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LOST-BODY WRITING IN LATIN AMERICA'S
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LOST-BODY WRITING DI LATIN AMERICA’S CONTEMPORARY HISTORICAL
NOVEL

By

Sara Ann Smith

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Romance and Classical Languages

2001

ABSTRACT

LOST-BODY WRITING IN LATIN AMERICA’S CONTEMPORARY HISTORICAL
NOVEL

By

Sara Ann Smith

Latin America’s new historical novel contrasts with the historical novel of
previous periods in its more complex conception of the formation of individual and
collective identity. This dissertation explores how the contemporary historical novel’s
expanded formulation of identity--which encompasses an individual’s bodily experiences
as well as mental processes-transforms conventional notions of cultural interaction and
history, and confronts the issue of who participates in the process of historical change.
Most importantly, the body’s emergence in the discourse of the new historical novel
signals its desire to explore ethical concerns about writing and its relationship to power.
Lost-body writing, a term coined but never explicitly deﬁned by Michel de Certeau,
describes the new historical novel’s ambiguous attitude toward language, writing and the
bodies it inscribes, while it points to an ethics of writing, an alternative to more violent
forms of discourse.

Chapter 1 establishes a theoretical framework with which to study textual bodies
in the new historical novel. I analyze The Praitice of Everyday Life in which de Certeau
argues that discourses of power, such as historiography, must suppress bodies in order to
shape the knowledge inherent in the activities of individuals into meaningful patterns that
are productive and reproducible. At the same time, de Certeau’s text shows how the

reemergence of the body can destabilize and subvert these discourses of power, and in

doing so, return agency to the individual. De Certeau’s Lacie; provides this study with
a broad overarching theory with which to articulate the relationship between body,
writing and violence; however, the analytical chapters that follow also engage the
thinking of other body theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, and Elaine
Scarry.

Chapter 2 examines how the emergence of the carnival body in Edgardo
Rodriguez J ulia’s La renuncia del herroe BM (1974) destabilizes hegemonic historical
discourse and clears a way for new interpretations of Puerto Rico’s past, free from the
gaze of the colonizer. Chapter 3 studies (dis)embodiment in characterization and in the
creation of ﬁction in Mario Vargas Llosa’s Q guerra del ﬁn del mundo (1981) as it
undermines the dichotomy barbaric/civilized and asserts the necessity of awareness of the
body to moral action. Chapter 4 explores the narrator’s construction of self through the
process of writing the history of the cannibal other in Juan José Saer’s El entenﬂo
(1983). This metaﬁctional narrative also examines the human impulse to “write” and the
violent nature of writing as it inscribes bodiesuour own and other’s--to produce
knowledge and to endow our existence with meaning. The Conclusions summarize the
way the emergence of the body in each of the three novels undermines traditional notions
of self, history and writing. I argue that this reemergenee of the body signiﬁes a change
in the conception of language, and a restored belief in its capacity to represent and act on

the material world, even as it admits the inevitability of writing’s violence and alteration.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
LOST-BODY WRITING IN LATIN AMERICA’S CONTEMPORARY
HISTORICAL NOVEL ..........................................................

CHAPTER 1
SUBVERSION AND THE EMERGING BODY: EXPLORING NEW

............ l

WAYS OF WRITING THE PAST ......................................................... 45

CHAPTER 2
CARNIVAL DESTRUCTION AND SELF -DEF INITION IN LA

REMCIA DEL HEROE BALTASAR .....................................

CHAPTER 3
KINDER FICTIONS: EMBODIMENT AND REDEMPTION IN

............ 66

LA GUERRA DEL FIN DEL MUNDO ................................................... 104

CHAPTER 4
ALLEGORICAL RENDERINGS OF THE BODY IN EL ENTENADQ

CONCLUSIONS

LOST-BODY WRITING AND THE REPRESENTATION OF THE
MATERIAL WORLD ...........................................................
ENDNOTES ......................................................................

LITERATURE CITED ..........................................................

iv

............ 143

............ 179

............ 192

............ 223

Introduction: "Lost-Body Writing" in Latin America's Contemporary Historical Novel

El pasado nos da e1 presente, e1 pasado como lo
vemos hoy es lo que nos da la forum que tenemos.
«Carmen Boullosa, "La destruccion de la escritura"
(218)

In the chronicles we learn about the roots of our
problems and challenges that are still unanswered.
And in these half-literary, half-historical pages we
also perceive--formless, mysterious, fascinating-«the
promise of something new and formidable, something
that if it ever turned into reality would enrich the
world and improve civilization.

«Mario Vargas Llosa, A Writer’s Reality (38)

The surge in publication of historical novels in Latin America over the last three
decades attests to the continuing impulse to examine the relationship between the region's
colonial period and its present and, particularly, to explore the roots of Latin American
identity in its controversial past.‘ Seymour Menton, who wrote the ﬁrst book-length study
concerning the proliferation of new historical novels, L_atin Americﬁa_'s New Hist_or_i9§l_
M (1992), accounts for the phenomena in terms of such cultural factors as the
celebration of the Quincentenial of the "discovery" of the New World, and in terms of
such socio-political factors as the return to dictatorial rule and human rights abuses
throughout the region during the decade of the seventies. According to Menton, the
Quincentenial celebration led to a greater awareness of historical bonds among Latin
American countries, while the failure of democracy led many intellectuals to search for
answers to contemporary problems by exploring their nations' pasts (27-30). In
Memorias del olvido (1996), Maria Cristina Pons concurs with Menton's linking of the
voluminous production of historical novels to recent political events and a reexamination
of national goals, as she concludes that the contemporary historical novel recuperates the
past ﬁ'om a present of crisis in order to continue the traditional search to redeﬁne national

identity (259).

However, the contemporary historical novel contrasts with the historical novel of
previous periods in its more complex conception of the formation of individual and
collective identity. The new historical novel rejects the notion of identity as theorized
solely in terms of abstract mental consciousness, as determined by racial, ethnic, or
national belonging, or as polarized by a series of dichotomies in mutually exclusive
opposiﬁon--civilization/barbarism, European/indigenous, conservative/liberal.2 Instead,
as will be seen shortly when I contrast how the body appears in the traditional and in the
new historical novels, these texts conceive of an evolving subject within a changing
social context whose body is inscribed by the colonial experience and its many
conﬂicting discourses.

This ontological move seems to run parallel to similar tendencies in colonial
studies and to correspond to Rolena Adomo's urging to move "beyond the lineal model of
how cultures supplant one another in succession, which is the very assumption that has
guided literary and intellectual historical studies of Spanish America" (173). Adomo
proposes instead that we attempt "to understand cultural interaction in far more
disquieting ways: in patterns of mutual inﬂuence and penetration..." (173). By
theorizing identity as constituted by the various social and material discourses and
practices that are inscribed on the body, the contemporary historical novel challenges
traditional representations of the colonial period as simply a European "conques " of the
"Other," bringing about the erasure of the subaltems' culture and the sentencing of their
history to the realm of the forgotten. This positioning of the body alongside the mind to
form a new material subject allows the reader to question traditional notions of identity as

homogeneous and monadic, and to analyze the impact that cultures have on one another

through mutual marking and inscription, revealing the impurity of terms like "Other" and
"identity," as it sets forth other ways of "knowing" history.

The hypothesis of this dissertation is that the contemporary historical novel's
expanded formulation of identity--which encompasses an individual's bodily experiences
as well as mental processes--transforms conventional notions of cultural interaction and
history, and conﬁonts the issue of who participates in the process of historical change. In
addition, I hypothesize that the body and body practices emerge in this recent historical
narrative not just as a force disruptive to theories of identity and traditional
historiographic discourse, but also as a way of exploring ethical concerns about writing
and its relationship to power. I will analyze how bodies emerging in writing subvert
hegemonic discourse, the knowledge it produces and the control it attempts to exert over
individuals and groups in society. Nevertheless, where bodies appear in discourse there is
always danger. Linguistic representations of bodies can never fully capture the effects of
suffering, discrimination and violence, which is progressively removed ﬁ'om reality as
image is based on image, representation on representation. At what point do bodies in
discourse lose their connection to humanity? At what point do they simply become
verbal representations and violence purely literary? These are some of the questions and
paradoxes I will explore in this study of Latin America's contemporary historical novel.

The three historical novels I have selected to study are not, I believe, unusual in
their focus on the body, but rather representative of the new historical novel in general.
In each of the three novels the body emerges as a prominent player in deconstructing
traditional notions of identity, in questioning ofﬁcial representations of history, and in
examining the violence of writing. In addition, the three novels span the ﬁrst decade of

the genre's renewed popularity, represent three different Latin American countries, and

dissimilar subject matter: La renuncia del héroe Ba_l_t_a;sa_r (1974), an historical
reconstruction of a violent and, yet, ﬁctitious slave rebellion, by the Puerto Rican novelist
Edgardo Rodriguez J ulia; La guerra del ﬁn del mundo (1981) an epic narrative dealing
with the revolt of a group of religious fanatics in the backlands of Brazil, by the Peruvian
novelist Mario Vargas Llosa; and, El entenado (1983), the ﬁctional autobiography of a
former captive of a cannibal tribe in Rio de la Plata, by the Argentinian novelist Juan J osé
Saer.

To begin a discussion of the relationship between the historical novel, identity,
and the body, I will ﬁrst deﬁne the basic terms. Deﬁning the genre of the historical novel
has proven problematic since Georg Lukacs ﬁrst attempted to do so in his seminal text,
The Historical Novel (1937, English trans. 1962).3 Lukacs’ prescriptive deﬁnition lists
characteristics derived ﬁom the novels of Sir Walter Scott, and thus, is overly restrictive,
not allowing for variation or change over time, and effectively excludes many modern
and contemporary historical novels.‘ Although Avrom F leishman’s study, The English
Historical Novel (1971) still employs Lukacs’ deﬁnition, recent studies of the genre
formulate more open deﬁnitions that embrace the signiﬁcant changes the genre has
undergone since the Romantic period.‘ For the purposes of this study, I adopt Elisabeth
Wesseling’s broad concept of the historical novel as formulated in Writing Histog as a
Prophet: Postmodern Innovations of the Historical Novel (1991): she simply asserts that
a historical novel is “ﬁctional narrative which incorporates historical materials” (27).

Attempts to deﬁne the term “identity” also provoke considerable controversy and
my own use of the word reﬂects this quarrelsome history. John Locke’s deﬁnition from

his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) states: “The identity of the same

man consists... in nothing but a participation of the same continued life, by constantly

ﬂeeting particles of matter, in succession vitally united to the same organized body”
(210). The concepts of sameness and continuity that stand out in Locke’s deﬁnition of
identity also stand out in Erik H. Erikson’s 1968 formulation of the term as “a sense of
personal sameness and historical continuity” (17). However, the very concepts that form
the basis of these most commonly used deﬁnitions of identity are what are now under
attack by researchers in various disciplines including psychology, philosophy, history,
sociology, anthropology, as well as literary studies—speciﬁcally under attack are the
notions that identity is unchanging overtime and that one’s identity is determined by who
or what one is not. Also by examining more deeply these established deﬁnitions of
identity, we discover their strong connection to traditional dichotomies such as self versus
other, and mind versus body, as well as other related dichotomies, all of which have come
under attack by contemporary theorists of self. Thus, as identity is the term most
frequently used by literary critics studying the historical novel in Latin America, I use it
with a keen awareness of the difﬁculties that it presents and the contradictory meanings
that it incorporates. The term I prefer in referring to the contemporary historical novel is
“embodied subjectivity,” to be deﬁned further on, as it resolves the problems associated
with the term “identity.”

Furthermore, the term “national identity” is closely related to the notion of
individual identity; thus, it presents many of the same problems. By “national identity” I
mean the sense of sameness that binds a group of people together with a common history
and shared goals for the future. This sense of unity and continuity at a national level is
also now questioned by academics across the disciplines. National identity is clearly a
social and historical construct used to maintain territorial boundaries and, ultimately,

power, by homogenizing differences within a nation, whether they be racial, religious, or

ethnic. As with the term identity, the concepts of sameness and continuity implicit in the
idea of national identity are not sustainable. In fact, this dissertation argues that the
contemporary Latin American historical novel aims to undermine the very of notion of
national identity.

Finally, my use of the term “body,” once again admits a number of complexities
and ambiguities. The body is the physical, material, or biological entity of animals and
humans. But, in addition to performing basic biological functions it also allows us to
move about, to think, to imagine, and even to remember. The body is both a given, in
that we are genetically determined to a certain extent, and it is a construct, in that as
individuals we can transform many aspects of our bodies through discipline, eating
habits, or surgery. The environment and society can alter the body, but also the body can
transforrn its surroundings. Thus, my concept of the body is not as a ﬁnished product, but
rather as a work in progress, that at times expresses agency and other times is determined,
that marks the social and biological enviromnent, as it is marked by it.

As this study analyzes the body's relationship to identity in the Latin American
historical novel, it is useful to brieﬂy summarize the genre's connection to notions of
identity. The historical novel has been closely linked to themes of nationality and to the
process of the formation of national identities and consciousness, beginning in the mid-
nineteenth century with the emergence of the ﬁrst historical novels in Latin America. To
be sure, the Romantic period in general, the era in which the historical novel ﬁrst takes
hold both in Europe and Latin America, is marked by a zealous devotion to the ideals of
ﬁ'eedom and nationalism. Works ﬁ'om all of the various literary genres of the time reﬂect
these ideals to a certain extent. But the historical novel, in particular, is associated with

the forming of new nations and patriotic sentiments. According to Lukacs, national

development and the awakening of a sense of national identity throughout Europe led to
the consciousness of history as a mass experience, and to the appearance of the historical
novel as a genre (19-30).

In Latin America, where new nations were emerging from the devastation of the
Wars for Independence, intellectuals hoped to bring about a feeling of nationalism by
breaking with their Spanish past and Spanish colonial rule, and by offering new models of
heroism ﬁ'om among their own countrymen and regional histories (Franco 47; Rojas Mix
55-56). It is not surprising then that many essays and literary works take as their theme
the misdeeds, corruption, injustice or inefﬁcacy of Spanish administration of the
American colonies (V arela J acorne 100-1). Similarly, in order to underline the
uniqueness of Latin American culture and its divergence from Spanish tradition,
Romantic writers bring to the forefront characters who were previously marginalized,
ﬁgures who are uniquely American and who were once considered to be unsuitable as
protagonists: native Americans in what has been called "Indianista" literature, gauchos in
the Gauchesque, and African-Americans in abolitionist literature (Franco 63).“ Miguel
Rojas Mix contends that among the most important tasks of post-war intellectuals trying
to build new nations, is the reassessment of the past through the rewriting of history (56).

Although this reevaluation of history is evident in the Romantic literature of Latin
America across the board, the historical novel was viewed as an especially appropriate
medium for teaching the reading public about its nation's past and to instill a sense of
national belonging and patriotism.’ Jean Franco convincingly argues this point by
quoting from the prefaces of several historical novels of the period, such as that of
Bartolomé Mitre, the Argentine statesman and intellectual. Mitre believes that the novel's

appeal to the masses allows it to disseminate cultural information throughout the region,

and serves as a didactic tool that can be used to arouse feelings of patriotism necessary to
the constitution of new nations. He writes in his preface to the novel my; (1846), that
"la novela popularizaria nuestra historia... [the novel would popularise our history...]" and
"pintaria las eostumbres originales y desconocidas de los diversos pueblos de este
continente..., [it would paint the original and unknown customs of different peoples of
this continent...]," (Franco 56, translation from Franco's text).
Similarly, Vicente Fidel Lopez explains his motivation for writing a series of
historical novels about colonial times in the letter-preface to L_a novig del hereje (1870).
He also argues the importance of historical knowledge to nation building:
Pareciarne entonces que una serie de novelas destinadas a resucitar e1
recuerdo de los viejos tiempos, con buen sentido, con erudicion, con
paciencia y consagracion seria a1 trabajo, era una empresa digna de tentar
a1 més puro patriotismo; porque creia que los pueblos en donde falte el
eonocimiento claro y la conciencia de sus tradiciones nacionales, son
como hombres desprovistos de hogar y de familia, que consumen su vida
en obscuras y tristes aventuras sin que nadie quede ligado a ellos por el
respeto, por el amor, 0 per la gratitud. Las generaciones se suceden unas a
otras abandonadas a las convulsiones y a los delirios del individualismo.
(Lopez 13)

Lopez contends that people who are unfamiliar with their nation's traditions and past are

in a sense homeless, in that they have no ties to those around them, and that this isolation

is passed on through time. The historical novel functions then as a sort of social glue

which binds diverse groups of people together with a common love of country.

Doris Sommer takes this notion of unifying through teaching love of country one
step ﬁrrther and posits in her study Foundational Fictions (1991) that tales of love and
romance in the narrative of the Romantic period, including several historical novels, are,
in fact, allegories of national consolidation. Erotic love and love of country become
inextricably linked in these novels, so that the obstacles confronting the lovers can only
be overcome in a state that unites the different contingencies represented by them (47).
Sommer argues that the new nations must form alliances between rival regions, economic
classes, racial groups and political parties in order to establish their legitimacy. These
novels provide a model for successful national reconciliation and patriotism as well as
exemplary patriotic heroes. In the new nations concentrating on establishing the civil
institutions of government and commerce, the ﬁctional heroes' more feminine
characteristics were preferable to the militaristic tendencies of many potential leaders
emerging from the recent wars for Independence (14-16). Sommer clearly demonstrates
that national romances, many of which are historical novels, provide models of coalition
building and guidance on proper civil behavior necessary to the construction of national
identity and new nations.

The explosion in production of the historical novel in Latin America over the last
three decades has led contemporary critics in the ﬁeld to afﬁrm, once again, the link
between the historical novel and the formation of national identity and consciousness. As
we have previously seen, Menton and Pons agree that contemporary political and cultural
events function as a catalyst that foments writing about the past. In addition to the failure
of democracy and the reemergenee of military dictatorships in the decade of the 1970's
mentioned by Menton, Pons also points to unsuccessful experiments with socialism and

the distancing of the Latin American literary vanguard ﬁ'om the increasingly dogmatic

and closed Cuban establishment as factors contributing to the search for the roots of
identity in history (20). This notion that the historical novel searches a nation's past in
order to better understand its present is a theme that has been explored widely in recent
studies of the genre and conﬁrmed repeatedly by writers of the historical novel as the two
epigraphs to this chapter reveal.8 The epigraph ﬁom Boullosa also subtly underlines a
closely related theme: "El pasado nos da el presente, el pasado como lo vemos hoy es lo
que nos da 1a forma que tenemos" ("Destruccion" 218). According to the Mexican
novelist, it is not the past itself, but rather our current reading or interpretation of the past
that shapes contemporary identity.

Some critics have underlined important differences between the way the
traditional historical novel and its contemporary counterpart formulate notions of identity.
For example, Pens argues that, while the historical novel of the nineteenth century
afﬁrrned identity by exclusion of the silenced and forgotten, the contemporary
manifestation of the genre proposes the formation of national identity to include those
repressed in the past, and actually does so by remembering history ﬁom this marginal
perspective (259-260). Without denying the link between national identity and the new
historical novel, Fernando Ainsa emphasizes the dissimilarity on this issue between it and
traditional works. Ainsa maintains that one of the new historical novel's salient
characteristics is "la ﬁ‘agmentacion de los signos de identidad nacionales a partir de la
desconstruccién de valores y procesos ideologicos" ("Nueva novela" 5). According to
Ainsa, Latin American novelists' rewriting of history using anachronism, irony, parody,
the irreverent and the grotesque, dismantles the myths, symbols and beliefs that
traditional historiography had instilled, and, ultimately, breaks down totalizing notions of

national identity. Ainsa quotes the Mexican novelist, Fernando del Paso, who says that

10

Latin American novelists' mission is "asaltar la historia oﬁcial," or to assault ofﬁcial
history ("Reescritura" 18). For example, Ainsa points to del Paso's J osé Trigo (1966), in
which the narrative present confronts Mexico's revolutionary past ﬁorn the perspective of
the capital's main train station, ﬁom whose wagons emerge the marginalized masses.
These homeless men and women represent, for Ainsa, the failure of the Revolution, and
del Paso's narrative, the dismantling of its values and mythic successes ("Reescritura" 20).

Ainsa's concept of the deconstruction of national identity in the contemporary
historical novel most closely conforms to my understanding of the genre through the
study of the body. In fact, when Ainsa refers to the grotesque and the irreverent, he too is
implicitly taking note of the way bodies are represented differently in this new
manifestation of the genre. For example, the critic examines the way the epic distance of
traditional historiography is destroyed in the new historical novel, by pointing not only to
literary techniques, like ﬁrst person narration, interior monologue, and colloquial
dialogue as ways of breaking down the otherness of past events ("Reescritura" 19). Ainsa
also asserts that the intimate descriptions of historical ﬁgures, such as the ailing Simon
Bolivar in Garcia Marquez's El general en su labertinto (1989), or the sexually inadequate
Francisco Miranda in Denzil Romero's La tragedia del generalisimo (1983), overshadow
and undermine the symbolic value of these ﬁgures by rehumanizing them ("Reescritura"
19). This irreverent portrayal of these heroes from the struggles for Independence that
focuses on the illness and decay of their bodies brings their mythic status into question,
showing them to be all too human and corruptible, a portrayal which ultimately
destabilizes the myths of national identity which these ﬁgures helped to form.

It can also be argued that the contemporary historical novel's emphasis on body,

which is as at times grotesque and carnivalesque, has the impact of reinserting humanity

11

and the individual experience of the past into history. For example, in Fernando del
Paso's Noticias del Imperio (1994), the former Empress of Mexico, Carlota, is not
allowed to retreat in a digniﬁed manner ﬁom the world stage into her silent insanity. On
the contrary, the aging Carlota cackles, through several hundred pages, her past
indiscretions and those of her dead husband, Maximiliano, as well as a range of her
current vulgar and even obscene behaviors, from willfully drooling to embarrass her
visitors, to biting her caretakers, and consuming her own excrement. Although critics
such as Lukacs, as well as many of his followers, claim that the personal and the private
have no place in the historical novel, the recuperation of the human dimension may be at
the core of the genre's recent revival in Latin America.9 Ainsa afﬁrms that parody and
irony in these novels have the effect of deconstructing historical ﬁgures who in traditional
historiography have become "hombres de mérmol," ﬁgures east in stone. He concludes:
Esta es la caracteristica mas importante de la nueva novela historica
latinoarnericana: buscar entre las ruinas de una historia desmantelada por
la retorica y la mentira al individuo auténtico perdido detras de los
acontecimientos, descubrir y ensalzar al ser humane en su dimension mas
auténtica, aunque parezca inventado, aunque en deﬁnitiva lo sea.
("Reescritura" 3 1)
By demolishing the "hombre de marmol" and then rummaging irreverently through his
remains, the contemporary historical novel dislodges ﬁxed historical "truths" and sets
history and bodies in motion. These historical ﬁgures whose contributions and meanings
were once "legible" or determined, are now destabilized, moving about and open to new
readings and interpretations. The personal histories portrayed in these novels include

major historical ﬁgures whose lives and accomplishments are familiar to all, secondary

12

ﬁgures who have faded into obscurity, and ﬁctional characters whose stories have been
passed along through centuries of oral tradition.'0 What continually stands out in each of
these novels is the presence of the individual's body as it experiences the world. Bringing
the individual to the forefront and laying bare the body as a text to be read and interpreted
are two important strategies that distinguish the contemporary historical novel ﬁom
traditional historiography's depiction of the mass experience of history, and
simultaneously demonstrate that there are other ways of knowing history, other ways of
reading and writing, and other ways of envisioning ourselves as individuals and as
communities.

Although I also agree with Pons' assertion that part of the strategy in dealing with
identity in these novels involves the inclusion of silenced and forgotten voices, taking my
cue ﬁ'om Ainsa, I will argue that, in fact, formerly marginalized voices, speaking ﬁom
revitalized and, at times, vulgar bodies, subvert traditional notions of national identity and
the possibility of collective memory, on which identity relies. History is no longer the
portrayal of "public" events that affect the life of a nation as Lukacs envisioned, but rather
the intimate thoughts and private details of the lives of ﬁgures, both historical and
ﬁctional, ﬁ'om the past. Likewise, the formulation of identity in the new historical novel
as an embodied notion of self represents a challenge to traditional conceptions of
subjectivity. To clarify then, for the purposes of this study, the term “new” historical
novel is used to designate the recent proliferation of historical narrative that incorporates
changing perceptions of history and of the way history is reconstructed through writing
and remembered experience, and that deconstructs traditional notion of national identity
by moving the body to the forefront of discourse. " In the novels of the nineteenth

century the body was depicted more subtly and its subversive impact was neutralized in

13

those novels’ discourse. In the new historical novel, however, the body dominates their
description and narration, undermining essentialist notions of identity and revealing the,
at times, whimsical participation of the individual in the process of history. A brief
comparison of the representations of the body in the traditional and new historical novels
allows us to discover the impact of the changes in bodily representation on our notions of
identity, writing, and history.

Few novels embody so fully the notion of the traditional historical novel in Latin
America as Enriquillo (1882) by the Dominican writer Manuel de J esr'rs Galvan. A
product of the Romantic period and its melodramatic battles between good and evil, the
novel narrates the personal history of Guarocuya--baptized as Enriquillo by the
Franciscans-—the Indian hero who rises up against the injustices and abuses of early
Spanish colonizers on the island of Hispaniola. Like many early historical novels,
Enriquillo constructs a symbol of nationhood around a historic ﬁgure, in this case, a
symbol so effective according to Doris Sommer, that the novel played an important role
in the constitution of the Dominican Republic as a nation ("Populism as Rhetoric" 256).'2
The physical description of the novel's protagonist that follows stands in contrast to the
representation of such ﬁgures in the new historical novel, and is noteworthy not just for
its obvious idealization of the character but also for the stillness of the moment and for
the absence of concrete reference to his body:

Enrique rayaba en los veinte afios: de estatura alta y bien proporcionada,
su actitud y sus movimientos habituales, nunca exentos de compostura,
denotaban a un tiempo modestia y dig'nidad: su faz presentaba esa
arrnonia del conjunto que, mas ar'rn que la misma hermesura, agrada y

predispone favorablemente a primera vista. Alta la ﬁente, correcto el

14

ovalo de su rostro, la blanda y paciﬁca expresién de sus ojos negros solo

dejaba traslucir la bondad y la franqueza de su caracter... (168)
Enriquillo is captured here as if frozen in time, statuesque and stone-like. In this passage,
in fact, the narrator halts the forward movement of the story to insert this still-life
portraiture allowing the reader to ponder the stationary ﬁgure transﬁxed by the narrator‘s
gaze. Ironically, this physical description of Enrique gives few details about his body
beyond his black eyes, tall forehead and oval-shaped face. The narrator's nebulous
depiction also describes the character's stylish dress and concludes that, were it not for the
absence of facial hair and his lightly bronzed skin, evidence of his Native American
heritage, Enrique could easily be mistaken for the son of one of the rich Spanish
colonizers (168).

This description of Enrique-one of very few moments in the novel when the body
comes into view--seems to obscure the historical reality of this ﬁgure rather than to reveal
him more fully to the reader. First, by using nouns like compostura, modestia, dignidad,
armom’a, and bondad, and adjectives like blanda and paciﬁca to emphasize Enrique's
peace-loving nature, the narrator tries to conceal the fact that the character is remembered
in history for leading a justiﬁed, but, nevertheless, violent rebellion against Spanish
colonial rule. And second, by physically associating Enrique with the Spanish colonizers,
the narrator attempts to brush aside the historical ﬁgure's actual racial makeup. As Doris
Sommer argues in Foundational Fictions, "Galvan manages to write a national identity by
erasing" (251)—-by erasing or whitening Enrique's native American physical traits, by
omitting even the mention of the extremely large number of Aﬁ'ican slaves already
present on the island during this period, by simplifying the historical reasons for Enrique's

rebellion and his capitulation fourteen years later, and I would add, by erasing the body

15

ﬁorn his historical narrative and construction of national identity. Only through erasure
and omission can Galvan shape a mythic ﬁgure representing Dominican nationality from
this non-representative and morally ambiguous ﬁgure of the past. Enrique is non-
representative in that most Dominicans today are descendants of Aﬁ'ican slaves rather
than of the native peoples of the island. The native population of Hispaniola, the Taino,
was virtually exterrninated, wiped out early in the colonial period by disease brought by
the European colonizers and by the miserable conditions of life and work in the
encomienda system. The introduction of black slaves into the narrative would have
complicated the simple picture of racial reconciliation that Galvan paints.l3 Enrique is
morally ambiguous because, as Sommer points out, according to the court appointed
historian Oviedo, the real Enrique is said to have agreed to hunt down former Indian and
Aﬁ'ican slaves who had participated in his rebellion and to return them to their owners, as
part of his deal with Carlos V to retreat peacefully to the land granted to him (Sommer
255). As a result, the physical representation of Enrique in this traditional historical
novel is most notable for the lack of speciﬁc corporeal reference, for the way it conceals
more about the character than it reveals, and for the way this erasure of historical detail
allows Galvan to construct a mythic national symbol.

In contrast, in the new historical novel bodies jump off the page at practically
every narrative turn constantly reminding the reader of the very human qualities of
important historical ﬁgures, and in effect, achieving the opposite outcome of traditional
representations of historical ﬁgures as seen in the example above. Whereas Enrique is
made motionless, idealized, whitened, and his bodily experience is erased ﬁom Enriquillo
to create a myth of national origins and identity, the activity as well as the intimate details

of bodily functions and experience of historical ﬁgures are accentuated in contemporary

16

manifestations of the genre in order to rehumanize and demythify them, underlining their
human ﬂaws. In doing so, their status as mythic ﬁgures of national origin and identity are
demolished.

The results are often quite comical as, for example, the depiction of Fray
Servando Teresa de Mier in the Cuban writer Reynaldo Arenas' archetypal new historical
novel, El mundo alucinante (1969). The novel is based on the memoirs of Fray Servando,
a secondary historical ﬁgure who Lezama Lima, Alfonso Reyes, and Edmundo O'Gorman
argued was a precursor to the movements for Independence in Latin America." This
historical ﬁgure preached that the Spanish justiﬁcation for the Conquest of the New
World--to convert the Indians to Christianity--was invalidated by Saint Thomas' visit to
the New World as Quetzalcoatl and the subsequent apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe
to the disciple prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. Fray Servando writes in his A 10 a:
"La Virgen de Guadalupe habia tenido culto en el cerro dc Tepeyac, desde antes de la
conquista, cuando Santo Tomas apostol, bajo el nombre de Quetzalcoatl, predico en
Mexico e1 Evangelio; la Virgen no esta pintada en la capa del indio Juan Diego, sino en la
de Santo Tomas" (1)."

The character in the novel is portrayed as perpetually ﬂeeing persecution from the
Spanish Inquisition for his anticolonial thinking and is physically battered by his
numerous escapes ﬁ'om imprisonment. In the following hyperbolic passage, Fray
Servando's captors use an endless series of chains wrapped around every imaginable part
of his body including his eyelashes and his internal organs, to ensure that this time he will
not escape:

Hablemos ahora de la sexta cadena, la cual cumplia una funcion

algo especial, pues salia recta, atrevesaba la frente del prisionero y luego

17

descendia e iba a enrollarse en sus testiculos, primero bordeaba uno, lo
rodeaba varias veees, lo amarraba; y luego empezaba a circular a1 otro.
Esta cadena partia después por entre el intersticio dej ado por las nalgas del
ﬁ'aile y remataba en la cadena central de modo que al condenado 1e era
casi imposible realizar cualquiera de sus necesidades; pero, por suerte, la
escasa alimentacion suprimia tales vicisitudes. La siguiente cadena
bordeaba de nuevo los testiculos, pero sin aprisionarlos y, de manera
airosa, rodeaba el pene del religioso; asi al terminar de ser encadenado este
organo, semej aba una serpiente brillante, de muchas roscas o anillos
pronunciados. Y por el constante roce de tal atrincamiento, e1 ﬁaile
permanecia con su miembro siempre alterado, lo cual 1e causaba gran
mortiﬁcacion. (148-49)
The chaining of the captive's body is described arnusingly in sordid and profuse detail
leaving no part of his body obscured or unexposed to the reader's view. Fray Servando
inevitably escapes from this prison as well when the weight of the chains that tie him
down brings about the collapse of the entire ediﬁce. Once set in motion, his enchained
body rolls over his enemies and ﬂattens several towns (152-53). Indeed, Fray Servando's
body is repeatedly displayed in absurd, erotic, and even grotesque representations of his
impossible life experiences, as Arenas comically parodies Fray Servando's tendency
toward exaggeration in his memoirs, defying any reverence or mythic standing associated
with the persecuted cleric.
To be sure, Arenas' novel never pretends to contribute to Lezarna's and Reyes'
construction of the historical myth around the ﬁgure of the precursor, Fray Servando. On

the contrary, Arenas wants to destroy that myth. This is clear ﬁom the opening pages of

18

the novel that the Cuban writer begins with a letter to his subject: “No apareceras en este
libro mio (y tuyo) como un hombre inmaculado, con los estandartes caracteristicos de la
pureza evangélica, ni como el héroe intachable que seria incapaz de equivocarse, 0 de
sentir alguna vez deseos de morirse (10).” The very notion of the precursor relies on a
conception of history as providential--a conception contrary to Arenas' vision of the past
represented in the novel as without logic or plan, even chaotic. Gonzalez Perez argues
that, to construct his historical framework in El mundo alucinante, Arenas parodies the
use of ﬁgural allegory in Carpentier's early works, a ﬁgure that, like the notion of the
precursor, implicitly asserts a divine or logical coherence between historical events.
According to Gonzalez Perez, Arenas breaks with Carpentier's use of traditional realist
narrative techniques and their reliance on Aristotelian causality by offering for many of
the events in Fray Servando's life several different narrative possibilities from the
perspective of various grammatical voices. So, for example, in the ﬁrst chapter of the
novel dealing with Fray Servando's childhood in Monterrey, we read, "Venimos del
corojal. No venimos del corojal" (l 1). In the novel's second Chapter 1, the same episode
is narrated in second person singular, "Ya vienes del corojal" (14). Finally, in a third
offering of Chapter 1, we read about the same events ﬁom the perspective of an
omniscient narrator (16-17). Nevertheless, Gonzalez Perez maintains, historical narrative
can never escape the use of ﬁgural allegory, a fact of which Arenas and other
contemporary writers are highly aware. The critic argues that, instead, these writers
deliberately and explicitly preﬁgure the present in the past as a way of acknowledging
their inevitable linking in the moment of writing.'6

Accordingly, Arenas parodically acknowledges the construction of ﬁgural allegory

in his text, that of Fray Servando, not as a ﬁgure of great historical signiﬁcance, i.e. as a

19

precursor to Latin American Independence, but rather as a precursor to the contemporary
Latin American writer, and in particular, a ﬁgure of himself: "Lo mas r'rtil fue descubrir
que tr'r y yo somos la misma persona" (9). Much like Fray Servando, Arenas is
persecuted, imprisoned, and eventually exiled from Cuba where he was unable to publish
his work.'7 Arenas' irreverent portrayal of Fray Servando pokes fun at himself, at the
ﬁgure of the Latin American writer, and at the writer's, occasionally, self-aggrandizing
perception of his own importance and capacity to know and reveal Latin American
culture to his reader through writing.

It is hardly surprising then, that one of Arenas' main targets in his novel is Alejo
Carpentier, the inﬂuential Cuban novelist, who, Juan José Barrientos asserts becomes a
character in El mundo alucinante. Humorously portrayed as an old man wandering about
the National Palace in Mexico City with the tools of the architect's trade and muttering a
litany of obscure architectural terms, methods, and other erudite trivia, the caricature is
important for Barrientos who believes it represents Arenas' break with previous forms of
the historical novel in Latin America and, in particular, with the works of Carpentier
(49)." In fact, Arenas' parody of El siglo de las luces, leads to renovation of the genre
and to a new way of representing bodies in historical discourse.

In an interview with Enrico Mario Santi, Arenas criticizes Carpentier's attempts to
faithfully reconstruct historical periods in his novels by providing elaborate detail. Not
only does he point to Carpentier's naiveté in believing that historical reality can be
reconstructed by relying on a contemporary reading of history's textual remains, but even
more emphatically rebukes Carpentier for the way all this historical detail impedes the

movement of bodies in his texts:

20

En las novelas de Carpentier llega un momento en que los
personajes estan tan connotados por la historia-mo ya en lo que dicen
(porque practicanrente no pueden decir nada) sino en el mismo
movimiento--que no pueden mover: cada vez que se mueven hay que
connotar el paso que dan, la época de la alfombra que pisan, cl paiio con
que se cubren el cuerpo, el mueble donde se sientan; es decir, que hay que
agotar completamente el contexto tan ﬁelmente que llega un memento en
que, por ejemplo, e1 personaje de Soﬁa, de El siglo de las luces, casi no
puede moverse con toda la utileria que Carpentier le provee. (25)
Here Arenas points to an important difference in the way bodies are represented in the
new historical novel: ﬁee of precise period dress, fumiture, decor, and scenery,
characters' bodies emerge, become conspicuous, and begin to move and to act. In his own
writing, Arenas is determined to avoid the petriﬁed historical ﬁgures represented in
previous manifestations of the genre that were more interested in scrupulously recreating
a lost past.

A clear example of the Cuban novelist's lack of concern for evoking the
authenticity of things ﬁ'om the past and his obsession with presenting straightforward
bodily presence and movement is the previously cited episode of enchainment. In
keeping with our parodic and allegorical reading of the novel, it can be argued that the
chains are symbols of the burden of the description of historical detail that prevents the
movement of the body in these novels. Fray Servando's breaking free preﬁgures Arenas'
own experimental escape ﬁorn the weight of this form of traditional historical narrative.
Arenas' concern with bodily movement is, aﬁer all, representative of the new historical

novel where the body is never stationary or withdrawn but rather explodes, much like

21

Fray Servando, onto the historical scene, ﬂattening conventional historical narrative in
which the body is virtually absent.
The historical novels of Carmen Boullosa are similar to those of Arenas in their

experimentation, in their destruction of old models of narrative, and in their conspicuous

 

display of the body in motion. In her novel Duerrne (1994), for example, there is little
focus on recreating authentic settings ﬁ'om the Colonial past, on reenaeting actual
historical events, or even on developing realistic characters. The protagonist and narrator,
Claire, a French woman whose identity, gender, race, and social class are repeatedly
transformed with each change of clothing, participates in a series of fantastic, picaresque-
like adventures from hanging as a nobleman, being raped as an Indian woman, to
suppressing an Indian rebellion, and, ﬁnally, sleeping for several years in hopes of being
revived at a later time. Although Claire's prince charming, the poet Pedro de Ocejo, fails
to make good on his promise to return her to Mexico City where the magic water that
runs through her body would allow her return to life, he does manage, before he dies, to
write a continuation of her adventures. His narration makes up the ﬁnal two chapters of
the novel. As in El mundo alucinante, the focus in m is clearly on plot, and on the
actions and bodily movements of the characters. In fact, Boullosa's novel deals more with
the contemporary construction of identity than with the colonial past. Claire's changing
identity allows her to anachronistically explore gender roles, racial divisions, and social
class structure in colonial society.

In her essay "La destruccion en la literatura," Boullosa reﬂects on the way the
contemporary novel depicts the human body and then manipulates it to encourage new

ways of constructing self:

22

...los cuerpos que aparecen en la novela cobran forma y reﬂejan en active
los cuerpos del mundo, destronzandolos a1 darles su propia voluntad,
nutriéndose de ellos, de su carne y su sangre, dejandolos inertes, obligados
a repensarse a si mismos, a re-facturarse, a volver a hacerse. (217)
In particular, she argues that bodies in literature both emulate and destroy bodies ﬁ'om the
real world, expressing a paradoxical stance toward language's capacity to capture the
material world without violent alteration. For Boullosa, manipulation of the body in
discourse is a given. The text's initial emulation, in which words take the form of the
material body, allows the text to then sap the body of life and ﬁll it with its own

intentions. Like Claire in Duerrne whose body is ﬁrst depleted of life by hanging, and

 

then restored to life with the Indians' magie‘water, writing can bring life to the body, snuff
it out at will, and then revive the body again. For Boullosa, the resulting destruction
forces bodies in the real world "to rethink themselves", and "to remake themselves again."
Destruction is the mission of writing, according to the Mexican novelist, it is threatening,
it puts us at risk, it does not permit us to be passively entertained ("Destruccion" 216-17).
The emergence of the body as an essential element of discourse in the new historical
novel is threatening as it both mirrors the material world and human activity, and then
shatters conventional meanings assigned to them.

Through this process of bodily destruction the historical novel explores new
avenues for constructing self and asserting agency. Antiquated notions of identity as
homogenous and static, and as given in essentialist terms of race, ethnicity, nationality,
gender, or sexual orientation, disintegrate in the new historical novel, which instead,
conceptualizes self as embodied subjectivity. As we shall see, embodied subjectivity is

an expanded, more ﬂexible concept of identity that incorporates an individual's bodily

23

experiences of the world as well as mental processes. At the same time, it asserts agency
by giving the individual both the power and the responsibility for formulating identity
based on his or her reading or interpretation of these bodily experiences. F oregrounding
the body in the construction of self highlights the reciprocal marking involved in cultural
interactions, undermines the mind/body dichotomy, and reveals the superﬁciality of
essentialist categories making other related dichotomous terms such as white and other,
male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, and even French and Mexican,
inadequate to the process of formulating identity. Characters in the new historical novel,

like Claire in Duerrne, are inclined to reject such conventional notions of self and choose

 

instead to shape identity from their personal ordeals, adventures, encounters with other
cultures--in short, ﬁom the experiences that mark their lives and their bodies. Claire, in
fact, changes identity as she changes clothing, adapting to each new personage she takes
on, wholeheartedly becoming this new person, and yet willing to shed this identity for a
new one when it is expedient to do so. In this new practice of constructing self, the body
and its functions blend with and become part of what are generally regarded as the mental
processes of thinking, imagining and remembering. From the representations and
activities of the body in these novels, a new process of self-formulation emerges, a
process that transforms our understanding of cultural interactions across history and
asserts the authority of experience and individual agency.

The transition to an embodied notion of subjectivity evident in the new historical
novel results as a reaction against modern conceptions of self. During the early modern
period there occurs a gradual ontological shiﬁ from being as divinely given to "being

measured by doing" (de Certeau, Practice 136-39). This shift is exempliﬁed by the

 

discoveries of new trade routes, "New Worlds", expanding empires, and is accompanied

24

by increasing human contact between cultures previously unknown to one another. It is
not surprising then, that, with the known world under siege, cultural identities are
constructed through writing in terms of dichotomies like self/other, civilized/barbaric, in
terms of absolute difference that show no recognition of the mutual contamination of
cultures and the sharing of ideas and knowledge that is actually taking place.” These
powerﬁrl mythical constructs perpetuate notions of difference based on linear models of
culture, and play an essential role in post-Independence period formulations of national
identity as well. As Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria has elucidated in his text ME and
Archive: A Theog of Latin American Narrative (1990), the hegemonic discourses of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries-~scientiﬁc and anthropological discourses respectively-
-also rely on these mutually exclusive dichotomies to produce "knowledge" about Latin
America and to impose constructs of national identity.”

Throughout the modern period conceptions of being and identity are based on
another related, and overarching antinomy, mind/body, where body is seen as the negative
other of the mind, in need of discipline and control. From the rationalist thought of René
Descartes to the psychoanalytic thought of Sigmund Freud, notions of disembodied
thinking or consciousness form the core of an individual's identity. However, recent
theorists including feminists, theorists of class and race, and postmodern critics, have
begun to question the mind/body dichotomy underlying much of Western thought.2|
These critics hope to disrupt the mind/body dualism and other related dichotomies--
male/ female, white/black, heterosexual/homosexual, reality/representation--in order to
deconstruct stereotypical concepts of self and other based on these opposing terms. This
is accomplished by valuing the body as an essential component of being that in

conjunction with the mind, incorporates experiences of the world, social interaction and

25

their discourses and practices to construct a notion of self that is always in the process of
becoming.

