rachel shamelessly displays her body on the stage of the Alhambra Theater, Quiela shows the self-destructive depths of her passion with an embarrassing openness. If Rachel’s Song, as discussed earlier, evokes in its discourse the aesthetics of the bolero, Dear Diego incorporates that aesthetics fully into its makeup, which is why its words are as direct and heartbreaking as the lyrics of the many boleros that insistently ask “Why don’t you love me?” or cry out desperately “Love me!” or even recall the urgency of a love message: Write to me . . . Don’t torment my life. A letter in your handwriting Will calm my suffering.24 Poniatowska’s turn to the epistolary genre in Dear Diego, besides being an ironic homage to one of the precursors of the testimonial or documentary genre (letters are “documents” par excellence), also marks a return to the literary-historical origins of sentimentalism, since a great many of the eighteenth-century sentimental romances—La nouvelle Heloïse, Werther, and Les liaisons dangereuses, among others—use the epistolary form. In this context, it should be remembered that epistolarity is consistently associated in these sentimental novels with femininity and, in general, with self-analysis, introspection, and intimacy. The epistolary genre, furthermore, throws into sharp relief the link between writing and love. If in Rachel’s Song the protagonist occasionally writes poetry and tries to turn herself into an author of sorts, in Dear Diego we fi nd another “visual” artist (so to speak) in Quiela, who, for more urgent reasons, turns herself into an “author,” with all this implies in terms of the power relations implicit in the acts of writing and reading. Epistolarity is also often associated with the search for communicative immediacy through the use of a language that is straightforward and unadorned. In Dear Diego it would be more precise to say that the entire text wavers between the extremes of mediation and immediacy. On the one hand, despite their rhetoric of immediacy, letters—in Poniatowska’s novel as well as in the epistolary tradition—are clearly a textual media-


33

tion. However much they use the “language of the heart” to bridge the gap with their readers, the fact remains that the letter itself attests to the absence and distance of the presumed interlocutor. The fact that Quiela’s letters in Dear Diego do not receive a reply underscores the rhetorical and artificial character of the supposed immediacy of epistolary discourse. On the other hand, by giving them access to Quiela’s letters, the novel places readers in the position of the letters’ intended addressee, Diego Rivera. Using the “found manuscript” technique that epistolary narrative derives from the romances of chivalry, 25 the text creates a sensation of immediacy by placing its readers squarely in the middle of an ongoing sentimental drama to which readers are expected to reply—of which I will say more in a moment. As may be seen, the epistolary technique in Dear Diego also evokes the zigzag movement between writing-as-eros and writing-as-agape that the new sentimental novels explore. From the point of view of eros, the language of Quiela’s letters is profoundly passionate and full of suffering, due to Diego’s rejection and distance. Although one might think that Quiela wishes to end her suffering by returning to an earlier state of conjugal bliss, the letters themselves show that her consensual marriage to Diego was already, from the outset, contentious and painful. An especially sad instance in this regard is seen in Quiela’s account of the illness and death of Dieguito, their son, a situation in which Diego practically refused to get involved: One afternoon you tried to read the newspaper and I still can’t forget your gesture of desperation: “I can’t Quiela, I don’t understand anything about anything, I don’t understand what’s going on in this room.” You stopped painting, Dieguito died, we went alone to the cemetery . . . . That day was atrociously cold, or maybe I was cold inside. You were absent, not once did you speak to me, you did not even move when I took you by the arm. (18) As the letters continue, we realize that Quiela is willing to keep loving Diego although he does not love her back, in spite of the suffering he causes her. Quiela thus follows the strange masochistic logic of eros, in which suffering is a way of purifying the self and moving toward transcendence. What does “transcendence” mean for Quiela? In Dear Diego, as in the discourse of courtly love, Quiela’s love gradually moves away from Rivera’s physical and spiritual being to become instead a more abstract love for

34


Mexico. This love in turn becomes even more sublime as it turns into a desire for artistic purity. In one of the novel’s most striking passages (which the real Quiela most likely would never have written), Quiela tells of how one night she felt possessed by the spirit of Diego, and in a hallucinatory metamorphosis, she turned herself into Diego and painted like him: I thought that your spirit had possessed me, that it was you and not I who was inside me, that this feverish desire to paint came from you and I didn’t want to lose a second of your possession. I even became fat, Diego, I burst at the seams, I couldn’t fit inside the studio, I was tall like you, I fought with the spirits—you told me once you’d had dealings with the Devil—and I remembered it then because my thorax expanded so much that my breasts, my cheeks, my double chin, became swollen. I was swollen like a car tire. I found a mirror and there I saw my face puffed up like a bellows from the inside. What pounding in my temples! And the eyes! How red they were! Only then did I touch my brow and realize that I had a fever—blessed fever! I had to make the most of it, live this hour until the last dregs; I felt you on top of me, Diego, it was your hands and not mine that moved. After that I don’t know what happened, I may have lost consciousness because I woke up in the morning lying next to the easel in the bitter cold. The window was open. I must have opened it during the night as you used to do when you felt your own body swelling up to cover walls, corners, covering so much land, going beyond its limits, breaking them. Naturally, I caught a chest cold, and had it not been for the solicitous kindness of the concierge, for her daily bouillons de poule, right now you would be saying goodbye to your Quiela. (23) These lines are a perfect example of what a few years later, in a classic essay that would have benefited from including Poniatowska’s text, feminist critic Susan Gubar observed about how many female artists have historically conceived their creative powers. For Gubar, female artists have often described their creativity “as an infusion from a male master rather than inspiration or commerce with a female muse” (303). Gubar further points out that “If artistic creativity is likened to biological creativity, the terror of inspiration for women is experienced quite literally as the terror of being entered, deflowered, possessed, taken, had, broken, ravished— all words which illustrate the pain of the passive self whose boundaries


35

are being violated” (302). In Quiela’s case, however, that “possession,” which almost ends up as death from pneumonia, is regarded, following the conventions of love-as-eros, not so much as a terrifying experience as an askesis that destroys the bodies of lover and beloved alike, taking them both, to paraphrase Quiela, “beyond their limits.” In other letters Quiela tells of how, thanks to her relationship with Diego, “I became terribly Mexicanized” (46), and elsewhere she declares: “You have been my lover, my son, my inspiration, my God; you are my country; I feel myself Mexican; my language is Spanish even if I speak it badly” (55). In turn, for Quiela and her Russian and French artist-friends, in consonance with the Neo-Primitivism of the Avant-Gardes, 26 Mexico becomes a metaphor of artistic and cultural transcendence: Élie Faure told me the other day that, since you had gone, a wellspring of legends from a supernatural world had dried up, and that we Europeans needed this new mythology because poetry, fantasy, sensitive intelligence, and spiritual dynamism were all dead in Europe. All those fables you told about the Sun and the fi rst inhabitants of the world, all your myths—we need them; we miss the spaceship in the shape of a plumed serpent that once existed, wheeled in the skies, and landed upon Mexico. (47) However, in the narrative itself, “Mexico” ends up being as unreachable for Quiela as Diego. Although the third-person epilogue states that Angelina Beloff did manage to move to “the land she longed for” (72; that is to say, Mexico), the text does not give further information about Quiela’s fate in Mexico save for an episode that underscores her separation from Diego: “[Quiela] did not seek out Diego, she didn’t want to bother him. When they came across one another at a concert in Bellas Artes, Diego passed her by without recognizing her” (72). Dear Diego tells the story of a passion that turns Quiela into a writer, an author, but also suggests that this was a failed enterprise, since Diego did not read her letters. At this level, it would seem that Dear Diego tells the tragic story of a love that consumes itself in the most absolute solitude and abandonment. Writing would then be like the residue of a lonely and infi nite passion that denies its own life and seeks a fi nal union with transcendence. Moreover, it would seem that we are witnessing the failure of sentimental writing, which, instead of being seductive, becomes importunate and pathetic. The loving and cultured but self-destructive Quiela

36


would seem to be the reverse, as in a photographic negative, of the bitter, uncultured, and self-sufficient Jesusa: two faces of women in their relation with men, the world, and writing. Nevertheless, as I pointed out in alluding to the technique of the “found manuscript,” there are elements in Dear Diego that take the novel beyond the solipsism of writing-as-eros and link it instead to the search for communion, or agape. By presenting the text as a collection of letters, Dear Diego seeks to involve its readers in the fictional narrative, placing them in the position of the letters’ addressee, that is to say, of Diego Rivera. We see here a mechanism similar to that found in Rachel’s Song, in which an analogical relation is posited between the historical past and the present in which the text is being read. In Rachel’s Song, it is the parallel between Republican Cuba and Cuba after the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. However, in Dear Diego Poniatowska goes even further by making use of figural allegory or prefiguration. As Erich Auerbach writes in his classic essay “Figura” (1944): Figural prophecy implies the interpretation of one worldly event through another; the fi rst signifies the second, the second fulfi lls the fi rst. Both remain historical events; yet both, looked at in this way, have something provisional and incomplete about them; they point to one another and both point to something in the future, something still to come, which will be the actual, real, and defi nitive event. (58) For example, in the Bible, Adam next to the Tree of Knowledge is a figura Christi, that is, a prefiguration of Christ on the cross, and Christ in turn is the fulfi llment and the supreme version of the image that Adam vaguely anticipates. This ancient mode of interpretation, which is rooted in Judeo-Christian providentialism and Biblical exegesis, returns in a renewed, secularized form in works of the early-twentieth-century narrative avant-garde (such Joyce’s Ulysses) and is a favorite of the Spanish American Boom authors and their precursors. 27 Poniatowska evokes it in Dear Diego by means of parallels between herself and Angelina Beloff: aside from being female artists, both have Slavic roots (Poniatowska’s Polish, Beloff’s Russian), both emigrate to Mexico, both display a strong desire to identify with Mexico and Mexicanness, and for both Diego Rivera is an emblem of Mexican identity.28 However, if Quiela prefigures Poniatowska, Poniatowska in turn is a


37

“fulfi lled” version of Quiela. Poniatowska achieves this because she is able to do what Quiela could not: make Mexico (Diego?) read her letters, now turned into a novel. The title of a collection of journalistic chronicles by Poniatowska, Fuerte es el silencio (Strong is Silence, 1980) is highly suggestive in terms of Poniatowska’s strategy in Dear Diego. To begin with, in this novel the “strength of silence” makes itself felt in Diego’s monolithic silence, which is the silence of power, which does not need to speak to make its strength felt. Diego’s silence is also that of the visual work of art, of the painting on canvas or the mural. Poniatowska appropriates this silence, in two ways: fi rst, through the letters’ textuality. Letters and documents are emblems of the absent voice, of the silence of the text. Secondly, Poniatowska carries out an ellipsis or rewriting of the context, which in this case is the biography of Diego Rivera written by Bertram Wolfe. Instead of surrounding Quiela’s epistolary fragments profusely with commentary, as Wolfe does, Poniatowska discards Wolfe’s masculine and authoritarian commentary and lets the letters “speak” for themselves. In this sense, Poniatowska, like many of the female writers discussed by Gubar, uses the strategy of the “blank page,” which consists of not writing what the patriarchy and society expect her to write: While male writers like Mallarmé and Melville also explored their creative dilemmas through the trope of the blank page, female authors exploit it to expose how woman has been defi ned symbolically in the patriarchy as a tabula rasa, a lack, a negation, an absence. But blankness here is an act of defiance, a dangerous and risky refusal to certify purity. The resistance of the princess [in Isak Dinesen’s “The Blank Page”] allows for self-expression, for she makes her statement by not writing what she is expected to write. (305–306) Writing, like the visual image, embodies the paradox of communication by means of silence, a paradox that Poniatowska uses in her text to the fullest. Moreover, unlike Quiela, Poniatowska is not only a professional writer, but also journalist, and she understands much better than her precursor what Diego Rivera also understood well: the power of public discourse. With her experience as a journalist, Poniatowska knows that the sentimental power of literature works best in a more public, less intimate context; an almost theatrical context in which, by means of a third individual (an actor or actress) the circuit of communication between au-

38


thor and reader is strengthened. Like Rachel on the stage of the Alhambra Theater, or like a bolero singer, the author of Dear Diego reveals Quiela’s intimate amorous discourse to all and sundry. In doing so, Poniatowska redeems Quiela, allowing her letters to be read, ensuring that they reach not one but many addressees, while also challenging her readers to respond to Quiela’s expressed need for love. As she does to Diego, Quiela also claims the attention of her readers, an attention that may lead to a whole gamut of responses, from irritation and polemics to compassion, love, or the chivalrous wish to “save” her, but which in any case seeks to establish a relation of proximity between Quiela and her readers, to turn Quiela into our “neighbor.” In this context, the figure of the author appears as a go-between, a mediator who makes possible the love-as-agape between Quiela and the reader, between Quiela and Mexico, by means of the lachrymose conventions of sentimental fiction. Earlier in this chapter, I argued that one of the deeper motivations for the turn to love and sentimentalism in the Spanish American narrative from the 1980s on is the intention of exploring the more seductive and vital aspects of writing, as opposed to the violence that has so often been associated with it. We have seen how Miguel Barnet and Elena Poniatowska took the fi rst steps in the transition toward a new sentimental narrative from the point of departure of testimonial or documentary fiction. The latter, despite its rhetoric of sacrifice and obsession with violence, paved the way for sentimentalism by means of the renewed interest in individuals, in specific persons with their specific desires, needs, and circumstances, seeing them as the true agents of history and not as an anonymous mass subjected to socioeconomic determinations. Barnet and Poniatowska gave the subjectivity already present in the testimonial genre a new twist by incorporating the affective dimension and the symbolic systems by which this dimension is expressed. In Rachel’s Song and Dear Diego we saw how the ruthless search for a collective “truth,” as well as the view of existence as a struggle, that characterized testimonial narratives were replaced by the expression of individual needs and emotions and by a search for healing or convalescence, through love, of the wounds caused by the great social and ideological struggles of the previous years. We also observed in these works of the new sentimental narrative a tension between two ways of conceiving the relation between love and writing: On the one hand, that of writing-as-eros, as passion, linked to suffering and violence, to knowledge and the realization of individual subjectivity,


39

and on the other, writing-as-agape, as love for your fellows, linked to conventionalism, compassion, and the search for a sense of community. In my reading of the works by Barnet and Poniatowska I pointed out how, despite the presence of numerous elements that could be associated with agape—for example, the allusions to popular music and to melodrama—in these two novels there still predominates the passionate view of writing that is also found in the Boom narratives and in the testimonial fictions the new sentimental narrative aspires to replace. Love as eros, with its enormous literary-historical prestige, still predominates in the writing of these inaugural works of neosentimentalism. We are still faced, then, with the fundamental questions raised by this new narrative: Is it possible to produce, by means of amorous and sentimental themes, a new type of writing that will encourage the development of a true sense of community amongst authors, texts, and readers? Is it possible to free writing from the violence and disjunction that seem to be inherent to it, to create instead a writing based on love and communion, a generous and happy writing that will not repeat the confl icts of society and history? As will be seen in the next chapter, Chilean author Isabel Allende confronts these questions directly in her second novel, Of Love and Shadows (1984), and in the attempt to answer them she begins to make even clearer the outlines of the new sentimental narrative in Spanish America.

Patriotic Passion

ONE

Isabel Allende’s Of Love and Shadows

The search for communion through writing has been a constant element in the narrative career of Isabel Allende, whose books hold an ambiguous place in the canon of Spanish American literature. This is due to the fact that, even as they evoke certain aspects of the Boom, they also tend toward a “lighter” and more easily consumed kind of writing. In this sense, Allende’s work is typical of the Post-Boom and of the new sentimental narrative. Like many of these works, those of the Chilean writer display a constant use of commonplaces, of conventional styles and themes, in order to produce a more effective and affective communication with readers.1 Commonplaces and conventionalisms are not the only ways to elicit a sense of communion, of course; another, much less inclusive way, is to endow novels with some of the traits of sacred texts such as the Bible or the Qur’an—texts that demand an attentive and devoted reading, a reading sustained by faith. The Boom novels frequently followed this model: for example, the history of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude is contained in Melquíades’s prophetic parchments, which, when read aloud, sounded like “chanted encyclicals” (68). In earlier works, such as Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1964) and José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso (1966), one fi nds the figure of a savant or demiurge who is the possessor of an occult and transcendent knowledge, as is the case with Morelli and Oppiano Licario. The Boom’s “total novels” offered themselves to readers not just as entertainment, but as instruments to acquire knowledge of Latin America’s


41

reality at all levels, from the social to the metaphysical. These novels attempted to create communities of readers by turning reading into a shared experience—one that was frequently arduous, similar to the rites of passage and the “mysteries” of premodern cultures and of religious cults. Often, as in Cortázar’s works, readers were invited to become “accomplices” (with the ethical ambiguity the term implies) of the author and the text, a “complicity” that was also a kind of discipleship. Like cults or elitist sects, these communities of readers were preoccupied with keeping the uninitiated at bay, unlike the more down-to-earth, broadly democratic community sought by the testimonial narratives and—with perhaps greater intensity—by the new sentimental novels. From her fi rst novel, The House of the Spirits (1982), Allende tries to establish a relation with the reader as a fellow instead of as an accomplice or a disciple. As many critics have already pointed out, this novel’s originality lies largely in being a feminist rewriting of One Hundred Years of Solitude. 2 However, I believe that Allende’s notoriously epigonal and mimetic attitude toward García Márquez may also be understood as a search for a broadly popular as well as prestigious literary model. Even the differences between The House of the Spirits and One Hundred Years of Solitude have to do with further opening up the text to its readers, since Allende’s novel does away with what some readers perceived as “obstacles” to their understanding and their enjoyment of García Márquez’s text. For example, in telling the story by way of a matriarchal genealogy, The House of the Spirits neutralizes or tones down the patriarchal machismo that feminist readers found distasteful in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Something similar happens when Allende abandons the tics of “magical realism” toward the end of her novel in favor of a more “realistic” mode, and substitutes an openly melodramatic and sentimental tone for García Márquez’s deadpan narrative style. The fi nal reconciliation between the reactionary grandfather Esteban Trueba and his leftist granddaughter Alba is emblematic of the movement toward communion in The House of the Spirits. In the novel’s last pages, Alba expresses her hope that all the violence she has suffered—caused partly by her grandfather—will be resolved in a harmonious future: I suspect that nothing that happens is fortuitous, that it all corresponds to a fate laid down before my birth, and that Esteban García is part of the design. He is a crude, twisted line, but no brushstroke is in vain. The day my grandfather tumbled his

42


grandmother, Pancha García, among the rushes of the riverbank, he added another link to the chain of events that had to complete itself. Afterward the grandson of the woman who was raped repeats the gesture with the granddaughter of the rapist, and perhaps forty years from now my grandson will knock García’s granddaughter down among the rushes, and so on down through the centuries in an unending tale of sorrow, blood, and love. When I was in the doghouse, I felt as if I were assembling a jigsaw puzzle in which each piece had a specific place. Before I put the puzzle together, it all seemed incomprehensible to me, but I was sure that if I ever managed to complete it, the separate parts would each have meaning and the whole would be harmonious. (452–453) To a great extent, in The House of the Spirits Allende creates a sentimentalized version of the “total novel” of the Boom, in which the characters’ adventures do not lead them to an instant of transcendental revelation or knowledge about Spanish America and its culture (an instant that often coincides with death), but take them instead to the private and subjective sphere. Unlike Aureliano Babilonia, who perishes in the “biblical hurricane” that erases Macondo from the face of the earth after deciphering the fate of the Buendías, Alba is able (although barely) to survive the military coup that devastates her country. The profound disillusionment produced by this terrible experience leads her to seek the explanation for her situation in the realm of family relations and the emotions, instead of in politics and culture. As in Rachel’s Song and Dear Diego, in The House of the Spirits disenchantment, physical and spiritual wounds, and postrevolutionary fatigue bring the characters back to the sentimental plane. Nevertheless, in this novel sentimentalism is still overshadowed by the novel’s accumulation of genealogical and historical detail, which leaves little room for the display of subjectivity: significantly, most of the fi rst-person passages in The House of the Spirits belong to the fearsome Grandfather Trueba, who, with typical machismo, is not given to displays of sensitive feelings. In Of Love and Shadows Allende seeks to produce a novel in which amorous and sentimental elements defi nitively triumph over violence and suffering, a novel that will not be “an unending tale of sorrow, blood, and love.” The note that precedes the text of Of Love and Shadows, signed with the author’s initials, announces the victory of love over “vulgarity” (a revealing term, as will be seen shortly): “This is the story of a woman and a man who loved each other to the fullest, thus saving themselves from


43

a vulgar existence” (6). At the level of literary genre, this novel seeks to unite testimonial or documentary narrative to sentimental fiction, with the former subordinated to the latter. Despite Allende’s statements in which she posits a harmonious relation between these two genres (García Pinto 15–16, Rodden 52–53), the clash between testimoniality and sentimentality in Of Love and Shadows was all too evident to most readers, as evidenced by the rather brusque questions about this novel addressed to Allende by a German interviewer: You describe in your latest novel people kissing ardently in front of mutilated bodies. Do you think this is a way of overthrowing a dictator like Pinochet? Doesn’t brutality become harmless when it is adorned with romantic love scenes? (Zuber and Strieder 182; see also Hart 137, Mora, Lemaitre) As is well known, the plot of Of Love and Shadows is based on the reallife discovery in 1978 of the bodies of fi fteen peasants who had been buried alive by the Chilean military in the Lonquén mine in 1973, and on the investigation and court cases that followed. These events, which were covered by the Chilean and the international press at the time, were retold by the lawyer Máximo Pacheco in his book Lonquén (1983), one of the sources consulted by Allende (see Mora 60n, Rodden 51–52, Castillo Zapata 90–92, García Pinto 15–16). Nevertheless, in her novel Allende brings testimonial discourse (the “shadows” of the title) face to face with sentimentalism (love) in a more confl ictive and visible way than Barnet and Poniatowska. In my view, this confrontation aims to promote a notion of writing based not on the passion of eros but on Christian agape. Unlike Barnet and Poniatowska, who make ambivalent use of the discourse of passion in their works even as they lean toward agape, Allende writes Of Love and Shadows almost exclusively with agape as her point of departure and her ultimate goal. There is in this novel an attempt to mitigate the tragedy and suffering that characterize passionate love and to emphasize instead the values of solidarity and friendship. In this sense, the writing of Of Love and Shadows depends on a series of widespread cultural and social codes, whose mediating role the text constantly underlines. Two of the main codes Allende uses in this novel are Christian religion—evidenced in the frequent allusions to Christ’s passion and death, to the Gospels, and to the Letters of the Apostles—and the code of popular romance novels, known in Spanish as novelas rosas.

44


This does not mean that the discourse of eros is absent from Of Love and Shadows; as will be seen shortly, it can still be found in the many allusions the novel makes to high culture as well as popular culture: from the Medieval courtly love poetry and the romances of chivalry to the novelas rosas and TV soap operas. In fact, as I hope to show, Of Love and Shadows is more erudite and “intellectual”—and therefore more “erotic” in the sense of eros-as-writing—than it at fi rst appears. Nevertheless, there is clearly in this novel an attempt to “domesticate” passionate love and its ascetic style of writing, supplanting it with a more vitalistic kind of writing based on a sort of pluralism, on the presupposition that although the world may appear divided between “good” and “evil,” it is in fact a fusion of opposites. In order to appreciate how the tension between writing-as-eros and writing-as-agape works in Of Love and Shadows, it is fi rst necessary to briefly review the novel’s plot. Of Love and Shadows takes place in an unnamed country that can easily be recognized as Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The novel tells the tale of a young journalist, Irene Beltrán, sent by the magazine for which she works to cover the story of a peasant girl, Evangelina Ranquileo, who supposedly performs “small miracles” (De amor y de sombra 253).3 While visiting the Ranquileos’ farm, Irene and her photographer friend, Francisco Leal, witness the arrival of a squad of soldiers who have come to arrest the “little saint.” Falling into a trance, little Evangelina, displaying supernatural strength, punches and sends flying through the air the lieutenant who tries to arrest her, humiliating him before his men and the crowd of onlookers. Enraged, the lieutenant returns to the farm that same evening, kidnaps Evangelina, and—as is later discovered—murders her. Upon hearing of the kidnapping, Irene resolves to fi nd Evangelina. This leads her to an even more extensive investigation in which she fi nally discovers a mass grave where, along with Evangelina’s body, lie those of hundreds of people “disappeared” by the country’s army. As these events unfold, Irene and Francisco fall in love, and this, along with the macabre discovery of the military’s crimes, leads Irene to break her engagement with her cousin, army captain Gustavo Morante. Irene’s mother, Beatriz Alcántara, who has lost most of her previous wealth and runs a nursing home called “The Will of God” in the fi rst floor of her mansion, opposes Irene’s relation with Francisco, who is the son of exiles from the Spanish Civil War and whose father, Professor Leal, is an avowed anarchist.


45

The news of the clandestine grave is spread by the Catholic church and the foreign news media (since those inside the country are intimidated by the dictatorship), and this causes a national and international scandal. When Irene’s role in uncovering the grave is discovered, the secret police try to assassinate her. Deeply moved by the attack against his former fi ancée, Captain Morante tries to provoke an uprising within the armed forces, but he is quickly captured and executed. Meanwhile, Irene, who has been hovering between life and death in the hospital, fi nally recovers. She and Francisco then realize that they have no other choice but to leave the country. Helped by friends and relatives, the two lovers leave heavy-hearted for exile, promising nevertheless to come back some day: “we will return, we will return . . .” (281). The plot of Of Love and Shadows, which I have very concisely summarized, is interwoven in the novel with a great many sentimental and melodramatic circumstances and events, a fact that has led some critics to associate this novel—unfavorably, for the most part—with the genre of the TV soap opera. Quite a few critics have also chastised this novel for its presumed inconsistencies and imperfections. Their criticisms range from the aesthetic to the political: the primary one, as was seen earlier, has to do with the inappropriate mixing of testimonial with sentimental elements. This mixture, along with a supposed lack of modulation in the narrative voice, is said to be the cause of stereotypical characterizations, incoherencies in the characters’ actions and motivations, the simplistic division of characters into “good” and “bad,” and a lack of suspense in both the amorous and the political aspects of the plot. It has also been said that, in the attempt to fuse sentimentalism with testimonial narrative, the novel presents a nebulous political ideology that denounces the revolutionary option, is “soft” on dictatorship, and seems to backtrack from The House of the Spirits’s more clearly feminist message.4 In my view, these inconsistencies and imperfections, be they due to the author’s inexperience or to shoddy editorial work, are also revealing in the context of the novel’s experiment with writing-as-agape. Without going so far as to say that these defects are deliberate, it is worth noting, however, that hardly any of the new sentimental novels have escaped similar criticisms (as will be seen throughout this book). These are fictions that almost ostentatiously display their formal or stylistic deficiencies, perhaps because in their attempt to achieve communion with readers the display of their vulnerabilities makes them more accessible, and also because in these novels verisimilitude and consistency (two debatable criteria of novelistic

46


perfection) are less important than the amorous effect these works aspire to produce and communicate.5 In stylistic terms, although Allende uses the “free indirect style” pioneered by Gustave Flaubert, Of Love and Shadows avoids Flaubertian irony as well as the use of the fi rst-person narration found commonly in testimonial as well as sentimental narratives. This novel’s presumed lack of modulation in the narrative voice may well be due to the attempt to avoid ironic distancing as well as the limits of the fi rst-person narrative. It is simply a purely functional narrative voice that tries to be transparent and incorporates other voices into its discourse as needed, without giving priority to any in particular, nor trying to experiment with narrative form. The tension between eros and agape in Of Love and Shadows arises as its protagonists, Irene and Francisco, move through a world dominated by the forces of eros or passion, which they see mostly as evil, in their search for agape, a communal spirit that is identified with goodness. Wandering in the midst of History (with a capital H), an environment in which passion, suffering, and egotism predominate, Irene and Francisco try to achieve De Rougemont’s “happy love,” which “has no history” (De Rougemont 15). Interestingly, the events that give rise to the novel’s plot have an ambivalent and liminal relation to the tension between eros and agape: these are the “seizures” suffered by Evangelina Ranquileo every day at noon (De amor y de sombra 25). Even as they seem to mimic the effects of erotic passion (74, 164), these attacks also bring together in the Ranquileo home a great many people from the surrounding community as well as from farther away. Evangelina’s convulsions, the novel tells us, cause objects in the house to shake and move strangely, and they are also linked to “insignificant marvels” such as the healing of warts (64, 66). These seizures are interpreted in widely differing ways in the text. Although the characters who stand for medical and spiritual wisdom in the community (the doctor at Los Riscos Hospital, the midwife, the Protestant minister, and the Catholic priest) regard them as a form of hysteria, the townspeople who come to see the young woman are divided in their opinion: some see them as mystical in origin, others see them as diabolical (66). The fact that the seizures always happen at the midpoint of the day underscores their symbolic ambiguity. From a more erudite standpoint, Evangelina’s crises could be associated with the tradition of the biblical “noonday demon” (Psalms 91:6), which many scholars relate to acedia, a feeling of spiritual stagnation and disgust, and which for Aldous Huxley is “in its most complicated and most deadly form, a mixture of boredom,


47

sorrow and despair” (22). No less puzzling, however, is the unusual physical strength the normally fragile Evangelina displays when Lieutenant Juan de Dios Ramírez comes to arrest her (De amor y de sombra 77–78). Is Evangelina possessed or enlightened? Is she strong or weak? Is she a child or a woman? Clearly, the symbolically divided body of Evangelina Ranquileo is the focal point on which many of the antinomies that divide Chile as a country also converge. When Irene and Francisco come to cover her story, they begin to see Evangelina as an emblem of the divided condition of their own country, a division or breach also symbolized by the mine at Los Riscos where, along with Evangelina, the bodies of those “disappeared” by the regime lie buried. The narrator tells us that Irene: Sensed that this saint of dubious miracles marked the frontier between her orderly world and a dark and unexplored region. Reflecting on this, she concluded that she was being drawn not only by her curiosity as a person and as a journalist, but also by something akin to vertigo. She had peeked into a bottomless well and she could not resist the temptation of the abyss. (127–128) For Irene, the almost-Manichaean discovery of the split in the world between Good and Evil, as well as between agape and eros, implies a loss of innocence, as the novel reminds us on many occasions.6 However, even before realizing she lived in a world where evil seemed to have triumphed, Irene already displayed her capacity for human solidarity, as seen in the episode of the maid Rosa’s stillborn child (143–146) and in her kindly behavior toward the elderly inmates of “The Will of God” (14). Irene’s spontaneous predisposition to do good—reminiscent of the protagonists in the eighteenth-century sentimental novels—is what ultimately leads her to fall in love with Francisco Leal. For his part, Francisco’s Manichaean awareness of good and evil in the world arises directly from his family heritage: from his father’s political activism and from his mother’s religiosity. Both of them, of course, had gone through the wrenching experience of the Spanish Civil War. When the novel begins, Francisco, who besides being a photographer has a degree in psychology (51), is already devoted in body and soul, along with his brother José, to the clandestine struggle against the dictatorship. Francisco and Irene are symbolically associated with agape from the novel’s beginning. They embody agape in their personal qualities and, later, in their love relationship, which flourishes after the discovery of the

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torture and killings by the dictatorship and is further solidified after the assassination attempt on Irene (241–244), until it develops into full-fledged conjugal harmony and happiness: Francisco ended up knowing Irene as well as he knew himself. In those long sleepless nights, they told each other the stories of their lives. There was not one remembrance of the past, nor dream of the present, nor plan for the future which they did not share. The gave each other their secrets, then went beyond physical limits and gave each other their souls. . . . They opened all their floodgates and this forged in them an unbreakable bond that helped them withstand the fear that had come to settle in their lives like an accursed presence. (250) Before reaching this point, however, the novel has already offered its protagonists (as well as the readers) many examples of conjugal agape: from the marriage of Digna and Hipólito Ranquileo, which lasts in spite of their poverty and of Hipólito’s itinerant work as a circus clown (36–39), to the highly exemplary union of Professor Leal and his wife, Hilda, which overcomes the adversities of war, Hilda’s amnesia, exile in Chile, and the suicide of their son Javier (122–127). Throughout the novel, the poor and the oppressed are viewed as faithfully practicing the love of their neighbors, and as people endowed with a far more intense community spirit than the wealthy who oppress them. Describing the “community of the poor” in which Francisco’s brother José, who is a priest, lives, the narrator states: It was a world of scarcity and hardship, where the only certain consolation was solidarity. Here nobody dies of hunger, because when they’re on the verge of hopelessness somebody always lends a helping hand, said José Leal when explaining the communal pots in which a group of neighbors put in what they could contribute to the soup that all would share. The newcomers lived attached to the families, because they were the poorest of the poor and did not even have a roof over their heads. In the children’s mess halls, the Church gave out food daily to the smallest ones. (211) Agape is also constantly present in the religiosity of the poor, and even in that of the authorities of the Catholic church. Although we are told in


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passing that Digna Ranquileo “distrusted Catholicism” because “she had seen the patrones in cahoots with the priest inside the parish confession booths” (65), she follows the advice of the pastor of the “True Evangelical Church” to which she belongs, and goes willingly to ask for help for Evangelina from the parish priest of Los Riscos (64–65). Instead of emphasizing the differences, the novel underscores the common Christian values that unite Protestants and Catholics in Chile. Characters such as José Leal and the unnamed Cardinal of the Chilean Catholic Church are fi rmly linked in this novel to agape. The Cardinal, we are told, “did not deviate an inch from his task of helping widows and orphans, aiding the imprisoned, counting the dead and replacing justice with charity where it was needed” (214). Beyond these thematic expressions of agape in the novel, there are in Of Love and Shadows a series of traits typical of writing-as-agape. The code of Christianity is one of these, as previously mentioned. The novel abounds in allusions to religiosity and to the Church, which, besides being easily recognizable to Spanish American readers, reinforce the theme of agape in the text. These allusions range from some of the characters’ names—the two Evangelinas and Francisco, whose fi rst name, the novel tells us, honors “the saint of Assisi, poet of the poor and of animals” (33)—to Hilda Leal’s Catholic fervor; the political and religious activism of her son, José; and the presence of other religious figures such as the pastor of the “True Evangelical Church,” father Cirilo, the parish priest of the Ranquileos’ town, and, of course, the Cardinal of the Chilean Catholic Church. Another of these agape-reinforcing codes is that of the novela rosa, including its more modern variant, the telenovelas, or TV soap operas. In a brief but perceptive essay, Linda J. Craft explores the similarities between the discourse of Of Love and Shadows and that of the TV soaps. Craft fi nds positive traits in both the telenovelas and the “testinovela”—as she calls the mixture of testimonial and sentimental elements in Allende’s novel.7 She convincingly shows how Of Love and Shadows makes use of the discourse of the TV soaps, particularly with regard to characterization, psychological complications, sentimentalism, and use of intimate details. As Craft observes: As feminist texts, De amor y de sombra and La mujer habitada work like soap operas in several areas. Both, like cinematographers, zoom in for close-ups of an extended network of family and friends. Allende focuses on the tensions between the beautiful young

