University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Aesthetics of the virtual: modernity, consumption and artifice in three Latin American novels

(USC Thesis Other)

Aesthetics of the virtual: modernity, consumption and artifice in three Latin American novels

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content AESTHETICS OF THE VIRTUAL: MODERNITY, CONSUMPTION AND ARTIFICE IN THREE LATIN AMERICAN NOVELS by Fiorella Cotrina A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMPARATIVE LITERATURE) December 2009 Copyright 2009 Fiorella Cotrina ii Epigraphs  Esta noche Solo; el alma Llena de infinitas amarguras y agonías de tu muerte, Separado de ti misma, por la sombra, por el tiempo y la distancia, Por el infinito negro, Donde nuestra voz no alcanza, Solo y mudo Por la senda caminaba ... José Asunción Silva, “Nocturno” Necessity is the mother of invention. Albert Einstein iii Dedication  Para mis padres, que me enseñaron que leer era la apertura secreta donde lo real y lo ficticio se entrelazan. iv Acknowledgements  I am very grateful for the wonderful professors I have had the opportunity to work with, the many special people I call friends, and the wonderful family I treasure. For this project, I am indebted to my thesis director, Roberto Diaz. His mentorship and encouragement throughout my academic trajectory has been invaluable. I will always remember fondly our wonderful discussions about Latin American literature, art, languages, cultures, and food, and the way these talks rejuvenated me and inspired me to keep widening my cultural horizons. I am also intellectually indebted to Natania Meeker, whose fascinating ideas about French decadence triggered my own comparative interest in exploring similar phenomena in a Latin American context. A very special thanks is due to Gabriel Giorgi, who shared the excitement about many of my ideas and brilliantly led me in the direction of key Latin American texts and theories that could be a source of evidence and support to my own thoughts. Special thanks also to Karen Pinkus for her advice, guidance, and supervision in the initial stages of this dissertation. Peter Starr, David James, Daniel Tiffany, Tace Hedrick, Amitava Kumar, and Jane Love are all inspiring professors who have left a deep imprint in my formation as a scholar and triggered different intellectual passions that I have followed in this project. I want to thank Claudia Soria, who helped me to conduct research in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My deepest gratitude goes out to Joachim Küpper (Freie Universitaet), who welcomed me in Berlin and made himself always available to any questions I may have regarding the German academic system. I am also thankful to Walter Bruno Berg v (Freiburg Universitaet) for generously sharing his scholarly work on Clarice Lispector and offering me the possibility to participate in his Ph.D. student colloquia. Friends who have supported me throughout this academic journey include Alexandra Runge, an invaluable friend who selflessly helped me to learn and fall in love with the German language, worked together with me at the Staatsbibliothek almost every day, and provided me with one more reason to adore Berlin. I want to thank my lovely painter friend Catarina Fragoso for her undivided attention in listening to my project ideas in a language that was not her own. Thank you to my dearest friend Ulli Ryder, who has been a loyal, warm, and constant source of wisdom, help, and advice throughout the years. Thank you also to Denise Sandoval for the reassurance and support that she provided during this time and by knowing when to convince me to take necessary breaks for dinner, wine, and conversation. A very special thanks goes out to my very generous friend Michelle Har Kim for helping me make this project as strong as it can be. Finally, I would like to thank my colleagues Bert Emerson, Millay Hyatt, Nisha Kunte, Perla Guerrero, and Oana Sabo for providing feedback on different aspect of this project at different stages and helping me strengthen my ideas and my words. As always, my deepest gratitude goes out to my parents, Dora and Erich Cotrina, whose love and support of their daughter has been boundless and infinitely sustaining. And to my brother Eric, who I know is very proud of his older sister. vi Table of Contents   Epigraphs iii Dedication iv Acknowledgements v Abstract vii Introduction 1 The Location of Latin American Modernity 1 European Modernity as Desired Contaminant 12 Modernity and Latin American Identity 20 Chapter One: ‘Todo es ella’: Fugitive Desire in José Asunción Silva’s De sobremesa 28 Introduction to José Asunción Silva’s De sobremesa 28 Fraternal Consumption at Villa Helena 47 The Reading of José Fernández’s Diary 54 Helena Revisited 91 Guiding Light 100 Chapter Two: The Feminizing Power of Cinema in Adolfo Bioy Casares’ La invención de Morel 107 Introduction to Adolfo Bioy Casares’ La invención de Morel 107 Source Material of La invención de Morel 112 Uses of Mass Media Technologies and Their Discourses 119 Bioy’s Peripheral/Liminal island as the Space of Consumption 151 Conclusion: Technology and its Connection to the Problematic of Modernity 166 Chapter Three: Wo(man) Writing Self and Corporeal Other in Clarice Lispector’s A hora da estrela 182 Introduction to Clarice Lispector’s A hora da estrela 182 The Coexistence of Center and Periphery in Rio de Janeiro 194 (Wo)man Flaneur Walking Through the Peripheral Metropolis 203 Mirrors, Gazes, Consumption, and Desire 209 Death as the Ultimate Approximation of the Feminine Other 235 Conclusion 259 Works Cited 270 vii Abstract  This study argues that the narratives of the Latin American novels De sobremesa (1896), La invención de Morel (1940), and A hora da estrela (1977) all thematize the masculine consumption of feminine entities, and thus serve as metaphors of modernity. These texts put the antithetical binaries of European center and Latin American periphery into dynamic play, along with those of feminine artifice and male identity, illusion and reality, the body and desire, and writing as both a sadist and masochist activity. Using Carlos J. Alonso and Beatriz Sarlo’s crucial insights about modernity as a myth that locates Latin American culture and literary practices in the periphery with respect to those of Europe, I also incorporate Rita Felski’s discussion of European discourses that define consumption as a seductively feminizing activity, to provide readings of these novels that render the broad notion of modernity and proper modern life as artificial, decentered, and virtual. Chapter One examines how the male protagonist José Fernández’s voracious consumption of luxuries and courtesans during his fin-de-siècle nomadic voyage in the European metropolis becomes a self-acknowledged vice in De sobremesa. Helena, the first spiritual soulmate who can halt his morally corrupting consumption, is a phantasmatic figure onto which Fernández projects the anxieties and fears that pathologizing fin-de-siècle discourses assigned to consumption. Fernández returns to Bogotá, no longer believing that the spiritual connection he was looking for can be found in Europe or that consumption is indeed pathological. He creates his own liminal aesthetic space in the Latin American city: Villa Helena. Chapter Two examines the viii technological effeminization that the Venezuelan fugitive protagonist in La invención de Morel experiences by falling in love with the simulacrum Faustine, whom he encounters in the inventor Morel’s island. Gradually seduced by Faustine’s beautiful image, the fugitive is transformed into an effeminized consumer who no longer maintains any aesthetic distance from Faustine’s auratic image. Rather, he identifies with her and wants to enter into her consciousness. The impossibility of this desire leads the fugitive to transform himself into a like simulacral image by masochistically surrendering his body to Morel’s machine, which ultimately records him in a rehearsed simulation of his relationship with Faustine, and annihilates his body in the process. Unlike Helena and Faustine, who are both European aesthetic and technological images, A hora da estrela’s Macabea is a (peripherally) Northeastern Brazilian girl who moves to Rio de Janeiro, looking for a way to escape her impoverished life. Chapter Three examines how A hora’s narrator, Rodrigo S.M., decides to write “Macabea’s life into existence,” after a flaneuresque walk through Rio de Janeiro leads him to catch a glimpse of death on the face and body of the anonymous young woman. Rodrigo gradually gains access to Macabea by masochistically evacuating his own bourgeois male identity for Macabea’s female consumer identity: who identifies with female movies stars and listens to cultural products aired on the radio. Yet Rodrigo’s masochistic decentering is not sustainable. His identity as a bourgeois writer often resumes a central positionality in the text that demonstrates a sadistic pleasure enacted by writing from the center. 1 Introduction  The Location of Latin American Modernity  In “Aesthetics of the Virtual,” I propose a reading of José Asunción Silva’s De sobremesa, Adolfo Bioy Casares’ La invención de Morel, and Clarice Lispector’s A hora da estrela that posits that the central narrative of each novel is organized around the masculine consumption of a feminine entity: Helena, Faustine, and Macabea, respectively. I refer to these three characters as “feminine entities” rather than as women protagonists because their artificiality—i.e. the fact that these three entities are technologically and fictionally reproduced copies of real women—is emphasized in each novel. The three narrators José Fernández, the fugitive and Rodrigo S.M., in contrast, all distinctively share a common Latin American national and male identity that becomes feminized through each protagonist’s initial consumption of the female entity, and consequent production of a narrative that describes the surprising effects of this consumption. These narratives all share common reflections about writing fiction under the influence of various aspects of modernity in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America. The idea of modernity and its two most remarkable strands, i.e., modernization and modernism, have had a complicated history in Latin America. At the risk of some oversimplification, I would like to provide my own brief clarification of each of these three terms. Modernization generally refers to the complex and uneven socioeconomic development that includes, but is not limited to, scientific and technological innovation (the radio and film, for example), the industrialization of production, rapid urbanization, 2 the emergence of capitalist markets, and the increasing coherence and naturalization of the nation (which can be seen as closely related to the development of the national and global markets). Modernism, in contrast, is an umbrella term for the many artistic schools and styles of the art and of literatures (the most important for my project would be those related to decadence) that emerged during the late nineteenth century in Europe and the Americas. Modernismo is a distinctive Latin American literary contribution to the artistic schools and styles of modernism initiated by elite Spanish American poets writing towards the end of the nineteenth century. 1 Finally, modernity, generally a periodizing term, also denotes a historical era that may encompass any combination of features of modernization and modernism. Latin America did not experience the same modernizing momentum that was witnessed in various urban centers of Europe and the U.S. Latin American political leaders and landowning criollo (creole) elites of the nineteenth century, many following the prescriptions of once-president of Argentina Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, tethered their nations in relationships of economic dependency to neo-imperialist European and U.S. creditors in order to fund their various movements towards independence from the Iberian empires during the nineteenth century. These decisions radically and often limited Latin American governments’ economic capacity to make or fund modernizing changes. Consequently, new Latin American nations were relegated to a peripheral                                                          1 In Modernity, Modernismo, and the Development of the Spanish American Literature, Cathy Jrade describes how in 1888 Rubén Darío, “head and intellectual center of gravity of the movement,” adopted the term modernismo “as a banner of distinction and pride that this movement was born of and within the context of modernity” (1). The most notorious early modernistas, in addition to Darío, are José Martí, José Asunción Silva, and Horacio Quiroga (1). 3 economic and commercial position in relation to Europe and the U.S., one that was in many ways similar to that which they occupied as Spanish colonies. It was also during this time that Latin American fascination with the idea of modernity was born, particularly through the desire for technology and its rapid advancement, as well as the desire for new literary approaches and explorations that would critique and theorize about them. As Carlos J. Alonso summarizes in The Burden of Modernity, many criollo elites identified wholesale with what he refers to as “the myth of modernity” both during and after independence. This myth proposed the idea that there were metropolitan foci out of which the modern emanated and which by means of a rippled and delayed expansion through time and space would eventually transform the material and cultural orders of those societies that languished in the outer confines of the system—if only they were fittingly receptive to its beneficent effects (19). Adhering to this myth had significant effects on Latin American material and economic realities and their identities. Latin Americans eagerly dreamed about and anticipated the arrival of advents of modernization that would dramatically transform their major cities and their everyday lives. 2 To borrow from Alonso, many also identified “spiritually” with a Western identity located outside of their hybrid cultural identity. Alonso points out that unlike India, for example, a postcolonial nation that saw the spiritual as an inner and private domain with essential marks of an Indian cultural identity; Spanish America posed “…no autochthonous sphere that could be configured and opposed overtly to the West as a strategy of containment, since cultural identity has been so inextricably bound to modernity” (35). The consequence that Latin American’s lack of an “autochthnonous                                                          2 For example, Argentine President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento dreamed about transforming Buenos Aires into the Paris of the South in the mid nineteenth-century. 4 spiritual identity” produced was a desired-for and thus “fugitive” identity, virtually located in the West, and in particular, in its cosmopolitan centers. Latin American appropriations of the discursive modalities of the metropolis that emerged near the end of the nineteenth century, including the novel, as well as scientific, technological, and philosophical discourses, were motivated by this configuration of Latin American modern identity (and spirituality) as located outside of their social landscape and culture. Silva, Bioy, and Lispector’s narratives foreground this search through their male protagonists’ encounters and desires to approximate their respective feminine entities. The novels explored here are exemplary in that they all postulate that though Latin American modernization did not occur at the same time, at the same speed or with the same effects as it did in European cosmopolitan centers during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, aesthetic production was prolific in very distinct ways in Latin America. Matei Calinescu’s separation of aesthetic modernism from socioeconomic modernization, in Five Faces of Modernity, offers an explanation as to why Latin American literary production could thrive in spite of the absence of modernization’s developments and changes. Calinescu distinguishes between aesthetic/textual modernism and socioeconomic modernization as two kinds of “modernities” that have followed essentially divergent trajectories; the split of these two kinds of “modernity” has created a unique situation that illustrates the Latin American situation: the possibility of aesthetic modernity to occur and to thrive in the absence of modernity’s perceived material conditions. Beatriz Sarlo, in Una modernidad periférica, names the uneven modernization of mid-twentieth century Latin American cities a “peripheral” modernity. She 5 comparatively contextualizes the unique modernizing processes that the city of Buenos Aires underwent between 1920 and 1930 and those of the cosmopolitan and industrialized European and North American city centers of Paris, London, and New York. One of the productive ways that Sarlo discusses the agency of Argentines ostensibly positioned at the periphery of modernization is to demonstrate that the fragmented way in which modernity variously arrived in Buenos Aires, that is, through the technologically imported products of modernization and aesthetic modernism, led its mix of old criollo landowners and new Eastern European immigrant populations to constitute themselves as a cultura de mezcla (culture of mixture) made-up of mixtures, loans, memories and images from both an Argentine past and imported modernity (Sarlo 27). Sarlo notes that Buenos Aires during the 1920s and 30s became characterized as a city “donde coexisten elementos defensivos y residuales junto a los programas renovadores; rasgos culturales de la formación criolla al mismo tiempo que un proceso descomunal de importación de bienes, discursos y prácticas simbólicas” (28). According to Alonso, the motivation behind Sarlo’s Una modernidad periférica was “taking to task the commonplace idea that modernity in the peripheral milieu of Argentina was nothing but a simpleminded reflection of metropolitan cultural motifs and models regarding the modern” (25). He feels that Sarlo “purports to provide a distinctive face to an Argentine—and, by extension, Spanish American—modernity, a sui generis face to counter the indictment of servility to metropolitan sources” (25). Yet Alonso disagrees with the way Sarlo contextualizes the problematic of the periphery. Although he appreciates Sarlo’s argument for not dismissing Argentine 6 aesthetic production as either inadequate or mere echoes of metropolitan discourses of modernity, he finds that Sarlo does not ultimately escape the center/periphery binary that she sets up as a “dialectic of restoration through the affirmation of the opposite” (25). But Alonso does concede that her rigorous denial of received notions of European cultural and aesthetic production as “original,” and Latin American versions as inadequate responses or degraded copies, is an indispensable step that gives value to the cultural production that occurs in Latin American cities understood to be at the periphery during the twentieth century. Yet Sarlo’s analysis of the periphery is a helpful category for my project. Her illustration of Buenos Aires’ cultural productivity demonstrates that even as Latin America was being relegated to the periphery in relation to Europe and U.S cultural productions, Argentine criollo identity, in par with seeking to preserve their cultural and socioeconomic privileges, argued that they were the only Argentine group with the legitimate right to define national identity. They thus cordoned off access to both their socioeconomic and cultural privileges from the newly-arrived immigrants. What criollo Jorge Luis Borges does when he claims to “acriollar su literatura” (to creolize his literature) by joining the voice of translation with the criollo voice of Buenos Aires is, as Sarlo argues, exemplary of this criollo rhetorical maneuver to keep the right of defining culture away from the immigrant masses. Accordingly, the two criollo voices Borges uses in his fiction are a way for him to explicitly differentiate himself and his literary production from the newly arrived immigrants who lack both of these voices, as part of a cultural inheritance only criollos have had access to in Argentina (49-50). The extensive education Borges received in Europe (enabling him to read Western European texts in the 7 original English, French, etc. as well as translate them), in contrast to Arlt’s “voluntad de literatura” (will to write literature) in spite of the limitations of “una formación cultural precaria” (a precarious cultural formation) (58) are personal facts that emphasize these writers’ cultural differences and social backgrounds. Clearly at a cultural and educational disadvantage in relation to Borges and other criollo elite writers like Bioy because of his lack of formal education, inability to speak and read multiple European languages, and acquisition of Spanish as a second language, Arlt’s desire to write fiction finds different and “unliterary” ways to circumvent his cultural limitations. Sarlo describes Arlt’s efforts to write as “una ‘respuesta activa’ que desencadena un proceso de apropiación verdaderamente salvaje de los instrumentos culturales y los medios de producción literaria” 3 (Sarlo 58). This appropriation is demonstrated by the books read by his male protagonists throughout most of his novelistic oeuvre: popular romance novels and technological manuals that illustrate the technological fantasies that modernity produces—for the newly arrived and impoverished immigrants, most importantly for Arlt. Ideologically placed at the periphery of a periphery, Arlt’s fictions illustrate a shared immigrant fantasy that “saberes técnicos” (technical know-how) will be able to pull them out of poverty and the squalor of their lives, and turn them into wealthy and famous inventors able to escape from the marginality of the periphery. 4 It is only by                                                          3 “an‘active response that sets in motion a truly savage process of appropriation of cultural instruments and mediums of literary production.” [my translation] 4 Significantly, in Adolfo Bioy Casares’ novella La invención de Morel, the figure of the technological inventor and his technical discourses also take center stage. It is surprising that the vast majority of critics have always relegated Bioy’s literary production to Borges’ influence and not often explored the similarities between Bioy and Arlt more closely. Despite Bioy’s very privileged criollo background and Arlt’s impoverished immigrant one, the two writers are contemporaries and, it should also be noted, they are both novelists and short story writers, unlike Borges, who exclusively wrote short stories. 8 building a precariously self-constructed and Barthesian “writerly” identity forged out of the popular literature that circulates in this periphery that Arlt can write about the potential dreams of immigrant people at the margins of Buenos Aires’ criollo culture. Instead of surrendering the center/peripheral binary of Sarlo’s dialectic, I want to argue that the marginalization of Arlt’s oeuvre and other Latin American literary production can have a paradoxically productive effect. That is, one’s location can provoke writers like Arlt to write about life in and the desire to escape the cultural margins of a periphery that a more established and acknowledged criollo culture imposes on one’s everyday life and on “outsider” immigrant identity. Because he was an immigrant with little formal training, Arlt’s novels are ultimately the testimony of his constant battle against limitations imposed by the “official” criollo culture that rejected his legitimacy to write or to create representations of the modern or spiritual identities of Buenos Aires and its inhabitants (Sarlo 50). As Alonso makes clear, Latin America’s adherence to the myth of modernity has bound the identities and cultural products of writers like Silva, Bioy, and Lispector to peripheral positionalities with respect to the cultural centers of Europe and the U.S. One might assume therefore that their literary productions and identities were vulnerable to a similar process of marginalization and devaluation by the European and U.S. centers than Arlt received by Argentine criollo culture. Even if Silva, Bioy and Lispector occupied privileged cultural spaces with respect to their nations and communities by virtue of their privileged class, education, and race, the equal treatment of their texts in respect to European literary production was already closed off by the very structure of the European center/Latin American periphery. 9 Yet I hope to demonstrate here that the solution to the problem of center/periphery that Silva, Bioy, and Lispector’s texts propose is not an inversion of the center/periphery dichotomy created by the myth of modernity, but rather a decentering of the location of modernity, a displacement, if you will, to the virtual space of the imagination. Paradoxically, modernity is able to be decentered precisely by Latin American’s rejection of an autochtonous sense of self to define their identity. In other words, the fact that there is no Latin American counter-myth of an authentic and unified Latin American national identity and spirit shared by all its inhabitants to battle the myth of modernity, unlike the previously mentioned case of India, makes Latin American identity inextricably bound to the fugitive quality of the idea of modernity, as a fiction, a dream, and a wishful desire for a future that has not yet arrived: in this case an identity that has not yet arrived, or fully constituted itself, as stable, authentic, natural, and unchanging. As De sobremesa, La invención, and A hora illustrate, the protagonist’s search for the self ties his Latin American identity to variously changing faces of modernity. These three “faces” may be seen as the chameleon feminine entities of Helena, Faustine, and Macabea. That a genuine spiritual identity is desired and embodied by the feminine entity with which each protagonist identifies, one that can never be grasped or contained, leads to each protagonist’s discovery that identity is always created, that it is a fictional production. Beatriz Sarlo’s assertion that, “Toda manifestación cultural, alta o popular, es en América (de la que la pampa funciona como sinécdoque) ficcional” 5 (223), supports                                                          5 “All cultural manifestation, high or low, is in America (of which the pampa functions as synechdoche) fictional.” [My translation] 10 the reading of these three Latin American texts as narratives that emphasize the artifice and fictional construction of identity. Since “América ha sido construida en la falsedad, marcada por un ‘subconsciente inclinado al gozo de los disfraces’, fantasma de la ilusión colectiva de los conquistadores españoles que trajeron no la civilización sino sus sueños de poder, de riqueza, de linaje” 6 (Sarlo 223), it follows that Latin Americans’ cultural production of identity has demonstrated a proclivity “por el simulacro: mascara, disfraz, inautenticidad constitutiva” 7 (223). How artifice becomes ideally suited to describe Latin American identity for Sarlo begins with Spanish conquistadors’ fantasies of wealth, power, and lineage projected onto the Latin American canvas. These dreams, or the projection of their phantasmatic desire as the idea of “The New World” makes a space where an artificial fantasy is superimposed over its reality. Using Sarlo’s insights, I suggest that the Latin desire for modernity—or the desire to be modern—is also a phantasmatic desire that is projected upon the locale of the metropolis. Yet as Carlos J. Alonso crucially points out: the ‘somewhere else’ where the modern is thought to reside [read metropolitan centers] for the Spanish American intellectual should not be construed as a discrete place or a concrete set of historical and economic circumstances but rather as what, in effect, it was: a conceptual and rhetorical category. 8 (32) Consequently, Latin American writers’ “face-to-face confrontation with the modern” (illustrated most closely by Silva’s firsthand experience of fin-de-siècle European                                                          6 “America has been built on falsity, marked by a subconscious inclined toward the enjoyment of costumes, ghost of the collective illusion of the Spanish conquistadors who brought not civilization but their dreams of power, of wealth, of high lineage.” [My translation] 7 “for the simulacrum: mask, costume, constitutive inauthenticity.” [My translation] 8 In Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, the Argentine writer and future president Sarmiento, in spite of never having actually been in Europe, envisions Buenos Aires in this book as a future metropolis resembling Paris and populated with civilized Western Europeans. 11 metropolis that provided the diary setting of De sobremesa) has invariably resulted in “its flight to another location or its identification with an element different from the one with which they started their search” (Alonso 32). 9 The fugitive quality of modernity, the continuous flight to another location, is metaphorically illustrated by the three feminine entities of De sobremesa, La invención de Morel, and A hora de estrela. After each male narrator’s face-to-face confrontation with the feminine entity that triggers his desire to write about the uncanny experience, “she” disappears immediately. The desire of the male protagonist thus takes flight to another location in the absence of this feminine figure, that is, a flight to the location of writing. Rather than a concept with epistemological validity, “modernity,” for these three Latin American narratives, is “a poetic metaphor that replaces the factually real with wish-fulfilling illusions about the way the world moves and means” (Bernheimer 4). This quote from Charles Bernheimer’s Decadent Subjects describes the blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy provoked by the concept of decadence. European decadent writers’ identification with the term “decadence,” a paradoxical concept that produces multiple and often contradictory meanings, has key similarities to Silva, Bioy, and Lispector’s identification with modernity. Simultaneously provoking desire and anxiety, both terms refer to that which appeals, liberates, and gives pleasure, as well as that which is exciting but dangerous, self-indulgent, perverse, and potentially destructive. The capacity of the term “modernity” to trigger these contradictory associations in a Latin American context can in part be explained by what                                                          9 Bioy’s many vacations and extended stays in France and Lispector’s life abroad in Europe and the U.S. with her diplomatic husband and children also make them writers exposed to the twentieth century European and U.S. metropolis. 12 Richard Gilman says in his classic Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet about the term decadence: “all forms in which we detect the phenomenon ... [are] not stable realities of the objective world” (14). Gilman’s words about the inability of a term to describe the actual world resonate with the ways in which Silva, Bioy, and Lispector illustrate modernities. For Bernheimer, this condition is precisely what gives decadence its valuable and subversive agency. In my view, the subversive agency that Silva’s, Bioy’s, and Lispector’s narratives demonstrate is to show that the “location” of modernity, rather than emanating from the cosmopolitan centers, can actually be followed to the virtual space of the imagination, as its impenetrable source of origin. This strategic move lays bare the constitutive lie that the myth of modernity affirms. The idea that modernity’s location in the European metropolis is a factual and verifiable reality is therefore supplanted in these narratives by a revelation that this location is a powerful illusion and a rhetorical game of cultural domination. European Modernity as Desired Contaminant  As Alonso, citing Weber and Benjamin, points out, “modernity [in Europe] results…in a profound sense of the disenchantment of the world—the distinct impression that the world has lost its former auratic quality” (43). Walter Benjamin, in his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” was one of the first European intellectuals to describe how what he called the “aura” of a work of art, that is its authenticity and uniqueness, was being actively [and productively] destroyed by technologies of reproduction which copied and distributed the image of master paintings and other artworks conspicuously. He observes how the aura persists and captivates the 13 masses, a source of mysterious power that appears in many copied images that emerge from new technologies of reproduction, especially cinema. Benjamin suggests that the power of the cinematic image, a reproduction of reality, contains something akin to the auratic power of the original work of art, now transformed into the power of the audiovisual spectacle that acts as a kind of mirror ideal for the masses (that could also powerfully misidentify with it). Benjamin also observes that the contemplative and distant relation of an art viewer to an original artwork, or to any other aesthetic image found in the museum, is eliminated in cinema by the distracted attention and intensely misidentificatory relation between the audience and the rapidly moving audiovisual spectacle. Through their respective narratives which each stage an initial visual consumption of reproduced feminine entities by male protagonists, Silva, Bioy, and Lispector offer interpretations of the rise of reproducible technologies and their deep impact on the relationship between spectator and artwork. The desire that each of these feminine reproductions engenders in their protagonists provokes each to shorten the originally contemplative distance of his first visual encounter for a closer and more intense approximation. This opens up an increasing misidentification of the male protagonist with each feminine entity and precipitates the loss of stable boundaries between each man’s own identity and the imagined identity of his object of desire. The ways in which the three protagonists come to misidentify with their feminine objects—onto which they also project their fantasies—parallels the popular reading habits of European middle class women during the end of the nineteenth century alleged by positivist discourses. 14 In The Gender of Modernity, Rita Felski gives a rich description of the core European characteristics of this ostensibly female activity: “The text is consumed metaphorically by analogy with the literal consumption of objects such as food; it is used to satiate an appetite, incorporated, used up” (86). This uncritical “devouring of fiction by ‘woman’” becomes, as Felski states, “a disturbing and threatening phenomenon [for European writers] because it negates the autonomy of the literary artifact” and lacks “any reverence for the auratic status of the artwork” (86). The idea of the European bourgeois female reader’s consuming practice is almost applied verbatim to her consumption of commodities. As Felski describes, “women are portrayed as buying machines, driven by impulses beyond their control to squander money on the accumulation of ever more possessions” (62). This cliché is significant not only because it perseveres today, but also because it comes to define the nature of modern male and female consumption under the aegis of capitalism. Yet if women’s perceived “emotionality, passivity, and susceptibility to persuasion render them ideal subjects of an ideology of consumption that pervades a society predicated on the commercialization of pleasure” (62), as Felski states, European men cannot completely escape this consumerist seduction. Indeed, Felski observes that European mainstream discourses that indicted the twentieth-century consumer as a threat of a decentering of the self “regularly invoke[d] a nostalgia for a robust sense of sense that [had] been invaded and feminized by an omnipresent culture of glossy media simulations” (62-3). This indictment of consumer culture made clear that the male consumer could not escape the irrational impulses, desires, and seductions provoked by the glittering phantasmagoria of an emerging mass culture, or their danger of becoming feminized in falling into these seductions through his surrender to consumption (62). 15 Felski’s analysis demonstrates that European male identity had to come to terms with a view of consumer identity that came accompanied with the already culturally ingrained idea that consumption was an irrational feminine activity; therefore any consumption that produced their identification or intense desire implied the feminization of their identities. This was an idea produced at the European center that reverberated in Latin American nations, and also has a clear illustration in the role gender plays in De sobremesa, La invención de Morel, and A hora da estrela. The at once phantasmatic and seductive feminine images found in these three novels are (re)produced through different kinds of technologies (a painting reproduction, a photograph, a holograph, writing) that augment their fascinating power. The seductive appeal of these three feminine images thus leads each of the three male protagonists to identify with these feminine entities and irrationally attempt to trespass the boundaries that constitute them as separate beings from their objects of desire. The dangerous psychic unravelling of each male protagonist’s identity that leads him toward his literal or symbolic death is thus produced by his unrelenting desire to approximate the feminine entity. The identification and relentless desire that the feminine entities trigger in the masculine protagonists, which produces in them the desire to want to live in the virtual (read fictional) space the feminine entities are located, therefore parallels the reading practices attributed to European women readers who want reality to resemble fiction. Arguably, the technological and psychic forces connected to modernity and illustrated by Bioy’s and Lispector’s two latter feminine entities in a twentieth-century context, show an increasingly powerful capacity of the aesthetic fused with the technology of cinema and 16 capitalism’s glossy images, to seduce (fe-)male consumers with an increasingly simulacral, or more “real” and thus fantastic object of desire that supplants reality. Importantly the Latin American literary metaphor of modernity, as a pathologizing, feminizing, and deadly female signifier presented in De sobremesa, La invención, and A hora, has an European literary precedent: decadent literature. Decadents were a marginal fin-de-siècle European literary group that subversively appropriated the idea of decadence and the feminine to define their artistic and spiritual identities and their decadent style and subversive philosophy. 10 Rather than delve into all of decadence’s complicated associations, which would take me beyond the scope of this dissertation, I would like to emphasize the primary use of the term as the literary metaphor for modernity, that is, the decay of civilization that stands in opposition to mainstream discourses of progress of the “other” the term modernity embodies: The two modernities raging for each other’s destruction that Matei Calinescu refers to in Five Faces of Modernity. Rita Felski contextualizes how the feminine is historically appropriated by decadence. She observes that one of the most significant ideological transformations of Europe during the fin de siècle is an artistic identity ideologically feminized by mainstream Positivist discourses. These discourses attribute a separate gender and social value to the scientific and the aesthetic realm, and emphasize the propriety and usefulness of a masculine science over the uselessness of a feminine aesthetics. A feminized aesthetics became “useless” when its cultural production was no longer perceived to contribute the same cultural advancement that socio-economic,                                                          10 Decadent were a primarily French aesthetic and literary movement of the end-of-the-nineteenth-century that set itself in opposition to Positivist and utopian views of modernity and nature by reifying artifice. 17 scientific, and technological development could contribute to extending people’s life and finding cures for illnesses, making productivity faster and more efficient, etc. As a consequence of this hierarchical gender split, the aesthetic realm has been placed in an inferior position antithetical to the masculine scientific realm. These Positivist European discourses place literature, like all other forms of aesthetics production, at the periphery of European culture, and empty it out of its cultural value and legitimacy. 11 The parallel between the situation of European Decadent writers who experience the relocation of the aesthetic realm to the periphery as the result of modernization, and the position that Latin American Americans occupy in relation to European cultural production is a productive one. European decadent artists reacted to mainstream ideas and technological and capitalist changes that threatened their writerly production and their artistic identity, in interesting ways that merit comparison to Latin American writers’ rhetorical strategies for adapting to the changes modernization brought to Latin America. Beginning with their response to the ideological relocation of their literary production to the periphery of culture, Decadents invented the trope of the anti- hero, an antithesis of the European masculine ideal idealized by mainstream discourse. In contrast to the Ulysses-like European hero and champion of progress who sublimates his desires and appetites in the service of the dynamic progress of civilization, decadent anti-heroes are portrayed as perverse, sexually deviant, excessive, dangerous, self- indulgent, destructive and feminine.                                                          11 As previously discussed, this European ideological “relocation of the aesthetic realm” occurred at the same moment as technologies of reproduction, put at the service of capitalism’s massive reproduction of affordable aesthetic copies for mass consumption, were perceived as actively destroying the aura of the original work of art. 18 Decadents thus subversively appropriate the idea of a feminine aesthetic as beautiful but useless, and of feminine desire as irrational and voracious, a strategic way to battle modernization from within its polarizing logic. 12 Through this appropriation, the stability of the categories “feminine” and “masculine” to describe intrinsic qualities of male or female subjects is radically challenged. Appropriating the “feminine” as an idea connected to both the aesthetic realm and to irrational desire, decadents dissociated the idea of the “feminine” away from the body of woman. 13 By extension, decadent writers’ self-conscious textualities “defined itself in opposition to the prevailing conventions of realist representation” and “a decadent aesthetic of surface, style, and parody that was explicitly coded as both ‘feminine’ and ‘modern’” (Felski 91). Though the decadent appropriation of the concept of the “feminine” is not new, what makes Decadent writers’ use of the feminine significant with respect to the authors at hand is that they appropriate the “feminine” to emblematize the modern, rather than stand in a Romantic opposition against it. Furthermore, Decadent writers’ equation of modernity with the feminine on one hand and the feminine with artifice on the other, parallels Silva, Bioy, and Lispector’s metaphorical configurations of modernity as                                                          12 The idea of the “feminine” became very complex. On the one hand, capitalist consumption, one of modernization’s “tools” of progress on a par with scientific and technological development, was ideologically illustrated as producing an irrational and female desire, and thereby implicitly suggested that consumption was a potentially “feminizing” and destabilizing activity. On the other hand, the aesthetic realm, where the aura of the artwork par excellence was located, was labeled feminine by utilitarian and Positivist discourses that made modernization, including scientific and technological developments, the key to reaching a future utopia. The idea of a female voracious and irrational consumer desire that destroyed aura, on a par with technological reproductions of art, and the idea of the aesthetic realm as feminine, beautiful, and useless thus inaugurated two significant threats to literary production. 13 Along similar lines, decadents attempted to distinguish their consumptive practices from those of women. In contrast to women’s undiscerning consumption of “low” art—exemplified by their escapist identification with romantic literature—decadents professed to have an aristocratic taste and a hypersensitive identification with the “high” decadent art whose symbolic meaning was only undecipherable to the initiates. 19 artificial and feminine vis-à-vis Helena, Faustine, and Macabea found in each narrative. Though clearly there are subversive reconfigurations of modern male identity defined by its artificiality and effeminization that are shared by these literatures both of European and Latin American margins, Felski’s study of these decadent texts is careful to qualify the influence that decadence had on mainstream culture by stating that the extent of the crisis in masculinity in Europe should not exaggerated. The transgressive gestures of the avant-garde [read decadence] where by definition limited to a small if visible and influential group that was by no means representative of writers as a whole, let alone the broader cultivated public. (91) However, it is precisely decadents’ subversive appropriation of peripheral spaces, spaces that mainstream discourses assigned to the aesthetic realm, that enable them to produce the kinds of insights about identity that continue to be explored in the novels of many Latin American writers. Ultimately, the connections between decadent literature and the three Latin American novels that I examine in this project resonate together most powerfully in their metaphorical conceptions of modernity. Decadents and Latin American writers enacted imaginary tour de forces in their fictions that radically destabilized normative identities. Though the idea of modernity as a category describing the specific location of the European metropolis was specifically contested by Silva, Bioy, and Lispector’s fictions, these writers also defined modernity as a coherent (feminine) entity to the extent that it is a force that relegated them to the periphery. Thus, these three Latin American writers proved in their narratives that insofar as modernity has tangible effects, it is a very palpable force, and so it is a thing, or an object, that produces complex affects and effects that the feminine entities have on the male protagonists, and which makes modernity suddenly very hard to define. 20 Modernity and Latin American Identity   In “Masculine Culture, Feminoid Modernism” Alfredo Villanueva-Collado discusses a paradigm shift in Latin America. European modernity’s myth of progress and its promise to place culture on the path of ever-advancing civilizations was appropriated by many Latin American national projects. The idealized executors of these fantasies of civilization that emerged during the late nineteenth century (and that continued into the twentieth)” were Spanish American criollo leaders capable of “civilizing” barbaric people—the Argentine gauchos, the indigenous, the Eastern European immigrants, and the Northeasterners, for example—who roamed aimlessly in the vastness of Latin American nations’ rural geographies (the pampas, the sierras, the provinces), or who were concentrated around the peripheries of the Latin American capitals in makeshift shanties and squalor. According to Villanueva-Collado, modernism, as a new artistic form of production from Europe that rejected the dead weight of history and tradition, implicitly threatened Latin America’s masculine national projects that began with Spanish American nations’ independence from Spain. Villanueva-Collado argues that from these nationalist points of view modernism was seen as a pathogen that threatened to feminize and pathologize Latin American culture. Yet at the beginning of the twentieth-century, technological advances like railways and trains were also seen to bring pathological states, like “railway spine” 14 . Villanueva-Collado therefore gives us a vision of Latin American nations at the end of the nineteenth century that is caught up in the fantasies and anxieties simultaneously produced by modernity. The late-nineteenth                                                          14 Please refer to Joseph Fredrick Drinka’s exploration of illnesses attributed to technological changes in The Birth of Neurosis. 21 century fantasy of progress and discourses of modernization carry over into the twentieth century as technological fantasies riddled with anxieties about the counterproductive and negative effects, both mental and physical, that these technologies will likely have on Latin American people. Here the unease that the myth of progress simultaneously engenders in Latin American cultures again parallels the way in which European Decadents also illustrate the contradictory and paradoxical effects of modernity. Indeed, the fantasy of a healthy male Latin American culture threatened by a decadent European feminizing culture takes center stage in the Latin American debate surrounding the dangers of exposing young criollo male youths to the feminizing and pathologizing infections of European texts and to Europe’s corrupting metropolitan influence. This great anxiety was centered on the ability to distinguish between what was “healthy” and what was “unhealthy” for young criollos—who would be the future spiritual and political leaders of Latin America into the twentieth century—to consume in the metropolitan centers. José Asunción Silva’s De sobremesa in particular illustrates this late nineteenth-century Latin American dilemma. 15 Silva’s male protagonist’s exposure to the demimonde class of Paris epitomizes the “unhealthy” exposure to European culture that produced such intense criollo elite                                                          15 As I analyze in chapter 1, Silva’s protagonist, José Fernández, is a criollo youth who travels to the European cosmopolitan cities as part of the journey all members of this elite Spanish American social class were expected to take during the end of the nineteenth century. Living mostly in Paris and in London, and travelling sporadically to other European countries, Fernández’s consumption of all aspects of European culture, including commodities, luxuries, literature and courtesans, are self-consciously catalogued in his diary. Fernández often has inner debates about which consumptions are productive and which are pernicious to his psychic, physical, and spiritual health; but ultimately he is eager to try all manner of novel vices. He is also eager to try on all kinds of different modern identities that the cosmopolitan city of Paris and London have to offer. 22 anxiety. But Silva, rather than sharing this anxiety, parodies it in De sobremesa. Anxiety about the exposure to “unhealthy” and morally corrupting behaviour is not what motivates Silva’s European setting for the diary. The main problem that Silva, as a Spanish American writer, had to negotiate in De sobremesa was modernity as located elsewhere (the European metropolis) and not in peripheral Bogotá. Like many of his modernista contemporaries—who were the first Latin American literary group that explicitly foregrounded their modernity—Silva looks to a diverse array of European models and assimilates them into his novel to serve his narrative goals and pleasures. As a result, a distinct Latin American aesthetic practice of consumption and appropriation of the discourses, ideas, developments, and art that emerges from Europe at this time, one that resembles the alleged practices assigned to “female readership,” is actualized. De sobremesa puts the idea of Latin America as occupying the periphery of modernity to the test. The marginalization of modernista Latin American intellectual and aesthetic innovations, because they are ostensibly unexposed to the direct effects of modernization happening in the European cosmopolitan centers, is explored by Silva’s Spanish American male protagonist who journeys to Europe in search of an encounter with the presumed kind of modernity that only exists at the center. Yet what Fernández ultimately finds after his initial encounter with Helena and his futile search for her is a modernity that remains elusive and ungraspable. Bioy’s La invención de Morel and Lispector’s A hora da estrela, which I examine in my second and third chapters respectively, share with Silva’s novel a self-conscious awareness of the crucial yet elusive dimension of the modern European center. Silva, Bioy and Lispector are all clearly aware that the ideas, discourses, products, and aesthetic 23 innovations of European (and North American) modernity are an integral part of their own writing possibilities about modernity; but their two novellas also emphasize the fact that Latin American cultural as well as artistic production is vitally defined by the assimilation of foreign influences (cultural, aesthetic, and philosophical) in par with modernity’s local effects in the twentieth century upon their own cultural canvases. Bioy and Lispector both assert the condition of the text as an artifice created by the imagination that contains metaphors about modernity: wishes, hypotheses and dreams, rather than reality. These writers’ incorporation of disparate elements taken from their local reality, such as the incorporation of cinema houses in Buenos Aires or the visible poverty of the Northeasterners living in Rio de Janeiro, implicitly decenters the center/periphery dichotomy that the myth of modernity inaugurated in Latin America during the late nineteenth-century. The myth’s claim that modernizing change only takes place in the European and U.S. urban centers can no longer be supported in the twentieth century. Bioy and Lispector’s use of the technological and capitalist changes that occur in their cities inform their fictions, and illustrate the fascinating new desires and fantasies that these technologies were able to produce in the fugutive male spectator as well as the male and female consumer (Rodrigo S.M. and Macabea). Thus La invención de Morel and A hora da estrela show films and advertisements consumed and absorbed by Latin American spectators suddenly caught up in an identification with imported fantasies, film stars, and lifestyles, that provoke not only consumers’ wishes for life to resemble fiction, but also a fugitive and restless desire. Bioy and Lispector arrive at this conclusion separately by exploring in their narratives the mid-twentieth century transformations a consumer culture and mass media 24 imports have had on the everyday life of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. Not surprisingly, the rise of new mass-media technologies, from radio to cinema and television, are objects of fascination that figure prominently in both novellas. For Bioy, the feminine and feminizing technological and aesthetic product that fascinates him, and which he both consumes and interrogates in La invención de Morel, is cinema, in particular, the relationship between male spectator and female film actress’ image and persona manipulated by the film industry. Like Silva, whose consumption of Bashkirtseff’s voice along with other “imported” texts is an act of identification that both propels and enables him to write De sobremesa, Bioy’s youthful experience of cinema, and his intense identification (or adolescent infatuation) with the silent film actress Louise Brooks, is a paradoxical experience (desiring an artificially reproduced feminine image) that he analogously fictionalizes in La invención. In my second chapter on Bioy’s La invención, I analyze the appearance of the American actress Brooks in German auteur G.W. Pabst’s silent film Die Büchse der Pandora (1929) that plays a pivotal role for the gendered narrative rendered by a male consumer and female entity as consumed aesthetic object. My argument in Chapter 2, supported by a variety of critics of Die Büchse, is that Pabst’s film lays bare both the passive and simultaneously identificatory role the male spectator plays as he falls for the narcissistic feminine trap of cinema—the image of Brooks and film actresses in general—and how the filmmaker and film industry manipulates this feminine image to activate the male spectator’s desire. Significantly, Pabst was able to expose the capitalist logic driving the relation between spectator, as consumer, and cinematic feminine image, as product, implicit in cinema through a self-reflexive narrative that openly illustrated 25 this dimension and a filmic and editing style that further reinforced the idea of his female protagonist as a glittering phantasmagoric commodity. What Bioy ultimately does in La invención is to illustrate narratively the passivity of male spectatorial desire by taking the fugitive’s irresistible attraction for the feminine simulacrum Helena to an at once fatal and ambiguous conclusion. For Lispector, on the other hand, the social reality that fascinates her is taken from the marginal conditions of North-East migrants who have relocated to Rio de Janeiro. These Brazilian migrants, who emerge out of a confluence of social, geographic, cultural, and economic conditions—which include the aridity of their land and their social and economic disenfranchisement by the Brazilian government—significantly demonstrate another Latin American internal othering of undesirable and inassimilable people that stand in the way of progress. Lispector’s novel thus sets the conditions for an exploration of the cultural center/periphery dichotomy ideologically playing out within a racially and socially divided Brazil. In contrast to Argentine immigrant writer Roberto Arlt, who could write novels that personally attested to the constraints imposed by the periphery on the value of his writing and his identity, Lispector, also a first generation European immigrant, but an upper middle-class and educated one, could not do the same. She could not, in other words, write from and within the experience of marginalization. Instead she must write of and about an experience that is foreign to her in a Brazilian context; her awareness of this impasse provokes in Lispector a self-reflexive interrogation of the role of writing fiction itself (i.e. via the male narrator Rodrigo S.M.). Lispector narrativizes this interest through a sudden, unplanned encounter between the male narrator, Rodrigo, and a Northeastern girl, who both walk about the city of Rio de Janeiro in anonymity. 26 However, Rodrigo is able to read certain physical signs (e.g. the girl’s ethnic features and malnourished body) as clues that reveal her racial and geographic origins as well as the general state of an advanced illness that is the mark of extreme poverty. His decision to write about the reality of the girl’s life that he himself could not and will never actually experience by identifying with her and playing her with his body, like an actor, provokes Rodrigo’s oscillation between a masochistic desire to lose his identity in hers, and a sadistic desire to crudely construct her life as a series of bourgeois clichés about the projected ugliness, dirtiness, stupidity, and ignorance attributed to the poor. Significantly though, Lispector also places her female protagonist at the perceived “center” of Brazilian modernity, Rio de Janeiro. Macabea’s identity as a marginal North- eastern therefore is expanded to include her role as avid consumer of newspaper advertisements, songs broadcasted by the local radio, horror films, and window shopping. Many of these mass produced objects, cheap or free of access to Macabea, are therefore accessible to the protagonist. Lispector’s illustration of Macabea’s consumption of these objects, as I will extensively demonstrate in this third and final chapter, is the closest approximation to the metaphor of female reading as eating found in all three texts. These factors will thus lead me to argue that in A hora, Lispector’s fictional male narrator/author roundly breaks with the artificial construction of modernity as a feminine European entity. Unlike Silva and Bioy, who attempt to unravel the European center/Latin American periphery binary by artificially setting up this binary through the Latin American male narrator/European feminine entity (standing in for modernity) relationship, Lispector analyzes the way in which the center/periphery binary gets set up from within Brazil’s actual social realities. In this maneuver, she like Arlt, is able to 27 create an actively desiring female figure from the margins that voraciously consumes the fantasies of Hollywood glamour, fame, and beauty, as well as dreams about becoming transformed into these female cinematic fantasies. Thus, if in Arlt the fantasy of the inventor and his technical know-how is what his male protagonist dreams will take him out of the margins of culture, Macabea’s belief in the possibility that her reality will be transformed into her desired fiction, to be desired by a man, at the conclusion of A hora da estrela, places modernity as a continuously mutating metaphor that gives nonexistent wish-fulfilling fantasies an imaginary existence. The possibility this new meaning of modernity opens up becomes an integral part of the making of an identity that escapes the limits of the periphery and the restrictive confines that mainstream culture assigns to it. 28 Chapter One:   ‘Todo es ella’: Fugitive Desire in José Asunción Silva’s De sobremesa  Introduction   In José Asunción Silva’s De sobremesa, the male protagonist José Fernández rejects the label of poet that both his closest circle of male friends and provincial Colombian society at large try to impose upon him: “Poeta, puede ser, ese tiquete fue el que me tocó en la clasificación. Para el público hay que ser algo. El vulgo les pone nombres a las cosas para poderlos clasificar. Después el hombre cambia de alma pero le queda el rótulo” 16 (Silva 37). Fernández’s oppositional stance against his categorization as poet ironically sheds light on the reason that motivated Silva’s friends and literary executor to wait so long to publish De sobremesa: to preserve Silva’s reputation as poet. As soon as it was printed in 1925, Silva scholars almost unanimously understood De sobremesa as a self-indulgent autobiography rather than a fictional novel; thus, Fernández was equated with Silva. As Rafael Gutierrez Girardot explains in his introduction of the Biblioteca Familiar Colombiana edition of De sobremesa, one of the major arguments in favor of reading Silva’s novel as autobiography was that Silva used the European self-reflexive journal intime (intimate diary), a literary innovation never before seen in Spanish letters, as the central narrative means by which José Fernández recounts his youthful travels throughout the cosmopolitan centers of Europe. According to Evelyn Picon Garfield, while Spanish American readers were familiar with anecdotal diaries, the intimate and intensely self- reflexive diary proved too shocking to conservative Spanish American audiences who                                                          16 “Could be, I’m the one in the least position to say,” Fernández went on. “Poet, maybe, that’s the label that stuck. In the public’s mind you have to be something. The herd puts names on things in order to speak of them and sticks labels on people in order to classify them. Afterward the man undergoes a sea-change but the label remains” (Silva 2005, 55). 29 misconstrued the diary form as presenting the actual thoughts, desires, and acts Silva engaged in while he was in Europe (278). Both form and content therefore contributed to the blurring of the lines between the actual Silva and the fictional Fernández. In addition to the text’s designation as an autobiography, which has resulted in De sobremesa’s reputation as a flawed work on a level below others of his poetic oeuvre, critics have pointed to stylistic disparities between Silva’s De sobremesa and his poetry, most often citing the dissonance between the meticulousness of his poetic verse and the antithetical disorganization of De sobremesa. As Jaramillo Zuluaga puts it: Este destino de poeta trágico se conforma muy bien con poemas como ‘El Nocturno III’… Sin embargo ¿cómo atribuir al autor del musical ‘Nocturno III’ los poemas sarcásticos que se reúnen bajo el título de ‘Gotas amargas’? ¿Y cómo concebir que un poeta tan cuidadoso en la composición de un verso compusiera también una novela deshilvanada, sin un claro comienzo, ni desarrollo, ni fin como De sobremesa? 17 (85) (My emphasis) Jaramillo Zuluaga emphasizes that many of Silva’s poems, along with his single fictional work, showcase different styles that disrupt rather that unify Silva as a cohesive authorial poetic body. Of all the disparate styles that problematize the mythological idealization of Silva as “the tragic poet of Colombia,” I am most interested in his depiction of Silva’s style deshilvanado (“unraveled”) in De sobremesa. Because of his long-running reputation as a poet laureate and the corresponding belief that De sobremesa’s unraveled style should result in its relegation to the status of embarrassing failed novel and thus excluded from serious critical appraisal, my analysis of De sobremesa is part of a recent                                                          17 “This destiny of tragic poet conforms very well with poems like ‘El Nocturno III’…Yet, how to attribute to the author of the musical ‘Nocturno III’ the sarcastic poems that are united under the title ‘Gotas amargas’? And how to conceive that a poet who was so careful in the composition of a verse could have also composed a novel so unraveled, without a clear beginning, nor development, nor end, like De sobremesa?” (My translation) 30 critical trend that emphasizes both the intentionality and the modernity of Silva’s style. Jaramillo Zuluaga’s argument that Fernández has many styles represents one of the many Latin Americanist critical voices of the last couple of decades that rebuts an understanding of Silva’s De sobremesa as a novel that stylistically and narratively fails. 18 Such recent critical opinion regarding Silva’s De sobremesa includes two central reappraisals voiced by Andrés Lema Hincapié and Alejandro Mejías-López. The former refers to De sobremesa as “un extraordinario ejemplo de la novela como construcción y exploración del yo” 19 (118), while the latter has characterized the novel as “una de las obras cumbres del modernismo … [y] una novela profundamente innovadora en relación tanto a la narrativa del momento como a los debates sobre el alcance y las consequencias de la modernidad y la epistemología moderna 20 (337).” Following Lema Hincapié’s lead, I assert that Silva problematizes identity as a fixed category through an intentional construction and exploration of the inner self, a move made possible by the stylistic structure of the intimate diary. Like Mejías-López, I too believe that the discourses and debates regarding modernity play an integral role in De sobremesa and foster its deeply innovative response to the paradoxes of modern identity. My own argument sets out with the premise that Silva is a Latin American writer who demonstrates a deep interest in the discourses and products of modernity emerging at the end of the nineteenth-century. Analogously, he is interested in exploring, through                                                          18 And that reduces Silva’s literary impact to that of a promising modernista poet whose tragic death prevented him from sharpening his craft and surpassing his modernista poet contemporaries, including the founder of the modernista group, Rubén Darío. 