Table Of ContentLatin American Fiction and the
Narratives of the Perverse
Latin American Fiction and the
Narratives of the Perverse
Paper Dolls and Spider Women
Patrick O’Connor
LATINAMERICANFICTIONANDTHENARRATIVESOFTHEPERVERSE
© Patrick O’Connor,2004.
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ISBN 978-1-349-52978-0 ISBN 978-1-4039-7870-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781403978707
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O’Connor,Patrick,1958–
Latin American fiction and the narratives of the perverse :Paper
dolls and spider women / Patrick O’Connor.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Spanish American fiction—20th century—History and criticism.
2.Sexual deviation in literature.I.Title.
863(cid:1)
PQ7082.N7036 2004
.6093538(cid:1)098—dc22 2004050144
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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First edition:December 2004
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments vii
1. Enter the Spider Woman: An Introduction to
the Narratives of the Perverse 1
2. The Impenetrability and the Glory: Ellipsing Lezama Lima 43
3. The Moving Target of Fixated Desire: Felisberto’s Paper Dolls 75
4. Fashionable and Unfashionable Perversions on the
Latin American Rive Gauche: Cortázar and
Pizarnik Read “The Bloody Countess” 121
5. (Triple-) Cross-Dressing the Boom: Fuentes,
Donoso, Sarduy, and the Queer Sixties 155
Conclusion/Epilogue: Perverse Narratives on the Border 193
Notes 211
Bibliography 235
Index 245
Preface and
Acknowledgments
[Molina]—But did you really like it?
[Valentín]—Well, it made our time go by faster, right?
— But you didn’t really like it then.
— Yes I did, and it’s a shame to see it ending.
— But don’t be silly, I can tell you another one.
— Honestly?
— Sure, I remember lots of lovely, lovely films.
(Kiss of the Spider Woman, 37/43)1
Here are some lovely, lovely stories.
One Argentine prisoner seduces another by telling him the plots of
movies...Although homosexuality among his own friends is punished in
the traditional ways of fiction, a young Cuban poet/narrator approvingly
narrates his father’s adolescent homosexual escapades....A rich Uruguayan
commissions a life-size doll for himself and his wife; he then falls in love
with it, cheats on it with still another doll, and eventually goes mad....
Two Argentines in Paris obsess over a Hungarian countess who murdered
peasant women in order to bathe in their blood....A Cuban transvestite
goes to Morocco for a sex-change operation couched in a parody of Lacanian
analysis....On the California/Mexico border, a man’s fetish for navels
induces him to find and marry the daughter of his father’s mistress....
I like to study moments of Latin American fiction such as these; and in
Paper Dolls and Spider WomenI hope to use some of these stories strategically,
to question or to extend the narratives which we have inherited from the fin-
de-siècle and especially Freud about the nature of the perverse. As I hope to
show, the perverse does not resist narration, as do some of the other terms one
might privilege in an investigation of the negotiations between sexuality and
textuality; indeed, unlike the hysterics who can only speak by means of their
symptoms, perverts are often compulsive narrators. But their narrations are
viii Preface and Acknowledgments
not necessarily reliable as they trope the master discourses of normality.
Molina, the homosexual in Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Womanalluded to
above, is quite the representative figure for this project. He and his cellmate
Valentín’s mutual creation, The Spider Woman, is just one of the many phan-
tom figures of powerful if vulnerable women that haunt the narratives of the
perverse. As my book hopes to do, Puig in Kissmoves from one level or kind
of storytelling to another, in order to compose a defense of certain kinds of
perversions and to satisfy a certain kind of perverse desire to tell stories.
Psychoanalysis is the discourse that promises to tell us the true story of
how some people become perverts, and for that reason the “narratives of the
perverse” which need to be examined most closely are Freud’s narratives. As
Peter Brooks has done in his work on narratology and Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, I find at work in Freud’s writing on the perversions various pow-
erful narrative strategies. Here the concept of polymorphous perversity, and
especially the notions of stages, fixation, and regression, create an intelligi-
ble model of characterization which relates but also subordinates the
pervert to the norm of “mature” sexuality. Because psychoanalytic theory’s
thoughts on the construction of female sexuality have been definitively
challenged, and because male deviance has been more tolerated in practice
in sexist societies but more invigilated theoretically than has female
deviance, my book takes as its center of gravity the “male perversions,” or
what Kaja Silverman has called “male subjectivity at the margins.”
For convenience’s sake, the chapters are divided according to recogniza-
ble male perversions: one on male homosexuality, one on voyeurism and
fetishism, one on sadism and masochism, and one on male transvestism.2
My principal objects of study come from mid-century and beyond: first,
some precursors of the Boom of the 1960s and 1970s; then the Boom
authors themselves; and finally, a U.S. Latino author after the Boom.
The first chapter of the book begins with a reading of the Spider
Woman in Manuel Puig’s novel. It also establishes my methodology, by
offering a critical reading of one of Freud’s narratives of the perverse, in this
case that of male homosexuality in Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality. (Puig himself, in the novel’s long footnotes, also summarizes the
debate over the origins of homosexuality, privileging Freud’s account.) Like
other critics (Paul Julian Smith, Ross Chambers), I find the writings of
Foucault to be a good point of departure to think critically through Puig’s
deployment of a gay liberationist discourse; however, I am more sympa-
thetic than they are to Molina’s strategy of “identifying with the heroine,”
and I try to work this figure of the glamorous/phallic mother back into
Freudian accounts of the vicissitudes of sexuality.
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
Latin American culture has generated at least one autochthonous
“perversion,” namely, machismo. Although machismo is arguably every-
where in Latin American relations, its power as an explanatory concept
derives to a great extent from being embedded in a prestigious narrative, the
“The Children of La Malinche” chapter of Octavio Paz’s much-anthologized
The Labyrinth of Solitude. In the context of a Third World cultural nation-
alism, Octavio Paz’s grounding of machismo in the relationship between
the conquistador Cortés and his betrayed translator and mistress La
Malinche is a potent and dangerous variant on Oedipus and historical
mythmaking: while seeming to lament it, Paz paradoxically renders machismo
“normal” for Latin American masculinity while also implying that it can be
one way to defend against the modernization and Yankeeification of
Mexican culture. Framed this way, “Oedipal colonialism” will be hard to
undo, and I suggest a few polemical strategies to undercut the power of
Paz’s formulations.
In quite a much more general way, the sexual perversion of incest has
also functioned as a paradoxically “normal” sexuality. Machismo separates
Latin Americans from other masculinities; the incest taboo unites them to
all other masculinities. Yet the discourses of cultural and structural anthro-
pology, through figures as diverse as Levi-Strauss and Oscar Lewis, have had
in the twentieth century a privileged position in formulating Latin
America’s incomplete modernity to itself. Thus, by declaring, through the
Oedipus complex, that incestuous desires are characteristic of the human
condition, Freudian discourses erect a sort of normality around incestuous
desire which Latin American authors such as Paz and García Márquez are
eager to exploit in their attempt to describe (or impose) a normal, healthy
modernity for Latin American fiction. There are subtle indications in Kiss
of the Spider Woman that even Puig is willing to abide by this normalizing
discourse.
Chapter 2 takes on the most important homosexual novel of Latin
American literature, José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso. Lezama’s novel is a grand,
double embarrassment to the literary tradition: traditional critics who wish
to canonize it for its complexity and theory of poetic genius wish that it
didn’t have so many gross sex scenes in it; the (anti-Castro) leftist and fem-
inist authors who might wish to canonize Lezama as a “minority voice”
wish that Paradisowere written in a more accessible style, and that it were
not so visibly sexist (indeed, gynophobic) and classist. I am actually rather
sympathetic to these positions, certainly the latter; it is more relevant to
criticize those readings by Lezama’s contemporaries that argued that a
Barthesian jouissance offered the reader a textual pleasure that had no
relation to the sexuality of the author or his characters. For this task it is
x Preface and Acknowledgments
necessary to look to the side of the rather asexual protagonist, José Cemí,
and instead read the novel through two important secondary characters,
José’s revered yet ambivalently presented father José Eugenio Cemí, and his
abjected yet ambivalently honored homosexual friend Eugenio Foción.
Such a reading goes against the grain of the text. But Lezama makes his own
attempts to situate himself to the side of a patriarchy he does not wish to
abandon in his portrayal of his uncle, providing us with an example of what
queer theorist Eve Sedgwick whimsically refers to as the “avunculate,” a
familial, homosocial (perhaps even homoerotic) yet non-Oedipal image of
a relationship to literary creativity.
Chapter 3 examines the writings of Felisberto Hernández, the solitary
vanguardist writer of short fictions that return constantly to the thematics
of voyeurism and fetishism. My main subject will be his novella Las
Hortensias (The Daisy Dolls, 1949), where I hope to show that Felisberto
understood far better than Freud did the complexities of erotic attractions
that have unmoored themselves from the heterosexual normal narrative;
however, in his 1927 essay on fetishism, Freud seems to have understood
better than Felisberto did how to construct a story that includes some (but
not all) of the sort of insights we see in Felisberto’s ramshackle fictions.