50


journalist Irene and her vain mother Beatriz, who, afraid to grow old, takes lovers young enough to be her sons. The melodramatic and the complex familiar of the novel include the stories of the two Evangelinas, switched at birth; the intimacies of the residents of “La Voluntad de Dios,” Beatriz’s home for the aged; the rock-solid marriage of the Leal couple, who forty years earlier had made a harrowing escape from Civil War–torn Spain; the suicide of one of the Leal sons; the seizures and “demonic possession” of Evangelina Ranquileo; and the exploits of a cast of other colorful characters such as the homosexual beauty salon operator Mario, the Catholic Cardinal and his human rights activist friends, as well as Irene’s former lover, Army Captain Gustavo Morante, and his military cohorts. Irene, who seems to know “everybody who’s anybody” in the country, is caught in the middle of the social and narrative tensions. (204–205) Craft further notes that Of Love and Shadows takes advantage of the telenovela’s ability to offer “a medium for exposing and detailing their [female characters’] suffering in order to exact a maximum level of identification and pathos from the reader” (205).8 Complementary to the TV soap operas’ role in the discourse of agape in Of Love and Shadows are the allusions to both men’s and women’s fashion: the novel abounds in detailed descriptions of the characters’ dress and of how changes in the characters’ clothing styles reflect changes in their personality. One example among many is the passage in which police sergeant Faustino Rivera is being interviewed by Irene: He took notice of the changes in the young woman’s appearance and wondered where she had left her noisy bracelets, her flouncy skirts and the dramatic eye makeup that had struck him when he fi rst met her. The woman before him, with her hair collected in a braid, khaki pants, and an enormous handbag hanging from her shoulder, barely resembled his previous image of her. (203)9 Returning to this novel’s use of stereotypes in characterization, it is true that social and cultural stereotypes are evidenced in characters such as Mario the gay hairdresser, Rosa the cook, and even Beatriz Alcántara, who plays the role of the typical “wicked mother” of the telenovelas as well as being the mouthpiece for the reactionary prejudices of the Chilean upper class. Even when characters are deemed to be eccentric, such as Professor Leal, his anarchism and perpetual rebelliousness fit the clichés


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about the left-wing exiles of the Spanish Civil War. Although a flaw from the standpoint of an aesthetically rigorous reading, this penchant for typecasting without veering into caricature undoubtedly makes the novel easier to read and allows readers to focus less on the characters than on their experiences and on the emotional effect the novel aims to produce. It could even be argued that Of Love and Shadows’ appropriation of certain elements of testimonial narrative is another strategy to evoke the readers’ sympathy. As Craft observes, both testimonial narrative and the telenovela share marked populist tendencies: “While testimonio emanates from and incorporates voices of ‘the people,’ the telenovela has mass appeal and is directed towards those people” (201). Of Love and Shadows, as was already noted, incorporates documentary elements from the Lonquén case, but there are also two characters in the novel who may be seen as literary homages to the testimonial narrative: one is Josefi na Bianchi, whose resemblance to Miguel Barnet’s Rachel I will discuss later in this chapter, and the other is Evangelina Flores, Digna Ranquileo’s “real” daughter, who, in keeping with the apostolic resonances in her name, turns into a Chilean version of Rigoberta Menchú: Evangelina Flores was rescued from the clutches of repression and taken out of the country in the dark of night. She had a mission to fulfi ll. In the years that followed, she forgot the peaceful countryside where she was born and traveled all over the world to denounce the tragedy in her homeland. She spoke before the United Nations, in press conferences, in television appearances, in conventions, universities, everywhere, to speak of the disappeared ones and to stop oblivion from erasing those men, women, and children swallowed up by violence. (De amor y de sombra 264) True to its dualistic worldview, Of Love and Shadows also features a series of characters and situations thematically linked to eros, or passion, and associated in turn with evil or, at least, with morally ambiguous postures. The forces of Evil are represented in the text, in general, by the dominant groups in Chilean society, the upper class and the armed forces, whose values seem like perverted versions of eros and of the search for purity in religious sects such as the Cathars, as described by De Rougemont in Love in the Western World: The exact origin of the [Catharist] Heresy can be attributed to the Neo-Manichaean sects of Asia Minor and to the Bogomil churches

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of Dalmatia and Bulgaria. The pure or Cathars were affi liated with the great Gnostic streams that flowed across the fi rst millennium of Christianity. It is well known that the Gnosis, like the doctrine of Mani (or Manes), thrust down its roots into the dualist religion of Persia. What was the Catharist doctrine? . . . Underlying the attitude of the Cathars, or, more generally, underlying Dualism, there has ever been, alike in the most various religions and in the minds of millions of individual men, the problem of Evil. . . . To the problem of Evil Christianity offers an answer at once dialectical and paradoxical. It is an answer summed up in the two words “Freedom” and “Grace.” More pessimistic and more solidly logical, Dualism declares Good and Evil to exist in absolute heterogeneity. There are two worlds and two creations. In effect, God is Love, but the world is evil. Hence, God cannot be the creator of the world, of its darkness, and of the sin which coils itself about us. His creation was fi rst spiritual and then one of souls. It was completed and also perverted in the material order by the Rebel Angel, the Great Arrogant, the Demiurge—that is to say, by Lucifer or Satan. (78–79) Catharism—whose doctrine, let us recall, influenced the origins of courtly love—preached the view of the flesh as evil; the virtue of chastity and the disdain of all material ties and affections, including that of marriage; the consequent disdain of individual women and the exaltation of Woman as an ideal (as a symbol of saving Light; De Rougemont 81), and the notion of death and suffering as an askesis or a purifying technique that frees the soul from its bodily prison so as to join with the Godhead (De Rougemont 65–66). In Of Love and Shadows it is the military who most clearly represent the perversion of eros and the ideals of courtly love. For example, Gustavo Morante, whose surname evokes both the verb morar (to dwell) and morir (to die), is later dubbed by Francisco as “Death’s Beloved,” alluding to a song by the Spanish fascists which Gustavo frequently sang and that Irene naively sings one day to Francisco: I’m a man whom fate Wounded with its fierce claws; I’m the Beloved of Death, Whom I embraced with my strong arms And whose love was my banner. (68)


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Morante had spent twelve months of forced celibacy in Antarctica, and during this time he had written Irene two hundred and ninety letters that he could not send (104–105). We are also told that he “had the habit of referring to women as ‘ladies,’ thus marking the difference between those ethereal beings and the rough masculine universe. In his social behavior, his manners were somewhat ceremonious, verging on pedantry, in contrast with the gruff and cordial way that he treated his comrades-in-arms” (102). Moreover, it is clear that, for Morante, marrying Irene was primarily a way of ensuring his promotion to a higher military rank (105). Similarly, the other military characters in the novel, echoing the dictator’s rhetoric, insist that they are defending the “purity” of the country against “contamination” by foreign ideologies (128, 131–135), treat women with contempt, and practice the cult of death. The latter is justified in terms reminiscent of the abuse of Nietzsche’s ideas by Nazi war criminal Otto Dietrich zur Linde in Borges’s story “Deutsches Requiem,” although in a more colloquial, profanity-laced style:10 The Lieutenant wavered. Ever since he heard about the execution he looked haggard, and a voice from his childhood hammered inside his head, perhaps the voice of some teacher or of the father confessor in the priests’ school: All men are brothers. But that’s not true, whoever goes around spreading violence is no brother of mine, and besides, the country always comes fi rst, the rest is shit and if we don’t kill them they’ll kill us, that’s what the colonels say, it’s kill or be killed, it’s war, these things have to be done, pull up your pants and don’t tremble, don’t think, don’t feel and above all don’t look them in the face, because if you do, you’re fucked. (De amor y de sombra 133) On the civilian side, it is Beatriz Alcántara who symbolizes egotism and hypocrisy in her obsession with preserving the appearance of wealth and beauty despite losing her fortune after the disappearance of her spendthrift husband Eusebio. With her aristocratic and literary-sounding name, Beatriz, we are told, “preferred to kill herself working and do all sorts of tricks rather than display her deterioration” (48). Beatriz’s clandestine and purely sexual relation with her young lover Michel is meant to flatter her vanity and soothe her fear of growing old (172–173). It is through Beatriz’s point of view that the novel’s narrative voice describes, this time with evident irony, the efforts by the Pinochet dictatorship to “cleanse” or “pu-

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rify” the country. Upon returning to Santiago after one of her encounters with Michel, the narrator tells us that Beatriz: could enjoy the beautiful spectacle of the city in springtime, the streets cleaned, the walls freshly painted, the people courteous and disciplined. Thanks to the authorities, all was under control and under careful vigilance. She noticed the store shelves crammed with exotic merchandise never before sold in the country; the luxurious buildings with swimming pools surrounded by dwarf palm trees on the rooftops; cement seashells harboring fantasy-laden shops for the caprices of the newly rich and high walls hiding the regions of poverty, where life went on outside the order of time and the laws of God. Given the impossibility of eliminating poverty, it was forbidden to mention it. The news given by the press was soothing, they all lived in an enchanted kingdom. The rumors of women and children sacking bakeries out of hunger were completely false. Bad news came only from abroad, where the world struggled with irremediable problems that left the blessed fatherland untouched. . . . People remarked on the opulence, the economic miracle, the foreign investors attracted in droves by the goodness of the regime. The discontented ones were regarded as traitors to the fatherland, since happiness was obligatory. By dint of an unwritten law of segregation known to all, two countries existed within the same national territory: one belonged to the powerful and gilded elite and the other to the marginalized and silent masses. (174–175) Despite the attempt on Irene’s life and of the forced exile she and her lover are forced to endure at the end of the novel, Of Love and Shadows clearly aspires to portray the victory of agape over eros in Chilean society. At the level of the plot, the army’s crimes are uncovered and denounced by the Church and the international news media; Captain Gustavo Morante leads a failed coup against the dictatorship, seeking to vindicate the armed forces’ honor; and the two lovers, Irene and Francisco, develop a solid love relationship that takes as its model that of Professor Leal and his wife Hilda. At the level of language and style, the novel features elements that make the text more accessible to readers and promote a reading that is entertaining, with few barriers to understanding, and hardly any suspense (as Hart [138] notes critically). Nevertheless, although Irene and Francisco fi nd happiness with each other, and although the novel as a whole seems written from an optimistic


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standpoint, there is still impediment, suffering, and tragedy in the background, since ultimately Of Love and Shadows clearly portrays the clash between De Rougemont’s “happy love” that “has no history” and History itself, that is, the events and circumstances that surround and threaten such love. In this sense, the novel as a whole does show similarities to the Catharists’ beliefs, as De Rougemont describes them: the story of Irene and Francisco’s happy love for each other is merely a frame for the larger story of their “unhappy love” for their country. Their love for their country is indeed passionate and tragic because it must struggle against obstacles and divisions of all kinds, but particularly those of class, gender, and political ideology. Like Professor Leal and Hilda (whose story they repeat, as the novel itself notes [269–270]), Irene and Francisco belong to the group of the “pure ones,” those for whom the love of their country leads to suffering and to the figurative death of exile. The clearest indication of Irene and Francisco’s search for purity is the novel’s allusions to courtly love and chivalry—whose discourse is dominated by eros—when describing many of the circumstances and behaviors of these two main characters. To a great extent, Allende’s use of the modern and popular discourses of the novela rosa and TV soap operas paves the way for the reappearance of the more ancient and elitist discourse of courtly love which lies at the root of contemporary Western notions and representations of love. Of Love and Shadows, the novelas rosas, and the TV soaps all share a common repertoire of themes, images, situations, and even characters forged centuries ago in the courtly love tradition. The imperfection and the naiveté of Of Love and Shadows may also be attributed to its archaic elements, including its frequent and blatant allusions to Medieval chivalry and to the novel that parodied chivalry and also gave it new life: Don Quijote. Even the most cursory reading of Of Love and Shadows soon discovers references to courtly love and chivalric discourse. In fact, the plot of this novel displays many traits similar to those of the prose romance, a genre directly related to the romances of chivalry. As M. H. Abrams points out, this genre typically deploys simplified characters, larger than life, who are sharply discriminated as heroes and villains, masters and victims; the protagonist is often solitary, and isolated from a social context; the plot emphasizes adventure, and is often cast in the form of the quest for an ideal, or the pursuit of an enemy; and the nonrealistic and occasionally melodramatic events are sometimes claimed to

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project in symbolic form the primal desires, hopes, and terrors in the depths of the human mind, and to be therefore analogous to the materials of dream, myth, ritual, and folklore. (A Glossary of Literary Terms 120) As we have seen, a frequent complaint about this novel by Allende’s critics is its stereotyped and stylized portrayal of its characters, whose dress and outward appearance correspond too closely to their personalities and to the changes in their psychology (Mora, Hart 139–41). Another of this novel’s “defects” that echoes Abrams description of the prose romances is its Manichaean division of characters into “good” or “bad” ones, which we have already noted. Similarly, the names of the characters, along with their attributes and idiosyncrasies, present clear links to the tradition of the romances of chivalry. The two principal “knights” in this novel are Francisco Leal and Gustavo Morante. Although Francisco’s fi rst name, as mentioned earlier, alludes to the humble Saint Francis of Assisi, his surname, Leal (which means “loyal”) alludes to a chivalric virtue that Francisco displays in abundance. Moreover, his Spanish origins connect him with the tradition of Amadis of Gaul, which is continued in the Quixote. His chivalric “lineage” is seen most explicitly in Francisco’s father, Professor Leal, an overtly Quixotic figure who, paradoxically, was a “professor of Logic and Literature” (32). Described as a “thin man with the hands of a pianist and fi re in his veins” (32), Professor Leal abandons his Communist ideology after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 to become fervently and somewhat anachronistically an anarchist, much as Don Quijote follows the model of the knights-errant. The chivalric attributes of Gustavo Morante are even more evident than Francisco’s, although they are described in a mocking tone, as in the following passage, of which I have already cited the fi rst lines: Morante had the habit of referring to women as “ladies,” thus marking the difference between those ethereal beings and the rough masculine universe. In his social behavior, his manners were somewhat ceremonious, verging on pedantry, in contrast with the gruff and cordial way that he treated his comrades-in-arms. His national swimming champion’s physique was attractive. The only time the typewriters in the fi fth floor of the publishing house went silent was when he appeared in the newsroom looking for Irene, tanned, muscular, and haughty. He embodied the very essence of


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the warrior. The women journalists, the female layout designers, the emotionless models, and even the faggots stopped what they were doing to look at him. He walked past unsmiling, and with him there marched the great soldiers of all time: Alexander, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, and the celluloid armies of the war movies. The air became fraught with a deep, dense, and ardent sight. (102) Let us also recall the epithet Francisco gives Morante: “Death’s Beloved,” which alludes to the cult of death and passion that historically has moved from chivalric discourse to that of the military and ultimately to politics, as in fascism (De Rougemont 243–271). In this context, it is important to point out that Irene also comes from a wealthy lineage, since her peripatetic father, Eusebio Beltrán, was the youngest son “of a family of rich farmers” (48). Beatriz Alcántara, we are told, “fell in love with his aristocratic bearing, his surname, and the ambiance in which he moved” (48). Irene’s mother, in turn, “belonged to a middle-class family and from childhood she had yearned to rise in society” (48). Irene herself had been brought up by her parents like a princess in an ivory tower, “protected from the roughness of the world and even from the inquisitiveness of her heart” (141). This did not prevent her from turning, from Beatriz’s point of view, into “an outlandish creature who mocks everything and abandons painting and music to become a journalist . . . a trade for rascals that has no future and is even dangerous” (142). Irene’s work as a journalist links her, of course, to writing and the sphere of culture, which is closer to eros, although, as Beatriz’s comments remind us, journalism is also connected with a more popular, less-elitist form of culture. In general, Irene’s beauty, purity of heart, wisdom, and strength of character are reminiscent both of the donna of Provenzal lyric and of certain heroines of the romances of chivalry and their parodies, like the combative Angelica in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516). The theme of the quest is yet another echo of the chivalric tradition in this novel’s plot. Irene and Francisco’s search for a disappeared woman who, despite her humble origins, has links to the supernatural and is named, significantly, Evangelina has more in common with the quest romances of chivalric literature than with the modern detective novel. In this context, Eugene Vance’s observations about the chivalric narrative poem Erec et Enide (1165) by Chrétien de Troyes are highly suggestive: Erec et Enide is a story about the initiation of a young man and woman into adulthood. Its tightly interwoven episodes of knightly

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combat and courteous erotic love fall into three major parts: fi rst, a young knight’s experience of love that culminates in marriage; second, the testing of the conjugal bond; third, the accession of the pair as mature adults to a hereditary throne. (A New History of French Literature 42) Reminding her readers that Irene, even as she seeks Evangelina, is also looking for her lost father, Craft notes that Of Love and Shadows shares with I, Rigoberta Menchú (1985) and Gioconda Belli’s The Inhabited Woman (1988), “a similar pattern of the ‘coming of age’ novel,’” in that the protagonists “reject their mothers as hopelessly materialistic and bourgeois, and both embark on simultaneous (and perhaps contradictory) journeys of sexual/gender liberation and the search for the father who long ago abandoned the daughter physically and/or emotionally” (199). Furthermore, the interweaving of love with violence and death in Of Love and Shadows that scandalized some of its early readers (see Mora, Lemaitre, and Hart 137) is analogous to that described by Vance in Erec and Enide and is common to all other chivalric narratives. Even the characters’ behavior in specific episodes seems explicitly to evoke the codes of courtly love. The most elaborate and dramatic example is the passage in which Francisco, already in love with Irene, sleeps with her “like a brother” (106) when a curfew leaves them trapped alone in the offices of the journal where they work. They both lie down in a storied couch, “upholstered in red brocade” (107), which: was used by the employees when they had a headache, to cry out their lovesickness or other minor pains, or simply to rest when there was too much pressure at work. A secretary almost bled to death there because of a botched abortion; there Mario’s assistants declared their love to one another, and there he found them with their pants down over the faded cloth of bishop’s red. (107) Upon this furniture so emblematic of passion, Francisco undergoes a test of his pure love similar to that recommended by the medieval codifier of courtly love Andreas Capellanus in his De amore (1184–1186): It is the pure love which binds together the hearts of two lovers with every feeling of delight. This kind consists in the contemplation of the mind and the affection of the heart; it goes as far as


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the kiss and the embrace and the modest contact with the nude lover, omitting the fi nal solace, for that is not permitted to those who wish to love purely. This is the kind that anyone who is intent upon love ought to embrace with all his might, for this love goes on increasing without end, and we know that no one ever regretted practicing it, and the more of it one has the more one wants. This love is distinguished by being of such virtue that from it arises all excellence of character, and no injury comes from it, and God sees very little offense in it. (122) Francisco, as we are told in Of Love and Shadows, remained motionless, controlling even the air he breathed in order to hide from Irene his pulsating and terrible excitement. On the one hand, he regretted accepting that tacit agreement of brotherliness that had kept his hands tied for many months and wanted to launch himself in desperation to conquer her body, and on the other he recognized the need to control an emotion that could draw him away from the goals that ruled his life at that stage. Suffering cramps from the tension and anxiety, but wanting to prolong that instant forever, he stayed at her side until he heard the fi rst street noises and saw the light of dawn in the window. (108) Clearly, Francisco is not unfamiliar with the sort of askesis shared both by knights-errant and by the saint whose fi rst name he carries. The passage in which Irene and Francisco visit Pradelio in the mountain cave where he has gone into hiding (157–160) evokes the pastoral interludes that are frequently present in the romances of chivalry, famously parodied by the Quixote in the adventure of Sierra Morena and the tale of Cardenio and Lucinda (Quixote, chapters 21–31). The physical description of Pradelio is also reminiscent of those “giants” who often were the villains in the romances of chivalry,11 and although it is true that his passion for his adoptive sister Evangelina causes the novel’s tragedy, here he is presented as a mostly pathetic figure: Pradelio was a giant. His enormous skeleton was impossible to explain in someone from a family of mostly small people. . . . With great precaution, he used his hands, two paws with gnawed and dirty fi ngernails, as if he feared destroying whatever he touched.

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Uncomfortable in his body, he seemed to have grown all of a sudden, without the time to accustom himself to his own dimensions. Incapable of judging the length and weight of his extremities, he constantly clashed with the world in his permanent search for an adequate posture. (159) These and other elements of the chivalric tradition, which, as we have seen, are not limited only to the “evil” characters but are also present in the story’s protagonists and in many of their associates, and which are also pertinent to the plot structure and the discourse of this novel, point to a wavering in this text toward the idea of writing as eros. Even the topic of exile may be interpreted here as an expression of eros’s “infi nite desire” according to De Rougemont (61–62), which aspires to reunite what had been sundered: “we shall return, we shall return . . .” are the last words in this novel’s open ending (Of Love and Shadows 281). Having lost her innocence, Irene also loses her country (280), which for the foreseeable future she will only be able to recover by means of writing, an activity that seems to be closer to eros than to agape. Most problematical, from the perspective of the Good-Evil dichotomy posited by this novel is the fact that the novel repeats at the allegorical level what it has condemned at the level of the story itself, since, as we have seen, the military also claim to “suffer” for their fatherland. Our awareness of the chivalric elements in Of Love and Shadows blurs the Manichaean distinctions posited by the novel: the characters linked to agape also show traits linked to eros and vice versa, and more generally, the novel’s discourse, which seemed solidly founded on the idea of writing as agape, appears “contaminated” with eros. To which side does this dualistic novel fi nally lean, at least in regard to the two notions of writing that form part of the new sentimental narrative? Two “impure” characters that fulfi ll important functions in the narration may offer a way out of this impasse: the aged actress Josefi na Bianchi and the hairdresser Mario. It is through Josefi na—a character reminiscent of Barnet’s Rachel—that Irene is able to transmit the evidence that proves the army’s guilt, since it is Josefi na who hides and later gives Francisco Irene’s taped interviews (258). Similarly, Mario, the homosexual character, who is ambiguous and “impure” in more ways than one (since he also has dealings with members of the dictatorship), uses his gift of transforming appearances through make-up to help Francisco and Irene escape (260–261). In my view, it is precisely this openness to “impurity”—manifested also


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in the text’s own ambivalence between the extremes of eros and agape— that contributes, in the end, to decisively shift the text to the side of agape, of communion. In its attempt to fuse and reconcile literary genres and even ideologies that seem to be diametrically opposed, as well as in its willingness to confront the risks of imperfection, Of Love and Shadows clearly opposes any longing for “purity” and favors instead communion as a way of bridging the gap between love and shadows. As De Rougemont cannily notes, “Agape is incapable of destruction, and does not even wish to destroy what destroys” (311). Of Love and Shadows shows that in the narrative economy of the new sentimental novel, eros and agape, even when one seems to predominate over the other, will continue to be inseparably linked. Still unresolved, however, is the question of whether it is possible to reconcile the writing of passion with the writing of friendship without wholly surrendering to the clichés and conventions of mass culture.

Love or Friendship?

TWO

Tarzan’s Tonsillitis by Alfredo Bryce Echenique

1 Choosing a jewel, I bend Over the jewelers’ treasure-trove: I’d rather choose a true friend And leave aside love [Si dicen que del joyero tome la joya mejor, tomo a un amigo sincero y pongo a un lado el amor.] josé martí, versos sencillos To Sylvie Lafaye de Micheaux, because it’s true one writes in order to be loved more. bryce echenique, dedication page of la vida exagerada de martín romaña A true original among the Post-Boom authors, the Peruvian Alfredo Bryce Echenique must be regarded as the founding figure of the new sentimental narrative in Spanish America. The novels by Barnet, Poniatowska, and Allende discussed so far, although significant, are by and large individual experiments in the creation of a new sentimental discourse. In contrast, Bryce’s work, particularly after his second novel, Tantas veces Pedro (So Many Times Peter, 1977), has explored the issues of narrative sentimen-


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talism so intensely and consistently, and with such literary verve, that his influence can be detected even in works by canonical authors of the Boom generation, such as Cabrera Infante’s La Habana para un infante difunto, Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, and García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. As we have seen, the new Spanish American sentimentalism of Barnet, Poniatowska, and Allende is derived from the subjectivism already present in testimonial narrative. Partly a reaction to the implicit violence in writing, it is also a response to the disillusionment and discouragement felt by writers and intellectuals in Spanish America after a long period of revolutionary struggles. Thus, in the three aforementioned authors, sentimentalism always appears as an adjunct to their critiques of the social and cultural conditions of their respective countries. A similarly critical view is also present in Bryce’s novels, but the novelty of his work lies in the self-reflexiveness of its sentimental discourse. Instead of offering social or cultural commentary from a sentimentalized perspective, Bryce’s work is primarily centered on the exploration of love’s effects upon language and on the writing subject. He does this, it should be stressed, without forsaking the new sentimental writers’ aim to ground their novels not on passion but on communion. His 1999 novel, La amigdalitis de Tarzán (Tarzan’s Tonsillitis), is in my view his most probing statement to date about the links between love, subjectivity, and writing. To a great extent, it is also a reconsideration by Bryce of his prior works in the mode of the new sentimental novel. From his fi rst novel, A World for Julius (1970), Bryce has shown a penchant for delving into the origins of sentimental fiction. Although he claims not to have read Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767) until after he wrote A World for Julius (Ruiz 10), his novel shows an undeniable “family resemblance”—so to speak—with the novels of sensibility.1 Indeed, it is that almost-forgotten literary modality, rather than the testimonial narratives or mass-media genres like the novelas rosas, that is Bryce’s point of departure for his contemporary reappropriation of sentimental discourse. The allusions to Sterne become more overt in Tantas veces Pedro, along with an increasingly self-conscious use of sentimental themes and motifs. In this novel Bryce discovers what will become a sort of archplot for his novels: the story of the many and varied obstacles interposed between the male and female protagonists as they try to fulfi ll their love. These obstacles range from the barriers of social class to personal idiosyncrasies, and they are generally impossible to overcome. This then leads the pro-

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tagonists to seek out new love interests, although they remain affl icted by nostalgia for their former lovers. Moreover, the experience of passion transforms the protagonists, leading them to seek out more serene and stable kinds of amorous relationships, although for the male protagonists, at least, these relationships never end up in marriage. This is a plot that Bryce repeats, broadening and enriching it, like variations on a theme, in all of his subsequent novels: the diptych of La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña and El hombre que hablaba de Octavia de Cádiz (The Man Who Spoke of Octavia de Cádiz, 1985), La última mudanza de Felipe Carrillo (Felipe Carrillo’s Last Move, 1988), No me esperen en abril (Don’t Expect Me in April, 1995), Reo de nocturnidad (Prisoner of Nocturnity, 1997), Tarzan’s Tonsillitis, and El huerto de mi amada (The Garden of My Beloved, 2002). Like the main characters in the eighteenth-century novels of sensibility, the male protagonists in Bryce’s novels—from Julius, Pedro Balbuena, and Martín Romaña, to Felipe Carrillo, Manongo Sterne, Max Gutiérrez, and Juan Manuel Carpio—are fundamentally kindly, innocent, even fragile individuals forced to survive in a harsh environment: that of the adults in A World for Julius, and that of expatriation and amorous vicissitudes in the other eight novels. A World for Julius, furthermore, is set in a context of parent-child, master-servant relationships reminiscent of Sterne’s fiction. As in the English novels of sensibility, young Julius feels alienated from his wealthy family and closer instead to the household servants and other humble people in society. 2 Bryce’s fi rst novel also shares with the novels of sensibility and with modern novels such as Of Love and Shadows the tendency to produce a sentimental critique of its own society and culture. Like Allende, Bryce attempts in A World for Julius to portray a divided and violent world with a language that has been cleansed as much as possible of the violence implicit in writing as eros. Critics have pondered at length the role of orality in Bryce’s style;3 this is certainly one of the traits of his work that brings it closer to the ideal of writing as agape, particularly in A World for Julius, where, aside from instances of onomatopoeia, the novel’s discourse flows smoothly, incorporating Peruvian colloquialisms along with allusions to popular culture and the mass media without losing its high degree of readableness. As Phyllis Rodríguez-Peralta observes: Through Julius we come into contact with the privileged, egotistic, and self-indulgent world surrounding him. Indifference toward others, rather than actual cruelty, characterizes this environment,


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and the attitude extends in all directions. . . . But there is no overt social protest in Un mundo para Julius. Rather, the author-narrator allows the social milieu simply to exist. It is the reader who must decide its worth. Bryce himself, who belongs by birth to this select group, has been marked by his background; yet at the same time he appears anxious not to remain within its ambience. . . . [Bryce’s humor] is the same frivolous, ironic humor with which the “limeños” have responded to life since colonial times, and which characterizes much of their literature. Peculiarly suitable to the oral tone of this novel, it substitutes for bitter social criticism. The light, unforced quality of the humor incorporates a certain air of tenderness when it touches Julius, which in turn serves to build congeniality between author and reader. (155–156) It should be pointed out that Bryce’s novels avoid the lachrymose sentimentalism that was common in most eighteenth-century works—although not in Tristram Shandy. Bryce’s protagonists cry, it is true, sometimes abundantly, but they also rage, spit out sarcasms, get drunk, and throw up—all without losing their inherent goodness and naiveté. It is also worth noting that from Tantas veces Pedro on, Bryce’s seemingly oral style turns more passionate and violent. Nevertheless, beneath this abrupt and disjointed speech, plagued by anacoluthon, there does not lurk a passion that can turn to crime, as in Romantic fiction or in novels that view sentimentalism with irony, such as Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (1829). Instead, amorous suffering in Bryce is always moderated by humor and tolerance. In Tantas veces Pedro, as he says goodbye to his American girlfriend, Pedro Balbuena reflects: “I was thinking that this was the sort of experience my experience always gives me, and that I was loving Virginia and at the same time my sense of humor was noticing something rather amusing: Virginia didn’t stop leaving me and I didn’t stop consoling her” (64). In contrast, the character of Martín Romaña in Bryce’s homonymous novel narrates the “positive crisis” in his love life. No less significantly, he does this seated “on a Voltaire armchair” (Martín Romaña 13). The allusion is important because Voltaire, although not usually associated with sentiment nor tolerance, in fact makes use of sentimentalism in his novel Candide (1758), and his philanthropic leanings are well known. Thus, despite its use of violent hyperbole and anacoluthon, La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña, like Bryce’s other novels, displays a view of life that is closer to the reasonableness and common sense of Voltaire and Sterne than to the nihilism and irony of the Avant-Gardes.

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There is in Bryce’s narrative a search for a state of convalescence, of healing or repair, that is thematized in the main characters’ constant visits to physicians and psychiatrists but also becomes a sort of literary ideology that may easily be linked to the goals of writing as agape. Writing and reading, particularly writing and reading oneself, that is, self-reflexive forms of these two actions, are often seen by Bryce’s protagonists as ways to achieve mental and physical renewal—although, paradoxically, such a renewal is always deferred because of the abysmal perspective produced by narrative self-reflexiveness. As in Borges’s story “Averroes’ Search” (1957), in Bryce’s fiction self-reflexiveness does not lead to closure and coherence but instead causes a proliferation of multiple images of the self: significantly, a character named “Bryce Echenique” often irritates Martín Romaña with his presence in certain chapters of the novel (187, 500–503).4 Bryce’s critics have already observed the vitalistic nature of his writings;5 from the perspective of writing itself, however, such a vitalism is paradoxical, since it goes against a well-established tradition that views writing as a monument or epitaph, as something alien to the world of the living.6 Bryce’s vitalism is undoubtedly, like that of Barnet’s Rachel, a fiction, an illusion produced not only by his oral style but also by the incessant proliferation of his abysmal writing that never reaches its end, which is that convalescence or healing that would allow the narrator-protagonist to fi nally rest. Although they are not the main sources for Bryce’s sentimentalism, popular culture and the mass media, particularly Spanish American popular music, are notably present and fulfi ll an important role in Bryce’s novels. Allusions to music provide some of the strongest clues as to the ultimate intentions behind the Peruvian novelist’s use of sentimental discourse. Particularly in novels such as La última mudanza de Felipe Carrillo and Tarzan’s Tonsillitis, there are numerous quotes and references to popular song genres such as the bolero, the ranchera, the tango, and, of course, the Peruvian vals criollo. The lyrics of these songs, like sentimental fictions themselves, tend to avoid the ironic tone so common in modern literature after Romanticism; the authors of boleros, for example, nonchalantly use the commonplaces of amorous rhetoric in order to convey their feelings unambiguously: It’s the story of a love that has no equal, that made me understand what’s good and what’s bad; that fi rst gave my life light


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and later darkness —oh, it’s such a dark night! Without your love I won’t survive. (Rico Salazar, 345) In fact, this bolero—“Historia de un amor” (A Story of Love)—is a key musical allusion in the story of Felipe Carrillo, a story its narrator jokingly calls a “Chronicle of a bolero foretold” (La última mudanza de Felipe Carrillo 71). Bryce’s use of popular song in his texts clearly indicates his desire to overcome irony and achieve a more immediate communication with his readers through a system of shared references. Further, these songs become a sort of guide to the “sentimental education” of the novel’s characters as well as its readers. Felipe Carrillo has two record players he listens to simultaneously and which he uses to try to resolve his amorous conundrums: one is for the music on the “for” side, where he plays the tango “Cambalache,” and the other is for the “against” side, where he plays the ranchera “Volver.” (141). More significant still is the content of that “sentimental education” offered by Bryce: opposing the Latin American macho tradition, Bryce’s texts display a positive view of men’s expressions of their feelings and promote a notion of masculinity based on the mutual respect, tenderness, and understanding between men and women. Although the lyrics of some Spanish American popular songs are decidedly male-supremacist, not a few boleros, tangos, and valses are “androgynous,” that is, they can be sung by both men and women.7 Bryce’s novels share in that fruitful androgyny: suffice it to recall that the tradition of eighteenth-century sensibility with which Bryce’s novels are connected gave female protagonists pride of place (as in Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa). It would be inaccurate to state that all of Bryce’s novels incorporate a feminist perspective (although this is the case in Tarzan’s Tonsillitis), but they undoubtedly display an intense reflection about gender roles in Spanish American society. Bryce’s male protagonists still show many childish traits, including a tendency toward sexual indifferentiation. Such is the case, for example, in Pedro Balbuena’s fl irtation with the homosexual priest in the Convent of San Pedro (Tantas veces Pedro 198–201), or in the grotesque comparison of the surgery to remove Martín Romaña’s fecal tumor to a Caesarean section: “A fecaloma, doctor?” “The most important one of my career, Miss. Look at his belly. It’s like he’s nine months pregnant.”