Identity conceptualized as "embodied consciousness," or "embodied subjectivity,"
refers to this formulation of self that incorporates an individual's bodily experience of the
world, one's connections with others, as well as an awareness of one's own body acting.22
Arthur W. Frank states this notion of identity concisely: "The progression to the self
must be through the body as consciousness of itself" (50). Keeping this in mind, the
reader can learn much about how a text constructs identity by studying the way bodies are
represented in language. Frank explains that one's concept of self, or bodily
consciousness, is most acute when the body is in movement, acting (47-48). As such,
identity can be formulated in terms of action, which can itself be analyzed, according to
Frank, by examining how an individual responds to four questions regarding bodily
activity. One's answers will fall along a continuum of possible responses (51). The ﬁrst
question deals with control, and the predictability of the desired outcome of action. As
Frank points out, epic heroes' actions are "utterly predictable," whereas most of us must
contend with a lesser degree of self-control. The second question deals with desire and
whether one's body is producing or lacking. Once again, responses fall along the
continuum from super-body, brimming with excess, to sub-body, suffering from
incompleteness. The third question deals with how the body relates to others. Does one
see oneself as self-contained and closed to social relationships, or as interacting with
others and open to mutual constitution? The ﬁnal question concerns the way the body
relates to itself. Does one's notion of self associate or disassociate itself from the physical
body? (51-53).” Frank's concept of bodily consciousness can be applied to our study of

the historical novel in order to gain a clearer understanding of how changing

26

representations of bodies and their practices contribute to shifts in the formulation of
identity.

Traditionally, historical ﬁgures have been represented as predictable, coherent,
uniﬁed entities, what Lukacs, following Hegel, refers to as "world-historical individuals."
These ﬁgures, as prescribed by Lukacs, should never be primary characters in the
historical novel as "this would mean reducing them to the general level of life portrayed"
(46). However, characters in the contemporary historical novel, even "world-historical
individuals," are immersed in the everyday, and as such are acutely body conscious, and
tend to view the outcomes of their bodily actions as unpredictable. For example, Abel
Posse's Alvar Nunez Cabeza dc Vaca in El largo atardecer del caminante (1992), views
his aging body through a mirror that, even in its ambiguous, cloudy reﬂection, "devours"
glorious images of his past self and calls attention to his nearing death (46-47). The
unpredictability of this character's body is evident in his inability to maintain anything but
a brief erection with a prostitute, which leaves him feeling ridiculous and longing for his
youth (48-51). In terms of desire, characters' bodily responses can fall on one end of the
spectrum or the other, ﬁ'om excessive productivity to unfulﬁlled longing, but rarely fall in
the middle. Cabeza de Vaca's impotence, for example, is in direct contrast to the sexual
prowess of Baltasar, whose nightly orgies become the subject of colonial art in Rodriguez
Julia's novel, La renuncia del héroe Baltasar. Regarding the question of relationships
with others, characters in the contemporary historical novel ﬁnd it nearly impossible to
close themselves off ﬁ'om the chaotic changes in their social world. The myopic
journalist in Mario Vargas Llosa's novel La gr_rerra del ﬁn del mundo (1981), who travels
to Canudos as an objective observer of his government's military campaign against a

community of religious fanatics, becomes inextricably involved in the war when he is left

27

nearly blind and incapacitated by the loss of his glasses. The character's concept of self
and outlook on the world are totally changed by his relationships with those within the
religious community, ironically a change precipitated by the loss of the "civilized
irnpedirnenta," the glasses, which had constituted a barrier of objectivity between him and
those he observed. Finally, in terms of the relationship between identity and body,
characters see their bodies as inseparable ﬁ'om their notion of self. In El mundo
alucinante, even the linguistically constructed F ray Servando contemplates the material,
speciﬁcally his hands, as he nears death. As symbols of his creative life as a writer, his
hands embody the contradictions, paradoxes and changing nature of his existence (219-
20).

However, the contemporary historical novel's interest in the body posits more than
just a new understanding of identity, the assertion of individual participation in history,
and the proposition of new readings of the past. Emphasis on corporeal experience in
these narratives brings into question our understanding of what history is by disrupting
the dichotomy between culture and nature that traditionally delineates and deﬁnes the
subject of history. In terms of history, deﬁned generally as the account or process of
human development, "the study of the formation and growth of commrmities and nations"
(OED), culture carries the positive connotation, as the word culture itself refers to human
development and reﬁnement or more speciﬁcally, to the "process of intellectual, spiritual
and aesthetic development" (Williams, "Culture," 87-93). On the other hand, within this
context of history and human development, nature carries a negative connotation as the
inherent, essential quality of things, and the material world, the physical universe, or "the
features and products of the earth itself, as contrasted with those of human civilization"

(OED). Also, considering the word's underlying theological connotation of "the moral

28

state of man as opposed to the state of grace," and "the condition of man before the
foundation of organized Society; the uncultivated or undomesticated condition; physical
nakedness" (OED), it becomes clear that, within the context of human development and
history, nature is that which is given, prior to the process of reﬁnement and improvement,
the negative other of culture, and therefore outside of history.

A stark illustration of this nature/culture dichotomy in historical discourse is
developed in the preface to Felipe F ernéndez-Armesto’s Civilizations: Cr_r_l_tu_r_c,_
Ambitioa, and the Transformation of Nature (2001 ), a recent contribution to the ﬁeld of
Historical Ecology. In the preface, the historian recalls his reading of Jorge Marmol’s

1851 historical novel Amalia, and his being struck by the title character’s ability to shut

 

out nature, to emphatically delineate the boundary between civilization and the
unpredictable natural world outside. Amalia’s bedroom is lined with dark velvet
wallpaper, carpeted with lush Italian carpets, its windows are covered with two sets of
heavy curtains and more drapes surround the bed. This impulse to reject nature, to
distinguish oneself ﬁorn it, is what Femandez-Armesto calls the Amalia Effect:

Not all people who aim to be civilized cocoon themselves so
deeply, shutter their rooms so thoroughly, and separate nature so
decisively from their dwelling space: Civilization is, however, a product
of what I like to think of as the Amalia Effect. Civilization makes its own
habitat. It is civilized in direct proportion to its distance, its difference
from the unmodified natural environment. (3, emphasis mine)

The negative connation that the term nature carries in the ﬁeld of history is again
apparent in E.H. Carr’s classic text What is History? (1961). Here the historian

conceptualizes the discipline, and the other sciences as well, as attempts to dominate

29

nature: “Scientists, social scientists, and historians are all engaged in different branches
of the same study: The study of man and his environment, of the effects of man on his
environment and of his environment on man. The object of study is the same: to
increase man ’s understanding oﬂ and mastery over, his environment (86, emphasis
mine). Finally, according to Peter Coates’ study game: Western Attitudes since
Ancient Times (1998), our current ideology that afﬁrms the superiority of the mind and
culture over the body and nature has its roots in ancient philosophy. The ﬁfth century
Greek philosopher, Lucretius, posited that the human body belonged to nature but that the
mind separated him ﬁom the natural world. This position allows us to continue to
envision nature as the conceptual opposite of human culture, and the body and its natural
ﬁrnctions as a past link to nature beyond which we must progress (4-7).

The contemporary historical novel breaks down this false nature/culture
dichotomy by showing its readers the beneﬁt of viewing history through the body. These
texts emphasize the individual body experiencing the world and participating in history,
and thereby expose the "natural" in human beings, and show how the natural body and the
knowledge of its nearing demise incite the production of cultural constructions such as
cities, religion, the arts, and the writing of history. By displaying the perceiving, feeling
body participating in the regular processes of nature rather than abstracted ﬁom them, the
historical novel subverts traditional notions of history as the record of past events in the
development of human civilizations as they dominate and build upon nature. Instead,
history is understood as the story of humans' futile attempts to distinguish themselves
from nature, to impose order on and create meaning from chaos, and to impede the

natural movement toward death.

30

As the dichotomy culture/nature-—oﬂen framed as the confrontation of civilization
and barbarism in Latin America--and the related dichotomy of mind/body begin to break
down in these novels, so do conventional notions of identity, thus allowing for the
formation of far more complex conceptions of subjectivity and agency. Where the
historical process is often seen as either a rational progression toward enlightenment that
derives its force ﬁ'orn a Hegelian disembodied Spirit, or as a F oucaultian "will-to-
knowledge" driven by the discourses of power far removed ﬁ'om the realm of human
inﬂuence, the challenge to the mind/body dualism in the historical novel grounds history
in the body and restores agency and individual participation to the historical process.
History no longer follows a logical progression but is instead subject to the whims and
capricious nature of the individual acting according to his carnal desires and needs. The
ﬂesh of the body is represented in these texts as nourishment for discourse and a site
where discourse is embedded. The body both acts and is acted upon as it experiences and
moves about the world. Embodied subjectivity as portrayed in the new historical novel
permits us to conceptualize identity as a blending of mental and corporeal processes,
continually evolving as it impacts and is impacted upon by its environment, and history as
a process in which the individual body, in conjunction with society, acts and creates
meaning through narrative, even though this meaning is illusory and ultimately unable to
stay death.

Moreover, examining these underlying motives for writing history reveals how
entangled the process of writing is with the processes of the body. In these novels,
writing history prolongs life, restores life to the dead, and provides comfort to those who
are ill or close to death. Bodies incite writing, serve as archives that hoard the

inscriptions of experience for future reference, and it is through the work of bodies that

31

experience is transcribed on the page. For example, when ﬁrst presented with a ream of
paper, the aging Cabeza de Vaca--the ﬁgure of the writer in Posse's El largo atardecer del
caminante-ﬁnds it difﬁcult to write anything but the usual, "ofﬁcial" lies about his
journey on foot in the New World. His arm and hand, at ﬁrst, resist participating in the
act of writing honestly (38). As he gradually becomes accustomed to the freedom of
writing without a reader, he begins to feel affection for the inkwell and the chair where he
sits, which has taken on the form of his body (147). In fact, writing in his old age is, for
Cabeza de Vaca, a form of walking allowing him to explore with ﬁ'esh legs memories
ﬁ'om his past (60). The gift of paper has given him the possibility of being born again
(38), a possibility realized in the hallucinations of the old man when his youthful self
appears before him on the rooftop where he writes. The younger self hardly recognizes
the old man's importance: "Creo que me miro con prepotencia: soy apenas su
escribiente, su muriente. Soy su tumba, su memoria. (El podra despreciarrne, pero sin mi
y mis cuartillas, no existiria.)" (140). The old writer serves as an archive for the young
Cabeza de Vaca, whose memory would be lost except for the old man's writing.
In Saer's novel, El entenado, the body of the writer actually preserves memories

that the mind had long ago forgotten:

A los recuerdos de mi memoria que dia tras dia mi lucidez contempla

como a imagenes pintadas, se suman tarnbién esos otros recuerdos que el

cuerpo solo recuerda y que se actualizan en 6] sin llegar sin embargo a

presentarse a la memoria para que, retenienéndolos con atencion, la razén

los examine. Esos recuerdos no se presentan en forma de imagenes sino

mas bien como estremecimientos, como nudos sembrados en el cuerpo,

como palpitaciones, como rumores inaudibles, como temblores. (175)

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These remembrances are played out again in the ﬂesh and are perceived by the narrator as
sensory stimuli, which are later materialized in writing. For the nameless narrator, the
ritual of writing each night, accompanied by food and drink to nourish his body, prolongs
his life so that he can fulﬁll his responsibility to record the history of the cannibal tribe.
Of course, the relationship between the body and writing is not always a positive
one. For instance, many of the writers within these texts are deformed, ill, or dying.
What is the reader to make of Fernando del Paso's Empress Carlota whose writing reﬂects
her demented mind? The previously mentioned myopic journalist and a second writer in
La gaerra del ﬁn del mundo, Leon de Natuba, whose very short legs, relatively long arms,
and giant head, force him to drag his body along on all fours like an animal, are regarded
as monsters because of their deformities. And yet, even dead bodies have the capacity to
incite production, as is the case in Garcia Marquez' novel, Del arnor y otros demonios.
The author explains in the preface, that as a young journalist reporting on the demolition
of a colonial convent and the disinterment of its crypts, he witnessed the emergence of
twenty-two meters of intensely red locks ﬁ'om a tomb containing the skeletal remains of a
young girl. It is the body of this child and her splendid hair that recall to his memory the
tales of his grandmother about just such a girl, and that gave origin to his book (9-1 1).
The new historical novel's focus on the body‘s role in history and its involvement
in the process of writing history underscores the human need to record our past in order to
elevate ourselves to a position above the natural and to afﬁrm the meaningfulness of our
lives. At the same time, the ever-present body returns us to our origin and end in nature.
It is here in this search for meaning while facing the notlringrress and solitude of death
that we discover what Ainsa calls the most important characteristic of the new historical

novel: the uncovering of the human being in its most authentic dimension. The emphasis

33

on the body in these novels grounds the human being in nature and exposes history as a
construct whose purpose is to deny our connection to nature and its ultimate corruptibility
and decay.

This foregrounding of the body in the contemporary historical novel and its appeal
to corporeal senses and experiences seems to indicate a return to a materialist conception
of language in Latin American literature, a conception prominent before Borges' and the
post-structuralist's critique of language's ability to capture reality.24 A materialist
conception of language, according to Elaine Scarry, relies on two assumptions about the
relationship between language and the world: "ﬁrst, that language is capable of
registering in its own contours the contours and weight of the material world; second, that
language itself may enter, act on, and alter the material world" (xi). Although, as we shall
see in the analysis of the selected novels, the emphasis on body in the historical novel
may appear, at ﬁrst glance, to conﬁrm a return to a materialist conception of language,
upon closer examination it becomes clear that these texts both posit and deny language's
capacity to preserve the physical world on the page.

This ambiguous attitude toward language, writing and the body expressed in the
historical novel exempliﬁes what I will call "lost-body writing," a term coined but never
explicitly deﬁned by Michel de Certeau in his essay, "Montaigne's 'Of Cannibals': The
Savage 'I.'" De Ccrteau's interest in Montaigne may stem ﬁ'om the French Renaissance
essayist's manipulation of language, his modern ability to deconstruct terms so hill of
ideology as "barbarian" and "savage." However, a factor even more important to
understanding de Ccrteau's keen interest in this particular essay, is the way in which
Montaigne conﬁ'onts the ethical issue of representing the other in language, and his

somewhat apologetic admission of his inability to resolve the dilemma. I contend, based

34

on de Ccrteau's essay on Montaigne and his other related writings that, with the modern
period's greater awareness of the power of writing and its manipulation of the natural
world and the primitive other, writing's relationship with the world it inscribes comes into
question. Can writing represent reality faithfully, and do so without prejudice or without
distorting the body of the other? Must it always alter the world it captures through
inscription? Can writing be benign? On the other hand, what are the consequences of
writing that ignores the body, that erases the individual and everyday practices from its
discourse? How can the body respond to the determining discourses of power? Can the
body, by emerging in writing, assert individual agency, appropriate the discourses of
power and undermine its attempts to control through inscription? These are the questions
that the new historical novel, a form of lost-body writing, elicits, wrestles with, and yet,
never resolves. Lost-body writing acknowledges writing's ability to manipulate bodies
and to dominate the individual with discourse, and so proposes an ethics of writing and a
way of resisting discourses of power. In order to better understand the origin and
meaning of de Ccrteau's concept of lost-body writing and how it applies to Latin
America's historical novel, we must ﬁrst examine his essay on Montaigne.

De Certeau contends in this essay, that the French Renaissance essayist attempts
to rescue writing from losing a stable referential relationship with the world it describes.
According to de Certeau, Montaigne aspires to rescue writing ﬁ'om this loss of
correspondence between action and word by demonstrating an ethics of speech
exempliﬁed by New World savage society, and then offering this as a model for writing
in the Old World. De Certeau argues that, in order for Montaigne to present the cannibal

as an acceptable model of behavior, he must challenge traditional representations of the

35

cannibal as a barbarian, and so, distance his discourse on cannibals from the authority of
traditional sources (74).

Montaigrre's essay, de Certeau asserts, is characterized by the rhetoric of distance
typical of travel accounts, but that the distance established is linguistic rather than
geographical in form. Montaigne is able to shift the meaning of "savage" and give it a
positive connotation by linking it to the "natural," in opposition to the "artiﬁcial" and the
civilized which alter and corrupt nature. The word "barbarian" loses its status as a noun
to become an adjective meaning cruel, no longer used to describe the New World savage,
but rather European cruelty. In this way, according to de Certeau, Montaigne empties the
word "cannibal" of meaning (70-73).

De Certeau subsequently shows how Montaigne, having cleared a space for
writing and for a new understanding of the cannibal, can now ﬁll that space with new
meaning by depicting savage society as a perfect, uniﬁed body without internal divisions
whose natural solidarity is maintained by a faithfulness to the law of veriﬁable speech.
Montaigne illustrates this law with the example of the savage warrior defeated in battle
who is willing to offer his body for consumption by others in order to afﬁrm his valor and
to uphold the ethic and the continued unity of society. As de Certeau explains it, "the
body is the price" paid to sustain veriﬁable speech, the ethic upon which savage society is
based (75).

Next, de Certeau demonstrates how Montaigne corroborates the virtues of
cannibalism with heroic comparisons ﬁ'om Greek and Biblical history, and illustrates his
analysis with two songs or poems ﬁ'orn savage society "born of this ethical passion" (76).
De Certeau interprets this progression, as depicted by Montaigne, ﬁ'om bodily sacriﬁce to

poetic expression as the movement beyond discourse to speech act. The poem expressing

36

this society’s ethic becomes "Mythos" (76), helping society to understand itself and its
history as it communicates the way its members should conduct themselves. Thus, this
hermeneutic process begins with the bodily action of self-sacriﬁce to afﬁrm society's
ethic or speech, which later, expressed in poetry and myth, upholds savage society's unity
of action and word as continued in the practice of cannibalism. Translated to the Old
World whose medieval symbolic order founded on truth is quickly disappearing, the New
World savage ethic of speech forfeits the notion of afﬁxing truth, and settles instead for
the "triumphant loss" of the defeated cannibal warrior, courageously keeping his word
(77).

Finally, de Certeau argues that Montaigrre's essay illustrates the bodily sacriﬁces
necessary for writing to emerge and for reading to be rendered: the body, offered for
consumption, produces veriﬁable speech; savage speech is also consumed when
(mis)represented in writing to the Old World, as the interpreter inevitably forgets or
misinterprets their words; this writing, or the body of the text, must offer itself up for the
author to make his mark (77-78). Ultimately, de Certeau maintains, even Montaigne
must concede, or reluctantly accept his "triumphant loss" as he offers his text on the altar
of the reader who may not know how to read the "speaking body" and may only see that
the savages "don't wear breeches" (79). In conclusion, de Certeau enigrnatically offers as
a consolation: "If one cannot be a cannibal, there is still the option of lost-body writing"
(79). Just as the savage ethic of speech must forfeit the notion of afﬁxing truth when
translated to the Old World, so too must the "lost-body" writer accept his or her
"triumphant loss" and courageously keep his or her word by asserting the body but

acknowledging writing's failure to inscribe it there without alteration.

37

From this reading of de Ccrteau's reading of Montaigne-the consumption of
bodies continues--we can deduce the meaning of lost-body writing and gain a clearer
vision of the strategies at work in many contemporary historical novels in Latin America.
Lost-body writing is an ethics and an alternative form of writing founded on the longing
for correspondence between language and the world, as modeled by the savage ethic of
speech and cannibalism, even as it admits the impossibility of such correspondence. This
disjunction between the world and the word is the space where violence occurs, where
bodies and nature are inscribed to conform with prevailing ideologies and laws. Lost-
body writing is aware of the bodily sacriﬁces made in order for reading, writing, and the
illusion of reality to emerge and, because of this awareness, pays homage by openly
displaying the body as it is marked by experience, as it is manipulated and transformed
into text, as it is misread, forgotten, and omitted from history, as it lives, thrives, becomes
ill, procreates, ages and dies. However, lost-body writing's textual display of the human
body, which ﬂaunts corporeal experiences and senses, while acknowledging the body as a
site where discourse is inscribed, also posits the body as a space where discourse is
created. Just as the bodily sacriﬁce of the cannibal warrior is transformed into poetry,
and then back again into bodily sacriﬁce as prescribed by society's ethic expressed in the
poem, so the body both incites discourse and feeds upon it. Lost-body writing then
reinserts the human body and agency into the historical sphere as it views discourse as a
ground for social interaction and practice, and not just as a tool of power, imposed ﬁ'om
above. By foregrounding human participation in discursive activity, as we reject some
discourses, assume the roles of others, invent, overlap, contradict, add to and subtract
ﬁom still others, the individual becomes, once again, an active participant in the

formation of identity and in the process of history, and the individual body moves to the

38

foreﬁ'ont of historical discourse. In fact, the exposure of the body in lost-body writing
subverts discourses of power by pointing to the difference that emerges when bodies
appear, revealing the violence of inscription and its repressive tactics, and showing how
bodies continue to rebel and resist domination through everyday activity. These are the
strategies and goals of lost-body writing and the new historical novel in Latin America.
In returning to the assrunptions underlying the materialist conception of language
as set forth by Scarry, we can see how lost-body writing in the contemporary historical
novel both proposes and rejects these assumptions. The desire to represent through
language the "reality" of the material world and the events of history including the
individual experience of the past is expressed in these texts by placing the individual
body front and center stage. However, these linguistic substitutes fail in their attempts to
capture the material world on the page without repression, distortion and prejudice, and
openly acknowledge this failure by reﬂecting, through metaﬁction, on the violent nature
of writing. The materialist notion that language has the power to alter the physical world
again is paradoxically asserted and denied in these texts. Lost-body writing shows that,
although writing is frequently used as a tool of power to inscribe its laws on bodies, it
also reveals that individual bodies have the power to rebel, to reject the discourses
imposed upon them, and to appropriate their language to express the individual's desires.
It is a paradox similar to that of the ethic expressed in the poetry that gloriﬁes the
sacriﬁce of the cannibal warrior and establishes a model of behavior for savage society.
Once this cannibal ethic is translated and offered to the Old World as a model for writing,
language slips and it loses it ability to determine unity of action and word, as it settles

instead for the integrity of the individual writer and the expression of his or her truth.

39

Once again, Mario Vargas Llosa's novel, La gaerra del ﬁn del mundo, can serve as
an example, this time to convey the paradoxical situation of the contemporary historical
novel with respect to the materialist conception of language. According to Vargas Llosa,
a self-confessed "realist" writer, his aim in writing the novel is to depict the events, the
people, their language, and the misunderstandings that lead to the rebellion in Canudos.
The very structure of the novel, narrated from the various perspectives of a large cast of
characters, reﬂects, in fact, the divisions within the society that leads to the failure of
communication and its tragic results. For the novelist, his rewriting of this episode of
Brazilian history serves as a lesson about the past and the present of all Latin Americans,
and so has the power to teach (Writer's Realig 133). However, at the same time, the
novel denounces the violence of writing. According to Vargas Llosa it is the
manipulative power of the written word that leads to the misunderstandings and to the
war:

It was because the newspapers said certain things about Canudos, because
speeches were made and then published, because lectures were given
about what was happening, that all this national misunderstanding was
possible. And so this written word, a word that was supposed to describe
and interpret reality, was in fact transforming and changing it, as ﬁction
frequently does. (Writer's Realig 140)
Clearly, for Vargas Llosa, writing has the power to alter the physical world and inﬂuence
the behavior of people. And yet, in the novel not everyone is so easily manipulated, even
when government forces use violence to impose the ruling powers ideology. The novel's
closing image points to the individual's ability to rebel, and subvert the discourses of

power: One of the army colonels, hoping to learn the fate of Joao Abade, a rebel outlaw,

40

interrogates an old woman who survived the government siege. She tells him freely that
she witnessed the archangels lifting him into heaven M 531). The old woman ﬁnds
freedom in her appropriation of religious discourse. In lost-body writing the outcomes of
language are uncertain as each individual has the ability to use discourse as he or she
pleases. Therefore, in some cases, discourse is imposed on the material world and the
passive body, and in others it is actively used to convey the individual's will.

Lost-body writing then is an alternative form of writing that explores the complex
relationship between writing and the body. It challenges conventional notions of identity
by questioning the mind/body dualism, it reinserts the body and individual experience and
participation into the historical process by viewing history through the body, it redeﬁnes
history by destabilizing the dichotomy of nature versus culture, and it reveals the human
tendency to write history as a way of preserving the body and denying death. But most
importantly, the ethic of lost-body writing in the contemporary historical novel
undermines hegemonic discourses by reinserting the body and its practices within the
place of power, where it roams about, whimsically emerging and retreating, and thus
avoiding subjugation. The paradoxical situation of lost-body writing and the historical
novel is, nevertheless, also a disturbing one: how can writing, which sees in itself an
alternative, more ethical way of depicting material reality and the other, avoid the
violence it decries in hegemonic discourse? Is the new historical novel's gesture of
reinserting the body a step forward, a movement beyond dizzying metaﬁctional
reﬂections, their avoidance of the material and denial of the existence of anything beyond
language? Or is it a return to more of the same, simulacrums of simulacrums, leading to

nowhere and to nothingness? Am I, even in my attempts to rescue the body ﬁ‘om its

41

dissolution in the language of critical discourse, just one more participant in an endless
discussion that cannot escape the play of mirrors?

Chapter One of this study, “Subversion and the Emerging Body: Exploring New
Ways of Writing the Past,” analyzes de Ccrteau’s book-length essay The Practice of
Evmday Life (1984), in which the French philosopher examines many of these questions
and explores more profoundly the ethical implications of the violence of writing
suggested in his essay on Montaigne. The Practice of Evegday Life contends that it is in
fact the violence of writing which leads to the suppression of human bodies and body
practices in the theoretical discourse of the Modern period and which enables the
production of "knowledge," including historical knowledge, and the centralization of
power in writing. According to de Certeau, discourses of power, such as historiography,
must suppress bodies and body practices in order to shape the knowledge inherent in the
activities of individuals into meaningful patterns that are productive and reproducible.
Furthermore, de Ccrteau's text examines how the reappearance of the body and everyday
practices can turn the tables and destabilize discourses of power, and in doing so, return
agency to the individual. The goal of this analysis of The Practice of Evmday Life is to
establish a theoretical framework with which to study textual bodies in the contemporary
historical novel.

Chapter Two of this study, “Carnival Destruction and Self-Deﬁnition in La
renuncia del hme Baltasar,” examines how the emergence of the carnival body and its
tactics in Rodriguez Julia’s novel destabilizes hegemonic historical discourse and clears a
way for new interpretations of Puerto Rico’s past, free from the gaze of the colonizer.
Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of carnival likewise elucidates the struggle for self-deﬁnition

between here and author, and between the writer and his precursors where, once again,

42

inverting hierarchies and diverting the gaze through carnival tactics creates new
possibilities for self-determination. Although the novel’s protagonist, Baltasar, can settle
for nothing less than a blank slate on which to inscribe his own conception of self and,
thus, insists on total destruction as a solution, the novel’s author ﬁnds a more hopeful
middle ground--parody--on which to strike a compromise.

Chapter Three, “Kinder Fictions: Embodiment and Redemption in La gaerra del

ﬁn del mundo ” uses Elaine Scarry’s notions of embodiment and disembodiment to study

 

characterization and the creation of ﬁction in Vargas Llosa’s new historical novel.
Although the theme of fanaticism drives the narrative forward, the study of the body in
characterization shows that, for Vargas Llosa, there are varying degrees of fanatical
behavior some of which are more reprehensible than others. The ﬁctions created by
ﬁgures of the writer in the novel are also studied in terms of embodiment and
disembodiment, that is, the way these ﬁctions themselves deal with the body. By
undermining the traditional dichotomy that relates embodiment to the barbaric and
disembodiment to the civilized, Vargas Llosa’s novel asserts that, in fact, awareness of
the body in one’s conception of self and in the creation of ﬁction is essential to moral
action and to progress toward civilization.

Chapter Four, “Allegorical Renderings of the Body in Juan J osé Saer’s E_l_
Mada,” explores the nameless narrator’s construction of self through the process of
writing the history of the cannibal other. In the process of writing, Saer’s narrator
discovers that his body stores memories of his years living with the cannibal tribe that his
mind had forgotten, and that these bodily memories are so deeply inscribed that they
shape his concept of self. He ﬁnds that he is no longer that which the cannibal is not, but

rather a blending of experiences and discourses inscribed on his body including those of

43

the cannibal tribe. However, the narrator’s body is not just a text for him, but also a text
for the cannibals in that they mark him with their movements, gestures, expressions, and
words so that he will communicate their history to his people. His bodily memories of
his own experiences and those of the cannibals form the basis of his writing that gradually
deconstructs traditional dichotomies of mind/body, self /other, savage/civilized, and
nature/culture. This metaﬁccional narrative also examines the human impulse to “write,”
and the violent nature of writing as it inscribes bodies--our own and others’--to produce
knowledge and to endow our existence with meaning. Much like Montaigne, the ﬁrst
lost-body writer, Saer’s narrator renders the body to discourse all the while knowing that
it will be violently altered by writing, which in turn will be consumed by a voracious
reader.

Finally, the Conclusions to this study summarize the way the emergence of the
body in each of the three novels analyzed undermines traditional notions of self, history,
and writing. In addition, I examine the way that this reemergenee of the body signiﬁes a
change in the conception of language, and a restored belief in its capacity to represent and
act on the material world. In closing, this ﬁnal chapter addresses the question of whether
the ethic of lost-body writing offers a legitimate alternative to violent forms of writing, or
if the lost-body writer must settle for a “triumphant loss,” and the reader must be content

with taking the writer at his “word.”

Chapter 1: Subversion and the Emerging Body: Exploring New Ways of Writing the

Past

In the Introduction to this study, I argued that one of the major changes in Latin
America’s new historical novel is in its conception of identity as embodied subjectivity.
This new formulation of identity alters our understanding of history and leads to the
emergence of an ethics of writing that we called “lost-body writing.” De Ccrteau’s essay
on Montaigne suggests that lost-body writing may serve as an alternative to more violent
forms of writing by allowing the body to reemerge in discourse. However, the essay does
not address many of the questions it evokes: First, how and why does the modern
practice of writing omit or repress the body from discourse? What strategies of writing
are involved in this repression and what are its consequences? Are there alternatives to
this repressive form of discourse or is all writing violent to a certain extent? What is the
impact of narrative in which the body and its practices are prominent? De Ccrteau’s
thinking on these matters is made explicit in his study, The Practice of Evegday Life
(1984), a text whose analysis in this chapter will not only allow us to examine the
relationship between writing and violence, but also between the body and the subversion
of hegemonic discourse. As we shall see, de Ccrteau’s theory of bodily tactics
complements a wide array of body theory and leads to a clearer understanding of lost-
body writing and the new historical novel in Latin America.

To understand dc Ccrteau's linking of body, writing, and violence in The Practice
of Evmday Life, we must brieﬂy outline his conception of the changes brought on during
the transition from the medieval to the modern period that transformed our understanding

of self. According to de Certeau, the premodem era gradually comes to an end and the

45

modern era comes into being with the invention of the printing press and the progressive
realization that the spoken word of the Bible can no longer be heard, that the voice of
God and truth has been silenced, altered by textual corruption. One's place in the world is
no longer given by the voice of authority, heard, understood, and then assumed. Rather
one's identity is produced, made, it is the result of what de Certeau calls the "work of
mourning" (137), a mourning the loss of place, identity, and truth. From here on out, de
Certeau contends, "being is measured by doing" (137) and by writing, which must ﬁll the
void left by loss.

Writing, too, is changing at this time; it is gradually moving away from its origin
in the spoken word or the voice which becomes its other, the thing to which writing is
opposed; the voice is the past which must be left behind in the ﬁantic necessity to
produce and progress. According to de Certeau, it is no longer enough to hear language.
In the modern period one must make language through the practice of writing and through
the construction of sciences, which is accomplished by fabricating languages. In this new
scriptural economy, the act of writing takes on the power of myth; however, the origin is
not found in the content of a story but in the "work of mounting," the very activity of
producing texts and bodies as text (137-39).

This new modern practice of writing not only opposes itself to the voice and
orality but also to the earth, nature, the body, and all nonverbal practices. In other words,
the new scriptural economy differentiates itself, or that which has been articulated in
discourse, ﬁ'om that which is outside of its realm--the "wild" or that which has not been
tamed by language. De Certeau points out that closely linked to the myth of writing is the
myth of reformation, the notion that reason can impose order on the world, transform

nature, and civilize savage bodies. In fact, writing carries out these goals of reason by

46

inscribing itself on nature and on bodies, thereby subduing the irrational. According to de
Certeau, knowledge and the law are inscribed on bodies to make them texts standing for
society's norms:
...the law constantly writes itself on bodies. It engraves itself on
parchments made ﬁom the skin of its subjects. It articulates them in a
juridical corpus. It makes books out of them. These writings carry out
two complementary operations: through them, living beings are "packed
into a text" (in the sense that products are canned or packed), transformed
into signiﬁers of rules (a sort of "intextuation") and, on the other hand, the
reason or Logos of a society "becomes ﬂesh" (an incarnation). (140)
Bodies, in turn, often willingly allow themselves to be inscribed, to suffer, in exchange
for the pleasure of being "legible," deﬁned and recognized by society, and thus, of
receiving an identity. Through various rites of initiation, bodies are inscribed in the
social order and become actors performing the roles given to them (139-40).
Nevertheless, de Certeau does not assume that individuals are condemned to
literally reproduce social discourse as it is disseminated. For de Certeau, the activity of
consumption is not a passive utilization of products and discourses, in which the
individual simply uses a product the way its producers intended. On the contrary, he
asserts that consumption is another form of production, a creative act, as it adapts the
dominant social order's products to its own needs while deﬂecting its power and
reﬂecting the individual's desires. De Certeau compares this concept of consumption to
that of enunciation in the ﬁeld of language and proposes it as a model for analyzing
consumption. He ﬁnds in the difference between performance, or language use by

speakers, and competence, knowledge of the linguistic system, an unpredictability similar

47

to the difference between the creative utilization of products by consumers versus the use
prescribed by its producers (32-34).
Indeed, the French philosopher sees his study as an expansion on the work of

Michel de Foucault in Discipline and Puniah (1977), where Foucault analyzes the
mechanisms used by the systems of power to create a generalized "discipline," thereby
focusing on production and the producers of culture. De Certeau, on the other hand,
studies how individuals and groups resist being reduced to the discipline, thereby
privileging the creative act of consumption and consumers. In fact, dc Certeau argues
that studies of the institutions and mechanisms of repression, like those of Foucault,
continue to assert the passivity of consumers and so, continue to propagate the myth on
which these institutions and the scriptural economy rely--that consumption is passive and
therefore the public has no historical role (167). Through the study of everyday practices-
-"reading, talking, walking, dwelling, cooking, etc." (xvii)--de Certeau asserts, we can
debunk this myth privileging the "producers" of culture and uncover the importance of
individual agency in the historical process:

By challenging "consumption" as it is conceived and (of course) conﬁrmed

by these "authoria " enterprises, we may be able to discover creative

activity where it has been denied that any exists, and to relativize the

exorbitant claim that a certain kind of production (real enough, but not the

only kind) can set out to produce history by "informing" the whole of a

country. (167)
By shifting our focus ﬁ'om institutions and their strategies of repression to the analysis of
the tactics or everyday practices of consumers we begin to change and enlarge our

understanding of society and the world around us. De Certeau argues that inquiry into

48

popular culture will not only alter our notion of today's reality but also our conception of
history and our role in history as individuals, by transforming "what was represented as a
matrix-force of history into a mobile inﬁnity of tactics" (41).

De Certeau asserts that, as scientiﬁc discourse, including historiography, gives
language to everyday practices in order to reﬁne them, it also erases individual
involvement or tactics. Science brings in the engineer, whose job it is to articulate
consumer tactics by isolating their techniques, and transforming them into mathematical
formulas so that they can be reproduced by machines and technology. In short, the
engineer separates human activity ﬁ'om the practice, a process of detachment that de
Certeau ﬁnds in all kinds of scientiﬁc writing. Scientiﬁc writing severs or "forgets" a
technique's relationship to individual activity to make it more productive and
reproducible. In terms of history, by removing the individual body acting at will, writing
can show cause and effect, and establish patterns and totalizing theories that give
meaning to the past by shaping it into the "progress of civilization." So, for example, de
Certeau points out that medieval maps which were once graphic depictions of itineraries
and journeys of past travelers, and that prescribed actions for future travelers, gradually
become a visual representation of the sum total of geographic knowledge, having
forgotten the practices and activities--the journeys and discoveries of individuals--that
produced that knowledge (120-21).

The discourses of power impede the study of everyday practices by establishing a
place ﬁ‘orrr which scientiﬁc writing can demarcate boundaries to constitute an inside and
an outside, and distinguish itself ﬁ'om that which still needs to be mastered. As de
Certeau puts it, "It [A subject of will or power] postulates a place that can be delimited as

its own and serve as the base ﬁ'om which relations with an exteriority composed of targets

49

or threats (customers or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the city, objectives
and objects of research, etc.) can be managed" (36). By privileging place over time, the
discourses of power hope to control the corrosive effects of passing time and dominate
objects outside of the place of power through vision and observation, or through what
Foucault calls panoptic practices.

Yet, according to de Certeau, within the place of power consumer tactics move
about, seizing the moment, or "poaching" without being seen. Having no place of their
own, as opposed to the strategies of producers, consumers rely on tactics--terrorist-like
maneuvers, ruses, tricks and raids that take advantage of opportunities--to express their
desire or will and to disrupt the place of power. Time and mobility, for consumers, are
the subversive elements which can be exploited by tactics as a way of introducing
heterogeneity and difference into power's foundation and discourses. Still, consumer
tactics are ignored by scientiﬁc inquiry because to it they are invisible-due to their lack
of a separate place--ghost-like, and fantastic, and so, unacceptable or nonexistent to
science (34-39). De Certeau argues that in spite of the strategies the producers of theory
use to repress everyday practices, to master them and to increasingly assert their own
authority over them, that scientiﬁc discourse can never entirely gain the upperhand. As
the study of everyday practices reveals, the subversive effects of the ordinary and of the
tactics of the consumer emerge from within the discourses of power unexpectedly, and
then abruptly retreat making them difﬁcult to tame.

Perhaps de Ccrteau's most striking insight is in his analysis of how, in the
scriptural economy, theoretical writing manages to repress everyday practices, the
ordinary and the body in its discourse, even as it invokes these practices as evidence to

support its theories. By ﬁrst studying the repressive techniques of scientiﬁc writing as it

50

produces knowledge, de Certeau is then able to suggest alternative ways of writing
without subjugating everyday practices and the body, a practice of writing which we
previously called lost-body writing.

De Certeau begins his analysis by underlining the repeated strategies of repression
used by theoretical discourse, which he calls "cut-out and turn-over: a recipe for theory"
(62-64). To illustrate this concept, he cites studies by Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, both
thinkers who highlight everyday practices in their work, and whose work he had
previously expounded on in order to show the genealogy of his own thought. This time
he cites them in order to demonstrate the way theoretical discourse manipulates and
represses non-discursive practices with language to produce knowledge (43-44).

The ﬁrst step, "cut-out," refers to the strategy of ethnological, historical, or
metonymical isolation, in which either the theorist studies the practices of a culture far
removed in space or time from the here and now, or isolates practices from the larger
social fabric by treating them as a separate but meaningful whole. This remote but
coherent culture or set of practices, once isolated or "cut-out," serves as a metonymic
ﬁgure of the whole human species or its tactics. The second step, "turning-over," is the
logical inversion that occurs when this remote culture's obscure activities or isolated
practices are turned-over to reveal them to be the essential element that illuminates
theoretical discourse and our understanding of the world.

According to de Certeau, Bourdieu's study, Eguisse d'une théorie de la pratigue.
Précédée de trois études d'ethnologje kabyle (1972), uses this "recipe for theory."
Bourdieu wants to challenge the scientiﬁc rationality of his discipline, sociology, by
allowing ethnology's study of everyday practices to confront the totalizing and

homogenizing tendencies of sociology's statistical analyses in its construction of theory.

51

The practices that Bourdieu "cuts-out," come ﬁom Kabylian ethnology and deal with
courtship and marriage in this remote culture. The various strategies he studies seem to
enhance Kabylian society's reproduction and wealth, and yet, Bourdieu contends, that
their use involves no "strategic intention" or forethought, but rather simply repeat
behaviors of the past. Bourdieu calls this silent but purposeful memory, that is both
internalized through learning and later extemalized through practices, the habitus (50-60).
De Certeau sees Bourdieu’s habitus as 'Docta ignorantia,‘ a cleverness that does not
recognize itself as such" (56). Paradoxically, according to de Certeau, it is this docta
ignorantia, the unarticulated habitus, that allows Bourdieu to articulate his theory and
give it coherence, by bringing practices under the law of reproduction that is essential to
theory. As a result, dc Certeau points out, although Bourdieu begins constructing his
theory around the "sly agent" of practices, the "hero of ethnography", in the transition to
sociological theory he "tums‘him over" so to speak, by sapping him of all activity and
self-understanding. Transgressive everyday practices become unconscious, providing
Bourdieu "with the means of explaining everything and of being conscious of everything"
(63).

In Heterologies, dc Ccrteau's study of Montaigne's essay "Of Cannibals" suggests,
at ﬁrst, a similar use and repression of the everyday practices of a remote culture to
construct theory and produce knowledge. As we have seen in the "Introduction" to this
study, de Certeau reads the Renaissance thinker's essay on New World savage society's
speech ethic as an attempt to transpose this ethic on a dying medieval symbolic order, and
thus, recapture the correspondence between word and action in the Old World.
Montaigne, like Bourdieu, "cuts-out" a distant primitive culture in South America to

serve as his model, and then isolates certain "savage" practices within this culture to

52

illustrate his thesis: in particular, polygamy and cannibalism. He then "turns-over" these
obscure "savage" practices by showing them to be a key to rescuing civilization, truth,
and order in the Old World. Much as de Certeau sees consciousness as "the price paid" to
sustain Bourdieu's theory on the structure of society (am 56), here "the body is the
price paid" (Heterologies 75)--literally devoured by one's enemies--to sustain Montaigrre's
theory of veriﬁable speech.

And yet, the outcome of Montaigrre's attempts to construct theory are quite
different ﬁ'om Bourdieu's, and lead de Certeau to reﬂect on the possibility of a new kind
of writing that challenges the hegemony of scientiﬁc writing and the new scriptural
economy rather than reinforces it. To illustrate, we will contrast dc Ccrteau’s synopses of
the way the two theorists conclude their essays. De Certeau summarizes his reading of
Bourdieu's study in terms of an increasing aggressivity and violence toward the practices
he describes: "The subtle descriptions of Béarnian or Kabylian tactics suddenly give way
to violently imposed truths, as if the complexity so lucidly examined required the brutal
counterpoint of a dogmatic reason" (P_raiti£e_ 59, emphasis mine). According to de
Certeau, Bourdieu "imprisons" everyday practices within the concept of habitus in order
to repress their subversive tactics and to secure the foundation of scientiﬁc order (60).

On the other hand, de Certeau ﬁnds in Montaigne a ﬁnal submission, a
recognition of his failure to (en)force his hoped for conclusion--the shoring up of the
symbolic order. Whereas Bourdieu sets out to question scientiﬁc rationality and ends up
sustaining it, Montaigne, on the contrary, begins his essay intending to defend truth and
order, but surrenders instead, concluding that they cannot be preserved. Consequently, de
Certeau summarizes his reading of Montaigne's essay in terms of a courageous loss,

rather than a violent conquest:

53

...in the passage from the medieval world to the cannibal, a loss of content
and a move away from the truth of the world (something said) toward the
courage to support one's word (a saying)--a move ﬁ'om dogmatism
founded upon a true discourse to an ethic which produces the heroic
poem... There is no longer any 'extraordinary' and presumptuous
assurance (like those of the priests and prophets) of detaining a truth that
is 'beyond our ken;' what there is instead is the duty to keep one's word in a
'triumphant loss.’ (Heterologies 77)
As de Certeau sees it, Bourdieu's "aggressive" theory violently imposes truth on tactics,
while, in contrast, Montaigne's less brutal attempts to reinstall order and truth fail, leading
Montaigne to acknowledge this failure or "triumphant loss." The model he tries to
construct of a New World ethic to be translated to the Old World slips within his own
writing, ﬁrst, as he acknowledges the sacriﬁce of the body as the precondition for
veriﬁable speech, then as he concedes the difﬁculty and errors of translation and
interpretation of that speech from one culture to another, again with the impact of his own
altering marks, and ﬁnally, with the alterations the reader makes to his text.

However, Montaigne's acknowledgement of the failure of language and writing to
capture truth and human reality does, as de Certeau concludes, begin a new form of
writing: "The savage ethic of speech opens the way for a Western ethic of writing-~a
writing sustained by the impossible Word at work within the text. If one cannot be a
cannibal, there is still the option of lost-body writing" (79). This form of writing that he
calls lost-body writing challenges that writing which forms the basis of the sciences and
the scriptural economy, by writing about scientiﬁc writing, about the way bodies are

sacriﬁced (written on and inscribed), and about the way the ordinary, everyday practices

54

of individuals and groups are manipulated and repressed to make it possible. At the same
time that lost-body writing openly questions the legitimacy of discourse that relies on
exclusion and erasure of human involvement, it also asserts individual agency by bringing
the body and its subversive practices to the forefront of discourse.