Felisberto’s protagonists grant power to the female body (often inanimate,
often large or fat and therefore usually coded as maternal) over themselves,
and this primary situation unleashes on the one hand a torrent of small
episodes and mini-narratives, and on the other hand a plot mechanics that
punishes the protagonists for abandoning their male privilege so com-
pletely. Felisberto remains outside Oedipus, as does the fetishist narrative,
insofar as the punishment (or castration threat) does not come from a
father figure. His anti-modern conservatism, while supportive of fetishistic
desire, criticizes the commodity fetishism of consumer capitalism, and Las
Hortensias maneuvers between these different uses of the concept of
fetishism as it brings down its protagonist.
Chapters 2 and 3 studied pre-Boom authors. In chapter 4 we move into
the writers of the Boom and into the milieu of the 1960s. Julio Cortázar’s
A Manual for Manuelshares with the footnotes of Kiss of the Spider Woman
a roughly Marcusean perspective on sexual politics: liberation in one sphere
requires liberation in others. Sexual violence that disrupted one’s bourgeois
habits was, so to speak, the party line of the Paris of the 1950s and 1960s,
and Cortázar’s enthusiastic adoption of this strategy in some of his writings
suggests a willingness to follow that fashion. Nevertheless, this field of sex-
ual theorizing was unstable: against the Freudian notion that sadistic and
masochistic impulses were vicissitudes of the same instinct, other theories
emphasized the radical disjunction between sadism and masochism.
Preface and Acknowledgments xi
While the writings of the Marquis de Sade were deplored or praised as
anti-humanist, a writer such as Gilles Deleuze would examine the writings
of Masoch as an independent source of both an ethics and a poetics.
Yet we should also note the stance of an Argentine poet who, though
much younger than Cortázar, was as aware as he was of new trends in French
thinking about the relationship between violence and sexuality: Alejandra
Pizarnik. Basing her ideas more directly on George Bataille’s view of Sade
than on Lacan’s 1963 “Kant With Sade” or Deleuze’s Bataille-inflected
readings of Sade, Pizarnik upbraids Cortázar for abandoning thepotential of
a Sadeian aesthetics. Not just in her famous prose piece “The Bloody
Countess” (1966) but throughout her prose oeuvre, Pizarnik positions
herself in the role of “the Satanic daughter,” visible in some of Sade’s
writings. The Satanic daughter goads the Sadistic father to new levels of
violence, often against a mother figure. The two Argentines provide
conflicting versions of The Bloody Countess, Pizarnik in her 1966essay and
Cortázar in his 1968 novel 62: A Model Kit. Nevertheless, it is only in poems
he published in 1983, many years after Pizarnik’s 1972 suicide, poems
situated in a fin-de-siècle lesbian boudoir, that Cortázar can defend himself
from Pizarnik’s rigorously Sadeian demands upon him.
My last chapter remains in the 1960s as it takes up a motif in a variety
of texts written almost exactly contemporaneously, the figure of the trans-
vestite in José Donoso’s Hell Has No Limits (1966), Carlos Fuentes’s Holy
Place(1967), and especially the works of Severo Sarduy in a variety of gen-
res, from the novels From Cuba With a Song (1966) and Cobra (1972) to
his literary criticism Written on a Body(1969) and La simulación[also col-
lected in the English translation of Written on a Body] (1982). While each
of these fictions deploys the phantasmatic phallic woman of the transves-
tite differently, they all bespeak an anxiety about the relationship between
fiction and reality, in which the feminized term threatens to usurp the mas-
culinized term or in which a castrated masculine position can only speak by
inhabiting the feminine (yet an insubordinate feminine) position. In this
chapter I descend to the rather insubordinately feminine genres of gossip
and literary innuendo to explain some of the formal inconsistencies in
Fuentes’s novel; then, in a short extra chapter, I resituate Sarduy’s transves-
tite Cobra in a broader landscape of his day, “the Queer Sixties,” to com-
plicate the text’s desire to turn Cobra into a pure sign, and to keep us all a
little anxious about the relationship between fiction and reality.
Where do we go from the Boom, into an environment in which Freud
is no longer canonized, and “perversions” no longer so clearly stigmatized
or demarcated? An epilogue to my book examines Poison River(1988–94),
by the Chicano graphic novelist Gilbert Hernández, and reflects on the