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“Baby is coming,” said I, speaking aloud to my innards. (La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña 575) Moreover, alongside the fragile and sensitive male protagonists Bryce features a gallery of strong and independent female characters: Vilma in A World for Julius, Sophie in Tantas veces Pedro, Inés and Sandra in La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña, Octavia in El hombre que hablaba de Octavia de Cádiz, Eusebia (in contrast to the problematical Genoveva) in La última mudanza de Felipe Carrillo, Tere in No me esperen en abril, Ornella in Reo de nocturnidad, and Fernanda María in La amigdalitis de Tarzán. As in the works of Barnet, Poniatowska, Allende, and other PostBoom authors, Bryce’s novels also carry out a profound and much-needed transgression of the codes of machismo. Martín Romaña’s “rectal via crucis” may be seen as an emblem of Bryce’s own view of the relation between writing and love, which foreshadows that of García Márquez in Love in the Time of Cholera. It is a neomedieval view, rooted also in pagan antiquity, of love as sickness. When his wife Inés ceases to love him, this produces in Martín a compensatory impulse toward retention—not just of Inés, but also of any word or action that might push Inés further away from him. Martín’s love for his wife is not fully the troubadour-style love he at fi rst believes it to be (as when he uses a courtly epithet when referring to Inés: “Light from which the Sun takes its rays”); neither is it, of course, an example of conjugal agape. It is instead an unrequited love, a love that is refused. This leads Martín to his figurative and literal constipation in the novel’s fi nal chapters: His “fecal tumor” is thus an emblem of the amorous text Martín carries within him and which Inés does not allow him to express. Martín’s “lovesickness” may be seen as a parody of the amor hereos or “heroic love” of the Middle Ages, which is profoundly passionate. In medieval medicine, this disease was believed to be caused by an extreme fi xation on the love object that led to what Michael Solomon calls “síndrome rana/Diana” (“frog/Diana syndrome”), in which the lover ignores or represses whatever is unpleasant or disagreeable (the “frog”) in his beloved, and substitutes pleasant and desirable traits like those of the goddess Diana (Solomon 58). Amor hereos sufferers lose their appetites; their faces turn yellowish; their eyes become sunken; they suffer from rapid mood swings and bouts of insomnia (Solomon 58). Martín displays all of these symptoms throughout the novel, although they worsen, significantly, after Martín learns of the death of his best friend, the Spaniard Enrique


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Alvarez de Manzaneda (433–438). To a great extent, only the friendship of people such as Enrique, the philosopher Carlos Salaverry (404–406), and the harmonious Spanish couple of the Feliús (444–452) has helped Martín withstand his marriage to Inés—a marriage without agape that becomes a mockery of courtly love and the suffering it produces. Only Martín’s newfound love for Octavia—still mostly visible as friendship in La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña, but which will turn into passionate love again in El hombre que hablaba de Octavia de Cádiz— manages to “free” Martín from his muteness to the point that it provokes its opposite: incessant verbalization, logorrhea, a sort of verbal “cholera.” Indeed, another positive aspect of amor hereos for a writer such as Bryce is that even its “cure” takes place through language, by means of the logotherapy and confabulatio recommended by medieval treatises (Solomon 37–38, 59–62). Love in Bryce is still regarded as an illness, but one that can be withstood as long as its effects produce writing. The most cursory review of Bryce’s work reveals that although his work deals extensively with passion, its main motivation, as in Allende, continues to be the search for communion. With respect to passion Bryce is a rationalist and an analyst in the style of Stendhal—even if, unlike the French master, he allows passion to affect the language and the form of his texts. Nevertheless, the key theme of friendship, along with Bryce’s vitalistic attitude, suggest that there is in his work a search for equilibrium, for a sort of moderate passion, so to speak. Passion in Bryce avoids the Romantic excesses (in the style of Tristan and Isolde) denounced by De Rougemont: his is not a passion that can culminate in crime or suicide (although he sometimes toys with the notion). In this sense, it is a fictional passion, a passion whose main aim is the creation of a literary text. Passion is the myth Bryce needs to create his writings; however, it is a myth that is toned down by reasonableness and tolerance—virtues embodied in Bryce’s celebrated sense of humor—since ultimately the Peruvian novelist does not seek the transcendence of a burning eros but the stability of communion, of agape, of friendship.

2 If I should contradict myself in error’s deep confusion, whoever has known love will understand my effusion.

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(Si acaso me contradigo en este confuso error aquel que tuviere amor entenderá lo que digo.) sor juana inés de la cruz, “amoroso tormento” (cited by bryce as an epigraph to la vida exagerada de martín romaña) Calisto and Melibea got married—as readers will know, if they have read La Celestina . . . Azorín, “las nubes” With Bryce’s typical blend of humor and sentiment, Tarzan’s Tonsillitis tells the story of a love that survives not only in spite of time and distance, but also because of these two terms, and almost requires them in order to exist. Despite their love, from their fi rst meeting and for thirty years afterward, the Peruvian Juan Manuel Carpio and the Salvadoran Fernanda María de la Trinidad Monte Montes are unable to unite the trajectories of both of their personal and professional lives, which neither of them is willing to renounce. In Juan Manuel’s case it is his career as a singer and composer, which eventually leads him to wealth and celebrity. For Fernanda, it is her search for personal independence, which follows a more haphazard course: It begins with her job as “Proofreader-in-Chief” at the UNESCO in Paris (31) and continues with her unhappy marriage to Enrique, a Chilean photographer. This is followed by her travels to Chile, the return to her homeland in the middle of El Salvador’s civil war, her exile in California, her divorce from Enrique, and, lastly, her marriage to Bob. All the while, she has been keeping alive her love for Juan Manuel through copious letters and fleeting reunions. At the novel’s end, the two lovers continue in their amorous comings and goings, often in a ménage à trois with Fernanda’s successive husbands, without resolving to break their other commitments in order to fi nally marry and live together in one place. At fi rst sight, Tarzan’s Tonsillitis seems to propose the search for an equilibrium, a middle point, between passionate love and communion or friendship. A quote from Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees (1950) in one of the novel’s five epigraphs is suggestive in this respect: “He had experienced anguish and sorrow. But he had never been sad in the morning” (Tarzan’s Tonsillitis 9). As one of Tarzan’s Tonsillitis’s fi rst reviewers observed, this novel tells “the story of a feeling through time: a feeling whose evolution goes through the various phases of passion only to


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end up as a sort of fondness or friendship, but which at every stage is presented as a love that is serene, respectful, and understanding” (Martínez de Pisón 6). Bryce appears to present here a post-tragical view of passion, much as one fi nds in the well-known essay “Las nubes” (The Clouds, 1912) by the Spanish author Azorín. “Calisto and Melibea got married . . .”: with these surprising words Azorín begins his essay, in which he imagines what might have happened if the doomed lovers of the tragicomic medieval play La Celestina had been able to wed and experience together domesticity and the routines of daily life. Like two planets whirling around a common center of gravity, in Tarzan’s Tonsillitis Juan Manuel and Fernanda’s passion (symbolized by the distance and the obstacles that separate Juan Manuel and Fernanda) has been effectively counterbalanced by friendship (as seen in the content of their letters and in the atmosphere of the lovers’ few physical encounters). Nevertheless, Fernanda’s fi nal comments and the novel’s inconclusive ending, along with other aspects in the text, suggest that this equilibrium is an illusion: “Believe me, peace is just a very deep manifestation of nostalgia, Juan Manuel Carpio. Peace is, in the end, just nostalgia, my dear old . . .” (319). The ellipses leave open the term Fernanda would use to fi nally describe her relation to Juan Manuel (“my dear old friend?”), suggesting that their relationship is still ongoing and that the balance between passion and friendship has not yet been achieved and may perhaps be unachievable. To better understand the nature of this imbalance, a review of those aspects of the text related to writing as eros and those related to writing as agape is in order. It is best to explore writing as agape fi rst, since this concept seems closest to Bryce’s literary project. There are many elements in Tarzan’s Tonsillitis, as in other works by Bryce, which are related to the idea of writing as a form of communion. The most obvious one is the theme of friendship. Friendship is one of the highest values in what might be called Bryce’s “ethics of writing,” and it is most visible in the dedications of his novels, which are always effusive and detailed in their allusions to friends and family members who have either been present during the novel’s writing or have aided in it: “With all my affection, I wish to express my most sincere gratitude to my cousins . . . for the generosity with which many times they invited me to their hotels . . . in Gran Canaria. There I found the peace and tranquility to begin, continue, or end, some of the last books I wrote in Europe” (Tarzan’s Tonsillitis 7). Within the text itself the theme of friendship appears in an analogous manner, since the relation between the two protagonists begins and is later

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mediated by a group of friends: the Salvadoran diplomats Charlie Boston and Rafael Dulanto (“a great specialist in knowing exclusively enchanting people,” 38), the Peruvian composer Don Julián d’Octeville y González Prada, and the Ecuadorian expatriate Edgardo de la Jara. Furthermore, as is evidenced in their letters, the relationship between Juan Manuel and Fernanda, even in its most passionate moments, bears strong traits of friendship in its mixture of desire with humor, nostalgia, and memory. The novel is presented as a collection of letters sent by Fernanda to Juan Manuel, accompanied by his comments and supplementary narratives. Juan Manuel’s own letters in reply to Fernanda disappeared, however, when muggers stole the purse where Fernanda carried them, although there are still a few fragments left that Fernanda wrote down in her notebook (14–21). In general, the letters exchanged by these two characters are not the ardent missives of lovers who dwell on the suffering of an unquenched passion, but are instead fi lled with gentle expressions of tenderness, confidences, anecdotes, and a conversational tone, as if attempting to recreate the domesticity and communion these characters do not, and cannot, have. Another aspect related to agape is this novel’s return to the epistolary narrative form, which—as in the eighteenth-century epistolary novels— seeks to involve its readers, inviting them to join Juan Manuel in his reading of Fernanda’s letters. For his part, the fi rst-person narrator does not present himself as a disinterested, impersonal, or all-knowing editor, but instead as the letters’ addressee and therefore as someone who is deeply involved in the events that are narrated—so involved that he sometimes cannot control or fully understand the events of which he tells. Here, as in La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña, Bryce makes use of a “very well-intentioned subjectivity” (“Confesiones” 38), that is, of a subjectivism whose profound self-criticism saves it from falling into blind egotism. The Brycean subject, as was said before, is fragile, needy, always in search of sympathy, and this is also true to the character of Juan Manuel, although he is in general more mature and self-assured than Pedro Balbuena or Martín Romaña. At the level of style, this novel—like the rest of Bryce’s work—privileges orality, seeking to establish a closer relationship between the narrator and his readers. Up to a point, Bryce imitates oral narrative; but there are, as is known, various ways of narrating orally, and not all of them favor the display of subjectivity. There is even a degree of impersonality in certain forms of oral storytelling, such as folk tales or jokes. In Bryce, then, there


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is not only an imitation of speech, but of speech deformed or transformed by emotion, by passion. Such deformation aims to give discourse a more “personal” stamp. The apparent artlessness, the imperfections in Bryce’s style, are meant to guarantee his sincerity, even as they lead in certain moments to incoherence. From the first line of Tarzan’s Tonsillitis readers feel that they are entering into the narrator’s confidence: “Hell,” exclaims Juan Manuel as he starts his narrative, “to think now, after so many, many years, that at bottom we were always better when we were writing letters” (13). The letters themselves, as was already indicated, also share in this conversational style. The theme of love and the use of sentimental discourse already tend to bring author, readers, and the text closer together. As Judith Belsey observes regarding love and desire: “In this field, everyone is an expert” (ix). No adult reader of fiction is unfamiliar with love or its conventionalisms. Moreover, as I have already pointed out, sentimental fiction’s discourse always tries to provoke sympathy for a protagonist who is weak, or child-like, and is often victimized by society, and it does so in a language that avoids irony, since its aim is to produce in the reader the same feelings to which it alludes. The very nature of Juan Manuel and Fernanda’s amorous relationship may be seen as emblematic of this text’s tendency to incorporate a third party, since the characters’ romance follows the model of the “open relationship” and often becomes a ménage à trois (as Juan Manuel himself observes, 70). Another trait that helps make the text more familiar and accessible to readers are its allusions to recent historical events in Latin America, including the narrative Boom of the 1960s (53–56) and the Salvadoran Civil War (92–143). These allusions to concrete and well-known historical circumstances, as well as to real-life people (Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, among others), not only make the characters’ environment believable and recognizable but also make the characters themselves credible as individuals, particularly when we are told about their interaction with historical personages: Fernanda was “Proofreader-in-Chief for Julio Cortázar” (31) and Juan Manuel is a friend of Julio Ramón Ribeyro (40). Fernanda’s Salvadoran background and her letters describing the situation in San Salvador during the civil war may be also seen as a reminiscence of the testimonial narratives, whose popularity during the 1970s and 1980s has been linked to the Central American revolutions (Beverley and Zimmerman 172–211) and whose contribution to the rise of the new sentimental narrative I have already discussed at some length.

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In any case, the insistence on the “realism” of the characters in this novel is obviously important in terms of the sympathy the discourse of sentimental fiction seeks to provoke as well as for the view of writing as communion. Moreover, despite the fact that the social origins of the protagonists are unequal—Fernanda is descended from “illustrious” Salvadoran families (22) while Juan Manuel’s “Andean thorax and the rest of him also indigenous” suggest his humble origins (32)—their common friendship with the Latin American expatriates in Paris compensates for this inequality. The text further reinforces this “social leveling” by stressing the human frailties that the characters share with their readers. In sum, Juan Manuel and Fernanda are not idealized lovers out of some legend, or—what is almost the same—of some novela rosa: they make mistakes and are prone to jealousy; they suffer from head colds and from “tonsillitis”; they experience indignities, boredom, and old age. A similar leveling function is performed in the text by the numerous and wide-ranging allusions to popular and mass culture—particularly, to pop music (from Latin American genres like the vals criollo, the bolero, and the protest songs of the 1960s to the U.S. love ballads of Frank Sinatra) and to characters from “lowbrow” genres such as comic books and the movies, like Tarzan. These allusions form a system of shared references between the text and its readers even as they help intensify its sentimental aspects. Ultimately Tarzan’s Tonsillitis, like Bryce’s other novels, offers itself to readers as a wide open, accessible text, seeking to evoke not only their sympathy and understanding but also their friendship, following the principle stated in the dedication of La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña: “because . . . one writes in order to be loved more” (8). Nevertheless, there are also many significant instances in this novel of the notion of writing as eros. As was stated in the introduction to this book, the metaphor of writing as passion or eros is linked to a more problematical view of writing and of communication generally. It is a view that stresses the material, textual elements of the written word even as it tries to go beyond them. Writing as passion generates a sort of passion for writing, since the twin acts of writing and reading are assigned a transcendent value as askesis, as purifying activities. Purification occurs in this case not by suppressing or ignoring writing, but, to the contrary, by calling attention to it, stressing the artificial qualities of the text. It is, in my view, a critical rather than a mystical operation (as De Rougemont conceives it). In Tarzan’s Tonsillitis Bryce seeks to purify both love and writing from their artificial elements in order to discover the “truth” of their relationship.


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Let us then review those aspects of Tarzan’s Tonsillitis that underscore its artificial, fictional aspects, particularly the highly visible allusions to language and writing that seem to go against the grain of the referential or “realist” reading the novel also proposes. To begin, let us comment on the names of the protagonists, which offer suggestive clues in this regard. From a literary standpoint, the male protagonist’s fi rst name alludes to the medieval Spanish author Don Juan Manuel, whose collection of stories El conde Lucanor (1335) marks one of the origins of narrative prose in Spanish, while his last name, Carpio, evokes the great seventeenth-century Spanish playwright and love poet, Lope de Vega, whose full name was Lope Félix de Vega Carpio. Juan Manuel himself points out his literary connections, associating them specifically with lyric poetry and music. With a wink to his readers, he states that he has studied in the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, “Liberal Arts, literature major, with an atrociously intense, I would say, almost Renaissance-style vocation, since nothing human was alien to me when dealing with literature, from the Bible to the Latin American Boom” (32). Shortly afterwards, Juan Manuel offers a lengthy list of his “influences,” which range from “the Song of Roland to the Mío Cid” and include an extensive catalogue of musicians and pop singers from Europe, the United States, and Latin America (33). He also alludes specifically to a good number of poets, “from Vallejo and Darío and Neruda and Martí and again Vallejo and Darío and so on again, because our poetry has only one homeland from Berceo, Quevedo, and Cernuda” (33). Absent from this list, perhaps because it would have been too obvious, is the name of Lope de Vega. Juan Manuel’s references to Medieval works and authors, particularly those linked to the chivalric tradition, are particularly relevant, not only because Juan Manuel sees himself as a sort of troubadour, but also because of the historical links between courtly love and the idea of passionate love explored in this novel. Fernanda’s name is no less fraught with literary and cultural references: among others, it alludes to the character of Fernanda del Carpio in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, who, it will be remembered, “carried out an anxious correspondence with the invisible doctors” (354), although in other respects she is quite different from Bryce’s protagonist. The term Trinidad (Trinity) in Fernanda’s name may be seen as a blasphemous anticipation of the ménage à trois relationships she experiences with Juan Manuel and her successive husbands but also as an emblem of the well-known triangular model of communication: sender-message-receiver. The surnames “Monte Montes,” on the other hand, underscore Fernanda’s

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qualities of plurality, distance, and elevation. Plurality, because Fernanda, like so many women, and unlike Juan Manuel and the rest of the male characters, is forced to play a variety of roles throughout her life: besides being wife, mother, and lover (another “trinity”), Fernanda is also a writer and political exile. The qualities of distance and elevation evoked by her surnames are associated not only with the physical distance that separates the two lovers but also with Fernanda’s upper-class origins. Both of these qualities are, of course, important preconditions in the courtly love ethos. With regard to Fernanda’s aristocracy, it is important to note that Juan Manuel also associates the surname “Monte” with the jungle, and from this is derived the nickname “Tarzan” that he foists upon his beloved (22, 147–148). After all, Tarzan, besides being the “King of the Apes,” was also the English nobleman Lord Greystoke.8 Fernanda’s links to literature are even more explicit than Juan Manuel’s. Fernanda is, in fact, a departure in Bryce’s extensive gallery of female protagonists: she is a true writer, not merely a virtual or potential one such as Octavia de Cádiz in La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña or Claire in Reo de nocturnidad. In Paris, Fernanda has been “Proofreader-inChief for Julio Cortázar, who in turn was an Assistant Proofreader, at the UNESCO, and she also corrected the Spanish for Mario Vargas Llosa’s radio transmissions to Latin America . . .” (31). As Juan Manuel recalls, during her years in Paris Fernanda was the “big boss” (jefota) as well as a sort of “muse” of some of the Boom writers: “I never asked for a cent to sing for Fernanda at one of her springtime or early summer get-togethers, where half the Latin American literary Boom came—sometimes in a very assistant mode, since she was still the big boss of some of these bigshot writers, who in turn brought others, always passing through Paris” (53–54). Further along in the novel, Fernanda becomes an author of children’s books (254–255, 272) and she even collaborates with Juan Manuel as his lyricist in a best-selling recording of children’s songs (270, 272–74). Above all, her work as a proofreader gives Fernanda an intimate connection with writing and its secrets. A master of language, she commands “five spoken and written languages that you can’t tell which isn’t hers” (30) and her writing style reminds Juan Manuel of “the agile and seemingly laconic prose of the best Hemingway. . . . In other words, something like a Hemingway but in Spanish and written furthermore by a very feminine woman” (79–80). Lastly, the theme of “tonsillitis” announced by the novel’s title can clearly be linked to the loss of Fernanda’s voice and the predominance of


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the written word in her communications. Even the link between tonsillitis and defenselessness in the text (203, 215) can be seen as part of the traditional view of writing since Plato.9 There is no doubt that the nickname of “Tarzan” with which Juan Manuel graces his beloved alludes to her strength and energy, traits found frequently in Bryce’s female protagonists (Inés, Octavia, Ornella), who are in general more vital and energetic than the male characters. Nevertheless, this is a “Tarzan” with “tonsillitis,” that is, a Tarzan that not only has been feminized but also deprived of the phallic attribute of his voice, symbolized by the scream made famous in movies by Johnny Weismuller. A literate woman such as Fernanda is like Tarzan with tonsillitis—in other words, a paradoxical mixture of strength and weakness. As contemporary feminist criticism reminds us, the Western tradition has often metaphorized writing as a woman—an image that is deeply ambivalent, since even as woman/writing appears dependent and subordinate, she also holds the keys to representation and the power of language to deceive, confuse, and undo.10 Of course, if one follows the logic of this Fernanda-Tarzan parallelism, Juan Manuel, her constant lover, would take the place of Jane. Indeed, like Jane in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novels,11 Juan Manuel is more “domestic” than Fernanda. While she lives in an itinerant exile that takes her from Paris to Chile, back to her homeland in El Salvador wracked by civil war, and fi nally to “the mythical and jungle-like California” (in Juan Manuel’s words, 159),12 her singer-composer lover, although a traveler because of his career, is building a house for himself in Menorca (244 and passim). Throughout the novel, both Juan Manuel and Fernanda compare Fernanda’s complicated life to a jungle (22, 126, 147–148, 203, 205, 215, 219), while Juan Manuel’s existence is much more orderly, similar to the garden planted by the unfortunate Catalonian gardener Flor a Secas (231–248). This inversion of gender roles is not gratuitous in light of the courtly love tradition that is often evoked in Tarzan’s Tonsillitis. As is known, Provençal lyric frequently made use of the expression midons—“My Lord”—to refer to the female beloved (Deyermond 44n). Continuing with these parallels it should be noted that if Fernanda, as a “Tarzan with tonsillitis,” symbolizes writing in its pure or “primitive” state, Juan Manuel, as singer and poet, symbolizes a view in which voice and music “domesticate” writing, making it more docile and manageable and even placing it in the service of society. It is well to remember that Juan Manuel, who began his career singing protest songs, ends up collaborating with Fernanda (at his suggestion) on a recording of children’s songs. Tak-

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ing into account the various metaphors of writing proposed by this novel, Juan Manuel seems closer to agape while Fernanda is closer to eros. “Tonsillitis,” however, can be contagious, and to a great extent the novel tells the story of how Juan Manuel, too, comes down with “Tarzan’s tonsillitis.” Throughout his relationship with Fernanda, Juan Manuel, who favors orality and vitalism and is presented as poet and singer “of the people” in an almost medieval sense, is won over to writing through the letters he is forced to write over the years to his beloved, to the point that he is responsible for a large portion of the novel’s text. In fact, the novel begins with Juan Manuel’s sudden awareness of his conversion to the notion of writing as eros, his recognition of the fact that he never loved so well and so much as when he wrote his letters to Fernanda: “Hell . . . To think now, after so many, many years, that at bottom we were always better when we were writing letters” (13). Further on, when telling of how muggers in Oakland stole the bag in which Fernanda carried almost all of Juan Manuel’s letters, he laments that, with the loss of his letter “also the best of me has disappeared forever, in large part” (14). In Tarzan’s Tonsillitis the writing of eros is expressed through a wide range of elements: the allusions to courtly love and the relation between the troubadour and his lady, including the theme of the ménage à trois; the ambivalence of the epistolary genre, which, even as it highlights the act of communication is also a reminder of the textually mediated nature of such a communication; the allusions to writers, texts, and the acts of reading and writing; the labor and the suffering of the two lovers, who are forced to try to recover the image of their beloved through the act of reading and interpreting the letters; the rhetoric of askesis or purification which appears frequently throughout the novel, as in the chapter “Tarzan in the Gym”; lastly, the inherent egotism of the two lovers who simply refuse to coordinate, as the narrator says using the aeronautical phrase in English, their “Estimated Time of Arrival” (14).13 But eros is also evidenced in the distance and the obstacles the text places before any attempt by readers to recover it in purely “realist” or referential terms. For instance, the two lovers’ prototypically literary, even allegorical, traits tend to dismantle the novel’s referential reading, turning it into a more enigmatic text and making it difficult to read it in terms of the idea of writing as communion. These two lovers of letters who are also made up of letters experience a passion that is inseparable from writing and whose development tells us as much or more about writing as about love. In the introduction I pointed out the importance of the trope of anacoluthon in sentimental rhetoric;


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this novel made out of letters, and comments on the letters, which in turn narrate a sequence of missed encounters and reunions, is itself a single enormous anacoluthon, as Barthes defi nes the term: a sudden change in meaning in order to begin again (“Chateaubriand” 158). Moreover, one does not need to have read Derrida’s La carte postale to realize that, with its emphasis on epistolarity, on textual fragmentation, on distance and the play of differences, Tarzan’s Tonsillitis is a very “writerly” novel. Indeed, this is probably Bryce’s most self-consciously literary work, despite his reputation as a writer who favors an oral style and an autobiographical and subjective tone. As was pointed out earlier, the novel’s title, which even in Spanish sounds deliberately awkward (La amigdalitis de Tarzán), evokes the image of a literary character, Tarzan (whose command of spoken language was itself rather dubious), who loses his voice, thus allowing signs and writing to predominate. In Tarzan’s Tonsillitis the writing of friendship, the ideal to which all of Bryce’s work aspires, is shown to be more fragile, more difficult to attain and sustain than the writing of passion. “Happy love has no history,” De Rougemont observes trenchantly at the outset of his book on love in the Western world (15). Happy love, that is, agape (whether understood as conjugal or brotherly love), is impossible to narrate, since it does not offer any incidents worthy of being told. It is a love free of accidents and obstacles, and therefore free of events that deserve retelling. Instead, all narrative depends on incidents and obstructions, and there is perhaps no greater obstruction than that of passion—a love that, seeking its fulfi llment, dwells too much on the difficulties it should overcome and turns amorous suffering into an end in itself. Perhaps then, Bryce, despite his avowed belief that “one writes in order to be loved more,” would not totally disagree with Barthes’s contention that “what I’m going to write will never make me be loved by the one I love” (Fragmentos de un discurso amoroso 122). Tarzan’s Tonsillitis shows that literary writing is inherently closer to eros than to agape, for, like eros, writing is a liminal activity that yearns for communion but is ultimately consumed in solitude, remaining on the verge of experience. How this deep and ancient link between literature and passion, or eros, came to be is a subject to be explored in the next chapter through a reading of another important neosentimental novel, Del amor y otros demonios by Gabriel García Márquez.

Journey Back to the Source of Love THREE

García Márquez’s Of Love and Other Demons

The rise of testimonial and sentimental narratives, along with the sociopolitical circumstances mentioned in the introduction, soon affected the production of some of the most celebrated authors of the Latin American narrative Boom. Thus, starting in the late 1970s, major Boom authors such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa began to incorporate and intensify the sentimental and amorous elements in their novels. In works such as Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Vargas Llosa and Infante’s Inferno by Cabrera Infante, with their mixture of autobiography, humor, and love, we fi nd an overt exploration of subjectivity and the feelings in relation to writing that follows the lead of many of the founding texts of the new sentimental tradition such as Rachel’s Song, Dear Diego, and A World for Julius.1 In terms of the dichotomy between writing as eros and writing as agape posited in the introduction, these novels by Cabrera Infante and Vargas Llosa, like those of Barnet, Poniatowska, and Bryce, clearly move toward writing as agape in their search for an improved communication between author, text, and reader, and in their less condescending or magisterial attitude toward readers. One fi nds in these novels traits that are typical of writing as agape: fewer erudite allusions, a partial or total abandonment of experiments with narrative form, and a consequent preference for linear narrative, as well as abundant allusions to popular and mass culture. The presence of elements of mass culture in the novels of Cabrera Infante and Vargas Llosa, such as radio and TV soap operas, the novelas rosas, and pop music genres


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such as the bolero, the ranchera, and the tango, signals their intention to forsake the Boom’s notion of the novel as a sacred and transcendent text that only initiates can fully understand. In the case of García Márquez, his fascination with the new sentimental narrative is evidenced by the fact that the Colombian master wrote not just one but three successive novels exploring the issues of love and the affects. García Márquez’s “amorous triptych”—Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Of Love and Other Demons—is clearly an homage to the new sentimental narrative as well as an attempt by the Nobel Prize winner to investigate the literary and even philosophical background of this kind of storytelling. While it is true that García Márquez’s earlier narratives (with the exception of El otoño del patriarca; The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975) were generally accessible and “reader-friendly,” to the extent that they served as models for Isabel Allende’s experiments with writing as agape, the novels of this triptych display a range of techniques and allusions that seek to make these texts more approachable and even seductive. In terms of technique, the three novels all display a predominance of lineal narrative, moderate use of narrative dislocation, and, in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the use of fi rst-person narration. With regard to allusions, although these novels contain more overtly erudite references than previous fictions by García Márquez (of which I will say more later), they are nevertheless framed by allusions to broadly shared cultural backgrounds and experiences such as the Christian religion and well-known historical events in Colombia and Latin America as a whole. It should be emphasized, however, that like his other colleagues in the Boom, and unlike some of the authors of the new sentimental narrative, García Márquez continues to view novels as instruments of knowledge. It is also evident that, in spite of his fascination with the new sentimentalism, neither García Márquez nor his Boom colleagues forsake altogether the trope of irony. Thus, in their approach to sentimentalism these authors have generally tended to follow the tradition of ironic reflection about love that stems from Stendhal and Flaubert rather than mimicking and rewriting—as Allende, Barnet, Bryce, and Poniatowska do—the different kinds of sentimental discourse found in pop music, the novelas rosas, or the eighteenth-century novels of sensibility. For instance, in García Márquez’s amorous triptych one does not fi nd a language broken up by passion (as in Bryce), or fi lled with commonplaces (as in Allende), or that imitates the confessional intimacy of testimonial narrative and the epistolary novel (as

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in Barnet and Poniatowska). Significantly, despite the importance of epistolary exchange in Love in the Time of Cholera, readers never see a direct transcription of the letters sent by Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, but rather a general paraphrase of their content. The fi rst-person narrator of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, for his part, seems less interested in revealing his inner self than in describing the causes of the strange collective murder of Santiago Nasar. Lastly, the action in Of Love and Other Demons takes place in a historical setting—late eighteenth-century Colonial Latin America—that is remote and exotic to most modern readers. García Márquez’s more coolly ironic exploration of love and literature takes the form of a “journey back to the source” (as in Alejo Carpentier’s celebrated short story): the temporal sequence of the novels in the triptych moves back from the present time in Chronicle of a Death Foretold through the end of the nineteenth and the beginnings of the twentieth century in Love in the Time of Cholera, to the colonial eighteenth century in Of Love and Other Demons. This inverted temporal sequence also moves from a more generalized sociocultural approach to love in the triptych’s fi rst novel to a more intensely literary view in the last two. With an epigraph taken from a poem by the medieval Portuguese author Gil Vicente—“The pursuit of love is like falconry”—whose context evokes the quintessential courtly love tradition and the ambiance of the so-called Spanish sentimental novels of the fi fteenth century, 2 Chronicle of a Death Foretold examines the foundations of the sense of community in Hispanic societies with the ironic and skeptical gaze of both the journalist and the detective. This sense of community appears to be based more upon the passionate violence of eros than on the peace and tolerance of agape. Significantly, the atavistic ritual death of Santiago Nasar, in which all the townspeople are involved, takes place just after the bishop’s riverboat has gone by the town’s dock without landing (Crónica 26–27). Santiago’s death resembles not only that of Christ but also the killing of the Commandant by the town folk in Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna (1612–1614).3 In Chronicle of a Death Foretold García Márquez suggests that societal bonds in contemporary Spanish America are based more on people’s complicity with a violence whose roots lie in passion than on the Christian values of brotherly love which both the political right and left claim to respect. To a certain extent, as in the testimonial narrative, Chronicle of a Death Foretold portrays a world in which the struggle for power and the subjection to social codes and customs predominates over individuals and the expression of their desires and feelings. It is worth remembering that Chronicle


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of a Death Foretold was published just five years after García Márquez’s “dictator novel” The Autumn of the Patriarch, a time during which García Márquez increasingly participated in left-wing politics and human rights campaigns (Bell-Villada 58). This gloomy vision of the lack of communion in the modern world—and perhaps in the literature the modern world produces—is the point of departure for García Márquez’s retrospective inquiry into the sources of amorous and sentimental discourse. In contrast, Love in the Time of Cholera pays special attention to the “healing” aspects of amorous discourse. Using the thematic leitmotiv of Pentecost—an instant of perfect communication through the Holy Spirit described in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 2—this novel explores the idea of writing as agape, as a form of friendship or communion. This is undoubtedly the most “Brycean” of the triptych’s novels, not just due to the use of the theme of “lovesickness” and its cure by means of logotherapy, but also for its style, which, like that of A World for Julius, has been compared to that of Proust and of the realist novels in general.4 Florentino Ariza also bears a noteworthy resemblance to Bryce’s masculine protagonists such as Pedro Balbuena and Martín Romaña, whose seeming helplessness hides a Don Juan–like attitude similar to that described by Ortega y Gasset in his Sobre el amor (1939): “Don Juan is not the man who makes love to women, but the man to whom women make love” (286). Also suggestive is the coincidence that, like Rachel’s Song, this novel narrates the lives of its protagonists retrospectively from their old age and that the historical period evoked is the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Based on the parallelisms between literature, religion, and love, Love in the Time of Cholera posits that the authority of literary texts, like that of religion and love, arises not from violence, but from a kind of seduction. This seduction is achieved by means of a wavering between the writing of eros and that of agape. In its promise to reveal the truth, this novel constantly displays the erotic strategy of “intermittence” that Barthes describes in The Pleasure of the Text. 5 Such intermittence can take various forms at the narrative level: it can be the mystery of what caused the suicide of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour (El amor 16) as well as the desire to know what is the “true” nature of love—a revelation with which this novel entices its readers by means of numerous passages offering “defi nitions” or reflections about love.6 All this is presented, however, by means of a narrative that flows seemingly without effort and therefore without provoking feelings of passion (and suffering) in its readers. Nevertheless, obstacles do

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begin to appear when the text’s seductiveness leads readers to go beyond the text’s surface and to track the meaning of the various erudite allusions offered by the novel, from Saint Thomas Aquinas (177–178) to Juvenal Urbino’s parrot, which evokes that in Flaubert’s “Un coeur simple” (1877).7 Passion arises, then, although in an intellectualized fashion, more analyzed than experienced. Significantly, the elderly Florentino Ariza only manages to succeed in his long-awaited seduction of Fermina Daza when he writes her a letter radically different from the “extensive and lunatic” letters he had sent her in his youth (108). It is a typewritten missive that gives barely a glimpse of his passion and appears instead as a meditative discourse (424–425, 433– 434). In turn, it is by means of these epistles from Florentino that Fermina is “healed” from her subservient relation to Juvenal Urbino and begins to better understand herself (438, 446). The healing power of literature in this novel appears linked to a phenomenon Freud called “transference”—a potentially endless process of communication and dialogue between the analyst and the analysand. This process’s erotic implications are further complicated by the fact that the “meaning” produced by transference is not located in either of the two individuals but in the very act of communication between them.8 Transference itself involves a give and take between eros and agape, since, like eros, it is an intense relation between two subjects whose purpose is ultimately egotistical; at the same time, however, as in agape, without the two subjects’ interdependence the knowledge transference seeks is not produced. The interminable coming and going of the ship New Fidelity with its misleading “yellow flag of cholera” (495–496) at the end of the novel could well be seen as an allegory of Freudian transference as well as of fiction writing itself. Nevertheless, instead of being a model of matrimonial agape, or, more generally of communion with one’s brethren, the novel’s end underscores the inherent egotism in the two lovers’ relationship: Still unmarried, surrounded by a devastated nature and the deforestation near the riverbanks caused by steamships like the New Fidelity; overcome, like Rachel in Barnet’s novel, by “the horror of real life” (El amor 500), Florentino and Fermina decide to continue indefi nitely in “this goddamned coming and going” (503). The two protagonists end up literally isolated from the rest of society, turning their backs on the world and without the least desire to reach any destination. It is not only an open ending, but also an ambivalent one, since Florentino’s and Fermina’s “free will” (502) is all too similar to a punishment.9


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In fact, the resemblance of these two characters to the well-known tale of Paolo and Francesca in the Divine Comedy is suggested throughout the novel. Florentino and Fermina are in many ways a rewriting of Dante’s doomed lovers. García Márquez’s text seems to allude to Paolo and Francesca in the tragic news bulletin Fermina hears over the radio about two elderly lovers who had maintained an adulterous relation for forty years until the day they were murdered by a boatman in the very spot of their fi rst amorous encounter (El amor 460–461). Unlike these aged lovers, or the dead Paolo and Francesca, Florentino and Fermina survive and are able to freely fulfi ll their love after the death of Fermina’s husband, Juvenal Urbino. However, Florentino and Fermina do resemble Paolo and Francesca in two important respects: they were brought together by writing (in this case, Florentino’s letters), and like Dante’s characters, they too seem ultimately to be caught in a sort of unending restlessness that Dante describes as “an infernal whirlwind that never rests” (Inferno V, 31). Isn’t this self-absorption of love as eros, this love that lives apart from everyone and everything and reaches the peak of its expression through letters, through writing, similar to the condition of writers and their readers, whose only real meeting place is in the letters on a page? At the end of the long journey of Love in the Time of Cholera the question arises whether the ideal of agape, unlike eros, is not ultimately inconsistent with the notion of any mediated communication, or even with the idea of communication itself, which already presupposes a gap, a separation between sender and receiver, while the principal commandment of agape is “you must love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18, Luke 10:25–37; my emphasis). As De Rougemont’s dictum—“Happy love has no history”— implies, happiness in love may well be able to do without writing and literature. Despite the relative simplicity of its style and structure, and in spite of the constant allusions to the Holy Spirit and Pentecost throughout the text, the spirit that presides over the ending of this novel seems rather demonic, in the Classical, pagan sense of the term. In particular, the protagonists’ comings and goings are reminiscent of the Platonic explanation of eros in the Symposium. The explanation appears in the well-known conversation between Socrates and Diotima (“a woman who was deeply versed in this [love] and many other fields of knowledge,” Plato 553): “Yes, but what can he be, then?” I asked her. “A mortal?” “Not by any means.”