19 “an extraordinary example of the novel as a construction and exploration of the ‘I’” [My translation] 20 “one of the peak works of modernism, and a deeply innovative novel in relation to both the narrative of the moment as well as to debates over the capacity to reach and the consequences of modernity and modern epistemology” [My translation] 31 De sobremesa’s first person diary narrative, what kind of consequences and effects modernity (as a discursive, ideological, and material force) was having on an understanding of the categories used to define the self, including gender, nationality, class, and race. Silva revamps modern identity through a crisscrossing of gender, national, and artistic identity lines that are blurred and subverted. In this respect, Fernández’s diary is the record of a self-reflexive internal exploration in which the unstable, artificially constructed play of multiplying masks adopted by Fernández throughout his nomadic travels in European cities serve to emphasize the lack of an original masculine artistic self. Furthermore, what makes possible Fernández’s progressive detachment to an authentic self is the role of excessive consumer. Fernández thus follows the imperative logic of capitalism as a way to try and satiate an unquenchable desire for sensual pleasures and knowledge, yet ends up over-satiated and seeking an escape from this compulsive, categorically “feminine” consumer behavior. When Fernández seeks to escape the new totalizing order of capitalism (and its corresponding imperative to consume) in Paris, he flees first to rural Europe and to nature before eventually returning to the city. A second, seemingly antithetical desire to that of sensual consumption, that is of his quest for “spiritual transcendence”, is provoked by his encounter with Helena. “She” appears to him as a “feminine spiritual mirror” that he pursues fruitlessly and as a phantasmatic and ideal feminine spirituality that cannot be possessed. Through this relationship, in which Fernández intensely identifies with the female entity Helena as his “twin feminine soul,” Fernández’s desire once again acquires a feminine quality. In the characterization of Fernández’s desire, vis-à-vis his consumption of luxuries and 32 courtesans and his identification with the feminine Helena as a spiritual embodiment of the essence of the aesthetic works of art, I want to argue that Silva provocatively codes desire as a feminizing and fugitive unconscious drive. Ultimately, on a par with Mejías López’s claim that De sobremesa is a novel that explores modernity and modern epistemology, I look at the ways in which De sobremesa’s stylistic innovations, specifically Silva’s heterodox usage of both European and modernista literary techniques, render the text itself as feminine. The narrative search for the ideal entity Helena, and his unfulfilled desire to access a different kind of transcendental (read spiritual) relationship with her that is higher than the physical encounter of the flesh he experiences with courtesans who leave him feeling spiritually sullied and unsatisfied, brings to the surface a modern illustration of a feminine desire that flows through a male body and moves beyond “la falta o carencia de un objeto” 21 into an understanding of “deseo como fin en sí mismo, como fuerza vital y productora” 22 (Mejías-López 339). In order to historically unpack what makes Silva’s Latin American male artistic identity susceptible to feminization during the emergence of nineteenth-century modernity, as in his textual product De sobremesa, I begin by focusing on the similarities the protagonist Fernández and the author Silva share. These include: 1) the shared adoption of European dandy and aesthete fashions (in both style and mannerisms), 2) the voracious consumption of European cultural, consumer, and aesthetic products and discourses and, 3) the exposure to the modern cosmopolitan city centers of Europe, in                                                          21 “the fault or lack of an object” [My translation] 22 “desire as an end in itself, as a vital and productive force” [My translation] 33 particular Paris and London, and their respective demimonde and bourgeois lifestyles, before his return to the Latin America peripheral city of Bogotá. Emphasizing these three similarities between the fictional protagonist José Fernández and the “real” Silva makes the European influence on Silva’s novel an undeniable aspect that emanates from Silva’s exposure and attraction to European cultural and aesthetic products. Silva’s preoccupation with a modernity localized in the cosmopolitan centers of Europe and with the conflicting and contradictory paths this modernity creates for a Latin American writer and intellectual, is echoed by his modernista contemporaries. In Modernity, Modernismo, and the Development of the Spanish American Literature, Cathy Jrade describes how in 1888 Ruben Darío, “head and intellectual center of gravity of the movement,” adopted the term modernismo “as a banner of distinction and pride that this movement was born of and within the context of modernity” (1). According to Jrade, in practical terms modernismo became the literary umbrella term that described a small and elite group of Spanish American poets writing towards the end of the nineteenth century, including among others Dario, José Marti, and José Asunción Silva 23 (1). As a term, modernismo described the shared literary orientations and tendencies of this small group. Francine Masiello further emphasizes in Between Civilization and Barbarism that the term “‘modernistas’ captured these Spanish American writers’ desire to be modern [and] contemporaneous with all of Europe … especially with its intellectual center, the city of Paris” (14). Being “modern” for modernistas meant that these writers needed to grapple with the various modern discourses that had emerged through modernity and were vying                                                          23 For a more extensive list and discussion of other modernista poets, see Cathy Jrade and Julio Ramos’ Divergent Modernities. For a discussion on Modernista Leopoldo Lugones see Gwen Kirkpatrick’s The Dissonant Legacy of Modernismo. 34 for dominance toward the end of the nineteenth-century, in particular the scientific and aesthetic discourses that were deployed against each other at this time. One of Modernistas’ most important sources of innovation therefore became the use and incorporation of different, dissonant discourses in their literary works. In Masiello’s words, “in their attempt to find their own voice… [Modernistas] considered the poetic and the prosaic, the religious and the scientific” (15). However, modernistas generally granted literature a privileged status over more scientific ways of knowing by asserting that the goals of modernista literature fused with philosophical, ethical, and political concerns and questions. Thus modernistas voraciously consumed many of the philosophical, aesthetic, and scientific discourses emerging from modernized Europe in order to help them “define the present and, through the present, the future” (Masiello 14). As Julio Ramos argues in Divergent Modernities, modernistas “were the first to exhibit the Book of Culture as a presupposed archive, [in which] reference to a specifically artistic past becomes a thematized device” (179). Ramos sees Silva’s De sobremesa as exemplary of this new, self-referential turn that modernista literature took with respect to its influences, in citing texts overtly in order to generate “a second-degree artificiality” (179). It is his impression that in De sobremesa “the system of citations becomes the driving force behind the entire work” (179). In my view, this driving force is metaphorically rendered in De sobremesa through the insatiable desire for knowledge that comes to motivate Fernández’s search for Helena. This search stimulates the continuous consumption of texts he cites along the way, texts on Pre-Raphaelite art, for example, which he voraciously assimilates in order to approximate “Her.” 35 What makes Silva’s novel unique in the modernista canon is that, as Masiello argues, many modernistas “turned their attention from the most up-to-date European trends toward home and resurrected, through flights of fancy as much as through historical fact, a Spanish American past that included ancient civilizations, indigenous peoples, and a Spanish American consciousness” (14). Furthermore, modernistas, most notoriously José Martí, relied upon the figure of the mestizo, the signifier of indigenous and Spanish racial mixing, as a central figure that defined the uniquely Spanish American cultura de mezcla (culture of mixture). Yet Silva departed from Martí’s criollo 24 definition of Latin American identity after independence, vis-à-vis the mestizo identity. Unlike Martí, Silva saw that the crisis of identity modernity brought to the Latin American criollo intellectuals after independence could not be resolved by alluding to the figure of the mestizo or to the ancient civilizations of the Southern Hemisphere’s pre- colonial past. Rather, in placing emphasis on the modernista desire to be included as part of the idea of modernity as futurity, Silva repudiated the connection to a pre-historic past or a racially autochtonous identity. Instead, in De sobremesa, he turned his focus to an analysis of the transformations of urban centers like Paris and London into aesthetic and consumer metropolises and bourgeois centers of capitalist activity, and what these signified for modern identity. The experience of modernity for his male protagonist in both the cosmopolitan centers of Europe and in his Villa Helena, and his imperative to consume, becomes the central preoccupation of De sobremesa. The fictional narrative of De sobremesa sets the stage for Silva’s questions about identity along the parameters of                                                          24 The term criollo describes the son of a Spaniard royal emissary who was born in a Latin American nation. For the criollo role in literary and politics, see Angel Rama’s La ciudad letrada and Julio Ramos’ Divergent Modernities. 36 what it means to be both Latin American and caught up in the new forms of desire the modern cosmopolitan cities produce in his male protagonist via his consumption of commodities, discourses, art, literature, and philosophical ideas. As Beatriz Sarlo points out in respect to the changes modernization brings for peripheral Latin American writers in Una modernidad periférica: “La ciudad misma es objeto del debate ideológico- estético: se celebra y se denuncia la modernización, se busca en el pasado un espacio perdido o se encuentra en la dimensión internacional una escena más espectacular” (28). Silva’s interrogation of where Spanish American identity is situated in relation to modernity is thus implicitly carried out within an exploration of the accelerated modernity of European cities—and in particular the different kind of consumerist imperatives that drive the cities of Paris and London—experienced by his protagonist José Fernández. In a late-nineteenth century context, where both the material and economic effects modernity was having on European metropolises had not yet began to significantly change the urban materiality and feudal economic system of Latin American nations, the European setting of Fernández’s journey becomes a necessary setting for the exploration of modernity. Before his return to Bogotá, Silva places Fernández at the center of the perceived location of modernity so that he can both discover and experience precisely what that modernity is and what transformative effects it has and will have upon those exposed to it. Fernández’s voyage to Europe exposes him to the crisis of the divided modern self, but does not resolve any of the ambiguities of modern identity. Yet his final return to Bogotá, presented as the beginning and conclusive space Fernández inhabits in De sobremesa, establishes one significant change in his personality and personal philosophy. 37 While in Europe Fernández is overwhelmed by his compulsion to consume the full spectrum of commodities at his disposal, upon his return to Colombia he has learned to “manage” his consumptive desire. In a way, one can argue that Fernández finds a cure to the psychic ailments and mysterious illness that afflict him when he is first exposed to the many vices of European consumption. In the social spectrum of Bogotá, Fernández learns to disperse himself in his many interests without losing his psychic equilibrium. His fear of going insane is also absent. He also rejects the possibility of finding a woman who is the spiritual equal that he sought in Europe through his pursuit of Helena. Rather, “love” becomes a game of seduction and artifice, whereby he plays the role he needs to play in order to seduce the women he sexually desires, and then moves on to his next conquest. The changes Fernández undergoes are the outcome of his failure to find in the metropolitan centers an aesthetic or a scientific cure that would restore his self to a unified cohesiveness. But Fernández’s failure to regain a whole and stable identity in Europe illuminates something new about the kind of desire being produced by capitalism: it is a fugitive desire caught up in the continuous consumption of novel commodities that will increasingly define modern identity more globally. In turn, Fernández’s consumption of European commodities in Europe, which continues upon his return to the urban periphery of Bogotá from his Villa Helena, is central to his continuous feminization in Latin America. The two significant questions that De sobremesa poses are: First, how do the ambiguities of modernity as contested aesthetic and scientific idea and material transformative force that has its deepest impact in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth- century, become relevant as a way to describe the changing political, cultural, national, and aesthetic realities of the cities of Latin America at the end of the nineteenth century? 38 And second, how does this modernity affect the Latin American male intellectual and the modernista writer’s conditions of literary production? As one response to this question, Alfredo Villanueva-Collado offers a provocative account summarizing the problem of modernity in a Latin American context. At the end of the nineteenth century, the projects of nation-building among newly independent Latin American nations became defined as a masculine project, backed by the promises of progress made by an imported ideology and discourses of scientific modernity. In contrast, aesthetic modernity came to be labeled by the nationalist, conservative promoters of this scientific modernity, made up largely of the landowning criollo oligarchy, as a pathogen that threatened to feminize culture (164). According to this binary, the term modernity became split into a contesting scientific and an aesthetic understanding of modernity in both Europe and Latin America. Scientific modernity became equated with masculine vigor and activity, and as the promoter of health, hygiene, morality, discipline, and well being of both Latin American citizens and nations. Analogously, scientific modernity condemned aesthetic modernity as its negative passive feminine other: the promoter of pathology, degeneracy, feminization, consumptive excess and moral corruption of Latin American citizens and their nation. 25 Villanueva-Collado points out, however, that the explicit gender divide that accompanied the division between science and art is illustrated in De sobremesa as the multiple feminization and pathologization of the male protagonist Fernández vis-à-vis his                                                          25 In a European context, the split between two antagonistic scientific and aesthetic modernities was first observed by Matei Calinescu in his seminal Fives Faces of Modernity. Calinescu proposed that modernity, from the nineteenth-century onward, became the contested site of an ideological warfare between scientific modernity, guided by positivism, utilitarianism, and liberalism, embodied by scientific and technological invention, and ruled by the idea of progress and artistic modernity. 39 excessive consumption of European cultural and aesthetic products, exposure to and experimentation with European lifestyles, and continuous destabilization of a “coherent, unified, masculine subject” through a transformation into the pathological, fragmented, and hysterical feminized male. In this respect, Villanueva Collado’s detailed definition of aesthetic modernity, using the medical metaphor of a “pathogen” to describe threatening “feminizing” influences, is useful to contextualize Silva’s awareness and manipulation of these antithetical poles of modernity in De sobremesa. [Aesthetic modernity] is a dis/ease insofar as it moves away from a notion of health, based on a perception and cultural production as masculine, toward a notionof dis/ease … identified by the dominant as a condition of non/virility or effeminacy. Modernity is perceived as an illness-inducing environment, and its artistic manifestations are classified as cultural pathogens, symptoms of a paradigm change involving gender confusion, leading to the loss of masculine health, and creating, within the culture, a dis/ease in the most literal sense of the word. (Villanueva-Collado 164) As Villanueva-Collado implies, European aesthetic modernity and its influence on fin-de- siècle Spanish American writers like Silva is portrayed—by Latin American criollo politicians and letrado 26 intellectuals with a conservative “nationalistic” agenda—as a dangerously infectious and feminizing disease transmitted through extensive exposure to the lifestyle and decadence of European cosmopolitan cities, through the excessive consumption of its decadent luxuries, and through the reading of its degenerate European philosophers, poets, and novelists. Through the appropriation of the pseudoscientific ideas of “scientific modernity,” conservative Spanish American order and hygiene are                                                          26 Angel Rama’s seminal La ciudad letrada defines letrados as the criollo sons of Spaniards who are given bureaucratic positions during the Empire which gives them hegemony over the act of writing. After independence, the letrados maintain their power and elite position over the mostly illiterate masses through the technology of writing, and survive the changes of modernity, including the professionalization of writing, by going to work in these specialized fields, such as journalism, and becoming literatos. 40 sought to be preserved by the Latin American criollo ruling and letrado (lettered) classes that, as Angel Rama persuasively argues in La ciudad letrada, were centrally involved in imposing a political system that kept them in power. One example of the anxiety and desire on the part of this conservative elite who inhabited the provincial, peripheral cities of Latin America during this time is given by Jaramillo Zuluaga. In “De sobremesa, de José Asunción Silva: El joven que llegó de Europa, el rastacuero,” he writes about a manual of conduct that José María Samper wrote in 1863 in order to provide landowning elite Latin American parents who were planning to send their sons to Europe sought advice on how to prevent the contamination of their child’s character by the decadence of Europe. The recommendations Samper gives to Latin American parents include: “… enviar a un joven de carácter ya formado, no menor de veinticinco años, que tuviera ideas republicanas y un objetivo determinado para el viaje, y, por supuesto, una persona mayor que lo aconsejara y vigilara 27 (qtd. in Jaramillo 204: 286-7). Furthermore, Samper assigns a specific goal and directive to all young Spanish American men traveling to Europe that would make their trip beneficial for the conservative parents and their homeland: que nuestra juventud vaya (a Europa) a recibir el saludable contagio, a observarlo todo, distinguir lo bueno de lo malo, aleccionarse aprendiendo a reprocharlo.Segundo, empaparse en la esencia de lo primero, y volver luego a difundir en nuestro fecundo y virgen suelo la simiente que se ha de multiplicar en frutos de civilización 28 (qtd. in Jaramillo 204: 280).                                                          27 “…send a youth of already formed character, not younger than twenty five, who had republican ideas and a determined objective for the trip, and, of course, an older person that could guide him and watch over him.” [My translation] 28 “…that our youth go (to Europe) to receive a healthy contagion, to observe everything, to distinguish the good from the bad, to learn to reproach the second [the bad], and soak in the essence of the first [the good], and to return later to spread over our fecund, virgin land the seed that is to multiply the fruits of civilization.” [My translation] 41 The contradictions that Samper’s directives require from the young Spanish American traveler are multifaceted. The oxymoron of “a healthy contagion” through exposure to Europe is brought up, and this health is connected to the idea that exposure to certain new ideas, like utilitarianism, should be brought back to his home country in order to multiply the “fruits of civilization” Latin America has only begun to sow on its “virgin land.” However, as Jaramillo points out, the young Latin American traveler himself must not change in any way, but preserve the normative and moral behavior of the provinces, and under no circumstances adapt to the European modern lifestyle and act like decadent Europeans. To do so, as Samper warns, is to risk becoming the dreaded Latin American rastaquouère: a French label referring to the word leather and to the leather business, which Parisians gave to young South American foreigners who lived the big life in Paris and whose means of material wealth were unknown. According to Samper’s logic, any Spanish American provincial youth who first landed on the cosmopolitan city of Paris risked becoming a rastaquouère by the unique freedom the anonymity of a metropolis provides. In contrast to the provinces, where both the elite social class and the close knit environment and control this class exerts over its members makes anonymity impossible for the young Latin American youth, a young man in Paris is suddenly handed an anonymous mask that hides and protects his family name and identity. The opportunity to satisfy secret, forbidden desires, unthinkable in the peripheral provinces, thus becomes more than possible in Paris. The Spanish American youth accordingly has the capacity to enter the playground of the Parisian demimonde 42 and enter whorehouses, court courtesans, or practice adultery with impunity, that is to say, without the fear of recognition and the risk of social punishment or scandal. Not surprisingly, Silva’s youthful protagonist José Fernández wears the artificial mask of the rastaquouère in Paris with defiant pride. Going completely against Samper’s directives, Fernández quickly adapts to the European lifestyle, dresses like a dandy, consumes and expends extravagant amounts of money on art and luxuries, seduces courtesans, goes to opera houses and theatres, gets invited to all manner of parties, and experiments with drugs; in short, he becomes a cosmopolitan Latin American. The mask of anonymity that Paris, and also London, provides for him, as an unknown foreigner, opens up the possibility for Fernández to put on many other masks—of seducer, pleasure- seeker, dandy, aesthete, philosopher, snob, poet, artist, aristocrat, etc.—which he keeps in continuous play until he bores or tires of one mask. The physical journey that Fernández undertakes in his nomadic travels through the European metropolises is a journey of self-discovery that engages with the effects both scientific and aesthetic modernity have on his national, artistic and gendered subjectivity. Recorded in his intimate diary, the journey begins with the experience of the many sensuous consumptive pleasures Parisian modernity offers to his senses, including exquisite foods, drinks, drugs, and the human commodity of the courtesan, who offers sensual pleasure in exchange for money. After this consumptive pleasures fail to satisfy his desire, his quest takes a different path. Suddenly Fernández, rather than seeking new consumptive pleasures that will heighten his sensations, desires spiritual transcendence through the feminine figure of Helena and the aesthetic realm she is associated with. 43 Initially, Fernández emphasizes the belief that the feminine aesthetic realm is the only place were the spirit of man continues to live after the Nietzschean pronouncement that God is dead takes over the modern world. Accordingly, this desire becomes incarnated in the appearance of the feminine entity Helena, who rather than a flesh-and-blood woman, is an aesthetic semblance that mirrors Fernández’s desire and “infects” him, that is to say, feminizes him through his intense identification with her feminine soul. By virtue of this feminization/infection, Fernández’s virile, masculine body begins to suffer from mysterious collapses and illnesses, which include fainting spells and paralysis and other hysterical symptoms. As Alejandro Mejías-López argues in “El perpetuo deseo”: El diario de Fernández se convierte en la narración de un viaje personal del protagonista, cuyo deseo de buscar a Helena se vuelve motor de su existencia. Este deseo es interpretado por los médicos del texto como enfermedad y Fernández como un ser fragmentado y disperso que necesita ser curado, controlado en su vitalidad amenazante 29 (339). Yet even prior to this feminization/infection vis-à-vis Fernández’s desire for Helena, he is already infected with the feminine desire to be beautiful and fashionable. As Rita Felski points out in The Gender of Modernity, the European fin-de-siècle preoccupation with beauty and appearance made possible an important shift in gender roles and the perception of the male body: To eroticize masculinity by transforming it into spectacle in previously unavailable ways. The male body was repositioned as a source of visual pleasure and an object of desire at the same time as it was being revealed as a highly coded                                                          29 The diary of Fernandez is transformed into the narration of the protagonist’s personal voyage, whose desire of finding Helena becomes the motor of his existence. This desire is interpreted by the doctors of the text as an illness, and Fernandez as a fragmented and dispersed being who needs to be cured and whose threatening vitality needs to be controlled. [My translation] 44 and artificial construct. The stylization and theatricality of aestheticism, exemplified through a living of life ‘in quotations’, was thus to become a defining feature of a ‘camp’ sensibility associated with the homosexual lifestyle of urban elites of the fin de siècle (103). In De sobremesa, Silva emphasizes Fernández’s physical beauty as an object worthy of both feminine and masculine desire, and Fernández reinforces this beauty by seeking to artificially enhance it in the same way as women do: through beautifying rituals and the careful selection of beautiful and fashionable clothes. Fernández writes about his obsession with fashion in the following note: “perder una hora conversando con el camisero para sugerirle la idea de una pechera de batisata plegada y rizada y cinco minutos escogiendo la flor rara que debe adornar la solapa del frac” 30 (Silva 63). The feminization of Fernández therefore occurs in two ways. First, his obsession with his surface beauty makes him as concerned with the perceptions of his appearance as the female courtesan, who seeks through her artificially enhanced beauty (dresses, jewels, makeup) to lure the desire of her prospective clients. Second, and more complex, is Fernández’s spiritual quest to unite with the feminine spiritual twin soul he encounters, which debilitates his body and transforms it from an ideal masculine specimen of strength and virility to a feminized and hysterically reactive body. The strange confluence of feminine and masculine traits intermixed in Fernández’s body, as I will analyze more extensively in section III, lures the masculine medical gaze. As Gabriel Giorgi claims, Silva is able to transform Fernández’s body into a legitimate beautiful and aesthetic object worthy of male admiration:                                                          30 “killing an hour in conversation with the shirt-maker to suggest to him the idea for a crinkly, pleated cambric shirt front, and five minutes choosing the rare flower that should adorn the tux’s lapel” (Silva 2005, 78). 45 a partir de una apropriación ‘táctica’ del discurso de medicina [donde] la mirada del artista interviene en la hegemonía ciega del discurso higienista de Nordau para encontrar allí un espacio legitimo de exhibición del cuerpo masculino, donde la belleza se funde con la salud, y erotiza el espacio normalizador del saber médico. 31 Giorgi’s insightful reading of how Silva appropriates the “medical space,” traditionally in charge of monitoring conformity to heteronormative masculine standards of health and vigor, produces a surprising new insight. It reveals the homoerotic desire of the medical gaze produced by putting the erotic image of a healthy, masculine body suffering from a mysterious feminine illness, or hysteria. The scene of medical examination thus exposes what “scientific modernity,” in its reification of the virile masculine body, disavows: the undercurrent of homoerotic desire that circulates around a reification of masculine health, activity, and vigor, as well as the disavowal that such an image could activate or be the object of sexual desire. The disavowed homoerotic desire found in the national projects of Latin American nations organized around the common, uniform identity of a virile, moral, and masculine scientific modern state displaying perfect health, therefore comes to the surface. The Latin American political realm, with its long history of dictatorships and military coups, gives the reader a perfect image of just what such a uniformly masculine, heteronormative, and virile identity disavows about these elite militarized men who live in close community with one another and who exclude women from equal presence and access to power in relation to the state. National hygiene, defined by the moral and                                                          31 “taking off from a tactical appropriation of the discourse of medicine [where] the gaze of the artist intervenes in the blind hegemony of Nordau’s hygienist discourse to find there a legitimate space for the exhibition of the masculine body, where beauty blends with health, and eroticizes the normalizing space of medical knowledge…” [My translation] 46 physical health of men, is accordingly, something very important to impose and regulate by Latin American militarized and dictatorial governments. 32 Fernández begins his journey into Europe as an optimal and promising Latin American national specimen of perfect “Herculean physical health and vigor.” However, this strength, and its nationalist underpinnings are undermined as Fernández becomes an insatiable feminized consumer of European decadent luxuries and products, which not only deplete his energy and strength, but also corrupt his moral fabric. Later, he becomes physically ill in a very characteristically feminine way when he is infected by his desire to connect with the transcendental ideal of feminine beauty that is Helena, identifying completely with both her image and her “feminine spirituality” as a perfect mirror of his own “soul.” Since scientific discourses tried to undermine aesthetic production by simultaneously pathologizing and feminizing the aesthetic realm, rendering the idea of the beautiful as functionally useless, it is provocative for Silva to subvert the negativity assigned to the aesthetic realm and its works precisely by appropriating those scientific discourses to reveal a homoerotic fascination with the healthy masculine body. In De sobremesa, Silva gives the pathologizing and feminizing discourses that accuse decadent artists and philosophers of creating deviant works that can contaminate the health of the male individual and society a new spin. By giving his protagonist an active, healthy, virile masculine body defined as a beautiful body, actively admired by the many doctors who examine it, scientific discourses in turn become decadent and deviant. Additionally,                                                          32 For more about this topic, please see Gabriel Giorgi’s Sueños de exterminio. 47 the apparent disjunctive connection between Fernández’s virile masculine exterior and his spiritual, feminine interiority further undermines the binary polarities the aesthetic and the scientific are placed in vis-à-vis both aesthetic and scientific discourses. Fernández is therefore a protagonist who synthesizes both scientific and aesthetic discourses, making room for a new understanding of femininity and masculinity as two artificial and socially constructed ideas that shift with the times, rather than as two stable and mutually exclusive categories connected to the male and female body. In this way, the narrative of Silva’s De sobremesa anticipates the ideas of later poststructuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Donna Haraway. Fraternal Consumption at Villa Helena  Returning briefly to the initial setting of the novel, De sobremesa begins with the detailed description of the precious luxury objects inside the living room of an older José Fernández, whose voyage in Europe has already taken place, and who again lives in Latin America, in his “Villa Helena.” Fernández’s voracious consumption continue upon returning to Bogotá. Thanks to the extreme wealth that Fernández has at his disposal, he imports all manner of luxuries from all parts of world to the periphery. Immediately after the initial modernista backdrop in the introduction of De sobremesa, Silva gives readers a powerfully suggestive visual image of the consumptive practices of the not-yet visible protagonist and his guests that sensually appeals to their imagination and senses: “el humo de los cigarillos, cuyas puntas de fuego ardían en la penumbra … y el olor enervante y dulce del tabaco opiado de Oriente se fundía con el del cuero de Rusia en que 48 estaba forrado el mobiliario” (Silva 31). 33 After this description of the objects of their consumption, the body of the male protagonist gradually appears. First, a “man’s hand” strikes a match and lights six candles beside the lamp and makes the room suddenly become brighter. Only then does the “perfil árabe” (Silva 32) [“Arabian profile”] of the protagonist Fernández and the faces of his guests become visible to the reader. The reader slowly discovers that Fernández and his two guests, after consuming all manner of luxurious food and drink, now sit together in the living room for an after dinner conversation. The artificial light that illuminates and lingers over the objects present in Villa Helena enables readers to notice the precious luxuries, pieces of artwork, decorations, and people inside Villa Helena, including the faces of Fernández and his two guests, Juan Rovira and the doctor Oscar Sáenz. The half-light has a narcotic effect on his guests, lulling them into prolonged silences that Rovira nervously breaks by comparing their collective silent stupor to the silence of three corpses: “callados como tres muertos” (Silva 32). Responding to Rovira’s complaint, Doctor Sáenz explains his silence by describing the completely different space and environment where he works day to day. As he describes it: “paso la semana entera en las alas frías del hospital en las alcobas donde sufren tantos enfermos incurables” 34 (Silva 32). In the internal space of the hospital, Sáenz’s senses are exposed to “… todas las angustias, todas la miserias de la debilidad y del dolor humano en sus formas más tristes y más repugnantes; respire olores                                                          33 “the smoke from two cigarettes, the fiery tips of which burned in the darkness … the sweet enervating smell of opiate tobacco from the Orient mingled with that of the Russian leather in which the household furnishings were covered” (Silva 2005, 50). 34 “…I spend the whole week in cold hospital rooms and in bedrooms where so many incurably ill people are suffering” (Silva 2005, 51) 49 nauseabundos de desaseo, de descomposición y de muerte” 35 (Silva 32-33). In stark contrast, entering Fernández’s villa on Saturdays fills the doctor’s senses with pleasurable delights. Replacing the stenches of filth, Sáenz smells the perfume that emanates from a profusion of rare flowers: “perfumado por una profusión de flores raras” (Silva 33). In contrast to witnessing all forms of human suffering and illness, his eyes feast on the internal décor of precious luxury and aesthetic objects Fernández has collected. Silva thus sets up Villa Helena as a spiritual and aesthetic sanctuary that allows Doctor Sáenz’s senses and mind to temporarily escape from the horrors and degradations of the human body and mind that the antiseptic scientific space of the hospital ostensibly treats. Entering Villa Helena for Sáenz is thus like entering a paradise for the senses and for the spirit. Significantly, the beautiful art, luxuries, and exquisite food and drink found in Villa Helena lack the traces of mortality and decay Sáenz observes daily. Instead, in this narcotic realm, the aesthetic products of human invention, craft, and artistry take on an uncanny sort of life and transform Sáenz, along with the rest of Fernández’s guests, into desiring consumers eagerly looking to partake of the pleasures of luxury foods and drinks as well as the reading of poetry, philosophy, and fiction along with the contemplation of Fernández’s art collection. Villa Helena, however, also becomes the seductive, internal feminized space that “manipulates the male guests and protagonists” to enter a game of “passivity, complicity, and pleasure” in partaking of its consumer delights (Felski 63). Sáenz, as a man of science with an ideological moral aversion to the feminine and useless modern space of                                                          35 “the anxieties…wretchedness, and weaknesses…of human pain in the saddest and most repugnant forms… [and] to the nauseating stenches of filth, decomposition, and death” (Silva 2005, 51). 50 beauty and consumption that is Villa Helena, sees this space as having a nefarious effect after prolonged exposure, which has evidently infected Fernández and threatens to further endanger the poet’s mental health and interfere with his poetic production. Therefore, though the doctor is glad to escape the space of the hospital and the abject reality of human mortality and suffering, for what can be described as Fernández’s liminal and feminine modern realm (i.e. Villa Helena) and take part in its temporary narcotic effect, Sáenz, as a pragmatic man of science, also does not believe that constantly living in this aesthetic realm, as Fernández does, is healthy for him. Speaking against Fernández’s philosophy of turning his life into an art based on experimentation and the constant search for new, more intense experiences, Sáenz firmly believes that Fernández should specialize and focus all of his energies on writing poetry, since for the doctor, Fernández’s soul is singular and specific: he has “el alma de poeta” (the soul of a poet) (Silva 36). Yet Fernández refuses Sáenz’s pigeonholing statement. Countering Sáenz’s conception of Fernández’s soul as the singular, unchangeable soul of a poet, predestined to fill this unique role in the world and consecrate himself to “cincelar sonetos” (Silva 38) [“the chiseling of sonnets” (Silva 2005, 56)], Fernández claims that his soul is not singular but multiple and changeable. As he will later argue, he sees himself as having the multiple souls of an artist, poet, philosopher, and analyst that complement his inexhaustible desire for all kinds of knowledge and experience: … como me fascina y me atrae la poesía, así me atrae y me fascina todo, irresistiblemente: todas las artes, todas las ciencias, la política, la especulación, el lujo,los placeres, el misticismo, el amor, la Guerra, todas las formas de la Vida, la 51 misma vida material, las mismas sensaciones que, por una exigencia de mis sentidos, necesito de día en día más intensas y más delicadas 36 . (Silva 37) Sáenz responds to Fernández’s arguments by accusing him of wearing a “mask” which he shows to the social space outside his home to protect himself by keeping him from real life 37 (Silva 38). Sáenz implies that Fernández only takes the mask off for the ten closest friends who are allowed to come into his elite, inner space and partake of its consumptive and aesthetic delights. Thus the personas, or masks, Fernández adopts when he is in the public sphere split his self into two incongruous identities: the Latin American public self who wears and performs the mask 38 of “perfecta corrección mundana” (Silva 38) [“perfect world uprightness” (Silva 2005, 56)] expected of his social position as an elite criollo in Bogotá; and the private self he reveals only for those closest male friends he trusts and only from within the private space of Villa Helena, a pseudo-aristocratic space designed by Fernández to bar him from the provincial and rigid mentality of elite criollo society and the vulgar realities of everyday life. For Sáenz, it is ultimately the enervating luxury and the refined comfort of Villa Helena and all its sumptuous objects that holds Fernández back from his tremendous potential as a poet, and that compromises his productivity by making him an insatiable consumer of new sensations. As Sáenz puts it: “…son las exigencias de tus sentidos                                                          36 “…just as poetry fascinates me, so too does everything else fascinate and attract me, irresistibly; all the arts, all the sciences, politics, speculation, luxury, pleasures, mysticism, love, war, all life forms, material life itself, the very sensations that my senses demand be ever more intense and exquisite” (Silva 2005, 56). 37 See the following lines: “…tú en tu disfraz de perfecta corrección mundana…” (Silva 38). 38 The function of the “mask”, as Sarlo describes it in Una modernidad, is unique to a Latin American peripheral identity which rejoices in the inventions of artificial identities copied from legitimated social or cultural identities. Through the effect of the mask, these legitimate identities become parodied, lacking “authenticity” or “originality,” is a mechanism that, as we shall see, Fernández will also on his voyage through Europe, where he will adopt the modern European masks of dandy and aesthete, which allows him to become modern and fit into the bohemian circles of the demimondaine Parisian lifestyle. 52 exacerbados y la urgencia de satisfacerlas que te domina (Silva 40) [“it is the exacerbated senses and the urgency to satisfy them … [that] rules you” (Silva 2005, 58)]. Sáenz goes on to provide several examples: “… esas joyas en cuya contemplación te pasas las horas fascinado por su brillo, como se fascinaría una histérica, el té despachado directamente de Cantón, el café escogido grano por grano que te manda Rovira … todos los detalles de la vida elegante que llevas, y todas esas gollerías que han reemplazado en ti al poeta por un gozador que a fuerza de gozar corre al agotamiento” 39 (Silva 41). Sáenz’s critique turns Fernández into the ultimate consumer who is addicted to the many pleasures the refined luxuries give to his senses. Indeed, consumption distracts the poet from aesthetic production and threatens his physical and mental health. Furthermore, when Sáenz characterizes Fernández as sharing the fascination of a hysteric for jewels, Sáenz also implies that his excessive consumption, which has replaced his production, has a feminizing effect on his masculine identity. As previously discussed vis-à-vis Felski’s The Gender, the equation between femininity and consumption that pseudoscientific ideologies of modernity promoted during the end of the nineteenth-century Europe echo in the comments of Doctor Sáenz, who, speaking as a man of science, labels Fernández’s excessive consumption and fascination with his jewel collection as a feminine, passive activity that likewise distracts Fernández from his poetic productivity. At stake for Sáenz is that in Fernández’s surrender to the passive pleasures of consumption, he jeopardizes his masculine, virile identity as active producer.                                                          39 “…those jewels in whose contemplation you spend your time fascinated by the sparkle, as a hysteric would be fascinated; the tea dispatched directly from Canton, the coffee Rovira sends you, chosen bean by bean … all those little dainties that have replaced the poet in you with the pleasure-seeker who by dint of pleasure is headed for depletion” (Silva 2005, 58) [My emphasis]. 53 Consumption transforms him into a passive, feminized consumer that shares the same desire and appreciation of jewels as the female hysteric. Fernández, however, defends his consuming practices by telling Sáenz that the fact that all human life ends in death has taught him that more important than dedicating his life to writing poems is “vivir con todas mis fuerzas, ¡con toda mi vida!” (Silva 42) [“to live with all my might, with all my life!” (Silva 2005, 59)]. The idea that the production of poetry will immortalize him is not appealing to Fernández. He is rather driven by “el deseo de sentir la vida, de saber la vida, de poseerla” (Silva 38) [“the desire to experience life, to know life, to possess it” (Silva 2005, 56)], which for him means “sentir todo lo que se puede sentir, saber todo lo que se puede saber, poder todo lo que se puede…” (Silva 39) [“to feel all that can be felt, to know all that can be known, to do all things possible” (Silva 2005, 56-7)]. This desire leads to the continuous consumption of all novel sensations that modern life has to give. As we shall see in the diary, these range from the consumption of women and hallucinogens to reading modern European literature, artwork, and philosophy. Rovira encourages Fernández to pay no attention to Sáenz’s criticisms, requesting that he read some pages pertaining to the name of Fernández’s estate, the trifolium design and butterfly stamped on the covers of several volumes of his library, and a Pre- rephaelite painting found in his gallery (Silva 44). Two more friends, Luis Cordovez and Máximo Pérez, arrive at Villa Helena and interrupt Rovira, presenting their own requests. Cordovez wishes for Fernández to read some notes about his voyage to Switzerland, and Pérez wants to hear the description of a mysterious illness Fernández had in Paris. Meanwhile Sáenz ambiguously mentions a short story that takes place in Paris on New 54 Year’s Eve. Significantly, the disparate wishes that all these requests evoke will be united, and contribute to the digressive, rambling nature of De sobremesa’s narrative style. As Fernández observes, his four friends’ conflicting desires merge into the same desire to hear the story of “Ella” (“She/Her”) (Silva 46). “She” is the mysterious feminine entity Helena that connects all his friends’ desires and whose memory is preserved in Fernández’s diary, written during his trip to Europe a couple of years before the after- dinner conversation taking place in his villa. Nervously, Fernández opens his diary and, dimming the lights on the chandelier and thereby intensifying the atmosphere of mystery, he begins reading his first entry. The Reading of José Fernández’s Diary  A.The Diary and Modernity In the reading of the diary, which makes up the main body of the novel, Fernández’s voyage to Europe marks the beginning of his experience and surrender to consumptive practices that take precedence over his desire for poetic productivity, and sheds light on the philosophy of life he has adopted upon his return to Bogotá. The structure that Silva sets up makes possible the following events. Borrowing Villanueva-Collado’s scientific metaphor, Fernández, an incredibly wealthy South American criollo elite whose body is a perfect specimen of masculine health, strength, and virility, goes to the European center of modernity, Paris. There he is “infected” by the artistic, cultural, philosophical, and scientific products of this environment, which feminize him in ways that affect his health, artistic identity, aesthetic sensibility, and philosophy of life. Upon his return to Bogotá, he builds Villa Helena, a liminal space between center and periphery where he can 55 continue his consumptive practices and shelter himself from the prying eyes, demands, and regulations upon his behavior by provincial Latin American society. Yet before Fernández achieves this balance, the diary becomes an exploration of the psychic dangers of consumption that can threaten the physical and psychic self. B. Marie Bashkirtseff’s Le Journal (1887) Posthumously published in France and translated into English as I am the Most Interesting Book of All, Le Journal enjoyed an unprecedented international success that made it the equivalent of a contemporary “bestseller” book. The impact Bashkirtseff’s diary had on her fin-de-siècle male readership is contextualized in Sylvia Molloy’s classic “Voice Snatching: De sobremesa, Hysteria, and the Impersonation of Marie Bashkirtseff.” Molloy argues that Bashkirtseff’s mother, who published the diary posthumously, took full commercial advantage of the fascination with the “female adolescent” which had come to occupy a powerful space in the masculine imaginary of nineteenth-century Europe “as an object of science, reverie, and, in many cases, of significant gender crisscrossings” (14) (my emphasis). Molloy’s observation that Bashkirtseff’s devoted male readers created a cult of artistic celebrity around Bashkirtseff’s “adolescent girl persona” connects in interesting ways to psychoanalytic feminist theories of male misidentification with the active, seducing male protagonist’s in front of the structures of cinema. 40 Yet in the male readership of Bashkirtseff’s diary, something else is happening: a male identification not with an active male actor but with an active and desiring girl and young woman. Phillip                                                          40 See Laura Mulvey, in particular Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema and Mary Annd Doane’s Femmes Fatales. 56 Guedalla, in Masters and Men, makes fun of Bashkirtseff and her followers by describing them in the following manner: “There was a young unhappy lady named Bashkirtseff, and her Selbst-portrât became the model of innumerable Narcissi, each fascinated by a watery reflection of himself” (qtd. in Molloy 61). Using Guedalla’s description, Molloy asserts that “instead of a muse …[Bashkirtseff] is a vessel for masculine identification, a mirror for the male readers who, when gazing into the bubbling, breathless, scattered text written by the female self-portraitist, recognize themselves” (17). Most importantly, the diary’s operatic voice, which Molloy connects to Bashkirtseff’s doubly thwarted singing career and desire for the spotlight, is the crucial textual “mirror” through which her male readers were able to misrecognize themselves, and the textual, disembodied voice that Silva, as one of her most ardent followers, “snatches.” The seductive tone of Bashkirtseff’s feminine diary voice is a clear source for Silva’s deshilvanado style in De sobremesa. Like her other “Narcissi” admirers, Silva intensely identifies with the idealized “artist persona” Bashkirtseff creates in her diary. But the effect of Bashkirtseff’s diary voice and persona goes further for Silva, and rather than being satisfied with being her admirer, he appropriated Bashkirtseff’s rambling, desirous voice in order to illustrate the flow of his male protagonist’s own desire. In De sobremesa, Silva departs from his highly organized and meticulous style and opens himself to Bashkirtseff’s desirous diary voice and wandering and divagating fictional structure, because he identifies precisely with the nonlinear way in which Bashkirtseff’s desire flows through the text of her diary without clear aim or direction. 57 Along with this textual appropriation, Silva’s “doing woman” goes further than mere voice snatching. As Molloy argues, Silva crafts a bodily transvestism and misidentification with Bashkirtseff by giving Fernández a mysteriously ill body that closely resembles the hysterical body of Bashkirtseff. The treatment Bashkirtseff undergoes under the eminent Doctor Charcot, Freud’s mentor, is replicated in Silva’s narrative. Fernández suffers from anxiety attacks, fainting spells, and temporary paralysis, three of the most salient symptoms of hysteria, and ones that closely resemble Bashkirtseff’s own illness, which according to Molloy, Bashkirtseff actively and hysterically desires. He also seeks the recourse of not one but several medical specialists: most notably Doctor Rivington and Doctor Charvet. The hysterical and beautiful body of Fernández, through its continuous collapse, mines the perversely erotic dimension of the femininely weak and hypersensitive body that was so central to fin-de-siècle definitions of physical attractiveness. The main point of convergence between Bashkirtseff and Silva’s desires, therefore, revolves around their exploitation of the nineteenth-century equation of a pale and debilitated youthful body as an erotic symbol of beauty to lure the desire of an imagined adoring audience. But in De sobremesa, this takes the explicit form of the medical gaze (as spectators), and more implicity his masculine guests at Villa Helena and his readers (as his audience). At first glance, what fascinates Fernández about Bashkirtseff is the kind of modern lifestyle manual that she offers to her many male aesthete readers. As Fernández closes his eyes and pictures Bashkirtseff’s lifestyle, he immediately draws an image of her sitting on her desk in her bedroom, “donde la rodean sus libros predilectos, Spinoza, Fichte, los más sutiles de los poetas, los más acres de los novelistas modernos” (Silva 49) 58 [“surrounded by her favorite books, Spinoza, Fichte the most subtle of the poets, the most caustic of the modern novelists” (Silva 2005, 66)]. Silva thus establishes the first identification between Fernández and Bashkirtseff as avid consumers of the philosophy, poetry, and fiction of the time, the integral elements of both their bookcase collections. What follows this initial image is Fernández’s imaginary reenactment of a day in the life of Bashkirtseff that is cut off from a notion of the everyday as banal reality. Instead, Bashkirtseff’s day is exalted by Fernández’s imagination as a day of living life as art, in which Bashkirtseff’s divagating desire leads her to follow many different paths of activity, production, consumption, and contemplation. Fernández thus imagines the spirit of Bashkirtseff as a hyper-sensible spirit who, upon waking up, is sentimentally moved by the spectacle of workers going to their jobs in the pouring rain (the first image of life she observes through her window in the morning), and immediately after engages for several hours in spiritual communion with the French writer Balzac, made possible by the act of reading one of his works (Silva 49). Bashkirtseff’s spiritual communion with Balzac is interrupted by the desire to produce a painting she dreams will immortalize her. However, after heading to her studio and feverishly working on a painting until exhaustion, she becomes “desencantada de la pintura hasta el fondo del alma, convencida de que serán vanos todos sus esfuerzos para alcanzar la meta soñada” (Silva 50) [“disenchanted to the depths of her soul with painting, convinced that all her efforts to reach the dreamt-of goal will be in vain” (Silva 2005, 66)]. In this stat of turmoil, Silva envisions that Bashkirtseff “tuvo que contenerse para no rasgar el lienzo en que trabajó con todas sus fuerzas” (Silva 50) [“must contain herself in order not to tear up the oil she was working on with her every ounce of 59 strength” (Silva 2005, 67)]. What snaps her out of this terrible sensation of artistic defeat is the arrival of her dressmaker Doucet, who brings a new pink silk dress for her to try on, a dress she is meant to wear at the next dance to make her look like one of the beautifully dressed women in one of Greuze’s paintings (Silva 50). The list of further activities, empathies, conflicting emotions, and temporary distractions of Bashkirtseff’s desire continue throughout her day. It is important to observe how this depiction of Bashkirtseff’s life by Fernández’s imagination captures so insightfully the quality of modern, cosmopolitan life as a life full of dispersal, distractions, and interruptions. Indeed, Bashkirtseff is in one day an empathetic spectator of the abject reality of the working class, reader of Balzac, producer of a painting, and consumer and co-designer of high fashion that copies art as its highest source of inspiration. In this cosmopolitan world, Bashkirtseff is not only an artist who devotes herself to her one calling, namely painting, but also both philosopher “que analiza la vida a cada minuto y a quien preocupan los problemas eternos” (Silva 50) [“that analyzes life every minute and whom the eternal problems preoccupy” (Silva 2005, 67)] as well as avid consumer of fashion, who, when excited about her new dress, “se olvida de la artista que es” (Silva 50) [“forgets about the artist or the philosopher she is” (Silva 2005, 67)]. A feminine modern environment, therefore, is revealed, vis-à-vis Bashkirtseff’s lifestyle, which interferes with the desire to consecrate her daily activity to the singular production of a painting that would secure her immortality, and subsequently disperses that desire into consuming, reading, or communing with other products of modernity that seduce her and disperse elements of her identity. As a consequence of this dispersal due to continuously shifting desires, Bashkirtseff’s singular identity as artist gives way to a 60 more fluid multiplicity of identities that temporarily replace artist with philosopher, consumer, or reader in a continuously alternating cycle. As Fernández continues with his imaginary reenactment, he lets the reader know that despite all of Bashkirtseff’s intense activity, and her infinite appetite and desire for all that life has to offer, a visit to the doctor reveals that she is nearing the final stages of her disease. Fernández greatly admires Bahkirtseff because the deathly illness that plagues her does not compromise her love of life, but instead increases it, since her desire to experience, produce, and consume as many of her dreams as possible fills her with the frenetic energy to experience all she can. Fernández thus imagines Bashkirtseff’s lifestyle up until the point of her death as the repetition of the day he envisions for her, in which she wakes up filled with “las mismas fiebres, los mismos sueños, de los mismos esfuerzos y de los mismos desalientos de la vispera” (Silva 59) [“the same fevers, the same dreams, the same endeavors, and the same disappointments as the previous” (Silva 2005, 74)]. Fernández concludes his description of Bashkirtseff with an invocation of Mauricio Barrès’ naming of the young artist as “Nuestra Señora del Perpetuo Deseo” (69). This appellation, which in English can be literally translated into “Our Lady of the Perpetual Desire,” as Mejías-López has suggested, is different than Barrès’ original French appellation “Notre-Dame qui n’êtes jamais satisfaite” (Our lady who is never satisfied). Silva/Fernández’s syntactical and semantic change in this translation, as Mejías-López observes, takes Bashkirtseff’s appellation from a negation (never being satisfied) to an affirmation (to desire without end) (340): 61 De esta manera, Fernández realiza una transformación en la cualidad del deseo que pasa de carencia a producción, de un acto limitado y limitador a un acto infinito…esta operación discursiva libera a Bashkirtseff de la violencia lingüística ejercida contra ella por Nordau e incluso por Barrès, y pasa a ser de objeto enfermo o sujeto insatisfecho a sujeto creador y productivo, anticipando así la propia trayectoria de Fernández a lo largo de su diario 41 (Mejías-López 340). Significantly then, Fernández’ appellation of Bashkirtseff as “Nuestra Señora del Perpetuo Deseo” affirms that Bashkirtseff’s cosmopolitan life and diary epitomize the continuous flow of desire that becomes for Fernández “un espejo fiel de nuestras consciencias y de nuestra sensibilidad exacerbada” (59) [“an accurate mirror of our consciences and our exacerbated sensibility” (Silva 2005, 74]. Bashkirtseff’s exacerbated sensibility predisposes her to experiencing life in the metropolis in the continuous flow of desire and is at once a feminine and a modern sensibility for Fernández/Silva that offers the best mirror of the modern self’s conscience and spirit. Femininity and modernity here function as the two forces that radically exchange the self-consciousness of the modern man as a singular and stable identity for a more fluid set of multiple identities or masks he can assume at any given moment. Poe Lang arrives at this conclusion when she asserts that “es extremadamente importante la actitud del protagonista que se niega a ser clasificado, a asumir una identidad específica, aunque esta sea la de poeta.” 42 She further                                                          41 “In this way, Fernández accomplishes a transformation in the quality of desire that moves from lack to production, from a limited and limiting act to an infinite act… this discursive operation liberates Bashkirtseff from the linguistic violence exerted against her by Nordau and also by Barrès; she thus moves from being the sick object or unsatisfied subject to a creative and productive subject, anticipating in this way Fernández’s trajectory throughout the length of his diary” [My translation] 42 “the protagonist’s attitude, who refuses to be classified, to assume a specific identity, even the identity of a poet, is extremely important” [My translation] 62 observes that “es como si [Silva] hubiera descubierto, varias décadas antes que Foucault, las relaciones de poder que encubre toda clasificación.” 43 In contrast to Bashkirtseff’s openness to all possible experiences of life and to the multiplication of her identities without feeling the need for classification, Fernández conjures up the myopic scientific view of Max Nordau, a scientist who seeks to catalog all human behavior and set a clear standard for normal living based on common sense morality that pathologizes artistic enterprise. As Giorgi argues in “Nombrar”: El relato (o el texto) del enfermo es el espacio en el que discurso médico y discurso estético entran en debate por las condiciones de representación del cuerpo –las estrategias de su visibilidad, técnicas de la interpretación del síntoma, la etiología del mal, etc.—para extraer de esa representación energías políticas alrededor del sujeto, energías que elaboran las narrativas de su diferencia, la legitimidad de su insatisfacción y la rareza de su deseo. 44 Giorgi’s insights point to Fernández’s mysterious illness that takes center stage in De sobremesa, transforming Fernández into a subject of medical interest who both perplexes doctors and forecloses any possible medical cure. The medical discourse found in De sobremesa is given voice through the various European doctors whom Fernández visits and consults with while seeking a cure for his mysterious illness. This becomes the par excellence masculine discursive voice of scientific modernity that wrestles with aesthetic modernity—or the feminization of Fernández’s body and identity—for the right to define and determine what kind of illness Fernández’s body mysteriously suffers from, and what                                                          43 “it is as if [Silva] had discovered, many decades before Foucault, the relations of power that all classification hides” [My translation] 44 “The narrative (or the text) of the sick person is the space in which the medical discourse and the aesthetic discourse enter into a debate over the conditions of representation of the body—the strategies of its visibility, the techniques of interpretation of the symptom, the etiology of evil, etc.—to extract from this representation political energies in relation to the subject, energies that elaborate the narratives of its difference, the legitimacy of its dissatisfaction and the strangeness of its desire” [My translation] 63 kind of cure he needs. Yet it is precisely the question of whether to understand what happens to Fernández as a classifiable illness, or as a series of effects of his unquenchable desire for knowledge, sensual pleasures, the aesthetic figure of Helena, or what Giorgi refers to as “un deseo raro” that Silva sets in motion throughout Fernández’s diary. Poe Lang puts the complications of this debate into perspective, and writes: A contrapelo del discurso pseudocientifico de los alienistas franceses, el texto de Silva propone un heroe decadente que se vanagloria de sus perversiones…José Fernández lega incluso a plantearse la necesidad—señalada reiteradamente por Foucault—de inventar nuevos placeres. Aunque el protagonista de Silva los llama vicios. 45 Furthermore, in “El perpetuo deseo”, Alejandro Mejías-López sees a connection between “cuerpo y corpus, personaje y texto” (“body and corpus, protagonist and text”) (339) in De sobremesa. It is not only Fernández’s ill body, but also Silva’s actual novel itself, with Fernández’s diary, that is simultaneously feminized. The pathogenic agents of this textual feminization are the decadent, Nietzschean, and other texts of modernity deemed as pathogenic. More significantly, this idea has also been adapted by Spanish American criollo conservative elites trying to build an idea of national and cultural identity based on the ideal scientific model of healthy heterosexual masculinity and conservative ideals drafted by conservative letrado literary works 46 (Villanueva-Collado). Villanueva-Collado points out that as a Spanish American text infected by the strong influences of European modernity, De sobremesa was labeled a pathogenic text that                                                          45 “Against the grain of the pseudoscientific discourse of the French alienists, Silva’s text proposes a decadent hero who boasts of his perversions…Jose Fernandez even goes so far as to pose himself the necessity—signalled repeatedly by Foucault—to invent new pleasures. Although Silva’s protagonist calls them vices” [My translation] 46 As Villanueva-Collado adds, “the perception of cultural products as dangerous to the health of the individual and the State, i.e., as subversive in regards to hegemonic constructs, is not a new thing; it goes back to Plato’s Republic” 64 posed a dangerous risk to the image of a strong, Spanish American national identity standing in opposition to the feminine decadence and moral corruption of European cultural and aesthetic modernism. These are the primary reasons why critical reception of De sobremesa has until recently labeled Silva’s novel as flawed. Villanueva-Collado reads this against this criticism: The cultural response, as expressed in literary criticism, has been to relegate these narratives to a secondary position in the history of the Latin American novel or to deny their existence completely; to utilize the ideologem of dis/ease to create biographical fictions about infecting, flawed texts. The infection stems from a feminoid virus present in cultural products. Therefore, dominant discourse has aimed its heaviest guns at these narratives censorship, rejection, evasion, the rewriting of history—so that culture may not lose its virile identity [My emphasis] In contrast to the perceived flawed, corrupting, and feminizing nature of Silva’s European cultural influences, via Fernández’s identification with these feminizing and pathologizing texts, Silva argues that these texts seek to preserve the space of spirituality in divinity by turning inwards, like the Decadents. He thus reveals that in the highly despiritualized and deaestheticized transformation of culture by a virile, masculine science, the spirituality and mystery of art is now contained in the feminine kernel of stylized modern artistic production, the pleasurable consumption of the refined and phantasmagoric commodity object, and the reading of these European feminizing texts. Ultimately, what I believe Silva does in De sobremesa is to argue that the “feminoid virus” present in European cultural products, as Villanueva-Collado puts it, is an “essential virus” with which Spanish American writers must be “infected.” This is in order to safeguard the survival of the aesthetic and spiritual aesthetic production in an increasingly hypermasculine, virile, and regulatory nation increasingly hostile to 65 “dangerous, infecting” cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic ideas imported from the decadent and feminine Europe. To reject stylistic feminization in favor of a writing which embraces masculine virility and heteronormativity, therefore, is to accept the hegemonic mandate of a “clean, hygienic” nation mobilized in the service of a cultural myth that shuts down aesthetic innovation and production, and significantly rejects any non- heteronormative desires as pathological. C. From criollo youth to Parisian rastaquouère After Fernández completes his description of Bashkirtseff’s lifestyle, including a recreation of the emotions, desires, and sensations she must have felt, it is time for him to move on to a description of his own experiences. Having given the reader a biography that begins with the writing and publication of his first volume of poems, entitled First Verses, Fernández recounts how he loses his youthful belief that his purpose in the universe was to be a poet who produces “impecables estrofas” (“impeccable stanzas”) (Silva 61). 47 He self-consciously criticizes the praise and pride drawn from the success of his first poems. He replaces vanity, which is all that literary fame has given him, with philosophical studies and discussions at the university where he communes with “the noblest of male friends” (76) about Western philosophers of Antiquity (Plato, Epicurus, Empedocles) and Modernity (Wundt, Spencer, Maudsley, Renan, Taine). Fernández takes it one step farther by ascetically giving up his sensual pursuit of women and the pleasures of the body for the “vértigo de la inteligencia…desprendida del cuerpo” Silva 62) [“vertigo of the mind…detached from the body” (Silva 2005, 76)].                                                          47 This comment echoes the original comment he makes to his friends gather in after dinner conversation at the beginning of De sobremesa. 