Some of the ways that the body emerging in writing can undermine hegemonic
discourse are also explored in The Practice of Everyday Life. These bodily practices--
memory, spatial stories, orality, and death--can be particularly useful in our study of the
new historical novel. Memory is an example of an everyday practice that can wreak
havoc on the stability of the place of power, according to de Certeau, as its energy springs
from its capacity for change and mobility. Although scientiﬁc writing establishes a place
in order to insure stability and to suppress the element of surprise associated with passing
time, memory emerges moving things about, bringing the established order into question,
and restoring the relevance of time to the place of power. For de Certeau, memory, like
other everyday practices, is closely linked to the body, the space where the past is
inscribed. When external events "touch" these spots on the body, memory arises as a
response, which is singular in nature, and ﬂeeting. The intense details of bodily memory
function as a metonymy of the whole past event through which the forgotten is
reconstructed. Nevertheless, each memory is unique as each recall alters it, springing up
in stories, daily practices, and even unexpectedly in scientiﬁc discourse. According to de
Certeau, memory is stagnant only when it ceases to change with each recall, thereby
loosing its mobility as it repeats itself. The apparently insigniﬁcant details of memory
inscribed on the body, can change the ﬁxed nature of history by bringing to light that

which has been forgotten or by remembering events in a new way (82-89).

55

Latin America's new historical novel relies on this disruptive power of memory, as
described by de Certeau, to undermine accounts of the past that have become ﬁxed and
stagnant, paralyzing the public imagination. These new historical accounts ask the reader
to reconsider traditional versions of events and to imagine what may have happened
beyond the silences. The bodies of historical ﬁgures in these texts bring this questioning
about because it is in the body where memory of these silences is stored. In Posse's ﬂ
largo atardecer del caminante, for example, the aging Cabeza de Vaca examines the
reﬂection of his nude ﬁgure in a mirror, "un objeto lleno de conocimientos" (47), and
there remembers the past and searches for meaning. What he sees is a body that is
constantly changing, treacherous and disloyal, scarred by experience and wrinkled by
passing time. And yet, this unreliable body and its practices evoke his hidden past and
allow him to write.

Rummaging through his old clothes stored away in trunks like cofﬁns, is another
way the narrator prepares to write his memoirs and through them is reacquainted with his
many past selves: "Trajes: vestiduras/investiduras/imposturas, como se quiera, pero ya
parte de la vida, de la larga vida" (24). Clothing is more than just garments to cover the
body for the aging explorer; it is a symbol of authority investing the person who wears the
garment with power, as well as a form of deception allowing one to pretend to be what he
is not. And yet, even when these garments are worn as disguise they reveal many hidden
secrets about the person who wore them as they tell the story of who he hoped or
imagined he should be. Writing in his old age for himself rather than for his king,
however, Cabeza de Vaca no longer needs to lie or to cover up the truth of his long
journey. In a sense he is writing on the blank page as he walked across the continent,

divested both of clothing and authority, no longer seeking compensation or power, but

56

rather honesty and forgiveness. The history Posse's narrator leaves behind tells the stories
of the silences in the ofﬁcial version--of his wife, his children, and of his deep
involvement with tribal customs, an involvement that to some would amount to heresy
and murder. By focusing on Cabeza de Vaca's bodily experiences throughout his
narration, Posse imagines what might have been the explorer's personal memories, those
that had to be suppressed in his ofﬁcial account, but those that in reality would give
meaning to his incredible experience.

As de Certeau would argue, suppressing the body and its experiences is one way
to control memory and the stories it might tell. Without the input of the body, memory
becomes stagnant and stories of the past can be entombed in the ofﬁcial pages of
historiography. The question of what happens when a controversial ﬁgure dies and the
body continues to live on through embalrnment is explored in Tomas Eloy Martinez'
historical novel, Santa Evita (1995). The subversive effects of the perpetuated body and
its ability to transmit power are evident to all the players involved in trying to seize the
embalrned cadaver of Evita Peron and, thus, to seize control of the creation of myths
around the historical ﬁgure. Bodies tell stories of difference, stories that diverge ﬁom
and question those told from the places of power.

Spatial stories, for de Certeau, like memory, are closely linked to the body and
are a disruptive force in the place of scientiﬁc discourse. He considers them to be a sort
of "mass transportation" in that they are narrated adventures that link many places
together, transforming the stability of places, which are determined by their landscapes
and immobile objects, into spaces, intersecting geographies created by the movements
and operations of historical subjects. Places are dead, lifeless, and transﬁxed by stagnant

history. Spaces are in motion, constantly changing, and bringing the dead back to life.

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According to de Certeau, stories can transform places into spaces or spaces into places.
Spatial stories are distinguished by their insistence on remembering the activity that
linked places together to create space and propel the inanimate into action (115-18). On
the other hand, stories can reestablish place by the "putting to death (or putting into a
landscape) of heroes who transgress frontiers and who, guilty of an offense against the
law of place, best provide its restoration with their tombs" (118). De Certeau argues that
encounters between bodies in stories create spaces, appropriating and displacing frontiers
and bridges, the ﬁrst a ﬁgure in which points of contact and disjunction between two
subjects are indistinguishable, the second a ﬁgure which simultaneously liberates subjects
and exposes them to alien intervention and loss of autonomy. Yet, it is this lack of
respect for places brought about by bodies in movement and disrupting the established
order that leads de Certeau to call spatial stories a "form of social delinquency" (129-30),
another way everyday practices resist the domination of the place of power.

In traditional historical novels as in stories of place, bodies in motion and crossing
borders, may, for a time, undermine the place of power. But later, as de Certeau points
out, these same bodies restore order and stability to place with their tombs, as they
become part of the immobile landscape. Enriquillo is a clear example of the
reestablishment of place by the "putting to dea " or "putting into landscape" of the hero.
After capitulating to Carlos V, according to the novel, Enrique, his wife, and members of
his tribe retire to Bahoruco, where along the foothills of the mountains they establish the
town of Boya. Soon thereafter Enriquillo dies and is buried near the lake that will
"eternally perpetuate” his name: "Este nombre vive y vivira etemarnente: un gran Iago lo
perpetr'ra con su denominacion geograﬁca" (287). The rebel's body is buried; his name

and meaning are ﬁxed. Enriquillo is made motionless as part of the landscape, and

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ultimately upholds the system of power that, in life, he had attempted to overthrow.
History in this story of place is given a ﬁrm footing on which to erect a monument to the
Indian leader: stilled, no longer rebellious, but rather forever acquiescent in his mythic
role as symbol of national reconciliation.

Los recuerdos del mrvenir (1962) by Elena Garro, although not a historical novel
in a traditional sense, arguably anticipates certain elements of the new historical ﬁctions.
In this novel, one of the rebellious heroines becomes landscape and the other provides an
example of de Ccrteau's concept of a spatial story. Julia, a beautiﬁrl and yet licentious
woman, is the lover of General Rojas whose troops occupy Ixtepec after the Mexican
Revolution. To those who live in this small, conservative town, Julia is the source of all
evil. Her sins and her promiscuity disrupt the ﬁagile peace between General Rosas and
the town's people. When Julia magically escapes Rosas and the conﬁnement of the town
with an old lover, she opens up the possibility of escaping for others by pointing to the
power of movement, to new places, and to rebellion. In the second part of the novel,
members of the community do follow Julia's lead and rebel.

Isabel, who belongs to a prominent family in Ixtepec and is subtly rebellious from
the beginning, openly rebels in part two of the novel by becoming General Rosas' second
lover in an effort to save her brother and other town's people ﬁom execution. Her
betrayal, however, is punished at the end of the novel when she becomes a stone inscribed
with the memory of her sins:

Isabel estaba en el centro del dia como una roca en la mitad del carnpo.
De su corazon brotaba piedras que corrian por su cuerpo y lo volvian
inarnovible. "3A las estatuas de marﬁl, una, dos, tres...! La ﬁase del juego

infantil le llegaba sonora y repetida como una carnpana. Ella y sus

59

herrnanos se quedaban ﬁjes a1 decirla, hasta que alguien a quien habian
seﬁalado en secrete pasaba per alli, les tocaba y rompia el encantamiento.
Ahera nadie vendria a desencantarla; sus herrnanes tarnbién estaban ﬁjos
para siempre. (292)
The two endings to the two parts of the novel associated with the two heroines clearly
illustrate the two types of stories de Certeau describes. On one hand, Isabel's body
becomes the rock upon which the town of Ixtepec is founded, permanently immobilized
as punishment for her rebellion against the laws of the town. Isabel's story then is one of
place in which transgressive heroes are put into landscape to restore order. On the other
hand, Julia's is a spatial story for her adventures link places together, disrupt the stability
of place, and create movement and rebellion in the town of Ixtepec. In fact, Julia's
magical ﬂight ﬁ'om the town is the kind of spatial story that expands with each telling, as
it remains open to new endings and to new adventures. Garro's novel anticipates the new
historical novel by showing how spatial stories like Julia's, as opposed to stories of place
like Isabel's, can revive the past and open history up to new interpretations.

Finally, de Certeau shows in his study why images of death and the dying body as
they emerge in writing have a particularly subversive impact on discourses of power.
When everyday practices, the body, voice, memory, space, and death return in lest-body
writing, they incorporate human participation into the historical process and destabilize
the scriptural economy and what de Certeau calls its "therapeutic politics" (196). As we
have already seen, de Certeau conceives of scientiﬁc writing as a way of reforming the
"savage" or "wild", that which has not been articulated by language. He also asserts that,
linked to its fervor for reforming and progressive civilization, scientiﬁc writing must be

opposed to death, which it views as the ultimate defeat and failure. Dying is, for the

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scriptural economy, a moment between life and a nothingness that the dying person is
becoming, a period of less of productivity, and thus, in a culture that values
instrumentality over all else, a period of immorality. Scientiﬁc writing instead embraces
a therapeutic politics, a medical model that posits the unending progress of the body, a
body that can always be improved, healed and transformed, but also protected ﬁem
illness, aging and death. The body is like a blank page, according to de Certeau, "on
which a scriptural operation can produce indeﬁnitely the advancement of a will-te-do, a
progress" (196).

Dying, on the other hand, a practice that cannot be spoken or articulated in
language is the ultimate subversive practice. As de Certeau sees it, in the scriptural
economy, death and the dying person must be repressed, removed from the reahn of
everyday experience so as not to hinder production or raise questions about the status of
being as doing or making, questions to which the dying person, who is neither productive
nor dead, constantly gives rise: "The dying man is the lapse of this discourse. He is, and
can only be, ob-scene, hence, censured, deprived of language, wrapped in a shroud of
silence: the unnamable" (191). The dying person is outcast, isolated by technology or
hospitalized, and there, prohibited ﬁom speaking about the act of dying, or of becoming
nothing. The cry "I am dying" would be undigniﬁed and, besides, would pronounce the
failure of the medical system. And yet, for de Certeau, it is these words that the dying
man (and the lost-body writer) desires most to pronounce because these words
communicate most sincerely the question of what it means to be. So, although de Certeau
concedes that death remains unspoken and exiled, it does, as he points out, at times,
emerge in scientiﬁc discourse as an escapee, implicating the scriptural economy in its

imprisonment. Hence, de Certeau argues that when the body emerges in writing, rather

61

than as writing (inscribed by society's norms), it disrupts the notion of perpetual progress
by exposing the reality of bodies diseased, aging, and dying. Lost-body writing speaks
death, the "unnarnable", and, so, unveils the myth of scientiﬁc writing--its presumed
ability to tame what is wild, including nature and the human body, and consequently, to
overcome death.

This other kind of writing opposed to scientiﬁc discourse-what de Certeau refers
to alternately as literature, ﬁction, or lost-body writing--is where death ﬁnds a language.
It is "the gesture of a dying man," writing that sees in itself "the movement of being"
(195), in that, writing begins with an absence or less (of voice and identity), tries to
recapture presence (the voice and the body) with a sign, but that presence repeatedly
eludes it, as writing gradually moves toward death, acknowledging the inevitability of
that which cannot be said. This writing can be distinguished from scientiﬁc discourse,
according to de Certeau, by its subject matter that is "no longer dealing with the objects
produced by the scriptural operation, it takes as its subject this operation itself" (197). In
writing about writing, it points to the way the myths of the scriptural economy are
created, and how the emergence of the body and death can disrupt them. In lost-body
writing, the notion that writing can represent and reform reality by articulating it as a text
is no longer believable, as it posits evidence of the wasting away of the body. De Certeau
describes the return of the body in writing not just as a reminder of human mortality and
decay, but also as an erotic act, an interrningling of desire for both life and death:

The body writes itself therein, but as an ecstasy arising ﬁom a wound
inﬂicted by the other, as the "expenditure" of a pleasure that is

indissociable from the ephemeral, as the elusive vanishing point that links

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"excess" to the mortal... the body returns as the instant, the sirnultaneity of

life and death: both of them in the same place. (197)
Lost-body writing tears down the walls of the isolated place assigned to death by
scientiﬁc discourse and frees this subversive practice to reenter the discourse of life.
Lost-body writing concedes that the presence of the voice and the body, which it tries to
capture, still eludes it, at the same time, it both alters and is altered by its attempt to
articulate this presence. Hence, the erotic nature of lost-body writing, as it desires what it
admittedly cannot have, a desire that in turn stimulates its production (150-5 1).”

Figures of illness, death and the dying are a persistent leitrnotif in the new
historical novel. There are dead narrators in Boullosa's El médico de 10M (1992),
and Son vacas, semos puercos (1991), in Rea Bastos' Vigilia del Almirante (1992), and in
Carlos Fuentes El naranjo (1993). Narrators nearing death appear in Carpentiefs E_la_rpa

y la sombra (I979), Saer's El entenado (1983), Boullosa's Duerrne (1994), Posse's ﬂ

 

largo atardecer del caminante (1992), Fuentes' L_a muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962), and
Fernando del Paso's Noticia_s del Imperio (1994). Gonzalez Echevarria argues, in fact,
that death is the "founding trope" representing the limits of knowledge and power in
contemporary archival ﬁctions (Myth and Archive 186). An example he uses to illustrate
this point is that of Garcia Marquez' Cien afLos de soleda_d (1967). As Aureliano
Babelonia deciphers the ﬁnal pages of Melquiades' manuscript to discover the secret
knowledge of the Buendia family's degenerative history, “all the ants of the world” are
devouring the last Buendia, the monstrous child that is the fruit of many years of incest.
The futile search for self-knowledge that marked each successive generation of Buendias
comes to an end with the death of the last Buendia and with the Windstorm that carries

Aureliano Babelonia ﬁ'om the face of the earth just as he ﬁnishes deciphering the

63

parchments and at the very moment he grasps a clear understanding of the knowledge he

had been seeking. As Gonzalez Echevarria points out, in Cien ailes de soleda_d, the

 

realization of knowledge and death occur simultaneously. F or the Cuban critic, novelistic
narrative arises in Latin America, not to mimic European literary movements, but rather
hegemonic discourses, revealing through mimicry its false claims to knowledge and truth
through which its gains power. Similar to de Ccrteau's notion of death emerging in
writing to reveal the scriptural economy's myths of knowledge and power, death as a
hope for Gonzalez Echevarria, subverts hegemonic discourse and its claims to authority,
exposing the limitations of writing's access to knowledge.

In conclusion, de Ccrteau's theoretical insights in The Practice of Evgyday Life
facilitate an examination of the ethical implications of writing that produces knowledge at
the price of the body and the natural world. Furthermore, de Ccrteau's study provides
important insights with which to analyze the subversive role that bodies play in Latin
America's new historical novel, and points to an alternative to repressive forms of
writing, to lost-body writing. Lost-body writing materializes bodies and their everyday
activities, exposes the violence to which bodies are subjected by the discourses of power,
reveals how the individual can escape their repressive strategies, and does not overlook or
conceal the violence or destructive impulse inherent in its own process of inscription. The
ﬁamework we have established using de Ccrteau’s The Practice of EvervdLLifa
provides this study with a bread, overarching theory with which to articulate the
relationship between body, writing, and violence. It is not meant, however, to exhaust the
possibilities of body theory, but rather to posit a larger structure within which the body
emerging in discourse can be studied. The chapters that follow engage the thinking of

other body theorists, such as that of Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, and Elaine Scarry,

64

as they analyze the tactics of lost-body writing and explore the ways in which the
contemporary historical novel in Latin America deals with the ethical dilemma of writing
the body in discourse.

In the following chapter, I read the Puerto Rican Edgardo Rodriguez Julia’s
camivalesque version of history in La renungia del héroe Baltasar in terms that link de
Ccrteau’s theories on the body with those of Bakhtin. Bakhtin, like de Certeau,
recognizes the body’s disruptive force, its ability to subvert hegemonic discourses and to
challenge their claims to knowledge and to power. According to Bakhtin it is, in
particular, the carnival body, the body of grotesque realism, that undermines established
hierarchies, brings about the destruction of established orders, and that allows for a new

order to be ushered in.

65

Chapter 2: Carnival Destruction and Self-Deﬁnition in L_a renuncia del héroe Baltasar

 

Expect no further word or sign
from me.

Your own will is whole,
upright, and free

and it would be wrong not to do
as it bids you,

therefore I crown and miter
you over yourself.
--Dante, The Divine Comedy

In his groundbreaking study, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin America_r_r_
Narrative (1990), Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria argues that contemporary Latin American
narrative wants to free itself from the hegemonic discourse that dominates the collective
imagination. The Cuban critic asserts that the Latin American writer is looking for “a
clearing in the jungle,” a place where the writer can escape the yoke of history and of
oppressive civilization (3-4). The novel La renuncia del héroe Baltasar (1974), by the
Puerto Rican author Edgardo Rodriguez J ulia, expresses this desire to clear the
(neo)celonizers’ history ﬁ'om the discursive landscape and to reconstruct a new historic
vision that is more faithful to colonial reality. Through the voice of his protagonist,
Baltasar, Rodriguez Julia proposes that carnival tactics and destruction are one way of
erasing the history and myths propagated in the literature, architecture, visual arts, and
other ideological constructs produced by the (neo)celonizers. In this chapter I
demonstrate how carnival in the novel not only destroys the power of hegemonic
discourse but also how it allows for the creation of a new historical perspective and a
redeﬁnition of Puerto Rican culture. In addition to the antagonistic relationship between
colonizer and colonized, Rodriguez J ulia examines in La renuncia parallel relationships
of authority such as author/hero, father/son, self and other, and the discourses that emerge

from them. These analogous relationships are problematic in that the struggle for power

66

and control that emerges within such relationships interferes with the weaker subject’s
search for originality, agency, and freedom, as he ﬁnds himself unable to avert the
mastering gaze of the dominant ﬁgure. At the root of this struggle is the need to deﬁne
oneself rather than to be deﬁned by another, and this battle for self-deﬁnition is played
out on the body. My analysis of the struggle for self-deﬁnition in La renuncia, a struggle
that occurs on several levels—between the colonizer and the colonized, self and other,
and between a writer and his precursors, reveals how carnival and carnival bodies can
subvert and overturn these power relations by disrupting representation and the power of
the gaze."5

The novel takes the form of an academic conference in which an historian
reconstructs for his audience the events and maneuvers that bring a young mulatto,
Baltasar Montahez, to the highest ranks of power in the colonial government of Puerto
Rico in the eighteenth century, and Baltasar’s subsequent renouncement of this power.
The character Baltasar is not totally ﬁctitious—his origin lies in a legend of the period
that tells how a rider, of the same name, on a runaway horse, falls ﬁ'orn a precipice and is
miraculously uninjured, although the horse he rides is destroyed by the fall. Legend has it
that it is in memory of this miracle that the Chapel of Christ in Old San Juan was
commissioned to be built on the border of this same precipice.27 Rodriguez J ulia slightly
modiﬁes the legend of the miracle; in the novel, the rider and the horse are both saved
ﬁem falling to their deaths presumably by divine intervention (10-1 1).

The rest of the novel’s plot becomes increasingly distant ﬁom historical reality as
Rodriguez Julia’s imagination takes over where history left off. Basing his argument on a
series of supposedly historical documents—letters, chronicles, and dispatches—the

narrator/historian postulates that the miracle of the runaway horse was staged by Bishop

67

Larra in collaboration with other government ofﬁcials as part of a sensational plan to
pacify the island’s agitated slave population (10-1 1). After the propagation of the
miraculous event throughout the island, Bishop Larra’s plan culminates with Baltasar’s
marriage to Joseﬁna Prats, a young aristocrat and daughter of the current Secretary of
State, General Prats, with the purpose of creating “la falsa ilusien de libertad y transito
social” in the imagination of the island’s black population (9). According to the
narrator/historian, Baltasar, a willing accomplice, becomes a popular here for the black
masses and, for a time, enjoys the privileges of power. In the same year as his farcical
marriage to Joseﬁna, Baltasar is named as the new Secretary of State, replacing his father-
in-law, who is imprisoned for his lack of cooperation with Bishop Larra’s project. The
historian also documents what he interprets as the hero Baltasar’s gradually deteriorating
mental state, his imprisonment by the Inquisition, the bloody slave uprising on the island
due to his detention, and Baltasar’s persistent refusal to reassume the power of his
position, in spite of the massacre that results because of his renouncement.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalization of literature reigns in La renuncia,
where its destructive force breaks down hierarchical relations, degrades hegemonic
discourses, and thus, opens a path in the jungle for the generation of new ways of seeing
the world. In his study Rabelais and His World. Bakhtin describes how this early
Renaissance writer injects images of carnival into his writing disrupting the discourse of
lingering medieval ofﬁcialdom and its strictly regulated society. For Bakhtin, Rabelais’s
carnivalization of literature commences a practice of writing that ridicules authoritative
discourse, inverts hierarchies, and celebrates bodily excesses:

Rabelais’ images have a certain nonofﬁcial nature. No dogma, no

authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness can coexist with

68

Rabelaisian images; these images are opposed to all that is ﬁnished and

polished, to all pomposity, to every ready-made solution in the sphere of

thought and world outlook. (Rabelais 3)
Rabelais’ carnival is characterized in particular by the dominance of the material body in
its most ﬂeshy, carnal state, and by the lack of repression of the most basic bodily
ﬁrnctions ﬁ'om eating and drinking to having sex and defecating. The importance of this
exaggerated presence of the body, which Bakhtin calls “grotesque realism,” is in its
capacity to degrade, to topple the high, to exalt the low, and to destroy barriers of all
kinds, especially those between observers and participants in the festivities (Rabelais 18-
30). According to Bakhtin, carnival obeys its own “peculiar logic of the ‘inside out,’ of
the ‘turnabout,’ of a continual shifting from the top to the bottom, from ﬁont to rear, of
numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and
uncrownings. . .” (Rabelais l 1).

It should be noted that Bakhtin’s notion of carnival and the carnival body is quite
similar to de Ccrteau’s thinking on the emergence of the body in discourse. Both
theorists assert that bodies have the power to disrupt authoritative writing and to
deconstruct power relations. However, Bakhtin’s more narrow focus on the grotesque
body’s transgressive potential circumscribes his theory’s applications to camivalesque
literature. In contrast, as will be seen in later chapters, de Ccrteau’s more expansive view
of the subversive power of the body in a wide range of manifestions makes it possible to
analyze in terms of the body other forms of literature beyond the grotesque and
carrrivalesque. Nevertheless, in the analysis of La renuncia, a novel in which carnival
logic and degradation upend several types of hierarchical relations including

colonized/colonizer, self/other, and writer/precursor, Bakhtin’s concentration on the

69

carrrivalesque proves to be particularly productive and revealing as a supplement to de
Ccrteau’s broader formulations.

In the plot of La renuncia the carnivalesque tumabout begins with Bishop Larra’s
plan to marry Baltasar to Joseﬁna Prats and to install him in the post of Secretary of State.
Elevating the illiterate, former slave to the highest civilian position in the colonial
government and pairing him with the most desirable female member of the white,
aristocratic elite blurs hierarchical distinctions and sets carnival logic in motion. Bakhtin
points to the mock crowning of the carnival king (and his immanent decrowning, already
contained within the act of crowning) as the exordium to carnival festivities, and at whose
very core lies “the carnival sense of the world—the pathos of shifts and changes, of death
and renewal” (Qostoevsﬂ 124). Baltasar, La renuncia’s carnival king, is temporarily
raised up from slave to ruler and lavished with opulence and power. However, with his
subsequent decrowning, he is dashed down again to depths ﬁ'om which he refuses to rise.
Baltasar’s crowning and decrowning, carnival acts that Bakhtin calls “ambivalent rituals,”
symbolize the inevitability of change and of death, but also of renewal (Mstoevsg 124-
25). As we shall see further on, Baltasar rejoices in the death and decimation that result
ﬁ'om his renouncement because he believes, with a sort of carnival logic, that total
destruction represents the supreme act of liberation (95).

Baltasar heightens the carnival mood of the plot when he decides to celebrate his
marriage by dragging his new wife in her wedding attire through the slaves’ district,
where she is forced to drink, dance, and romp about in the mud with the revelers as she is
fondled and subjected to a week of humiliations (26-27). The carnival body continues to
dominate the plot when Baltasar, after assuming his position in the government, enjoys

the fruits of power, in particular, easy access to willing women, by indulging in orgies

70

that are captured for posterity in a series of erotic illustrations by the leprous artist, Juan
Espinosa (56-69). In addition, Baltasar’s camivalesque invention, “el J ardin de los
Infortunios,” the Garden of Misfortunes, which is designed to be a new defensive system
for the island, is a travesty of the established system of fortress walls. The labyrinthine
garden, full of all manner of deadly games and traps, poisonous bugs and natural
disasters, recalls a carnival funhouse with its slanting ﬂoors, hidden doors, and distorting
mirrors. Nature and the garden are no longer associated with the innocence and
tranquility of Eden, but rather are parodically transformed into their polar opposites, evil
and warfare, and recall the depiction of hell in Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, “The
Garden of Earthly Delights” (47-51). According to the historian/narrator, the artist, Juan
Espinosa, meets his untimely demise in the garden, consumed by a large crab (69).

Once the Inquisition imprisons Baltasar for his “false culto a Jardines” (70), his
false cult to gardens--a maneuver that destroys the myths of racial harmony and of the
possibility of upward-mobility for blacks on the island--all mayhem breaks loose.
Bakhtin argues that the ritual of decrowning, when the former king is stripped of his
regalia and the vestrnents of power, reveals with extreme clarity “the image of
constructive death,” and reminds us of the relativity of all things (Dostoevsky, 125).
Baltasar’s “decrowning” leads to carnival violence in which images of death abound. The
slave population rebels, massacring slaveholders and their co-conspirators, leveling the
sugar plantations, and with them the established social hierarchies. Although the extent
of the violence may seem to preclude calling these massacres carnivalesque, the tone of
the narration by the ofﬁcial government chronicler is indeed comical as he tries to be

respectful of the dead in his descriptions, and yet fails miserably:

71

La primera diﬁcultad que encontramos a1 entrar a la galeria de la
casa ﬁre unos intestines humanos que, a manera de guardacolas, estaban
atadas a las vigas de ausubo del techo. Per ﬁn logramos acceso a la sala
principal de aquella que fue tan bella casa... Sobre el piano de la nifla
Carrnencita encontramos la cabeza'decapitada del que fue el muy noble Sr.
Cambe, y en su boca, embutidos salvajemente, sus organos pudendes.
Tirade sobre el gran sofa de la bella mansion, encontramos el torso
desnudo del Sr. Cambe, y habia side colocado en muy obscena postura.
Amarrado al trasere del que fuera aquel muy noble y distinguido senor, se
encontre la cabeza de su leal capataz negro. (80-81)

In fact, the chronicler’s discourse is itself carnivalesque, not only because he
characterizes human intestines as “guardacolas,” a cordon demarcating the pathway to a
theater entrance, and describes the intimate details of the placement of body parts as if
they were props in a play, but also as he leaves the role of the observer to participate in
the carnival itself. Thus, in attempting to restore each member of the family’s body parts,
spread about the plantation, to its rightful person, the chronicler compares the breasts of
the dead older woman to those of her dead teenage daughter: “Baste decir que sus
pechos, ya ﬂacidos por los aflos y no tan ﬁrmes come los de la nifla Carmeneita, fueron
colocados en la sopera de su bellisima vajilla de plata, y su cabeza espetada a1 alto cocuyo
de la palma real” (82). Of course, unnecessary details such as the withered and ﬂabby
state of the elder woman’s breasts as compared to the ﬁrm breasts of her daughter, and
the beauty of the silver serving dish in which her breasts had been placed, add dark humor
to what would otherwise be a morbid description. Furthermore, the discourse places the

chronicler himself within the sphere of carnival as he participates in collecting body parts

72

 

trim
looses

betwe

gm
be c

bro:

Chi:

in

One:
min .

bOunc

and in matching them to the appropriate person. The chronicler’s ofﬁcial discourse
looses all pretense of seriousness as carnival’s blurring of boundaries between bodies, and
between participant and spectator, reaches the height of confusion.

Through a series of letters Bishop Larra tries to convince Baltasar to reassume his
position of power and thus, bring an end to the violence (86-100). When these attempts
fail, the Bishop appeals to Baltasar’s bodily appetites to tempt him into returning to the
gevemment palace, and thereby initiates a new round of carnival activity (102-8). First,
he offers Baltasar six beautiﬁrl women, and next, a carnival feast. These “offerings” are
brought to the prison ﬁ'om the Bishop’s palace in a long procession accompanied by large
throngs of people who have come to wish the Bishop well in his “holy” efforts. The
chronicler of the event does not fail to emphasize the Bishop’s diligence in fulﬁlling his
duties:

“El lugarteniente de la poderosisirna fortaleza presento llaves de
guarnicien al Obispo Larra, quien asistio personalmente a1 cuido de las
bellas doncellas que servian dc sefiuelo, y ello para avivar la misericerdia
de Nuestro muy querido Senor Baltasar. iMuy atento el pastor a las dulces
ovejas que traerian a rebaiio a la muy descarriada! (103-4)
Once again, carnival activities bring about the inversion of ofﬁcial hierarchies, when this
man of the cloth facilitates the deﬂowering of his congregation’s ﬁnest maidens. The
boundary between the profane and the sacred is eliminated.

The chronicler also becomes involved in the Bishop’s carnival orgy, as the events
he witnesses provoke his desire, and so, blur the boundaries between the writer and the
object of representation: “Una vez que el Obispo hizo la presentaeion ante cl

Excelentisimo Secretario dc Gobiemo, se procedie a mostrarle al renuente enajenado las

73

muy sabrosas partes de aquellas hembras que inﬂarnaron todos los masculinos corazones,
y digo que también otras partes pertinentes” (104). Whereas, in traditional representation
desire circulates among the characters represented, here sexual desire leaves the ﬂame of
representation and involves the writer himself, a camivalesque tumabout that erases the
boundary between participant and spectator, and degrades authoritative historiographic
discourse. The Bishop’s efforts to tempt Baltasar also arouse the chronicler’s gastronomic
desire, as is evident in the following camivalesque passage that describes one course of
the succulent feast:

La bandeja de mariscos guarde particular atraccien para mi persona: alli

vi ricas almejas aderezadas con limen; merluzas y sierras aderezadas con

una salsa roja tan picante come deliciosa, y bien generosa en cebolla; y mi

gloria de vista, ya que no de paladar, se excedia con una langosta muy

conﬁtada con dulce salsa de papaya. Pero aquello era un laberinto de

gustes sutiles que jamas se agotaba. .. (106)
The chronicler’s description of this “carnaval dc sabores” is so detailed and lavish that it
manages to kindle the hunger of the reader as well, thus broadening the reahn of carnival
beyond the text (108).

In La renuncia, carnival spares no pretense to authority or knowledge, not even

that of history itself. Rodriguez J ulia represents the process of writing about the past as a
comedy of errors at every level of the process of “knowing.” In fact, the form of the
novel itself is a parody of history and of historiography. Parody, for Bakhtin, is alien to
“pure” genres such as epic, tragedy, and historiography, but “organically inherent” in
carnivalized genres (Dostoevsn 127), such as Latin America’s new historical novel,

exempliﬁed by La rengcia. Thus, Rodriguez Julia does not write the novel in its

74

traditional form, ordering the plot in chapters, rather La renuncia pretends to be an
objective investigation, the academic presentation of the historian/narrator’s research.
The narrator’s seemingly detailed investigation, and careful documentation of dates and
names convince the reader that the novel, indeed, has an historic basis. Furthermore, the
documents he cites during the course of his presentation are written in the complex style
of the period. In her article “Exploring Conscious Imitation of Style,” Estelle Irizarry
uses a computer to prove the convincing authenticity of the historic documents’ baroque
language. Comparing the ﬁctitious documents with actual chronicles of the period,
Irizarry ﬁnds the same exaggerated style, the excessive use of superlatives and of the
word “muy,” and the archaic vocabulary characteristic of the period.

Nevertheless, with the exception of the legend of Baltasar Montaiiez, the
characters, the events and the social environment presented in the novel do not
correspond to the island’s ofﬁcial historiography.” In his Historia general de Pu_e_rto Rico
(1988), Fernando Pico comments that in spite of the successes of the slave rebellions in
Haiti during the same period, slaves in Puerto Rico escaped their bonds individually and
in groups as the principal form of resistance instead of making recourse to violent
rebellion (153). Thus, the novel’s apocalyptic scenes of violent slave rebellions and
massacres parody Puerto Rico’s somewhat uneventﬁrl, “ofﬁcial” colonial history. The
novel violates historic “truth” in order to reinvigorate the past, to undermine received
history, and to force the reader to question monologic historiography and the cultural
identity imposed by its discourse. The novel’s author himself confesses that, in writing
the novel, his intentions were camivalesque: “Decidi inventarrne un siglo XVIII que
fuera como una pesadilla de la historia puertorriqueﬁa. Las pesadillas también hablan de

la realidad (“A mitad dc camino” 132). By camivalizing preserved history, by making a

75

“nightmare” out of Puerto Rico’s past, Rodriguez Julia’s novel frees the past ﬁ'om the
hegemonic discourse of the (neo)celonizers, and allows Puerto Ricans to write their own
history and to redeﬁne themselves.”

In addition to his parody of historical events, Rodriguez Julia carnivalizes the
historiographic model upon which Western culture bestows the power of truth, and thus,
ridicules the authority and the legitimacy of this discourse. The Puerto Rican writer
achieves this “decrewrring” of historiography by displaying the process of writing history,
revealing many of the erroneous presuppositions that underlie the conventional
conception of the genre. First, the historical documents in the novel are full of lies and
constructed “facts” that the historian/narrator himself acknowledges: “Larra disimule,
con cuidadoso dole, un acuerdo pactade con Baltasar. .. Las palabras de su carta al
Secretario General Prats estan llenas dc falsedad y engafio” (27). Many documents in the
historian’s presentation contradict one another, while others are fabricated under Bishop
Larra’s direction, as can be seen in a letter from the cleric to his new chronicler:

En esta cronica testada per El confeso de la calavera se hace muy
notable la ausencia del Secretario del Gebiemo Prats. Reconozco mi
terpisima distraccien protocolaria a1 no emitir erdenes de indole muy
particular sobre tan grave asunto; pero, a todos los modes, el culpable de
diche testimonio sera muy castigado... El r'rnico consuelo que a esta hora
nos resta es que mi secretario dc camara... ha comenzado testimonio
nuevo sobre el notable suceso. (17-18)

Still other documents are mutilated and therefore incomplete, preserving only a portion of

their original text. In the novel these misleading and ﬁagmentary documents give

76

testimony to the textual and interpretive quality of history and to the impossibility of
ﬁnding historical truth.

Furthermore, it would be difﬁcult to overlook how the historian/narrator, who
compiles and interprets these documents, exposes his own prejudices that, none too
subtly, color his interpretation of events. For example, when referring to Baltasar’s wife,
he calls her “la nifia Joseﬁna,” the child Joseﬁna and “la muy delicada Joseﬁna,” the very
delicate Joseﬁna. However, he uses terms like “borracha,” drunken, “ebria,” intoxicated,
and “ﬁ'enética,” frenetic, to describe the black population. Rodriguez J ulia demonstrates
through this parody of historigraphic discourse that the process of writing history is not an
objective activity; instead, it is wrapped up in language, which cannot escape value
judgments or ideology.3o

Of course, the ideology that dominates historiographic discourse in the novel is
that of the Spanish colonizers (and by analogy, the ideology of the American
(neo)celonizers). Spanish colonial ideology is expressed through the manipulation of
images in the novel’s historical documents. Those that have the power of discourse mold
the interpretation of the “other.” The ideological frameworks corresponding to eighteenth
century Spanish colonial rule are Christianity and Enlightenment rationalism, and the
“other” of this discourse is the black population of the island. Therefore, Bishop Larra’s
correspondence, for example, and many of the chronicles, evoke the image of Satan in
relation to the blacks and also compare the slave population to a runaway horse, a symbol
of irrationality:

La negrada primitiva e ido'latra que pretende violar lo querido per
naturaleza y sancionado per Dies Padre Celestial, ha entrado en el cauce

que su propia cendicien le ha sigrrado. Este humilde testige...ha visto

77

come e1 llarnade Baltasar Montaiiez ha reconido con muy magniﬁcas
muestras dc culto los sectores ma's convulsos por las antiguas rebeliones
de Lucifer. El populache le rinde culto a este mufiece...e imagina en él la
esperanza dc cumplimiento del anomalo y diabolico deseo de romper
cadenas, y de ese mode violar lo dispuesto por el Senor de los eielos...
Con habilisimo dole distrae la diabo'lica violencia con la muy futil
esperanza, mientras mantiene ﬁrme las bridas del desbocado caballo que
es su raza. (12-13, emphasis mine)
In this ideological construct, the Bishop and the colonial government are representatives
of God and Reason; the slaves represent Satan and animal savagery. This demonization
and animalization of blacks in Bishop Larra’s rhetoric justiﬁes slavery in the same way
that the Christiarrization of the Native Americans justiﬁed the cruelties of the Spanish
conquest of the New World in the ofﬁcial discourse of the Spanish Monarchy. This
creation of myths through the melding of language discretely controls the imagination of
the colonized and their concept of self. In La renuncia Rodriguez J ulia ultimately ﬁghts
against this (neo)celonialist discursive manipulation and the imposition of its images on
Puerto Rican consciousness through the carnivalization of historiographic discourse.
Finally, it is revealing to note how this historical and scientiﬁc conference
presentation degenerates into hallucination as the historian narrates the decline in
Baltasar’s mental state. The historian increasingly depends on non-scientific sources such
as erotic drawings by a ﬁctitious artist, and poetic meditations by a writer, who curiously
has the same last name as the novelist’s great uncle, in order to ﬁll the gaps of history."
In a sense, the historian/narrator loses his objectivity and becomes a participant in the

carnival atmosphere of Baltasar’s world. The technique of using the structure of a

78

historiographic study with invented footnotes and references recalls Borges’ false
eruditien and his habit of “contaminating reality with dreams” (Rodriguez Monegal 68).
The historian/narrator’s conference presentation is a camivalesque vision of
historiography, a vision that overturns historiography’s authority and so distorts the
(neo)celonialist version of history that the Puerto Rican colonial past becomes almost
unrecognizable. It is this profanation or degradation of esteemed discourses and
hierarchies that carnival proposes in order to “disclose the potentiality of an entirely
different world, of another order, another way of life” (Rabelais 48).

On one level, as we have seen, the novel explores Puerto Rico’s struggle to deﬁne
its past and itself as a nation by destroying colonial hegemonic discourse, by using
carnival to create a “clearing in the jungle.” However, the struggle for self-deﬁnition
does not occur only on the text’s thematic level between the discourse of the imperial
state and that of the aspiring nation, but also on the diegetic level with the conﬂict
between father and son, between the ﬁgure of the author, Bishop Larra, and his hero,
Baltasar, and then again on a formal level with the analogous conﬂict between Rodriguez
Julia and his literary precursor, Alejo Carpentier. Much as the novelist theorizes that
parody and carnival destruction will clear a way through the jungle of oppressive colonial
history to create a space for national self-deﬁnition, so too must the individual subject use
carnival tactics to avert the deﬁning gaze of the other/author and to shape his or her own
concept of self. One Caribbean writer and critic, Iris Zavala, suggests that Caribbean
writers’ use of fantasy facilitates the breaking down of imposed colonial identities and
that the struggle for national self-deterrnination is closely linked to the individual
subject’s learning to “author(ize)” him or herself. According to Zavala, because

Caribbean nations must narrate against “the gaze of Ulysses”--the false identities imposed

79

by the discourses of imperialisms--it is necessary for Caribbean writing to pursue
“subjectivity itself in sirnultaneity with colonial liberation” (193).32 In La renunc'
Rodriguez Julia does just that as he explores the search for self on both the individual and
national levels.

Baltasar embarks on his struggle for self-deterrnination by negating his father. At
the beginning of the conference, the historian/narrator declares that Baltasar’s ﬁrst
renouncement takes place the day he marries Joseﬁna Prats, an action whose
predetermined outcome implies Baltasar’s repudiation of his father (9). Because the
purpose of this false union is to cultivate the illusion of racial harmony in a moment of
upheaval, Baltasar’s agreement to the marriage betrays the revolution that his own father,
Ramon Montafiez, incites. Baltasar’s disloyalty to his father and to his father’s cause is
his ﬁrst attempt to formulate a concept of self in contrast to a ﬁgure of authority. By
negating what his infamous dead father stood for, he ﬁ'ees himself ﬁem the paternal
bonds that deﬁne him. He becomes a conciliator between the warring races while his
father was a well-known instigator of the most violent slave rebellion of the century;
while his father worked as a stimulant to revolt, the son is a “narcotic” (9).

In order to explore more profoundly Baltasar’s struggle for self-deﬁnition, I turn
to Ann Jefferson’s article “Bodymatters: Self and Other in Bakhtin, Sartre, and Barthes.”
In this article, Jefferson lays out a history of thought concerning the body in
intersubjective relations based on the writings of these three thinkers at the foreﬁont of
body theory. Each of the three writers is concerned with the body as a site where the
struggle between the self and other takes place. Jefferson explains the reason why the
body is the center of attention in this conﬂict: “. .. since the body is what others see but

what the subject does not, the subject becomes dependent upon the other in a way that

80

ultimately makes the body the focus of a power struggle with far-reaching implications”
(153).
As Jefferson shows, the early Bakhtin formulated this relationship between
subject and other in terms of artistic activity, speciﬁcally in terms of hero and author.
Accordingly, the author’s role is to give form and wholeness to what the hero experiences
as the ﬁagrnents of his being, and, in particular, of his body, which is not within his
vantage point. Jefferson describes the author’s activity of giving coherence and
wholeness to the hero’s body:
Essentially this authoring is an act of gathering. The author gathers
together all the parts of the body that escape the subject’s own visual ﬁeld,
“his head, his face and its expression” (“Author and Here,” 25), and then
places the resultant entity in the world where for the author (but not, of
course, for the here) the body appears as an object amongst other objects.
In short, he transforms the dispersedness of the subject’s experience into
the assembled whole that makes him a here. (155)

The hero’s construction as a whole is an aesthetic activity, and yet it is an exclusively

one-way process; in contrast to the author’s activity, the hero is passive and accepting of

the author’s “gift.”

Jefferson shows that Sartre concurs with much of Bakhtin’s conception of these
intersubjective relations but adds the dimension of the hero/subject’s feelings of
alienation ﬁom the author/other’s construction or representation of him. Unlike
Bakhtin’s passive hero, Sartre’s subject struggles against the other’s power over him.
Jefferson quotes Sartre’s negative concept of the other’s representation of the subject:

“. . .in Sartre this incarnation (which he calls an image) is a negation (228), a theft (225),

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an alienation (263), an enslavement (267); it represents danger (268); it brings shame
(261) and fear (259) and is the harbinger of death—‘the death of my possibilities’ (271).”
(159). Jefferson’s analysis of the way the later Bakhtin and Barthes deal with this
problem of self-determination and the self’s possibilities for breaking free ﬁ'om the
penetrating gaze of the other by using carnival tactics is particularly relevant to our study
of La renuncia.

For Jefferson, Bakhtin’s concept of carnival, as developed in his later works on
Rabelais and Dostoevsky, undermines the hierarchical relations of representation and
questions the specular basis of these relations (165-68). Whereas in representation there
is a distinct boundary between authorial observer and the subject represented, in carnival
there is no such distinction between spectator/author and actor/hero; in carnival all are
participants. Another change in representation brought about by carnival, according to
Jefferson, is in the construction of bodies. Bakhtin’s notion of a represented or
“classical” body is as a completed, closed, and isolated form, whereas the carnival body
of grotesque realism lacks boundaries, is epen, unﬁnished or in process. Carrrival’s
blurring of boundaries between individual bodies, between actors and spectators, and
between life and death, destroys representation, undermines the power of the author/other
over the subject, and leads to the possibility of the subject’s self-determination that
representation precludes.