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“Well, what then?” “What I told you before—halfway between mortal and immortal.” “And what do you mean by that, Diotima?” “A very powerful spirit [daimon], Socrates, and spirits, you know, are halfway between god and man.” “What powers have they, then?” I asked. “They are the envoys and interpreters that fly between heaven and earth, flying upward with our worship and our prayers, and descending with the heavenly answers and commandments, and since they are between the two estates they weld both sides together and merge them into one great whole. They form the medium of the prophetic arts, of the priestly rites of sacrifice, initiation, and incantation, of divination and of sorcery, for the divine will not mingle directly with the human, and it is only through the mediation of the spirit world that man can have any intercourse, whether waking or sleeping, with the gods. And the man who is versed in such matters is said to have spiritual powers, as opposed to the mechanical powers of the man who is expert in the more mundane arts. There are many spirits, and many kinds of spirits, too, and Love is one of them.” (Plato 555) Although Love in the Time of Cholera does not altogether abandon the ideal of agape—which, among other ways, is nostalgically evoked in Fermina’s memories of her lengthy visit to her relatives in the countryside (El amor 134)—the novel ultimately recognizes the primacy of eros in a time when the world seems to be held in thrall by both cholera (a disease that symbolizes the physical effects of lovesickness) and cólera—the Spanish word for “wrath,” exemplified in the novel by the Colombian civil wars and the environmental degradation of the country (129–130, 486–488). The novel’s ending evokes what Plato had observed two millennia before in the Symposium and the Phaedrus: that love as eros is a daimon, a demon, a mediator or go-between, and that as such it is as unreliable and untrustworthy as that other go-between, writing. Read in Christian terms, the title Of Love and Other Demons sounds paradoxical and even a bit shocking. Read in terms of the Platonic view of love, however, to which it openly alludes, it is crystal clear in its implications. Fully devoted to the exploration of love as eros and its writing, the last novel of García Márquez’s amorous triptych is the most patently


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erudite of the three, the one that most openly flaunts its literary and philosophical sources. This is not surprising, since in the “journey back to the source” of love that this triptych embodies, Of Love and Other Demons tries to achieve the closest encounter possible with the very roots of amorous discourse and of the complex relation between love and language. Unlike the triptych’s other two novels, this one begins with a prologue set in the present, in which a fi rst-person narrator who is identified as García Márquez himself narrates the incident that supposedly gave rise to the novel: the exhumation—part looting, part archaeological dig—of the crypts in a convent that was going to be turned into “a five-star hotel” (De amor 9). In particular, the narrative is derived from the discovery “in the third niche of the main altar, on the side of the Gospel” (11) of the bones of Sierva María de Todos los Angeles, whose cranium was covered by “a living head of hair of an intense copper color” that “measured twenty-two meters and eleven centimeters” (11; I will say more later about the meaning of these details). This prologue, which connects the novel’s origins to the journalistic work of the young García Márquez in the Colombian city of Cartagena in 1949, may be seen fi rst as a gesture of acknowledgment by García Márquez of the literary-historical links between the new sentimental novel and the testimonial narratives. Furthermore, with its anecdotal clarity, this is the part of the novel that most clearly displays the traits of writing as agape that are always present, to a greater or lesser degree, in every new sentimental novel. Along with the autobiographical perspective and the verifiable facts of time and place it offers, the prologue’s fi rst-person narrative also displays more openly than the rest of the novel the subjective dimension shared both by the testimonial narratives and the new sentimental novels: “Almost half a century later I am still astonished by that terrible witness to the destruction wrought by the passing years” (Del amor 10), the narrator confesses, remembering how the exhumed bones were identified with handwritten names on scraps of paper. The confessional and affective tone of the prologue is reinforced by the novel’s dedication: “To Carmen Balcells, bathed in tears” (1), which conjures up the almost-shocking image of García Márquez’s famously feisty literary agent crying her heart out, presumably because of the novel’s emotional effect. The tale told by the novel’s third-person narrator takes place in the same slightly fictionalized Cartagena de Indias portrayed in Love in the Time of Cholera, and some of its scenes even occur, nearly two hundred years earlier, in the same places as in the earlier novel (the palace of the

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Marquis of Casalduero, the madhouse of La Divina Pastora). Moreover, the general plot of the novel—the story of a young priest who falls in love with a beautiful maiden—coincides with that of the medieval play Comédia de Rubena by Gil Vicente, from which the epigraph of Chronicle of a Death Foretold is taken. The story begins when the girl Sierva María de Todos los Angeles, “only child of the Marquis of Casalduero” (13), is bitten by a presumably rabid “ash-colored dog with a white mark on its forehead” (13) in the city’s marketplace. The mistaken belief that his daughter is infected with rabies leads the Marquis to try a series of outlandish remedies. These cause a public scandal so great that it reaches the attention of the asthmatic bishop Don Toribio de Cáceres y Virtudes, who insists the child is possessed by a demon. At the bishop’s urging, the Marquis locks up his daughter in the convent of the Poor Clares while the bishop assigns the task of exorcising her to his most trusted aide, the priest and librarian Cayetano Alcino del Espíritu Santo Delaura y Escudero. In the convent Sierva María becomes a pawn in the ecclesiastical intrigues between the Poor Clares and the bishop. At the same time, she becomes acquainted with Cayetano, who, after being bitten by Sierva María during their fi rst meeting, falls in love with her. Cayetano, in turn, who is a devotee of the poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega—to whom he claims to be related—begins to court Sierva María by reading her the sonnets of the great Spanish poet. Sierva María’s situation at the convent improves briefly thanks to the new viceroy and his wife, who, with their eighteenth-century reformist spirit, order that she be better treated. After a fruitless attempt to free Sierva María from the convent, a remorseful Cayetano Delaura confesses his actions to the bishop, who punishes him severely, depriving him of his authority and sentencing him to help in the lepers’ hospital. From the hospital Cayetano is able to surreptitiously visit Sierva María by means of a secret tunnel. The two protagonists love each other intensely but do not consummate their passion physically, since they continue “waiting for the happy day in which they would be free and married” (173). Sierva María then experiences a series of wildly melodramatic changes in her condition when the bishop himself tries to exorcise her. The bishop desists after suffering one of his severe asthma attacks and assigns the task to the mulatto priest Tomás de Aquino de Narváez, who treats Sierva María with kindness and understanding but later dies mysteriously by drowning in a well. Cayetano, who “had more confidence in legal formalities” (183) that


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would allow him to free Sierva María and marry her, refuses to consider her proposal to flee together to a maroon slave community. After the tunnel through which he visited her is discovered and sealed, Cayetano fails in his last desperate attempt to take her out of the convent in broad daylight and is returned to the lepers’ hospital, which he never leaves again. The bishop again tries to exorcise Sierva María, despite the admonitions from other Church authorities. After three days of severe exorcism rites, depressed at not being able to see Cayetano, Sierva María is found “dead of love on the bed with radiant eyes and a newborn’s skin. The stubs of her hair came out like bubbles from her shaved head and one could see them grow” (198). A secondary plot line in the novel describes the background of the Marquis of Casalduero’s deteriorated relations with his second wife, Bernarda Cabrera, Sierva María’s mother, who detested her daughter even before her birth and threw her out of the house, leaving her in care of the black slaves. Because of her upbringing by the slaves, Sierva María identifies so strongly with the culture of the Afro-Colombians that she learns how to speak several African languages and renames herself María Mandinga (62–63): “The only thing this child has that is white is her color,” her mother exclaims (63). Of particular note is the secondary—although significant—character of the Portuguese Jewish physician Abrenuncio de Sa Pereira Cao. His seemingly enigmatic presence in the novel can be understood, as will be seen shortly, on the basis of his symbolic role in the plot, which goes beyond merely being a mouthpiece for the medical discourse about love. Undoubtedly the abundance of melodramatic circumstances and episodes in this novel devoted to the effects of eros may nevertheless be linked to writing as agape in its various historical manifestations. On the one hand, it may be linked to the truculent view of Colonial life presented by Spanish American Romantic authors in serialized novels such as La novia del hereje o La Inquisición de Lima (The Heretic’s Beloved, or The Inquisition in Lima, 1854) by Vicente Fidel López and Monja y casada, virgen y mártir (Nun and Spouse, Virgin and Martyr, 1868) by Vicente Riva Palacio, and in the Tradiciones peruanas (Peruvian Traditions, 1872–1891) by Ricardo Palma, among other texts.10 On the other hand, Of Love and Other Demons’s melodrama may be connected to the content of Spanish American and Brazilian TV soap operas, some of which, in fact, are set in the Colonial period, and in which race relations are often presented in terms similar to those in this novel.11

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Parodying the title of an essay by Randolph Pope on Love in the Time of Cholera—“¿Amor? ¿Tiempo? ¿Cólera?” (Love? Time? Cholera?)—a similar sequence of questions could be asked about the themes of Of Love and Other Demons: Love? Demons? Rabies? What do these terms have to do with one another? What is the meaning of their joint appearance in this novel along with other themes such as poetry (in the tutelary figure of Garcilaso) and medicine (symbolized by Abrenuncio)? In my view, the relationship among these terms in the novel can best be understood if we view Of Love and Other Demons as a rewriting of the ideas as well as certain characters and metaphors in Plato’s Symposium—one of the most ancient and influential sources of the discourse about love in Western culture. It is not difficult to extract from the Baroque ossuary of this novel the “remains”—so to speak—of Plato’s discourse on love, which, like Sierva María’s long red hair, have continued to exist and grow over time. Let us recall that in the Symposium a group of Athenians that includes the philosopher Socrates competes to see which of them discourses most eloquently and persuasively about love (eros) during a dinner in honor of the poet Agathon’s victory in a literary competition. All through their extensive after-dinner talk, the characters offer, each in turn, their theories about love: Phaedrus exalts the antiquity of love and the heroism love inspires (Plato 532–534); Pausanias posits the existence of two forms of eros, the celestial and the popular, which correspond to the goddesses Urania and Aphrodite and are associated, respectively, with homosexual and heterosexual love (534–539); Eriximachus the physician accepts Pausanias’s dualistic scheme and speaks of the relation between love and medicine, underscoring the importance of moderation and the links among love, astronomy, and divination (539–542); it is the playwright Aristophanes who voices the celebrated myth of the Androgyne or Hermaphrodite, according to which love is the attempt by individuals to return to a primordial union of the sexes through the search for their “other half” (542–546); Agathon, as befits a poet, exalts love’s youthfulness and beauty, and defi nes love as the search for Beauty (547–550). It is Socrates’s view of love—and the commentary added by Alcibiades— that serves as the point of departure for Of Love and Other Demons. After defi ning love as a daimon or demon, that is, a figure of mediation, in the passage previously cited, the wise woman Diotima tells Socrates her mythical version of love’s origin, which is worth quoting in detail: On the day of Aphrodite’s birth the gods were making merry, and among them was Resource, the son of Craft. And when they had


supped, Need came begging at the door because there was good cheer inside. Now, it happened that Resource, having drunk deeply of the heavenly nectar—for this was before the days of wine— wandered out into the garden of Zeus and sank into a heavy sleep, and Need, thinking that to get a child by Resource would mitigate her penury, lay down beside him and in time was brought to bed of Love. So Love became the follower and servant of Aphrodite because he was begotten on the same day that she was born, and further, he was born to love the beautiful since Aphrodite is beautiful herself. Then again, as the son of Resource and Need, it has been his fate to be always needy; nor is he delicate and lovely as most of us believe, but harsh and arid, barefoot and homeless, sleeping on the naked earth, in doorways, or in the very streets beneath the stars of heaven, and always partaking of his mother’s poverty. But, secondly, he brings his father’s resourcefulness to his designs upon the beautiful and the good, for he is gallant, impetuous, and energetic, a mighty hunter, and a master of device and artifice—at once desirous and full of wisdom, a lifelong seeker after truth, an adept in sorcery, enchantment, and seduction. He is neither mortal nor immortal, for in the space of a day he will be now, when all goes well with him, alive and blooming, and what he gains will always ebb away as fast. So Love is never altogether in or out of need, and stands, moreover, midway between ignorance and wisdom. You must understand that none of the gods are seekers after truth. They do not long for wisdom, because they are wise—and why should the wise be seeking the wisdom that is already theirs? . . . “Then tell me, Diotima,” I [Socrates] said, “who are these seekers after truth, if they are neither the wise nor the ignorant?” “Why, a schoolboy,” she replied, “could have told you that, after what I’ve just been saying. They are those that come between the two, and one of them is Love. For wisdom is concerned with the loveliest of things, and Love is the love of what is lovely. And so it follows that Love is a lover of wisdom, and, being such, he is placed between wisdom and ignorance—for which his parentage also is responsible, in that his father is full of wisdom and resource, while his mother is devoid of either. “Such, my dear Socrates, is the spirit of Love . . .” (Plato 555–556)

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The parallels between this Platonic vision of eros and the figure of Sierva María de Todos los Angeles in the novel are numerous. As in the myth of Resource and Need, Bernarda Cabrera, “daughter of a former overseer [of Ygnacio de Alfaro’s father] who became a wealthy merchant” (57), hoping to obtain the fortune of the Marquis of Casalduero, surprised Ygnacio in his hammock one afternoon at naptime “and ingloriously took away his virginity” (58). In time, Bernarda’s pregnancy and the musket in her father’s hands forced Ygnacio to marry the woman. A product of this violent marriage, Sierva María, “daughter of a nobleman and a plebeian, suffered an exposed childhood” (60). Just as Love wanders the streets homeless and in rags, Sierva María is left by her mother in care of the slave nursemaid Dominga de Adviento and is later thrown out of the house and sent to live in the slaves’ barracks. When she is bitten by the dog, she is again forced to leave her home and society and is imprisoned in the Poor Clares’ convent. Significantly, the only community that receives Sierva María with kindness is that of the slaves, whose social condition at the time was the most marginal of all. (Sierva María’s links to the blacks have further symbolic resonances that will be explored shortly.) Like Love, who is described as “harsh and arid, barefoot and homeless” (Plato 555), despite her long and beautiful head of hair, Sierva María has a “squalid body” (20) and a “destitute air” (43).12 In the Platonic myth, Love is “adept in sorcery, enchantment, and seduction” (556) as is Sierva María, with “her vice of lying for pleasure” (149; see also 25, 44, 45, 127), her links to the magical beliefs of the slaves (60, 63, 88, 124), and her power to communicate by means of dreams and prophecies, as seen in the dream of the snowfall and the bunch of grapes that both she and Cayetano Delaura experience (102, 144). Even Sierva María’s illiteracy, which is counterbalanced by her intelligence and her knowledge of African languages and cultures, corresponds to Diotima’s description of Love as a being who stands “midway between ignorance and wisdom” (556). As Sierva María’s music teacher exclaims after her failed attempts at making her learn to play various instruments: “It’s not that the child is incapable, it’s just that she’s not of this world” (62). Only Sierva María’s female gender would seem to deviate from the Platonic description of Love. In my view, the feminized eros that is Sierva María points to another aspect of the Platonic discussion of love: its relation to language. Diotima suggests this when she explains the communicative functions of demons in general and of love in particular, but it is also important to point out that her description of Love as a poor vagabond


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echoes Plato’s metaphors for writing in the Phaedrus. In a well-known passage of this dialogue, Socrates asserts: You know, Phaedrus, that’s the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever. And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parents to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself. (Plato 521) Both Love and writing appear in the Platonic dialogues as restless, seemingly defenseless entities, but also as untrustworthy and even dangerous: in the Phaedrus’s much-cited myth about the origins of writing, writing is derided as something that “will implant forgetfulness in [men’s] souls” and “not true wisdom . . . but only its semblance” (Plato 520).13 Sierva María’s female gender, along with the rest of her qualities, indicates that she is not only a stand-in for eros in the novel but also an emblem of writing, which has often been metaphorized as a woman at least since the end of the eighteenth century, in a lineage of characters that derive from the child-acrobat Mignon in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795–1796).14 The association of woman with writing grew throughout the nineteenth century until it became a commonplace that was eventually questioned in the second half of the twentieth century by feminist criticism.15 The fi rst name of García Márquez’s character, Sierva María, is another indication of her role as a metaphor of writing, since after Plato it has also become common to insist in writing’s servile condition even as it is seen as unruly and rebellious. Paradoxically, in Plato writing appears at fi rst as a “low” activity, unworthy of a noble soul. In Phaedrus, Plato exalts philosophers over poets: philosophers are “those who know the truth” since they already carry the discourses about justice and honor and goodness “veritably written in the

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soul” (Plato 523). For Plato, both Love and writing are “slaves” and mediators that gravitate constantly around beauty, but Love is not beautiful in itself nor can writing compete with the living speech through which intelligence communicates with the soul. Four centuries later, this elitist vision of orality is modified in the Christian Gospels, some of whose authors were Greeks or Hellenized Jews. The Gospels posit—as St. Paul famously does in 2 Corinthians 3:6—the existence of a script “given life” by the Spirit, that is, a writing as agape that, as in the story of Pentecost, is equally accessible to all. Thirteen hundred years afterward, Renaissance Neoplatonism rejects both Plato’s disdain for the written word and the Gospels’ less elitist view of writing. Instead, Neoplatonists propose a hermetic and sublime view of the written word in which writing is a privileged medium to achieve a transcendent knowledge. As Walter Mignolo observes in The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Nebrija introduced, in his Reglas de la ortografía castellana, a theory of writing in which the domain of the letter took over the domain of the voice, reversing the ancillary role of the letter with respect to the voice in the Greek philosophical tradition. This inversion was, indeed, the fi rst manifestation of the discontinuity of the classical tradition in the modern world. (58–59) Simultaneously, Renaissance Neoplatonism begins to think of poetry as a form of hermetic symbolism: The theory of imitation and inspiration as developed by the Neoplatonists tended to emphasize the mystic and occult elements in poetry. Carried to an extreme it encouraged poetry which was consciously obscure; and obscurity is perhaps the most obvious feature of Hermetic writing from Hermes Trismegistus through Pico della Mirandola down to Blake and Yeats. This obscurity results from the conscious use of esoteric symbols, which are explained in two ways: First, the poet is by defi nition trying to convey a more than human vision (the divine archetypes). Since normal language is inadequate, he must resort to symbols. Second, the poet must conceal his knowledge from the profane, who would abuse it. His symbols and allegories create a veil which only the initiated can penetrate. The theory of symbolism as a veil protecting knowledge from the rabble is evident in Fulgentius’ reading of the Aeneid, in Dante’s Convivio, in Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Gods, and in numerous


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Renaissance critical works. (Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 620) Neoplatonism effectively fuses eros with writing, and does it in a way that is consonant with the troubadors’ poetic practice and with the aesthetics of courtly love. This also helps to explain the novel’s insistence on linking Sierva María to the enslaved blacks. Not just an evocation of Spanish American mestizaje, this is also a reminder of writing’s marginalized nature, as well as of its enigmatic qualities: Blacks in this novel are not only objects, but also signs that can be endowed with erotic qualities (as in the case of the beautiful Abyssinian slave, 14, 16, 133), although in most cases they are seen as mysterious and indecipherable even by the most cultured whites, such as the physician Abrenuncio. A white woman brought up by the blacks, Sierva María herself becomes a sort of living writing that symbolically joins the whiteness of the page with the blackness of ink. However, it is through her relationship with Cayetano Delaura that Sierva María enters the world of European letters by memorizing Garcilaso’s verses. It is through that literate culture that she begins to fully assume her double condition as emblem of eros and of writing, particularly when, in Garcilaso’s verses, she comes upon the codes of courtly love and its “religion of death”—as Abrenuncio, sounding like Denis de Rougemont, refers to the love between Sierva María and Cayetano (195). As in Allende’s Of Love and Shadows, in this novel by García Márquez agape is infrequent and only appears, in a limited way, among the poor and the marginalized, above all among the blacks: The slaves’ quarter, at the very edges of the swamp, was harrowing in its misery. In the mud-and-palm frond barracks people lived along with vultures and pigs, and children drank from the puddles in the streets. Nevertheless, this was the most cheerful quarter, full of intense color and radiant voices late in the afternoon, when they took out their chairs to enjoy the coolness in the middle of the street. (Del amor 180–181) Ironically, however, as mentioned earlier, blacks are often seen by whites in this novel in markedly erotic terms. The Abyssinian slave, in this sense, is a parallel figure to Sierva María, since men’s desire turns both of them into eroticized beings even though their origins are closely linked to the communitarian and egalitarian agape of the slaves. One of the deepest

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tragedies embodied in the character of Sierva María is the frustrated project she at fi rst seems to represent of fusing the elitist heritage of the whites’ writing with the agape that the blacks practice daily. Significantly, the only other character who could symbolize this possible fusion, the mulatto priest Tomás de Aquino de Narváez, dies from drowning in mysterious circumstances (182). What about rabies? What is its symbolism with regard to Sierva María and throughout the novel? It should fi rst be noted that, ironically, Sierva María never contracted that disease in spite of being bitten by a presumably rabid dog. The text is clear in this respect: “It was in the last cell of that corner of oblivion [the convent of St. Clare] where they locked up Sierva María, ninety-three days after being bitten by the dog and without any symptom of rabies” (87). Rabies can of course be interpreted as an obvious symbol of passion, and it has even been seen in this novel as a variation of the same wordplay García Márquez does with the word cólera in the triptych’s previous novel (Ianes 347): rabia in Spanish can refer to the disease of rabies, but it is also a synonym of cólera, meaning “rage.” Undoubtedly, rabies can be understood here as another metaphor of the unbridled—and contagious—passion of amor hereos or “lovesickness.” In Of Love and Other Demons the narrator speaks of an epidemic of rabies just as there is an epidemic of cholera in Love in the Time of Cholera. Certainly, if we view rabies as a symbol of unleashed passion—be it from love or rage—then clearly the whole environment of Cartagena in the novel is saturated with that emotion. We see it displayed in the erotic undercurrents of the relations between masters and slaves (as in the Abyssinian slave episode); in the vice of the “cacao tablets” eaten daily by Bernarda (since chocolate was linked, then as now, with erotic love);16 in the fights and polemics, also impassioned although not at all with love, that pit the priests against the nuns and lead the bishop to declare the Cessatio a Divinis, “the stopping of every religious service in the city until further notice” (89); and, lastly, we see passion at work even in Nature, in the various and emblematic animal stampedes that occur at various points in the story (95, 121–122, 191). Returning to Plato’s Symposium, however, we fi nd that in Alcibiades’s speech, which follows Socrates’s, the notion of rage is linked not only to passion but to philosophy: People say, you know, that when a man’s been bitten by a snake he won’t tell anybody what it feels like except a fellow sufferer,


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because no one else would sympathize with him if the pain drove him into making a fool of himself. Well, that’s just how I feel, only I’ve been bitten by something much more poisonous than a snake; in fact, mine is the most painful kind of bite there is. I’ve been bitten in the heart, or the mind, or whatever you like to call it, but Socrates’s philosophy, which clings like an adder to any young and gifted mind it can get hold of, and does exactly what it likes with it. And looking round me, gentlemen, I see Phaedrus, and Agathon, and Erixymachus, and Pausanias, and Aristodemus, and Aristophanes and all the rest of them—to say nothing of Socrates himself—and every one of you has had his taste of this philosophical frenzy, this sacred rage; so I don’t mind telling you about it because I know you’ll make allowances for me—both for the way I behaved with Socrates and for what I’m saying now. But the servants must put their fi ngers in their ears, so must anybody else who’s liable to be at all profane or beastly. (569) Alcibiades speaks of having been “bitten in the heart or the mind” by Socrates’s philosophy, which has fi lled him with a “philosophical frenzy, this sacred rage” (569). He also adds, tellingly, that this philosophical passion should be the privilege of a few, and should be forbidden to the servants and to “anybody else who’s liable to be at all profane or beastly” (569). Let us recall, of course, that “philosophy” in this context is Plato’s philosophy as voiced by the character of Socrates, which consists in the love of beauty and wisdom, which leads in an ascending scale— suppressing all that is disordered or ugly—to the contemplation of “the beautiful itself” (563). This ascent to the beautiful in Platonic love, as Denis de Rougemont reminds us, is: “a divine delirium,” a transport of the soul, a madness and supreme sanity both. A lover with his beloved becomes “as if in heaven”; for love is the way that ascends by degrees of ecstasy to the one source of all that exists, remote from bodies and matter, remote from what divides and distinguishes, and beyond the misfortune of being a self and even in love itself a pair. (61) “Rabies” in this novel is thus also the lettered wisdom, the literary passion of which Cayetano Delaura suffers and which he passes along to Sierva María by reciting to her the Renaissance verses, laden with neopla-

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tonic doctrines, of Garcilaso. As in Tarzan’s Tonsillitis, both lovers are linked to writing, one more intensely and openly than the other, and it is the more “lettered” lover who contaminates the other with his scriptural passion. A librarian, an insatiable reader, and a worshipper of Garcilaso, Cayetano is a “man of letters” in every sense of the term and, like Sierva María, is another emblem of writing. His very name is fi lled with literary allusions: Cayetano Alcino del Espíritu Santo Delaura y Escudero. “Alcino,” or Alcinous, was the name of the king of Scheria who sheltered Ulysses shortly before his return to Ithaca in the Odyssey, and was the fi rst to hear the hero’s adventures; but the name also evokes the figure of Alsino the winged child in the homonymous novel written in 1920 by the Chilean Pedro Prado, which is a minor modern Spanish American classic—a character that is itself a rewriting of the modernista José Enrique Rodó’s wellknown Ariel (1901). The Holy Spirit, furthermore, is linked to the miracle of perfect communication in the Pentecost episode of the Gospels, but it is also used throughout Love in the Time of Cholera and in this novel as a synonym for inspiration and creativity. The surname “Delaura” contains a transparent allusion to Laura, who was beloved by Petrarch, the great medieval Tuscan poet whose sonnets were models for Garcilaso and for all other Renaissance poets. As if this were not enough, the last name “Escudero” (Squire) patently refers to the romances of chivalry such as Amadís de Gaula—another of Cayetano’s favorite books—and, of course, to the Quijote, another work directly mentioned in the novel (Del amor 154). In this context, the fact that Sierva María was bitten by an “ash-colored dog with a white mark on its forehead” (13) is shown to be a prefiguration when we read that Cayetano Delaura had “very black hair with a streak of white on his forehead” (77). The entry about dogs as symbols in J. E. Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols reinforces the link between Cayetano and the rabid dog: “the dog also has in Christian symbolism another attribute derived from the shepherd’s dog: that of guardian and guide of the flock, which is why it is sometimes used as an allegory for the priest” (359). Curiously, Abrenuncio’s last name, as Cayetano himself notes, “means ‘dog’ in the Portuguese language” (77). In view of the many forbidden books owned by the physician and his evident sympathy for the new ideas of the Enlightenment, this makes Abrenuncio into another vector of “contagion” like the dog that bit Sierva María and Cayetano himself. The “disease” Abrenuncio transmits, however, is a very different one. Certainly, at fi rst his role in the novel would seem to be similar to that of Erixymachus in the Symposium. Like the Greek physician, who counsels moderation and balance in one’s desires (Plato 540), Abrenuncio follows


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the ancient Western medical tradition that regards love as “an unnatural feeling that condemned two people who previously did not know each other to a petty and unhealthy dependency that was as fleeting as it was intense” (Del amor 194). But the name and attributes of this character also suggest that he embodies in the novel an ironic approach to love and to the religious discourse with which love has also been associated since Plato’s Symposium. A converted Jew whose name means, in fact, “rejection” (“rechazo”: Diccionario Vox 8), Abrenuncio displays an ironic negativity and a dispassionate rationalism that lead him to question everything, even the books he avidly collects but which he does not treat with much respect: “‘Books are useless,’ said Abrenuncio good-humoredly. ‘I’ve spent most of my life curing the diseases caused by other physicians with their medicines’” (41). Reminiscent of Melquiades in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Abrenuncio also resembles Jorge Luis Borges, with his encyclopedic knowledge, his irony, and his lack of interest in sex: “‘Sex is a talent I don’t have,’” Abrenuncio asserts (194).17 It is worth noting that in Abrenuncio’s dwelling, medicines “in porcelain jars labeled in Latin” share space with “books, many in Latin, with storied spines” (41). His tale about the deadly copy of Amadís de Gaula that “went from hand to hand for over a year, at least among eleven people, and at least three of those died . . . killed by some unknown effluvium” (154) is not just a parody of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980)—where a character similar to Borges is the villain—but also underscores Abrenuncio’s awareness of the dangers of writing as eros such as appears in the romances of chivalry and the aesthetics of courtly love. However, Abrenuncio also resembles Gustave Flaubert (whom Borges regards as one of his precursors),18 who dealt much more openly with love than the Argentine master in novels like Madame Bovary (1857), L’Education sentimentale (1869), and stories like “The Legend of St. Julian Hospitaller” (1877).19 As with Flaubert and his character Emma Bovary, Abrenuncio, even as he keeps his distance from him, is fascinated by Cayetano and the fusion of eros and writing he embodies: “I’d like to know why you humor me so much,” he [Cayetano] said. “Because we atheists can’t live without priests,” replied Abrenuncio. “Patients commend their bodies to us, but not their souls, and we are like the Devil, trying to steal them from God.” (164) Abrenuncio has been able to diagnose the “Bovaryism” avant la lettre of which Cayetano suffers. Like Emma Bovary, and, of course, like her

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precursor Don Quixote, Cayetano has allowed his life to be taken over by books. In his case, he has fallen ill with amor hereos through the poetry of Garcilaso and the codes of courtly love. Abrenuncio tries to “cure” him by means of logotherapy, trying to “vaccinate” him with ironic books that will serve as antidotes, such as the eccentric Latin translation of Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques (1734; Del amor 164). 20 But his efforts are in vain, since the force of writing as eros is too overpowering and, like rabies, is incurable. In Of Love and Other Demons there are frequent parodies of the Romantics’ “pathetic fallacy,” in which the text abounds with correspondences between atmospheric and cosmic events and the tormented feelings of the main characters. Aside from the “apocalyptic storm” that “convulsed the sea” while Cayetano and Abrenuncio were speaking about Sierva María (155), the most evident and powerfully symbolic instance of this trait is the solar eclipse whose image becomes engraved in Cayetano’s retina (123, 151–52). In my view, the eclipse is another of the many emblems of writing contained in this novel. Specifically, it is an emblem of the notion of writing as eros that holds Cayetano in thrall: the burning whiteness of the sun covered by the moon’s black shadow may be seen as a cosmic version of the writing of eros, of the Renaissance notion of the letter as a medium to ascend to a transcendent unity, and of reading as a form of passion and askesis. Of Love and Other Demons’s ironic narrative about love and literature underscores the predominance of passion in literary writing and marks the instant when that predominance began. The medieval troubadors produced not only a new notion of love—that of courtly love—but also a new concept of literature that led to the Renaissance view of literature as a means of reaching a transcendent reality. The novel’s fi nal scene, Sierva María’s death by love (and also by exorcisms) and the growth of her shaved hair, highlights the durability of the notion of eros in writing, which, like Sierva María’s “living hair,” does not need to be resurrected, since it never dies at all. Furthermore, Sierva María’s burial in the main altar “on the side of the Gospel” is suggestive of the worldwide diffusion the notion of writing as eros would have through the centuries. Abrenuncio’s presence, however, adds another layer of irony to these observations. Evocative of the hoary topic of the love-medicine relation (fi rst seen in Plato’s Symposium), Abrenuncio also brings to mind a related theme explored even more openly in works of the new sentimental narrative such as Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, which will be


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studied in the next chapter: It is the theme of love as both a prescription and as a recipe (two senses of the word receta in Spanish). Often appearing as the “love philter” that gives rise to the lovers’ passion, 21 in the postmodern context of the new sentimental narrative this topic is steeped in irony, since the new narrative openly accepts the love theme’s deeply conventional and codified nature, which turns it into a mere formula or “recipe” for literary creation. Turned into a recipe, the writing of eros becomes “domesticated,” so to speak, becomes less sublime and more accessible, entering the domain of agape. The ironic view of eros García Márquez presents through the figure of Abrenuncio also implies that passionate love is not an unavoidable destiny—as those who suffer from it believe—but rather a conventional code of conduct that has already become a literary myth, a pretext for artistic creation.

Recipes for Romance

FOUR

Laura Esquivel, Luis Sepúlveda, and Marcela Serrano

1 But, my lady, what can we women know but kitchen philosophies? Lupercio Leonardo rightly said that one can easily make philosophy while preparing dinner. And as I am wont to say when faced with these petty matters: If Aristotle had cooked, he would have written much more. sor juana inés de la cruz, “respuesta de la poetisa a la muy ilustre sor filotea de la cruz” (1691) An elixir of such perfect, of such rare quality! You don’t know its recipe But you know what it does to you! [Elissir di sì perfetta, Di sì rara qualità, Ne sapessi la ricetta, Conoscessi chi ti fa!] chorus from l’elisir d’amore (the love potion, 1832) by gaetano donizetti The notion that love is a founding myth of narrative fiction and has even become a formula that serves as a framework for a vast category of fic-


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tions is implicit not only in García Márquez’s Of Love and Other Demons but also in the novels by Barnet, Poniatowska, Allende, and Bryce we have already analyzed and in practically all of the new sentimental novels. Only recently, however, under the aegis of postmodernism, has the use of love as a literary formula been unmasked, while simultaneously a “domestication”—in every sense of the word—of passionate love has been taking place. In my view, the Spanish American novel that has most clearly carried out this transformation is the Mexican Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. By means of humor and parody, eros is deprived in this novel of its elitist and transcendent traits and turned instead into a “recipe,” a conventionalized formula that does not need to be decoded. The magical and enigmatic love-philter that is the immediate cause—and the alibi—of the suicidal passion of the lovers in the courtly love tradition (as in the myth of Tristan and Isolde; De Rougemont 46–50) is transformed here into a kitchen recipe, into food that is consumed in the family dinner, and consequently it is demystified, democratized, and channeled towards the aims of agape. Later in this chapter, Esquivel’s example will allow us to examine a similar approach to amorous discourse in two other popular novels of the 1980s and 1990s: Luis Sepúlveda’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (1989) and Marcela Serrano’s Nosotras que nos queremos tanto (We Who Love Each Other So Much). Similar to the novels of Isabel Allende—whose work, although less polished, Esquivel’s resembles—Like Water for Chocolate had great commercial success from its fi rst edition and provoked disparate reactions among critics and readers.1 Aside from a debate about whether or not it is a feminist text, the novel was also the target of often sarcastic commentary due to its evident formal and narrative defects, from its fairy-tale plot to its Manichaean and cliché-laden characterizations. 2 It is worth noting, however, that few of the reviews and critical articles devoted to this novel took into consideration its humoristic traits. With few exceptions, this novel has been read far too seriously, ignoring Elena Poniatowska’s canny comments on the back cover of the 1990 Planeta Mexicana edition, in which she stresses the “happiness” of Like Water for Chocolate: We women usually write sadly. José Joaquín Blanco was partly right when he said Rosario Castellanos was a weeper in her poetry. We are numbed by nostalgia, we are stiffened by memory, we are defeated by an everyday routine that covers everything in gray dust.