66 Shortly after this commitment, however, he inherits the responsibility of administering his sizeable fortune. This transition puts an end to the “quasi-monastic period” of philosophical inquiry in his life (Silva 2005, 77). From this point on, the desiring Fernández enters into European modern society, self-identified as “suelto, libre, sin padre, sin madre ni hermanos, recibido y cortejado dondequiera, lleno de aspiraciones encontradas y violentas, poseído de una pasión loca por el lujo en todas sus formas” (Silva 62) [“footloose, free, fatherless, motherless, brotherless, welcomed and courted everywhere, full of conflicting and intense aspirations, possessed of a mad passion for luxury in all its forms” (Silva 2005, 77)]. All of these characteristics transform Fernández into the ridiculous rastaquouère in Europe, especially when he puffs up “como un pavo real” (“like a peacock) (Silva 53) in response to an article in Gil Blas announcing his purchase of a small painting by Raffaeli, or when he is admired by the onlookers as he passes them by in his splendid carriage (Silva 53). The vain pleasure this attention initially produces is subsequently replaced by his self-disgust. Fernández becomes the target of his own derision, and significantly, the core reason for this derision is exposed when Fernández directs the following harsh critique at himself: “eres un miserable que gasta diez minutos en pulirse las uñas como una cortesana y un inútil hinchado de orgullo monstruoso” (Silva 64) [“you spend ten minutes polishing your nails like a courtesan, you useless wretch, you head swollen with monstrous pride” (Silva 2005, 79)]. The comparison of Fernández’s monstrous vanity in relation to his appearance reaches its peak example when he compares it to the feminine beautifying ritual of the courtesan, who beautifies her external appearance in order to lure prospective customers. Like the courtesan, Fernández, as well as all rastaquouère men, in their mad passion for 67 luxury in all forms becomes just as obsessed as women with their appearance upon their arrival to Europe. They therefore seek to impress the newly met European society by the fashionable clothes they wear, which act as signifiers of their wealth and ameliorate their lack of aristocratic origins. Accordingly, their refined taste, manifested through the purchases of paintings, relics, and jewels, becomes visible in their conspicuous consumption while in Europe. The only escape Fernández has from feeling like “a grotesque snob” or acting like “a courtesan” in his compulsive concern for beautifying his surface image is to devise a plan that will take him out himself. In his own words, he needs “un plan que no se refiera a mí mismo, que me saque de mí …” (Silva 65) [“a plan that has nothing to do with myself, one that takes me out of myself”… (Silva 2005, 79)]. In response to his “prayers,” Fernández gets involved in an irrational crime of passion which does indeed take him out of himself, if only temporarily. He analyzes it in detail as soon as he discovers that his violent attack on the two women Lady Orloff and Angela de Roberto did not result in the Orloff’s death, and thus has not doomed him to incarceration. Recounting the events leading up to this attack after he knows he is safe, Fernández begins by describing to the reader how he first met Lady Orloff. In this initial meeting, which takes place at the Opera house during the performance of Wagner’s Walküre, Fernández describes the overall effect of Orloff’s appearance amidst Wagner’s music: La expresión soñadora de la cabeza rubia, la palidez dorada de la tez, el color del aéreo vestido, el brillo de aquellas joyas de reina, la hacían semejar, más que una mujer de carne y hueso, una aparición irreal […] La cabalgata de las walkirias poblaba el aire, la sobrehumana música llenaba la sala con sus sobrehumanas vibraciones y ella, como subrayaba por la insistencia de mis ojos que la devoraban 68 desde el palco, volvió a mirarme. La primera mirada, lenta y penetrante como un beso …. me hizo correr un escalofrío de voluptuosidad por las espaldas … tres días después era mía” 48 (Silva 69). [My emphasis] Significantly, all of the artificial decorations of fashion, including jewelry, makeup, and dress style and color, transform Orloff’s beauty into a spectacle that supersedes her reality as a flesh-and-blood woman for the powerful impression of an aesthetic ideal or a feminine fantasy of voluptuous sensuality. Wagner’s music, described as a superhuman music, simultaneously intensifies the voluptuous boldness and seductive power of Orloff’s courtesan gaze, which expertly lures and captures her prospective male client’s sensual desire. Fernández’s affirmation that three days later he made Orloff “his” underscores the sexual possession of Orloff’s body as his purchased object. Yet the fact that everything about this seduction was intentionally set-up by Orloff—the courtesan who possessed his gaze and triggered his desire through the expert manipulation of the modern artifices of fashion and art—makes the relationship between male consumer and female sexual object of consumption more complex than Fernández avows. The influence the objectified woman exerts over Fernández, like the commodity object, is illustrated further by what happens during this relationship. Six months after their initial sexual encounter, Fernández lives by Orloff’s philosophy: “la vida no es para saber, es para gozar, Goza; gozar es mejor que pensar” (Silva 72) [“Life isn’t for learning, it’s for enjoying. Enjoying…is better than thinking” (Silva 2005, 85)]. Laying                                                          48 The dreamy expression on the face of that blonde head, the golden pallor of her complexion, the color of that aerial dress, the sparkle of those queenly jewels, gave her more the seeming of an unreal apparition than a flesh-and-blood woman […] The Ride of the Valkyries inhabited the air, the superhuman music filled the room with its superhuman vibrations, and she, as if held in thrall to the urgency of my eyes that devoured her from the box seat, looked at me again. The first gaze, slow and penetrating as a French kiss, sent a shiver of voluptuosity down my spine…Three days later she was mine (Silva 2005, 82) [My emphasis] . 69 his intellectual studies aside, which are always carried out in sexual abstinence, Fernández surrenders to the sensual delights of Orloff’s courtesan world, which in addition to enjoying the pleasures of her body, caters to all his senses. As Fernández writes, Orloff’s apartment is “amueblado con un refinamiento de gusto inverosímil en una mujer, aun nacida sobre las gradas de un trono” (Silva 70) [“furnished with an exquisiteness of taste unlike even a woman born on the steps of a throne” (Silva 2005, 89)]. Her “aristocracia de los nervios “(Silva 71) (“aristocracy of the nerves”) makes her select only the most refined foods, flowers, and wines. Fernández puzzles over the inexplicable way in which “el lujo es su elemento como el agua el de los peces, pero un lujo como inconsciente e ingénito” (Silva 72) [“luxury is her element like water is that of a fish, but an inborn, unconscious luxury” (Silva 2005, 84)]. On one level, emphasizing the fact that Orloff has the monarch’s taste for the most refined luxuries is a way to transform Orloff beyond her actual vulgar profession as courtesan into a worthy lover of unsurpassed beauty and compatible with Fernández’s own aristocratic taste. However, Orloff’s apparent aristocratic taste does not undo the fact that her origins can be traced to a Parisian alley and a different name: María Legendre. Orloff/Legendre tells Fernández that she is the daughter of a shoemaker father and a sickly mother. She rises above her poverty and obscurity by selling her beautiful body and her attentions to a Spanish American former president and later a Russian Duke, the latter conferring upon on her a title in St. Petersburg that disguises her humble origins and allows her to re-enter Parisian society with a new name and identity, that of “Lady Orloff.” In spite of Orloff and Fernández’s similar tastes, he begins to resent the courtesan’s philosophy of life, gradually becoming convinced that she is “… la Circe que 70 cambia los hombres a credos …” (Silva 72) (“… the Circe who changes men into swine”). Fernández’s resentment at being metaphorically transformed into a swine, who sullies himself in the paid sensual encounters he exchanges with Orloff and which distract him from the more noble ascetic pursuits of knowledge through study, leads him into an inner struggle that is exacerbated when he begins suspecting Orloff of having an affair with Ángela de Roberto. The fact that Orloff has complete freedom regarding her clients fills Fernández with a sense of impotence and suspicion. After Orloff refuses Fernández’s request not to see de Roberto anymore, he surprises them in bed together, and in an irrational fit of passion, physically attacks both of them, stabbing Orloff with a small Toledan blade before fleeing the scene. At a safe distance from the event, in which Fernández find out that his blade caused no life-threatening wound to Orloff, he asks himself: ¿Por qué cometí esa brutalidad digna de un carretero e intenté un asesinato de que me salvó el tamaño del puñal, que es más bien una joya que una arma, yo, el libertino curioso de los pecados raros que ha tratado de ver en la vida real, con voluptuoso diletantismo, las más extrañas decadencias […] ¿Odio por lo anormal? … No, puesto que lo anormal me fascina como una prueba de rebeldía del hombre contra el instinto” 49 (Silva 74). Finding no solution, he concludes, “Fue un movimiento irrazonado, un impulso ciego, inconsciente, como el que una tarde del otoño pasado me hizo insultar al diplomático alemán que me habían presentado” (Silva 74) [“it was an unreasoned move, a blind impulse, unconscious, like the one that one afternoon last fall led me, having no call to do                                                          49 Why did I commit that brutal act, the act of a highwayman, and attempt a murder from which I was saved by the size of the knife, which is more of a jewel than a weapon. I the libertine curious for rare sins who has sought to see in real life, with voluptuous dilettantism, the strangest practices invented by human depravation … Hatred for the abnormal? … No, since the abnormal fascinates me like a trial of man’s rebellion against instinct” (Silva 2005, 87). 71 so, to insult the German ambassador who had been introduced to me ten days earlier” (Silva 2005, 87)]. The fact that in the end Fernández emphasizes the unconscious nature of his act, as a dark and irrational impulse from a repressed, hidden part of himself approximates his description to the Freudian idea of the unconscious. Just what this unconscious is repressing, however, particularly as it prompts a vicious attack on Orloff and her lover, can be partially explained by an understanding of the anxieties and humiliation provoked by Fernández’s affair with Orloff and the event of catching her in bed with another female lover. As Richard Ledgard posits in his dissertation “La evolución del tema el amor en cinco novelas hispanoamericanas,” “Lo que le molesta al diarista [Fernández] es el hecho de que Lelia Orloff sea una identidad creada como pantalla para quien en realidad se llama María Legendre a fin de ocultar un pasado nada aristocrático” 50 (120). Fernández is perplexed and angered by Orloff’s refined aesthetic sensibility and taste: “¿Pero de dónde diablos había sacado aquella aristocracia de los nervios, más rara quizás que las de la sangre y la inteligencia, ella la hija de un zapatero mugriento?” 51 (Silva 71). In my view, the fantasy world of the demimonde, in which María Legendre sells both her sex appeal and her reinvented image, plays a key role here. Legendre sells her aristocratic mask, Lady Orloff, a woman of studied and meticulous refinement, along with her body, to wealthy suitors including bankers, government officials, aristocrats, and Latin American millionaires such as Fernández. Yet Orloff’s artificiality and adoption of                                                          50 “What bothers the diarist [Fernández] is the fact that Lelia Orloff is an identity created like a screen for the benefit of a woman who in reality is called Maria Legendre in order to hide a past with no aristocratic origins.” (Ledgard 133) 51 “But where in the blazes had she gotten that aristocracy of the nerves, rarer perhaps than that of the blood of the mind, she being the daughter of a grimy shoemaker?” (Silva 2005, 84) 72 this aristocratic mask fills Fernández with anxiety about his own precarious and artificial rastaquouère identity. According to Ledgard, “el malestar de Fernández responde a verse precisado a recurrir a una falacia, un sucedáneo que hace patente su marginación de las verdaderas elites sociales” 52 (120). It is Ledgard’s view that Fernández’s attack is provoked by his perception that he has received the ultimate humilliation when Orloff, the courtesan posing with a deceptively conferred high-ranking social title that hides an embarrassing pedigree, replaces him with a female lover. However, since de Roberto adapts her style and mannerisms to the same dandy fashion that Fernández wears and adopts, both Orloff and de Roberto become reflections of Fernández’s own artificial posturing as rastaquouère. None of these three peripheral people—located outside of European aristocracy and the social and moral norms of sexual conduct—are who they appear to be. They are outsiders who perform self-constructed roles that play with and subvert established gender, class, and national norms constructed by the so-called center. Importantly, the lesbian and the courtesan are two marginalized and criticized female entities located on the peripheries of mainstream moral codes of conduct in Europe and thus vulnerable, in different ways, to structures of othering and pathologization. Fernández, as a rastaquouère, occupies a similarly peripheral position and is also vulnerable to pathologization, but at this point in the diary, he refuses to recognize this fact, repressing this association until the moment he projects his own otherness into their sexual act and                                                          52 “Fernández’s unease is a response to being obliged to recur to a fallacy, a substitute that makes clear his marginalization from the real European social elite” [My translation] 73 seeks to annihilate them, and with them that marginal other within himself whom he refuses to avow. Anticipating Judith Butler’s theories of gender identity as performance first articulated in Gender Trouble, the Roberto girl is a proximate reflection of Fernández’s dandyesque feminine posturing. The very appropriation of the dandy’s feminine affectations and his meticulous style by a lesbian woman thus becomes a parody of a parody. Confronting two feminine mirror reflections’ posturing act, as aristocratic courtesan and dandy lesbian, Fernández lashes out against his potential association with an artificially constructed femininity (the courtesan) and female appropriation of a feminized masculinity (dandy) that would better define his own artificial and changing identity masks. However, in his association with such deviant feminine figures, Fernández also emphasizes his cosmopolitanism and modernity, a la decadence. D. Fernández’s Temporary Escape into Nature After Fernández’s irrational attack on Orloff and de Roberto, he feels that he needs a break from Paris and its many temptations, and stays for a prolonged time in Whyl in “una casucha de madera tosca” (“a hovel built out of wood”) (Silva 74). Stripping himself from all of his former luxuries and living according to Doctor Sáenz’s prescription for the restoration of his health and poetic productivity described at the beginning of De sobremesa, Fernández communes with nature. The “grandiosidad de la escena” (“grandiosity of the scene”) (Silva 78) that he observes inspires in him the idea of a plan to which he can devote his life to turning into a reality. Cut off from the feminizing and deviant influence of decadent Paris and its cultural products, Fernández’s 74 masculine vigor is restored. He plans to thoroughly modernize the peripheral Latin American country of Colombia by single-handedly forcing it on the path of progress, a plan that satirically echoes the ambitions of Spanish American political leaders like the Argentine president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Sarmiento, one of the biggest early Europhile modernizers of Latin American history, began his career as a political writer and critic of the violent, totalitarian regime of nineteenth-century Argentine dictator Rosas. A text that helped Sarmiento become president, the acerbic critique of Rosas entitled Facundo: Civilización y Barbarie (1845) chronicles the emergence of Argentina as a nation in which the forces of civilization, qua modernization, battle against the intrinsic barbarism of the land (the pampas) and its people (the racially mixed gauchos). Like Sarmiento, who dreamed of transforming Buenos Aires into a Paris of the South, Fernández envisions transforming Bogotá “a golpes de pica y de millones—como transformó el baron Haussman a París” (Silva 84) [“with pickax blows and with millions—as Baron Hausmann transformed Paris” (Silva 2005, 95)]. But before Bogotá can be transformed, Fernández imagines using the wealth he gained in the United States to build a military force. In Fernández’s lucid dream, such a force would be lead by familial criollo dynasty, where he, along with “lo más selecto de la aristocracia conservadora, mis primos los Monteverdes, atléticos, brutales y fascinadores, improvisados generales en los campos de batalla, debido a sus audacias de salvajes…” (Silva 86-7) [“the most select of the conservative aristocracy, my cousins the Monteverdes [who] … Athletic, brutal, and fascinating … will serve as makeshift generals on the battlefields, owing to their audacity of savages” (Silva 2005, 97)]. Once success is guaranteed and progress has been firmly established, he envisions gradually 75 allowing the political situation to return to a free democracy, allowing the overthrown party to return to the political arena. Further steps involve a plan to control the barbaric impulses of its people through indoctrinated public education and political propaganda in which the elite and the masses alike would clamor and unequivocally support the system. All of this would enable Fernández finally to retire to a remote country state, contemplate his life’s work from afar, reread favorite philosophers and poets, and write his last verses (Silva 87). At the conclusion of this diary entry, Fernández interrupts the reading of his diary to ask Sáenz: “Yo estaba loco cuando escribí esto, ¿no, Sáenz?” (Silva 88) [“I was mad when I wrote this, wasn’t I?” (Silva 2005, 97)]. For Sáenz, however, Fernández’s fantasy would have been the ideal culmination of the scientific, utilitarian philosophy he advocates, a philosophy committed in practice to the idea of national progress. Such would be the perfect destiny for the virile, healthy, energetic body and mind of an elite masculine Latin American specimen such as Fernández. Thus, he replies, “Es la única vez que has estado en tu juicio” (Silva 88) [“It’s the only time you’ve been in your right mind” (Silva 2005, 98)]. However, for Fernández, the dream of achieving this enormous feat and the corresponding immortality becomes like his youthful dream of consecrating his life to poetry: another virtual desire he fails to carry out. Sáenz sardonically points out that Fernández is ultimately seduced away from that noble goal by “los pasteles trufados de hígado de ganso, el champaña seco, los tintos tibios, la mujeres ojiverdes, las japonerías y la chifladura literaria” (Silva 88) [“truffled goose liver pâté, dry champagne, tepid coffee, green-eyed women, japonaiserie, and wild literary schemes” (Silva 2005, 99)]. 76 In the end the world of luxuries, as well as the cultural and aesthetic objects of modernity, prove much more alluring for Fernández than humble lodgings, abstinence, and daily commune with nature, or with any long term political or artistic projects for that matter. While Fernández concedes that his simple, rustic life in Whyl has provided an escape, that “Ni un deseo, ni una imagen sensual me han perseguido” (Silva 90) [“not one desire, not one sensual image has pursued me” (Silva 2005, 100)], he will once again succumb to the desires of his awakened sexuality upon his return to the European city of Interlaken. As he states, “las tentaciones enfermizas se respiran con el olor de cocina y de perfumería, de polvos de arroz y de mujer que flotan en el aire, cargado de efluvios de lascivia y de enfermedades mentales, de la Babilonia moderna” (Silva 90) [“the unhealthy temptations are breathed in with the smell of fine food and perfumeries, of rice powders and of Woman, smells that waft through the air, laden with the effluvia of lust and with the germs of mental illness from the modern Babylon” (Silva 2005, 100)]. Nevertheless, Fernández is very eager to return to this modern Babylon and be seduced again by its unhealthy temptations. Like a moth irresistibly drawn to the artificial light of Paris, Fernández returns and falls into the repetitive patterns of perverse sensual consumption he alternately enjoys and loathes. E. Todo es ella (Everything is Her) After an extended period in an opium den, triggered by Fernández’s attack of the courtesan Nini Rousset who, trying to seduce him, breaks his abstinence and provokes his ire, Fernández states: “Queria ir de la vida por unas horas, no sentirla” (Silva 95) [“I wanted to flee from life for a few hours, to not feel it (Silva 2005, 104)]. In his post- opium haze, Fernández desires salvation from the madness brought on by oscillating 77 between antithetical desires of the mind and body, between the pursuits of ascetic study and seeking new sensual pleasures. At this point, he recalls his grandmother’s deathbed prayers, that her grandson be saved from the sins of the flesh that would drive him to madness. He also recollects the sign—a bouquet of white flowers and the sign of the cross—that his grandmother stated would lead to his salvation. It is this memory that prefigures Helena as Fernández’s “salvation.” Dazed, Fernández seeks the privacy of the private dining room of his hotel to be alone and undisturbed by the spectacle of the offensive bourgeois tourists. It is in this dining room that he spots Helena dining with her father. Fernández’s description in his diary of his first and only encounter with the actual Helena is marked by the intensely fetishistic attention to detail as well as by the aesthetic metaphors he uses in recalling her beautiful appearance: El otro perfil, el de ella, ingenuo y puro como el de una virgen de Fra Angélico, de una insuperable gracia de líneas y de expresión … conplementaban su belleza los cabellos, que se le venían y caían sobre la frente estrecha en abundosos rizos, las débiles curvas del cuerpecito de quince años, con el busto largo y esbelto, vestido de seda roja, las manos blanquísimas y finas. 53 (Silva 98) In the next moment, as Fernández and Helena’s eyes meet, Fernández describes a powerful, post-opium-induced hallucination in which it appears to him as if Helena has a supernatural capacity to penetrate his body and transform it into a body more transparent than his own diary, where she reads the truth of his soul: De repente sacudió la cabeza hacia atrás y … la volvió en la dirección de mi asiento y los clavó en mí mirándome fijamente, con expresión severa. Eran unos                                                          53 “The other profile, hers, naïf and pure as that of a Fra Angélico virgin, of a nonesuch grace of line and expression …Completing her beauty was her hair, which came undone in front and fell across her narrow forehead in abundant curls, the feeble curves of her fifteen-year old body, her long, thin bust, her dress of red silk, her thin, snow-white hands” (Silva 2005, 107). 78 grandes ojos azules, penetrantes, demasiado penetrantes, cuyas miradas se posaron en mí como las de un médico en el cuerpo de un leproso corroído por las úlceras, y buscaron las mías como para penetrar, con despreciativa y helada insistencia, hasta el fondo de mi ser, para leer en lo más íntimo de mi alma. 54 (Silva 98-9) Helena’s penetrating, uncanny gaze reads the sinful experiences written on Fernández’s soul, and as she does so his experience of his own body changes. He suddenly feels his body has become “el cuerpo de un leproso corroído por las úlceras” 55 (Silva 98). Shortly thereafter, in Fernández’s second encounter with Helena’s mirror-like gaze, Fernández sees himself reflected in her eyes in a way that closely resembles a schizophrenic hallucination. Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, give us a way to understand Fernández’s schizo-like hallucination. The critics claim that schizophrenia is a mental illness produced in line with capitalism, which directly connects with, redirects, and intersects the flow of human desire through consumption. Many of these consumptive practices, including the consumption of drugs, have the capacity to undo the psychic integrity of an individual. Fernández’s insatiable consumption of the many novel, perverse, and high-shock stimulants that fin-de-siècle modern metropolises have to offer pushes him dangerously into what Deleuze and Guattari would describe as a “destratification.” Deleuze and Guattari use this term to describe the progressive undoing of a unified self, which can push the mind into schizophrenic hallucinations that eventually replace objective reality. Developing this idea further in A Thousand Plateaus, the critics describe the                                                          54 “Suddenly she tossed her head back … and directed her gaze towards me, staring at me fixedly with a stern expression. Hers were big, blue, penetrating orbs, too penetrating, their gazes fell on me like those of a doctor on the body of a leper eaten away by ulcers, and sought mine as if to penetrate, with demeaning and icy insistence, to the depths of my being, to read the innermost recesses of my soul.” (Silva 2005, 107). 55 “the body of a leper eaten away by ulcers” (Silva 2005, 107). 79 schizophrenic hallucination, or episode, as a physical as well as psychical event in which the body, which Deleuze and Guattari argue is forced to be whole and to signify a singular identity, “destratifies” from its forced organization as a unified organism and approximates its inorganicity (i.e., death). In the process, the subject is temporarily transformed from a person with an identity into an identity-less “Body without Organs” (BwO). As Deleuze and Guattari describe in A Thousand Plateaus “The BwO is what remains when you take everything away. What you take away is precisely the fantasy, and signifiances and subjectifications as a whole” (151). Interpreting Fernández’s schizo hallucination along Deleuzian and Guattarian lines provides insight into what happens to Fernández in these two instances in which repressed thoughts come to the surface. First, his body speaks through the first mirror image Fernández sees of himself and suddenly emphasizes to him his inevitable decay (the image of the older man) and the perverse impulses of his psyche (the image of the crook). Second, in his encounter with the second mirror, Helena’s feminine gaze, he reads the disease of his soul, which is material, and which is transformed into a leprous body. This second moral and masochistic image materializes what Fernández’s inner ascetic perceives as vices and how these vices have corroded the beauty of his material soul into the ugliness and deformity of a leper’s body. As he lists them himself, the ulcers that have infected his soul are “la orgía de la víspera, la borrachera del opio, y penetrando más lejos, la puñalada de la Orloff, las crápulas de París, todas las miserias, todas las verguenzas de mi vida” 56 (Silva 98-99). Under this new material codification of his                                                          56 “the previous night’s orgy, the opium binge, and penetrating deeper the knifing of Lady Orloff , the debauchery in Paris, all the weaknesses, all the wretchedness, all the disgrace of my life (Silva 2005, 107). 80 moral “sins,” Fernández’s furious attack on Orloff and her lover, his attempt to strangle Nini Rousset following their sensual encounter, and his escape into opium, combine under the heading of the debauchery of Paris, which fills his body with waves of pleasure that simultaneously corrode his soul. Like drugs, courtesans form part of an addiction that proves difficult for Fernández to give up. Entering the world of the demimonde means to enter the world of consumption par excellence, where the sensual pleasures of the body are always intermixed with the sensual pleasures of food, drink, fashion, and all manner of expenditures and the consumption of luxury items. Thus the luxury commodity and the courtesan are intimately intertwined. Indeed, femininity is something that courtesans self-consciously create through the artificial enhancement of their beauty—i.e. through jewelry, makeup, and sumptuously elegant dresses. These beautifying objects become key signs, and as we have seen in the case of Fernández, become powerful fetishes that attract male desire. Thus, they are the essential lures that activate their customers’ desire. 57 In an effort to find a cure for his sensual addiction to modern consumption, Fernández sees two possible remedies. The first is the medical domain of psychological and medical treatment emerging at the end of the nineteenth century, which promises him a scientific treatment and cure for the mysterious spiritual illness that oppresses him after his encounter with Helena. The second is the illusory promise that Helena, as his salvation, conveys in being conjured up as a “totality” that can unify his divergent and contradictory desires. Helena reads Fernández’s spirit without warning or permission,                                                          57 As Walter Benjamin observed in The Arcades Project, the dress becomes more important than the courtesan’s body. It is the thing that the male observer desires and is titillated by. 81 and adopting a medical precision that insinuates sadistic undertones, examines the completely exposed vices, miseries, and humiliations of Fernández’s soul. In this respect, Fernández’s description of Helena’s first glance is very telling; he writes that Helena “clava los ojos” (pierces him with her eyes) (Silva 98) on Fernández, “mirándolo fijamente, con expresión severa …como las de un médico en el cuerpo de un leproso corroido por la úlceras…para penetrar, con despreciativa y helada insistencía … para leer en lo más íntimo de mi alma” 58 (Silva 98). As previously mentioned, Fernández’s soul is read by Helena like a text. However, Fernández admits this text is more honest than the diary text that he himself has been keeping. The reader is left to reflect on the artificially constructed nature of this diary, which by Fernández’s own admission, cannot be understood as a transparent portrayal of his own desires. The masochistic role Fernández occupies during this initial exchange and the sadistic (Godly and medically cold eye) role that Helena plays in this initial encounter inverts traditional gender roles. The effect of Helena’s gaze forces Fernández to lower his eyes for the first time in his life to the gaze of a woman: “por primera vez en mi vida bajé los ojos ante la mirada de una mujer” 59 (Silva 99). Fernández’s inner battle between his desire for aescetism and his Faustian pursuit of knowledge constantly thwarted by his sensual experimentation and attraction to different acts of consumption under the influence of capitalism is thus given a powerful illustration. Fernández/Silva uses an abject, biblical illness to portray the pathogenic                                                          58 “…staring at me fixedly with a stern expression … like those of a doctor on the body of a leper…with demeaning and icy insistence…to read the innermost recesses of my soul” (Silva 2005, 107). 59 “For the first time in my life I lowered my gaze from that of a woman” (Silva 2005, 107). 82 effect of Parisian vices on Fernández’s soul. Helena, in contrast, has a beautiful, undefiled feminine soul that Fernández identifies with and simultaneously desires. Furthermore, the signifier of power that penetrates into Fernández’s spiritual interior and exposes his vices becomes a hybrid feminine gaze that is medical, aesthetic, and divine. Before introducing the medical discourses that will compete for his faith, Helena is construed as a paradoxical feminine figure that blurs the boundaries between the aesthetic, the scientific, and the divine, containing them all within herself. As such, she is a provocative feminine metaphor of modernity as a confluence of antithetical aesthetic and scientific gender discourses. Helena is thus the receptacle of Fernández’s shifting desire capturing the contradictory impulses modernity provokes. Accordingly the “identity” of Helena also shifts. During their first encounter, Helena is the fantasy of religious transcendence and faith in a lost Divine power in a modern, secularized world, a world where desire can no longer be filled by religious fervor, for God has become a human invention rather than an unwavering fact. It is from this desire that Fernández gives to Helena a supernatural, semi-divine power. That Fernández attributes to Helena a beautiful and undefiled feminine soul that he simultaneously identifies with and desires enables him to put her on a pedestal. From that pedestal Fernández transforms Helena into his Divine Judge. It is to this Judge that Fernández reveals, in his hallucination, the spiritual corruption he believes his soul has undergone. Like the schizophrenic German Judge Schreber originally analyzed by Freud—a case Deleuze and Guattari reinterpret in A Thousand Plateaus—Fernández’s and Schreber’s schizo-hallucinations share a common trait. They both hallucinate that their 83 male bodies are transformed into two masochistically feminized bodies that are penetrated by two different symbols of a divine, God-like force. In Schreber’s case, he believes himself transformed into a woman daily sodomized by God; in Fernández’s hallucination, he believes Helena’s feminine gaze penetrates the inner recesses of his soul, reading his soul like a book. Fernández’s shameful secrets from his life of inveterate consumption, and in particular his sensual consumption and violent reactions against women’s bodies, therefore are masochistically punished by his own hallucination of his body’s passive openness to penetration by a woman’s gaze. Like Schreber’s, Fernández’s hallucination fulfills a masochistic desire to be punished for avowed moral sins by a quasi-divine entity. In Fernández’s case, however, this entity, in addition to having divine powers, is both aesthetic and feminine. The humiliating penetration of Fernández’s soul by Helena’s gaze reflects his desire to expose his sins to a godly, divine feminine entity in order to access divine forgiveness and to cleanse his soul. Helena’s second gaze leads to the second part of his religious schizo-phantasy. As he describes: Al mirarla de nuevo me encontré con dos pupilas fijas en mí, y habría bajado las mías si no hubiera visto en el azul de las suyas, en la curva de los labios finos, en toda la dulce fisonomía una expresión de lástima infinita, de suprema ternura compasiva, más suave que ninguna caricia de hermana. Aquella mirada derramó en mi espíritu la paz que baja sobre un corazón de cristiano después de confesar sus faltas y de recibir absolución; una paz profunda y humilde, llena de agradecimiento por la piedad divina que leía en sus ojos. 60 (Silva 99)                                                          60 “When I looked at her again I chanced upon her pupils trained on me, and would have lowered mine had I not seen her pupils trained on me, and would have lowered mine had I not seen the blue of hers, in the curve of her delicate lips, in her whole kindly countenance, an expression of infinite pity, of supreme compassionate tenderness, gentler than any sister’s caress” (Silva 2005, 107). 84 Helena’s godly “forgiveness” of Fernández’s sins thus embodies a desire on the part of Fernández that absolves him from his corrupting acts and cleanses his soul, figuratively returning it to its former purity. After Fernández receives this absolution from Helena, the final “message” her gaze sends to him is that she will become a guiding light that will keep his soul pure and prevent him from returning to the path of sensuous pleasures that will infect his soul: “Descienda la paz sobre ti, pero no te alejes de mi camino, pobre alma oscura y enferma, yo seré tu conductora hacia la luz, tu Diotima y tu Beatriz” 61 (Silva 99). Significantly then, Fernández’s imagination/hallucination transforms Helena into his aesthetic feminine muse, who like the muses Diotima and Beatriz, will guide Fernández toward an ascetic and aesthetic path. Fernández’s fervor and belief that Helena is really a divine and mysterious feminine aesthetic force is further strengthened that evening. When Fernández passes her room, and in response to his throwing a bouquet of flowers in her balcony, Helena throws a bouquet of white flowers and makes the sign of the cross: both signs that his dying grandmother predicted would lead to his salvation. Vertigo is the effect that this coincidence provokes in Fernández, and he collapses unconscious on the floor. The beginning of his mysterious illness, or Fernández’s first hysterical symptom, is thus set in motion. F. European doctors diagnose the rastaquouère Sir John Rivington, “the great doctor who had devoted his final years to experimental psychology and psychophysics” and whose works, “especially Moral Hygiene and The                                                          61 “May peace descend upon you, but do not stray from my path, poor, dark, sick soul, I will be your guide toward the light, your Diotima and your Beatrice” (Silva 2005, 108). 85 Evolution of the Idea of the Divine, place him at the pinnacle of the great contemporary thinkers –Spencer and Darwin…” (Silva 2005, 122) becomes the first British doctor to treat Fernández. On their first meeting, as Poe Lang observes, “la demanda de ayuda es claramente espiritual, ya que Fernández se describe a si mismo como poseedor de una perfecta salud corporal.” 62 Fernández thus states to Rivington: “Yo, falto de toda creencia religiosa, vengo a solicitar de un sacerdote de la ciencia, cuyos méritos conozco, que sea mi director espiritual y corporal. ¿Acepta usted el cargo?” 63 (Silva 117). Rivington accepts Fernández’s charge, following Fernández’s lead in a role-playing game, and asks Fernández in turn to promise “contricción por los pecados contra la higiene que usted haya cometido y el firme proposito de enmienda”(“to do contrition for the sins against higiene that you have comitted and the firm resolution of ammending your ways”) [my translation] and directs Fernández: “…cuenteme usted sus pecados” (“Tell me your sins”) (Silva 117). Fernández starts by narrating the last couple of months of his life in Europe, and, at Rivington’s urging, recalls his life as a youth. He draws a portrait of the Latin American city he grew up in, illustrating all that he deems pertinent to that life (Silva 117). After further questioning on the part of Rivington regarding Fernández’s organization of his life, his future plans, and all that refers to his present condition (Silva 118), Rivington concludes the consultation with a physical exam. After his examination, Rivington diagnoses Fernández as a young man addicted to the indiscriminate experience of all novel sensations in life. He warns that Fernández’s                                                          62 “the request for help is clearly spiritual, since Fernandez describes himself as possessed of perfect physical health” [My translation] 63 “I, lacking all religious belief, have come to request a priest of science, whose merits are known to me, to be my spiritual and physical leader. Do you accept the position?” (Silva 2005, 122) 86 intoxication with life, like drug abuse or any sensory overindulgence, will have dire consequences for the patient in his older years: El día en que tu sistema, cansado de los abusos, se debilite, los nervios transmitirán de preferencia las sensaciones desagradables o dolorosas, mortal apatía lo dominará a usted inhibiéndole para la acción, su estómago gastado y sin fuerzas digerirá mal, trabajará escasamente su cerebro y entonces será usted el reverso de la medalla, su misantropía, su odio por todo, no tendrán límites. 64 (Silva 125-6) Rivington insists that Fernández stop his oscillation between asceticism and sensual dissipation. In order to put an end to this oscillation, he tells Fernández that he needs to find Helena and make her his wife, emphasizing the importance of finding Helena and marrying her. His parting words to Fernández are: “¡Ese amor puede ser tu salvación!” (“That love could be your salvation!”) (Silva 129). Upon hearing Rivington’s diagnosis, Doctor Sáenz interrupts Fernández’s reading of the diary to exclaim “—Y has resistido ocho años de la misma vida de entonces y hoy, cuando te hablo yo como te hablaría Rivington, hoy, cuando todavía es tiempo, te ríes de mi y no me haces caso—” 65 (Silva 128). Echoing Rivington’s medical diagnosis, Sáenz emphasizes that Fernández continues to obey the same irrational desire to excessively consume all manner of luxuries, including stimulants and women, he pursued in Europe. At this point, however, Fernández easily dismisses Sáenz’s warnings, something that he could not do with Rivington eight years prior. He tells Sáenz that over the eight years that have transpired since that initial conversation with Rivington, Fernández has learned how                                                          64 “The day when your system, worn out by abuses, weakens, your nerves will prefer to transmit disagreeable or painful sensations, deadly apathy will rule you, inhibiting you from action …and then you will be the flip side of the action: your misanthropy, your blanket hatred, your disenchantment will be limitless” (Silva 2005, 131). 65 “So you’ve held up under eight years of the same lifestyle, and now when I talk to you like Rivington talked to you, when there’s still time, you laugh at me and pay no attention” (Silva 2005, 132). 87 to manage his desire: “he distribuido mis fuerzas entre el placer, el estudio, la acción, los planes políticos de entonces los he convertido en un sport que me divierte, y no tengo violentas impresiones porque desprecio a fondo a las mujeres…” 66 (Silva 128). Fernández’s continued consumerist desire, therefore, is if not diminished or satiated, carefully managed. Significantly, as Felski describes, the cliché of woman as the insatiable female shopper epitomizes the close associations between economic and erotic excess in dominant images of femininity. Yet the irrationalism of female shopping desire can simultaneously be seen as modern because it is a managed desire, even if it is a desire manipulated by the logic of calculation and rationalization in the interests of the profit motive. (62) [My emphasis]. In contrast, Rivington’s and Sáenz’s medical warnings to Fernández can be seen as implicitly expressing a scientific discourse which Felski describes as the overt anxiety “that men are in turn being feminized by the castrating effects of an ever more pervasive commodification” (62). Not incidentally, seduction is the recurring term during the fin de siècle, which according to Felski, is “used in the writings of male intellectuals to describe the manipulation of the individual by marketing techniques” (62). In this way, the subject becomes understood as “decentered, no longer in control of his or her desires, but prey to the beguiling forces of publicity and the image industry” (62). Yet for Fernández, the feminization and accompanying decentering of the self vis-à-vis the forces of capitalism, is a productive way of countering the peripheral position he occupies as a Latin American criollo in relation to the cosmopolitan European and American centers of power. Like women, Fernández’s consumption while in Europe can be seen as a tacit act of [fe]male                                                          66 “I have distributed my efforts among pleasure, study, and action, I have turned political plans from the time into an amusing bit of sport, and I have no strong sentimental impressions since I have a thorough contempt for women…” (Silva 2005, 132). 88 aggression (Felski 77). In being “othered” in Paris as a rastaquouère, Fernández exploits the economic largesse at his disposal to indulge in hedonistic pleasures and simultaneously undermine the European cosmopolitan and aristocratic male superiority set-up by European discourses to diminish his own Latin American criollo identity. Against the grain of bourgeois ethos, Fernández’s ultimate goal is not to accumulate wealth for his progenitors, as Rivington sensibly advises him, but to use his wealth toward the temporary satisfaction of an everchanging desire that is correspondingly insatiable. Fernández’s consumerism therefore renders each object of his desire, as Felski aptly describes, “whether lover or commodity—interchangeable with the next in the relentless pursuit of the unattainable” (78). The goal of this pursuit, and the reason for the perpetual elongation of this process, is Helena, metaphorically understood in the final analysis as the mysterious and inaccessible source of desire itself. Fernández thus concludes that Rivington’s cure, to turn Helena into his wife and the mother of his future heirs—and to settle in England, start a lucrative business, and amass as much wealth as possible—is completely antithetical to his desire. Countering Rivington’s advice, he chooses to preserve in his memory the powerful aesthetic-religious hallucination the Pre- Raphaelite beauty of Helena. He continues his search precisely by getting lost in the search for Helena along a variety of alternate paths and interests that present themselves along the way. In finding no other cure in medicine to his spiritual ailment other than his sensual desire’s subjugation to the institution of heterosexual marriage, Fernández refocuses his faith once again on the aesthetic and uncanny Helena, but this time, he also figures out a way to manage his own sensual desires, which is to separate them from his spiritual 89 needs. Fernández’s sexual hunger, initially fed by courtesans, feeds itself with married women’s bodies, and renounces the idea of a spiritual connection with a real woman, like the once living Helena. In the switch from courtesans to married women, the attraction to beautiful women artificially enhanced by the fashions and accessories of modernity does not change; however, the disappointment over his incapacity to make a spiritual connection, so prevalent in respect to the courtesans, vanishes with these women. By separating spirituality to the unlocalizible aesthetic space Helena’s femininity embodies, and despiritualizing the actual married women he seduces with increased cynicism, Fernández finds his own “cure” to satisfy his sensual needs—without the negative effects of his own spiritual desire for a connection or for finding a Romantic love to transcend the connections of the body. His initial awe of the perspicacity with which Orloff and the rest of the courtesan women manifest their sensual power via their expertise and innovation, 67 is replaced by a cynical and misogynistic attitude. Fernández transforms himself from the newly arrived and easily seduced provincial youth into the experienced seducer of married women. His primary practice of seduction involves the manipulation of a woman’s emotional identification and passionate abandonment to the artificial recreation or simulation of scenes of love she has read and dreamed about. In this respect, Fernández has learned to manipulate women in the same manner as capitalist marketing techniques aimed at women: by preying on their identification with the fictional Romantic heroine found in                                                          67 Fernández goes so far as to describe Lady Orloff as an artist of the boudoir 90 literature and art and their desire to play that role and become that heroine who finds an aesthetic, idealized love that supersedes reality. Fernández, in contrast, no longer takes part in this identification in his games of seduction. Rather than seek a spiritual love that will resemble the aesthetic love that Dante, Shakespeare, and other scribes created in their works as his female lovers desire, he plays the role of seducer intentionally and artificially. He does this with the conscious objective of extracting the sensual pleasure he desires from his sensual victims whom he simultaneously courts to offset the possibility of attachment, or of falling into the fantasy he has created together with his female conquests. The spiritual and feminine misidentification he experiences with Bashkirtseff’s text and with Helena’s aesthetic image become misidentifications only possible in the unlocalazible virtual space of the aesthetic imagination. The possibility of love between Fernández and an actual, living woman is therefore annulled. As Richard Ledgard argues, modernista novels of the fin- de-siècle ya no reflejan un mundo donde el amor reune a los miembros de la pareja de manera casi mágica, sino que nos muestra a personajes que se saben poseídos por una ansiedad irracional, a la que buscan dominar a traves de razonamientos que derivan en escrutinios profundos de sí mismos que los llevan a la autocrítica, a problematizar filosóficamente sus identidades 68 (103). Ledgard’s last statement, modernistas’ philosophical concern with multiple identities, thus bring us to how Silva constructs this problematic specifically in De sobremesa. In his diary, Fernández experiences and records the paradoxical sensation he as a subject                                                          68 “…no longer reflect a world where love unites both members of a couple in an almost magical manner, but rather shows us protagonists who find themselves possessed by an irrational anxiety that they seek to dominate through reasonings that drift into a deep self-scrutiny and lead them to autocriticism, to problematize philosophically their identities.” [My translation] 91 experiences in the relationship he has to both the crowd of his native Colombian countrymen and to cosmopolitan European society. He finds that he occupies a constant peripheral position in relation to both of these crowds, which simultaneously include and exclude him. As he reflects: Mi lucidez de analista me hizo ver que, para mis elegantes amigos europeos, no dejaré de ser nunca el rastaquouère que trata de codearse con ellos empinándose sobre sus talegas de oro; y para mis compatriotas no dejaré de ser un farolón que quería mostrarles hasta dónde ha logrado insinuarse en el gran mundo parisiense en la high life cosmopolita. 69 (Silva 202) With this self-analysis, Fernández, looking at the prejudicial way in which both crowds exclude him, emphasizes the paradoxical situation of being simultaneously a part of and at the margins of both the provincial Colombian crowd and the European cosmopolitan crowd who never fully accept him, but partially marginalize him by differentiating and othering him, as either Latin American rastaquouère or Europhile snob. His double marginalization by virtue of his dually peripheral and cosmopolitan identity, however, also enables him to categorically observe the artificiality of characteristics that both groups argue are intrinsic to their identity, and that he can both assimilate and take on and off, like a mask. Helena revisited  Whereas Paris is equated with the artificial beauty and seductive world of artifice of the courtesan and the demimonde lifestyle, London is portrayed as the center of capitalist bourgeois activity: specifically of sales and speculation in the stock market, and of a                                                          69 “To my elegant European friends, I’ll never cease to be the rastaquoere who tries to rub elbows with them, by towering up his bags of gold; and to my compatriots I will not cease to be a swanky show-off who wants to show them to what extent he has managed to insinuate himself into the grand Parisian world and the cosmopolitan highlife.” (Silva 2005, 194) 92 bourgeois lifestyle that creates new class divisions. Fernández’s initial time in London, therefore, is occupied by his business deals and flaneur meanderings through London, taking strolls through both the middle- and lower-class neighborhoods. As Graff Zivin points out, Fernández’s fluid movement in and out of aesthetic and bourgeois activities is a tense negotiation between the useful capitalist activities and how they are set up against aesthetic discourses: “Lo útil…representa el otro contra el cual se constituye la subjetividad estética modernista [y]… con lo cual José Fernández está constantemente negociando en esta novela; es su ‘otro adentro’” 70 (210). By embracing Helena, therefore, Fernández temporarily disavows his bourgeois, practical business-like “other within” and distances himself from that part of himself exclaiming: “¡La realidad! ¡La vida real! ¡Los hombres prácticos! … ¡Horror!” 71 (Silva 139). In rejecting this other self, Fernández adopts the aristocratic, decadent stance of des Esseintes, the Decadent protagonist of Huysmans’ À rebours. His desire to be spiritually joined with the hallucinated aesthetic perfection of Helena in eternal contemplation of her as perfect artwork leads Fernández to shut himself into an internal aesthetic realm of his own making, surrounded only with aesthetic and luxury products of his liking, including the Pre-Raphaelite copied portrait of Helena that Rivington sends him as a gift, in very much the same manner as des Esseintes’ willful enclosure in his French chateau. In contrast to de Esseintes, however, who remains inside his internal aesthetic space until the                                                          70 “the useful…represents the other against which modernist aesthetic subjectivity constitutes itself [and]…. is something Jose Fernandez is constantly negotiating with in this novel; it is his other within.” [My translation] 71 “Reality! Real life! Practical men! … Horrors…” (Silva 2005, 141) 93 conclusion of À rebours, Fernández’s vital desire for life intervenes and compels him to exit his self-imposed aesthetic entombment. De sobremesa thus makes clear that the aesthetic realm Fernández builds in his desire to commune with Helena eternally cannot contain the fluctuations of Fernández’s desire. Desire flows past and through the artificially constructed aesthetic space Fernández consecrates to Helena’s memory, and becomes an unbearable and claustrophobic space that drains Fernández of life and approximates him to the stasis of death. Escaping the confines of the aesthetic realm for the sensual pleasures modernity has to offer thus complicates the idea of seeing Fernández merely as a Latin American Decadent copy of des Esseintes, since des Esseintes adopts a decadent, antimodernist stance that compels him to remain in his chateau and avoid the external space of modernity he considers the space of the vulgar bourgeoisie until the very conclusion of the novel. In contrast, as Oscar Collado observes, “la vida de Fernández—droga, lujo, sexo—no es muy diferente a la de cualquier contemporáneo de la clase media” 72 (276). José Fernández’s bourgeois lifestyle, though at times disavowed in his diary for the aristocratic posturing of the Decadent aesthete, keeps him active in life, and restores his psychic equilibrium by involving him in the production of capital. However, as Graff Zivin has pointed out, modernista aesthetic subjectivity, on par with decadent subjectivity, was constituted against this practical, active bourgeois capitalist lifestyle. Silva’s protagonist embodies the problematic of having to define himself as an aesthete in                                                          72 “Fernández leads a life in Europe—drugs, luxury, sex—that is not very different from any other bourgeois contemporary.” (My translation) 94 spiritual communion with an art that is autonomous, essential, and completely separate from capitalist and utilitarian goals; the same problems that Decadents confronted. Aníbal González contextualizes the problematic this conception of autonomous art posed for all fin-de-siècle artists, including both European decadents and Latin American modernistas in “Estomago y Cerebro: De sobremesa, El Simposío de Platón y la indigestión cultural.” He writes: “los decadentistas y los modernistas, deseosos de cimentar la noción del ‘arte por el arte’ y de sustentar la autonomía de la literatura frente a los demás discursos de su época, se sentian atraídos en su ideología por la noción platónica del arte” 73 (243). Yet if, as González, argues, Huysmans’ decadent goal, as embodied in the name des Esseintes (i.e. “the essences”) was the same as Fernández’s goal of finding an essence in art and literature, at the end of both novels, neither protagonist is able to find such an essence in the artificial aesthetic space filled with works of art and literature they have created respective to their tastes. Instead, as González states, modernistas’ discovery about the so called autonomy of art was that “paradójicamente, mientras los modernistas más perseguían la ‘esencia,’ ‘lo propio’ del arte, mas descubrían que el arte carece de ‘esencia’ y de propiedad, y de que su naturaleza consiste más bien en querer parecerse siempre a otras cosas” 74 (243). What makes Fernández’s aesthetic search for an essence different from des Esseintes’ is that his search for an essence leads him to a confrontation with the undeterminable feminine                                                          73 “decadents and modernistas, desirous of cementing the notion of ‘art for art’s sake’ and of supporting the autonomy of literature in front of the rest of the discourses of their epoch were very attracted in their ideology to a Platonic notion of art” [My emphasis] 74 “paradoxically, the more that modernistas followed the essence of art, the more they discovered that art lacked any essence or property, and that its nature is in actuality closer to always wanting to look like other things” [My translation] 95 entity Helena, a being, it should be noted, whose nature is always shifting into different qualities resisting apprehension and understanding. To clarify, Fernández cannot decide whether Helena is body or spirit, real girl or ghostly hallucination, aesthetic copy or original, feminine twin soul or a separate individual. Furthermore, the conclusion of De sobremesa forecloses the possibility of solving the mystery of Helena, and of determining her “true nature” by Fernández’s discovery of her tombstone, a gesture that approximates the mysterious source of the aesthetic to death. Commenting on this ending, González observes, “algo anda mal cuando para representar alegóricamente la ‘esencia del arte’, hay que recurrir a la figura de una mujer hermosa pero muerta” 75 (243). As a consequence of this association between a beautiful feminine entity and death, González concludes, “el ‘arte puro’ se revela en la novela de Silva como una actividad asociada no a la vida, sino a la muerte [donde] … la contemplación de la belleza suprema, lejos de promover la plenitud vital, actúa como una suerte de filtro o de veneno que ocasiona la páralisis” 76 (243). What differentiates Huysmans’ decadent novel from Silva’s modernista novel is that, as Ledgard points out, “en la novela de Huysmans, no existe el tema sobre el que se construye el argumento central de la novela de Asunción Silva: la historia de amor                                                          75 “something is amiss when, in order to allegorically represent the essence of art, it is necessary to recur to the figure of a beautiful but dead woman” [My translation] 76 “‘pure art’ is revealed in Silva’s novel as an activity associated not with life, but with death [where]… the contemplation of supreme beauty, far from promoting vital plenitude, acts like a sort of filter or poison that causes paralysis” [My translation] 96 protagonizada por alguien específicamente hispanoamericano cuyo cosmopolitanismo le hace compartir la incertidumbre característica de la época en el viejo continente” 77 (113). Crucially then, by falling in love with the beautiful and indeterminable Helena at first sight, Fernández, the cosmopolitan rastaquouère, is emotionally moved into believing she contains a divine aesthetic essence. Leading up to the discovery of her death, however, Fernández finds through a series of coincidences, that Helena’s beautiful image bears the resemblance of another aesthetic object: the Pre-Raphaelite portrait of Helena’s mother. Shortly after her initial appearance to Fernández as an indeterminable hallucination that transforms reality, she reappears to Fernández as a pictorial representation that turns out to be the prized possession of Doctor Rivington’s wife, the first doctor to treat him in London. This is the first coincidence that, as Collado Villanueva argues, sets in play the two doctors’ (Rivington and Charvet) central role in the development of the supernatural events that surround the mystery of Helena. Doctor Rivington sends to Fernández, as a gift, a painted reproduction of the Pre-Raphaelite painting. It is through Fernández’s acquisition of this painting that he later learns from the second doctor he visits, Professor Charvet, the origins and history of Helena Scilly Dancourt. Charvet, who shows Fernández a photographic reproduction of the same Pre- Raphaelite painting, recounts how the photograph has been given to him. Upon Doctor                                                          77 “in Huysmans novel, the theme over which the central argument of Asunción Silva’s novel is built does not exist: the love story with a specifically Hispanoamerican protagonist whose cosmopolitanism makes him share in the uncertainty characteristic of this epoch in the old continent” [My translation] 97 Charvet’s inadvertent entrance into Fernández’s worship site 78 , he tells Fernández the personal history of the painting, revealing the identity of the woman as Helena’s mother. He tells Fernández that about twelve years before, he went on an emergency call to see Helena’s mother, the wife of the Count Scilly Dancourt, who was gravely ill. Charvet describes the illness: La enfermedad había sido un resfriado, cogido en la noche en que salieron de París; pero la fragíl constitución de la enferma y quién sabe que herencia de tuberculosis hicieron estallar una tisis galopante, ante la cual fueron inútiles mis esfuerzos. Decirle a usted qué especie de dolor, de locura fue la del marido al convencerse de que estaba muerta, sería tarea imposible 79 (Silva 166). Helena’s beautiful mother leaves behind an inconsolable husband and Helena, then a girl of four, and after one last gaze with eyes resplendent with “un amor sobrehumano” (“a superhuman love”), she expires (Silva 166). 80 The supernatural power of those eyes is seemingly inherited by the young Helena, as is her imminent illness, foretold by Charvet’s observation that Helena as a girl “tenía aspecto delicado como el de una flor enferma” 81 (Silva 166).                                                          78 After Rivington sends Fernández the duplicated Pre-Raphaelite painting of Helena’s mother, Fernández takes the painting into a room and builds up a decadent shrine to Helena, where the painting becomes the centerpiece. This parallels the value of two paintings of Salome by Gustave Moreau have for the decadent protagonist des Esseintes. Des Esseintes spends long hours in intense contemplation of Salome’s fatally alluring fetishized image, thrilled by the terror her image induced through Moreau’s painting style, which makes “her image come to life” as he captures her in the suggestion of motion as she dances for the Tetrarch (Huysmans 50-57). 79 “The disease had been a cold, caught in the night they left Paris; but the patients’ fragile constitution and some unknown family history of tuberculosis caused a galloping consumption, against which my efforts were in vain. It would be an impossible task to tell you what kind of pain, of madness, the husband went through upon being convinced she was dead” (Silva 2005, 164). 80 Worthy of note is that similarity between this description and that of the death of Marie Bashkirtseff, also of tuberculosis. 81 “…had a delicate appearance like that of a sick flower” (Silva 2005, 164). 98 Helena thus comes to enfold an additional feminine figure of imminent death and exquisite beauty, the real life Pre-Raphaelite model par excellence Elizabeth Siddal, who died a young and tragic death. Helena’s ancestry, as Scilly Dancourt emphasizes to Charvet, makes her and her mother a part of a long chain of women who have driven men to worship them: Doctor, no se extrañe usted al verme sufrir así, al ver mi desesperación; usted no sabe que era una santa, usted no sabe que todas las de su raza han sido adoradas así, frenéticamente. ¿No ha oído usted contar la historia de Rossetti, el poeta pintor que casó con María Isabel Leonor Siddal, que era de la misma familia de mi mujer … y que jamás pintó en sus cuadros ni cantó en sus versos a otra que a ella, y que muerta ella depositó en el ataúd el manuscrito de sus poemas para que durmiera junto de la que los había inspirado? 82 (Silva 166) The Siddal generation of women, of which Helena is the last link, therefore, is a race of supernatural feminine muses who inspire painters and poets because they embody the ideal of feminine physical and spiritual beauty. Charvet tells Fernández that compared to the “original woman’s beauty,” the Pre-Raphaelite painting, made by the brother of the deceased, did not do anything but “…dañar el modelo al sujetarlo a las invenciónes de su escuela” 83 (Silva 167). However, in spite of his aesthetic inclination for the original model over the stylistic interpretation of her image according to Pre-Raphaelite conventions, Charvet happily accepted from Scilly Dancourt the gift of the painting’s duplicated photograph.                                                          82 “Doctor, don’t be surprised to see me suffer this way, to see my despair; you don’t know that she was a saint, you don’t know that all the women of her family line have been worshipped this frenetically. Haven’t you heard the story of Rossetti, the poet-painter who married Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, who was from the same family as my wife, twenty-odd years ago…and who never painted in his pictures anyone but her, and that once she was dead he deposited in her casket the manuscript of his poems so that they could rest alongside her who had inspired them? (Silva 2005, 164). 83 “…damage the model by subjecting it to the inventions of his school” (Silva 2005, 165). 99 However, Fernández never encounters the original model, since Helena is actually a genetic copy of Helena’s mother; like her she inherits the supernatural aesthetic beauty of her blood relative Elizabeth Siddal, a beauty that inspires poets and painters. At this point, it is important to note that after Fernández’s first visual encounter with Helena, his subsequent “encounters” with her become increasingly simulacral. In other words, Helena’s supernatural re-apparitions replaces the Classical aesthetic idea of Helena as representing an original work of art by a new, modern idea of art as simulacral and significantly, set in constant proliferation through technologically reproduced aesthetic likenesses, or copies, by the mediums of lithography and photography. One suggestive interpretation of Helena’s simulacral re-apparitions that can support this claim is given by Giorgi, who in “Nombrar la enfermedad” writes: El cuerpo femenino, el objeto ‘por definición’ de la mirada estética, no es aquísino una cita que se repite idéntica a si misma, como una raza de cyborgs capaz de reproducir sus propias réplicas; más que un cuerpo, es un código de representación estética que se despliega en esa multiplicación de la ‘misma’ Helena. 84 The multiplication of Helena, as proliferating technological feminine simulacra detached from a feminine body, thus points to a new uncanny dimension that reproducible art acquires in its copying process. Namely, the physicality of the art object, as critics including Saussure, Foucault, and Baudrillard have pointed out, becomes secondary and separate from its signifier; it is the disembodied sign that replaces the reality of the                                                          84 “The feminine body, the object par excellence of the aesthetic gaze, is here only a citation that repeats identical to itself, like a race of cyborgs capable of reproducing its own replicas; more than a body, it is a code of aesthetic representation that unfolds in the multiplication of the ‘same’ Helena.” [My translation] 100 banished object. 85 The “European men of science” from whom Fernández seeks help to cure him of his nervous psychic “illness” thus inadvertently support Fernández’s insistence that there is a supernatural dimension to art that connects to human spirituality and that science cannot explain. Furthermore, this supernatural phenomenon, with its accompanying uncanny sensation for the viewer/spectator whereby a familiar object suddenly becomes defamiliarized and transmits a wordless threat that produces in him abject terror, is produced precisely through new technologies of modernity that change the parameters of aesthetic production and reception. Guiding Light  Helena ultimately becomes an “hilo de luz” [thread of light] (Silva 137) that mysteriously guides Fernández through life, and toward uncanny encounters with her simulacral reappearances. Ironically, these amazing coincidences are brought about by the very medical men who claim to be disbelievers in the spiritual and mysterious power of art as one of the essential conductors of unconscious desire. Indeed, as Fernández tells his friends at the beginning of De sobremesa, when he questions who knows what life is, he muses: “las religiones no, puesto que la consideran como un paso para otras regiones; la ciencia no, porque apenas investiga las leyes que la rigen sin descubrir su causa ni su                                                          85 I will expand on this point in my analysis of the feminine entities Faustine and Macabea, from Bioy’s La invencion de Morel and Lispectors’ A hora da estrela, in the following two chapters. To briefly sum up my arguments, I define the cinematic simulacrum of Helena and the hypertextual Macabea as exceeding the limits of reality, entering into what Baudrillard describe as the hyperreal, meaning that for both the fictional male consumer/ protagonist of both these feminine aesthetic entities, as well as for the reader, the reality of these feminine figures exceeds reality. In other words, they become “more real than real”. 