Finally, Jefferson interprets Barthes’ application of carnival to the processes of
writing and reading as another possibility for undermining representation, and returning
the power of self-determination to the subject (169-74). Because Barthes imagines the
conﬂict between self and other as a battle of discourses, he also conceives of the solution

in terms of language practice. Barthes’ other constructs the subject he observes with

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language, a linguistic construct that the subject experiences as the “doxa,” the already
said. For Barthes, according to Jefferson, the best way for the subject to counter the doxa
is through the bodily practice of writing:
In this practice the body’s relation to language is altered from being the
object of representation to becoming the support and condition of a certain
linguistic activity. Or as Barthes rather elliptically puts it, “Writing
proceeds through the body [L’écriture passé par le corps]” (Roland Barthes
80). When the body sides with the subject, then it becomes possible to
counter the ﬁnished and static representations of the doxa, a discourse that
Barthes describes as being without a body, even if it takes the body as its
object. A doxa is no longer a doxa if it is no longer ﬁnished and complete,
if its structures open up. The body is a kind of wild-card that slides and
also creates slide... (170-71)
Jefferson contends that Barthes’ body is a camivalesque body--fragmented, erotic, and
blurring boundaries between self and other, author and subject, and ultimately between
reading and writing. The carnival body creates a carnival text that destroys doxa or
representation by allowing the body to leave the conﬁnes of representation’s ﬁ‘ame, an
effect that Barthes calls ﬁguration. In leaving the ﬂame, bodies and their desires are no
longer imprisoned in the text, but instead circulate with bodies outside of representatien’s
ﬂame, and thereby reconstruct representation’s specular subject-object relations (171-72).
Camival’s redeﬁning of the specular relations of representation is apparent
throughout Rodriguez J ulia’s novel, as we have seen in the chroniclers’ discourses, and as
we will now examine in Baltasar’s struggle to formulate his own concept of self.

Baltasar’s most bitter conﬂict for self—determination rages between him and Bishop Larra.

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As the Bishop is, in many ways, the author of Baltasar, the creator of his legend and the
man who gave him power, Baltasar, the mythic hero, is beholden to him, obliged to act
out the part written for him.33 Within this story, the hero Baltasar is what de Certeau calls
a “bridge” ﬁgure, a character whose body, like a bridge, both ﬁ'ees a subject by allowing
him to explore new places, and exposes him to alien intervention and loss of autonomy
(hence of Everyaiay Life 126-29). In the novel, it is Bishop Larra who, in fact,
“constructs” Baltasar as a bridge between the blacks on the island and the white elite.
Baltasar appears to be a coherent whole, a well-structured building, an accomplishment
that the Bishop boasts of in his writings: “Su bien arregladafachada de emancipador le
conviene a su persona; pero también—y ello per orden natural y no sutil dole politico—a
nuestra santiﬁcada monarquia” (13, emphasis mine). Baltasar, accepts the Bishop’s
“gift,” and allows himself to become the Bishop’s construct as a way to achieve personal
power, wealth, and status. However, like a bridge, the freedom that he wins comes at a
cost———his self-determination. Baltasar’s body becomes the Bishop’s text, as the Bishop
scripts his movements and activities, and inscribes him with meaning. Just as the Bishop
intended, Baltasar’s marriage to Joseﬁna represents the myths of peace between the races
and of social mobility for blacks.

Although at ﬁrst Baltasar plays his part, he becomes increasingly uncomfortable
with his status as the passive protagonist/hero of the Bishop’s narrative, and takes action
to impose meanings of his own invention. As Jefferson interprets Sartre’s position with
regard to this conﬂict, the hero, alienated ﬁom the author/ether’s representation of him,
responds with a representation of his own making, either one more favorable to himself,

or one that makes the other/author the object of his representation (164). Baltasar

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responds ﬁrst by ﬁguring the other in a representation he authors, and then with carnival
tactics, in his attempt to free himself from the discourse imposed upon him.

Baltasar’s alienation from his constructed image ﬁrst becomes apparent to the
narrator/historian when he uncovers a draft of an ofﬁcial chronicle, describing the
wedding ceremony, to which changes have been made in the margins of the text. The
historian ﬁrst suspects that these marginal annotations, which insert the presence of
General Prats at his daughter’s wedding to Baltasar, are made by Bishop Larra, knowing
that such a glaring omission could bring into question the veracity of his narrative. With
further research and careful reading, however, it becomes clear to the narrator that these
exaggerated annotations were written by none other than Baltasar himself:

Ahera bien, nuestra cuidadosa lupa sigue esclareciendo misteries: Las
adiciones hechas a la cronica dc Oviedo se las atribuimos a Baltasar
Montafiez. La graﬁa de estas adiciones corresponde a la de varies
manuscritos de Baltasar que conservarnos. El estilo es el de Baltasar:
arnpuloso, reterico, resultado de una asimilacien cultural precipitada. ..
Baltasar exageraba e1 estilo hiperbelico de la intelectualidad espaiiola del
siglo XVIII. Aquel estilo dieciochesco que Heltfeld llame “crepr'rsculo del
barroco”, se convierte bajo su insegura pluma, en una exageracien de lo ya
desmesurado. .. (18-19)
With this discovery, the narrator/historian speculates about Baltasar’s motives for making
these changes to the manuscript, and concludes that Baltasar craves his father-in-law’s
acceptance. General Prat’s absence ﬁom the wedding and his subsequent imprisonment
underline his sheer disgust with the Bishop’s plan and the dishonor he believes that the

marriage to Baltasar brings to his daughter and his family. The General’s actions provoke

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feelings of inferiority in Baltasar and lead him to construct his own modiﬁed narrative of
the wedding in which Prats is present and glowing in all of his glory, in Baltasar’s words:
“3Bello adomo de la autoridad insular! . .. Alli despedia luz para todos los siglos
venideros. iEste gran senor dc nuestras Indias!” (19). The offending representation is
replaced by another authored by Baltasar, and yet this second version of events does little
to free him from the mastering gaze of the elitist other, as the response remain within the
specular conﬁnes of representation. Baltasar’s incitement of carnival festivities, however,
does open the way to his self-determination.

After his marriage, Baltasar’s inferiority complex, which stems ﬁom the Bishop’s
power over his construction of self, prevents him ﬁ'om consummating his marriage to
Joseﬁna. It is, in particular, Joseﬁna’s gaze that horriﬁes Baltasar, the fear that, in his
pleasure, her eyes will express disgust. In his diary Baltasar writes, “Y es per ello que
temo al treparla una muy gldcida mirada de odio que me haga notar la debilidad de mi
intento” (55, emphasis mine). The power of Joseﬁna’s gaze to master Baltasar, to deﬁne
him as weak or impotent, similar to Bishop Larra’s narrative, alienates him and threatens
to deny him the possibility of self-deﬁnition. According to the narrator/historian’s
reading of Baltasar’s diary, Joseﬁna’s anticipated look of revulsion would be Baltasar’s
ultimate hurrriliation, and so he “renounces” his wife’s body:

Renuncie carnalmente a su bella esposa; la relacion carnal con ella lo
convertiria en poderoso humillado por el desprecio del débil. Y esa
posibilidad dc humillacien surgia de su mas profundo estrato sicologico:
el miedo a una latente inclinacien a reconocerse come inferior ante el amo
blanco. El cuerpo de Joseﬁna se convirtio en “tentacion de inferioridad”,

segr'rn sus propias palabras. (54)

86

However, Baltasar fears that the mere act of renouncing his wife’s ﬂesh might in itself be
viewed as recognition of his inferiority. Therefore, he ingeniously invents a method to
humble Joseﬁna, to bring her down a notch, so to speak, without degrading himself. His
method, with a camivalesque twist, deconstructs the power of the gaze.

Recent body theory, and in particular the work of Michel Foucault has focused on
vision as a tool of power and as a means for controlling bodies. According to Foucault,
panoptic practices, society’s techniques of surveillance, produce a disciplined body, a
body fabricated by a network of power relations.” In the novel, the ﬁctitious poet,
Alejandro J ulia Marin, who the historian/narrator frequently cites to document his
presentation, describes an oppressive landscape of eyes through which man must pass:
“Son los ojos del poder, que acechan a1 hombre-apenas nacido y con la tripa dc madre
ar'rn enroscada en el vientre--y lo pasean por todo este grande paisaje de esclavitud que los
antiguos llamaron e1 laberinto del buen orden” (61). Certainly, this concept of the gaze,
as the wielding of power, penetrating, probing and mastering other bodies, describes
Baltasar’s feeling of objectiﬁcation as both Bishop Larra’s passive representation, and as
the object of J oseﬁna’s hate-ﬁlled gaze. However, Baltasar is able to undermine the
power of the gaze by using his awareness of others’ looking at him to make them
participants in his carnival-like activities—his orgies, his obsessions, and his meditations.
By looking, Joseﬁna and Bishop Lana become involved in Baltasar’s carnival beyond the
mere act of observing or seeing. The newly crowned carnival king knows that sight is not
a sense isolated from the rest of the body, or a disembodied perception. On the contrary,
sight functions in conjunction with other bodily senses, and in turn stimulates the entire

body. Baltasar takes advantage of this more complex understanding of the gaze to incite

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carnival, which in turn, overturns power relations in the novel, allowing Baltasar to regain
a sense of power over his own construction of self.
Baltasar begins the carnival process of deconstructing the gaze of the other by
installing a “mirilla” or peephole in the walls between Jeseﬁna’s bedroom and Baltasar’s
“retire de placer” (55), or chamber of pleasure. In order to draw Joseﬁna to the mirilla,
Baltasar also installs small speakers that carry the sounds of Baltasar’s lovemaking into
Joseﬁna’s room. In this way he tempts Joseﬁna to look at him, to observe his body in the
throws of pleasure with his lovers. In other words, rather than avoiding the gaze of the
other, Baltasar purposefully draws the gaze of the other to him by appealing to another
bodily sense, sound, which consequently attracts yearning eyes, and involves the whole
body in the erotic scene. The narrator/historian quotes ﬁom Baltasar’s diary to reveal the
desired effect of this system of imposed surveillance on Joseﬁna:
‘ . . .y sera esta mirilla la permanente tentacien en aquellas fantaseosas
noches cuando mediando los oidores su mente inventara los mas
deliciosos y rizados placeres de la carne. Oira los rumores, el vivisirne
jadeo que emiten los cuerpos convulsos por el inmenso placer que es el de
la carne, y entonces deseara unirse a la orgia; pero sera posible $610 per la
mirada, y sera ésta su dulce humillacien, la que doblega su cuerpo a mi
gran voluntad sin yo suﬁir la persecucien de sus ojos. Se lograra nuestro
amor conyugal en un solitario placer que se debe a la musica celestial de
mi acompaiiada frenesi’. (55-56)

Baltasar envisions that Joseﬁna will ﬁrst be beckoned to the peephole by what she hears,

where she will become transﬁxed by what she sees. Seduced by the lovemaking she

observes, Joseﬁna will imagine herself participating in the orgy and, in this way, in

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Baltasar’s mind, the marriage will be consummated without his suffering the mastery of
her gaze. Instead Joseﬁna’s lustful gaze will lead to her own involvement in the orgiastic
experience. The controlling gaze of the other, then, reverses its effect and becomes a way
of drawing the observer in as a participant in what she observes.

Through a series of ﬁve camivalesque drawings by the ﬁctitious artist, Juan
Espinosa, the narrator/historian shows how the peephole achieves its desired effect,
disrupting the power of the gaze and making not only Joseﬁna, but also Bishop Larra and
other characters participants in Baltasar’s constructed scenes of debauchery. Each of the
ﬁve drawings that the historian describes is a triptych featuring the bedrooms of Baltasar
and Joseﬁna, and the ofﬁce of Bishop Larra. Poetic meditations, written by Julia Marin,
follow the historian/narrator’s descriptions of each of the erotic scenes. In the ﬁrst three
triptychs the narrator describes Baltasar with many different women in various states of
sexual rapture, while in the adjoining room Joseﬁna shows increasing interest in the
sexual activity next door (56-62). In the third triptych Joseﬁna masturbates while
watching Baltasar through the peephole. Clearly, with the description of these drawings
the historian reveals how Baltasar’s strategy for reversing the power of Jeseﬁna’s gaze
works just as he had planned. Once attracted to the peephole, Joseﬁna participates in
Baltasar’s orgy. The power is no longer in the eyes of the observer, but rather in him who
is being observed.

Nonetheless, it is the camivalesque depictions of Bishop Larra in these drawings
that are particularly amusing and revealing as they show his incremental evolution ﬁ'om
observer to participant in Baltasar’s erotic activity. Indeed, Baltasar manages to reverse
the mastering gaze of the Bishop through his confessional, which instead of producing a

disciplined body, seduces the Bishop himself. Foucault sees the confessional as a space

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where the speaker is transformed ﬁ'om bad to good by speaking about his acts that
contravened the laws of God. By granting forgiveness, the priest--in whom resides what
Foucault calls the “agency of domination” (History of Sexualig 62)--realigns the
speaker’s desires from illegitimate to legitimate, normalizing him and eliminating his
transgressive potential. However, in La renuncia the Bishop’s confessional produces the
opposite outcome: the ﬁgure of authority, the Bishop, is himself transformed by the
discourse of confession as the speakers’ desires and transgressions become his own. In
the series of drawing the Bishop is depicted ﬁrst as calibrating peepholes for himself and
for his page and housekeeper, then presiding over a confessional with a penis-like
shepherd’s crook in his hand, and ﬁnally, participating in an orgy with his two servants.
A poetic meditation entitled “El coleccionista,” alludes to the Bishop in the confessional,
who excitedly awaits the arrival of confessors with their stories of sexual encounters:

“. . .se anima la carne tras el poder, esperando e1 testimonio de aj enas delicias, guardando
en coﬁ'ecillos de oro esos gemidos, que son los mas preciades trofeos de su inﬁnita,
catedralicia coleccien de pasiones” (62). Although Baltasar is, in the beginning, the
Bishop’s “hero” or construct, his carrrivalesque maneuvers invert the relations of power.
While the Bishop becomes a participant in the carnival scenes that Baltasar creates,
Baltasar becomes his own author.

The ﬁnal two drawing in the series of ﬁve depict Baltasar’s gradual evolution
from Bishop Larra’s hero in the creation of myths to a contemplative ﬁgure aware of his
need for self-determination (62-69). While the drawings show Joseﬁna and the Bishop’s
increasing involvement in the carnival orgies, they also depict Baltasar’s loss of interest
in the sexual activity that he instigates and his emergent infatuation with the natural

landscape, e1 J ardin de los Infortunios, just outside of his bedroom window. The artwork

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reveals Baltasar’s growing realization that his eroticism is also a construct, a myth that
stands in the way of his own search for self. J ulia Marin’s poetic meditation interpreting
these ﬁnal drawings reﬂects on eroticism as an obstacle to creative thought and Baltasar’s
awakening to this fact: “Del ciclo bajaron muiiecas con agujeros placenteros. Este
entretuvo a los hombres... El ingenie no tuve un memento dc soledad creadora, las
muiiecas hastiaban; desperto de nuevo la fastidiosa curiosidad” (64). According to
Octavio Paz, eroticism is, in fact, a form of social control over human sexual instinct:

...el erotismo es sexualidad socializada, sometida alas necesidades
del grupo, fuerza vital expropiada per la sociedad. Inclusive en sus
marrifestaciones destructoras--la orgia, los sacriﬁcios humanos, las
mutilaciones rituales, la castidad obligateria--el erotismo se inserts en la
sociedad y aﬁrma sus ﬁnes y principios... el erotismo deﬁende al grupo de
la caida en la naturaleza indiferenciada, se opone a la fascinacien del caos
y, en ﬁn, a1 regreso a la sexualidad infonne. (183)

Baltasar becomes aware of his eroticism as a construct imposed by society, as a
myth that distracts him from his “fascination with chaos” and that impedes him from
realizing his own animal nature in need of ﬁ'eedom. In a dream, Baltasar discovers his
philosophy of destruction that helps him to form his new concept of self, a concept of his
own making that celebrates the violence and destruction occurring all around him: “Soy
un artiﬁce del vacio, un negador de la arquitectura y ediﬁcios que los hombres han dicho
y hecho por siglos” (89). Carnival destruction, a form of destruction that combines death
with renewal, or what Baltasar describes as “la destruccion redentora de la vida” (95),

becomes the rule of the day. This redemptive destruction is the essence of carnival as it

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clears a way for positing “another way of life,” and for Baltasar to formulate his own
vision of self.

In conclusion, carnival tactics allow Baltasar to transforrn the relationship
between his body and language. At ﬁrst, Baltasar’s body is the object of representation, a
product of the gaze of the other over which he has no control. In his ﬁrst attempt to free
himself he creates a representation of his own, making the other the object of his gaze.
This mere reversal of the gaze, however, does not challenge the specular basis of
representation, and so, the other maintains his power over the subject and the subject’s
body.

Nevertheless, Baltasar’s carnival orgy that invites all to participate brings bodies
out of representation’s ﬁarne and destroys its specular basis. The opening created by the
break down of traditional representation leads to a carnivalized literature in the
meditations of Julia Marin and carnivalized art in Espinosa’s erotic drawings. Finally,
Baltasar recognizes in his own body a deeply inscribed text. Even his own sexuality, it
seems, originates in a discourse imposed upon him by society and its gaze. F or Baltasar,
the only possibility left for him to regain control over his body and identity is through the
most extreme forms of carnival violence and destruction.

Within the novel we can discern a dynamic that runs parallel to Baltasar’s struggle
to make his body his own text. Just as the young Baltasar must ﬁ'ee himself of the gaze
of his author, Bishop Larra, the ﬁrst time novelist, Rodriguez J ulia must ﬁnd a way to
disrupt the deﬁning gaze of his literary precursor, Alejo Carpentier. Rodriguez J ulia’s
carnival tactics, much like those of Baltasar, free the young novelist to make his body of
work his own. In the article “Imagenes de la conquista y la colonia en la novelistica

hispanoarnericana contemporanea,” Anibal Gonzalez contends that the work of a group of

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young Latin American writers has entered into dialogue with the work of Carpentier that
serves as a model to both emulate and criticize. Rodriguez Julia forms part of this group,
according to Gonzalez, which is reﬂected in his camivalesque parody of many aspects of
the Cuban writer’s work. Most poignant is Rodriguez Julia’s parody of Carpentier’s
offering of transcendental truths in his early historical novels. By this I am referring to
the privileged knowledge the Cuban historical novelist shares with his reader through his
ﬁction. F or example, Carpentier opens his novel gage de lg luces (1962) (in English
translated as Explosion in the Cathedral) with an epigraph ﬁ'om the Zohar: “Las palabras
no caen en el vacio,” or, “Words do not fall into the void.” The Zohar is the principle
source of the kabala, a Jewish mystic tradition that teaches a system of biblical analysis
and interpretation, in which nothing is casual, everything has signiﬁcance and is
susceptible to interpretation.” The epigraph suggests that the novel should be read as a
sacred text, and furthermore, that the novelist is a vehicle of revelation. In his epilogue to
El_sigLo de la_s lucea, “Acerca de la historicidad de Victor Hughes,” Carpentier afﬁrms
that, in the writing of this novel, he had accomplished his prophetic vocation:

Estaban publicados ya estas paginas al ﬁnal de la primera edicien
que de este libro se hizo en Mexico, cuando, hallandome en Paris, tuve
oportunidad de conocer a un descendiente directo de Victor Hugues,
poseedor dc importantes documentos farniliares acerca del personaje. Per
él supe que la tumba de Victor Hugues se encuentra en un lugar situado a
alguna distancia de Cayena. Pero con este encontré, en uno de los
documentos examinados, una asombrosa revelacion: Victor Hugues fue
amado, durante aﬁos, per una hermesa cubana que, por mas asombrosa

realidad, se llarnaba Soﬁa. (362-63)

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The Cuban writer conﬁrms that he recorded historical truth, without realizing it at the
time, when he imagined the story of the romance between the historical ﬁgure, Victor
Hugues, and his Cuban lover, Soﬁa.

Rodriguez J ulia openly criticizes this providential authority that Carpentier
confers on the writer. In his essay “Tradicion y utopia en el barroce caribeiio,” the Puerto
Rican writer describes Carpentier’s novels as “un museo de sefias, ciﬁas y claves
historicas” (10). Rodriguez J ulia ﬁnds something na'r‘ve in the kabalistic nature of
Carpentier’s work and in his desire to communicate a mystic knowledge which
establishes a link between historical reality and ﬁction. Thus, in La renuncia Rodriguez
Julia parodies Carpentier’s providential vision; there is no omniscient narrator who
watches over the world with a ubiquitous eye as there is in Lsiglo dc la__s lucea. On the
contrary, the narrator in La renuncia is a very human historian who makes mistakes, who
is partial and who does not have all the answers that he would like to possess. Rodriguez
Julia strips the writer of his privileged insight when at the end of his presentation the
novel’s narrator/historian gives the ﬁnal word of the conference to the invented writer,
Julia Marin, commenting ironically, “30h, el poder el del poeta! iAdivinador de la
posible historia!” [Oh, the power of the poet! Foreseer of the possible history!] (114).

The Puerto Rican writer further attempts to create distance between himself and
his Cuban precursor, that is, to avert Carpentier’s deﬁning gaze, by using other carnival
tactics. In addition to his camivalesque parody of the writer’s providential authority,
Rodriguez Julia parodies the Romantic relationship that Carpentier establishes between
the cycles of nature and those of history in El siglo de las luces. As in the literature of
Romanticism, nature in E_laigl_o reﬂects the social environment in which the characters

ﬁnd themselves. Carpentier adopts in his novel the Romantic ideology of the early

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nineteenth century that promulgated an organic vision of culture. This vision maintained
that human beings and all of their activities were part of and corresponded to nature and
the physical world. So, history and art, as human activities, exhibited organic preperties
like the universe itself and also participated in this unending process of creation (Abrams
185-86). According to M.H. Abrams, the English Romantic, Coleridge, postulated that
literature, like a plant that synthesizes diverse elements ﬁom water, air and the earth to
grow, assimilates a diversity of materials to form an organic unity (220—21).

In Elaiglg, Carpentier concretizes this organic vision of united multiplicity in the
form of a spiral. Gonzalez Echevarria, in his text Aleio Carpentier: The Pilgg'm at Home
(1977), has studied the spiral and the conch shell, the natural form of the spiral, as a
reﬂection of the movement of history and artistic creation in the novel. Esteban’s
meditation on the conch shell underlines this Romantic vision of the harmonic destiny
between nature and man (ﬂsigm 184). F or Esteban the conch shell is the conciliator
between order and chaos; it represents the united multiplicity of the historic and the
cultural organism. Gonzalez Echevarria ﬁnds the same “ﬂuidity of form” in the
repetitions and returns in the action of the novel. However, according to the Cuban critic,
the repetitions are not identical, but are rather progressive cyclical movements (232-33).
For example, he points out that Esteban’s return to the familial home in Havana does not
mark the repetition of events in history, but rather a new beginning in the character’s
progressive self-understanding (230). As history progresses cyclically, material
manifestations of this progress change meanings when they reappear. We can see this
pattern of “repetitions with variations” in the novel’s allegorical ﬁgure of the revolution
that represents continual progress. When the French Revolution follows its course and

deteriorates into repression, the uprising against Napoleon’s forces in Madrid, in which

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Esteban and Soﬁa lose their lives, paves the way for the Wars for Independence
throughout Latin America. This use of ﬁgural allegory, a ﬁgure that anticipates another
in the future that is the fulﬁllment and the surrnounting of the ﬁrst, expresses a
progressive and providential vision of history.36
In La renuncia, Rodriguez J ulia rejects this providential concept of history and its
connection with the natural cycles. Instead of a progression through time, the historical
vision of the Puerto Rican writer is one that marches linearly toward carnival and
destruction, and parodies Carpentier’s Romantic ideology that harmonically links nature
with the destiny of man. For example, as Secretary of State, Baltasar dreams of the
Garden of Misfortunes in which he perceives, behind nature’s beautiful surface, an
insidious perversity:
Era una vision de lo que nosotros los cristianos llamamos el Paraiso
Terrenal antes de la caida de aquel desdichado que ﬁre nuestro primer
padre. Pero come aquel, también en éste se escondia la ﬁuta de discordia
y la maldad tras el belle ropaje de las ﬂores... Satanas ensei'ie su pezuﬁa
entre tanta belleza... Este jardin sera ar'rn mas cruel que aquel que llevo a
nuestros primeros padres al pecado. Porque era entonces la naturaleza
muy inocente; pero desde aquel formidable suceso de los siglos se ha
vuelto la mas implacable fuerza contraria al hombre. (48-49)
Instead of being the harmonious reﬂection of man, nature becomes his enemy, indifferent
to his suffering. Rodriguez J ulia also parodies Carpentier’s Romantic descriptions when
Baltasar says: “Es sabido que las plantas, los arboles, las ﬂores y el sol permanecen
radiates y rebosantes, o secas y escuras, sin gravitar importancia a la tristeza y alegria de

las gentes” (49-50). In contrast to the congruent spiral movements of humans and the

96

physical world in ELaiglg, man and nature move in contrary directions in La renuncia. In
this novel, natural forces and history ﬂow in a horizontal path toward destruction, death
and forgetfulness. The island’s colonizers attempt to impede this natural ﬂow toward
destruction by constructing vertically with monuments, buildings, texts, and myths,
hoping to establish a historical “truth” that will remain in the collective imagination. This
battle between the two opposing tendencies, permanence and destruction, is depicted in
this description of human beings’ struggle with nature that Baltasar offers:
La vanidad de los hombres es borrada cruelrnente por el paso de las
estaciones, y la etema renovacion dc fauna y ﬂora. De este mode la
naturaleza no se entera de los principios, creencias y muy ﬁrmes
propositos que llevan a los hombres a la matanza; y ella con muy impia
crueldad hace imposible que los hombres recuerden los heehos gloriosos o
nefastos de los antiguos siglos... Y yo diria que los hombres recuerden por
las ruinosas piedras de las antiguas ciudades porque los hombres rrrismos
las han obligado a halagar su vanidad. (50)

With the construction of the Garden of Misfortunes, Baltasar threatens the island’s
defensive system of walls, and therefore threatens the colonizers’ vertical constructions,
which assure the hegemonic culture’s stability and survival. Here we observe Rodriguez
Julia’s parody of the concept of architecture as text, an idea that prevails in much of
Carpentier’s work. In his essay La ciudad de las columnas, for example, Carpentier
emphasizes the connection of a culture’s ideology and its expression in the culture’s
architecture.” At the end of La renuncia, Baltasar insists on the total destruction of
buildings and monuments as the only way of liberating a culture ﬁ'om the weight of

history and it’s myths, a solution that suggests Rodriguez J ulia’s own desire to create a

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clearing in the jungle of literary precursors and their writings, to demolish the “doxa,” the
already said:
Pedir compasien a un hombre de verdad es hacerlo complice de la

mentira que-come belle palacio donde los hombres olvidan la intemperie-
-ha sido fabricada, dia a dia, per la desenﬁ'enada astucia, que es reserve de
la piedad. Yo el mas pure de los hombres, sostenedor de la verdad,
pretende la destruccion de todas las catedrales, de todos los fastuosos
palacios que provocan el olvido en los hombres. .. iqué dulce y ﬁel
arquitectura la mia! F abrico del aire y con el aire; hacia el silencio y el
vacio de las esferas se alza mi intento desolado, la morada del teche
olvidado. (89)

When the Inquisition orders Baltasar’s imprisonment due to his construction of the

Garden of Misfortunes, it sends this requisition that demonstrates the institution’s desire

to control Baltasar’s propensity for nature’s horizontal and destructive movement:

Referimos al brazo secular de estos Reinos el tratarniento de

suspension de garantias civiles, cuyo ej ercicie esta en potestad, hacia el
sr'rbdito extrarnuros Baltasar Montaiiez. Y ello asi se requiere la privacien
de movimiento mediante encarcelamiento al memento, dejéndole dentro
de su privacien ejecutada aire a respirar que mantenga con vida su cuerpo.
Es per ello que certiﬁcamos con sello Pontiﬁco ejecutado en Indias la
negacio'n de volicio'n horizontal, permitiéndole la vertical, para que con
ella, y segr'rn la benefactora gracia divina, se acerque a la verdad de los

cielos. (71, emphasis mine)

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Of course, Baltasar is permitted to move vertically because this would imply his
participation in the creation of myths, whereas his horizontal movement implies carnival
destruction against the colonizers’ ideological constructions and the instability of
hegemonic discourse.

With Baltasar’s imprisonment the myth of racial harmony that was constructed
around him collapses, and with the revolts and massacres that follow, the carnival ﬂow of
nature and history toward destruction begins. The Inquisition quickly decides to restore
Baltasar to his post as Secretary of State, but Baltasar voluntarily renounces his power
and refuses to intervene in the violence. The Bishop writes desperate letters to his young
protégé, trying to convince him of the necessity of “la mentira piadosa,” white lies or
myths, which are reﬂected in the ideological constructions that preserve the peace. But
Baltasar, who has come to recognize himself as the Bishop’s masterpiece, a mere text that
exists as the creation of others, is convinced that carnival violence and destruction are the
ultimate act of liberation, the only way of escaping the gaze of the other and the control of
the hegemonic discourse. He states emphatically: “La smna caridad es la obligada,
insistente y gigantesca destruccien” (95).

In his ﬁnal letter to the Bishop, Baltasar narrates his vision in a dream of
destructive crabs that devour the world. Like the conch shell in Esteban’s meditation, the
crab represents the author’s historical vision. In MED. the conch shell symbolizes the
conciliation between order and chaos, the harmonic unity of nature and history in
continual progression. The crab in Baltasar’s vision is a parody of Esteban’s conch shell
and presents itself as a response to his question: “1,Qué habra en temo mio que esté ya
deﬁnido, inscrito, presente, y ar'rn no pueda entender? LQué sigrro, qué mensaje, que

advertencia en los rizos de la aehicoria, e1 alfabeto de los musgos, la geometria de la

99

pomarrosa. ” (184). The message of the crab is in its distinct perspective of history. This
crustacean represents history’s linear ﬂow toward destruction. We could say that
Rodriguez Julia’s historic vision in La renuncia is a “histrionic” vision, in the Borgesian
sense of the word. In Borges’ short story “The Theologians,” the Histriones are a
religious sect that believes that history never repeats itself and tirerefore it is necessary to
commit all possible atrocities in order to impede their occurrence in the future, and to
accelerate the conclusion of history (553). Baltasar describes his vision in the following
manner:

Ya cede la gran piramide; el mundo fue devorado por los
cangrejos, y era entonces que me colrnaba la dulce sensacien dc caida. Ya
todo cae: cangrejos, piramides y hombres; los humanos ya entienden sus
pasados errores, y se acercan a lo benigno de la destruccién...Y fue asi que
se quede muy aliviado el corazen de los humanos. Ya no existe el tenor, y
ello porque ya no existe vacio que aplaste. Todo lo creado fue devorado.
No hay gigantesco y ﬁero dedo que setiale. Se ha realizado el muy
supremo acto de liberacion. (95)

Rodriguez J ulia’s concept of history in La renuncia negates Carpentier’s
providentialism and his search, in the past and in the present, for indications of a better
future. The ﬁgural allegory, implicit in Lsiglp, loses its ﬁnal stage in this historic
scheme, and without its temporal dimension becomes simple allegory. But in the end it is
important to point out that the novel’s linear and destructive vision of history is not
exactly the vision of the novelist. Rodriguez J ulia reveals his more optimistic vision
through the research of the historian/narrator that attempts to construct a bridge between

the historic ﬁgure of Baltasar Montaiiez and contemporary Puerto Rican culture. As he

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tells his audience, looking into Baltasar’s face will help them to see themselves more
clearly: “El adentramiento en su enigma tiene que ser lento y cuidadoso; solo asi
lograremos reconocer en su rostro e1 nuestro. . .” (46).

In La renuncia Rodriguez Julia tries to destroy the myths of colonial life as a “mar
quieta,” a silent sea, and of racial harmony, in order to better understand the complexity
of contemporary Puerto Rican culture in its battle to deﬁne itself. The author maintains
that Puerto Ricans, like Baltasar, will ﬁrst have to free themselves ﬁom the
(neo)celonizers’ gaze and interpretive discourse that repress the possibility of self-
determination, and reinterpret the ﬁagmented history of the eighteenth century where the
origins of their national culture can be found. The liberation ﬁ'orn the dominating gaze of
hegemonic discourse will come through carnival acts and the destruction of thought
imposed by the (neo)celonizers. But herein lies the contradiction in Rodriguez J ulia’s
argument: the author wants to annul the power of the oppressors’ historic discourse at the
same time that he confers the power of truth upon his own novelistic discourse. For
Gonzalez Echevarria this contradiction is inherent in the Latin American novel:

The novel dons a disguise to appear as something else. That something

else includes a desire to preserve secrets about the origin and history of a

culture, and in this way may be related to the epic... but also its Protean

ability to change and to disavow the knowledge/power equation lodged in

those secrets. (38)

A parallel contradiction occurs in the confrontation of letters between the old

writer, represented by Bishop Larra, and the young writer, represented by Baltasar.
Rodriguez J ulia has said that “La renuncia es una novela sobre la paternidad. .. Mi obra es

un dialogo entre un joven y un viejo, entre la ilusien y el desengafio, entre la inocencia y

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ﬁr.

he

the

la madurez, entre la utopia y la tepia, so peligro de convertir este testimonio en confesien
(“A mitad de camino” 132). In this epistolary interchange we ﬁnd the most profound
theme of the novel: the young writer’s desire to return to the origins, before the
construction of cities and texts, to ﬁnd his “clearing in the jungle.” Rodriguez Julia is
looking for a blank slate, a space without the inﬂuence of historical myths, or the
oppression of other writers’ works where he can begin to write his ﬁrst novel. But once
again a contradiction: this parodic work would not exist without the precursor that the
author attempts to destroy.

Bakhtin speaks of the image of ﬁre in carnival that “simultaneously destroys and
renews the world” (Dostoevsky 126). Dante before the wall of ﬁre at the entrance of
Paradise must take leave of his “sweet father” and guide, Virgil, in order to pass through
its purifying ﬂames. Virgil, who represents “the spirit of knowing through art” (Pinsky),
encourages Dante to proceed forward with conﬁdence in his own will: “I have brought
you here with understanding and with art. Take henceforth your own pleasure as your
guide” (Purgatog, “Canto XXVII”, 130-32). Similarly, Rodriguez J ulia, in writing his
ﬁrst novel, is both guided by and leaves behind his literary master, Carpentier, as the text
he writes passes through the carnival ﬂames of destruction and renewal.

In La renuncia the carnival body emerges to disrupt the authoritative discourse of
the colonizer, the other, and ﬁnally, that of the precursor. And yet, paradoxically,
Rodriguez Julié’s early form of lost-body writing offers little alternative but to respond to
violent hegemonic discourse with more violence, with destruction. In Chapter Three of
this study, I will examine Mario Vargas Llosa’s La gaerra del ﬁn del mundo (1981), a
new historical novel that, in contrast to La renuncia, deplores violent ﬁctions and their

brutal treatment of the body, while offering an alternative form of writing and

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redemption, a form of writing which I call kinder ﬁctions. By analyzing characters and
the ﬁctions that these characters create in terms of Elaine Scarry’s notions of embodiment
and disembodiment, I show that, for Vargas Llosa as for de Certeau, awareness of the
body and bodily experience underlies advancement toward a more civilized and moral

society.

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in!

tha

Chapter 3: Kinder Fictions: Embodiment and Redemption in La gaerra del ﬁn del
mun—do
Angel Rama’s important article “La gaerra del ﬁn del mundo: Una obra maestra

del fanatismo artistico,” identiﬁes two types of fanaticism in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel-
-ene of the body and the other of the mind. According to the Uruguayan critic, the novel
mistakenly values the ﬁrst and condemns the second, which it considers destructive. Are
they not both equally irrational and dangerous, Rama asks, in their rejection of
moderation? Rama pinpoints the source of this contradiction in the novel’s effort to
provide solutions to social conﬂict through individual action. Whereas Euclides da
Cunha in his original work on the conﬂict, Os Sertees (1902), limited his study of the
rebellion in Canudos to analysis of the causes that led to the violence, Vargas Llosa,
according to Rama, “procura dar soluciones, haciendo proposiciones de lo que seria una
especie de moral natural, les impulses a la efectividad y al placer que vienen en la piel de
les seres humanos: ‘il faut cultiver son jardin’” (637). In short, for Rama, the novel’s
scenes of love-making juxtaposed with the epic violence of war create narrative
imbalance, and these “hedonistic” solutions--earlier identiﬁed as fanaticism of the body--
that the text proposes detract from the larger social problem of ideological fanaticism.

I agree with Rama that La gaerra del ﬁn del munjdg (1981) does, indeed, favor
fanaticism of the body over that of the mind. However, 1 disagree with Rama’s judgment
that Vargas Llosa’s bodily solutions detract from the novel’s larger concern with
ideological fanaticism at a social level. An analysis of the role of bodies in the novel’s
depiction of characters and of the relationship of this embodiment to language use reveals
that, for Vargas Llosa, bodies shape moral action on both an individual and societal scale.

In this chapter, I examine characterization in terms of embodiment and disembodiment,

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as deﬁned by Elaine Scarry, what this characterization communicates about each ﬁgure’s
construction of self and his or her social standing, and, in the end, how (dis)embodiment
reveals the author’s attitude toward each character’s moral rectitude. Which is to say, in
answer to Angel Rama’s query, Vargas Llosa does not create all fanatics equally: some
are justiﬁed in their outlook and actions while others are condemned. In addition, several
of these characters, some embodied and some disembodied, are ﬁgures of the writer,
creators of ﬁction. Consequently, I explore the different types of ﬁction that these
“writers” generate, the way each deals with bodies, and the impact of their ﬁctional
creations on the bodies with which they come into contact. Ultimately, Vargas Llosa
privileges what I call “kinder ﬁctions,” that is these ﬁctions that provide a form of
redemption, a more humane concept of self and of the self’s interaction with others by
allowing the body to emerge in discourse rather than repressing it. Furthermore, as
writing and reading are essentially two sides of the same coin, suppressing the body in the
generation of ﬁction may lead to the suppression of bodies in reading, an equally
dangerous practice for Vargas Llosa. Finally, while da Cunha’s original text unwittingly
questioned the accepted positivistic dichotomy between the civilized and the barbaric,
Vargas Llosa’s novel pointedly reconsiders this dichotomy from the standpoint of the
body.” Members of the urban ruling class whose notions of self tend toward
disembodiment, and who are collectively associated with the civilized, are contrasted
with the rural folk that form the religious community in Canudos. These characters are
deeply embodied and are traditionally, as in da Cunha’s text, considered barbaric.
Although at ﬁrst glance, the novel seems to uphold the dichotomy, my analysis of
embodiment in the conception of self and in ﬁctional discourse shows that, in reality, the

novel questions the negative valuing of body in the process of civilization as an obstacle

105

to be overcome, and asserts that the presence of the body is a necessary component in
achieving an ethical society.”

Angel Rama’s observation of La gaerra del ﬁn del mundo’s fanaticism of the
body may be due in part to the novel’s technique of characterization that relies heavily on
bodies as signs of social class and of access, or lack thereof, to power. Speciﬁcally, there
are embodied characters, those whose bodily experience mark their existence and concept
of self, and there are disembodied characters, those whose bodies play little or no
apparent role in the development of their character or in their notion of self. This contrast
between embodied and disembodied is closely related to a character's social class, gender,
or race, all categories that play a role in determining access to power. These characters
associated with the ruling classes, regardless of political afﬁliation, are described and
deﬁned in terms of language, their use of words, and the objects that surround them in
their environment. Whether Republican or Monarchist, these ruling class ﬁgures' bodies,
gestures, and bodily movements are rarely depicted.

In stark contrast, however, are the sertaneros, the people who live in these
isolated backlands, mostly poor, small town folk, whose existence precariously depends
on their harsh environment. It is these rural folk who ultimately form the religious
community in Canudos. These characters are described in terms of their bodies and their
bodily experiences. From the moment they are ﬁrst depicted in the novel Vargas Llosa
deﬁnes them in terms of their scars, deformities, physical peculiarities and suffering. In
addition to characters from the rural, peasant class, female characters, too, tend to be
more deeply inscribed by their bodily experiences, and in particular by the violence of

rape.

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In order to understand why some characters are deﬁned in terms of their bodies
and others in terms of their use of language, it is helpful to turn to Elaine Scarry’s l8.
Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985). In chapter 3 of her
study, entitled “Pain and Imagining,” Scarry describes what she calls the ﬂaming events
of the human psyche, or what we might call a spectrum of sentience. She notes that on
one end of the spectrum is pain, the most embodied state, in that it is an objectless state
where perception is experienced as one’s own body or as bodily sensations. On the other
end of the spectrum lies imagination, a state of disembodiment in which sensation is
experienced as objects other than one’s own body. Scarry describes the state of
disembodiment as one of two possible sensations:

...one seems to become disembodied, either because one seems to have
been transported hundreds of feet beyond the edges of the body into the
external world, or instead because the images of objects ﬁ'om the external
world have themselves been canied into the interior of the body as
perceptual content, and seem to reside there, displacing the dense matter of
the body itself. (165)
For Scarry this disembodied state of imagination, ﬁee of pain, is the state that she
connects to the “making” of the world, these activities that allow one to share thoughts
and ideas with others through acts of creation or civilization. As Scarry envisions it,
between the two ﬁaming events of pain and imagining, between total embodiment and
total disembodiment, lies the whole reahn of human experience.

Scarry further demonstrates that the experience of embodiment or pain has the

capacity to absorb one’s perception of the world entirely with the suffering of one’s own

body, canceling the content of the world and, in turn, destroying a person’s ability to use

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language and to extend one’s self beyond the body (35). F or this reason she associates
the state of embodiment with the “unmaking” of the world and acts of “decivilization.”
Scarry uses the extreme example of torture to illustrate how intense experiences of pain
that increase the torture victim’s perception of his or her own body, disintegrate the world
or civilization beyond the body and, with it, the ability to communicate that suffering to
others through language. At the same time, by making the voiceless victim’s entire world
a weapon with which to inﬂict pain, the torturer expands his voice and increases his
power.

In considering Scarry’s notion of embodiment it is important to keep in mind the
negative value she assigns to this state and consequently to the body. In fact, Scarry’s
theory of the making and unmaking of the world, though in many ways revolutionary, at
the same time, stems ﬁom the traditional mind/body dualism. This dualism sees the body
as the negative other of the mind, an obstacle to the painless state of imagining in which
acts of civilization are possible. The body and embodiment seem to represent for Scarry
the uncivilized past while disembodiment represents the ultimate goal of civilization as it
progresses and evolves.‘0

I propose to use Scany’s concepts of embodiment and disembodiment, even as I
set aside her dualist perspective. It will become clear during the course of this analysis
that, rather than viewing embodiment as a purely negative state, I conceive of it as our
actual state, in that we are always embodied. On the other hand, disembodiment is a
notion of self in which one tends to disassociate oneself from one’s own body. As we
saw in the Introduction to this study, Arthur Frank considers the relationship that an
individual establishes between his or herself and the body to be an essential element in

the construction of identity, or what I have called embodied subjectivity. In addition, my

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modiﬁed formulation of (dis)embodiment questions the dualist tendency to associate the
body and embodiment exclusively with negative qualities such as decivilization or
barbarism, irrationality, pain, and hedonism, as both Scarry and Rama do. Indeed, Vargas
Llosa’s novel subverts this negative valuing of the body by problematizing the traditional
dualist notion of the body as barbaric, and at the same time proposes bodily solutions to
the moral dilemmas presented by the text.

In this chapter, then, my modiﬁed use of Scarry’s theory of the making and
unmaking of the world supplements de Ccrteau’s general assertions about the subversive
impact of the emergence of bodies in discourse that forms the basis of my analysis.
Although both theorists are interested in the relationship between the violent treatment of
bodies and the production of discourse, Scarry focuses more speciﬁcally on the inﬂiction
of bodily pain as way of generating a sense of reality. F or Scarry, the “open” body
confers reality on baseless ﬁctions or ideologies. De Certeau, on the other hand, addresses
the suppression of bodies of all kinds ﬁom discourse that claims to produce knowledge.
For de Certeau, the body is “the price paid” when scientiﬁc writing inscribes the
unarticulated natural world. In short, that while dc Certeau and Scarry are at loggerheads
in certain aspects of their theories, most conspicuously in Scarry’s negative appraisal of
embodiment, both share a strong ethical interest in exploring the way bodies participate in
creative acts and the way violence is used against bodies to produce knowledge, to
establish “truth,” and to claim power.