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It could never be said that one of the main traits of the writings of Angelina Muñiz, Elena Garro, Inés Arredondo, Julieta Campos, is happiness. But a book such as Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel of Monthly Chapters with Recipes, Loves, and Home Remedies has never been seen before in this vale of tears that is Mexican literature—because men too are crybabies and, save for Jorge Ibargüengoitia, they all take themselves terribly seriously and sweat solemnity by the bucketful. The critics’ uncertainty over how to deal with this novel is largely due to its inherent ambivalence as a parody of amorous suffering. Esquivel violently juxtaposes humor and love, laughter and tears, “high” and “low” culture, much as is done in the Mexican popular arts from the corridos to the engravings of José Guadalupe Posada, and, as with these, it is difficult to tell if the novel’s emotional and artistic effects on its audience are deliberate or just the result of happenstance. It is true that despite its obvious links with “subliterature”—with mass genres such as cookbooks, textbooks on manners, and romance novels—this novel was marketed and sold as “literature.” Nevertheless, like other new sentimental novels, Like Water for Chocolate fl irts with formal and aesthetic imperfection, perhaps due to its intention to appeal to readers more used to the mass media than to elite literature. Similar to Of Love and Shadows, this is a novel about passion written from the more “social” and communitarian perspective of agape. Its very title condenses the novel’s simultaneously popular and elitist character, since it uses the Mexican colloquialism “to be like water for chocolate” (“that is, boiling . . . . To be furious, upset, agitated;” Gómez de Silva) to signify a notion whose roots go back to courtly love: the ardor of amorous passion. The entire novel evokes the tone of the romances of chivalry, which is also that of the so-called “magical realism.” Many, if not all, of this novel’s “magical realist” elements—the emotional effects of Tita’s cooking; the enormous blanket Tita weaves (24); the ardent love that explodes literally into flames—are symbolic hyperboles, exaggerations caused by passion’s effect on language, much like those found in Bryce’s La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña. Throughout the novel, in fact, Esquivel translates with deliberate humor the most venerable topics of the chivalric tradition into the codes of Mexican popular culture.3 In doing so, she shows just how much love as passion has saturated West-


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ern culture even as she demonstrates how the eros of the troubadors and Neoplatonism has been downgraded to satisfy the anti-individualistic and fundamentally communal demands of popular and mass culture. The plot of Like Water for Chocolate takes place on a ranch in Mexico’s northern frontier during the Mexican Revolution. The grandniece of Tita, the protagonist, narrates the extreme passions that were unleashed on the ranch where the repressive widow Elena de la Garza lived with her three daughters, Tita, Rosaura, and Gertrudis, when young Pedro Muzquiz arrived to ask for Tita’s hand in marriage. When she learns of Pedro’s intention, Mama Elena offers Pedro instead her daughter Rosaura, since by family custom Tita, the youngest daughter, had to devote herself exclusively to taking care of her mother for the rest of her days. A weakwilled opportunist, Pedro agrees to marry Rosaura so that he can continue covertly his relationship with Tita. Thus is configured the classic love triangle whose obstacle to the lovers’ amorous satisfaction only serves to intensify their passion. (In contrast to Pedro and Tita’s tense and unsatisfied love, her sister Gertrudis devotes herself fully to carnal love and for a time works as a prostitute before becoming a revolutionary “general.”) Months after the wedding, and with considerable reluctance, Pedro engenders a son in Rosaura. When the child’s nursemaid dies in the midst of a fi refight between rebels and the Mexican federal army, Tita, in spite of her virginity, is able to breast-feed her nephew. Concerned about the implications of this fact, Mama Elena manages to have Pedro sent, along with his family, to work in San Antonio, Texas, thus separating Tita from the nephew she now treated as her son. Separated from Tita, the nephew dies of hunger, and upon learning of this, Tita loses her mind. The mother calls the family physician, a young American doctor named John Brown. Brown, a widower with a small son named Alex, falls in love with Tita and takes care of her in his house on the other side of the border while Tita recovers her sanity. She then remains living chastely for a time in Brown’s home until the news arrives that Mama Elena has been beaten up by bandits and is unable to move. Tita returns to care for her mother, but Mama Elena, full of paranoid fears, refuses to eat the food Tita prepares for her. Out of fear of being poisoned, Mama Elena takes an excess of emetics and dies. Meanwhile, John has proposed marriage to Tita, and she agrees out of gratitude. Nevertheless, upon seeing Pedro again at her mother’s burial, Tita felt that “her body shook like gelatin” (Esquivel 143). Soon after, in the midst of the preparations for her wedding with John, Tita and Pedro give

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in to their passion and make love for the fi rst time. Seeing the changes in Tita and surmising their cause, John nobly agrees to cancel the wedding. The novel ends twenty years later, after the wedding of Esperanza, Pedro and Rosaura’s daughter, to Alex, John Brown’s son. By mutual agreement, Tita had shared with Rosaura Esperanza’s upbringing, and Rosaura had agreed to let Tita and Pedro continue their love on condition of keeping it secret. Rosaura dies shortly before the wedding of “an acute stomach congestion” (Esquivel 238), and after the newlyweds and their guests leave, Pedro and Tita remain alone, free to fully consummate their passion. However, true to the novel’s parodic spirit, the two lovers are never able to enjoy the conjugal harmony of agape, since both die during the sexual act: Pedro dies fi rst, and Tita commits suicide then and there by eating a box of matches which literally burn due to Tita’s passion and consume the bodies of the two lovers in a week-long fi reworks display (Esquivel 242–244). Tita’s only legacy, as the voice of her grandniece tells us, is “the cookbook . . . that tells in each of its recipes this long-buried love story” (Esquivel 244). It is precisely this cookbook that serves to structure the novel and is its most original resource as well as the key to the parodic inversion the novel performs on the discourse of eros. Cooking and the culinary arts are the most salient aspects of this text. Their presence is seen in the fusion of the cookbook recipes with the novel’s narrative (which is already announced in the novel’s subtitle: A Novel of Monthly Chapters with Recipes, Loves, and Home Remedies) and also in the character of Tita herself, who has the magical ability to transfer her feelings into the food she masterfully cooks. The fusion of feelings with cooking is presented from the novel’s very fi rst lines, when the narrator says about Tita that “even while in my greatgrandmother’s womb she cried and cried when my great-grandmother chopped onions” and that when Tita was born she “literally was pushed into this world by the impressive torrent of tears that overflowed over the table and the kitchen floor” (Esquivel 13). The novel does not delay in pointing out the pharmacological nature of the food Tita cooks, which to a great extent fulfills the same function as the love potion in the chivalric tradition. A good example is the recipe for “Quails in rose petals” in the third chapter. This recipe, to which accidentally a few drops of Tita’s blood are added, not only provokes “real lust” in Pedro but also causes in Gertrudis: an aphrodisiac effect that made her feel an intense warmth invading her legs. A tickling in the center of her body did not let her stay


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properly seated in her chair. She began to sweat and imagine what it would be like to be sitting on a horse’s back embraced by a villista, one of those she’d seen the week before coming into the town square smelling of sweat, of earth, of sunrises full of danger and uncertainty, of life and death. (56) The text also explicitly and jokingly compares Tita’s recipe-elixir to “a new code of communication in which Tita was the sender, Pedro the receiver and Gertrudis the fortunate one in which this singular sexual relation through food was synthesized” (57). Tita’s food is thus also a kind of writing which, like the “Galleot’s book” in the story of Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s Commedia (Inferno V, verses 137–138), arouses passion in whoever reads it. The triangle of communication alluded to here could well be interpreted as a self-referential description of the novel’s possible effect on its readers: Tita’s recipe, which is a coded love message destined for Pedro, is “published” by being served at the dinner table, which allows others such as Gertrudis to share in it (or read it) and feel its effects. This same “elixir of love” effect is repeated at the novel’s end with the recipe for “Chiles in almond sauce” that Tita prepares for the wedding of Alex and Esperanza: The diners all looked delighted. What a difference between this wedding and Pedro’s unfortunate wedding to Rosaura, when all the guests ended up poisoned! Now, on the contrary, upon trying the chiles in almond sauce, instead of feeling great nostalgia and frustration, they all experienced a feeling similar to Gertrudis’s when she ate the quails in rose petals. And for a change it was Gertrudis who again felt the fi rst symptoms. She was in the middle of the courtyard dancing with Juan My Dear Captain and she sang out the refrain while dancing like never before. Every time she sang “ay, ay, ay, my dear captain” she remembered the far-off time when Juan was still a captain and he found her in the middle of the countryside stark naked. Immediately, she recognized the warmth in her legs, the tickling in the center of her body, the sinful thoughts, and she decided to leave with her husband before things got out of hand. Gertrudis was the one who began the exodus. All of the other guests, with all sorts of pretexts and libidinous looks, also excused themselves and left. The newlyweds were secretly grateful, since they were free to take their bags and leave as soon as possible. They urgently needed to get to the hotel. (240–241)

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It is important to note that the two “amorous” recipes—the quail in rose petals and the chiles in almond sauce—have a “national” character to them: the chiles in almond sauce (as the text itself points out) “wore with pride the colors of the Mexican flag” (240) and in chapter three we are told that the quail dish is from “an ancient prehispanic recipe” (54). This link between the amorous recipes and society indicates that unlike the traditional love-philter that provokes the self-destructive passion of the lovers, the love these recipes produces will be channeled more toward agape than toward eros: Under the quail’s effects, as we know, Gertrudis goes off with a follower of Pancho Villa and ends up, after working as a prostitute (an individual that does not suffer passion herself but provokes it in others) as a “general” in the revolutionary army; the chiles in almond sauce, for their part, are a nuptial dish which, although it causes the guests’ “exodus,” also gives the newlyweds the chance to happily consummate their marriage.4 Feminist critics are right in accusing this novel of promoting a conservative value system in which getting a husband, marrying him, and having his children are seen as things every woman should aspire to (Potvin 64–65). It should be remembered, however, that the new sentimental novel arises largely from what I have called, when discussing Rachel’s Song, “postrevolutionary fatigue.” In Like Water for Chocolate this is also manifested as a post-feminist fatigue: a desire to leave behind a lengthy period of sometimes fruitless struggle in order to replenish one’s strength and come to terms with some of the social institutions against which one struggled. Moreover, if it is true that many of the new sentimental novels seek to connect with a broad range of readers, it is not surprising then—as we saw in Of Love and Shadows—that these novels should accept, or pretend to accept, most of the conventional values of their societies. Written from the standpoint of agape, the new sentimental novels seek to attract readers, not reject them, and thus they try to reach consensus and hold apparently “reformist” rather than “revolutionary” positions. In any case, beneath their seemingly conventional façades, these novels do carry out the innovative task of exploring long-derided aspects of the human experience, such as the affective dimension, which recent historical and social developments have made once again relevant. As in Of Love and Shadows, in Like Water for Chocolate the passion and suffering of eros continue to be present, but their effects are controlled by means of parody, which reduces them to a mere pretext for artistic creation. Significantly, the text tells us that after Tita’s “period of suffering . . . her best recipes were born” (76). Let us recall that it is after Tita and


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Pedro’s love-death in the midst of a spectacular conflagration that Tita’s book of recipes is found among the ashes: passion and death are still hidden forces that produce writing. The novel’s last lines, however, even as they reaffi rm this link between suffering and writing, also posit a balance of sorts between eros and agape when the narrator tells us that she feels just as close to the “happy love” of her parents Alex and Esperanza as to the tears of her grand-aunt Tita (244). The figure of doctor John Brown fulfi lls a mediating function in this novel, serving as a bridge between receta as recipe and as prescription, as well as between eros and agape, like a less picturesque but no less rationalistic version of Abrenuncio in Of Love and Other Demons. Ironically, it is the calm and selfless Brown—who in many respects embodies agape in this novel—who explains to Tita the esoteric and risky doctrine of courtly love while trying to warn her of its dangers. With the pretext of explaining the chemical recipe to make matches, Brown offers Tita his theory of love, which echoes many of the Catharist doctrines that were later incorporated in courtly love and Neoplatonism—as was discussed in Chapter 1—such as the dualities body/soul, light/shadow, heat/cold and the theme of the return to divinity by means of amorous passion: As you see, we all have within us the elements needed to produce phosphorus. What’s more, let me tell you something I haven’t told anyone else. My grandmother had a very interesting theory: she said that while it’s true we are all born with a box of matches inside us, we can’t light them up by ourselves, we need—as in the experiment—oxygen and the aid of a candle. Only in this case the oxygen has to come, for example, from our loved one’s breath; the candle can be any type of food, music, caress, word, or sound that can serve as a detonator and so light up one of the matches. For a moment we’ll feel dazzled by an intense emotion. A pleasant warmth will be produced within us that will gradually disappear as time passes until a new explosion comes to revive it. Each person has to discover what are their detonators to be able to live, for the combustion that is produced when one of them is lit is what feeds the energy of the soul. In other words, this combustion is their nourishment. If one doesn’t discover his own detonators in time, the matchbox gets wet and we’ll never be able to light a single match again. When this happens the soul flees from our body, wanders through the deepest darkness, vainly trying to fi nd nourishment by

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itself, unaware that only a body that has ceased to be passive and cold can give it to her. . . . Of course, one should take care to light the matches one by one. Because if, due to a very strong emotion, they should all light up at the same time, this will produce a brightness so strong that it shines beyond what we can normally see and then our eyes behold a splendorous tunnel that shows us the way we forgot when we were born and calls us to fi nd again our lost divine origin. The soul yearns to return once again to the place from which it came, leaving an inert body behind . . . (Esquivel 119–120) At the novel’s end, as we know, Brown’s counsel of moderation becomes the “recipe” through which Tita takes her life in an apotheosis of death that parodies the less spectacular demises of Tristan and Isolde and Romeo and Juliet. Thus, to a great extent, Like Water for Chocolate achieves its aim to “domesticate” passion, subjecting it to the rules of agape by uncovering passion’s formulaic and conventionalized nature. But Esquivel’s novel also reminds us that the reduction of eros to a mere recipe in popular and mass culture also indicates how much these cultural manifestations distrust passion—despite giving it widespread currency and using it (perhaps cynically) to arouse in audiences a thrill that is just a pale reflection of the nearsacred feeling “fear and trembling” eros evoked in the elites of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Reflecting on the popularization of the Tristan and Isolde myth in Western culture, Denis de Rougemont observes: The process whereby our literature, whether middle-class or “proletarian,” has come to consist mainly of novels, and of love stories at that, corresponds precisely to an invasion of the contemporary mind by the now completely profaned content of the myth. The myth, indeed, must cease to be the real thing once its sacred framework is removed and the mystic secret which it both divulged and veiled is vulgarized and popularized. The claim to passion put forward by the romantics thereupon becomes a vague yearning after affluent surroundings and exotic adventures, such as a low grade of melodramatic novel can satisfy symbolically. That this no longer has any kind of valid meaning is evident as soon as we realize how impossible it is for the readers of these novels to imagine a mystic reality, an askesis, or any effort on the part of the mind to throw off its sensual fetters; and yet courtly passion had no other purpose, its language no other key. Purpose and key have been lost and for-


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gotten; and passion, although the need of it still disturbs us, is now a mere sickness of instinct, seldom fatal, usually poisonous and depressing, and quite as degraded and degrading in comparison with the Tristan myth as the consequences of dipsomania, for example, must be in comparison with the divine intoxication described in the poetry of the Arab mystics. (233) However, the awareness that passionate love is a fiction, a degraded version of a myth, does not automatically imply the disappearance of eros and the triumph of agape in social life. As De Rougemont further reminds us, echoing many specialists on the mass media, the passionate love disseminated by the romance novels and the media, although seemingly the opposite of the middle-class morality which currently predominates in Western societies, in fact “has had the effect of contributing to the stability of the established order” (234). De Rougemont adds: Literature is thus employed—unconsciously, of course—to ensure that the subversive desires of the individual mind shall be volatilized in sensual reverie. It is true that the morality of marriage comes off rather badly, but it does not matter, since the middle class is well aware that the institution is no longer grounded in morality or religion, but rests upon the fi nancial foundations—prospect of inheritance, dowries, the social position of each party, business connections, and so on. (234) Soon after these comments on the diminished role of eros in twentiethcentury culture, De Rougemont highlights a more sinister version of eros to which I have already alluded when analyzing Of Love and Shadows: patriotic passion. This is the use of the rhetoric of passion to justify war, ultranationalism, and totalitarianism. Alluding to the rise of Nazism in Germany, De Rougemont observes: . . . [I]f total war abolished the merest possibility of passion, politics transferred individual passions to the level of the Collective Being. Everything that a totalitarian education withheld from individuals was heaped upon the personified Nation. It is the Nation (or the Party) that had passions. It is the Nation (or the Party) that took over the whole interplay of exciting obstructions, askesis, and the rush made unwittingly toward a heroic and therefore divinizing death. (268)

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Passionate love was thus during the twentieth century a pretext for human violence and egotism, one of the masks of power—as it remains today. Like Water for Chocolate calls attention to this fact, and also, by means of its culinary themes and its allusions (however postfeminist they may be) to the oppressed condition of women in Mexico, it seeks to further the idea of literature as a form of communion, turning writing into a meal that can be shared by all.

2 The curate observing that Don Quixote’s understanding was disordered by the books of chivalry he had read, the innkeeper replied: “. . . at least, I can say for myself, when I hear him read of those furious and terrible strokes that have been given by certain knights, I am seized with the desire of being at it myself, and could listen to such stories whole nights and days without ceasing.” . . . “And what is your opinion of the matter, my young mistress?” said the priest to the innkeeper’s daughter. “Truly, Signior, I don’t well know,” she replied, “but listen among the rest: and really, though I do not understand it, I am pleased with much what I hear; yet I take no delight in those strokes that my father loves; but in the lamentations made by the knights, when they are absent from their mistresses, which, in good sooth, often make me weep with compassion.” “Then you would soon give them relief, if they mourned for you, my pretty maid?” said Dorothea. “I don’t know what I should do,” answered the girl; “but this I know, that some of these ladies are so cruel, their knights call them lions, tigers, and a thousand other reproachful names. . . .” miguel de cervantes, el ingenioso hidalgo don quijote de la mancha, chapter 32 The narrative in the Chilean Luis Sepúlveda’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories presupposes the reduction of eros to a recipe or formula in today’s world. The “old man” of the title, a snake hunter named Antonio José Bolívar Proaño, reads romance novels (novelas rosas) trying to overcome the nostalgia he feels for his dead wife as well as for the “pure love” (Sepúlveda 52) he experienced among the Shuar Indians in the Ecuadorian Amazon. However, the novel ultimately shows that the passionate love of


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the romance novels is a poor substitute for the Shuar’s version of agape and barely helps the old man “forget human barbarism” (137). At fi rst, despite its title, it would seem that The Old Man Who Read Love Stories has little to do with the genre of the new sentimental novel. The story of the old hunter Antonio José Bolívar’s fight with a man-eating tigress is more directly linked to the tradition of jungle narratives that in Spanish America dates back to the works of the Uruguayan Horacio Quiroga as well as to the telluric novels of the 1920s and 1930s such as the Colombian José Eustacio Rivera’s La vorágine (The Vortex, 1927) and the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos’s Canaima (1935). 5 But the deliberate anachronism this novel shares with other Post-Boom fictions can also be seen as a stylized rewriting and a reduction of precursor works of the Boom such as Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps (1953) and of Boom novels such as Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Green House (1969). It could be said, with black humor, that like the Ecuadorian Jivaro Indians, Sepúlveda has made his novel into a tsantsa, a “shrunken head” of those great novels.6 They are all archtexts or pretexts of this brief but powerful novel that explores an already well known literary terrain. Sepúlveda’s variation on the already familiar—even parodied—theme of Westerners “devoured by the jungle” fi rst seen in Rivera’s La vorágine lies precisely in the importance his narrative gives to the sentimental dimension. This turn toward sentiment is also linked to the novel’s ecological theme, in which the devouring jungle is itself being devoured by a modern technology that destroys everything, including the natural world. Among the various kinds of love displayed in this novel the feeling of agape toward a personified nature, a nature turned into a fellow being, stands out. Unlike Like Water for Chocolate, The Old Man Who Read Love Stories has a serious intent, as announced in the “Author’s note,” which memorializes the murdered Brazilian ecologist Chico Mendes, and in the text’s dedication to an indigenous leader of the Ecuadorian Amazon (Sepúlveda 9–11). Sepúlveda’s style, more polished than Esquivel’s, deliberately avoids any trace of “magical realism.”7 However, like Esquivel’s this novel displays a “lighter” kind of writing—which I have been calling the writing of agape—that is more concerned with narrative effectiveness and fluidity than with artistic experimentation or ideological reflection. To a great extent, The Old Man Who Read Love Stories belongs to the lineage of texts that treat love ironically, even as they evoke and make use of it. That lineage, as I proposed in the introduction, dates back to the nineteenth century and the works of Stendhal and Flaubert, although its origins could easily be traced back to Don Quixote. Cervantes’s master-

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work is in fact one of the most evident intertexts of The Old Man Who Read Love Stories. The title itself sounds like a succinct description of Don Quixote. Antonio José Bolívar, “a leathery-skinned old man who didn’t seem to mind bearing the names of so many heroes” (Sepúlveda 19), is undoubtedly a quixotic figure.8 Dwelling in the archaic world without writing that is the jungle, where books are extremely rare though not much appreciated, Antonio José lives in a village ironically named “El Idilio” (The Idyll)—a name suggestive not only of the illusory and mirage-like enterprise of trying to colonize the Amazon jungle, but also of the fundamental role played by a certain kind of erotic illusion in the very notion of “civilization.” In the middle of the ragtag community of El Idilio, the old man, like the Quixote, fi lls his lonely hours and tries to forget his age by reading romance novels, which seduce him with their exploration of “the mysteries of love” and offer him glimpses of an exotic and near-legendary outside world (Sepúlveda 73). These novels are brought to him from that outside world by his friend the dentist Rubicundo Loachamín, who, like John Brown in Like Water for Chocolate, is the medical mediator who gives Antonio José access to the discourse of passion, of eros. Antonio José’s tragedy is that he reads romance novels precisely because he fi nds in them a mirror-image of his experience of feeling an “impossible love” toward an Amazonia that does not accept him fully. As we are told in the novel’s third chapter, Antonio José is from the Ecuadorian Andes, and he migrates with his wife to the jungle. After the death of his wife, he goes to live with the Amazonian Indians and adopts their lifestyle and customs but is fi nally exiled from them and lives still longing for the “pure love” of the Shuar. Antonio José’s years among the Shuar took him away from the passionate and egotistic world of the whites and allowed him to experience a culture that seems to exemplify the values of agape, although not, of course, in its Christian version. It is the Shuar who, “full of pity” (43), appear almost miraculously from the jungle to save Antonio José and the fi rst colonists of El Idilio when they are about to perish because of their ignorance about how to survive in Amazonia: “From them [the Shuar] they learned to hunt, fish, raise sturdier huts that withstood the windstorms, to recognize edible and poisonous fruits, and, above all, from them they learned the art of living together with the jungle” (43). The death of Antonio José’s wife, with whom he had no children (her presumed infertility had been the cause of their migration to the jungle), brings him closer to the Shuar, to the point where “with them he abandoned Catholic peasant’s prudishness. He went about half-naked and


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avoided contact with the other colonists, who regarded him as crazy” (44). “Seduced by the invitations of those landscapes without limits nor owners” (45), Antonio José seeks out the company of the Shuar. After surviving a viper’s bite through the care of a Shuar medicine man, Antonio José is accepted by the tribe in a ceremony with hallucinogenic plants in which “he saw himself as an undeniable part of those ever-changing places, like another strand of hair in that endless green body, thinking and feeling like a Shuar” (47–48). Later Antonio José develops a close relationship with Nushiño, a Shuar “who had also come from far away” (48), with whom he shares a life of hunting and quiet friendship. Even so, the Shuar make Antonio José understand that “defi nitely, he was like one of them, but not one of them” (50) and that every so often he must move away from the tribe in order to return to it. The most dramatic example—as well as the most alien to Western culture—of “communion” among the Shuar is the patriarchal custom of sharing the women. “During his life among the Shuar,” the narrator tells us, Antonio José “did not need romance novels to know about love”: He was not one of them and, therefore, could not have wives. But he was like one of them, so that during the rainy season the host Shuar begged him to accept one of his women to bolster the pride of his lineage and of his house. The woman who had been offered led him to the river’s edge. There, singing anents, she washed, adorned, and perfumed him before returning to the hut to have a romp on the mats with feet held high, softly warmed by the fi re, without ceasing to sing anents, nasal poems that described the beauty of their bodies and the joy of a pleasure infi nitely magnified by the magic of the description. It was pure love without any other purpose than love itself. Without posession nor jealousy. (51–52) The Shuar’s “pure love,” based on the enjoyment of the body, is clearly the opposite of the courtly eros. Antonio José is in fact not only caught between two cultures but also between two notions of love: that of agape, as he learns it from the Shuar, and that of eros, which he learns from the romance novels. Antonio José’s happiness among the Indians ends after his friend Nushiño is murdered by a white man. According to the Shuar’s code of conduct, Antonio José has avenged his friend’s death by killing the murderer in an incorrect way, and they forbid him to rejoin them. Before these events,

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however, Antonio José had already decided to go back to live in El Idilio because he was getting old and he knew he could not allow himself to be killed like the Shuar did to their elders (53). Exiled forever from the Indians’ community, Antonio José also decides to remain on the margins of El Idilio. He can no longer live in either world, and reading the romance novels becomes his only consolation. Ironically, he learns of these novels’ existence through a priest who, though he claims to have read only a couple of them, explains that these books “tell the story of two people who meet, love each other, and struggle to overcome the difficulties that don’t allow them to be happy” (65). There are no books in El Idilio, and it is only when Antonio José manages to travel to the larger town of El Dorado that he has access to a school library of “about fi fty volumes set up on a wooden shelf” (70). There he fi nds “what he really desired,” the novel El Rosario (The Rosary, 1910) by Florence Barclay, which “had love, love everywhere. The characters suffered and mixed happiness with suffering in such a beautiful way that the reading-glass became fogged with his tears” (71).9 Following this English missionary’s moralizing novel, Antonio José goes on to consume the romance novels brought by the dentist Loachamín from Guayaquil, which the dentist buys advised by a prostitute from Esmeraldas named Josefi na who “alternated her duties as lady of the night with those of a literary critic, and every six months she selected the two novels that, in her judgment, promised the greatest sufferings, and these were the ones that later Antonio José Bolívar Proaño read in his lonely hut by the Nangaritza River” (33). It is through these popular novels that Antonio José receives a second “sentimental education,” this time in the codes of passionate love. Among the things he learns about, for example, is the exotic custom of kissing: “Kissing with ardor. Kissing. He had just discovered that he had done it very few times and only with his wife, because among the Shuar kissing was an unknown custom” (82). However, as with Don Quixote’s romances of chivalry, the romance novels reinforce his knowledge of passionate love and of the (by now degraded) codes of courtly love with their Manichaean worldview. When one of the colonists asks the old man to read aloud one of his novels, the old man warns him: “Then I have to read it from the beginning, so that you’ll know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys” (113). Although the old man’s words sound naive, the text of The Old Man Who Read Love Stories obviously takes them seriously, since it unequivocally condemns “all those who corrupted the virginity of his Amazonia” (137).


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It does not take long for Antonio José’s readings to turn him into a fully quixotic character whose Dulcinea is not only his dead wife Dolores Encarnación del Santísimo Sacramento Estupiñán Otavalo, but also the “virgin jungle” itself, whose purity the old man wants to defend. In the old man’s mind, love as eros in its popularized version becomes mixed up with the Shuar’s version of agape, which also extends to the natural world around them. “Contaminated” by passionate love and the chivalric ideas on which it is based, the old man desperately searches for purity and, having been cast out of the Shuar’s communal world, he forges a new worldview for himself that is based more on passion than on communion. The “recipe” of passion is not totally useless, of course. Among other things, it allows the old man to understand what is taking place around him in the jungle, where the agape of the forest dwellers is being destroyed by the whites’ greedy eros. More concretely still, the old man used the codes of passion in combination with his experience of the jungle acquired from the Shuar to interpret the motivations and actions of the tigress, the homicidal animal whose hunt forms the backbone of the novel’s plot. One day, the Indians bring to the village in a canoe the mutilated corpse of a dead “gringo” (the novel’s own term). The mayor of El Idilio—a character that shares with Sancho Panza his rotundness and the post of mayor (recall Sancho’s burlesque stint as “governor” of an “island” in Don Quixote, second part, chaps. 44–53), although not his loyalty nor bravery— immediately blames the Indians (Sepúlveda 25–26). The old man instead observes the dead man’s wounds, notices the stench of cat’s urine, and exculpates the Indians, offering his interpretation of what happened: The gringo sonofabitch killed the pups and he also surely wounded the male. Look at the sky, it’s ready to pour. Try to imagine it: the female went out to hunt to fill her belly and suckle them during the fi rst weeks of rain. The pups weren’t weaned yet and so the male stayed to watch over them. That’s the way it is among beasts, and that’s how the gringo must have found them. Now the female is wandering around gone crazy with pain. Now she’s hunting for men. . . . A pain-crazed tigress is more dangerous than twenty assassins put together. (29–30) The scene painted by the old man in sentimental and personified terms is that of the destruction of a family and of a mother who acts moved by hatred and a desire for revenge. Antonio José not only personifies the

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tigress, but he also uses the language of chivalry to describe her actions, attributing her the right to take revenge and the virtues of love of her male, intelligence, and nobility. Indeed, throughout the narrative the tigress appears as a symbol of passion, of suffering with erotic overtones; in a momentary pause during the chase, we are told that the old man “imagined her there with her skinny body, rapid, anxious breathing, eyes fi xed, stony, all her muscles tense and shaking her tail with sensuality” (126). Further on, when the tigress has led the old man to where the male lies mortally wounded and the old man, feeling pity, decides to kill it with his rifle, the animal’s actions are again described in emotional terms: “He did not see the female, but he could imagine her up there, hidden, making cries perhaps like those of a human” (131). When at last Antonio José kills her, the narrator describes her in terms evocative of nobility and the sublime: “she was a superb animal, beautiful, a masterpiece of gallantry impossible to reproduce even in our thoughts” (136). The last lines of the novel, however, take readers back to the same disenchanted view of passionate love presented in Like Water for Chocolate, to the recognition of passion’s fictional nature: “without ceasing to curse the gringo who started the tragedy, the mayor, the gold searchers, all those who corrupted the virginity of his Amazonia, he cut a thick branch with a swipe of his machete and leaning on it began to walk back to El Idilio, to his hut, and to his novels that spoke of love with words so beautiful that sometimes they made him forget human barbarism” (137). The code of eros collected in the romance novels and mass culture is no longer a guide for action nor understanding, but at most an entertainment, a “recipe” to forget for a while the violence and lack of communion that predominate in the real world.