101 objeto. Tal vez el arte que la copia…tal vez el amor que la crea” 86 (Silva 38). Art, which copies life, and love, which creates life, are the only two possibilities that Fernández considers worthy of defining life in its fullness. Furthermore, Helena, who aesthetically copies life and who is the object of Fernández’s love, leads Fernández to adopt the against-the-grain method of taking the longest detour possible to gain further knowledge about her in order to approximate her. He describes that “por un fenómeno que es frecuente en mí y que me hace tomar siempre el camino más largo y perderme en él cuando trato de investigar algo que me interesa” 87 (137). He studies the development of Pre-Raphaelite art from the inner sanctum that he builds for Helena rather than asking Rivington directly about the name of the painter responsible for her painting. In Fernández’s shrine to Helena, her simulacral painting is surrounded by all the fetish objects that have acquired a supernatural meaning in relation to her phantasmatic presence. Her forgotten brooch with the three leaves and white butterfly, the bouquet of flowers she threw at him, and the poets that she inspires him to read and recite—all become part of his commemoration site, or artistic chapel to Helena. Fernández thus creates an aesthetic and simultaneously uncanny atmosphere in which the fetish objects associated with the dead Helena are able to conjure up her presence. It is this initial                                                          86 “Not religions, since they consider it a step toward other regions; not science, since it merely investigates the laws that govern it without discovering its cause or its purpose. Perhaps art, which copies it…perhaps love, which creates it” (Silva 2005, 56). 87 “A phenomenon common in me makes me always take the long road and lose my way on it when I try to investigate something that interests me” (Silva 2005, 140). 102 operation in Europe that prefigures the liminal and uncanny Latin American aesthetic space of Villa Helena. 88 Fernández’s detour into Pre-Raphaelite studies, which lead him nowhere other than into a new appreciation and knowledge of the British Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, aptly capture the digressive way in which Fernández gets lost in his continuous search for Helena. This in turn captures, as Mejías-López argues, the radical philosophical stance that this divagating textuality, what Jaramillo-Zuluaga labels as una novela deshilvanada, intentionally makes. Fernández’s procedure of finding Helena demonstrates, as Mejías- López conclusively argues “… un paulatino cambio de atención del encuentro a la búsqueda, o dicho de otro modo, del objeto del deseo al acto mismo de desear” 89 ( 342) [My emphasis]. Mejías-López posits further that esta reflexión del protagonista, es pues, de suma importancia al apuntar ya a la posibilidad de que la premisa epistemológica de la razón moderna, o sea, del inquirir hasta dar con la verdad, en las palabras de Fernández, sea sustituida por el ‘perderse’ en los vericuetos de esa inquisición 90 (342) [My emphasis]. Following Mejías-López’s arguments, I read the deshilvanada textuality of De sobremesa as intentionally replicating the divagating nature of desire as a motor that propels both thought and action toward a continuous and never-ending search for an aesthetic truth                                                          88 Important to emphasize here is once again Marx’s remark about the latency of a fetish in Capital: “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (163). 89 “….a gradual change of attention from the encounter to the search, or put another way, from the object of desire to act of desiring itself.” [My translation] 90 “…this reflexion of the protagonist, is thus, of the highest importance in already pointing to the possibility that the epistemological premise of modern reason, that is, the act of inquiring until arriving at the truth, in the words of Fernandez, is substituted for the act of getting lost in the ins and outs of this inquiry.” [My translation] 103 that is ungraspable. This truth is protected by an inviolable wall of death, in which there is only a one-way entrance and no exit. Fernández’s search for Helena, therefore, is ultimately Fernández’s search for the mysterious origins of the motor that animates his desire for experiencing new thoughts and perceptions. Contrary to scientific discourses that single-mindedly pursue the discovery of an ultimate and totalizing truth in order to, as Foucault has argued, demarcate limits and areas of control of human desire and behavior, Fernández’s emphasis on the process and search itself makes him, as Mejías-López argues, a threat to this discourse (241). That is why both Rivington and Charvet pathologize Fernández’s desire to lose himself in the search for knowledge and the consumption of all the novelties cosmopolitan modernity has to offer. Yet rather than developing a pathology, what occurs with Fernández, in his insatiable desire to know, is better described by Aníbal González, who observes in respect to the title De sobremesa: “La sobremesa es también, después de todo, un intervalo de reposo digestivo, una pausa mientras el cuerpo saciado asimila los alimentos que ha consumido” 91 (241). The illness Fernández suffers from is therefore, according to González’s argument, a kind of mental and physical indigestion that his voracious and eager overconsumption produces. To put it another way, Fernández, the prototype of newly arrived Latin American rastaquouere who, during his initial nomadic visit through the European cosmopolitan centers, is first given access to the newest aesthetic and cultural products available for consumption, uncontrollably binges in the same way that Silva binges on the aesthetic products of                                                          91 “The after dinner conversation is also, after all, an interval of digestive rest, a pause while the satiated body assimilates all the food it has consumed.” [My translation] 104 modernity. As González describes: “el hiperrefinado protagonista sufre de colicos estomacales y de una nausea ya casi existencialista, que son la expression métaforica de su incapacidad de asimilar—de armonizar en una totalidad coherente—todo el exquisito arte y la fina literatura que ha consumido” 92 (242). In contrast to des Esseintes, whom González claims is analogously engaged in the same process and suffers from the same aesthetic “indigestion,” Fernández’s overconsumption is integral for his desire to open up the possibility for modernista writers to have a space of enunciation within modernity. Silva manages to go further than Huysmans in the sense that, contrary to turning to the totality of religion, Silva, as González argues, “se resiste a concluir, evitando una síntesis de los numerosos materiales culturales que ella incorpora a su texto, pero sin asimilarlos del todo: desde Platón y Nietzsche hasta la pintura prerrafaelita…” 93 (247). The conclusion of Fernández’s nomadic European travels, sealed by his discovery of Helena’s death, highlights the fact that even after this discovery nothing has happened. Only the nature of Helena’s secret has changed forms, ultimately encapsulated in the tombstone bearing her name Fernández accidentally stumbles upon. During his final walk through Paris, he initially spies the magical object that always announces Helena—the three golden leaves with the butterfly—and then sees her name written on a tombstone. At the sight of Helena’s name, Fernández lets out a terrified cry and hysterically                                                          92 “the hyperrefined protagonist suffers from stomach colics and from an almost existentialist nausea, which are the metaphorical expression of his incapacity to assimilate—to harmonize into a coherent totality—all the exquisite art and fine literature he has consumed.” [My translation] 93 “…resists concluding, avoiding a synthesis of the numerous cultural materials that the novel textually incorporates without assimilating them altogether: from Plato to Nietzsche to Pre-Raphaelite painting…” [My translation] 105 collapses on the arms of his friend Marinoni; as usual, Fernández recuperates. Later, when Fernández returns one final time to the cemetery to put flowers on her grave, he notices one final, surprising coincidence: the date of her death coinciding with Fernández’s most serious nervous illnesses, one that almost led to his own death (at midnight of the last day of December). The supernatural connection between Fernández and Helena therefore is reinforced one final time, and intimated to inexplicably persist after Helena’s spirit has crossed to el más allá (the beyond). The mystery of Helena therefore necessarily remains open and ponderable. Fernández’s last words unmistakably reaffirm the continuation of Helena as well as of the contemplation of the mysterious source of art itself, as a femininely coded desire that intermingles with life and alters all perception of an objective reality. ¿Muerta tú? … ¿Convertida tú en carne que se pudre y que devoran los gusanos? … ¿Convertida tú en un esqueletito negro que se deschace? No, tú no has muerto, tú estas viva y vivirás siempre, Helena, para realzar el mistico delirio de las abuelas agonizantes, arrojando en el alma de los poetas ateos, entenebrecida por las orgías de la carne, el pálido ramo de rosas y para hacer la señal que salva, con los dedos largos de tus manos alabastrinas 94 (Silva 227). It is at this moment that Fernández’s diary search for Helena reaches its limit, the limit of death itself, beyond which Fernández’s aesthetic inquiry cannot trespass. As the unknowable and imperceptible thread of illumination that has unconsciously guided Fernández’s divagating journey, Helena thus leads to a dead end that provides no absolute truth or singular explanation to explain her mystery. The last page of                                                          94 “Her tomb? … Dead you? …You turned to flesh that rots and that the worms will eat?... You, turned into a black little skeleton that decomposes? No, you have not died; you are alive and will live always, Helen, to enhance the mystical delirium of dying grandmothers, tossing into the soul of the atheist poets, darkened by the orgies of the flesh, the pale bouquet of roses, and to make the sign of salvation with your tapered fingers and your alabastrine hands” (Silva 2005, 216). 106 Fernández’s diary, which returns the reader to the space of Villa Helena, is thus closed through the descriptive imagery of Fernández closing his diary: “ajustándole la cerradura de oro con mano nerviosa, lo colocó sobre la mesa” 95 (Silva 228). De sobremesa’s reader thus becomes conscious of exiting one kind of narrative located in the past and returning to a present reality of the fictional character Fernández, who, after sharing his intimate diary, must now confront the reaction of his fraternal male audience to what they have just heard and consumed. Yet his male audience responds to the diary with an inscrutable silence. Reacting to this silence, the reader is left with many questions that Fernández’s companions fail to ask. Indeed, why is this silence a persistent question for the modern reader? One answer might be that, as Jaramillo and Giorgi argue, De sobremesa’s silence allows Silva to conjure a future reader whom he divines will understand his text. Until this future reader/spectator arrives, what appropriately remains in the closing scene of De sobremesa, after the camera-like pen of Silva moves from the illuminated hand of Fernández and his diary past the silence of Fernández’s male audience, is one final image. The sound of the pendulum of a clock bids a future reader, desired and anticipated by Silva to consume his work and to discover that, like a resonating piano, the coded significance of the text’s unraveled feminine structure follows the logic of a nomadic and uncategorizible desire.                                                          95 “closed the book, bound in black morocco, and adjusting its golden keyhole with a nervous hand, placed it on the table” (Silva 2005, 270). 107 Chapter Two:   The Feminizing Power of Cinema in Adolfo Bioy Casares’ La invención de  Morel  Introduction to Adolfo Bioy Casares’ La invención de Morel  Adolfo Bioy Casares’ construction of the plot of La invención de Morel is an exercise in precision that many critics have compared to the internal workings of a very precise clock. Unlike José Asunción Silva’s divagating diary narrative found in his De sobremesa, the first person diary of an anonymous male narrator in Bioy’s novella contains no extraneous elements. Bioy’s clockwork precision in La invención de Morel’s plot earned particular praise from Jorge Luis Borges, who declared the novella perfect in his Prologue to Bioy's 1940 publication. Borges also posits that the adventure's highly organized form and logic “do[] not propose to transcribe reality” (Bioy 2003, 5); rather, the form of the story itself calls attention to its own status as “an artificial object, [of which] no part of which lacks justification” (Bioy 2003, 6). Borges’ emphasis on Bioy’s La invención de Morel as an utterly artificial object is an important avant-garde stance taken by many early twentieth-century Latin American writers who produced works that earned the label of “new narrative,” attempts to sever the mimetic connections between literary product and material reality. Yet as Philip Swanson has argued, it is the modernista literary legacy of an earlier generation that includes José Asunción Silva’s De sobremesa as its center, a text which “sought to recreate the complex, contradictory, fluid, ambiguous or even plain unintelligible nature of reality” (37-8). As I have previously discussed in my first chapter, De sobremesa’s male protagonist José Fernández rejects the vulgar bourgeois and scientific constructions 108 of reality as sterile spaces devoid of emotions and curiosity, due to the feminizing and sensuous consumption of refined luxuries as a singularly feminine aesthetic entities. Modernista developments such as Silva’s enabled avant-garde writers like Bioy and Borges to further complicate the idea of reality as an “existential or metaphysical malaise, in which the very idea of reality was problematic and life itself was possibly without any fundamental meaning” (Swanson 42). As I analyze throughout this chapter, the specific product of modernity that Bioy metaphorically references in La invención de Morel, the product that connects to an existential and metaphysical masculine malaise, is cinema and its feminine moving images. Like the effect produced on spectators by the twenty-four-frames-per-second moving images of cinema, La invención de Morel textually produces a powerful quasi- magical effect on the fictional protagonist that simulates the experience of a cinematic spectator. This quasi-magical effect can be described as a spectatorial sensation, produced as a result of the protagonist’s disorientation, of being pulled into a fantastic world filled with phantasmatic and feminized consumable images that supplant material reality. In my view, the imposition of a new quasi-magical virtual reality that emphasizes simulation over reality allows a crucial understanding of the feminizing effects that contemporary mass media has had upon spectatorial consumers (male and female alike). The central role that the masculine consumption of a technologically produced feminine entity plays marks a reversal of the cliché of woman as the ultimate and inveterate consumer. This image emerged in late nineteenth-century gendered discourses condemning capitalism in Europe and arguably continues in this century. As Felski notes, the current of thought that turned women into the ultimate consumer posited that 109 women’s emotion, passivity, and susceptibility to persuasion made them “the ideal subjects of an ideology of consumption that pervades a society predicated on the commercialization of pleasures” (62). In the mid-twentieth century, this ideology continued to exert an influential role in attitudes toward women’s relation to modernity and to mass culture. Yet with this an anxiety is foregrounded, that men are effeminized by the castrating effects of an increasingly pervasive commodification of all surrounding realities. Elaborating on this anxiety and fear of constantly consuming objects, Felski writes: Seduction is a recurring term used in the writings of male intellectuals to describe the manipulation of the individual by marketing techniques, eloquently evoking the mixture of passivity, complicity, and pleasure seen to characterize the standpoint of the modern consumer. The subject is decentered, no longer in control of his or her desires, but prey to the beguiling forces of publicity and the image industry. Indictments of twentieth-century consumerism regularly invoke a nostalgia for a robust sense of individual self that has been invaded and feminized by an omnipresent culture of glossy media simulations. In an intellectual tradition extending from the Frankfurt School to the recent work of Jean Baudrillard, the discourses on commodity fetishism and the tyranny of the sign reveal a persistently gendered subtext (63). Felski’s expansive description of the triggered anxieties and effects of male effeminization during the twentieth century, including effects of these upon philosophy and literary theory, is worthy of full citation. She illustrates what is unique about Bioy’s twentieth-century narrative of masculine feminization via the consumption of mass media products in La invención de Morel. In particular, the trope of seduction Felski alludes to above, with its evocative mix of passivity, complicity, and pleasure, provides a model with which to decode the metaphorical rendition of a male cinematic consumption that 110 acquires all the qualities typically ascribed to females who cannot help but consume (and desire to consume). As I will demonstrate in this chapter, the metaphysical machine found on the inventor Morel’s deserted island illustrates Bioy’s textual critique and examination of how a male film spectator's desire falls prey to the manipulation of the cinema industry, and incites his consumption of beautiful feminine images and actresses. The metaphysical machine that the inventor Morel creates on his deserted island acts as a metaphor for cinema and its powers that trigger male spectatorial desire. That the fugitive’s senses are fooled into confusing the simulacrum of Faustine for a living woman is a significant argument that Bioy makes for the tremendous power that cinema can wield in making technologically reproduced artificial reality to appear indistinguishable from actual reality, via the senses and minds of spectators of any gender. Bioy’s experience of the changes that cinema brought to Buenos Aires must be considered along with his own avid consumption of films. His strong infatuation with American actress Louise Brooks led him to watch G.W. Pabst’s silent film Die Büchse der Pandora (1929), starring Brooks as the femme fatale Lulu. In Die Büchse, the German auteur Pabst uses the medium of cinema to critique itself, as he exposes the film industry’s manipulation of technology and cinema's beautiful feminine images that seduce male desire—and turns that seduction into huge profits. The film surely influenced Bioy’s rendering of La invención de Morel’s plot of a male consumer seduced by a feminine techno-aesthetic object, and the inspiration of Brooks’ cinematic image has 111 been often referenced but never closely analyzed with regard to La invención de Morel. 96 My goal in bringing La invención and Die Büchse together is to discuss the similar ways in which both Pabst and Bioy frame the seductive feminine cinematic images of Brooks as Lulu and Faustine, respectively, and illustrate the spectatorial desire that these images trigger. Many critics have also read two other European literary influences as models for Bioy’s stranded island protagonist in La invención: H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). In these texts the figure of the island, as a space of the imagination that intersects conflicting eighteenth and nineteenth century European fantasies about “the New World,” will be analyzed in relation to Bioy’s twentieth century Latin American appropriation and revision of the symbolically and metaphorically colonized island space. The historical, cultural, and aesthetic influences I will analyze provide support for an understanding of Bioy’s La invención de Morel as a narrative illustration of the multiple and often anxiety-producing effects that technological modernity had on the mid twentieth century peripheral city of Buenos Aires. Yet as I will demonstrate, the most important outcome of Bioy’s use of cinema in relation to his own creative process is that the effeminization of masculine desire through cinema’s alluring female products paradoxically enables the conditions and the possibilities for writing a new fantastic literature from the periphery.                                                          96 For example Suzanne Jill Levine’s book cover for her English translation The Invention of Morel is a still black and white photograph of Louise Brooks. 112 The reader shall therefore see that the negative associations of the technology of cinema as contributing to a new techno-aesthetic and capitalist-industrial medium that threatens to compete with literary production and to undermine it, a theme also revealed in Bioy’s La invención de Morel to have a productive influence. Indeed, Bioy’s fascination and consumption of films becomes a pre-condition for the invention of his breakthrough fantastic novella. Source Material of La invención de Morel   A. The Fantastic: Literature as Artificial Object Bioy employed various fantastic conventions in La invención de Morel, which begin at the point of his close collaboration and friendship with Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Borges’ emphasis on Bioy’s La invención de Morel as a perfect “artificial object” as opposed to its verisimilitude underscores a crucial characteristic of fantastic literature; Borges’ claim, “La literatura es literatura (invención verbal) y lo démas son procedimientos” [Literature is literature (verbal invention) and the rest are procedures] (qtd. in Brescia 149-50) asserts the view that all literature, regardless of whether it belongs to the realist or fantastic genre, is ultimately an artificial construction. In response to Borges’ apparent equanimity, Pablo A.J. Brescia argues: “Frente a la dos poéticas literarias que Borges entiende en pugna (la natural, o mimético-psicológica- realista, y la mágica, o artificial-imaginativa-fantástica) su elección es clara. La literatura 113 fantástica representa una promesa” 97 (150). Like Bioy, Borges believes in the promise of the fantastic for three reasons that Brescia articulates: 1. La longevidad de la literatura fantástica. 98 2. La primacía de la ‘imaginación razonada’ en la literatura fantástica. 99 3. El cuestionamiento de la noción del ‘escapismo’ o ‘evasión’ o ‘falsedad’ de la literatura fantástica con respecto al mundo referencial en favor de un procedimiento que, definiéndose desde su autonomía, contempla una profundización de las complejidades y las ambiguedades del texto y del mundo. 100 (Brescia 150) There were numerous consequences with regard to fantastic writers’ emphases on the construction and craft of detective and adventure narratives, as well as their overt displays of reasoned imagination, the longevity of fantastic narratives over psychological narratives, and the capacity of literature to describe the world without ceasing to be an artificial object. Bioy, like Borges, looked to European models from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially detective stories and travel narratives, as forms that followed a clear logic and artificial constructions and conventions. Second, by emphasizing the autonomy of literature from actuality or reality, Bioy and Borges set their experiments in reasoned imagination not in the urban spaces of Buenos Aires, but in locations such as the Pampas or the island. 101 The space of the island, traditionally where                                                          97 “Facing the two kinds of literature that Borges understands are at odds with one another (the natural, or mimetic-psychological-realist, and the magical, or artificial-imaginative-fantastic), his selection is clear. Fantastic literature represents a promise.” [my translation] 98 “The longetivity of fantastic literature.” [my translation] 99 “The primacy of reasoned imagination in fantastic literature.” [my translation] 100 “The interrogation of the notion of ‘escapism’, or ‘evasion, or ‘falsehood’ of fantastic literature with respect to the referential world in favor of a procedure, that defining itself from its autonomy, contemplates a deepening of the complexities and ambiguities of the the text and the world.” [my translation] 101 Beatriz Sarlo refers to the Borgesian liminal space as “las orillas” (the shore). 114 colonialist European fantasies about the New World were formulated and projected, becomes a fantastic recuperative space in La invencion de Morel. B. European Influences and the Subversion of Center/Periphery Critics have observed that the island setting of Bioy’s text, as well as its mystery plot and first person diary narrative, has a variety of European literary precursors, most notably Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). Indeed, both Wells’ and Bioy’s novellas are indebted to Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe, one of the first travel-narrative novels in Western fiction. Yet the history of European colonialism that marks the relationship of Defoe (and Wells) as eighteenth- (and nineteenth-) century British writers with the “New World” 102 contrasts sharply with the twentieth-century relationship that Bioy, as a peripheral Argentine writer, has with Europe. This highlights two radically different perspectives and positionalities—center and periphery—that need to be properly contextualized. Roger Bozzeto’s comparison of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe with Bioy’s La invención de Morel is relevant because it emphasizes how national and temporal differences filter into the construction of Bioy’s and Defoe’s repective plots through very different objects of desire. Regarding Defoe’s male protagonist Robinson, Bozzeto writes: L’objet du désir, chez Robinson, est à situer du côté des choses et de l’avoir: cela se manifeste par la production et l’accumulation des biens matériels—et meme au delà du raisonnable, quand on voit les immenses provisions qu’il accumule. Robinson manifeste son pouvoir par le type de communication qu’il impose, avec                                                          102 The idea of the “New World” that Europe projected on America, as Carlos J. Alonso poses in The Burden of Modernity, “functioned as the central conceit of an ideological narrative that propelled the spread of empire into ever wider exploration and acquisition of territory and ever more intricate epistemological constructs with which to encompass it” (6). 115 son esclave ... Il interiorize de manière euphorique le modèle social privilégié par son époque 103 . (75) The object of desire of Bioy’s protagonist, the fugitive, is notably different, une illusion, et ne semble engager qu’une sensibilité personnelle—et singulière, fantasmique. Cette illusion se concretize dans le poursuite d’une femme morte… Le seul pouvoir du narrateur consiste dans le choix de sa propre transformation en simulacra, dans une situation de leurre” 104 . (75) The dramatic contrast between the objects of desire of Robinson and the fugitive determines the source of power, or loss, that each European and Latin American male protagonist respectively acquires. While the eighteenth-century Robinson rejoices in the power he acquires vis-à-vis his accumulation of material wealth facilitated by his colonizer status in the New World, Bioy’s fugitive becomes radically disempowered by the virtual nature of the island and its inhabitants. Unlike Robinson, as I will elaborate in this chapter, the fugitive can have no effect upon or establish any form of communication with, however asymmetrically, 105 the virtual entities that he finds on the island, including his beloved Faustine. The fugitive’s “choice” thus involves possibly transforming himself into one of these phantasmagoric images in order to get out of his position as voyeur and to become a part of the spectacle of Morel’s recording. For now, suffice it to say, Robinson’s colonizing and dominating impulses reflect Europe’s eighteenth-century                                                          103 “The object of desire, for Robinson, is situated on the side of things and on possession: it manifests itself by the production and the accumulation of property of material wealth—and beyond that of the reasonable, when one sees the immense provisions he accumulates. Robinson demonstrates his power by the type of communication which he imposes, with his slave.... He interiorizes in an ecstatic manner the social model privileged by his epoch.” (my translation) 104 “…an illusion, that seems to only engage a personal sensibility— and singular, phantasmic. This illusion becomes concrete in the chase of a dead woman …The only power of the narrator consists in the choice of his own transformation into a simulacra, in a situation of illusion.” [my translation] 105 Unlike Robinson, who has an asymmetrical relationship with the natives of the New World he encounters, whereby he imposes his language and his European view of the world, and models his slave after him. 116 modernizing dream of conquering nature and the New World through individual enterprise and scientific mastery. Accordingly, Bioy transforms the naturalistic setting of Defoe’s island into a space of an artificial reality in which nature, along with the rest of objects and subjects found in the material world, are supplanted by simulacra. The naturalistic European vision of the New World is thus replaced by an unlocatable and liminal island space populated by artificial beings. Bozzeto, after contrasting of the respective positions occupied by Robinson and the fugitive vis-à-vis their different desires, sums up these crucial differences: Robinson inaugure l’ère de la mainmise sur le monde et deviant ‘maître et possesseur de la nature’ sauvage de l’île. Ce faisant, il la rattache par son mode de travail à la ‘civilisation’ occidentale de l’époque. Par contre, si ‘le narrateur du texte Argentin maîtrise les outils de production des images il ne s’en sert que pour se dissoudre dans un monde virtuel. 106 (74) Bozzetto’s contrast makes clear that eighteenth-century Europe’s ideological portrayal of modernization, like the colonialization of the barbaric space of the New World, is dramatically altered in Bioy’s novella. In the twentieth century, a new kind of technological modernization has taken effect vis-à-vis the rise of mass media culture and the consumer imperative inaugurated by late capitalism. A second European influence, H.G Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, gives Bioy a central figure of late nineteenth-century science, the inventor Moreau, whom he                                                          106 “Robinson inaugurates the era of seizure of the world and the becoming of “master and possessor” of the primitive nature found in the island. In doing this, he reattaches the island to the work mode of the Occidental civilization of this epoch. By contrast, if the narrator of the Argentine text masters the tools of production of images, it is only to dissolve himself in a virtual world.” [My translation] 117 appropriates in La invención in order to construct his own inventor Morel. 107 Some key similarities between two characters highlight some of my key arguments. In The Island, the scientist Moreau plays God by conducting terrible surgical experiments on animals, without anesthesia, in an attempt to transform them into humans. For Suzanne J. Levine, H.G. Wells’ science fiction plot brings to life the late nineteenth-century European faith in science as the newfound hope that man would transcend his prior limitations. At the same time, The Island of Doctor Moreau is a moral fable of how this utopian hope can turn into a nightmare (85). As Levine writes: “Aunque Wells fue un hombre de ciencia, expresó sobre ésta las eternas dudas fáusticas respecto a sus monstruosas consequencias y fracasos, dudas que se hicieron más fuertes a medida que el siglo veinte avanzaba” 108 (85). Bioy shares Wells’ ostensible concerns with the failure of pure science to fulfill man’s dreams of becoming God. Inventor and “technological God” Morel creates a machine capable of capturing perfectly all the five senses a human body produces or “transmits.” Yet in the process of capturing these transmissions, Morel’s machine annihilates the bodies of the human transmitters. 109 The ethical and philosophical questions that natural science experiments provoked for Wells during his time have shifted into new questions for Bioy regarding emerging and powerful mass media                                                          107 Borges was the first to point out Bioy’s appropriation; in his “Prologue” he argues that by naming his inventor Morel, Bioy was paying homage to Well’s inventor Morau. Borges explictly states: “El titulo de Morel alude filialmente al otro inventor isleño, Moreau” (Bioy 15). 108 “Although Wells was a man of science, he expressed the eternal Faustian doubts in respect to the monstrous consequences and failures of science, doubts that became stronger as the century advanced.” [my translation] 109 As a historical footnote, Bioy, who worked on La invención from 1938 until its completion and publication in 1940, witnessed, as World War II began in Europe, the accuracy of Wells’ belief at the beginning of the twentieth century that technology could indeed have monstrously Faustian consequences. 118 technologies. Unlike Wells’ Moreau, the twentieth-century Morel is not interested in transforming animals into humans that he can control by enforcing a primitive religious Law, 110 nor with whether human beings are domesticated animals somehow interpellated by the ideologies of Christianity. Rather, Morel is interested in transforming himself, his human friends, and the woman he might love into immortal techno-aesthetic beings through a machine that can capture their souls and annihilate their unnecessary bodies. 111 Bioy’s emphasis on the metaphorical symbolism of the technology of cinema, illustrated by an inventor’s desire to preserve human beings in an artificial world after their death, carries the greatest significance for my concerns in this chapter. Bioy’s technological emphasis dramatically reconfigures modernity. That a reproduced feminine image (read cinematic image) seduces a male spectator into consuming and desiring “her” unto death complicates what is at stake for mid twentieth-century Latin American writers and their societies in new phases of media modernization. Bioy’s narrative appropriates Wells’ Moreau and illustrates a new form of colonization taking place at both a local and a global level. In the words of Geoffrey Kantaris, Bioy’s La invención illustrates a mediatic colonization in a twentieth-century context that serves as                                                          110 Levine writes “Dr. Moreau se propone acelerar la ley de la evolución de Darwin, cambiando mediante cirugía a los animales en hombres. Pero también procura convertirles en hombres haciendóles recitar la Ley, un canto de apariencia religiosa, basado en preceptos inventados por Moreau, que parodian los mandamientos de la Biblia” (84). 111 This argument is reinforced by Eduardo González, who reads Morel’s technological machine as the producer of definitive creatures that have become radically removed from their connection to life and reality and trapped in an embodied mechanical destiny. As he describes, the beings that appear on the island are not evanescent phantoms, but “… criaturas definitivas, en las que ya el destino—un destino mecánico para más irreparabilidad de la tragedia—no puede ser torcido por ninguna fuerza humana ni divina. [in definite creatures, in which destino, a mechanical destiny to make the tragedy more irreparable still, cannot be bent by either human or divine force. [My translation] (161). 119 an “allegory of globalization—and precursor of a new mode of telematic simulation” (178). Uses of Mass Media Technologies and their Discourses   A. Cinematic consumption as a Feminization of Male Desire As I argue in my second chapter, José Asunción Silva’s modernista novel De sobremesa was the first fin-de-siècle novel to illustrate the effeminization of Latin American male desire through a first person diary narrative that depicts the masculine consumption of key feminine products of modernity. 112 Silva’s illustration of the rise of an increasingly feminizing world of consumption in the late nineteenth century, vis-à-vis phantamagoric luxuries, courtesans, and the photographic and lithographic reproductions of Helena’s image, becomes a central theme in La invención de Morel. Yet an important distinction to make is that in Bioy’s mid-twentieth-century Argentine novella, the luring feminine product of modernity embodied by Faustine, and the scientific and philosophical discourses that contextualize and describe the experience of this paradoxical and lethal feminine modernity, have changed. Silva’s metaphorical use of the emerging late nineteenth-century reproducible technologies of art (photography and lithography) to illustrate how Helena’s image is transformed into reproducible and proliferating aesthetic copies, is updated by Bioy. In La invención, Bioy turns his attention to the next generation of mass media’s reproducible technologies, in particular the technology of cinema, to illustrate the new technological effeminizing power of modernity.                                                          112 As I analyzed in chapter 2 in De sobremesa Silva’s male protagonist, José Fernández, encounters the phantasmagoric world of fin-de-siècle consumption as well as the simulacrum Helena, an aesthetic entity that he can never fully consume or fully approximate, but continuously desires, in the European metropolises. 120 There is an important precedent for Bioy’s choice of using the technology of cinema and moving images as a models for the feminine image of Faustine and the rest of the visitors that populate the island. As Beatriz Sarlo observes in Una modernidad periférica, in Buenos Aires el cine se difundió a un ritmo comparable con el de los paises centrales: hacia 1930 existen en todo el país más de mil salas y, según la revista Señales, pocos años después de introducido el sonoro, se abren 600 salas preparadas para esta nueva técnica 113 (21). Cinema in Bioy’s La invención is a ready metaphor that illustrates the experience and arrival of new technological mass media in the “peripheral” city of a 1930s Buenos Aires. The ability of cinema to transform twentieth-century Argentine literatos 114 like Bioy and the rest of the spectatorial masses into effeminized consumers of films (populated by beautiful and phantasmatic images of actresses), along with the nuances that such effeminization provokes for a male Argentine writer, is the central experience of modernity that Bioy narrates in La invención de Morel. 115                                                          113 “…the cinema spread at a pace comparable to that of centralized countries: toward 1930 there are already more than a thousand cinema viewing rooms, and according to the magazine Señales, a few years after sound is introduced to film, 600 rooms equipped with this new technology open.” [My translation] 114 Angel Rama’s term in La ciudad letrada for twentieth-century professionalized writers. 115 Edmundo Paz Soldán’s has argued that for writers like Bioy, among other Latin American writers who became interested in cinema during the 1920’s and 30’s, (e.g Horacio Quiroga, Vicente Huidobro, Augusto Cespedes, and Roberto Arlt) the new aesthetic medium registers a substantial impact: “tanto en cierta temática elegida en que la imagen cinematográfica se mostraba como una de las características más notables que tomaba la experiencia de la modernidad—con el cambio social y el cuestionamiento de la subjetividad—como con el mismo nivel formal de sus textos que entran en diálogo con las nuevas tecnologías, las apropia y a la vez, se muestra influido por ellas.” [“as much as in the theme chosen, in which the cinematic image is shown to be one of the most notable characteristics that the experience of modernity has taken—on par with the social change and questioning of subjectivity—as with the same formal level in which their texts come into dialogue with the new technologies, appropriate them and at the same time, demonstrates their influence by them.”] (my translation) (759) [My emphasis] Paz Soldán’s description helps contextualize the complex role the feminine entity Faustine plays in La invención de Morel. Furthermore, Paz Soldán’s latter observation of the dialogic relation—of appropriation and influence—that exists between the new technology of cinema and Bioy’s narrative is a very acute observation. 121 B. Bioy Casares’ youthful love for Louise Brooks I would like to consider Bioy’s personal relationship with the cinema. In his autobiography Memorias (1994), he writes that as a young avid cinemagoer he fell in love with some of Hollywood’s beautiful silent movie stars of the 1920s. The constellation of Hollywood stars that caught his attention included Marie Prévost, Dorothy Mackay, Marion Davis, Evelyn Brent, and Anna May Wong, but the star that captured his heart was Louise Brooks. According to Bioy’s auto-chronology, recollected by Suzanne J. Levine in Guía de Bioy, his enigmatic love for Brooks began in 1927 when he was thirteen years old. 116 Bioy emphatically yet ambivalently asserts that his love for Louise Brooks “fue el más vivo, el más desdichado” 117 (Levine 41). His candid admission that the desire triggered by Brooks’ image makes him “suffer” is an intriguing testimony to the effects and affects produced by such new images. However, Bioy’s attraction to Brooks’ image diminished after seeing her in the role of Lulu in G.W. Pabst’s avant-garde silent film Die Büchse der Pandora (1929). 118 Pabst’s avant-garde film broke the spell of Brooks’ Hollywood image and altered the way                                                          116 Writes Bioy: “En películas que veo en los cines de Buenos Aires y de Mar de Plata me enamoro de la actriz Louise Brooks” [In the movies I saw in the theatres of Buenos Aires and Mar de Plata, I fell in love with the actress Louise Brooks] (My translation) (Levine 167). 117 “was the most alive, the most wretched.” [My translation] 118 The following translated conversation between the journalist and filmmaker Sergio Wolf and Bioy, conducted in July 1995 for the Argentine magazine Film, makes explicit Bioy’s changed feelings of Brooks’ image as a result of Pabst’s film: Wolf: You said that the inspiration for La invención de Morel came to you, at least partially, from the vanishing of Louise Brooks from the movies. What happened with you and Louise Brooks? Bioy: I was deeply in love with her. I didn’t have any luck, because she disappeared quickly. She went to Europe, she made a film with Pabst, and then I didn’t like her so much as when she was in Hollywood. And then, she vanished too early from the movies. Wolf: Could she be seen as one of the characters in La invención de Morel? Bioy: Yes, she would be Faustine. 122 in which Bioy experienced and “consumed” her. I attribute this change to the fact that in Die Büchse, Pabst wastes no time confronting male spectators (including Bioy) with a highly unflattering double: a fumbling meter-man who sexually desires Brooks/Lulu from the moment she appears on screen, and foolishly believes he stands a chance when Lulu opens the door to her apartment to invite him in, and gives him her rapturous attention as she offers him a drink. In the next instant the tramp Shighloch, Lulu’s presumed father, appears, and her attention shifts to him. A second later, in a rapidly cut sequence, the meter-man is literally shut out when Lulu takes her father into the living room and closes the door. The meter man looks angry and disappointed as he picks up the coins he dropped in his attempt to get the tramp to go away, a sequence that for Thomas Elsaesser’s is a parody of the petit-bourgeois Weimar spectator who falls for the fantasy sold by the cinema: the idea that, for the price of an entrance ticket, he can be the man the film actress desires. Pabst’s rapid-shooting technique complements the deflated mirror image that he offers to the spectator in this opening scene, making the shock even more powerful. His manipulation of Brooks’ image, along with the fast-cutting editing found in the meter-man’s opening scene, serve to reveal and intensify the way in which the cinema can powerfully function to amplify the spectator’s fascination with Lulu’s image, even as the spectator is simultaneously being shown how he is being manipulated. The adolescent Bioy, like the majority of Argentine and international spectators who disliked Die Büchse der Pandora when it was first released, might have registered to some conscious degree the critique Pabst was making from this very opening scene about how bourgeois male spectatorial forms of pleasure produced by Hollywood can dupe and inflate the male ego in order to economically exploit his wallet. Bioy’s biting comments 123 about French cinephiles who rediscovered Brooks through Die Büchse many years later 119 can be attributed to Pabst’s exposure of the male spectator as the dupe who falls for the fantasy produced by technology of the cinematic machine in the hands of the Hollywood studio and the cinema director. It should be noted that it is only after Brooks’ disappearance from cinema, and thus from Bioy’s consuming sight, that she becomes the source of inspiration for the writing of La invención. She never disappears completely from Bioy’s memory. Rather, Bioy’s memory of what Brooks’ image once provoked in him, through his spectatorial consumption, is represented in La invención de Morel by the fugitive’s relationship to the image of Faustine and the rest of the island visitors that take part in Morel’s week long “film.” Simply put, the fugitive gradually falls in love with Faustine by repeatedly looking at her image from a distance. The spectatorial relationship that Bioy once had with the cinematic image of Brooks, is described by the author as his impossible and unrequited love. His consumption of her image from his theater seat is a condition mirrored by the voyeuristic position of the male fugitive in relation to Faustine. Bioy’s representation in La invención de Morel of the enigma involving his relation to Brooks’ cinematic image has many labyrinth connotations that are captured by Héctor Mario Cavallari’s expansive definition of the term representation in “La tramoya de la escritura en La invención de Morel, by Bioy Casares”:                                                          119 In Descanso de Caminantes Bioy ridicules the pedantes (snobs) from Cahiers du Cinéma who rediscovered Brooks in the nineteen-fifties and claimed her as the lost modern silent icon of the nineteen- thirties. Henri Langlois, head of the Cinémathèque Française, proclaimed in 1955: “There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks!” Bioy reasserts his rights of possession over Brooks by asserting in Descanso de Caminantes that when he was in love with her, from his cinema seat, around 1923 or 1930, no one shared his admiration (229). With this comment, Bioy persists in implying that he was the first and only spectator who truly loved Brooks when she first appeared, before any of these snobs “rediscovered her” and she became the object of both their elitist fascination and praise. 124 De modo abstracto, ‘representación’ denota y connota re-presentación, presentación repetida o re-creada, repetición de una presencia original ausente; pero además, en sentido de actividad teatral o performativa, dramatización, imitación, (‘réplica’) de un original (‘genuino’), aparentación o práctica engañosa (consentida o no), actividad artificiosa (que pone en juego un ‘arte’) y sustitutiva (‘irreal’). Y también—teniendo en cuenta el factor temporal—recreación de lo ya transcurrido, volver a hacer presente un momento pasado, ‘re-memoración, recuerdo (es decir, lo que funciona como fijación, grabación y archivo). 120 (97-8) The narrative re-presentation of Brooks as Faustine found in La invención therefore folds within itself the mystery of what Brooks’ cinematic image did to activate Bioy’s spectatorial desire. The ways in which the fugitive experiences and desires Faustine illuminates Bioy’s own cinematic spectatorial experiences and consumption of Brooks’ image. C. Cinematic and Technological Discourses in La invención de Morel After his first encounter with the mysterious feminine entity on a deserted island, the fugitive develops an increasingly addictive desire to visually consume her. Through this voyeuristic act, his desire to approximate and be joined with the entity he comes to know as Faustine is triggered. The holographic image of Faustine contextualizes the uncanny experience the fugitive has in desiring a techno-aesthetic perceptual copy of a no longer living woman. 121 Faustine, a three-dimensional image that “looks, sounds, tastes, smells, and feels” like the original, is a simulacrum that takes the place of the body consumed by                                                          120 “In an abstract mode, representation denotes and connotes re-presentation, repeated or re-created presentation, repetition of an original presence that is absent; but in addition—in the sense of theatrical or performative activity—dramatization, imitation (‘replica’) of an original (‘genuine’), the appearance of or a deceitful practice (consented or not), activity of artifice (that puts ‘art’ into play) and substitution (‘unreal’). And also, keeping in mind the temporal factor, re-creation of what has already taken place, to make a past moment once again present, re-memorization, memory (that is to say, what functions as fixation, recording, and archive).” [My translation] 121 The technologically reproduced lithographic and photographic copies of Helena found in De sobremesa serve a similar function. 125 Morel’s machine. 122 As Geoffrey Kantaris observes, the living bodies that Morel’s machine records begin to “crumble, consumed, literally, by the image, until the original dies, leaving only the holographic projection to repeat for eternity” 123 (179). Bioy’s technological simulacrum introduces to the reader a new twentieth-century feminine techno-aesthetic product that imaginatively blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy to a point in which they become virtually indistinguishable for the fugitive. The deserted island populated by simulacral images produces an uncanny effect on the perception of the fugitive, who voyeuristically observes these images as well. His contemplation of Faustine and the visitors turns his perception against him. Rather than enabling him to tell an actual person apart from the same artificially replicated emissions of that person, the fugitive’s senses, in particular his vision, contribute to his inability to “see” that Faustine is a simulacral projection In La invención de Morel Bioy appropriates the “technical” language used to describe the way the cinematic apparatus and other new mass communications media inventions work, in order to describe the metaphysical cinematic machine that Morel creates in the island. 124 Morel’s technical language is inserted into the fugitive’s diary                                                          122 I describe this altar as fetishistic because, in addition to having Helena’s reproduced painting as the centerpiece this room also contains the objects, i.e., the brooch and bouquet of roses that Helena leaves behind for Fernández on their singular encounter. 123 Kantaris also observes that this vision of simulation consuming the real is a remarkably prescient allegory for an affect that only began to make itself felt fully from the 1960s and which Jean Baudrillard analyses some 40 years after La invencion de Morel is published. Baudrillard calls the rise of the simulacrum “the ‘liquidation of all referentials’ in the age of simulation” in which it is now the real “whose shreds slowly rot away beneath our simulations, the real ‘whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of Empire, but our own.’ The desert of the real itself.”(qtd. in Kantaris179-80) 124 As I have discussed in chapter 2, Silva appropriates the scientific discourse of the time in a similar way in his novel De sobremesa, opening up this strategy as a possibility for Bioy and his Latin American avant- garde contemporaries. 126 narrative through its transformation into a written testimony, or informe (an official report) of the events that occur in the island. In turning his diary into a report, the fugitive records the speech that he witnesses Morel giving to his guests, in which the inventor tries to explain the technical development of his invention. Not surprisingly in this speech to his friends on the island, Morel references actual mass technologies of the twentieth-century that he claims that have helped him develop his invention: television, cinema, photography, the radio, the phonograph, and the telephone. Yet Morel’s scientific rhetoric is tinged by an epicurean materialism in which he likens these technologies as food for the senses. “¿Cuál es la función de la radiotelefonía? Suprimir, en cuanto al oído, una ausencia espacial? 125 … En cuanto a la vista: la televisión, el cinematógrafo, la fotografía; en cuanto al oído: la radiotelefonía, el fonógrafo, el teléfono” 126 (Bioy 57). The senses are thus transformed into sensuous organs fed by different kinds of technological as well as luxury products of modernity. Morel’s conclusion is that until his invention, “La ciencia … se había limitado a contrarrestar, para el oído y la vista, ausencias espaciales y temporales” 127 (Bioy 57). His machine, conversely, surpasses mass technologies by being able to completely copy all the sensory transmissions a person, animal, or thing emits. These include olfactory, tactile, and gustatory emissions, as well as visual and auditory ones. The transmission of an object’s complete sensory data to the antenna that is Morel’s machine, and the                                                          125 “What is the purpose of the radio? To supply food, as it were, for the sense of hearing.” (Bioy 2003, 68) 126 “‘For sight: television, motion pictures, photography.’ ‘For hearing: radio, the phonograph, the telephone’” (Bioy 2003, 68) 127 “science had been able to satisfy only the senses of sight and hearing, to compensate for spatial and temporal absences” (Bioy 2003, 69). 127 machine’s projection of these transmissions into a different plane of virtual reality, is the core and quasi-magical procedure of Morel’s invention. As he posits: Una persona o un animal o una cosa, es, ante mis aparatos, como la estación que emite el concierto que ustedes oyen en la radio. Si abren el receptor de ondas olfativas, sentirán el perfume de las diamelas que hay en el pecho de Madeleine, sin verla. Abriendo el sector de ondas táctiles, podrán acariciar su cabellera, suave e invisible, y aprender, como ciegos, a conocer las cosas con las manos. Pero si abren todo el juego de receptores, parece Madeleine, completa, reproducida, idéntica. 128 (Bioy 58-59) Through Morel’s explanation, Bioy is able to inject into La invención a new twentieth- century technological discourse, which has, as Kantaris observes in “Holograms and Simulacra,” swallowed up scientific discourse. For Kantaris, La invención traces the movement from “science as investigation of the real—as empirical discovery—to science as one of the primary discourses by which the real, the reality effect, is now produced, simulated, replicated” (175). On par with the technologization of science that Kantaris points out is one of the biggest changes of the twentieth-century underscored by Bioy’s novella, Edmundo Paz Soldán points out that Bioy’s novella is very conscious of how “la escritura narrativa fue desplazada de su lugar central en la fábrica cultural de una sociedad, y fue forzada a competir con tecnologías más avanzadas de inscripción, como el gramófono y el cine” 129 (765). Soldán further suggests that one of the biggest questions posed and answered by Bioy’s La invención is: ¿Hay lugar para la tecnología                                                          128 With my machine a person or an animal or a thing is like the station that broadcasts the concert you hear on the radio. If you turn the dial for the olfactory waves, you will smell the jasmine perfume on Madeleine’s throat without seeing her. By turning the dial of the tactile waves, you will be able to stroke her soft, invisible hair and learn, like the blind, to know things by your hands. But if you turn all the dials at once, Madeleine will be reproduced completely, and she will appear exactly as she is.” (Bioy 2003, 70) 129 “narrative writing was displaced from its central place in the cultural fabric of society, and forced to compete with more advanced technologies of inscription, like the gramophone and cinema.” (My translation) 128 escritural en la nueva ecología? (Is there are space for the technology of writing in the new ecology?) The answer to this question is found in the nuanced way in which Bioy appropriates and subverts technological ideals in La invención de Morel’s narrative, demonstrating how Morel’s machine falls short of his metaphysical and sentimental goals by the introjection of the fugitive’s opinion. As a secondary consumer of Morel’s technology, the fugitive’s experience gauges to what degree Morel effectively succeeds in his plan to both capture the human spirit and preserve it in an immortal paradise. As the fugitive observes, Morel’s metaphysical goals become clearer to him after he witnesses the technical explanation given by Morel to his friends. Morel’s explanation that mass media technologies, like cinema, have influenced the creation of his own invention, reveals the quasi-magical capacity of his invention to project olfactory sensations with relative facility, without screens or paper since the projections can be received through space—a technology that, like the remote transmission of television, can synchronize all the senses. Morel’s discourse enhances the seemingly magical and metaphysical power of mass technologies. The mystification and unreality of Morel’s machine and its projected images are heightened by his technical speech and explanation rather than undermined by it. Bioy, through Morel’s technical explanation, brings to light the magical and fantastic—rather than realistic—nature of an inventor’s desire to capture and transmit the physical and sensory reality of an actual person into a private and impenetrable virtual reality that is projected onto the island. If successful, such an invention can artificially preserve the intangible human spirit and freeze it in a continuous repetition of the week 129 during which it was recorded. Morel explicitly refuses to look at the copies of physical entities his machine produces merely as simulacra. Instead, his machine’s capacity to collect all human senses convinces the inventor, who very much embodies the ideals of an epicurean materialist, that the souls of all his guests have also been captured. According to his logic, the human spirit is given a distinctly material nature and equated to the sum of all human senses. Countering the belief in the immaterial soul, Morel firmly contends that adding all the senses of perception is what constitutes a complete human being of body and soul. D. Aura, the Body, and Aesthetic Critique Morel’s refusal to accept his own and his visitors’ reproduced sensory bodies as merely remaining transmitted signals of annihilated bodies has to do with Morel’s desire to preserve what can best be described as “aura.” What he describes as the visitors’ captured spirits found in the virtual “film” can be likened to uniqueness that the visitors emit, a singularity on a par with the sensory messages that materially define them. We witness Morel’s desire to transform himself and his visitors into aesthetic projections that emit aura in the structure serving as hotel for his guests as well as housing the machine: the museum. Evoking the traditional site where auratic works of art are displayed for visitors’ contemplation, Morel fills his museum with Picassos, Foujita drawings, and ancient Indian statues. Arguably all these works from different parts of the world, treasures of Eastern and Western art, possess a strong aura. Yet putting them all together in one space makes the fugitive’s experience of them desagradable (unpleasant) due to the juxtaposition of both modern and antique art in the same space. 130 Morel’s simulacral Faustine, in contrast, who moves in and out of the museum, and is ontologically reconstituted as a technologically produced feminine aesthetic artwork acquired from the senses of a human model herself, rapturously captures the fugitive’s desire, attention, and contemplation. The fugitive tries to communicate with Faustine. But after many attempts in which he receives no reaction from her, he observes “No fue como si no me hubiera oído, como si no me hubiera visto; fue como si los oídos que tenía no sirvieran para oír, como si los ojos no sirvieran para ver” 130 (Bioy 18-19). Faustine’s active but non-communicative gaze makes the fugitive both paranoid and bold in approximating all the visitors. Later on, when one of Morel’s staff fails to acknowledge him, the fugitive suspects that the reason for the man’s self- controlled focus is an attempt to resist the urge to look back at him. This happens when the fugitive, watching the visitors in hiding, is suddenly discovered by a servant. As the fugitive states, “esta lamentable ocupación desapareció completamente, fue sustituida por el horror que me dejaron la cara roja y los ojos muy rendondos de un sirviente que estuvo mirándome y entro en el hall” (Bioy 2003, 37). The fugitive’s voyeuristic spying is thus turned into the simultaneous shock of discovery, met with a complete lack of recognition, or reaction, from any of the visitors. The vacant gazes of the visitors who look through him, are experienced again when the fugitive, hiding in one of the guest rooms, is discovered by Dora. He notes that “Sus ojos pasaron por mí. Se fue, sin intentar apagar la luz” (Bioy 2003, 38). After Dora leaves, the fugitive “Quede con miedo casi convulsivo” (Lispector 2003, 38). The uncanny way in which the visitors’ gaze is imbued with a                                                          130 “It was not as if she had not heard me, as if she had not seen me; rather it seemed that her ears were used for hearing, that her eyes could not see” (Bioy 2003, 28). 131 mysterious source of life and power, which can look through people, is increasingly unnerving to him. I would define this gaze as auratic. The visitors’ gazes approximate, as Wendy Ryden argues, a “schizoid sense of an observer of a photograph; a sense of estrangement from the self; an uncanny sense of the fictive status of the autonomous object and its agency” (198-9). Not surprisingly, according to Ryden, Walter Benjamin’s remarks about film actors allude to this felt sense of the deconstructed subject. “In his discussion about the difference between stage actors and film actors he writes that ‘the audience’s identification with the (film) actor is really an identification with the camera’” (199). As Ryden also observes, the fugitive’s observations that Morel’s act is something sublime suggests “that Faustine is being (re)created as a work of art through Morel’s lens” (197). What happens to Faustine’s aura then, as Ryden asserts, is complicated. She asks: “Does Morel’s machine destroy the aura of its natural object by reproducing it, or does it preserve, enhance, even create the aura that surrounds the work of art known as Faustine?” (197). My answer is that Bioy definitely attributes an aura to the visitors through Morel’s machine and that there are significant consequences for how this aura functions in the narrative. Bioy’s insistence on the auratic power of the visitors and of Faustine undermines Benjamin’s claim in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” that aura is destroyed through mechanical technologies of reproduction. As Lutz Koepnick claims, it is possible to argue that “residues of the auratic experience may also enter into postauratic film practice” (105). One possible continuation, as Koepnick posits, is found through alternative cinema practices which can provide an 132 “unsettling counterpoint to dominant film practices” and also “provide an antidote to the very kind of instrumental rationality and temporal fragmentation Benjamin’s [sic] endorses all too quickly and homogeneously as the signatures of modern life” (Koepnick 105). This cinema, as Koepnick defines it, is “a cinema that returns the gaze” (105). Although Morel’s machine can reproduce a perfect material replica of Faustine, the narrator’s first encounter with her is limited to the visual. Shortly after he witnesses the sudden and miraculous arrival of the visitors, the fugitive observes her sitting alone on top of a rocky cliff reading a book. The first recorded description of Faustine in his diary is as follows: En las rocas hay una mujer mirando las puestas de sol, todas las tardes. Tiene un pañuelo de colores atado en la cabeza; las manos juntas, sobre una rodilla; soles prenatales han de haber dorado su piel; por los ojos, el pelo negro, el busto, parece una de esas bohemias o españolas de los cuadros más detestables. 131 (Bioy 11) In this initial description, the narrator makes an aesthetic assessment of the unknown mystery woman, a critique enabled by his hidden position as voyeuristic spectator. It is as a far-removed viewer that the narrator assumes the right to make a negative aesthetic judgment of Faustine. 132 Although the fugitive perceives Faustine as an actual woman, he still reduces her to an aesthetic object that he feels completely entitled to critique.                                                          131 “One of these people, a woman, sits on the rocks to watch the sunset every afternoon. She wears a bright scarf over her dark curls; she sits with her hands clasped on one knee; her skin is burnished by prenatal suns; her eyes, her black hair, her bosom make her look like one of the Spanish or gypsy girls in those paintings I detest.” (Bioy 2003, 19-20) 132 Significantly, the fugitive’s initial negative assessment of Faustine’s appearance echoes Bioy’s description of the Buenos Aires spectators’ ambivalent comments about Brooks being an insufficiently attractive actress. Like Bioy’s co-spectators—the narrator’s initial visual discovery of the faraway feminine image of Faustine (Brooks) from a voyeuristic distance by the fugitive—duplicates the conditions of cinema spectatorship and initially provokes his aesthetic judgment of her beauty, which he categorizes as an unsophisticated, vulgar feminine image. 133 E. The Social and the Simulacral After this initial encounter with Faustine, the fugitive’s feelings progressively change. His first aesthetic rejection of the mysterious woman begins to unravel, and his attraction grows: Mira los atardeceres todas las tardes; yo, escondido, estoy mirándola. Ayer, hoy de nuevo, descubrí que mis noches y días esperan esa hora. La mujer, con la sensualidad de cíngara y con el pañuelo de colores demasiado grande, me parece ridícula. Sin embargo siento, quizás un poco en broma, que si pudiera ser mirado un instante, hablado un instante por ella, afluiría juntamente el socorro que tiene el hombre en los amigos, en las novias y en los que están en su misma sangre. 133 (Bioy 11) Though the narrator still describes Faustine as “a ridiculous figure,” he begins to harvest the hope that this strange feminine intruder could provide the same emotional comfort and reassurance he has received in the past from people he has loved. He continues to hide from Faustine, with a heightening attraction as he watches her. Eventually, his need to see her becomes a psychic necessity like to the act of eating, an instinctual act necessary for his body’s survival. Indeed, the fugitive’s most common activities on the island involve the scavenging and eating of food, experimenting with edible roots, and the voyeuristic consumption of Faustine’s image. Faustine’s image appears to feed the more subtle psychic and emotional needs tied to the fugitive’s prolonged isolation from the social world. He writes about an internal struggle that Margaret L. Snook describes as metaphorical rendition of “the                                                          133 “She watches the sunset every afternoon, from my hiding place I watch her. Yesterday, and again today. I discovered that my nights and days wait for this hour. The woman, with a gypsy’s sensuality and a large, bright colored scarf on her head is a ridiculous figure. But I still feel (perhaps I only half believe this) that if she looked at me for a moment, spoke to me only once, I would derive from those simple acts the sort of stimulus a man obtains from friends, from relatives, and most of all, from the woman he loves.” (Bioy 2003, 20) 134 subject’s struggle…for independent selfhood” (109). In his next entry about Faustine, the fugitive writes about his internal emotional battle: Me dije que todo era vulgar: el tipo bohemio de la mujer y mi enamoramiento propio de solitario acumulado. Volví dos tardes más: la mujer estaba; empecé a encontrar que lo único milagroso era esto; después vinieron los días aciagos de los pescadores, que no la vi, del barbudo. 