The embodied characters in La gaerra del ﬁn del malaria are those who the
narrator describes in terms of their bodies and bodily acts: they are frequently these who
suffer pain, whether it is the pain of poverty and neglect, pain inﬂicted by the violence of

others or by the institutions of society, the pain of physical deformity, or pain that is self-

109

inﬂicted. Their embodiment as characters indicates that their conception of self is closely
associated, rather than disassociated, with their bodies and bodily practices. Depending
on the level of their embodiment, these characters’ sense of self is more or less likely to
be deﬁned in terms of their use of language, as a close analysis of some of the principal
embodied characters in the novel reveals. It should be noted that, although Vargas Llosa
employs an omniscient narrator in the novel, this does not preclude my analysis ﬁ'om
examining concepts of self. Indeed, Vargas Llosa’s narrator is able to delve into the
minds of the enormous cast of characters through the use of focalisers—characters
through whose eyes we view the world, the changing reality, and even each character’s
concept of self.‘I

Embodied characters in the novel include the brothers Antonio and Horacio
Vilanova and their families who, before becoming followers of the Counselor, suffer the
bodily calamities typical of the region’s poor—illness in the form of an epidemic of
smallpox that kills their parents and other family members; years of drought and then
ﬂoods which leave them homeless, destitute, and suffering starvation and thirst. Then,
exposed to the elements, one of their children dies of dysentery, another of a simple cold,
while still another loses his sight. Later, a scorpion bite debilitates Horacio. The
suffering and bitterness of their lives, like so many of the Counselor’s followers, is
continual until they settle in Canudos with the other pilgrims where they ﬁnd alleviation
ﬁ‘om their misery (82-87).

In addition, various characters in La gaerra del ﬁn del mundo are embodied by the
violence of others. Catarina, the wife of Joao Abade (known before his conversion as
Joao Satan), suffers a brutal rape and stabbing. She is one of the few survivors ﬁ'om her

village of an attack carried out by a group of bandits led by her future husband. Her

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fragile body seems permanently marked by the pain she suffers, communicated to the

observer, here J oao Abade, by her fragility and the anguish in her eyes:
Habia entre ellos una ﬁgura tan delgada que parecia espiritu, embutida en
una tunica blanca como un sudario. El ex-cangaceiro habia encontrado
muchas veces les ojos de la mujer, ﬁjos en él, durante las marchas, les
rezos, los descansos. Lo ponian incemodo y, por mementos, lo asustaban.
Eran ojos devastados por el dolor, que parecian amenazarlo con castigos
que no eran de este mundo. (180)

Later, Vargas Llosa describes her as emaciated, mortally sad, and a person whom most

people had never seen smile nor heard speak (342-43). Catarina embodies physical and

emotional pain--her silence points to the way immense suffering destroys language, as she

continues to suffer for years after the original violence.

At the same time, J 050 Grande exempliﬁes an embodied character who suffers the
pain inﬂicted by an institution of society—slavery. Joao Grande’s pain is not inﬂicted by
actual whips and chains, or other weapons of slavery, as he was adopted into his master’s
family and “privileged” to live in the big house, however, the pain of his embodiment is
still quite real. Not only is his body not his own because of his legal status as a slave, his
very body is a “product” of the careful breeding the master learned ﬁ'om years of mating
the ﬁnest stallions and mares in Bahia:

Su proceder era dictado por el ojo y la inspiracien. Consistia en
seleccionar a las negritas mas agiles y mejor formadas y en arnancebarlas
con los negros que por armenia de rasgos y nitidez de color él llamaba mas

puros. .. J oao Grande ﬁre e1 resultado de una de esas combinaciones que

lll

llevaba a cabo ese hacendado de gustos perfeccionistas. En su case, sin
duda, nacio un magniﬁco producto. (35-36)

The narrator never explicitly tells us of J 030 Grande’s pain and suffering that
result ﬁom being the creation of this eugenic experimentation and sexual bondage. He
does, however, hint at the character’s underlying turbulence as Joao Grande matures—his
physical strength, his brutal nature, and his lack of affection or feeling for anyone,
including his own mother (37). But the depth of Joao Grande’s torment becomes clear
when he attacks his master’s old-maid sister--the woman who raised him--with diabolic
savagery, stripping her of clothing, humiliating and raping her, stabbing her to death, and
ﬁnally, dismembering her body (38). Later, when he is asked why he was driven to kill,
he simply replies: “Porque tengo al Perro en el cuerpo” (39). This escaped slave
experiences the agony of his body as possession by Satan, who is expressed through Joao
Grande in an explosion of violence. Clearly, while Vargas Llosa describes these
characters in terms of their physical suffering, thus, “embodying” them, several
characters, by inﬂicting violence on others, also embody their victims. Joao Grande is
similar to characters such as J 050 Satan and Galileo Gall, who after being embodied by,
or suffering violence at the hands of others, become violent as well. Therefore, the
experience of extreme embodiment often leads to the expression of that embodiment by
inﬂicting pain on (or embodying) others.

Vargas Llosa also embodies other characters not only by their poverty but also by
the trials of physical deformities. For example, Pajer'r has been marked physically by his
violent life with a notorious scar across his face. One hunter, Ruﬁno, describes Pajer'r
when he ﬁrst sees the legendary bandit as “un cabocle fortachon, amarillento, con una

cicatriz que lo ha privado casi de nariz” (234). When Pajer'r arrives at Calumbi to

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announce the burning of the estate, the Baron dc Canabrava searches the outlaw’s
deformed face for signs of his violent past: “El Baron trato de identiﬁcar en esos ojitos
pertinaces, en esas facciones curtidas, las fechorias y crimenes que se le atribuian. La
feroz cicatriz, que podia ser de bala, faca o zarpa, rememoraba la violencia de su vida”
(237). Pajer'r’s facial features are so strongly tied to his identity that even as he lies dying,
the soldier who kills him observes how these features augment his bravura: “la cicatriz
benneja ha crecido, cubre la cara del bandido, una masa de barre y sangre sin rasgos ni
ferrna. Pero tiene arin les ojos abiertos y hay arin en ellos esa indiferencia tan ofensiva y
tan extraiia” (498).

Other characters that suffer from physical deformity, including Leon de Natuba,
the storytelling Dwarf, and the myopic journalist, problematize the relationship between
language and embodiment. Leon de Natuba, for instance, endures the embarrassment and
rejection of his family, insults and beatings from other children, the prejudice and
suspicion of town people, physical abuse and humiliation at the hands of drunks, and
ﬁnally, nearly being bumed alive by the father of a young girl who blames him for his
daughter’s death. But Leon dc Natuba’s only fault was having been born deformed:

Le pusieron Leon tal vez per burla, seguramente per la inmensa
cabeza que, mas tarde, come para dar razon a les bromistas, se cubriria en
efecto dc unas tupidas crenchas que le tapaban las orejas y zangoloteaban
con sus movimientos. O, tal vez, por su manera de andar, animal sin duda
alguna, apoyandose a la vez en los pies y en las manos (que protegia con
unas suelas de cuero come pezufias o cascos) aunque su ﬁgura, al andar,
con sus piemas cortitas y sus largos brazos que se posaban en tierra de

manera interrnitente, era mas la de un simio que la de un predador. .. For

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su peculiar manera de moverse nunca vistio pantalones, solo tunicas, come
las mujeres, los misioneros o les penitentes del Buen J esr’rs. (101)

Leon de Natuba’s strange, animal-like body is such a source of preoccupation for
him, for his family, and for the people of the town in which he lives, that, at one point, he
is forced to join the travelling circus to be a monster or ﬁeak in the side show, where it is
believed he will ﬁnally ﬁt in. Clearly, his body and his deformity dominate Leon dc
Natuba’s construction as a character, as well as his construction of self.

However, another of Leon’s distinguishing characteristics that provokes wonder
while still arousing suspicion is his ability to read and write in a town of illiterates.
Although he willingly lends his services to those who need correspondence transcribed,
his own words are highly suspect. When he composes and sings a song for Ahnudia, a
young girl who later becomes gravely ill, he is accused of smiting her with a curse and the
evil eye that bring about her death. Upon being saved ﬁ'om the funeral pyre by the
Counselor and his wandering group of pilgrims, he joins them and becomes the holy
man’s scribe, writing down the words he speaks, words that he hopes will serve as
scripture for the faithful of the future. Thus, Vargas Llosa problematizes Leon de
Natuba’s relationship with language, which is ambiguous at best. When the words he
transcribes belong to others, they represent no threat to the people around him. However,
when this highly embodied character attempts to express his own thoughts, to extend
himself into the world, or to represent himself, through language, as in the song for
Almudia, his words meet with suspicion and fear (100-105).

The Dwarf, the star of the Gypsy’s travelling circus, at ﬁrst shares his anomalous
physical state with the other monstrous entertainers that make up his “family:” the

Bearded Lady, the Giant, the Human Spider, and the Idiot (149-50). Having lost the other

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members of his troupe to starvation, the Dwarf clings helplessly to J urema, another
refugee of the war, with whom he manages to escape ﬁ'om being killed by retreating
Republican soldiers. The Dwarf’s intense will to live moves J urema, when he manages to
keep up with her after many hours of running without rest, and in spite of his physical
impairments: “Cuando ya no pudo correr, siguie andando. Pensaba, compadecida, en lo
extenuado que debia estar e1 Enano, con sus piemas cortitas, a quien, sin embargo, no
habia sentido quej arse y que habia corrido prendide con ﬁrrneza de su mane” (313).

The Dwarf is particularly vulnerable because of his diminutive size and spends
much time seeking protection ﬁom the violence around him, yet because of his embodied
state, the Dwarf empathizes with the suffering of others, and tries to protect those who are
in need, in particular, the myopic journalist. As the journalist explains to the Baron de
Cafiabrava, he owes a large debt to the Dwarf who saved his life during his long stay in
Canudos through the joy and entertainment of his storytelling (338). In fact, the Dwarf’ 8
use of language allows him to give strength and comfort to those around him even in the
midst of war. Joao Abade also reﬂects on the Dwarfs stories, and, remembering the
happiest moments in his life (64), ﬁnds courage and contentment in them:

En ese, algo lo hace detenerse dc golpe. Cierra les ojos, para
escuchar. No se ha equivocado, no es suei‘io. La vez monotona, aﬁnada,
sigue recitando. Desde el fondo de su memoria, cascada que crece y se
toma rio, algo exaltante toma fonna y coagula en un tropel de espadas y un
relumbre de palacios y alcobas lujosisimas. “La batalla del Caballero
Olivero con Fierab ”, piensa. Es uno de les episodios que mas lo
seducen de las historias de les Doce Pares de Francia, un duelo que no ha

vuelto a oir desde hace muchisimo tiempo. La vez del trovero viene de la

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encruciaj ada entre Carnpo Grande y el Callejen del Divine. .. Quien canta
la prision dc Oliveros y su duelo con Fierabras es un nii‘io. No, es un
enano. Minr'rsculo, delgadito, hace come que toca una guitarra y ya
también mimando el cheque de las lanzas, el galope de los jinetes, las
venias cortesanas a1 Gran Carlomagno. (347)

In “Roberto el Diablo,” one of the Dwarf’ s tales, the basic plot structure is that a
young boy becomes a cruel man, experiences a miraculous conversion, and therefore
becomes a good man through repentance. As Leopoldo Bemucci explains, this plot runs
parallel to the life of Joao Abade (Bemucci 371), and thus, the story assures the fonner
criminal of eternal life rather than condemnation.

Crippled by fragility, myopia and sudden ﬁts of sneezing, unlike the more
gregarious Dwarf, the myopic jeumalist is, at the beginning, quite isolated and alone in
his suffering. We ﬁrst observe him at work in his ofﬁce at the J omal de Noticias:

...esta, solo, ese periodista joven, ﬂaco, desgarbado, cuyos espejos
de miope, sus frecuentes estomudos y su mania de escribir con una pluma
de ganso en vez de hacerlo con una de metal son motive de bromas entre
la gente dc oﬁcio. Inclinado sobre su pupitre, la desgraciada cabeza
inmersa en el halo de la larnparilla, en una postura que lo ajoroba y
mantiene el sesgo del tablero, escribe de prisa, deteniéndose solo para
mojar la pluma en el tintero o consultar una libretita de apuntes, que acerca
a los anteojos casi hasta tocarlos. (129)

Here Vargas Llosa emphasizes the character’s embodied state, and also how, for
the jeumalist, the act of writing is very much an embodied activity, one that is both

impeded by his body and intertwined with his bodily functions. Later in the novel when

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the jeumalist breaks his glasses during one of his sneezing attacks, he loses the ability to
continue writing his reports on the war. However, when this barrier of the glasses——a
form of civilized impedimenta—is removed, the myopic jeumalist becomes more open to
others, especially those he once considered barbaric, irrational backlanders, as he
becomes dependent on them for his survival. He is increasingly aware of his own
embodied state and, as a result of his suffering, more aware and more compassionate of
the suffering around him. It is no coincidence that the Dwarf, the nameless journalist,
and Leon de Natuba, all characters who suffer from physical deformities, are also ﬁgures
of the writer in the novel, a theme to which we will return later in this analysis. Sufﬁce it
to say for new that all three use language as a means to overcome their own deﬁciencies,
and to be of worth to their communities.

Finally, several characters in La gaerra del ﬁn del mundo actually choose to inﬂict
pain on themselves and, in so doing, emphasize their own embodied state. Although one
might think this self-embodying behavior is a form of renouncing the body and thus, a way
of achieving a disembodied state, Scarry asserts that the opposite is true:

The self-ﬂagellation of the religious ascetic, for example, is not (as
is often asserted) an act of denying the body, eliminating its claims from
attention, but a way of emphasizing the body that the contents of the world
are cancelled and the path is clear for the entry of an unwordly, contentless
force... the metaphysical is insistently coupled with the physical with the
equally insistent exclusion of the middle term, world. (34)

According to Scarry, those who are self-embodied inﬂict pain on themselves

willingly in order to draw closer to themselves, their bodies, and to God, to expand the

perception of their bodies through suffering, and to collapse the notion of a meaningful

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world outside of themselves. Of the characters in the novel, El Beatito ﬁts Scarry’s
model. However, Vargas Llosa’s depictions of Maria Quadrado and the Counselor
subvert, in part, Scarry’s paradigm of the world-creating possibilities of the self-
embodied character.

To begin with, Antonio da Meta, better known as el Beatito, the Little Blessed
One, is an example of a self-embodied character that conforms to Scarry’s model. To
prove his love and devotion to God and the Counselor, he wears a wire around his waist
that lacerates his skin, turning it black and blue. Once the rawness diminishes, he cinches
the wire even tighter again under his coarse woollen shirt. When the Counselor and his
followers return to Pombal, the Little Blessed One reveals his sacriﬁce of pain without
speaking; as the narrator states, “no hubiera podido” (24), he would not have been able to
speak. The pain he suffers from his self-inﬂicted wounds make it difﬁcult to express
himself verbally, recalling again Scarry’s assertion that pain destroys language. Although
part of the religious community, El Beatito spends most of his time in prayer, withdrawn
from the world, submerged in the exaltation he feels ﬁ'om the pain of self-ﬂagellation.

On the other hand, Maria Quadrado exempliﬁes a self-embodying character that
does, in fact, extend herself into the world. She walks barefoot carrying a large cross for
three months across the deserts of the region to arrive at Monte Santo. Once there, she
reaches the summit of the mountain by crawling for hours on hands and knees. On her
pilgrimage, she endures hunger, thirst, and four rapes, tests that she believes God subjects
her to in order to expiate her sins (49-53). After her long penitence, Maria Quadrado
makes a home for herself in a small cave near Monte Santo, where she paints the scenes
from Christ’s Passion, inspirational art that she shares with pilgrims who visit the holy

site. In addition, she serves her new community with acts of goodness, carrying for the

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sick, acting as a midwife to women giving birth, mediating between quarrelling couples,
giving refuge to battered women, and providing food and clothing to the poor and elderly.
Maria Quadrado’s spirituality is not conﬁned within her body, but is shared with others in
her community through her art and charitable works.

Moreover, the Counselor himself is the ultimate example of a self-embodied
character who, rather than cancelling the content of the world, reaches out to the world
and creates a healing community through his teachings and through his use of language.
The Counselor, like e1 Beatito, wears a wire around his waist, and in addition, walks long
distances as he travels to preach ﬁ'om town to town, choosing to live the lifestyle of an
ascetic--eating very little and sleeping outside, exposed to the rain and the cold, even
when shelter is offered to him. The novel opens with an unattributed drawing of the
gangly ﬁgure of the Counselor. The drawing is followed by the narrator’s detailed
description of the Counselor’s body, dress, facial expressions, the way he moves, and his
eating and sleeping habits:

El hombre era alto y tan ﬂaco que parecia siempre de perﬁl. Su piel era
oscura, sus huesos prominentes y sus ojos ardian con fuego perpetuo.
Calzaba sandalias de pastor y la trinica morada que le caia sobre el cuerpo
recordaba e1 habito de esos misioneros que, de cuando err cuando,
visitaban les pueblos del serten bautizando muchedumbres dc nifios y
casando alas parejas amancebadas. Era imposible saber su edad, su
procedencia, su historia, pero algo habia en su facha tranquila, en sus
eostumbres ﬁ'ugales, en su impertublable seriedad que, aun antes dc que

diera consejos, atraia alas gentes. (15)

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The passage continues by describing the activities the Counselor undertakes upon
arriving in each town, and ﬁnally, the practical advice he gives and the lessons he teaches
to the people there. First, he empathizes with their suffering and their losses, and then he
prays for them. Immediately he goes about restoring churches and repairing cemeteries,
and ﬁnally, he heals the hearts of the poor with his words by giving them hope for a better
future.

The Counselor’s words are clearly those of a fanatic, irrational, and without basis
in reality. Some of his reported preachings are outlandish, especially those that describe
the nearing end of the world and the signs that will precede it: the ocean will turn into the
dry serton and the serten into sea, the number of hats will increase and the number of
heads decrease, the rivers will run red, and a new planet will cross space (1 7). The newly
established Republic ﬁnds others of his teachings threatening: the scandals of the
separation of Church and State, and of the secularization of marriage and cemeteries, the
refusal to pay taxes and to participate in the census. From the Republican perspective,
these are all teachings that seem to attempt to turn back time, and instill the suspicion that
the Counselor’s true aim is to reestablish monarchical rule.

In a sense the Counselor’s words are a ﬁction. They construct an imaginary
world out of real edicts and events by placing them in a new context, and giving them
new meaning and new urgency. However, I suggest that the ﬁgure of the Counselor
problematizes the practice of grouping all fanatical characters in the novel into a single

mom] category, as Rama does when he argues that fanaticism of all kinds should be
denounced equally. The Uruguayan critic is correct, however, in stating that the novel
does not judge them by equal measure. The text reveals that Vargas Llosa favors one

form of fanaticism, one form of ﬁction, over another. This is because, in addition to the

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Counselor’s ludicrous teachings on the devil State and the apocalypse, the Counselor’s
ﬁction gives language to the suffering of the poor, the ill, and the deformed: an act that in
itself diminishes pain, according to Scarry, and allows these that suffer to rediscover their
voice:

An act of human contact and concern... provides the hurt person
with worldly self-extension: in acknowledging and expressing another
person’s pain, or in articulating one of his nonbodily concerns while he is
unable to, one human being who is well and ﬁ'ee willingly turns himself
into an image of the other’s psychic or sentient claims, an image existing
in space outside of the sufferer’s body, projected out into the world and
held there intact by that person’s powers until the sufferer himself regains
his own powers of self-extension. By holding that world in place, or by
giving the pain a place in the world, sympathy lessens the power of
sickness and pain, counteracts the force with which a person in great pain
or sickness can be swallowed alive by the body. (Body in Pain 50)

The Counselor’s compassionate words allow the poor of the backlands to move
beyond their own pain, and to participate in world creating activities again. In this way
the followers of the Counselor begin to establish their community in Canudos, a society
that provides food, shelter, and meaning to the poor, which neither the Monarchy nor the

Republic has done. Yet not all creators of ﬁction in the novel are inspired by such
Philanthropic motives as the Counselor’s, making his fanaticism relatively less
reprehensible.

In concluding this analysis of embodied characters, it is important to call attention

to the range of possibilities of embodiment as represented by Vargas Llosa’s characters.

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Clearly, Catarina’s silence and J 050 Grande’s display of violence indicate the most
extreme cases of embodiment. Their concept of self is so strongly connected to bodily
suffering that this aspect of their subjectivity, their relationship with their physical bodies,
govems their sense of self. In contrast, the storytelling Dwarf, the myopic jeumalist, and
the Counselor exemplify characters who adapt to their embodied state and strive to use
their bodily experience to become more aware of the suffering around them, to become
more compassionate, and, consequently, to endeavor to diminish the pain of others
through their words.

The myopic joumalist’s process of adaptation is explicitly depicted through the
course of the novel, which allows the reader to witness his increasing awareness of his
embodiment and how this awareness changes his notion of self. In Arthur Frank’s terms,
he becomes more open to interaction and constitution by others, and he increasingly
associates, rather than disassociates, his notion of self with his physical body.
Furthermore, we see how his understanding of desire evolves from a sense of
incompleteness to a force of energy that pushes him forward. At the end of the novel, his
commitment to writing the story of Canudos and the people there, to set the record
straight about the reasons for the conﬂict, and to tell of his admiration of the yaguncos
faith rather than of his abhorrence of their fanaticism, demonstrate his compassion for
their suffering and the desire to give language to it.

As mentioned earlier, Vargas Llosa describes some characters, in contrast to the
embodied characters I have just analyzed, much less in terms of their bodies and more in
terms of their use and manipulation of language. The absence of bodily description in the
ChaI’aCterization of a ﬁgure seems to indicate membership in the political class and access

to Power. These characters’ bodily status and well-being never come into question due to

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their social and economic position in Bahian society. In fact, this lack of preoccupation
with their bodies bolsters their concept of self, creating a distancing ﬁ'om the body or a
sense of disembodiment that, Scarry would argue, allows an individual to participate in
acts of creation or in the making of the world.‘2 One of the characters I have in mind
here, Eparninondas Gonealves, is indeed a creator, a generator of ﬁction, but, in contrast
to Scarry’s conception of disembodiment, this disembodied character’s ﬁctions are world
destroying rather than world creating. Eparninondas Gonealves’ destructive creation,
indeed, reverses the conventional duality that relates disembodiment with the civilized
and embodiment with the barbaric.

We are ﬁrst introduced to Gonealves, the director of the Jomal de Noticias and
head of the Bahian Republican Party, in the second section of Part One of the novel.
Devoting only one sentence to his description, the narrator gives us relatively little
information about the physical aspects of this character: “Ocupa el r’mico escritorio, lleva
betas, un traje gris, y es joven y moreno, de aires enérgicos” (18). In comparison to the
extensively detailed physical descriptions of the embodied characters we examined
previously, this description is curt and almost disinterested. The rest of the section is
dedicated to Gonealves’ dialogue with Galileo Gall (whose body is described with a
luxury of detail) and his fascination with the Scottish anarchist. Gonealves reappears in
Part Two of the novel, which consists of three sections, all dedicated to this character and
his manipulation of the political fallout ﬁ'om the occupation of Canudos by the Counselor

and his followers. In these pages the reader might hope to ﬁnd a more detailed physical
description of this skillful politician, but instead encounters him, once again, behind his
dCSk and depicted again in terms of his energy, this time though, through the eyes of the

myOpic jeumalist with few details added:

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Tiene los codes sobre la mesa y las manos cruzadas. Al verlo, su cara
morena, angulosa, en la que rasgos y huesos estan subrayados per esa
energia interior que le permite pasar las noches en blanco en reuniones
politicas y luego trabajar todo el dia sin dar muestras de cansancio, se
distiende come si se dijera “per ﬁn”. (129)
Of particular interest in this description is the fact that Gonealves’ face does not reﬂect,
and is apparently unaffected by, his physical exhaustion, an indication of the disconnect
between the character’s body and his notion of self. This partial physical description is
followed by a lengthy article written by the myopic journalist, but commissioned by
Gonealves, that narrates the meeting of the legislative assembly of the State of Bahia after
the defeat of the second military campaign to Canudos (131-38). In this section we
observe Gonealves’ masterful manipulation of language and events as he accuses the
ruling Autonomist party of supporting the rebellion in Canudos in order to overthrow the
newly established Brazilian Republic. Thus, Vargas Llosa’s characterization of
Gonealves is practically bodiless, and focuses instead on this character’s ability to create
a powerful ﬁction about the Canudos rebellion, a ﬁction notable for its violence.
Gonealves’ ﬁction not only manages to construct historical events and then
impose meaning on them, but also requires bodies to sustain it and to falsely substantiate
its veracity. Upon learning of Galileo Gail's misplaced support for the rebels in Canudos,
Gonealves convinces Gall to take a shipment of arms to the rebels, purporting that this
military aid is necessary to help bring about the overthrow of pro-monarchist rule in the
State of Bahia. Gonealves tells Gall that a defeat for the Baron de Cafiabrava in Canudos
Will bring to an end his party's dictatorial reign in the region (66). We learn later that

Gonealves never intends for the arms to reach the religious rebels. Instead he has

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arranged for Gall to be murdered en route to the commune with his guns, so that Gall’s
body will serve as physical evidence to back up the Jornal de Noticig's claims of
conspiracy between the rebels, the Baron's Autonomist Party and the British crown. The
Scottish Gall, with his ﬂaming red hair is to serve as an "English corpse" (p. 113).
Ironically, due to a series of unforeseeable events, the English corpse never materializes.
Even Epaminondas Gonealves with his narrative power and complex manipulations
cannot impose order on the chaotic events that surround him, as he loses control of his
ﬁction. Instead of the whole body, he must settle for only locks of Gail's red hair as proof
of the British connection to the Baron and the yaguncos.

The narrative that Gonealves creates surrounding the rebellion at Canudos, which
reﬂects his beliefs and desires, takes hold in the imagination of the Brazilian public. Like
Borges' ﬁctitious universe of Tlen, which explodes into reality and whose culture
eventually takes over the world, Gonealves' narrative representation of the events at
Canudos, as expounded in his newspaper, becomes the accepted version of the rebellion.
This public acceptance of his ﬁction is a reﬂection of his present authority as the owner
and editor of a leading newspaper, and, at the same time, leads to his increasing power in
the State of Bahia. F or although the development of his narrative escapes his control, the
outcome is still favorable for his party. The Baron and Gonealves ultimately decide to
join forces to prevent increased central gevemment involvement in the region, with the
agreement that the Republican Party leader will become the state's new governor.

The connections between power, ﬁction-making, and violence in the novel cannot
be overlooked. Gonealves struggles to gain political power in the region, which, for him
equates with the ability to interpret events and, therefore, with storytelling. But in order

for his representation of events to become the "ofﬁcial" history he must impose his

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ﬁctionalized order on the chaos of reality, and he must kill a man for his story to become
fact. Once his ﬁction is released for public consumption it leads to even further violence.
It incites riots in the capital of Rio de J aneiro where several Autonomist Party leaders and
newspaper editors are assassinated by angry Republican mobs. Gonealves’ use of the
open body to substantiate his ﬁction, what Scarry calls the “laying edge to edge of the
extremes of the material and the immaterial” (126), his placing the injured or dead body
alongside ideology or ﬁction, is what gives his story veracity. This disembodied
character’s violent narrative relies on the ﬁction-generating capacity of the injured body,
even as the suffering body dissipates and ﬁnally disappears in his story.‘3

Compared to the Counselor’s kinder ﬁction, Gonealves’ construct is motivated by
the desire for power. It manipulates without regard for its impact on people’s lives. It
inﬂicts pain and suffering in order to accomplish its goals, and it destroys bodies to
impose its point of view. It is just this type of writing--writing that sacriﬁces bodies to
substantiate itself, to grant it reality, and then represses bodies to produce knowledge and
claim power-~that troubled de Certeau and that led him to propose ways of subverting this
violent writing. What are the consequences when this destructive form of ﬁction
succeeds in claiming power? Is one of these consequences 3 sense of betrayal, a loss of
faith in language and writing? What impact do violent ﬁctions have on their readers?

We ﬁnd answers to these questions by analyzing a naive reader of Gonealves’
ﬁction, Galileo Gall. While the embodied characters I analyzed are embodied by their
own experiences and in turn by the narrator, Galin Gall is embodied in the narrative, but
disembodied in his concept of self, creating a chasm between the way other characters
and the narrator see him and the way he sees himself. This lack of self-awareness is

Characteristic of Gall, a Scottish anarchist, infamous political agitator and terrorist, and

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phrenologist—that is, a scientist who analyses behavior and personality traits by
examining the shape and protuberances of the skull with his hands. In fact, Gall’s faulty
self-understanding combined with his poor understanding of others (in particular the
people of Canudos) and fed by his adherence to a discredited science, and his
misapprehension of the events around him, make him the quintessential ﬁgure of
misreading.
From his ﬁrst appearance in the text, Gall stands out as physically distinctive and,
therefore, marked by his bodily difference. His curly red hair and beard, his blue eyes, as
well as his heavy accent, indicate his foreigrress, distinctions between himself and other
characters that he fails to perceive but that others consistently focus on:
Viste de oscuro, con una levita de dos puntas y un sombrero hongo que
denotan use. Una enrulada cabellera rojiza 1e cubre las orejas. Es mas
alto que bajo, dc anchas espaldas, solido, maduro. .. Tiene una barbita
rojiza come sus cabellos, y sus ojos penetrantes, muy claros; su boca
ancha esta ﬁ'uncida con ﬁrmeza y las ventanillas de su nariz, muy abiertas,
parecen aspirar mas aire del que necesitan. (18-19)

When he reappears in the text, the narrator does not, at ﬁrst, identify him by name but

rather by his red hair and beard (47).

In addition to the obvious physical and linguistic distinctions, the cultural gap
between Gall and the people of the region is enennous. Gall’s praise for the revolt in
Canudos as well as his interpretation of the events sun'ounding the religious community
as an anarchist rebellion, are ideas that come across as totally absurd to political ﬁgures in
the capital and to the sertaneros of the backlands. No one can make sense of this strange

ﬁgure or his abstract ranting about exploitation, injustice, and revolution. And yet, this

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self-anointed intellectual is unaware that others, even the least educated of society,
perceive him as a fool. For example, as Gall travels toward Canudos with J urema and the
members of the circus, the group, on the verge of starvation, stops to give a performance
in a small town in hopes of receiving food in exchange for entertainment. But as the
Dwarf captivates the crowd with his stories, Gall, seeing an opportunity to call his
brothers to arms in support of the yaguncos, interrupts with one of his incoherent,
political diatribes. As usual, he shows little awareness that his words mean nothing to the
backlanders. The Bearded Lady tries to stop him ﬁom ruining their opportunity to cat by
pointing out the obvious: “--;Estr'rpido! iEstr'rpido! iNadie te entiende! iLos estas
peniendo tristes, los estas abuniende, no nos daran de comer! jTocales la cabeza, diles e1
future, algo que les alegre!” (226).

Yet even while his identity in the narrative is bound up with his body, the
character sees himself as disembodied. Gall fancies himself an intellectual and a writer,
and several articles that he sends to l’Etincelle de la révolte. a small anarchist newspaper
published in Lyon, are included in the novel. Nevertheless, we learn from the Baron dc
Caiiabrava that the newspaper had ceased to exist years before, and Gall’s writings about
his heroic endeavors in Brazil had no readers (434). Furthermore, the committed activist
distances his concept of self ﬁom his body and his desires by taking an oath of celibacy in
order to focus his mental energy on his political activities and his ﬁght for justice.“
Ironically, his supposed ability to dominate and control his body and sexual urges, is
revealed to be a farce when, on a whim, he rapes J urema, and commits the ultimate
injustice. In the end, his existence is tied to his physical body rather than to his ability to
think and use language, and his greatest fear--to die a senseless death--is played out. Gall

and Ruﬁno, J urema’s husband, both die in conjunction ﬁghting out their differences in

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hand-to-hand combat in the midst of a battle between Republican forces and the
yaguncos.

In addition to misreading himself, others, and the rebellion in Canudos, Gail’s
misplaced faith in phrenology (which causally links random head protuberances to
temperament), also exempliﬁes Gall as a naive reader. His reading of history reveals an
analogous tendency to give meaning and order to random events. He writes in one of his
articles concerning the Counselor:

Nosotros sabemos, compaiieros, que no existe el azar en la historia, que,
por arbitraria que parezca, hay siempre una racionalidad encubierta detras
de la mas confusa aparieneia. . . La racionalidad esta grabada en la cabeza
de todo hombre, y... puede guiarlo,. .. a actuar en la direccion de la
historia. (90)
Hayden White argues, on the contrary, that in order for real events to have meaning they
must take the form of a story in which an inherent order is revealed, or rather invented
(“The Value of Narrativity”). For Gall that inherent order seems naturally there; history
has a shape and a direction that can be deciphered. Vargas Llosa’s vision of history as
expressed in the novel, like White’s, is history as chaotic, arbitrary events that only ﬁnd
order and coherence through ﬁction."

The most revealing example of Gall as the ﬁgure of misreading is his gullible
reading of Gonealves’ ﬁction concerning the shipment of guns to Canudos in support of
the rebels. Gall accepts this apparently coherent story without seeing the ruptures or
gaps, in other words, the "countertext," or even considering its existence. He is wrapped
up in following the events of what he interprets and hopes to be an anarchist revolution in

the backlands. Gail's unsuspecting reading of events is reminiscent of Borges' arrogant

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detective, Erik Lennrot, who credulously connects constructed clue after constructed clue
to form a believable narration, which, instead of leading to the prevention of the predicted
fourth crime, leads to his own murder (F icciones, 147-63). In fact, Gall's misreading of
Gonealves' violent narrative twice nearly costs him his life. It is not until Caifas,
Gonealves' hired killer, literally spells out to him the intended plot (whose desired
outcome is all but certain as the killer holds a gun to his head) that Gall understands the
extent of his own na'r'veté. But the fortuitous nature of reality is revealed when Jurema,
the woman who Gall has just raped, inexplicably intervenes on Gall's behalf, preventing
Caifas ﬁ'om killing him.

Here begins the plot of another story, a story that Gall, once again, fails to
understand, his second notable misreading. This time, however, his misreading does lead
to lethal consequences and the ultimate embodiment in death. Gall refuses to grasp the
importance of the code of honor that govems the behavior of the sertaneros, and chooses
instead to try to impose his system of beliefs and his reading on a story whose
dénouement is already decided. His mad attempts to convince both J urema and Ruﬁno of
the absurdity of their beliefs and values, to change a centuries old story of rape and
revenge in the name of honor, end only with his unheroic death.

Gall, as the misguided reader of violent ﬁctions, is violent himself, not only in his
futile struggle with Ruﬁne that seems inevitable, but especially in the rape of J urema, a
crime that he commits twice.“ Particularly notable in Gall’s response to his crime is his
lack of sympathy for his victim. In typically condescending fashion, he actually thinks
that the rape might have been good for Jurema as a way of waking her ﬁom her

uneventful and backward life:

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Penso en J urema. gEra un ser pensante? Un animalito doméstico,
mas bien. Diligente, sumiso, capaz de creer que las imagenes de San
Antonio escapan de las iglesias a las grutas donde fueron talladas,
adiestrado come las otras siervas del Baron para cuidar gallinas y earneros,
dar de comer a1 maride, lavarle la ropa y abrirle las piemas solo a 61.
Pense: “Ahera, tal vez, despertara de su letargo y descubrira la injusticia”.
Pense: “Yo soy tu injusticia”. Pense: “Talvez le has hecho un bien”.
(108)
Incredibly, he thinks most profoundly about the impact of his crime, or what he interprets
as “hacer el amor” or making love, on his own life, that is, whether he should renew his
oath of celibacy, and whether it might impact his goal of reaching Canudos. Gall’s
disembodied concept of self not only impedes his own self-awareness but also obstructs
his ability to feel compassion for the poor and suffering around him, except on the most
abstract, theoretical level, and thus, it allows him to inﬂict violence on those he purports
to help.

Reading is also highlighted in Vargas Llosa’s depiction of the disembodied Baron
de Caﬁabrava, a character that, like Eparninondas Gonealves and Galileo Gall, requires us
to rethink Scarry’s linking of disembodiment and world creating. During the ﬁrst two
parts of the novel, the Baron is most notable for his absence. He is ﬁequently mentioned
by name as a powerful landowner, proprietor of an inﬂuential newspaper, and leader of
the pro-monarchist Autonomist Party of Bahia But his bodily absence from the state and
hem the narrative during the period of time when the rebellion in Canudos develops and
then begins to heat up not only contributes to his disembodied characterization, but also

leads to suspicion about his involvement in organizing shipments of arms to the rebels.

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When the Baron ﬁnally does appear in the text, Vargas Llosa characterizes him by
his words and thoughts, his environment, and the people around him rather than his
physical attributes. In fact, the lack of any physical description of this character is
striking, considering the important role he plays in the novel. For example, in Part Three,
section ﬁve, the section in which the character ﬁrst appears, the Baron returns with his
wife from an extended vacation in Europe. The couple is greeted by only a small crowd
of well-wishers and local dignitaries, a reception that the Baron correctly interprets as
corresponding to his party’s loss of inﬂuence during his absence. A meeting with his
associates upon arriving at the palace depicts the Baron planning the party’s response to
recent events, maneuvering to regain the upper hand, and advising his cohorts on their
next moves. The reader quickly comes to know the Baron as a prudent political operator,
with keen insight into the power of public opinion and the importance of moderation; we
could say he is an astute reader of the region’s political terrain. However, at no time does
the narrator attempt to draw, or even sketch, a visual picture of the Baron.

Irnportantly, the disembodied Baron is a sensitive observer, a reader of others’
bodies. Like the omniscient narrator of the novel, he seems to rise above his visitors, to
scrutinize their appearance, postures, and gestures, looking for the key to understanding
them. I have already examined his reading of the deformed Pajer'r. He similarly reads the
face of Colonel Moreira Cesar hoping to gain insight into this character’s motivations:
“El Baron examine con minucia la menuda cara impavida del oﬁcial, sus ojos hostiles, 1a
mueca despectativa. gEra un cinico? No podia saberlo min: 10 rinico claro era que
Moriera Cesar lo odiaba” (212). Later, he observes Galileo Gall with scientiﬁc interest:
“. . .volvio a exarninar a Gall como un entomologo fascinado per una especie rara” (236).

Holding himself in a position superior to those embodied characters that he scrutinizes,

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the Baron is like the objective and bodiless scientist deriving knowledge ﬁom what he
observes, and always maintaining his dispassionate perspective.‘7

We might also characterize the Baron, in contrast to Gail, as a ﬁgure of the sage
reader, not only in his perceptive readings of the various visitors to his home, of his
levelheaded understanding of the people of the backlands, but in particular, of Gonealves’
ﬁction. The Baron discovers the key to its twisted plot and develops strategies for
minimizing the ﬁction’s impact on the balance of power. The Baron’s superior
understanding of the region’s culture and politics apparently makes him a better reader.
Nevertheless, the Baron’s conversation with the myopic jeumalist brings his
understanding of the conﬂict in Canudos into question, and this questioning subtly
disrupts his orderly life. Furthermore, this man of apparent moderation and gentility,
moments after the conclusion of his conversation with the jeumalist, becomes a violent
rapist. The disembodied Baron sheds his veneer of civility and reveals his underlying
barbarism.

An examination of his relationship with his wife, sheds light on this change in the
Baron’s character. From the beginning, the Baroness, Estela, and her maid, Sebastiana, in
contrast to the Baron, are embodied as characters:

La Baroness se rio, con una risa gracil y desocupada, que la rejuvencia.
Era dc cabellos castaiios y piel muy blanca, con unas manos dc largos
dedos que se movian come pajaros. Ella y su mucama, una mujer morena,
de fonnas abundantes, miraban arrebadas el mar azul oscuro, e1 verde
forforescente de las riberas y los tejados sangrientos. (162)

However, the Baroness becomes increasingly embodied by events, as she is

unable to continue to maintain her composure with the disruption that the conﬂict in

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Canudos creates in her life. The Baroness, as the wife of an aristocrat, is expected to
accompany her husband at public events and to provide charming but superﬁcial
conversation at the appropriate moments. As the Baron reminds his ﬁiend and cohort,
Adalberto dc Gumucio, “Es mala educacion hablar de politica ante las damas” (162), he
implies as well that it is inappropriate for women to be involved in such discussions.
Generally, the Baroness performs her role gracefully, making herself “invisible” to her
husband and his ﬁiends. However, the destruction of their plantation and home in
Calumbi brings about a change in her character that inﬂicts discomfort on the Baron’s
guests:
...la escuchaban esforzandose per mostrarse naturales, pero no podian
disimular la incomodidad que les producia el desasosiego de la Baronesa
Esa mujer discreta, invisible detras de sus maneras corteses, cuyas sonrisas
levantaban una muralla irnpalpable entre ella y los demas, ahora divagaba,
se quej aba, monologaba sin tregua, come si tuviera la enferrnedad del
habla. (267)
The Baroness’ words that attempt to describe her suffering and that draw attention to her,
making her visible, embodied, produces uneasiness and embarrassment in the Baron’s
guests. She no longer behaves according to the rules of her social class and her position
of power, and her increasing embodiment is considered demeaning. The Baroness
describes the pain that she feels at having watched Calumbi burn as a physical pain in her
belly, similar to that she felt when she lost her children in childbirth. The Baron, once
again playing the part of the observer, examines the changes in his wife, the loss of her
beauty and vivacity (268), and he pities her, as he blames himself for her ultimate descent

into insanity.

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Nevertheless, the Baron himself continues in his disembodied state, as the world
seems to crumble around him. His, formerly disembodied wife, is new embodied by her
illness, and her incapacity leaves her husband, like Gall, leading a celibate life. The
Baron remains a disembodied character in Part Three and most of Part Four of the novel.
The sections in which he appears generally consist of dialogue rather than narration of
action or description. In Part Three he is found conversing with his various houseguests
including his fellow Autonomists, Galileo Gall, Colonel Moreira Cesar, and
Eparninondas Gonealves. Part Four includes his long discussion with the myopic
jeumalist. However, in the ﬁnal section of the novel the Baron, a man of words, is also
momentarily embodied by the narrator who describes the character’s penis as he rapes his
wife’s servant, Sebastiana, who is asleep in the same room with the Baroness:

--La seiiora esta ahi y yo la quiero mas que tr'r—se eye decir, pero
tenia la sensacien de que era otro el que hablaba y trataba ar'rn de pensar",
él solo era ese cuerpo caldeado, ese sexo ahora si despierto del todo a1
que sentia erguido, duro hr'rmedo, botando contra su vientre. .. (504,
emphasis mine)

During this act of violence, this disembodied character becomes only his body: he is his
penis, not the man who speaks. In this moment of partial embodiment, the Baron
disassociates himself from his words. As a victim of rape, however, Sebastiana is more
completely embodied, because although she was embodied earlier by the narrator, she is
now embodied with excruciating detail by the Baron (502-7).

How can we read the many instances of rape in this novel? Even with such an
abundance of violent acts depicted throughout this war narrative, the multiple scenes of

rape still stand out, a fact that is clear when we consider recent criticism dealing with the

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issue. A close reading of the two most indelible scenes of rape committed by Gall and
the Baron clariﬁes the meaning of sexual violence in La gaerra del ﬁn del mundo. As we
have seen, both of these men view themselves as disembodied, disassociating their notion
of self from their bodies and bodily drives. And yet at the time these two characters
commit rape, both feel the loss of control and power in their lives and they become slaves
to their bodily urges. The strong sense of disembodiment that both men feel as they
construct their subjectivity is disrupted by the violent events occuning around them, that
threaten to embody them as well.

Gall’s sense of a loss of control stems primarily ﬁom the many instances of his
misreading people and events. When Gall, who considers himself a man of science, ﬁrst
meets Jurema, she seems an enigma to him; in her he sees “esa vocacion penriciosa,
anticientiﬁca—salir del campo de la experiencia, sumirse en la fantasmagoria y la
ensoiiacion—es evidente” (62). Subsequently, moments before the attack on her home
that leads Gall to rape, the Scottish anarchist tries desperately to read Jurema’s face again,
but without success:

No hay ni pizca de burla en sus palabras y tarnpoco en sus ojos cuando
Galileo Gall la mira, tratando de adivinar por su expresien come toma ella
esas habladurias. No lo averigua: la cara brui’iida, alargada, apacible, es,
piensa, tan inescrutable como la de un indostano 0 un chino. (97)
Gall rapes Jurema moments after this failed reading and after the ﬁrst attempt on his life
by Gonealves’ thugs. His complete bafﬂement as to why anyone would want to kill him
(due to his misreading of Gonealves’ ﬁction), and J urema’s attempt to ﬁnd protection

from the violence that has entered her home, leads to Gall’s sexual violence.