3 If we judge of love by the majority of its results it rather resembles hatred than friendship. There are some who never would have loved if they never had heard it spoken of. la rochefoucauld, maxims 72, 136, réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales It is precisely in the midst of Nature, on the shores of a lake in southern Chile, in a country house the narrator describes as a “true sanitarium”


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(Serrano 306), where the frame story of the Chilean Marcela Serrano’s Nosotras que nos queremos tanto takes place. Reminiscent of Boccaccio’s Decamerone (1351), in which a group of Italian nobles who have taken refuge from the plague inside a castle entertain each other by telling stories, in this novel four middle- and upper-class professional Chilean women gather in the country house to exchange anecdotes and reminiscences of a friendship that has extended from the 1960s through the 1980s. In these anecdotes, politics and sentiment frequently meet and clash. The four women share a left-wing ideology, and the narrative alludes in detail to the most significant political events in recent Chilean history: the electoral victory of Salvador Allende’s socialist government, the subsequent military coup and rise to power of general Augusto Pinochet and the years of repression that followed, the economic crisis of the early 1980s, and the return to democracy with the Concertación government presided over by Patricio Aylwin. For her part, Ana, the principal narrator, who describes herself as “the oldest” (la mayor) of the friends and is a former literature professor and writer (Serrano 11–15), narrates in detail the lives of Sara, Isabel, and María, who are also her colleagues at a private educational institution only referred to as “the Institute.” Ana relates the family origins of her friends, their social class, episodes from their childhood and youth, their loves, marriages and divorces, children, deaths of their spouses, studies, ideas and political activities, and jobs, also including in these episodes the lives of other women related to her friends: sisters, colleagues, employees, or acquaintances. A valedictory atmosphere envelops the novel as a whole, since after the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship Ana knows that her friends will leave the Institute to join the new government: “it’s clear that this tight-knit society we’ve formed is coming to an end. Democracy has arrived. And we always knew this would scatter us” (Serrano 17). Anticipating the turn toward intimacy and the contrast between public and private life explored throughout the novel, Ana makes clear from the beginning that she will not follow her friends’ footsteps because she has lost interest in public service: “Now I want my independence and to earn my living in the private world” (17). Despite Ana’s statement, this novel, like those by Esquivel and Sepúlveda I have discussed, is also written from the standpoint of the search for communion, or agape. In a fi nal scene evocative of communion, the four good friends join together, perhaps for the last time, around the “rose-colored oak of that table that gathered us around it three times a day, offering us

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nourishment” (Serrano 353). At the beginning of the novel, on their arrival to the country house the friends had also gathered around the emblematic oak table and Ana, after serving them wine, had raised her cup in a toast: “To us!” (Serrano 27). Immediately after, she addresses the readers: “We looked at each other with some emotion. After all, it’s not every day you fi nd four women who love each other” (27). The latter phrase echoes the novel’s title, which in turn evokes the well-known bolero “Nosotros” (We) by the Cuban Pedro Junco (1920–1943): We who love each other so much Must part—don’t ask me why. It’s not lack of fondness —I love you heart and soul. I swear I adore you, And in the name of this love And for your own good I bid you farewell. (Rico Salazar 425) “We, who love each other so much, must part . . .”: the bolero’s phrase elided by the novel’s title prefigures the tension explored in this novel between the agape that brings together and the eros that separates. Serrano’s text, like those of Esquivel and Sepúlveda, also emphasizes how difficult it is to love one’s neighbor in a world where the code of passion, however fictional it may be, is widely used to justify society’s violent excesses. In this novel, agape understood as the love of one’s neighbors in their full and concrete individuality (and not as an abstraction, such as the concept of “the poor”), is presented as the antidote or “counter-recipe” of the egotism produced by eros. As we saw in Of Love and Shadows—another novel set in Chile under dictatorship—both the left and right in Chile adopt the codes of eros (including that of courtly love) in their “patriotic passion.” Nosotras que nos queremos tanto exposes and denounces that unexpected similarity between opposite poles of the Chilean political spectrum. In fact, of all the novels studied in this book, Nosotras que nos queremos tanto discusses most openly the phenomenon of “post-revolutionary fatigue” I have pointed out in many of the new sentimental novels. In passages that sound perhaps too essayistic or journalistic, the narrator and her friends explicitly describe the change in their attitude toward politics and criticize the repression of their feelings during their years of leftist militancy:


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For fi fteen years they were part of a greater whole. The Party: A body with innumerable arms, capable of covering—and manipulating—them. The total collectivization of life: of everyday life, as well as thoughts and feelings. . . . In sum, the Party played for them the role traditionally assigned to the family, in its full patriarchal structure: the Party as affectionate mother with her protective bosom, the Party as monolithic father with his oppressive claws. Sara tells María that she thinks it was a generational problem. She reminds her how, as a generation, they only aspired to the collective. It pains her to remember how their individual identities were stepped on without any regard for their psyches. In this sense, they were fighters. Like the rest of Latin America, they too were marked by the Cuban Revolution—and later, at another level, by the French revolts of May 1968. Theirs was, in truth, a generation of intense militancy. They had no time for personal struggles— those weren’t urgent. “There wasn’t any time to indulge in private matters,” says María, “Public issues ate us up. Only that was worthwhile. . . . Any attempt at introspectiveness was branded as laziness and vanity. Choosing happiness was considered almost obscene. (Serrano 178–179) As can clearly be seen from this passage and others like it in this novel, Serrano’s criticism of the repression of feelings by left-wing political movements, which applies equally to men as well as women (María’s last comment about the obscenity of happiness is reminiscent of Barthes’s in A Lover’s Discourse), is also linked to a feminist, or more precisely, postfeminist perspective. The narrator denounces the “completely patriarchal structure” of the Party, but María’s comment that “public issues ate us up” points to a critique of all the militancy of those years, including that of feminism. The postfeminist view, which posits a return to the affects in the debate about woman’s condition in society, is more evident still in Chapter 20 of Nosotras que nos queremos tanto when, in a group therapy meeting for women directed by Sara, a psychologist named Ximena exclaims, “I think that we can speak of a whole generation with affective problems, with an enormous incapacity to connect with their feelings. In sum, a generation that’s shown an almost psychotic distrust of love.” (Serrano 254) An anthropologist named Carla responds to these comments with a cri

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de coeur that gives vent to her own bewilderment as well as that of other characters in the novel: “This whole talk about women obsesses me. I try to understand my gender through myself, and I try to understand myself through my gender. I don’t make any progress; I’m blocked. I read, I study, I talk. I hook up with feminism fi rst, then postfeminism, and I’m fi lled with a thousand questions.” (Serrano 254–255) One character in the novel who most intensely experiences the shock of postrevolutionary disillusionment and the uncertainty about the role of women in Chile’s changing society is María. To a great extent, María’s role in this novel is similar to Tita’s in Like Water for Chocolate and Antonio José’s in The Old Man Who Read Love Stories. Like them, María is initially linked to passion. Like Antonio José, who tries to overcome his nostalgia for agape with the vicarious passion of the romance novels, María longs for passion even as she disbelieves it, seeking it again and again in the “parallel loves” she practices with different men and in the ephemeral love triangles she joins, which never arouse deep feelings in her. Political militancy and the passion of eros were commingled in María’s youth.10 María, who had substituted leftist politics for her Catholic militancy after reading a book by the French actor and dramatist Antonin Artaud whose title is never mentioned,11 began to experience doubt “like an incurable disease” (Serrano 181). The collapse of her political passion runs in tandem with her sudden awareness of the illusory nature of amorous passion. In a conversation with Ana after separating from a lover, María reveals her unbelief as well as her nostalgia for passion: “We know love ends, Ana. Why fool ourselves? Plans for the future are just that, plans. . . . We know all relationships come to an end. You say they are transformed instead. Sure: into something warm, cuddly, and complacent! Where’s the energy in that? We know passion isn’t forever . . . .” (187–188) Like Rachel in Barnet’s novel, María tries to use her knowledge of seduction to arouse men’s passion even as she avoids experiencing passion herself. However, she also avoids agape in its matrimonial form with all its overtones of domesticity, or as she says sarcastically, “something warm, cuddly, and complacent.” Despite having found a possibly more durable


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love in Ignacio, a Chilean sociologist, she refuses to marry him. Refusing both the placidity of marriage as well as the devotion and the suffering of eros, María remains suspended in a liminal situation that only breaks down after her sister Soledad is murdered along with her husband by the dictator’s police (317–320). Soledad, who, as Ignacio perceptively observes, “was already a good friend of Death” (319), had remained active in the clandestine resistance against Pinochet. Her death breaks María’s last link to the political passions she had tried to leave behind, leading her into depression and an attempt to commit suicide with pills and alcohol (9, 321). In a pattern that should by now be familiar, María, as the most passionate character in the novel, becomes “sick”—literally and figuratively—with love. Nosotras que nos queremos tanto, in fact, begins with a monologue by María in the clinic where she has been taken because of her depression, and the novel’s fi rst sentence is, tellingly: “They say I’m sick” (Serrano 9). True to the principles of writing as agape, this novel constantly offers its own gloss, its own explanation for the readers’ benefit, and so in Chapter 26 María herself recognizes that her illness resides in her fear to give herself over to love, be it agape or eros: Trying to arouse feelings in others, she forgot her own feelings. . . . Being attentive to how others felt, she stopped feeling herself. Her heart falters when she realizes that in trying to see through others, she did not see. In trying to burn others, she snuffed herself out. And now she doesn’t know what to do with all this loneliness. (346) Ignacio also offers his pithy diagnosis: “My poor María. The priestess of love, whose aim and task in life was to keep the secrets of the temple. And the temple was empty” (347). Complementary to María is the character of Isabel. If María is the passionate woman who fears the effects of passion and rejects marriage, her friend Isabel is the woman who believes in marriage in its most traditional form—the patriarchal one—and suffers the consequences. To deal with the suffering caused by her husband’s indifference, Isabel begins to drink on the sly (305). Nearing her fortieth birthday, she timidly rebels by secretly becoming the lover of one of her students at the Institute (292–295). Her family problems multiply: her husband Hernán is unfaithful and one of her sons is arrested for drug possession (296–305). After getting her son released from jail, Isabel returns to her husband and they reach an agreement, although Isabel’s alcoholism continues. Isabel’s situation shows

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that this novel does not propose marriage uncritically as an alternative to passion, although in general it tends to present marriage and family as responses to the emotional void left by the right wing’s violence and the left wing’s discredit. In Nosotras que nos queremos tanto, as in the other new sentimental novels examined so far, passion, or eros, is regarded as an illness of the soul, and its healing resides, unequivocally, in agape. María’s and Isabel’s healing takes place in the country house, under the care of Sara and the narrator, and in a context of communion: Sara and I were full of energy, and the South and its nature gave us the chance to pass it on to them. It was also our shared life that allowed it. It was the warm bread coming out of the wood-fi red oven early each morning. It was the prune-colored wine that put into our blood that which doesn’t run in the misers’ veins—as Virginia Woolf would have said—who for years have deprived themselves of wine and warmth. Yes, it was the wine and the warmth that tempered us. It was the rose-colored oak of that table that gathered us around it three times a day, offering us nourishment. . . . (Serrano 353) Passionate love is paralleled in this novel, to a great extent, with the political ideologies whose violence devastated Chile and whose influence waned toward the end of the twentieth century. Like those ideologies, the code of passionate love is another one of those things that will be swept away by “the new winds” (in María’s words) that blow around the world. The very style of Nosotras que nos queremos tanto seeks to embody this refusal of passion. The novel is written in a spare, direct style, with mostly short sentences, frequent use of commonplace expressions, and a general avoidance of rhetorical flourishes. Its use of the rhetoric of gossip (when narrating the lives of the friends) underscores the novel’s social and communitarian function while avoiding gossip’s sensationalistic aspects. The narrator’s self-description could well be applied also to the text’s style: I come from the middle class, that which could be called “middlemiddle.” That’s it. Nothing that could lead to confusion. Little in the way of appearances and a lot of austerity. . . . I’m neither pretty nor ugly. Neither tall nor short. Neither very dark nor light. My physical appearance is directly related to my inner being. Neither


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strident nor invisible. A sort of balance flows through me. María would say that all this is terribly boring. I hope time shows her it is the opposite. My greatest conquest is serenity. And that’s enough for me. (15) Curiously, in spite of this novel’s abundant allusions to mass culture, mass culture does not play a significant role in most of the characters’ lives: the allusions to cinema, boleros, the music of Spanish and Cuban pop singers like José Luis Perales and Pablo Milanés, and the U.S. bestsellers María reads are used mostly to evoke the atmosphere of a time period or as devices for characterization. The reason for this becomes obvious when we read Nosotras que nos queremos tanto in the context of Like Water for Chocolate and The Old Man Who Read Love Stories: Like Esquivel and Sepúlveda, Serrano recognizes that popular and mass culture are saturated with eros—and its negative effects—and help to disseminate it, and it is therefore advisable to keep them at arm’s length. Nevertheless, the middle-class, conciliatory, and dispassionate writing of Nosotras que nos queremos tanto still depends on eros for its existence: Without the amorous suffering of the women there would be no point to the story. However, viewed with evident distrust, eros is consigned to the “sanitarium” of literature. In its search for agape, this novel prefers to risk sounding obvious and tedious. Recognizing that “happy love has no history,” Serrano tells stories of unhappy love, but does so from a distanced and liminal perspective. Like María, who at the end is still awaiting her beloved Ignacio’s return, Nosotras que nos queremos tanto remains suspended between a farewell to eros and a welcome to agape. In our next and last chapter, we examine how more recent instances of the new sentimental novel have adopted a more open attitude toward the mass media and the discourse of passion. Novels like Antonio Skármeta’s Love-Fifteen and Luis Rafael Sánchez’s La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos take for granted the current triviality of eros and seek to explore instead the importance of agape for contemporary literature and culture.

The Importance of Being Sentimental FIVE

Antonio Skármeta’s Love-Fifteen and Luis Rafael Sánchez’s La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos

1 My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires and more slow . . . andrew marvell, “to his coy mistress” A dilemma faced by the authors of the new sentimental novel in Spanish America in their attempt to forge a new relationship with their readers was the seemingly trivial nature of this type of fiction, its relative unimportance when compared to the great political and social questions that polarized the Latin American continent and the world as a whole. Until recently in Spanish American literature and culture, to affi rm the primacy of the subject and of subjectivity, to give pride of place to the details of an individual’s emotional life, and to show respect and compassion toward others, including one’s adversaries, were regarded less as acts of daring than as acts of folly. In this sense, the moral and artistic courage displayed by new sentimental authors such as Barnet, Puig, Poniatowska, Allende, and Bryce Echenique, among others, cannot be underestimated. Even so, few of the new sentimental novels have directly confronted the most common criticism directed at sentimentalism from various quarters of politics and aesthetics: that sentimentalism is too confi ned to the private sphere and that it is therefore trivial and lacking in any deep cultural significance. Roland Barthes summarizes this attitude in A Lover’s Discourse: “The amo-

Antonio Skármeta and Luis Rafael Sánchez

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rous text (scarcely a text at all), consists of petty narcissisms, psychological paltrinesses; it is without grandeur: or its grandeur (but who, socially, is there to recognize it?) is to be unable to attain grandeur . . .” (195). Most of the new sentimental novels have opted to leave implicit their protest against those who question their importance, and thus have not devoted themselves to openly articulating a defense or justification for their turn toward love and sentiment. Two notable exceptions, however, are the novels with which I conclude this study. Perhaps because they were written when the neosentimental mode was already becoming well established, the Chilean Antonio Skármeta’s Love-Fifteen and the Puerto Rican Luis Rafael Sánchez’s La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos offer meditations about what might be called, paraphrasing Sánchez’s title (who in turn paraphrases Oscar Wilde), “the importance of being sentimental.” At fi rst sight, these two novels could not be more different: Skármeta’s takes place in the still-divided Germany of the 1980s and tells the story of an American doctor’s forbidden passion for a teenage German tennis player; Sánchez’s is presented as a hybrid text (which Sánchez calls fabulación) with traits from testimonial fiction, the short story, and the essay, which tells of the career and influence of the Puerto Rican bolero singer Daniel Santos, whose Don Juan–like figure over the years acquires mythical proportions. As will be seen, both novels share certain significant traits beyond their common use of sentimental and amorous themes. Chief among these is the fact that the two novels address the issue of the contemporary relevance of sentimental discourse, although each author does so in a different style: Skármeta assumes a defiant posture, producing a text that might seem ostentatiously frivolous, and daring his readers to condemn him for it; Sánchez instead adopts a more reflexive strategy consonant with the essayistic tone of parts of his novel, leading ultimately to an open and positive defense of the value of sentimentalism in modern culture. The publication of Love-Fifteen in 1989 bewildered quite a few of Skármeta’s critics and readers.1 Until then, the rising reputation of its author, who would go on to win the prestigious Premio Planeta prize in Spain (2003) and become Chile’s ambassador to Germany (2000–2003), was based on documentary-style narratives with strong subjective elements about political events that had affected his personal life and his ideological development: the military coup against Salvador Allende’s government in Soñé que la nieve ardía (I Dreamt the Snow was Burning, 1975), No pasó nada (Nothing Happens, 1980), and Ardiente paciencia (Burning Patience, 1985), 2 and the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua in La insu-

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rrección (Insurrection, 1982). A professor of Latin American literature and a short story writer, Skármeta went into exile in Germany following the 1973 military coup, and there he developed a solid career as a scriptwriter for fi lm, radio, and television, as well as playwright and fi lm director. Love-Fifteen, published upon Skármeta’s return to Chile during the transition to democracy under president Patricio Aylwin, bewildered readers mostly because, as Marcelo Coddou noted in an interview with Skármeta: “everything in it is foreign to the immediacy of the sociopolitical situation, just when the situation is so urgent” (581). Responding to Coddou’s comments, Skármeta defended his position by alluding to his prior novels and their links with politics and the events in Chile and Nicaragua. He then went on to posit “a ‘neo-democratic’ concept of the writer’s function” (Coddou 579): I have defi ned versatility as the internal democracy of the writer. Thus, this new novel of mine is a way to branch out, to strike out in search of another narrative world. What attracted me, what led me to it? It was the sheer pleasure of writing a novel that was eminently literary, in which literature stood out more than life. It’s a response to my desire to join a universal literary tradition, following a narrative pattern in which the sujet “idyll-disordered passion between characters with different ages” was already established—in other words, to explore a literary byway. (Coddou 579; Skármeta’s italics) Skármeta points out here that his turn to sentimental and amorous topics is a challenge to the traditionally political thematics of so much Spanish American fiction and an expression of his creative freedom. Moreover, he shows his awareness of the literary, conventional, and “universal” nature of the theme of love. Thus, Love-Fifteen is not only a product of the postrevolutionary fatigue we have noted in other new sentimental novels, but also a recognition of the formulaic nature of passionate love. Skármeta’s allusion to “a ‘neo-democratic concept of the writer’s function” underscores his sense of the Spanish American writers’ need for greater creative freedom but also his desire to produce a more accessible type of fiction through the use of familiar narrative patterns. As will be seen, to uphold the importance of agape, Love-Fifteen uses humor and parody to mock the glittering world of the European sports jet set, the subgenre of amorous narratives about “May-September romances” (from Goethe’s Faust [1808] to Nabokov’s Lolita [1955]), and the inherent elitism


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of writing as eros. Further, this novel proposes that due to “globalization,” passionate love has become increasingly trivialized, making it possible to propose a more fruitful and benign kind of love. Among the various burlesque resources this novel uses are caricature, stylization, and self-reflexive comments about its own writing. Although Love-Fifteen abounds in allusions to referential reality, these only serve paradoxically to stress the narrative’s departures from realism and its strong resemblance to literature and the movies in their portrayal of passionate love. The novel’s tendency to underscore its own artifice persists even in spite of its use of a fi rst-person narrator, which could at fi rst sight give the novel an appearance of realism. Nevertheless, as often happens with fi rst-person narratives, the narrator undermines his own reliability through his deceitful actions—which he does not hide—as well as through his constant and explicit comparison of his situation with a wide range of fictional works. This also happens on a smaller scale in the “Prologue” to the novel, in which an unnamed Latin American author claims to be the novel’s ghostwriter—similar to the “editors” of many testimonial novels—but his anonymity, his mocking tone, and his equivocations about his own identity undermine his reliability. 3 Like the picaresque novels that are also its models, Love-Fifteen is a deeply ambiguous text, a patently artificial and superficial verbal creation not unlike the founding texts of the sentimental novel we have studied in this book, Rachel’s Song and Dear Diego. In Love-Fifteen, an American physician in his fi fties, Raymond Papst, narrates the misadventures of his ever-unsatisfied passion for the young and coquettish teenage German tennis star Sophie Mass. The refi ned Dr. Papst, a Harvard alumnus and friend of Jacqueline Bouvier, the Kennedys, and the novelist William Styron (Skármeta 11), is married to a lawyer who is the daughter of a West German aristocrat and industrialist. Papst falls in love with Sophie the instant he sees her practicing in the exclusive Munich tennis club where he often plays with his father-in-law. Feeling moved as if “by a script I was acting” (22), Papst succumbs to the nubile charms of “the Princess” (as Sophie is also called; 19), although to reach her he must overcome the various—and formidable—obstacles posed by Sophie’s mother, the Countess von Mass; Pablo de Braganza, the young Spaniard who is also in love with Sophie; his own wife; his father-in-law, and, ultimately, the police and the courts. The attraction between Papst and Sophie is mutual, although for the girl her love for “the old man” is merely a passing fancy, while Papst’s love

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for Sophie becomes the dominant passion in his life. At the start of their relationship Sophie gives Papst as an enigmatic sign of her love a book of verses by Ceszlaw Milosz in which she had marked and underlined the poem “The Sea” (57–58), to which Papst reciprocates with a poem by John Crowe Ransom, “Blue Girls” (71). Taking advantage of his adoration for her daughter, Sophie’s mother hires Papst to be the tennis star’s private physician, which allows him to follow her on her trips to tournaments in Paris and Wimbledon. It is in Paris where Papst and Sophie physically consummate their passion and the tennis player loses her virginity with the doctor. Pursued by the scandal of the photographs of them in bed taken by a paparazzo who had managed to enter their hotel room, Papst, Sophie, and her mother—who had consented to their relationship as long as that made her happy and she won in Wimbledon—travel to London, where Sophie leaves Papst and meets again with Pablo de Braganza. Catching Sophie and Braganza together in the hotel bar, with “a movement dictated by that damned script” (155), in Papst’s words, the doctor fi nds in his jacket pocket the gun he had taken from Braganza in Berlin, and he shoots the young lover, wounding him (156). Papst is jailed while awaiting trial, and his lawyer brings him “around fi fteen books” that he calls his “literary jurisprudence” (165): it is a collection of classical and modern works about love and passion ranging from the Bible, Catullus, Tacitus, and Suetonius to Mario Benedetti, Curt Goetz, Edgar Alan Poe, and Vladimir Nabokov. Papst reads and annotates them, and even dreams with some of them, but none serves to free him from his passion for Sophie, nor to fi nd any legal argument that will acquit him. Just when Papst is making plans to escape, Sophie comes to visit him in jail and offers him her own plan for escape, in which Papst would escape from his guards as he is being taken to court. The plan fails, however, when despite her promise not to be present, Sophie personally tries to intervene in the escape. Fearing the guard may fi re on Sophie, Papst stays motionless in the police car. The novel closes rapidly with a postscript by Papst about the less-than-stellar subsequent sports exploits of Sophie, her growing attachment to Braganza, and his own obsession with Sophie, which Papst cultivates by bouncing a tennis ball against the prison wall with the racquet his beloved once gave him as a gift. As this brief summary makes clear, Love-Fifteen displays quite deliberately in its ironic view of eros many of the most common traits and topics of sentimental narrative: aristocratic or noble characters;4 the view of love as sickness (here the patient is the doctor himself); the topic of “love’s


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prison”—here made literal; the epistolary genre (two letters are included in the narrative); references to love poetry, to pop songs, and to the mass media in general (tabloid journals and newspapers, television, and radio); and, of course, the myriad obstacles that increase the protagonists’ passion, chief among which is their age difference. Even its encyclopedic tendency, which with its plethora of literary allusions seems to want to say “the last word” about passion, may be seen as another trait this novel shares with many of the new sentimental novels such as Infante’s Inferno, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Tarzan’s Tonsillitis. Nevertheless, as was indicated earlier, Love-Fifteen differs from other sentimental novels—even of the ironic type—in its deliberate superficiality, which was already anticipated in Skármeta’s statements to his interviewer but which is also manifested in the novel’s avoidance of the question of Latin American identity—one of the perennial “transcendent” themes of Latin American literature. A striking and somewhat controversial trait of Love-Fifteen for its Latin American readers or readers familiar with Latin America is its near-total lack of characters from that region, with the exception of the anonymous Latin American “left-wing writer” presented in the novel’s prologue as the protagonist’s secretary and translator (7–9)—of which more will be said in a moment. The avoidance of whatever is obviously Latin American becomes absolute in a widely available edition of Love-Fifteen published in Spain by Plaza y Janés in 1997 under the title La velocidad del amor (The Speed of Love), which does away altogether with the prologue! Aside from highlighting the novel’s frivolity and its cosmopolitan (or “globalized”) aspects, the near-total absence of Latin American characters in this novel, along with its original title—Match-Ball—which was already in English, can also be linked to another of its major themes: the pointlessness of trying to express feelings through language. The plurality of languages and the presence of translation in the novel are clearly linked to this theme. It is evident that, within the fiction, the novel Love-Fifteen is a translation into Spanish of a story that was fi rst told in English. Furthermore, within the narrative there are dialogues that were obviously translated from the German in which they were originally spoken, as well as fragments of poems, or even whole poems translated from Polish (Milosz’s “The Sea”; 57–58), English (Ransom’s “Blue Girls” and Poe’s “Annabel Lee”; 71, 168), and Latin (Catullus’s “Poem 37”; 181), aside from scattered untranslated phrases in English or German. In this multilingual context, the texts presumably written originally in Spanish,

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such as the mocking and obscene letters from Pablo de Braganza to Papst (92–97, 177, 202) become tinged with linguistic strangeness due to the uncertainty about the language in which they were originally written. Nevertheless, the Babel of tongues in the novel does not hinder its narrative flow nor the actions described in the story. Curiously, the multiplicity of languages is not an obstacle for the characters in this novel; they always seem to fi nd a common tongue (which, ironically, is frequently German, despite its reputation as a difficult language). Beyond languages, however, a code to which all the characters take recourse and which even moves them like a “script,” as Papst says, is clearly that of love, specifically love as eros. The characters’ frequent use of erotic double entendres infuses their words with desire: When we reached a fountain where cherubs urinated under ballooning bellies, Diana stopped, and without the shadow of a glance in my direction, said: “It’s hard to explain how Sophie can fit so much intelligence and talent in that body.” “Exactly,” I agreed. “And then you start to think what else could fit inside that body, right?” (124) Paradoxically, however, the same desire that allows the characters to understand each other also makes them impatient with a language that, despite being erotically charged, is insufficient to satisfy their wishes. The parodic culmination—laughable in its literalness—of this eroticism of language in the novel occurs in the two different episodes of cunnilingus that are described, fi rst between Sophie and Braganza (according to Braganza’s letter to Papst; 95–96) and later between Sophie and Papst (130–131). Suddenly aware of how ridiculous the language of eros sounds, just before inserting his tongue in Sophie’s vagina Papst tells the girl: “Don’t make me say ridiculous words. All words related to love are ridiculous” (130). Significantly, a few seconds after initiating cunnilingus, Papst deviates from “the well-known script” (131)—that is, from the codes of love as eros—leaving aside (in every sense) the use of his tongue and the wordy meanderings and obstacles of courtly love, and, throwing her upon the bed, he enters her “without sparing any roughness” (131). In this climactic scene (so to speak) and in the subsequent appearance of the paparazzo, the novel underscores the fact that all the rhetorical flourishes of passionate love are merely a mask for sex pure and simple. As the


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“journalist’s” presence in the lover’s bedroom symbolizes, sex has become a commonplace, everyday thing, like the sex “scandals” that appear daily in the tabloids. Papst’s dialogue with the photographer Bracourt highlights this demotion of erotic passion to the level of mass entertainment and links it to the “globalization” of the press: “If I understand your intentions correctly, sir, you intend to blackmail us, right?” Bracourt made a dismissive gesture. “It looks like blackmail, but it isn’t,” he said, sitting as fresh as you please on the edge of the Ritz’s fragile rococo chair, looking as if he had all the time in the world. “Blackmail used to work before because it was more profitable to extort someone than to publish their picture in a newspaper. Today, with all the mass media there are, you can sell the interesting stuff to an agency and get almost as much as in a blackmail operation, without the risk of running into the police. The stuff multiplies in many newspapers over various countries, in television, etcetera. And the trick to make it pay off is to release the news bit by bit. You put part of the stuff on public view fi rst. If the news catches, all the press agencies start making you interesting offers to buy the rest of the documents. You get my drift, doctor Papst? (133) Disseminated by the national and international press, forbidden love between high-born personages—a supposedly extraordinary event— becomes something ordinary. It is worth noting that this worldwide broadcasting of eros takes place mostly by means of images—the paparazzo’s photos—with words coming in a distant second place, whether they are the chivalrous-sounding verses of Milosz’s “The Sea” or the ironic but no less courtly verses of Ransom’s “Blue Girls” with their carpe diem theme. 5 There are evident parallels between the mass-mediatization of eros and that of the formerly aristocratic game of tennis. But the tennis-game metaphor in this novel has other implications. Skármeta’s comparison of love to a tennis game does not simply signify that both have become “globalized” activities but also, as suggested by the title of this novel’s Spanish edition, The Speed of Love, that love is “speedy,” a fleeting spark, a passing effect, like the back-and-forth fl ight of a ball in the tennis court. This image of the sentimental novel as a tennis match highlights the paradox of the novel as a community of ironists—that is, of readers who, although brought together by a text, are always at a remove from what they read and from

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its author, since they know it is all an artifice, a game of which they are the spectators. Is this all there is to this love story? Seemingly, to judge by the Spanish edition with its omitted prologue, Love-Fifteen is telling us that love can only survive in modern literature as an object of mockery, something to be made fun of, a mere literary pastime. This may be true of eros, but we still need to account for the agape that is present in all of these fictions. The “Prologue” to the fi rst edition is highly relevant in this context, since in it, with a mixture of truth and humor, the Latin American writer who claims to be Papst’s secretary reveals that ultimately the writing of this novel is motivated by compassion and solidarity. It is essential to note here the historical and political situation to which the prologue alludes: that of a dictatorial Latin America in the 1970s and early 1980s, and of a Cold War world divided into capitalist and communist camps, one of whose zones of tension was precisely the divided Germany of those days. The prologue’s narrator identifies himself as one of the many Latin American political refugees who were saved from being deported from West Germany thanks to the aid of Ana von Bamberg and her husband, Dr. Papst: When they were almost ready to throw me into the plane—which in my fancy I saw as the bark of Charon—the prestigious lawyer Ana von Bamberg entered the departure lounge; she had come straight from her office after being moved by a tearful article about my case in a local left-wing paper. She was accompanied by a physician who began to make a show of examining me in front of the police and the passengers, and who in less than a minute diagnosed that I was gravely ill and that it would be a crime against Hu-ma-ni-ty to make me fly in such a state. This providential physician was doctor Raymond Papst, the narrator of the novel infl icted upon you in the following pages. When the Latin American lowlifes in West Berlin knew that I’d been saved by the skin of my teeth thanks to the fictions of this distinguished professional, every time one of our comrades was in danger of being deported they asked me to intercede before my sympathetic lawyer, who then called Dr. Papst. Thus, by virtue of pestering them, a sort of friendship began to develop between us. (8) A sort of friendship. The phrase identifies the impulse that ultimately moves this novel: the compassionate approach to the Other, to those who


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perhaps before, in a divided world, would be seen as “the enemy”—as would have been the case between a Latin American leftist and a wealthy American physician. From this perspective, the apparent frivolity of LoveFifteen can be seen instead as a sensible, down-to-earth gesture: a downgrading of passion in favor of friendship. The rhetoric of passion in this novel, as in the others we have seen, is a widely shared code that, although degraded, can still serve as a vehicle of understanding between people from different nations. Far from being a Latin American’s joke about the awkward way Americans deal with passion, Love-Fifteen can be seen instead as an example of how the devalued language of eros can still serve as a means to seek and to fi nd agape.

2 All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. walter pater, the renaissance If Skármeta’s novel describes the trivialization of eros in the context of European and North American mass culture, in La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos Luis Rafael Sánchez explores the Spanish American experience of the “globalization” of sentimentalism in the second half of the twentieth century. Specifically, Sánchez examines how sentimental discourse, after being rejected by the high culture and the politics of the late twentieth century, took refuge in popular and mass culture. From there it was diffused throughout Spanish America until it made its triumphant return to “high culture” in Sánchez’s own novel and in the new Spanish American sentimental narrative. From its very title, this novel announces at various levels its concern with the issue of the contemporary relevance of sentimentalism. Daniel Santos (1916–1992), to whom the title alludes and around whom the text revolves, was a celebrated Puerto Rican popular singer of guarachas and boleros who reached the zenith of his fame in the 1940s and 1950s. Daniel Santos’s performances of boleros by Spanish American composers such as Pedro Flores, Pablo Cairo, and Isolina Carrillo, among others, along with the events of his stormy life, made him the prototype of the passionate man and artist in the Spanish American popular culture of those decades. In this sense, the title La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos might well be understood simply as “the importance of sentimentality.” The title also evidently translates and paraphrases that of Oscar Wilde’s well-known play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), whose usually

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omitted subtitle is, significantly, A Serious Comedy for Trivial People. Wilde’s famous piece is a comedy of manners that satirizes the repressed and repressive customs and the hypocrisy of Victorian Britain. Although Wilde’s epigrammatic humor is quite distant from the lachrymose sentimentalism prevalent in late-nineteenth-century theater, one of its principal themes is that of the revelation of the truth of feelings.6 Like Wilde, Sánchez adopts a frivolous pose in order to lead his readers toward a more positive view of sentimentalism.7 La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos has obvious links with the genre of the new sentimental novel. Like Barnet’s Rachel’s Song, it centers on an emblematic character from the world of show business and the mass media. Also as in Barnet’s novel, in Sánchez’s we fi nd a wide-ranging mixture and fusion of discourses. The discourses of testimonial narrative, the essay of cultural interpretation, the short story, and theater all make their appearance in a clearly recognizable manner in Sánchez’s novel. Moreover, as in Allende’s Of Love and Shadows and other new sentimental novels, in La importancia . . . these discourses are made to serve an archetypal plot that has its origins in the medieval prose romance and the romances of chivalry: the story of a search or quest. Unlike Allende’s novel, however, Sánchez’s quest is not that of the body of a murdered girl but is instead a search for the myth of Daniel Santos, that is, of the imprint or image left by this artist on Spanish American culture. In the manner of a knight-errant confronting a giant, or as in the revealing face-offs that happen in melodramas, Sánchez seeks to come face to face with the powerful and influential myth of Daniel Santos—“Daniel Santos the Chief, Daniel Santos the Hard One, Daniel Santos the Totem” (Sánchez 111)—and, after “disarming” it (Sánchez 73), he tries to recover from it what is still relevant to our own times. Its relevance lies precisely in that sentimental dimension embodied by Daniel Santos, which he disseminates in his songs and in his way of life. For Sánchez, Daniel Santos is the keeper of a profoundly affective worldview that has often been rejected—like Santos himself (Sánchez 76–77)—due to class and generational prejudices, yet which returns again and again. “The myth of Daniel Santos,” says Sánchez, “lives on in the great theatre of sentimental affi nities of the bitter America, the shoeless America, the America in Spanish that idolizes him” (76). A key element in Daniel Santos’s sentimental arsenal, according to Sánchez, is his deep artistic understanding of melodrama. Listening to Daniel Santos sing, Sánchez states, implies a commitment “to praise the grand melodrama that allows the clockwork of tears and the mechanics of bewitching kisses to fulfi ll their function” (105).


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Within the sphere of popular culture and the mass media, Sánchez singles out two main preserves of sentimentalism: on the one hand, the theatrical genre of melodrama and all its varieties in radio, TV, and the cinema, and on the other, the popular love songs, particularly the genre of the bolero. However, for Sánchez, who is also one of Puerto Rico’s most important playwrights,8 theatrical melodrama ultimately absorbs the bolero. As we will see, La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos is an apotheosis of melodrama, a demonstration of the fundamental role melodrama has played in the discourse of sentimental narrative in all periods, as well as a celebration of the return of the affective dimension to today’s Spanish American narrative. When I speak of melodrama I am referring to that vast mode of representation that Peter Brooks has called “the mode of excess.” In The Melodramatic Imagination (1984), Brooks points out that melodrama arises from an interpretive impulse that seeks to decipher the causes of the seemingly chaotic events of the real world. This impulse gives rise to a discourse that, in Brooks’s lucid formulation, tries to “express all”: The desire to express all seems a fundamental characteristic of the melodramatic mode. Nothing is spared because nothing is left unsaid; the characters stand on stage and utter the unspeakable, give voice to their deepest feelings, dramatize through their heightened and polarized words and gestures the whole lesson of their relationship. They assume primary psychic roles, father, mother, child, and express basic psychic conditions. Life tends, in these fictions, toward ever more concentrated and totally expressive gestures and statements. (4) Brooks also reminds us that the term “melodrama” originally referred to a dramatic work accompanied by music. The term appears to have been fi rst used in this sense by Jean-Jacques Rousseau to describe one of his plays, in which Rousseau sought to communicate a new emotional expressivity through the mixture of soliloquy, pantomime, and an orchestral accompaniment (Brooks 14, 208n). Rousseau’s description of melodrama in his “Observations on Gluck’s Alceste” (1774) is highly suggestive with regard to Sánchez’s novel: “a type of drama in which words and music, instead of walking together, appear successively, and in which the spoken phrase is in a certain way announced and prepared by the musical phrase” (cited by Pavis 304–305). Sánchez follows quite closely Rousseau’s description, since throughout La importancia the lyrics of the boleros sung by Daniel Santos

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are interwoven with the text’s narrative and essayistic segments, often in a complementary relation with the passages that surround them. Melodrama, whose origins date back to the French Revolution and its aftermath, is an eminently modern theatrical mode that arises as a supplement to the classical modes of tragedy and comedy (Brooks 14–15). Despite its origins in the theater, by the early nineteenth century melodrama moves to the narrative, particularly to the novel (Brooks 108–109). There can also be little doubt that nineteenth century narrative melodrama owes much to the earlier tradition of the eighteenth-century sentimental novel in the works of Richardson, Sterne, Mackenzie, Goethe, Laclos, and Rousseau himself. Melodrama, in fact, serves as a bridge between eighteenthcentury sentimental fiction and its more modern avatars, and, sharing the fate of sentimental discourse in the modern age, it too has taken refuge in popular culture whenever “high culture” has rejected it. Let us now see how Luis Rafael Sánchez vindicates the tradition of melodrama in La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos. This novel presents itself as a hybrid text which its author refers to as a fabulación and contains a mixture of elements from testimonial narrative, the essay, the short story, and theater through which the story of the narrator-protagonist’s quest for the myth of Daniel Santos is told. The beginnings of that quest are presented in the novel’s fi rst section, “Las palomas del milagro” (The Doves of the Miracle) as a series of testimonies about the life and reputation of Daniel Santos collected by the narrator-protagonist in the voices of various characters from Puerto Rico and the rest of Spanish America (9–70). This is followed by the narrator-protagonist’s essayistic reflections about the role of myths in popular culture and about modernity and Spanish American machismo in the section titled “Vivir en varón” (Living in Maledom, 71–136). The novel ends with the section titled “Cinco boleros aún por melodiarse” (Five Boleros Still Without a Melody), featuring a series of love stories where the songs of Daniel Santos fulfi ll important symbolic functions and in which the narrator-protagonist assumes an increasingly visible role (137–206). In his essay-like reflections about modernity in the novel’s second part, Sánchez evokes the French painter Paul Gaugin’s trenchant defi nition of modernity as: “Daring to do everything” (“Atreverse a todo,” La importancia 78). As Jason Cortés points out, in this passage: The rough and daring nature of the so-called modernity of the French painter fi nds its echo in the figure of Daniel Santos . . . .


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This sui generis modernity whose imposing axiom is “daring to do everything” displays evident parallels between the figure of Santos and that of Sánchez. “Daring to do everything” . . . becomes a strategy used by Sánchez to reflect on his role and on his ethical responsibility as a writer. Even as he bases his ethics as a writer on this principle, however, Sánchez transforms Gaugin’s defi nition into the melodramatic (though no less modern) imperative of “expressing all.” This is why the novel begins with a pseudo-testimonial section in which readers are introduced without cover or subterfuge to all that is said, rumored, and judged about Daniel Santos: The mere mention of his name arouses rumors of genital anarchy. He’s accused of being too amorous, of wounding chastity and throwing it headlong into joy. They say he was educated in the rigors of the critique of phallic reason. They say there was no course in his sensual career he did not pass with the highest grade. They say that each and every woman he touched lives burning with the je ne sais quoi of his kisses. Other scandals are cited, other lasciviousnesses support the stunning prestige of his maleness. (La importancia 9) The varied cast of characters who speak of Daniel Santos in this section includes one of his former Puerto Rican lovers, three Cuban homosexuals, a bordello-hopping Panamanian, a Puerto Rican living in New York City, and the diverse voices of Peruvians, Venezuelans, Ecuadorians, Nicaraguans, and Dominicans. Some of these segments, such as the one featuring the “Three Graces” from Havana, are written as dialogues, and their theatricality is explicit. Of course, as Brooks reminds us, melodrama’s desire to “express all” frequently arises in a polemical context, in an open confrontation between opposing polarities such as good and evil, poverty and riches, love and hate: The ritual of melodrama involves the confrontation of clearly identified antagonists and the expulsion of one of them. It can offer no terminal reconciliation, for there is no longer a clear transcendent value to be reconciled to. There is, rather, a social order to be purged, a set of ethical imperatives to be made clear. (Brooks, 17)

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In Sánchez’s novel, the melodramatic confrontation is generally left understood: the testimonial voices, for example, are of predominantly popular origins and their admiring anecdotes about Daniel Santos are narrated in implied opposition to the bourgeois morality that Daniel Santos himself constantly defies with his conduct. “Write that down exactly as I’ve told you,” the Puerto Rican lover tells the narrator, “because it can only be understood with dirty words” (15). (A direct confrontation of another sort that does not occur in the novel is that of the text’s own narrator-character with the flesh and blood Daniel Santos, of which more will be said later.) A more conventional form of melodrama appears in the novel’s third and last section, “Five Boleros Still Without a Melody.” In each of the episodes narrated in this segment, some of which feature the author as a secondary character while in others he becomes the protagonist, there is a melodramatic confrontation of opposing polarities. That confrontation is of an amorous nature in two of the episodes, while in two others it takes the form of a clash of cultures, and in the last one it appears as a generational confl ict. The fi rst episode goes back to the testimonial and gossipy style of the novel’s early chapters to tell the story of a Vietnam veteran’s failed attempts at love in the Puerto Rican countryside (139–153). The second, following the model of the Venezuelan soap operas, tells of the unrealized love between an upper-class Venezuelan woman and the lower-class owner of a long-play record rental store (155–168). The clash of cultures portrayed in the third episode is that of the narrator-protagonist himself with his own native Puerto Rico, before which he places himself as in the classic melodramatic face-off: Why is it that our native land pursues us like a loyal shadow? Could it be because we are our native land? We are its alternate map, its mirror. We look at our native land, we judge it. And our native land looks at itself in us, and judges us. (175) In the fourth episode, the clash of cultures is more literal, since it has to do with the misunderstandings that arise when the narrator-protagonist, who is a gregarious mulatto from the Caribbean, tries to haggle over a poncho with some laconic Ecuadorian Indians in a marketplace in Quito (180–193). Lastly, the generational confl ict that appears in the fi fth segment is mostly metaphorical, since the middle-aged narrator-protagonist never actually comes face to face with the girls and boys—high school students playing hooky from their classes—whom he observes, half-hidden


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like a voyeur, in the Puerto Rican forest of El Verde while they undress and make love (193–206). The melodrama in this last episode arises mostly from the narrator’s open expressions of admiration and even jealousy with regard to the youth and beauty of the students, but also from the unexpected sounds of the bolero Amor by Pedro Flores sung by Daniel Santos coming from a cassette player brought by the youths. In fact, throughout these five stories Daniel Santos’s music is ever-present, working as a sort of common code or language shared by all of the characters, a code or language that by “expressing all” conveys with exemplary clarity the meaning of each episode. As discussed earlier, the bolero, which serves as the last refuge and archive of sentimentality in modern Spanish American culture, is shown in Sánchez’s novel to be just another of melodrama’s avatars. The bolero, with its themes of love and its lyrical confrontation between a “you” and a “me,” is like a fragment of a melodrama, or like a synthesis of melodrama itself in its seamless fusion of lyrics and music. Favoring the literary and dramatic aspects of the bolero, Sánchez privileges their lyrics over their music and associates the bolero’s lyrics with “the grand melodrama that allows the clockwork of tears and the mechanics of bewitching kisses to fulfi ll their function” (105). As in other postmodern works, Sánchez’s novel anticipates its critics and openly displays its theoretical foundations. Not surprisingly, the essayistic section of the novel devotes one of its segments to the “Shameless praise of grand melodrama” (Elogio descarado del melodramón, 115). Here, to hyperbolically express melodrama’s range of influence and power, the author posits the existence of a broader category, which he calls “grand melodrama” (melodramón): More overpowering than melodrama, more verbose, is grand melodrama. I defi ne grand melodrama as the gluttony of passion. It is an affi rmation of emotional outbursts and dishevelment. It is an anticipated enjoyment of the catastrophe that, either rosy or dark, draws near. Such lovely catastrophe! For melodrama beautifies suffering with its cadenced syntax. I defi ne grand melodrama as a piling on of rampant hysteria. Grand melodrama’s verbosity always threatens to unbalance its construction. And in the display of this threat the artistic form of grand melodrama reaches Pantagruelesque proportions in drama, in opera, and in some nineteenth-century ballets. (115)

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There is no doubt, however, that “grand melodrama” and melodrama are one and the same, both founded on the imperative to “express all.” Luis Rafael Sánchez’s explicit reflections on melodrama are a sign that, like many other authors of the new sentimental novel, he is aware of the fact that melodrama is not an immediate or direct expression of feelings, but rather a sort of formula or “recipe,” a conventional code that makes “the clockwork of tears” work. Nevertheless, melodrama’s apparent inauthenticity, its artificial character, is counterbalanced by its links to popular culture and to a more democratic concept of art. Art by the people and for the people, melodrama, in Sánchez’s words, “cuts deeper, cuts better into reality pure and simple” (saja más, saja mejor la realidad monda y lironda, 115). Melodrama is, in fact, one of the secrets of the sentimental formula’s success. Going back to the counterpoint between eros and agape I have posited as one of the most salient traits of the new sentimental novel, we might say that melodrama is in these novels the form eros takes when it is mitigated by agape. In this sense, melodrama would be an eros that does not end up in tragedy or death. It would be, perhaps, a false eros in which the story of a passion is told, as Brooks argues, as a fable that aims to restore social order (Brooks 17). Therein may lie the deeper sense of the term “fabulation” (fabulación) Sánchez uses to describe his novel: It is not merely a question of what is said (as in the Medieval Spanish fablar) about Daniel Santos, but of extracting from what is said a moral or a lesson. “Fabulation” is an activity that turns Daniel Santos from an emblem of eros unleashed to a prototype of domesticated eros, from an antisocial Don Juan to a promoter of harmony and a sense of community. Curiously, Daniel Santos himself is never made present in the narrative of La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos. Sánchez’s text openly indicates that this is a deliberate absence, when the narrator’s father asks him: “How can it be that you’re writing a book about him and you don’t want to meet him even from afar?” (45). It would seem that Sánchez is avoiding what should be the very core of his melodramatic quest, the climactic scene in which opposing characters come face to face: hero and villain, pursuer and pursued, or, in this case, the writer and his subject. But this is not the case: In La importancia the narrator does not encounter Daniel Santos in the flesh—which would have resulted in a banal form of journalism—but instead encounters the myth of Daniel Santos. That myth is an amplified, gigantic version of Santos’s self blown up to continental proportions, which is precisely the sort of intensification produced by melodrama.


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The entire text of La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos is the portrayal of a portentous meeting between two mythical figures: the totemic icon of Daniel Santos and the sinuous and elusive figure of the postmodern author. Such a confrontation, which is melodramatic in itself, may also be seen as an allegory of the encounter of a late-twentieth-century Latin American writer with a character who is in large measure an emblem of the melodramatic and sentimental tradition. Like the sentimental tradition of which he is a part, Daniel Santos (the man as well as the myth) is full of ambiguities and confl icts that can be summarized in a long list of antinomies: plebeianism and aristocracy, rebelliousness and conformism, violence and tenderness, selfishness and devotion. Sánchez takes hold of these antinomies, these imperfections of Daniel Santos, and using a term that has an ambiguous meaning in Spanish, he tries to “desarmarlo”—that is to say, dismantle or deconstruct him—but also to disarm him, to deprive him of his power to do violence: “Dismantling a mongrel myth, one that’s vulgar and naked, a runaway myth, is harder than writing a sonnet to a thorn without wounding it with recriminations” (Desarmar un mito raso y sato, populachero y al natural, un mito cimarrón, es más difícil que versificarle un soneto a la espina y no herirla con recriminaciones; Sánchez 73). Let us recall Peter Brooks’s observation that melodramatic confrontations always conclude with the expulsion of one of the antagonists (Brooks 17), but let us add nuance to that observation by remembering that the melodramatic expulsion is always carried out by means of language, by “expressing all.” Sánchez does not cast out Daniel Santos from his text (despite his reluctance to interview him), but instead he seeks to determine his “importance.” The section “Living in Maledom” offers in this regard one of the novel’s climactic moments, when Sánchez lays bare the contradictions of Daniel Santos and comes face to face with the least recoverable, most expendable part of his mythical legacy: It is Santos’s “mongrel machismo, vulgar and naked, that’s plagiarized by millions of Latin American machos” (machismo raso y sato, populachero y al natural que plagian millones de machos latinoamericanos, Sánchez 124). Sánchez condemns this machismo in no uncertain terms: To seem male, therefore, means sadly, unsuccessfully, disgracefully, to snuff out the light of gentlemanly behavior in order to burn in the sordid flames of a machismo that’s a terminal disease, a machismo that’s indecorous and beastly . . . . A visceral Latin American machismo that is further poisoned by the bohemian im-

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age of Daniel Santos the Hard One, Daniel Santos the Chief, Daniel Santos the Totem. Rude, vulgar, and insolent bohemian image of Daniel Santos that’s a required subject in the countless seminars in how to seem male that are offered tuition-free in all the bars, canteens, beer-gardens, grills, taverns and pool halls of the bitter America, the shoeless America, the America in Spanish. (129) Once this evil is named, once it is expressed, it can be cast out, and what is left can then be reappropriated for the use of a new generation such as the one Sánchez observes in the novel’s last episode. For that generation of youths who carry out a sort of communal and pastoral orgy, Daniel Santos becomes a “totem that redefi nes its mission, [a] totem that looks approvingly on the sweet weariness of love, [a] totem that encourages genital anarchy” (206). Daniel Santos becomes then a benevolent emblem of love, of that love which, in the lyrics by Pedro Flores with which the novel ends, “is life’s consolation, the only magnificent emotion” (es el consuelo de la vida, la única, magnifica emoción, 206). Perhaps it is in literature’s allegorical link to a love that is not lethal but vital, a love that is at once sensual and communal—eros disarmed by agape—where Luis Rafael Sánchez and today’s Spanish American novelists have discovered the importance of being sentimental. Throughout these pages I have tried to offer an account of the rise and the political and cultural implications of a new mode of the Spanish American novel which I have called “the new sentimental novel.” Although I have confi ned myself to the study of novels, I hope to have made clear at various points of this book that the “new sentimentalism” also extends to other narrative forms such as the short story, the novelette, and the journalistic chronicle. Moreover, as I remarked in the introduction, the new sentimentalism is evidently an encompassing cultural phenomenon that is not limited to Hispanic culture. I am acutely aware of the illusions and mirages with which literary criticism traffics daily: we critics make a living out of inventing categories, discourses, movements, modalities, which are merely nets in which we try to trap the amazing diversity of human textual endeavors. I do not ignore the fact that the new sentimentalism I have seen in the current Spanish American novels shares a space with other forms of narrative and thought, and that it is still far from having the deep effect of what critics of earlier generations used to call a “spiritual transformation” or a “paradigm


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shift.” In other words, neosentimentalism is not yet a Neo-Romanticism. However, I do believe that the weight of evidence shows that during the past few decades certain sectors of Western culture that used to ignore or disparage the affects have again begun to consider them important, and that the Spanish-language narrators have been particularly attentive to this renewed interest in the emotions and their influence on the arts and on public and private life. I have offered here readings and interpretations of barely a handful of the new sentimental novelists—among whom, it is true, are some of the most important names in contemporary Spanish American literature—but the roster of authors who have practiced this narrative mode is far more extensive, and I invite interested readers to examine the by no means exhaustive list of works and authors I have included as an appendix to this book. In my readings of Barnet, Poniatowska, Allende, Bryce, García Márquez, Skármeta, and Sánchez, among others, I have explored in particular the link this new sentimental narrative presupposes between writing, society, and love. Based on the ideas of the Swiss scholar and thinker Denis de Rougemont in his well-known book Love in the Western World, I posited that the discourse of the new sentimental novel wavers between two concepts of love that also symbolize two notions of writing and of social relations: writing as eros and writing as agape. The fi rst is characterized, above all, by a view of both writing and reading as profoundly passionate and egotistical activities associated with pain and suffering, but which also promise access to transcendence. The second differs markedly in regarding textual production as an act of communication that should always strive for simplicity and transparency, seeking to promote a closer and more equitable relationship between author, reader, and text that leads ultimately to an experience of communion. I soon realized that in each of the new sentimental novels I was analyzing, these two concepts were present in variable proportions but always in an interdependent relationship. However, I was able to observe in many of the new sentimental novels I have studied here a clear tendency to privilege the view of writing as agape. It became clear to me that many of the authors who write this type of novel do so not only to carry out an aesthetic “transgression of transgression” (as Barthes proposes in A Lover’s Discourse), nor merely to exploit a subject that would allow them to sell more books, but also and perhaps principally out of a desire to contribute to their societies by producing works that would somehow help their readers to begin healing the divisions, rancor, and fears produced by decades of social and political struggles. As part of

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this process, these novels tend to underscore the formulaic and inauthentic character of passionate love, showing how passion has turned into a technique of social manipulation as well as just another consumer product in the mass media marketplace. Even as they denounce the negative effects of passion, the new sentimental novels invite readers to seek out another way to love, that of agape—that is, love of one’s neighbor. Paradoxically, agape is in many of these novels a goal that is unreachable within the confi nes of the text, since its conciliatory and harmonizing nature seems incompatible with narrative, which depends fundamentally on confl ict and tension for its existence. From this contradiction arise the formal imperfections of a good number of the new sentimental novels, which often fi nd themselves reduced to wavering between the critique of passion and the announcement of a more perfect love—a love so perfect it cannot be represented. Perhaps part of the attraction of these new novels lies in their fl irtation with the very limits of literature and of art. However, a deeper attraction, in my view, lies in their constant desire to educate their readers in the values and feelings that should ideally govern the lives of citizens in a democratic society: love, compassion, mutual respect, and humane understanding.

Appendix

Some Spanish American Novels with Amorous or Sentimental Themes (1969–2003)

The following list is arranged in chronological order according to year of fi rst publication. Miguel Barnet, Canción de Rachel (1969) Manuel Puig, El beso de la mujer araña (1976) Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Tantas veces Pedro: La pasión según San Pedro Balbuena, que fue tantas veces Pedro y nunca pudo negar a nadie (1977) Mario Vargas Llosa, La tía Julia y el escribidor (1977) Elena Poniatowska, Querido Diego (1978) Guillermo Cabrera Infante, La Habana para un infante difunto (1979) Sylvia Molloy, En breve cárcel (1981) José Emilio Pacheco, Las batallas en el desierto (1981) Gabriel García Márquez, Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1983) Isabel Allende, De amor y de sombra (1984) Alfredo Bryce Echenique, La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña (1985) Alfredo Bryce Echenique, El hombre que hablaba de Octavia de Cádiz (1985) Gabriel García Márquez, El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985) Rosario Ferré, Maldito amor (1986) Alfredo Bryce Echenique, La última mudanza de Felipe Carrillo (1988) Angeles Mastretta, Arráncame la vida (1988) Luis Rafael Sánchez, La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos (1988) Laura Esquivel, Como agua para chocolate (1989) Luis Sepúlveda, Un viejo que leía novelas de amor (1989) Antonio Skármeta, La velocidad del amor (Match-Ball, 1989) Sara Sefchovich, Demasiado amor (1990) Gonzalo Celorio, Amor propio (1991)

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Ana Lydia Vega, “El baúl de Miss Florence,” in Falsas crónicas del sur (1991) Carlos Fuentes, Diana, o la cazadora solitaria (1994) Gabriel García Márquez, Del amor y otros demonios (1994) Alfredo Bryce Echenique, No me esperen en abril (1995) Tomás Eloy Martínez, Santa Evita (1995) Angeles Mastretta, Mal de amores (1996) Zoé Valdés, Te dí la vida entera (1996) Jorge Volpi, Sanar tu piel amarga (1997) Marcela Serrano, Nosotras que nos queremos tanto (1997) Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Reo de nocturnidad (1997) Olga Nolla, El manuscrito de Miramar (1998) Alfredo Bryce Echenique, La amigdalitis de Tarzán (1999) Cristina Peri Rossi, El amor es una droga dura (1999) Antonio Skármeta, La boda del poeta (1999) Alfredo Bryce Echenique, El huerto de mi amada (2002) Tomás Eloy Martínez, El vuelo de la reina (2002) Jorge Volpi, El fi n de la locura (2003)

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. The bibliography on testimonial narrative is already enormous. Among the books on this topic I have found most useful are Elzbieta Sklodowska’s compendious study, Testimonio hispanoamericano: historia, teoría, poética (1992) and the anthology The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America (1996), edited by George M. Gugelberger. The aspects of the testimonial genre most frequently examined in these and other similar works are its relation to “reality” and “truth,” its political function, the privilege it accords to orality, and its representation of marginalized people. There is as yet no work of scholarship that studies the affective elements of testimonial narrative. 2. On the “total novel” and the Boom, see González Echevarría’s The Voice of the Masters, 86–97. For my commentaries on the Boom and the Post-Boom, I have also consulted the studies by Gutiérrez-Mouat, Pellón, Williams (The Postmodern Novel in Latin America, 1995), and Shaw. To the three currents of the Post-Boom Pellón identifies (testimonial narrative, the new historical novel, and detective fiction) it would surely be necessary to add two others identified by Shaw (The PostBoom in Spanish American Fiction 23–24): what might be called “neo-Vanguardist narrative” (exemplified by Sarduy and Eltit) and the amorous-sentimental current that is the subject of my book. Shaw has been the fi rst critic to note the importance of sentimentalism within the Post-Boom and to single out particularly in this regard the novels Of Love and Shadows by Allende, Dear Diego by Poniatowska, and Love-Fifteen by Skármeta, all of which I study in this volume. See also Shaw’s Antonio Skármeta and the Post-Boom, 185–186. 3. Borges was not immune to the charms of sentimentalism, as I have pointed out in regard to his “An Autobiographical Essay” (1970) in “‘La imagen de su cara’: vida y opiniones de Jorge Luis Borges.” In fact, a recent biography of Borges

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Notes to pages 5–16

by Edwin Williamson offers a detailed portrait of a sentimental Borges. Williamson bases his biography on the premise that Borges inscribed and disseminated episodes of his private life—including a failed romance with Norah Lange— throughout many of his fictions. 4. Two other journalistic articles offer similar accounts of the recent turn in the United States toward the exploration of feelings, not just in the mass media, but also in academia: Daniel Mendelsohn, “The Melodramatic Moment,” and Scott McLemee, “Getting Emotional: The study of feelings, once the province of psychology, is now spreading to history, literature, and other fields.” A significant new development is the concept of “emotional intelligence” posited by psychologists Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer. 5. On these narratives, see Deyermond, who prefers to call them “sentimental adventure books” (293–313). 6. For the discussion of sentimentalism in the following pages, I have benefited from Janet Todd’s Sensibility: An Introduction. A detailed comparison between Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Bryce’s novelistic work is to be found in Margarita Krakusin’s La novelística de Alfredo Bryce Echenique y la narrativa sentimental. 7. See in particular the segment titled “Romantic Love” in Chapter 5 of Natural Supernaturalism, 292–299. The working group “Discours et Idéologie” of Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III also notes the mask-like or metaphorical use of the discourse on love: “At once text and pretext, one of the essential functions of amorous discourse is that of the mask. Underneath its ‘pleasant’ exterior, this discourse speaks of other, ideological, subjects, such as the relation between the world, the sign, and art. Amorous discourse . . . always works as a signifi er of another discourse to which it may claim to be unrelated, although it is in fact fully conditioned by that other discourse” (Le discours amoreux 12–13; italics in the original). 8. The best point of departure for this reading of the Platonic dialogues is Derrida’s well-known essay, “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination. 9. See Menocal’s comments on De Rougemont’s legacy to contemporary studies of Medieval literature and to the study of lyric poetry in general (123–134). 10. For a useful discussion of the contrast between eros and agape, although from a strictly theological perspective, see Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (1939). I thank my colleague at Yale, Giuseppe Mazzotta, for this reference. 11. See the background information in Lumsden’s sociological study, Machos, Maricones, and Gays (55–80), and, in a more literary context, Menton’s Prose Fiction of the Cuban Revolution (41, 121–156). 12. Barnet cites this phrase in his essay “La novela-testimonio: socio-literatura,” attributing it to the Cuban historian Juan Pérez de la Riva (143). 13. As González Echevarría reminds us in Myth and Archive, Barnet worked for a time as Fernando Ortiz’s assistant (166). “The Human Elements of Cubanness” (Los factores humanos de la cubanidad) is the title of an article published by Fernando Ortiz in the Revista Bimestre Cubana in 1940. In “La novela-testimonio,” Barnet declares: “That is why, in fact, the character [of Esteban Montejo] appeared, was always there, in my nostalgia of an unreachable past, in my need to understand my country. . . . Esteban was, then, an ideal model, because he had two of the qualities necessary for the ‘novela-testimonio’: he was a character who


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represented a social class, a whole way of thinking, and he had lived through some unique moments in Cuba’s history which had left their mark on the psychology of a whole group of people” (144). 14. Regarding the narrator’s identity in Biography of a Runaway Slave, see González Echevarría, The Voice of the Masters (120–23), and Sklodowska, Testimonio hispanoamericano (109–147). The metaphor of the mirror appears in Rachel’s Song on pages 23, 24, 29, 35, 63, 84, and 121. 15. See the essays by Bush, Sklodowska (“Miguel Barnet” in Dictionary of Literary Biography), and Vera. 16. For these and other observations about the relation between feelings and political life, particularly in regard to Cuba, see the important book by Damián J. Fernández, Cuba and the Politics of Passion (2000). This book examines, from the standpoint of the social sciences, the role played by the emotions in Cuban politics and culture during the twentieth century. Fernández even posits a duality similar to the eros-agape one I have proposed here, when he points out that in Cuba there is a confl ict between what he calls the “politics of passion” and the “politics of affects.” See especially pp. 16–24. 17. See the lucid summary by Luis E. Aguilar in Cuba 1933: Prologue to Revolution (1972), 1–48. 18. This and other facts about the origins of the bolero are found in Jaime Rico Salazar’s Cien años de boleros (17–21). About the Cuban composers who forged the bolero, and also about the history of the Alhambra Theater, see also Cristóbal Díaz Ayala’s Música cubana: del areyto a la nueva trova (92–100). Other important sources about the origins of the bolero are: Natalio Galán, Cuba y sus sones (275–300) and Helio Orovio, Diccionario de la música cubana: biográfi co y técnico (58–61). 19. At various points in the text, Rachel alludes to her “masculine” traits; a good example is the following passage: “I’m a bit masculine in the good sense of the term. If I had been able to become an aviatrix, I would have done it gladly—throw myself with a parachute from fi fteen thousand meters, feel that vacuum, and then touch down on the ground. I know it’s a man’s job, but I’m crazy about it. One time I went to the movies for a whole week to watch the No-Do, an adventure newsreel, where they were showing a tiny little woman who looked like a jockey throwing herself with a parachute while reading a book” (92). This passage shows again the constant dualities in Rachel between masculine and feminine, earth and sky, and, in the curious image of the woman who parachutes while reading a book, the duality between action and writing. 20. See Gubar, “‘The Blank Page,’” Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body, and Chapter 2 of my book La novela modernista hispanoamericana. 21. I refer readers again to Fernández’s well-documented study, particularly to Chapter 3, “Emotional Political History: Cuba in the Twentieth Century,” 44–61. 22. See Roderic A. Camp’s synthesis of Tlatelolco and the Mexican intellectuals in Intellectuals and the State in Twentieth-Century Mexico, 208–222. 23. This is the title of a brilliant chronicle by Leñero in which he comments on the influence of the 1930s Cuban radio soap opera El derecho de nacer (The Right to Be Born) on the Mexican media: “Everyone’s heart,” Leñero concludes,

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parodying the soap-opera style, “has a crust of sensibility; we are all—some more, some less, for the love of God!—a little corny. We are all born (heroic background music, signaling the end of the play) with the right . . . the sacred right to cry!” (279; Leñero’s italics). 24. Lyrics by Felipe de Rosas and Hernán Restrepo Duque to the Colombian bolero from the 1950s “Escríbeme” (Write to Me), in Rico Salazar’s Cien años de boleros. The love letter is, naturally, a common theme of boleros. The abundant bibliography on the bolero is not only musicological but also contains works of literary criticism and sociological and cultural interpretation. A classic study in the latter vein is Carlos Monsiváis’s Amor perdido (1977). Two other recent studies on the aesthetics and the cultural effects of the bolero are Rafael Castillo Zapata, Fenomenología del bolero (1990) and Iris M. Zavala, El bolero: historia de un amor (1991). The existence of a so-called “bolero-novel” in Spanish America has been posited; this would be, in my view, only a subcategory of the new sentimental novel; see Vicente Francisco Torres, La novela bolero latinoamericana (1998). 25. A commonplace of the romances of chivalry (also parodied in Cervantes’s Don Quixote) was the claim that the novel’s text was the translation of a manuscript discovered in a far-off place and written in a foreign and frequently archaic tongue (English, German, Arabic, Hungarian, Phrygian, Greek, and Latin were some of the languages used). A good introduction to this topic is Daniel Eisenberg, Romances of Chivalry in the Spanish Golden Age (1982). 26. A lucid and engaging account of the turn toward the “primitive” in avantgarde art is Marianna Torgovnik’s Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. See particularly Chapter 8, “Oh Mexico! D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent” (159–174). 27. See González Echevarría, “Historia y alegoría en la narrativa de Carpentier” and my “Revolución y alegoría en ‘Reunión’ de Julio Cortázar.” On the readings of Joyce by Borges, Lezama, Paz, and other precursors of the Boom, see César A. Salgado, From Modernism to Neobaroque: Joyce and Lezama Lima. 28. A good example is “Añil y carne humana,” a synthesis of various interviews Poniatowska did with Diego Rivera in 1956, collected in Poniatowska’s book Palabras cruzadas: crónicas (1961). As Beth Jörgensen points out, Poniatowska is particularly intrigued by Rivera’s paradoxical embodiment, at the same time, of progressive politics and patriarchal values (Jörgensen 15). That paradox is also largely that of postrevolutionary Mexico.

CHAPTER 1 1. In an interview with Celia Correas Zapata, Allende states: “There are various themes that are repeated in my books: love, death, solidarity, violence. Also political and social themes, dreams, coincidences, historical elements. But . . . in my life the main motivation has been love, not only erotic love, of course. Perhaps what sustains love is affi nity. A climate of affi nity, affection, intimacy, is like the good soil in which everything grows without effort. When I say ‘making love’ I speak about an encounter that may or may not include sex—it is a complicity in communication, solidarity, caresses, humor. One could even say that I ‘make love’ with my grandkids” (Correas Zapata, 152).


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2. On the Allende-García Márquez relation see the works by Antoni, Clancy, Marcos, Moore, and Urbina. 3. A secondary plot line tells the story of the two Evangelinas, one surnamed Ranquileo, the other Flores, who were switched in the hospital at birth. 4. I summarize here the comments by Hart, Mora, and Lemaitre. 5. Many of the Post-Boom novels I have dubbed “new sentimental novels” have also been called “Neo-Romantic” (Shaw, Antonio Skármeta and the PostBoom, 185–86). There is undoubtedly in these novels a reappropriation of sentimental discourse from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and of many Romantic traits. Among the latter is the relative unconcern with formal aspects and with the notion of “perfection” in general, abetted by subjectivism and notions similar to the expressive theories of art and the idea of the sublime, as discussed by M. H. Abrams with regard to the Romantics (The Mirror and the Lamp, 100–155). 6. See pages 69, 80, 113, 117–18. 7. Similar to the ideas I have posited in the introduction, Craft sees a certain continuity between the testimonial and sentimental narratives. Craft’s analysis, however, presupposes that testimoniality and sentimentality are harmoniously fused in Of Love and Shadows. 8. Unlike Craft, I believe the relationship with the predominantly visual and narrative codes of the TV soaps is not the sole factor relevant to the presence of sentimentalism in this novel. There are also mediations of a textual sort, such as the romances of chivalry, of which I will say more toward the end of this chapter. 9. For additional examples of this novel’s use of the code of fashion, see Perricone’s essay. 10. In Borges’s story the Nazi war criminal exults that, despite his death sentence by a war crimes tribunal, the Allies have become “contaminated” by the Nazis’ own cult of violence: “An implacable epoch now looms over the world. We forged it, we who are now its victims. What does it matter if England is the hammer and we the anvil? What matters is that violence should rule, not servile Christian meekness” (Borges, Obras completas I, 580–581). 11. As Daniel Eisenberg points out: “Among the evil characters the knight will come into contact with on his travels are giants . . . the giants were not supernatural beings but merely very large and ugly men, who believed themselves to be superior to ordinary men and therefore free from the troubling need to follow society’s rules. Never Christians, they usurped kingdoms because of their whim, and carried off women with the intent of raping them and men to be sold as slaves. . . . The giants are haughty and disrespectful. They offer the knight the chance to show his extraordinary abilities in defeating and killing them; in the case of giants, he does not hesitate to put them to death. Occasionally one fi nds a good or reformed giant, and sometimes dwarfs, evil or otherwise” (65–66).

CHAPTER 2 1. Like his models Cervantes and Rabelais, Sterne has been influential even for authors who have not read him directly. Such seems to have been the case with Proust, for example, about whom Michael Bell observes that “the most teasing relationship, or non-relationship, in European literature is that between Proust

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and Sterne. Given Proust’s knowledge of English literature and the European impact of Sterne in the era of sensibility, followed by his impact as a humorist on the German romantics and then as a self-conscious fictionist on modern authors, it is extremely unlikely that Proust had not read him although there appears to be no direct evidence of this. The important aspect of Sterne here, however, is not the sensibility on which his continental reputation was initially based but the underlying structure of Tristram Shandy as an eighteenth-century A la recherche du temps perdu” (154). In Bryce’s case a possible intermediary may well have been Proust himself, whose work Bryce did know well when he wrote A World for Julius because—as Bryce has reminisced humorously several times—of his mother’s admiration for the French novelist’s work (“Confesiones” 27). For a detailed reading of Bryce’s debt to Tristram Shandy, see Margarita Krakusin’s La novelística de Alfredo Bryce Echenique y la narrativa sentimental. 2. This is evidenced from the beginning of the novel, when the narrator states: “Only Julius ate in the little dining room or the children’s’ dining room, now called Julius’s dining room. Here there was a sort of Disneyland. . . . But—as never happened when his siblings ate in Disneyland—now all of the servants came to keep Julius company” (12–13). 3. In La oralidad escrita: sobre la reivindicación y re-inscripción del discurso oral Jorge Marcone offers a solid analysis of orality in La última mudanza de Felipe Carrillo based on the theoretical debates about the relationship between orality and writing. For a more general discussion of orality in Bryce’s works, see César Ferreira’s doctoral dissertation, “Autobiografía y exilio en la narrativa de Alfredo Bryce Echenique” (University of Texas at Austin, 1991). Marcone and Ferreira both agree that, for Bryce, orality is a device to foment a sense of “complicity”—or, as Marcone prefers, “solidarity”—between author and reader (Marcone 266). 4. In Borges’s story, the Hispano-Moorish sage Averroes, after gazing at himself in a mirror, “disappeared suddenly, as if annihilated by a fi re without light, and . . . with him there disappeared the house and the invisible fountain and the books and the manuscripts and the doves and the many dark-haired slaves and the trembling red-haired slave and Farach and Abulcásim and the rose bushes and perhaps the river Guadalquivir” (587). Further on, the narrator explains: “I felt that Averroes trying to imagine what a theater is was no less absurd than myself trying to imagine Averroes with hardly anything to go on but a few bits of Renan, Lane, and Asín Palacios. In the last page, I felt that my narration was a symbol of the man I was as I was writing it and that, in order to write that narration I had to be that man and that, to be that man, I had to write that narration, and so until infi nity. (The instant I cease to believe in him, ‘Averroes’ disappears.)” (588). 5. As César Ferreira points out, “a distinctive trait of the writing of La vida exagerada—and, by extension, all of Bryce’s work—is precisely the conviction that literature is an activity that is deeply rooted in life’s experiences, that it is an extension of life itself, for in Bryce’s world all of life’s experiences are the stuff of literature” (11). 6. A study of the origins of this tradition is found in Jacques Derrida’s celebrated essay, “Plato’s Pharmacy” in Dissemination (1972). See also Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement.”


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7. See Iris Zavala’s comments in El bolero: Historia de un amor, 75–81. 8. An insightful comment on Tarzan as a cultural icon and a symbol of modernity’s “Neo-Primitivism” is found in the chapter “Taking Tarzan Seriously” in Marianna Torgovnik’s Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. 9. “You know, Phaedrus,” explains Socrates, “that’s the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever. And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not to address the wrong. And when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parent to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself” (Plato 521). 10. See Susan Gubar’s classic essay “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity,” as well as Nina Auerbach’s Woman and Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth and Elizabeth Bronfen’s Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic. 11. See Torgovnik’s comments on the function of Jane and misogyny in the Tarzan myth, 62–69. 12. It should be remembered here that California was the name of the island of the Amazons in the Spanish romance of chivalry Las Sergas de Esplandián (1510), the sequel to the most famous of all the romances of chivalry, Amadís de Gaula (1508). More details on both works may be found in Irving A. Leonard’s classic Books of the Brave, 38–53. 13. In one of the most overt passages in which the impossibility of ending their suffering through marriage is broached, Juan Manuel makes a tentative proposal to Fernanda (whom he often calls “Fernanda Mía”): “If I could stay, Mía. . . .” “It would have to be forever, my love, and that’s impossible.” “But Enrique knows everything now!” “Don’t forget the kids are his, Juan Manuel, and they adore him. And whoever has the love of those children has me.” “It’s incredible, Fernanda. I’ve never had, never felt so much your love, and yet the only new conclusion I can reach is that you’ve never been so little, so not at all mine.” “Keep in mind always that everything failed us from the beginning, my love, except loving each other this way.” (174) This is not the fi rst (nor the last) time in the text in which Juan Manuel proposes marriage to Fernanda, always with the same result: Fernanda refuses, citing the love of her children. In large part, it is Fernanda, like the Provençal midons, who imposes obstacles to the fi nal and defi nitive union of the two lovers, and it is Juan

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Manuel who must learn to struggle with this different way to love. On the other hand, it is undoubtedly true that Juan Manuel’s itinerant career as a musician hardly makes him a prototype of domesticity.

CHAPTER 3 1. A highly perceptive essay on Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is Carlos J. Alonso’s “La tía Julia y el escribidor: The Writing Subject’s Fantasy of Empowerment.” On Cabrera Infante’s Infante’s Inferno, see González Echevarría, “Autobiography and Representation in La Habana para un infante difunto” and Prieto’s Body of Writing: Figuring Desire in Spanish American Literature, Chapter 2. 2. The poem is part of a play by Gil Vicente, Comédia de Rubena (1521), written with dialogue in both Spanish and Portuguese. The fi rst act tells the story of the maid Rubena, who is seduced and made pregnant by a “young cleric” (clérigo mozo; Obras Completas de Gil Vicente 3). With the aid of demons invoked by a sorceress, Rubena is taken to some mountains where she gives birth to a girl, Cismena, whose story is the subject of the rest of the play. Act 3 contains a direct allusion to Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor as one of the books Cismena reads (Obras completas de Gil Vicente 50). The links between the fi rst act of this play and the plot of Of Love and Other Demons are highly suggestive. Ana María Hernández has studied the relation between this play and Chronicle of a Death Foretold in “La significación del epígrafe en Crónica de una muerte anunciada.” 3. Santiago Nasar, as the autopsy report made by the priest Carmen Amador states, “had a deep wound in the palm of his right hand. The report says: ‘It looked like the Crucified One’s stigmata’” (Crónica de una muerte anunciada 99). 4. An excellent reading of Love in the Time of Cholera in the context of Proust’s work is found in Wendy B. Faris’s “Love in the Times of Proust and García Márquez.” On García Márquez’s “return to realism” in this novel, see Bell-Villada 191–192 and Alfred J. McAdam’s “Realism Restored.” 5. As Barthes observes in The Pleasure of the Text: “Isn’t the most erotic place in a body there where clothing opens up? In perversion (which is the rule in textual pleasure) there are no ‘erogenous zones’ (a rather unfortunate expression): It is intermittence—as psychoanalysis has rightly pointed out—that is erotic: the skin that flashes between two pieces of clothing (the pants and the sweater), between two edges (the half-open shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is that flashing which seduces us, or better yet: the display of an appearance-disappearance” (El placer del texto 17). 6. As in the following few examples: “He just needed a canny interrogation, fi rst to him and then to the mother, to confi rm once more that the symptoms of love are the same as those of cholera” (98); “One night [Fermina] returned from her daily walk stunned by the revelation that one could not only be happy without love but also against love” (134); “Hildebranda had a universalist notion of love, and she thought that anything that happened to one person affected all the other loves in the entire world” (193); “The widow Nazaret never missed Florentino Ariza’s occasional dates, not even in her busiest times, and it was always without aspiring to love nor being loved, although always hoping that she would fi nd something like


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love but without the problems of love” (223–224); “nothing in this world was more difficult than love” (326). 7. See Jean Franco’s “Dr. Urbino’s Parrot.” 8. See Freud’s essay “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” and the comments by Peter Brooks in Psychoanalysis and Storytelling 57–58. 9. De Rougemont’s observations about eros are pertinent here: “Eros is complete Desire, luminous Aspiration, the primitive religious soaring carried to its loftiest pitch, to the extreme exigency of purity which is also the extreme exigency of Unity. But absolute unity must be the negation of the present human being in his suffering multiplicity. The supreme soaring of desire ends in non-desire. The erotic process introduces into life an element foreign to the diatole and systole of sexual attraction—a desire that never relapses, that nothing can satisfy, that even rejects and flees the temptation to obtain its fulfi llment in the world, because its demand is to embrace no less than the All. It is infi nite transcendence, man’s rise into his god. And this rise is without return” (61–62). 10. Raúl Ianes offers a detailed discussion of the Romantic texts which Of Love and Other Demons resembles in “Para leerte mejor: García Márquez y el regreso de la huérfana colonial.” Despite its title, Ianes’s perspicacious essay does not allude to Carolyn Steedman’s Strange Dislocations, which traces the genealogy of the theme of the “orphaned girl-child” in European sentimental literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For his part, Carlos Rincón posits that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) is one of García Márquez’s main sources for this novel in “García Márquez con Hawthorne, o la re-escritura en Del amor y otros demonios.” 11. The bibliography on Latin American TV soap operas is already quite extensive. Among the more recent studies I have consulted are Assumpta Roura, Telenovelas, pasiones de mujer: el sexo de culebrón (1993); Gustavo Aprea and Marita Soto, Telenovela/telenovelas: los relatos de una historia de amor (1996); and Jorge A. González, ed., La cofradía de las emociones (in)terminables: miradas sobre telenovelas en México (1998). See also Lidia Santos’s synthesis of the development of Brazilian TV soaps in “A telenovela brasileira: do nacionalismo à exportação.” A fundamental text for all discussion of race relations in Latin American radio and TV soaps is the arch-famous Cuban radio serial (adapted numberless times for TV and the cinema) El derecho de nacer (The Right to be Born) by Félix B. Caignet. Following the illustrious literary model of the Cuban Romantic novel Cecilia Valdés (1882) by Cirilo Villaverde, Caignet develops the theme of the light-skinned mulatto who “passes” for white, causing confusion of all sorts in society. An ironic account of the influence of El derecho de nacer on the Mexican radio serials is offered by Vicente Leñero in his chronicle “El derecho de llorar.” By a curious coincidence, the Colombian TV chain Caracol Televisión produced a soap opera set in the colonial period. Titled “La mujer doble,” it starred Carlos Vives and Ruddy Rodríguez and featured a script by Carlos Enrique Taboada. A summary of the plot, offered by Caracol Televisión, reads as follows: “The beautiful Carmita Figueroa falls victim to a witch who by means of sorcery transforms her personality, turning her into a perverse woman, while Mateo Escontria, her great love, must risk his own life to recover the woman he loves so much and who is now the victim of a terrible revenge.”

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12. A similar lack of physical attractiveness is attributed to Florentino Ariza in Love in the Time of Cholera. Hildebranda Sánchez’s opinion, voiced after she meets Florentino, says it all: “He’s ugly and sad . . . but he’s all love” (193). 13. I follow here Jacques Derrida’s reading of Phaedrus in his book Dissemination. 14. See Carolyn Steedman’s Strange Dislocation: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority 1780–1930. 15. Two key studies in this regard are Susan Gubar’s classic “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity” and Elizabeth Bronfen’s Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (1992). 16. See Fernando Ortiz’s delightful observations in his classic Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar about Western culture’s initial demonization of two agricultural products of the Americas—tobacco and chocolate—as well as products from elsewhere cultivated in the New World, such as coffee and tea (229–235). “Perhaps the tempting substances in each of them are effluvia from the same infernal crucible,” comments Ortiz. “In more modern times those four demons will profit together and will appear in the altars of sensuality along with the ancient and Medieval alcohols, spices, and syrups” (231, 232). 17. Jorge Luis Borges reflects on the Portuguese origins of his father’s family line in his poem “Los Borges” in El hacedor: “Little or nothing do I know of my Portuguese / Forebears, the Borgeses: A vague people / Who continue obscurely in my flesh / Their habits, rigors, and fears” (Obras completas II 209). Borges’s distrust of love (whether carnal or spiritual) is displayed in many parts of his work. One of his most eloquent expressions of this attitude toward love is the poem “El amenazado” from El oro de los tigres in Obras completas II 483. 18. See “Flaubert y su destino ejemplar” in Discusión, in Obras completas I 263–266. 19. The theme of leprosy in Of Love and Other Demons could well be linked to this latter text by Flaubert collected in his Trois contes, in which the master of Rouen, like García Márquez, recreates a legendary tale from a distant past. In Flaubert’s story, the noble Julian, after renouncing his violent life and his success as a warrior, fi nds sanctity by turning into a hermit. His apotheosis occurs when Julian embraces a leper who asks Julian to warm his dying body with his own (Three Tales 86–87). 20. As English Showalter points out, Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques (1734) has traditionally been viewed as the fi rst attack launched against the ancien régime: “Originally called English Letters, the work is composed of letters written home by an imaginary French visitor to England. The narrator alternates between perceptive didacticism and expressions of naive astonishment, made funny by Voltaire’s irony and aphorisms, but the book met with instant popular success as much for its shocking ideas as for its amusing tone. Voltaire’s England is fi rst of all a land of religious tolerance; Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and others thrive by ignoring differences of doctrine” (439). 21. See De Rougemont’s discussion of the theme of the “love-philter” in the legend of Tristan and Isolde, 46–50.


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CHAPTER 4 1. Reactions to this novel vary from those who see it as antifeminist and lacking intellectual depth (Potvin, Arredondo) to those who exalt it as a feminist work and a prototype of postmodern parody (Ibsen, Dobrian, Escaja, González Stephan). 2. Antonio Marquet’s comments are typical in this respect: “Judged from a literary point of view, the novel’s defects are quite evident (in fact, it brings together all of the typical elements of ‘popular literature’): It is simplistic, Manichaean; it has a logic that presumes to be childlike; it is full of banal conventionalisms, lacks a well-defi ned stylistic intention, and only aspires to the status of a novelty” (58). 3. Dobrian points out this novel’s parodic inversion of a series of themes from the Hispanic and Latin American literary traditions, from the image of the hypersexual macho to the chivalric stereotype of the “damsel in distress” (59). 4. A detailed commentary on the communal aspects of cooking in Like Water for Chocolate is found in Lawless’s study, “Cooking, Community, Culture: A Reading of Like Water for Chocolate.” Curiously, when reviewing the communal traits of cooking and nourishment, Lawless does not allude to the symbolic significance of supper in the Christian tradition, which is in my view the paradigm of the relation between cooking and community in Western culture. 5. However, as one critic has pointed out, this novel’s image of the jungle is a far more positive one, and thus diametrically opposed to that in telluric novels like La vorágine (Araya). 6. It would be interesting—given their shared interest in ecological themes and their allusions to Italy—to compare The Old Man Who Read Love Stories with Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller (1987), a novel in which the Peruvian author reconsiders his earlier The Green House from the perspective of the Post-Boom aesthetics. 7. Araya points out that Sepúlveda “distances himself from the magical realism of García Márquez by eliminating its exoticism and tropicalism and incorporating magic as just another component of our way of life and society. Thus, he characterizes his narrative style by means of a new formula expressed in the phrase ‘the magic of reality.’” Sepúlveda himself has expressed in various interviews his dislike of “experimental narratives”: “Most of the experimental narratives I’ve read have seemed to me to be charming displays of erudition and culture, but I think they drive readers away from books—they terrorize them” (Costamagna). 8. The heroes alluded to in the protagonist’s name are, of course, Simón Bolívar, the liberator of South America, and his colleague General Antonio José de Sucre. 9. Florence Barclay (1862–1921) was the daughter of an Anglican pastor and she married another pastor, the reverend Charles W. Barclay. They spent their honeymoon in the Holy Land, a trip during which the newlyweds took the opportunity to make a modest archaeological discovery: the Biblical Jacob’s Well. Convalescing from a cardiac disease, Mrs. Barclay began to write a short novel, The Wheels of Time, and this was soon followed by The Rosary, her most popular work. The “lit-

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erary creed” of this author is summed up in the following remarks: “There is too much sin in this world for the imaginative powers of an author to be used with the aim of adding even fictional sins to their amount. Too many evil, sordid, and morbid characters already wander, unfortunately, over this earth. Why should writers add others and run the risk of introducing them into beautiful homes where such people would not be tolerated for an instant?” (“Florence Barclay”). The allusion to Florence Barclay is revealing in various ways: although there is humorous irony in the fact that a tough and leathery man of the jungle like Antonio José likes syrupy romances such as The Rosary, Sepúlveda’s novel clearly shares with Barclay’s a strong moralizing intention. Curiously, William Faulkner wrote a story titled “The Rosary” that parodies Barclay’s novel (Folks). 10. In the narrator’s words: “During her university years María never rested. She had multiple relationships, always parallel to one another. She advocated free love and swore she would never marry nor have children. She despised traditional couples, thinking they lacked a certain grandeur, they lacked passion—horrible sins, in her view. . . . Not even her leftist militancy made her see reason” (Serrano 129–130). Further along, the narrator states that “one day María simply stopped believing” (180). 11. The allusion to Artaud as a cause of María’s disbelief in politics may be explained not only by his brief break in 1927 with André Breton’s surrealists due to Breton’s becoming a Communist, but also by Artaud’s ideas about art and sincerity. In Dyonisius in Paris (1960) Wallace Fowlie observes that “Antonin Artaud’s name is associated with a fundamental revolt against insincerity, and especially against insincerity in literature, where the written word corresponds to an attitude or prejudice. His most cherished dream was to found a new kind of theatre in French which would be, not an artistic spectacle, but a communion between spectators and actors. As in primitive societies it would be a theatre of magic, a mass participation in which the entire culture would fi nd its vitality and its truest expression” (203). Also suggestive in terms of the discussion in Serrano’s novel about the repression of feelings and politics is Chapter 12 of Artaud’s seminal book Theater and Its Double (1938), “An Affective Athleticism,” where Artaud argues that “the actor is like the physical athlete, but with a surprising difference: his affective organism is analogous, parallel, to the organism of the athlete—in truth, its double—although it does not act on the same plane. The actor is an athlete of the heart” (Artaud 147).

CHAPTER 5 1. Bibliography on this novel by Skármeta is not abundant. Among the few scholarly works available, besides the interview with Coddou, are Yovanovich’s (on the picaresque in Love-Fifteen) and Shaw’s (his detailed gloss of the novel in Chapter 7 of Antonio Skármeta and the Post-Boom). 2. This novel was the basis for a 1983 fi lm version with the same title directed by Skármeta himself and for the popular Italian fi lm Il Postino (1995) directed by Michael Radford. The popularity of Il Postino led to a change in the novel’s title in subsequent editions to El cartero de Neruda.


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3. For example: “Regarding aristocracy, I would be lying if I said I haven’t had any relation to it in Germany, since it is well-known in certain circles of this city— and also to my German editor, doctor Piper—that some years ago I was almost married to a countess, herself a writer colleague. (The wedding never took place on that occasion since we were both already married to someone else.)” (8). 4. As in Tarzan’s Tonsillitis, the characters’ names in Love-Fifteen evoke those of medieval aristocracy, despite the fact that the prologue’s narrator claims he has given his protagonists names that do not resemble “even remotely their extremely lengthy real last names” and that he opted to “cover these up with names from my poor fancy such as Bamberg and Mass that are not found in aristocratic circles” (9). Raymond Papst’s name, for instance, alludes not only to the Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church—“Papst” means “Pope” in German—but his fi rst name is also reminiscent of the Frenchman Raymond de Poitiers, prince of Antioch, who reached that position in 1136 at the age of 37 years after marrying princess Constance of Antioch, who was then only nine years old. Twelve years later, Raymond’s relations with his niece Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of king Louis VII of France, gave rise to scandalous rumors (“Raymond,” Encyclopaedia Britannica Online). As for Pablo de Braganza’s last name, the narrator of Love-Fifteen himself points out its disquieting medieval resonances: “With my father-in-law’s typical sarcastic tint, he told us that there was once a Braganza who had been exiled to Castile in the fi fteenth century and that, when back in Portugal, already married to a daughter of the duke of Medinasidonia, he had killed her after believing certain rumors that claimed his wife was an adultress. Obsessed by the literary fate of so many young heroines, I prayed to God that Pablo would not have the same talent as his ancestor” (220). On the other hand, Sophie’s fi rst name (from the Greek sophia: knowledge) could not be more explicit in terms of its symbolic links with the intellectualism of the courtly love tradition. 5. The chivalric tone of Milosz’s “The Sea” is evidenced in the following verses: I sowed the golden seed and did not pick the fruits, But I save in my soul, indulgent and arrogant, The consolation of having everything forgiven. So I dare love the loveliest one of all, She who, under the yoke of ceaseless labor, Harbors all of life in her tremulous lap, Opening its vast ways to men’s adventure. (Love-Fifteen 37) The carpe diem theme appears toward the end of Ransom’s “Blue Girls”: Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail; And I will cry with my loud lips and publish Beauty with all our power shall never establish, It is so frail. For I could tell you a story which is true; I know a lady with a terrible tongue,

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Blear eyes fallen from blue, All her perfection tarnished—yet it is not long Since she was lovelier than any of you. (Skármeta 72) 6. As Karl Beckson observes, “in many of his [Wilde’s] works, exposure of a secret or indiscretion and consequent disgrace is a central design” (“Oscar Wilde,” Encyclopaedia Britannica Online). 7. This would not be the fi rst time Sánchez has parodied nineteenth-century texts: Sánchez himself has pointed out the affi nities between his fi rst novel, Macho Camacho’s Beat (1976) and the Naturalist novel La charca (1894) by the Puerto Rican Manuel Zeno Gandía. There is another nineteenth-century work written before Wilde’s play and radically different from it, which could nevertheless be productively compared with La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos. Almost one hundred and fi fty years before the publication of the latter novel, another Spanish American author wrote a book about a man whose life seemed to embody the enigma of an entire nation. Making abundant use of melodrama, the author of that work began, like Sánchez, evoking and invoking the figure of the absent individual, who in this case was already dead and gone: “Terrible shade of Facundo I will evoke you, so that shaking off the bloody dust that covers your ashes you will rise up to explain to us the secret life and the internal convulsions that rend the entrails of your noble people! You possess the secret: Reveal it to us!” (Sarmiento 37–38). While a detailed comparison of Sánchez’s novel and the Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo would fall outside the scope of these pages, we can nevertheless note that both are openly ageneric works; that one is Romantic while the other is Neo-Romantic; that both focus on caudillos and their machismo—Facundo Quiroga was a military leader, while Daniel Santos, “the Totem, the Chief,” is a metaphorical caudillo—and that both works attempt, in Sánchez’s words, to “dismantle a myth.” 8. Among other works, Sánchez has authored two classic plays of the contemporary Puerto Rican theater: La pasión según Antígona Pérez (1968) and Quíntuples (1985). The best synthetic account of Sánchez’s theatrical career is found in Sánchez’s own autobiographical essay (written in Spanish, despite its title in English), “Strip-Tease at East Lansing,” in his book of essays No llores por nosotros, Puerto Rico (1997).

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INDEX

Abrams, M. H., 11, 55, 56, 153n5 Aguilar, Luis E., 151n17 Alighieri, Dante, 85, 94, 107 Allende, Isabel, viii, ix, 3, 4, 5, 39, 40–61, 62, 63, 64, 68, 69, 81, 95, 103, 126, 136, 145, 147, 149n2, 152n1, 153n2 The House of the Spirits, 41–42 Of Love and Shadows, 39, 40–61 Allende, Salvador, 3, 119, 127 Alonso, Carlos J., ix, 156n1 Anacoluthon, 9, 65, 78–79 Antoni, Robert, 153n2 Aprea, Gustavo, 157n11 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 84 Araya G., Juan Gabriel, 159nn5,7 Arenas, Reynaldo, 3, 16 Ariosto, Ludovico, 57 Arredondo, Isabel, 149n1 Artaud, Antonin, 122, 160n11 Auerbach, Erich, 36 Auerbach, Nina, 155 Aylwin, Patricio, 119, 128 Azorín, 70, 71 Azuela, Mariano, 29 Barclay, Florence, 116, 159–160n9 Barnet, Miguel, viii, ix, 1, 3, 4, 5, 7,

15–17, 28, 29, 31, 38, 39, 43, 51, 60, 62, 63, 66, 68, 80, 81, 82, 84, 103, 122, 126, 136, 145, 147, 150nn12,13, 151n15 Biography of a Runaway Slave, 1, 15, 16, 17, 28, 151n14 Rachel’s Song, 4, 15, 16–27, 31, 32, 36, 38, 42, 66, 80, 83, 85, 108, 122, 129, 136, 147 Barthes, Roland, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 15, 28, 31, 32, 79, 83, 121, 126, 145, 156n5 Bashkirtseff, Maria, 25 Beckson, Karl, 162n6 Bell, Michael, 9–10, 153n1 Bell-Villada, Gene, 83, 156n4 Beloff, Angelina (Quiela), 30–38 Belsey, Judith, 30, 73 Benedetti, Mario, 130 Beverley, John, 73 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 119 boleros, 19, 30, 32, 38, 66–67, 74, 81, 120, 125, 135, 137, 141, 151n18, 152n24, 155n7 Boom, viii, ix, 2, 3, 4, 6, 17, 36, 39, 40, 42, 63, 73, 75, 76, 80, 81, 113, 149n2, 152n27, 153n5 Borges, Jorge Luis, 2, 6, 22, 27, 53, 66,

174

Index

99, 149–150n3, 152n27, 153n10, 154n4, 158n17 Bórquez, Josefi na (Jesusa Palancares), 1, 28, 30, 36 Bronfen, Elizabeth, 151n20, 155n10, 158n15 Brooks, Peter, 137, 138, 139, 142, 143, 157n8 Bryce Echenique, Alfredo, viii, ix, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 62–79, 80, 83, 103, 104, 126, 145, 147, 148, 150, 154nn1,3,5 El hombre que hablaba de Octavia de Cádiz, 64, 68, 69, 147 El huerto de mi amada, 64, 148 No me esperen en abril, 64, 68 Reo de nocturnidad, 64, 68, 76, 148 Tantas veces Pedro, 4, 63–64, 65, 67, 68, 147 Tarzan’s Tonsillitis, 62–79, 98, 131, 148, 161n4 La última mudanza de Felipe Carrillo, 64, 66–67, 68, 147, 154n3 La vida exagerada de Martín Romaña, 4, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67–69, 70, 72, 74, 76, 83, 104, 147 A World for Julius, 63, 64–65, 68, 80, 154n1 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 77 Bush, Andrew, 16, 151n15 Butler, Judith, 12 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, viii, 2, 4, 16, 27, 63, 80, 147, 156n1 Cairo, Pablo, 135 Camp, Roderick A., 151n22 Capellanus, Andreas, 58 Carpentier, Alejo, 6, 16, 73, 82, 113 Carrillo, Isolina, 135 Castillo Zapata, Rafael, 43, 152n24 Castro, Fidel, 15, 19 Catullus, 130 Celorio, Gonzalo, 4 Cervantes, Miguel de, 112, 113, 152n25, 153n1 Don Quixote (Don Quijote), 55,

56, 59, 98, 100, 112, 113–114, 116, 152n25 Cirlot, J. E., 98 Clancy, Laurie, 153n2 Coddou, Marcelo, 128, 160n1 Correas Zapata, Celia, 152n1 Cortázar, Julio, 2, 6, 40, 41, 73, 76 Cortés, Jason, ix, 138–139 Costamagna, Alejandra, 159n7 Craft, Linda J., 49–50, 51, 58, 153nn7,8 De Flores, Juan, 7 De Laclos, Choderlos, 138 De la Cruz, Sor Juana Inés, 70, 102 De Rojas, Fernando, 7 De Rougemont, Denis, 13, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 47, 51–52, 55, 57, 60, 61, 69, 74, 79, 85, 95, 97, 103, 110, 111, 150n9, 157n9, 158n21 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 13, 79, 154n6, 158n13 Deyermond, Alan, 77, 150n5 Díaz Ayala, Cristóbal, 151n18 Dickens, Charles, 10 Dobrian, Susan L., 159nn1,3 Donizetti, Gaetano, 102 Don Juan Manuel, 75 Echavarría Ferrari, Arturo, ix Eco, Umberto, 99 Eisenberg, Daniel, 152n25, 153n11 Epistolary genre, 32–33, 72, 78, 81, 131 Escaja, Tina, 159n1 Esquivel, Laura, 100, 103–112 Estrada Palma, Rafael, 19 ethics, 6, 71, 139 Faris, Wendy B., 156n4 Fernández, Damián J., 151n16 Ferré, Rosario, 147 Ferreira, César, 154n3 Ferrero, Jesús, 5 Finkielraut, Alain, 4 Flaubert, Gustave, 10, 20, 21, 46, 81, 84, 99, 113

Index

Flores, Pedro, 135, 141, 144 Folks, Jeffrey J., 159n9 Fowlie, Wallace, 160n11 Franco, Jean, 157n7 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 84, 157n8 Fuentes, Carlos, viii, 2, 4, 148 Galán, Natalio, 151n18 Gallegos, Rómulo, 113 García Márquez, Gabriel, viii, ix, 2, 4, 6, 41, 63, 68, 75, 79, 80–101, 103, 145, 147, 148, 156n4, 157n10, 158n19, 159n7 The Autumn of the Patriarch, 81, 83 Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 4, 81, 82–83, 88, 147, 155n3, 156n2 Of Love and Other Demons, 4, 79, 81, 82, 86–101, 109, 148, 156n2, 157n10, 158n19 Love in the Time of Cholera, 4, 63, 68, 81, 82, 83–86, 87, 90, 96, 98, 131, 147 156n4, 158n12 One Hundred Years of Solitude, 2, 40, 41, 75, 99 García Pinto, Magdalena, 30, 43 García Sánchez, Javier, 5 Gaugin, Paul, 138–139 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7, 93, 138 Goetz, Curt, 130 Gómez, José Miguel, 18 Gómez de Silva, Guido, 104 González, Jorge A., 157n11 González Echevarría, Roberto, 149n2, 150n13, 151n14, 152n27, 156n1 González Stephan, Beatriz, 159n1 Gubar, Susan, 34, 37, 151n20, 155n10, 158n15 Gugelberger, George M., 3, 149n1 Gutiérrez-Mouat, Ricardo, 149n1 Hart, Patricia, 43, 54, 56, 58, 153n4 Hemingway, Ernest, 70, 76 Hernández de López, Ana María, 156n2 Hobbes, Thomas, 7–8

175

hooks, bell, 5 Hume, David, 7, 8 Huxley, Aldous, 46 Ianes, Raúl, 96, 157n10 Ibsen, Kristine, 159n1 Irigaray, Luce, 4 Jankowiak, William, 11 Jordán, María, ix Jörgensen, Beth E., 152n28 Krakusin, Margarita, 150n6, 154n1 Kristeva, Julia, 4, 11–12 Kronik, John W., ix Langa Pizarro, María Mar, 5 Lanham, Richard, 9 La Rochefoucauld, François duc de, 118 Lawless, Cecelia, 159n4 Lemaitre, Monique J., 43, 58, 153n4 Leñero, Vicente, 30, 151–152n23, 157n11 Leonard, Irving A., 155n12 Lezama Lima, José, 16, 40, 152 López, Vicente Fidel, 89 López-Baralt, Luce, ix López-Baralt, Mercedes, ix love: as agape, 13–14, 15, 20, 33, 36, 38, 39, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47–50, 54, 60, 61, 64, 66, 68, 69, 71–74, 78, 79–81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 94, 95, 96, 101, 103, 104, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 117, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 128, 134, 135, 142, 144, 145, 146, 150n10, 151n16; as eros, 13, 14, 15, 20, 23, 25, 26, 28, 31, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 43, 44, 46, 47, 51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 60, 61, 64, 66, 69, 71, 74, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85–86, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 99, 100, 101, 103, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134,

176

Index

135, 142, 144, 145, 150n10, 151n16, 157n9; courtly, 7, 13, 17, 19, 23, 25, 33, 44, 54, 55, 58, 68, 69, 75, 76, 77, 78, 82, 95, 99, 100, 103, 104, 109, 110, 115, 116, 120, 132, 133, 161n5 Luhmann, Niklas, 11 Lumsden, Ian, 150n1 Machado, Gerardo, 18 Mackenzie, Henry, 7, 138 Marcone, Jorge, 154n3 Marcos, Juan Manuel, 153n2 Marías, Javier, 5 Marquet, Antonio, 159n2 Martí, José, vii, viii, 18, 19, 25, 62 Martínez, Tomás Eloy, 148 Martínez de Pisón, Ignacio, 71 Marvell, Andrew, 126 Mastretta, Angeles, viii, 4, 5, 147, 148 McAdam, Alfred, 156n4 McLemee, Scott, 150n4 Meléndez, Priscilla, ix Menchú, Rigoberta, 1, 15, 51 Mendelsohn, Daniel, 150n4 Mendes, Chico, 113 Mendoza, Eduardo, 5 Menocal, María Rosa, 13, 151n9 Menocal, Mario, 18 Menton, Seymour, 151n11 Mignolo, Walter, 94 Milanés, Pablo, 125 Milosz, Ceszlaw, 130, 131, 133, 161n5 Molloy, Sylvia, ix Monsiváis, Carlos, 152n24 Monsó, Inma, 5 Montejo, Esteban, 1, 16, 17, 28, 150n13 Montero, Rosa, 5 Moore, Pamela L., 153n2 Mora, Gabriela, 43, 153n4 Nabokov, Vladimir, 128, 130 Nietszche, Friedrich, 53 Nolla, Olga, 148

Orovio, Helio, 151n18 Ortega y Gasset, José, 12, 83 Ortiz, Fernando, 16, 150n13, 158n16 Pacheco, José Emilio, 4, 147 Pacheco, Máximo, 43 Palma, Ricardo, 89 Pater, Walter, 135 Pavis, Patrice, 137 Paz, Octavio, 12, 15, 153n27 Pellón, Gustavo, 149n2 Perales, José Luis, 125 Pérez-Firmat, Gustavo, ix Peri Rossi, Cristina, 148 Perricone, Catherine R., 153n9 Pinochet, Augusto, 43, 44, 53, 119, 123 Plato, 11, 20, 27, 77, 85–86, 90–94, 96–97, 98–99, 100, 155n9 Poe, Edgar Alan, 130 Poniatowska, Elena, viii, ix, 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 28–38, 62, 68, 80, 81, 103, 126, 145, 147, 149n2, 152n28 Dear Diego, 4, 7, 15, 28–38, 42, 80, 129, 147, 149n2 Fuerte es el silencio, 37 Here’s to You, Jesusa, 1, 28 Massacre in Mexico, 29–29 Pope, Randolph, 90 Post-Boom, 3, 5, 6, 40, 62, 113, 149n2, 153n5, 159n6 Potvin, Claudine, 108, 159n1 Pozuelo Yvancos, José María, 5 Prado, Pedro, 98 Prieto, René, 156n1 prose romance, 55–56, 57 Puig, Manuel, viii, 3, 4, 126, 147 Quiroga, Horacio, 113 Ransom, John Crowe, 130, 131, 133, 161n5 Richardson, Samuel, 7, 31, 67, 138 Rico Salazar, Jaime, 67, 120, 151n18, 152n24 Rimbaud, Arthur, 24

Index

Rincón, Carlos, 157n10 Riva-Palacio, Vicente, 89 Rivera, Diego, 30, 28–38, 152n28 Rivera, José Eustacio, 113 Rodden, John, 43 Rodó, José Enrique, 98 Rodríguez-Peralta, Phyllis, 64 Roura, Assumpta, 157n11 Salgado, César A., ix, 152n27 Salovey, Peter, 150n4 Sánchez, José (Pepe), 19 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, viii, ix, 3, 4, 125, 127, 135–144, 145, 147, 162n7,8 San Pedro, Diego de, 7, 156n2 Santos, Daniel, viii, 135, 137–144, 162n7 Santos, Lidia, 157n11 Sarduy, Severo, 3, 16, 149n2 Sarmiento, Domingo F., 162n7 Schaefer, Claudia, 31 Schwartz, Stuart, ix Sefchovich, Sara, 147 Sepúlveda, Luis, ix, 103, 112–118, 125, 147, 159n7, 160n9 Serrano, Marcela, viii, ix, 4, 5, 119–125, 148, 160n10 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 7, 8 Shaw, Donald L., 149n2, 153n5, 160n1 Showalter, English, 158n20 Silva, José Asunción, 25 Skármeta, Antonio, viii, ix, 3, 4, 5, 10, 125, 127–135, 145, 147, 148, 149n2, 160n1 Sklodowska, Elzbieta, 149n1, 151nn14,15 Smith, Adam, 7, 8 Solomon, Michael, 68, 69 Sontag, Susan, 5 Soto, Marita, 157n11 Steedman, Carolyn, 157n10, 158n14 Steiner, Wendy, 5 Stendhal, 10, 12, 20, 22, 27, 65, 69, 81, 113

177

Sterne, Lawrence, 5, 7, 63, 64, 65, 138, 150, 153n1 testimonial narrative (testimonio), ix, 1–3, 6, 7, 15, 16, 17, 28, 29, 30, 32, 38, 39, 41, 43, 45, 46, 49, 51, 63, 73, 80, 81, 82, 87, 127, 136, 138, 139, 140, 149n1, 153n7 Todd, Janet, 150n6 Tompkins, Jane P., 14–15 Torgovnik, Marianna, 152n26 Torres, Vicente Francisco, 152n24 Urbina, Nicasio, 153n2 Valdés, Zoé, 14 Vance, Eugene, 57, 58 Vargas Llosa, Mario, viii, 2, 4, 63, 73, 76, 80, 113, 147, 159n6 Vega, Ana Lydia, 148 Vega, Garcilaso de la, 88, 90, 95, 98, 100 Vega, Lope de, 75, 82 Vera, Bensa, 151n15 Vicente, Gil, 82, 88, 156n2 Villalón, Alberto, 19 Villaverde, Cirilo, 27, 157n11 Volpi, Jorge, 148 Voltaire, 65, 100, 158n20 Weismuller, Johnny, 77 Wilde, Oscar, 127, 135–136, 162n6 Williams, Raymond L., 149n2 Williamson, Edwin, 150n3 Wolfe, Bertram, 31, 37 Yovanovich, Gordana, 160n1 Zavala, Iris M., 152n24, 155n7 Zayas, Alfredo, 18 Zimmerman, Marc, 73 Zuber, Helene, 43


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