134 (Bioy 16) The narrator attempts to consciously resist his love for Faustine, and reasons that such a love is the product of a recluse who has been away from civilization too long, a consequence of the fugitive’s flight to the mysterious island. He implies that his attraction to a woman whom he finds “ridiculous” would not have occurred in the city of Caracas, where he was an anonymous citizen among millions, occupying himself with literary groups and experiments. Yet despite his realization that his former urban life once legitimized his identity and allowed him such creative and professional pursuits, after becoming a recluse on Morel’s island this is all lost, along with his secure grasp on reality. The possibility of resuming his past experiments on the island is compromised by Morel’s purely literary library, and his communal collaboration of producing journals is further curtailed. His time is now split between his foraging for food, his writing of the diary, and his increasing compulsion to watch Faustine—a passive and contemplative activity which threatens continuously to offset his other two activities. Eventually, a force stronger than his own reason, a force connected to his unconscious desire, trumps his objections regarding Faustine’s unworthiness. In the next entry, the fugitive reports that his voyeuristic consumption of her image, as well as his                                                          134 “I told myself that this was vulgar; like any recluse who had been alone too long, I was falling in love with a woman who was nothing but a gypsy. I went back to see her the next afternoon, and the next. She was there, and her presence began to take on the quality of a miracle. After that came the awful days when I did not see her because the fishermen and the bearded man were there.” (Bioy 2003, 25) 135 obsessive preoccupation with what Faustine is doing when he is not around, has driven him to attempt to approach her. This decision leads to the fugitive’s utter humiliation. What the narrator emphasizes about his failed attempt is the mounting hysteria that Faustine’s nonresponsiveness produces in him: Le hablé con una voz mesurada y baja, con una compostura que sugería obscenidades. Caí, de nuevo, en señorita. Renuncié a las palabras y me puse a mirar el poniente …Volví a hablar. El esfuerzo que hacía para dominarme bajaba la voz, aumentaba la obcenidad del tono. Pasaron otros minutos de silencio. Insistí, imploré de un modo repulsivo. Al final estuve excepcionalmente ridículo, trémulo, casi a gritos, le pedí que me insultara, que me delatara, pero que no siguiera en silencio. 135 (Bioy 18) In the narrator’s increasingly hysterical attempt to speak to Faustine, we find an intensely desperate attempt at making a connection with a female other that proves to be one-sided and ultimately futile. On one level, through Faustine’s non-responsiveness to the narrator’s hysterical pleas for her to say something, this scene could be read as a parody of heterosexual relations and the futility of communication between genders. More accurately, though, by virtue of her “refusal to acknowledge the fugitive,” Faustine denies the fugitive’s presence and his existence. As Snook posits, it is the loneliness of the deserted island that increasingly drives the fugitive to seek a union with Faustine, which negates his “own boundaries and those of Faustine’s feminine image” (114). Nevertheless, the fugitive’s first hysterical attempt to speak to Faustine, in seeking to break the voyeuristic pleasure he enjoys as he watches Faustine without her                                                          135 “I spoke in a slow, subdued voice with composure that suggested impropriety. I repeated the words, ‘young lady.’ I stopped talking altogether and began to look at the sunset…I spoke again. The effort I was making to control myself pitched my voice even lower, and increased the indecency of my tone. After several moments of silence, I insisted, I implored, in what was surely a repulsive manner. And finally I became ridiculous. Trembling, almost shouting, I begged her to insult me, to inform against me even, if only she would break the terrible silence” (Bioy 2003, 28). 136 knowledge, demonstrates an attempt by the fugitive to seek a dialogue with Faustine that places them on equal enunciative fields. Unfortunately, the possibility of Faustine’s enunciation has already been foreclosed by Morel’s machine. Her docile body, through its technologization, has thus been transformed into a powerful and potentially lethal spectacle. Faustine’s subjectivity has thus been annihilated by Morel’s machine. Morel’s film subsequently gives Faustine the new role of beautiful feminine image that can seduce any male spectator into the consumptive act of watching and then desiring her simulacrum. 136 The fugitive’s diary entries and multiple attempts to resist the seductive power of her image allege that he will be unable to escape his love for Faustine. Even if at first he qualifies her as “ridiculous,” his power to judge Faustine and her actions as common and distasteful cannot permanently hold off the seductive power of her image. The gravity of her simulacral image decimates the contemplative distance that had allowed him to critique her aesthetically. Once the distance between the fugitive and Faustine’s image is reduced, however, the power of her image begins to sadistically assert itself, and leads him to humiliate himself in different ways in order to elicit a response from her. His love for the feminine simulacrum condemns him to the torment of believing that he is in love with a “cruel” woman who intentionally refuses to acknowledge his presence, or who toys with him by bringing along another man, Morel, to humiliate him further.                                                          136 The fact that the “intruders,” as Cavallari argues, no longer exist within this new time-space as cosmic beings with souls, but rather as material beings without souls that occupy a space leads to Cavallari’s conclusion that the “intruders” are not fantasms (souls without bodies) but zombies (bodies without souls) (100). 137 F. The Figure of the Femme Fatale The fatal allure Faustine produces in the fugitive is at least partly defined as the reality effect her transformation by Morel’s machine from a real woman into a beautiful simulacral image has to trap the fugitive’s masculine desire. This additional transformative effect that Morel’s machine has on the Faustine’s image thus gives her the fatal allure that captures the fugitive’s desire and slowly lures him to his technological death. 137 As a technological feminine creature cut off from nature, Faustine occupies a new liminal state in between life and death. Yet as the simulacral invention by a male scientist that meant to replace the original biological woman whom she replicates, she becomes extremely alluring and deathly for the male protagonist who falls in love with her, since the promise of love that “she” offers is an optical illusion. Ultimately, then, her new femininity, after her body is technologized, becomes dangerous for the male spectator, because the only way to for him to connect with her feminine image is to join her in an ambiguous timelessness only acquired through disembodiment. Taking this idea further, the literary allusion Faustine’s name evokes, that of Goethe’s Faust, provides us with another way in which the machine of cinema is equated with the power of the femme fatale. Goethe’s Faust is a melancholic scientist and philosopher whose pursuit of divine knowledge causes him despair, due to his inability to cross the limitations of mortal knowledge. This drives him to sell his soul to the devil                                                          137 As a fatal technological feminine invention created by a megalomaniac inventor and his machine, Faustine resembles two other fantastic feminine cinematic and literary inventions: the feminine robotrix Maria in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis and the feminine android Hadaly in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s novel L’Eve Future. All three of these texts rewrite the myth of origins found in Genesis, replacing God with the male inventors Morel, Rotwang and Edison, respectively and reinventing God’s biological woman (the companion and mother of mankind) with a new technological woman cut off from her biological body and therefore from nature, and her ability to produce life biologically. 138 Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles promises Faust immortality, for him to see and experience all of the mysteries of the world and satisfy all of his desires—until Faust experiences something that makes him want to stay in that particular moment forever, and thus die in that particular instant. Faustine embodies both Faust’s quest and Mephistopheles’ deceitful promise of freezing Faust’s life in an instant of perfect bliss that he can experience eternally. The ambiguous promise that Faustine offers to the fugitive/spectator, as the feminine lure to the artificial “eternal” recording constructed by Morel, at first occludes her role as victim and as unconscious, and thereby innocent, seductress of spectatorial masculine desire. Morel never gives her the choice of whether she would like to be filmed by his machine. As a simulacrum, Faustine is condemned to repeat her actions for the duration of the entire week. Her simulacral image thus acts like a femme fatale without intrinsic will or malice who leads the fugitive to masochistically surrender his body to Morel’s machine. Here the connection between Faustine of La invención and the femme fatale Lulu, played by the actress Louise Brooks in Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora, is helpful. In “Lulu and the Meter Man,” Thomas Elsaesser argues against a reading of Pabst’s Lulu as a traditional femme fatale, countering that the intentionally destructive will of the femme fatale Lulu is only present in Frank Wedekind’s original dramas cycles Der Erdgeist (1895) and Die Büchse der Pandora (1904). 138 Elsaesser reads Pabst’s cinematic reinterpretation of Lulu as “a childlike creature … [whose] attraction resides in the incorruptibility, the lack of guile, menace, and calculation, the simple pleasures she                                                          138 Pabst’s film was a synthesized adaptation of both of Wedekind’s plays. 139 enjoys, among which are sex, but which could be the bulging biceps of a trapeze artist” 139 (42). Elsaesser’s differentiation between Wedekind’s femme fatale Lulu and Pabst’s “childlike” Lulu indicates that while the former is an intentionally destructive force, the latter is not driven by intrinsically evil intentions to harm others. Instead, the “childlike innocence” of Pabst’s Lulu, as Elsaesser defines it, is a figure that displays polymorphous desire. As a prostitute, Lulu is as indiscriminating in choosing her clients as she is in experiencing pleasure, making herself accessible to everyone. 140 Her promiscuity, however, angers the protagonists who desire to have exclusive possession of her affections. 141 The inability to possess Lulu’s desire, even if they can possess her sexually, creates feelings of jealousy in all of her “lovers,” and simultaneously increases their desire for her. Elsaesser emphasizes this, explaining that “Lulu is desirable whenever her appearance is caught in the crossfire of someone else desiring her as well, and her sexual attractiveness always stands in relation to someone else experiencing a crisis in their own sexual identity” (45) . Returning to Bioy’s infatuation with Brooks, what the author describes as his embalasamiento, wholly centered on his act of loving the fantasy of Brooks’ Hollywood image through his spectatorial experience, initially blinds him to the complexity of the cinematic machine and the filmmakers who had actively produced and made Brooks’                                                          139 By contrast, Elsaesser argues that “for Wedekind, Lulu is a construct, not a sociological portrait: she represents in all her manipulative deviousness the only constant value, set against the relativity and dissolution of the so-called absolute and transcendental values” (41). 140 Cf. Doane (66) and Elsaesser (45). 141 Lulu’s possessive suitors include an aristocratic doctor and client (Schön), his artistic son (Alwa), and a lesbian Countess (Geschwitz), as well as her incestuous father (Shigolch). 140 image into a spectatorial male fantasy. This is particularly salient at this point in La invención. As Snooks describes in “Boundaries of the Self”: The narrator’s desire to possess Faustine, a woman who cannot see him, parallels an earlier episode recounted by the narrator in his diary. While in Calcutta, the narrator had accompanied a friend to a brothel in which all the prostitutes were blind. The act of visual apprehension, also a symbolic act of appropriation, is thus denied in both instances to the female object of desire…In both instances, the narrator plays the role of voyeur, empowered by the fact that he can see without being seen (111). The voyeuristic power that the fugitive is given in relation to the blind Calcutta prostitutes he sexually consumes in a literal way is a suggestive illustration of the patriarchal narrative structures that Hollywood has proliferated. As Laura Mulvey has pointed out in her seminal Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema, Hollywood films have traditionally privileged the voyeuristic masculine consumption of objectified beautiful female bodies. Hollywood actresses have often played passive and traditionally female roles in narratives that acquiesce to the heteronormative setup of being the actively pursued objects of desire of the male protagonists. Significantly then, the association of the fugitive as sexual consumer of blind and passive prostitutes offers an allegory for the way in which female images of Hollywood are visually consumed in traditional Hollywood cinema. G. The Natural The fugitive’s increasing emotional and psychic dependence on Faustine’s image, as nourishment for his isolation, ultimately turns his love for her into an amour fou. The narrator’s jealousy and possessiveness over Faustine grows with his desire to have her all too himself. Significantly, after his failed attempt to speak to Faustine and be acknowledged by her, the narrator finds an aesthetically creative alternative to 141 demonstrate his love for her in hopes of moving her to acknowledge him. He spends all of his physical and mental energy building a flower garden for Faustine before she arrives to her customary spot on the beach. During her absence the narrator is satisfied with his garden, his creation, and considers it quite beautiful. But the moment she appears, it suddenly becomes a dreadful mistake. Though initially relieved that Faustine “simuló no verlo” 142 (Bioy 24) the narrator wonders if he has lost all hope in being able to move her to speak to him. In his next encounter with her, the fugitive is confronted with the fact that she has brought Morel along with her. When Morel steps over the narrator’s garden, the latter misreads Faustine’s lack of response as an intentionally cruel disregard for the narrator’s feelings. After Faustine and Morel leave, the narrator finds himself with unresolved questions about Faustine’s motives. Was her behavior sadistically meant to make him suffer, or does she want to emphasize her complete rejection for him by bringing along Morel? His inability to find a clear explanation for her behavior makes him say to himself, desperately: “Creo que voy a matarla o enloquecer, si continúa” 143 (Bioy 28). His initial voluntary voyeuristic relation to Faustine, which in itself was pleasurable, is soon not enough for him. What he seeks in his attempt to approximate Faustine, by trying to establish direct communication with her and creating his allegorical garden to escape his position as voyeur, seems like another kind of life sentence, similar or worse than his imprisonment in Venezuela.                                                          142 “Pretends not to notice the garden” (Bioy 2003, 35). 143 “I think I shall kill her, or go mad, if this continues any longer” (Bioy 2003, 37). 142 Though the narrator divines that there is something more complexly amiss with Faustine’s “refusal” to acknowledge him that will inevitably affect his own destiny, he decides that, rather than go mad, he will simply stay away from Faustine and her cruelty, determining to be self-sufficient and to forget her. Yet he keeps to this resolution for all of one day, and by the middle of the following afternoon, he states, “supe que iría” (“I knew that I had to go”) (Bioy 37). As Snook describes, the narrator’s resolution not to see Faustine after she refuses to acknowledge him makes him seek a self-sufficiency that he cannot maintain on the island. The narrator’s complete dependency on Faustine’s image soon becomes undeniable, as does his mounting anxiety in the following days when all the intruders on the island, including Faustine, suddenly disappear. The miracle of the intruders’ first appearance becomes even more mysterious and anxiety-provoking for the narrator in the subsequent periods of their equally miraculous disappearance. The narrator discovers that the “intruders” on the once deserted island appear and disappear according to the mechanical logic of Morel’s machine. While Morel’s machine is powered by the tides, there is a flaw in his calculations and the tides have changed so that there are interruptions in the projection of the images that make them periodically and unpredictably disappear. But before he discovers Morel’s machine, the phenomenon mystifies and torments him since he cannot find a logical explanation for the vanishing and reappearing acts of the visitors. The fugitive also discovers that Faustine and the others are holographic remainders of actual people who once vacationed on the island, and that their appearance and disappearance is based on the strength of the rising ocean tides from which Morel’s machine derives its energy. 143 H. Bioy’s Move on the Movie Industry after Pabst’s Intervention The significance of the source of energy for Morel’s machine suggests, after considering Pabst’s Die Buchse’s intertextual influence on La invención’s narrative, that the tides are a metaphor for the cinema industry’s economic patterns. The unpredictability of the tides, which trigger the appearance and disappearance of Faustine and her supporting cast in Morel’s “film,” can be read as the unpredictable economic support of the masses as rising and receding. Historically, prohibitive costs affected the economic structure of the early twentieth-century filmmaking by creating a situation where both the filmmakers’ and actresses’ careers depended on the spectators’ mass attendance. Yet in seeking mass appeal, it became each individual actor’s/actress’ star power over the director’s “auteur” fame that was most vital for the masses’ attraction to the film. As Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure” argues, the Hollywood actress’ “star power” has been defined largely by her ability to attract the largely male spectatorial gaze. With the release of Die Büchse, for example, Brooks failed to activate this male mass desire, and upon her return to Hollywood, rather than become a star, which would have guaranteed her continuous presence in Bioy’s sight, she receded into obscurity. 144 Yet even if Brooks’ image disappeared from films, her role as Lulu gave spectators, including Bioy, an explicitly novel understanding of the powerful manipulations of the aura of beautiful actresses like Brooks could have. For the unwitting mass audience, this meant consuming repetitive patriarchal narratives that reinforced binary gendered relationships of passive female/active male and categorical divides                                                          144 According to Kenneth Tynan’s biographical summary in Lulu in Hollywood, Louise Brooks (1906- 1985) starred in twenty-four films before she was effectively blackballed and made her last movie in 1938, after which she faded into obscurity. 144 between innocent virgin/femme fatale. Pabst’s narrative explicitly makes these categories messier for the spectator. 145 His subversion of the binary of femme fatale/innocent woman in Die Büchse enacts judgment on the innocent prostitute Lulu, who is charged with the murder of one of her male admirers, Doctor Schön, who sought to possess her exclusively by marrying her. 146 The prosecutor’s entire case against Lulu rests on his equation of her with Pandora, the Grecian temptress who seduced the first king and unleashed the plague of death upon humanity. As Doane argues, Lulu’s trial is the trial of the modern spectacle of the femme fatale that lures masculine desire to its encounter with death. As such Lulu is declared guilty of the seduction of the voyeuristic spectator (Doctor Schön), which leads him to his death. Writes Doane: The amazing thing about feminine culpability is that guilt does not necessarily attach itself to the woman through intentionality or motivation. Her sheer existence—particularly in its spectacular capacity—is often the cause of disaster or catastrophe … hence, Lulu’s trial is a battle over images—with that of Pandora, the figure of feminine catastrophe, ultimately winning. (72) In turn, the figure of Pandora, as Bernard Stiegler writes, is crucially associated with the gender difference brought on by the creative inventiveness that humans illicitly inherit from the gods. Like the artifices adorning Pandora, this stolen creativity renders humans as technical beings who are increasingly moved to produce objects external to themselves. Poses Stiegler:                                                          145 On an extra-diegetic level it provided actresses like Brooks an understanding that the auratic power of their on-screen and off-screen beautiful images were willfully manipulated in order to make a profit by the film industry. 146 Schön had tried to make Lulu kill herself with a gun, but in the struggle, he shoots himself instead. Yet he dies with a peaceful look on his face—freed from the torment of his possessive and passionately sexual love for Lulu. 145 The sending of difference is the sending of a being covered in artifice and resplendent, deceptive finery, what is also called kosmos, still spoken of and seen in cosmetics, a decorous set of ornaments worked on by the handicapped god Hephaestus. This difference, more than any other, places the andres [humans] in a calamitous state, outside themselves, left exhausted. (195) (my emphasis) Pandora thus brings sexual difference to humans through artificial beauty (jewelry and other deceptive and artificial finery) given to her by the gods. Pandora’s ornaments of seduction continue in the present day as the most common artifices that the prostitute and the courtesan use to lure the sensual desire of their potential customers in the metropolis and peripheries of the world. Ornamentation furthermore is what primarily signals that Pandora is a woman (i.e., what gives her a gender), and what splits humans (andres) between those who must be artificially adorned like her (women) and those who must admire this ornamentation (men). Through ornamentation, the women’s body becomes an ornamented fetish object that differentiates her from a man, while man, rather than being seduced by the woman’s body, comes to be seduced by the artifice that adorns her. Significantly then, rather than gender difference resting on biology, it is rather the artifice of adornment that separates women from men. 147 In La invención, the narrator experiences Faustine’s sudden disappearance with intense emotion that feels like “a detachment from himself of what constitutes a part of his being” (Snooks 111). For Snooks, the narrator’s sensation is “an indication of his difficulty in accepting both his own and Faustine’s separate ego and body boundaries. [His] separation [from Faustine] is viewed consequently as a fragmentation, splitting, or                                                          147 The consequences for our contemporary moment, in which adornment is increasingly the socially accepted prerogative of both women and men, are best exemplified by the emergence of new categories, such as the term “metrosexual”, which blurs the definitions of a male consumer who is allowed to engage in activities of self-adornment, beautification, and the cult of the body traditionally reserved for women. 146 partial loss of the self” (111). Yet for Snooks, this dream of boundless union begins not with the narrator, but with Morel and his invention. The primary function of Morel’s invention is to counteract or negate absence and summon forth the presence of the female. Through it, Morel seeks to eradicate all boundaries and eliminate completely the absence of the loved one. Morel ultimately seeks in his union with Faustine that mythical oneness of being only possible in the Lacanian ‘absolute subject’ or infant who has not yet made the discovery of difference or boundaries of the ‘other’ (110). I. Temporality, Finality, and Immortality Bioy’s great accomplishment in La invención is his novel illustration of the complex relationship of viewership and masculine consumption of the feminine image that feminizes the viewers’ desire. Picking up on the transformation Pabst enacts when he gives Brooks the “timelessness” of cinema—“mak[ing] her the intelligence of the cinematographic process … the most perfect incarnation of photogenie” (Henry Langlois qtd. in Doane 71)—Bioy invents a narrator willing to sacrifice himself to join the simulation of timelessness the cinematic machine projects, vis-à-vis the figure of Faustine. Yet the nature of Faustine’s and Brooks’ reproduced cinematic copies, as timeless images, remains ambiguous. As Doane argues, Brooks’ timeless “temporality [is] that of the moment—the glance, the smile that signifies no lasting commitment. It is also a femininity that is despatialized, a hallucinatory image characterized by diegetic resistances” (150). Doane also points out the conflation between Lulu and Brooks, which leads her to the conclusion that they “act[] as a mechanism, the provoker of events. All that happens in the film happens through or around her, although she can in no sense be described as a traditional protagonist” (Doane 153). Faustine, in La invención de Morel, 147 is also the primary feminine mechanism through which the narrator actively desires and acts out his desire. She is hardly a traditional protagonist with clear subjectivity; instead she telescopes re-presentations of Brooks as the prostitute Lulu, an allegory for the feminizing and capitalist driven mechanism and logic of cinema. Unlike Lulu, Faustine is not punished for the femme fatale role she plays. Indeed she has already been assimilated by Morel’s film before the entrance of the fugitive. Rather, it is the inspiration that Faustine provokes in the fugitive, making him want to join her in her artificial reality, that marks a new turn and departure from Pabst’s cinematic allegory. Once he discovers Faustine is an artifice, the fugitive finds consolation in the idea that he could spend the rest of his life in “eterna contemplación de Faustine” 148 (Bioy 88). Yet the narrator finds that this plan, the key to his happiness, “como todo lo humano, es inestable” 149 (Bioy 88). He anxiously lists the reasons that his happiness, the contemplation of his beloved Faustine, might end: La contemplación de Faustine podría—aunque no pueda tolerarlo, ni aun como pensamiento—interrumpirse: Por una descompostura de las máquinas (no sé arreglarlas); Por alguna duda que podría sobrevenir y arruinarme este paraíso (debo reconocer que hay, entre Morel y Faustine, conversaciones y ademanes capaces de inducir en error a personas de carácter menos firme); Por mi propia muerte 150 (Bioy 88). Here the narrator locates the insecurity of human life in the chaos of the world that makes unforeseeable events outside of his control. He anticipates with dread that Morel’s                                                          148 “seraphic contemplation of her” (Bioy 2003, 100). 149 “like everything human, is insecure” (Bioy 2003, 100). 150 “My contemplation of Faustine could be interrupted, although I cannot tolerate the thought of it: If the machines should break (I do not know how to repair them); If some doubt should ruin my paradise (certain conversations between Morel and Faustine, some of their glances, could cause persons of less fortitude than I to lose heart); if I should die” (Bioy 2003, 100). 148 machine will stop when the currents no longer fuel it, that it could break down in time and be impossible for him to fix, or that his mind (his unconscious) could convince him that Faustine loves Morel. Finally he cites the event that no human can escape: his own death. This last irrefutable fact, that he will die, convinces the narrator that rather than live the remainder of his life on the island anticipating a catastrophe that will cut him off from his loving contemplation of Faustine, he will choose a “Faustian” moment of eternity alongside Faustine. He painstakingly prepares for this moment by continuous study and experimentation of what Faustine says and by inserting appropriate sentences into her repertoire so that she appears to be answering him. 151 He rehearses walking alongside her and hopes to give some future observer the impression that he and Faustine are inseparable and have an understanding of each other so clear that they have no need of speaking (Bioy 101). When he finally records himself, the narrator observes that: Una molesta conciencia de estar representando me quitó naturalidad en los primeros días; la he vencido; y si la imagen tiene–como yo creo—los pensamientos y los estados de ánimo de los días de la exposición, el goce de contemplar a Faustine será el medio en que viviré la eternidad 152 (Bioy 89). His desire to spend eternity in contemplation of Faustine demands that he liberate himself from the self-consciousness of his theatrical acting and replace it with a mimetic naturalness that will make a spectator believe he and Faustine really to be in love. After                                                          151 I will like to emphasize that the reader is never given access to Faustine’s words, except a repeated decontextualized conversation between Faustine and Morel which the narrator includes small fragments of in his diary like “No…ya sé lo que anda buscando…” [Bioy 26] and “Morel, ¿sabe que lo encuentro misterioso? [Bioy 27] The narrator never reveals what Faustine referred to in her few words and refuses to share with the reader any more of the conversation that goes on in Morel’s film between herself and Morel. 152 “An oppressive self-consciousness made me appear unnatural during the first few days of the photographing; now I have overcome that, and, if my image has the same thoughts I had when it was taken, as I believe it does, then I shall spend eternity in joyous contemplation of Faustine.” (Bioy, 2003, 101) 149 the recording is complete, the narrator voices satisfaction with the final results. Meanwhile, his body begins to die in a hyper-accelerated process of decay. The descriptions the narrator gives the reader of his painful process of dying are told in a detached way. Even as his body becomes increasingly foreign even to himself, and he observes its grotesque decay in the front of a screen of mirrors that multiply his image, he expresses no fear or terror. “[E]n cuanto al dolor, tengo una impresión absurda: me parece que aumenta, pero que lo siento menos” 153 (90). In the throes of death, the anonymous narrator drags pieces of his past into his final moments of dying, revealing that there was a woman (Elisa) and a country (Venezuela) he once loved. These memories from his past are immediately replaced by an all-consuming love for Faustine. The simulacral image of Faustine thus becomes an image that enfolds the memory and love the narrator felt for his homeland and a woman of his past. The narrator’s last request, that man create a technology that will enable him to enter the “heavenly consciousness of Faustine,” evokes a fantasy of immortality via technology. As Bernard Stiegler argues in Technics and Time, humans are set apart by “a technical activity that characterizes all humanity” (198). Yet because of their mortality, the divine gifts of artistic and technological invention collapse upon themselves and turn into their opposite: technicity becomes a deadly and dangerous gift (Stiegler 198). 154 The                                                          153 “I have the absurd impression of the pain: it seems to be increasing, but I feel it less” (Bioy 2003, 102). 154 The German meaning of das Gift as “poison” and the English meaning of the gift as “something given voluntarily without payment in return” captures the paradox of technicity as both blessing and curse, in which humans can benefit from, and simultaneously, be threatened by the destructive power of their own technicity. Technicity therefore captures the ever present threat of physical harm and death that mortals can suffer through their inventions by virtue of their mortality, as well as their god-like inventiveness that separates them from the animals, and harbors the hope that death might eventually be able to be escaped through invention. 150 impossible human desire to escape the mortal condition and join the immortal world is demonstrated in the sacrifice. As Stiegler writes: As a food rite, the sacrifice ‘revives the memory of the former companionship at table when, intermingled, men and gods made merry day after day at the common table’ (Vernant 1979, 43). This golden age, as we have seen, is not, however, an origin. It is a limit, irremediably lost, a condition both forgotten and unforgettable, since it is re-evoked and recalled antithetically by the counter image of the Immortals, always present in their distance, a proximity nevertheless forever withdrawn, and thus, for mortals, an infinite regret in which the eternal melancholy of the genos anthropos is configured. (192) Paralleling humanity’s desire to cross mortality’s limit into immortality depicted by the fantastic banquet of mortals and gods, the madness of Morel and of his prosthetic invention illustrates humanity’s inventive relation to technology as increasingly fraught with dangers. This is because, as Stiegler argues, the fact that humans, as technical beings, are always outside of themselves makes them self-destructive. In other words, the human’s act of inventing things outside of themselves gives prosthetics an independent and terrifying power capable of destroying the docile bodies that have created them. “In contrast to animals whose species do not destroy themselves … Mortals, because they are prosthetic in their very being, are self-destructive. Hence prostheses, when visible, frighten or fascinate as marks of mortality”(Stiegler 198). Morel’s technological invention is a significant illustration of the self-destructive drive humans, as mortals, pursue as they invent. Technologies like Morel’s lead to the annihilation of the vulnerable bodies of its creator as well as the other mortal bodies that enter into contact with it, and attempt a symbiosis between the technological and the organic that leads to human’s death. 151 Bioy’s liminal/peripheral island as the space of consumption  A. Borges, Translation, and the Fantastic As I have discussed, Bioy’s use of the island setting departs from the traditional form employed by European writers with colonialist and primitivist fantasies about the inhabitants and space of the New World. With different intentions, Bioy reconfigures the space of the island to reflect the position of the Argentine author as both an inventor of a virtual textual world separate from reality and a consumer of a dangerous new mediatic technology, cinema, fraught with the double threat of feminization and death. 155 His inventive act gains traction with the appropriation of European foreign texts, most notably filmic narratives that played a large role in helping him construct an allegorical tale about the effects technological media like cinema have on reality, gender, national identity, and his own writerly possibilities for writing the new. An essential component of writing the new vis-à-vis fantastic literature involves a specific Latin American practice of translation and assimilation of foreign texts, discourses, and technological products. Speaking about this process of translation and appropriation enacted by Latin American writers, Borges elliptically comments in an essay titled “Cuentos del Turquestán”: Que un argentino hable (y aun escriba) sobre la versión alemana de la traducción rusa de unos cuentos imaginados en el Turquestán, ya es magia superior que la de                                                          155 Alfred Mac-Adam’s interpretation of the island as the metaphorical space where literary production takes place supports this view: “La vida solitaria en la isla es una metáfora para el escritor que se encierra en su texto. Su viaje a la isla es el que hace cualquier autor cuando escribe, y la página en blanco es la isla que puebla de imagenes.” (311) [Qtd. in García 125] “The solitary life of the island is a metaphor for the writer who locks himself up in his text. His voyage to the island the voyage that any author makes when s/he writes, and the blank page is the island that he populates with images.” (my translation) 152 esos cuentos. Es un énfasis de la multiplicidad del tiempo y del espacio, es casi una invitación a la metafísica…” 156 (260). Borges’ interest in underscoring the Argentine intellectual writer’s capacity to translate and read literary works in a foreign language (German), or through translations of that language into another foreign but accessible European language (the reading of a Turkish text translated into German), puts Latin American writers in a unique position. Borges portrays the Latin American fantastic writer as both a powerful producer of radically innovative narratives that will preserve their importance in time, and a powerful reader able to transcend the linguistic limits imposed on him or her by Occidental culture. In Borges’ work, the metaphysical quality emerging from this position emphasizes the randomness and inexplicability of life and a view of the universe based on chaotic chance. As Swanson has shown, the majority of Borges’ metaphysical fantastic narratives end in paradoxical conclusions. Rather than explaining the nature of the universe, they “serve to prove its inexplicability” (46). Borges comments on the relation between the fantastic with the metaphysical: “El encanto de los cuentos fantásticos…reside en el hecho de que, siendo fantásticos, son símbolos de nosotros, de nuestra vida, del universo, de lo inestable y misterioso de nuestra vida” 157 (Brescia). In Brescia’s view, metaphysics functions in Borgesian fictions to underscore “la atracción de Borges por la magia, entendida esta como un modo de composición que                                                          156 “That an Argentine can speak (and also write) about the German version of the Russian translation of imaginary stories from Turkey, is already magic superior to those stories. It is an emphasis of the multiplicity of time and space; it is almost an invitation to the world of metaphysics.” [my translation] 157 “The enchantment of fantastic tales…resides in the fact that, being fantastic, they are symbols of us, of our lives, of the universo, of the instability and misteriousness of our lives.” [my translation] 153 frecuentemente trabaja en dos planos: ‘lo maravilloso y lo cotidiano se enlazan, y es evidente que para el narrador no hay jerarquía que los distancie o los clasifique” 158 (143). Bioy’s La invención de Morel is an illustration of Borges’ observations about what the fantastic paradoxically seeks to emphasize: the inexplicability, mystery, and instability of life through the commingling of the marvelous with the quotidian. The fugitive’s discovery that Faustine is in actuality a technological copy of a dead woman whom he loves through visual consumption, transforms her image into a quasi-magical (read auratic) image from which the fugitive cannot liberate his desire, even after he discovers that she is not an actual person. Paradoxically, once the fugitive figures out that Faustine is an uncannily realistic physical copy of a once-living woman whom Morel’s machine has annihilated in its process of copying, his desire rather intensifies. Thus after Faustine ‘s mystery is resolved; he is left in a more deplorable position than when he believed that Faustine was intentionally trying to hurt him. Put another way, the fugitive’s discovery of the reasonable technological explanation behind the mystery of Faustine and her companions leaves him feeling more alienated than ever on the virtual island. Knowing that he will not be able to enter Faustine’s consciousness but continuing to involuntarily desire her, the fugitive chooses to record himself into Morel’s film in order to join Faustine, Morel, and the rest of the visitors in their artificial paradise. Rather than have an authentic relationship with Faustine, which was foreclosed years before the fugitive’s arrival to the island, the fugitive theatrically orchestrates artificial dialogues and simulated interactions with his                                                          158 “Borges’ attraction for magic is understood as a mode of composition that frequently works on two planes: the marvellous and the quotidian interconnect, and it is evident that for the narrator there is no hierarchy that distances them or classifies them.” [my translation] 154 beloved. These theatricalities include the careful study and repetition of gestures that would create for a future spectator of “Morel’s film” the illusion that Faustine and the fugitive have enjoyed an intimate relationship. The fugitive thus ultimately becomes an actor in an artificial play of his own creation that, in turn, adds to and changes the contents of Morel’s seven-day recording. 159 B. The fugitive as translator Although the mystery of Faustine and powerful desire are the motor that drives Bioy’s novella, the national origins of the visitors, whose language the protagonist recognizes as French and is able to understand, is an important, if subtle, part of fantastic concerns presented in the narrative plot. There are various allusions the narrator makes with regards to the role of foreign language in La invención. The fugitive is given the first opportunity to listen to the visitors who have suddenly and inexplicably shown up on the deserted island a month after his arrival. He writes in his diary: “Oí algunas exclamaciones francesas. Después no hablaron…Eran Franceses” 160 (Bioy 26). Then, at a later instance of listening to them the fugitive observes that “Hablaban correctamente Frances; muy correctamente; casi como sudamericanos” 161 (Bioy 29). These two observations make apparent that the visitors are not from France, but probably from one of the former French colonies. His insistence that the visitors’ French is “too correct” to be from France, and thereby closer to the South American French, subtly insinuates the                                                          159 In this last respect, Bioy’s La invencion de Morel can be seen as contributing an additional and explicitly filmic influence to its practice of foreign textual appropriation and translating practices, whereby an avant-garde filmic narrative found in Pabst’s Die Buchse is assimilated alongside textual and discursive European references. 160 “I heard some French exclamations. Afterwards they didn’t speak…They were French.” (My translation) 161 “They spoke French correctly, too correctly, almost like South Americans.” (My translation) 155 linguistic perfection Latin American literatos 162 have achieved over the French language, superseding the correctness of even the native speakers from France. Bioy again subverts the traditional paradigm of Europe as cultural center and Latin America as periphery. As the fugitive begins to ponder the nature of these strange visitors, he has the idea that perhaps “…ese idioma fuera un atributo paralelo entre nuestros mundos, dedicados a distintos fines” 163 (Bioy 42). French becomes a language suddenly uniting two parallel but distinctive worlds. That these worlds are able to intersect results from the fugitive’s ability to understand French and translate it in his diary. The diary is thus a translated and multilayered testimony of the crossing of two worlds that he intends to leave for a future and unknown reader. If the fugitive did not understand French, it would be impossible for him to understand the narrative (Morel’s recording) that he consumes and eventually participates and includes himself in. The consequence of a non-French speaking protagonist would completely change the narrative; the fugitive would not be able to understand the visitors, nor would he be able to read the Belidor book Travaux-Le Moulin Perse París, the only book that can help explain part of the technology used in the construction of Morel’s technological invention. He would also be unable to read Morel’s yellow papers that explain both his invention and the motive for his actions. The                                                          162 The literato is the twentieth-century professional man of letters understood as evolving from the letrado, a powerful elite, and primarily criollo segment of Latin American society whose power has derived, from the inception of the Spanish Empire through Independence and beyond, from their hegemonical control over writing. For a more extensive geneology of this term, please refer to Angel Rama’s La ciudad letrada. 163 “this language could be a parallel attribute between two worlds, dedicated to different goals.” (My translation) 156 narrator’s capacity to understand multiple languages is one of the preconditions for understanding what the “protagonists” in Morel’s repeating recording are saying. C. Gender Ambiguity Regarding the Inventor Morel The interjection of French in the novel, especially when the fugitive employs it as an added insult to Morel, takes us to the inventor’s complex gendered construction. To make fun of Morel in front of Faustine, the fugitive speaks French, calling him “La femme à barbe” (Bioy 31). Although the fugitive’s attempt to communicate with Faustine proves futile since he achieves no reaction from either Faustine or Morel, the reader of La invención is also suddenly involved in the act of translation. He or she knows French, or if that is not the case, is left in suspense, or can look up the meaning of the fugitive’s short exclamation to translate and discover the joke. Once a translation occurs, the discovery that the fugitive calls Morel “a bearded lady” may strike the reader as both funny and odd. Indeed, “el barbudo” (“the bearded man”) is the most frequent way the narrator describes Morel before learning of his identity as the inventor of the “perceptual” machine and the builder of the three architectural structures found in the island: the museum, the chapel, and the pool. Yet the more difficult part of the joke is what to make of the fugitive’s feminization of Morel through his “bearded lady” joke. The question on some readers mind might be: Why this incongruous insult involving a bearded man (typical signifier of masculinity) wedded to the idea of a bearded lady (the image of a female circus freak)? An earlier unflattering description of Morel made by the fugitive can shed some light on this odd gendered insult. First, the fugitive affirms: “la presencia de este hombre 157 debe calmar los celos” [his appearance alone should appease jealousy] (Bioy 26). Then he describes Morel: Es muy alto. Llevaba un saco de tenis granate, demasiado amplio, unos pantalones blancos y unos zapatos blancos y amarillos. Desmesurados. La piel es femenina, cerosa, marmórea en las sienes. Habla despacio, abriendo mucho la boca, chica, redonda, carmesí, pegada siempre a los dientes inferiores. Las manos son larguísimas, pálidas; les adivino un tenue revistimiento de humedad. 164 (Bioy 26). Morel’s physical unattractiveness can be attributed to his role as a masculine scientific figure who grotesquely disfigures the realm of the aesthetic, a character akin to the pseudo-scientist Max Nordau, whom the protagonist José Fernández critiques for deforming aesthetic genius through his psychopathological theories in De sobremesa. 165 In Morel’s case, his sentimental desires leads him to produce an invention that reconfigures the value and meaning of art from a mimetic act of artistic creation to a violent and murderous appropriation of the beautiful body of Faustine and his guests. Morel admits that the desire that propelled his invention began “primero como un simple tema para la imaginación y después como un increible proyecto para dar perpetua realidad a mi fantasia sentimental” 166 (Bioy 56). The fugitive’s critical response to this is that Morel, “como un mundano hombre de ciencia” (“like a mundane man of science”), engages in “un discurso repugnante y desordenado” (“a repugnant and disorganized                                                          164 “He is very tall and was wearing a wine-colored tennis jacket, which was much too large for him, white slacks, and huge yellow and white shoes. His beard seemed to be false, his skin effeminate, waxy, mottled on his temples. His eyes are dark; his teeth ugly…His hands are long and pallid—I sense that they are slightly moist” (Bioy 2003, 35). 165 Silva’s protagonist José Fernández describes Nordau as a grotesque myopic with rough hands who fails to see aesthetic beauty and simultaneously deforms with his scientific discourse the genius of all Western artists by attributing to each a different pathology. 166 “first as a simple theme for the imagination and later as an incredible project for my perpetual reality and sentimental fantasy.” (My translation) 158 discourse”) when it comes to speaking about the sentimental desire that drives his illicit and murderous act of recording. As a mundane and degraded figure of science, Morel is only successful, as the fugitive asserts, “cuando [él] deja los sentimientos y entra en su valija de cables viejos, [porque] logra mayor precisión” 167 (Bioy 56). Although Morel’s discourse continues to be “desagradable, rica en palabras técnicas y buscando en vano cierto impulso oratorio” 168 (Bioy 56), the fugitive asserts that Morel’s discourse is nevertheless better when it is focused on his techno-scientific area of expertise, and he avails himself of the technical language that he has learned to master in order to communicate his ideas. Even so, as he translates and transcribes Morel’s written speech, the fugitive asks the future and anticipated reader of his diary to be the ultimate judge. Through this double act of translation and transcription, the fugitive becomes self-consciously aware of how his diary is given another more technical function, as an informe (report) that records all of the mysterious events that transpire on the island. Returning to the issue of gender, the initial characterization of Morel as the scientist who dreams up a machine that exceeds the boundaries of nature and mortality, and as a man who adopts a superman stance in the act of killing his friends and himself in order to fulfill his “sentimental fantasy,” aligns him with the hegemonic ideals of scientific masculinity. Thus half of Morel—his masculine superman ego-driven side— illustrates the modus operandi the Latin American state leaders and bureaucratic                                                          167 “when Morel overlooks his personal feelings and concentrates on his own special field.” (My tranlation) 168 “unpleasant, filled with technical words and vain attempts to achieve a certain oratorical force.” (My tranlation) 159 machines, in being given the new powers of technology, would take as the means to manipulate, survey, and discipline their citizens. In this respect La invención, published only three years before the coup d’état that would catapult Juan Peron’s rise to power in Argentina in 1946, anticipates Peron’s masterful manipulation of mass media that garnered him the popular vote of the working class and immigrant masses. The massive distribution of propaganda through mass media, and in particular the exploitation and mythification of the image of Eva Peron as the Cinderella of the masses, adds a fascinating prophetic element to Bioy’s novella. 169 Even so, the fugitive’s attribution of feminine characteristics to Morel seems counterintuitive to the more obvious associations emerging from his Nietzschean masculine scientist “übermensch” ego persona, a character achieved through his amoral and murderous act of filming his friends without their permission. 170 Morel, however, does not limit himself to the role of masterful inventor of a powerful technology; he instead masochistically surrenders his body to his annihilating machine to fulfill his sentimental fantasy of being together with the woman he allegedly loves (Faustine), and of being eternally united with his closest friends. In divulging Morel’s sentimental motivation for taping himself with his beloved Faustine, Bioy draws upon certain conventions common in romance literature, which as many critics note, traditionally targets the female reader.                                                          169 For more on the rise to power of Peron through the use of mass mediatic propaganda and the mythological mediatization of his wife’s image , see Claudia Soria’s Los cuerpos de Eva. 170 Jean-Christophe Valvat, in “Le corps dociles” argues that the way in which Morel amorally captures his friends’ image through their machine illustrates Foucault’s observation that of the new form of discipline that bodies in the new of technological mediations suffer, transforming them into “docile bodies” (see pg. 248-49) [In French] 160 Rita Felski’s observations in The Gender of Modernity about the romantic author Marie Correlli, the queen of bestsellers, offer two key parallels. Similar to the way in which Morel’s and the fugitive’s loves for Faustine culminate in tragedy, Corelli’s fictions, as Felski posits, mobilize a “pessimistic and fatalistic vision of the sexes as separated by an eternal chasm of antagonism and misunderstanding.” Corelli’s heroines “remain aberrant, marginal, awkwardly positioned in relation to the social structures in which they find themselves … illustrating a persistent if inchoate dissatisfaction with the ideal of heterosexual romance that they simultaneously seek to invoke.” Dissatisfaction with the ideology of romantic love leads Corelli’s fiction to “a pursuit of other paths of self-transcendence that manifest themselves most often as dream-worlds free of the humdrum constraints of historical contingency” (131). In a similar fashion, Morel’s decision to leave his unrequited love for a new virtual dream world thus can be seen as an emotionally escapist solution that can be associated with the reading practices of female readers. The congruency of the escapist desires of both female romance readers and Morel becomes clearer when Felski points out that these female readers have a dissatisfied and restless consciousness. This is, she notes, a central characteristic of modern experience which locates redemption in the somewhere else, or elsewhere, of the fictional Romantic text or, in Morel’s case, in the cinematic film. Cinema is thus the new techno-aesthetic escape world that traps and lures a male desire (illustrated through the fugitive) also dissatisfied with the heterosexual conception of love. Morel’s and the fugitive’s, escapism demonstrates that their desire is lured by the feminine image of Faustine in the same way that female readerly desire is lured toward Corelli’s romantic fictions. The 161 escape of Morel to his machine transforms his masculine body into a technological and aesthetic image. This transformation of his body into a techno-aesthetic copy, joined in eternal repetition of a week’s worth of interaction with Faustine and his guests, changes his formerly masculine body into a feminized and consumable phantasmagoric product that can trigger the desire and identification of a future spectator. The future spectator and consumer are, of course, the fugitive and anticipated readers of La invención. Parallels between the fugitive and Morel emerge throughout, demonstrating the fugitive’s strong identification with Morel. Early in the novel, the fugitive implies that he might also be a scientist, albeit in another field. When he finds the French Belidor Book in Morel’s vast library, he writes that he is searching for some “ayuda para ciertas investigaciones que el proceso interrumpió y que en la soledad de la isla traté de continuar” 171 (6). Following this comment is an elliptical and parenthetical observation that connects his previous investigations with Morel’s aspirations: (creo que perdemos la inmortalidad porque la resistencia a la muerte no ha evolucionado; sus perfeccionamientos insisten en la primera idea, rudimentaria: retener vivo todo el cuerpo. Sólo habría que buscar la conservación de lo que interesa a la conciencia) 172 (Bioy 6). Morel and the fugitive come to share many physical similarities as well. When the fugitive attempt to clean himself up and look presentable for Faustine, he ends up looking messier than ever due to “la humedad en la barba y en el pelo” (his humid beard and hair) (Bioy 16). When the fugitive’s plan to arrive at the hill before Faustine fails, he imagines                                                          171 “help for certain investigations that the trial interrupted, and which in the solitude of the island I will try to finish.” [My translation] 172 “(I believe we lose immortality because we have not conquered our opposition to death; we keep insisting on the primary, rudimentary idea: that the whole body should be kept alive. We should seek to preserve only the part that has to do with consciousness.)” (Bioy 2003, 14) 162 that “visto desde abajo [por Faustine], debí aparacer con mis atributos de espanto acrecentados” 173 (Bioy 17). The fugitive is transformed—through the lack of products normally available in the metropolis to look “civilized”—into a frightful bearded man devoid of physical beauty mirroring the physical ugliness and awkwardness of “el barbudo” [the bearded man] (Morel). Although the fugitive first sees Morel as his competitor for the affection of Faustine, the inventor of a technology that leads him to unwittingly fall in love with the artificial double of Faustine, the fugitive ultimately comes to identify with and excuse Morel’s act of recording and killing Faustine along with himself. Based on the observations, the fugitive hypothesizes that Morel’s filming of Faustine and of his friends with his deadly machine was the consequence of Faustine’s rejection of his love. As the fugitive imagines: “Faustine evitaba su compañía; él, entonces, tramo la semana, la muerte de todos sus amigos, para lograr la immortalidad con Faustine. Con esto compensaba la renuncia a las posibilidades que hay en la vida” 174 (Bioy 87). But he goes farther than this hypothesis: he supports Morel’s act, arguing that Morel “Entendio que, para los otros, la muerte no sería una evolución perjudicial; en cambio un plazo de vida incierto, les daría la inmortalidad con sus amigos preferidos. También dispuso de la vida de Faustine” 175 (Bioy 87).                                                          173 “viewed at from below by Faustine, my scary, unkempt appearance must have been emphasized.” (My translation) 174 “Faustine tried to avoid him; then he planned the week, the death of all his friends, so that he could achieve immortality with Faustine. That was his compensation for having renounced all of life’s possibilities.” (Bioy 2003, 99) 175 “realized that death would not be such a disaster for the others, because in exchange for a life of uncertain length, he would give them immortality with their best friends” (Bioy 2003, 99). 163 The initial indignation and resentment felt against Morel for having taken the life of Faustine without her knowledge is in this way mollified by the fugitive’s own identification with Morel’s motive: his unrequited and continuous desire for Faustine. The fugitive exclaims that “La hermosura de Faustine merece estas locuras, estos homenajes, estos crimenes. Yo lo he negado, por celos o defiendiendome, para no admitir la pasión. Ahora veo el acto de Morel como un justo ditirambo” 176 (Bioy 88). Morel’s simultaneously sentimental and superhuman act becomes for the fugitive a techno- aesthetic tribute and poetic homage that Faustine’s beauty provokes and deserves. Both men of science are subsumed into two different acts of “madness” triggered by the fatal beauty of Faustine, which activates their ceaseless desires to be joined with Faustine in a precariously constructed artificial eternity that enables them to escape the pain of their unrequited love. We can conclude, then, that the feminizations of Morel and of the fugitive occur from the unceasing and fatal desire to merge in a boundless artificial paradise that the two Faustines—the living and the simulated—provoke in Morel and the fugitive. The desire to be with her drives them to masochistically objectify themselves and sever their connection to life and their masculine bodies. The recompense for this voluntary physical surrender to a machine of death is that they will both mysteriously “go on living” as feminized phantasmagoric entities (awaiting a future voyeur who will sensorially consume them). Prior to their physical transformation, their virtualizations are anticipated as Morel and the fugitive become actors who self-consciously play the roles of co-                                                          176 “Faustine’s beauty deserves that madness, that tribute, that crime. When I denied that, I was too jealous or too stubborn to admit that I loved her. And now I see Morel’s act as something sublime.” (Bioy 2003, 100). 164 protagonists of different parts of Faustine’s artificially repeating cinematic “life.” Once all their theatrical interactions with Faustine are recorded, the image of Morel and of the fugitive pass on to the virtual world by way of Morel’s machine, as they passively await their cinematic consumption by a future spectator. D. Technological Modernity on the Periphery The fugitive does not share Morel’s faith in the preservation and perpetuation of his spirit via the machine. His motivation for surrendering his body to the annihilating machine is rather based on the fact that by the time he arrives on the deserted island, every other choice and possibility for a return to civilization has been cut off. Indeed, the fugitive makes the decision to flee to the island only after he feels he has no other options left. Returning to the city of Caracas would mean a return to a life sentence in prison, and a move to another country would mean the need to be constantly on the run, hiding in the most removed and “barbaric” peripheral spaces of the world, enduring a permanent exile from the metropolitan centers that would surely process him and capture him. While the fugitive cannot escape the trap of his desire for Faustine without ultimately surrendering his body, the island incidentally offers the ideal space for the possibility of the fugitive’s productive act of writing. After various nomadic travels through a variety of peripheral places (e.g. Calcutta), he becomes a narrator, a protagonist, a writer and producer of a textual work, only after bearing witness to the miraculous appearance of surprise visitors on the deserted island. The theme of persecution that leads the fugitive to the space of the island is also what facilitates his transformation into a diarist and later into a diary informant. Prior to his arrival to Morel’s island, the fugitive lives in Caracas as an average middle class citizen and as part 165 of the social world that reduces the act of his writing to an occasional hobby that he pursues by attending literary tertulias. It is only after he is accused of a political crime and sentenced to life in prison that he is forced to flee his homeland and thus becomes “a writer.” The fugitive pointedly critiques what happened in Caracas and what has forced him to flee his homeland. He laments the invasion and infiltration of the infernal side of technological modernity into Caracas, which is manifest in “el perfeccionamiento de las policías, de los documentos, del periodismo, de la radiotelefonía, de las aduanas” 177 (Bioy 1). As the fugitive stresses, these new bureaucracies recently imported to Venezuela have made irreparable “cualquier error de la justicia, es un infierno unánime para los perseguidos” 178 (Bioy 1). Technologies of modernity put at the service of the Law in mid- twentieth century Caracas presents for the reader a disturbing image of a technologized Latin American city’s modernization resembling the Kafkaesque rise of bureaucratic machines (e.g. the police, immigration, etc.) connected to global technologies of capture imported to peripheral Latin American urban spaces. Under these new infernal conditions, the fugitive can only prevent his capture and re-assimilation into the Venezuelan penal system by going into the most peripheral of peripheries: Morel’s unlocalizible island. As an imaginary space that contains a central fantastic mystery that the fugitive must solve, the island is an alternative space that temporally and spatially distances the                                                          177 “the efficient police forces, its documents, newspapers, radio broadcasts, and border patrols.” (My translation). 178 “any error of justice irreparable; it is a unanimous hell for any of the hunted.” (My translation). 166 fugitive from the disturbing effects of modernization in urban Latin American cities. It is precisely the remoteness of this most peripheral space, cut off from contact with the metropolis or any technologically modernized Latin American urban space, where potential bureaucratic machines of entrapment might lurk, and which enables a fantastic world to take center stage. Conclusion: Technology and its Connection to the Problematic of Modernity   A. Postcoloniality, the Cinema, and Textual Production As La invención de Morel demonstrates, cinema is an ideal metaphor that renders the paradoxical situation of twentieth century Latin American literary production as the outcome of uniquely Latin American assimilative strategies of consumption. Matei Calinescu’s distinction in Five Faces of Modernity, between aesthetic/textual modernity and socioeconomic modernity, helps clarify why modernity is such a complex descriptive to use in relation to Latin American cultural, textual, and aesthetic production. As Calinescu points out, these two kinds of modernity have followed essentially divergent trajectories, and created the possibility of aesthetic modernity to be able to thrive in the absence of the material conditions of modernity. In the words of Carlos J. Alonso, the ability of textual/aesthetic modernity to thrive in spite of the absence of material modernity is the situation in which Latin America has continuously found itself: In Spanish America the appropriation of the discursive modalities of metropolitan modernity have had to contend with the absence of its material antagonist in its midst, or more precisely, with its phantasmatic presence as the always distant and assumed reality of the metropolis. (32, my emphasis) Although Calinescu argues that aesthetic modernity and socioeconomic modernity have had a history of hostility that continuously seek to negate the existence of one other, for 167 Alonso these two modernities are inextricably linked, and have produced “a variety of mutual influences in the rage for each other’s destruction” (31). In Latin America, the economically dependent relation Latin American nations have with their neo-imperialist European and U.S. creditors after independence is responsible for the disparity in the advancement of material modernity. This lack of material modernity has challenged Latin American nations economically from the end of the nineteenth-century until the present time. Yet it was also during Spanish American independence that the relationship between Latin American and the myth of futurity was sealed. As Alonso summarizes in The Burden of Modernity, Latin American criollo elites availed themselves of this myth of futurity, identifying wholesale with the myth of modernity when they sought independence from the imperial powers of Spain. The consequence of this identification with futurity by Latin Americans was that “in Spanish America there has been no autochthonous sphere that could be configured and opposed overtly to the West as a strategy of containment, since cultural identity has been so inextricably bound to modernity” (35). The location of cultural resistance for post-independence Spanish American writers, beginning with modernistas such as Silva and continuing with fantastic writers such as Bioy, has therefore resided “in a space created by the text within and against itself rather than in a collectively acknowledged social sphere of contestation” (36). This paradoxical situation is well illustrated by Bioy’s La invención de Morel through his use of the technology of cinema to show the impact of modernity on the national, gendered, and personal identity of a Venezuelan male protagonist. The flight of 168 the fugitive to the liminal space of the island captures Alonso’s observation that Latin American production needs a textual space created within and against it in relation to the foreign discourses, aesthetic practices, and other products from which it borrows, and which threaten to undermine or marginalize its possibility for enunciation. The island becomes an important setting because as a space located outside of the European metropolitan centers and the Latin American peripheries, it is an escape from the conventional European metropolis/Latin American periphery binary. But on the island the fugitive is threatened by a new, more powerful trap set by mass media modernity: the feminine cinematic image of Faustine, which demands his constant consumption. The goal for the fugitive on the island, therefore, is to learn to assimilate the image of Faustine while resisting its consumptive imperative, in order to write the new and produce his fantastic diary as a testimony of his modern experience before his consumptive desire leads to self-annihilation with Faustine. But as Jean-Christophe Valvat notes, learning to resist this consumptive imperative will be a great challenge for the fugitive, who escapes one law “…pour une loi plus tyrannique encore, celle de l’invention de Morel” (for another even more tyrannical law, which is Morel’s invention) (236). If Bioy’s La invención de Morel is radically innovative and modern even today, it is because the spectatorial position of the fugitive not only describes the experience of a Venezuelan spectator vis-à-vis the techno-aesthetic and capitalist product of the cinematic image, but also that of cinematic spectators from both the European metropolitan centers and of Latin American “peripheral” cities like Caracas and Buenos Aires. If binaries of the metropolitan center and periphery have always positioned 169 modernity in a “somewhere else” that is inaccessible to Latin Americans regardless of the relative advancement of the Latin American writer’s society at any given time (Alonso 33), this somewhere else “should not be construed as a discrete place or a concrete set of historical and economic circumstances, but as what, in effect, it was: a conceptual and rhetorical category” (32). According to Alonso’s provocative arguments, the continuously changing reality of modernity, which in the mid-twentieth century has become equated with technological advancement, was never located in the European metropolises. Thus even if, as I analyze in chapter 1, José Asunción Silva used the landscape of the European metropolises of Paris and London to explore the experience of modernity in De sobremesa, the reader should not assume that the location of the modern was in these centers all along. 