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The Baron too experiences a loss of control over his life moments before raping
Sebastiana. He has just concluded his long, disorienting conversation with the myopic
journalist, which has led him to question his understanding of the problems around him--
the conﬂict in Canudos, the consequent loss of most of his fortune and power, and the
reasons for his wife’s insanity. The Baron’s feeling of impotence is related to the myopic
journalist’s narrative concerning the war, an endless series of revelations,
“incomprehensible” (500) for the Baron, a narrative that points to the Baron’s misreading
of the rebellion that leaves a profound impression on his life.

Although rape has frequently been portrayed as evidence of male power and
dominance, and female victimization as proof of women’s powerlessness and
vulnerability, considering sexual violence in light of Scarry’s theory of torture and the
laying edge to edge of the material and immaterial, changes our understanding of rape. If
rape as a war crime can be considered a form of torture (as was recently decreed by the
United Nation’s War Crime Tribunal), then as with torture, in rape illegitimate
ideological regimes inﬂict pain on their victims, not as a form of punishment, but as way
of confening reality on their baseless ideologies, with the reality of the open or injured
body. Renee Heberle in fact argues that rape is just that—“a sign of the impotence of
masculine social power and dominance” (68). The rape victim’s body then serves to
confer reality on the ﬁction of male power.“ With this in mind, I conclude that Gall and
the Baron rape in order to regain a sense of power and control by using the ﬁction-
generating capacity of their victims’ open bodies. Ironically, their ﬁctions ignore the
consequence of their violent acts on the victims’ bodies, repressing them, and thus, could

be called “disembodied” ﬁctions.

137

The violent ﬁctions created through rape by these two disembodied characters, as
with Gonealves’ narrative, lead to further misreadings and violence. We have already
noted Gall’s total lack of compassion for J urema, his victim, as he justiﬁes his actions as
part of a learning process: “Volvie a acercar la cara a J urema: --No me arrepiento, ha
sido. . . instructive. Era false lo que creia. El goce no esta refiido con el ideal. No hay
que avergonzarse del cuerpo Lentiendes? No, no entiendes” (224). J urema’s injured
body serves to instruct Gall, and to substantiate his abstract theories and philosophy.
Meaning ﬂees J urema’s open body (she does not understand), to attach itself to Gall’s
new reading of reality. Her body is, as de Certeau would have it, “the price paid” for
knowledge.

Perhaps the most violent misreadings occur as a response to the Baron’s rape of
Sebastiana, and most interestingly, they occur outside of Vargas Llosa’s text. Many
critics have interpreted this explicitly savage rape as an act of love. F or example,
Seymour Menton believes that although rape is normally a reprehensible act, in this case
it has been justiﬁed by Vargas Llosa and transformed into an act of tenderness toward the
Baron's wife (47). Dick Gerdes also ﬁnds positive signiﬁcation in this violent act, when
he states that the Baron "makes love to his wife's servant" (186-87, emphasis mine) and
then, goes on to argue that the act brings harmony, understanding and peace to the Baron's
life.‘9

These critical interpretations or misreadings are a form of ﬂight ﬁom looking
squarely at Sebastiana’s injured body and acknowledging the Baron’s capacity for
violence. These critics’ comments reveal a desire to bring closure to a disturbing novel,
to assign meaning to the open body, to ﬁnd a satisfying and coherent ending to the

violence of the text. But these readings also repeat the violence of ﬁction that Vargas

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Llosa has been demonstrating in the novel, ﬁction that, like Gonealves’, sacriﬁces bodies
to produce “knowledge.” The text itself, however, does not support these misreadings of
lovemaking or happy endings in the Baron’s case.50 A close reading of this section
reveals unquestionably the forced nature of the violent act between the Baron and
Sebastiana. For instance, the Baron “la oblige a ladear la cabeza,” he feels her lips
“cerrados con fuerza,” “ordene” as if he were commanding a slave, Sebastiana’s arms are
wrapped across her chest like a “escudo,” a shield, and ﬁnally, she trembles, “temblaba,”
and she cries, “sollozaba,” as the Baron attempts to forcefully penetrate her (504). In
addition, although the Baron does awaken to the peaceful singing of birds and cool
breezes coming though the window, there is, once again, a disturbing sensation, "una
vaga inquietu ” (507), a vague anxiety in the Baron that something is not quite right.
Suddenly he notices far out in the Bay of Bahia an unidentiﬁable commotion. Using his
wife's opera glasses, which underline the theatrical, and thus ﬁctional, nature of reality,
brings the scene into focus: he sees several boats full of people singing, praying, and
tossing ﬂowers into the sea in a ﬁrneral ceremony for the severed head of the Counselor
(507-8). The Baron's momentary illusion of well-being, his sadistic ﬁction of control, is
again destroyed.

At the end of the novel, the kinder ﬁctions emerge as victorious. These include
the Counselor’s teachings of a better world to come, manifested in the celebration of the
Counselor’s resurrected head and in the ascendance of Joao Abade into heaven as told by
the old woman survivor (531). What makes some ﬁctions kind while others are violent,
according to Vargas Llosa’s novel, is the sense of compassion with which they are told
and the awareness of, and compassion for bodies that the reader brings to the text.

Although disembodiment has frequently been associated with language use, the civilized

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and the rational, La gaerra del ﬁn del mm implies that a disembodied concept of self
not only distances a person from his or her own body and sentience, but also ﬁom others’
pain, and thus, ﬁom empathy and compassion. Disembodied ﬁctions--that is, those that
repress bodies ﬁom their discourse-like disembodied characters, disregard the pain they
bring about as they impose their point of view, and in doing so, overturn their
identiﬁcation with the civilized and become, instead, barbaric. Clearly, for Vargas Llosa,
the use of language is not a panacea for physical violence, as language itself becomes
increasingly sophisticated in its capacity to manipulate, to repress, and to bring about
violence.

On the other hand, embodied characters and ﬁctions may enable a shared
understanding of suffering and a desire to lessen it through language and communication.
Whether they are the oral legends of the storytelling Dwarf or the Christian teachings of
the Counselor, such embodied ﬁctions express the pain of those who suffer and the hope
of overcoming. As in lost-body writing, the body and body practices are made prominent
in these kinder ﬁctions in order to emphasize the importance of being aware of and
acknowledging the experiences of others. Like the myopic joumalist’s anticipated
writings about the history of the conﬂict in Canudos, these kinder ﬁctions strive to
represent the reality they depict ﬁ'om the various viewpoints of the many participants, and
without intentional distortions. Embodiment and the body, then, are no longer associated
with the uncivilized, the irrational, and the barbaric past, but instead are viewed as
essential to compassion, understanding and advancing civilization. For Vargas Llosa,
embodiment is a necessary component to moral action at both individual and societal
levels, a notion which subverts Scarry’s negative valuing of the body and the need to

progress beyond its sentience.

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Thus, pain is not the only form of embodiment. Pleasure also brings about an
embodied state, and thus, inspires moral action. In Scarry’s ﬂaming events of the human
psyche, pleasurable sensations are associated with disembodiment and imagining. But
Vargas Llosa, once again, questions Scarry’s paradigm by proposing that pleasure, such
as that achieved through lovemaking, is a positive form of embodiment, and a possible
path toward redemption. In gguerra del ﬁn del mundo. the character of the myopic
jeumalist best represents the possibility of redemption through embodiment, in terms of
both pain and pleasure. As we have seen, the jeumalist is made increasingly aware of his
embodied state during the conﬂict in Canudos, suffering ﬁ'om hunger and thirst, and
teetering on the verge of death. But in this embodied state he also experiences, for the
ﬁrst time, extreme pleasure, as does his new lover, J urema. More than any other aspect
of the joumalist’s embodiment, it is his new understanding of desire, not as a deﬁciency
or a void, but as a force of energy, that motivates him to seek help for the Dwarf, who is
dying of tuberculosis, and to write the story of Canudos.

In fact, feelings of pleasure and love rooted in the body not only inspire the
journalist’s charitable acts but also allow J urema to move beyond her resignation, ﬁ'om
being a rape victim and a dishonored woman, to being happy even in the midst of war and
to rekindling her desire to survive these catastrophes:

...solo ahora habia descubierto que también el cuerpo podia ser feliz, en
los brazos de este ser que el azar y la guerra (go el Perro?) habian puesto
en su camino. Ahera sabia que el amor era también una exaltacion de la
piel, un encandilamiento de los sentides, un vertigo que parecia

completarla. (487)

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Bodily pleasures are what bring about this transformation of being in J urema and permit
her to leave behind the pain of rape.’l Is this “exaltation of the skin” indeed fanaticism of
the body, as Angel Rama claims, or instead a form of redemption, a path toward a more
humane concept of self and of the self’s interaction with the world? Vargas Llosa’s novel
indicates that a return of the body in ﬁctional discourse, and a reafﬁrrning of embodiment
in our notion of self might reduce violence and further civilization.

While Vargas Llosa’s La gaerra del ﬁn del mun_gl_g subtly points to a more humane
form of writing and of conception of self through embodiment, Saer’s E1 entenado
epitomizes this “kinder ﬁction” as it explicitly examines the process of writing one’s own
and others’ bodily experience of the world. In the following chapter, I study the way
Saer’s narrator constructs a history of the cannibal tribe, with whom he lives for ten years,
that merges with his own personal history to create a discourse in which the notions of
self and other fuse, and the dichotomy savage/civilized unravels. The nameless narrator
is not only compassionate, as his writing the history of the tribe ﬁrlﬁlls its desire to be
remembered, but is also honest about his own vulnerability expressed in his need to write
and to be remembered. Coming full circle, in this ﬁnal analytical chapter we return to
Montaigne, the ﬁrst lost-body writer. He, like Saer’s narrator, writes to be remembered,
to vanquish death. However, as de Certeau has shown us, these lost-body writers
ultimately submit to a “triumphant loss,” the loss of the illusion of truth and the triumph

of inevitable uncertainty.

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Chapter 4: Allegorical Renderings of the Body in E1 entenado

They are savages at the same rate that we say ﬁuit are
wild, which nature produces of herself and by her
own ordinary progress; whereas in truth, we ought
rather to call these wild whose nature we have
changed by our artiﬁce, and diverted ﬁ'om the

common order.
«Michel de Montaigne, "Of Cannibals," Essaﬁ of
Michel de Montaigaa (66-67)

 

Pero ahora que soy viejo me doy cuenta de que la
certidumbre ciega de ser hombre y solo hombre nos
hermana mas con la bestia que la duda constante y
casi insoportable sobre nuestra propia condicion.
«Juan Jose Saer. El antgaado (109)

Arcadio Diaz-Quifiones establishes a relationship between the Argentine writer
Juan Jose Saer's contemporary historical novel, El entenado (1983), and what the critic
refers to as the novel's two historical and philosophical sources: Herodotus and
Montaigne. Both of these sources contribute to the long-standing discussion concerning
barbarians and cannibals that is also explored in Saer's novel. Herodotus labeled
barbarians those who were not Greek, while Montaigne questioned the traditional
dichotomy between the civilized and the savage. According to Diaz-Quiiiones as he
interprets de Ccrteau's reading of Montaigne's essay "Of Cannibals", Saer's novel
responds in particular to Montaigne's discussion of the space of the Other, the space of
difference and the space of the literary (9-10). I too am interested in this exploration of
the relationship between Montaigne's essays and El entenado but I will focus more
speciﬁcally on how the body's exposure to different cultures and discourses (the space of
the Other and of difference) brings about a new process for conceiving one's own identity,
less in terms of self versus Other than as a blending of cultures and values experienced. I
will also analyze how the body rendered in the texts of both writers, representative of

what we earlier deﬁned as lost-body writing, is valued as a storehouse of memories and

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experiences, and also as a catalyst for writing. El entenado recalls the essays of
Montaigne beyond the breaking down of the savage/civilized dichotomy. The novel also
alludes to the relationship Montaigne establishes between the body and writing both as a
way of capturing reality more faithfully and reconnecting humanity to the natural, his
blending of the discourses of self with that of the subject of writing, and his ultimate
acknowledgment that writing is another artiﬁce which fails to preserve the human body
from encroaching death.52

In 1580, when Montaigne ﬁrst presents his "honest book" of essays to his reader,
and expresses the wish that his writing be understood as sincere and as an accurate,
unadorned depiction of himself, the French Renaissance essayist becomes the ﬁrst lost-
body writer: "I desire therein to be viewed as I appear in my own genuine, simple, and
ordinary manner, without study and artiﬁce: for it is myself I paint" ("To the Reader" N.
pag.). Montaigne engages in the activity of writing to make sense of the world, exploring
subjects ﬁ'om education and philosophy to drunkenness and thumbs, and manages to do
so by inserting his own body into the text and showing the reader how bodily experience
can be organized in writing to create meaning. This new form of essay blends the
personal experience of the writer with the subject of writing and so erases the distinction
between the author and the world he describes. In his attempt to faithfully portray
himself in his writing, Montaigne clearly demonstrates his belief that simple language can
transparently represent the material world. Being himself the principal subject of his
writing, Montaigne prominently displays his body and its defects in the text "so far as
public reverence hath permitted me." This ﬁrst lost-body writer, in fact, wishes to
unreservedly bare his body in its most simple state in his discourse as a way of revealing

himself most completely and capturing his natural essence: "If I had lived among those

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nations, which (they say) yet dwell under the sweet liberty of nature's primitive laws, I
assure thee I would most willingly have painted myself quite fully and quite naked." In
acknowledging that he himself is the subject of his writing, albeit a "ﬁivolous and vain"
one, the essayist also acknowledges that his body accumulates knowledge and its
experiences incite the act of writing.

Implicit in his desire to be "naked" in the text, and explicit in the epigraph to this
chapter, are the two dichotomous associations that Montaigne establishes: the ﬁrst links
the naked body and nature to accuracy and honesty, and the second relates culture and the
artiﬁce of civilization to corruption and falseness. Although revealing the unadorned
body in writing is a gesture which communicates the essayist's longing to capture his
natural essence in language, and in spite of his previously mentioned faith in the capacity
of language to represent material reality, in dedicating his book of essays to his family,
Montaigne is yet aware that his representation of self is incomplete and somehow
unnatural:

"I have dedicated it to the particular commodity of my kinsfolk and
ﬁiends, so that, having lost me (which they must do shortly), they may
therein recover some traits of my conditions and humors, and by that
means preserve more whole, and more life-like, the knowledge they had of
me." (emphasis mine, N. pag.)
It seems that artiﬁcial language has failed to capture fully the vitality and the integrity of
the body. only some characteristics of the essayist can be grasped and retained in writing,
and the portrait therein is contrived. But regardless of language's inability to reconstitute
the writer completely, it is clear from this passage that Montaigne views writing as a way

of prolonging his life beyond his nearing death. In spite of Montaigne's attack on the

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"savage" way culture intrudes on and perverts nature, the essayist himself attempts to
forestall the progress of nature toward death by preserving his body in writing.
Montaigne's awareness of the interconnected nature of the body and writing--as his bodily
experience forms the basis of his essays and his essays resurrect hope of continuing life--
represents what de Certeau calls a "triumphant loss." The lest-body writer courageously
offers the body to the text out of a longing to establish correspondence between language
and the world; there it is consumed by the perverting power of language, whose
remaining meaning is then devoured by the reader. Truth and the body are impossible to
grasp, but agency is born as the writer expresses his truth and the readers manipulate
discourse at will.

The undermining of the notion of ﬁxed truths, the role the body plays in writing,
and the relationship between humanity, nature and the impulse to write are themes also
explored in Saer's El entenado. El entenado's focus on these themes, the apparent
confusion and break down between the subject and object of writing in the novel, as well
as the its stark, self-conscious nanative style and preference for analytical discourse over
storytelling, recall Montaigne's personal style of essay, and suggest a link between the
essays of Montaigne and this contemporary Latin American novel which goes beyond the
questioning of traditional ideas concerning the representation of otherness.

In El entenado, the nameless historian-narrator, a survivor of Jurin Diaz de Solis'
1516 expedition to Rio de la Plata, attempts to remember and write sixty years later about
his experience living as a captive amongst a tribe of cannibals in the region.” His
ﬁctional narration, whose writing would coincide with Montaigne's writing of his book of

essays, reveals that memory is not only recorded as images in the mind, but is also

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imprinted on the body in ways that do not lend themselves to examination by rational
thought:

A les recuerdos de mi memoria que dia tras dia mi lucidez
contempla come a imagenes pintadas, se suman también esos otros
recuerdos que el cuerpo solo recuerda y que se actualizan en él sin llegar
sin embargo a presentarse a la memoria para que, retenienéndolos con
atencien, la razen les examine. Esos recuerdos no se presentan err fonna
dc imagenes sino mas bien come estremecimientos, come nudos
sembrados en el cuerpo, come palpitaciones, come rumores inaudibles,
come temblores. (175)

The narrator of El entenado does not consider these corporeal memories to be any less
useful to his task of remembering. In fact, these bodily memories, which, according to
the narrator, may take the form of shudderings, knots buried in the ﬂesh, palpitations, or
inaudible munnurings, may actually be more powerful in that they have become an
integral part of his being, and therefore, help to form his notion of self and identity.

By positing the body as a site where experience is recorded, El entenado
challenges the mind/body dualism that pervades Western thinking. Body is no longer
conceived as the separate, inferior other of the mind, an alien self in need of discipline
and control, but instead an equal partner in preserving knowledge and memory of the
past, a text where many discourses inscribe themselves or leave their mark. F or example,
even as the narrator's cerebral memory begins to fade in old age, his body continues to
retain the past: "Mi cuerpo se acuerda sin que la memoria lo sepa...puedo decir que, de
algr'rn mode, mi cuerpo entero recuerda a su manera, esos afies de vida espesa y carnal..."

["My body remembers without my memory knowing it...I can say that, in some way, my

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entire body remembers those years of thick, carnal life..."] (176). These bodily memories
become essential to his formation of identity as they allow the individual, through
intuition, to recall and relate his experiences and perceptions of the world.

This conception of body as text is not unique to the narrator's body, but rather,
throughout his text, the narrator consistently reads the bodies of others as texts and as
layered with the discourses of social practice as well. For instance, in describing the
battered bodies and slow, painful recovery of the Indians after one of their violent
cannibal feasts and orgies, he depicts the scanings, and other deformities left on their
bodies by the events as "marcas imborrables" ["unerasable markings"], "e1 sigrro
inequivoco de sus excesos en su propio cuerpo" ["the unequivocal sign of their excesses
on their own bodies"] (84). Also, the narrator's careful observations or readings of the
physical appearance of others reveal their personalities with great accuracy. Upon
meeting for the ﬁrst time Father Quesada, a man who will become the narrator's spiritual
father, the narrator is able to discern that "De su persona emanaba una insolencia
resigrrada y generosa" [a resigned and generous insolence emanated from his body"]
(126). " Others, too, read bodies to gain knowledge, as occurs when the narrator returns
home after his release ﬁom captivity and is subjected to the suspicious interrogations and
careful study and observation of learned priests and courtesans (124).

In the case of the narrator of El entenado, the body not only serves as an archive of
his own life experiences, but also preserves the history of the cannibal tribe with which
his identity is thoroughly entwined. This material subject, whose very notion of self
results from the negotiation of discourses associated with the communities be has
encountered, is clearly aware that his identity is shaped by his experience of living for ten

years with the cannibal tribe. The narrator describes the formation of self by comparing

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the body's experiences in the world to the melding of clay into rock (108). Later, he
wonders if the tribe had left their essence engraved on his body converting him into a
walking text, a "signo viviente que era evidente para todos" ["a living sign that was
apparent to all"] (124). In fact, the cannibals explicitly recognize the narrator as an
embodiment of their history, a "def-glri", a native word with many related meanings, such
as an object to symbolize an absent person, an interpreter, a bird with the capacity to
mimic human speech, or a reﬂection of things in water (172-73). "Def-ghi" is also the
name they give to their captive and future nanator. His witnessing of the events
surrounding the annual cannibal feast and of the customs and social practices of the tribe
imposes upon him the responsibility of communicating his knowledge of the Indians to
his own kind. The narrator will serve as a substitute in their absence, and in his presence
(and in the presence of his body), their history survives. In this way, the narrator's body
can be seen as a form of writing, a text inscribed by his experiences with the tribe.

After his release from captivity, the nameless narrator returns to the Old World
with a clear understanding of the importance of his role as tribal historian. He knows
that, with the inevitable dispersal, disappearance and slaughter of the tribe under Spanish
conquest, only he can testify to its existence and leave a written record of its culture. In
the act of writing this record, the narrator discovers the seminal role his body plays in
remembering and writing the tribe's history and in knowing himself as he is marked by
his experience. He learns that even the most mundane movements of his body can
extricate memories hidden beneath the surface of the skin:

...y no pocos de les gestos que realize, mecanicos, en los mementos mas
inesperados, estan come impregrrados de esos recuerdos, a veces de un

mode tan indirecto y secrete que ni yo nrismo alcanzo a darrne cuenta de

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que existe una relacien, sin dejar de experimentar, sin embargo, la
sensacien extraiia de que a través de ese acto fugaz y secundario, todos
esos afies van a volver, de golpe, de la region oscura en la que estén

enterrados, a la superﬁcie. (175)

The body of the narrator in El entenado is an archive of memories and knowledge of the

cannibal tribe whose resources can be tapped through motion and intuition.” Reﬂecting

the feeling of the profound responsibility of his role as "defghi," the narrator's

autobiographical narrative, the novel itself, becomes the historical record of the tribe, a

testimony to their lives and customs, unavoidably fused with his own. The structure of

the narrative itself expresses this ﬁrsion of histories and identities as it tells these stories

without pause, breaks, or chapter divisions to signal transitions to new subjects, places or

times. In the mind of the narrator, the story of his life and that of the cannibals have

become inseparable. In fact, his very skin forms a barrier to anything that might sever

this unity:

De la misma manera que los indies dc algunas tribus vecinas trazaban en
el aire un circulo invisible que los protegia de lo desconocido, mi cuerpo
esta come envuelto en la piel de esos aiios que ya no dejan pasar nada del
exterior. Unicamente lo que se asemeja es aceptado. El memento
presente no tiene mas fundarnento que su parentesce con el pasado.
Conmigo, les indies no se equivocaron; yo no tengo, aparte de ese

centelleo confuse, ninguna otra cosa que contar. (176)

This combined history is not, however, another instance of a representative of the

dominant culture speaking for the voiceless Other as some critics have argued.“ I

believe, on the contrary, that El entenado questions the purity of terms like self and Other,

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terms which themselves form the basis of a traditional dichotomy and which rely on
stereotypes, exclusive categories of race, and a monadic conception of self and cultural
identity. In contrast, the narrator-historian of El entenado speaks as an adopted member
of the cannibal community, as a stepchild, the meaning of "entenado" in English. His
writing and exploration of self demonstrate the complexity of human identity in a world
where encounters between cultures once unknown to each other permit the individual to
perceive and theorize the world differently. In this conception, identity is not a stable,
disembodied consciousness, nor is it determined solely by one's race, ethnicity, or
nationality. Identity, as formulated in El entenado, is an impure, changeable hybrid based
on life experiences and exposure to different discourses, whose origins cannot always be
traced. The narrator, himself an orphan who never knew his parents and who prior to
traveling to the New World lived at the margins of Spanish society, exempliﬁes this
notion of self as embodied subjectivity, in which life experiences leave their mark on the
body, and thus inﬂuence the formation of identity.

For example, even though the narrator lives only a relatively short time with the
tribe, the ideological and cultural discourses grafted on him during his captivity have a
greater impact on his notion of self and his place in the world than the discourses of
national origin. Writing as an old man, the narrator describes his youthful voyage to the
New World, and his perception of this exotic land using a discourse that reﬂects the
philosophy of the cannibal Indians. In the tribe's conception of the universe, one's own
presence is necessary to uphold and sustain the reality of the world, whose very
materiality has the effect of making its existence more doubtful. In the following

passage, the narrator describes the necessity of bolstering reality after many days at sea:

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No se veia un pez, un pajaro, una nube. Todo el mundo conocido
reposaba sobre nuestros recuerdos. Nosotros éramos sus unicos garantes
en ese medio liso y uniforme, de color azul. El sol atestiguaba dia a dia,
regular, cierta alteridad... Pero era poca su realidad. Al cabo de varias
semanas nos alcanzo el delirio: nuestra conviccion y nuestros meros
recuerdos no eran fundamento suﬁciente. Mar y cielo iban perdiendo
nombre y sentido. Cuanto mas rugosas eran la soga o la madera en el
interior de les barcos, mas asperas las velas, mas espesos les cuerpos que
desarnbulaban en cubierta, mas problematica se volvia su presencia. (15)
Like the Indians he has yet to encounter, the narrator and, by implication, his shipmates
act as guarantors of the continuing existence of the world, and yet, at times, even their
presence is insufﬁcient to maintaining its persistence. Also reﬂecting the philosophy of
the Indians is the narrator‘s assertion that physical objects on the ship like rope, wood, and
the sails actually diminish reality rather than reinforce it. This description is entirely
anachronistic in its perspective, as the narrator is remembering a time previous to his
captivity with the Indians, memories on which, nevertheless, he imposes their ontology.
Throughout the novel we ﬁnd similar descriptions, in which the narrator shows that he
can no longer visualize the world ﬁom the perspective of his youth; his outlook and
memories are totally altered by the thinking of the Indians and their conception of the
world. In terms of culture and ideology, the narrator has been fully incorporated into the
tribe, and having been chosen by the tribe to be a "defghi," and to represent its culture to
the outside world, he cannot be conceived of as a conqueror speaking for the conquered,
or a dominant voice appropriating the voice of the voiceless Other. By suggesting that

bodies are marked by their exposure to various social discourses and practices and that

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they are involved in the formation of identity, this embodied notion of self presented in _E_l
entenado precludes the practice of conceiving of identity by deﬁning one's self in contrast
to the Other. Mutual marking occurs and perspectives of the world change when bodies
meet and even when they clash. Consequently, the Other becomes part of the self through
this act of mutual inscription.”

A similar conception of self as the embodiment of conﬂicting discourses can be
seen in the inﬂuential writing of Saer's Argentine compatriot Jorge Luis Borges, and as
we shall see, this is just one of many Borgesian discourses that seem to have penetrated
Saer's narrative. In Borges' short story, "Les teologos," the theologian Aureliano spends
his life in secret battle trying to surpass the writings of a rival theologian and his polar
opposite, Juan de Panonia. Aureliano's treatises against heretical groups are characterized
by the complexity of their reasoning in contrast to the simple but elegant argumentation
of Juan de Panonia. Years of intense rivalry, however, do not lead to a widening of the
chasm between them and their styles of writing, but rather to conformity in their
discourses, and later to a merging of their selves. First, Aureliano unconsciously
plagiarizes the work of his adversary:

De pronto, una oracion de veinte palabras se presente a su espiritu. La
escribie, gozoso; inmediatamente después, lo inquieto la sospecha de que
era ajena. Al dia siguiente, recorde que la habia leido hacia muchos aﬁos
en el Adversus annulares que compuso Juan de Panonia. (554)
The disturbing inﬁltration of his rival's words into his argument will lead Aureliano to
place these remembered words in a new context to accuse Panonia of heresy, a crime for
which he will burn at the stake. Nevertheless, by destroying the Other, Aureliano also

destroys himself, for while observing Juan de Panonia's execution, Aureliano recognizes

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his own face in that of the dying man. It seems that in this Borgesian conception of self,
the individual is transformed by his contact with the discourse of the Other, even when
the Other is despised for his difference.

A similar proposition is asserted in El entenado where, once the encounter of
cultures has occurred so has the process of mutual marking and inscription. The narrator,
who is "contanrinat " (118) by his experience with the camribal tribe, does not see the
Indians as Other but rather as a part of himself, and is unable to disentangle his own
history ﬁom the history of the tribe. Not only that, but on contemplating the probable
slaughter of many of the Indians at the hands of Spanish soldiers, the narrator states that,
because nothing exterior to them could exist without them, the native victims and their
victimizers were deemed to suffer the same sad fate: "Sin embargo, a1 mismo tiempo que
caian, arrastraban con ellos a los que les exterminaban" (161). Much like the way
Aureliano and Juan de Panonia were two sides of the same coin, and the destruction of
one lead to that of the other, so too the Indians and the Spanish soldiers are unable to
extricate themselves ﬁom one another, because, according to the narrator, death for the
Indians deems the Spanish as well.

We have explored the role the narrator's body plays in remembering and writing,
and in constructing a notion of self in which the body is a palimpsest of overlapping and
conﬂicting discourses. Likewise, in examining the narrator's memory of the tribe, we ﬁnd
writing lush with materiality, with images-~sights, sounds, smells, feel and ﬂavors-of
native bodies in the movement of daily life, images of bodies in action which help the
narrator to construct tribal history. In fact, the narrator provides explicit, almost
anthropological detail about the Indians' obsessive cleanliness, their attitudes toward their

own and each other's bodies, customs conceming urinating and defecating, sexual

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behavior, personal distance during communication, bathing, cooking, and house cleaning
habits, the pace of movement in carrying out chores, and the well-deﬁned roles of the
members of the community as they struggle to survive during the difﬁcult winter months
(84-96). But the descriptions of the annual cannibal feast, the rendering of human ﬂesh,
and the ensuing periods of drunkenness and orgy are particularly startling and enduring in
their blunt corporeality. For example, the narrator's memories evoke the sight and smell
of human meat, broken down into its various body parts, whose melting fat produces
smoke, crackling and sizzling as it slowly cooks over an open ﬁre (55-56). Grotesque
images of human bodies being prepared for cooking and of the anxious looks of hungry
onlookers give way to graphic depictions of gluttony, intoxication, public copulation and
sexual violence (67-72).
The effect of this writing, in which the body in its various states is so prominent,
is to inject discourse with vitality, breathing life back into events and people ﬁom a
lifeless past. The narrator's memories of the smells, sounds and tastes ﬁom long ago
bring his descriptions into the present of the reader who experiences these memories in a
very concrete, palpable way. In the following passage, the narrator remembers his
perceptions of his childhood in the ports:
El olor del mar y del canamo humedecido, las velas lentas y rigidas que se
alejan y se aproximan, las conversaciones de viejos marineros, perfume
multiple de especias y amontonarniento de meracaderias, prostitutas,
alcohol y capitanes, sonido y movimiento: todo eso me acuno, ﬁre mi
casa, me die una educacien... (l 1)
As readers we hear the conversations of old sailors, we smell the ocean, hemp, spices, and

cheap perfume of prostitutes, we feel the humidity of the sea, and we see the movement

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of ships coming and going, and of commerce in the ports. Throughout the novel, the
narrator's sensual descriptions recreate and reinvigorate the material world of his past.

Nevertheless, even as the sensual world the narrator creates in his writing brings
the past to life, it also has the effect of reconnecting humanity to nature and the natural
world and, therefore, to its ultimate death and decay. In the following passage from the
novel, the narrator describes how the language of the Indians reﬂects the materiality and
the uncertainty of their world. In doing so, his own language, through synaesthesia,
exudes doubt and ambiguity, but also recalls the physical nature of his memories and his
life, and ﬁnally, his link to the natural world and to disintegration:

Esa vida me deje-el idioma que hablaban les indies no era ajeno a esa
sensacionuun saber de planeta, a ganado humane, a mundo no inﬁnite
sino inacabado, a vida indiferenciada y confusa, a materia ciega y sin plan,
a ﬁnnarnento mudo: come otros dicen, a ceniza. (109)
In this single evocative sentence, the narrator describes his life with the tribe as the ﬂavor
of soil--the sound of their language captures a similar sensation for him--of the earthy
smell of the populous like a herd of cattle, of a vision of the blind, silent disorder of their
lives, and of ash. Of course, ash represents the insubstantial nature of this life, the
awareness of the unreality of existence, as well as the certainty of death.

In El entenado, this grounding of the human being in nature by rendering the body
to discourse, and to disintegration, emphatically points to the opposing human tendency
to deny our link to nature and its corruptibility by removing the body ﬁ'om historical
discourse and by constructing monuments to memorialize the eternal nature of human
accomplishments and values. The narrator of the novel implies that civilization, or

culture, the traditional subject of history, and all of its constructs are simply ways of

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removing ourselves from the natural ﬂow toward nothingness. Throughout the text, the
narrator suggests that speciﬁc cultural constructs--religion, theater, the city, history,
defghis and cannibalism-create the illusion of durability.

One recurring example of a cultural construct that creates or reinforces the illusion
of meaning in human life is theater. Early in his captivity the narrator observes that
theater is a social practice that the cannibals and the Spanish share. He ﬁrst witnesses
theatrical acting among a group of children playing by the river. One child removes
himself ﬁom the group, and after a period of mental preparation, returns walking,
gesturing and speaking in an exaggerated fashion provoking the laughter and applause of
his playmates. When the children return to the village, the narrator remains pondering the
empty space left behind, the stage, and the feelings fostered by the children's play:

...permaneci todavia unos minutes contemplando el espacio vacio que
habian estado ocupando, come si hubiesen dejado, detras de su presencia
bulliciosa, algo impapable y benévolo que despertaba, en quien llegaba a
percibirlo, no r'micamente dicha sino también compasien per una especie
de arnenaza igrrorada y comr'rn a todos que parecia ﬂotar en el aire de este
mundo. (49)
First, by contemplating the abandoned stage, the narrator calls the reader's attention to the
similarities between the native children's play and the conventions of Western theater, in
particular, to the illusion of dramatic representation requiring the involvement of both the
actors and the audience in a game of make-believe. In the theater of both cultures, the
audience must collaborate with the players by accepting the action represented on stage to
be mimetic, a faithful imitation of real life that shows society to itself as it really is. Also,

the narrator reminds the reader of the empathetic reaction that theater in both cultures

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evokes in the observers as they identify with the characters on stage and project
themselves into the action of the play, but even more importantly, the feeling of catharsis
theater arouses. Catharsis, which the narrator subtly alludes to in the preceding passage,
is the release of pity or compassion juxtaposed with fear, here, of an undeﬁned threat
which we later learn is the cannibals' lingering anxiety about their existence and their
preoccupation with the persistence of reality. So, theater in cannibal culture serves the
same purpose of purging through expression of these emotions, and provides the same
sense of joy of seeing "rea " life compressed and intensiﬁed in an orderly way on stage as
the values of society are reinforced, ﬁlling the theater audience with a sense of comfort of
the familiar, of endings as they should be, and of lasting truth and meaning. At the same
time that theater provides a release for society's fears, it also constructs the illusion of
purpose in human life.

For the narrator of El entenado cultural constructs like theater give order and
meaning to existence, and deny the human link to nature, death, and the absurdity of life
by reinforcing the mind/body dichotomy. In theater, the opposition of these terms is
perpetuated through the cathartic reaction to dramatic illusion. Plato regarded catharsis as
a separation of body and soul, a process of learning in which the soul mastered the ability
to free itself ﬁom bodily restraints.” In the preceding passage, it is clear that the narrator
of El entenado also views catharsis as a disjunction of mind and body, when, after
viewing the children's play, he describes his perception of these feelings of compassion
and fear as lacking grounding, "irnpalpable," and seemingly "ﬂoating about in the air."
Later in the novel, as he describes the Spanish audience's reaction to the theatrical
rendering of his capture and years of captivity, the narrator reiterates this concept of

catharsis as separation of mind and body, although this time criticizing the ensuing loss of

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reality. Even though the drama, in which he plays himself, is blatantly false-as the
narrator says, "De mis verses, toda verdad estaba excluida," [From my verses all truth
was excluded], (138)--the audience consistently responds with praise and applause.
Commenting on their enthusiasm for his dramatic illusion and wishing that someone
would denounce the fraud, the narrator views the Spanish audience as "titeres," puppets,
"fantasmagorias," ghosts, (140), and in the following quote, as empty, lifeless bodies:
el vigor de les aplausos que festejaban mis verses insensatos
demostraba la vaciedad absoluta de esos hombres y la impresien de que
eran una muchedumbre de vestidos deslavados rellenos de paja, oformas
sin sustancia inﬂadas por el aire indiferente del planeta... (emphasis mine,
141)
Cathartic reaction to dramatic illusion allows for the separation of mind and body, leaving
behind a vacuous form as the soul rises above the body and, therefore above nature, with
the belief in its etema] values that bring meaning to human existence. But what the
narrator implies with his description of the satisﬁed Spanish audience is that this meaning
comes at the price of the awareness of reality and at the expense of the body whose
natural essence must be ignored and overcome in order to construct the illusion of
immortality.

Hoping to bring his audience back down to earth, the narrator experiments with
changing the meanings of his pronouncements on stage. But to his surprise, the audience
never seems to notice the change, a reaction which the narrator surmises shows that the
audience has come to ﬁnd the same meaning ascribed to it by the play's publicity and

fame (141). In trying to understand the audience's exuberant, yet distracted, reaction, the

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narrator wonders if the play transmits some vitally important "secret message" or if, on
the other hand,
...durante las representaciones, los actores representabamos nuestro papel
sin darnos cuenta de que el priblico representaba también e1 suyo, y todos
éramos los personajes de una comedia en la que la mia no era mas que un
detalle oscuro y cuya trama se nos escapaba... (139)
Here, the nanator evokes the theme of life as theater or dramatic illusion, a recurring
leitrnotif in Hispanic literature. In this variation on the theme, reminiscent of Cervantes'
entremés "El retablo de las maravillas," individuals in society blindly play their parts and
read their lines without listening, questioning, or looking behind the curtains to examine
the mechanisms and conventions that create dramatic illusion.” This indifferent
acceptance of society's norms and evasions, which the narrator translates into the
metaphor of life as theater, blurs the boundaries between ﬁction and reality, between art
and life. The narrator's conception of life as theater underlines his view that as humans,
we are constantly disavowing our link to nature by creating a ﬁctional reality that
separates us from nature and death, and so, ﬁ'om reality itself. Reality, for the narrator as
for the cannibal Indians, is chaos, the uncertainty of existence, and the haunting doubt
that at any moment the material world, which we are a part of, can disappear or fade into
notlringrress. Although for a time, the narrator goes along with the illusion of theater and
success, as he says "Yo me dejaba incorporar indiferente, en ese orden que se me
escapaba" ["I, indifferent, allowed myself to be incorporated into this order that escaped
me"] (142), later, when he adopts the children of a murdered colleague, he decides to
leave behind the lies and the falseness of the theater for their sake (143). His search for

more reality for himself and for the children leads him to open a printing house, "menos

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per acrecentar mi fortuna que por ensefiarles a los que ya eran come mis hijos un oﬁcio
que les pennitiera manipular algo mas real que poses o que simulacros" ["less to increase
my fortune than to teach those who were now like my children a profession that would
permit them to manipulate something more real than poses and simulacrums"] (144-45).
The narrator's implicit criticism of the deceptive nature of theater goes hand in hand with
the assertion that writing is more capable of expressing the dubious nature of reality, a
theme that will be explored subsequently.
In addition to theater, the narrator observes other constructs and practices in the
cannibal culture that give meaning to their chaotic world, in particular, the annual
cannibal feast and the selection of the "defghi." As the narrator comes to understand, the
yearly practice of the consumption of human meat is a way of instilling in the tribe a
stronger sense of their existence. During the summer of each year when the feeling of
uncertainty of existence increases amongst the tribe along with the intensity of the sun, an
ancient desire inscribed on their bodies drives them to hunt for other humans and then to
consume them. Eating human meat for them is not to satisfy a hunger or a craving for a
particular ﬂavor, instead it is like chewing nothing, it is an empty ritual which, like the
Christian practice of communion--itself a form of symbolic cannibalism--grants a sense
of certainty to a people tortured by their own mortality:
...estaban obligados a repetir, una y otra vez, ese geste vacio para seguir, a
toda costa, gozando dc esa existencia exclusiva y precaria que les pennitia
hacerse la ilusien de ser en la costra de esa tierra desolada, atravesada de
rios salvajes, les hombres verdaderos. (166)

Like the Christian ritual of communion, cannibalism for the Indians gives hope of the

perpetuation of life even in the face of the certainty of death. The narrator explains that,

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at one point in their history when they were indistinguishable ﬁ'om the dark nothingness
of the universe, the Indians consumed each other, members of their own tribe. Later,
when they turned outward and became uniﬁed as a tribe, they began consuming only
outsiders, Others, and thus, they became real, the Center of the universe. The nanator
describes the Indians' perception of their newly found realness as well as their continued
link to their origin in nothingness through the ﬁgure of a divided body:
No obstante provenir también ellos de ese exterior improbable, habian
accedido, no sin trabajo, a un nivel nuevo en el que, aun cuando los pies
chapalearan todavia en el barre original, la cabeza ya liberada, ﬂotaba en
el aire limpio de lo verdadero. (167)
The image here of the separation of their heads, ﬂoating in the air of true existence, and
their feet wallowing in the mud of nothingness not only symbolizes the Indians' keen
awareness that there is still darkness within them and that their destruction can occur at
any time, it also points to the cathartic-like reaction of the tribe after each cannibal feast.
As occurs in theater, the mind separates from the body, under the illusion of realness and
lasting truth, and in the ephemeral belief that the tribe can somehow rise above their
natural condition and the movement toward death by consuming others.

Another important element of the Indians' ritual cannibalism and another construct
clearly designed to perpetuate the memory of the tribe is the setting aside of the "defghi"
ﬁ'om among the prisoners they have taken to be consumed. At the time of his capture, the
narrator is oblivious to the role he is expected to play as "defghi," and does not
comprehend the Indians' excessive gesturing, dramatic posturing, and exaggerated
expressions constantly performed on his behalf. Gradually, after years of observing this

repeated ritual, he comes to understand this strange form of theater performed by the

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cannibals as a way of accentuating their image in the mind of the "defghi" and impressing
upon him a strong corporeal spectacle sure to endure in his memory:
De mi esperaban que duplicara, como el agua, la imagen que daban dc si
mismos, que repitiera sus gestos y palabras, que les representara en su
ausencia y que fuese capaz, cuando me devolvieran a mis semejantes, de
hacer como el espia 0 el adelantado que, por haber side testigo de algo que
el reste de la tribu todavia no habia visto, pudiese volver sobre sus pasos
para contarselo en detalle a todos. (173)
It is hoped that the "defghi"-narrator will in turn repeat these exaggerated movements and
posturings to evoke the memory of the tribe and represent them in their absence, a hope
as we have seen which the narrator of El entenado faithfully ﬁrlﬁlls. According to the
narrator, the importance of the "defghi" lies in his responsibility as witness to leave a
legacy of the tribe's accomplishments, in particular their having pulled themselves ﬁom
the original clay to become "les hombres verdaderos" ["the true men"] (174), and so, save
them ﬁ'om the dark nothingness of death:
Amenazados por todo ese que nos rige desde lo oscuro, manteniéndose en
el aire abierto hasta que un buen dia, con un geste sr'rbito y caprichoso, nos
devuelve a lo indistinto, querian que de su pasaje per ese espejismo
material quedase un testigo y un sobreviviente que ﬁrese, ante el mundo,
su narrader. (173)
In this passage, the ﬁgure of the "defghi" in cannibal culture is subtly linked to the
Western historian who narrates the accomplishments of civilizations and peoples from the
past, a link that points to our own need to be remembered, and memorialized in history.

In fact, it becomes increasingly salient that many aspects of cannibal culture serve as

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allegory for parallel constructs in Western culture. As we have seen, the native children's
play acting points to Western theatrical conventions, the tribe's cannibalism cleverly
parallels Christian communion, and the role of the natives' "defghi" recalls that of our
historian. All of these social practices give order and meaning to human life as we
struggle to understand existence or being in a chaotic, absurd world. Through these
constructs, death seems less ﬁnal as it looses its power to destroy everything; it may take
the body, but traces of our existence endure.

In much the same way that many cultural constructs create the illusion of
immortality, the narrator of El entenado points to aspects of nature and other human
constructs that create or reﬂect doubt and uncertainty about our existence: the sun, the
moon, the stars, the ocean, the river, the earth, the human body, and, interestingly,
language and writing. F or example, the brutal harshness of the sun brings out the
unreality of our being; according to the narrator, it shows us our "unjustiﬁed existence"
(197). The intense summer sun also brings about the annual need for cannibalism
amongst the Indians, and at the moment of at least three deaths in the novel--those of
Captain Solis (30-31), Father Quesada (131), and the ﬁ'iendly neighbor cannibal--the
sun's intense presence seems to sap humans of their very existence and harshly reveals the
illusory naturé of life. The narrator's memory of his neighbor's death after one of the
violent cannibal feasts clearly shows the sun's power to mock human existence:

A medida que el hombre iba entrando en la muerte, casi con el mismo
ritrno, e1 sol de verano subia en el cielo que, con la luz creciente, iba
poniéndose, a partir de la palidez del alba, cada vez mas azul. Que el
mundo nos roba su substancia, que se sostiene con nuestra sangre, podria

probarlo el contraste que ofrecian el hombre agonizante y el espacio en

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cuyo interior se extinguia, porque, a medida que el brillo de sus ojos se
apagaba,...la luz matinal ganaba brillo y magrriﬁcencia... (180)

F or the narrator, the moon is more benevolent than the sun, but still reminds him,
albeit in a more gentle way, of the same intolerable message. At times the moon's
wannness, constancy and familiarity permit the illusion of order and realness.
Nevertheless, when the narrator describes the eclipse of the moon as it divides in two and
then slowly erases itself, the moon, through its own example, serves only to reinforce the
tribe's conviction of their temporality. In the end, the gentle moon is, for the narrator, like
a bridge between the illusion of life and nothingness, not able to prevent human
annihilation, but making it less cruel and impersonal (196-97).

The narrator associates the stars with a characteristic somewhere in between the
cruelty of the sun and the charity of the moon. Their light is soft and merciful but the
presence of each individual star represents for him the existence of another world, taking
reality away ﬁom this world (19). Both in the opening and closing paragraphs of the
novel the narrator refers to his need in old age to take refuge in the cities where "la vida
es horizontal, porque las ciudades disirnulan el cielo" ["life is horizontal because the
cities conceal the sky"] (11). Remembering his life with the Indians, the narrator tells
how they slept under the open sky making him feel "aplastado," crushed or ﬂattened by
the stars. For the narrator, the cities are another cultural construct that allow him to evade
the constant, overwhelming reminder of his nothingness represented by the stars. The last
sentence of the narrator's text, summarizing his life after captivity, reminds us of the
ambiguous relationship he maintains with the stars, a relationship which symbolizes his

strong connection to nature, and his nearing, inevitable death:

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A lo que vino después, lo llamo afios e mi vida--rumor de mares, de
ciudades, dc latidos humanos, cuya corriente, como un rio arcaico que
arrastra los trastos de lo visible, me deje en una pieza blanca, a la luz de
las velas ya casi consumidas, balbuceando sobre un encuentro casual entre,
y con, también, a ciencia cierta, las estrellas. (201)
It seems, in fact, that the very subject of his narrative is his relationship with the stars,
symbols of his mortality. This ﬁnal sentence brings the reader to the moment and to the
act of writing, to the narrator's "babbling" about his encounter with the stars, and by
association, with his eminent death. The ﬁnal ﬂickerings of the candles that light the
room where he writes point to the end of his narrative and to the end of the act of writing,
a process which has sustained him and even given him life, although transient. The stars
represent both the narrator's purpose for writing--to preserve the memory of the cannibal
tribe-and the ﬁrtility of this quest given the nature of writing.

Writing and language are examples of human constructs that, rather than create
the illusion of disjunction between human life and nature, actually reﬂect nature's
indeterminacy. These two related constructs are similar to the elements of nature
emphasized in the text, although they are more like the moon than the sun in that they
provide comfort to the narrator as he confronts the empty, dark future. Nevertheless,
writing and language, due to their grounding in the natural body, simultaneously reveal
the uncertainty of existence through their ambiguity and contradiction. For the narrator,
language is inseparable from the body as is clear in his conception of the body as
discourse, or as a text to be read and interpreted. The narrator's descriptions also show
how communication depends to a large extent to gesturing with the body and to facial

expressions. For example, when the narrator is ﬁrst brought to the village as captive, he

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observes the mixture of gesturing, expressions and words with which three Indian women
communicate with his guardians:
Al vemos llegar se interrumpieron, y una de ellas dirigiéndose a mis
guardianes con interés displicente, seiialandome con la cabeza, lo interroge
con la expresien y con un ademan consistente en juntar las yemas de les
dedos de una mane y sacudirlos varias veces hacia su boca abierta,
aludiendo a1 acto de comer. Def-ghi, Def-ghi, respondie, perentorio, uno
de sus acompanantes. Al oirlo, las viejas abrieron desmesuradamente les
ojos, con asombro complacido, y comenzando a sacudir la cabeza me
dirigieron las mismas sonrisas melosas y deferentes con que me recibieron
en general todos los miembros de la tribu. (42)
The women communicate through motioning with the head and hands, and expressions
made with the eyes and mouth, as well as with words. The fact that the gesture for eating
described here by the narrator is common among many Spanish speakers today points
allegorically to the importance of body language beyond this "primitive" culture. Later in
the novel, when the narrator is released ﬁom captivity to be reunited with other
Spaniards, he has difﬁculty remembering how to speak his native language and he cannot
comprehend the spoken language, which he perceives as "pure ruido," pure noise. His
ability to understand is apparently made more difﬁcult by the beards on the Spaniards
faces which, "come mascaras rigidas", like rigid masks, cover their facial expressions
(116-17). With time, the narrator explains, he regains the capacity to speak and
understand Spanish, a gradual process involving the mind and the body: "Dia tras dia, e1
idioma de mi infancia...ﬁre volviendo, intimo y entero, a mi memoria primero, y después

poco a poco a la costumbre misma de mi sangre" [Day after day, the language of my

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childhood...returned, intimate and complete, to my memory ﬁrst, and later little by little
to the very custom of my blood] (123).

But even as language ﬂows through our veins with our blood, forming part of the
material and seemingly concrete body, it frequently fails to describe this physical world
and our suffering as we pass through it. It may be language's very grounding in the body
and in nature that make it so susceptible to deterioration at moments of crisis, as it
reﬂects the irreality of the world. For example, the narrator recalls Captain Solis'
incoherence and inability to articulate his thoughts concerning this strange land they were
exploring on the day of his death: "Las pocas palabras que pronunciaba le salian con una
vez quebrada, débil, cercana al llanto" ["The few words that he pronounced came out in a
broken, weak voice close to tears"] (30). The narrator attributes Solis' inability to speak
to his realization of the intolerable nature of his condition, his nothingness, revealed to
him by this land. As the Captain tries to muster up the words to verbalize his thoughts
concerning this horriﬁc world, he can barely utter more than monosyllables and resorts to
gesturing with his body:

...se puso a sacudir la cabeza con la expresion de la persona que esta a
punto de manifestar una conviccien proﬁrnda que las aparieneias se
obstinan en querer desmentir... Per ﬁn, mirandonos, y con la misma
expresien de conviccien y desconﬁanza, empeze a decir: T ierra es ésta
sin..., al mismo tiempo que alzaba el brazo y sacudia la mano, tratando de
reforzar, tal vez, con ese ademan, la verdad de la aﬁrmacien que se
aprestaba a comunicarnos. T ierra es ésta sin...--eso fue exactarnente lo

que dijo el capitan cuando la ﬂecha le atravese la garganta... (31)

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At this moment of death, language, incoherent and dependent on the body to express
itself, reﬂects the absurdity of existence. Captain Solis, apparently aware of the folly of
his search for glory in a nonsensical land, can only babble meaningless phrases as the
arrow pierces his throat. In the end, words cannot express the hopelessness of
overcoming death, and instead expose the illusion of history, and the futility of its records
of great deeds and heroic accomplishments.

Written language also reveals the illusory nature of human existence, but at the
same time, provides consolation for those in pain, and restores a semblance of meaning to
life. This dual nature of writing is born out in the narrator's autobiographical discourse.
After being released ﬁom captivity and retunring to Spain, the narrator falls into a deep
depression. Seemingly contaminated with the cannibal malady of the persistent
awareness of one's own irreality, he describes how this sadness immobilizes him, making
it almost impossible for him to speak or to move his body. Words turn to ashes in his
mouth, and his body and the world seem strange and distant to him. He wishes to
become a "forgotten thing", as if he could just fade away into oblivion (124-25). The
cure for the narrator's depression, we learn, is writing, and it is Father Quesada who gives
him the instruments he needs to begin the process of recuperation: the ability to read and
write. The narrator explains that for Father Quesada these abilities are like tentacles that
allow a person to wield their bodily experience of the world to form a coherent narrative,
a conception of language, as we have seen, reﬂected in the narrator's writing:

Para él, eran come tenazas destinadas a manipular la incandescencia de lo
sensible; para mi, que estaba fascinada por el poder de la contingencia, era
come salir a cazar una ﬁera que ya me habia devorado. Y, sin embargo,

me mejore... Después, comprendi que si e1 padre Quesada no me hubiese

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ensefiado a leer y escribir, el r’mico acto que podia justiﬁcar mi vida

hubiese estado ﬁrera de mi alcance. (127)
In this passage, the narrator depicts the paradoxical nature of writing, as it both reminds
us of our connection to the natural world and to death--the beast that had already
devoured him--and consoles us by forming meaning from the chaos and absurdity of our
lives, captured or hunted down in writing. In fact, writing is the activity that justiﬁes the
narrator’s life."0 For the narrator, its ritual like quality, like the nightly return of the stars,
expressed in the repetition of time, place, lighting, and sustenance, soothe him and
provide an outlet to vent his fears and doubts and to tell the story he needs to tell: "Es a
pesar de renovarse, puntual, cada noche, un memento singular, y, de todos sus atributos,
el de repetirse, periodico, como el paso de las constelaciones, e1 mas luminoso y el mas
benévolo" (146). Each night the narrator slowly sips the same red wine, and alternates
eating black and green olives whose ﬂavors evoke an image for him that shoots ﬁ'om his
mouth to his memory, like ﬁre] for his writing. The certainty that comes from this ritual
of writing gives order to his world, which, at the same time he recognizes as illusion:
"También es inr'rtil, porque no sirve para contrarrestar, en los dias monotonos, la noche
que les gobiema y nos va llevando, come porque si, a1 matadero" (147). In the end,
writing is useless because it lacks the power to overcome death.

Also, the very nature of writing undermines its ability to create meaning in life.

The narrator, in a series of Borgesian gestures, points out the contradictory nature of
writing, its ambiguity, its characteristic multiplication of meanings into inﬁnity, and,
through authorial self-effacement, the unreliability of memory and interpretation:

Como era en los primeros afios, y como las palabras signiﬁcaban, para

ellos, tantas cosas a la vez, no estoy seguro de lo que el indie dijo haya

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side exactamente ese, y todo lo que creo saber de ellos me viene de
indicios inciertos, de recuerdos dudosos, de interpretaciones, asi que, en
cierto sentido, también mi relate puede sigrriﬁcar muchas cosas a la vez,
sin que ninguna, viniendo de fuentes tan poco claras, sea necesariarnente
cierta. (160)
By underlining the indeterminacy of his own writing, the narrator strips the readers of
their grounding in meaning and throws them into a whirlwind of confusion and chaos.
The narrator's text not only undermines the capacity of writing in general to capture
history, but also self-reﬂexively doubts its own ability to tell the story of the Indians' past.
Even more disruptive to the attachment between writing and meaning is the way
the narrator constantly returns to the present of writing and observes the hand, his hand,
as it scribbles marks on the page. F or the narrator, as we have seen, writing about the
past is a process inextricably tied up with the body. The bodies of the natives form the
basis of his memories of the tribe; his own body functions as an archive of corporeal
remembrances where his perceptions and experiences are inscribed that emerge to nourish
his writing; and it is his aged body in the present of writing that struggles to push the pen
forward. And yet, bodies, which are apparently so solid or real in their materiality, are
also constantly changing and are susceptible to rapid deterioration and death. As the
narrator brings us to the present of his writing, we observe with him his body's
involvement in the act of writing-~his slow, quiet breathing, his adjustments in posture to
relieve the cramping in his legs, his wrinkled hand moving ﬁom left to right leaving a
trickle of black ink on the page (73). It is this connection between the failing body and
the process of writing which underscores the illusory nature of writing, here a sort of last

ditch grasping for meaning in the ﬁnal throws of life. But like the ﬁrtility of trying to

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escape the nothingness and solitude of death that awaits him, or the conversion of his
body into ashes, the promise of writing to preserve him and his memories seems empty
and destined to be unfulﬁlled. In fact, the narrator compares the markings on the page to
scoria, the ashlike substance left behind from volcanic eruptions, something less than
solid, easily blurred and erased, and destined to melt away. The recurring image of ash in
the novel representing death and decay links the insubstantiality of the body and life with
that of writing and history.

By emphasizing the connection between the body and writing the past, the
narrator's text "embodies" a new way of writing history, that admits its constructed and
illusory nature as well as its indebtedness to the body as it creates the illusion of reality.
The text proposes writing that renders (offers; restores) the body to discourse, and by
doing so reconnects human activity to nature, prolongs life and creates meaning. At the
same time, just as in the narrator's text, this bodily writing is ﬁrlly conscious that it
captures merely a rendering (a translation) of meaning that like ash (the body
disintegrated) will fade away. In El entenado, the narrator's writing is impregnated with
the bodily senses, sensuality, and camality of his life experiences and that of the Indians.
His urgent appeal to the senses and the experiences of the body underlines the narrator's
attempts to somehow preserve the "realness" of the tribe, to protect his bodily memories
from the passing of time, and the destructive ambiguity and immateriality of written
language. Much as the cannibal word "def-ghi" came to name the narrator as a stand-in
for the tribe, or as the embodiment of tribal history, so the narrator's writing becomes a
rendering (a representation) of his bodily experience and memories, as it tries to represent

and etemalize his material reality. The narrator, nevertheless, concedes that, in this task,

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his writing will inevitably fail, and so, accepts the "triumphant loss" of lost-body writing-
-the rendering (surrendering) of the body and meaning to discourse.

In El entenado the narrator's purpose for writing is to document and preserve his

 

memory of the Indian tribe, expressing in this purpose a belief or hope for
correspondence between his writing and physical reality. His narrative exempliﬁes lost-
body writing's open exhibition of the body as a record of experience or as a text, a
resource he tums to in order to recall the past. His own body serves as an archive of
memory that, through movement and other bodily processes, nurtures the act of writing.
The bodies of the Indians also feed his discourse, as they are the very subject of his
narrative, and so, they ﬁll the pages of his work. And yet, as the narrator accumulates
memories and concrete images of the Indians, bringing them to life for the reader, he also
calls the reader's attention to the unreliability of language and writing in general, and of
his own narrative in particular. Memories, like dreams and like ashes, are difﬁcult to
grasp and even harder to communicate because, according to the narrator, memories tend
to divide into their many component details and then multiply inﬁnitely:
Esos recuerdos que, asidues, me visitan, no siempre se dejan aferrar; a
veces parecen nitidos, austeros, precisos, de una sela pieza; pero, apenas
me incline para asirlos con un solo geste y perpetuarlos, empiezan a
desplegarse, a extenderse, y los detalles que, vistos desde la distancia, el
conjunto ocultaba, proliferan, se multiplican...muchas veces empiezo a
sentirme un poco asolade y me digo que no solamente el mundo es inﬁnite
sino que cada una de sus partes, y por ende mis propios recuerdos, también

lo es. (176-77)

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Recalling the Borges' story, "Funes, e1 memorioso,” in which the title character is unable
to articulate thoughts because his mind has no way of organizing his endless capacity to
remember each and every detail, the narrator of El entenado ﬁnds his remembrances
expand beyond his ability to capture them in writing. He also contends that memories are
like death in that they are unique for every person, even for those people who have
witnessed or lived through the same event. According to the narrator, each is condemned
to the solitude of their memories as they are to the solitude of death (189-90). The
narrator of El entenado justiﬁes his life by writing the history of the cannibals and
simultaneously posits the impossibility of knowing or faithfully representing them in
writing.

As we have seen in the "Introduction" to this study, lost-body writing's textual
display of the human body acknowledges the body both as a site where discourse is
inscribed and where it is created. This notion of discourse feeding the human body is
asserted in El entenado when the narrator, paralyzed by depression and a lack of desire,
regains the will to live through the process of writing. By stimulating desire and
providing a purpose for living, discourse nourishes the human body and extends the life
of the languishing narrator. Writing, as a creative, self-reﬂective act, is life giving. In
fact, as the narrator writes, looking back on his ﬁrst days with the tribe and the painful
realization of his abandonment and solitude, he relives his birth and is at the same time
rebonr:

Pero esa noche, mi soledad, ya grande, se volvie de golpe desmesurada,
come si en ese pozo que se ahonda poco a poco, el fondo brusco, hubiera
cedido, dejandome caer en la negrura. Me acosté, desconsolado, en el

suelo, y me puse a llorar... Entenado y todo, yo hacia sin saberlo y como

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nifio que sale, ensangrentado y atenito, de esa noche oscura que es el
vientre de su madre, no podia hacer otra cosa que echanne a llorar. (42-3)
El entenado also demonstrates the body's involvement in creating discourse, in
particular, the way his individual body selects from among the social discourses and
bodily experiences he encounters, and then layers these discourses to construct identity.
In other words, identity is not so much imposed on the body, but rather social discourse is
processed and transformed, and identity is created there. The narrator, who remains
nameless throughout the novel, is continually in the process of forming an identity, but
one whose boundaries are ﬂexible and ever-changing. By abstaining ﬁ'om naming
himself, the narrator sides steps the need to afﬁx identity. In fact, when he decides to
retire ﬁ'orn acting, the narrator allows one of his fellow actors in the theater company to
assume his identity and name so that the play can continue its long, successful run. His
name's connection to the play gives it validity and deﬁnes its meaning (144). The
narrator’s lack of attachment to his name and to any determined identity is reﬂected in his
belief that people can be born and reborn repeatedly throughout their lives, constantly
recreating themselves, although, he also maintains, some people are never born at all:
No se sabe nunca cuando se nace: el parte es una simple convencien.
Muchos mueren sin haber nacido; otros nacen apenas, otros mal, come
abortados. Algunos, per nacimientos sucesivos, van pasando de vida en
vida, y si la muerte no viniese a interrumpirlos, serian capaces de agotar e1
ramillete de mundos posibles a ﬁrerza de nacer una y otra vez, come si
poseyesen una reserva inagotable de inocencia y de abandono. (43)
For the narrator, the formation of identity is a choice. An individual can allow society to

impose one's identity by simply adopting its values, norms and practices without

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questioning, a concept that the narrator explores in his philosophy of life as theater. On
the other hand, the individual can, as the narrator does, actively participate in the
production of their own concept of self by reﬁrsing, accepting, amending, and blending
social discourses.

In this way lost-body writing in El entenado reinserts the human body and agency
into the historical sphere, as it foregrounds human participation in the creation and
manipulation of discourse. However, the individual's active participation in the processes
of history and the formation of identity is grounded in desire, and therefore, in the body,
without which there is no memory, no purpose, and no agency. According to the narrator

of El entenado forgetting is due to indifference and apathy, rather than less of memory:

 

"Cuando nos olvidarnos es que hemos perdido, sin duda alguna, menos memoria que
deseo" (110). The desire the narrator refers to here is the same desire for continuing life
that drives the Indians to cannibalism, Christians to communion, and all cultures to write
history, the desire that Spinoza understood as the striving "to persist in one's own being"
(qted ﬁ'om Butler, 378), and I would add, in one's own body. Historical writing must not
necessarily deny the human link to nature. As El entenado shows us, lost-body writing
recovers the natural in human activity and at the same time acknowledges that the very
existence of writing about history is founded on the human desire to give meaning to
existence and to overcome death. Desire, in this discourse, is no longer perceived as a
lack, or as something missing, but instead as a productive force grounded in the body and
leading to artistic creation.

Finally, Saer's text, like much of Borges' writing, is a metaﬁctional discourse--a
reﬂection on the nature of writing. For some, such as the French philosopher Henri

Lefebvre, metadiscourse has created "an enormous emptiness" that is ﬁlled with vacuous

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signs, "the great alibi for masking and forgetting these historical tasks and missions that
have not been accomplished, for erasing responsibility..." (qted. in Chanady 682). And
yet, in light of our reading of El entenado, we can argue that Saer's metadiscourse is, in
fact, a way of countering traditional historiographic discourse that speaks for the Other by
"exiling orality" (Chanady 689). Saer's metadiscourse, which we have called lost-body
writing, rather than creating an "enormous emptiness," reﬂects on the nature of writing
and its inability to represent the other without violent alteration. The purpose of lost-
body writing is to explore this dilemma of writing and the body, of inscription and the
violent representation of the other, and to ask what the alternatives might be. The most
obvious would be to write only about oneself, one's own culture, race, and history. Of
course, this altemative, nearly impossible during the age of Herodotus, has become
inconceivable in the age of the Internet. In addition, it is becoming increasingly difﬁcult
to construct a notion of self based on monadic concepts of race, nationality, and ethnicity,
and therefore, equally difﬁcult to conceive of self to the exclusion of an "Other."
Another altemative would be to exclude the other in body and speech from the text,
which is, as de Certeau contends, to do what traditional historiography has always done,
ultimately erasing individual accomplishments and human agency ﬁom the historical
process in order to produce knowledge. Lost-body writers like Saer, instead, accept a
"triumphant loss;" by offering the body honestly to writing and openly admitting that the
body can only be represented with alteration and prejudice, they make a commitment to
depict the experience of others as fully and straightforwardly as language and writing
permit. Whereas historiography presents writing as a reliable form of communicating
knowledge, Saer's narrator, much like Montaigne, candidly questions writing's ability to

capture knowledge about the world and admits that the writing of history, rather than a

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sign of progress, is a reﬂection of the need for self-deception, an artiﬁce to obscure the

inevitability of death.

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Conclusions: Lost—Body Writing and the Representation of the Material World

...Quiero que en la palabra
se vea 1a aspereza,

la sal ferruginosa,

la fuerza desdentada

de la tierra,

la sangre

de los que hablaron y de los que no hablaron. . .
«Pablo Neruda, “Verbo”

Latin America’s new historical novel reﬂects an increasing awareness, in the
history of the region, of writing’s violence as it inscribes bodies. The historic period of
the transition to what de Certeau calls a “scriptural economy,” coincided with the
encounters between the peoples of the New and Old Worlds. As de Certeau has shown
us, this modem period initiates writing that produces knowledge about the unarticulated
world by inscribing it with language. In the process of producing knowledge, scientiﬁc
writing violently represses the bodies and bodily practices from which knowledge is
extracted. Thus, like many modern writers, the explorers, conquistadors and other
European travelers to the Americas described their new reality with a language
inadequate to the task, brutally altering what they attempted to represent, and suppressing
the source of this newly found knowledge. Writing about the other, in America in
particular, was formulated in terms of contrasts and antinomies, and led to a deformed
depiction of the New World other as a savage and an animal, which, in turn, justiﬁed his
suppression.

As Gonzalez Echevarria so clearly demonstrates in Mﬂ and Archive, this pattern
of violent hegemonic discourse, that misshapes as it suppresses, inspires literature that
mimics this discourse while at the same time subverting its power and its claims to
knowledge. Mimicking historiographic discourse, Latin America’s new historical novel

returns to the moments when the dichotomy between self and other became the lens

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through which people viewed the world and it deconstructs the binary oppositions on
which this vision of the world relied. The new historical narrative challenges, in
particular, the dichotomy of mind/body, with its notion of embodied subj ectivity—a
reworking of the formulation of identity to include bodily experience alongside mental
processes. Once this dichotomy breaks down, other dichotomies, like barbaric/civilized,
and nature/culture quickly follow suit, so that traditional notions of identity as a monadic
mental construct of belonging or not belonging are destroyed. This study has explored
the different ways that embodied subjectivity in the new historical novel not only changes
our conception of the formulation of identity, but also changes our interpretation of the
past, the way we view individual participation in history, and the way we regard writing
as an objective tool for describing material reality.

Although traditionally the historical novel has been viewed as an instrument to
encourage feelings of patriotism and to help to establish a sense of national identity, this
study has shown that Latin America’s new historical novel undermines the notion of
national identity, revealing it to be a mythic construct, useful to those interested in
maintaining national boundaries and harnessing power, and yet, repressive of dissenting
voices. Rather than simply enlarging the notion of national identity to include voices
repressed in the past as Pens suggests, the new historical novel, instead, subverts the very
concept of national identity by showing the experience of history to be multifarious, the
remembrance of the past a highly individualized experience, and the formation of identity
itself a much more complex process than imposing a given vision of a country’s history.
Hence, in the traditional historical novel, the body is neutralized by dressing it in

language that conceals its subversive tendencies, and instead, bestows the body with the

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air of myth. On the contrary, the new historical novel undresses the mythic body to reveal
its humanity, its links to nature, and its lowly beginnings and end in the natural world.

In the ﬁrst analytical chapter of this study, we saw how the emergence of carnival
and the carnival body in Rodriguez Julia’s early new historical novel, La renuncia del
héroe Baltasar, undermines traditional notions of self, history, and writing. In the
beginning, Baltasar conceives of self in terms of the conﬂict between father and son, as
he struggles to deﬁne himself in opposition to his father, a notorious leader of the slave
uprisings that shake the island colony. Not only does he renounce his father’s cause by
not participating in the rebellion, but, in addition, he brings peace to the island by
becoming the embodiment of reconciliation between the warring races. Baltasar, a fonner
slave, becomes a symbol of the potential for upward mobility of blacks on the island
when he agrees to marry Joseﬁna Pratts, daughter of the Secretary of State and a
prominent member of the white, aristocratic community. Nevertheless, in becoming a
“bridge” between blacks and whites, Baltasar forfeits his personal autonomy and becomes
Bishop Larra’s “here,” a character in his ﬁction of racial harmony. The here soon
realizes that his body and its movements are Bishop Larra’s text, and in order to he
himself ﬁom the violence of the Bishop’s inscription, he must ﬁrst escape the power of
the Bishop’s gaze and disrupt representation itself. Baltasar, thus, incites carnival activity
with the open display of his nightly orgies, where the emergence of the carnival body
invites the participation of all spectators, including Bishop Larra, which in tum allows
Baltasar, once the object of the gaze, to escape representation’s ﬂame and the violence of
writing.

Rodriguez Julia’s novel also subverts the bodiless historiographic discourse of the

colonizer by injecting his ﬁctional version of historiography with carnival and the

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canrival body. The crowning and decrowrring of the carnival king, the spectacle of
violent massacres, lustful orgies, sumptuous feasts, and nightmarish gardens, underline
the novel’s perversion of Puerto Rico’s ofﬁcial past. The form of the novel is itself a
canrivalization of the historiographic model, and as such, undermines historiography’s
claims to knowledge and truth. The ﬁctional historian is also an object of derision and
carnival, as his errors, prejudices, and lack of objectivity taint his version of the past and
reveal the subjective and even violent nature of the process of writing history.
Nevertheless, while La renuncia points to writing’s violence as it inscribes bodies
with its discourse, it also reveals how bodies rebel against inscription through carnival
tactics. For instance, Baltasar’s realization that his body has become Bishop Larra’s text
and thus has been inscribed with the meaning that the Bishop imposes, leads him to
instigate carnival activities that subvert the power of the other’s gaze as well as the
other’s power over his conception of self. Even so, only the most extreme forms of
carnival violence, like the carnival ﬂames of destruction and renewal, can bring a deﬁnite
end to Baltasar’s sense of bodily inscription and to the Bishop’s hegemony over him.
Through destruction, La renuncia clears a way for a new form of writing
concerned with the ethical implications of inscription’s alterations, distortions and
violence. In particular, Rodriguez Julia’s lost-body writing points to the violence of
writing the other, and focuses our attention on the importance of individual agency and
self-determination that writing suppresses. Although canrival tactics may free us ﬁom
the other’s gaze, there may be endless layers of bodily inscription that can only be erased
by further violence and destruction. Baltasar’s abdication of power represents his
“triumphant loss,” brought on by his understanding that, since the advent of the modern

practice of writing, the relationship between language and the world is forever changed.

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Writing unavoidably alters what it touches, including the body. Even as a freed slave,
Baltasar remains enslaved to a history of social inscription that can only be overcome
through absolute annihilation of the discourses that make up his being.

If lost-body writing seeks an ephemeral correspondence between the world and
the word, then La renuncia’s violation of Puerto Rico’s ofﬁcial colonial history shows
that Rodriguez J ulia searches for a deeper truth than the facts and ﬁgures that traditional
history records. The mythic “silent sea” of Puerto Rico’s colonial past may correspond to
(neo)celonialist versions of history, but does little to enlighten contemporary conceptions
of self and national self-understanding. For Rodriguez Julia, as we have seen, nightmares
also reveal much about our reality. Therefore, paradoxically, Rodriguez Julia’s ﬁctional
version of a past of racial conﬂict and slave revolts is a more realistic mirror for
contemporary self-evaluation.

La renuncia, published in 1974, is an early form of lost-body writing. It restores
the body to discourse and demonstrates the violent alterations to the body that inscription
requires. The novel also recognizes that writing and other cultural constructs such as
architecture, deny humanity’s link to nature and the inevitability of death. Nonetheless,
La renuncia offers no alternative to canrival destruction as a means of combating violent
writing and its suppression of bodies. Rodriguez J ulia proposes to counter violence with
violence, leading us to what appears to be an irremediable dead end. The two later novels
by Vargas Llosa and Saer pursue many of the same themes as Rodriguez Julia’s earlier
novel but also propose solutions to the impasse of violence in Rodriguez Julia’s text.

In contrast to La renuncia, Vargas Llosa’s novel La gaerra del ﬁn del mundo not
only reinserts the body in historical discourse, but also explores different ways of

constructing self in relation to the body. In both Vargas Llosa and Rodriguez Julia’s

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novels characters are marked by their bodily experiences. In La renuncia, Baltasar
struggles to ﬂee his formation of self ﬁom the inscription of the colonizing other, while
in La gaerra del ﬁn del mundo Vargas Llosa’s characters are inscribed according to their
social class, race, and gender. Although both novelists view the construction of self as an
embodied process, and one that, at ﬁrst glance, seems predetermined by factors beyond a
character’s control, in fact, Vargas Llosa’s characters have more ﬁeedom to choose or
reject the discourses that form them, a fact that may, in part, explain Rodriguez J ulia’s
recourse to violence and his novel’s more pessimistic outcome. For instance, in the
beginning of La gaerra, Jurema is inscribed by the traditional sertanero code of honor,
and, thus, believes that because she was raped she should pay with her life. However,
after having left her home to follow her rapist, Galileo Gall, then witnessing the absurd
battle to the death between her husband, Ruﬁno, and Gall, and ﬁnally, becoming a
refugee of the war in Canudos, Jurema uses her new experiences in the world to reforrn
her conception of self. In the midst of war, J urema discovers happiness, ﬁiendship, and
her own sexuality. These discoveries, in turn, bring about her rejection of traditional
hegemonic discourse, and her contact with different ways of thinking allows her to patch
together a new way of being, and a new way of envisioning the world.

Admittedly, the Counselor’s followers’ choice to refuse the dominant Republican
discourse leads to war and violence, much as Baltasar’s reﬁrsal to readopt the discourse of
the colonial government leads to massacre and rebellion. Clearly, the individual choice
of identity can assert a political position, and thus, can affect not only the subject
involved in that choice, but others in society as well. Nonetheless, Vargas Llosa’s
principal argument concerning the construction of self and the body is that distancing

one’s self ﬁ'om the body and conceptualizing one’s self as monadic, or closed to mutual

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constitution with others, results in individuals who are unable to feel compassion for
others’ suffering and, thus, are incapable of moral action. Hence, Jurema’s embodied
subjectivity-her having known pain and suffering-enables her to empathize with the
pain of others, which, in turn allows her to care for the people in need all around her.In
contrast, the Baron’s disembodied notion of self, which isolates him ﬁ'om the misery of
the poor of the region, makes him both incapable of truly understanding the catastrophe
of Canudos and capable of committing the violent crime of rape.

Furthermore, Vargas Llosa’s exploration of (dis)embodiment and its impact on
moral action deconstructs the traditional dichotomy barbaric/civilized that frequently
underlies the discussion of Latin American identity, and leads to a rereading of the past.
On one hand, embodied characters such as Jurema and the Dwarf, associated with the
backlands and barbarity, are, in fact, characters whose behavior exempliﬁes compassion
and civility. On the other hand, disembodied characters such as the Baron and
Gonealves, associated with the capital and civility, show themselves to be inhumane and
barbaric. Accordingly, La gaerra del ﬁn del mu_r§l_q forces readers to reinterpret not only
the events at Canudos themselves but also da Cunha’s original reading and interpretation
of the people and the events in his classic text, Os sertbes. By questioning the
barbaric/civilized dichotomy ingrained in Latin America’s scientiﬁc writing of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bodies in Vargas Llosa’s new historical novel subvert
hegemonic discourse and reveal violent writing’s sacriﬁce of the body in order to produce
“knowledge.”

In addition, as Vargas Llosa’s novel exempliﬁes lost-body writing, it clearly
participates in its metadiscursive reﬂections. We have seen that La gaerra del ﬁn del

mundo differentiates between the motivation behind violent and kinder ﬁctions, and also

 

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between the resulting impacts of these two kinds of writing. Accordingly, disembodied
writing often leads to disembodied reading, a form of misreading, in that it disregards the
ﬁction’s impact on bodies and any suffering that may result because of writing’s violence.
Galileo Gall’s misreading of Gonealves’ ﬁction, for example, contributes to his lack of
understanding of the rebellion in Canudos and almost results in his death at the hands of
thugs. Similarly, Gall’s misreading of the sertanero code of honor gives him license to
rape without remorse and in the end results in his murder at the hands of the offended
husband. Likewise, many critics have misread the Baron’s rape of Sebastiana, his ﬁction
of male superiority, by passing over Sebastiana’s injured body, the open body that confers
reality on the Baron’s ﬁction. These disembodied readings of a disembodied ﬁction
duplicate the violence of writing and its suppression of the body, allowing brutal rape to
be read as tender love-making. Vargas Llosa’s novel shows us how to read the body back
into discourse from which it has been repressed, it shows us that as with the formulation
of self, in reading we are “consumers” who have the capacity and the responsibility to
reconnect with the body. The tendency to disassociate one’s self and the discourse one
reads ﬁ'om the body can be reversed, restoring the awareness of others’ bodily
experiences of the world and the compassion necessary to moral action.

Once again, Vargas Llosa’s text, in contrast to Rodriguez Julia’s novel, proposes
an alternative to violent forms of discourse, what we have called “embodied” or “kinder”
ﬁctions, a later form of lost-body writing. Similar to the embodied characters’
understanding of pain and their desire to lessen the suffering of others, embodied ﬁctions
emphasize bodily experience in order to bring about a greater awareness of others’ pain
with a desire to diminish it. The medieval romances and epic tales of the storytelling

Dwarf, for instance, entertain and revive the war-weary, while giving hope of redemption

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to a reformed murderer. The Counselor’s ﬁctions, although preposterous, give meaning
to the lives of destitute backlanders, and give them strength and courage to rebuild their
lives. La gaerra del ﬁn del mando is itself a kinder ﬁction, in that, rather than
condemning all fanatical behavior as equally irrational and inexplicable, instead reveals
how human suffering can lead to extremist behavior and, consequently, suggests how
such conﬂicts might be avoided in the future. Although writing the other is often a
violent activity in early forms of lost-body writing, for Vargas Llosa it must not
necessarily be so. Lost—body writing can diminish pain by expressing the experience of
others and inspire moral action by teaching empathy.

Finally, whereas La gaerra del ﬁn del mantle exempliﬁes lost-body writing, Saer’s

novel, El entenado incorporates within its structure the very process of lost-body writing.

 

El entenado’s narrator shows us that the body is an archive of memory that plays an
essential role in remembering, writing and in constructing the self. The body recalls the
past to the narrator’s consciousness in movements and gestures that evoke those of the
cannibals, and through the bodily senses that call forth memories of textures, sights,
sounds, tastes, and smells from the past. In fact, by conceptualizing the body as a
storehouse of memories, as a text of past experience, the narrator breaks down the
mind/body dichotomy underlying traditional notions of identity, and allows us to envision
our subjectivity as a ﬁrsion of discourses, expanding the notion of self to reﬂect our ever-
changing bodily experiences. Thus, although the self is ﬁequently deﬁned in contrast to
the other, in Saer’s text the experiencing of the cannibal other becomes an integral part of
the narrator’s own conception of self. This disruption of the boundaries between self and
other is apparent in the narrator’s thinking and in his philosophy of life that reﬂect those

of the cannibal tribe; for example, the reality he narrates, even that of his past before his

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encounter with the other, is imbued with the tribe’s uncertainty of the existence of the
material world.

In addition, Saer’s narrator’s discourse incorporates and illuminates the body of
the cannibal other by describing the tribe’s existence and everyday practices with rich
detail. In his writing, the narrator attempts to preserve his memory of the cannibal tribe
and to fulﬁll his responsibility as the tribe’s defghi, its historian. The narrator, one of
many captives of the tribe assigned to be defghis, witness to their annual cannibal feast,
has come to see himself as the embodiment of the tribe’s history. On his body is
inscribed the memory of their past, and, therefore, he is a sort of walking text. The
narrator recognizes that his function in cannibal society is much like that of the historian
in the Old World—to preserve their culture’s accomplishments for future generations,
somehow defeating death by enduring through memory.

However, at no time does the narrator see his writing as a purely faithful
representation of the cannibal other’s reality. On the contrary, he constantly reminds us
of the unreliability of memory and of language itself. According to the narrator, writing
and language, inseparable from the body and thus, grounded in material reality, are
ﬁequently incoherent, ambiguous, and fail to express our experience of the world.
Captain Solis, moments before his death, struggles to express his feelings of ﬁrtility and
hopelessness as he conﬁonts the impenetrable American landscape. The narrator recalls
the captain’s incoherent babbling and attempts to communicate through bodily gestures
the absurdity of their endeavors to conquer this strange land and to forge a place for
themselves in history.

On the other hand, writing has some redeeming values for the narrator of Q

entenado. For instance, writing has the beneﬁt of giving order and meaning to what he

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sees as his chaotic and absurd existence. The ritual of sitting down each night to
remember and to write the history of the cannibal tribe intertwined with memories of his
personal story justiﬁes his life. The narrator’s lost-body writing consoles him by giving a
purpose to his life in old age, and yet he explicitly acknowledges that it is an illusory
comfort, as writing lacks the power to truly overcome death. While many cultural
constructs, like theater, religion, cities, and history, repress the body and deny the human
link to nature and therefore to death and decay, writing is a process so thoroughly
intertwined with the natural body--in the case of the narrator, a process reliant on an aging
and increasingly feeble body--that writing’s ﬁagile markings, in fact, remind him of the
insubstantiality of life itself, both like ash, destined to fade.

Saer’s metaﬁctional reﬂection, like that in Vargas Llosa’s novel, centers on the
ethical implications of writing the other and the dilemma of how to represent the other
without violence and alteration. F or some critics, Saer’s narrator oversteps the bounds of
what should be narrated by one such as him; in their view, the narrator, a representative of
the dominant culture, appropriates the voice of the voiceless other. In part, this ethical
dilemma is resolved by my argument that the narrator’s conception of self is not based on
absolute distinctions between self and other. Rather, as the narrator acknowledges the
other’s inﬂuence on his ever-changing sense of self, he recalls Rolena Adomo’s urging
“to understand cultural interactions in far more disquieting ways: in patterns of mutual
inﬂuence and penetration...” (173). For the narrator of El entenado, writing the other is
writing the self.

Nevertheless, as de Certeau has shown, writing the other, even for lost-body
writers like Saer’s narrator and like Montaigne who are intent on preserving the symbolic

order of correspondence between the word and the world, necessarily relies on a series of

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interpretations and translations, each, in a sense, consuming the body that writing hoped
to represent. Like de Certeau, the narrator of El entenado suggests that this alternative
form of writing must settle for a triumphant loss. The best a writer can hope to do is
honestly render the body to discourse with the commitment to depict the other’s
experience as straightforwardly as writing and language permit, while admitting the
impossibility of the task and the inevitability of writing’s violence and alteration.
Paradoxically, however, while rendering the body honestly to discourse in an
attempt to capture the material and the “real,” lost-body writing also incorporates a
reﬂection on the nature of writing and language, a strong metaﬁctional component that
works a bit like confession. At ﬁrst, this may seem contradictory. How can writing that
retunrs to a more materialist conception of language, that proposes that language can
represent material reality and has the power to shape that reality, subsequently turn for
salvation to metaﬁctional discourse, a discourse that instead conceives of language more
as a mirror that reﬂects only on its own nature? Writing about writing, in the case of the
new historical novel, is not a denial of the existence of a material reality beyond language,
an empty discourse referring only back to itself. Instead, the metaﬁctional discourse of
the new historical novel is the moment of confession. In this self-reﬂexive discourse, the
novelist admits the existence of a reality that is difﬁcult to capture fully and without
alteration, but is a reality all the same and one whose existence should not be ignored or
repressed. The contemporary Latin American historical novel exposes the violence that
the modern practice of writing inﬂicts on bodies while confessing that writing of all
kinds, including lost-body writing, cannot escape doing harm. A much greater harm,
however, would be for authors to return to the bodiless historiographic discourse of the

past that perpetuated simplistic notions of identity, illusory conceptions of a progressive

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movement of humanity through time, and a lack of awareness of the way writing shapes

our vision of the world and alters material reality.

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Notes

' Several critics have noted this reemergenee of interest in the historical novel in
Latin America in recent decades. See Angel Rama, Daniel Balderston, Fernando Ainsa
"Nueva novela", Seymour Menton, and José Emilio Pacheco. Balderston, who in 1985
organized a symposium at Tulane University dealing with the genre, is one of the ﬁrst
critics to call attention to the new generation of historical novel and to note its Borgesian
twist: "The new historical novel in Latin America owes much to Pierre Menard, for
whom historical truth <no es lo que sucedio; es lo que juzgarnos que sucedio.>" (l 1).
Menton's text catalogs nearly four hundred historical novels published, for the most part,
since the 1970's. Ainsa identiﬁes the decade of the 1980's as the period in which the
historical novel enjoys renewed popularity.

The historical novel in Latin America has been associated with themes exploring
the formation of national identity since its inception during the Romantic period, which
coincided with the creation of new nations throughout the region after the wars for
independence. See Jean Franco (Spanish American Literature 62-66). Raymond Souza
and Balderston argue that contemporary historical novelists look to the region's past to
understand present problems and conﬂicts. F or example, Balderston states: "In Fuentes,
in Garro, in Vargas Llosa, in Piglia we ﬁnd a similar preoccupation with history or
origins and with the present and the future. The recreation of a past time serves as an
inducement to meditate on the shape of things to come" (1 l). Anibal Gonzalez-Perez
argues that reconstructions of the Latin American past have always mirrored the concerns

of the present from which it is written. As a result, the critic concludes, even postmodern

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historical narrative which parodies the use of ﬁgural allegory cannot avoid the linking of
the present of writing to the rewritten past (445-46). Ainsa compares traditional and
contemporary manifestations of the genre, by asserting that the new historical novel
continues to participate in the exploration of the concept of national identity by
deconstructing ofﬁcial history and ﬁagrnenting the concept of national identity itself
("Nueva novela" 5).

2 In "Antinomies," Ainsa maintains that Latin American discourses of identity are
founded on several unresolved antinomies that are reﬂected in the region's literature. He
lists many of them: unity/diversity, authentic/foreign, interior/port, countryside/city,
masses/elite, Creole/Hispanic, tradition/modernity, continuity/rupture, religious/secular,
neocolonial/metropolitan, to name a few. Ainsa argues that literature can synthesize
these opposing terms by showing the ways they often overlap and by undermining their
mutual exclusivity.

3 An earlier study by Herbert Butterﬁeld, The Historicﬂlovel: An Essay,
published by Cambridge University Press in 1924, did not so much attempt to deﬁne the
genre as to distinguish it ﬁom the work of the historian. Butterﬁeld regards the historical
novel as a form of history that, in treating the past, manages to reveal its inner "secret," a
peculiar knowledge captured by the novelist through the illusion of direct human
experience (112).

4 The deﬁning characteristics of the genre according to Lukacs are the following:
the authentic historical portrayal of characters, time, and place, not presented as givens,
but rather presented as they developed through time; the characterization of the central

ﬁgure of the novel as average or mediocre, and thus representative of a social type; the

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appearance of great historical ﬁgures as minor characters, only present in the action of the
novel to fulﬁll their historical missions; the importance of dialogue to depict conﬂicting
political forces and social class struggles; and, the representation of history as a
precondition of the present, and as a series of crises whose resolution leads to progress
(19-88).

5 F or example, in an article published in the journal (L_cnrj in 1979, Joseph W.
Turner points out the problematic nature of deﬁning the historical novel due to the
instability and oxymoronic nature of the two underlying terms: history and ﬁction.
Turner recommends, instead of attempting to attribute certain characteristics to a genre
that resists deﬁnition, that we designate three types of historical novels positioned along a
continuum pertaining to the narrative's relationship with history--documented, disguised,
and invented historical novels. Such an approach would only require that a given novel
have attributes of one of the three types, although many novels, he points out, contain
aspects of all three. A documented historical novel, according to Turner, includes at least
one real person or historical ﬁgure, and as such maintains a close relationship with
documented history. In the invented historical novel, situated on the other end of the
spectrum, all the characters and events are ﬁctional; and yet because the novel's setting is
typically far removed in time, it requires the reader to engage his or her historical
imagination. Turner differentiates the invented historical novel ﬁ'orn other ﬁction by
asserting that these novels primarily reﬂect on the way we reconstruct the past. Finally,
the disguised historical novel falls somewhere between the documented and invented
historical novels, because in it there are striking similarities to recorded history, even

though this type of novel insists on its ﬁctional autonomy.

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In H_istory and the Contemporary Novel (1989), David Cowart establishes a
deﬁnition of the historical novel in broad and simple terms: "any novel in which a
historical consciousness manifests itself strongly in either the characters or the action"
(6). Like Turner, Cowart feels compelled to organize the genre into categories so that he
can demonstrate some of the possible variations permitted within his broad deﬁnition.
The ﬁrst of the four kinds he calls "The way it was," which are novels that, like Turner's
documented historical novels, recreate a believable past. From this point on there is no
overlap between the two critics' categorizatiens. Cowart's second type, "The way it will
be," are ﬁctions about the future that reverse the past. The third kind is called "The
tunring point." These are novels that attempt to locate seminal moments in the past that
have shaped the present. And ﬁnally, "The distant mirror" refers to ﬁctions that
anachronistically view the past with a modern sensibility (6-11).

6 Although Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria admits that Indians and Blacks were
important ﬁgures in Romantic literature, he contends that in fact the idealized depictions
of marginalized groups in these texts contribute little to the constitution of national
identity in the new republics:

But no one thought, save in the most stylized and abstract romantic poems
or novels which invoked "universal" feelings such as love or grief, that the
Indian or the Black had anything to say that could be incorporated into
Latin American culture, or that their history was anything but ancillary in
the composition of the nascent independent states. They were not a source
of stories that could express the innermost secrets of Latin American

society, nor could their beliefs compete with the knowledge offered by

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"civilization" in general, or by scientiﬁc reportage in particular.... The
new story had to be of the present. In the present Indians and Blacks
appeared as part of nature, part of the violent becoming of the New World,
but not its voice. (Myth and Archive 149)
This legitimate observation by the Cuban critic does not, however, negate the accuracy of
France's contention that the emergence of marginalized ﬁgures as protagonists in
Romantic literature helped to distinguish the cultures of the new nations from their
Spanish heritage.

7 In a 1996 dissertation, Lee Joan Skinner studies the way Latin American
historical novels of the nineteenth-century address the objectives of national
consolidation and the formation of national identities, as well as reﬂect intellectuals'
changing attitudes about the colonial period. Also see Nina Gerassi-Navarro's 1994
dissertation, "Pirate Novels: Metaphors of a Developing Identity", which analyzes
nineteenth-century historical novels that reconstruct the ﬁgure of the pirate, who
embodies the ideological debate over national identity at that time.

8 See Lori A. Madden's 1991 dissertation, "The Discourses on the Canudos War:
Ideologies and Rhetoric," which shows how recent rewritings of the war were "designed
to symbolize Latin American Politics." See also Cheryl Rae Riess's 1989 dissertation,
"Narrating History: Five Argentine Novelists," which concludes that these rewritings of
history are as much a reaction to, and an examination of the present time in which they
are written. And ﬁnally, see Claudia Montilla Vargas' 1993 dissertation, "History and

Narrative: The Latin American Experiment," in which, similar to the intellectuals of the

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Romantic period, the critic views the historical novel as the "ideal space" for reassessing
cultural identity and traditions.

9 Lukacs' prescriptive deﬁnition of the historical novel relegates the great
historical ﬁgure to the role of a "minor" character that appears only at moments of
historical signiﬁcance, "while avoiding what Hegel calls the psychology of the valet,
namely the detailed analysis of small, human peculiarities which have nothing to do with
the historical mission of the person concerned" (47). Later in his study, Lukacs will
identify the "making private of history" as one of the tendencies manifest in the decline of
the historical novel (199). Avrom Fleishman agrees with Lukacs' contention that primary
characters in the historical novel should not be world-historical ﬁgures as it is essential to
maintain their status as "exceptional" individuals (10-11).

In her recent study of the contemporary historical novel in Latin American, Pens
coincides with this point of view. Pens excludes from the genre works in which
historical events "estan sujetos y son interpretados en funcien de la vida privada e
individual de les personajes" ["are subject to and are interpreted as a function of the
private, individual lives of the characters"] (58).

’0 A few examples of major historical ﬁgures portrayed in these novels include
Christopher Columbus in Alejo Carpentier's El arpa y la sombra (1979), in Abel Posse's
Les perros del paraiso (1983), and in Augusto Rea Bastos' Vigilia del Almirante (1992);
Simon Bolivar in Gabriel Garcia Marquéz's El general en su laberinto (1989); and Phillip
II in Antonio Benitez Rojo's El mar de las lentejas (1979). Secondary ﬁgures include

Lope de Aguirre in Posse's Daimon (1987), fray Servando Teresa de Mier in El mundo

 

alucinante (1969) by Reynaldo Arenas, and AD. Exquemelin in Carmen Boullosa's El_

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médico de les pira_ta_s (1992), and in Sen vacas, somos puercos (1991). Examples of
ﬁctional characters passed down through oral tradition are Baltasar Montafiez in

Rodriguez Julia's La renuncia del héroe Baltasar, and Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles

 

in Garcia Marquez's Del amor y otros demonios.

” Ainsa is one of the ﬁrst critics to describe the new literary trend in terms of its
innovations and to call the renovated genre “la nueva novela historica.” Ainsa lists
several characteristics of the new historical novel, most of which revolve around its intent
to rewrite and reread ofﬁcial history, and around the narrative strategies the new historical
novel employs to accomplish this goal: use of multiple perspectives to demonstrate the
inaccessibility of historical truth; elimination of historical distance by establishing a
dialogue with the past; deliberated distancing ﬁom official historiography to degrade
foundational myths; inclusion of anachronism; utilization of authentic historical
documents or false chronicles disguised as historiography; use of parody; and
preoccupation with language (“Nueva novela” 9). In addition to these renovations to the
genre described by Ainsa, I argue in this study that the new historical novel ﬂaunts the
human body as it moves through history.

’2 Also, in the preliminary study to the Porrr'ra edition of the novel, Concha
Melendez quotes various intellectuals that ﬁnd in the ﬁgure of Enriquillo as constructed
by Galvan, a man who represents a nation (xviii-xxiii).

’3 Sommer explains Galvan's emissions by pointing to his conservative political
leanings, in particular, his ofﬁcial gevemment involvement as secretary to the President
in the 1861 attempts to restore Spanish colonial rule over the Dominican Republic in

order to avoid Haitian annexation. By omitting Aﬁican slaves' presence on the island in

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his national romance, Galvan can erase the relevance of black contributions to national
origin and identity. In short, Galvan denies the racial heritage of the majority of
Dominicans and implies that blacks are Haitians, and thus, foreigner invaders. See 247-56
for a more detailed discussion.

It is interesting to note that Dominican attitudes toward race continue to show
denial of their Aﬁican heritage. For example, Helen I. Safa maintains that Dominicans
often use the term "indie" to refer to anyone ﬁom racially mixed origins, a euphemism
that falsely suggests descent from the Tainos and at the same time reveals "negrophobic"
attitudes still current in the Dominican Republic (9).

'4 In _L_a expresien grim (1957), Lezama Lima ﬁnds in Fray Servando a
transitionary ﬁgure between the Baroque and the Romantic periods in America, a
transition that Lima associates with the leaving behind of the colonial past and a moving
toward Independence:

Frey Servando es el primero que se decide a ser el perseguido, porque ha
intuido que otro paisaje naciente, viene en su busqueda, el que ya no
contaba con el gran arco que unia el barroce hispanico y su
enriquecimiento en el barroce arnericano, sino el que intuye la opulencia
de un nuevo destino... (97)

In fact, Lima asserts that, with the declaration of Independence in Mexico, Fray
Servando's life ﬁnds meaning, "la plenitud de su rebeldia, la forma que su madurez
necesitaba para que su vida alcanzara el sentido de su proyeccion historica" (91). In

short, Fray Servando preﬁgures the great leaders of Latin American Independence like

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Hildalgo and Bolivar, while their later heroic deeds bear out Fray Servando's role as
precursor.
Alfonso Reyes, who writes the prologue to an undated edition of Fray Servando's

Memorias simply declares, and without wavering, that the cleric "hasta 1795 es, en

 

Mexico, un precursor de la independencia," at which time he is forced into exile in Spain
(Reyes xvi). O'Gonnan's prologue to his 1945 edition sidesteps the terms "precursor" and
yet magniﬁes the importance of Fray Servando's political writings, sermons and speeches
in the Mexican movement for Independence and the country's later move away from
monarchy and toward republicanism.

’5 In her article, "A Natural History of the Old World: The Memorias of Fray
Servando," Kathleen Ross maintains that Fray Servando's sermon combines the idea of
the visit of Saint Thomas to the New World as Quezalcoatl, previously theorized by
Carlos de Singiienza y Gongora and other Jesuits, with the myth of the Virgin of
Guadalupe, a combination which leads to Fray Servando’s condemnation by Spanish
Church authorities (98).

’6 Gonzalez Pérez' article points to innovation in the new historical novel when he
shows how contemporary historical discourse «including poetry by Ernesto Cardenal,
poetic prose by Eduardo Galeano, and essays by Severe Sarduy--enters into dialogue with
the early historical narrative of Carpentier and its representation of the past as a
preﬁguration of the present (439). According to Gonzalez Perez, each of the six novels
he studies--El mundo alucinante by Arenas, E1 mar de las lentejas by Benitez Rojo,
pm and Les perros del paraiso by Posse, La noche oscura del Nifio Avilé§ (1984) by

Rodriguez Julia, and El entenado by Saer--challenges in different ways Carpentier's use of

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ﬁgural allegory and its providential notion of history. As we have seen, Gonzalez Perez
show how in El mundo alucinante, Arenas destroys the notion of Aristotelian causality
that governs historiography by offering several alternative versions of the same events
throughout the novel. According to Gonzalez Perez, Benitez Rojo questions the
providential notion of history by allowing excessive historical detail to muddy simplistic
conceptions of the past, showing in this way the multifarious nature of historical events.
In contrast, Saer, Posse, and Rodriguez J ulia parody the use of ﬁgural allegory by openly
displaying its use in their texts in an exaggerated manner to reveal its distortions as it
represents historical events as preﬁgurations of the present.

’7 In a eulogy to Arenas, who died of AIDS in New York in December of 1990,
Dolores M. Koch explains the circumstances of his imprisonment in the same Havana
prison where, ironically, at one time, Fray Servando had been held. According to Koch,
although El mundo alucinante won a national prize in Cuba, the novel was never
published there, and Arenas was forced to secretly publish the work in Mexico (1969), in
France (1969) and in England (1971), winning both intemational recognition and
incarceration for its author. After 2 years of hard labor, Arenas was released but not
permitted to work, and ﬁnally managed to ﬂee the island on the Mariel boatlift of 1980.
See Koch 686.

’8 Banientos article, "Reynaldo Arenas, Alejo Carpentier y la nueva novela
historica hispanoarnericana," studies El mundo alucinante as an explicit parody of 1_3_1_
siglo de las luces. Barrientos shows that where Carpentier's novel is notable for its
eruditien, Arenas employs imagination; where Carpentier strives for verisimilitude,

Arenas opts for the unbelievable; Carpentier's narrative is strictly chronological, and

201

Arenas' is brimming with anachronisms; Carpentier locates the actions in his novel in the
places and on the very streets where they would have occurred, whereas Arenas makes
the different settings in the novel unreal, and dream-like. Banientos concludes, however,
that the most important difference between the two novels is that in Carpentier's, the
protagonist, Victor Hugues, is transformed into a literary character, while Arenas' Fray
Servando becomes a mythic ﬁgure. According to Barrientos, Fray Servando becomes
myth because he somehow "escapes" imprisonment as a literary character--fascination
with his life goes beyond that with Arenas' novel, somehow overshadowing the
importance of the Cuban writer's work. I disagree with Barrientos' conclusion, as I
believe Fray Servando had achieved a mythic status through the writings of Lima, Reyes,
and those of Fray Servando himself, before becoming Arenas' ﬁctional character. As we
have previously shown, Arenas deconstructs the mythic historical ﬁgure by exposing the
cleric's body, by thrusting him into motion, and by exaggerating his very human qualities.
The 2000 release of “Before Night Falls,” a movie about Arenas’ life, adds a new
dimension to this argument, as the historical ﬁgure of the writer Arenas also becomes a
literary personage and is on his way to becoming a mythic ﬁgure himself.

’9 Hayden White ﬁnds that the need for "self-deﬁnition by negation" (152), in
particular the antithetical characterization of oneself as civilized, and the other as wild,
often occurs during periods of crisis:

In times of sociocultural stress, when the need for positive self-
deﬁnition asserts itself but no compelling criterion of self-identiﬁcation
appears, it is always possible to say something like: "I may not know the

precise content of my own felt humanity, but I am most certainly not like

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that," and simply point to something in the landscape that is manifestly
different ﬁ'om oneself. ("The Fonns of Wildness" 151)

Certainly the period of discoveries and conquest in the New World taking place
during the transition from a premodem to a modern ontology, would be an example of a
moment of "sociocultural stress."

20 Gonzalez Echevarria argues in Chapter 3 of his text, "A Lost-World
Rediscovered," that scientiﬁc travel literature of the nineteenth century derives its
authority, in part, by isolating the European traveler in Latin America from the object of
study through various rhetorical strategies and "civilized impedimenta," and thus,
establishes an inside and an outside, a self and an other, a civilized subject and a wild or
barbaric natural object (106-109). In Chapter 4, "The Novel as Myth and Archive:
Ruins and Relics of Tlen," the critic shows how, in the twentieth century, anthropology
still relies on these ﬁssures to produce knowledge about the other. According to
Gonzalez Echevarria, the telluric novels of this period that imitate ethnography "explode
under the pressure of their internal contradictions" (159). One of these contradictions is
the attempt to speak for and describe the myths of the primitive other using the realist
language of anthropological discourse (144-59).

2’ For a general discussion of strategies used by these various types of
contemporary critics to disrupt the traditional mind/body dichotomy in literature, art and
other cultural constructs, as well as an overview of important critics in the ﬁeld, see Anne
Cranny-Francis' The Body in th_e Text (1995). In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity (1990), feminist critic Judith Butler challenges the accepted gender

categories of male and female by showing them to be discursive practices rather than

203

"natural" ways of being, and examines the consequences of this challenge in terms of
sexual identity. bell hooks, a theorist of race, criticizes the essentialism underlying racial
identity as a perpetuation of stereotypes inscribed on the bodies of the colonized and the
colonizer. See Y_earning: Race. Gendenaral Cultural Politics; (1990), in particular, her
essays entitled "Postmodern Blackness" and "Representing Whiteness: Seeing Wings of
Desire." Michel Foucault is considered the most prominent postmodern theorist of the
body. In one of his most important works, D_i_scipline a_nd Puniah: The Birth of the
m (1975 ), Foucault asserts that the body is constructed or inscribed by the discourses
and practices of society's institutions. Michel de Ccrteau's work, particularly The Practice
of Evmday Life (1984), expands on Foucault's theories by analyzing the ways bodies
resist the "discipline." See Chapter 1 of the current study for a more in depth discussion
of de Ccrteau's contribution to the study of the body in discourse.

22 The term "embodied consciousness" is used by Arthur W. Frank in his article,
"For a Sociology of the Body: An Analytical Review," in which the author establishes a
theoretical typology of the body in order to explore the relationship between the body and
ethics. Anne Cranny-Francis uses the term "embodied subjectivity" in her study, _Thg
Body in the Text. which analyzes how contemporary theory focuses on the body to
change the way we position ourselves socially, politically, and economically.

2’ Frank uses these four questions concerning bodily action to construct a matrix
of four idealized body types based on their styles of action: the disciplined body, the
mirroring body, the dominating body, and the communicative body. Frank does not
contend, however, that empirical bodies are conﬁned to one type of action, but rather that

these body types can help us to understand body behaviors and relations.

204

24 Although some might argue that twentieth century vanguard movements in
Latin America and even tum-of-the-century "modemistas" had previously abandoned
referential pretenses in their work, these literary movements do not propose the radical
critique of language and representation as set forth by Borges or Derrida. Latin America's
"modemistas" may have, especially in the ﬁrst "preciosista" phase, rejected naturalism's
aspirations to describe social reality and its drive to reform, in favor of an escape into an
imaginary world of exotic beauty and aesthetic perfection; nevertheless, they maintained
faith in the power of the poetic word, and later during the "arnericanista" phase, expressed
a rekindled interest in regional problems. See J iménez 9-64.

Vanguard artists, too, withdrew ﬁ'om the material world in order to transcend the
human condition and the boundaries of nature. However, as Poggioli argues, what Ortega
y Gasset called the vanguard's dehumanization of art, can be better understood not so
much as a "recoiling from life and living beings" as a "deforming" of material reality
(176). For Poggioli, the vanguard's experimental language is not a ﬁguration but rather a
"transﬁguration" of the real (197). In vanguard poetry's "vision the word is not spirit
which became ﬂesh, but ﬂesh which became spirit" (199). The vanguards' almost mystic
belief in poetic language's capacity to renew the impoverished language of bourgeois
society demonstrates its faith in the power of the word to alter the world.

25 De Ccrteau's linking of death and eroticism recalls George Bataille's conception
of eroticism as distinguished ﬁom animal sexuality: "In human consciousness, eroticism
is that within man which calls his being into question" (29). Although de Certeau does
not explicitly explore eroticism as a subversive everyday practice, his linking of the two

suggests the importance of the erotic body in dismantling hegemonic discourse.

205

26 Several critical texts on the work of Rodriguez J ulia have contributed to my
analysis of La renuncia, including two articles by Estelle Irizarry. The ﬁrst, “Metahistoria

y novela: La renuncia del héroe Baltasar ” analyzes the novel using the theories of

 

Hayden White about metalristory. Irizarry examines emplotrnent, tropes, historical
philosophy, and the ideological position employed in La renuncia. This article is
particularly interesting as an application of White’s theories, but concerns itself less with
clarifying a reading of the novel. The second article by Irizarry, “Exploring Conscious
Imitation of Style with Ready-Made Software,” makes use of a computer to study the
imitation of eighteenth century language in the text. The principle purpose of this article
is to show the possibility of employing computer technology in literary research, and so,
once again, does not explore the novel’s salient themes.

Two recent articles have examined the novel’s themes and historical context more
profoundly. A study by Francisco Cabanillas examines La renuncia as “politica dc
ﬁccien,” and analyzes the novel’s theme of the dangers of power. In particular, he
explores how historical discourse, constructed with the language of power, cannot escape
its ideological and ﬁctional foundations. Cesar A. Salgado’s insightﬁrl article “Archives
encontrados: Edgardo Rodriguez Julia 0 los diablejos de la historiograﬁa criolla,” studies
the parody of the archive in three works by the Puerto Rican author. According to
Salgado, Rodriguez Julia lays bare through parody the “Generacion del Treinta’s” project
to construct an archive that would represent elitist Creole identity. Salgado concludes
that Rodriguez Julia’s novels reﬂect the revisionist work of a Pancaribbean group of
“new historians” that reveals the actual brutal nature of the treatment of slaves on the

islands, and the less than harmonic relations between the races.

206

Although in relative terms, the critics have overlooked this ﬁrst novel by
Rodriguez Julia, beginning with his second novel the Puerto Rican writer has garnered
increasing interest. A compilation of analyses on the work of the writer, Las tribulaciones
d_eiulia (1992), includes broad thematic approaches to Rodriguez J ulia’s writing. Of
particular interest in my analysis of La renuncia is “Escribir la mirada,” by Aurea Maria
Sotomayor. In this study, the critic examines the Puerto Rican writer’s readings of visual
artwork, real and imaginary, in several of his texts including La renuncia. Her focus is
primarily on Rodriguez Julia’s verbal transformation of visual images, a strategy repeated
frequently in his work.

27 In her article “Metahistoria y novela,” Irizarry cites Caytano Coll y Toste,
Leyendas puertonigueiias, as a source for this legend.

2” Miguel Henriquez is another historic ﬁgure that may have served as a model for
the novel’s characterization of Baltasar. José Luis Gonzalez describes him in the
following way: "un zapatero mestizo que llego a convertirse, mediante su extraordinaria
actividad come contrabandista y corsario, en el hombre mas rice de la colonia durante la
segunda mitad del siglo XVIII... hasta que las autoridades espaiiolas, alarmadas por su
poder, decidieron sacarlo de la Isla y de este mundo" (22).

29 For a brief discussion of the history of Puerto Rico’s colonization and its effects
on contemporary Puerto Rican culture, see Jesé Luis Gonzalez, “El pais de cuatro pisos:

notas para una deﬁnicien de la cultura puertorriqueiia,” in El pais de cuatro pises y otros

ensayos, (1 1-42).

207

3" In Marxism and the Philosophy ofLa_ngu_ag§ (1973), V.N. Volosinov
convincingly maintains that all language is a social construct and therefore cannot be
divorced ﬁ'om the ideology of its community.

3 ’ See Rodriguez Julia’s conference presentation at the Wilson Center, “Puerto
Rico y el Caribe: Historia de una marginalidad,” for more information on his great uncle,
Ramon Julia Marin, who was also a novelist (10).

’2 In her essay, “A Caribbean Social Imaginary: Redoubled Notes on Critical-
Fiction against the Gaze of Ulysses,” included in the anthology Latin American Identig
and Construction; of Difference (1994), Zavala asserts that Caribbean cultures “are
bookish or ‘grammatological’ to the root” (187). By this she means, that they look to
symbols, tropes, and allusions to communicate cultural meaning and identity. This
impulse to obtuseness, she argues, stems ﬁom the ﬁnnly-constituted imaginary cannon of
the imperialist powers, that, when imposed on islanders, provoked “many energies of
symbolic vehemence” in the islanders’ expressions of national identity and in their
attempts to recapture self-determination (187). To a list of past tropes and metaphors
adopted by Caribbean poets and novelists, the Puerto Rican writer adds her own:

All epistemic metaphors ﬁ'om the cultural anthropophagy of Oswaldo de
Andrade, to the metamorphosis of the cannibal of Maximilien Laroche, the
baroque of Severe Sarduy, the creolization of Edouard Glissant, the
counterpoint of Femando Ortiz, the real maravilloso of Alejo Carpentier,
the cultural maroonization of Rene Depestre, to the dialogical imaginary
and the metalepsis I propose, in other words, the primacy of displacing the

colonial by the liberatory. .. have created a constant shift in our remapping

208

of identities. Such entities emerge in the continuum of the struggle for the
sign of our histories. In such struggle, metaphoricity and subjectivity have
been reconstituted since the contested space of the Caribbean was mapped
by the European imperialist epistemologies. (192)
No matter the metaphor it employs, the principal aim of Caribbean writing, according to
Zavala, is to redeﬁne individual and national identity by ﬂeeing the imagination.

’3 Cabanillas also contends that the Bishop is a ﬁgure of the author, and
speciﬁcally of the “categorical and hegemonic” author (287). In addition, he argues that
Baltasar is a ﬁgure of the reader who opens up the Bishop’s text to the democratic
process through the activity of reading.

’4 See Foucault’s text, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), in
particular “Panopticism,” and The Histog of Sexualig Volume One: An Introduction
(1976).

’5 Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria ﬁnds other symbols ﬁom the Zohar and the
kabala in Carpentier’s novel El siglo de las luces. See A_lej_o__(_3_arpentier: the Film
Mp, 237-54.

36 For a discussion of ﬁgural allegory as a way of interpreting history, see Erich
Auerbach, “Figura,” Spenes from the Drama of European Literature, 11-76.

37 In this essay Carpentier observes that the architecture of Havana expresses the
island nation’s disorderly, mestizo psychology:

Y come todo mestizaje, per proceso de sirnbiosis, de adicion, de mezcla,
engendra un barroquismo, el barroquismo cubano consistie en acumular,

coleccionar, multiplicar, columnas y columnatas en tal demasia de dericos

209

y corintios, de jénicos y de compuestos, que acabo e1 transer'rnte per
olvidar que vivia entre columnas, que era vigilado por columnas que le
median el tronco y lo protegian del sol y de la lluvia, y hasta que era
velado per columnas en las noches de sus suefios. La Multiplicidad de las
Columnas ﬁre la resultante de un espiritu barroce que no se manifesto--
salvo excepciones--en e1 atirabuzonarniento de pilastras salomonicas
vestidas de ’enredaderas doradas, sombreadoras de sacras homacinas.
Espiritu barroce, legitimarnente antillano, mestizo de cuanto se
transculturize en estas islas del Mediterraneo americano, se tradujo en un
irreverente y desacompasado rejuego de entablamentos clasicos, para crear
ciudades aparentemente ordenadas y serenas donde les vientos de ciclones
estaban siempre a1 acecho del mucho orden, para desordenar el orden

apenas los veranos, pasados a octubres, empezaran a bajar sus nubes sobre

las azoteas y tejados. (La ciudad de las columnas 101-103)

’8 In Os sertees, da Cunha at once attempts to justify the Brazilian government's

massacre of the thousands of inhabitants at Canudos by appealing to the Darwinian notion

of progress through the elimination of racially inferior beings, and to the Romantic

concept of national unity and the advance of civilization. However, while condemning

the government's actions, da Cunha empathizes with the jaguncos ' courageous defense of

their home and ideals. This long narrative is an attempt to understand the tragedy using

scientiﬁc methods and discourse to reach a conclusion. And yet, in the closing

paragraphs of the text da Cunha expresses his own skepticism regarding the ability of

science to present us with positive knowledge, as science seems to come into conﬂict

210

with his own moral code. In this passage, a commission assigned to conﬁrm the death of
the Counselor disinters his corpse, and after retunring the decaying body to its gave,
decides they should preserve his head for ﬁrrther study:

. and, since it was a waste of time to exhume the body once more, a
knife cleverly wielded at the right point did the trick, the corpse was
decapitated, and that honible face, sticky with scars and pus, once more
appeared before the visitors' gaze.

After, that they took it to the seaboard, where it was geeted by

delirious multitudes with carnival joy. Let science here have the last word.

(476)
Da Cunha's ironic distancing from his own methodological approach leaves the reader
questioning the author's stated purpose and conclusions. The Brazilian writer's
preliminary thesis that "civilization is destined to continue its advance in the backlands,
impelled by that implacable 'motive force of history' in the inevitable crushing of weak
races by the strong" (xxix), is forcefully contradicted in his concluding image of the
supposedly "civilized" in their camivalesque barbarity.

’9 In addition to Rama’s study, several other articles dealing with the theme of
fanaticism in the novel have aided me in this analysis. For José Miguel Oviedo as for
Seymour Menton, the novel’s principal theme is the condemnation of fanaticism, to
which Menton adds the praise for ﬂexibility as represented in the Baron de Caiiabrava.
Andrew J. Brown categorizes and examines the characters in the novel in terms of their
relationship to fanatical thinking-the fanatics themselves, those neutral to fanaticism, and

those who ﬁght against it--and concludes that only those who struggle to defeat

211

fanaticism, like the myopic journalist, can be considered morally successful by the
novel’s ethical standard. Marie Madeleine Gladieu studies fanatical characters in several
of Vargas Llosa’s novels, including La gperra del- ﬁn del mando. and links these ﬁgures
to the return of barbarism and violence. She concludes that although da Cunha believed
in the triumph of civilization over barbarism, a century later, Vargas Llosa does not.
James W. Brown explores the theme of fanaticism in the novel and the responsibility of
the individual to make moral decisions in societies that are amoral.

J uzyn-Amestoy questions the supposedly impartial voice of the narrator in the
novel, and studies his idolatry of violence and his participation in the violence of the text.
Although the critic is not speciﬁcally studying the novel’s representation of the body, she
does discuss what she interprets as the narrator’s obsession with the phallus, the anus, and
excrement. She argues that these obsessions do not point to a “vital acceptance of the
body” (186), but rather to the gloriﬁcation of violence and death. And ﬁnally, concerning
the link between authority and narration, Anibal Gonzalez’ discusses the portrayal of
journalism in several works of contemporary Spanish American ﬁction, including _La
gm del ﬁn del mangg. He sees journalism in these works as a metaphor that allows
authors to reﬂect on the ethical implications of writing that is frequently associated with
authoritative discourse and oppression. My analysis of the embodiment of characters and
ﬁctional discourse in the novel allows me to reconsider dimensions of several of these
articles, including fanaticism, the moral implications of fanatical thought, the perceived
dichotomy between the civilized and the barbaric, and the novel’s stance toward ethics

and writing.

212

’0 Norbert Elias, another important contributor to contemporary body theory,
argues in his two-volume text, The Civilizing Process (1939, the English translation 197 8
& 1982) that, through time, bodies have become more civilized, in that they are
increasingly rational, socialized and individualized. Bodily processes and drives have
been repressed, become unmentionable, and violence as a means for competing and
resolving conﬂict has been replaced gadually by an increasing rationality, drive
inhibition and reﬁnement of manners as a means for distinguishing oneself. In Elias’
evolutionary scheme of civilization, the human body and bodily practices ﬁom the
Middle Ages to modernity have become increasingly repressed in our interactions with
others, and this repression is valued as a sigr of civilization and diminishing violence.
Although Elias’ theory of the civilizing process does not rely on dualist thinking like
Scarry’s theory of the making and unmaking of the world, it is similar in that it too views
the repression of the body and bodily practices as a move toward a more civilized world.

4’ Focaliser is a term ﬁrst coined by Mieke Bal in Narratology: An Introduction to
the Theory of Nam. Raymond Leslie Williams effectively uses the term to describe
narrative perspective in _Iaguerradel ﬁn del mando (139-47), as does Seymour Menton
in his study (48).

’2 In The Civilized Body: Social Domination Control and Health (1982), Freund

 

argues that bodily well-being and health are related to social class, economic position,
and whether one is in a position of power or of subordination. Feelings of
disempowerment or lack of control over one’s own goals leads to stress, the questioning
of one’s concept of self, and ultimately, illness. In The Managed Heart:

Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983), Hochschild shows how people in positions

213

of power are protected by what he call “status shields” that defend a person’s self concept
and their sense of well-being. Individuals lacking power have less access to these status
shields, and so, are more likely to suffer the stress of attacks on their concept of self, and
therefore, are more likely to become ill.
43 This reality-confening or ﬁction-generating capacity of the open body is
explained by Scarry as an avoidance of the disturbing reality of the corpse:
It is as though the human rrrind, conﬁonted by the open body itself
(whether human or animal) does not have the option of failing to perceive
its reality that rushes unstoppably across his eyes and into his mind, yet the
mind so ﬂees ﬁom what it sees that it will with almost equal speed
perform the countennovement of assigring that attribute to something
else, especially if there is something else at hand made ready to receive the
rejected attribute, ready to act as its referent. (Body in Pain 126)
Scarry gives as an example the use of sacriﬁce in the Brahmin religion. The sacriﬁced
body was placed at the walls of a city to make the city impenetrable. Thus, the open body
substantiated the belief of the city’s impenetrability in the imagination of its people
’4 Gall’s oath reminds Jacques Joset of Simon Bolivar’s oath at Monte Sagado.
He concludes that Vargas Llosa’s rewrite of this oath profanes a sacred episode in Latin
American history and thus underlines an important theme in the novel—that no matter
how heroic the cause, it is susceptible to fanaticism.
4’ In La gaerra del ﬁn del mund , Vargas Llosa is clearly interested in portraying
the historical events preceding the massacre and the war itself as a series of accidents in

direct contradiction with the necessary relationship of cause and effect set up by

214

traditional historiography, and represented by Gall’s description of history. The Peruvian
novelist achieves this effect by accumulating massive amounts of detail, by introducing
large numbers of characters, and by presenting so many varying perspectives on the
events, that it becomes difﬁcult for the reader to perceive any certain connection between
the actions of the characters and their effect on others and the war itself. The multiple
perspectives that Vargas Llosa shows us through the use of focalizers represent the
varying interpretations of reality and the competing discourses that make-up history. For
Antonio Conejo Polar, chance undermines the verisimilitude of the text and negates
history as absurd.

’6 Although many critics have written about Gall’s rape of J urema (Menton;
Gerdes; J uzyn-Amestoy; Brown, A.; Brown, J.; Company Gimeno; Henderson;
Weatherford; Meneses) it seems that they fail to note his continuing violence. Gall
commits the ﬁrst rape after the ﬁrst attempt on life (98-100). He rapes again after the
second attempt on his life while he and Jurema travel to Canudos with the mule (124).

’7 Among critics there are varied responses to the character of the Baron. For
example, Menton argues that Vargas Llosa characterizes the Baron as a “compassionate
human being” (46), who breaks down stereotypes of the wealthy landowner, and
represents moderation in a landscape of fanaticism. In contrast, A. Brown maintains that
the novel condemns the Baron because of his lack of responsibility in ﬁghting fanaticism.
Rama asserts that the Baron represents a weak point in the novel, as Vargas Llosa’s
characterization of this ﬁgure is of a man without class afﬁliation and removed ﬁom the
conﬂict in Canudos as well as from history. Finally, for Patricia Montenegro, the Baron

and his anachronistic vision are representative of Vargas Llosa himself.

215

’8 Another instance of rape in La gperra del m del mundo makes this assertion

 

almost literal. Joao Satan, a traveling bandit, who before reforming his life and becoming
J 050 Abade, a member of the Counselor's Catholic Guard in Canudos, abducts and rapes
the thirteen-year-old sister of Leopoldina, his lover, when Leopoldina runs off with
another man. The young girl becomes a scapegoat for Joao's vengeful anger when he is
unable to control the actions and heart of the woman he loves. Joao rapes in order to
restore the myth of masculine dominance and control and converts the girl’s body into a
text of this myth. First, Joao Satan brands his initials on either check of his young victim,
and then abandons the pregnant girl on the streets of her hometown with a sign dangling
around her neck "explicando que todos los hombres de la banda eran, juntos, el padre de
la criatura" (69). In this instance, the rape victim’s body is actually inscribed as a text of
the ﬁction of male power.

’9 A sampling of other critical comments concenring the Baron’s rape of Jurema
also are quite disturbing: Salvadro Company Gimeno maintains that the Baron opts for
the path of “love” and pleasure in an erotic scene with his wife and maid as a solution to
the irrationality of history. James Brown interprets the scene of “rape/love” as a
reﬂection of “la conciencia naciente del Baron de les simples actos del amor y del placer,
un intento burdo de retomar la hebra del amor con su mujer loca, de tender una puente,
come habia logado e1 periodista, sobre el espacio que le separa de los otros de la
realidad. . .” (174). Carlos Henderson simply states that the Baron’s “erotic” scene is
without importance in the development of the character: “la escena erotica es gatuita en
tanto conﬁguracion de este personaje; es decir que a pesar que esta escena se inserta

causalmente en la progession narrativa no adquire una importancia reconocible” (221).

216

5° Juzyn-Amestoy also points to critical misreading of this scene as erotic (184).
However, what most concerns her is what she views as the narrator’s participation in the
violence of the text, including the Baron’s rape of Sebastiana. While her concern about
violence is valid, her arguments supporting the notion that the narrator participates in the
novel’s violent acts are less than convincing. Juzyn-Amestoy’s focus on the gotesque
nature of the text’s bodily representations reveals her desire to repress the body in Vargas
Llosa’s ﬁctional discourse. In this analysis, I argue, that Vargas Llosa’s novel instead
privileges readings that allow the open body to emerge, providing a medium through
which one can learn compassion and achieve redemption.

5 ’ J urema also represents hope for Patricia Montenego, although she concludes
that, because of the destruction of the community at Canudos--the place where J urema’s

new outlook on life became possible--Jurema’s hopeful viewpoint is destroyed as well.

52 This study of El entenado has beneﬁted ﬁ'om my readings of several previously
published analyses of the novel by Saer. First, concerning the notion of history explored
in El entenado, see de Grandis who examines the narrative and rhetorical nature of
history, and Gnutzman who contrasts the novel with the chronicles of the Conquest.
Bastos' article explores the relationship between writing and memory--ﬁagile, tainted by
the present, and therefore unreliable-and places El entenado among other historical
novels that were published in Argentina during the military dictatorship of the seventies
and early eighties. The theme of language and representation is analyzed in studies by
Diaz Quiiiones and Premat. Both critics explore the narrator's struggle to represent the
tribe with language that ultimately undermines meaning. And ﬁnally, the theme of

identity and the exploration of self versus Other are explored in articles by Chanady,

217

Romano Thuesen, Steinberg de Kaplan, and Pens. My analysis will investigate how
each of these themes is modiﬁed by considering the representation of the body and the
resulting breakdown of the mind/body dichotomy in Saer's novel.

53 In her article, Bastos establishes the historicity of these events and documents
the name of the expedition's sole survivor, Francisco del Puerto. According to Bastos, the
episode is well-known to all Argentine school children, although the account of
cannibalism among the tribe that attacked the Solis expedition belongs to the realm of
legend (3-4).

5" The reader should not overlook the symbolic signiﬁcance of the name Quesada,
which is one of the possible surnames given to Don Quixote in the ﬁrst chapter of the
novel by Miguel de Cervantes. In this passage, Saer points to his own spiritual father, the
great Spanish novelist, and to the unreliability of writing, of the knowledge it presents,
and of memory in the writing of history, so evident in the ironic passage it recalls:
"Quieren decir que tenia el sobrenombre dc Quijada, o Quesada, que en este hay alguna
diferencia en los autores que deste case escriben; aunque per conj eturas verosimiles se
deja entender que se llamaba Quej ana. Pero este importa poco a nuestro cuento; basta
que en la narracien del no se salga un punto de la verdad" (36). Diaz-Quiiiones also
detects in the name Quesada "un secrete homenaje a Cervantes y evoca la cadena de
incertidumbres con que se abre e1 Quijote" (4-5), whereas in "The First Colonial
Encounter," de Grandis ﬁnds in the same ﬁgure "the overpowering presence of Bartolomé
de las Casas" (35).

55 Both Pens and Bastos cite passages from the novel with explicit references to

the body and contend that they demonstrate how the intensity of experience can impact

218

memory. Neither critic, however, connects these bodily remembrances with the
formation of identity or with a challenge to the mind/body dualism. See Bastos 8-9, and
Pens 249.

5" Amaryll Chanady criticizes Saer's novel for its Eurocentrism, and sets E_l
e_n;;epaglp apart from other new historical novels that reinterpret ofﬁcial history by
pointing to its recurrence to, and "nonproblematic" use of past paradigms and stereotypes
of the Amerindian (679). Chanady argues that the text devalorizes "the excluded Other"
(698). Among the examples that Chanady gives of this stereotyping and devalorization
are the novel's description of the tribe's annual cannibalism, orgy and intoxication, and
the depiction of the tribe as lacking arts, culture, and especially writing, representations
which reinforce the traditional dichotomy between a "literate," advanced European
civilization and an "illiterate," primitive culture of Amerindians. For Chanaday, E
w follows the tradition of modern historiography that "exiled orality and replaced
the discourse of the Other with its discourse founded on scientiﬁcally articulated
knowledge" (689).

It is my argument that, in fact, El entenado undermines the traditional self/other
dichotomy through the narrator’s unique process of formulating identity. The narrator's
concept of self recalls Arthur Frank's notion of embodied subjectivity in which an
individual incorporates bodily experience of the world, one's connection with others, and
an awareness of one's own body acting. Of particular interest here is Frank's question
regarding whether one sees oneself as self-contained and monadic, or as interacting with
others and, thus, open to mutual constitution. As we shall see, the fact that the narrator

sees himself as being molded like clay by his experiences with the tribe, that he adopts

219

their phi1030phical outlook on the world as his own, and that the story of his life and that
of the cannibal tribe merge to form a single, uninterrupted narrative, show the irrelevance
of the dichotomy self and Other in his construction of identity. In addition, Chanady's
argument that Saer depicts the tribe as lacking art, religion, and writing will also been
challenged by our reading of the text. Art takes the form of theater, which is apparent in
the children's play. Religious belief manifests itself in the yearly ritual of cannibalism
and the need to conﬁrm their continued existence through this rite. And writing,
following the broader deﬁnition proposed by Levi-Strauss, is inscribed on the body of the
defghis who are designated from among the captives before the ritual cannibal feast. Like
the modern day historian, the defghi organizes and memorializes the accomplishments of
the tribe.

Pens too implies that the narrator appropriates the discourse of the other and so
Speaks out of turn, when she contends that El entenado exposes the conﬂict between "la
imposibilidad (y la indeseabilidad) dc hablar en nombre del otro silenciado, y, a su vez, la
necesidad de que esas ausencias y silencios de la Historia no se olviden sino que perduren
a través de la escritura," ["the impossibility (and undesirability) of speaking in the name
of the silenced other, and, at the same time, the necessity that History's absences and
silences not be forgotten, but rather that they survive through writing."] (246). Pens here
suggests that the narrator, a member of the dominant culture, speaks for the other, and
yet, ultimately contends that "el relate del entenado (y la novela) se maniﬁestan, no como
la representacion de la tribu, sino como la representacien y la perpetuacion de la ausencia
misma diferida a través de la escritura," ["the narrator's account (and the novel) present

themselves, not as the representation of the tribe, but rather as the representation and

220

perpetuation of their abSence itself deferred through writing."] In other words, Pens
argues that the narrator is placed in the untenable position of speaking for the tribe so that
their existence not be forgotten, a paradoxical position resolved to a certain extent by his
writing which reﬂects the tribe's continued absence ﬁorn history rather than their
presence. Pens alludes here to an issue-the ethical dilemma presented by lost-body
writing--which I will address further on in this analysis. However, based on my argument
that the involvement of bodily experience in the formation of identity renders exclusive
categories of self and Other invalid, I contend that the narrator is not a representative of
the dominant culture silencing the oppressed other.

57 An entirely different reading of the narrator's formation of identity can be
found in Romano Thuesen's article. Applying a Lacanian approach to her study of the
stages of the narrator’s development, Romano Theusen asserts that it is his encounter with
the Other which allows him to discover and identify himself in complete contrast to and
in utter isolation from the Other: "El 'otro' permanece siempre come tal, y esa alteridad
es la que hace posible e1 planteo y el cuestionarniento de la propia conciencia" (51).

58 According to Wheelwright, Aristotle was the ﬁrst to use the term catharsis in
reference to literature, but that the term was used previously in medical and religious

discourse. Wheelwright quotes from Plato's Phaedo to explore catharsis' religious

 

meaning: "in separating, so far as possible, the soul ﬁ'om the body, and in teaching the
soul the habit of collecting and bringing itself together ﬁom all parts of the body, and in
living, so far as it can, both now and hereafter, alone by itself, ﬁ'eed ﬁom the body as

from fetters" (107).

221

’9 The theme of life as theater is prominent in such works by the seventeenth-
century Spanish dramatist, Calderon de la Barca, as El gpap teatro del mjundo. and m
M. These plays explore religious aspects of this theme by drarnatizing how
humans, regardless of their social standing, ultimately lose any power or riches they may
have accumulated during this worldly life when they face their maker. A different
variation of the theme is set forth in Cervantes' Qpiiot_e, in which theater becomes a
creative act that the individual may engage in in order to invent a better reality, and to
participate actively in the production of the world. This variation of the theme is in
contrast to that explored in "El retablo de las maravillas," where the individual is seen as
passive, a social type who simply acts out the role given to him or her.

60 The idea that writing "justiﬁes" one's life is repeated obsessively in Borges'
stories and essays and often accompanies the notion that an individual's identity is merely
a verbal construct or a ﬁction. Borges' characters, ﬁequently terrorized by their lack of a
substantial identity, attempt to create the illusion of permanence and stability, to "justify"
themselves, by constructing coherent, personal histories. The author presents himself as a
case study of this concept in his essay "Borges y yo," just one of many examples in his
work. See my study, "El terror y la justiﬁcacien del ser en la obra de Borges," presented

at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, Spring 1995.

222

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