179 In fact, actual trips to the European centers made by Latin American intellectual figures and writers, from Sarmiento to Bioy, have invariably resulted, as Alonso argues, in the flight of modernity to another location or its identification with an element different from the one with which these Latin American writers and intellectuals started their search (32). In this light, Bioy’s narrative should be understood as following a unique procedure of Latin American cultural production that begins with Silva and continues with Lispector and succeeds in capturing the effects the latest version of modernity has—in being defined by the hybridization of scientific discourses, technological products and medias, and capitalism—as the paradoxical imperative to consume they must break in order to write the new. Latin American writers’ procedure of literary production both addresses the                                                          179 By contrast the space that Silva builds upon his return to Colombia, “Villa Helena,” becomes the ultimate repository of a unique aesthetic/textual Latin American modernity. 170 nature of the relationship between the postcolonial nation and the metropolis, and delimits the location of a speaker in a discursive situation that continuously transcends the personal or even the national (Alonso 36). Briefly returning to my previous chapter analysis of Silva’s De sobremesa, the emerging technological elements of modernity were metaphorically rendered by the alluring copies of the feminine entity Helena, which continuously proliferated and denied Silva contact with the actual Helena. In Bioy’s La invención de Morel, it is once again a feminine entity who, as an unreachable techno-aesthetic product of modernity, comes to embody “the phantasmatic, displaced existence of the modern ‘somewhere else’” (Alonso 32). What has changed from Silva’s rendition of modernity, vis-à-vis the feminine figure of Helena and her reproducible copies, to Bioy’s twentieth-century reconfiguration of Faustine as a cinematically reproduced feminine image, is the specific reproducible technology that most closely captured the effects modernity was having during Silva’s and Bioy’s respective times. Thus, during Bioy’s time, the massive development of cinema houses in Buenos Aires and its effects on the consuming and spectatorial practices of its citizens was, for Bioy, the most provocative experience of modernity worth illustrating in his fiction. This change of focus in the technologies of modernity makes Alonso’s comment particularly insightful: “From this perspective it would be more accurate and useful to speak of the existence of Spanish American modernities as opposed to a univocal and homogenizing conception of that experience” (33). Returning to the issue of European influences discussed at the beginning of this chapter, I want to further consider Bioy’s ostensible rejection of Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau as the ur-text. Bioy’s La invención de Morel should be understood as 171 following the uniquely Latin American writerly process of cultural production, based on consumption, appropriation, and subversion of European discourses of cultural hegemony. Thus, if there is an ur-text that makes possible Bioy’s La invención de Morel to emerge from Latin America, it is José Asunción Silva’s novel De sobremesa rather than Wells’ novel. De sobremesa was one of the first Spanish American novels that brought to light the necessity for future Latin American writers to grapple and come to terms with the complex and double-edged influence of modernity, as hegemonic myth and as rhetorical idea. Silva’s emphasis on the consumption that leads Latin Americans to literary production vis-à-vis practices of appropriation, subversion, and the decentering of subjectivity and national identity, all continue in Bioy’s novella. The essential outcome of Silva’s emphasis on masculine consumption of a feminine entity (and twentieth century technological figure of modernity) is that becoming feminized through this very act, becomes the primary way through which Spanish American writers can invent/produce an aesthetic/textual product that speaks to the experience of the most contemporary modernity and its imported products and discourses, thus enabling the possibility of writing the new. Morel’s invention mirrors the artifice of writing fiction that duplicates, through the metaphor of mirror-like projections, the desire of the fugitive to invent a different kind of textual artifice, and which in turn is read by an editor who makes additional changes to this artificial report. In the words of Cavallari, “El discurso de la novela se articula como un texto ‘primario’, ‘el informe’ escrito en primera persona por el 172 fugitivo—que ha sido editado por un ‘editor’” 180 (268). Furthermore, Bioy’s fictional creation of the fugitive as a reader who references his consumption of secondary texts (e.g. Morel’s recording, the Belidor Book, Morel’s yellow notebook, and allusions to Malthus’ essay) gives Bioy’s novella an intertextuality that gestures toward its own fictional status. The fictional primary narrative diary of the fugitive, in being annotated by the editor, makes the fugitive’s diary a textual object that is corrected and scrutinized. The anonymous editor thus serves to undermine the verisimilude that Bioy plays with. For instance, in one of Morel’s talks recorded in the fugitive’s diary, the inventor states that the island is part of the Ellice Islands located in the South Pacific—but the editor’s note to Morel’s comment expresses doubts about that being the actual location of the island. For Suzanne Levine, the editor’s comments demonstrate that “Bioy utiliza los nombres de islas reales para burlarse de la verosimilitud, para revelar que los nombres, los significantes que se refieren a las islas, son la unica realidad que el texto puede contener” 181 (97). As Levine suggests, the power of Latin American modern literature, like cinema, is not its capacity to mimetically contain reality, but to carry a nomadic writerly desire that connects intertextually to narratives it has already consumed with experiences of modernity that have captured his/her imagination, duplicating the conditions of its own possibilities for literary production. Cavallari’ observation accurately captures this movement: “por el doble aislamiento especial de la figura solitaria del fugitivo en la isla                                                          180 “The discourse of the novel is articulated as a primary text, or report written in first person by the fugitive—that has been edited by an editor.” (My translation) 181 “Bioy uses the names of real islands to make fun of verissimilitude, in order to reveal that the names, or the signifiers that refer to the islands, are the only reality that the text can contain.” (my translation) 173 remota pasa todo una serie repetida de exilios forzosos: el exilio de la patria se duplica al exilio de las instalaciones del museo, y esto se duplica a las ‘imágenes’ de Faustine, Morel y los otros” 182 (268). Significantly then, the nomadic desire of the fugitive writer/narrator for recounting his experience of these progressive exiles recedes only when he annihilates himself in order to join Faustine in the last virtual exile available: the virtual space of Morel’s film. Situating Bioy’s allegorical narrative of progressive exiles historically as Edmundo Paz Soldán has suggested, many Latin American writers, including Bioy, found it important to reflect in their literature “los cambios que esta[ban] ocurriendo en la ecología mediátiva de las sociedades latinoamericanas gracias a la expansión de la influencia de la imagen fotográfica” 183 (759). The feminization of Bioy’s masculine protagonist, through his consumption of the technological feminine image Faustine, illustrates a nuanced examination of the effect cinema had on both masculine and writerly Latin American identity and desire, removing them to a new ambiguous virtual space where local identity was loosened for a seductive misidentification and desire for imported European and American feminine images that powerfully duplicated reality, or the reality effect, as simulacra. B. Morel’s Technical Speech I would like to consider Morel’s technical speech and articulation of his grand plan. After listening to the speech, the fugitive decides to read the yellow papers Morel uses to guide                                                          182 “.. the double isolation of the lonely figure in the remote island goes through a repetitive series of forced exiles: the exile of the homeland duplicates the exile in the museum, and this in turn duplicates in the ‘images’ that Faustine, Morel, and others.” [my translation] 183 “the changes that have been happening in the mediative technology of Latinoamerican societies thanks to the expansión and influence of the photographic image.” [my translation] 174 him in his attempt at self-disclosure in front of his friends. Through this readerly act, the fugitive discovers stronger evidence for his belief that Morel is in love with Faustine as well as for the deadly effect Morel’s machine has on the subjects it copies (a convenient omission on Morel’s part). As the narrator transcribes and translates for the reader, Morel writes in his notes: Ha llegado el momento de anunciar: esta isla, con sus edificios , es nuestro paraíso privado. He tomado algunas precauciones—físicas, morales—para su defensa: cre que lo protegerán. Aquí estaremos eternamente—aunque mañana nos vayamos repitiendo consecutivamente los momentos de la semana sin poder salir nunca de la conciencia que tuvimos en cada uno de ellos, porque así nos tomaron los aparatos. 184 (Bioy 65) Reading Morel’s hybrid technological and sentimental speech provides a way for the fugitive to better understand the mystery of Faustine and the rest of the guests. It enables him to try and understand the reasoning and the desire that “inspired” Morel into using the machine on his friends and on himself. After this initial reading, the fugitive will go back to Morel’s written testimony and scrutinize its careful and coded language for implied meanings and hints that would lead him to answer further questions he has about the visitors. Through this process of readerly investigation, he ultimately discovers what really happened to Faustine, Morel, and the rest of his guests so many years prior to the fugitive’s arrival to the island and thus solve the final mystery Morel’s invention hides: namely its annihilating power.                                                          184 I found that my first plan was impossible—to be alone with her and to photograph a scene of my pleasure of our mutual joy … Now the time has come to make my announcement: This island, and its buildings, is our private paradise. I have taken some precautions—physical and moral ones—for its defense: I believe they will protect it adequately. Even if we left tomorrow, we would be here eternally, repeating consecutively the moments of this week, powerless to escape from the consciousness we had in each one of them—the thought and feelings that the machine captured (Bioy 2003,76). 175 In addition to solving this mystery, Morel’s technical speech and writing awaken in the fugitive the desire to improve and innovate on Morel’s invention. Reflecting on the explanation Morel gives about the technologies of motion pictures, photography, and the phonograph as “verdaderos archivos…y metodos de alcance y retención” 185 (Bioy 66-67), the fugitive suddenly has the illusion “de inventor un sistema para recomponer las presencias de los muertos” 186 (Bioy 67). He reasons further that “quizá pudeira ser el aparato de Morel con un dispositivo que le impidiera captar las ondas de los emisores vivientes (de mayor relieve, sin duda)” 187 (Bioy 2003, 78). In time, however, these illusions fail to materialize, and the fugitive gives up his dream of giving life back to Faustine. His intuition proves true:“Para mí ha de ser imposible descubrir algo mirando las máquinas: herméticas, funcionarán obedeciendo a las intenciones de Morel” 188 (Bioy 69). The fugitive blames his inability to figure out how Morel’s machine works partly on how his ignorance is kept intact by the library [of Morel], which does not have a single book [he] can use for scientific study. Filled with a vast and exclusive collection of literature, poetry, and drama books, Morel’s library appears to intentionally foreclose the fugitive from gaining any access to the technical knowledge that can decode this mystery (Bioy 6). As Beatriz Sarlo notes, the kind of knowledge the fugitive is barred from by Morel’s library is access to “los saberes técnicos” that captured the imagination of both                                                          185 “authentic archives…[or] methods of achievement and retention” (Bioy 2003, 77), 186 “…of inventing a way to put the presences of the dead together again” (Bioy 2003, 78) 187 “[he]…might be able to use Morel’s machine with an attachment that would keep it from receiving the waves from living transmitters (they would no doubt be stronger)” (Bioy 2003, 78). 188 “it will be impossible for [him] to learn anything by looking at the machines … [since] hermetically sealed, they will continue to obey Morel’s plan(Bioy 2003, 80) 176 the criollo elite and the poorest immigrant sectors of Buenos Aires during the 1920’s and 30’s. In Sarlo’s words: La técnica es la literatura de los humildes y una via hacia el exito que puede prescindir de la Universidad o de la escuela media. La técnica esta, por otra parte, en el centro de una sociedad transformada por el capitalismo y por la inserción de formas modernas en la vida cotidiana: artefactos electronicos, medios de transporte y comunicación 189 (57). Using the novel of Argentine immigrant and working class writer Roberto Arlt’s Los siete locos 190 as evidence, Sarlo further observes that in twentieth-century Argentine fictions fascinated with technological knowledge, inventors pasan a ser los constructores del futuro, y diferenciandose del estereotipo del desinteres cientificio, pueden apuntar al mismo tiempo al poder tecnologico y al poder del dinero. Son los actores de un mundo moderno abandonado por los dioses, que, en las ensoñaciones más audaces, la técnica podría re-encantar 191 (57). In the last analysis, the important figure of the inventor found in both Arlt’s and Bioy’s fictions is “la figuración del futuro en el presente: sus delirios le dan forma caracteristica a la ensoñacion moderna” 192 (Sarlo 58). At the same time, technical knowledge is shown                                                          189 “Technology is the literature of the humble and a way toward a success that can do without the university or secondary school. Technology is, on the other hand, the center of a society transformed by capitalism and by the insertion of modern forms in everyday life: electronic artifacts, means of transport and communication.” [my translation] 190 Another Argentine writer and contemporary of Bioy fascinated with technology with a very different social background and preoccupations. He centers his novels on the city of Buenos Aires. 191 “go on to become the builders of the future, and differentiating themselves from the stereotype of scientific objectivity, can point at the same time to the power of money and of technology. They are the actors of a modern world abandoned by gods that, in the most audacious hallucinations, technology could re-enchant.” [My translation] 192 “the figuration of the future in the present: his deliriums give a characteristic form to modern hallucinations.” (My translation) 177 to be capable of creating “nuevos valores y nuevos dioses, supercivilizados, que colmen el vacio de magia y mito en el que vive el hombre moderno” 193 (Sarlo 58). The artificial paradise that Bioy’s inventor Morel creates in his island for himself and for his friends should not be read as a straightforward and wholesale critique of the technical medium of cinema. The fugitive’s enthusiastic appreciation of Morel’s invention, even if he himself lacks the capacity to understand completely how the machine works or intervene and make changes to it, rather reflects the productive dimension cinema’s technological productions have on the fugitive’s imagination and on his dreams. Morel’s machine persuades the fugitive that there will be a future machine capable of fulfilling his own personally untenable dream to return the images back to life. As he states: “Y algún día habrá un aparato más complete. Lo pensado y lo sentido en la vida—o en los ratos de exposición—sera como un alfabeto, con el cual la imagen seguirá comprendiendo todo…La vida será, pues, un depósito de la muerte” 194 (Bioy 70). The fugitive’s last request, once he has used Morel’s machine and recorded himself, is addressed to the future reader of his diary/report, to whom he asks: “Al hombre que, basándose en este informe, invente una máquina capaz de reunir las presencias disgregadas, hare una súplica: busquemos a Faustine y a mí, hágame entrar en el cielo de la conciencia de Faustine. Será un acto piadoso” 195 (Bioy 91). The fugitive therefore                                                          193 “new values and new gods, supercivilized, that fill the emptiness of magic and myth in which modern man lives.” (My translation) 194 And someday there will be a more complete machine. One’s thoughts or feelings during life—or while the machine is recording—will be like an alphabet with which the image will continue to comprehend all experience…Then life will be a repository of death” (Bioy 2003, 82). 195 “To the person who reads this diary and then invents a machine that can assemble disjoined presences, I make this request: Find Faustine and me, let me enter the heaven of her consciousness. It will be an act of piety” (Bioy 2003, 103). 178 gives his diary/report the explicit role of acting as a source of creative/inventive inspiration for a future reader who will be led by the fugitive’s narrative to invent the machine that will make the fugitive’s dreams a reality. Despite the fugitive’s enthusiastic appraisal of Morel’s machine as a productive source of inspiration that influences his writing and transforms it from a diary into a faithful report recording the phantasmatic beings and events on the island, the parallels that are set-up between the machine and the report become more apparent. As Cavallari argues, the act of filming and the act of writing both function as recording machines. The act of writing, as Callavari describes “fija, conserva, re-produce imagenes verbales (o efectos del sentido) en el medio homogeneo del lenguaje” 196 (270). Furthermore, as Soldan argues, the fugitive’s diary/report sets itself up as an attempt to illustrate the reality of the events that transpire on the island, but this diary/report becomes “a su vez una representacion de otra realidad artificial donde …la imagen de vida [Faustine] es en verdad una imagen de muerte” 197 (767). The effect produced by the fugitive, who writes about and ultimately adds himself to Morel’s recording, is that “al sumarse al simulacro—al sumarse a la muerte—da lugar para entender de que la escritura de un simulacro (de una ficción) es vencida por el mismo simulacro” 198 (767-8).                                                          196 “fixes, conserves, re-produces verbal images (or sensory effects) in the homogenous medium of language.” (My translation) 197 “at the same time a representation of another artificial reality where … the image of life is truly an image of death.” (my translation)_ 198 The displacement of literature within the intense mediatic ecology that the novel profers gives place to the textual production of The invention of Morel as a cultural artifact. Paradoxically, in narrating the symbolic defeat of writing at the hands of the simulacrum, Bioy Casares articulates one of the possible paths for the twentieth-first-century novel to take: to redefine itself as a narrative instrument capable of representing the multiplicity of media present in contemporary society, like a discurse practive that can facilitate an understanding of the relationship between the individual with this changing mediatic universe.” (My translation) 179 However, here a paradoxical new condition of the act of writing in relation to new mediatic technologies of modernity emerges. As Soldan writes: [el] desplazamiento de la escritura dentro de la intensa ecologia mediatica que profana la novela, da lugar a la producción textual de La invención de Morel como artefacto cultural. Paradójicamente, al narrar la derrota simbolica de la escritura a manos del simulacro, Bioy Casares articula uno de los posibles caminos para la novela del siglo XXI: redefinirse como un instrumento narrativo capaz de representar la multiciplidad de medios presente en la sociedad contemporanea, como una practica discursiva que puede ayudar a entender la relacion del individuo con este cambiante universo mediatico 199 (756). Following this new role assigned to literature, the fugitive undermines the realism of Morel’s utopia by stating that even with a new technology capable of joining the consciousness of two people “la imagen no estará viva … Conocerá [solo] todo lo que ha sentido o pensado” 200 (Bioy 82). Even more significantly than undermining the capacity of Morel’s invention to capture and reproduce eternity, the fugitive gives the reader an unexpected comparison between the eternity of this paradise and objective reality when he observes that “El hecho de que no podamos comprender nada fuera del tiempo y del espacio, tal vez este sugeriendo que nuestra vida no sea apreciablemente distinta de la sobrevivencia a obtenerse con este aparato” 201 (Bioy 71). Morel’s machine, therefore, rather than being a utopic new form of technological embodiment that liberates man from                                                          199 “The displacement of writing within the intense mediatic technology that profanes the novel, gives place to the textual production of La invención de Morel as a cultural artifact. Paradoxically, in narrating the symbolic deafeat of writing in the hands of the simulacrum, Bioy Casares articulates one of the two possible paths of the novel in the twentieth-first-century: redefine itself as a narrative instrument capable of representing the multiplicity of media present in contemporary society, as a discursive practice that can help us understand the relationship of the individual with these changing mediatic universe.” [my translation) 200 “the image will not be alive…It will know only what it has already thought or felt.” (My translation] 201 “the fact that we cannot understand anything outside of time and space may perhaps suggest that our life is not appreciatively different from the survival to be obtained by this machine” (Bioy 2003, 82). 180 death, is more like a mirror image of the temporal and spatial boundaries within which human’s embodied life span is already caught up, vis-à-vis nature and natural decay. At this moment, the philosophy and goals of fantastic literary production, like those of cinematic production, are given one of their most salient articulations. Cinema is an apparatus that reflects to what degree reality, even in its most intense sensorial audiovisual reproduction, is an impossible thing to perfectly capture in the aesthetic/technological or aesthetic/textual reproductions of twentieth-century inventors (i.e. by filmmakers and writers). The fugitive’s observation that “un hombre solitario no puede hacer máquinas ni fijar visiones, salvo en la forma trunca de escribirlas o dibujarlas, para otros, más afortunados” 202 (Bioy 69) reinforces Bioy’s assertion that cinematic and literary fictions can never fully grasp reality, only provide a mirror of it in which the spectator/reader can misrecognize himself/herself. Yet La invención ultimately reveals that both textual and technological mirrors are very powerful and dangerous tools. First, Bioy demonstrates that his novel, as a verbal artifact, can also become an instrument “muy capaz de representar la multiplicidad de los medios presentes en la sociedad contemporanea, como una practica discursiva que puede a ayudar a entender la relación del individuo con este cambiante universo mediatico 203 (Tabbi y Wutz 24)” (qtd. in Soldan 765). What the text enables readers to understand about these new mediatic technologies on par with technologized scientific                                                          202 “a recluse can make machines or invest his visions with reality only imperfectly, by writing about them or depicting them to others who are more fortunate than he” (Bioy 2003, 80). 203 “very capable of representing the multiplicity of the present mediatic communication systems present in contemporary society, like a discursive practice that can help to understand the relation of the individual with these changing mediatic universe (Tabbi and Wutz 24).” [my translation] 181 discourses, is that they are at the disposal of both the authoritarian state from which a counter-praxis and counter-aesthetic must necessarily emerge. In this respect the figure of the “small-time inventor” found in both Arlt’s and Bioy’ fictions respectively becomes “the technological artist, the one who has a chance, however infinitesimal, of shuffling the codes of a consolidating discourse of technocratic power” (Kantaris 177). 182 Chapter 3:   Wo(man) Writing Self and Corporeal Other in Clarice Lispector’s   A hora da estrela  Introduction  It is difficult to situate Clarice Lispector’s oeuvre in any specific Latin American literary group or genre. According to Philip Swanson, many critics have attempted to claim her as one of the few Brazilian authors who should be included in the Spanish American dominated literary Boom of the 1960’s. Although her writing style is most often qualified as avant-garde, Latin Americanist U.S. critics, most notably Earl E. Fitz, have also comparatively aligned her lyrical prose with the modernist style of T.S. Elliot. Still others have traced her philosophical influences, in particular Jean-Paul Sartre, as contributing to her portrayal of a continuous and existentialist feminine malaise. A final and often referenced influence is Kafka. 204 A cursory look at Lispector’s oeuvre makes apparent that all these categories and influences do indeed describe certain qualities of her work. Lispector’s experiments with language often took, as Fitz points out, a technical vehicle akin to Eliot’s “objective correlative,” in which an “object, a situation, or an action, visibly and concretely, conveys the mood or state that the author wishes to evoke in the reader” (195). Furthermore, an existentialist malaise frequently afflicts many of her fictionalized female and male protagonists’ experiences of everyday modern life. In A paixão segundo G.H., Lispector summons the unforgettable Kafkaesque figure of the cockroach in The Metamorphosis, but this time given a female gender and filled with a primordial essence the female                                                          204 This list is by no means exhaustive, but rather meant to illustrate the diversity of reception her work has received. 183 protagonist G.H. tries to incorporate in her own body by killing and literally consuming the roach’s oozing fluid. Like Silva and Bioy in earlier generations, Lispector appropriates these European influences in order to open up a space of enunciation for her specific writerly and philosophical interests. Yet unlike these two male Latin American writers, she does not explicitly cite any of her influences, neither in her texts nor to the public. In contrast to a Latin American practice eager to acknowledge its sources rather than conceal them, as Carlos J. Alonso points out, Lispector’s consumption of foreign influences is more implicit. However, literary critics and writers are certain to pick up on them; thus her ouevre, like Bioy’s fantastic and Silva’s modernista works, privileges a reader who is an informed insider. Lispector’s refusal to openly cite her sources receives some measure of illumination in Alonso’s observation that Spanish American (read mostly male writers’) motivations for evoking foreign influences resided in the prestige and status these discursive models gave to their writing (21). Lispector, a female author who often questions literature’s value to the world as well as traditional authorial control in her fictions, does not seek out the prestige and legitimization of a foreign authority. Instead, the cloaking of her literary and philosophical influences is one of the ways in which she decenters authorial position. Even while she does this she paradoxically includes autobiographical reflections and experiences into her narratives. In her novella A hora da estrela in particular, Lispector’s autobiographical and authorial voice enters in a manner that creates a fundamental ambiguity for readers as well as for critics. Unlike the gendered narratives set up by Silva and Bioy repectively in De sobremesa and La invención de Morel, offering a binary between the male as active 184 protagonist/narrator and the feminine entity as the aesthetic object of the narrator’s desire and of his writing, Lispector transforms her novel into what Lesley Feracho identifies as a triad gendered narrative. Explaining the structure of this triad, Feracho states, “the discourses of self-representation and representation of the Other occur through … the author, Clarice Lispector, the narrator Rodrigo S.M., and the narrator’s interaction with the protagonist Macabea” (75). Furthemore, the varied and shifting positioning of the author, narrator, protagonist, object, along with readers, results in a strengthening of their interconnectedness (74). She continues: “Their varied positioning are especially affected by social, economic, and psychological factors that create another level of movement between centralized and marginalized spaces internally and externally” (74). Feracho’s insights provide a helpful way to examine the movement between the central and marginal spaces occupied by Rodrigo at different moments in relation to the aesthetic distance he positions himself in relation to his feminine subject/object of invention: the North-east girl Macabea. Yet before discussing the female character I would like to illustrate the two key moments in which Lispector introduces the narrative triad to the reader within A hora da estrela. In the “Dedicatória do Autor” (“The Author’s Dedication”) page and in the subsequent list of thirteen alternate titles that precede the beginning of A hora da estrela’s main narrative, Lispector emphasizes her authorship of the novella twice. First, she places the parenthetical “(Na verdade Clarice Lispector)” [(“In truth Clarice Lispector”)] (Lispector 9) below The Author’s Dedication (Lispector 1986, 7). Second, she signs her name as one of the fourteen alternate titles she offers to A hora da estrela readers (Lispector 1986, 10). The emphasis that Lispector places on her own identity as 185 the author of A hora da estrela makes the surprise of finding a male narrator, Rodrigo S.M. Relato, a disorienting experience for the reader. This masculine figure who addresses the reader in the first person is particularly discomfiting for readers familiar with Clarice’s oeuvre yet who are still able to recognize her narrative voice and style under the seemingly incongruous mask of the masculine narrator Rodrigo. For a writer like Lispector, whose oeuvre up until A hora da estrela can be summarized as a bipartite philosophical exploration of the act of writing and of the material feminine body as the essential source of feminine being, identity, and creativity, the introduction of a masculine narrator seems at first hand incompatible with her interests. Why Rodrigo is included as part of Lispector’s triad narrative only becomes evident after “he” reveals that the narrative is going to be about an impoverished North- east girl, someone occupying a very different social class, position, and experience than both Rodrigo and Lispector herself. Rodrigo therefore enters into the setting of A hora da estrela’s narrative with a purposeful role. His masculine narrative voice will often assume complete authorial control and power over the North-east girl that parallels both the authorial and actual position of power Lispector’s class and social privilege also grant her over Northeasterners. In this way, a perverse dimension of the class and social privilege Lispector and Rodrigo share is illustrated primarily through the authorial power they both, as actual and fictive writers, possess to interpret and speak for the feminine North-eastern girl, Macabea, whom “they” invent. This becomes especially relevant to my argument when, in the words of Marta Peixoto, this move “allows for double entendres that sometimes propose for this ‘liason’ the model of a typically exploitative sexual affair between a man and a woman of disparate social circumstances” (93). Thus, 186 gendered “images of [female] victim and [masculine] victimizer alternately define the relationship between narrator and Macabea” (3). Rodrigo’s masculine victimizing authorial position in relation to Macabea makes him adopt a writing practice of distance and coldness: “Mas tenho o direito de ser dolorosamente frio, e não vós” (Lipector 15) [“I want my story to be cold and impartial” (Lispector 1986, 13)], he “tells” the reader toward the beginning of A hora. He also emphasizes that his cold and impartial stance is an intrinsic capacity for aesthetic distance that only a male writer possesses when, commenting on the fact that her story could be written by another, he argues “mas teria que ser homem porque escritora mulher pode lacrimejar piegas” (Lispector 16) [“but it would have to be a man for a woman would weep her heart out” (Lispector 1986, 14)]. The irony of Rodrigo’s comment is palpable. As Hélène Cixous argues “It is [Lispector’s] disguise into the masculine which [at times] calls attention to what is being disguised. One sees only the disguise. Obliquely one remembers in parenthesis: ‘(In truth Clarice Lispector)’” (159). The cold and impartial masculine discourse that Rodrigo engages in is further characterized by his localization in the central position of male subject who creates the female as the aesthetic object of his imagination and over which he exerts complete authorial control. Yet in choosing the North-east girl as the female protagonist of his fiction, Rodrigo also meets a great challenge with regards to his inventive and writerly skills. As he states: “Transgedir, porém, os meus próprios limites me fascinou de repente. E foi quando pensei em escrever sobre a realidade, já que essa me ultrapassa” 205                                                          205 “But the idea of transcending my own limits suddenly appealed to me. This happened when I decided to write about reality, since reality exceeds me” (Lispector 1986, 17). 187 (Lispector 19). As we shall see, it is precisely the challenge of inventing the girl’s reality and to confront her in the physical fleshiness of her female being and existence that will force Rodrigo to give up his cold and impartial masculine tone and to approximate her by yielding to emotion. He puts it as “Com esta história eu vou me sensibilizar” (Lispector 19). When Rodrigo yields to emotion, he observes that he is unconsciously creating a different kind of language that is neither cold nor impartial, but deeply personal. And he refers to this change explicitly: “É. Parece que estou mudando de modo de escrever” (Lispector 20) [“It seems that I am changing my style of writing” (Lispector 1986, 17)]. Significantly, the new style that Rodrigo gradually adopts in his surrender to emotion de- centers his appropriative masculine authorial voice. The effect that this decentering of Rodrigo’s authorial control provokes is the temporary effacement of his cold and impartial narration of the girl’s life. Rodrigo’s masculine authorial identity and his cold and impartial creation of the girl’s story is in this way interrupted. In its place, a divagating self-reflexive interrogation of his ambiguous identity and his reason for writing comes to the foreground. Directly addressing the reader, Rodrigo writes: “Desculpai-me mas vou continuar a falar de mim que sou meu desconhecido, e ao escrever me surpreendo um pouco pois descobri que tenho um destino” (Lispector 18) [“Forgive me if I add more about myself since my identity is not very clear, and when I write I am surprised to find that I possess a destiny” (Lispector 1986, 15)]. Along with the multiplicity of positionalities—feminine/masculine and cold/emotional— occupied by the narrator Rodrigo, an added layer emerges in his hyper- reflexive voice that questions the act of writing itself. This self-reflexive voice causes 188 irruptions in the narrative that disrupt the narrative flow of the North-east girl’s narrative. Rodrigo unexpectedly questions the nature of his human identity, his writerly activity, and his motivations for writing in general, and for writing about the North-east girl in particular. Indeed, on one such irruption, Rodrigo asks: “Por que escrevo?” (“Why do I write?”) (Lispector 20) and answers: Antes de tudo porque captei o espírito da língua e assim às vezes a forma é que faz conteúdo. Escrevo portanto não por causa da nordestina mas por motivo grave de ‘força maior’ como se diz nos requerimentos oficiais, por ‘força de lei.’” 206 (Lispector 20) Lest we forget Lispector’s authorial voice, speaking through the mask of the male narrator Rodrigo, it is this self-reflexive and autobiographical style that becomes distinctively recognizable for Lispectorian readers. Even so, the cold, impartial and appropriative style Rodrigo uses is the invention of Lispector. Lispector, therefore enacts a disjunctive innovation in A hora da estrela by supplanting the role of the narrator Rodrigo with her central authorial position, and by ascribing that centrality and control to a masculine gender that she herself both appropriates and eventually incorporates, as we shall see, as part of her feminine writerly identity. In the meantime, Feracho argues that the interplay among characters, and ever changing distance between them is one of the ways in which Lispector undercuts ‘the power of the singular, the One …or authorship per se’”(69) that Rodrigo’s phallocentric masculinity embodies. This translates into Lispector’s refusal to allow Rodrigo’s masculine and dominating side to continuously occupy the center. Importantly, each time                                                          206 First of all because I have captured the spirit of the language and at times it is the form that constitutes the content. I write, therefore, not for the girl from the North-east but for the much more serious reason of force majeure, or as they say in formal petitions by ‘force of law.’” (Lispector 1986, 17) 189 Rodrigo occupies the center and believes himself to be the master of the narrative, as Feracho argues, he stresses his narrative voice to the exclusion of other viewpoints and enforces Macabea’s silence (69). From his position at the center Rodrigo also distances himself from the character of Macabea, and reaffirms the subject-object relationship of author and invention (Feracho 69). To counteract this dualistic and phallocentric masculine model between male writer and feminine creation, Lispector interjects an other kind of writing with the body, in order to set up, as Tace Hedrick comments “the dangerous scene of (a woman) writing, or representing, the female body” (46), although this female writing is half-hidden behind the curtains. Rodrigo’s ultimately limited role as fictional narrator and inventor becomes salient in this respect. He is self-conscious of his fictional role as both character and narrator and of the limited control he has in writing about Macabea. But because part of his impulses are coded with a desire for dominating and wielding his writerly power over the narrative voice and life of Macabea, Rodrigo also begins his narrative from the center in relation to the peripheral position the North-east girl occupies. At the beginning of the novella, Rodrigo has not yet started his fugitive movement to the margins. Along those lines, it is also at this point that he informs the reader that his initial narrative strategy and voice will be cold and impartial. Indeed, he emphasizes his privileged position to objectivity and impartiality over those of the reader, telling the reader, unlike him or her, only he has “o direito de ser dolorosamente frio” (Lispector 15) [“the right to be devastatingly cold” (Lispector 1986, 13)]. However, in Rodrigo’s gradual movement away from the objective stance he takes when he occupies the authorial center and switches to writing with emotion from the margins, he switches into a different kind of 190 writing: “Eu não sou um intelectual, escrevo como o corpo” (Lispector 19) [“In no sense an intellectual, I write with my body” (Lispector 1986, 16). It is through this writing with the body that Rodrigo explores the connections between his sense of self and his writer identity. Rodrigo thus observes, “Ainda bem que o que eu vou escrever ja deve estar na certa de algum modo escrito en mim. Tenho é que me copier com uma delicadez de borboleta branca” 207 (Lispector 23). Rodrigo’s narrative identity, then, as a man who uses metaphors of the fecund female body to talk about his writerly reproduction of himself, is also disjunctive, as Peixoto’s oblique yet illuminating comment makes clear: “the male other resides in one’s very blood” (91). This is something I will discuss in greater detail in the last section of this chapter, where I discuss the relationship between a production of the feminine essentially connected to the female body as yet another product of modernity. For now, Felski’s observations regarding French Feminist thought about the relationship between the feminine and the masculine in The Gender of Modernity can provide an important point of clarification. For French feminism: “The difference of woman lies, paradoxically, in the fact that she is beyond difference; that which precedes the division of gender is itself gendered as feminine” (53). Applying French feminism’s arguments about this essential feminine nature of the human in the “pre-history” of gender division, Rodrigo’s masculine identity can be read, like Peixoto reads him, as part of Lispector’s more complete feminine identity. Lispector’s own introductory metaphor to A hora da estrela contributes further evidence of alignment with this line of feminist                                                          207 “Just as well that what I am about to write is already written inside me. I must reproduce myself with the delicacy of a white butterfly” (Lispector 1986, 20). 191 thought: “Tudo no mundo começou com um sin. Uma molécula disse sim a outra molécula e nasceu a vida. Mas antes da pré-história havia a pré-história da pré-história e havia o nunca e havia o sim” 208 (Lispector 13). The metaphor Lispector presents here references the essential role that organic reproduction plays for the possibility of life to come to be. Physical bodies’ reproductive capacity to engender life, therefore, is thus what enables Lispector to approximate Rodrigo to the figure of the feminine body, as the possibility of self-production, through writing. Lispector’s writing powerfully subsumes masculine and feminine gender differences under the sign of feminine indifferentiation that is Macabea at her moment of death. 209 But at this juncture, Rodrigo’s metaphor in which the process of fictional writing is presented as a delicate reproduction of the self, foreshadows further references to the fecundity of the female body and parthogenesis that will become more explicit as the novella advances. In addition to Rodrigo’s personal irruptions exploring the gendered self, the fecund body, and writing, he also moves from the center to the margins where the North- east girl is positioned. Regarding this move, Lesley Feracho observes, “Rodrigo moves from an initially self-imposed indifference or coldness to a deep involvement in his creation” (69). In this movement to the edge or margin, Rodrigo’s subject positioning dramatically changes. Through the interplay between “a feminine sentimentalism” and “a masculine rationalism,” Lispector utilizes sentimentalism as a way to approximate                                                          208 “Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes” (Lispector 1986, 11). 209 Here Rodrigo’s description of writing, as an event that occurs inside the body, echoes Silva’s male protagonist José Fernandez: “[I found that were inside me] some finished stanzas that were fluttering to find a way out. Verses make themselves inside one, one does not make them, one simply writes them down” (60). 192 Macabea in her otherness and enter her consciousness. Significantly, as Walter Bruno Burg observes, it is the relationship between the intense self-consciousness of Rodrigo and the near lack of self-consciousness of Macabea that illustrates one of the most paradoxical elements of Lispector’s novella (112). Powerfully echoing the male narrator’s plea made in Adolfo Bioy Casares’ novella La invención de Morel, as I examined in the previous chapter, to have a future reader invent a technology that will enable him to enter into Faustine’s consciousness, Rodrigo, according to Berg’s evaluation, is also an incomplete being constantly experiencing his incompleteness and desiring to enter the consciousness of the feminine other. “Para salir de esa experiencia— la del ‘yo’ incompleto-, parece que es necesario el encuentro con ‘el otro’—un otro, sin embargo, concreto e individual, y no la abstracta ‘otredad-en-general’ (feminidad, religión, historia, familia)” 210 (114). In this case, the female other is Macabea. In the encounter Lispector stages between these two gendered, classed, and racially different others, Berg further observes that a paradoxical situation arrives in relation to their individual consciousness: Mientras el ‘narrador’ se siente ‘incompleto’ y además tiene una plena conciencia de que lo es y, sobre todo, por qué lo es, la protagonista, al contrario, no ‘sabe’ nada de sí misma y se siente, al parecer, ‘feliz.’ En virtud de esa ‘inconciencia,’ ella le parece al narrador al mismo tiempo tan ‘completa’ (‘uma pessoa inteira’, dice el narrador) como ‘incompleta’. Su fascinación—en la perspectiva del narrador—esta ahí, fascinación que se expresa por la necesidad de escribir sobre ella” 211 (114).                                                          210 “To get out of this experience—the experience of the incomplete ‘I’—the encounter with the other appears as necessary; however, this must be a concrete and individual other, not the abstract ‘othernesss in general’ (femininity, religion, history, family).” [My translation] 211 “While the narrator feels incomplete, and is also very aware of this state, and above all, why he is that way, the female protagonist, by contrast, doesn’t know herself and at the same time appears to be happy. The girl’s unconsciousness therefore appears to the reader as ‘complete’ (a whole person) as it is ‘incomplete’. His fascination—from he narrator’s perspective—is localized there, [and it is] a fascination that expresses itself through the narrator’s necessity to write about her.” [my translation] 193 Peixoto’s observations about the North-east girl complement Berg, in that she believes that Macabea is a character who, although unaware [read unconscious] of the male narrator inventing her story, believes that she is real and furthermore “possesses a peculiar power as a site for the narrator’s investments” (93). In this third and final chapter, I will analyze the characteristics that make Macabea’s complex feminine unconsciousness ultimately a product of modernity (read modern society) that exists in contrast to Rodrigo’s masculine existentialist self- consciousness; and in particular, the new insights Macabea’s feminine unconscious encounter with Rodrigo’s masculine self-consciousness produces through his writerly act, leading up to my final analysis of the death of Macabea. In considering Macabea a product of modernity vis-a-vis her modern socialization, I will also pay attention to the way in which this modern identity is constituted through her consumptive practices. Although extremely limited in entering actual capitalist exchange due to her poverty, the section on Macabea’s consumption will show that she does actively participate in the libidinal economy of desire that constitutes the modern subject. The productive and oppressive elements this kind of modern constitution of self through consumer desire brings to bear for someone like Macabea, placed outside the margins of what mainstream culture promotes as its dreams and ideals of beauty, success, and power, through mass media images, also prove salient. Lispector herself, in her “Author’s Dedication,” foreshadows the importance played by mass media technologies and glossy female images from cinema and advertisements as a key trigger of her protagonist’s feminine desire when she writes that the girl’s story will be a story “em tecnicolor para ter algum 194 luxo, por Deus, que eu também preciso” (Lispector 10) [“in technicolour to add a touch of luxury, for heaven knows, I need that too” (Lispector 1986, 8)]. In this way, Lispector anticipates her appropriation of high and low consumer objects of popular culture, including the cinema, as metaphors also put to service in her fiction. The coexistence of center and periphery in Rio de Janeiro    In this section, I historically contextualize an important event occurring in the city of Rio, which both illustrates its late twentieth-century peripheral modernity and informs Lispector’s use of the North-eastern figure Macabea: the convergence of modern Rio urbanites and North-eastern migrants in the 1970s. If, as Philip Swanson argues, avant- garde artists of the 1960s, Lispector included, “interrelated a literary and existentialist reaction to the experience of modernity” (42), in the 1970s Post-Boom, changes came with “the exhaustion of experimentalism…[and a] return to and engagement with human reality” (84). Significantly, in Brazil’s case, the new Post-Boom sensibility was anticipated by a clear political call in the early 1960s for writers to infuse their work with ethical and political messages. The response of Brazilian writers at this time was to return to the regional novel associated with the drought-stricken north-eastern sertão (backlands) and adopt a neo-realist narrative style that focused on human suffering. The near absence of social themes in Lispector’s earlier narratives led various critics in the 1960’s to attack her novels. Sonia Roncador’s historical reference of this criticism helps to contextualize part of the literary climate that propelled Lispector’s fusion of her existentialist concerns about modernity and her emphasis on the female body with the social reality of the North-easterns (22). 195 Clearly the influence of her peers made an impact on Lispector’s awareness of how her fiction suddenly came to be perceived as apolitical. For Lispector, however, stepping into this role brought about intense questioning, as Roncador describes, “of literary authority to speak of, and for, the poor,” since “For her, the author is not necessarily a privileged interpreter of social reality, and literature, in turn, is not always a special site of revelation of this reality” (22). Accordingly, Lispector interrogates and problematizes this writerly act through her avant-garde questioning of mimesis, critiquing male writers who employ a highly “aestheticized style” to write the poor. The beautification of poverty through words or a romantic narrative that idealizes the marginal becomes suspect in leaving structures of oppression intact. Moreover, in A hora the collusion of the reader, who consumes these beautiful and romantic narratives of the poor with identificatory pleasure, but is not socially moved to make any kind of social change or intervention, also comes under scrutiny. Rodrigo’s direct address to the reader, which often takes an accusatory tone, challenges the reader to question the ethicality of his own reading practices. Nobody in this narrative—author, narrator, or reader—is allowed to claim innocence without being confronted with the disingenuousness of that claim. As long as the image of the marginal is appropriated by bourgeois writers and turned into a commodity that bourgeois readers consume, while simultaneously the actual Northeasterners’ oppressive circumstances are left intact, no one can claim innocence. Lispector illustrates the complex social and temporal spaces the reader and the North-easterns occupy in her “Author’s Dedication” when she writes, “Esta história acontece em estado de emergência e de calamidade pública” (Lispector 10) [“This story unfolds in a state of emergency and public calamity” (Lispector 1986, 8)]. From this 196 initial moment in the novella, Lispector’s statement draws her readers’ attention to the parallel temporality in which something is actually happening and continues to happen to the North-east people—the state of emergency and public calamity—at the same time as Lispector’s story about a North-east girl is published, sold, and consumed. The narrator Rodrigo S.M.’s oblique assertion later in the novella that “Irremediável era o grande relógio que funcionava no tempo. Sim, desesperadamente par mim, as mesmas horas” 212 (Lispector 45) attains a new meaning based on the two simultaneous temporal planes in which the fictional narrative of a female Northeasterner and the actual plight of the Northeastern people unfolds. Lispector’s novella gestures to the co-existence of two different temporalities, the temporality of fiction and the actual temporality of reality, which simultaneously occur during the reader’s consumptive act. Thus while the reader reads about the fictional narrative of Macabea in A hora da estrela, Lispector simultaneously points out that the calamities of the real Northeasterners continue, uninterrupted by unconcerned Rio bourgeois citizens and the Brazilian government. Her indictment includes the reader in his failure to do anything concrete, along with the author and narrator, to help the Northeasterners’ plight. More than a facile narrative adoption of Northeastern plight, it is my belief that what influenced Lispector to bind her fictional interests to this aspect of the social was Lispector’s own experience of the transformed city of Rio, reconstructed as a center filled with affluent neighborhoods surrounded by peripheral shanty towns of extreme poverty. Living abroad for many years with her diplomat husband, Lispector returned to a                                                          212 [“Nothing could be done about the great clock that marked time within time. Yes, to my exasperation the same hour” (Lispector 1986, 40). 197 dramatically altered city. Of special note is that in Rio, Lispector began writing crônicas (chronicles) for newspapers about different aspects of modern everyday life. It is these crônicas that, emerging from her wanderings through this peripheral city, attest most forcefully to Lispector’s awareness about the many ways in which racial, social, and class asymmetries entered daily life. Indeed, the literary precursor to Macabea, as Peixoto and Hedrick have both argued, can be seen as the gallery of shadowy black Brazilian maids that Lispector wrote about in her crônicas, and in her novels, most significantly, A paixão segundo G.H. Historically, Rio’s late-twentieth-century urban modernity attracted a mass migrant movement of rural Brazilians. Fleeing droughts and famine that plagued their lands, the migrant, disenfranchised, and impoverished masses of Northeasterners arriving in Rio at this time changed the canvas of the recently modernized metropolis into a center surrounded by an impoverished migrant periphery. The fact that these exiled and previously “phantasmatic” people (living in the most remote rural spaces) came to the city of Rio and built fabelas (shanty towns) around its outskirts, or the margins, made their presence and squalor palpable, if largely ignored, in Rio’s wealthier neighborhoods. Seeking jobs and any other means of subsistence in the city center, the migration of the Northeasterners was a neglected social problem that through their sudden presence in the city made the asymmetrical positionality between the “haves” and the “have nots” glaringly obvious in both the inner urban city as well as on its margins. In their move from Brazilian rural periphery to urban center, Northeasterners’ visible signs of poverty in turn transformed them into a daily spectacle for bourgeois Brazilians, including Lispector. 198 The modernizing process that made late twentieth century Rio a seductive space for Northeasterners came in part from the fantasies of modernity and its promise of an escape from poverty. As one of the most technological and capital-driven cities in Brazil, 213 Northeasterners, exposed to and avid consumers of the romantic fantasies about urban spaces disseminated by mass media narratives of television, radio, and cinema, anticipated finding a better life in Rio. Once in the city, however, they experienced no escape from poverty. Instead, Northeasterners found that they had replaced the rural squalor of the Northeast with the urban one of the fabelas. The failure of the city to make migrants’ dreams come true brings in sharp relief the discrepancies between the promises of the modernized city as the fantastic urban place where social upward mobility is possible and the stark and oppressive realities in which modernization, vis-à-vis capitalism and industrialization, support a continuous system of hierarchical oppression with intrinsic class, gender, and racial asymmetries. Work enters into this asymmetrical new relation between the relocated Northeasterners who live in the fabelas and the carioca (white Rio bourgeois natives) population who exploit their labor in different ways. In A hora, Lispector makes reference to the fact that largely uneducated, poor, and racially mixed Northeastern girls can only find jobs in minimum wage jobs that traditionally employ women, by inventing the four Maria’s. These four girls, bearing the same common name, are all “moças balconistas das Lojas Americanas” (shop-assistants of American department stores) (33). As Rodrigo comments, the four Marias … “estavam cansadas demais pelo trabalho que                                                          213 The other major city is Sao Paolo. 199 nem por ser anónimo era menos árduo” (were too exhausted to complain, worn out by an occupation that was no less taxing simply because it was anonymous) (35). Anonymously selling products they cannot afford to impersonal clients in the department store all day produces an existentialist malaise that coexists with their physical exhaustion. If, as Rita Felski asserts, the department store sells not just commodities but the very act of consumption, “transforming the mundane activity of shopping into a sensuous and enjoyable experience for the bourgeois public” (67), the anonymous Marias who sell these products yet cannot enjoy the pleasurable activity of consumption due to their meager salaries, illuminates a perverse logic of capitalism that makes objects worth more than human labor and people. While these girls are expendable in a capitalist economy and in particular for the customer and shopping center, in the sense that all Marias are replaceable by another migrant Maria seeking work, products for sale are not. Northeastern men, in turn, also become minimum wage paid blue collar workers in factories or plants. In A hora, the Northeastern character Olímpico, who courts Macabea, works as a metal worker. Although he tries to elevate his blue collar laborer status by referring to himself as a “metallurgist,” Rodrigo informs the reader that “o trabalho consistia em pegar barras de metal que vinham deslizando de cima da máquina para colocá-las em baixao, sobre uma placa deslizante” 214 (Lispector 49). The robotic action of picking up the rods and loading them on the conveyor belt becomes Sisyphean in its repetitiveness. Rodrigo observes that “A tarefa de Olímpico tinha o gusto que se                                                          214 “his job was to collect the metal rods as they came off the machine and load them on to a conveyor belt” (Lispector 1986, 45). 200 sente quando se fuma um cigarro acendendo-o do lado errado, na ponta da cortiça” 215 (Lispector 49). Olimpico’s industrial job proves to be just as alienating as the four Marias’ depersonalized jobs as sales assistants. The four Marias and Olimpico therefore are two different examples that illustrate the massive exploitation of Northeasterners Rodrigo promises to bring to light in the beginning of A hora da estrela. After disclosing to the reader that he will write about the life of a Northeast girl, Rodrigo states: Como a nordestina, há milhares de moças espalhadas por cortiços, vagas de cama num quarto, atrás de balcões trabalhando até a estafa. Não notam sequer que são facilmente substituíveis e que tanto existiriam como não existieriam. Poucas se queixam e ao que eu saiba nenhuma reclama por não saber a quem 216 (Lispector 17). Rodrigo’s social commentary foregoes delicacy for a blunt statement of the indifference the rest of the world, and in particular Rio’s affluent, have in relation to these Northeastern girls. Isolated and cut-off from the social, the exploitation of the girls’ labor and the squalor in which they live, is passively accepted by them as the only possible way of life. Thoroughly disempowered by the capitalist system that exploits their labor and simultaneously dehumanizes them, the girls cannot protest, particularly because as Rodrigo asserts, they have no audience. Accordingly, Rodrigo sets himself the task of enunciating the protest that these disempowered Northeastern girls cannot utter in their everyday lives through his act of writing about the everyday life of one of them. States                                                          215 “Olimpico’s job had the flavor one tastes when smoking a cigarette the wrong way round” (Lispector 1986, 45). 216 There are thousands of girls like this girl from the North-east to be found in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, living in bedsitters or toiling behind the counters for all they are worth. They aren’t even aware of the fact that they are superfluous and that nobody cares a damn about their existence. Few of them ever complain and as far as I know they never protest, for there is no one to listen. (Lispector 1986, 14) 201 Rodrigo: “O que escrevo é mais do que invenção, é minha obrigação contar sobre essa moça entre milhares delas” 217 (Lispector 15). He adds, “E dever meu, nem que seja de pouca arte, o de revelar-lhe a vida” 218 (Lispector 15). Rodrigo’s two “duties” become two bifurcating elements that constitute the narrative of Macabéa: first, the details of the girl’s everyday life, taken from her childhood past in Alagoas and her present life in Rio; and second, her inner life (including thoughts, impressions, and feelings) and reactions to the external world (including her reaction to events and various external and internal stimuli). Rodrigo begins this narrative by sketching the important details about the girl’s characteristics. He mentions that some Northeast girl’s “sell their bodies, their only real possession, in exchange for a good dinner rather than the usual mortadella sandwich” (Lispector 1986, 14) (my emphasis). For a reader familiar with Lispector’s oeuvre, the emphasis Rodrigo places on the preciousness of these bodies is not lost. Here Lispector’s recognizable philosophical emphasis on the preciousness of the female body is inflected. However, Rodrigo tells us in the following sentence that the girl he will write about “falarei mal tem corpo para vender” (scarcely has a body to sell), adding that “ninguém a quer; ela é virgem e inócua, não faz falta a ninguém” (nobody desires her, she is a harmless virgin whom nobody needs (Lispector 16). The fact that, as Rodrigo asserts, nobody desires this Northeastern girl makes one wonder why Rodrigo chooses such a physically undesirable feminine figure to write about. Yet if we compare this girl’s scarcely present body with                                                          217 “It is my duty to relate everything about this girl among thousands of others like her” (Lispector 1986, 13). 218 “It is my duty, however unrewarding, to confront her with her own existence. For one has the right to shout” (Lispector 1986, 13). 202 the seductive but ultimately phantasmatic images of Helena and Faustine, as discussed earlier in Silva’s De sobremesa and Bioy’s La invención de Morel, we find that her living body gives her an inner life and consciousness that Rodrigo can access, and that sharply contrasts with the experiences of José Fernández and the fugitive, who are blocked from entering into a relationship with their respective entities because they are already dead. Thus Macabea’s undesirability, a consequence of her female corporeality, gradually becomes undone through Lispector’s writerly process of invention. Rodrigo, it should be pointed out, is the privileged masculine narrator given writerly control, but he is also ultimately a character like Macabea with limited control over her narrative, which makes him share with Macabea an uncertain future. Macabea’s seduction of Rodrigo occurs in a gradual way that resembles Bioy’s fugitive’s progressive desire for Faustine. Forced to flee to the simulacral space of Morel’s island, the fugitive’s initial encounter with the simulacrum of Faustine does not provoke love at first sight. Instead, the fugitive’s initial voyeuristic positionality of objective and contemplative distance enables him to aesthetically judge Faustine at the beginning of La invención as a vulgar and undesirable woman, and only gradually become seduced by her image, which in his isolation grows more powerful. Rodrigo, similarly trapped in the matrix of Lispector’ narrative, will have an analogous experience with the Northeastern girl, finding that as he invents her, he gradually approximates her, and his initial hatred and disgust turns to love. 203 (Wo)man flaneur walking through the peripheral metropolis  As I discussed in the previous section, Lispector’s wanderings through Rio were a crucial element for the possibility of writing her autobiographical cronicas, in which she employed an anecdotal style of popular writing about her subjective, albeit anonymous, observations of the city’s inhabitants caught up in the dramas of everyday life. Similarly, in A hora da estrela, Rodrigo S.M. provides the reader with his own anecdote regarding the inspiration to write about the Northeastern girl. Assuming the role of flaneur aimlessly walking through the urban landscape of 1970’s Rio, Rodrigo describes his encounter with the image of an anonymous and marginal girl in this way: “É que numa rua do Rio de Janeiro peguei no ar de relance o sentimento de perdição no rostro de uma moça nordestina” (Lispector 1977, 14). Two distinctive translations of this passage expose a crucial issue in this passage. Giovanni Pontiero translation describes it in this manner: “In a street in Rio de Janeiro I caught a glimpse of perdition on the face of a girl from the Northeast” (Lispector 12) (my emphasis). Pontiero’s choice of perdition, which is a translation from the Portuguese perdição, which shares the same Latin root perditione, is an interesting one. The OED defines perdition thus: The fact or condition of being destroyed or ruined. Loss; diminution; degradation. A thing which causes destruction; the ruin of something. The state of final spiritual ruin or damnation; the consignment of the unredeemed or wicked and impenitent soul to hell; the fate of those in hell; eternal death. The place of destruction or damnation; hell. 219                                                          219 The Portuguese dictionary translation of perdição parallels the OED’s definition: acto ou efeito de perderse (act or effect of losing oneself); ruína (ruin); desgraça (disgrace); desonra (dishonor); irreligiosidade (irreligiosity); imoralidade (immorality). 204 Although I believe Pontiero’s English translation of the Portuguese perdição as perdition captures the multiple connotations of the original’s reference to what Rodrigo catches in the girl’s face and body, his translation of Lispector’s whole sentence, however, alters the description of how this event comes to be perceived. Marta Peixoto translates the original Portuguese more literally: “Because on a street in Rio I caught a glimpse of the feeling of utter loss on the face of a girl from the Northeast” (123) (my emphasis). As Peixoto’s translation clarifies, the author catches something (a feeling of loss, one of the definitions of perdition) that surprises him as he walks through the city of Rio. The feeling of perdition, or utter loss, that Rodrigo catches is an intuitive sensation transmitted to his perception from the Northeastern girl’s gaze and countenance, rather than a verbal communication. Thus, although both “perdition” and “utter loss” describe the kind of feeling Rodrigo catches, these terms do not contribute to making the event of the girl’s loss or perdition tangible for the reader. Rodrigo alone feels, or senses, her perdition as non-verbal message, or intuition, that enables the girl’s perdition to be transmitted to his consciousness. In catching these non- verbal messages, Rodrigo is now compelled to give, through writing, a tangible form (a story), and a referential image (the girl) that is transmitted from the girl to Rodrigo through the non-verbal narrative encounter of two gazes and the recognition of the other’s plight. Rodrigo must write of this strangely communicated experience of the Northeastern girl’s plight into fiction for the benefit of the reader, as well as for his own later avowed ethical and writerly imperatives. Significantly, writing about the girl satisfies the desire to write and what he refers to more ambiguously as a duty to write 205 about the girl. But as Rodrigo will assert, it is the desire to write, as his only escape from routine, which takes clear precedence, as I shall demonstrate later on, over his social imperative to bring attention to the reader, vis-à-vis fiction, of the social plight of the Northeastern people. The two disjunctive interests in themselves are part of what produce such a complex narrative as A hora da estrela, full of tensions, contradictions, and ambiguity about the reliability of “words” to convey meaning. As I have mentioned, Rodrigo’s attempt at capturing the story of this girl through literature is fraught with complications that stem from her complete otherness with regards to gender, social status, education, and general every day life. That for most middle class citizens she is completely inconsequential, and that the spectacle of poverty’s banality and commonality in Latin American urban spaces like Rio is so familiar, desensitizes viewers and complicates things further for Rodrigo. Lispector uses a metaphor of science, the atom—an invisible body rendered visible only by the microscope—to describe the nearly invisible existence of the Northeastern girl, and to anticipate her great destiny in embracing death: “um dia viverei aqui a vida de uma molécula com seu estrondo possível de átomos” 220 (Lispector 15). As Lispector’s male narrator poses, the girl’s marginalization makes her as invisible as an atom to most inhabitants of Rio, in spite of the fact that her material existence is as incontestable as the atom. When her face mysteriously becomes visible to Rodrigo one day as he walks through Rio, his intuition of her perdition leaves a deep impression on his body and mind. After this initial encounter, the Northeastern girl phantasmatically materializes to                                                          220 “I shall one day assume the form of a molecule with its potential explosion of atoms” (Lispector 1986, 13). 206 Rodrigo’s imagination as a mental image who accuses him: “Ella me acussa” (Lispector 20). His only way to defend himself is, as Rodrigo states, to write the girl: “e o meio de me defender é escrever” (Lispector 20). It is not Rodrigo’s mind but his body that involuntarily reacts to this accusation by giving him the sensation that if he does not write about the girl “sufoco” (Lispector 20) [“he will choke” (Lispector 1986, 17)]. The new choking sensation scares him. But the metaphors Lispector constructs around various physical sensations (in particular of pain and discomfort) Rodrigo feels as he writes about the Northeastern girl persist. Near the beginning of A hora, Rodrigo tells the reader that there is “a dor de dentes que perpassa esta história” (Lispector 13) [“sharp toothache that passes through the narrative”] that has given him “deu uma fisgada funda em plena boca nossa” (Lispector 13) [“a sharp twinge right in the mouth”]. The toothache is brought up again later on in the novella. This time Rodrigo states: “Devo acrescentar um algo que importa muito para a apreensão da narrative: é que esta é acompanhada do princípio ao fim por uma levíssima e constante dor de dentes, coisa de dentina exposta” 221 (Lispector 26). Both the sharp and faint sensations of the toothache are physical symptoms explicitly associated with Rodrigo’s ongoing inventive process of writing about the anonymous Northeastern girl whose face caught his eye one day as he was walking in the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Yet an intuitive part of Rodrigo also appears to understand that these various and often unpleasant physical sensations are physical manifestations of an unconscious message that is being sent, opening him up to the possibility of some connection with the                                                          221 “I must add one important detail to help the reader understand the narrative: it is accompanied by the faintest yet nagging twinge of toothache, caused by an exposed nerve” (Lispector 1986, 23). 207 Northeastern girl that will allow him to enter her consciousness through his writing. This sensation of becoming a receptive body, however, is not felt without his ambivalence and resistance. He submits to writing about the Northeastern girl, but often views her as an alien and feminizing virus whose invasion he must tolerate in order to write her story, even as he at times both fears and loathes this feminine contamination. When he writes the girl’s story with his body, and without distance, he often feels as if something extraneous and foreign has infiltrated it or covered his skin. It is at these moments that Rodrigo attempts to establish a cruel and methodical distance in his approximation of the girl and her repulsive feminine and marginal physical and psychical self. At other moments, Rodrigo’s body recognizes her as a transformative virus that can lead him to access a feminine consciousness of plenitude radically different from his existential consciousness of lack. As Berg describes, ultimately the relationship between Rodrigo and Macabea proves to be mutually influential and contaminating: “El encuentro entre el narrador y la protagonista significa que éste le comunica a Macabea su conciencia y ella le comunica a él su felicidad de ‘pessoa inteirea’, es decir su inconciencia’” 222 (115). Even more revealing is the contaminating viral influence of Rodrigo on Macabea, which according to Berg’s analysis proves to be one with an ultimately harmful effect: “al comunicarle al narrador a Macabea su conciencia, ella, immediatamente, va a perder su excelencia de ‘pessoa inteira’; ya no es capaz de                                                          222 “The encounter between the narrator and the protagonist means that he communicates his conscience to Macabea and she communicates her happiness, of whole person, to him, that is to say, her unconsciousness.” [my translation] 208 comunicarle la felicidad tan deseada” 223 (115). Rodrigo’s self-awareness and masculine experience of self as lack thus will be the fatal transmission that annihilates Macabea’s feeling of wholeness, and to her fateful meeting with the fortuneteller Madame Carlota, through which this transmission of Macabea’s self, reinterpreted as lack, is reinforced. Rodrigo’s initial authorial distance from Macabea, however, through which he treats her as the at-once aesthetic female object of the narrative, prevents this kind of encounter and transmission. Furthermore, Macabea is able to transmit to Rodrigo the sensation of her happiness multiple times before her death because he does not communicate back his own self-consciousness, but rather appropriately forgets himself and loses himself to the flow of desire that passes through Macabea that grants her a state of beatitude. As I will analyze in the following section, Rodrigo takes a perverse pleasure in inventing victimizers and victimizing situations for Macabea, which transforms him into a sadistic writer. But as Peixoto observes, there is a curious side-effect to Rodrigo’s inventions, which is that the Northeastern girl “drags him through the misfortunes he invents for her” (93). In the constitution of these sadistic narratives, Peixoto argues that it is the “language of the grotesque which fixes Macabea’s life and appearance in cruelly degrading poses” (93). However, as she notes, there is periodically a lyrical language that rewrites Macabea in lyrical terms (93). These lyrical re-writings largely favor moments in which Macabea is absorbed in the activities of aesthetic contemplation of nature and in some of her consumptive practices, like listening to music or to the cultural broadcasts of                                                          223 “in the narrator’s communication of his conscience to Macabea, she immediately loses her excellence, as ‘a whole person’; she is not able to communicate to him the happiness so desired…” [my translation] 209 Clock Radio. While other consumptive activities, like watching horror films, or misidentifying with female movie stars reveals that Macabea herself has certain sadomasochist desires connected specifically to death and the erasure of her social (read racial and class) markers. Mirrors, Gazes, Consumption, and Desire   A. Sadistic and Masochistic Entrances into Feminine Consciousness As a central and oft-repeated theme in A hora, Rodrigo’s various illustrations of Macabea’s confrontation with her mirror image produces different results at different moments. One such illustration happens the day Macabea lies to her boss about a toothache and gets the day off work. Left alone in the normally cramped room that Macabea shares with the four Marias, Macabea finds that “Tinha um quarto só para ela…então dançou num acto de absoluta coragem” 224 (Lispector 45). This great moment of freedom, that as Macabea observes she would have never enjoyed under the sadistic monitoring of her aunt back in Alagoas, is a gift that she relishes to the fullest. Echoing Lispector’s often referred to necessity for solitude, Macabea “dançava e rodopiava porque ao estar sozinha se tornava l-i-v-r-e!” 225 (Lispector 45). Subsequently, Macabea studies her own enjoyment in the mirror. “Encontrar-se consigo própia era um bem que ela até antão não conhecia” 226 (Lispector 46). Lispector’s giving of oneself to oneself, as a philosophical impulse, here is given a narrative form and frame. In this singular encounter with of Macabea with her mirror image, her                                                          224 “has a room for herself…[and] danced with great abandon” (Lispector 1986, 41). 225 “Macabea danced and waltzed round the room for solitude made her: f-r-e-e!” (Lispector 1986, 41). 226 “To confront herself was a pleasure that she had never before experienced” (Lispector 1986, 41). 210 experience is intensely pleasurable, and echoes Lacan’s encounter of the infant’s joy when faced with his mirror image for the first time as the sensation of having a whole body. Yet, catching a reflected image of Macabea’s enjoyment is a very rare experience in this narrative, which more often relates the cruelties she encoutners, and it is significant because it is the only positive moment Macabea ever has in front of the mirror where the pleasure her mirror image should give her is not in time negated. Indeed, Macabea’ first encounter with her image in the mirror in the early stages of the novella is replaced by the appearance of Rodrigo’s “rosto, cansado e barbudo” (Lispector 25) [“own face, weary and unshaven” (Lispector 1986, 22)]. Rodrigo’s initial appropriation of Macabea, and his attempt to turn her into an identical image of himself that negates her own identity, is emphasized by this replacement of her image with his image in the mirror. Rodrigo’s subsequent assertion, “Tanto nós nos intertrocamos” (Lispector 25) [“We have reversed roles so completely” (Lispector 1986, 22)], further stresses this appropriation. Contrasting these two mirror encounters of Macabea, Leslie Damanesco asserts that instead of the frequently flawed moments in which Rodrigo interprets Macabea for the reader, as in the latter encounter, Macabea’s ability to see her pleasure in the mirror in the first illustration enables her to use her gaze as a progressively self-framing device (7). As Feracho adds, through the self-framing power Macabea’s gaze acquires, “she is able to step ever so briefly out of the constant victimization by others (narrator, boss, coworker, or society in general) and be a central figure in her universe” (101). These two antithetical examples of Macabea’s encounters in front of the mirror in turn help frame Rodrigo’s approach to write the girl into being, which results in an oscillation between 211 victim and independent subject. As his initials “S.M.” suggest, Rodrigo writes about the girl’s victimization with sadistic cruelty and about her potential subjectivity with a masochist effacement of his own masculine self. On the plane of cruelty, Rodrigo must replicate and reproduce the same psychic and physical violence and sadism that the systems of power, and all of its beneficiaries, are able to inflict to the docile body of Macabea from childhood to adulthood. Secondly, on the plane of masochism, Rodrigo must surrender and sacrifice his own identity for an encounter with the materially present feminine other. Rodrigo S.M.’s narrative construction of the girl is on one hand inflected with stories that emphasize his sadistic inventions for the girl and his denial of the capacity for the girl to be anything other than an abject object of cold, impartial scientific inquiry, a live insect he probes under his microscope. On the other hand, Rodrigo alternately approaches the girl by following a kind of masochistic love in which he surrenders his own masculine identity and allows himself, via his writing, to inhabit the space of the other. Beginning with his cruel portraits of Macabea’s childhood, which anticipate a future list of characters who will also become victimizers of Macabea, Rodrigo writes that Macabea was left at the care of a sadistic aunt who obtained sensuous pleasure in beating her as a little girl. Macabea’s aunt therefore is the first negative mirror image that resembles the pleasure Rodrigo achieves in inventing this fictional female sadistic character allowed to victimize Macabea with impunity. As Rodrigo describes: [A tia] Davah-lhe sempre com os nós dos dedos na cabeça de ossos fracos por falta de cálcio. Batia mas não era somente porque ao bater gozava de grande prazer sensual—a tia que não se casara por nojo—é que também considerava de 212 deber seu evitar que a meninan viesse um dia a ser uma dessas moças que em Maceió ficavam nas ruas de cigarro aceso esperando homem 227 (Lispector 31). As a female sadist, the aunt’s perverse attainment of sensual pleasure comes from the thrashings that she is able to give to her docile niece without her complaint. Her aunt’s disgust for the sexual act itself, which turns into the deviant pleasure through the physical abuse of her niece, makes the hypocrisy of her moral imperative to keep the girl from becoming a prostitute all the more grotesque. 228 So called moral “duties” become highly problematized, and help shed a suspicious light on Rodrigo’s own “dutiful” writing of Macabea’s story as his moral imperative. Like Macabea’s aunt, the other five characters that Rodrigo invents, including Macabea’s boss, her Northeastern boyfriend Olímpico, her coworker Gloria, the doctor, and the séance Madame Carlota, perversely join in the games of cruelty that Rodrigo wants to play with Macabea. This form of domination, as Cynthia Sloan argues, often takes the form of characters who dominate the girl through language (96). Additionally, according to critics that include Peixoto, Feracho, and Sloan, Rodrigo invents the Northeastern girl’s story by mining bourgeois guilt, suspicion, disgust, and hatred provoked by impoverished Northeasterners. Peixoto in particular describes how the disparities in economic status and cultural presupposition between narrator and marginal characters, in particular his female protagonist, “are not smoothed over, but are played up                                                          227 Her aunt would use her knuckles to rap the head of skin and bones which suffered from a calcium deficiency. She would thrash the girl not only because she derived some sensuous pleasure from thrashing her—the old girl found the idea of sexual intercourse so disgusting that she had never married—but also because she considered it her duty to see that the girl did not finish up like many another girl in Maceió standing on street corners with a lit cigarette waiting to pick up a man. (Lispector 1986, 27-28) 228 In this respect, Foucault’s observation that modern society is perverse, in that it simultaneously creates, even as it pathologizes, a panoply of peripheral sexualities, is applicable. 213 as points of friction” (92). Summoning various clichés produced by bourgeois discourses about poverty enables Rodrigo to materialize cruelly and with perverse enjoyment, or as he puts it, coldly, the facts about the Northeastern girl’s abject life. Motivated by his classes’ negative sentiments, Rodrigo tellingly describes the space where people like Macabea live, Acre Street, as a place where “lá é que não piso pois tenho terror sem nenhuma vergonha do pardo pedaço de vida imunda” 229 (Lispector 33). Significantly though, Rodrigo’s sadistic inventions become interlocked with the production of his masochist narrative, making it difficult to separate these two modes of writing the girl. Instead, often one sadist narrative leads to the beginning of masochistic narrative in the next moment, or vice versa, in a game of approximation and distancing that Peixoto describes “as the dizzying reversals of subject/object relations” (91) repeatedly enacted by Rodrigo and Macabea. Rodrigo comes to appreciate, the unsought for inner harmony and unconscious wisdom made evident by Macabea’s pleasurable encounter with her reflected image and her feelings of joy at such simple pleasures as her solitude and a room to herself. In writing the girl’s story, however, Rodrigo wonders: “será que entando na semente de sua vida estarei como que violando o segredo dos faraós?” 230 and fears he might “terei castigo de morte por falar de uma vida que contém como todas as nossas vidas um segredo inviolável?” 231 (Lispector 43). Yet when he overcomes these fears, he discovers again and again that the poverty of Macabea’ body is                                                          229 “I wouldn’t go to for the world because I’m shamelessly terrified of that drab piece of filthy life” (HS 30) (9). 230 “if in penetrating the seeds of her existence, I might be violating the secrets of the Pharaohs?” (Lispector 1986, 39). 231 “condemned to death for discussing a life that contains, like the life of all of us, an inviolable secret?” (Lispector 1986, 39). 214 filled in her near-emptiness, like a anorexic saint, with moments of beatitude Rodrigo describes as something close to ecstasy (Lispector 36). Thus, in spite of being deprived of so much of what her body needs to live a healthy life and to acquire a strong sense of self, the girl, in her near lack of a fixed subjectivity and of physical presence, appears to be given in return lyrical visions that trigger supreme happiness. Her ecstatic contemplative experience of the rainbow is one such example: Devo registar aqui uma alegria. É que a moça num aflitivo domingo sem farofa teve uma inesperada felicidade que era inexplicável: no casi do porto viu um arco- íris. Experimentando o leve êxtase, ambicionou logo outro: queria ver, como uma vez em Maceió, espocarem mudos fogos de artifício 232 (Lispector 39). The description of the girl’s happiness at the sight of the rainbow, which gives her the sensation of near-ecstasy and triggers a memory of fireworks seen as a child, is a lyrical one. At the same time, however, Macabea’s innocent recall of the fireworks display triggers Rodrigo’s bourgeois paranoia and renewed distance and coldness. Assuming the voice of bourgeois paranoia, Rodrigo states: “Ela qui mais porque é mesmo uma verdade que quando se dá a mão, essa gentinha quer todo o resto, o zé-povinho sonha com fome de tudo” 233 (Lispector 39). He interpellates the reader by asking him to agree with this idea: “E quer mas sem direito algum, pois não é?” 234 (Lispector 39) The reader’s position and collusion with this kind of outrageous conclusion is thus emphasized, provoking the                                                          232 One distressing Sunday without mandioca, the girl experienced a strange happiness: at the quayside, she saw a rainbow. She felt something close to ecstasy and tried to retain the vision: if only she could see once more the display of fireworks she had seen as a child in Maceió. (Lispector 1986, 35) 233 “She wanted more, for it is true that when one extends a helping hand to the lower orders, they want everything; the man on the streets dreams greedily of having everything” (Lispector 1986, 15). 234 “He has no right to anything but he wants everything, wouldn’t you agree?” (Lispector 1986, 15) 215 reader’s significant unease, and furthermore, provoking her reflection about her potential belief in these ideas. At this moment, Rodrigo’s dominant, class-conscious voice takes a violent turn away from his avowed “duty” to protest for the Northeastern girl and thousands like her, and demonstrates his bourgeois complicity in desiring to maintain the girl’s oppressed condition. The prior moment of “strange happiness” he has witnessed via the girl’s spiritual experience of the ephemeral rainbow in his masochistic surrender to the girl’s consciousness is in the next moment forgotten after the girl’s memory of the fireworks reminds Rodrigo in turn of his socio-economic identity, as one of Brazil’s privileged citizens. Rodrigo’s tone, in addressing the reader, here assumes a disjunctive rhetorical function. He demonstrates ambivalence between sympathizing with the girl’s plight in one moment and refusing to surrender the privileges of his superior position in the next. His bourgeois guilt thus engenders aggressive and unfounded accusations that once again reestablish the distance between his identity and that of the Northeastern girl’s “marginal identity.” B. Macabea’s Identification through Consumption: In contrast, the girl is not made fully conscious of herself as poor and marginal until near the conclusion of the novella by the fortune teller Madame Carlota. Instead, when she has the first opportunity to ponder her condition through the title of a book, she does not become self-conscious and recognize her condition: Mas um dia viu algo que por um cisava de muita coisa: um libro que Seu Raimundo, dado a literatura, deixara sobre a mesa. O título era ‘Humilhados e 216 Ofendidos’. Ficou pensativa. Talvez tivesse pela primerira vez se definido numa classe social” 235 (Lispector 45). In contrast to Rodrigo, who understands what this book is about (i.e. an innocuous reference to Marxist thought that categorically defines her socioeconomic and marginal position), the girl does not understand that the words “shamed” and “oppressed” describe her life. Simply put, these words, as theoretical concepts that describe the disempowerment of the working classes, are not enough to make her self conscious of her systemic oppression. Instead, what happens when the girl sees this book title is that “Pen- sou, pensou e pensou! Chegou à conclusão que na verdade ninguém jamais a ofenderá, tudo que acontecía era porque as coisas são assim mesmo e não havia luta possível, para quê lutar?” 236 (Lispector 45). The irony of finding a book with the title The Shamed and the Oppressed on the bookshelf of her boss, Senhor Raimundo Silveira, adds another twist to the issue of class hypocrisy. Raminundo pays Macabea less than minimum wage for her job as a typist, actively exploiting her labor, and threatens to fire her, unsatisfied with her sloppiness and frequent mistakes. Thus the fact that Rodrigo describes Senhor Raimundo as a man who likes to read books like The Shamed and the Oppressed only increases the irony that he actively uses his middle class power to exploit the labor of his marginal Northeastern employee.                                                          235 One day, however, she saw something that, for one brief moment, she dearly wanted… The book was entitled The Shamed and Oppressed. The girl remained pensive. Perhaps for the very first time she had established her social class (Lispector 1986, 40). 236 “She thought and thought and thought! She decided that no one had ever really oppressed her and that everything that happened to her was inevitable” (Lispector 1986, 40). 217 After her run-in with Senhor Raimundo’s book, Macabea feels quite shaken up. She goes to the lavatory to be alone and recover from the event, but as she stares at herself, she is scarcely able to see any image reflected in the tarnished mirror. In the next moment the mirror gives her a grotesque metaphor of her existence Rodrigo describes as “a pia imunda e rachada, cheia de cabelos, o que tanto combinava com sua vida” 237 (Lispector 28). According to Rodrigo’s rendering, Macabea’s physical ugliness is given here one of its most cruel metaphors. In the next moment, the mirror distorts her face into a carnivaleque otherness with racist undertones. Macabea observes that her nose has suddenly “tornado enorme como o de um palhaço de nariz de papelão” 238 (Lispector 28). This second moment of grotesque alterity passes, and Macabea, seemingly very out of character, muses about this image: “tão jovem e já com ferrugem” (Lispector 28) [“so young and yet so tarnished” (Lispector 1986, 25)]. Rodrigo’s own point of view, or interpretation of Macabea, is transparent in this conclusion. Significantly, he aesthetically rejects the beauty of Macabea’s face according to the distance her racial attributes have from European ideals proliferated through mass consumer culture and beauty product advertisements all over Rio. This claim is supported by Feracho, who argues that Macabea’s “Otherness is further expressed by Rodrigo’s at times detailed descriptions of her overall facial features” (95). In particular she notes that Rodrigo’s most extensive description of Macabea’s physical features makes her aesthetically racial inferiority in relation to whiteness clear:                                                          237 “filthy hand basin that was badly cracked and full of hairs” (Lispector 1986, 24). 238 “grown as huge as those false noses made out of paper mâché donned by circus clowns” (Lispector 1986, 24). 218 Vi ainda dois olhos enormes, redondos, saltados e interrogativos…No espelho distraídamente examinou de perto as manchas no rostro. Em Alagos chamavan-se de ‘panos’, diziam que vinham do fígado. Disfarçava os panos com grossa camada de pó branco e se ficava meio caiada era melhor que o pardacento 239 (Lispector 30). As Feracho notes, in this reference “Rodrigo S. M. links Macabea’s physical defects to a physical deficiency. Not only is her face tainted, but so is her body” (95). In Feracho’s view Macabea’s use of the face powder is an attempt “to erase or at least conceal her otherness with a literal and figurative ‘whiteness’” since “her sallow complexion—and consequently her racialized identity—can never be erased” (95). Thus despite Macabea’s attempt to erase or conceal the racial and social markers of her complexion and skin tone through her use of whitening powder, Rodrigo’s cruel portraits of Macabea—as ugly, sexually undesirable, racially inferior, unclean, etc.—are characteristics that enhance her invisibility and otherness, rather than making her identifiable to her readers. This invisibility is emphasized by the fact that Macabea’s lack of reflection in her previous encounter with the mirror reminds her of the figure of the vampire without a reflection her aunt would tell her about when she was a child to frighten her. Tragicomically, Macabea reasons that “não seria de todo ruim ser vampiro pois bem que lhe iria algum rosado de sangue no amarlado do rostro, ela que não parecia ter sangue a menos que viesse um dia a derramá-lo” 240 (Lispector 28-29). As Feracho observes,                                                          239 “Her eyes were enormous, round, bulging, and inquisitive…Lost in thought, [Macabea] examined the blotches on her face in the mirror. In Alagoas, they had a special name for this condition—it was commonly believed to be caused by the liver. The girl concealed her blotches with a thick layer of white powder which gave the impression that she had been whitewashed but it was preferable to looking sallow” (Lispector 1986, 26-27). 240 “it might not be such a bad thing being a vampire; for the blood would add a touch of pink to her sallow complexion. For she gave the impression of having no blood unless a day might come when she might have to spill it” (Lispector 1986, 25). 219 “Macabea’s sallow, nonwhite skin, in the narrator’s view, is representative of her condition as outsider—someone seemingly dead (bloodless) and not a ‘real’, ‘beautiful’ woman” (94). The fact that Macabea is not beautiful makes it impossible for to turn her body into a commodity for sale like other Northeastern girls whose physical beauty, according to Rodrigo, enables them to sell their bodies as prostitutes. Macabea, in contrast, has no recognizable feminine appeal or glamour to sell or trade. Her limited participation in economic transactions, however, does not prevent her feminine consumer investment in advertisements. Rather Macabea indulged in certain little pleasures. “Nas frígidas noites, ela, toda estremecente sob o lençol de brim, costumava ler à luz de vela os anúncios que recortava dos jornais velhos do escritório” 241 Lispector 42). Macabea’s pleasurable visual consumption of her collected advertisements gives way to a literal fantasy of consuming one of the luxury objects advertised: Havia um anúncio, o mais precioso, que mostrava em cores o pote aberto de um cfreme para pele de mulheres que simplesmente não eran ella. Executando o fatal cacoete que pegara de piscar os olhos … o creme era tão apetitoso que se tivesse dinheiro para comprá-lo não seria boba. Que pele, que nada, ela o comeria, isso sim, às colheradas no pote mesmo 242 (Lispector 42). Macabea’s emaciated body craves nourishment that the rich luxuriousness of the cream evokes. The asymmetry of a consumerist system which advertises expensive luxuries to bourgeois white women but also to lower class woman like Macabea who cannot afford                                                          241 “On wintry nights, shivering from head to foot under a thin cotton sheet, she would read by candle-light the advertisements that she had cut out of old newspapers lying around the office” (Lispector 1986, 38). 242 The advertisement she treasured most of all was in colour: it advertised a face cream for common with complexions so very different than her own sallow skin…The cream looked so appetizing that, were she to find enough money to buy it, she wouldn’t be foolish. Never mind her skin! She would eat the cream, she would, in large spoonfuls straight from the jar (Lispector 1986, 38). 220 the essentials makes Macabea’s fantasy at once perversely humorous yet poignant. Macabea, who finds herself often starving for food, imagines possessing the rich and luxurious cream not to apply for her face and better her skin, but to literally eat and put an end to the pangs of hunger that torment her. At other times however, Rodrigo describes a productive element in Macabea’s desire for certain luxuries and commodities that speak to an explicitly female consumer desire. He describes that “Vez por poutra ia para a Zona Sul e ficava olhando as vitrinas faiscantes de jóias e roupas acetinadas—só para se mortificar um poco” (Lispector 38) [“occasionally she wandered into the more fashionable quarters of the city and stood gazing at the shop windows displaying glittering jewels and luxurious garments in satin and silk—just to mortify the senses” (Lispector 1986, 34)]. The truth, he adds, “é que ela sentia falta de encontrar-se consigo mesma e sofrer um pouco é um encontro” (Lispector 38) [“is that she needed to find herself and a little mortification helped” (Lispector 1986, 44)]. The neurotic and mortifying activity of window shopping, according to Rodrigo, enables Macabea to find herself again. It becomes a kind therapy Rodrigo compares to having “crutches,” which provide a temporary escape from the daily shocks and stresses of the real world. Lost in observation and the unattainable desire for the glittering jewels and beautiful objects in front of her, Macabea forgets the world, and in the process paradoxically finds herself. Macabea’s consumerist impulses, as demonstrated by her desire for the face cream and for the precious luxury objects in the display windows barred from her access because of her lack of money, acquires instead the new function to mortify her senses. Macabea’s act of consumption therefore becomes largely the practice of actively desiring 221 an object without actually ever possessing it. Her desire continues to ache for that unreachable object of consumption without it ever being given what it wants. Ironically, however, if Macabea were ever granted access to any of these objects, her desire would cease, and her mortification, which as Rodrigo establishes, which brings her back to herself, would end. C. Macabea’s Feminine Gaze: Capturing Female Desire for the Male other In contrast to Macabea’s desire for various commodity objects, one day a young Northeastern young man like herself named Olimpico approaches her, and her sensual desire is instantly triggered. Describes Rodrigo: “E a moça, bastou-lhe vê-lo para torná-lo imediatamente sua goiaba-com-queijo” (Lispector 47) [“The girl only had to see the youth in order to transform him immediately into her guava preserve with cheese” (Lispector 1986, 42)]. Macabea’s internal transformation of Olimpico into her favorite and most cherished sweet is significant. The sensuous pleasure derived from this common Brazilian sweet is significantly connected to a childhood memory in which her perverse aunt would intentionally keep the guava preserve she knew Macabea loved as yet another way to torment her. Macabea’s gaze however, in looking at Olimpico, produces a different kind of objectification than the aesthetic objectification male desire and his corresponding gaze have produced in Silva’s José Fernández and Bioy’s fugitive when they encounter their feminine entities. Rather than transform Olimpico into a desired aesthetic object, like Helena and Faustine, Macabea turns him into a food with the implicit potential to feed her body’s sensual desires. The girl’s first encounter with Olimpico happens in Rio on a rainy day in May, the “mês dos véus de noiva” (“month of brides”) (Lispector 42). Significantly, it is to 222 Olimpico that she finally reveals her name, which the reader discovers at the same time. (Previous to that Rodrigo refers to Macabea as the Northeastern girl or simply as the girl.) Macabea and Rodrigo’s encounter also adds another second person to the alternating first and third voices already in play up until this point. As Earl E. Fitz breaks down: [on a structural level] there is a fluctuation between the first-person, either that of our struggling narrator or that of one of the characters most involved; second person which is generally reserved for the illuminating and often funny exchanges of dialogue between characters but which is also used by the narrator in direct discourse with the reader; and third person, the omniscient, traditional mode of story-telling and one with which Clarice Lispector has been able to produce a very telling kind of psychological realism (199). In this dialogic exchange in which Macabea and Olimpico are able to speak without Rodrigo’s first person mediation or omniscient third person psychological meditations, Lispector deploys a stylistic element more commonly used in theatre and cinema. Reading like a fluid script between two actors, Olimpico and Macabea can be seen as putting on a performance for the reader. On this first encounter, Olimpico has difficulty pronouncing the girl’s strange and unheard of name, and concludes “Me desculpe mas até parece, doença de pele”(Lispector 47) [“Gosh, it sounds like the name of a disease… a skin disease” (Lispector 1986, 43)] a comment that echoes Rodrigo’s own comment that the girl had clung to his skin “qual melado pegajoso ou lama negra” (Lispector 24) [“like some viscous glue, or contaminating mud” (Lispector 1986, 21)]. Macabea agrees with Olimpico, but explains “minha mãe botou ele por promessa a Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte se eu vingasse” (Lispecto 47) [“that’s the name my mother gave me because of a vow she mad to Our Lady of Sorrows if I should survive.” (Lispector 1986, 43)]. 223 Needless to say, the relationship between Macabea and Olimpico does not bode well when Macabea’s name produces such an undesirable connotation for Olimpico. Furthermore, Olimpico’s brutal honesty replicates the cruel undertones Rodrigo’s prose takes in describing Macabea as undesirable other and victim. Olimpico and Macabea meet a couple more times in different spaces of Rio free to the public, except for their singular visit to the zoo. But eventually, Olimpico tires of the bottomless curiosity she manifests in sharing the pieces of knowledge she hears from “Clock Radio” and his own inability to explain or understand the information she provides. Too often, Macabea asks Olimpico about the words she hears on “Clock Radio” that fascinate her but that she cannot understand: que quer dizer ‘élgebra’? … que quer dizer cultura? … que quer dizer rua Conde de Bonfim? ... que é conde? 243 (Lispector 54-55). These questions irritate and anger Olimpico because they, and by extension Macabea, confront him with his own ignorance. The two Northeasterners dialogic exchange thus continuously fails, vexed as it is by Macabea’s insatiable curiosity and Olimpico’s inability to answer any of her questions. Things worsen when Macabea responds with wonder and disbelief after Olimpico tells her of his ambition to become a successful politician, to which she innocently replies: “Nao será somente visão?” (Lispector 55) (“Are you sure you’re not having visions?”) It should be noted that Macabea’s incredulous response to Olimpico’s ambitious dreams of gaining access to power and wealth through politics often takes these comical turns. The reader can also laugh at Olimpico’s response: “Vá para of inferno, você só                                                          243 “What does elgebra mean? . . . What does electronic mean? . . . What does culture mean? . . . What does Count of Bonfim Street mean? . . . What is a Count?” (Lispector 1986, 49-50). 224 sabe desconfiar. Eu só digo palavrões grosssos porque voce é moça donzela” (Lispector 55)[“Got to blazes! You don’t trust anybody. Only the fact that you’re a virgin stops me from cursing you” (Lispector 1986, 49)]. But underneath the humor, there is a traditional gendered portrayal of the personality differences that exist between Macabea—as self-effacing, complete in herself, and having no ambitions—and Olimpico—as ambitious, violent, and cruel. In spite of sharing the same Northeastern migrant background and systemic impoverishment and marginalization, ultimately Olimpico and Macabea relate very differently to the world and to each other in ways that are, to a large degree, determined by gender: “Ela falava coisas grandes mas ela prestava atenção nas coisas insignificantes como ela própia” (Lispector 56) [“Olimpico concerned himself with important things but Macabea only noticed unimportant things like herself” (Lispector 51, 2009)]. The interest and desire of Macabea for discovering the world of the small (the microcosm) thus clashes with Olimpico’s ambitions in wanting to take part in bigger events (the macrocosm). Macabea also becomes undesirable to Olimpico because, even if she is still a virgin, he can observe that her undernourished body cannot bear children. Rodrigo will confirm Olimpico’s suspicions when he writes that Macabea could not bring a child to term and later on reveals that she is tubercular. Olimpico thus quickly leaves Macabea, who didn’t cost Olimpico anything, for her lower-middle class co- worker Gloria, whose curvaceous body, seductive mulata 244 attitude, and above all whiteness, make her much more attractive than Macabea.                                                          244 The Portuguese word mulatta in a Brazilian context generally refers to a Brazilian woman of African- descent, though in this case Gloria, described as a “white” Brazilian of Portuguese descent, consciously performs the stereotypical associations Brazilian culture espouses about mulatta women as being provocatively sensual women. 225 The theme of whiteness as the privileged racial category of feminine beauty in Brazil, despite the majority numbers of non-white Brazilians, is here given further elaboration. As previously noted, Macabea tries to cover up her racial otherness with white powder, but fails. Then Olimpico leaves her for her whiter co-worker. Finally, after confiding in Olimpico a secret desire, to become a movie star like Marilyn Monroe, he points out her racial otherness as one marker that makes it absurd for Macabea to have such a dream. Macabea first asks Olimpico if he knows that Marylin “era toda cor-de- rosa?” (Lispector 58) [“Marilyn Monroe was the color of peaches?” (Lispector 1986, 53)]. Olimpico, with his by now customary cruelty, retorts: “E você tem cor de suja. Nem tem rosto nem corpo para ser artista de cinema” (Lispector 58) [“And you are the color of mud. What makes you think that you’ve got the face or the body to become a film star?” (Lispector1986, 53)]. Here another reference and contrast of skin color, the peach-colored skin of Marilyn Monroe versus the mud-colored skin of Macabea, reinforces another way in which women of color, like Macabea, become the negative antithesis to the Hollywood produced (read white) ideal of beauty of actresses like Monroe that is disseminated to the peripheral Latin American cities like Rio through movies, posters, and other kitsch reproductions and paraphernalia. In spite of Olimpico’s brutal remark, the girl holds on to her fantasy, and later shares this dream with Gloria (her workmate and Olimpico’s new girlfriend). But Gloria, who can in effect pass as white, has the same reaction as Olimpico, a Northeast man. Ridiculing such an idea, she asks Macabea whether she has not seen herself in the mirror (Lispector 64). Ironically, Olimpico, a marginal Northeasterner whom Rodrigo describes as “crestado e duro que nem galho seco de árvore ou pedra ao sol” (Lispector 62) [“born 226 more shriveled and scorched than a withered branch or a stone lying in the sun” (Lispector 1986, 57)] and Gloria, a self-described “born and bred” carioca 245 who wore too much cheap perfume, and did not often wash (Lispector 65) hardly approximate Hollywood ideals of feminine or masculine beauty. Ultimately they both are also peripheral. Indeed, as Peixoto argues: The characterization of Olimpico and Gloria, especially, relies with strident glee on the clichés through which the upper classes typically view the poor: Olimpico’s gold tooth, proudly acquired, and greasy hair ointment; Gloria’s cheap perfume disguising infrequent baths, her bleached egg-yellow hair. (93) Thus in denying Macabea the possibility to become a film star because of her perceived racial ugliness they both unwittingly maintain a standard of beauty that is foreign to both their persons and that systemically excludes them. Indeed, beyond Olimpico and Gloria, the images of Marilyn Monroe and other beautiful white film stars are hardly representative of the incredible cultural diversity that actually exists in Brazil and make for a particularly narrow construction of beauty that is disjunctive with the reality of how Brazilian women, in their majority, actually look. Thus, while both Olimpico and Gloria internalize the dictums of Hollywood images of feminine beauty, and scoff at Macabea for her desire to be like Marilyn Monroe because her appearance is such a radical deviation, they are not aware that their rejection of Macabea’s desire for inclusion into cinematic representation is also a rejection of their own physical features. After Olimpico leaves the girl with the parting words, “Você, Macabea, é um cabelo na sopa. Não dá vontade de comer” (Lispector 66) [“Macabea, you’re like a hair                                                          245 The Portuguese word carioca refers to a Rio de Janeiro long-term resident, who’s family from various generations has resided in Rio. Since cities such as Rio de Janeiro are privileged cultural centers in stark contrast to marginal places such as the North-east, the word carioca is also a territorializing identity which stakes a claim of superiority to recently arrived immigrants. 227 in one’s soup. It’s enough to make anyone lose their appetite” (Lispector 60)], she becomes hysterical. Macabea starts to laugh, as Rodrigo states, “por não ter se lembrado de chorar” (Lispector 66) [“because she had forgotten how to weep” (Lispector 1986, 61)]. The constant onslaught of cruelty that Macabea faces starts to make cracks in her psyche; Macabea feels “very, very tired” and her incapacity to know the origins of her onslaught of hysterical laughter only makes her feel more exhausted. She also becomes jealous of Gloria, who despite being ugly, is “buxom”. Macabea learns that this physical characteristic makes women attractive to men after she hears a young man in Maceio say to a girl who was passing by, “a tua gordura é formosura!” (Lispector 66) [“You’re a buxom beauty!” (Lispector 1986, 61)]. Though she desperately desires to put more flesh on her waif thin body, she cannot afford to do so. Physical hunger therefore ultimately blocks Macabea from satisfying her sensual hunger. Olimpico, her “guava preserve,” sees her barren, shriveled body and leaves it untouched (virginal), going after a woman with a buxom, fertile body he actually desires to sensually touch. In spite of the cruelties stacked up against Macabea, she persists in her dreaming, and since, as Rodrigo asserts, “ninguém lhe dava festa, muito menos noivado, daria uma festa para si mesma” (Lispector 67) [“nobody wanted to give her a treat, much less become engaged to her” (Lispector 1986, 61)], she decides to treat herself. She buys a new bright red lipstick she does not need. Macabea’s persistence in wanting to approximate the beauty of Marilyn Monroe thus continues unabated by Olimpico’s and Gloria’s remarks. Again in front of the mirror (in the washroom of the office where she works): 228 No banheiro da firma pintou a boca toda e até fora dos contornos para que os seus lábios finos tivessem aquela coisa esquisita dos lábios de Marylin Monroe. Depois de pintada ficou olhando no espelho a figura que por sua vez a olhava espantada. Pois em vez de batom parecía que grosso sangue lhe tivesse brotado dos lábios por um soco em plena boca, com quebra-dentes e rasga-carne 246 (Lispector 67). The familiar washroom mirror where the girl regards herself once again becomes the site of alterity and violence done to her image. Only this time, instead of having no mirror image, like a vampire, or having a deeply distorted and grotesque mirror image, like a huge clown nose, this new mirror image reflects the violence wrought by the desire to look like Marilyn Monroe’s white and heavily fabricated feminine image does to Macabea’s own racial and feminine identity. The desire for whiteness and its equation with beauty, however, has very different connotations for Macabea than for the bourgeois man or woman who fantasizes of having more successful and glamorous lives in an Americanized Rio. In Macabea’s persistent desire to look like Marilyn Monroe, an aspect of feminine spectatorial identification with the cinematic image that fails to recognize physical boundaries emerges that parallels Bioy’s narrator’s (the fugitive’s) spectatorial desire for Faustine. Yet if the fugitive’s spectatorial desire is triggered when he visually encounters the feminine image of Faustine, as are his subsequent dreams of seduction and experience of love, Macabea neither sexually desires nor loves Monroe’s image. Rather Macabea’s desire is to be a feminine object of male sensual desire: precisely what Marilyn Monroe’s seductive cinematic image as sex symbol embodied during and after her time. She dreams of being                                                          246 “she painted her lips lavishly beyond their natural outline, in the hope that she might achieve that stunning effect seen on the lips of Marilyn Monroe. When she had finished she stood staring at herself in the mirror, at a face which stared back in astonishment. The thick lipstick looked like blood spurting from a nasty gash, as if someone had punched her on the mouth and broken her front teeth” (Lispector 1986, 62). 229 magically transformed into Monroe’s physical likeness, and through that likeness, becoming a visible object of desire and have her own sensual desire be returned by the male gaze and body. It is through this fantasy therefore that Macabea ultimately tries to recuperate the sexual vitality that her body has been robbed of by what Peixoto describes as patriarchy’s neutralization of her sensuality (90). Another example that reinforces the repressed nature of Macabea’s sensuality is found when Rodrigo describes: “Quando dormia…sonhava estranhamente em sexo, ela que de aparência era assexuada” (Lispector 37-8) (“When she slept…she dreamed about sex, she, who to all appearances was completely asexual”). In Rodrigo’s revelation, the girl’s sensuality, “awakened” in her dreams, is not acted upon in actual life because people perceive her as asexual and undesirable. Furthermore, her aunts’ religious disgust for sex also shapes Macabea’s own understanding of her sexual desires and impulses as sinful. Thus when she wakes up: Quando acordava se sentia culpada sem saber por quê, talvez porque o que é bom devia ser proibido. Culpada e contente. Por via das dúvida se sentía de propósito culpada e rezava mecánicamente três ave-marias, amém, amém, amém.” 247 (Lispector 38) Significantly, Macabea’s internalized guilt, the product of her aunt’s religious fervor and disgust of sex, is also subverted by her pleasure. After she prays her Hail Mary’s, she feels forgiven of her sexual dreams and the enjoyment they provided, and can continue to relish them.                                                          247 She was overcome by feelings of guilt without being able to explain why. Perhaps because everything that is pleasurable should be forbidden. Guilty and contended. Her doubts confirmed her sense of guilt and she mechanically recited three Hail Mary’s Amen, Amen, Amen. (Lispector 1986, 33-34) (my emphasis) 230 Unlike Emma Bovary, whose cravings and desires are characterized by Flaubert as “debased” and as evidence of her inherent lack of any authentic impulse toward spirituality and self-transcendence”, Lispector weds, as Felski demonstrates, Macabea’s corporal desires to her spiritual ones (Felski 84). Over and against Flaubert’s emphasis in Madame Bovary “that the work of art is to be valued as an end in itself, separate to contingent desires and needs of particular subjects,” Lispector’s Macabea ultimately shows a uniquely feminine sensuous aesthetics of “use-value rooted in sensual rather than cognitive interests” (Felski 84). Based on these similarities, it is very tempting to conclude that, as Felski argues about Emma Bovary, Lispector’s feminine sensuous aesthetic, demonstrated via the portrayal of Macabea’s singular acts of consumption, collapses the distinction between art and reality “not in order to achieve a better understanding of society and human nature (the usual justification of a realist aesthetic), but as a means of facilitating a loss of self in the pleasures of the text” (Felski 84) for both herself and the reader. Although Macabea does not read more than the beauty advertisements she collects, The Shamed and Oppressed, or Senhor Raimundo’s letters she transcribes, she does consume two other mass media products. Macabea watches horror films and, in contradistinction to the sadomasochist narrative pleasures these narrative cinema affords her, she also listens to music on the radio. Beginning with horror films, Rodrigo informs the reader: “Macabea gostava de filme de terror ou de musicais. Tinha predilecção por mulher enforcada ou que levava um tiro no coração” 248 (Lispector 63). Peixoto interprets                                                          248 “Macabea had a passion for horror films.She especially liked films where the women were hanged or shot through the heart with a bullet” (Lispector 1986, 58). 231 this moment as another example of how Macabea is “‘raped,’ not by one individual man, but by a multitude of social and cultural forces that conspire to use her cruelly for the benefit of others” (Lispector 1986, 90). Although I agree that social and cultural forces do conspire to victimize Macabea, I think the idea of rape does not fully consider the attraction to death Lispector continuously attributes to feminine desire through her female character. As I have already established in regards to Bioy’s fugitive in chapter 2, the feminization of his desire through the consumption of the cinematic image Faustine leads to a masochistic surrender to Morel’s machine that annihilates his masculine body. The fugitive’s desire for Faustine ultimately leads him into an initially painful and uncanny encounter with death, marked by his slow decay and the progressive loss of his sensorial capacities. Macabea’s visual pleasure in watching the cinematic spectacle of death violently “taking” the body of woman, is if problematically violent, also perversely sensual. Further supporting the association of feminine desire with death, Tace Hedrick observes that “Macabea’s sex is the mark, literally, of her being, her existence. This sensuality is connected explicitly to death” (52). Indeed, Hedrick reveals another surprising element between Macabea’s attraction to Monroe, when she states “her [Macabea’s] dream is to be a movie star like the suicide Marilyn Monroe, with pink skin (65)” (52). Hedrick’s interpretation makes Rodrigo’s following statement, after his description of Macabea’s love for horror films, acquire more clarity: “Não sabia que ela própia era uma suicida embora lhe tivesse ocorrido se matar” (Lispector 64) [“It never dawned on her that she was a suicide case even though she had never contemplated killing herself” (Lispector 1986, 58)]. 232 It is significant therefore that Macabea also identifies with a portrait of the young Greta Garbo hanging in her boss’ office. Garbo, the divine face of silent cinema, like Monroe, the eternal female sex symbol, continue to be disjunctive identifications when one compares Macabea’s appearance with their extraordinary and privileged white beauty. However, together the unique auras Monroe and Garbo join the divine and transcendental desires of the mind and the sensual desires of the body that Lispector joins in her construction of Macabea’s feminine desire. 249 In addition to the suicide connection that exists between Macabea and Monroe, as Hedrick asserts, both Monroe and Garbo had impoverished childhoods that connect them to Macabea’s poverty. 250 Unknown to Macabea, (but not to Lispector), the rise to stardom of the poor and orphaned Norma Jean, through her transformation into the platinum blonde sex goddess Marilyn Monroe, all concluded in Monroe’s suicide. Louise Kaplan has argued that Monroe committed suicide to escape her transformation into “a caricature of femininity” (89). Kaplan points out that Monroe became trapped in the mirror of her feminine star persona: [T]hough she had longed to find herself in a different kind of mirror, Monroe felt only alive and real when she was the sexual object of a powerful and prominent man. She was desperately ‘feminine’, treating her body as if it were a container on                                                          249 Lispector’s use of autobiography, which has countless echoes of her own life throughout her novella, including her own infancy spent growing in the North-east (which Rodrigo claims as his own experience), her job as a ghost writer for face cream advertisements, her own love of horror films, her marriage to an ambitious diplomat, sets up the model for her use of autobiographical information of both Monroe and Garbo that connects with Macabea. 250 As Louise Kaplan describes in Cultures of Fetishism, Monroe’s American childhood was spent between orphanages and the neglectful and abusive charge of her mentally ill mother. She never knew who her father was. According to the Greta Garbo online archives Garbo, who came from a close-knit but impoverished Swedish family, was half-orphaned at age fourteen when her father died and was forced to seek work as a salesgirl to help support herself and her family. Maçabea’s life in the North-east was similarly harsh: When she was two years old, her parents died of typhoid fever in the backwoods of Alagoas, in that region where the devil is said to have lost his boots. Much later she went to live in Maceió with her maiden aunt, a sanctimonious spinster, and the girl’s only surviving relative (Lispector 1986, 28). 233 which she or her retinue of hair-dressers, costume designers, voice and body coaches, directors must inscribe the designs of femininity. 251 (58) Macabea remains ignorant of how the structures of Hollywood cinema exploited the image of Marilyn Monroe they helped manufacture, reproduce, and disseminate. As Monroe rose to stardom, she simultaneously became trapped in playing the role of sexual object, which according to Kaplan’s assessment, Monroe came to loathe. In contrast, the identification of Macabea with Garbo has interesting intersections with Macabea’s final moment of death and the explicit connection Rodrigo makes to cinema: “Assim como ninguém lhe ensinaria um dia a morrer: na certa morreria um dia como se antes tivesse estudado de cor a representação do papel de estrela. Pois na hora da morte a pessoa se torna brilhante estrela de cinema, é o instante de glória de cada um e é quando como no canto coral se ouvem agudos sibilants” 252 (Lispector 32). As Roland Barthes’ states in his Mythologies, Garbo’s face belonged to a moment in cinema before the war where capturing the human face was able to plunge audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when a face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced. (56) (my emphasis) In stark contrast, Gloria asks Macabea: “Oh mulher, não tens cara? (Lispector 70) [“Hey girl, haven’t you any face?” (Lispector 1986, 65)]. Rodrigo also lectures Macabea on the importance of a face, and how the message her face sends to the world is unacceptable:                                                          251 Yet behind her female impersonation, Kaplan argues, there lurked another Norma Jean, the orphaned girl both hiding behind the caricature of femininity fabricated for her by the Hollywood machine, and trying to find a way out of this fixed persona projected onto her body and face. Kaplan concludes that “Monroe’s creative growth was stunted and betrayed by the stereotypes of womanhood she eventually succumbed in her desperation to find herself”(58). Bound to the hellish repetition on screen she described as “an imitation of myself” (quoted in Kaplan 58) in film after film, Monroe committed suicide a year after her marriage with playwright Arthur Miller ended in divorce, at the age of thirty-six. 252 “No one would teach her how to die one day: yet one she would surely die as if she had already learned by heart how to play the starring role. For at the hour of death you become a celebrated film star” (Lispector 1986, 26). 234 “A cara é mais importante do que o corpo porque a cara mostra a pessoa está sentindo. Você tem cara de quem comeu e não gostou, não aprecio cara triste, vê se muda de ‘expressão’” 253 (Lispector 57). If Macabea initially functions as a “calcomanía de ese sinnumero de mujeres—y de hombres, por supuesto—sin cáracter y sin cara que produce la sociedad moderna” 254 (Berg 113), then in dying Macabea can recuperate the singularity that her face, along with everyone else, has lost in modern society. Lispector hints that this loss is unconsciously intuited by most people, although they do not acknowledge it consciously, as Rodrigo’s statement suggests: “Sei das coisas pore star vivendo. Quem vive sabe, mesmo sem saber que sabe. Assim é que os senhores sabem mais do imaginam e estão fingindo de sonsos” 255 (Lispector 14). Garbo’s multiple roles playing the figures of the tragic seductress or femme fatale in Hollywood often end in climactic death scenes that could be described as Garbo’s experience of “deepest ecstasy” (56) and transfiguration 256 . In this vein, Barthes concludes that the face of Garbo “still partakes of the same rule of Courtly Love, where the flesh gives rise to mystical feelings of perdition.” (56) We thus come back full force to the word perdition and find a “film star” whose incredible aura was most powerfully radiant during her staged tragic “deaths” in front of                                                          253 “A person’s face is the most important thing because the face betrays what a person is thinking: your face is that of somebody who has just tasted a sour apple. Stop looking so mournful…he said: try to change your demeanour” (Lispector 1986, 52). 254 “a stick-on image (like a tattoo), of the countless women—and men, of course—without a character or a face that modern society produces.” [my translation] 255 “I know about certain things simply by living. Anyone who lives, knows, even without knowing that he or she knows. So, dear readers, you know more than you imagine, however much you may deny it” (Lispector 13). 256 Some of the exemplary films in this category are The Temptress, Camille, and Matahari. 235 the cinematic camera. In Garbo’s at once sensuous and mystical evocation of death through her face, we find the metaphorical connection that ties her to Macabea’s tragic death. Thus, even though Rodrigo affirms that Macabea’s identification with Garbo is surprising to him, because he “não imaginava Macabea capaz de sentir o que diz um rosto como esse” (Lispector 69-70) [“could not imagine any affinity between Macabea and an actress with a face like Garbo” (Lispector 1986, 64)], Macabea feels a deep connection with Garbo. She believes that “Garbo…deve ser a mulher mais importante do mundo” (Lispector 70) [“Garbo is the most important woman in the world” (Lispector 1986, 64)]. However, at this point Macabea also stresses that she “mas o que ela queria mesmo ser não era a altiva Greta Garbo cuja trájica sensualidade estava em pedestal solitário” (Lispector 1986, 70) [“herself felt no inclination to be like the haughty Greta Garbo, whose tragic sensuality placed her on a solitary pedestal” (Lispector 1986, 64)]. Rather, while Macabea is still alive, she wants to look like Marilyn Monroe; that is, she wants to experience sensuality. In my view, Lispector attempts to reproduce Garbo’s cinematic transfigurations in A hora da estrela during Macabea’s textual (read virtual) moment of death, when Rodrigo and the reader have arrived at the moment of the girl’s final star hour. It is then that Macabea’s female body is to enter a perverse sensual connection with the ultimate other that is what Rodrigo calls the groom of death. Death as the Ultimate Approximation to the Feminine Other   A. The reconnection of the Feminine with the Female Body At first glance, Lispector’s writing with and through the body, along with Rodrigo’s approximation of the Northeastern girl’s physical femaleness as crucial to his possibility for writing the new, seems to have little connection with modernity. However, 236 Lispector’s reconnection of the feminine to a material and female reproductive body is also a product of modernity, albeit a production that is also a reaction that constitutes itself because of and against it. The historical discourses that intersect Lispector’s emphasis on feminine embodiment in A hora da estrela begin to take form in late nineteenth-century European masculine and feminine anxieties about modernity that appropriate the figure of “woman,” as Rita Felski posits, “as the overt object of nostalgic desire” (37). If the feminine, for late nineteenth-century Decadents, was equated with modernity and with artifice and removed from its connection with the female body that Silva and Bioy in turn used in their fictional constructions of the feminine, these other sociological and psychological discourses emphasized precisely the connection of the feminine to the maternal body as the nostalgic site for a different feminine consciousness capable of resisting the alienating influences of modernity. One such prominent figure is the German sociologist Georg Simmel, who conceived of an authentic and autonomous femininity existing beyond the bounds of symbolic and institutional structures already in place. As Felski states, Simmel’s yearning for the feminine as emblematic of a nonalienated, nonfragmented identity is a crucially important motif in the history of cultural representations of the nature of modernity. Woman emerges in these discourses as an authentic point of origin, a mythic referent untouched by the strictures of social and symbolic mediation; she is a recurring symbol of the atemporal and asocial at the very heart of the modern itself. (Felski 38) As Felski posits, Simmel’s construction of an atemporal and asocial feminine space helps to illuminate “a set of deeply ingrained assumptions about the necessary identity of modernity, alienation, and masculinity which underpin the work of an influential 237 intellectual tradition stretching from Hegel to Jacques Lacan” (38). As she summarizes, “within this tradition, nostalgia and the feminine come together in the representation of a mythic plentitude, against which is etched an overarching narrative of masculine development as self-division and existential loss” (Felksi 38). Ultimately, it is precisely the redemptive maternal body that comes “to constitute for [these philosophical male thinkers] the ahistorical other and the other of history against which modern identity is defined” (Felski 38). Simmel’s claims that there is a singularly feminine intrinsic unconscious located in an elsewhere, outside the symbolic and institutional structures already in place, and completely connected to the fecund female body, is supported by Lispector’s writing of the Northeastern girl in A hora da estrela. Lispector, however, has not been the only woman writer to reach out to the figure of the maternal feminine body in order to write the new. In seeking to reject a phallocentric notion of femininity derived from the subject-object dualism of Western metaphysics, twentieth-century French feminism incorporated the figure of the feminine and its intrinsic connection to the maternal body in their feminist discourses. The feminine body became for French feminists, including Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray, “that which resists classification, blurs boundaries, and collapses the distinction between subject and object” (Felski 53). French feminism therefore availed itself of “an alternative, quasi-utopian vision of the feminine as that which exists outside categories, distinctions, and patriarchal structures of individuation and socialization” (Felski 53). Yet unlike Lispector, French feminists stopped short of essentializing femininity. Hélène Cixous in particular, also one of the most prolific Lispector scholars of the 1970s, 238 makes this clear when she states: “Clarice tries to be as essentialist as possible, even if there is, of course, no essence” (1989a, xix) (qtd. in Hedrick 41). For Latin Americanist scholar Tace Hedrick, Cixous’ assumption that Lispector cannot really believe in a female essence is misguided by her feminist problematization of women’s essentialization as part of patriarchal discourse that reduces woman to matter. Hedrick argues that “Lispector’s writings privilege woman’s reproductive capacity, her fecundity, as the immutable essence of what it means to be female” (41). Rather than attempting to rescue Lispector from an anti-essentialist feminism by maintaining, like Cixous, that her essentialism is a rhetorical strategy, Hedrick takes Lispector’s deployment of essentialism literally “as an unfolding, a spreading out of a feminine space where ‘female’ is neither a rhetorical strategy nor a social construct” (42). Providing support for Hedrick’s claims is Diana Fuss’ observation that “‘[a]n essentialist definition of ‘woman’ implies that there will always remain some part of ‘woman’ which resists…socialization” (42). For Hedrick, “Lispector’s notion of an originary being- female also resists socialization just as it resists language and representation” (42). Significantly then, “Lispector’s space of the feminine, alinguistic and wholly body- oriented, operates under the sign of maternal fecundity; this is that space and sign which Lispector’s writing continuously searches out” (Hedrick 42). The first and most crucial part of Lispector’s feminine essentialism is thus established: the act of writing as a literal approximation to the elsewhere of the fecund and female body. The late-nineteenth century writer, feminist, and psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salome discusses how masculine subjectivity, an existentialist crisis that stands in counter-distinction to female wholeness and happiness, fits in with these feminine 239 essentializing discourses. In her essay “The Human Being as a Woman” (1899), Salome argues that woman exemplifies an elemental bisexuality, as an autonomous, undifferentiated being who contains both masculine and feminine within herself (52). According to Salome, because of this essential undifferentiated bisexuality, women are more at home with themselves and less driven by the contradictions of modernity, symbolizing a unity and a rootedness in the body that men have lost. Lispector asserts such an idea of women through the existentialist crisis of Rodrigo, who continuously experiences life as lack, while the female protagonist Macabea, is paradoxically and often full in herself despite her extreme poverty. If, as Salome argues, women’s wholeness in themselves is exemplified above all in the experience of motherhood, then the ultimate symbol of the redemptive totality that allows woman to unite both masculine and feminine impulses within herself is the reproductive writing of the self and the other that Lispector’s novella enacts. Berg’s arguments supports this by noting that Lispector initially asserts the arbitrary character of traditional gender paradigms in A hora in order to ultimately assert, or lay claim to the idea of creation, invention, spirit, and art, that up until this moment has been presumed to belong and be the product of masculine desire, as belonging all along to a feminine and feminizing desire that predates masculinity (112). “Según estos, la ‘creación’ pertenece a la esfera masculina—al contrario de la ‘vida’, el paradigma femenino de la creación…La provocación de Lispector consiste en proponer que todo 240 eso—creación, espíritu, arte y lenguaje, en una palabra: ‘escritura’—también este del lado de las mujeres” 257 (112). For Salome, “the more profoundly a woman is female in this fundamental maternal sense, the less she is feminine in relative, that is, male-defined, terms” (qtd. in Felski 52). The importance of this observation becomes clear when, as we have seen, in the fin-de-siècle Decadent writers were the first to appropriate an idea of the feminine as artifice that they divorced from the body. Decadent writing, constructed as a feminine activity with a highly aesthetic style, therefore ultimately did not seek to evoke a connection with any essential and material femaleness. What is emphasized in Silva’s and Bioy’s fictions, through narratives of masculine desire triggered by feminine artificial entities, is also that what ultimately attracts their protagonists to these entities are not the women’s material bodies, but rather the phantasmatic and simulacral quality of their replicated images that they can aesthetically consume and desire—but not interact with sexually. The fetishistic way in which the artificial aesthetic images of Helena and Faustine are desired makes the disavowal of their feminine bodies clear. Conversely, in the process of inventing the narrative of his female protagonist, Rodrigo S.M. cannot circumvent the experience of her body’s materiality, or for that matter, of the sensuality that this body contains. Lispector, who imposes her narrative will over that of the narrator, forces him into a confrontation with an aspect of femininity that Silva and Bioy avoid in their fictions, an encounter of the masculine protagonist recording his                                                          257 “According to these paradigms, ‘creation’belongs to the feminine sphere—against life—the paradigm of feminine creation. Lispector’s provocation, consists in her proposal that all of these things—creation, spirit, art and language—in a word: writing, is also on the side of women” (Lispector 1986, 112). 241 experiences with the material feminine body of the other, and with the alterity of a feminine sensual desire and voyeuristic pleasure that objectifies the masculine body. The introduction of Rodrigo is one innovative way in which Lispector experimentally forces masculine writers to encounter and come to terms with the physical otherness of the female body as well as to discover the source of a feminine desire that predates a masculine one and is directly responsible for their possibility of creation of art. As Hedrick asserts, “refusing, unlike Sartre, to ‘pass by’ the body ‘in silence’, in A hora da estrela, Lispector tries to work out the implications of her own philosophical essentialism, the fact that the essence or nature of being-female, which for her is privileged as being fertile, is also dangerously death bound” (53). This said, I would like to stress that Macabea, like Helena and Faustine, is also a textual invention explicitly enabled by the technology of writing. Thus even if Lispector uses Macabea, as Hedrick posits, as a powerful symbol of the essentially generative core of woman and as the key to her own writer creativity, Macabea does not escape her fundamentally artificial condition as fictional artifice. What her character does instead is to help Lispector mobilize a philosophical and ontological recuperation of the centrality of the female body as a central libidinal source for the writing of fiction, connected further with the unconscious, at a time when the female material body had been largely replaced in fiction by a male desire that favored a dematerialized and artificially produced idea of femininity equated with modernity. B. Writing about Macabea’s Desire: A Question of Style Lispector illustrates the spiritual, creative, and artistic qualities that ultimately become the property of women through her exploration of writing, in particular, the impossibility 242 of Rodrigo’s writing about the other. Such a task involves the need to invent new styles that will make it possible for him to write her in a way that goes against the grain of traditional masculine approaches and unproblematic appropriation of the female other and desire to transform her into a feminine mirror of his idealized self. As I have previously argued, Macabea’s fleeting inner thoughts and life, as well as her consumptive practices demand that Rodrigo enact a very different kind of writing. As he invents the girl’s secret and intimate inner life made up of sensations, feelings, illusions and thoughts that are unique to her way of experiencing the material world, his cruel way of writing is evacuated. To enable his writing to enter into the inner life of the other, Rodrigo is presented with a series of technical challenges specific that he explicitly explains to the reader. The first challenge is his style. To write the Northeastern girl’s story into words that will capture her essence is an extremely difficult task that Rodrigo believes he can accomplish only by transforming his normally rich and erudite style into an impoverished style devoid of any ornamentation. As he writes: Tenho a tentação de usar termos suculentos: conheço adjectivos esplendoros, carnudos substantivos e verbos tão esguios que atravessam agudos o ar em vías de acção…mas não vou enfeitar a palabra pois se eu tocar no pão de moça ese pão se tornará em ouro—e a joven (ela tem dezanove anos) e a jovem não poderia mordê-lo, morrendo de fome 258 (Lispector 17). Rodrigo believes that by eliminating his verbal flourishes, too luxurious to capture the girl’s impoverished life devoid of most luxuries, he will more adequately invent the                                                          258 I am clearly tempted to use succulent terms: I have at my command magnificent adjectives, robust nouns, and verbs so agile that they glide through the atmosphere as they move into action … Yet I have no intention of adorning the word, for were I to touch the girl’s bread, that bread would turn to gold—and the girl (she is nineteen years old) the girl would be unable to bite into it, and consequently die of hunger. (Lispector 1986, 15) 243 Northeastern girl’s delicate coming-into-visibility through words. Such a “verbal diet” of simplicity, however, proves a difficult task. Nevertheless, his claim regarding the process of writing a textual double of the Northeastern girl, as depending upon what words he feeds her narrative, emphasizes the role played by consumption in the invention of the girl’s story. At this point, this is illustrated through the metaphor of appetite, by establishing points of resemblance and disparity between his writerly appetites (hungrer for refined words and new experimentations) and her psychic appetite and cravings Rodrigo ultimately defines as feminine desire: Ela sabia o que era o desejo—embora não soubesse que sabia. Era assim: ficava faminta mas não de comida, era um gosto meio doloroso que subia do baixo- ventre e arrepiava o bico dos seios e os braços vazios sem abraço. Tornava-se toda dramática e viver doía. 259 (Lispector 49). The illustration of Macabea’s feminine desire is connected to her body. The pain of her desire’s starvation manifests itself physically in a mysterious pain located in the womb, which simultaneously makes her nipples quiver. In the description immediately following, Rodrigo tells of Macabea becoming overwrought to the point of finding it painful to live. Ficava então meio nervosa e Glória lhe dava agua com açúcar” (Lispector 49) [“At such moments, she would shake with nerves and her workmate Gloria would rush to get her a glass of water with sugar” (Lispector 1986, 44)]. The image of the hysteric, in relation to the location of her illness (in the womb) and the physical symptoms that Macabea experiences, is invoked here. On par with the literal starvation                                                          259 She understood what desire meant—although she didn’t know that she understood. That was how it was: she was starving but not for food, it was a numb sort of pain that rose from her lower abdomen, making the nipples of her breast quiver and her empty arms starved of any embrace came out in goose pimples (Lispector 1986, 44). 244 of her body, Macabea is shown to suffer from the starvation of her feminine sensual desire. Further blurring the lines between this physical and psychical starvation, Macabea’s visit to the poor people’s doctor recommended by Gloria also colludes these two hungers. After questioning Macabea and discovering that her diet consists mostly of hot dogs, the occasional mortadella sandwich, coffee, and Coca-Cola, the doctor pretends that Macabea is on a voluntary “diet” rather than addressing the obvious reason for her eating habits. Yet in the next moment, he impulsively exclaims “Essa história de regime de cachorro-quente é pura neurose e o que está precisando é de procurer um psicanalista!” (Lispector 73) [“This tale about a diet of hot dogs is pure neurosis. What you need is a psychiatrist!” (Lispector 1986, 67)]. In this comical outburst, the doctor reveals his unwillingness to deal honestly with the predicament in which most of his patients find themselves. Instead, “Eles eram para ele o rebotalho de uma sociedade muito alta à qual também ele não pertencia” (Lispector 73) [“He resented having to deal with the poor whom he saw as rejects of that privileged society from which he himself had been excluded” (Lispector 1986, 67)]. The pathologization of Macabea as a woman who refuses to eat properly thus strikes one as strange, even if the doctor’s diagnosis is pointedly farcical, were it not for the repression of feminine sexual desire identified by Freud as the root of hysterical symptoms. To corroborate the source of Macabea’s sexual repression, as a literally beaten-in religious prudery that makes her proud of being a virgin, Macabea tells the doctor, “Ouvi dizer que no medico se tira a roupa mas eu não tiro coisa nenhuma” (Lispector 73). “I’ve been told you have to take your clothes off when you visit the doctor, but I’m not taking anything off” (Lispector 1986, 68). 245 This is a moment when Macabea becomes a doubly coded symbol. Her social plight, as literally starving, is wedded to her subjective feminine plight, the plight of her sensual desire’s starvation. Significantly, Macabea’s body sends distress signals in both respects. After Macabea refuses a physical examination, the doctor takes an X-ray of her body and tells her: “Você está com começo de tuberculose pulmonar (Lispector 74) [“You’re in the early stages of pulmonary tuberculosis” (Lispector 1986, 68)]. But the confrontation of Macabea with her body’s X-ray, which replaces the doctor’s touch, does not illuminate her precarious condition to her. Ironically she thanks the docto and leaves his office believing that she has been cured from both the physical and psychical symptoms of an illness she cannot explain. Not unlike the challenge of style, Lispector’s second challenge involves writing reality. Rodrigo emphasizes the difficulty of capturing the girl’s reality and expresses his fears about what it takes to push past his writerly limitations: Ah que medo de começar e ainda nem sequer sei o nome da moça. Sem falar que a história me desespera por ser simples demais. O que me proponho contar parece fácil e à mão de todos. Mas a sua elaboração é muito difícil. Pois tenho que tornar nítido o que está quase apagado e que mal vejo. Com mãos de dedos duros enlameados apalpar o invisível na propia lama 260 (Lispector 21). The writer’s block that Rodrigo must escape requires a decentering of his identity. Responding to a higher authority that often speaks through him, Rodrigo adds: “Cuidai dela porque meu poder é só mostrá-la para que vós a reconheçais na rua, andando de leve                                                          260 I am scared of starting. I do not even know the girl’s name. It goes without saying that this story drives me to despair because it is too straightforward. What I propose to narrate sounds easy and within everyone’s grasp. But its elaboration is extremely difficult. I must render clear something that is almost obliterated and can scarcely be deciphered. With stiff, contaminated fingers I must touch the invisible in its own squalor. (Lispector 1986, 19) 246 por causa da esvoaçada magreza” 261 (Lispector 22). The ethical weight imposed on Rodrigo’s writing, as a mandate issued by some unconscious source, and that supersedes his will, is the same ethical imperative Rodrigo demands of his readers: that they open their minds to an awareness of the girl’s complex existence, which will be rendered gradually visible through his and Lispector’s oscillating feminine and masculine styles of writing. 262 To align himself further with the reader, Rodrigo fails to claim for himself an a priori knowledge of the girl’s existence, but states that he is writing in obscurity. Yet he foreshadows Macabea’s death by stating: “sigo uma oculta linha fatal” (Lispector 23) [“I follow a secret fatal line. I am forced to seek a truth that transcends me” (Lispector 1986, 20)] Unlike his technical difficulties in writing the Northeastern girl’s story, Rodrigo’s motive for writing about the girl produces a surprising confession: “Talvez porque nela haja um recolhimento e também porque na porbrez de corpo e espírito eu toco na santidade, eu quero sentir o sopro do meu além” (Lispector 23) [“Perhaps because within her there is seclusion. Also because in her poverty of body and soul one touches sanctity and I long to feel the breath of life hereafter” (Lispector 1986, 21)]. Significantly, Rodrigo’s motivations illustrate the reasons why Peixoto describes the Northeastern girl as a privileged fool when set against the gallery of Lispector’s seekers of truth and inner harmony. Her simplemindedness attenuates anguish and self-division; she                                                          261 “I have taken care of her because my mandate is simply to reveal her presence so that you may recognize her on the street, moving ever so cautiously because of her quivering frailty” (Lispector 1986, 19) (my emphasis). 262 Under the economic logic of capitalism, the girl’s life has no value since her exploited labor is quickly replaceable by the thousands of other immigrants desperately seeking jobs after fleeing from the North- eastern droughts to Rio. 247 believes she is happy. As the quintessentially vulnerable being, ideally open to existence, she possesses, like a holy fool, an unsought, unconscious wisdom. (Lispector 1986, 96) Rodrigo’s assumption, that within the Northeastern girl there is both seclusion and sanctity, reveals that Macabea’s marginal and feminine existence paradoxically contains an escape from his masculine bourgeois subjectivity, which he also opens up for the reader. As Peixoto contextualizes: “Macabea’s hunger is both a product of material deprivation and a metaphor of that totally vulnerable and denuded existence that Lispector sets up as an ideal in many texts” (97). While she might be deprived, certain emotions filter into Macabea’s denuded existence and serve as a crucial way to show how she experiences the world and its stimuli. Crucial to Macabea’s emotional connection with the world is an auditory experience of the world that takes precedence over visual consumption. Indeed, it is through sound, an ever-present characteristic of A hora’s narrative, that Macabea feels moved to produce aesthetically which correspondingly helps Rodrigo, and thus Lispector, capture reality. Starting with her dedication, Lispector emphasizes sound by dedicating the novella to classical composers such as Stravinsky, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Strauss, Debussy, Schoenberg, the “strident notes of the electronic generation” (Lispector 1986, 7-8). Rather than citing literary, philosophical, or even cinematic influences, she identifies music as her muse, appreciating its unique ability “a todos esses que em mim atingiram zonas assustadoramente inesperadas, todos esses profetas do presente e que a mim vaticinaram a mim mesmo a ponto de eu neste instante exploder em: eu” (Lispector 9-10) [“to touch within me the most alarming and unsuspected regions; to all those 248 prophets of our age who have revealed me to myself and made me explore into: me” (Lispector 1986, 8)]. The unique power of classical music to connect immediately with the listener at an emotional, non-verbal level, can be seen as what Lispector tries to paradoxically do in A hora da estrela. In contrast to the aesthetic distance that visual consumption can initially grant to the spectator/consumer, even if that distance can also be broken, and on par with a literature that sets up aesthetic distance from its characters, or objects of invention, Lispector wants her fiction to pull the reader in as music does. Accordingly, she repeatedly uses musical metaphors to describe different emotions that constitute the subjectivities of Rodrigo and Macabea, as well as their attempts at different kinds of aesthetic production in the creation of the self. Rodrigo’s existential relationship to life is described in the following way: “Então eu canto alto agudo uma melodia sincopada e estridente—é aminha própria dor, eu que carrego o mundo e há falta de felicidade” (Lispector 13-4) [“I break out into a strident, high-pitched, syncopated melody. It is the sound of my own pain, of someone who carries this world where there is so little happiness” (Lispector 12)]. The girl’s music, described by Rodrigo at the conclusion of A hora as “little more than a music box sadly out of tune” (Lispector 86), reflects her singular, and failed attempt at achieving musical mimesis. This failed attempt has its genesis in Macabea’s experience of listening to Caruso’s Una Furtiva Lacrima on her roommate’s little transistor radio, where she also listens to her favorite station “Radio Clock.” As Rodrigo asserts, “‘Una Furtiva Lacrima’ for a única coisa belíssima na sua vida” (Lispector 55) [“Una Lacrima Furtiva had been the only really beautiful thing in Macabea’s life” 249 (Lispector 1986, 50)]. Listening to Una Furtiva Lacrima moves the girl to tears, and significantly to an attempt to sing the song she has just heard. As she tries to reproduce Caruso’s gentle voice, however, she weeps because her “voz era crua e tão desafinada como ela mesma era” (Lispector 55) [“voice is as tuneless and rough as the rest of her body” (Lispector 50)]. Nevertheless, her experience of Caruso’s song, as Rodrigo asserts, “adivinhava talvez que habia outros modos de sentir, havia existencias mais delicadas e até com um certo luxo de alma” (Lispector 56) (“also divined that there were other ways of feeling; that there were more delicate forms of existence and certain spiritual refinements”). Macabea therefore connects with “na vastidão do mundo musical que não carecia de se entender” (Lispector 56) [“the vast world of music that required no understanding” (Lispector 1986, 51)]. Likewise, in one of her meetings with Olimpico, she tries courageously yet futilely to once again plunge into “no desconhecido de si misma” (Lispector 56) [“the mysterious depths of her being” (Lispector 1986, 51)] and use her voice to bring Caruso’s voice, and the non-verbal understanding this music provokes in her, to the surface for the benefit of her fellow Northeasterner, who is equally shut out of experiencing this world of refined feelings. However, Macabea’s out of tune attempts only produces aesthetic rejection and ridicule from Olimpico: “Você até parece uma muda cantando. Voz de cana rachada” (Lispector 56). [“You look like a deaf-mute trying to sing. Your voice is like a broken reed” (Lispector 1986, 51)]. Macabea can thus be described as “little more than a music box sadly out of tune” because the music that so intensely communicates with her body cannot be approximated by her own voice. Yet what makes these two moments lyrical, and what in effect the failure of Macabea to reproduce this music does is to pull Rodrigo, along with the reader, 250 into the immediacy of the intangible world of music to communicate non-verbally intense emotions such as deep sadness that are instantly reproduced in listeners and thus capture reality. C. Enter the Character of Death: Macabea’s Groom In the closing scenes of A hora, death and its signifying power take center stage. As she articulates in a letter to her close friend and personal companion Olga Borelli a short time prior to her death, 263 Lispector’s fear of death as the transition from limited hate into unlimited love describes the trajectory that the feminine entity Macabea narratively goes through from her textual birth, vis-à-vis the fictional male narrator Rodrigo S.M.’s progressive invention of her life story using a sadomasochistic approach that displays at times the hatred of Rodrigo for his object of invention, toward his gradual seduction and love of Macabea, leading to her death. Ironically, Macabea’s death occurs shortly after her visit to Gloria’s house, who, feeling guilty for taking her boyfriend away, invites her to lunch, and feeds her the usual third-class Brazilian suburban fare of “farto copo de grosso chocolate de verdade misturado com leite e muitas species de roscas açucaradas” (Lispector 72) [“piping hot chocolate mixed with real milk, a selection of sugared buns and even a small cake” (Lispector 1986, 66)]. Macabea furtively eats a biscuit, and “pediu perdão ao Ser abstracto que dava e tirava” (Lispector 72) [(and asks the Abstract Being, the Giver and                                                          263 Lispector’s personal letter provides context for her preoccupation with as it plays out in the grand finale of A hora da estrela. As she writes in her letter,“El paso de la vida a la muerte me asusta: es igual como pasar del odio, que tiene un objectivo y es limitado, al amor que es ilimitado.” (“The step between life and death scares me: it’s the same as passing between hatred, which has an objective and is limited, into love which is unlimited.” Quoted in the Brazilian journal Polimica 1 in 1979). Significantly, since Lispector died from terminal cancer in the same year A hora da estrela was published, Lispector’s preoccupation with death is understandable. 251 Taker of all things” (Lispector 1986, 66)] to be forgiven for eating something meant for the rich. Her precarious condition, already revealed by the doctor who tells her she is in the early stages of pulmonary tuberculosis, only worsens when she eats the rich diet Gloria’s family can afford, and her feeling of nausea, which is constantly mentioned throughout the novella, worsen. Gloria, adopting a more maternal role to Macabea toward the end of the novella, even if it is in part influenced by her guilt, suggests that the girl go see a fortune-teller, and offers to lend her the money to do so. Macabea’s acceptance of this proposal puts her on the definitive path to her deathly moment of cinematic stardom. The moment of death arrives when Macabea finally learns of her unhappiness through the fortune teller and former prostitute Madame Carlota, who divines everything about the girl’s past, and sheds a new horrifying light on the misery of her childhood and her present: “Mas Macabeiazinha, que vida horrível a sua! Que meu amigo Jesus tenha dó de você, filhinha! Mas que horror” (Lispector 82) (“Poor little Macabea, what a terrible life you have! May my friend Jesus have pity on you, my child! How awful! (Lispector 1986, 75). As Macabea listens to Madame Carlota, she is shocked to learn that her life was so awful, since this thought had never occurred to her before. Madame Carlota continues recounting Macabea’s list of tragic misfortunes, including the loss of her Olimpico and the imminent loss of her job. In this way, Madame Carlota collects all the cruel and victimizing events of the girl’s life that Rodrigo has up to this point perversely invented, and makes Macabea suddenly become aware and “espantou-se com a revelação” (Lispector 82) (“horrified by these revelations”). 252 Having taking care of reinterpreting Macabea’s past and present, as a story of continuous victimization, Madame Carlota then looks into her cards for the future of the girl, and tells Macabea that she has wonderful news for her. She excitedly tells the girl: Esse estrangeiro parece se chamar Hans, e é ele quem vai se casar com você! Elé ten muito dinheiro, todos os gringos são ricos. Se não me engano, e nunca me engano, ele vai lhe dar muito amor e você, mina enjeitadinha, você vai se vestir com veludo e cetim e até casaco de pele vai ganar! 264 (Lispector 83). Macabea’s response to Madame Carlota’s news is a surfeit of happiness that makes Macabea tremble all over. Unable to find the proper words to describe her feelings, Macabea’s only response is to exclaim, “mas casaco de pele não se precisa no calor do Rio…” (Lispector 84) [“I don’t need a fur coat in this climate!” (Lispector 1986, 77)]. The seductive power of Madame Carlota’s predictions, however, is encoded in the hunger for love that Macabea’s desire has been aching for so long. Thus Madame Carlota’s prophecy, as Rodrigo writes, makes Macabea suddenly feel “uma súbita voracidade pelo futuro” (Lispector 83) [“a hunger for the future” (Lispector 1986, 76)]. Rodrigo, who persistently claims his ignorance as to how the girl will end up, tells the reader “E eu também estou com esperança enfim” (Lispector 83) [“And I too, am beginning to cherish hope at last” (Lispector 1986, 76)]. Though Macabea has never met Hans, Madame Carlota’s prediction makes her experience “o que outros chamavam de paixão: estava apaixonada por Hans” (Lispector 84) (“what other people referred to as passion: she was passionately in love with Hans).                                                          264 You are about to come in for a great fortune that a foreign gentleman will bring to you in the night… this foreigner is apparently called Hans, and he is the man whom you will marry! He has lots of money, but then all foreigners are rich. Unless I’m mistaken, and I never make mistakes, he is going to show you a great deal of affection: and you, my poor little orphan, you will be dressed in satin and velvet, and you will be presented with a fur coat! (Lispector 1986, 77) 253 At the same time, Macabea perceives what has just transpired between herself and Madame Carlota as a violent exchange. “Parecia que lhe tinham dado um forte cascudo na cabeça de ralis cabelos, sentia-se tão desorientada como se lhe tivesse acontecido uma infelicidade” (Lispector 84) [“It was as if someone had delivered a sharp blow to her lank hair. Macabea felt confused as if some great misfortune had befallen her” (Lispector 1986, 77)]. After this visit, Macabea feels transformed. She feels like a person whose life has been transformed by words, which ironically have constituted Macabea’s life from the beginning and will likewise constitute her death. It is through Madame Carlota’s card reading that Macabea is able to see her life as others see it. Madame Carlota’s interpretation of her life, as her continuous victimization, is something that the book title The Shamed and the Oppressed, could not make her understand. As she perceived the other side, Rodrigo writes, “eu sentiu vontade de chorar” (Lispector 86) (“she felt like weeping”). But Rodrigo also points out a paradox when he reminds the reader that up “só então vira que sua vida era uma miseria” (Lispector 85) (“she didn’t know that her life had been so miserable”), and this happiness, which affirms her love of life, is traded for hope in a future happiness made possible through another, the foreigner Hans, who becomes the other which she suddenly lacks. What Macabea stands to gain from this cheaply reproduced fantasy of the poor, echoed in so many of Brazilian telenovelas (television soaps) that feed their male and female audiences a revised modern tale of the foreigner prince falling in love with the impoverished Cinderella in the city of Rio, is dubious to say the least. Macabea, in believing in this perverse fantasy, relinquishes her belief that she was happy in both her 254 present and her past for “uma esperança tão violenta como jamais sentira tamanho desespero” (Lispector 85) [“a hope more fierce than any anguish she had ever known.” (Lispector 1986, 79)]. Macabea steps out from Madame Carlota’s home and into the world with this newfound hope for the future, feeling life “muito e muito e tão amplo” [“to be so abundant and overwhelming” (Lispector 1986, 79)]. In the very next moment, she is abruptly run over by a Mercedes Benz driven by her fantasy man: the foreigner Hans, who rather than stopping, speeds away. Macabea’s true groom thus ends up being death—not Hans, Rodrigo’s favorite character in this story. And her future ends up being her starring role opposite death, in a final sensuous embrace with complete otherness. Lying on the dirty pavement and unable to get up, Macabea suffers while Rodrigo toys with the reader as to whether she will live or not. At first he writes: “Acho com alegria que ainda não chegou a hora de estrela de cinema de Macabéa morrer” (Lispector 90). [“To my great joy, I find that the hour has not come for the film-star Macabea to die” (Lispector 1986, 82)]. Later he taunts and attacks the reader more directly: “Eu poderia resolver pelo caminho mais fácil, matar a menina-infante, mas quero o pior: a vida. Os que me lerem, assim, levem um soco no estômago para ver se é bom. A vida é um soco no estômago” 265 (Lispector 90). Finally he threatens to thwart the reader’s desire for an ending, or resolution, to the girl’s story when he ponders that “he could leave her lying there and simply not finish the story” (Lispector 1986, 83).                                                          265 “I could resolve this story by taking the easy way out and murdering the infant child, but what I want is something more. I want life. Let my readers take a punch in the stomach to see how they enjoy it. For life is a punch in the stomach” (Lispector 1986, 82-3). 255 All the cruelty and perversity that comes out of Rodrigo at this point is directed at the readers. As the girl lies helplessly on the street without anyone bothering to help her, he attacks them for their failure to acknowledge their readerly pleasure at the systematic victimization of her life he has enacted, which has subsequently led to her death and of which they now must witness as a final spectacle joining the marginal others, the female body and death. By having an anonymous audience of onlookers gather on the street to watch Macabea’s death without trying to help her in any way, Rodrigo also invents doubles for the readers who read about her death as a spectacle. As Peixoto argues, this is a moment when Rodrigo’s act of narration itself appears problematic, aggressive, guilt-provoking (99), and makes the reader complicit through the act of reading: “Reading the victim, like writing the victim, entails a symbolic engagement with the pressures of her life. That engagement is doubly uncomfortable, doubly suspect, in the role this text proposes to the reader: sympathy slides into suffering, and disengagement into the wielding of a malevolent power” (97). Macabea, an innocent virgin whose sensuous and intellectual hunger is never satisfied, here becomes the child sacrifice. It is her sacrifice that paradoxically opens up the possibility of collective enunciation. Rodrigo, through the Northeastern girls process of dying, has confronted the bourgeois reader with his or her collusion with that violence. Ultimately, however, Rodrigo backs away from directly accusing the reader and reflects parenthetically: (Mas quem sou eu para censurer os culpados? O pior é que preciso perdoá-los. É necessário chegar a tal nada que indiferentemente se ame ou não se ame o criminoso que nos mata. Mas não estou seguro de mim mesmo: preciso perguntar, embora não saiba a quem, se devo mesmo amar aquele que me trucida e perguntar 256 quem de vós me trucida. E mina vida, mais forte do que eu, responde que quer porque quer vingança…) 266 (88). The “I” here is highly ambiguous unless we understand that Rodrigo’s body is somehow connected to the dying Macabea, in the sense that his body continues to be covered by her contaminating skin, or infected by her virus. After he lashes out at the girl’s symbolic “killers” (i.e., the bourgeois readers), Rodrigo includes himself. As the slow and agonizing image of Macabea’s death is prolonged, she holds on “o sopro de vida que Deus nos dá” (90) [“to that breath of life granted by God,” (Lispector 83)] reluctant to surrender to the seductive embrace of death. It is no coincidence that death’s seduction, slowly penetrating into Macabea’s body and consciousness, is compared to a sexual embrace that brings a sensation as “suave, arrepiante, gélido e agudo como no amor” (Lispector 91) [“pleasurable, tender, horrifying, chilling, and penetrating as love” (Lispector 1986, 83)]. Death is thus the character that will “deflower” Macabea, to “whom” she will lose her virginity, and through “whom” she will finally become a woman in the climactic moment of her death. As Rodrigo writes, “[Macabea] Intuíra o instante quase dolorido e esfuziante do desmaio do amor. Sim, doloroso reflorescimento tão difícil que ela empregava nele o corpo e a outra coisa que vós chamais de alma” 267 (Lispector 91).                                                          266 “(But who am I to censure the guilty? The worst part is I must forgive them. It is essential to arrive at an absolute zero so that we indifferently come to love or not to love the criminal who kills us. But I am not sure of myself: I must really ask, without knowing whom I should ask, if it is really necessary to love the man who slays me. My life, stronger than myself replies that it wants revenge at all costs…)” (Lispector 19, 81) 267 “Macabea had perceived the almost painful and vertiginous moment of overwhelming love. A painful and difficult reflowering that she enacted with her body and that other thing you call a soul” (Lispector 1986, 84). 257 Yet before reaching this deathly paroxysm, Macabea’s life inside her body makes sure to utter the last words “As for the future” (Lispector 1986, 84) before being seized by death’s last throes. The crowd gathered around Macabea observes with fascination this final spectacle of the body taken by death and watches as Rodrigo describes how Macabea suddenly “queria vomitar o que não é corpo, vomitar algo luminoso. Estrela de mil pontas” 268 (Lispector 91). When she vomits a little blood, Rodrigo knows that her life (the luminous star) and death have finally touched (essence touching essence). The connection between nausea and the body, leading to this final luminous moment reveals, according to Hedrick’s insights “a female ‘truth’: the originary, demanding ‘truth’ of fecundity, like a ‘sunflower in a tomb’, both life-giving and death- bound” (Lispector 53). The capacity for Lispector to confront the body’s own death, in contrast to Bioy and Silva, whose fictions fetishize it, by replacing it with simulacral feminine aesthetic copies, here becomes significant. As Berg argues, “el espanto de la muerte, tan presente en el paradigma de ‘escritura masculina’” is replaced by a narrative “que se refiere a una vida segura de su finitud, una vida capaz de ‘aceptar’…su propia muerte” 269 (116). If we pick up on Lispector’s last words to her companion, we may conclude that perhaps women, like Lispector, can accept the finitude of life and understand the infinitude of death because it is through their bodies that the experience of “the inhuman                                                          268 “feels like vomiting something that was not matter but luminous. Star with a thousand pointed rays” (Lispector 1986, 84). 269 “ the fear of death, so present in the paradigm of masculine writing … that refers to a life certain of its finite state, a life capable of accepting its own death.” [My translation] 258 within her through fertility” occurs. And that this presence of “a foreign ‘body’within oneself, as Hedrick emphasizes, “can be deadly” (53). The end of A hora da estrela, after “essence” (the female body) touches “essence” (death), is therefore the final signifier that the reader receives that Macabea is dead. She has died in Lispector’s text in the mystical way that Garbo died for the cameras: with an aura, a luminosity of sensuousness and spirituality wedded in surrender to the final seduction of death. 259 Conclusion  This project began with a recollection of an early spectatorial act of consumption of my own: my avid childhood enjoyment of Japanese anime cartoons in the living room of my home in Lima, Peru. Japanese cartoons may seem a curious import for Peruvian television in the 1980s, but it is one example of the great variety of imports to Latin America from “East” and “West” via popular media, and so my love of anime should come as no surprise. One particular episode of my favorite childhood anime show, translated from the original Mahō no Purinsesu Minkī Momo (Magical Princess Minky Momo), and renamed for Latin American television as Gigi: la princesa magica, has been seared in my memory and continues to echo and reverberate through this dissertation as a kind of meta-narrative that contains many of the key elements that I explore in my three Latin American novels. Gigi, or Momo, is the princess of “Fenarinarsa”, or “the land of dreams in the sky”. This is the dwelling place for fairy tale characters; but it is in danger of leaving Earth's orbit and disappearing because people have began to lose their dreams and hopes. The king and queen of Fenarinarsa send their daughter Momo/Gigi to Earth to help them regain their dreams. Her duty on earth therefore is to help people regain their hopes and dreams. Each episode revolves around a person, or people, Momo/Gigi encounters, whom she must try to help. The Gigi episode I recall most vividly involved her attempt to help a beautiful female android who achieves a recognizable humanity when she falls in love with one of the young male scientists who work in the lab where she and other androids are being developed. The young scientist returns her love, and the star-crossed lovers run away 260 from the lab so that they can be together. However, as property of the lab, as well as of “science,” the female android is hunted down, and the couple is found and surrounded by armed men on a precipice, a few steps from death on the other side. The choice the two must make is to choose between surrendering to the authorities, which would be a permanent separation, or embracing death together. Refusing to cede their desire for each other, they plunge off the precipice into the abyss. But the young anime princess Gigi intercedes for them and uses her magical powers to save the android and her human male lover before their bodies hit the ground, suddenly transporting them with her magic wand to her fantastic universe, in effect the location of the fictional products of all human imagination, where the lovers will be able to be together. The common themes that the female android and the scientist bring together should look familiar: female as a technological Other, the ill-fated love between a feminine android and a “real” man, and the refusal to cede desire as the opening up of the self to death (since desire is only possible when a person is alive and is what pushes a person’s desire to live; refusing to accept the possibility of desiring something else approximates the person to death, and to the return to an inorganic state where actively desiring is no longer possible). When I watched this particular episode, I was like the young scientist, rapt by the affective power of the story in the same way he was seduced by android. The fact that Gigi’s fantastic intervention sends both lovers to a virtual alternate world where all manner of fictional creatures of the imagination are able to live separately from the real world, but whose parallel “existence” is simultaneously threatened by human’s loss of their dreams and illusions, offers a productive metaphor to 261 render the connection between technological feminine beloveds and organic male subjects, as a symbiotic relationship between reality and fiction. Ultimately, the curiosity to find a way to understand this deceptively simple narrative is what I believe started me down the path of this project, and has brought me to tying together these ostensibly impossible love stories between “real” masculine protagonists and artificially coded feminine entities. I have tried to demonstrate that the masculine consumption of unique feminine images in theses narratives illustrate unique seductions and resistances enacted by these three Latin American writers in reaction to the myth of modernity. The problem with this myth is that its promotion of the idea that modernity was located in the European metropolis—as well as its promise to eventually transform the material and cultural orders of societies located in the outer confines of these cultural “centers”—positioned Latin American writers like Silva, Bioy, and Lispector as peripheral producers. Coming from the spaces of the periphery, for Latin American literary production to claim the same legitimacy as the cultural production of Europe was increasingly vexed by Latin American practices of consumption and incorporation of the desired products of European modernism and modernization. This Latin American assimilation of foreign products was, from the outset, compromised by the myth of modernity. Often presumed to borrow the authority and prestige of European discursive models—also products—to lend status to its writing, Latin American literary works were considered to be degraded aesthetic simulacra by both Latin American and European critics. This is precisely what happened to José Asunción Silva’s novel De sobremesa. Its critical reception initially labeled it a minor copy of J.K. Huysmans’ À rebours. Adolfo Bioy Casares also had to 262 contend with a reception of his novella that emphasized the central influence of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau on La invención de Morel. In a similar vein Kafka has also been assumed to be the most critical influence on Clarice Lispector’s oeuvre as a whole. My point in bringing up these European influences is not to deny them as great influences upon these authors’ works. They are, however, neither the only literary influences, nor are they the only sources that Silva, Bioy and Lispector tap into in order to write about modernity. If the presence of Huysmans in De sobremesa is clear, so is the presence of Baskirtseff, Nordau, Nietzsche, Poe, Baudelaire, the Pre-Raphaelites, Gustave Moreau, along with the discourses of pathologies, psychology, an emergent psychoanalysis, theories of the unconscious, Sarmiento, capitalism, and the commodity fetish—not to mention photography, reproductions of paintings, figures of the courtesan and of the lesbian. As I hope this extensive catalog illustrates, modernista writers like Silva, as well as avant-garde writers like Bioy and Lispector, all avidly consumed foreign influences, including scientific, medical, and philosophical discourses, mass media technologies, and both high and low elements of popular culture, retooling these modern fragments to write their fictions. These factors have made the consumption of these aesthetic products, discourses, and technologies of modernity a central Latin American intellectual and writerly practice. Rita Felski crucially observes that “To view modernity from the standpoint of consumption rather than production is to effect a shift in perspective which causes taken- for-granted phenomena to appear in a new light” (61). Along those lines I have focused on how the ideological gender split between an idea of production as “masculine, active, and self-restrained” and of consumption as “feminine, passive, and sensual” that emerged 263 in a late-nineteenth European context also had a crucial impact in the negotiation of modern identity on the fictions of these three Latin American writers. The search for modern identity that all three male protagonists in De sobremesa, La invención, and A hora undertake in different ways and settings is increasingly tied to consumerist identity. The protagonist of De sobremesa, José Fernández, exhibits a voracious consumer identity that significantly remains the only constant “identity” he maintains throughout his arrival and travels to Europe. All other modern and cosmopolitan identities—including “dandy”, “aesthete”, “philosopher”, and “poet”—are put on and off by Fernández like so many alternating masks. That Fernández does not truly belong to European society—or rather, allowed to belong to it—does not prevent him from assimilating cosmopolitan behaviors and adapting to his environment. Fernández is masterful in his adaptation, yet his experience of being paradoxically othered by the European culture of the metropolis makes him aware of the nature of identity as artificially produced rather than intrinsic. In other words, when Europeans project an identity that he does not associate himself with, it makes him aware of the fictional nature of identity in general. Ultimately, Fernández experiences and consumes the many products and discourses of European modernity before his return to Spanish America. In the process he experiences the erosion of his male criollo Spanish American identity, and the loosening-up of essentialist characteristics connected to his nationality and gender that tend toward a new feminized consumer identity that is driven by a fugitive and queer desire. 270 His dreams of finding                                                          270 In De sobremesa, Silva seeks to both explore and subvert in various ways the peripheral position the Latin American writer, as well as his gender identity, is given through this binary logic of center/periphery and through his consumer status in De sobremesa. 264 the “aesthetic ideal” that would give him a “legitimate modern identity” is ultimately revealed to be a feminine illusion, a Helena that he cannot access or possess. In the twentieth century, Bioy and Lispector’s placement in the periphery continues. The avant-garde writers are still considered writers who produce fiction from the unevenly modernizing cities of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. The persistence of the center/periphery binary that Beatriz Sarlo critiques using the example of Buenos Aires continues to ideologically disqualify Bioy and Lispector’s fictions. They are, in other words, too remote from the cosmopolitan centers to have an equally valid literary production. Yet what their narratives demonstrate is the inverse. The innovations Bioy and Lispector demonstrate in these narratives have something to say about the effects the transformative forces of technology and capitalism have on everyday Latin American life through both their form and content. These two narratives describe an experience of technology and capitalism. The European metropolis that Silva alludes to and explores in De sobremesa in order to demystify the myth of modernity as located at the European center is no longer needed by Bioy and Lispector, who are able to observe the effects of technological and capitalist innovations connected to the idea of modernity in their respective Latin American cities. The impact modernity, as a transformative force, has on the periphery, vis-à-vis two singular twentieth-century products (cinema and the North- eastern migration), is thus placed squarely in two virtual spaces of the imagination (the island and text itself) that set the background for the fugitive and Rodrigo’s identification with Faustine and Macabea. The seduction of the male protagonists, like José Fernández’s seduction by Helena in De sobremesa, destabilizes their visions of themselves as coherent individuals. Yet in contrast to Fernández, the desires of the 265 fugitive and Rodrigo S.M. to assimilate their feminine entities into their own identities, concludes in a final plunge into two unique experiences of death. These two deaths are the literal death of the fugitive, who intentionally annihilates his body by recording himself with Morel’s machine, and the metaphorical death of Rodrigo, who invents a death for Macabea and then claims that her death, which he invented, has paradoxically killed him as well. My reading of these two deaths, in La invención de Morel (1940) and A hora da estrela (1977), is that it illustrates the kind of fantasies that modernity engenders in a mid- twentieth century context. The fantasy of La invención de Morel is a technological invention. Bioy, using the metaphor of cinema and its rapid emergence and popularity in Buenos Aires, describes a new kind of technological bourgeois male fantasy to escape the body and live in virtual immortality in an eternally repeating recording. A hora da estrela complements and adds another dimension to this fantasy by focusing on how the rise of capitalist mass culture also engenders the dreams of a Northeastern girl located on the socio-economic and cultural periphery of Rio de Janeiro. Thus while the bourgeois male fugitive’s desire for the fatal appeal of Faustine’s beauty leads him to identify with the inventor’s Morel dream of immortalizing it, and to his own death by embracing the technological transformation of his body into a simulacral image like Faustine, Macabea’s desire to be loved leads her to dream about pre-fabricated romantic fantasies and identifications that paradoxically nourish her starving body until the day of her death. Two complex illustrations the affective power modernity, taking the form of the cinematic apparatus and advertisement fantasies, provoke in the mid-twentieth-century Latin American consumer are therefore illustrated. 266 At first glance, the national and temporal differences that exist between Silva, Bioy, and Lispector’s works make them and their fictions odd bedfellows. Yet, what crucially unites these authors and their respective novels is their self-reflexive exploration of the contradictions and productive disjunctions of what it means to have a Latin American identity that identifies with a modernity always located “elsewhere,” as Carlos J. Alonso phrases it, a place that ultimately resides in the virtual space of the text. The trajectory leading to this final realization begins with consumption. After each feminine entity is initially consumed by the gaze of the male protagonist, José Fernández, the fugitive, and Rodrigo all are incited to produce a text. Significantly, the desire that each male protagonist experiences through his gradual seduction by each feminine entity leads him to approximate her and death, both inevitably connected to the artificial (virtual and simulacral), and (in the case of Lispector’s last novella) physical quality of each feminine figure. 271 In the symbolism these feminine entities assume, as vehicles for death’s seduction that awaits the male protagonists, a significant connection between aesthetic production and the realm of death is revealed. La invención and A hora in particular end in this deathly space, with both Bioy’s male fugitive and Lispector’s Macabea. The fugitive in La invención masochistically surrenders his body to Morel’s machine in order to join Faustine, knowing that it will annihilate him. Yet what he accomplishes through this is an entrance into the ambiguous paradise of Morel’s eternal film, the possibility of reliving the simulated relationship he self-consciously orchestrated for the machine’s recording. The fugitive’s desire for a “real” connection with Faustine                                                          271 In these series of events, the crucial role the masculine consumption of a feminine entity plays in these all three Latin American novels, as the trigger that inspires aesthetic production in all three protagonists, should not be underestimated. 267 remains wished-for but unattainable, since Faustine was already a simulacrum prior to his arrival to the island. All the fugitive can do is hope for a reader who will, in turn, invent or produce a new technology that can open him to Faustine’s consciousness and release him from his eternal simulation. Contextualizing Bioy’s appropriation of the cinematic technology as a central metaphor for his novella shows this ending as the author’s philosophical reflection on the new kinds of human relations that the technology of cinema and other media technologies paradoxically produce and disable. Geoffrey Kantaris provides a key insight about Bioy’s deadly scene, and claims that science has been largely swallowed up and instrumentalized in technology and into the production of the social, making of us “post- scientific subjects… in the sense that a pure science which is not already bound to technification, the production of informational space and of the virtual is no longer possible” (Kantaris 175). In contrast, the moment of death found in Lispector’s A hora da estrela, rather than emphasize the disappearance of the masculine body into the realm of the virtual in its encounter with technology, reinscribes a power upon the body of her female character. Death becomes a seduction that makes Macabea forcefully aware, in her final death throes, of the physicality of her female body and its reproductive power. The severed connection between “the feminine” and the female body, appropriated by masculine discourses to signify a disembodied aesthetic and inventive productivity, is thus undone by Lispector—whose great provocation, to paraphrase Walter Bruno Berg, is to take creation, spirit, art and language, in other words writing, as having always been on the side of women (112). 268 The contribution Silva, Bioy, and Lispector’s novels have made to both the possibility of decentering the location of modernity and to the exploration of modern identity, as an increasingly artificial identity driven by a polymorphous desire, is significant. Their three novels anticipate and illustrate the increasing influence of mass media technologies and capitalism on modern constructions of identity. However, that male protagonists in De sobremesa and La invención are coded as criollo, with the feminine entities Helena and Faustine as European, forecloses an exploration of the racial diversity and mestizaje that is an integral part of Latin American culture. Only in A hora is race, as a key element to identity, explicitly examined by the male narrator Rodrigo S.M., and by extension an additional way in which Lispector also examines the urban/rural center and periphery binaries that exist within Latin America. How does the positioning of a mestiza Latin American woman as protagonist and modern consumer in search of modernity transform the virtual canvas of desire? This is the question that Lispector evokes in A hora da estrela though the figure of Macabea. Nevertheless Macabea, as protagonist, must share the center stage with the much more prepared male “actor” and writer, Rodrigo S.M., who most often overshadows her with his own existentialist preoccupations and who exerts more control over the narrative than she does. Lispector therefore, is the jumping board for an analysis of other Latin American texts in which female identity tied to consumption takes center stage. Looking at the texts that have recently explored the issue of a female, ethnic, and consumer desire produced from the periphery of culture that Lispector’s novel A hora da estrela began to explore in the 1970’s, I can envision a new direction to this analysis that leaps into twentieth-first century Latin American cinema. In this new direction, the exploration of a 269 Latin American female consumer identity located at the periphery of the periphery, along the parameters of an urban/rural and mestiza/criolla dichotomy, would be very promising. Examples of how mestiza, rural, and female consumer identity has recently been explored include the two films of Peruvian director Claudia Llosa: Madeinusa (2006) and La teta asustada (2009). Two films that focus on Argentine elite consumer identity are Argentine director’s Lucrecia Martel’s La ciénaga (2001) and La niña santa (2008). A future exploration of how seduction—shown to be an integral part of the effect consumption engenders in Latin American elite male identity in the narratives of De sobremesa, La invención, and A hora—plays out in the negotiation and production of rural mestiza and urban criolla twentieth-first century female identities in cinema are the next parameters of inquiry opened up by this project. 270 Works Cited  Alonso, Carlos J. The Burden of Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999. Bashkirtseff, Marie. I am the Most Interesting Book of All. Trans. Phyllis Howard Kernberger and Katherine Kernberger. San Francisco: Edition Stemmle, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zorn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. London: Pimlico, 1999. Berg, Walter B. "Otredad y escritura femenina en algunas obras de autoras latinoamericanas." Iberomania 41 (1995): 102-114. Bioy Casares, Adolfo. La invención de Morel. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. —-. The invention of Morel. Trans. Ruth L.C. Simms. New York: New York Review Books, 1964. —-. Palabra de Bioy: Conversaciones entre Adolfo Bioy Casares y Sergio López. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 2000. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Favia Glaser. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Bozzetto, Roger. "L’invention de Morel. Robinson, les choses et les simulacres. " Études Françaises 53.1 (1999): 65-77. Brescia, Pablo A.J. "Los (h)usos de la literatura fantástica." Escritos: Revista del Centro de Ciencias del Lenguaje 21 (2000): 141-153. Burkett, Andrew. "The Image Beyond the Image." Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24.3 (2007): 233-47. Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1987. Cavallari, Héctor Mario. "La tramoya de la escritura en La invención de Morel, de Adolfo Bioy Casares." Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 75.1 (1997): 95-105. —-. "El exilio sin fin." Alba de America 15:28-29 (1997): 262-271. Cixous, Hélène. Reading with Clarice Lispector. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. 271 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. —-. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. —-. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Doane, Mary Ann. "The Erotic Barter: Pandora's Box (1929)." The Films of G. W. Pabst. Ed. Eric Rentschler. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990. 62-79. Ellis, John. Visible fictions. London: Routledge, 2003. Elsaesser, Thomas. "Lulu and the Meter Man: Pabst's Pandora's Box (1929)." German Film and Literature. Ed. Eric Rentschler. New York: Methuen, 1986. 40-59. Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Feracho, Lesley. Linking the Americas. New York: State University of New York Press, 2005. Fernandez-Medina, Nicolas. "The Modern Self as Subject." Latin American Literary Review 34. 68 (2006): 59-82. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1. New York: Random House, 1978. Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking. New York: Routledge, 1989. García, Mara L. "Lo fantástico y el proceso creativo en La invención de Morel." Signos Literarios y lingüísticos 2.2 (2000): 123-29. Giorgi, Gabriel. "Nombrar la enfermedad: Médicos y artistas alrededor del cuerpo masculino en De sobremesa de José Asunción Silva." Ciberletras 1 (1999). 02 Oct. 2009 <http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v1n1/ens_04.html> González, Aníbal. "Estomago y cerebro." Revista Iberoamericana 63.178-79 (1997): 233-248. Gotlib, Nadia Batella. "Readers of Clarice, Who Are You?" Closer to the Wild Heart: Essays on Clarice Lispector. Eds. Claudia Pazos Alonso and Claire Williams. Oxford: Legenda, 2002. 272 Graff-Zivin, Erin. "Traducir lo raro." Literatura y otras artes en America Latina: Actas del XXXIV Congreso del Instituto de Literatura Iberoamericana (2004): 203-211. Hedrick, Tace. "Mother, Blessed Be You Among Cockroaches: Essentialism, Fecundity, and Death in Clarice Lispector." Luso-Brazilian Review 34.2 (1997): 41-57. Jrade, Cathy. Modernismo, Modernity, and the Development of Spanish American Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Kantaris, Geoffrey. "Holograms and Simulacra." Science and the Creative Imagination in Latin America. Eds. Evelyn Fishburn and Eduardo L. Ortiz. London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2005. Kaplan, Louise J. Cultures of Fetishism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Kirkpatrick, Gwen. The Dissonant Legacy of Modernismo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Koepnick, Lutz. "Aura Reconsidered." Benjamin’s Ghosts. Ed. Gerhard Richter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Lanuza, Eduardo González. "Adolfo Bioy Casares: La invención de Morel." Sur 75 (1940). Ledgard, Melvin R. "La evolución del tema del amor en cinco novelas hispano- americanas."Dissertation Abstracts International: 56.10 (1996): 101-144. Levine, Suzanne J. Guía de Adolfo Bioy Casares. Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1982. Lema Hincapie, Andrés. "De sobremesa de José Asunción Silva: La novela como egología."Estudios de Literatura Colombiana 18 (2006): 117- 130. Lispector, Clarice. A hora da estrela. Rio di Janeiro: Relógio d'Água Editores, 2002. —-. The Hour of the Star. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1992. Masiello, Francine. Between Civilization and Barbarism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Mejías-López, Alejandro. "'El perpetuo deseo.'" Revista Canadiense de estudios hispanicos 31.2 (2007): 337-57. Molloy, Sylvia. "Voice Snatching." Latin American Literary Review 25.50 (1997): 11-29. 273 Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Movies and Methods Volume II. Ed.Bill Nichols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Not, Anton. "El intercambio sensorial en De sobremesa, de José Asunción Silva." La literatura hispanoamericana con los cinco sentidos: V congreso internacional de la AEELH (2002): 483-91. Oviedo Pérez de Tudela, Rocío. "Una paradoja en la corte europea." Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 560 (1997): 79-88. Pabst, Georg Wilhem. Die Büchse der Pandora (1929). Criterion Collection (133 min., restored version). Paz Soldán, Edmundo. "La imagen fotográfica, entre el aura y el cuestionamiento de la identidad." Revista Iberoamericana 73: 221 (2007): 759-770. Peixoto, Marta. " 'Fatos são pedras duras': Urban Poverty in Clarice Lispector." Closer to the Wild Heart. Eds. Claudia Pazos Alonso and Claire Williams. Oxford: Legenda, 2002. —-. Passionate Fictions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Picon Garfield, Evelyn. "De sobremesa: José Asunción Silva el diario intimo y la mujer prerrafaelita." Revista de Estudios Colombianos 2 (1987): 3-12 Poe Lang, Karen. "Avatares de la relación médico-paciente en De Sobremesa de José Asunción Silva." Ciberletras 19 (2008) 02 Oct. 2009 <http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v1n1/ens_04.html> Rama, Angel. The Lettered City. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Ramos, Julio. Divergent Modernities. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Roncador, Sonia. "'Nunca fomos tão engajadas.'" Disciplines on the Line. Eds. Anne J. Cruz, Rosille Hernandez-Pecoraro and Joyce Tolliver. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2003. Ryden, Wendy. "Bodies in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Competing Discourses of Reality and Representation in Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel." Atenea 21.1-2 (2001): 193-207. Santos Molano, Enrique. El corazón del poeta. Bogota: Nuevo Rumbo Editorial, 1992. Sarlo, Beatriz. Una modernidad periférica. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nueva Visión, 1988. 274 Silva, José Asunción. After-Dinner Conversation. Trans. Kelly Washbourne. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. —-. De sobremesa. Bogotá: Hiperión, 1996. Sloan, Cynthia A. "The Social and Textual Implications of the Creation of a Male Narrating Subject in Clarice Lispector’s A hora da estrela." Luso-Brazilian Review 38.1(2001): 89-102. Snook, Margaret L. "Boundaries of the Self" Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 20.2 (1991): 108-15. Sorrentino, Fernando. Siete conversaciones con Adolfo Bioy Casares. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1992. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, Vol. 1. Trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Swanson, Phillip. Latin American Fiction. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Villanueva-Collado, Alfredo. "Marie Bashkirtseff, José Asunción Silva y De sobremesa: Patología o intertextualidad?" Ciberletras 11 (2004). 02 Oct. 2009 <http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v11/villanuevacollado.html> —-. "Maculine culture, feminoid modernism." Confluencia 19.2 (2004): 164-213. Zuluaga, Jaramillo, and José Eduardo. "José Asunción Silva entre el lector intuitivo y el lector digital." Estudios de Literatura Colombiana 19 (2006). 02 Oct. 2009 <http://find.galegroup.com/itx/start.do?prodID=AONE>

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Gastropoetics: Cultural figurations of eating in modern Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba

PDF

Becoming darkness: Mexico, the United States and the psychic vanishing of radical blackness

PDF

The poetics of reemergence: psetry, subjectivity, and political violence in the neoliberal age

PDF

Errant maternity: threatening femininity in Caribbean discourses of family, nation, and revolution

Asset Metadata

Creator Cotrina, Fiorella (author)

Core Title Aesthetics of the virtual: modernity, consumption and artifice in three Latin American novels

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 11/27/2009

Defense Date 10/12/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag A hora da estrela, Pandora's box,artifice,Cinema,De sobremesa,desire,La invención de Morel,Latin American literature,masochism,modernismo,modernity,OAI-PMH Harvest,periphery,sadism,Technology,the feminine,virtual,Writing

Place Name Latin America (region)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Diaz, Roberto Ignacio (committee chair), Graff Zivin, Erin (committee member), Meeker, Natania (committee member)

Creator Email cotrina@usc.edu,fiorellacotrina@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2768

Unique identifier UC1204368

Identifier etd-Cotrina-3303 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-284734 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2768 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Cotrina-3303.pdf

Dmrecord 284734

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Cotrina, Fiorella

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu