Echoes of the Child in Latin American Literature and Film

CitationBuiting, Lotte Bernarda. 2015. Echoes of the Child in Latin American Literature and Film. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.

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Echoes of the Child in Latin American Literature and Film

A dissertation presented

by

Lotte Bernarda Buiting

to

The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

in the subject of Romance Languages and Literatures

Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts

October 2014

© 2014 Lotte Bernarda Buiting

All rights reserved.

iii

Abstract

Echoes of the Child in Latin American Literature and Film

This dissertation explores the rhetoric of childhood to comprehend how Latin

American literature and film signify childhood. It furthermore analyzes the figure of the

child as a rhetorical device in the construction of literary and cinematographic meaning in

twentieth and twenty-first century poetry, narrative prose and film. I claim that, contrary

to prevailing cultural notions of childhood innocence, the child often constitutes an

unsettling presence, signaling textual as well as extradiegetic opacities and tensions.

Echoes of the Child is divided into three chapters that each present a different

approach to childhood. Chapter 1 posits the politicization of the child narrator’s voice as

both enabling and restricting the articulation of socio-political trauma. Analyzing texts by

Nellie Campobello, Rosario Castellanos, Juan Pablo Villalobos and Juan Rulfo, I contend

that child narrators create and subvert meaning depending on the position they occupy

vis-à-vis the socio-political turmoil they witness.

The second chapter postulates an uneasy alliance between what I call the ‘visual

pull’ of the child on screen, and the erotic charge of the image in three Argentine films by

Lucrecia Martel, Julia Solomonoff and Federico León / Martín Rejtman. I probe the

relationship between the child’s strong screen presence and the forms in which the

cinematographic image offers the child ways of transforming sexuality into sensuality;

resisting heteronormative sexuality; and of eluding the spell of the adult’s libidinal gaze.

Professor Mariano Siskind Lotte Bernarda Buiting

iv

Performing when she is merely present, I argue that the child bestows a performative

dimension on her acting and her very presence.

The third and final chapter posits infancy as an impossible experience in poetry

from the historical avant-garde by Oliverio Girondo, César Vallejo and Vicente

Huidobro. I contend that reading the poetry guided by the infant reveals two sides of

‘experience;’ the poetic expression of the infant’s experience of the world, a question I

broach through psychoanalysis, and the poet’s attempts at articulating transcendental

experience in language.

My analyses reveal how the rhetoric of childhood bears on issues and dynamics in

the socio-political realm; it thus contributes to our understanding of processes of

signification within Latin American culture.

v

Contents

Abstract iii

Contents v

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction. Rhetorics of Childhood: Some Minor Issues 1

1. Turmoil on Mexican Soil: Child Narrators

Introduction 26

On genre, narrators, and verisimilitude 33

Childhood creates a collective voice 44

Camels in Comitán 62

Speaking in the madriguera 84

Positioning the child’s narrative voice 96

2. Sensual Presence: Children Performing Childhood in New Argentine Film

Introduction 104

Sensuality and haptic viewing 113

Childhood as refuge from gender performance 128

Undoing performativity 148

3. An Impossible Meeting in Oblivion: Infancy and Poetry

Introduction 168

The historical avant-garde contextualized 174

Infantile perception and fragmented expression 184

Kristevan semiotics: senseless and sensible babble 192

An impossible meeting in oblivion 211

Bibliography

217

vi

A Jorge

vii

Acknowledgements It is a pleasure to express my gratitude to everyone who has contributed to this

dissertation over the past several years. First of all, I owe an immense debt of gratitude to

Mariano Siskind, for being the best advisor I could have asked for. From my first

graduate seminar until the final stages of the dissertation and the job search, your

continuous support, guidance, generosity and encouragement have been crucial. Thank

you for the patience, warmth, intelligence, and indelible care with which you have read

and discussed many drafts and chapters, and for showing me how to become a better

scholar.

Many thanks to Gonzalo Aguilar for teaching me most of what I know about

Latin American cinema, and for your generous support of my research throughout the

years, both at Harvard and from abroad. Your comments and suggestions have shaped the

way I think about Argentine film.

Thanks also to Sergio Delgado, for being an enthusiastic part of my dissertation

committee from the very beginning. Your feedback has helped shape especially the

chapter about poetry, and our conversations always gave me much food for thought, the

influence of which shows all throughout the following pages.

Haden Guest has been an invaluable interlocutor in my inquiries into childhood

and film from the very start. Thank you for your ongoing generosity and friendship, and

for the opportunity to learn from you as a Teaching Fellow of great film courses.

Eric Rentschler has provided continuous support and encouragement throughout

my years at Harvard, for which I am very grateful. Thank you for teaching me so much

about film and film theory, close reading, and elegant writing.

viii

Thanks to Brad Epps, who has keenly supported this project along the way, and

whose detailed feedback has helped me to become a better writer.

Mary Gaylord has provided help and encouragement during the dissertation

writing years, for which I am very grateful. She also organizes the writing workshop,

whose members I would like to acknowledge: Andrew Gray, Nicole Legnani, Melissa

Machit, Max Seawright, and Tali Zechory.

A conversation with Robin Bernstein during the early stages of the prospectus

was essential to kick-starting my research, for which my sincere gratitude.

For intellectual support in many forms, I would like to thank Rose Corral, at El

Colegio de México; Alejandra Josiowicz, who has not only been an esteemed interlocutor

about everything related to childhood in Latin America, but also a wonderful friend; the

members of the panels about childhood I organized at the ACLA, particularly Iben

Engelhardt Andersen, Karin Nykvist and Sophie Dufays.

I would have been nowhere without the emotional support from many, near and

far. Thanks to my parents, Ben and Marian Buiting, and my sisters Hilde and Marleen

Buiting, for your love and care. To Bertha Vargas, Jorge, Alejandro and Alicia Téllez, for

providing me with a second home in Mexico City.

Thanks to Carlos Varón for the conversation in the Gato Rojo about Jan Terlouw,

many years ago, that prompted this dissertation, and for being such an amazing friend.

Thanks to Melissa Machit for your friendship, support, celebrations, visits, and

countless conversations about gender and sexuality.

Thanks also to Raquel Abend van Dalen, Violeta Banica, Kim ter Beke, Juan

Berdeja, Sengdeune Braun, Annemarie Eek, Jonas de Graaf, Goretti González, Rosario

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Hubert, Chloé Lavalette, Eduardo Ledesma, Nicole Legnani, Brenda Lozano, Manuel

Molina, Sally Onn, Sergi Rivero, Andrés Sanín, Cara Takakjian, Cinthya Torres, Ana

María Tribín, and Marcel Verheijdt.

A very special thank you to Charlotte Bakker, who is there for me always, no

matter how many miles separate us. Your loving friendship and confidence in me mean

the world to me.

I dedicate this dissertation to Jorge Téllez, to whom I owe more than I know how

to express. Your critical readings and suggestions, as well as our many conversations

have much benefitted this dissertation; your belief in my intellectual project has given me

confidence; and your love has held me. Thank you.

And finally, to el Sófocles, for all things childish.

Introduction.

Rhetorics of Childhood: Some Minor Issues

On April 9, 2012, a private political platform in Mexico called ‘Nuestro México del

Futuro’ posts a short film on YouTube, titled “El reclamo de los niños incómodos.” The

film, aimed to intervene in public debate regarding the presidential elections of July 1,

2012, is shared massively on social media.1 In the short, several children act out corrupt

or socially disadvantaged versions of their adult selves. During the final sequence they

assume their identities as children, walk out onto an empty sound stage, and address the

presidential candidates directly: “México ya tocó fondo. ¿Sólo van a ir por la silla, o van

a cambiar el futuro de nuestro país?” (00:03.49). Perhaps the most telling response is that

of presidential candidate for the Partido Acción Nacional, Josefina Vásquez Mota. She

mentions how “profundamente doloroso” it is to be called to order by children –

conveniently sidestepping the fact that none of the candidates are called to order by

children, but by the political platform that organized and financed the short film.

A few years earlier, Fabrica, the “communication research center” of United

Colors of Benetton, asks English photographer James Mollison to articulate an artistic

response to the issue of children’s rights.2 He creates a book that contains 56 diptychs,

each consisting of a portrait of a child and her or his sleeping quarters, taken all around

1 On Twitter, for example, the video was a trending topic under the hashtag #niñosincómodos.

2 The NGO ‘Save the Children’ also provided financial and practical support for the project.

2

the world.3 A short paragraph accompanies the photographs, capturing the socio-political

context of how and where the child grows up. The website that contains several images

from the book quickly went viral, and was cited on multiple media and news outlets.4

Mollison underscores the political commitment of his project: “I hope the book gives a

glimpse into the lives some children are living in very diverse situations around the

world; a chance to reflect on the inequality that exists, and realise just how lucky most of

us in the developed world are” (Sekoff, n.p.).

Set and filmed in a Spain that is only starting to recover from the shock of

Francisco Franco’s death, Carlos Saura presents the story of young Ana (Ana Torrent) in

Cría cuervos (1976). She prepares her father a nice glass of warm milk, carefully stirring

in a powder that she retrieves from the mansion’s garage. The substance that she lovingly

mixes into his evening drink, however, is a poison strong enough to kill an elephant. That

night her father, a despotic Francoist general engaged in an adulterous affair, gasps and

dies instantly. That Ana’s potion is, in reality, innocuous, is irrelevant; her murderous

intent is not lost on the spectator, to whom her behavior may appear all the more

shocking because s/he had come to know the actress as the innocent and slightly

traumatized protagonist from Víctor Érice’s El espíritu de la colmena (1973).

The first two cases garner much international traction, to a large extent because of

the way they enlist the image of children to support a political objective that, ostensibly,

serves the child’s best interest – i.e. securing for their future a just, non-corrupt Mexican

government; and critical reflection on the world’s social injustices that will, in the long

3 Where Children Sleep. London: Chris Boot, 2010.

4 http://jamesmollison.com/books/where-children-sleep/

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run, provide a better future for all, not just the privileged.5 These concerns, expressed in

the name of the children, pale in comparison to the practical, short-term goals of both

projects. Mollison displays great care in the documentation of the different faces of

childhood, contrasting miserable living circumstances with extravagant opulence so the

adult viewer/reader can easily extrapolate the need for enhanced support for children’s

rights. Similarly, the message of the Mexican short activates the conceptualization of

childhood as innocent, and contrasts it with the corrupt and violent behavior of the actors

representing future adults. The brief coda re-inscribes them into the realm of childhood,

exposing the misfit between the children’s present, and the enactment of their own

futures. Saura’s film, on the other hand, shows a remarkably different child, one who

approaches patricide without qualms or hesitations. Even as an adult, aware that her

powder was harmless sodium bicarbonate, she reflects on her behavior without remorse

about her ethical implication in her father’s death. Ana’s unsettling actions need to be

considered within their political context; dictator Franco too dies from natural causes, and

like Ana’s father, his presence haunts Spain long after he is gone.

What all these projects reveal is the complexity of the child’s presence in artistic

expression; they employ childhood in order to achieve a particular goal or reflect on a

political situation. My dissertation centers on these rhetorical maneuvers; it explores the

rhetoric of childhood to comprehend how Latin American literature and film signify

childhood. Vice versa, I also analyze the figure of the child as a rhetorical device in the

5 The “best interest” principle forms part of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states in Article 3.1 that “[i]n all actions concerning children [...] the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration” (qtd. in James and James 83).

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construction of literary and cinematographic meaning in twentieth and twenty-first

century poetry, narrative prose and film. I claim that, contrary to prevailing cultural

notions of childhood innocence and purity, the figure of the child often constitutes an

unsettling presence, signaling textual as well as extradiegetic opacities and tensions,

which s/he both mediates and further complicates. In my analyses I read the child in her

biological and historical specificity, and also as a concept that privileges her childish

characteristics abstractly. Performance studies have shown that childhood as a category

of analysis becomes real because it is uttered into being through a sort of speech act. The

archival material that comprises the corpus of this thesis both performs and documents

childhood. The opposition between historical specificity and an abstract, rhetorical force

bespeaks the child’s capacity to signify on multiple levels at once, and accounts for part

of the disruptive presence of the child in many, if not all, of the texts.

* * *

In society at large, as in most texts studied in my dissertation, the notion of innocent

childhood recurs insistently. Innocence is not, however, essentially related to the child,

and the ways in which it has come to serve as a near-synonym of childhood can be traced

historically. Although there is no simple, straightforward definition of childhood, on one

aspect a consensus has been reached: children may be biologically different from adults,

but childhood is by no means a biological condition. After all, “biology is socially

constructed” (Oakley 25). French social historian Philippe Ariès, with his hugely

influential Centuries of Childhood (1963), was among the first scholars to claim

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‘childhood’ as a social construction, and he traced its incipience back to the origins of the

modern family in the seventeenth century. Childhood is thus separated from it supposed

biological foundation, i.e. age. James Kincaid summarizes the research that supports this

claim:

Lawrence Stone’s study of the historical development of family formation lends further support to this conception of the child as a historical and linguistic phenomenon, as do Richard Lewinsohn’s comments on the absence of children from the pictorial representations of the Aurignacian Age, Peter Conveney’s observation on the unimportance of child in literature until the last decades of the eighteenth century, and Deborah Gorham’s tracing of the rapid development of toys and books for children during that same period. [...] It is safe to say that Ariès and his followers have driven a sharp wedge between child and nature, shown us the contingent, determined nature of this phenomenon, the child. (1992, 61-62)6

The separation between the concept of childhood and the lived experience of the real

child constitutes, as Robin Bernstein points out, a “fundamental opposition” that the

academic field of childhood studies does not always know how to address. She criticizes

the model in which ‘childhood’ is “abstract and disembodied, whereas ‘children’ are

tangible and fleshy” (22). Instead, she suggests, research should account for the

“simultaneity and mutual constitution of children and childhood” (22). The analysis of

material culture, such as toys or children’s attire is one way this simultaneity can be taken

into account.

Yet neither print nor material culture is always readily available for analysis. Part

of the difficulty of grappling with the idea of an early-modern perception of childhood, to

know if such a thing even existed, is the scarcity of archeological material, as Teresa

6 Some scholars challenge the tendency to date the invention of the child. Karin Calvert, for example, objects: “That medieval children dressed like adults is not proof that there was no medieval concept of childhood. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” (73).

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Chapa Brunet points out: “Si a esto unimos el carácter siempre incompleto de la

evidencia y la lejanía respecto a la sociedad en estudio, es comprensible que la capacidad

de detección de las actividades infantiles sea escasa” (116). Increasingly, however,

scholarly work both in the social sciences as well as the arts and humanities are starting

to assemble the picture of what childhood may have looked like in different parts of Latin

America.7 Scholars have found writings by Spanish friars, for example, that record proof

that childhood, in some form, was operative in the Mexica’s culture in New Spain;

Nahuatl differentiates between the various stages of early life, from infant to child under

six years old, with no less than nine different terms.8

According to Ariès childhood innocence did not enter cultural imagination until

the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, with concepts such as the tabula rasa or

‘blank slate’ (mainly through John Locke) and the view of the child as an intrinsic part of

nature, to be formed by education (an idea most influentially put forth by Jean-Jacques

Rousseau).9 Throughout the nineteenth century, the malleable, impressionable child plays

7 See Historia de la infancia en América Latina (2007), edited by Pablo Rodríguez and María Emma Mannarelli. The essays cover childhood from the pre-Hispanic period until the twentieth century. In English, see Minor Omissions, edited by Tobias Hecht (2002).

8 Díaz Barriga Cuevas: “[L]os cortes de edad utilizados por los mexicas: 1) niños de teta: occhichi, occhichi piltontli; 2) niños que aún no hablan: ocatl, xochtic, octototl, conechichilli; niños destetados: tlachichihualcahualtilli; niño o niña delicada, muy tierna: cone alacton, conechichipil; niños menores de seis años: conetl, conetontli, pipil, cocone; 4) niños o niñas mayores de seis años: piltontli, piltzintli” (29-30).

9 Child-rearing literature, in vogue after the publication of Rousseau’s Émile (1762), started to bloom. At the turn of the century, for instance, Swedish author Ellen Key wrote The Century of the Child (1900), in which she outlines a sort of manual for a happy, autonomous child, what will come to be known as the ‘Pippi-ideal,’ after the famous character from Astrid Lindgren’s children’s books.

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a crucial role in Latin American nation building;10 s/he often symbolizes the nation itself,

or represents the positive forces of futurity, a projection of all a nation can, or should,

be.11 As Sosenski and Jackson Albarrán argue: “En todos los casos, la idea de la

ciudadanía se vincula con la de la utopía. Los niños son medidos [...] contra el ideal o la

representación de lo que significa ser miembro de un grupo colectivo” (19). Such ideals

can be found in José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (1900), for instance, dedicated to “la juventud

de América,” and underlies José Martí’s journal for children, La edad de oro (1889). This

project, cut short after only four monthly issues, constitutes an intervention in his larger

project of forming a “hombre nuevo,” one capable of fighting for independence in Cuba

and throughout Latin America.

At the start of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud introduces a whole new

concept of the child, whose inherently sexual nature he outlines, first, in Three Essays on

the Theory of Sexuality (1905), and which he revisits throughout his career. Along with

the libidinal forces that regulate the infant’s actions, Freud also establishes the child as

utterly dependent on her parents, physically as well as psychologically. Psychoanalysis

was to have a tremendous impact on the way societies in the twentieth (and twenty-first)

century imagined the child, but the concept of the libidinal child did not replace the

innocent child. Rather, psychoanalysis’ ‘sexual child’ continued to coexist, perhaps

somewhat uncomfortably, alongside the innocent child. The centrality of the family in

Freud’s writings, moreover, institutes the dichotomy between the ‘civilized’ versus the

10 Lavrin: “Mientras más revolucionaria se hacía la educación [en México], más importancia se le daba al niño como futuro agente de cambio” (57).

11 In 1969, Jean Heywood states rather bluntly: “[T]he child has always been a symbol as well as a person” (13).

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‘wild child.’12 Needless to say, the latter, a creature of street culture and poverty, and

product of failing educational and health systems, was seen as a threat to the civilized

child.

In the late twentieth, and twenty-first century the ‘wild child’ all but disappears

and gives way to another recurrent cultural stereotype, the overly sexual/overly

sexualized child. These sexualized children tend to be gendered and racialized, i.e. they

tend to be female and non-white. Indeed, the version of acceptable girlhood is narrow, as

Sarah Pojansky argues: “[T]he impossibly high-achieving heterosexual white girl who

plays sports, loves science, is gorgeous but not hyper-sexual, is fit but not too thin, learns

from her (minor) mistakes, and certainly will change the world some day” (1).13 Society

and mainstream media immediately cast the girl who does not fit into this normative

mold as problematic, or at the very least deviant. Artistic expressions and, sometimes,

academic discourse provide leeway to explore more diverse and complex versions of girl-

and childhood.

As these shifting attitudes regarding the child reveal, childhood innocence is an

illusion that is firmly rooted in culture and collective conscience, and is generally taken

to be the child’s natural condition and predisposition. Leading scholars in childhood

studies concur on the necessity of severing childhood and innocence, and have shown the

myriad ways in which the concept has been constituted culturally and socially, but the

12 The binary civilized/wild child develops much along the same lines, and around the same time as Sarmiento’s Facundo: Civilización y barbarie (1845).

13 See for example Projansky (2014); Isabel Molina-Guzmán with Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media (2010); Anita Harris with Young Femininity: Girlhood, Power and Social Change (2005); or Walkerdine (1998).

9

notion continues to inform policy as well as cultural belief.14 Innocence has to be related,

first, to a Judeo-Christian understanding, i.e. to be without sin. Secondly, it can be

understood as ‘without guilt,’ in the juridical sense. Both of these interpretations demand

continuous prudence: “Almost all the categories that we use in moral and religious

judgments are in some way contaminated by law: guilt, responsibility, innocence,

pardon.... This makes it difficult to invoke them without particular caution” (Agamben

1999, 18). Just how difficult this is shows in recent scholarly and artistic attempts to

challenge this assumption, which are often met with public outrage, or even (threats of)

incarceration.15 Innocence, thus, no longer serves, or not only, to simply describe the

child, but has acquired a prescriptive function. In his last work, On Late Style (1999),

Edward Said introduces an understanding of the concept “timeliness” that seems

pertinent here: “[B]oth in art and in our general ideas about the passage of human life

there is assumed to be a general abiding timeliness, by which I mean that what is

appropriate to early life is not appropriate for later stages, and vice versa” (2006, 5,

original emphasis). Yet who are the arbiters of time? Who is in charge of deciding what

is appropriate and what is not, at any given age? Certainly reigning cultural assumptions

about childhood claim innocence as the timely and appropriate form of being a child,

which at least partially explains its stubborn perseverance.

14 To name but a few: Robin Bernstein, Lynn Spigel, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Howard Stein, Anne Higonnet and James Kincaid.

15 Kincaid was called “a passionate champion of pedophilia” (Kincaid 1998: 251) by the British press, and artists such as Alice Sims, Sally Mann, Denise Marika, Jock Sturge and Robyn Stoutenberg were either arrested, censored, or subjected to million dollar criminal investigations (Pace 442) for the alleged pornographic qualities of their photographs of children.

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To be sure, it is easy to comprehend why childhood is so often related to lofty

ideals and even protectionism, all under the banner of the child’s innate innocence. In her

exploration of childhood in Mexico and Latin America, Asunción Lavrin details, for

example, the high rates of infant mortality in early twentieth century: “El interés en la

puericultura de los higienistas o expertos en salud pública del primer tercio del siglo XX

se basa en el alto índice de mortalidad infantil que se detectó en casi todas las naciones de

Hispanoamérica” (52). In a very real, tangible sense, children do need protection and the

constant care of the adults around them. Politicians, writers, artists and the general public

alike, often capitalize on this real and existing concern to push their own agendas. The

easiest way to conjure up the (financial) support of adults to combat poverty and its

related issues such as health care and education – which affects adults as well as children

– is by invoking the suffering child, much in the way James Mollison demonstrates in his

successful series of photographs Where Children Sleep. For that very reason, my

explorations in this dissertation are concerned with the ways in which these material

concerns often end up determining the rhetoric of childhood. I therefore constantly move

between the analysis of the usage of the child as a rhetorical ploy, and her experience

grounded in historical reality.

* * *

During the last two decades or so, scholarly interest in childhood studies has increased

rapidly, producing numerous critical studies on the subject both in literature and film.

Traditionally childhood studies, which claimed its place in academia in the 1980s, have

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been dominated by the social sciences – a trend that is still noticeable.16 Literary, visual

and cultural studies, however, have a crucial role to play, by bringing cultural

manifestations and the rhetorics of childhood into the conversation. In the best studies,

those analyses demonstrate how childhood studies are not only an understudied field that

deserves careful readership, but also how pertinent it is to other disciplines and

subfields.17 In Latin American studies an interest in the topic has taken root even more

recently, and the scope of many publications tends to be limited to either case studies on

the representation of children, or typical ‘children’ genres, such as the Bildungsroman or

children’s literature.18 At the same time, academic conferences such as LASA, MLA and

16 The recent volume Key Thinkers in Childhood Studies (2014), edited by Carmel Smith and Sheila Greene, contains interviews with prominent social scientist, but no scholar of literary, visual, or cultural studies. This despite the editors’ stated intent to “push the boundary of Childhood Studies a little beyond where it is most commonly drawn in order to be as inclusive as possible in terms of discipline and focus” (10). The influential Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University draws most of its faculty from the social sciences, but does include several faculty members working on film, media and literature.

17 In her latest book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011), Robin Bernstein analyzes how representations of childhood and child’s play are integral to notions of blackness and whiteness in the United States; Kathryn Bond Stockton in The Queer Child: or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (2009), as well as the editors of Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (2004), examine the intersections of childhood and queer studies; in Reconstructing Childhood (2003), Julia Kushigian proposes strategies for reading the Spanish American Bildungsroman based on examinations of gender and culture. 18 To cite but a few examples: Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet edit two volumes on children in film, Representing History, Class and Gender in Spain and Latin America: Children and Adolescents in Film (2012), and Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema (2014), the first on the representation of the child, the second on the child’s subjectivity; Kristine Vanden Berghe, with Homo ludens en la Revolución: Una lectura de Nellie Campobello (2013), studies Campobello’s literary oeuvre according to Huizinga’s play theory; Yolanda Doub’s Journeys of Formation (2010) considers the literary motif of travel in Bildungsromane from Argentina, Peru and Mexico; Marta López Luaces, with Ese extraño territorio: representación de la infancia en tres

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ACLA have in recent years shown a significant increase in the number of panels

dedicated to the child, and emerging as well as established scholars all over the field are

increasingly devoting attention to the theorization and analysis of the child. Another

testament to its increased academic visibility is the growing number of dissertations on

the topic that have been presented in just the last few years.19

My own dissertation participates in this growing field; it aims to shed some light

on the ubiquity of childhood, and through the analysis of the myriad ways in which it is

invoked rhetorically, I propose to show how the figure of the child intersects society, and

how it contributes to the ways in which Latin American culture understands itself. I

combine both literary and visual culture; the preponderance of the image (still and

moving) has played a crucial role in the consolidation of a modern understanding of

childhood. As Vicky Lebeau puts it in her discussion of early cinema: “[A]s a

quintessentially modern medium, cinema began to institute itself with and through the

child, bringing into renewed focus the visual dimension of the ‘myth’ of the child, that

modern commitment to the difference of childhood as a time and space apart” (40,

original emphasis). Similarly, Anne Higonnet claims that “photography made it possible

for the ideal of Romantic childhood [i.e. innocence] to seem completely natural” (9).

Modern technology continues this trend to lock childhood innocence in the image;

escritoras latinoamericanas (2001), traces the child characters that appear in chosen works by Norah Lange, Elena Garro and Silvina Ocampo; Richard Browning studies the relationship between nation building and childhood in Childhood and the Nation (2001). 19 For example: Alejandra Josiowicz, “La cruzada de los niños: Infancia y cultura en América Latina, 1880-1980” (2013); Sandra Navarro, “Captive Subjects: The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Argentine Cinema” (2013); Catalina Donoso, “Marginal Childhoods in Spanish American Film (1950-1969)” (2012); Ruth Roman, “Latin American Coming of Age Narratives: A Symbolic and Psychoanalytical Reading” (2009).

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Lauren Berlant argues that through the sonogram, the fetus becomes an innocent citizen,

by virtue of being photographed (Wilson 12). Given the centrality of the image to many

contemporary appreciations of childhood, I decided that an exploration of the child’s

image merited a place in my thesis.

As I put together the corpus of my dissertation, however, I did not consider the

age of the child as a selection criterion; even for the sake of distinguishing between terms

such as child, youth or adolescent, age is arbitrary at best, and inaccurate at worst.20

When Rodó dedicates Ariel to the ‘juventud de América,’ he is not, or not only, referring

to readers of a certain age. Instead, he appeals to the rhetorical possibilities of “juventud,”

and invites everyone who recognizes him or herself in this dedication, to participate in his

project to instigate educational and cultural reform. These types of invocations of

‘childhood’ and ‘youth’ greatly contribute to an understanding of the manifold ways the

rhetoric of childhood is employed, precisely because they do not (exclusively) conjure up

the juvenile body. Making a similar point, but approaching it from the opposite angle,

José Quintero laments that “[n]o estoy de acuerdo con que existan los niños.” Quintero is

not a child-hating misanthropist, but author of an alternative comic book for kids.21 His

assertion points to a larger preoccupation with what one (involuntarily) puts forward

when using the term “niños.”

20 Rocha and Seminet choose this method in Representing History, Gender and Race (2012), which they explain in the introduction. It leads to a delimitation of terms, such as child, adolescent and teen, based on a range of ages. They back their methodology up with a number of disclaimers, because they themselves realize that these age/term pairs do not accurately cover the essays in their edited volume.

21 He describes his comic as “un libro infantil [...] que me hubiera gustado leer cuando yo era niño” (n.p.).

14

If age ceases to operate as a determining factor of childhood, however, what are

we left with? It is important to recognize that, although age does not accurately describe

any aspect of childhood, it cannot be completely disregarded either. There is an age-

related specificity to the term that I cannot and have no intention to deny. Even though a

sports journalist may refer to adult athletes as ‘our boys,’22 or Mexican Spanish may

address all unmarried men as ‘joven,’ regardless of their age, this does not obscure the

fact that ‘children’ tend to refer to humans with juvenile bodies. The question of age is

the ‘lie’ that covers the ‘truth’ of childhood. To be sure, behind that lie there is nothing;

the inextricable link between childhood and age forms the nucleus of so many discourses

of childhood and is instilled in culture in so many ways, that separating the two would be

impossible. Posing of the question of age itself is important, though, because it opens up

productive spaces where childhood can operate without being reduced to or essentialized

into age.

Several social discourses do, in effect, employ age as a defining feature of the

child; jurisprudence, (developmental) psychology or sociology, to name but a few of the

most influential areas. None of these, in themselves, offer an encompassing theory of the

child, but together they constitute a significant part of what it means to be a child in

society.23 Jurisprudence utilizes age to dictate whether or not one may vote, engage in

consensual sex, drink alcohol or drive a car, which amounts to a prohibitive structure, i.e.

22 For example: Joe Drape, Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains With the Smith Center Redmen (2009).

23 These discourse mutually influence each other; despite evidence, however, theories on children are particularly unlikely to be revised based on evidence. Jean Piaget’s theories of psychological development have been contradicted by a lot of evidence, but continue to inspire legislation (Oakley 23).

15

before one reaches a certain age, one would break the law.24 From the beginning of the

twentieth century, nonetheless, there are also structures in place to protect the rights of

the child, which commenced with the promulgation, in 1924, of the Geneva Declaration

on the Rights of the Child. Within a few years, the declaration passed in most Latin

American countries, where subsequent measures were taken to institute the protection of

the child.25 In 1959, the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child followed, as well as a

plethora of subsequent international statements and declarations of varying levels of

scope and significance. Perhaps the most important, in terms of its impact on the

international discourse about children and childhood, was the adoption in 1989 by the UN

General Assembly of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (James and James, 81).26

One of the crucial achievements of the UNCRC is its attempt to articulate, for the

first time, “the rights associated with childhood as a single and undifferentiated collective

social status, [providing] the first ever framework within which discussions about the

nature of childhood and the rights of children around the world can take place” (James

and James, 82, original emphasis). Although the UNCRC purports to grant children the

status of human subjects with full rights, its legal implementation has proven thorny at

best. Language plays an important part herein; its universalizing tone often clashes with

24 The ages for consent, drinking, and obligatory education, for instance, differ quite widely among countries, indicating to what extent child legislation is culturally determined.

25 Lavrin: “Cuba aprobó el concepto en 1924 y Chile enuncia un Decálogo de los Derechos del Niño en 1928. En 1927, la Cuarta Conferencia Panamericana aprobó la fundación de un instituto Interamericano para la Protección de la Infancia con sede en Montevideo (65). In Mexico, moreover, “se establecen tribunales de menores desde finales de los años veinte (1928)” (Lavrin 67).

26 Hereafter abbreviated to UNCRC.

16

the needs of specific cultures, politicians, and children themselves. Perhaps the UNCRC,

in its desire to represent the Child, as a universal, non-specified being, fails to represent

the individual child. In her discussion of feminism in Gender Trouble (1990), Judith

Butler writes: “Representation serves as the operative term within a political process that

seeks to extend visibility and legitimacy to women as political subjects: on the other

hand, representation is the normative function of a language which is said either to reveal

or to distort what is assumed to be true about the category of women” (1999, 2, original

emphasis). The UNCRC most certainly intended, and succeeded in, extending visibility

to the rights and legitimacy of the child; furthermore, for the child too the “language

which is said to reveal or to distort what is assumed to be true about the category of

[children]” plays a pivotal role. So much so, in fact, that Dominique Marshall, assessing

children’s rights in the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, asserts that

“UNICEF only adopted the language of rights by the mid 1980s: to those weary of the

sentimentalism associated with childhood, the notion of rights bore a reassuring

seriousness” (129).27 The risk associated with this “reassuring seriousness” is that it

makes it seem that the child’s rights are covered, so to speak. Reality proves a little more

complicated than that.

The question of speech remains, for instance, for what is the legal status of the

child’s speech? For one, s/he cannot cast a vote until s/he reaches a certain age, so in a

27 Another problem, possibly more serious, is that not all law intended to protect the child, obtains the desired effect. Legal scholar Amy Adler has argued provocatively, in 2001, that United States child pornography law, intended to protect children from sexual exploitation, threatens to unwittingly perpetuate and escalate the sexual representation of children it seeks to constrain: “[L]egal discourse on prohibiting child pornography may represent yet another way in which our culture drenches itself in sexualized children” (213).

17

political sense, her voice cannot be heard.28 Drawing on the arguments in Gayatri

Spivak’s canonical essay, Leerom Medovoi, Shankar Raman and Bejamin Johnson ask

whether the subaltern can vote.29 This analysis, according to Spivak, is “a fruitful way of

extending my reading of subaltern speech into a collective arena. Access to ‘citizenship’

(civil society) by becoming a voter (in the nation) is indeed the symbolic circuit of the

mobilizing of subalternity into hegemony” (65). Clearly, this road into hegemony is not

(yet) accessible to children – no matter according to which framework one defines her.

Today, to reach voting age functions precisely as a benchmark to the end of childhood. In

many other circumstances (education and health, for example) the legal minor also needs

to rely on an adult to voice her concerns on her behalf.

Although age may be a most helpful framework to understand the possibility of

the child’s speech in juridical terms, my aim to elucidate the rhetoric of childhood

requires an analysis of the elusiveness of the very term. The ambiguous and equivocal

understandings of ‘childhood,’ moreover, have serious political implications, some of

which impact direct legislative decision-making. In her discussion of the (im)possibility

of political representation, Spivak problematizes the usage of what she calls ‘master

words,’ such as ‘woman’ or ‘proletariat,’ terms that pretend to represent (vertreten) a

group, but that lack real examples. Instead, they often become proxies for the ideals or

ideas that society has mobilized in them. She therefore considers them catachreses, a term

28 Whether or not, and under what circumstances, a minor can testify in court varies per country. See for example Children as victims, witnesses, and offenders: psychological science and the law. Eds. Bette L. Bottoms, Cynthia J. Najdwoski, Gail S. Goodman. New York: Guilford Press, 2009.

29 “Can the Subaltern Vote?” Socialist Review 20.3 (1990): 133-149.

18

for which she offers a politically inflected understanding: “The OED defines ‘catachresis’

as ‘abuse or perversion of a trope or metaphor.’ We appropriate this to indicate the

‘abuse’ constitutive of language production where both concept and metaphor are

‘wrested from their proper meaning.’ Thus, in the narrow sense, a word for which there is

no adequate referent to be found” (1990, 242). Spivak’s unstable ‘master words’ provide

a helpful point of departure to understand the ways in which the child operates in

discourse, in terms of political import of ‘child’ and its frequent pretension to represent

the child as a collective. Specific, often contradictory readings of the child lead to an

emptying of the term, so that it can be instrumentalized according to the specific needs of

the speaker.

Similarly concerned with universalist discourses that tend to cancel out

particularist difference when invoked to achieve political aims, the writings of Ernesto

Laclau offer another, complementary framework to consider the child’s discursive

instability, i.e. the ‘empty signifier.’ As signifiers of an absence, these deal with “the

precise theoretical possibility of something which points, from within the process of

signification, to the discursive presence of its own limits” (Laclau 36). Like Spivak’s

catachresis, the empty signifier signals textual opacities that could render invisible

political minorities and their possible representation. In Emancipation(s) (1996) Laclau

explains how he binds hegemony to politics:

[T]he hegemonic operations would be the presentation of the particularity of a group as the incarnation of that empty signifier which refers to the communitarian order as an absence, an unfulfilled reality. [...] [I]n a situation of radical disorder 'order' is present as that which is absent; it becomes an empty signifier, as the signifier of that absence. In this sense, various political forces can compete in their efforts to present their particular objectives as those which carry out the filling of that lack. To hegemonize something is exactly to carry out this filling function. (44)

19

Laclau cites freedom, democracy and unity as examples to explicate his definition of the

empty signifier, concepts that have “no content, because [they] only exist[] in the various

forms in which [they are] actually realized” (44). Through their expression they ‘fill that

lack’ with particular content, which becomes the hegemonic signifier for all other

possible, particular renderings of the empty signifier. Thus, its expression entails the

effacement of the original absence of a signified. If one accepts childhood as a socio-

cultural construction, the pertinence of critical discourse analysis becomes apparent.

Hegemonic discourse understands the child as the immature human being, the ‘blank

slate’ to be inscribed by society, be that a hyper-sexualized, colored girl or an innocent,

pure white boy. Whether catachresis according to Spivak, or empty signifier following

Laclau, it becomes clear that the child, in rhetorical terms, functions as an unstable

signifier. Although society’s hegemonic discourse locks ‘childhood’ into an overly

stabilized space, my critical reading of childhood, as well as many of its artistic

renderings, restore the instability of the signifier childhood, which helps explain the

term’s wide range of often-contradictory uses, the confusion that frequently surrounds it,

and its aptness for political manipulation. It does not account for the status of the child’s

speech, but it does help to elucidate the complex structures of power in which her speech

inevitably finds itself entangled. Both catachresis and the empty signifier grapple with the

(im)possibility of political representation, with the power structures that (do not) allow

access to speech, and with the (im)possibility of speech itself.

Proposing the child as unstable signifier entails problematizing the essence of

childhood, articulated in universalizing discourses. The UNCRC illustrates the scope and

reach of the ideal, upheld by many, that there is indeed an essence to childhood that

20

defines children everywhere. In the 1930s, Paul Hazard coins the phrase ‘the world

republic of childhood,’ “a romantic vision of unlimited exchange of children’s books

across borders and international understanding that at times has functioned as an

ideology, as a catchword implying that children throughout the world are all the same”

(O’Sullivan 195). The hegemonization of this idea tends to lock the child in a Eurocentric

discourse that disregards specificity; the common features of childhood upheld by

international organizations such as ‘Save the Children’ or UNICEF are mostly those that

reflect the experience of the white, middle-class, heterosexual child.30 The efforts to

abolish child labor, for example, have the capacity to unite adults; the ‘right’ of the child

to play is challenged by few. And yet, sociologists Allison James, Chris Jenks and Alan

Prout argue that the abolition of child labor in some cases is contrary to the child’s best

interest. A “protectionist framework,” they contend, “attends to children’s voices in a

highly selective way” (107).

Attention to gender and sexuality can play an important role in the

denaturalization of the hegemonized phenomenon of childhood.31 As Eve Kosofsky

Sedgwick argues, to fail to analyze nominally ungendered constructs in gender terms can

30 James, Jenkins and Prout assert that there is an “imposition of a politicized uniformity that defies the differences within. Thus the universal child becomes a minority group with demands that have to be heard; that the group is fractured and faceted in internal diversity is less often remarked” (31). See also pages 140-143.

31 Any discourse about the child necessarily involves a choice of gender pronouns, more so in Spanish than in English, where the very word “child” – niña or niño – involves a gendered choice. In this dissertation, whenever I refer to the child, I follow the logic of the particular section. I speak about the poet’s choice as “his choice,” when the poet in question is Girondo, for instance; and when I refer to the narrator’s discourse as her discourse, the narrator-protagonist is a girl. Whenever such clarity does not exist, I have favored the female pronouns, in a small contribution to the denaturalization of the universalizing use of male pronouns.

21

itself be a tendentious move in the gender politics of reading (2008, 34). For gay kids this

holds even more true. In her influential essay “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,”

Kosofsky Sedgwick quotes Friedman, an established psychoanalyst, who bluntly

proclaims: “ ‘The rights of parents to oversee the development of children is a long-

established principle. Who is to dictate that parents may not try to raise their children in a

manner that maximizes the possibility of a heterosexual outcome?’ Who indeed – if the

members of this profession can’t stop seeing the prevention of gay people as an ethical

use of their skills?” (237). Heteronormative society imposes itself on the child from a

very young age, especially, but not only, when s/he does not comply with normative

gendered behavior. The performance of gender, Butler reminds us, is the forced

reiteration of the norm, deviations of which are dangerous (2011, 59).32 The ability to

think children as gay, as non-white, as other-gendered, not only guides us to the limits of

the thinkable,33 but also rewrites the script of childhood, and actively resists

essentializing childhood.

* * *

32 The ‘bible’ of psychoanalysis, DSM-III (1980), is the first that does not contain a label for homosexuality, but it does contain a new disorder, i.e. “Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood.” This disorder is nominally gender-neutral, but is applied to girls only when they assert that they are anatomically male, whereas boys receive the label when they merely suggest it could be better not to have a penis, or if they display female stereotypical behavior, or attire (Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1998, 233).

33 Julia Kristeva: “[T]he real stakes of a discourse on childhood within Western thought involve a confrontation between thought and what it is not, a wandering of the limits of the thinkable” (1980, 276).

22

The child, in all her renderings, informs the analyses in my dissertation, as I read the

rhetoric of the child throughout the three chapters. At the start of this introduction I put

forth my claim that the figure of the child often constitutes an unsettling presence, a claim

each chapter explores and interrogates from a different perspective. As such, the first

chapter, about child narrators in Mexican prose from the twentieth century, posits the

politicization of the voice of the child as both enabling and restricting the articulation of

socio-political trauma. I analyze Cartucho (Nellie Campobello), Balún Canán (Rosario

Castellanos), Fiesta en la madriguera (Juan Pablo Villalobos), and “Macario” (Juan

Rulfo), texts in which the child narrators create and subvert meaning depending on the

position they occupy vis-à-vis the socio-political turmoil they witness; I propose to call

this ‘positionality.’ This paradigm, which I elaborate by drawing from Ferdinand de

Saussure’s structuralist concept of value and from queer theorists’ interpretations of the

term, allows me to relate the child’s narration to other voices that suffuse the text and to

understand her silence as a possible site of condensed meaning. I question, moreover, the

make-up of the child’s narrative voice; what does it mean to speak as a child?34 The four

texts offer varying answers to these questions, and employ the child narrator to different

political ends.

The second chapter postulates the uneasy alliance between the almost inevitable

visual attraction, or ‘visual pull,’ of the child on screen and the erotic charge of the image

in three recent Argentine films; La niña santa (Lucrecia Martel); El último verano de la

Boyita (Julia Solomonoff); and Entrenamiento elemental para actores (Federico León

34 In the Bible one reads, for instance: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (St Paul: I, Corinthians 13:11).

23

and Martín Rejtman). I probe the relationship between the child’s strong screen presence

and the forms in which the cinematographic image offers the child ways of transforming

sexuality into sensuality; resisting heteronormative sexuality; and of eluding the spell of

the adult’s libidinal gaze. Performing when she is merely present, and exuding a strong

presence on and off screen, the child bestows a performative dimension on her acting and

her very presence.

The third and final chapter posits infancy as an impossible experience in poetry

from the historical avant-garde; Espantapájaros (Al alcance de todos) and En la

masmédula (Oliverio Girondo); Trilce (César Vallejo); and Altazor o el viaje en

paracaídas: Poema en VII cantos (Vicente Huidobro). Through poetic experimentation

these poets aim to express linguistic plenitude, seeking poetry’s ultimate expression that

can, nonetheless, never be expressed. The pre-linguistic infant is the embodied existence

of infancy, unable to articulate the unsayable but capable of suggesting and connoting it

because of her innate capacity of forming all phonemes of every language. S/he embodies

both the theoretical possibility of linguistic plenitude, and marks the entrance into

historical reality when s/he utters her first sounds, mimicking words overheard in her

environment. Reading the poetry guided by the infant thus reveals two sides of the

question of ‘experience;’ the poetic expression of the infant’s experience of the world, a

question I broach through psychoanalysis, and the poet’s attempts at articulating

transcendental experience in language.

Each chapter thus presents a different approach to childhood, and exposes various

of its possible conceptualizations. Although the corpus consists of texts from different

time periods, geographical regions, and genres, they all point to the unsettling presence of

24

the child. S/he may appear as a force of possibility and futurity, but also as a signifier of

things that cannot be expressed. The child mediates the unsayable in poetic language, the

articulation of trauma in narrative prose, and the force of sexuality and sensuality in the

moving image. My analyses reveal, moreover, how the rhetorics of childhood bear on

issues and dynamics in the socio-political realm; they thus contribute to our

understanding of processes of signification within Latin American culture at large.

* * *

Juno’s wrath befalls her when the goddess discovers that the nymph’s enthralling tales

serve to distract her, while Jove retreats with other nymphs; punishing in kind, Juno

cruelly restricts the force of the nymph’s speech, who can no longer express herself,

unless instigated by others. Echo is “unable to keep still when someone spoke, / or speak

at all before another did” (Ovid, III, v. 459-461). The use of her voice is reduced to

babbling, mimicking and repeating, returning the sounds she hears around her. Frustrated,

humiliated and desperate, she hides quietly in the woods, until one day she encounters

one “who even as an infant was adorable” (III, v. 445). Her passion for him ignites a

desire to communicate so strong, that she echoes his words and appears before him.

Narcissus rejects her embrace though, as untouched by her declaration of love as by

anyone else’s. He neither loves nor desires anyone, until he stumbles upon the face of

perfection in a well. Although he fixes his desirous gaze upon the image, his love is

unrequited; he withers away, and dies.

Through the figures of both Echo and Narcissus, this Ovidian myth connects

language with image, and resonates powerfully with many of the main preoccupations of

25

my dissertation. Punished for her loquacious tongue, Echo can only perform the very

speech acts that constitute the entrance of the infant into linguistic existence; echoing

those around her she produces echolalias and barely discernible phrases. And like the

child who echoes adults in order to acquire language, when Echo desperately pleads her

love with Narcissus, she learns how to turn mere repetition into the creation of something

new.

Ovid, moreover, locates libidinal desire in the image as soon as he qualifies

Narcissus as a young man who “even as an infant was adorable.” This first, unattributed

look at the “adorable” infant is followed by a concatenation of desiring gazes that several

nymphs direct towards Narcissus, culminating in the unattainable image of his own

reflection. Upon this discovery, the myth’s narrator exclaims: “Why even try to stay this

passing fancy? / Child, what you seek is nowhere to be found, / your beloved is lost when

you avert your eyes: / that image of an image, without substance, / arrives with you and

with you it remains, / and it will leave when you leave – if you can!” (III, 558-563).

These verses, though wholly unrelated, when read at the end of this introduction seem to

evoke childhood’s ambiguous definition and undeniably attractive presence. A beloved

cultural concept, childhood is elusive; as an unstable signifier, it resembles an image of

an image without substance. It arrives with the child and with the child it remains,

disappearing when s/he enters adulthood, although it continues to haunt the cultural

imagination. Encompassing the teller of stories that entail trouble; the desiring gaze and

the deflective image; and the babbling child and her echolalias, this dissertation reads and

listens to the echoes of the child in Latin American literature and film.

1. Turmoil on Mexican Soil:

The Child Narrator

Introduction

In the heat of the Mexican Revolution, several Villista soldiers shoot a man in a small

town of the northern state of Chihuahua, and leave his lifeless body on the street, half-

propped against a wall. A little girl contemplates the corpse for days from her bedroom

window and grows fond of him, regarding him as something of a special toy, her very

own dead person. When he disappears a few days later, she falls asleep sad and wishfully

dreams that the soldiers shoot another man near her house. The image of the Mexican

Revolution that emerges from the girl’s observations in Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho1

veers from that of other novels about the same time period in its failure to depict the

grand events of historical relevance, and the matter-of-fact, often even comical tone with

which the narrator describes the Revolution’s horrors. A fictional girl with a similarly

vivid imagination, in Rosario Castellanos’s Balún Canán, dreams up miniature tigers that

rest high up in the trees, and birds that comfortably nest in her mother’s hair. She too is

confronted with a political reality that violently shakes the world as she knows it. A

diligent informer, she describes her observations and transcribes the documents she

encounters. She decides to remain silent, however, when her family begrudgingly attends

to the lawful demands of their indigenous workers, her own loyalty torn between her

1 Specifically: “Desde una ventana” (118-119).

27

indigenous nana, or caretaker, and her criollo family. Tochtli on the other hand, the

young boy who narrates Juan Pablo Villalobos’s Fiesta en la madriguera, does not waver

in the face of violent confrontation. It rather constitutes an integral part of his small

world, which consists only of the house he lives in, the madriguera or ‘rabbit hole,’2 his

drug trafficking father, the servants and an occasional house guest. To articulate and

make sense of his experiences, he avidly reads the dictionary in bed, and constructs his

discourse around a few pet words he incessantly repeats, and the literalization of

metaphoric expressions he picks up from his father. Since the drug war literally passes

through his front door, Tochtli’s musings present an unusual and often humorous, albeit

partial, account of an otherwise perturbing drug war.

Apart from the similarities in narrative perspective, the three texts all showcase

periods of major upheaval in Mexican society. The fourth text under consideration in this

chapter, Juan Rulfo’s short story “Macario,” a boy’s monologue on his insatiable hunger,

though less explicitly engaged with a moment of turmoil, nonetheless reflects problems

of a more general socio-political order. I believe these connections between literary form

and content are not coincidental. Each in their own way, the authors of this chapter come

up against the deep breaches in Mexican society caused by the traumatic and violent

twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

2 The English title reads Down the rabbit hole, a translation by Rosalind Harvey (2011), evoking a reference to Lewis Carroll’s classic that is absent in the Spanish. Other languages have taken equal liberty with the title, which in Italian, for example, reads Il bambino che collezionava parole (translated by Thais Siciliano, 2012), shifting the focus on Tochtli’s pet words; while in French the reference to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is made even more explicit, including the adjective “blanc,” Dans le terrier du lapin blanc (translated by Claude Bleton, 2011).

28

This chapter aims to analyze the interplay between socio-political turmoil,

childhood and narrative voice, elucidating in the interstices of their connections the

politicization of the child narrator. Campobello, Castellanos, Villalobos and Rulfo at

times capitalize on cultural assumptions regarding childhood to advance a political

position or, alternatively, they strategically employ these implied premises to mask an

anti-hegemonic narrative regarding, for instance, the Mexican Revolution. The child

narrators in this chapter are thus involved in a complex web of creating and subverting

meaning, depending on the position they take up in the face of socio-political unrest. For

this reason, although the critical tradition has long leaned on ‘verisimilitude’ as its

preeminent literary ploy for analyzing narrative focus, I propose ‘positionality’ as a

paradigm to consider the speaking situation of the child narrator. As such, I follow critics

who, in different contexts,3 have employed this term to underscore their disbelief in the

possibility of distilling ‘essential’ characteristics of race, gender, sexuality or, as I hope to

substantiate, childhood.

Positionality does not presuppose any essence of childhood but instead turns to

the text to tease out a particular understanding of childhood in a specific text. My

understanding of the concept comes through an interpretation of Ferdinand de Saussure’s

3 David Halperin, for example, writes about the notion of queer that the unnatural “acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence [...] [and] demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative” (qtd. in Alber and Heinze, 3). Moreover, the question of positionality often includes the position of the critic her or himself, as Michael Awkward points out in the introduction of Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender and the Politics of Positionality (1995).

29

structuralist concept of value4 – the sign as it is determined in opposition to other signs in

a semiotic system. The child’s speaking position accounts for the oppositional

connections between the different factors of the text, and even those that are exterior to it;

it moreover seeks to locate the voice of the child narrator in relation to the voices that

surround her. Instead of a purely formalist approach, I also take positionality to pry open

the relations between the text and its social, historical and political context; hence the

exterior factors that influence her discourse. Child narrators maneuver between positions

of power and powerlessness, access to or exclusion from knowledge, thereby casting the

narration in an uncertain light, where ambiguity prevails over certainty. Their

continuously shifting position, more often than not, shatters the illusion of a coherent

political message, favoring questions over answers.

To fully grasp how the child narrators function within the text, it is crucial to pose

productive questions. The critical tradition that is wont to turn to verisimilitude might ask

whether ‘real children’ speak like the narrator. Approaching the issue from the child’s

positionality prompts a whole different set of questions: how does her voice relate to the

other voices in the text? In what ways, if at all, does it reference and incorporate the

tensions caused by the conflict narrated into the text? What elements in her narration help

differentiate her position as a child? Finally, it can be read as verticality. For many

4 De Saussure writes: “[T]he conceptual part of linguistic value is determined solely by relations and differences with other signs in the language” (116); and later: “Two signs, each comprising a signification and a signal, are not different from each other, but only distinct. They are simply in opposition to each other” (119, original emphasis).

30

children, literally looking up to adults is a daily reality, and one that affects their mutual

relationship. Roald Dahl, a writer mostly known for his literature for children, once

quipped that adults should go around on their knees for a week, to remember what it’s

like to live in a world in which the people that hold all the power literally loom over you.5

Questioning the very possibility of speech also pertains to positionality; I will

therefore consider the question whether the child is a subaltern who can(not) speak. The

issue at stake when considering the child as a subaltern is not so much a silence in literary

history that can be filled by writing new narratives, but the theorization of the

(im)possibility of the child’s narrative voice. Implicated as s/he is in complex power

structures that do not provide for the (political) representation of her voice, the

consideration of the child narrator in the paradigm of subaltern studies warrants an

interrogation of the child’s silence, by treating it as a possible site of condensed

meaning.6

At this point, let me advance the hypothesis that child narrators are more likely to

appear in texts that involve complex social, political, or economical turmoil.7 The choice

to have a child narrate the story is not an exclusively aesthetic one; given the subject

matter (the Mexican Revolution; Cárdenas’s agrarian reforms; the drug war; and an

5 http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/07/11/050711crat_atlarge?currentPage=all

6 The protagonist of Fiesta en la madriguera puts it thus: “Yo conozco muchos mudos, tres. [...] Los mudos son misteriosos y enigmáticos. Lo que pasa es que con el silencio no se pueden dar explicaciones. Mazatzin piensa lo contrario: dice que con el silencio se aprenden muchas cosas” (Villalobos 23).

7 This may sound counter-intuitive, and such was the opinion of Rosario Castellanos, who deemed her young narrator unfit to guide her readers through the tumultuous second part of Balún Canán, because she would be too young to understand.

31

extremely impoverished country side), this literary form becomes imbued with political

significance. Struggling to represent these complex, far-reaching traumas, the authors

turn to the child narrator as a literary ploy through which they attempt to articulate the

turmoil of contemporary Mexican history. This rhetorical device, however, turns out to

be a double-edged sword, as the child-as-narrator provides both the possibility and

impossibility for community to express its recent socio-political traumas, and s/he even

signals the (im)possibility for the articulation of community itself.

This double bind, both enabling and restricting, bears resemblance to the

pharmakon as analyzed by Jacques Derrida in “Plato’s Pharmacy:” “This pharmakon,

this ‘medicine,’ this philter, which acts as both remedy and poison, already introduces

itself onto the body of the discourse with all its ambivalence. This charm, this

spellbinding virtue, this power of fascination, can be –alternately or simultaneously–

beneficent or maleficent” (70, original emphasis). All too often, the complexity of the

ambivalence of pharmakon gets lost in translation, reducing it to either one of its

meanings. Derrida criticizes Plato’s translator for opting to render it either as ‘remedy’ or

as ‘drug:’

[I]f [...] what is supposed to produce the positive and eliminate the negative does nothing but displace and at the same time multiply the effects of the negative, leading the lack that was its cause to proliferate, the necessity for this is inscribed in the sign pharmakon, which Robin [the translator] (for example), dismembers, here as remedy, there as drug. We expressly said the sign pharmakon, intending thereby to mark that what is in question is indissociably a signifier and a concept signified. (100, original emphasis)

Like the pharmakon, the child narrator is both ‘remedy’ and ‘poison;’ it cannot evoke one

without also signifying the other. Through her discourse s/he enables community to

articulate its trauma, while also lending visibility to the insufficiency of that articulation;

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although the child narrator seems to provide a way for community to form and express

itself, with the same, individual discourse s/he negates that very possibility. Thus, I hope

to show in this chapter how the four authors, through the politicization of the narrator,

offer critiques and commentary on Mexico’s troubled past and present.

Finally, in addition to the main objectives of this chapter, I also wish to offer an

alternative to the sentimentalism, for want of a better term, that characterizes a good part

of the critical tradition that deals with child narrators, especially criticism that concerns

novels written by female authors. Sentimentalism often manifests itself as a structural

feature in the scholarly work about child narrators, where assumptions about childhood

(such as innocence; purity; lack of moral judgment) presuppose the critic’s analysis of the

text.8 In the case of Cartucho, for example, scholars often celebrate what they call the

authentically child-like, innocent vision, without acknowledging that the voice of the

narrator is extraordinarily layered and complex.9

The sentimentalists almost unfailingly, and perhaps unwittingly, participate in the

gendered hierarchization of the (national) literary canon. In such an approach, female

writers are considered, first, in comparison to male canonical authors and, then, lauded

for providing a different, more emotive approach to the Mexican Revolution or the

8 A similar critical attitude can be found in other literary traditions; see for example Kolesnikoff (1982), Porter (1982), Géher (1981), Seraphinoff (2004) or Lee Six (2013).

9 In Aguilar Mora’s prologue to Cuartucho one reads: “Con auténtica naturaleza infantil, Campobello transmitía esa visión descarnada donde el niño [sic] no ha interiorizado aún ninguna moral” (19). Whatever “auténtica naturaleza infantil” is supposed to mean is left unsaid, because it is presumed to be self-evident. This critic even refers to the “inocencia radical de su mirada de niña” (21). One can only conjecture what is meant by “radical innocence,” since the radicalism of innocence lies in its purity, in its absence of gradation.

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agrarian reforms of the thirties.10 While the critical tradition has started to consider

women writers in their own right, both integrating them in the canon as well as analyzing

some of their dissenting, anti-hegemonic voices, writers that choose to portray child

narrators do not receive the same critical attention. Scholars all too often fall back on

unspecified cultural assumptions, and interpret ‘the child’ as a placeholder for anything

positive, from ‘unique’ and ‘different’ to ‘sensitive’ and ‘female.’ As I attempt to show in

this chapter, however, the child narrator is anything but straightforwardly positive and

pure. The texts included here politicize the literary construction of the child narrator to

seek ways to articulate the recent socio-political traumas that happened in and to Mexico.

On genre, narrators and verisimilitude

In order to broach the question of the child narrator, several different aspects need to be

taken into account. I explore the question from a narratological perspective, asking in

what ways, if at all, the authors mold the narrator’s voice to the particular situation of a

child. I also study what the characteristics of the narrator’s voice are able to reveal about

the text’s particular notion of childhood.11 I should like to reiterate that by ‘child narrator’

10 An recent anthology of new “critical perspectives” on Rosario Castellanos (2010), edited by Fidel Chávez Pérez and Pol Popovic Karic, is indicative of a widespread trend: “Los personajes de Juan Rulfo y Carlos Fuentes se adentran en la época de las reformas agrarias y la Revolución mexicana con pasos firmes y retumbantes, mientras Balún Canán se encamina con el paso ligero y tentativo de una niña” (7). In one sentence, the editors exemplify both the hierarchization of the canon and the self-evident interpretation of ‘the child.’ The editors compare Castellanos to the Mexican male literary establishment, “firm” and established, and they highlight her comparative literary merits by likening her novel Balún Canán to the “tentative” steps of a child.

11 For example: Henry James’s classic The Turn of the Screw (1898) does not have a child narrator, but it illustrates well how a preconceived idea of childhood can form an integral part of the text. In his short, Gothic novel James toys with the child characters’

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I refer only and exclusively to narrators who are also child characters or protagonists in

the fiction they narrate. Furthermore, I use the term ‘narrative voice’ instead of ‘point of

view’ or ‘focalization,’ in order to distinguish better between a narrator (heterodiegetic,

adult, third-person, omniscient, or of any other denomination) who focalizes through the

child; and the child who narrates her own story.12 Revisiting the historical development

of the narrator will help to elucidate the child’s place within this history, and gauge

whether or not the child narrator in fact constitutes something of an anomaly.

Novels that are told entirely from the perspective of a child are rare, although

there is no reason, in theory at least, for which a child narrator cannot appear in any

literary genre. And yet, Villalobos’s Fiesta en la madriguera is one of the very few

novels in Spanish that maintains the child as narrator throughout the entire text, whereas

this occurs more frequently in short stories.13 If the selected texts are indicative of a

alleged innocence. The governess repeatedly remarks on their innocence and goodness of heart, yet the narrator simultaneously implies that Miles’s angelical countenance masks darker intentions, and a darker past. James builds his characters on the assumption that children are, or are supposed to be, inherently good, and he then calls this very assumption into question. He is thus able to challenge the governess’s sanity, aided by the narrator, who includes the children in the web of sexual desire, overt and repressed, abusive and consensual, that surrounds all characters. This sexualization of the children contradicts their innocence and thrusts the entire narration into an indeterminable ambiguity.

12 In this distinction I follow Gérard Genette. Lanser summarizes: “Genette carefully distinguishes [...] between voice (‘who speaks?’) and vision (‘who sees?’). The concept of voice encompasses distinctions about the narrator’s relation to the story, the time of narration, and narrative level; a separate set of indices is necessary for describing the mode of vision or ‘focalization’ the narrative entails” (1981, 37, original emphasis).

13 Critics often point to texts that, upon careful scrutiny, are not actually narrated by a child but rather focalize through the child, or present childhood memories. Texts that are often referred to as such are La flor de ‘Lis’ (1988) by Elena Poniatowska or Los ríos profundos (1958) by José María Arguedas. These novels, however, show the perspective of a child but do not actually have a child narrator. Another Mexican author who, like

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larger trend, generic specificity provides a first clue as to the dearth of the child in the

wide and varied company of novels’ narrators. Although the specificity of genre

conditions many aspects of a text, it is a vague line that divides the short story from the

novella or the novel. The generic ambiguity of some of the texts in this chapter attests to

the flexibility and porosity of generic definitions that do not always, cannot always,

account for literary production in its entirety.14 Cartucho, for example, reads like a series

of short stories with a common theme and overlapping characters, yet has mostly been

read as a novel. And Fiesta en la madriguera could well be considered a long ‘short

story,’ or a novella, but has been regarded by critics, and has been marketed, as a novel.

The main line of inquiry in short story theory for many years has evolved

precisely around its difference from the novel.15 One of the most prominent authors of the

short story and its most influential early critic, Edgar Allan Poe, first introduced this

perspective, and his ideas continue to frame short story theory to this day.16 But it

Rulfo, employs a child narrator in several short stories is Efrén Hernández (1904-1958), in stories such as “Tachas” (1928) and “Teresa” (1941).

14 These ambiguities are not limited to the distinction between short story and novel. Lanser remarks, for instance, how Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is a memoir, but was marketed by the editors as a novel, and has been read as such ever since (2005, 206).

15 For a collection with some of the most authoritative scholars in short story theory, see Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey (1989).

16 Poe writes: “The ordinary novel is objectionable from its length, for reasons already stated in substance. As it cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality. Worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal modify, annul, or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book. But simple cessation in reading would of itself be sufficient to destroy the true unity. In the brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the

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remains unclear just how issues of length, scope of plot and action, all distinguishing

features of the short story (Head 5), affect the choice of a certain type of narrator in either

short story or novel – if at all. Latin American writers, with the advent of independence

from the Spanish peninsula, often take to literature to imagine the future of their

newfound nations17 with novels that usually rely on omniscient, third-person narrators.

Surely one may point to many exceptions to this generalization,18 but at this point

narrators are considered to be reliable, do not participate as characters in the stories they

tell, and the information they present remains largely unquestioned.19 In the early

twentieth century, many avant-garde writers experiment with this stylistic convention,

and different types of narrators and perspectives appear. Felisberto Hernández,

Macedonio Fernández and Pablo Palacio in Uruguay, Argentina and Ecuador,

respectively, are but a few authors who all publish roughly at the same time and

writer’s control. There are no external or extrinsic influences – resulting from weariness or interruption” (qtd in Cooper Lawrence, 60). Also see Head (1992).

17 These writers were often also statesmen; for example José Mármol (Argentina, 1818-1871).

18 For one, El periquillo sarniento (José Joaquín Fernández Lizardi, 1816), generally considered to be the first Latin American novel, is told not by an omniscient narrator but by a first-person narrator who looks back on his picaresque life.

19 More interesting than pointing to novels that are told in the first-person narration, is to consider not-so-straight-forward omniscient narrators, as Doris Sommer does with Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés (1882), in her chapter “Who Can Tell? Villaverde’s Blanks” in Proceed With Caution (1999, 187-211). The narrator withholds information that the competent reader can easily fill in. Sommer suggests that this interpretation is so ridiculously easy, because something completely different is at stake. “The narrative veil hides nothing, but it does serve as a figure for the social conventions that the narrator locates around himself” (190).

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experiment extensively with narrative style.20 In these early twentieth century fictions,

narrators more often than not double as characters – just like child narrators.21 To be sure,

in one type of literature, which originates around the same time, children often narrate

their own stories: I refer to children’s literature, of course.22 The trope of the protagonist

who narrates her own story quickly becomes a staple in children’s literature, later in the

twentieth century.23

A specific genre exists in which a first-person narrator/character dwells at length

on childhood experiences, namely autobiography, or the memoir, although the narrator in

these cases is actually the reminiscing adult, rather than the child.24 The ways in which

the (fictional) autobiographer differs from the child narrator, nonetheless, bring to light a

20 Macedonio starts writing his ambitious experimental novel Museo de la novela de la eterna in 1925, which is published posthumously in 1967. It questions not only narrative voice and perspective but also the entire novelistic enterprise itself. Palacio’s omniscient narrator in the short story “El huerfanito” is no longer the authoritative voice: “Y he aquí que cumple quince años. He aquí que llega un día en que quiere visitar la tumba de su madre” (53) plays with the convention of the self-references of the omniscient narrator.

21 Felisberto Hernández has several stories in which he does not exactly employ a child narrator, but does present childhood memories that he focalizes through the child. For example: “El caballo perdido” (1943) or “Mi primera maestra” (1964).

22 See Marah Gubar (2009) on the early appearance of Anglophone children’s literature, particularly the chapter “The Rise of the Child Narrator” (39-69).

23 I exclude children’s literature in this chapter, due to the complexity of issues that children’s literature brings to the table. See, for example, Marah Gubar (2011).

24 Françoise Perus considers the narrator in Balún Canán to be the superimposition of a reminiscing adult over the voice of the child. She bases this interpretation on the final image: “[E]sta voz en primera persona conjuga o superpone la voz de la niña que fue a la de quien se halla ahora rememorando mediante la escritura, tal y como lo sugiere anticipada y retrospectivamente la imagen final de la novela” (17). Perus not only assumes “the ironic mastery of a deliberate communicator behind the scenes” (Yacobi 112) but she even invents another character, the adult-narrator, to make that mastery function. In my opinion, Perus’ interpretation is not upheld by the text itself.

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few key concepts that help to appreciate the specificity of the latter. According to Sylvia

Molloy, at its inception, Spanish American autobiography is perceived as a form of

history, a public story – ‘public’ in the sense that it tells what can and should be told, and

in that it serves public interest (82). For that very reason, “one of the most expressive

silences [...] concerns childhood” (Molloy 6). The familial, personal anecdotes from

childhood were not deemed interesting in the grander scheme of things in which, for

example, Sarmiento aims to present himself as an important statesman in Recuerdos de

provincia (1850).25 There are many other texts, however, in which childhood stands out

or that focus exclusively on childhood.

In point of fact, there seem to be two ways of representing childhood in

autobiography. First, there is a teleological reading in which the child shows markers of

what will later make him or her famous.26 If those markers are absent or inconspicuous,

the author’s childhood is severed from her adulthood, as if s/he were a different person

then. In both cases, childhood is regarded as uninteresting and insignificant in itself. A

possible third approach to childhood can be found, for example, in Norah Lange’s

Cuadernos de infancia (1937), which presents the reader with an idealized and

dehistoricized account of childhood. This approach, however, really is not all that

different from the preceding two. It focuses on childhood as an isolated time period, 25 Therefore, autobiographies like Sarmiento’s don’t interest me here, for Sarmiento barely acknowledges his past as a child, and tweaks all that he does remember to serve his future as a political figure, which is already known to him and his reader. The story of his young self is told to serve the teleology of Sarmiento-the-statesman.

26 Sylvia Molloy observes this first tendency in Victoria Ocampo’s Autobiografía (1979). Ocampo depicts herself in her childhood surrounded by books, reading, which indicates her future as one of the few women in Argentina’s literary scene, founder and editor of the important literary magazine Sur (Molloy 55-58).

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without any connection to the socio-historical context in which it occurred, and does not

disentangle childhood from its ideological, utopian qualities.

A significant difference of enunciation separates the child who narrates her story

from the here and the now, and the adult who reminisces on her childhood at a temporal

and (often) spatial remove. In (fictional) autobiography, all that is told passes through the

filter of memory, which distorts, idealizes or ignores entire parts of one’s past. As such,

the situation in which a narrator looks back at her life is more familiar, since every (adult)

reader can only access her childhood through memory, while a child narrator may conjure

up a slightly alienating, or even uncanny feeling: “The created or edited voice of the child

is often exceptionally resonant to adults because of its familiarity as well as its startling

novelty or subversiveness” (Goodenough et. al, 4). At once familiar and strange, the

child’s voice strikes a chord with many adult readers, yet since the creator who expresses

this familiarity is an adult, the reader may also perceive it as uncanny.27

Indeed, the way the child’s voice sounds is critical for the interpretation of the

text; that is, it is not a voice that is ‘realistic’ per se, but one that is articulated so that

even though the reader knows that an adult author hides behind the narrator, disbelief is

suspended for the duration of the novel.28 The adult reader expects certain differences in

27 Note the relevance of the uncanny in the constitution of an alienating yet familiar perspective. When Freud developed the concept of “uncanny” through the analysis of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman,” he combined literary criticism with psychoanalysis.

28 In her analysis of Cartucho, Thornton argues that Campobello “manipulates” the reader through the “artifice” of the child: “The child is constructed by an adult who will have his or her views fully formed, coloured by memory and the subsequent interpretations put on those memories” (48).

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style and subject matter, just as the narrator’s gender is bound to influence her story.29 In

(fictional) autobiography, the fact that an adult articulates her memories accounts for the

worldliness with which childhood is depicted. For instance, in Lange’s Cuadernos de

infancia we read the following scene:

Al cruzar la plaza del pueblo veíamos arrinconados junto a los bancos, innumerables mosaicos de tierra rota, como si su presencia ribeteada de ceniza, o la distracción de sus hendiduras, hubiesen provocado una impaciencia. Durante algún tiempo supuse que ello se debía al roce de los zapatos, al ir y venir de los ocupantes del banco. Ahora sé que eran las parejas de novios quienes los echaban a un lado para poder escribir, como nosotras, sobre la tierra fresca que recubrían, el nombre más familiar y más querido. (55, my emphasis)

The narrator first transmits to the reader the sense of curiosity that the mosaic inspired in

the young girl, but she then promptly provides an explanation of the phenomenon. She

therefore does not have to resort to a construction that both permits the reader to

understand what is going on, while it also maintains the pretense that the narrator herself

does not; her subsequent life experience has taught her the significance of the earthy

mosaic. Balún Canán contains many such circumlocutions: “De su boca vacía sale un

olor a fruta demasiado madura que marea y repugna” (24), a rather elaborate and verbose

construction to indicate the girl’s ignorance of alcohol, while it still allows for the adult

reader to understand that the narrator’s uncle is drunk.

This type of circumlocution is brought about by the exigencies of verisimilitude,

or so the story goes. According to its logic, since the narrator of Balún Canán is too

young to understand anything about drunkenness, she cannot exclaim that her uncle

29 An example of how we expect gender to influence narration: “What I shall consider here [...] is the way in which this text, as an autobiography, differs from other Spanish American autobiographies of the time. One of the reasons for this difference is that Mis doce primeros años is written by a woman” (Molloy 86).

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smells like a drunk. Rather, she describes the effect the smell has on her. Yet there is

something odd about this particular demand of verisimilitude on the child narrator. The

reader readily accepts any narrator, by simple virtue of a pact with literature. Thus, in

Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955) dead people speak from the grave, and this does not

bother most readers, even though it violates normative understandings of reality.30 Any

narrative voice is always a literary construction, and as such is never ‘truthful’ per se. So

what is it that seems to make a child narrator any different? Verisimilitude is an

important concept that needs to be addressed here, if only for the insistence with which it

is invoked in regards to any narrative with a child narrator.

When asked in an interview whether he didn’t feel limited or fearful when he

created “un niño resabido,” Juan Pablo Villalobos responds resolutely: “Al final hubo un

par de razonamientos chapuceros que me liberaron. Primero asumir una noción

elemental: que un narrador, sea un niño o lo que sea, por más aspiraciones de

‘verosimilitud’ que tenga, siempre es y debe ser literario. Esto es literatura y no tiene

nada que ver con la realidad. Hay que trascender la realidad” (Fresquet 8). But is it really

as simple and straightforward as Villalobos makes it seem? To be sure, ‘verisimilitude’ is

a slippery concept, and one that has been redefined and nuanced many times during its

long existence. By binding ‘verisimilitude’ to ‘reality’ and ‘truthfulness,’ Villalobos

rejects a specific interpretation of verisimilitude; one that is rooted in classical antiquity

30 In Diamela Eltit’s El cuarto mundo (1988) an embryo speaks from his mother’s womb moments before he is conceived – yet despite this ‘unbelievable’ speaking position, critics have not discussed the novel in terms of dubious or problematic verisimilitude.

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and essentially stands for mimesis.31 According to many critics, Aristotle, in response to

Plato’s exile of the poets from the Republic (Potolsky 33), redefines mimesis as the

persuasive or lifelike imitation of the real.32 Similar objections regarding verisimilitude

and mimesis are ubiquitous. Some nineteenth century male critics prescribe that women

authors write in the first-person, and avoid creating male characters, because, they reason,

women lack sufficient knowledge to portray ‘real men’ from the ‘inside’ (Lanser 1981,

25). The very tripartite structure of Balún Canán owes its existence to the fact that

Castellanos claims to have felt bound by a direct connection to extra-literary reality.33

Rather than verisimilitude, the operative term in this context is perhaps decorum,

which entails a prescriptive stance toward literature. In 1609, Lope de Vega asserts in El

arte nuevo de hacer comedias: “Si hablare el rey, imite cuanto pueda / la gravedad real; si

el viejo hablare / procure una modestia sentenciosa” (v. 269-270).34 Similarly, those

critics who demand what they call verisimilitude in the child narrator/character have a

preconceived and normative idea about how a child not only speaks but should speak.

31 This conception starts with Plato’s The Republic, which provides the first definition of mimesis as the imitation of something real. He emphasizes the relationship between the artistic image and reality, in the sense that a fictional character’s speech is supposed to resemble the extra-fictional reality.

32 This is probably what Rulfo’s critics have in mind when they say that his characters do not speak like ‘real,’ or ‘lifelike’ peasants. Yet Aristotle refers less to verbatim repetition, and more to a coherence within human thought, which makes the actions or dialogues of the peasants seem plausible, or ‘verisimilar.’

33 In an interview with Carballo, Castellanos explains that she changed the narrative perspective in the second part, because “[u]na niña de esos años es incapaz de observar muchas cosas y, sobre todo, es incapaz de expresarlas” (506). That is to say, she esteemed that to maintain the child’s perspective would not have been plausible in the second part, in which (racial) politics play such an important part.

34 I thank Mary Gaylord for pointing me to El arte nuevo.

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The notion of decorum thus elucidates why certain critics protest that some child

characters do not speak like children, whereas they accept the voices of dead people,

stones or cats without a problem: because in reality dead people, stones and cats do not

talk, cannot talk. Therefore, no prescriptive notion exists of how a stone or a cat should

talk, and one author’s guess at how a cat may talk is as good as another’s.35

A more productive way to consider verisimilitude is through Mikhail Bakhtin’s

analysis of dialogic and monologic novels, which he develops in his Problems of

Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1963).36 According to Bakhtin, in truly dialogic fiction, such as

Dostoevksy’s, the “fully valid and pure unalloyed word of the hero” (56) stands opposite

the authorial discourse. To achieve this, the author must speak from a “fantastical

viewpoint” (54), one that does not respect the autonomy of the characters’ field of vision.

If the characters’ words respond to the author’s fixed discourse about them, they

constitute a monologic discourse. Bakhtin defines verisimilitude in Dostoevsky as “the

character’s own internal discourse about himself in all its purity” (54). That is to say, this

type of character-bound verisimilitude can occur only if the author does not subordinate

35 An additional complication is that, in order to prescribe what a child should sounds like, it is necessary to have a characteristic that essentializes the speaker, one that is completely transparent and easily legible to the culture in which it emerges. Although ‘innocence’ has long been the child’s identifying feature, it has increasingly been questioned, making it increasingly difficult to single out one essentializing feature of ‘the child.’ Moreover, the idea that a single feature identifies kings may have worked well in Golden Age Spanish theater, but is an anachronistic concept for contemporary literature, in no small measure because the notion of a divinely ordered, hierarchical system in life is no longer hegemonic.

36 Bakhtin first published a version of this book in 1929 in Russian, and completely revised the second edition. The first edition has not been translated in its entirety, but Richard Balthazar and I.R. Titunik translated a portion of the 1929 text as “Discourse Typology in Prose” (1971) (Emerson viii).

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the character’s discourse to his or her own. The construction of character-bound

verisimilitude cannot be solved at a superficial, formal level, by introducing a first-person

narrator or by dividing the novel up into scenes and thus reducing authorial discourse to

something like stage direction: “All these compositional devices for eliminating or

weakening authorial discourse at the level of composition do not in themselves tackle the

essence of the problem; their underlying artistic meaning can be profoundly different”

(56-57). Depending on the field of vision, situation or context, one can thus still have a

monologic authorial vision, which leads to a “fixed image,” not a discourse (57).

Bakhtinian verisimilitude allows the author to create a child narrator/character according

to the rules of the diegetic world s/he has given shape, instead of abiding by normative,

prescriptive conceptions regarding childhood that exist in exterior reality. It takes as its

premise the fictional world, constructing the child’s discourse in opposition and in play

with the other voices, allowing for character-bound verisimilitude, whether the narrator is

a “niño resabido” or a 7-year-old who is ignorant of the political reality that surrounds

her.

Childhood creates a collective voice

Before considering the narratives that have a child narrator proper, I would like to start

with Cartucho: Relatos de la lucha en el Norte de México, a text in which the narrator

appears to be a child, but whose voice is actually constituted through the layering of

many different voices, to the point where it is no longer discernible which part of the

discourse belongs to whom. Nellie Campobello (1900-1986) first publishes her

fragmented novel in 1931, and again in 1940 with substantial revisions. She is generally

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considered the only major female writer from the Mexican Revolution, and with the

exception of her poetry, her other publications also center on the Villista revolution in the

northern states of Durango and Chihuahua.

Although some studies have carefully considered the narrative voice in

Cartucho,37 many critics tend to take for granted that the narrator is a girl.38 In order to

highlight Campobello’s innovation in comparison to other novels about the Mexican

Revolution, for example, Brian Gollnick points out that Cartucho was long considered

innovative exclusively for using “the first-person voice of a young girl” and that one

should pay closer attention to the fact that the “young woman who narrates Cartucho

assails such stereotypes as women’s passivity and moral superiority” (52). In

alternatively identifying the narrator as young girl/young woman Gollnick, perhaps

inadvertently, appreciates the indeterminability of the narrator’s voice. Moreover,

Campobello’s unusual treatment of gender indeed defies the typical stereotypes of the

time period in which she wrote, and she equally disregards culturally prevailing ideas

surrounding childhood. Both in terms of content and of formal structure, the child is not

relegated to a separate, idealized space, but participates in the text on par with the adult

characters and voices.39 What is more, through the child’s discourse a collective voice

37 Most notably Dennis J. Parle (1985), Doris Meyer (1996) and Max Parra (1998).

38 For example Niamh Thornton (2006); Betina Keizman (2007); Tanya Weimer (2010); or Kristine Vanden Berghe, who in her recent Homo ludens en la Revolución: Una lectura de Nellie Campobello (2013) provides careful readings of Cartucho, but refers to the narrator predominantly as a girl.

39 In what follows I will analyze the ways in which the child’s voice participates in the text. Her role in the narrative plot merits a more detailed analysis than this footnote can provide, but I would at least like to point to a few ways in which the child characters are similar to the adult characters. There are adult heroes (El Siete), and there is a child hero

46

starts to take shape, one that invites a political reading that points to a community in

which the narrator grows up, but that also exposes the tension and, ultimately, the

dislocation of that very community.

Cartucho is first published in Jalapa in 1931, edited by Mexico’s celebrated

avant-garde poet Germán List Arzurbide (Campobello 351),40 with a cover designed by

Leopoldo Méndez, an avant-garde graphic artist.41 Nine years later, in 1940, Campobello

publishes a second edition of Cartucho, which has undergone radical changes. Although

the tripartite structure remains in place,42 it now counts 56 instead of the original 33

chapters. Campobello moreover radically rewrites the existing text, changing anything

from syntax and word choice to plot changes and different perspectives and points of

view. According to Valeska Strickland Nájera, the main difference resides in the greater

emphasis that Campobello places on the collective rather than the familial, in the second

(baby Gloriecita); adult casualties (part II is called “Fusilados”) and child casualties (the eight-year-old Roberto Rendón in “El centinela del mesón del Águila”); sadness and suffering in adults (“Las tristezas de ‘El Peet’”) and in children (“Me quedé sin voz, con los ojos abiertos abiertos, sufrí tanto” [103]); adults cleaning up dead bodies (“Las tripas del general Sobarzo”) and a child doing the same (in “Zafiro y Zequiel”).

40 Both List Arzurbide and Méndez formed part of the estridentismo movement and collaborated with journals such as Irradiador. List Azurbide describes their collaboration as follows: “No le agregué ni le recorté nada, salió tal cual, lo único que hice fue agrupárselos por tema” (qtd. in Rodríguez 157).

41 See “Prólogo a mis libros” (351). The first edition does not credit Méndez. His design, which Campobello liked very much, was not used again in the subsequent editions.

42 The three-partite structure also sustains her first publication, a book of poems titled Yo!Versos, which was published in 1929.

47

edition of her book (63).43 In other words, the second edition, which tends to be the one

critics use,44 has undergone a radical politicization.

Cartucho resists easy definition or facile plot summary. Scholars have referred to

the work as autobiography, testimonial chronicle, episodic novel, first-person historical

narrative (Meyer 47) and auto-fiction (Vanden Berghe 37). Each of the three parts

consists of very short, titled chapters that center on the Villista Mexican Revolution

during the period of 1915 to 1919 in the northern states of Chihuahua and Durango.45

During that time Pancho Villa’s soldiers returned to their native lands where they enjoyed

immense popular support, from where they waged a guerilla war against Venustiano

Carranza.46 The chapters capture isolated moments about the soldiers, their adventures,

victories and defeats, but also of the townspeople, who attempt to carry on with their

lives despite the continuous upheavals. Like estampas costumbristas, a sort of vignettes,47

each chapter presents a particularly evocative anecdote that relates to the revolutionary

struggle between the Villistas and the Carrancistas. Moreover, Cartucho has many

43 For more detailed analyses of the differences between the first and the second editions, see Nájera (54-63); Rodríguez (155-188); and Aguilar Mora (31-40).

44 The only exception I have come across is Kristine Vanden Berghe (2013), who prefers to work with the first edition.

45 The idea of one, coherent “Mexican Revolution” is an idea proposed by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), essentially to legimitize its own existence. In reality there were many different revolutions and conflicting interests, and the one Campobello is interested in is clearly the Villista.

46 See Alan Knight, “Caudillos y revolucionarios en el México revolucionario” (1991), quoted in Parra (169).

47 Parle compares them to corridos (209-210).

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characteristics in common with the classical avant-garde,48 which may explain why List

Arzurbide and Méndez took an interest in the project. Campobello shares the avant-

garde’s commitment of art to the less privileged and she experiments with form and

voice. In the third part especially she includes songs and poetry verses, often as

epigraphs, and the chapter “Tragedia de Martín” is essentially composed as a romance, or

a corrido.49

It is difficult to ascertain to what extent Campobello’s writings reflect her own

experiences, since mystery and confusion surround her biography. She is born in Villa

Ocampo (in the northern state of Durango) in 1907, 1908, 1909, 1911 and 1913,

according to her own, contradicting, statements. The church register of San Miguel de

Bocas shows that, in all likelihood, her date of birth is 1900, when she is registered as

María Francisca Luna (Rodríguez 71).50 The last years of her life are as mysterious as her

48 Weimer has noticed the simultaneous indebtedness of Cartucho to costumbrismo and the avant-garde (106-110). Whereas she relates Cartucho, mainly, to Breton’s surrealism and Spanish ultraism, I also see similarities with avant-garde fiction writers such as Pablo Palacio who plays with and innovates narrative perspective.

49 Each line consists of two sentences, each divided into 2 parts. Together those sentences make up a quatrain, written in octosyllables, with assonant rhyme. For example, the first line reads: “Paloma Real de Durango, párate ahí en el Fortín. Les dices a los carranzas, que aquí se queda Martín” (159). Every new ‘quatrain’ starts on a new line, so even though the chapter’s layout isn’t structured as a romance or a corrido, its contemporary form, it is nonetheless recognizable as a poem. Furthermore, the previous chapter, “Las hojas verdes de Martín López” anticipates the poem with the following, concluding sentence: “(Así fraseaba un poeta del pueblo que me narró espontáneamente la muerte del general Martín López)” (159).

50 Nellie Campobello was registered with her mother’s last name: Rafaela Luna. Her father, Felipe de Jesús Moya, was her mother’s cousin [primo hermano], and appears to have played a minimal role in the life of his family. According to Campobello, he left with the Revolution and was never heard of again. Jesús Vargas and Flor García Rufino maintain, in Francisca Yo, el libro desconocido de Nellie Campobello (2004) that he did not die in the Revolution, but rather started a new family in the United States (Bautista

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beginnings, in a more sensationalist way. Nellie Campobello becomes the object of the

boulevard press when she goes missing in 1984. Two years later she passes away in

captivity, kidnapped by family members who neglect to take care of her and sell all of her

valuable belongings.51

Although Campobello clearly had no say in the tragic way she spent the last phase

of her life, the aura of uncertainty surrounding her identity is definitely due to her own

cunning. She assumes her new name, Nellie Campobello, around 1923 (Bautista Aguilar

12) and she carefully constructs her public image as a writer.52 In the prologues to her

fiction she underscores the image of the child, fashioning herself as a “muñeca,” and

representing the process of writing Las manos de Mamá (1937) as taking refuge in her

mother’s skirt.53 The invention of a new date of birth greatly aids her in this process,

Aguilar, 12, n3). Campobello adopts the last name “Campbell,” after her sister Gloria’s father Ernest Campbell Reed, a North American doctor or engineer, and Castillianizes it to Campobello. Both sisters change their first names around the same time, in the early or late twenties; Gloria’s birthname was Soledad (Rodríguez 73). About her own first name, Nellie says: “Mi nombre completo es Nellie Francisca Ernestina. Nellie por una perrita que tenía mamá. Yo deseaba que me dijesen Francisca. [...] Me llaman, sin embargo, Nellie” (Carballo 378).

51 She was kidnapped and kept under house arrest by Claudio Niño Fuentes and Cristina Belmont from 1984-1986, and even after her death Fuentes and Belmont kept her death silent for years, so they could keep collecting her payments. Due to her close ties with Mexico’s avant-garde artists Campobello owned sketches and paintings by, for example, Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. Her art collection had an estimated value of 60 million dollars (http://www.jornada.unam.mx/1999/01/07/arrestan.html). See also Matthews 173-183 and especially Juan Bautista Aguilar’s “Dónde están los bienes de Nellie”, published in Excélsior, November 7, 2002. For two book length studies about her disappearance see Clara Guadelupe García, Nellie: el caso Campobello (2000); and César Delgado Martínez, Nellie Campobello: crónica de un secuestro (1987).

52 During her lifetime, Campobello was mostly known as a choreographer (371).

53 This happens, first, in the prologue to the first edition of Cartucho: “muchachitas” (1931, II and III); she repeatedly uses “muñeca” (1931, II). In 1960 she employs the same

50

since it allows her to map her childhood directly onto the Mexican Revolution, and tell

the story of the Revolution with a child’s voice. Indeed, the autobiographical accuracy of

those events becomes irrelevant, as she employs the narrator for specific political

objectives.

To be sure, Campobello is astutely aware of the rhetorical possibilities of the

child’s discourse. In the following fragment from “Prólogo a mis libros” it becomes

evident how she carefully constructs an allegedly innocent childhood:

Latente la inquietud de mi espíritu, amante de la verdad y de la justicia, humanamente hablando, me vi en la necesidad de escribir. [...] Sabía que muchas de las gentes que me rodeaban no aprobarían mi actitud e iban a sentir desagrado al verme metida en una misión que nada bueno traería a mi persona [...]. Busqué la forma de poder decir, pero para hacerla necesitaba una voz, y fui hacia ella. Era la única que podía dar el tono, la única autorizada: era la voz de mi niñez. Usar de su aparente inconsciencia para exponer lo que supe era la necesidad de un decir sincero y directo. (339)54

This fragment is as deceivingly simple and straightforward as the short chapters of

Cartucho. Her initial tribulations echo those of Sor Juana’s Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la

Cruz (1691), and even the structure of her “Prólogo” bears striking resemblance to the

Respuesta, most particularly in the way Campobello’s text feigns innocence where she is

astute, or admiration where she covertly expresses disdain.55 Like her predecessor, she

rhetoric in “Prólogo a mis libros:” “Estábamos en la edad en que se les dice muñecas a las jovencitas y así nos decía José Antonio, y así nos lo escribió siempre” (342). About the first publication of Cartucho she notes: “era la travesura más grande que había cometido” (351, my emphasis). About the writing process of Las manos de mamá: “En medio de estos pensamientos, nacidos del ambiente que me rodaba, traté de escapar, refugiándome, cosa natural para mí, en la falda de mi madre” (355).

54 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Campobello’s works are from Obra reunida (2007).

55 A few of the resemblances include the way Campobello, like Sor Juana before her, insists that she writes against her will: “Por eso yo tenía que escribir, decir verdades en el

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claims to be writing as against her will and driven by the necessity to defend herself and

her people against the lies that are being spread.56 She acknowledges the need to employ

a voice that those around her, i.e. those in power in the Mexico City where she now

resides, would find least offensive and would do her least harm.57 The only voice capable

to do so is that of a child, and not just any child, but her very own voice as a child.

Shielded by the apparent truth of direct observation (memory) on the one hand, and the

innocent perception of a young child on the other, she has found the only voice

“authorized” to speak up against official history and to denounce official discourse about

the Mexican Revolution and about Francisco Villa in particular, which to Campobello is

a grave misunderstanding and falsification of history.58 Her simple “y fui hacia ella” is

mundo de mentiras en que vivía. Claro está que todo ello no me gustaba; tenía que estudiar, seguir mis tareas diarias” (339); and that she is but an unskilled writer: “necesitaba una técnica, que yo no tenía” (341). Other similarities include the way she tells her life’s story to justify the publication of Cartucho; to attack the learned men she pretends to admire; and to explain that marriage would not have allowed her to develop herself as a woman.

56 Some of the chapters address this need directly, for example “Nacha Ceniceros.” The first edition ended with the idea that Nacha Ceniceros was shot for having accidentally killed coronel Gallardo. Subsequent editions correct this mistake and describe that she went on with her life after the Revolution, having rejected the fame that could have befallen her: “La red de mentiras que contra el general Villa difundieron los simuladores, los grupos de la calumnia organizada, los creadores de la leyenda negra, irá cayendo como tendrán que caer las estatuas de bronce que se han levantado con los dineros avanzados. / Ahora digo, y lo digo con la voz del que ha podido detejer una mentira: ¡Viva Nacha Ceniceros, coronela de la revolución!” (107).

57 And she is certainly not out of harm’s way: “Comprendí que decir verdades me ponía en situación de gran desventaja frente a los calumniadores organizados. Me ponía en el peligro de que me aplastaran aquellas voces enemigas” (340).

58 When it is first published, readers do not know what to make of this small child who takes pleasure in watching soldiers being shot, and mostly ignored the book. When it resurfaces in critical circles towards the end of the twentieth century, most readers actually follow Campobello’s lead, and take Cartucho as the alternative history of the

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delightfully ambiguous about the nature of that voice. Does she reconstruct it? Invent it?

Try to capture it as she remembers it? Campobello does not say. She does, however,

imply that if she is to achieve her goal of speaking the truth about Villa, she needs “un

decir sincero y directo.” Here too “un decir” is remarkably vague, but with the hindsight

knowledge of how she manipulated her own biography, it seems safe to assume that she

deliberately constructed a voice – and a displaced childhood to go with it – to tell her

story about Pancho Villa.59 Thus, Campobello controls the discourse of and about her

own life, which she leads into the space of indeterminability, a space it shares with the

narrative voices of Cartucho.

Many of the stories reference the girl Nellie Campobello claims to have been

during the Revolution, either as a first-person narrator or as a character. From the very

first chapter, however, many indicators signal that, in truth, the narrator is someone who

recalls her childhood. In many instances the narrator admits to a failing memory:

“Contaban detalles que ya no recuerdo” (109); at other times she clearly contrasts her

own time and place of enunciation with the one she just narrated, for example when she Mexican Revolution in the north, as an autobiography even. Indeed, according to Aguilar Mora, the voice of the child that transmits the Revolution’s atrocities with unprecedented directness, is precisely one of the reasons Cartucho is not well known, for it has caused in the critic a “profundo pavor ante la visión directa, objectiva, amoral, inmediata de una auténtica niña” (20).

59 Offering a more political reading, Horacio Legrás reaches the same conclusion: “To narrate such an unsubsumable afternoon [the ‘forgotten afternoon’ of the Revolution] (to sustain the gap between the locally lived and narrative subsumption) offers the possibility of living the temporality of the event not from the perspective of an extra in the crowd, but as part of the unanimous and inalienable experience of the everyday” (147). This reading means, Legrás argues, “distrusting Campobello’s professed ‘sincerity’ and reading her novel as a sly narrative of vindication” (147).

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concludes the vignette about her brother, El Siete, with the exclamation: “Ahora, ¿dónde

está?” (141). The narrative situation, however, always contains a hint of ambiguity, even

when it seems obvious. Precisely because the narrator always specifies where the stories

come from, who tells them where and to whom, it actually casts the shadow of a doubt

over those very precisions.

In fact, the narrative voice is a mix of personal memory and fiction, of stories that

are transmitted in the tradition of oral story telling, and of historical events. The

dedication, added to the second edition (1940) and maintained in subsequent editions,

succinctly introduces this confluence of history and fiction: “A Mamá, que me regaló

cuentos verdaderos en un país donde se fabrican leyendas y donde la gente vive

adormecida de dolor oyéndolas” (94). Critics have offered different, and at times

contradicting interpretations,60 which is hardly surprising, given the contradictory nature

of her word choice. The “cuentos,” a fictional genre, are “verdaderos,” and the legends

are fabricated by an impersonal voice.61 The mother, one of the main characters in

Cartucho, instigates the creative process of the book, only to make way for an

impersonal, collective voice that suffers under the weight of Mexico’s legends. The

dedication thus encapsulates the impossibility to determine what a true story constitutes,

and how or by whom, a legend is created. As such, the dedication introduces one of

Cartucho’s major rhetorical ploys, the indeterminability of the narrative voice.

60 Jorge Aguilar Mora critiques Doris Meyer’s English translation, which he deems a misinterpretation (34). I agree with Aguilar Mora that her translation contains mistakes, but I don’t believe that the interpretation he suggests, namely that “con los cuentos verdaderos se fabrican las ‘leyendas’” (34) is the only viable one.

61 One might add that “cuentos” can also mean “mentiras,” which could be another explanation for the adjective “verdaderos.”

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I argue that it is the child’s voice that allows the collective voice to exist. Her

discourse, which is constructed as memory, constitutes the site of the collective – it is

through the clever use of the voice of the child that the collective and the child, together,

commemorate the Villista revolution.62 To be sure, the complexity of the narrative voice

has not gone unnoticed. Max Parra remarks that the narrator “termina por asumir una

función discursiva aglutinante” (177) and Doris Meyer maintains that “Campobello

collectivizes her testimony and shares the narrative function with others. The true

protagonist thus becomes the pueblo. Although individual voices speak through her

memory, they all represent one group – the common people of the north who witnessed

the Revolution” (53, original emphasis). As these, and other, critics note, there is indeed a

collective dimension to text, but the oscillation from child to pueblo is not as automatic or

simple as these comments seem to suggest. The collective implicates a complex

relationship with the child’s discourse that is fraught with tension. For one, the child’s

voice cannot be neatly separated from the other narrative voices, as Parra suggests.63 Her

discourse is the sine qua non for the collective voice, so any separation is always forced;

convenient, perhaps, for the sake of analysis, but giving the false impression that these

voices can exist independently.

62 I therefore disagree with critics who, like Niamh Thornton for example, dissociate the child from politics: “The child appears to be outside of the conflict insofar as he or she has no power to influence the action. He or she can only bear witness. There is an assumption of directness and honesty in this child’s voice. The child is not suspected of collusion with any side in the conflict because he or she is supposedly outside of politics” (47).

63 Parra: “Campobello hace un yuxtaposición de planos narrativos en el relato, uno quimérico, infantil, y otro realista, popular, propio de una visión adulta” (172).

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More importantly, the notion of the collective many of these scholars invoke

ascribes unproblematic, almost utopian qualities to both the community and the child’s

voice that, I believe, she does not and cannot uphold. Meyer’s analyses, for example,

show that kind of interpretation of the collective: “Campobello accomplishes [...] the

primary objective of the artist-originator of the testimonial novel: to articulate the

collective memory of the we (nosotros) and not the I (yo)” (54). Here, the collective

memory is a straightforward, uncomplicated ‘we,’ that rises above the individual

discourse to articulate the experience of ‘us.’ To put it in Derridian terms, several critics

translate, so to speak, the ‘pharmakon’ consistently as ‘remedy,’ ignoring the ‘poison’

contained in the same concept. As I posit above, I believe that the child here functions as

the pharmakon in the sense that she cannot open up her discourse to the collective

without simultaneously dislocating community. In his book on literature and marginality

in Latin America (2008), Horacio Legrás actually points to a similar function of the

narrative voice: “Cartucho addresses [...] the constitutive fissure between people and

peoplehood and, consequently, the distance between narrative redemption and the

irredeemable nature of life as simply lived” (124). What Legrás calls the “constitutive

fissure between people and peoplehood” is similar to the tension that the child narrator

faces as she creates a collective voice.

Since Campobello filters her narrator’s discourse through memory and

recollection, it is easy to tint the concept of community that arises from it with nostalgia.

Given Campobello’s desire to protect and honor the remembrance of Pancho Villa, it is to

be expected that the community that takes shape in her novel is one that presupposes a

commonality, a shared identity (as norteños or as Villistas, for instance) that creates a

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collective of individuals behind the discourse of the child. But the narrator, while

allowing for the permeation of the voices of community through her discourse, also

exposes the very tension within this desire of community. In fact, this way of

understanding community has been subject of intense philosophical debate. In

Communitas (1998) Roberto Esposito attempts to shift away from the debate that

considers community as doubly tied to what its members have in common; in this view,

they have in common what is most properly their own, and they are the owners of what is

common to them all (3). Drawing on a long tradition that he takes from Hobbes all the

way to Heidegger and Bataille, Esposito suggests that

community isn’t an entity, nor is it a collective subject, nor a totality of subjects, but rather is the relation that makes them no longer individual subjects because it closes them off from their identity with a line, which traversing them, alters them: it is the ‘with’, the ‘between’, and the threshold where they meet in a point of contact that brings them into relation with others to the degree to which it separates them from themselves. (139)

Rather than effortlessly representing a community, the child’s discourse is a fictional

construction that helps bring voices together that both unites them and, as Esposito puts

it, “separates them from themselves.”

Due to the indeterminability of the narrative voice, in Cartucho there are no (self-

imposed) problems with verisimilitude, decorum, or the coherence of the girl’s voice.

The narrator acknowledges the temporal distance that separates her from the events, and

incorporates the child’s experiences from her adult point of view: “Hacía un mes – un

año para mis ojos amarillos – sin ver a Babis” (111). The hyphenated clause marks the

child’s different perception of time, while it also establishes the identity of the narrator as

non-child, i.e. as someone who can understand time according to objective measures.

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Indeed, the very temporal distance causes the memory on which the narrator relies to

falter. The uncertainty usually concerns language, what someone did or did not say. It is

granted its own space in the narration, usually in parentheses or between hyphens. In “La

muerte de Felipe Ángeles,” for example, the narrator transcribes what happened in a trial,

and adds: “(Digo exactamente lo que más se me quedó grabado, no acordándome de

palabras raras, nombres que yo no comprendí)” (123). In another clever twist, the narrator

makes a claim for the exactitude of her prose, although what she really admits with this

parenthetical clause is her fundamental subjectivity; she does not remember everything

said, and all she can reproduce is what impressed her most. Where in her “Prólogo a mis

libros” Campobello acknowledges that she uses childhood’s alleged innocence to shield

her from political repercussions,64 in this case the simulation of exactitude allows her

narrator to create the appearance of veracity.65

At times, the narrator offers new interpretations or images that spring from her

imagination. In the case of “La muleta de Pablo López” she subtly employs the

conditional verb tense to this end: “Agarró su muleta, se colgó de ella, bajó los ojos y se

miró las piernas heridas, tímidamente levantaría la cara, como preguntando ¿qué, ya nos

vamos?” (125). After a series of four verbs conjugated in the preterite tense, “levantaría”

moves the sentence into the realm of conjecture and subjectivity. Her interpretations are

often alternatives to the way events are transmitted through oral history: “José Rodríguez

64 Kristine Vanden Berghe suggests, correctly in my opinion, that the “Prólogo” deserves “atención detallada,” for it is a “texto rico y complejo” (12).

65 That this veracity is only feigned becomes clear when she writes: “Yo moví la cabeza, no me acuerdo si le dije que sí o no” (98-99); or when she projects her own ignorance onto the collective: “Algo dijo en palabras raras que nadie recuerda” (104).

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se puso muy triste –yo creo que muy enojado–, por eso se dio un balazo en el cuello;

nada más que cuando se lo iba a disparar le arrebataron la pistola” (127). Her

understanding of Rodríguez’s motivation behind his suicide attempt remains a simple

alternative to popular belief, neither more plausible nor more unlikely.

The case of Tomás Urbina is illustrative for the narrative structures in Cartucho.

As Weimer has noted, in a few pages, the voices of the town unite to tell his story from

birth to death (119). In historical reality, general Urbina, Villa’s right-hand man, was

rumored to have started negotiating with the Carrancistas in 1915. This caused a rupture

within the Villista ranks, and he was assassinated shortly after his retreat to Nieves.

Campobello attempts to restore his honor, writing off his treason as the acts of a man

dishonored by his wife (Parra 180-182). The chapter opens with the narrator’s great-

uncle, who declares: “Son mentiras las que dicen del Chapo –dijo mi tío–; El Chapo era

buen hombre de la revolución. ¡Ni lo conocían estos curros que hoy tratan de colgarle

santos!” (127). From his privileged position as someone inside Urbina’s intimate circle,

the great-uncle contrasts the “lies” told by the “curros,” those who are not from the city

(Parra 181), with the local truth. As usual, the narrator weighs in and includes her own

appreciation of the events: “(composición hecha a escondidas de mi tío)” (128), later

specifying her antagonistic speaking position: “(Todo esto es una suposición inocente,

nacida hoy, acá donde las gentes ignoran al Santo Niño de Atocha y al general Tomás

Urbina)” (128). That hers is not an innocent supposition, but rather a deliberate attempt to

rewrite official history and restore Urbina’s political honor, becomes apparent in context:

Margarito, el hermano, sabía todo: doña María y el jefe de los talabarteros de la ‘Brigada Morelos.’

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Urbina, con la estrella en el sombrero, con sus venas gordas palpitantes bajo la piel prieta, abriendo los ojos hasta hacer gimnasia, haría un resoplido de general ante aquellas noticias. (Todo esto es una suposición inocente, nacida hoy, acá donde las gentes ignoran al Santo Niño de Atocha y al general Tomás Urbina). (128)

Her supposition, ostentatiously, refers to Urbina’s reaction “ante aquellas noticias,” i.e.

his wife’s unfaithfulness, and is placed on a new line, separated from the news itself.

Margarito’s knowledge, however, is expressed without a verb, and the ‘innocent

supposition’ may well supplant that verbal lack with the supposed act of unfaithfulness,

which in turn stands in for the unnamed act of treason: Urbina’s political alliance with

Carranza.66 As Parra puts it: “[E]l lugar común de la traición femenina cumple la función

de desdibujar la traición militar como el motivo real de la muerte del personaje” (182).

Feigning and flaunting childish innocence, the narrator enlists and aligns the whole town

to rectify the rumors about Urbina. She attempts to redress his alleged treason, whilst her

narration also exposes the tension caused by her rectification of Urbina’s alleged

flirtation with the Carrancistas.

To grasp the relationship between the child’s and the collective voice in chapters

such as these, Jean-Luc Nancy, in The Inoperative Community (1985), offers helpful

insight. He understands “literary communism” as the exigency of “thinking the practice

of a sharing of voices and of an articulation according to which there is no singularity but

that exposed in common, and no community but that offered to the limit of singularities”

66 Both acts are ultimately implied in the chapter: doña María holds a wake for her assassinated lover in Urbina’s very own bed, and Urbina is attacked and killed by Villista soldiers. Neither of these acts is explained, nor do they need to be, since they are perfectly understood.

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(80).67 When in several chapters different voices of the town collaborate as storytellers,

they do not form an ideal or nostalgic community, but expose what Nancy calls

‘compearance’ and communicate their version of the Revolution. Communication,

according to Nancy, “consists before all else in this sharing and in this compearance

(com-parution) of finitude: that is, in the dislocation and in the interpellation that reveal

themselves to be constitutive of being-in-common – precisely inasmuch as being-in-

common is not a common being” (29, original emphasis). Cartucho includes many

chapters in which the voices together articulate a discourse, without constituting

themselves as a ‘common being.’ One includes a song about a group of soldiers, many of

whom appear as characters in Cartucho, which has even more authors than it has

characters: “Esa canción era la de todos, la cantaban juntando sus voces, y haciendo una

rueda enlazaban sus brazos por los hombros” (154). The song can be read as a

synecdoche of the book itself – the stories of Cartucho belong to everyone, and they can

be told only by joining the voices together.

Many chapters open with a clearly identified narrator, usually an eyewitness or

the mother, who narrates a story she heard first-hand. “Los hombres de Urbina,” opens

with a vague reference to the source of the story: “Le contaron a Mamá todo lo que había

pasado” (119), and the mother proceeds: “ –Fue en Nieves –dijo Mamá–, allá en la

hacienda de Urbina entraron a balazos los villistas” (119). Halfway through the

paragraph, it is unclear whether the mother is still talking: “Contaron que al general Villa

67 The limit, for Nancy, “is not a place, but the sharing of place, their spacing. There is no common space” (73).

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le había sorprendido mucho la noticia de la muerte de su compadre Urbina, pero todos

supieron que Fierro le dijo que Urbina se andaba volteando” (119). A collective voice

and knowledge seep into the mother’s discourse with “contaron” and “todos supieron.”

At the closure of the paragraph the narration has veered from direct discourse, and now

forms part of the narrator’s recollection: “Mamá decía que todo se debió a una

corazonada del Jefe de la División del Norte” (119). There is no punctuation to indicate

the end of direct discourse; the voices seamlessly dissolve into one another.68

A democratic principle regulates this conflation of voices. No voice is superior to

another, and each is necessary to create the collective voice of Campobello’s North. The

child too stands at equal footing, because at times the narrator not only remembers her

experiences when she was young, but actually reconstructs her voice:69 “A Toña le gusta

el ‘macuchi’, no le da vergüenza que la vean torcer las hojas. El café le gusta a Mamá, yo

creo que por eso me gusta; los cigarros de Mamá son de cigarrera. Mamá es más bonita

que Toña – decía yo para terminar mis pensamientos profundos y cansados.” (113). The

short sentences, apparently unrelated, reveal associations according to a self-centered

(and therefore child-like), associative logic. The narrator treats the reconstructed voice of

childhood via the familiar schema: she indicates the source of the voice (memory), and

after a few paragraphs it conflates with the collective voice, which takes over to tell the

story of José Díaz, a handsome Villista with whom Toña was in love. Like so many

68 This is not an editorial choice, for in many other instances she does indicate where a direct quote ends.

69 I therefore disagree with Betina Keizman, who writes: “[L]a niña carece de una perspectiva propia y es la madre quien la aportará, quien funciona como la ideóloga de aquello que la niña solamente puede transmitir desde lo perceptual” (37).

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others, however, he ends up as “un bulto pegado a la pared” (114). The narrator shivers,

not because of his death, but because this handsome man died in a dirty street, his body

and clothes filthy with mud.

The conception of childhood upheld by Cartucho is far from conventional. The

child characters are capable of assimilating most anything, no matter how dire the

circumstances. The last words of the prologue to the first edition testify to that capability:

“Mis fusilados, dormidos en la libreta verde. Mis hombres muertos. Mis juguetes de la

infancia” (IV). The narrator’s actual toys, and particularly her doll Pitaflorida, suffer the

same fate as the human dolls: “mi muñeca, que se rompió la cabeza cuando se cayó de la

ventana” (114). Narrated without sadness or emotion, Pitaflorida’s death is just one

among many. Childhood in Cartucho is a shield upheld to protect its author; and it is a

fictional construction that constitutes the collective voice, necessary to redeem Pancho

Villa. Cartucho questions every prevailing conception about childhood – innocence, lack

of understanding, impressionability. The child is not oblivious to what is going on around

her and provides her own interpretation on equal footing. It is her discourse that

constitutes a collective voice to oppose the institutionalized rhetoric of the Revolution,

while it simultaneously shows the impossibility of the community it supposedly

represents.

Camels in Comitán

A very different concept of childhood underpins Balún Canán, based mainly on

prevailing notions of innocence, immaturity and lack of understanding. Although both

Castellanos and Campobello share a concern for groups marginalized by official

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discourse, the way and the purpose with which Castellanos inscribes notions of childhood

into her prose could not be more different from Campobello.

Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974) publishes her first novel, Balún Canán, in 1957.

It is her only novel told by a child narrator, although in her subsequent work she

continues to explore similar thematic concerns, such as the oppression of women and

indigenous peoples; religion; and political reform.70 Balún Canán is a novel in three parts

about the landowning Argüello family. In the first and last part, a nameless seven-year-

old girl narrates her daily observations, most of which concern domestic life and, soon

after the novel’s beginning, the political reforms that upset the stability of her family. The

girl is marginalized in multiple ways: she is educated between two contrasting belief

systems, one indigenous and one mestizo; she is a girl, which means that she does not

have the same rights and privileges as her brother Mario; and by virtue of being a child,

she is not taken seriously by the adults. Befitting this marginalization, her attitude is

predominantly passive: she observes and listens. However, at the very end she gains

some agency when she steals the key to the oratory and, on the last page of the novel,

starts to write.

The first part ends with the family’s arrival at their large ranch in Chactajal. The

second and longest part, told from different perspectives, shows how the agrarian reforms

incite the Indians that work the Argüello land to make demands for their newly acquired

rights. The novel frames these events through figures that are marginalized by the

70 Oficio de tinieblas (1962), for example, is a novel situated in the same time period of agrarian reform as Balún Canán and in the same state of Chiapas. It focuses on the conflicting interests of landowners and the indigenous peoples, which leads to an uprising of the latter.

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patriarch César Argüello – most notably Ernesto, César’s illegitimate son who has to

teach the indigenous children at the makeshift school; and Zoraida, César’s wife, whom

he mostly ignores and neglects. Finally, in the last part, the girl narrates how the family

falls apart. Her father travels to the capital to demand his version of justice, and her

brother Mario falls fatally ill. A series of events that combine elements of superstition,

Catholicism and indigenous beliefs lead the girl to believe she is responsible for her

brother’s death. At the novel’s conclusion she tries to grapple and come to terms with this

sense of guilt.

The socio-historical backdrop of the novel is the administration of president

Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) who, as historian Stephen Lewis summarizes,

“expropriated nearly fifty million acres of land, nationalized foreign-held oil reserves,

generally favoured workers in their disputes with their employers, and invested heavily in

indigenous programmes and rural education” (424). Furthermore, Cárdenas

revolutionized the educational system to ensure free, compulsory education, accessible to

all. In the novel one of the indigenous workers, Felipe Carranza, feels a personal

connection and responsibility regarding the reforms because he has been to the capital

and has shaken the president’s hand. He spreads the word of equality in his community,

but obligating César to respect Cárdenas’ reforms is no easy task. César refuses to

provide a school building, alleging that he complied when he provided a teacher. Yet this

teacher is Ernesto, who does not even speak Tzeltal, the language in which he supposedly

has to instruct the children. Not every indigenous character in the novel is as outspoken

as Felipe. Nana, the indigenous caretaker of the girl, maneuvers between the two worlds,

since she lives with and cares for the Argüello family.

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Castellanos shows her complicity with the indigenous struggle by choosing a title

in Tzeltal, “Balún Canán,” which is the Mayan denomination for Comitán, and she opens

each section of the novel with an epigraph chosen from sacred Mayan texts such as the

Popol Vuh.71 The choice of narrators points to the same political conviction. Although the

girl is an Argüello herself, she is raised by nana, who transfers a wealth of indigenous

wisdom onto the girl, and she never sides completely with one or the other. In the second

part the indigenous perspective provides a loud counterpoint to César’s unjust, dominant

behavior.

The various ways in which Balún Canán supports the indigenous cause affect the

construction of the girl’s narrative voice. An explanation of just how this political

conviction influences the child’s discourse may be most helpfully be framed in

Bakhtinian terms. The novel’s overarching political message, a fixed authorial discourse,

reveals the novel’s monologic character.72 Although Balún Canán does not have an

omniscient narrator, the different parts and perspectives are subordinate to one singular

worldview, what Bakhtin describes as a “finalizing, monologic function of the author’s

‘surplus’ field of vision” (70). The ‘surplus’ knowledge that Castellanos possesses but the

narrators do not, is an awareness of the marginalization many of the characters suffer,

most conspicuously the Mayan people and the women. Although several characters

express their subjective points of view, they ultimately remain within the author’s field of

71 The epigraphs are taken from the following texts: Popul Vuh, Chilam Balam de Chumayel, Anales de los Xahil.

72 Whether or not a novel is monologic is by no means a value judgment – after all, Bakhtin’s monologic novels of choice are Tolstoy’s.

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vision, which binds the narrative together.73 Regarding the child narrator’s voice it means

that, even though she observes and comments on the world she perceives, her discourse

remains subservient to the authorial discourse. The rationalization behind the structure of

the novel illustrates this subordinateness nicely. According to Bakhtin, in a monologic

world ‘the idea,’ instead of being inextricably bound up with the image of the hero, could

be expressed with equal success by any character: “[W]ho utters it, and when, is

determined by considerations of composition, by what is convenient or appropriate, or by

purely negative criteria: it must not jeopardize the verisimilitude of the image of him who

utters it” (79). This is particularly obvious in novel’s structure: so as not to jeopardize the

plausibility of the girl’s voice, Castellanos introduces different narrators in the second

part to forcefully convey the indigenous exploitation. The full transcription of the

manuscript that details the Mayans’ history in the first part (55-58), and the letters César

sends to his wife in the third (228-230; 269-270), attests to the same monologic artistic

worldview; the idea of the novel belongs to no character in particular.74

In a way, Castellanos chooses a narrator that she herself deems unfit to transmit

the political message she wants her novel to convey. Balún Canán aspires to be

polyphonic through the incorporation of different voices, but these voices are never truly

73 Bakhtin: “Even the noblewoman’s world [...] is portrayed from the author’s point of view, and not as the noblewoman herself sees and experiences that world (although while reading the story we are also fully aware of her subjective perception of that world)” (71). That parenthesis is very important; just because a character’s speech is subjective, does not make it dialogic. It remains “an object of the author’s point of view” (71).

74 A dialogic novel would deal with the manuscript or letters in a very different way. Bakhtin gives the example from Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov has published an article with some of his ideas, and the content of the article becomes apparent to the reader through the way different characters describe and discuss the article.

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autonomous, nor do they unite to form a collective voice as in Cartucho. It is the clash

between the novel’s authorial vision, committed to a political cause, and its more

profound structure that leads to the construction of the child’s narrative voice that is

punctuated with inconsistencies regarding point of view and language usage. One of its

consequences is that it leads to a prose full of camels.

On the opening page of Balún Canán we find a statement intended to designate

the childhood sphere of narration: “Miro lo que está a mi nivel” (9). Sentences such as

these, however, are like the camels in the Qur’an that Jorge Luis Borges refers to in his

much cited “El escritor argentino y la tradición:” Borges argues that there are no camels

in the Qu’ran, simply because they form such an obvious part of reality that it is

completely unnecessary to specify their existence:

[Y]o creo que si hubiera alguna duda sobre la autenticidad del Alcorán bastaría esta ausencia de camellos para probar que es árabe. Fue escrito por Mahoma, y Mahoma, como árabe, no tenía por qué saber que los camellos eran especialmente árabes; eran para él parte de la realidad, no tenía por qué distinguirlos; en cambio, un falsario, un turista, un nacionalista árabe, lo primero que hubiera hecho es prodigar camellos, caravanas de camellos en cada página; pero Mahoma, como árabe, estaba tranquilo: sabía que podía ser árabe sin camellos. (156)

Similarly, the statement “[m]iro lo que está a mi nivel” would be that of a “tourist” in the

world of childhood. A child knows no better than to look at whatever she finds at her

eyelevel, because it simply forms ‘part of her reality.’ Only an adult would notice the

contrast, and comments such as the one quoted serve the purpose of assuring that the

reader fully grasps the implications of the narrative perspective.75 Following Borges’s

pertinent observation, I propose to use the term ‘camel’ for statements that ostensibly

75 Some critics have done precisely that: see for example Murphy’s interpretation of the same sentence (49-50).

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designate the realm of childhood, while in point of fact the camel signals the narrator’s

status as an outsider in the very world she claims to be part of.

Borges chooses the absence of camels to prove the authenticity of the Qu’ran

because, to an outsider, camels seem “particularmente árabe.” Similarly, the presence of

cameline statements in Balún Canán reveal what characteristics are perceived as

‘particularly childish.’ It is easy to infer the premise, from “[m]iro lo que está a mi nivel,”

that children are physically smaller than adults. This is hardly surprising, though not

necessarily always true.76 Other moments reveal more intangible connotations of

childhood: “[Mi madre y Amalia] [c]ontinúan charlando. Un momento se hace presente,

en la conversación, su juventud. Y es como si los limoneros del patio entraran, con su

ráfaga de azahar, a conmover esta atmósfera de encierro. Callan y se miran azoradas

como si algo muy hermoso se les hubiera ido de las manos” (33). The idea of ‘youth’ as a

paradise lost pertains decidedly to the realm of adulthood, and has been explored

extensively in literature.77 More often, though, the girl does not seem to regard her age or

immaturity as particularly blissful. Fully immersed in the experience of childhood, she

has no way of comparing or contrasting her world with any other. Childhood to her is not

something to be cherished, nor “algo muy hermoso,” but her normality; a time of fear and

anxiety as well as games and joy.

76 In chapter XVIII of the Third Part, the narrator repeats this statement from the opposite perspective: “Desde su altura de personas mayores me contemplaban con ojos benévolos y tristes” (276, my emphasis). This is a slightly deformed camel, for if the girl cannot look higher than “lo que está a mi nivel,” how can she perceive the expression in their eyes?

77 See for example Rubén Darío’s poem “Juventud, divino tesoro,” or José Martí’s journal intended for children, La edad de oro.

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The girl’s first words as a narrator78 are worth quoting at length:

No soy un grano de anís. Soy una niña y tengo siete años. Los cinco dedos de la mano derecha y dos de la izquierda. Y cuando me yergo puedo mirar de frente las rodillas de mi padre. Más arriba no. Me imagino que sigue creciendo como un gran árbol y que en su rama más alta está agazapado un tigre diminuto. Mi madre es diferente. Sobre su pelo – tan negro, tan crespo – pasan los pájaros y les gusta y se quedan. Me lo imagino nada más. Nunca lo he visto. Miro lo que está a mi nivel. (9)

Although her opening words sound like a camel, the narrator actually exclaims this in

response to the nana, who has just asked “¿Acaso se habla con los granos de anís?” The

second statement, however, is exclusively intended to orient the reader, as the narrator

needs not remind herself that she is a seven-year-old girl.79 The rest of the paragraph is

filled with “caravanas de camellos.” When the narrator states that “cuando me yergo

puedo mirar de frente las rodillas de mi padre. Más arriba no” the perspective is actually

that of an adult, because the girl’s point of view is presented as the exception, “más arriba

no,” which defines itself against the rule of the adult, whose gaze includes the “más

arriba.” The narrator not only describes what she, as a child can see; she implies that

there is much she can not see. Her restricted vision can easily be read figuratively, as

incapacity to understand the world of the adults.

This caravana of camels, no matter how contrived, achieves one important goal:

it sets the stage of innocent childhood, it marks the narrator as an ‘innocent observer.’

Consequently, the insistent markers of childhood prepare the reader to accept the

78 Her first words as a character are “No me cuentes ese cuento, nana” (9).

79 In a very similar situation Tochtli, narrator in Fiesta en la madriguera, will avoid stating the obvious: “Entonces el gober me preguntó mi edad y cuando se la dije opinó que yo todavía era pequeño para estas cosas” (27). Other critics have argued that the entire paragraph is a response to the nana (Messinger Cypess 75).

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narrator’s voice as that of a child. In point of fact, her voice in this first paragraph is

rather a-typical in comparison to the rest of parts one and three of the novel. Her

sentences are short and grammatically straightforward; employ simple vocabulary; and

often use the simple connector “y.” In the rest of the parts of the novel narrated by the

girl such plain vocabulary and sentence structure occur only rarely.

The cameline statements in the girl’s discourse constitute a particularly

remarkable departure from the infantile perspective, but certainly not the only one: many

other instances indicate that the narrative voice belongs to an adult figure. The girl

mainly expresses herself in the present tense, which according to critics such as Sandra

Messenger Cypess and Paul Julian Smith possesses mythical, eternal qualities, and

implies directness.80 The present tense, however, does not provide a guarantee of

immediacy.81 When the girl narrates,“Pero yo sigo en el suelo, cogida de su tzec, llorando

porque no quiero irme” (62), the first-person narration and the present tense display a

distance that an adult reflecting on her childhood might feel; the sentence certainly does

not capture the immediacy of a weeping child. The present tense, moreover, is employed

in a rather whimsical manner. In one and the same paragraph the narrator may actually

switch between the past and the present tense, as in the following sentence: “No me toca

[la figura], no acaricia mi cabeza como mi nana lo hacía siempre para arrullarme” (72,

my emphasis). The use of the imperfect, which implies a retrospective contemplation, is

80 Messinger Cypess (71); Smith (144).

81 Smith, for example, states: “In the immediacy of the child’s response to the world (reinforced here by first-person narrative in the present tense) the text offers itself as a window at which the reader can, slowly, draw close to newly strange and singular objects and experience encounters with them” (135).

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not incidental. Time and again the point of view does not actually lie with the girl, but

conveys an adult’s perspective, looking back at her childhood. Although the changes in

verb tense are more frequent in the third part, they also appear in the first, and especially

in the third part they even occur within the same narrative unit.82

Sometimes the narrative voice even forgets, so to speak, that she is a child herself:

“[El circo] [h]a de traer personas de los países más remotos para que los niños vean cómo

son” only to remember it right after: “Tal vez hasta traigan un tren para que lo

conozcamos” (17, my emphasis).83 These inconsistencies occur throughout the novel: the

girl narrates an encounter with her drunk Uncle David: “De su boca sale un olor a fruta 82 Chapter XVI of the first part starts in the present tense, and then proceeds to tell the story of what happened that day: “Desde hace varios días esperamos una visita desagradable en la escuela. Hoy, mientras la señorita Silvina explicaba que los ojos de las avispas son poliédricos, llamaron a la puerta” (48). Chapter XVII then continues in the past tense: “Mi padre nos recomendó que cuando viniera el muchacho que reparte el periódico no lo dejáramos marchar antes de que hablara con él. Lo detuvimos en el corredor mientras mi padre terminaba de desayunarse” (52). In chapter XVIII we’re back to the present tense: “Como ahora ya no voy a la escuela me paso el día sin salir de la casa” (54). In chapter XXIII the verb tenses shift within the same situation: “Después de cenar, mi madre, que está muy cansada, fue a acostarse. La acompañaron tía Romelia y tía Matilde. Nosotros quedamos en el comedor un rato más. Colgada del techo la lámpara de gasolina zumba como si devorara los insectos que incesantemente se renuevan rondando a su alrededor. Tía Francisca dice:” (69, my emphasis). In this fragment, the narrator starts in the present, moves to the preterite, passes through an ambiguous “quedamos,” which is both present and preterite, only to end with the present tense again. Examples in the third part of the novel abound, often within the same paragraph. For example: “Mi padre se decide de pronto. [Omitted: dialogue between the father and don Jaime]. Mi padre bajó la cabeza y se quedó mirando, meditativamente, la punta empolvada de sus botas” (218, my emphasis); or “Mario se vuelve de espaldas para no verse de obligado a contestar, porque los cuentos de Vicenta lo aterrorizan. Quedé sola y con un hilo de voz contesté” (252, my emphasis).

83 Irene Nicholson, who translates the novel into English, moves beyond the task of the translator to become an active editor of the text. She transforms the phrase “para que los niños vean” into “So we children can get an idea,” which is more coherent with the narrator’s point of view. Nicholson also smoothes out unnecessary changes in verb tenses and eliminates awkward phrases such as “Miro lo que está a mi nivel.”

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demasiado madura que repugna y marea” (24); a circumlocution that, as I mention

earlier, serves to indicate the girl’s ignorance of alcohol. A few short chapters later,

however, the girl effortlessly recognizes “aguardiente añejo” (37) and has no trouble in

identifying another man as drunk: “Un hombre ebrio pasó rayando el caballo” (40).

Several critics have remarked on the instability of the narrative voice. According

to Françoise Perus, for example, the real narrator is actually the adult who remembers her

past, and who utilizes the present tense to bring the past back to life. According to this

critic, the preterite tense imposes itself when the memory is too painful and the narrator

needs the distance created by the past tense (17-24). Perus’s creative explanation likely

finds its provenance in Castellanos’ personal life. It is well known that the occurrences in

her first novel are semi-autobiographic, and that she suffered a great deal from her

brother’s undisputed privileges as the only male child, and from her parent’s neglect after

her brother’s death (Seale Vásquez 17-18). Castellanos explains: “A la novela llegué

recordando sucesos de mi infancia. Así, casi sin darme cuenta, di principio a Balún

Canán” (Carballo 506). Susan Lanser argues that readers often (mis)take the ‘I’ of the

narration as the ‘I’ of the author outside of the text, that they “routinely ‘vacillate’ and

‘oscillate’ and even double the speaking voice against the logic of both structure and

stricture” (2005, 207, original emphasis). Indeed, readers, aware of the autobiographic

resonances in Balún Canán, have often conflated Castellanos with the girl-narrator.

The hypothesis of an adult narrator, however, is untenable for several reasons, and

the text’s inconsistencies warrant a different interpretation. First of all, Perus bases her

analysis solely upon the closing paragraph of the novel; the girl mentions her notebooks,

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but even here she does not posit herself as a writing narrator.84 While Perus’s invention of

a traumatized, reminiscing narrator attempts to account for the changes in verb tense, it

does nothing to explain the many instances in which the narrator distances herself from

the narration as an outsider to childhood. Rather, when the perspective does not

correspond with that of the girl seem to belong to a disembodied, extradiegetic narrator.

In a detailed analysis of the first chapter of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Mary

Galbraith observes a back-and-forth between the first narrator, a child who experiences

what he narrates, and a second, more distanced narrator. Even though Great Expectations

overtly frames its events in the past,85 Galbraith argues that the second narrator is

nonetheless not a memoirist.86 To be sure, the narrative situation she describes is different

from Balún Canán. Castellanos’s novel situates its narration firmly in the present, yet the

moments in which the narrator ‘forgets’ her status as a child, indicate the presence of

another, unidentified narrator who shadows the experience of the girl from a distance. As

I argue above, the second narrator of Balún Canán isn’t a memoirist either, and the

interplay between the two resembles Galbraith’s description of the interaction between

Pip and his adult narrator:

[T]he distance between the narrator and the child is never completely collapsed in the recounting of the child Pip’s first impressions [...]. Instead, the narrator either

84 The last chapter reads as follows: “Cuando llegué a la casa busqué un lápiz. Y con mi letra inhábil, torpe, fui escribiendo el nombre de Mario. Mario, en los ladrillos del jardín. Mario en las paredes del corredor. Mario en las páginas de mis cuadernos. Porque Mario está lejos. Y yo quisiera pedirle perdón” (286).

85 “My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing larger or more explicit than Pip. So I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip” (qtd. in Galbraith 124).

86 This concept of the memoirist appears in Molloy as “memorator” (96).

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distances himself from the child or he disappears, leaving the field to the child. He has access to the child’s consciousness, but he does not frame this access as ‘memory.’ In short, he behaves as an extradiegetic or a witness narrator rather than as a memoirist. (138)

Balún Canán has its own type of witness narrator,87 disembodied yet bestowed with

worldly, adult knowledge, whose voice narrates the second part of the novel. In the first

and last part of the novel, this witness narrator now and then interrupts the girl’s narration

to provide details that would be inaccessible to the child, such as thoughts and feelings of

other characters: “[Ernesto] [s]e sentía orgulloso de estar aquí, sentado frente a uno de los

señores de chaleco y leontina de oro” (54); knowledge of what has happened in many

years past: “Durante los años de convivencia mi madre ha procurado hablar con ella [la

nana] lo menos posible” (225); or an adult use of language: “El doctor Mazariegos es un

hombre de baja estatura, rechoncho, con una mirada infantil, su sonrisa inocente y

mejillas rubicundas y vellosas como las de los duraznos” (261). The last example forms

an inverted camel of sorts. At the risk of belaboring my point: since the child’s situation

constitutes her normality, she would not characterize an adult’s smile as “infantil,” an

adjective that means next to nothing to someone who considers herself a child.88

The many camels that amble through Balún Canán mark the distance between the

author and her narrator, and in turn also between the narrator and her readers, exposing a

87 Bakhtin notes a similar type of narrator, which he describes as a “fantastic stenographer” (56). Note that, whereas in Cartucho there is a conflation of innumerable narrators and story tellers, in Castellanos’ novel it is actually possible to distinguish between the narrative voices.

88 Paul Julian Smith notes a similar double-narration: “[T]his perception of Indians as undifferentiated, corporeal mass [...] is once more intersubjective, shared by the characters observed by the child and by the child herself, who at such moments slips imperceptibly into the role of omniscient, authoritative narrator” (137).

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conceptualization of childhood that highlights innocence and immaturity. Another result

of this same conceptualization is the uncanny appearance of the child as ‘tabula rasa.’

The child as a ‘blank slate’ stems roughly from the European Enlightenment, and took

firm hold with the romantics, who believed that the child was born as a blank canvas,

innocent and (sexually, politically) pure.89 Significantly, the narrator remains nameless –

unidentified, blank. One character overtly puts the novel’s concept of childhood into

words: “Queridas niñas: ustedes son demasiado inocentes para darse cuenta de los

peligrosos tiempos que nos han tocado vivir” (14). The speaker is schoolteacher señorita

Silvina, whose affirmations about childhood obtain more weight by virtue of her

profession. Childhood innocence is here bound in a causal relationship to immaturity, the

incapacity to comprehend the social and political reality in which the children live. The

other adults in the novel share this conceptualization about childhood, and often reference

it.90

The idea of the child-as-tabula-rasa as subtext accounts for the choice of the child

as an opportune choice for the charged subject matter. Enjoying her status as ‘blank

slate,’ the child provides the author with an empty page to be inscribed, and consequently

with the possibility to narrate events with the voice of an unblemished character,

unhindered by any political convictions that could tarnish the purity and objectivity of the

account. The child’s objectivity is fictional, first because it occurs in a fictional context,

and also because this objectivity is the result of the fiction of childhood innocence. It 89 See Ariès (1996 [1963]).

90 Francisca says César should not have brought the kids to Chactajal (69); Zoraida pleads with God, begging him to take her life and not her son’s, “Pero no él, que es inocente. No él, que no ha tenido más culpa que nacer de mí” (240).

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nonetheless bestows a particular kind of urgency on the text. Castellanos is a widely

acclaimed author and a prominent intellectual who during her life participates extensively

in public debates in Mexico. She expresses her intellectual engagement in different

forms, to which her novels and poetry form no exception. The reader will thus likely put

the girl’s objectivity, though fictional, in the context of Castellanos’ other literary and

essayistic production, which gives a special valence to the political dimension of the

novel. Yet even if the reader is completely unfamiliar with Castellanos’s work and/or

with the political situation in Chiapas under Lázaro Cárdenas’s rule, what is presented as

a pure, objective account of the uprisings highlights the suffering of the marginalized

groups of the novel.

If the main intent of the novel is to convey a political message of the abuse and

continued marginalization of women and indigenous peoples, the inconsistencies in the

child’s voice are largely irrelevant. Indeed, the camels bolster the political message by

triggering the reader’s associations with childhood. Castellanos effectively mobilizes

these connotations and inscribes them into her larger concern for the Mayan peoples in

Chiapas. The girl narrator lends poignancy to the socio-political message, charging it

with a futurity that fuels its message for socio-political changes. Castellanos’s project is

thus similar to Campobello’s in one important regard: both writers interpellate childhood

innocence to denounce a political injustice. Campobello uses ‘apparent’ (339) innocence

as a protective shield to mask her intention of spreading a counter-hegemonic truth about

the Revolution, while Castellanos elicits an emotional response to align the reader with

her political denunciation.

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Yet what I have called the girl’s ‘fictional objectivity’ cannot be understood at

face value. The characters actively attach values to childhood, all of which are largely

shared by cultural norms, such as innocence, purity and political and sexual immaturity. I

argue that her objectivity functions as a rhetorical device, and the girl’s innocence

simultaneously serves as a mask that hides other qualities. While the girl’s innocence and

immaturity are fundamental to the novel’s project and structure, there is more to her than

meets the eye; perhaps the gaze should wander, looking at ‘lo que [no] está a mi nivel.’

Indeed, the conceptualization of the seven-year-old narrator as a blank slate may

uphold the novel, but there is a way in which the narrator mounts a small rebellion of her

own. Critics often accept, at least partially,91 Castellanos’s claim that the silence of the

narrator in the second part of the novel is due to a young girl’s lack of understanding of

political complexities. Her camels fool many an astute reader into believing that we are,

in fact, in childish Neverland. Instead of construing the girl’s silence as the result of a

lack of understanding inherent to her age, I propose to reconsider her silence as a refusal

to speak or take position in the dispute between her parents and the Mayan workers.

To broach the question of the girl’s silence in the second part, as well as her

witness narrator in the first and last, subaltern studies provide a helpful theoretical

framework. Paul Julian Smith offers a reading of the novel’s subaltern subjects from

which he draws the conclusion that “[s]ubaltern subjects seem incompatible with realist

narrative because they resist universalization: any attempt to identify them with a

traditional omniscient voice is inevitably doomed with failure” (145). I agree with Smith

that the indigenous, or subaltern, subjects do not seem compatible with Castellanos’s 91Murphy (49); Lagos (167).

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realist narrative, although I believe the incompatibility stems from the tension between

the novel’s aesthetic form and its enunciation. As I mention above, Balún Canán shows

its alliance with the indigenous struggle at the level of content, through its indigenous

characters and sympathy for their struggle. In terms of form, the realist prose of the

novel, in keeping with the novelistic genre and adhering to its Eurocentric origins, does

not effectively support the counter-hegemonic message. Moreover, I believe a crucial

reason for the uneasy bind between form and enunciation is the novel’s conceptualization

of the figure of the child according to occidental beliefs, which define her according to

notions such as innocence, purity, directness and objectivity.92

The child’s position within subaltern studies is complicated by many limitations,

not the least of which is of a legal nature. Subalternity, in Rosalind Morris’ phrase, is the

structured place from which the capacity to access power is radically obstructed. It is not

something that, if given a ventriloquist, could speak the truth of its oppression or disclose

the plenitude of its being (8). The child’s subalternity, in point of fact, is partially

determined by legal structures that, in the name of child protection, “obstruct her access

to power” – in the sense that many decisions regarding her personal life are legally

determined by age, such as suffrage, sexual consent or the right and possibility of

political engagement. This exclusion from legal and, hence, power structures complicates

the representation of the child – both in in the political sense of Vertretung and the

aesthetic sense of Darstellung. In terms of the voice of the child narrator, it means that 92 Other writers (José María Arguedas in Los ríos profundos, for example) have effectively used realist novels to express subaltern concerns; although I partially agree with Smith, I therefore take issue with his encompassive “subaltern subject” that refers simultaneously to Indigenous peoples, women and children. This blanket category does not allow for subjective specificity.

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instead of presenting the voice of an underrepresented group of society, it is a literary

construction by an adult.

As I have shown throughout this chapter, political and artistic representation are

very much intertwined in Balún Canán. The witness narrator continuously interrupts the

child’s discourse in the first and third parts, and narrates the second part along with

several adult characters so as to strengthen the force of the novel’s political commitment.

The girl-narrator’s silence in the second part, therefore, becomes particularly eloquent.

As I have illustrated with her use of the ‘camels,’ Castellanos is more concerned with

evoking a semblance of childhood that, if not verisimilar per se, is at least easily legible

as such to the adult reader, than with creating an autonomous and independent voice.

Consequently, the innocence and ignorance that create the infantile aura, are at odds with

the novel’s committed and informed political stance. The child-narrator here is thus a

subaltern that cannot speak, because Castellanos has created a discourse that does not

allow her to articulate her experience in terms that are legible without hegemonic, adult

interference. The aesthetic form Castellanos chooses, the child narrator, is subordinated

to the political message that is articulated at the level of enunciation. In Bakhtinian terms,

the girl’s discourse stands to strengthen the novel’s authorial message, but it cannot

articulate its own concerns.

Although this subaltern cannot speak, she can, and does, opt to remain silent,

actively and meaningfully. Given that society assigns political inferiority to underage

speech, silence best represents the struggle she faces when she witnesses her family

commit social and political injustices. Doris Sommer has hinted at the complexities of

what the girl holds back: “Sometimes I think that Rigoberta Menchú, Jesusa Palancares,

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the nameless narrator of Balún Canán, and Richard Rodriguez write at length about their

apparently private selves precisely to withhold the anticipated intimacy and sting readers

with the rebuff” (30-31).93 Indeed, Balún Canán’s main narrator may reveal more by way

of her lack of speech than with the observations she offers throughout the other parts. Her

silence, heavy with all that remains unsaid, stands as a reminder of the impossibility to

articulate the trauma caused by the Mexican Revolution, here concretized in Cárdenas’s

agrarian reforms. She silently refuses to narrate the landowning elite’s exploitation of the

indigenous workers in Chactajal; her position, sandwiched uncomfortably between the

Argüello family and ‘their’ Tzeltal workers, cannot be articulated.

In the second part the girl largely remains absent not only as narrator but also as

character. The adults ignore her most of the time,94 and she makes but one appearance

with a voice of her own, in chapter IX:

Pero cuando todos los rumores volvieron a aquietarse persistió una voz infantil, una voz inerme. Irreflexivamente Matilde se lanzó al encuentro de esa voz. Al pie de un árbol, con la cara pegada contra el tronco, estaba llorando la niña. Y cuando sintió que unos pasos se aproximaban al lugar en el que se había refugiado, cerró fuertemente los ojos, se tapó los oídos con los dedos, porque era la única manera que conocía de defenderse de las amenazas. [...] Matilde le preguntó con dulzura: –¿Qué viniste a hacer aquí? La voz de la niña, quebrada en sollozos, dijo: –Quiero irme a Comitán. Quiero irme con mi nana. (139)

Matilda, who has become pregnant with Ernesto’s illegitimate child, has run away from

the Argüellos out of shame, and the girl provides her with the pretext she needs to return

93 Sommer analyzes all the examples mentioned here in her book Proceed With Caution, except for Castellanos, whom she does not mention again.

94 She speaks two more words other than the ones quoted below: “Está fría [el agua]” (145). Mario does not speak at all. All other communication performed by both children is reduced to a few times they nod their heads in agreement.

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home without feeling like a “cobarde.”95 The narrator facilitates this excuse by

underscoring the girl’s need of protection, qualifying her voice as “una voz infantil, una

voz inerme.” Yet despite the narrator’s characterization of her voice as “inerme,”96 the

girl is not actually defenseless. She halts all forms of communication, refusing to look,

listen or speak, and she thus protects her “voz inerme;” by shielding it with deliberate,

purposeful silence. In this instance, the girl literalizes ‘infancy’ in its etymological

meaning as the ‘inability to speak.’ All she produces is sobbing, inarticulate speech,

which she contrasts with two clearly stated desires: “Quiero irme a Comitán. Quiero irme

con mi nana.” These statements differ very much from the narrator’s voice in the first and

last part of the novel, and are similar only to the style of the very first page, quoted

above. Both in form (inarticulate speech; short sentences) and content (wish to return to

the nana, her caretaker), therefore, the girl is reinserted into the stereotypical space of

childhood.

It is significant that the one and only time the girl appears in the narration of the

second part, she performs her silence. She contrasts it with one brief instance of speech,

which allows her silence to be appreciated as such. As Sor Juana puts it, far more

elegantly: “[C]omo éste [el silencio] es cosa negativa, aunque explica mucho con el

énfasis de no explicar, es necesario ponerle algún breve rótulo para que se entienda lo que

se pretende que el silencio diga; y si no, dirá nada el silencio, porque ése es su propio

oficio: decir nada” (40-42). For the adults in the novel, to have a voice means to have 95 “[A]hora sí tenía motivo para regresar a la casa, sin que su conciencia la acusara de cobarde” (140).

96 Definition of the Real Academia Española: 1. Que está sin armas. 2. Desprovisto de espinas, pinchos o aguijones. (www.rae.es).

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access to power.97 The girl inverts this power dynamic – her refusal to speak is

empowering and prevents her from having to take a stance in the dispute between her

family and the Tzeltal workers, both of whom she feels emotionally attached to.98

The performance of silence encompasses more than her refusal to talk; it also

illustrates images that emerge from the girl’s and the witness narrator’s discourse in the

first and third parts. In part one, the girl laments frequently that her mother Zoraida does

not worry herself much with her daughter. Indeed, throughout the long parts that present

Zoraida’s perspective, only her son Mario occupies her thoughts. As we have seen, only

when Matilda needs an excuse to return home does the girl reappear; but as soon as she

has fulfilled this minor narrative function, she melts into the background once again:

“Cuando llegaron, la niña iba dormida” (140). The girl’s almost complete vanishing from

the second part thus corroborates her implicit claims that she goes unnoticed.

By the same token, the child narrator in Balún Canán explicitly does not share

what her experience as a girl is like. She frequently mentions what she can not do or what

she is not allowed to read, but by the end of the novel the reader knows next to nothing

about what the girl feels, thinks and desires. Here too form and content form an uneasy

alliance, in which the performative silence stands in sharp contrast with the overt

integration of gender inequality into the plot, which becomes increasingly apparent in the

last part. Zoraida slowly looses her mind because she knows that her only son is fatally

ill: “Si Dios quiere cebarse en mis hijos... ¡Pero no en el varón! ¡No en el varón!” (246). 97 “Me escogieron a mí, Felipe Carranza Pech, para que yo fuera la voz” (96); Zoraida: “Daba gusto servirles [a los Argüello] cuando tenían poder, cuando tenían voz” (143).

98 Similarly, Edith Negrín Muñoz observes that the girl “no se identifica con su familia, pero tampoco con los indígenas” (71).

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When the girl narrator finally acquires some agency and starts to write, moreover, it is

her brother’s name she scribbles everywhere. Yet neither the many inexplicable changes

in verb tenses and the constant incoherence in narrative perspective, nor the explicit

denunciation of misogyny, should blind one to the performance that the girl puts on for

the reader – a performance of not telling, of simply transcribing what others around her

say, or the letters they read, as if she were Bakhtin’s “fantastic stenographer” (56). The

ellipsis that sneaks up in her discourse early on, “Cuando yo sea grande...” (11), serves as

a reminder of the information that will remain inaccessible to the reader.

Paradoxically, the same girl who discovers the many forms of injustice in which

her own existence, by virtue of being an Argüello, is embedded, extends this behavior to

her own nana when she describes the nana as la rajada: “Hablan [los indios] y es como si

cerraran un círculo a su alrededor. Yo lo rompo, angustiada. –Nana, tengo frío. Ella,

como siempre desde que nací, me arrima a su regazo. Es caliente y amoroso. Pero tendrá

una llaga. Una llaga que nosotros le habremos enconado” (16).99 This fragment100

highlights the girl’s anxiety, who notices that she does not belong to the same social

circle as her nana, but who demands to be let in. At the same time, she realizes that she

belongs to a different group, a “nosotros” that is guilty of the pain inflicted upon her

99 The vocabulary, a “llaga profunda” which is located in the nana’s “regazo” depicts the nana as the “rajada,” as Malintzin, the original translator and “vendida” of her people, in the way Octavio Paz puts forth those ideas in El laberinto de la soledad: “la Malinche [...] es la Chingada en persona” who “se ha convertido en una figura que representa a las indias, fascinadas, violadas, o seducidas por los españoles” (105). The nana here breaks the circle around her people to console the narrator, and she “translates” her indigenous cosmology to the girl so she can appreciate and understand it.

100 Told with the worldly knowledge of her witness narrator: “desde que nací” and “Tendrá una llaga.”

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family’s indigenous workers, and particularly upon the indigenous woman. The only way

the girl knows how to respond to this conflicting, contradicting reality throughout the

three parts of the novel is by keeping silent.

Speaking in the madriguera

For Tochtli, protagonist and narrator of Fiesta en la madriguera (2010),101 as for the

narrator of Balún Canán, silence is his only defense. His voluntary muteness transforms

him into an enigma for the adults, which is the most effective way Tochtli has to provoke

them and procure they take an interest in him. Fiesta is a short novel or novella,

published by Juan Pablo Villalobos (born in 1973) in 2010. It is Villalobos’s first novel,

and the first installment of a trilogy about Mexico, structured around three different

phases of life: childhood, adolescence and old age. In the second novel, titled Si

viviéramos en un lugar normal (2012), narrator Orestes recounts his adolescence in

Lagos de Moreno, which involves alien abductions and invasions.102

Tochtli narrates his life story in three parts; in the first and longest, he details his

daily life in the “palacio,” a dwelling that in truth resembles a fortress more than a palace,

101 Hereafter abbreviated to Fiesta.

102 Intended as an homage to the Mexican writer Jorge Ibargüengoitia (1928-1983), who was celebrated for his mastery of humor, in Si viviéramos Villalobos stacks cliché on top of cliché. Where with Fiesta he creates a narrator whose outlook on life is wholly innovative and coherent with his character, Si viviéramos mismatches dialogue with the narrator’s voice. It creates an adult narrator’s voice that, at once, recognizes his temporal remove from the story, trying to remember his adolescence, while reconstructing his adolescent self not only in dialogue but also in the narration. This creates an overlap that leads, quite simply, to a whole lot of “mentadas de madre” (11). In an overt attempt to make a political statement, Si viviéramos constantly criticizes Mexico and its stringent poverty, by providing an account of poverty that is both exoticizing and cliché-ridden.

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where he grows up almost completely isolated from the rest of the world, due to his

father Yolcaut’s involvement in drug trafficking. Tochtli talks at length about his

different obsessions (he has a special predilection for all kinds of exotic hats, dictionaries,

and Japanese samurai); his daily classes with private teacher Mazatzin; and about the

news, which reports the developments in the government’s war on drugs. He is consumed

by one ardent wish: to add a pygmy hippopotamus,103 a species on the verge of

extinction, to his collection of wild animals. When the drug war heats up, Yolcaut needs

to stay clear of Mexico for a while, and he decides to take his son to Liberia to find his

pygmy hippo, a journey that Tochtli describes in the second part of the novel. Although

they are successful in their endeavor, the hippos die in captivation before taking ship for

Mexico. Tochtli narrates in the third part how he assumes a Samurai identity, and reflects

about his teacher Mazatzin, who leaves the palace and proceeds to sell the story of

Yolcaut’s business and living arrangements to a national magazine.104

Tochtli’s status as a child narrator becomes conspicuous right away, because he

opens by echoing those around him, stating that “[a]lgunas personas dicen que soy un

adelantado. Lo dicen sobre todo porque piensan que soy pequeño para saber palabras

difíciles” (11). These two sentences effectively establish Tochtli’s identity as a child, and

also connect his presumed precociousness to one particular characteristic, namely his

familiarity with difficult words. He moreover takes particular pride in his command of 103 In Spanish this goes by the more evocative name of “hipopótamo enano de Liberia.”

104 Yolcaut’s reacts exactly as many real-life narcos: he gets his hands on as many issues as possible, to prevent circulation. During the six-year term of president Felipe Calderón (2007-2011), about 53 thousand issues of the political magazine Proceso were confiscated or bought up in mass, when Proceso brought a drug-related story that incriminated high-profile politicians and clergy. (http://www.proceso.com.mx/?p=298084).

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advanced vocabulary, and he constructs his entire discourse with and around the words

“sórdido, nefasto, pulcro, patético y fulminante.”105 Villalobos incorporates Tochtli’s

meta-linguistic reflection as part of creating this child’s voice, thus contributing to

making the child narrator’s voice accessible to the reader, who becomes an intimate

observer of Tochtli’s learning process.

More importantly, Tochtli’s complex relationship to the (written) word serves as a

channel to articulate and make sense of a chaotic world. Like the nameless narrator in

Balún Canán, he references the violent drug war most conspicuously in all that he does

not express, and he resorts to pet phrases and favorite expressions to create a protective

armor. As mentioned before, his opening statement defines him, through the eyes of the

adults, as different, “un adelantado.” He immediately links this assertion to his being

“pequeño para saber palabras difíciles” and the fact that he realizes that “no conozco

mucha gente” (11). That is to say that Tochtli, who has met other children only on

counted occasions in his life, realizes that adults regard him as an atypical child. His

barely-hidden pride in his linguistic prowess allows Tochtli to define himself as different,

as a child-unlike-a-child, which forms part of the armor that protects him in his

loneliness. Whereas Campobello employs childhood to create a shield to protect her

counter-hegemonic version of the Mexican Revolution, Villalobos provides Tochtli with

the tools to use language, and vocabulary in particular, to create a shield to protect his

105 Especially in the first few pages, but all throughout the novel, these words are repeated: sórdido 9 times; nefasto 11; pulcro 7; patético 16; and fulminante 9 times. A few more words are added to the list later on, for example ‘prestigio:’ “Bonita palabra, prestigio” (33), and from then on he will continue to use that word, for example to elaborate on the decline of the hat usage (39).

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narrator’s innocence, i.e. his childhood. Villalobos’s approach more resembles

Castellanos’s, in that he enlists the reader to lament the boy’s impossibility to have a

‘regular’ childhood, filled with other children and (stereo)typical, joyful experiences.

Tochtli reads the dictionary before going to sleep because he delights in learning

new words, and it soon becomes clear that elaborating exact definitions of the newly

acquired vocabulary fascinates him. This want for linguistic precision and demarcation

characterizes the entire narration, and often transitions into a judgment about people or

their behavior.106 He furthermore approaches words and their definitions with the same

creative impulse with which he narrates his story. The title of the novel, Fiesta en la

madriguera, plays with his fondness for the dictionary. The word “madriguera” has two

entrances in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (DRAE): “1. Cueva en que

habitan ciertos animales, especialmente conejos. 2. Lugar retirado y escondido donde se

oculta la gente de mal vivir.”107 The novel’s title combines both definitions; the first

refers to the meaning of Tochtli’s name in Nahual; ‘rabbit.’ The second is an obvious

allusion to Yolcaut’s dealings in the drug world, and the ‘palace’ is, indeed, a hidden

place.

At times Tochtli’s usage of a certain word manifests that he is unaware of its

meaning, which he has inferred incorrectly from the context: “Nosotros no usamos a

nuestros tigres para los suicidios o para los asesinatos. Los asesinatos los hacen Miztli y

Chichilkauli con orificios de balas. Los suicidios no sé cómo los hacemos, pero no los

106 [Mazatzin] [q]uería ponerse a pensar y a escribir un libro sobre la vida. Hasta se llevó una computadora. Eso no es sórdido, pero es patético” (16).

107 www.rae.es

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hacemos con los tigres” (34). The provenance of the idea that “asesinato” and “suicidio”

are synonyms quickly shows when Yolcaut employs “suicidar” transitively rather than

reflexively, clearly deviating from the verb’s standard use.108 Tochtli, moreover,

formulates entirely new definitions for existing words, which are attuned to his particular

situation: “En realidad hay muchas maneras de hacer cadáveres, pero las que más se usan

son con los orificios. Los orificios son agujeros que haces en las personas para que se les

escape la sangre” (20). This particular interpretation of ‘orificio’ obviously does not

appear in the DRAE, but it is one of the ways in which Tochtli makes sense of his

existence, in this case normalizing violence through abstract-sounding terms. Like the

insistent repetition of the five key words, this technique also contributes to the coherence

of Tochtli’s voice as a child narrator. Precisely because his understanding of “orificio”

defies any standard dictionary entry, it highlights the boy’s particular situation. He leaves

the palace only on very limited occasions, and his knowledge of the world is therefore

reduced to whatever he has been able to gather from this limited contact.

Similarly, the newly acquired vocabulary and the descriptions he invents tend to

be related to violence. This fascination may be necessity-borne, since violence

characterizes his father’s (and therefore his own) existence, but that is not all there is to it.

Like the child characters in Cartucho, Tochtli savors hearing bloody war time stories:

“En estos días estamos estudiando la conquista de México. Es un tema divertido, con

guerra y muertos y sangre” (17). Tochtli and Yolcaut even invent a game based on

gunshots: “El juego es de preguntas y respuestas. Uno dice una cantidad de balazos en

una parte del cuerpo y el otro contesta: vivo, cadáver o pronóstico reservado” (18). 108 “ –Ahhh, la suicidaron” (35).

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Whereas in Cartucho the corpses transmute into dolls, in Fiesta the process of killing and

dying itself turns into a pastime.

Changing circumstances may lead to adaptations to the rules,109 or to a new game

altogether, which occurs when they arrive in Liberia: “Parece increíble pero fue

divertido: inventamos un juego, el juego de ver quién descubría la pared con más

balazos” (69, my emphasis). The disclaimer “[p]arece increíble” is a concession to his

imagined reader, who may fail to understand the source of enjoyment. Once again,

Tochtli’s discourse reveals cognizance of his extraordinary situation, which may appear

strange to an interlocutor. Often his explanations anticipate reactions, in this case

surprise: “La sangre es muy difícil de limpiar. Eso repite todo el tiempo Iztapapalotl, que

es la sirvienta que hace la limpieza de nuestro palacio. Sí, nuestro palacio, Yolcaut y yo

somos dueños de un palacio, y eso que no somos reyes” (18-19, my emphasis). The boy

engages in a unilateral dialogue with the imagined interlocutor – not a monologue,

because he anticipates his reader’s possible objections or surprises, and addresses them.

Indeed, Villalobos constructs his narrator’s voice by constituting it as a perfectly

dialogic voice, what Bakhtin terms “internally dialogized discourse” (203). The following

analysis concerns Raskolnikov, but fits Tochtli’s speech as a glove:

Characteristically, his inner speech is filled with other people’s words that he has just recently heard or read [...]. He inundates his own inner speech with these words of others, complicating them with his own accents or directly reaccenting them, entering into a passionate polemic with them. Consequently his inner speech is constructed like a succession of living and impassioned replies to all the

109 One day Tochtli walks into one of the ‘empty rooms,’ only to discover that it is filled with loaded guns and rifles of every imaginable type: “Ahí me di cuenta de que Yolcaut y yo estamos jugando mal el juego de los balazos: con un balazo de ese rifle seguro te conviertes en cadáver, no importa dónde te lo den, menos en el pelo que ya está muerto” (45).

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words of others he has heard or has been touched by, words gathered by him from his experience of the immediately preceding days. (Bakhtin 238)

Tochtli echoes other people’s opinion of him upon opening the novel, after which he

eagerly engages them in an imagined dialogue. Presumably because he converses with so

few people, the short fragments of dialogue that he does participate in continue to

preoccupy him throughout the novel. Well into the first part of the novel, he references

the opening statement: “Pero en eso pienso que sí soy un adelantado, en descubrir

secretos” (34, my emphasis). He internalizes whatever he overhears and, ever eager to

expand his vocabulary, integrates the new expressions into his speech. Thus, when he

hears his father say that Mazatzin is “un pinche inocente” (32) he appropriates that

expression, but unwittingly decontextualizes it, thus providing it with an entirely new

meaning: “A partir de entonces todos los días hay cadáveres en la tele. Han salido: el

cadáver del zoológico, los cadáveres de la policía, los cadáveres del ejército, los

cadáveres de los políticos y los cadáveres de los pinches inocentes” (37). Yolcaut’s insult

directed at Mazatzin’s naïveté has become, in the boy’s mouth, a bitter truth.

Tochtli does not recognize that his particular usage of Yolcaut’s affront prompts

an altogether different meaning. In fact, he does not distinguish between registers – insult

and formal address are one and the same to him. In one sentence he says: “Yolcaut dice

que el gober no gobierna a nadie, ni siquiera a su puta madre” (26), and in the next he

refers to the governor as “un señor simpático” (27). There is something anarchical to this

undifferentiated language, and also something rather unsettling. It is not his cursing that

is disconcerting, but that he does not know his language is profane. His obscenities

therefore read as the linguistic manifestation of his almost complete lack of socialization.

Growing up in the madriguera, he has next to no social context in which to put his

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(verbal) knowledge to the test. His unawareness of register not only pertains his

swearing, but also his constant – and often inappropriate – use of pet phrases.

I propose to read Tochtli’s many creative inventions and innovative use of

language within the paradigm of ‘minor literature.’ Properly speaking, Fiesta cannot be

considered a work of minor literature as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari conceive of it,

for they consider minor literature “the deterritorialization of language, the connection of

the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation”

(18). Villalobos does not form part of a minority that constructs its literature in the major

language of the country he lives in, and though his novel contains a certain political

immediacy, this is related to the topic of the drug trafficking of his novel,110 not as a

revolutionary force against the literary canon. Instead of considering Fiesta a minority

expression of its real life author, I suggest reading Tochtli’s narration, within the novel,

as a minor use of language (Deleuze and Guattari 26-27). The stakes here are different –

Tochtli does not enter in dialogue with literary history the same way Kafka does. An

analysis of the concept of Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature, however, pries open

the boy’s relationship to language and literature, and will elucidate this child narrator’s

speech.

Tochtli’s is involved in a process that, following Deleuze and Guattari, one could

call ‘becoming-child.’ As I show above, although the boy himself takes pride in his

knowledge of Spanish, his vocabulary is actually rather limited, which leads to the

surprising creation of new meanings for existing terms. He plays with language by

decontextualizing it and, essentially, engaging in a process of deterritorialization of 110 Against Villalobos’s will, Fiesta has been marketed as narcoliteratura.

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language, artificially enriching the Spanish language through sobriety (cf. Deleuze and

Guattari, 18). Becoming-child itself is a process of deterritorialization, in which, as

Gerald Bruns puts it, “a subject no longer occupies a realm of stability and identity but is

instead folded imperceptibly into a movement [...] whose mode of existence is nomadic”

(703). As a subject whose status resists definition (and definitions are precisely what he

chases after throughout the novel), because it entails an unfinished process, Tochtli

dislocates and problematizes the hegemonic, male subject – the type of subject

epitomized perhaps most conspicuously, and most hyperbolically, by his father Yolcaut.

Fiesta also suggests the possibility that Tochtli actually does narrate in a major

language, while being inflected by a minor language: Nahuatl. All the proper names in

the novel are Nahuatl, and the meaning of the names is symbolic, directly related to their

role in the narration.111 Although Tochtli never acknowledges that he speaks the

indigenous language, at the very least he knows how to decipher the nickname that

Mazatzin chooses for his news story about Yolcaut: “[E]l nombre con el que firma el

reportaje es Chimalli, que quiere decir escudo. Y para Mazatzin el significado de los

nombres es muy importante, por eso me decía Usagi y no Tochtli” (93). This furthermore

suggests the possibility that Tochtli, as narrator, has carefully selected, i.e. invented, the

names of all the characters.

111 Yolcaut (father): rattlesnake. Mazatzin (teacher): deer. Itzpapalotl (house servant): obsidian butterfly. Miztli (guard): puma. Chichilkauli (guard): red eagle. Azcatl (gardener): ant. Itzcuauhtli (animal carer): golden eagle. Quecholli (Yolcaut’s lover): flamingo. Alotl (Yolcaut’s second lover): parrot. Cinteotl (cook): god of maize.

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Yet even if he does not speak any Nahuatl at all, there is another way in which

Tochtli’s narration is a form of minor literature. The relationship of any child to language

is similar, yet opposed to, that of a speaker of a minor language writing in a major

language. Kafka’s German, for example, is inflected by Czech and Yiddish, and the

language of any child is inflected not by others that influence the mother tongue, but by

the child’s own unrelenting curiosity within his native language. “To be a sort of stranger

within his own language; this is the situation of Kafka’s Great Swimmer,” Deleuze and

Guattari write (26, original emphasis). The becoming-child is also ‘a sort of stranger

within his own language,’ a language that he has not yet made completely his own.

Tochtli, for one, has such a desire of virtuosity in Spanish, that with this very desire he

calls attention to his lack of formation and understanding. Deleuze and Guattari write

about becoming-animal that “[w]e are no longer involved in an ordinary, full language in

which, for example, the immediate designation for the word ‘dog’ would be an animal,

and would apply metaphorically to other things (of which we would say ‘like a dog’)”

(22). In Tochtli’s world, similarly, immediate designations for many words are lacking,

and metaphors do not exist as such; they appear only literalized. Deleuze and Guattari

find in minor literature an absence of metaphor: “Kafka deliberately kills all metaphor

[...]. Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor. There is no longer any proper sense or

figurative sense, but only a distribution of states that is part of the range of the word”

(22). Essentially, then, metamorphosis literalizes the metaphor. In Kafka, this gives way

to “a becoming that includes the maximum of difference as a difference of intensity”

(22), and in Villalobos too the literalized metaphor prevails. Tochtli grasps only the

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intensity of the metaphors he hears around him, and reterritorializes them in sense, very

literally, while vituperating those that do not:

Al final del reportaje el señor de las noticias se puso muy triste y le deseó a la directora del zoológico que descansara en paz. Qué estúpido. En ese momento ella estaba dentro de la panza de los tigres hecha papilla. Además que sólo se va a quedar ahí mientras los tigres hacen digestión, porque va a terminar convertida en caca de tigre. Descanse en paz, cuernos. Si acaso descansará en paz la pierna izquierda. (34)

Tochtli’s literal understanding of language yields a new scale of intensity in language,

with an often-humorous effect.

Tochtli moreover reveals a particular sensitivity to the Spanish language. Minor

literature tends to express, in a variety of ways, the internal tensions of a language, which

Deleuze and Guattari, borrowing from linguistic theory, term ‘intensives’ or ‘tensors’

(22). In Kafka, they argue, many different marks of poverty of language have been taken

over by a creative utilization for the purpose of a new expression (23). Tochtli’s speech is

replete with such ‘intensives’ or ‘tensors:’ his key words. His often-incorrect use of these

words, placed in new contexts, invests them with a new meaning. Moreover, it helps

create entirely new expressions, inextricably bound with this ‘incorrect use,’ of the child

narrator’s voice.

Whereas Tochtli, in his behavior and discourse, defies the idea of childhood

altogether, the novel does suggest an essence to childhood, which it locates in maternity.

Tochtli’s psychosomatic symptoms (severe stomach aches) could have many causes

(from the violence he witnesses, to social depravation, to his excessive boredom) but the

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doctor diagnoses a lack of motherly love.112 The end of the novel corroborates the

doctor’s diagnosis when Alotl, Yolcaut’s new lover, takes on the maternal function, and

when Tochtli shows himself very receptive to her attention.113 On two different occasions

Tochtli decides to go mute, and especially after the death of the hippos, none of the

adults’ attempts to change his mind are effective. Like the narrator in Balún Canán, for

this child-subaltern silence is the most effective recourse to call attention to himself, by

not making himself heard. Castellanos’s narrator quickly fades into adult oblivion after

her performance of silence, but Villalobos resolves the tension with an ersatz mother:

“De tanto que hablaba Alotl me dio vergüenza seguir siendo mudo” (99). The arrival of a

mother figure awakens in Tochtli a completely new sense of happiness. This affects

Yolcaut as well, who becomes a different man in her presence, one that seems more

capable of feeling and expressing emotion. When all three together watch a film about

Japanese samurai Tochtli introduces a new, positive word into his vocabulary,

‘divertirse:’ “De todas maneras nos divertimos mucho con la película, más que nada en la

parte de las peleas. También en la parte de las pláticas nos divertimos” (101). Even

Yolcaut shares a tender moment with his son, which he expresses the only way he knows

how: by showing him all the ‘empty’ rooms that are filled with a broad range of firearms.

112 “Según Miztli, una vez el doctor le dijo a Yolcaut que en realidad yo no estaba enfermo de la panza, que los dolores eran por no tener mamá, que lo que necesitaba era un doctor de la psicología” (48).

113 The only other time Tochtli mentions his mother, is in the very beginning: “[N]o me la paso llorando por no tener mamá. Se supone que si no tienes mamá debes llorar mucho, litros de lágrimas, diez o doce al día. Pero yo no lloro porque los que lloran son de los maricas” (12-13). On many occasions he has shown, however, that being the macho his father wants him to be requires tremendous willpower, suggesting that he might actually like to cry about not having a mother.

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Tochtli’s final words conclude with a confirmation of the newly discovered familial

bond: “El día de la coronación mi papá y yo haremos una fiesta” (104). He here calls

Yolcaut “papá” for the first time, because his father dislikes the word.114 With his

newfound sense of family, nonetheless, Tochtli lets down his guard, and taps into hitherto

unexplored linguistic areas. Thus, Tochti’s atypical childhood notwithstanding, the

concept of a traditional, nuclear family actually underpins the larger project of Fiesta.

This final narrative twist suggests the novel’s retrospective inscription in the realm of

childhood innocence. In the beginning, Fiesta seems to propose Tochtli as a perverted

child, a boy that wants to be part of his father’s gang and who is training to harden

himself. The end, on the other hand, shows the novel’s larger project of, first, providing

him with a protective linguistic shield, which can later be let down that he can be

reinserted into a nuclear family and start enjoying a carefree childhood.

Positioning the child’s narrative voice

In the introduction I posed the question of the child’s positionality as a way of analyzing,

not so much a particular type of discourse, but the (im)possibility of the child narrator’s

voice in narrative prose. The analyses of the position of the child’s narrative voice, one

that overlaps with her voice as a character, has helped to tease out the conception of

childhood that upholds the novel. In Balún Canán verticality becomes an operative term.

The girl and her witness narrator frame all relationships in the novel hierarchically. The

most important ‘camel’ of the novel, “[m]iro lo que está a mi nivel,” achieves exactly 114 “Yolcaut es mi papá, pero no le gusta que le diga papá” (13).

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that. Moreover, once the perspective shifts to the adults in the second part, the girl falls

out of sight. This particular vertical positionality is one that has the camels step out in

caravanas; verticality here – just like the societal hierarchy the novel critiques – is a

literary construct, intended to foreground the girl’s voice, but that in point of fact loses

her altogether in the second part. She has to resort to silence as a rhetorical device to not

voice her conflicting interests. In Cartucho, contrarily, the voice of the child stands out as

a literary and mnemonic construction, which functions horizontally. The young girl’s

discourse gives rise to the articulation of a collective voice in an attempt to express the

trauma of the Mexican Revolution, while it simultaneously signals the impossibility of

the collective, of community. Fiesta holds a bit of both; verticality is not abandoned

altogether, but the reader and the narrator find themselves on both ends of the hierarchy.

The reader is in a privileged position because s/he has access to knowledge that Tochtli

does not. The reader can see Tochtli as a becoming-child, deterritorializing language, and

picks up on cues about Yolcaut’s involvement in drug trafficking, organized crime and

corruption. Tochtli has a more limited perception; but just like the narrator in Balún

Canán, he employs silence to mount a little rebellion within the palace, one that only

Alotl, a substitute mother, is able to assuage by guiding the boy into a space of childhood

innocence and protection.

Since all literature with a child narrator is actually produced by adults,115 the

situation of the child narrator is starkly different from that of a subaltern writer. In the

introduction to Proceed With Caution Doris Sommer writes: “The question, finally, is not

115 Save exceptional cases such as Het dagboek van Anne Frank, published posthumously in 1947.

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what ‘insiders’ can know as opposed to ‘outsiders’; it is how those positions are being

constructed as incommensurate or conflictive. Even readers who share enough social

space with a writer to claim privileged understanding may too hastily fill in the gaps

these texts would demarcate” (Sommer 8-9). All readers, by virtue of personal

experience, can claim a privileged understanding of the child. Every adult balances

between feeling and acting like an insider and an outsider of childhood. This could

rapidly lead to the illusion that therefore every adult also occupies the privileged position

to interpret the child’s voice. In an analysis of Henry James’s All Masie Knew Kevin Ohi

problematizes the premises of this interpretative faculty:

[T]he positing of a naïveté through which truth might be revealed often relies on the assertion that the naive child does not understand the revelation it makes. The child able to speak the truth because it does not know what it is saying [...] makes necessary the positing of an interpretive faculty (admiring, punitive, indulgent, or whatever) above the child to make the child’s speech comprehensible, to bring knowledge and speech back into alignment. (96)

Ohi analyzes Maisie’s positionality by linking her to the adults around her, who impose a

notion of naïveté onto her discourse. This is similar to what happens in Balún Canán or,

albeit in a different way, in Fiesta. To conclude, I will analyze the speaking position of

the narrator in “Macario,” a story in which such an innocence or naïveté has little part.

The only short story of this chapter, “Macario” is included in the collection El

llano en llamas (1953) by Juan Rulfo (1917-1986). Set in a small town, it presents many

of Rulfo’s well-known themes, such as extreme poverty, small town social dynamics, and

religion. It is also one of only two stories in the collection to be one long monologue,116

uttered by Macario to no one in particular. It does not contain any division into 116 The other story is “Acuérdate.” This monologue is directed to a non-identified “tú,” someone who was a childhood acquaintance of the narrator.

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paragraphs, and only the occasional suspension points. The boy sits next to the sewer,

waiting for the frogs to come out so he can batter them to death; this will allow his

godmother a pleasant night’s sleep. The narrator lives in extreme poverty with his

godmother and Felipa – the former stingy and mean, the latter caring and motherly. To

the adult characters of the story, the narrator presumably called Macario, after the story’s

title, consider him crazy and even dangerous: “Un día inventaron que yo andaba

ahorcando a alguien; que le apreté el pescuezo a una señora nada más por no más” (140),

and his godmother will not let him leave the house without tying his hands together.

Macario does not claim to be innocent of the crimes the townspeople accuse him of, nor

does he seem to care much. He simply states: “Yo no me acuerdo” (140). About his

religious innocence he utters, even more straightforwardly: “Porque yo creo que el día en

que deje de comer me voy a morir, y entonces me iré con toda seguridad derechito al

infierno” (144). His existence is plagued with physical discomfort; the townspeople

throw stones at him, at night scorpions and cockroaches crawl over his body, but what he

really cares about is finding a way to satiate his constant hunger. He finishes the story

with another reference to Felipa: “De lo que más ganas tengo es de volver a probar

algunos tragos de la leche de Felipa, aquella lecha buena y dulce como la miel que le sale

por debajo a las flores del obelisco...” (145). The emblematic image of childhood

innocence, a mother breastfeeding her child, masks a relationship that is not quite so

unequivocal, for Macario is not Felipa’s son, and though his age remains unclear, he is

too old to be nursed.

The image seems to hide a sensuous, quasi-incestuous relationship between

Macario and Felipa. That suggestion transgresses the usual division between childhood

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and adulthood, a demarcation most often defined by sexuality. In his usual polemical

style, James Kincaid writes:

[T]he dividing lines [between adulthood and childhood], like the child itself, was, first of all, constructed, and second, often constructed sexually. Childhood ended with the onset of puberty, of sexuality. Such logic requires that the child be thought of as that which is non-sexual, a conception which seems always to have required some elaborate mental slithering and some brash pseudoscience. (1992: 70)117

Macario certainly displays a child-like, sensuous desire for Felipa. He feels comfortable

when she sleeps in his bed and tickles him all over his body, but he does not recognize

this as sexual desire: her milk merely stills his hunger and thanks to her body heat “yo no

me apuraba por el frío ni de ningún miedo” (141). Although these desires may in fact be

of a libidinal nature, the boy does not recognize them as such.

One question complicates this reading of his child-like desire, sensuous but not

sexual – is Macario really a child? Certain parts of the narration suggest that he is, but

others intimate that he is mentally disabled. Word in the street has it that he is crazy, that

his godmother ties his hands because “dizque luego hago locuras” (140); and he displays

repetitious, obsessive behavior, “[u]no da de topes contra los pilares del corredor horas

enteras y la cabeza no se hace nada, aguanta sin quebrarse” (142). Finally, the fact that

the townspeople throw stones at him whenever they see him, also points to his reputation

117 “Es que somos muy pobres” is another story with a child narrator in El llano en llamas. Interestingly, in that story sexuality too plays a big part, precisely in the sense that Kincaid points out, as a division between childhood and adulthood. The narrator’s two older sisters became prostitutes as soon as their sexuality awakened, and now that the river has taken the other sister’s dowry, a cow, the father fears the same will happen to her. As the girl sits crying, the narrator observes with barely-contained Schadenfreude how her body is nearing puberty: “El sabor a podrido que viene de allá salpica la cara mojada de Tacha y los dos pechitos de ella se mueven de arriba abajo, sin parar, como si de repente comenzaran a hincharse para empezar a trabajar por su perdición” (168).

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as a crazy person. And yet, parts of his narration show remarkable similarity with some

of the techniques of the other texts analyzed in this chapter. Macario literalizes metaphors

in a similar way as Tochtli does in Fiesta. When the priest preaches that “[e]l camino de

las cosas buenas está lleno de luz. El camino de las cosas malas es oscuro” 142), a

terrible fright of darkness overwhelmes Macario: “En seguida que me dan de comer me

encierro en mi cuarto y atranco bien la puerta para que no den conmigo los pecados

mirando que aquello está a oscuras” (143). He also employs the short, apparently

unrelated sentences that reveal a child-like associative logic that appear in several

chapters of Cartucho: “Las ranas son verdes de todo a todo menos en la panza. Los sapos

son negros. También los ojos de mi madrina son negros” (139). In this case, however, it

remains ambiguous whether he connects the black toads and his godmother’s eyes simply

because of the color black, or because the toads remind him of her.

Macario’s story includes one temporal reference, but it is so vague that it does not

resolve the question either: “Ahora ya hace mucho tiempo que no me da a chupar de los

bultos esos que ella tiene donde tenemos solamente las costillas, y de donde le sale,

sabiendo sacarla, una leche mejor que la que nos da mi madrina en el almuerzo de los

domingos” (140-141, my emphasis). How much time “mucho tiempo” covers remains

unspecified and therefore ambiguous. The purpose of the circumlocution with which he

describes something as simple as Felipa’s breasts, a technique he has in common with

Balún Canán’s narrator, lends itself more easily for interpretation: it highlights his

ignorance and, depending on one’s take of the story, it may also underscore his

innocence. Regardless, whether or not Macario is a child, the story at the very least offers

the possibility of reading him as such which makes the constant veiled references to a

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sexual attraction or even relationship between Macario and Felipa so unusual and

unsettling.

* * *

Ultimately, all of the child narrators considered in this chapter occupy very different

positions in relation to the other voices of the narration and their socio-political context.

The narrative voice in “Macario” remains ambiguous, and is directly related to his

position as an outcast in his town. In Cartucho the deliberate constructedness of the

collective voice of the narrator presents a counter-hegemonic story of the Mexican

Revolution that is at once personalized and general, very small yet all-embracing. The

bewilderment and silence with which Balún Canán’s narrator responds to the

implementation of Lázaro Cárdenas’ agrarian reforms signal the unwillingness of the

narrator to provide explanations, a resistance both to denounce her family and to side

with them as they exploit their indigenous workers. Tochtli similarly uses his silence

strategically, as a weapon even. Yet even when he ceases to speak to the adults around

him, he incorporates their voices dialogically into his narration. Whether it is along with

the adults or opposed to them; with innocence or violence savvy; whether they have to

keep quiet to be heard or simply talk to themselves; these four child narrators come

forward to tell the story of turmoil on Mexican soil.

In many ways, the stories they tell could not be more diverse; they differ in terms

of style, length, theme, and time period, for instance. Yet they all take up a position

regarding a socio-political trauma that may best be described as mediation. The rhetoric

of childhood allows the four different authors to craft, first, different discourses of

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childhood and second, the type of infantile discourse that befits their individual literary

and socio-political project. The four narratives analyzed in this chapter indicate that when

a child comes forward to tell a story, it tends to contain trauma, social or political

upheaval, which s/he mediates and regulates by adjusting her voice and its position in the

larger project of the narration in question. The child’s discourse possesses the remarkable

capacity of invoking seemingly universal notions such as innocence, while

simultaneously investing these same concepts with the particular value that the socio-

political context demands. As such, the child’s narration is always unsettling, in an

almost literal sense; the child can dislocate the hegemonic discourse by resorting to her

ignorance, objectivity or directness, or s/he may invoke those notions to mask the

author’s ulterior agenda. The rhetoric of childhood, in the mouths of these child narrators,

is malleable and brings to the fore the (im)possibility of articulating socio-political

traumas.

2. Sensual Presence:

Children Performing Childhood in New Argentine Film

Introduction

In a film shot entirely in black and white, a young girl in a red coat, frightened and

confused, wanders a busy street. On top of a hill a Nazi officer observes how his German

soldiers, on that very street, ravage homes and mercilessly execute groups of adults. He

cannot help but fixate his eyes on the small figure – and neither can the spectator. This

single spot of color, an image from Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Schindler’s List

(1993), hyperbolically underscores the way onscreen children pull the spectator’s eyes

onto themselves, demanding visual attention.1 Yet how does this ‘visual pull’ on the

spectator function, and how can it be understood vis-à-vis the spectator’s (libidinal)

investment in the image? This chapter claims an uneasy alliance between the visual pull

of the child on screen and the erotic charge of the image in three recent Argentine films:

La niña santa, Lucrecia Martel, 2004; El último verano de la Boyita, Julia Solomonoff,

2009; and Entrenamiento elemental para actores, Federico León and Martín Rejtman,

2009. These three films do not stylize and heighten the child’s screen presence in the way

Spielberg does, who dramatizes her innocent presence as a trope for remorse and

redemption. Instead, they explicitly address the child’s onscreen status, through form as

well as content. The films I have chosen put different phases and faces of childhood on

display for the (adult) spectator’s delight, which prompts the question, forthwith, of the

1 The little girl in her red coat is also the critical juncture in the film that awakens Oskar Schindler’s consciousness; her death stands as a metonymy for the millions of other innocent lives that were lost to Nazism.

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adult’s investment in the image. Indeed, the three films all invite readings that relate the

child’s presence to sensuality and sexual identity. I therefore probe the relationship

between the child’s strong screen presence and her performance, and analyze how haptic

visuality channels the libidinal gaze onto the sensuous surface of the image; how

cinematography helps set childhood apart as a space from which to resist heteronormative

sexuality; and how the combination of cinematography and the actor’s screen behavior

may break the spell of the adult’s libidinal gaze.

Presence and performance are closely linked whenever the child appears in the

(moving) image; the child’s segues between these two concepts provide a first

explanation of her visual pull. As Robin Bernstein argues in Racial Innocence (2011), by

merely being present, children engage in a performance childhood, an act of embodiment,

which occurs through “surrogation.” Following Joseph R. Roach, she defines this

particular performance as a process by which “culture reproduces and re-creates itself”

(22). The performing body “stands in for an elusive entity that it is not but that it must

vainly inspire both to embody and to replace” (Roach, qtd. in Bernstein 23), called an

effigy. She further argues, persuasively, that “childhood itself is best understood as a

process of surrogation, an endless attempt to find, fashion and impel substitutes to fill a

void caused by the loss of a half-forgotten original” (24, original emphasis). Since

children are always already involved in the process of performing childhood, when

juvenile bodies are cast in the surrogation of childhood, i.e. when they interpret the role

of a child on screen, they “have the special ability to naturalize childhood, to assert an

essential correspondence between childhood and the young body – that is, to blur any

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distinction between children and childhood” (Bernstein 24).2 Although the juvenile body

is the most common effigy to perform the surrogation of childhood, the possibility of an

alienated fit does exist (24).3 The reverse situation, a juvenile body performing

‘adulthood,’ is less frequent, although there are exceptions. Bernstein notes how a four-

year-old Shirley Temple plays a prostitute in Polly Tix in Washington (Charles Lamont,

1933). This short film, however, highlights how Temple remains, first and foremost, a

child-performing-adulthood. It creates a kind of mise-en-abîme of the effigy surrogating

childhood, while performing adulthood. The charm (or horror, depending on one’s view)

of the short rests, precisely, with the visible fissures between effigy and surrogation.4

Temple’s later career reveals to what extent effigy and surrogation are connected. Even

though she starts interpreting child characters, her earlier performances as miniature adult

‘ghost’ her appearances, in the sense that they linger, affecting aspects of her new roles.5

2 Some directors have experimented with casting, hiring an adult actor to interpret the role of a minor; in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), for example, Werner Herzog casts 40-year-old Bruno S. in the role of adolescent Hauser. Admittedly, this choice spurred a lot of comments and criticism. See Lebeau, 56-69.

3 Bernstein cites the case of Clarence Darrow, attorney for two convicted murderers, who in 1924 convinced the court to imprison rather than execute the two men, referring to the defendants as ‘boys’ and ‘lads’ no less than fourteen times (24).

4 At the start of the short the actors, bare-chested and wearing diapers, hold up signs that read slogans like “A. Clodbuster stands for a full milk bottle!” “A lollypop in every fist!,” thus clearly referencing the childhood of the senator and his constituents. The early Shirley Temple films offer many examples of children surrogating adulthood; for example War Babies (1932) or The Pie-Covered Wagon (1932), both starring Shirley Temple and directed by Charles Lamont.

5 In The Haunted Stage (2001) Marvin Carlson explains the concept of ghosting: from recycled props, rehearsals or other performances of the same play, other roles the same actors have played; all these aspects continue to inflect the current performance, ‘ghosting’ with its (no longer) presence. Ghosting may well be what informed Graham Greene’s writing when he famously criticized Temple’s sensual display, which led to a

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Audiences had gotten to know her as the little seductress, and the anticipation of seeing

her play that part affected her screen presence, even when she no longer interpreted adult

roles.

The Mexican short film that I mention in the introduction of this dissertation, “El

reclamo de los niños incómodos,” shows children surrogating adulthood in a remarkably

different way, without director Lamont’s obligatory tongue-in-cheekness, favoring,

instead, political critique. In this short too, and even more explicitly, the actors are re-

inscribed into the realm of childhood in the final sequence. Hence even in the few films

in which children interpret adult roles, they cannot completely sever ties with childhood.

The spectator’s often-partial differentiation between effigy and surrogation explains why

the actors in the Mexican and Lamont’s shorts continue to appear as children, despite

their adult roles. In other words, audiences read children on screen first as interpreting the

script of childhood and, second, acting the particular role assigned to them by the film

script and director.

The visual pull of the child on screen relates not only to the child as object, but

also as bearer of the gaze. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image Gilles Deleuze posits that with

World War II a new idea of cinema is born.6 Before World War II, he argues, the

libel case and the judge calling Greene’s remarks “a gross outrage” (McDonald 61); see also Lebeau 95.

6 As Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener (2010) point out, Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema was foremost an attempt to overcome the Cartesian division between subject and object; for him the sign does not conceal any hidden meaning (158). The question of the spectator and its relation to the image therefore does not appertain to his philosophical system.

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movement-image dominates the screens,7 characterized by the sensory-motor link that

“corresponds to masculine agency and its gaze because [it] suggests a coordinated,

instrumental, or reified perception, a kind of perception that helps constitute the

privileged specular position of the male” (Fisher 2007b, 30-31). After the war, the time-

image emerges because cinematographic language enters into crisis, and “the post-war

period has greatly increased the situations which we no longer know how to react to, in

spaces which we no longer know how to describe” (Deleuze xi). When cinema

experiences a transition from the active movement-image to a passive time-image, the

character finds itself in “purely optical situations” that “outstrip[] his motor capacities on

all sides” (2-3): the character becomes a spectator.8 The time-image coincides in Italian

neo-realism with the figure of the child; Ladri di biciclette (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) and

Germania anno zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948) are among the first neo-realist

productions in which the child becomes the protagonist, his9 gaze inculpating the actions

of the adults around him.10

7 The movement-image is theorized in Cinema 1. Despite the proposed paradigmatic shift, even after 1945 many (mainly commercial, mainstream) films favor the centrality of the action-image.

8 Fisher comments that “Deleuze’s concept of the child as a naturally weak observer reeks of a constructed discourse about youth as much as any, particularly because children, even in Italian neorealism, are anything but simply weak and passive” (2001, 99). Indeed, in the films that I discuss in this chapter, the observing child is anything but weak. In La niña santa no character seems interested in moving the plot along – in fact, there is very little plot – but the movements that do occur, are mostly instigated by Amalia.

9 The children in these films are all male – thence my use of the male pronoun.

10 The observing child had its precursors, of course. Four years earlier, in 1944, De Sica directed I bambini ci guardano, for example, foregrounding the child’s inculpating gaze in its very title.

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Particularly Martel and, to a lesser extent, Solomonoff present child characters

that actively observe and even spy on the adult world, whereas León and Rejtman’s film

thematizes the act of watching, with the child acting as object as well as bearer of the

gaze. The Deleuzian notion of the time-image and the observing child, as epitomized in

Italian neo-realism, exercises influence on the ‘nuevo cine argentino,’ or ‘New Argentine

film,’11 which the three films of this chapter form part of. As Gonzalo Aguilar has argued

convincingly in Otros mundos (2006), a new type of film emerged in Argentina during

the late nineties.12 Martín Rejtman occupies a special place in shaping the new filmic

order as a precursor, due to his influential film Rapado (1992),13 as well as a contributor

with films such as Silvia Prieto (1999) and Los guantes mágicos (2003).14 The film that

inaugurated, so to speak, this new cinematographic phenomenon was Pizza, birra, faso

(1997), co-directed by Adrián Caetano and Bruno Stagnaro. This film owes a particular

debt to Italian neo-realism, in terms of its negotiation of the ‘real,’ and a series of

procedures such as the sequence shot; mise-en-scene; and elliptical, erratic narration

11 Hereafter referred to as NCA.

12 When Aguilar first published his book, it was still necessary to justify the very use of the term “New Argentine Cinema” – as illustrated by the title of the first chapter “Sobre la existencia del nuevo cine argentino.” As Aguilar argues: “[U]no de los grandes logros de la generación de nuevos cineastas fue imponer la idea de que, en los años noventa, se produjo un corte y una renovación. Es decir, que existe un nuevo cine argentino, lo que no supone aceptar que este fenómeno se haya provocado deliberadamente o como parte de un programa estético común” (13).

13 Aguilar explains that the praise and admiration this film received were due not only to the story the film tells or how it tells it, but also because of how the film was made, i.e. with external funding from the Dutch Hubert Bals Fund (18).

14 Other directors that have contributed with films that helped establish the new Argentine film are, among others, Lucrecia Martel, Lisandro Alonso, Albertina Carri, Ana Katz or Pablo Trapero.

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(Aguilar 57), as well as its use of non-professional actors. In fact, the ‘real’ entered filmic

imaginary with Italian neo-realism, after which André Bazin provided it with the

theoretical justification, and NCA witnesses a ‘return’ to this real (Aguilar 33-39).15 In

general, it offers profuse instances in which the child lends itself to be read as an index,

that is, as an ‘imprint’ of the real.16 It should come as no surprise, then, that the child was

to perform such a crucial part in neo-realism or the NCA.

The NCA can be explained as the confluence of “producción, producción artística

y propuesta estética” (Aguilar 14). In terms of the latter, the different directors associated

with the NCA differ radically. Rejtman’s aesthetic, for example, has as little in common

with Lucrecia Martel’s or Pablo Trapero’s as it has with Julia Solomonoff’s, but the

virtuosity of the composition of their frames is a characteristic they share. Moreover,

these films benefit from funding provided by international film funds, such as the Dutch

Hubert Bals Fund or the French Fond Sud Cinéma; unconventional modes of production

and distribution that sought to avoid the Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales

(INCAA), and to foment alternative forms of cultural expression (i.e. not sponsored by

governmental organizations); and from the technical and aesthetic knowhow of a new

generation of producers and technicians (Aguilar 13-20). During the first years of the new 15 Aguilar argues that the construction of the real in NCA is related to both the role of television and our perception of the real. He quotes Martín Rejtman, who summarizes both of these points: “Esa especie de costumbrismo o de supuesto realismo de buena parte de las ficciones de TV es un poco nociva. En un punto, se convierte en algo más real que la realidad. Por eso, cuando se escucha hablar de otra manera no suena verdadero, cuando para mí lo cierto es que en la vida cotidiana se habla mucho más como en Silvia Prieto que en una comedia de televisión del tipo de Son amores” (37, original emphasis).

16 To cite but a few examples of NCAs with important parts for children: La ciénaga (2001) and La mujer sin cabeza (2008), both by Lucrecia Martel; Un oso rojo (Adrián Caetano, 2002); or Leonera (Pablo Trapero, 2008).

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millennium the epithet ‘nuevo cine argentino’ proved productive to account for the

sudden surge of films that ruptured the national film tradition. About fifteen years after

its first appearance, however, its use as a classificatory category is dubitable, due to the

institutionalization of the new cinema on one hand, and the impulse the INCAA is giving

to a cinema tied to its own institution, on the other.17 Some critics have gone so far as

signaling its end already.18 It is certain, in any case, that the NCA radically altered the

cinematographic horizon, exercising great influence on posterior films, and paving the

way for films such as El último verano.19

The NCA harks back to Italian neo-realism directly, but it also forges a place for

itself in the tradition of Latin American film, and its specific appropriation of Italian neo-

realism. During much of the first half of the twentieth century, only Argentina, Brazil and

Mexico had any cinematographic tradition to speak of.20 During the sixties, the ‘Tercer

Cine,’ as proposed in a four-part essay by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, as well

as the ‘Cine Imperfecto’ of Julio García Espinosa, or Glauber Rocha’s ‘Estética da fome’

and the ‘Cinema Novo’ – often all heaped together under the label ‘New Latin American

17 Thanks to Gonzalo Aguilar for bringing this to my attention.

18 Jaime Pena cites Historias extraordinarias (Mariano Llinás, 2008) as the last film of the NCA.

19 More than the NCA, however, Solomonoff stresses her involvement with the Proyecto de Cine Independiente (PCI). The PCI is a group of about 50 filmmakers that includes Lucía Puenzo, Pablo Giorgelli, Ariel Rotter, Celina Murga, and Rodrigo Moreno. They have no aesthetic dogma or “alignment;” rather, the PCI’s intent is to defend independent filmmaking from development to exhibition, share information and fight for better institutional policies and transparency (Shaw and Martin, n.p.).

20 For a comprehensive history of Latin American cinema see, for example, John King, Magical Reels (2000). The first two chapters deal with the silent era and the sound cinema before ‘new cinema’ (7-65).

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Cinema’ – first take up the legacy of Italian neo-realism. They originate in the epoch of

political upheavals and reform, and need to be understood in that socio-historical context.

Many of its directors are trained in Rome (Fernando Birri and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, for

example), and bring techniques and ideas about cinema back home, putting them to the

service of socialist and revolutionary ideals. NCA severs this direct linkage with a

political ideology; given its appearance in a time of serious economic crisis and neo-

liberalism, leftist utopian ideals no longer seem tenable.21

Following the figure of the child throughout Latin American cinema provides a

fairly comprehensive overview of its movements, and establishes a context for the

children in the films of this chapter. New Latin American film often employs the figure

of the child to denounce extreme poverty and social inequality.22 In the national cinemas

that emerge as a result of flourishing cinemas in the countries with a more established

tradition and larger budgets, the child fulfilled a similar role.23 Argentine national cinema

21 This does not mean that politics disappears from NCA, which has also seen films such as Los rubios (2003), by Albertina Carri. Los rubios is an autobiographical documentary in which she investigates the lives of her parents, two prominent leftist intellectuals who disappeared during the military junta. It does mean, however, that its style is more opaque – Carri was criticized for not taking a more definitive political stand in her film. See Amado (194-197).

22 Two early films of the New Cinema that do just that, are Nelson Pereira dos Santos with the film Rio 40 graus (released in 1956, after having been censored in 1955), and Fernando Birri with the documentary Tire dié (1960).

23 In Chile, for example, iconic directors Miguel Littín and Aldo Francia both make films about children. Littín directs El chacal de Nahueltoro (1969), about the real-life story of an assassin who massacred a mother and her six children who had given him food and shelter; and in 1983 again with Alsino y el cóndor, a co-production with Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico and Costa Rica about a poor young boy who knows no happiness until he joins the Sandinista Revolution. Aldo Francia directs Valparaíso mi amor in 1969, about four children who are, for all matters practical, orphaned when their father is incarcerated for an attempt to steal a cow to feed his family. In all these films the children imbue the narrative with emotional urgency. The child as a tool for emotional enhancement is also a

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is no exception either, with films such as Crónica de un niño solo (Leonardo Favio,

1964) protagonizing the suffering child. In El secuestrador (Leopoldo Torre Nilsson,

1958), on the other hand, an infant ends up as a pig’s meal, and yet another dies at the

hands of the kids who hold him responsible for their little brother’s death.24 In Mexico

Arturo Ripstein offers a highly unusual portrayal of the child in Profundo carmesí (1996),

in which a mother abandons her two children at a convent, to join a man she barely

knows. In all these films and cinematographic traditions, Luis Buñuel’s canonical Los

olvidados (1950) is a constant reference. His child characters are both innocent and

guilty, they fight, lie and seduce, but they also protect and care for each other. Through

the starkly realistic approach combined with a surrealist dream sequence, childhood in

Los olvidados is more complicated than the portrayal of innocence, which it both

reinforces and defies. In what follows I analyze the child’s sensuous and sensual presence

and the way her performance of childhood engages in an affective exchange between

image and spectator.

Sensuality and haptic viewing

In extreme close-up, parts of an arm and torso of two girls appear, out of focus. They are

lying on a table, surrounded by large piles of neatly folded towels. Amalia has her eyes

tightly shut, while she murmurs a prayer, indistinct to the viewer’s perception as well as

that of her friend. It is a delicate yet abundant sensuous input: blurs of an arm, clothes,

staple in many melodramas, for example in the recent Machuca (Andrés Wood, Chile, 2004) or Tarata (Fabrizio Aguilar, Peru, 2009).

24 Other films by Torre Nilsson provide an equally divergent and, sometimes, disturbing look at childhood: La casa del ángel (1957) and La caída (1959).

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towels and faces; murmured prayers and the rhythmic buzz of a sewing machine; and the

sound of Josefina’s voice, imploring Amalia to open her eyes. Before Amalia can do so,

Josefina hesitatingly kisses her friend on the mouth; and then again, more passionately.

Giggling, they roll away from each other. Lucrecia Martel’s La niña santa excels in

scenes like these, in which religious fervor flows over into sexual explorations and desire,

scenes in which the characters shut out sight to favor other senses, particularly touch and

sound. Martel employs haptic imagery to enlarge the presence of her characters in La

niña santa. Consequently, their visual attraction remains in tact, but it appears diverted,

deflected. Martel’s sensuous cinema invites the spectator to join in an erotica of surface

viewing that exists independently of her characters, an erotica that needs not turn her

characters into a spectacle.

La niña santa (2005) is the second film of Martel’s Salta trilogy that, in addition,

consists of La ciénaga (2001) and La mujer sin cabeza (2008), and is the one film that

arguably presents the most conventional narrative.25 Amalia (María Alche) and her friend

Josefina (Julieta Zylberberg), two adolescents, embark on a quest to find their religious

vocation, while they are simultaneously exploring their incipient sexuality.26 When the

hotel where Amalia lives with her mother Helena (Mercedes Morán) hosts a large

medical conference, both explorations converge when she is sexually assaulted by one of

the attendants, Dr. Jano (Carlos Belloso). She confides only in Josefina, because she

25 Lange-Churrión, for instance, states that “[p]erhaps this [La niña santa] is the instalment of the trilogy that comes closer to a conventional narrative” (471).

26 Martel has already explored the superficial interest of a bourgeois family in spirituality in La ciénaga, in which an appearance of the Virgin fascinates everyone, but when Momi (Sofía Bertolotto) goes to see her, she states that she didn’t see anything. See also Forcinito (112-117).

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interprets the accident as her religious calling to save his soul. Overwhelmed with

religious zeal and sexual titillation she starts spying on him and pursues him throughout

the hotel. Meanwhile, her mother has started to develop feelings for Dr. Jano, which she

tentatively acts upon. When Josefina spills the beans about the assault in order to cover

up her own sexual escapades with a cousin, Dr. Jano’s life is about to reach a critical

juncture. The spectator does not find out just how the accusations affect him, or anyone

else for that matter, because La niña santa breaks off right before that moment.

Different critics have pointed to the special place that childhood occupies in

Martel’s cinematographic world.27 In La ciénaga the entire film builds up to Luciano’s

death, and in the same film the children are the only characters not completely numbed to

experience. In La mujer sin cabeza too children play a marginal, but crucial role, as

Verónica (María Onetto) runs over ‘something’ in her car, quite possibly one of the

neighborhood children. In La niña santa this interest in childhood becomes the focus of

attention. Given Amalia’s interest in discovering her religious calling and her subsequent

mission to save Dr. Jano, the holy girl of the film’s title most ostentatiously refers to

her,28 although other holy girls present themselves. The religious school that Amalia and

Josefina attend is full of girls on religious missions, and though their teacher Inés (Mía

Maestro) attempts to thwart and repress any sexual desires (Forcinito 119), she herself

may not always practice what she preaches.29 But the film’s title need not be construed at

27 See Amado (2009, 234-236); Martin (2013b, 145); Sosa (253).

28 In fact, several critics take this for granted, for example Forcinito (121) or Holmes (138).

29 While the opening credits are still rolling, we hear Inés’s voice singing a religious hymn. When she gets to the verse “¿Qué queréis Señor, de mí?” her tears choke her up. Josefina and Amalia, during later classes, exchange rumors about an illicit love affair

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face value, for although Amalia’s mother Helena is neither a girl nor holy, she too may be

referenced by the title. From the outset, the label ‘niña did not apply to either Amalia (an

adolescent) or Helena (an adult), and the film’s careful cinematography (by Félix Monti)

befuddles the concept even further. As Pedro Lange-Churión points out, Helena and her

brother Freddy (Alejandro Urdapilleta) often display so-called childish behavior (475).30

They have little sense of boundaries (they sleep in the same bed, for instance, when the

hotel is fully booked) and Helena provides none for Amalia, who freely roams the hotel.31

Moreover, Helena’s relationship with her loyal employee Mirta (Marta Lubos), shows

more characteristics of a mother-daughter relationship than the one she sustains with her

own daughter – with Helena in the role of daughter.32 She performs her own imagined

with an older man that Inés appears to be engaged in. Inés’s attitude vis-à-vis religious and amorous passion remains ambiguous, though. Her ‘premarital relations’ (as Josefina likes to say) may only exist in the friends’ imagination. Catholic religious passion, moreover, has a long tradition of being expressed as amorous/sexual passion.

30 See also Holmes 139.

31 Although given less importance, among the male characters a similar type of partial role inversion can be observed. Dr. Jano acts hapless and looks uncomfortable in front of Helena, unsure what to do with her (rather clumsy) attempts at seduction, for example when they rehearse the scene for the conference’s closing act. One of the young children of the hotel, on the other hand, looks at Helena with keen interest, as she dances in front of him and his siblings, scarcely-clad, until Mirta interrupts to take the children away (00:47).

32 Mirta upholds the kind of bourgeois morale that Josefina’s mother accuses Helena of lacking as a mother. Mirta is in charge of making decisions in the hotel, even though Helena owns it, and she even manages Helena’s personal life. She continuously reprimands Helena for chasing after Dr. Jano, for he is a married man; and when Helena plays with the other employee’s children in her room, Mirta fetches them and gives Helena a stern look for indulging in this kind of ‘childish’ behavior. Finally, Dr. Jano and Helena have to simulate their mutual interest and attraction because Mirta constantly spies on them.

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version of ‘childhood’ – one in which she attracted Jano long before he was a doctor,33

and in which she was free of any earthly responsibility. Hence, if one takes ‘holy girl’ to

bear on Helena, her holiness manifests itself rather grimly: it appears as the absence (in a

non-absolute sense) of material preoccupation, rather than the presence of religiousness.

It is only befitting that the object of desire of both women is Dr. Jano, whose name

alludes to the two-faced god of Roman mythology, who looks simultaneously to the past

and future. Thus, instead of staging a generational conflict as such,34 Martel stages a

cancellation of generations, one that arguably could be reinstalled when Dr. Jano’s has to

confront his sexual assault on Amalia; that confrontation, nonetheless, does not take place

within the film.

Given these variations on the surrogations of ‘childhood’ by different characters,

how should ‘childhood’ be construed in this film? More than childhood/adolescence

versus adulthood, an argument could be made for the distinction between maturity and

immaturity,35 for the immature need not necessarily be those that are minor in age.36 In

his essay on Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant opens with two definitions: “Enlightenment

is the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority [Unmündigkeit].

Minority is the inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction from

another. This minority is self-incurred when its cause lies not in lack of understanding

33 Dr. Jano tells her that he used to have a crush on her when she was a professional diver, in her teens.

34 This is what Forcinito suggests, for example (114; 119-125).

35 Russell suggests that the film’s sensuality is related to immaturity (n.p.).

36 The German “unmündig,” central to his essay “What is Enlightenment?” has been translated both as “minor” and “immature.”

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but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another” (17,

original emphasis). Following this definition, Helena acts as a minor, since she shows

neither resolution nor interest in using her own understanding without direction from

someone else. Yet, although the Kantian description seems to fit Helena like a glove, a

purely intellectual approach to this film does not even start to exhaust its rich

complexities. The question of spectatorship provides a more productive approach to read

the muddled performances of childhood.37

La niña santa invites the viewer to skirt reason and relate to the image otherwise,

in intimate and embodied forms, through a type of visuality that film theorists of

phenomenology such as Laura Marks have termed ‘haptic visuality.’38 In her analysis of

La ciénaga, Ana Amado notes: “Hay un estado de experiencia en su relación con el

mundo y las cosas, colocadas entre la potencia táctil y olfativa de los chicos – que

deviene una manera de sobrevivir – diferente a la de la existencia embotada de los

adultos. Allí donde estos establecen un corte radical con el entorno [...], los niños reponen

una relación con el mundo, con el afuera, con los semejantes, con el otro” (234). Her

description of the way these children relate to the world resonates with the way Lacanian

37 I use ‘read’ here in its most encompassing definition; Martel involves her spectators in the blur of childhood through myriad images (haptic and otherwise) that invite the spectator to relate to the film not just through sight and intellect, but also through sensuous and embodied means.

38 Art historian Alois Riegel coined the term ‘haptic,’ while Noël Burch adapted it to cinema. See Marks 2002, 7-8; Elsaesser and Hagen, 125. In my analysis of the haptic in this section I draw mainly from Laura Marks’s two books on the subject; The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (2000) and Touch: sensuous theory and multisensory media (2002). Other film theorists who have contributed substantially to phenomenology in film are Vivian Sobchack (The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, 1992) and Mary Ann Doane (The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, 2002).

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psychoanalysis construes the relationship of the pre-mirror infant.39 Theories of

embodied spectatorship counter theories of representation rooted in the alienation of the

visuality from the body, which is essentially what happens after the Lacanian mirror

phase. Haptic visuality recreates a sensory experience that is akin to the infant’s.40

The optical visuality of most narrative films41 relies on the ability of the spectator

to visually ‘master’ the images – to render them (more or less) intelligible and to provide

interpretations – and thus necessitates a critical distance between viewer and image.

Haptic imagery provides a critique of this illusion of visual plenitude42 and the mastery it

implies.43 Marks explains: “Haptic visuality is distinguished from optical visuality, which

sees things from enough distance to perceive them as distinct forms in deep space: in

other words, how we usually conceive of vision” (2002, 162). Both types of visuality,

however, do not radically oppose one another. Rather, the difference is one of degree.44

39 In chapter 3, “An Impossible Meeting in Oblivion: Infancy and Poetry,” I explore the relationship child-world-language in detail in poetic works by Huidobro, Girondo and Vallejo.

40 Sense experience is often treated as pre-discursive, but it does not have to be: “[W]hile much of sensory experience is pre-symbolic, it is still cultivated, that is, learned, at the level of the body” (Marks 2000, 145).

41 Narrative fiction, as well as narrative non-fiction, predominantly displays optical visuality.

42 Marks: “[H]aptic images refuse visual plenitude” (2000, 177).

43 For a succinct overview of haptic versus optical visuality, see Ríos 9-11.

44 See for example Marks’s analysis of works by Yasmine Khlat, a Lebanese video artist: “The difference between the narrative Leylouna notre nuit and the experimental I Wet My Hands... is one of degree. The former gives a sense of what the women of Beirut suffered (in the senses both of undergoing pain and of having experience) during the years of the Israeli shelling through narrative, more than through appeals to sensory experience. The latter evokes the suffering by embodying it in the image” (158-159).

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An otherwise conventional film, moreover, may well include a few haptic images or

incorporate sensory explorations from experimental cinema.45 Due to commercial

cinema’s constraints, however, haptic visuality is much more likely to appear in formally

experimental film. It brings vision as close as possible to the image, which appears in

extreme-close up and out of focus, so that the eyes take on the function as organs of

touch, so to speak. It is preoccupied with surfaces, rather than the illusion of depth that

optical visuality presents. Since the body perceives touch through the skin, we associate

the tactile with closeness, so it is understandable that so much of haptic visuality depends

on extreme close-ups. Other ways to withhold images from optical visuality and create

texture, include the layering of different images; enlarging the grain; or speeding up

footage.

Despite its interest in the senses of touch, taste and smell, haptic visuality is a

cinematographic exploration within the restraints of vision. That is to say, it does not

experiment with the injection of smell into the auditorium, for example,46 but rather seeks

to activate the viewer’s own sensuous memory. To a certain extent, therefore, response to

haptic visuality will remain historically, culturally and even personally determined. Due

to the difficulty to discern exactly what they show, these images beg to appreciated and

perceived differently, with an embodied response. In Martel’s body of work, formally

innovative and experimental, all senses contribute to the constitution of a multilayered 45 See Marks 2000, xii-xiii.

46 Technology has experimented with the incorporation of smell into the cinema-going experience. In 2000 a software company named “DigiScents” was beta-testing its iSmell platform to deliver odors in interactive media. Despite its ‘Best New Technology’ award, in 1999, by April 2001 the company had closed its doors for good. Marks argues that the value of smell is its materiality, which makes it inherently resistant to instrumental uses like those of DigiScents (2002, 113-115).

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image, with a particular emphasis on sound. Hugo Ríos observes: “En [La niña santa]

destaca la manera en que Martel se acerca a los espacios y los puebla con una textura y

un campo sensorial saturado” (11). Her films effectively employ a form of haptic

visuality, in which the senses carry a formal as well as a narrative function. In La niña

santa Martel often eliminates her characters’ sense of sight, by having them close or

cover their eyes, which allows the characters to focus on and intensify the experience of

touch and sound.

In the sequence I describe at the opening of this section, Amalia lies on a table in

the hotel’s laundry room, with her eyes closed. The sounds are multilayered – Amalia

herself prays, sewing machines roll, Josefina talks, and the servants work and move

around in the background. When Josefina suddenly kisses her, the sensation of touch is so

strong, in part because she had her eyes closed.47 The two friends play continuously with

the different senses. They are fascinated with the sensuality and sexual allure of touch,

but also explore the intensity of sight after its absence. Amalia closes her eyes repeatedly

throughout the film (00:19; 01:18; 01:32;), and the first time this occurs, Josefina asks her

what she sees after she reopens them: “Veo distinto... lo blanco mucho más blanco”

(00:20).48 This game is later intensified, when she plays with the other children of the

hotel at keeping their breath under water – darkness is intensified by the absence of

47 Both friends repeat this way of intensifying the perception of touch through the exclusion of other senses. In both sexual encounters with her cousin, Josefina begs him not to say anything, while she closes her eyes; and in the masturbation sequence, Amalia shuts off the radio before getting into bed, covering her head with a pillow.

48 Smell is less prominent in the film, but Amalia does treasure it as a way of getting closer to ‘experiencing’ Dr. Jano. She sneaks into his hotel room, steals some of his shaving cream and put it on the collar of her shirt. Later, as she watches him in the dining hall, she sniffs her shirt .

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oxygen, transforming it into a sensuous darkness.49 Whereas the characters enlarge the

other senses by not seeing, the viewer becomes enveloped in a sensory experience of

sound and touch, made possible precisely by the haptic qualities of vision. When in the

laundry scene Amalia’s arms and torso appear in close up and out of focus, the sequence

does not directly invite a tactile response to the image. Rather, the spectator starts to

experience the scene from Amalia’s aural perspective, taking in the different sounds that

occur without differentiation.

One scene captures both haptic visuality and aurality particularly well. Amalia has

started to pursue Dr. Jano, and spies on him near the pool. Filmed from the opposite side

of an opaque tarpaulin, her fingers appear in extreme-close up, running along the surface

that fills the rest of the frame. The viewer cannot yet ascertain what s/he is looking at,

other than the hand, while taking in the sounds, ever so slight, that the material produces

as it moves under the light pressure of the fingers. When Amalia reaches the end of the

canvas, she peeks her head around the pole, and precisely one half of her face, intersected

vertically, appears in sharp focus.50 Martel then cuts to Dr. Jano, who is relaxing in the

water, but suddenly becomes aware of Amalia’s presence – or perceives the sound she

makes as she softly knocks the rings of the tarpaulin against the pole. The effect of this

brief sequence is remarkable. As it highlights sounds so subtle that they would normally

go unnoticed, the viewer haptically engages with the material, ‘touching’ the tarpaulin, 49 The closing act of the conference illustrates this separation of the senses. Dr. Jano and Helena act out a scene between doctor and patient in which Helena’s hearing is transformed into a visual spectacle (one that is withheld from the spectator’s view, nonetheless).

50 Her face, cut vertically in half by the pole, shows remarkable similarity with a poster in a copy shop, which shows half a face drawn in a cubistic style against a yellow background (01:05).

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and marveling at the play of sounds. S/he moreover shares Dr. Jano’s confusion and

incipient worry, as he notices he is being observed, as well as Amalia’s faint pleasure

when she perceives his disturbance.

When sound is so multilayered as it is, for instance, in the sequence in which

Amalia and Josefina lie in the laundry room, it may be referred to as ‘haptic hearing:’

“that usually brief moment when all sounds present themselves to us undifferentiated,

before we make the choice of which sounds are most important to attend to” (Marks

2000, 183). It occurs frequently in La niña santa, for example when Amalia and Josefina

study at the latter’s home, and dialogue occurs between many different interlocutors at

the same time, and none is singled out as more relevant than the others (1:09). According

to Aguilar, this type of dialogue is actually quite typical of the NCA: “Los diálogos no

son sólo lo que los personajes se dicen, sino una tonalidad, un ruido o una musicalidad

que recorre transversalmente las historias” (95). That is to say, human voices serve as yet

another component of the total creation of sound, to which they are not necessarily, or at

least not always, superior. Martel furthermore creates haptic sound by working the other

way around; she creates aural close-ups that enlarge sound so much that its effect is

alienating, and it becomes difficult to discern what the sound is, or where its origin lies.

Aural close-ups may also aid to convey subjective sound, as when Helena climbs out of

the swimming pool because an inner-ear infection causes her to hear a high-pitched

sound.51 It can foreground a particular sound, furthermore, in a way normally

51 See Dominique Russell’s insightful piece on sound in Martel (2008, n.p.) for a precise description of how Martel describes in sound how Helena’s hearing slowly returns.

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unachievable by human hearing. When the soft, unfamiliar music of the theremin player52

interrupts a religious lesson, its sound reaches everyone, but the girls look into many

different directions in their attempt to locate its source. In fact, sound is not inherently

spatial,53 which resonates strongly in an interrupted session on God’s calling, which can

be anything and, therefore, anywhere.

Martel’s sensuous cinema serves not only to evoke the other senses through

vision; one particularly striking sequence in her subsequent film shows how she is even

capable to reverse this process. In La mujer sin cabeza Martel imbues the images with a

political charge that is much more poignant than in her first two features.54 Cecilia Sosa

argues that the film “countersigns” the memorial films about the disappeared, by

proposing “a hallucinatory experience of immersion within the affects of guilt, complicity

and denial” (250). In the long opening sequence that precedes the opening titles, a

middle-aged bourgeois lady, Verónica, hits ‘something’ with her car – a dog or a child,

she does not leave her car to find out55 – and is haunted by its specter throughout the film.

52 The theremin player manipulates electronic waves with his hands, thus making it seem like he plays ‘nothing.’ See Homes (141) and Russell (n.p.) for explanations of the instrument.

53 Jonathan Rée comments: “Although you may cup an ear with your hand [...] hearing is not intrinsically spatial; there is no auditory ‘field’ to compare to the visual one” (qtd. in Russell, n.p.).

54 See Cecilia Sosa (2009) for a suggestive interpretation of the ways in which the film, through its formal experimentations and (scant) narrative, provides a reflection on Argentine mourning of the ‘disappeared’ during the Dirty War (1976-1983).

55 The film remains ambiguous on the matter, but suggests rather strongly that she hits a child. The first images of the film show three indigenous kids playing on the same highway where the accident happens; and one of those three children ‘disappears.’ When Vero returns to the scene with her husband, he exits the car alone, and upon return informs her that she hit a dog. He does, however, proceed to erase all traces of his wife’s involvement in the accident.

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After she hits ‘it,’ she stops the car and, trembling, tries to decide on a course of action.

She peeks into the side mirror, but the viewer is deprived of the satisfaction of a point-of-

view shot. As she drives away, the imprint of tiny hands becomes visible on her door

window. Presumably, one of her friends’ children is responsible for those when they

played in her car, right before she left. More importantly, though, they are subtle and

tremendously uncomfortable reminders of whom she has just run over. These little hands

point at her, inculpate her, and drive her crazy; after driving on for a little while, she

abandons the car, and is unable to make sense of the world for several days. As Sosa puts

it, “[t]hese are hands that request responsibility, hands without a face” (Sosa 253). If in

La niña santa the eyes obtain qualities of touch, in this sequence the dead boy’s eyes

pierce through the touch of the hand.56 Touch in La mujer sin cabeza has become vision,

and grants visibility upon the disappeared, who cannot be seen, but much less ignored.57

Many critics58 have remarked on the refreshingly new outlook on feminism that

Martel’s cinema displays. It does not rely on a narrative treatment of feminism that one

observes in Argentine cinema from the eighties, for instance,59 but on a radical

reconceptualization of feminist cinema. As Russell argues: “Neither La ciénaga nor La

niña santa is overtly feminist in the ways we’ve come to expect. Rather, refusing the

56 Upon close re-view of the sequence, this seems to be almost literally true. The reflection of Vero’s hands on the driving wheel create two black spots behind the little hands that seem almost like a skull.

57 Obviously, the viewer has the option of ignoring the subtext. As Sosa argues: “Of course, the piece also offers the option of responding through refusal or denial. But the film sets its own conditions: in its context silence means complicity and ultimately to remain captured in the old machinery of guilt” (259).

58 See Russell; Forcinito; Ríos.

59 For example: María Luisa Bemberg with Camila (1984) or Yo, la peor de todas (1990).

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gendering and hierarchy of sound and image, they quietly assert a whole other way of

seeing – and listening” (n.p.). I argue that this ‘whole other way of seeing’ is at least as

important regarding the minor (unmündige) characters – especially those that are

interpreted by juvenile bodies. The innovative ways of seeing, listening, touching and

experiencing that Martel’s cinema puts forth also questions knowledge, the ways one

obtains knowledge, and how certain types of knowledge relate to discourses of power and

privilege.

Through its haptic visuality and aurality, at the diegetic level La niña santa

evokes another sense, a ‘sixth sense,’ if you will, that captures the conflation of religious,

sexual, sensual and sensuous feelings that Amalia and Josefina yearn for. Ana Amado

observes: “La inercia de los cuerpos en lo privado, la intensidad de las sensaciones

táctiles y sonoras sobre lo visual (materias húmedas, olores, texturas ásperas), organizan

un circuito sofocante y detenido en el tiempo desde parámetros plásticos y narrativos”

(2009, 47). Indeed, time in this film seems almost halted (only the medical conference in

the hotel provides any indicator of the passage of time), which contributes to exalting the

sixth sense, encompassing the friends’ desire for religious purpose and eroticism. It

expresses an immaterial desire that is, nonetheless, often tangibly present in their lives. It

materializes in their erotic experiences, but there are other instances as well, especially

where it regards Amalia. Right after the incident in which a naked man falls from a

balcony and survives (00:39), an episode Amalia qualifies as a ‘miracle,’ she walks into

her room to find her mother sleeping. Amalia’s hand hovers closely over Helena’s back,

but it never touches her. Nevertheless, Helena suddenly awakes, gasping for breath,

reacting as if the touch had, in fact, occurred. Later, Amalia spies on Dr. Jano, who wakes

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up exactly the same way (01:19). She uses the hotel’s master key to open his room,

cracks the door open to stare at the sleeping body, and finally steps inside. Martel then

cuts to a medium shot of Dr. Jano, whose torso is draped over the mattress, until he

suddenly wakes up with a startle. From his reaction it becomes apparent that, just like

Helena, his sudden awakening is related to her presence and fixating eyes, even though

she has left and no longer shares the same physical space with him. Ostensibly, her

presence is powerful enough to transcend the need for direct physical contact.

While the layered soundtrack and haptic visuality creates a sort of sixth sense for

the characters, it simultaneously invites the viewer to engage sensually with the film.

Haptic visuality is able to confer an erotic charge to the image that is completely

independent of its content, as it moves eroticism from what is being shown to the surface

of the image (Marks 2000, 185). For that very reason, they are particularly apt for

suggesting eroticism in films with child characters, since they do not depend on the

depicted body for their erotic allure. In a way, haptic visuality liberates the image of the

child from its indexical value. It does not capitalize on the representation depicted, but on

the texture of the image’s surface and the (sensuous) memory it invokes. In visual erotics

(e.g. voyeurism) the object of desire remains distant, while by engaging with an object

haptically, one loses oneself in the “intensified relation with another that cannot be

possessed” (Marks 2000, 184). Martel is thus able to deflect the libidinal charge of the

gaze onto the surface of the image – whether that be an arm, bed sheets, or the sound of a

tarpaulin softly ticking against a pole. Indeed, sound too plays an important part in the

creation of this surface-eroticism. Jonathan Rée argues: “Hearing does not presume as

much as vision. It is not so arrogant, and it is willing to refer its experiences to

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evanescent qualities without insisting, as sight does, that they have to be tethered

unambiguously to definite things in the material world” (qtd. in Russell, n.p.). Sound

therefore contributes to the veering from indexicality that is at the core of the child’s

visual pull. Martel creates a highly sensual, sensuous and erotic cinema that includes

children, severing the linkage between eroticism and the content of the image. The usual

libidinal charge of the dominant gaze of the spectator is therefore dislocated, and now

finds its pleasure in the evocation of sense, touch, sound and smell – sensual and

sensuous experiences rather than the illusion of visual plenitude.

Childhood as refuge from gender performance

A girl in a pink-flowered nightgown walks out into a room that is being packed up,

nosing about. She puts a stethoscope to her chest and rummages through a box. She then

furtively picks up a book and, after ascertaining that the coast is clear, clasps it to her

chest and carries it to her room. The next shot shows the girl’s face in close-up,

completely absorbed by the book. She lies on her bed, surrounded by colorful toys. The

reading that has her so intrigued is an old-fashioned biology book that shows sexual

maturation of the female body in a series of drawings titled “cronología de la evolución

feminina” (00:04).

The girl is Jorgelina (Guadalupe Alonso), one of the two protagonists of El último

verano de La Boyita (2009),60 written and directed by Argentine Julia Solomonoff.61 The

60 Hereafter referred to as El último verano.

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other protagonist is Jorgelina’s friend Mario (Nicolás Treise), a young farm hand. The

anatomy book comes to play a pivotal role in the film, which centers on the two friends’

attempt to understand the (imminent) changes of their bodies, on the verge of abandoning

childhood. Jorgelina feels estranged from her sister Luciana (María Clara Merendino),

who has just entered adolescence and has started to claim the right of privacy in the

bathroom, and prefers the company of her friend to that of her little sister. Jorgelina

therefore decides to spend the summer with her father (Gabo Correa), a doctor, in Entre

Ríos, the Argentinean countryside. There she meets up with Mario, her friend who works

the land with his father, and is training for the local horse races. One day, Jorgelina

discovers blood on Mario’s saddle and pants. Fearing for Mario’s health, she asks her

father to examine him. As it turns out, Mario is not sick, but menstruating. Although the

most readily available reading of the film is one about Mario’s discovery of his

intersexuality, a subtly veiled subplot reveals that Jorgelina struggles with some gender

issues of her own. When Mario whispers into Jorgelina’s ear what he has found out about

his “abnormal” genitalia, she responds: “Yo tampoco soy muy normal” (00:42).

Mario’s ambiguous biological characteristics complicate his masculinity, whereas

Jorgelina seems not to feel at ease with the restrictive femininity assigned to her gender.

In this section I analyze the contested relationship of both friends to their queer gender

and (gender) identities. It is my contention that the film negotiates these issues by

interpellating the concept of innocent childhood in two opposing, yet complementary

ways. First, it serves to instill a notion of heteronormativity, which in and of itself

61 The director has explained that the film’s plot is a combination of, first, a story she overheard her gynocologist mother tell, about an individual who had had a sex change (Shaw and Martin, n.p.).

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contains a contradiction; innocent childhood assumes ‘queerness’ to be an adult category

because the child is asexual, while it also presumes every child to be straight (Stockton

6). Secondly Jorgelina, aided by the film’s cinematography, performs childhood to play

up her innocence and childish ignorance to shield both herself and Mario from the

normativizing gender discourse that the adults deploy in the film.

Thematically, an important point of reference within contemporary Argentine film

is Lucía Puenzo’s XXY (2007). Puenzo’s film tells the story of intersexual Alex (Inés

Efron), who has the Klinefelter syndrome, meaning that she has two x-chromosomes and

one y-chromosome.62 In XXY intersexuality functions as the explicit thematic focus of the

film, starting with the title and encompassing the entire narrative. XXY reads gender

mostly on the body’s surface, and accordingly, Alex’s body is constantly on display (in

the shower, in the ocean or in bed).63 Nevertheless, the one body part that distinguishes

her, i.e. her penis, is carefully hidden from view. In doing so, the film transforms the

vision of Alex’s penis into its fetish. The narrative too supports this fetish; a group of

boys assaults her, exposing her genitalia to ‘confirm’ her gender identity, and even Alex

herself ascribes to the rhetoric in which seeing her penis equals ‘knowing’ her identity in

the final sequence, in which she voluntarily exposes herself to Álvaro.64 Thus, despite

Alex’s parents’ insistence on their daughter’s normalcy, the film’s formal workings as

well as its narrative do not escape society’s tendency to see intersexuals as abnormal. In 62 Anne Fausto Sterling explains that the Klinefelter syndrome is a form of gonadal dysgenesis that causes infertility, and after puberty often leads to breast enlargement (52).

63 Even the hormones Alex takes are directly linked to outward bodily features: she tells Álvaro that she takes them to prevent growing a beard.

64 Interestingly, Álvaro (Martín Piroyansky) is the only person who does not want to see it.

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El último verano intersexuality is more subdued, and rather than having the phallus take

center stage, in Solomonoff’s film intersexuality questions Mario’s right to masculinity,

and thereby raises issues of gender, and sexual or gender identification.65

El último verano opens with Mario in a typical gaucho scene.66 Mario, himself a

farm hand, lives in a decidedly masculine environment with the other workers, one that

owes much to traditional gaucho culture, for example in the centrality of horses in their

lives. To be taken seriously by the other men, dexterity with horses is crucial, and in the

first scene, Mario actually participates in taming one. Right away, the film thus

establishes a social context in which masculinity is almost hyperbolical. Furthermore,

Mario is training for the local horse races, a sort of test of his masculinity. For Mario to

win the competition would constitute his legitimization as a man in town. Similarly

traditional, women are strictly relegated to the domestic sphere, and apart from Mario’s

mother, Elba (Mirella Pascual), the only other townspeople that appear in the film are

men or children.67 The film’s mise-en-scene reinforces this point: Elba appears either in

65 Solomonoff has remarked that the condition that Mario suffers is CAH (Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia), caused by two recessive genes, and more common in more endogamic or closed communities such as the one he lives in (Shaw and Martin, n.p.). This condition, however, is never explicitly stated – quite the contrary, the film makes a point of not identifying what ‘condition’ he ‘suffers’ from, in its efforts to de-pathologize his gender, biologically and performative. Given the information that the film does provide (i.e. two different gender identifications by medical professionals, socialization as a boy, female genitalia) I take his condition to be ‘intersex.’

66 There are many screen versions of the gaucho, but the most well known gaucho emerges from José Hernández’s two epic poems about Martín Fierro (1872 and 1879), both of which have been adapted to film. See for example Leopoldo Torre Nilsson’s Martín Fierro (1968). For analyses screen gauchos, see Pablo Martínez Gramuglia, (2006); for early cinematic manifestations of the gaucho see Matt Losada, (2012).

67 During the scene of the horse races, there are a few women in the audience, but even then, the camera only focuses on the men (betting money on the horsemen), the children (cheering), and Elba (searching for Mario).

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the back yard or in her kitchen, and Jorgelina often appears positioned behind the gate

that separates her from Mario and the other men. In this tight-knit community, the

feminine-domestic sphere is not to interfere with the masculine-public and, presumably

for this reason, Elba has serious misgivings about the amount of time her son spends with

Jorgelina. Although he is still young, having left school recently, he is now participating

fully in adult masculine life, and the parents attempt to separate the two friends.

There is no doubt that Mario identifies completely as a boy, and that his

community accepts him as such. All the cultural markers, what Suzanne Kessler has

called the “cultural genitals,” identify him as male (Fausto-Sterling 110); he dresses in

boy’s clothes, responds to a male name, works the land with the other men and has

already gained some local fame as an extraordinary horseman. When confronted with

Mario’s strange bleedings, his parents take him to see a doctor, but they never share the

results of the tests with him. Mario, nonetheless, develops a sense of shame, and realizes

he is different. He moves out of his parents’ house and creates a place for himself in their

garage, where he places his bed. Moreover, he starts to bind his breasts, and secretly

washes his bloodstained clothes.68 And yet, none of these unusual occurrences interfere

with his gender identification; his worry concerns his body only.

When Jorgelina notices that Mario’s body is a source of confusion to him, she

avails him of one of her father’s anatomy books. With every diagram and photograph he

watches, his nervousness grows more apparent, until he decides to confront the situation. 68 Breast-binding is not only a practice to hide secondary gender characteristics; the film industry has used it to mask adolescence or even womanhood. Warner Brothers, for example, wanted Shirley Temple for the role of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), but she was unavailable. Physically, Judy Garland already appeared a young woman, so they decided to bind her breasts, bread her hair, and craft her appearance to conform to that of a young(er) child (Aylesworth).

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Filmed from a low angle in a medium shot, Mario starts to slowly unbutton his shirt. The

camera movements, ever so slight, contribute to a sense of tension, as Mario is about to

compare his genitalia to the pictures. A cut to Mario framed from behind in close-up,

shows him opening up his pants and reaching down. Solomonoff then cuts to an extreme

close-up of a hole in the ground, outside. This less-than-subtle juxtaposition of frames

provides the visual confirmation of the existence of Mario’s vagina. What follows is a

sequence of great intimacy between the two friends. In a long traveling shot, Mario and

Jorgelina stroll while discussing Mario’s discovery of his non-conforming body, which is

not “como en las fotos” (00:42). Although Mario feels visibly embarrassed about his

abnormal body, Jorgelina comforts him.

The anatomy book provides Mario with a first, preliminary clarification about his

biological sex, but it does not resolve how he can (much less should, according to his

community’s strict gender binary) function socially with his non-conforming body.

Mario, however, does not immediately connect his biological characteristics to his gender

performance. Despite his realization that he is physically different from the other men, he

continues to identify as male; it is how he has been raised and socialized, and he feels

comfortable with his masculinity. The adults, on the other hand, cannot assimilate these

changes quite so easily. His masculinity, to which he was “naturally” entitled in his

childhood, may now be challenged. Indeed, his parents are unable to dissociate Mario’s

ambiguous biological gender from his social gender performance. When he is born, his

intersexuality shows no easily legible signs, apart from his undersized penis/oversized

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clitoris,69 which the doctor identifies as penis and which, so he assures the parents, will

grow (00:56).70 Since Mario is perfectly healthy, and since a boy can prove his economic

worth to the family by working the land, they choose to ignore the issue altogether.

With the imminence of adolescence, however, the concern resurfaces with

particular urgency. It first manifests itself first as the unidentified menstrual pains, which

pose the question of Mario’s gender in medical terms. After examining the boy,

Jorgelina’s father confronts the parents with the “truth” of Mario’s body, articulating a

discourse of medical reason and pathology. As Judith Halberstam notes: “[G]ender is

always a rough match between bodies and subjectivities; when and where that mismatch

shows itself, we tend to talk about pathology” (1998, 126). 71 I have put the word truth in

quotation marks to indicate the contested nature of its claim. Over the course of the

twentieth century people of mixed sex “all but disappeared out of medical history, not

because they had become rarer, but because scientific methods classified them out of

existence” (Fausto-Sterling 39). This also entails the medical world striving to correct

those bodies to neatly fit into the binary, to constitute them as either male or female,

resorting to hormonal therapy or surgery. Yet, as Fausto-Sterling has shown, the criteria 69 For the arbitrariness with which intersexuality is determined according to the size of the penis/clitoris, see figure 3.4 in Fausto-Sterling, 59.

70 For a long time, surgeons responsible for assigning the intersex child’s sex believed it was very important that the parents ‘believe’ in the child’s assigned sex. For this reason they would often tell the parents half-truths (Fausto-Sterling, 63-64). Although Fausto-Sterling’s research is based on North American medical history, something similar seems to be happening with Mario. The doctor chooses Mario’s sex and reassures the parents of his masculinity, ignoring other, evident, outward signs of female genitalia.

71 In fact, the doctor says that the hospital made a “mistake” when Mario was born and that Mario should see “specialists” to see what kind of “treatments” can be done – he never explains why, or to what effect all these treatments are necessary, other than the biological normalization of Mario.

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used in determining sex and, as a matter of fact, choosing to make the determination at

all, are social decisions for which the scientist can offer no absolute guidelines (5).72 The

opinion of Jorgelina’s father will therefore be inevitably informed by the social

conventions of gender. As he investigates Mario’s pelvic area, his distressed face is

shown in close-up, and contrasted by a reverse close-up of Mario’s worried expression

(00:55). The doctor does not answer Mario’s straightforward question “¿Qué tengo?”

(00:56), telling him merely that some tests may be necessary.73 Instead, he hurries to talk

to Mario’s mother, Elba, to share his discovery that Mario “is” a girl. He urges Elba to

talk to her husband as soon as possible, “por Mario” (01:00). In this adult’s opinion, the

fact that Mario could live as a man in a body with outward female genitalia is quite

literally unthinkable.74

Mario’s parents, and particularly his father, radically alter their behavior toward

their son, whom they now consider to be their daughter. Their drastic change in behavior

lays bare the different aspects that socially constitute masculinity in the town,75

culminating in the sale of Mario’s horse Yayo; the race is between men. The film’s mise-

72 In her book, Fausto-Sterling shows how scientific discourse works with underlying, often subconscious assumptions about the gender binary. She disputes the existence of a clear binary in terms of genitalia; the sexed brain; sex glands; hormones; and gendered chemistry.

73 The film leaves the matter ambiguous; although Mario is aware that he is “not normal,” neither one of the doctors that examines him, nor his parents explain his biological situation to him. The spectator, therefore, equally remains in the unknown.

74 La niña santa also presents a case of how medical discourse reinforces gender normativity. When of Helena is examined by Dr. Jano for her inner ear disfunction, “the gender hierarchy is re-established” (Russell, n.p.). Dr. Jano is in a superior position because he has the knowledge of her illness (tinnitus), which he does not share with her.

75 Mario can no longer work the land, his father does not let him lift any heavy items, and he is not allowed to join the men at the local bar.

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en-scene corroborates Mario’s involuntary gender re-assignment. After he has been

medically labeled as female, the film aligns Mario with his mother. Elba’s screen time

with Mario increases significantly, and she becomes more openly affectionate towards

him.76 The position of the parents exemplifies the hold of the medical world over issues

of intersexuality. Jorgelina’s father and the obstetrician assess the same body in the

opposite way, and in both cases the parents accept the authority of the medical discourse

without question. They fail to recognize that this very discourse is the result of gender as

a social construction, and take it as an essentialist truth. They cannot conceive of any

options outside of the gender binary, even though the fact that two doctors can make

opposing claims about Mario’s biological gender, suggest that he is quite literally inter-

sexual.

Mario himself may be confused about his body, but not about his masculinity.

The film demonstrates this with another hyperbolic gesture: on the day of the races, he

bluntly steals back his horse Yayo, competes against four-time-winner Claudio, and wins.

In this rural community, winning is the most effective way of asserting his masculinity.

When Mario competes in the races he performs his gender – not as a choice, nor as a

theatrical performance, but as his only possible identity. Judith Butler points to a

prevailing tendency to think of sexuality as either constructed (and thus in some sense

free) or determined (and thus in some sense fixed). She argues that “[t]hese oppositions

do not describe the complexity of what is at stake in any effort to take account of the

conditions under which sex and sexuality are assumed. The ‘performative’ dimension of

construction is precisely the forced reiterarion of norms” (2011, 59). Mario is not free to 76 She tries to comfort him after his father beats him up, and goes looking for him when he runs away from home.

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choose his gender, and when he participates in the race, it is because he has been

socialized as male. Since it is the first time he partakes of the race, it constitutes a sort of

rite of initiation for him, one that he performs not by free will, but because he feels he has

no choice.77 When Mario beats the town’s local macho guy, the film literalizes the

performative dimension of masculinity. His body is gender-defiant, but it best endures the

test of masculine performance, one that is performed in front of an audience that validates

it.78 Accordingly, one cannot speak of Mario as “passing as a man,” in this case, since

Mario truly has no other identity.

There is one instant, however, in which gender performance does become an act:

a playful act of cross-dressing (00:46). Mario and Jorgelina are readying themselves for

the carnival parade in Gualeguaychú when two elements from the beginning of the film

reappear: the stethoscope is set on Mario’s chest this time, and Jorgelina is once again

rummaging through boxes. At her parents’ house in Rosario Jorgelina was depicted as a

child, due to the toys in her room and, more specifically, as a girl by way of her girly-

pink attire. At this ‘repetition’ of the scene, in contrast, she plays an adult male. The film

thus relates the initial quest to understand gender as biological and essentialist, to this

session of cross-dressing, and poses the question of gender’s social validity and fluidity.

The two friends are able to try out a different gender, because they frame this

experimentation as innocuous child’s play.

77 Furthermore, there is a very real danger in this performance for him. If (or when?) his community finds out that he “really” is a “girl,” he risks being outcast and he probably risks more physical violence, which he has already suffered from his father.

78 The film verbalizes this point. Jorgelina’s father says about the race that “Mario tiene que probarse como hombre” (00:24).

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Yet, how innocent is this play really? Jorgelina’s painted facial hair may be good

fun – her giggles seem to indicate as much – but this queer act of cross-dressing needs to

be considered in light of her other gender bending behavior. Her sister Luciana

mockingly calls her ”varonera” and “Jorgito” (00:10), after which Jorgelina attacks her

sister and wrestles her to the ground. Clearly, Luciana hits a nerve. Jorgelina’s

masculinity can only be read by carefully piecing together clues in dialogue,

cinematography, and editing. Its difficult legibility may be explained because her

masculinity appears as inseparable from childhood. In other words, the force of her

masculine identification is downplayed because it is presented as tomboyism, i.e. as a

passing phase of childhood. As Halberstam elaborates in Female Masculinity (1998),

“tomboyism is tolerated as long as the girl remains prepubescent: as soon as puberty

begins, however, the full force of gender conformity descends on the girl” (6). The film,

in point of fact, establishes a clear contrast between Jorgelina and her sister Luciana, who

has recently entered adolescence, and savors every change it entails. While Luciana and

her friend are trying on brassieres, Jorgelina holds up a magazine that reads “¡Feliz día

del niño!” (00:12). In close-up, she hides behind the magazine that covers most of her

face, peeking over it only to stare warily at the two young women.79 Here, childhood

quite literally provides her with a shield that protects her from adolescence and

femininity.

This shield of childhood, nonetheless, works both for and against her; while it

protects her from femininity, it also prevents her pre-adult female masculinity from being

79 There are other ways in which Jorgelina is framed specifically as a child: the camper van is full of toys; to amuse his daughter, the doctor puts on a mask and imitates a sheep; Luciana claims her little sister has lice; etc.

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taken seriously. Culture’s hegemonic understanding of childhood associates it with

innocence, which most importantly implies an asexual childhood. Jorgelina’s gender

defiant behavior, consequently, is permissible only insofar as her body shows no signs of

sexual maturation, and as long as she does not show sexual interest. Even her asexual

tomboyism cannot be truly severed from sexuality, however, due to her close friendship

with Mario. Fausto-Sterling observes: “[T]he debates over intersexuality are inextricable

from those over homosexuality; we cannot consider the challenges one poses to our

gender system without considering the parallel challenges posed by the other” (112). The

underlying “danger” that both Mario and Jorgelina pose to their community, therefore, is

the destabilization of the gender binary, and with it, a transgression against society’s

compulsory heterosexuality. As Mario’s case illustrates, masculinity is a privileged

category to which only ‘real men’ have access, and the idea of Jorgelina aspiring to

female masculinity may be even more threatening and destabilizing than Mario’s

intersexuality.

Jorgelina’s character provokes the question whether, with time, she will outgrow

childhood and tomboyism at once, or whether she will develop a more clearly defined

female masculinity, and possibly lesbianism.80 The film offers no easy answer, but it does

suggest that, at the very least, her tomboyism is to be taken seriously. Jorgelina cross-

dresses as a man for the carnaval; her sister teases her about being a tomboy; she likes to

play rough; she spends the summer in the countryside with her father, rather than on the

beach with her mother and sister; and at the farm, she often longingly looks in the

80 For an analysis of the research on tomboyism and lesbianism, see Judith Halberstam, “Oh Bondage Up Yours! Female Masculinity and the Tomboy,” (2004), especially pages 197-203.

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direction where the men are at work (00:17; 00:26; 00:49), a space inaccessible to her as

a girl. Moreover, the outward manifestations of gender fascinate her, both as they appear

inscribed on the body, as in the performance of gender. Her father explains that the horse

races are a test of masculinity for Mario, but she misunderstands him, wondering whether

Mario’s masculinity is something he can try on, in case he doesn’t like it. When her

father corrects her, explaining that Mario has to prove himself a man, she squints her eyes

and asks: “¿Y cómo lo va a demostrar?” (00:24). She wants to learn how to read gender,

and the possibility that one can change if so desired, seems laughable only to her father.

Jorgelina experiments a little with gender manifestations herself. At home in

Rosario, she is shown playing in the Boyita, a camper van the two sisters use as a

playroom. On the bed behind Jorgelina lies a book with big letters that reads “las

vocales,” and all around her colorful toys are stacked against the walls. In other words,

the Boyita van symbolizes Jorgelina’s and Luciana’s childhood, and the film’s title thus

signals its end. When the end credits have already started rolling, Solomonoff shows an

image of a fallen tree on top of the Boyita van, thereby literally putting an end to the

summers in the Boyita. Yet even before the times of happy playtime are definitely over,

the image of carefree happiness already appears crooked. The maid Peca (Edith Nadalin)

enters the van and picks up a pair of panties from a chair, which she examines carefully

before asking Jorgelina sternly: “¿Cómo es que se te rompen todas las bombachitas en el

mismo lugar?” (00:07). Self-consciously, Jorgelina diverts her eyes and mumbles a form

of excuse. The film’s cinematography (designed by Lucio Bonelli) assigns particular

interest to the sequence; Peca picks up the panties in extreme close-up, after which the

camera pans up to the maid’s face, which displays an accusatory expression. The

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spectator is not allowed a privileged look at the cause of Peca’s concern, however, since

both Jorgelina and Peca block the camera with their movements and hide the panties from

view at crucial moments. The incident is silently repeated at the farm, with Elba, thus

confirming Peca’s qualms, but without providing any explanation.81

The mystery of Jorgelina’s ripped panties is never resolved, but its deliberate

visual treatment and its reiteration mark its importance. One possible explanation is that

she would rather wear boys’ underwear, and that she makes holes in her panties for that

purpose; another is that she plays games rough enough to rip her underwear repeatedly,

and in the same place. Whatever the case may be, Jorgelina’s embarrassment suggests

that she considers her own behavior to be transgressive. While Mario’s mother keeps her

disapproval limited to an austere look, Peca is quick to make an explicit reference to

sexuality. She warns Jorgelina that “si te dañás la telita de adentro, esa no te la cose

nadie” (00:08), implying a possible sexual nature of Jorgelina’s games. On the one hand,

Jorgelina is thus linked to a form of sexual transgression. At the same time, the film

rhetorically releases her from any sexual implication, by virtue of her innocent childhood,

written all over the Boyita van in which she is playing.82

And yet, her ripped underwear is not all that connects her to implied sexuality;

one particular editing decision suggestively implicates her in non-sexual, vaginal

penetration. I mention above how Solomonoff literalizes Mario’s discovery of his vagina 81 Jorgelina is brushing her teeth in the bathroom when Mario’s mother walks in. In the mirror we can see how she grabs some panties from the drying line, and then looks disapprovingly at Jorgelina. Neither says a word (00:49).

82 The Boyita van promotes an ideal of heterosexuality. As the sisters play on top of the camper van, Jorgelina flips through a Boyita promotional magazine. It shows images of happy families that consist of a man, a woman, and a small child. Thus, by refusing to spend the summer in the Boyita Jorgelina also, in a way, rejects heteronormativity.

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by juxtaposing Mario, who reaches down into his pants, with and an extreme close-up of

a hole in the ground (00:42). Keeping the hollow centered in the frame, from the lower

left corner an arm then slowly moves towards the cavity and inserts its hand. The sound

of Mario’s screaming voice follows, while the camera cuts to a medium shot of Jorgelina.

Solomonoff toys with the ambiguous interpretation of sight and sound. The montage

suggests that Mario yells out in surprise upon discovering new parts of his body, but it

quickly becomes clear that he teasingly scared Jorgelina, who was poking around in the

shrubs. The interpretation of these shots seems straightforward enough regarding Mario,

but just how do they relate to Jorgelina? After all, it is her hand that penetrates the cavity

that the film has rhetorically equated with Mario’s vagina. By suggesting her phallic

gesture through purely formal means, the film engages in a form of doublespeak again: it

hints at the girl’s desire for phallic masculinity, while at the same time maintaining the

girl’s sexual innocence intact. Moreover, briefly hereafter Jorgelina affirms to Mario that

“yo tampoco soy muy normal” (00:42). This is the only time she explicitly talks about

herself, and she provides no further explanations. Her statement is particularly powerful,

though, because she makes it after Mario’s intimate revelations. The context opens up her

affirmation as a divulgement about her own gender identification.

She then changes the tenor of the conversation: “Igual, me gustas así” (00:43).

Her fondness for Mario, thus expressed, can have both platonic and sexual

connotations.83 Jorgelina is so insistently portrayed as a child, however, that with those

simple words of loving acceptance, she creates a space for both of them to remain a child

for a little while longer – with or without mutual sexual desire. For a moment, she steers 83 The affirmation could be read as a preconfiguration of a lesbian attraction, especially given her tomboyish nature.

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Mario and herself away from individualistic gender identities that depend on socially

acceptable categories that both friends feel to be insufficient. She reassures him of their

relationship in which both can be queer without the need to define their gender or

sexuality in any particular way. “Queer,” as several scholars have argued, is a strangely

apt term to describe childhood.84 Certainly the idea of “the innocent child,” especially

over the course of the twentieth century, has been packed with often-contradictory

meaning, which has led to the figure of the child being “queered by innocence” (Stockton

12). In El último verano the two protagonists are queered by their bodies or cross gender

identification, and the notion of innocent childhood operative in the film, rather than

confining them to heteronormative conformism, is actually instrumental to a tranquil

exploration of their changing bodies and (gender) identities. Mario and Jorgelina perform

childhood in order to find refuge from societal impositions of specific gender

performance.

Early in the film an extraordinary emblem of idealized childhood innocence

cushions two moments of discovery about Mario’s body. Jorgelina inquires about the

bandages she has seen on Mario’s chest, worried his father has hit him (00:34). In lieu of

a response, there is a cut to the two friends in medium close-up, cheerfully riding a horse

together, their faces beaming with happiness. The scene, which lasts for nineteen full

seconds, is accompanied by a particularly cheerful and loud guitar tune.85 The

soundscape in El último verano mostly consists of diegetic sounds that often pertain to

nature, which is why this particular sequence aurally stands out. Both sound and image 84 See, for example, the introduction of The Queer Child by Stockton or many of the essays included in Curiouser, edited by Bruhm and Hurley.

85 The music in the film is composed by Sebastian Escofet.

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create the impression of a ride on a carrousel horse, a moment of childhood carefree

pleasure, but the very constructedness of this cinematic moment mirrors the

constructedness of the concept of childhood as a time of happiness and play. The joyful

ride comes to an abrupt end when Jorgelina discovers Mario’s bleedings,86 but these

instances of idealized childhood do provide both friends with some respite.

The notion of idealized childhood innocence also serves to protect them from too

much adult interference. The doctor prefers to communicate with his parents, instead of

talking directly to Mario. This kind of protected childhood provides the two friends,

paradoxically, with a space and time to explore their bodies and gender, without having

to endure the alienating discourse of pathology. Jorgelina, herself uncomfortable with her

femininity, does not require him to conform to a certain gender or to act in any specific

way. They are often filmed together in extreme long shots, which accentuate the distance

that separates them from the spectator, as several key moments in the narrative are

withheld.

Those moments function as narrative lacunae, in which either the characters

cultivate a deliberate silence, or formal procedures such as cinematography or frame

composition block the spectator’s view by filming from angles that conceal actions or

bodies. I have already discussed the moment when Jorgelina’s ripped panties are

carefully kept out of sight; and when Mario whispers into Jorgelina’s ear what he has

discovered about his body, the audience cannot hear his words. Another important

86 During the eighteenth century, the idea took hold that a girl’s menstruation signals the end of her childhood, because it indicates her sexual maturity: “the dividing lines [between adulthood and childhood], like the child itself, was, first of all, constructed, and second, often constructed sexually. Childhood ended with the onset of puberty, of sexuality” (Kincaid 1994, 70).

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deliberate silence occurs after the doctor’s examination (01:01). The camera is placed

inside the house, filming Jorgelina from her back. She sits in the doorstep next to her

father, and both look out at the pampas. A silence of twelve long seconds passes, before

she asks her father what is wrong with Mario.87 Although the doctor did not provide

Mario with any explanation, he now proceeds to detail the medical situation to his

daughter: “Todos tenemos una glándula, que produce hormonas masculinas. En el caso

the Mario, hay un exceso de esas hormonas” (01:02). As soon as Jorgelina hears the word

“exceso,” she covers her ears with both hands and starts humming loudly to shut out his

voice, until he falls silent. For the first time in the film, Solomonoff deploys subjective

sound. The spectator perceives the doctor’s voice as if through a thick filter, while the

humming becomes so overbearing that the description of Mario’s case cannot be fully

understood. Jorgelina refuses to hear anything her father has to say. The frame in which

the exchange takes place is composed hierarchically; Jorgelina’s father occupies the

superior position in his chair, while Jorgelina looks particularly small and childlike, next

to him on the doorstep. He speaks to her in a calm, soothing voice, and after her refusal to

listen he gently caresses her head. His demeanor implies that he believes her to be too

young to understand the medical details about the construction of gender. She has

displayed a real thirst for knowledge throughout the film, though, so perhaps another

reason informs her behavior. I propose to read her refusal to hear her father out as a

refusal to accept his pathologizing discourse. To her, Mario is fine just the way he is.

The final sequence in the countryside may be construed as a final retreat into

childhood, or as an incipient romantic and sexual relationship between the two friends. 87 Jorgelina feels she has betrayed her friend by telling her father about Mario’s bleedings.

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The film invites both interpretations, due to yet another narrative lacuna that obscures the

central action. After Mario has won the race, he disappears to the river, a place where the

two friends have previously spent much time. As he sits by the shore, the composition of

the frame and the camera angle are exactly the same as when he was leafing through the

anatomy book, about to discover his “abnormal” body (01:17), visually connecting both

sequences. The mellow guitar tune that sets in signals that this time the development of

the sequence may be more akin to the joyful horse ride. Jorgelina walks into the frame

and, in the next shot, has taken Mario by the hand, leading him into the river. The camera

frames the friends in an extreme long shot, looking down at them from roughly the

position they occupied in the previous shot. Jorgelina moves Mario with his back toward

the camera, starts to unbutton his shirt and then to unwind the breast bindings, tossing

both items into the river. Mario takes Jorgelina’s hand and, giggling, they fall back into

the river and float downstream. Throughout the film, Jorgelina has insisted that Mario

take off his clothes and come swim with her. She herself mostly walks around in her

bathing suit, and spends a lot of screen time in the water. The final sequence therefore

marks a last withdrawal into an act of innocent childhood play. At the same time, the

disrobing scene, discreetly hidden from the spectator’s view, also opens the possibility of

a more sensual reading; they hold each other’s hand, and in the car home, Jorgelina

caresses a woodcarving of the horse Yayo, Mario’s gift to her.

The question of Mario’s gender identification remains ambiguous. Does Mario

feel comfortable identifying as a man in a gender-bending body? Has he accepted or even

understood his intersexuality? The film provides no answers, and does not make the

spectator privy to Mario’s feelings about the issue. Jorgelina’s status as a tomboy, on the

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other hand, is disputed and almost inversed in the last few minutes. She joins her mother

on the beach, wearing a pink, girly bikini, a huge contrast with the blue, much less

feminine looking one-piece we see her in during the entire film. Her mother discusses

Jorgelina’s situation with a friend, completely ignoring her daughter, who is within

earshot and listens attentively, but does not utter a word. When they refer to her as

“Georgie” and “Jorge,” however, she firmly demands to be called “Jorgelina” (01:19), no

longer comfortable with the childish, masculine diminutives. When she joins her sister’s

friends on the beach, moreover, they all stand in a circle, neatly separated by gender. An

extreme close-up of a round-breasted girl is juxtaposed with Jorgelina’s girl-like, flat-

chested body, and seems to reinforce the film’s medical discourse that equals gender

identity with outward gender manifestations. Jorgelina’s arrival at the beach thus

coincides with her arrival at the realm of strict gender conformity.

The final sequence, nevertheless, reinstalls a sense of ambiguity. Luciana

demands to be told exactly what occurred in the countryside, surmising something

happened with Mario. Yet in a final narrative lacuna, Jorgelina refuses to talk. She claims

it is a private matter, just like Luciana had demanded her privacy in the bathroom. Her

refusal to talk is more than a childish revenge on her sister. It signals a refusal to

interpret; a refusal to simplify Mario’s physical situation, their intimate friendship, and

their joined search for identity in and with their gender. Rather than violating this

intimacy, she prefers to remain silent.

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Undoing performativity

So far, the analysis of La niña santa has developed the child’s visual pull in the context

of her incipient sexuality. Haptical visuality creates distance between the child character

and the spectator by inviting the latter to relate sensually to the texture of the image,

rather than its content. My reading of El último verano, furthermore, illustrates how

gender performance imposes its norms more leniently on children. In this film, childhood

can therefore function as a shield to bar adult interference, and allow the protagonists to

explore issues of gender and sexuality unperturbed. One aspect of the visual pull remains

unexplored, however, which is the visual allure of the child’s screen presence in relation

to the performance of childhood itself, which brings me to the last film of this chapter.

“Un chico sólo puede actuar de chico. [...] La gran ventaja de un niño es que es el

único que puede actuar de niño con naturalidad. Por lo tanto sus grandes competidores

son los animales” (00:07).88 Thus speaks Sergio (Fabián Arenillas), teacher of an acting

class for grade school children in Buenos Aires, in Entrenamiento elemental para

actores.89 Rejtman has expressed his fascination by the attention screen children attract;

Entrenamiento explores this visual attraction by thematizing it.90 In this section I unravel

the complicated links between the visual pull, performance, and Freudian scopophilia,

88 In fact, early Hollywood star Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939) has said that children and animals make the best actors (Aylesworth 9).

89 Hereafter: Entrenamiento.

90 Q&A session after the screening of Entrenamiento in the Harvard Film Archive (Cambridge, MA), on April 3, 2010. In an interview with Cecilia Sosa, Rejtman elaborates: “En Copacabana saqué prácticamente todo el material en donde había niños porque llamaban demasiado la atención. Para mí los chicos son la espontaneidad y yo estoy acostumbrado al control [...]. Había que encontrar la manera de controlar la espontaneidad sin perderla completamente” (81).

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with a particular interest in Laura Mulvey’s feminist appropriation.91 The teaching

principles of this acting workshop guide the actors towards a transcendence of both forms

of scopophilia, voyeurism and exhibitionism, a space where the child can be a true actor

instead of a small human animal. Invited to follow their journey, the adult spectator is no

longer bound by the spell of the child’s visual pull, and s/he can thus cathect the libidinal

energy of the gaze otherwise.

Entrenamiento is a short feature film of 52 minutes shot on digital video, that

León and Rejtman were asked to produce for a television series.92 The film’s plot is

straightforward. It centers on the acting workshop lead by Sergio, a passionate and

unorthodox teacher who teaches his students to become true actors, not child-actors. He

teaches them how to overcome childhood clichés, inasmuch as these affect their acting,

but also in regards to how they determine the spectator’s gaze.

Both León and Rejtman explore similar themes in their previous directorial

efforts.93 In the documentary Estrellas (2007, co-directed by Marcos Martínez) Federico

León questions what constitutes an actor, and what aspects limit the roles a certain actor

can play. Estrellas illustrates that, too often, those limitations are based principally on

stereotypes. Protagonist Julio Arrieta, a villero of “Villa 21,” one of the shantytowns of

91 Scopophilia, from the Greek for “love of looking,” in psychoanalysis refers to the pleasure one derives from seeing or being seen. Sigmund Freud analyzes the concept in Three Essays On the Theory Of Sexuality, a text I revisit later in this chapter.

92 Claudio Morgado, from the Argentine Canal 7, came up with the idea to invite duos of theater and film directors to join forces for a television series (Sosa, 78). Rejtman: “Partían de esa distinción: que al cine le falta dramaturgia, que entiende de imagen, pero que no entiende de actores. La idea era que el dramaturgo podía suplir esa carencia del cine” (Sosa, 79).

93 Federico León not only works in film, but is also an established theater director.

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Buenos Aires, owns a film studio that provides many neighborhood folks with jobs as

film extras. Arrieta posits, firstly and most importantly, that, as villeros, they will never

be able to play anyone but a poor character. The extras that work for Arrieta’s film studio

therefore embody a paradox: they are non-professional actors on a professional basis;

they are poor people performing (yet not acting) poverty in publicity campaigns and

commercial Argentine films. Secondly, Arrieta intends to show Argentina that life in

Villa 21 is the same as everywhere else. Hence he employs his own actors to produce a

science fiction film in his neighborhood, to offer resistance to cinema’s tendency to show

the shantytowns with a (feigned) sort of documentary interest, as “porno-miseria.”

Rejtman approaches the topic of acting almost from the reverse angle. Where

León documents actors that seek to give the commercial films in which they appear a

touch of authenticity by means of non-acting,94 Rejtman operates the opposite way. In the

films previous to Entrenamiento he trains his actors to abandon the conventions of the

cinematographic tradition in Argentina. Apropos of Silvia Prieto (1999) he explains:

“Odiaba las actuaciones del cine argentino. No podía basarme en esa tradición. [...] Tuve

que empezar a pensar por mi cuenta cómo hacer para que se hablara de una manera que a

mí me gustara, y lo hice muy de a poco” (Bernini 74). The collaborative project

Entrenamiento thus compliments both Rejtman’s and León’s earlier films in thematic as

well as aesthetic ways; it investigates the relation between acting and reception, between

presence and performance.

94 And hopefully gain some money to get out of their extreme poverty.

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Like León’s extras from Villa 21 seem to only ever be able to act as villeros, “un

chico sólo puede actuar de chico.”95 The performance of a child actor tends to

essentialize the concepts audiences (and culture in general) have construed about

childhood. As mentioned before, when the child surrogates childhood s/he has the ability

of naturalizing it, establishing an essential connection between the young body and

childhood. The operations of the star system may elucidate the allegedly perfect fit

between effigy and surrogation that occurs when a child plays a child.96 When Ava

Gardner plays herself in The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, 1953) opposite Fred

Astaire who plays a star, we have “a perfect fit between Gardner as an image and

Gardner as a character” (Dyer 100). This fit consists of the conflation of the star image

(the star as a text in the media) and the character she plays on screen. Stars “inform their

role with the reverberations of their image, just by being in them” (Dyer 119). Thus when

Madonna portrays Eva Perón in Evita (Alan Parker, 1996) her performer-persona

reverberates in her portrayal of the Argentine icon – much to the outrage of some

spectators. Madonna’s off-screen persona haunts her on-screen performance, ghosting her

body by the operations of her extratheatrical celebrity (Carlson 91). Similarly, when a

child plays a child, the viewer cannot not look her.97 S/he seems to conflate the image of

95 Unlike the villeros, however, the child’s screen limitations are not tied to class or socio-economic status, and s/he will eventually outgrow her status. For the villeros, on the other hand, leaving poverty behind is not a certain, nor even a likely future prospect.

96 See, for example Dyer (1986), DeCordova (1990) or McDonald (2000), for approximations of the star system.

97 Karen Lury notes a similar visual attraction, but only when the child actor posseses the “It” factor: “If the successful child actor is often blessed (or cursed) with It [allure, charm], then another risk accrues to their presence beside adult actors – that they will upstage these actors and draw the audience’s attention and admiration towards them unfairly” (148).

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the child in society and the character s/he plays on screen. Regardless of the actor’s

interpretation of the role, the performance echoes the spectator’s conceptualization of

childhood – whether or not the particular part played by the young actor actually

confirms or challenges those views.

Spectators thus reading the image of the child on screen give prevalence to the

indexical value of the image over the actor’s performance.98 That is to say that the child’s

seemingly inevitable protagonism is directly related to the involvement of real children in

the filming. In his analysis of the star system Richard DeCordova describes the

ambiguous status of the body in fiction film, which appears split between a body

produced (that of the character) and a body producing (that of the actor) (19-20). Since,

as I have shown, only the juvenile body can convincingly play a child in fictional film,

the child’s producing body gains significant importance within the film’s diegesis. The

case of child stars such as Shirley Temple or Pablito Calvo99 is even more complex, for

their stardom includes one more step: their visual attraction moves from index (effigy) to

screen persona back to (newly formed) star, continuously reinforcing each other. 100 Most

98 Mary Ann Doane notes that “[t]he concept of the index [...] seems to acknowledge the invasion of the semiotic system by the real” (70).

99 Calvo attains great fame after starring in Marcelino, pan y vino (Ladislao Vajda, 1955). He stars in two more films directed by Vajda, and Marcelino initiated a cycle of films with ‘niños prodigio’ in Francoist Spain.

100 Karen Lury comments: “The limitations of stardom for the actor are related to the way in which aspects of the performer’s body, voice and associated mannerisms are fixed and thus dictate what roles the actor may appropriately play. [...] For the child actor all of these limitations exist in an exaggerated form, since the child actor’s acquisition of stardom is sometimes entirely dependent on the apparently natural or essential attributes associated with ‘being’ a child” (155).

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child stars disappear from the limelight once grown up, because their stardom is

inextricably connected with their performance of childhood.

In addition to the centrality of indexicality regarding the child’s seemingly

unavoidable protagonism, I propose a re-reading of the seminal essay that Laura Mulvey

publishes in 1975 in Screen, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey

instrumentalizes psychoanalytical theory as a “radical weapon” (58), with the objective to

deconstruct the pleasure in cinematic looking. She criticizes Hollywood’s classical

cinema that offers the woman as image, and the man as bearer of the gaze. She proposes,

instead of the pleasure of the gaze in classical Hollywood, a “thrill” that comes from

“transcending outworn or oppressive forms, and daring to break with normal pleasurable

expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire” (58). Several decades have

passed since the publication of Mulvey’s essay. As Walsh succinctly states, “[t]he

parameter of debates have shifted. Whether due to the impact of digital technology or to a

wider configuration of factors, immersive spectatorship is not seen as the bugbear it was

in the 1970s and 1980s. Critical distance [...] is no longer seen as the sine qua non of our

engagement with images” (4). Yet several of the suggested new forms of interacting with

the image, such as haptic visuality and mimetic identification (Walsh 4) still imply a shift

away from the spectator’s immersion into the narrative, in order to relate sensuously to

the image.

Other than the suggested paradigmatic shift in the modes of seeing (and

theorizing) film, other distances separate Mulvey’s proposal from the NCA. Mulvey

overtly states that she takes issue with classical Hollywood cinema; she purports to

explore the way in which visual pleasure is created in the spectator of a culturally and

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historically specific epoch: “The magic of the Hollywood style at its best [. . .] arose, not

exclusively, but in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation of

visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the

dominant patriarchal order” (58).101 The scope of her argument is therefore necessarily

limited. 102

If I resort to Mulvey despite these historical and paradigmatic distances, it is due

to the pertinence of her analysis of scopophilia, which forms the nucleus of her essay, in

the context of the child. I borrow from Mulvey the deconstruction of the cinematic

pleasure of looking, and a psychoanalytic approach to do so. Objectification of the

woman, and the way visual pleasure functions, can be explained through two forms of

scopophilia: active (masculine), voyeurism; and passive (feminine), exhibitionism. Both

forms of scopophilia serve to analyze the performanc of the child actor, and to reconsider

the libidinal economy of the spectator’s gaze. As I have argued throughout this

dissertation, culture’s hegemonic discourse tends to defend and protect a perceived

childhood innocence. In this particular case, it allows for the equally ‘innocent’ pleasure

of watching a child perform, just like desire could be cathexed in the image of the woman

101 Her article generated a wave of critical responses, which Mulvey addressed in her ‘afterthoughts’: “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired By King Vidor’s Duel In the Sun (1946).” This second essay explores, precisely, how masculine identification can be attractive to female specators, albeit in a different way. 102 This precision is not always appreciated by film critics. Ana Forcinito, for example, writes about cinematographic gaze and Martel (2006): “Estas miradas femeninas, en primer lugar, constituyen a las mujeres como sujetos del mirar, y no como sugiere Mulvey (1975) como objetos de la mirada masculina” (117). The suggestive phrasing makes it seem like Mulvey comments directly on Martel’s films, which clearly cannot be the case. Quite the contrary, Mulvey is careful to point out that her analysis pertains to classical Hollywood film, to a specific mode of historically determined narrative filmmaking, to which Martel’s cinematography certainly does not prescribe.

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in classical Hollywood cinema.103 I contend that Entrenamiento deconstructs the

performance of the innocent/ignorant child, by means of which the film problematizes the

eroticized gaze.

Sigmund Freud’s “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915), one of Mulvey’s

sources, offers a way into understanding the workings of the cinematic gaze. Freud

discusses scopophilia in the broader context of what he calls the “instincts,” which appear

as “a borderland concept between the mental and the physical” (1959, 64). Instincts

undergo vicissitudes during the developmental processes, one of which is the “reversal

into its opposite” (69) that yields the opposition scopophilia/exhibitionism. Freud’s first

definition for “instinct” is physiological: “[T]he concept of stimuli and the scheme of the

reflex arc, according to which a stimulus applied from the outer world to living tissue

(nervous substance) is discharged by action towards the outer world” (61, original

emphasis). Near the beginning of the film Sergio briefly but passionately lectures his

students about directors who have literalized this understanding of instinct in their

strategies to obtain the desired performance from their child actors. The best-known

example is Vittorio de Sica, who directs the young Enzo Saiola in Ladri di biciclette

(1948) by providing him exterior stimuli, literalizing the carrot and stick approach; he

would hurt the young actor to make him cry, and promise a piece of cake to achieve a

happy look.

In Entrenamiento actor Sofía (Melanie Guignant) exemplifies the narcissistic

aspect of scopophilia, i.e. exhibitionism. She joins the workshop when the rest of the

103 Many critics have problematized the supposition of childhood innocence in the still and moving image. See, for example, Karen Lury (2010); Vicky Lebeau (2008); Anne Higonnet (1998).

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group has already spent three years together, and after several classes Sergio expels her.

In a relatively long sequence, she sits at a small table on stage, surrounded by darkness on

all edges of the frame. She interprets a scene from the Argentine film La nona (Héctor

Olivera, 1979), mimicking an old Napolitano lady. The other children thoroughly enjoy

her performance, but Sergio criticizes her harshly – his classes are not a platform for

cultivating the audience’s “risa idiota” (00:29) or harvesting applause. Children,

nonetheless, seem to be born performers, quite literally so. As babies and toddlers they

entertain and transfix those near to them, demanding everyone’s attention. León and

Rejtman insert a home video of one of the actors, Julián (Julián Zuker), in which he is

approximately one year old. He is dancing, and responds to his mother’s encouragements.

Sergio comments: “El chico ya está haciendo su performance para un público reducido.

Es consciente, maneja los silencios.” (00:38). As this video suggests, children love their

exhibitionism, because they are celebrated for it, and through it they invite the adults’

voyeurism. To be sure, it is only natural that children should act on external stimuli.

Essentially, what Sergio asks of them goes against their very nature, self-preservation,

one of the two modes of primal instincts (Freud 1959, 67). He tries to take them a step

further, to less instinctive places, in order to foster their growth as actors.

Regardless, exterior stimuli determine the acting performance very directly, and

not exclusively those executed by children. Freud reminds us that the “activity of even

the most highly developed mental apparatus is subject to the pleasure principle, i.e. is

automatically regulated by feelings belonging to the pleasure–‘pain’ series” (64).

Translated to the practice of acting, the pleasure principle occasions and determines the

relationship of dependency that many actors develop with their audience. If soliciting and

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obtaining the audience’s laughter or applause satisfies her pleasure principle, s/he will

adapt her performance according to the necessities and exigencies of the spectator, even

though s/he may not consciously acknowledge this mechanism. Acting, in that case, is

determined not so much by the particularities of the mise-en-scene or the script, but more

by the force of exhibitionism. The audience’s approval, nonetheless, does not guarantee a

satisfactory performance – merely entertainment. Sergio’s work consists in making his

actors aware of their movements, of every word pronounced, of silence. He aims to undo

the dependency on the audience, and encourages them to “buscar lugares en donde no

haga[n] pie, en donde no se sienta[n] cómod[os]” (00:28); in other words, to work against

their instinct. In so doing, the actors de-naturalize the stage performance as well as their

surrogation of childhood, and thereby remove any quintessential childishness of their

own performances – whatever that may be exactly.

The rupture of the performer-audience linkage equally involves the spectator, as it

effectively limits its importance. Rejtman has said that “Entrenamiento [...] pone al

espectador en su lugar, o al menos intenta cambiarlo de lugar” (Sosa 2012, 91). The

transformative force of the actor’s performance is related to its disruptive power;

scopophilia, like all Freudian drives, is libidinally charged, and visual pleasure takes

place when the desiring look identifies with or can possess the image. Therefore, when

the actor, by virtue of her performance, refuses to offer herself as a pleasurable image to

behold and to desire (active scopophilia), or with which the viewer may narcissistically

identify herself (passive scopophilia), the actor destabilizes the eroticization of the look

and the gaze. For the spectator that means that, to use Mulvey’s phrase, the “thrill” in

watching children perform comes from “daring to break with normal pleasurable

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expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire” (58). Both spectator and

actor are empowered as they are no longer, or at least not as much, bound by the libidinal

energy of scopophilia.

One spectator is particularly affected by the training the actors receive in offering

resistance to immediate visual gratification: the parent. Aguilar observes that there is

“una cierta orfandad en los personajes del nuevo cine. Los padres no aparecen por ningún

lado y si lo hacen es solamente para anclar despóticamente a los demás en un orden

disgregado” (41). In point of fact, in Entrenamiento the adults, and parents in particular,

are noticeably absent. The children do not share a single frame with their parents – not

even in the opening shots that occur at their homes. When the parents do make an

appearance, it is to demand visible results of the acting workshop. Their request

combines active and passive scopophilia; they want to watch their children perform.

Sergio won’t concede such a thing, and passionately defends chaos as an inseparable

aspect of the actors’ process of formation.104 He does not ignore the parents – but instead

of inviting them to a performance for their viewing pleasure, he invites them to a

workshop, one that is representative of his work with the children. Instead of seeing what

their children have learned, they now experience what their children’s training has been

like. The parents undergo a shift from visual pleasure to embodied experience. Along

with the newly acquired experience, they gain knowledge about acting that informs their

viewing habit and experience; in all likeliness, they will have learned to watch

differently.

104 “No hay niños actores. Ellos no están trabajando para ser niños actores. Están trabajando para ser actores. [...] Sus hijos no son un producto; son personas” (00:31).

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Before they go through that experience, the parents believe they have no way of

gauging their children’s progress. Sergio asks a mother: “–¿No notás una diferencia entre

la primera Camila y la Camila actual? –¿Qué querés decir, cómo actúa o cómo es? –¿Me

estás hablando en serio? ¿Todavía no entendiste que es parte de lo mismo?” (00:31). In

more implicit form the idea Sergio expresses, that acting and real life overlap, has been

around for quite some time. It is generally believed that there is a difference between the

poise and professionalism of trained, adult actors, and children, who have to be child-like

– even when acting. Margaret O’Brien, for example, was a kid, but also a trained and

experienced actress when she worked on the musical Meet me in St. Louis (1944).

Director Vincente Minelli claims he “went out of my mind” to get her to “act natural and

be like a kid” (qtd. in Lury 151). Karen Lury comments: “Within this assertion there is a

contradiction that requires a child actor to ‘act’ and ‘be’ at the same time” (151).

Entrenamiento explores the apparent contradiction between acting and being, between

performance and presence, suggesting that the two terms, rather than opposed, may

actually be extensions of one another.

To be sure, although Minelli, León and Rejtman notice a similar effect that acting

classes exercise on the child’s performance, they assess this influence in completely the

opposite way. Indeed, Entrenamiento suggests that training the children like any other

actor is an effective strategy to denaturalize the child actor’s performance. Sergio shows

his group a film clip from Ponette (Jacques Doillon, 1996), and detachedly analyzes how

the actress produces tears:105 “Miren cómo relaja los ojos, la tensión que pone en la boca.

105 The entire sequence demythifies the idea that child actors, or at least the child stars, can spontaneously produces tears on command. See Lury for an analysis of the film business’ obsession with children’s tears (145-160).

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Pone los ojos fuera de foco y eso permite que el lagrimal se dilate” (00:04). He does not

provide any narrative context for the clip, which has no relevance to his exercise, thus

stripping it of its strong emotive charge.106 Nevertheless, even though Sergio may wish to

isolate the scene for technical reasons, his students cannot completely dissociate tears

from strong emotion. Paula (Paula Egdechman) is seated next to the television set and

imitates Ponette, but when she is told to get up she does not immediately react, engrossed

in the tears/emotion she has just generated. A cut to a close-up of Iago’s face (Iago

Scippo), another student, confirms that her tears indeed affect her audience. Acting and

simply being are two states that are not separated by a clear division line, but rather

gradually dissolve into each other.

The film shows that both acting and real life contain a performative dimension, or,

as Anne Varty puts it: “The child actor has neither a mask nor a face, but unsettles by

possessing both in equal measure” (qtd. in Lury 152). Entrenamiento suggests that the

difference is located in intention and intensity, although that may not always be visually

discernible. When Sergio is ill, his replacement Gonzalo (Carlos Portaluppi) employs

radically different methods. His main preoccupation is that the children have a good time;

we see them running amok, yelling and laughing.107 A few sequences later, Sergio

instructs his actors to improvise: “Personajes que empiezan enteros y se degradan. Vamos 106 The film tells the story of a four-year-old girl, Ponette (Victoire Thivisol), who loses her mother in a car accident in which Ponette herself breaks an arm. She spends a lot of screen time crying and praying. Thivisol was awarded the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the 1996 Venice Film Festival for her performance.

107 Martín Rejtman explains, in an interview with Cecilia Sosa, that the idea behind Gonzalo’s class is much more similar to a typical theater workshop for children: “[Federico] decía que no existía una escuela de teatro en la que a los chicos se les enseñara a hacer una escena de Chéjov, por ejemplo. Que siempre los hacían jugar y se los trataba como niños” (80).

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a evitar el proceso. Así que la idea es que los personajes están sanos, enteros; yo apago la

luz, la vuelvo a prender y ya están degradados” (0:35). Without giving them any time to

reflect, he starts the exercise. The movements and gestures the actors display bear close

resemblance to their behavior in Gonzalo’s class – they shout, run, and chairs fly through

the studio – but the effect is radically different. The intention and intensity behind their

actions completely alter the way the spectator perceives them, and also how the actors

relate to their own performance. They no longer jokingly chase each other, but each child

acts with purpose, absorbed in their own degraded character.

Indeed, improvisation highlights the child’s performative presence, which

accounts for an important part of her visual attraction. In a short piece on children’s

theater Walter Benjamin remarks on the centrality of improvisation:108

Every child’s gesture is a creative impulse that corresponds exactly to the receptive one. The developing of these gestures into various forms of expression, such as the production of theatrical props, paintings, recitation, dance, and improvisation, falls to the separate sections. In all of these, improvisation is central; for in the final analysis the performance is merely their improvised synthesis. Improvisation rules; it is the condition from which the signals, the signal-giving gestures, arise. And that is precisely why performance or theater must be the synthesis of these gestures, for it alone has the unintended, one-time-only particularity in which the child’s gesture finds its true place. (233)

The “unintended, one-time-only particularity” that one finds in the child’s “gesture” in

theater, can productively be paired with the way film theory conceptualizes contingency,

the “micro-unexpected or unforeseeable changes of the temporally passing things

captured by the camera and recorded on the celluloid” (Ross n.p.). In point of fact,

contingency shares many qualities with those habitually ascribed to the child. In her study

of cinematic time, for example, Mary Ann Doane explains that “[c]ontingency proffers to 108 “Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theater,” originally written in 1928, published posthumously.

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the subject the appearance of absolute freedom, immediacy, directness,” as well as “a

vast reservoir of freedom and free play” which is “irreducible to the systematic

structuring of ‘leisure time’” (11). It grasps those moments that escape systematic

structuring, and finds its way into the performance of many young actors. Moreover,

although his type of contingency usually disappears in the digital era,109 young actors

retain some of it even in digital film. In this conceptualization of the contingent, as in

Benjamin’s account of improvisation, the ‘unintended’ prevails. When one watches the

performance of a child on screen, one sees part of the inescapable, the ungraspable, that

which goes against the system. Part of the visual pull of the child’s performance is that

this very attraction cannot necessarily always be accounted for. The spectator, moreover,

has come to expect this type of contingency, and informs her viewing experience and

pleasure by its very anticipation.

The aesthetic of the film mirrors the child actor’s performative presence; the film

registers the classes in a deceivingly straightforward way, documentary-style.110 Its

tripartite structure gives it a circular quality, starting and ending with sequences shot

outside of the studio. Aguilar comments that “muchas [películas del nuevo cine]

comienzan como si se tratara de un documental: se registra con una cámara algo que

atrae la atención” (25, original emphasis). That “algo” can be truly anything: “[E]l corte

de las historias es tan contingente como las causas de lo narrado” (Bernini 36). Although

109 It is important to note that ‘contingency’ is specifically related to analog film. Even if a digital filmmaker decides to keep something s/he accidentally filmed, it is her decision to do so. It therefore differs from analog film, where the filmmaker has to either keep the contingent element, or reshoot the sequence.

110 Rejtman y León have commented that many audience members get confused and consider Entrenamiento a documentary (Sosa 2012, 84-88).

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the first eleven shots of Entrenamiento (lasting approximately three minutes) seem to

introduce a narrative feature, they do not form the start of a conventional plot. Rather, the

initial sequences show different members of the acting workshop in their personal

lives.111 Upon second view, one realizes that the gestures and motions echo those that the

children have practiced with Sergio. The film closes with a short documentary that Sergio

has made about his own personal life, to illustrate that in his life too, real life and

performance transition into each other.112 To further complicate the imbrications of

presence and performance, the young actors use their own names;113 the parents that

appear in the film are their real parents; and the home video of Julián belongs to the

personal archives of the Zuker family. Finally, the opening sequences were filmed where

the actors actually live, and the party in Sergio’s concluding documentary was shot in

Arenillas’s own home (Sosa 2012, 86).

I would like to conclude with a consideration of the investment of the spectator’s

gaze who, due to the studio’s closed-doors policy, is granted a particularly privileged

position. The film seemingly invites her to feel and act as a voyeur, since s/he can witness

the process of formation that none of the adult characters is allowed to see. Yet the

spectator who takes up this implicit invitation will probably get less than s/he bargained

for. S/he occupies a privileged point of view, without a doubt, but content and formal

111 We see Matías (Matías Delgado) brushing his teeth; Paula pulling up a chair to contemplate the landscape through a window, in the middle of the night; or Micaela (Micaela Vega) carefully placing the DVD’s remote control in a box that she lovingly locks up and covers with clothing to hide it.

112 The images are familiar: when Sergio brushes his teeth, the shot resembles that of Matías in camera angle, duration and body posture.

113 With the exception of Sofía and Camila.

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choices interlock to prevent an immersive visual experience. Mulvey claims that “the

mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved,

portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence

of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic

fantasy” (59). In this sealed world “extreme contrast between the darkness of the

auditorium [...] and the brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen

helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation” (59). Entrenamiento plays with

the ways in which the cinematic experience stimulates the spectator to access the

voyeurist mode. Rather than stitching the spectator into immersive viewing through a

careful procedure of suture, it exposes its interstices. In Kaja Silverman’s phrase,

“[s]uture is the name given to the procedures by means of which cinematic texts confer

subjectivity upon their viewers” (195). A concept initially outlined by Jacques-Alain

Miller in 1966 as an intervention in Lacanian psychoanalysis, and adapted to film theory

three years later by Jean-Pierre Oudart,114 suture theory gained momentum in the eighties

as it uncovered the ideological effect of primary identification, the idea that the

spectator’s gaze conflates with the camera’s.115 It posits that the viewer experiences

imaginary plenitude in the first shot of the film, until s/he realizes that the shot is framed

and therefore limited, at which point jouissance becomes unpleasure (Silverman 203). 114 See Screen issue 18.4 (1977/1978) that reprints both articles, as well as a third by Stephen Heath that provides commentary to both.

115 Primary identification is based on the conflation of two looks (camera and spectator), that are different in time (recording and viewing), a-symmetrical in agency (camera active and spectator passive), amounting to an ideological effect. It disguises how the fusion and reversal are brought about, and at what cost, thus making it unstable. The moment of rupture caused by editing brings the apparatus (usually hidden) to the viewer’s attention, and produces moment of anxiety and loss, which the subsequent shot has to bind up (Elsaesser and Hagener, 90).

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The shot/reverse shot provides the most conspicuous example of how suture theory

works: whereas the shot causes anxiety in acknowledging an off-screen space that the

spectator has no access to, the reverse shot anchors the fictional gaze and fills in the

absence.

León and Rejtman’s self-reflective film makes very limited use of the shot/reverse

shot,116 and more generally calls attention to the limitations of the frame and the filmic

apparatus. The mise-en-scene; the use of light, not only as a formal procedure but also as

a narrative device;117 and Sergio’s instructions to the actors, all contribute to highlight the

performative character of the moving image. Any immersive viewing experience is

obstructed, furthermore, by the fragmentariness of the film, narratively as well as

visually. The borders of the frames are often black, which underlines the anecdotal

character of the performances, for there is no narrative flow that allows the spectator to

follow the professional development of the actors. Finally, the spectator rarely gets an

establishing shot of the workshop, gaining only partial views, cut off and chaotic, which

reinforces, once more, the film’s cinematic reflection through both form and content. It is

thus that the film produces a rupture of the desiring gaze, excluding the spectator, at least

116 There is little dialogue in the film to begin with, dialogue being the most common content of the shot/reverse shot. When Sergio interviews Sofía and her mother, (00:18) and (00:35), the exchanges roughly follow the shot/reverse shot schema. Changes are made in camera position throughout the conversation, though, and once it frames all three interlocutors in one shot, the camera positioned behind the backs of Sofía and her mother. And when Sergio talks to the group of parents, the reverse shots consist of close-ups of several parents’ faces, thus not showing the spectator what would be Sergio’s field of vision.

117 Sergio often changes the lighting from stage light when they practice, to regular lighting when they discuss their techniques.

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partially, from this childish performance and performance of childhood. Entrenamiento

does not suture the absent fields; it cultivates them.

The film reflects on the actors’ visual pull with a new form of awareness that

allows the child, as actor, to create a critical distance with the spectator. The

deconstruction of the child’s performative presence facilitates the dislocation of

scopophilia, unbinding both actor and spectator from the imposition of its libidinal

energy. A child actor aware of her or his own influence over the spectator is better able to

manipulate it, and to thus unsettle the pleasure of immersive cinematic visual experience.

The liberating force of the unbound gaze consist in creating awareness in the young

actors that they are perfectly capable of determining their own acting and speech; this

realization affects the performative dimension of their behavior on and off screen. It frees

them from the dependence on the external approving look,118 and also from the

stereotypes that suffuse childhood; if their mere presence has a performative dimension,

it follows that their ‘being child’ does too. And they do not have to live or act that out

according to the expectations of their ‘audience.’ The space that the film’s ‘elementary

training for actors’ frees up for children to determine their own actions, also trains

spectators to let go of pre-established ideas surrounding childhood, and provides an

example of how to engage with the image of the child differently.

* * *

The child in the three films of this chapter is an unsettling presence, because s/he invites

the adult spectator to revel in her image, while s/he simultaneously problematizes the

118 Following suture theory and Lacan, one might call this the “Other’s” gaze.

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connection between her image and the libidinal gaze. Each in their own way, the films

pose the question of the child’s presence in terms of her visual attraction that pulls the

spectator into the film. Through her carefully constructed sensory universe, the focus in

La niña santa shifts from the viewer’s exclusive desire for the content of the images to

include its texture, thus deflecting the spectator’s attention by offering imagery that

incites a sensuous, embodied response. Haptic visuality and aurality grant the spectator

an experience that is, if not titillating, at least sensual and sensuous. El último verano

employs the trope of innocent childhood to create narrative lacunae that withhold images

and speech from the spectator and create a safe space for the protagonists to explore their

gender and sexual identity. The lacunae intersperse the child’s performance with blind

spots that the spectator cannot interpret, but which s/he is aware exist. Therefore, they

provide a knowing ignorance, a way of explicitly excluding the spectator. Finally,

Entrenamiento similarly uses editing and frame composition to restrain the spectator’s

immersive viewing pleasure, but it also thematizes deflection. It deconstructs the child’s

visual pull by training the children to deviate the adult’s libidinal gaze through their

acting and as such, it also teaches the viewer to relinquish stereotypical ideas about

childhood, and to view the image of the child freed from the imposition of the visual pull.

3. An Impossible Meeting In Oblivion:

Infancy and Poetry

Introduction

Two grown men in a prison cell, one of whom receives the happy visit of his three-year-

old daughter; such is the rather atypical scene of “Trilce XX.” Witnessing the girl

interacting with her father moves the lyrical I, who momentarily forgets his suffering: “Y

he aquí se me cae la baba, soy / una bella persona, cuando / el hombre

guillermosecundario / puja y suda felicidad / a chorros, al dar lustre al calzado / de su

pequeña de tres años” (192). The scene is atypical not only due to the presence of a three-

year-old in a prison cell, but more so considering the general absence of children in

Vallejo’s Trilce, and in avant-garde poetry in general.1

In this chapter I read the echoes of the infant in Vallejo, Girondo and Huidobro in

order to understand how these poets grapple with the tensions between the unsayable, that

is, (any) language’s limit, and their grounding in particular experience – personal, local,

and localized. At the same time, my attentiveness to the infant babbles in these

experimental, innovative and often difficult poems allows for a reconsideration of the

meanings of the infant. The unusual juxtaposition of adult experiences (such as sexuality)

as well as impossible experience (like Girondo’s “transmigración”), complicates our

understanding of the infant, because it appears distanced from its usual indexical,

1 Vallejo’s later poetic work shows more children, for example in the poem “España, aparte de mí este cáliz,” posthumously published in the homonymous volume.

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biological referent, and stripped from any qualifier (such as purity or innocence). This

throws a new light on the understanding of the infant in poetry.

In many ways, discussing “the infant in poetry” is a complicated matter. To be

sure, one would be hard-pressed to find examples of the presence of a child, let alone an

infant, in Girondo, Vallejo and Huidobro. Even if one does make an appearance, as in

“Trilce XX,” the lyrical subject acknowledges her presence in terms of how she affects

the adults. She does not speak, and the poet essentially erases her; she is an absent

presence.2 In most other poems studied in this chapter, the way the infant experiences the

world informs and enriches the poetic language, but s/he does not belong in the poetic

world; in those cases, the infant is a present absence. As I move through the chapter’s

analyses and theoretical frameworks, I keep these two opposing yet complementary

forms of the infant’s being in poetry into account.

Both experimental poet and babbling baby are bound by infancy, inasmuch as

infancy, as Agamben suggests in Infancy and History (1978), constitutes the unsayable:

“[T]he entry into the babble of infancy (when, linguists tell us, the baby forms the

phonemes of every language in the world) is the transcendental origin of history. In this

sense, to experience necessarily means to re-accede to infancy as history’s transcendental

place of origin” (2007, 60). But there is no way to enter into the babble of infancy

without the babbling infant her or himself. The figure of the infant, both as concept and

as biological entity, is necessary to mediate between the human and the linguistic,

between the abstract and the specific. Positing infancy as the unsayable therefore allows

me to explore the constant flux between the unsayable and (poetic) expression, and it is 2 Other poems by Vallejo in which the child is an absent presence: Trilce III, XI, XXIII, XXXVII, LVI and LXI.

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the infant who mediates between the impossible sites of linguistic plenitude and the

unsayable. At the same time, the infant in her individuality gives rise to a dimension of

historical specificity, the same historicity that inflects the poetry of Vallejo, Huidobro and

Girondo. The infant is the manifestation of this impossibility – combining both the

theoretical possibility of linguistic plenitude, as well as the infant’s entrance into

historical reality when s/he utters her first sounds, and echoes and mimics words

overheard in her environment. When I refer to the figure of the infant, I therefore include

both the conceptual frame of the impossible experience, as well as the biological entity

that approaches language and life.

A certain tension exists between the infant as concept and as biological entity; the

transition from biological child to abstract concept is uneasy, uncomfortable. The

biological infant is defined by socio-historical specificity, whereas infancy as a condition

for language purports to encompass a universality that no infant can embody completely.3

I believe this to be a productive tension; I will clarify which concept of the infant I refer

to as I move through the chapter, but I have no intention to smooth out the tension, as this

very tension is constitutive both of language and of the biological infant’s historical

experience in the world.

Reading the infant in poetry thus shows two sides of the question of ‘experience’;

the poetic expression of the infant’s experience of the world, a question I broach through

psychoanalysis, and the poet’s attempts at capturing transcendental experience. Despite

the impossibility to give expression to the unsayable, poets render material their attempts

3 Even though, as many scholars have pointed out, the ‘universal child’ of, say, psychoanalysis, is often the white, male, heterosexual child (see, for example, Kincaid; Stockton; Bernstein).

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through linguistic and poetic experimentation, which may take the form of neologisms,

fragmentation, calligrammes, or hyperbata, to name but a few, frequently used rhetorical

figures.

In this chapter I ask how the poetry I analyze expresses, or refuses to express,

poetic plenitude and fragmentation in the face of modernity in Latin America. Moreover,

I explore the links between the three poets’ experimentation and experience, a connection

that exceeds their common etymology. By exploring the various ways in which the poets

approach infancy, one thus gains insight into the echoes and traces of the unsayable in

their poetic language. Moreover, it places the reader in a privileged position to

understand the relationship of the infant with language, and the formation of experience

of the infant with the world. I explore the poetry, via Freudian, Lacanian and Kristevan

psychoanalysis, for expressions that elucidate the experience of the child vis-à-vis the

world (fragmented, uneven, unaware of its own bodily limitations). Furthermore, I assess

the infant’s relationship to language, which is one of theoretical plenitude, due to her

innate ability to pronounce the phonemes of any language, but which in practice does not

yet move beyond babbling and onomatopoeia. I thus explore the experience of language

(which moves from infant to language); experience in language (from poet to language);

and finally, the experience as language (from infant to poet).

I have chosen three poets of the historical Latin American avant-garde that stand

out for their innovative and experimental poetry: Oliverio Girondo (Argentina, 1891-

1967) with Espantapájaros (Al alcance de todos) (1932) and En la masmédula (1953);

César Vallejo (Peru, 1892-1938) with Trilce (1922); and Vicente Huidobro (Chile, 1893-

1948) with Altazor o el viaje en paracaídas: Poema en VII cantos (1931). I am especially

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interested in poets that work intensively with the materiality of language. Although much

of the poetry by Gabriela Mistral would lend itself brilliantly for an analysis of the

rhetoric of childhood as constitutive of nationhood, for example, her poetry does not fit

so well with this particular project. Altazor, Trilce and En la masmédula display the type

of experimentation with language that allows me to read in it echoes of the infant’s

babbles, to analyze it as an approximation to infancy. Furthermore, I include Girondo’s

Espantapájaros both for its extraordinary cacophony and play with sound, as well as the

enmeshment of different (human) bodies into one sensory experience.

Returning to the poem I allude to in the opening paragraph, “Trilce XX,” one

notices that, although the appearance of the girl in the tableau that Vallejo sketches

constitutes an exception in his poetic oeuvre, the poem contains the same experimental

impulse that characterizes Trilce. The little girl’s father, for example, embodies an “A

vertical subordinada.” Chosen here for its graphic shape, the A resembles the form that

“ese hombre mostachoso” outlines with his body while he stands, wide-legged,

urinating:4 “Bulla de botones de bragueta, / libres, / bulla que reprende A vertical

subordinada. / El desagüe jurídico. La chirota grata.” The A, first letter of the alphabet,

also connects the father with his little girl who is laboriously learning how to spell: “La

niña en tanto pónese el índice / en la lengua que empieza a deletrar / los enredos de

enredos de los enredos, / y unta el otro zapato, a escondidas, / con un poquito de saliba y

tierra, / pero con un poquito, / no má- / .s.” To illustrate the difficulty with which she

draws this “.s.” with the saliva of her tongue (where “lengua” plays double duty,

signifying both ‘tongue’ and ‘language’) on a dirty shoe, the poet breaks his last verse up

4 I owe this interpretation of the “A vertical” to Carlos Varón.

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so that it forms a triangle pointing down, with the “.s.” at its zenith – indeed, as a capital

A upside down (see fig.1):

Thus another preoccupation in Vallejo’s poetic emerges here, which is the de-

automatization of language; the man embodies the letter A with his body posture, while

the girl uses her own saliva as ink, and her finger as pen. Bodily fluids, in the form of

“desagüe jurídico” and “saliba” further connect father and daughter, and draw attention to

the coarse materiality of the verses. This kind of formal innovation is indeed a constant in

Vallejo’s work. Michelle Clayton rightly observes that, despite the political charge of his

later work, his poetry is “nowhere entirely free from a formal violence or fragmentation

that mediates and mirrors the poetry’s content” (2). Thus, while seemingly exceptional

due to the presence of a young girl in “Trilce XX,” the poem is illustrative both of Trilce

and of the main concerns of this chapter. Its language is simultaneously in process of

decomposition and creation, highlighting the materiality of the verse.

Figure 1 (Vallejo 197)

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The historical avant-garde contextualized

The statement asserted above, that Vallejo, Huidobro and Girondo are poets of the Latin

American historical avant-garde, is as true as it is imprecise. The context of the Latin

American avant-garde in general, and of these poets in particular, is complex. Literary

and artistic innovation, experimentation and the formation of artistic movements occur,

roughly simultaneously, in different parts of the world, mimicking, borrowing and

adapting practices seen, heard or read elsewhere. Although procedure, ideological stance

and aesthetic proposal differ in each case, they share the purpose of “la renovación de

modalidades artísticas institucionalizadas” (Verani 11). The three poets’ indebtedness to

different literary and artistic schools often appears idiosyncratic, differing wildly from

one poet to the other. Indeed, the three poets central to this chapter are radically different

in regards to their poetical trajectory, provenance, political engagement and relationship

with the different avant-garde movements. With hindsight, however, one can

unhesitatingly confirm that their innovative poetry has made a lasting impression upon

Hispanic poetry.5

Throughout the development of the different phases of the avant-garde the figure

of the infant serves as a constant source of inspiration and reference. Many of the avant-

garde movements were quite attentive to the babbling infant; the very name of Dada and

its possible relationship to senseless babble points to the infant’s centrality in Dadaism’s

conception. In his 1918 manifesto Tristan Tzara affirms that ‘dada’ doesn’t mean 5 It goes beyond the scope and intention of this chapter to trace these three poets within the Hispanic tradition, or even fully within their own trajectories. For recent monographs one may consult Michelle Clayton’s Poetry in Pieces (2011) on César Vallejo; Patricia Montilla’s Parody, the avant-garde and the poetics of subversion in Oliverio Girondo (2007); or Federico Schopf’s El desorden de las imágenes: Vicente Huidobro, Pablo Neruda, Nicanor Parra (2010).

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anything (De Micheli 250), while he later claims to have found the term in a dictionary.

Lexicographers Hatzfeld and Darmesteter define it directly as “onomatopoetic baby-talk”

(Poggioli 36). The Dadaist poets thus appreciate the infant’s babbling, and celebrate the

flexibility with which a term as apparently simple as “dada” can mean nothing at all, or

stand for a bookish dictionary definition. Or, to put it in Lacanian terms; they implicitly

acknowledge how dada can refer to the Symbolic and the pre-Symbolic order at once.

Capitalizing on the infant’s creative and at times nonsensical approach to language, they

also reconsider the linguistic construction of meaning. For the Dadaists, ‘infant’

encompasses an opportunity for linguistic experimentation.

The three poets under scrutiny in this chapter take the invitation to linguistic play

seriously. Clayton observes of Vallejo that “exploitation of infancy both coincides with

dada’s playful infantilism – its creative destruction of received modes of production and

the rearticulation of utterances from the level of the letter on up – and turns it into the

basis for a new articulation of the body and of language” (66). And Huidobro declares in

his manifesto on creacionismo: “En Tristan Tzara encuentro poemas admirables que

están muy cerca de la más estricta concepción creacionista. Aunque en él la creación es

generalmente más formal que fundamental” (Schwartz 87).

As the Latin American poets turn their ear to infant echolalias, however, they also

seek a rupture with the dominant poetic aesthetic of the time, modernismo. “Non

Serviam,” a short poetic manifesto that Huidobro reads at the Ateneo de Santiago de

Chile in 1914, is a first attempt at just that. In José Quiroga’s phrase, “Non Serviam” is “a

text that retains the modernista framework while arguing that the framework itself is

unreal” (1992b, 518, original emphasis). Jorge Schwartz proposes it as a possible

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beginning6 of the avant-garde on the Latin American continent (2002, 37).7 Several years

later, in 1925, Huidobro elaborates on the foundations of creacionismo: “Os diré qué

entiendo por poema creado. Es un poema en el que cada parte constitutiva, y todo el

conjunto, muestra un hecho nuevo, independiente del mundo externo, desligado de

cualquier otra realidad que no sea la propia, pues toma su puesto en el mundo como un

fenómeno singular, aparte y distinto de los demás fenómenos” (Schwartz 1991, 87). The

impact of creacionismo on poetry, particularly in Chile, was felt long after this

statement,8 and was often contrasted with ultraísmo. As José Quiroga succinctly states:

“Both of these movements had a utopian vision of language centered on the poetic image

and on an overvaluation of metaphor. Ultraísmo wanted to go beyond the received

notions of language as representation, and creacionismo sought a language that would

rearrange empirical reality in order to fashion a poetic object” (2008, 311-312). Other

poets prefer to highlight the similarities between the different isms. Jorge Luis Borges,

for one, states: “[U]ltraísmo, simplismo, el rótulo es lo de menos” (qtd. in Verani 29).

The duration of the Latin American avant-garde is as disputed as its beginnings,

but is generally considered to last until roughly 1935 (Verani 2008, 114). Quiroga even

considers Altazor, published in 1931, a “point of closure for the Latin American and

European avant-garde” (2002, 165). En la masmédula, published in 1953, could therefore

6 For a periodization of the Latin American historical avant-garde, see Schwartz (2002, 36-40).

7 Hugo Verani suggests a later text by Huidobro, “Arte poética,” which he published in Espejo de agua (1916), as the initial text of the Latin American avant-garde.

8 In an open letter to Paul Dermée, Huidobro himself would later declare: “[H]oy ya no estoy de acuerdo con los otros adeptos de esta escuela [el creacionismo], pues la mayor parte cayó en la pura fantasía” (Schwartz 1991, 78).

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be considered somewhat of an outsider to the historical avant-garde in Latin America.

Girondo’s preoccupations in this collection of poems, however, are the culmination of a

literary trajectory that involve a very active participation with the avant-gardes, and

coincide with the avant-garde’s desire for (aesthetic) rupture and innovation.

In Europe the avant-garde was born from a breach with the nineteenth century,

a rupture that was not only aesthetic in nature, but also historical and ideological (De

Micheli 15); the political and artistic avant-gardes evolved together, sometimes in

tension, others in fruitful coexistence. Marinetti publishes the first Futurist Manifesto in

1909, which, according to Schwartz, “toma la delantera de todos los ismos como violenta

reacción contra la burguesía de la época, contra el arte museológico y contra todo

parámetro pasatista” (42). Bréton’s Surrealism, its first Manifesto dating from 1924,

closes the long list of new schools and literary movements that flourish in Europe. In

many critical accounts of these isms the term ‘infantilism’ keeps turning up, for example

in Mario De Micheli’s Las vanguardias artísticas del siglo XX (1959), in which he

declares forthright: “En varios modos y en distinta medida, el exotismo, el negrismo, el

infantilismo y el arcaísmo fascinaron, en los primeros años del siglo, a los artistas de toda

Europa” (62). The way in which De Micheli meshes together these four isms is indicative

of his indiscriminate employment of the terms. He takes them as the antithesis of the

bourgeoisie, with little interest in the specific contribution of, say, primitivism or

infantilism: “[L]as sugestiones de los mitos primitivos tomados en sí mismos, es decir, en

sus aspectos de inocencia, de pureza y de lejanía de la denostada sociedad burguesa [...]

era una manera de llevar adelante [...] la rebelión contra los módulos figurativos de la

tradición europea” (62, my emphasis). In this account, the ‘infant’ in ‘infantilism’ is

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preempted to express judgment, aesthetic or moral, positive or negative, about the avant-

garde artists.9 De Micheli levels the infant with ‘primitivism,’ ‘innocence’ and ‘purity’ –

all highly debated, contentious terms.

The role of the infant in the different isms, nonetheless, is much more

multifaceted than its leveling with any of the terms De Micheli mentions, and Dadaism or

Surrealism, for example, more complex than the simple exaltation of innocence and

primitivism. These European expressions of the avant-garde, in all their complexities,

constitute important influences on Girondo, Huidobro and Vallejo. It is doubtful,

however, whether ‘influence’ is the proper way to phrase the fluctuation of innovation,

creation and mutual influence between the different artists. Mari Carmen Ramírez notes

that “there is a tendency to quickly assimilate the formal and discursive complexity of

these [Latin American] movements’ real contribution to the avant-garde through the

decorated and grotesque discourses of either the exotic or the primitive” (3). To be sure,

during the early twenties, the realization that poetry and art was undergoing profound

changes in Latin American was only slowly sinking in. Girondo publishes his first

volume of poetry in 1922, Veinte poemas para ser leídos en el tranvía, which he himself

edits. José Emilio Pacheco is one of the first Latin American writers to notice the

internationalization of what turned out to be the phenomenon of 1922 – the year that sees

9 A similar judgmental attitude is found in Renato Poggioli’s The theory of the Avant-Garde (1962), in which the critic goes as far as identifying an “avant-garde cult of youth” (35). He views this exaltation of youth as regressive primitivism: “Excessive exaltation of youth obviously leads to a regressive condition: from youthful freshness to adolescent ingenuousness, to boyish prankishness, to childishness. This sui generis primitivism determines a psychological regression and produces what one might call infantilism in certain aspects of avant-garde movements and art” (35).

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the publications of Ulysses, The Waste Land, Trilce and Desolación; the year in which la

Semana de Arte Moderno occurs in São Paulo; and the year that the avant-garde journals

Proa and Actual are founded, respectively in Buenos Aires and Mexico City (Schwartz

37). It is also in 1922, however, that Vallejo bemoans to Antenor Orrego, an author

friend who had provided a prologue to the first edition of Trilce: “El libro ha caído en el

mayor vacío” (Oviedo 564).

Almost a century later, the question remains how to critically approach the Latin

American historical avant-garde. Seemingly, there are “two alternatives supposedly

confronting the critic of peripheral modernisms –on the one hand to read them as either

degraded or disruptive parodies of the metropolitan original, on the other hand to

reconsider their status as ‘proper’ to their own cultural and geographical locations”

(Madureira 6).10 Critics have also had a penchant for differentiating poets (and artists, for

that matter),11 in categories of local and global. Vallejo, particularly, has been read as

both Peruvian (in his early poetry) and universal (in his posthumous poetry and

chronicles), yet rarely as both at once. Recent criticism contests this labeling; in her

recent monograph on Vallejo, Michelle Clayton takes issue with the oppositional logic of

the local and the universal: “Vallejo is tethered neither to the local (speaking exclusively

to, of, and from Peru) nor to a denationalized universalism [...] but rather tied to the

world [...], about and to which he speaks from a localized position which is nonetheless 10 Madureira adds: “[O]ne should therefore add a third and arguably aporetic one. From this indeterminate position, this contextual and conjunctural element that [...] we ought to define as ‘backward’ could be grasped in a more disturbing light, that is, in terms of their ‘affinity’ with tendencies that are just beginning to emerge in the ‘center’ and have yet to manifest themselves in the ‘periphery’” (6).

11 See, for example, “The Surrealist Continent” in Drawing the Line (1989), by Oriana Baddeley and Valerie Fraser.

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constantly on the move” (6). A hierarchized list of influences between the European and

Latin American avant-garde will not do – the localized position is often ‘on the move’

not only in Vallejo, but also in Huidobro and Girondo. Indeed, all three poets travel

extensively, connect with foreign poets and visual artists and continuously redefine the

meaning of ‘local.’12

All the journeys and collaborations complicate the question of center and

periphery, for each poet selectively picks and chooses from the poetic and artistic

innovations he encounters. Is Huidobro influenced by cubism, for example, or does his

Torre Eifel contribute to the definition of cubism? Vallejo is an avid reader of the French

symbolists, and explicitly invokes Albert Samain in “Trilce LV,” but he marks, more than

indebtedness, differentiation: “Samain diría el aire es quieto y de una con- / tenida

tristeza. // Vallejo dice hoy la Muerte está soldando cada / lindero a cada hebra de cabello

perdido” (237).13 And Girondo, ever the clever self-promoter, approaches the publication

of Espantapájaros as a performance, an event similar to a Dada ‘happening’ (Montilla

12 Huidobro moves to France in 1916, where he meets artists such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Juan Gris, who will be one of his closest friends and collaborators. Huidobro constantly plays with typographical spatiality, and his Tour Eiffel (1918) attempts to bridge pictorial and literary cubism. Vallejo travels to Paris five years after Huidobro, in 1923. There he meets and collaborates with Huidobro, Juan Larrea and Tristan Tzara, among others. Girondo is no exception, traveling to France for the first time at the age of nine, pursuing studies in Paris, and avidly reading French and European novelties after his return to Argentina. After the publication of Persuasión de los días (1942) he travels through Brazil with writer Norah Lange, his spouse, where they connect with the Brazilian avant-garde and meet Oswald de Andrade, Mário de Andrade and Manuel Bandeira.

13 Michelle Clayton has shown that an early version of “Retablo,” a poem from Los heraldos negros, Vallejo named the European Symbolists (Francis) Jammes, (Albert) Samain, and (Maurice) Maeterlinck in a half-verse, which he later excised. Trilce reincorporates Samain, but only in order to declare the differential nature of Vallejo’s own lyric language (Clayton 79).

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105).14 Espantapájaros itself, however, shows more resemblance to Surrealism than to

Dadaism.15

As I mention before, the political and aesthetic avant-gardes evolved

simultaneously and were often correlated, and the violent force of the avant-garde’s

poetic rebellion does not remain exclusively tied to the linguistic domain. Clayton

observes of Vallejo that “his poems are always more attentive to parts than to wholes, to

broken metonymies than to integrative metaphors. While this might seem a primarily

aesthetic question, it is related to much larger questions of political representation” (14).

Renato Poggioli points into a similar direction when he states that “the most typical

avant-garde antinomy establishes and antagonistic relation [...] between poetic language

and social language” (38). Poets are trying to make sense of a world that is broken up by

wars of unprecedented scale, the world of the early twentieth century that appears

increasingly fragmented due to the changes of modernity, industrialization and its

increasing dependence on technology; poetic language often disintegrates and breaks

apart in an attempt to give expression to these rapid changes and political crises. Latin

American poets struggle with questions of identity and belonging, and attempt to forge a

place for themselves in the post-colonial order of the literary world. They often forego

earlier rural traditions such as indigenismo in favor of a more urban approach.

14 Montilla: “Girondo appropriated Dada principles and advertising methods for the promotion and sale of the book” (105).

15 In an early study of Girondo’s entire oeuvre that dates from 1964, critic Marta Scrimaglio discards Espantapájaros as “unworthy” of study, but notes that the work “comienza a señalar la entrada de Girondo en un clima más o menos surrealista” (qtd. in Montilla 108). Jorge Schwartz is more outspoken about the importance of Surrealism in Espantapájaros, which he considers “una obra nítidamente surrealista” (417).

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The case of Vallejo shows just how problematic it is to make generalized

statements about the poetic avant-garde as a whole. It is generally presumed that Vallejo

struggles to shrug off his own poetic formation in Los heraldes negros (1919), which still

bears the imprints of modernismo, but which is also caught “between anachronistic local

conceptions of poetry and radical reconceptualizations entering from Europe” (Clayton

45). With the publication of Trilce, which shows tremendous formal experimentation and

innovation, he manages to constitute an entirely new aesthetic. Curiously enough, Vallejo

was weary of the formal experimentation of his colleagues. Verani notes: “Vallejo

rechaza la frivolidad lúdica e intelectual de la vanguardia, el mero juego de ingenio, la

novedad formal como fin en sí mismo” (31). Although he may have disliked formal

experimentation for the sake of experimentation, with Trilce he acquires the rupture with

established, institutionalized and bourgeois poetry that the avant-garde strived for.

Avant-garde poets elsewhere in Latin American were equally attentive to the

socio-political tradition of their countries. Miguel Ángel Asturias, in an early

commentary on En la masmédula, brings out the affinity between Girondo and an Afro-

Caribbean particularity: “Oliverio Girondo nos sorprende en el camino de la jitanjáfora

con su último libro de poemas que lleva por título En la masmédula, y que si

tipográficamente es un alarde de buen gusto, en lo que toca a los textos es una incursión

audaz del poeta en la superación del idioma de que se vale busca buscando otras formas

de expresión que superan el lenguaje corriente” (655). In 1929 Alfonso Reyes coins the

term “jitanjáfora,” based on one of the poems that the Cuban Mariano Brull publishes in a

volume that carries the title Poemas en menguante (1928). According to Reyes,

jitanjáforas aspire to return words to their ‘pure linguistic value’ and he considers them,

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first, as a linguistic exercise (Quiroga 2008, 335). He underlines how Brull’s

experimental poetry veers from an excess of philosophical content: “Ciertamente este

poema no se dirige a la razón, sino más bien a la sensación y a la fantasía. Las palabras

no buscan aquí un fin útil. Juegan solas, casi” (2009, 186). Before connecting Girondo’s

experimentation with jitanjáforas, however, it is important to bear in mind that the latter

arise in a specific socio-literary context, i.e. Afro-Caribbean poetry of the first decades of

the past century. Quiroga elaborates how seemingly random sounds in Luis Palés Matos’s

poetry, for example, is actually meaningful: “The Afro-Caribbean vocabulary serves a

dual function: it is at once rhythmic and signifying, it encompasses the categories of

sound and meaning. The agrammatism of the Spanish obscures the grammatical sense

that is being played out in a different language, somewhere else, in the space of nostalgia

or plenitude” (2002, 165). This connection to indigenous languages is absent in

Girondo’s neologisms and echolalias, and perhaps the term jitanjáfora should be reserved

for its specific literary context.16

Respecting the differences, though, there is something to be said for considering

the term in this context. Girondo too employs sonority and rhythm to create meaning,

although his neologisms are not rooted in a different language that render his verses

grammatical “in the space of nostalgia or plenitude.” As nonsensical words that

nonetheless evoke meaning by virtue of their sonority, the play with words typical of the

jitanjáforas is particularly likely to appear in the infant’s linguistic world. This is true for

the babbling infant herself, who spontaneously invents sonorous words, but also for the 16 Much has been made of Vallejo’s ‘indigenist’ poetry; despite his use of several terms in Quechua, in all likeliness he did not speak the language himself (Clayton 276n8, 278n8), and his use of Quechua is very different from the way Palés Matos employs indigenous languages.

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adult writing for the young child. The most well known example is, of course, Lewis

Carroll’s jabberwocky that appears in Through the Looking Glass (1872). While

conversing with the White King and the White Queen, Alice finds a book in which she

reads a poem, “Jabberwocky.” One of its stanzas read: “‘And hast thou slain the

Jabberwock? / Come to my arms, my beamish boy! / O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’ /

He chortled in his joy.”17 The combination of rhyme and rhythm is comparable to the

effects of the jitanjáforas, and of several of the poetic experiments of Girondo, mainly in

En la masmédula, Huidobro and Vallejo.

Clayton notes that “[i]n both the avant-garde and indigenism, the figure of the

infant points to a moment where poetry starts to become contemporary by beginning all

over again, risking new forms of expression rather than remaining within an established

and by now anachronistic aesthetic of good taste” (67). My reading of the infant in

Espantapájaros, En la masmédula, Altazor and Trilce probes the site of that new

beginning, and elaborates the concept of infancy as constituting both an impossible

experience and linguistic plenitude. In order to broach this aporetic expression of infancy,

I will start by considering the experience of the biological, pre-linguistic infant as

expressed through linguistic means in these volumes of poetry.

Infantile perception and fragmented expression

In order to provide insight into the pre-linguistic infant’s experience of the world, I resort

to a psychoanalytic framework. At the same time, reading Vallejo’s, Girondo’s and

Huidobro’s poetic experimentation through this psychoanalytic lens proffers a first way

17 Chapter I, n.p. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12/12-h/12-h.htm

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of appreciating how their poetic expression draws closer to infancy-as-experience. The

babble that the infant produces shows remarkable similarities with the poet’s attempts to

articulate the inexpressible. This relationship between poetry and babble is not restricted

to the historical avant-garde. George Steiner quotes the verses in Dante’s Paradiso where

the poet compares his art with the “inarticulate babblings of an unweaned child” (1998,

41). The connection between Dante’s long, religious poem and a babbling baby may

seem farfetched. The infant’s echolalias, poetry and religiousness may be connected,

however, through Freud’s concept of the “oceanic feeling.” The term was originally

coined by Romain Rolland who employed it in a letter to Freud, in response to “a small

book that treats religion as an illusion [The Future of an Illusion]” that Freud had sent

him (Freud 1962, 12). To Rolland, the “oceanic feeling” describes the true source of

religious sentiments. Freud refutes the oceanic feeling as source religiousness, perhaps in

part because he admits that he cannot detect that feeling in himself. He relates it, rather,

to the “primitive ego feeling” of the infant, when the body is unbound: “[O]riginally the

ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself [...]. [O]ur

present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive –

indeed, an all-embracing – feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between

the ego and the world about it” (1962, 15). To the unweaned child, the mother’s breast is

part of him or herself, while taking away the breast creates in the infant the idea that

people other than herself exist. The oceanic feeling therefore reconnects an adult to the

infantile consciousness when the body was still unbound, previous to the creation of the

ego, when human and non-human environment overlapped and flowed into one another.

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Thus, “the inarticulate babblings of the unweaned child” in poetry set up a possible

connection between the adult and his or her primitive ego-feeling of the unbound body.

Although psychoanalysis as a discourse is far removed from the poetic endeavor,

Freud’s explanation of the oceanic feeling and the poet’s attempt at articulating infancy-

as-experience actually do have something in common; they both attempt to express

something that cannot (the poet’s unsayable) or no longer (psychoanalysis’ primitive ego-

feeling) be reproduced in reality. Psychoanalysis provides a framework to understand the

infant’s experience of the world, and reading the infant’s absent presence in poetry can

render her experience more intelligible through artistic means, as well as further our

understanding of the poetic expression of transcendental experience.

An unbound bodily experience similar to the one described by Freud can be found

in poem 1618 of Espantapájaros, which opens with an unusual declaration: “A unos les

gusta el alpinismo. A otros les entretiene el dominó. A mí me encanta la transmigración. /

Mientras aquéllos se pasan la vida colgados de una soga o pegando puñetazos sobre una

mesa, yo me lo paso transmigrando de un cuerpo a otro, yo no me canso nunca de

transmigrar” (98). Throughout the poem, the lyrical subject explains the intense pleasure

that these metamorphoses provide him. Rose Corral explains: “Esta identidad expansiva y

gozosa puede [...] ‘transmigrar de un cuerpo a otro’ y franquear los límites de lo humano

para abarcar otros reinos” (595). Indeed, the boundaries of the body do not constitute the

limits of this lyrical I. A similar abolition of boundaries occurs in “Espantapájaros 8”

where the subject is “un cocktail, un conglomerado, una manifestación de 18 Not all critics agree on the denomination of the pieces in Espantapájaros as poems. Saúl Yurkiévich writes: “[Las] veinticuatro piezas [de Espantapájaros], numeradas y sin título, oscilan entre los polos narrativo y poético, pero sólo dos se alinean nítidamente en las categorías poema y cuento” (1999, 705).

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personalidades,” and in the sexual encounter of “Espantapájaros 17,” in which the bodies

are literally glued together: “Me estrechaba entre sus brazos chatos y se adhería a mi

cuerpo, con una violenta viscosidad de molusco” (100). This curious confluence of

bodies, animals and personalities suggests a perception of the world different from the

ordinary. Freud’s oceanic feeling takes as its point of departure the adult and her/his

relationship to the residues of the infant s/he once was;19 for the sensations evoked in

these poems I propose a reading that takes into consideration the way an infant in the

(pre-)mirror stage perceives the world.20

In “The Mirror Stage As Formative of the I” Jacques Lacan maintains that the

child in the mirror stage (roughly between 6-18 months old) perceives her own body as

fragmented, and that s/he does not distinguish between her own body and that of the

mother who is holding her.21 According to the infant’s knowledge of herself and of the

world, her body merges with the world that surrounds her – indeed, s/he is not aware

there is any difference between her own body and the world. Furthermore, although the 19 Freud describes how the infant with his primitive ego feeling does not yet distinguish between his own body and that of her mother: “He must be very strongly impressed by the fact that some sources of excitation, while he will later recognize as his own bodily organs, can provide him with sensations at any moment, whereas other sources evade him from time to time – among them what he desires most of all, his mother’s breast – and only reappear as a result of his screaming for help” Freud 1962, 14). This infant, who according to Lacan’s categories is pre-mirror stage, starts to learn how to differentiate between eternal and internal, (what belongs to the ego and what is external world), which amounts to the introduction of the reality principle.

20 Lorna Close suggests a similar retreat into childhood when one reads Vallejo’s poetry. She argues that Vallejo’s dislocation of the common procedures in language “slow[s] down our rate of reading, violently disturbing our comprehension, making each word starkly distinct, so that we are forced back to that childhood state of having to grapple with meaning half-understood, making us recapture the primal impact of the strangeness of words” (165, original emphasis).

21 The same effect is achieved through the mother’s gaze, or any other mirror-substitute.

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infant in the mirror stage does not yet have complete control over her motor capacities,

when s/he gazes in the mirror s/he recognizes herself in the unified image s/he perceives.

This self-recognition, however, essentially provides a fictional account of the formation

of the self. The mirror stage is a formative phase of each individual’s subject formation

that causes a discrepancy between image and reality that will continue to haunt

throughout adult life. Lacan regards “the function of the mirror-stage as a particular case

of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its

reality” (1977, 4, original emphasis). The often-noted fragmentation in Vallejo, Huidobro

and Girondo may be analyzed in connection to this psychoanalytic paradigm. In this case,

the infant makes her absent presence felt not because these poems speak of mirrors,

mothers and infants, but through the ways in which the lyrical I perceives the world

around him/her in relation to her own, fragmented body. In psychoanalysis fragmentation

of the subject entails latent violence. Lacan comments: “This fragmented body [...]

usually manifests itself in dreams when the movement of the analysis encounters a

certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual” (1977, 4). In poetry, a similar

process takes place within language; fragmentation allows the poets to express their

unease with what Lacan calls the Symbolic order, and to stage a linguistic rebellion

against the name of the father.22 Language in Vallejo, Huidobro and Girondo often

appears fragmented on a syntactical and lexical level, and in several poems it shows

aggressive disintegration. In Altazor Canto VII consists of words that still conform to

22 To be sure, there are ways to read the fragmented subject other than the infant entering the mirror stage. To stay within a psychoanalytical framework one can think, for example, of the schizophrenic as another fragmented subject. I find the reading of infancy particularly compelling, because in the infant this fragmentation appears alongside a promise of linguistic, even though that promise is never fulfilled.

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Spanish grammar and pronunciation, but that no longer employ conventional Spanish

language.

In “Trilce VIII” the lyrical I expresses a violent urge for fragmentation. First,

Vallejo plays with a purposely ill-defined perception of time, where “mañana esotro día”

(177) does not refer to a specific moment in time, but rather to the possibility of eternity:

“Mañana esotro día, alguna / vez hallaría para el hifalto poder, / entrada eternal.” This

play is treacherous and will profoundly alter perception of time, to the point where the

morning is no longer discernible: “Pero un mañana sin mañana, / entre los aros de que

enviudemos, / margen de espejo habrá / donde traspasaré mi propio frente / hasta perder

el eco / y quedar con el frente hacia la espalda.” The “margen de espejo,” the space

between the self and the fiction of self, provides the lyrical subject with the opportunity

to effectively sever its reflection from itself.23 As an inversed Narcissus, the lyrical

subject does not love or desire its own reflection, but rather wants to disappear behind it,

“traspasaré mi propio frente,” to the point where even Echo cannot follow. The desire

here is to disappear into a non-defined time, or eternal non-time, where there can be no

echo, since echoes depend on a chronological perception of time; they return a sound

after it has been uttered.

The turn to self here causes the I to lose “el eco,” which prompts questions

regarding self-identification, for how does one “lose” the echo? It seems to suggest that 23 Curiously enough, in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” Freud describes the case of a (treacherous) mirror image out of which a young boy makes himself disappear: “It soon turned out [...] that during this long period of solitude the child had found a method of making himself disappear. He had discovered his reflection in a full-length mirror which did not quite reach to the ground, so that by crouching down he could make his mirror-image ‘gone’” (1961, 9n).

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the lyrical subject, in order to sever itself from its reflection, first needs to disconnect its

attachment to sound. Mladen Dolar proposes, in A Voice and Nothing More (2006), that

the first stage of subject formation is auditory before it becomes visual: “[I]f the voice is

the first manifestation of life, is not hearing oneself, and recognizing one’s own voice,

thus an experience that precedes self-recognition in a mirror?” (39). If, in fact, self-

recognition precedes the gaze and occurs by means of one’s own voice, this would at the

very least assuage the effects of the difficult divide that is established between viewing

the image of the fictional unitary self, and the reality that that this mirror image outdoes

the motor capacities of the infant. Yet even if self-recognition occurs through sound

before image, the I needs, like in Lacan’s mirror stage, the Other for self-identification:

“The essential feature is the double nature of this sound – it is on the one hand what one

hears, which manifests the enigmatic activity of the Other by which one is spellbound,

awestruck, mesmerized; and at the same time the sound that one might produce oneself

and which could betray us in front of the other” (133). In “Trilce VIII” the self becomes

fragmented and moves to an impossible place, but behind itself, “con el frente hacia la

espalda,” a place that is not too far from infancy as I have described it, through its

language and its imagery.

Espantapájaros contains one of the visually most

arresting examples of fragmentation, namely the caligramme that

opens the volume, where the verses form the title’s scarecrow

(see figure 2). At the same time, the caligramme plays with

perception, the image of the scarecrow recalls the Urbild that the

infant perceives in the mirror; it is an illusion, a fiction, for the

Figure 2 (Girondo 77)

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unified image s/he sees does not correspond with her fragmented reality, but that does not

render the image any less forceful. The opening poem readily invites an appreciation that

depends less on the content of the verses, and more on its visual and audio effects. It

plays not only with the visual lay-out of the verses on the page, breaking up verses and

words, but also with onomatopoeias: “Creo que / creo en lo que creo / que no creo. Y

creo / que no creo en lo / que creo que creo.” These verses verbally reconstruct the

“Cantar de las ranas,” the verse that immediately follows. The first eight verses of the

poem form the head of the scarecrow, ironically so, since they are made out of the

negated conjugation of the verb “saber,” ending with the ascertainment: “Nosotros no

sabemos nada”. They thus establish the negation of learned knowledge and guide the

reader toward a different kind of approach to this poem, which also serves to confront

those that follow in Espantapájaros, an approach that privileges sensorial perception over

signification, fragmentation over the illusion of unity.

Throughout the works discussed in this chapter, one finds other poems that

acquire additional meaning when read in conjunction with a psychoanalytic framework.

In “Topatumba” (from Girondo’s En la masmédula) an appreciation of infancy provides

an unexpected explanation of the poem’s eroticism. What the infantile perception reveals

in this poem is not the sexual experience per se, but the erotic charge of the neologisms.

In his analysis of Dora’s case Freud remarks: “Children [...] divine something sexual in

the uncanny sounds [das unheimliche Geräusch] that reach their ears” (qtd. in Dolar 134).

“Topatumba” cleverly uses neologisms to evoke an erotic scene, verbs and nouns that

have an uncanny ring to them because the invented words sound familiar and strange at

the same time. He is therefore a precursor (and most likely a source of inspiration) of

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Julio Cortázar’s glíglico,24 continuously playing with the sounds of the words, and

making scarce use of words that directly reveal the eroticism of the poem. The verse “ah

la piel cal de luna de tu trascielo mío que me lelitabisma” is both familiar and strange at

the same time. It cleverly combines recognizable words (cal, luna, mío) with invented

ones (trascielo, lelitabisma), all of which are imbued with a form of meaning by the

Spanish grammar that upholds the verse. Moreover, the sonority of the poem takes on a

far greater importance than the (possible) significance of the words, such as in the first

verse that reads: “Ay mi más mimo mío25” or in “te tato y topo tumbo y te arpo” (254), in

which the alliteration of the ‘m’ and ‘t’ creates a musical, rhythmical effect. Therefore, to

evoke sexuality through inventive, expressive, and ultimately uncanny sounds leads the

reader or listener of this poem to perceive this sexuality much in the same way Freud

claims that young children do.

Kristevan semiotics: senseless and sensible babble

In this section I continue to broach infancy mainly through the infant as biological entity,

exploring the infant’s world via psychoanalysis. Rather than the infant in process of

subject formation, however, I shift my focus to the way the infant makes her way into

language. Poet and infant find themselves pushing and pulling the margins of language,

24 Chapter 68 of Rayuela (1963) describes an erotic scene between la Maga and Oliveiro, evoked through invented lexicon that follows Spanish grammar and pronunciation. There are a few other instances in the novel where the characters use glíglico.

25 It is worth pointing out that the second definition of the noun “mimo” in the dictionary of the Real Academia Española reads: “Cariño, regalo o condescendencia excesiva con que se suele tratar especialmente a los niños.” www.rae.es

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in order to innovate poetic expression and to acquire a mother tongue, respectively.

According to Roman Jakobson infants are at “the apex of babble,” a state in which they

are capable of pronouncing any and every sound of all human languages (Heller-Roazen

9). In order to learn a mother tongue, however, this creative state of absolute phonic

ability needs to be abandoned. In Echolalias (2008), Daniel-Heller Roazen comments: “It

is as if the acquisition of language were only possible through an act of oblivion, a kind

of linguistic infantile amnesia (or phonic amnesia, since what the infant seems to forget is

not language but an apparently infinite capacity for undifferentiated articulation)” (11).

The poet goes through the inverted process; in order to fully explore the limits of

language, to see how far he can stretch the linguistic and poetic possibilities, he needs to

‘forget’ the rules of the language in which he expresses himself. Michelle Clayton points

to “Babel” from Los heraldos negros to argue that “this poem performs the collapse of

language in its reaching toward a referent, whether sacred or secular, at the same time

that it insists on its quest for an audience” (64). The poem first appeared in a magazine

for schoolchildren, La cultura infantil in 1917, for which Vallejo submitted several other

poems, all with a pedagogical intent. Clayton suggests that the decision to publish the

poem in a children’s magazine “underlines the poet’s own need to unlearn a language, to

return to the state of infancy – of being prior to language” (65). The poet thus finds

himself in an impossible situation, for in order to enter language as a child, he once

needed to forget his capacity for “undifferentiated articulation.” However, his desire to

move towards a larger range of (un)differentiated articulation in his poetic

experimentation, requires him to ‘forget’ the linguistic rules that made language possible

in the first place.

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There is something contradictory about, especially, the poet’s willful

‘forgetfulness’ of his own mother tongue. Heller-Roazen recounts the tale of Abu Nuwas,

a young Arabic poet, whose poetic mentor required of him that he memorize 1000 lines

of classical Arabic poetry before writing anything himself. Once Abu Nuwas had those

lines thoroughly committed to memory, his mentor then demanded he forget everything

he just learned by heart. Heller-Roazen points out how, astonishingly, this forced

forgetting did not cause bewilderment: “How [...] could the poet truly forget all the

passages he had learned by heart if he did not continue to remember to do so? [...] It is as

if for him the sole place of poetry were in an indistinct region of speech in which memory

and oblivion, writing and its effacement, could clearly be told apart” (193). Altazor gives

the reader an idea of what the poet’s deliberate oblivion may look and sound like. The

first words of the Prefacio indicate proximity between poet and infant: “Nací a los treinta

y tres años” (55). In this long poem the poet is born through his language, or born again

perhaps. In José Quiroga’s phrase: “Altazor [...] is a poem about the death and the rebirth

of language” (2002, 164). The linguistic progression throughout the poem is reversed,

towards the total disintegration of language, which culminates in a scream built of

nothing but three vowels: “Ai a i ai a i i i i o ia” (138). After Canto II, language slowly

but surely marks a “viaje a la semilla” of sorts, as in the short story Alejo Carpentier

would publish in 1958.

The oblivion that advances the child into language acquisition and the poet into

hitherto unexplored areas of poetry and language, finds itself in that same domain of

infancy. In this sense, the poetry I analyze in this chapter is the expression of an

impossibility, the expression of a state that cannot be, i.e. a simultaneous forgetting and

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remembering of the same concept: language. In the introduction of the chapter I propose

to read that space as infancy; infancy functions as the Ur-limit of language which, in its

impossibility, is constitutive of language’s expressibility. At the zenith of her phonic

capabilities, the voice of the pre-linguistic infant is pregnant with potential sounds –

indeed with all potential sounds. In the eighth poem of Espantapájaros the lyrical subject

accumulates so many personalities that he ends up exclaiming: “Mi vida resulta así una

preñez de posibilidades que no se realizan nunca” (87). The phonic capacities of the

infant are just like these “posibilidades” – they exist, but the infant cannot hold on to

them upon entering the linguistic realm, s/he cannot turn them into lived experiences. As

such, the infant suggests the unsayable, without ever articulating it. Whereas infancy as

language’s constitutive impossibility is always out of reach, linguistic oblivion

necessitates the embodied experience of the infant, and poet. This oblivion, a place that is

simultaneously before (the child) and beyond meaning (the poet), resonates strongly with

the semiotic as construed by Julia Kristeva.

To be sure, this linguistic oblivion is quite different from the Kristeva’s semiotic,

which she understands as the prelinguistic drive energy that becomes manifest in the arts,

and particularly in poetic language. The Lacanian mirror stage, the “birth of the sign”

(1980, 284), functions as the thetic phase that is the threshold of the Symbolic and of

language (1984, 49). It marks the divide not only between fictional self and reality, but

also between pre-linguistic Imaginary and linguistic Symbolic. Rather than having the

rationalized Symbolic take over language completely, however, the semiotic challenges

the repression of the primary relationship of the infant to the maternal body, which, as I

have shown, is essential both to the infant’s perception of the world during the mirror

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stage and to the adult’s oceanic feeling. Judith Butler summarizes: “Kristeva challenges

the Lacanian narrative which assumes cultural meaning requires the repression of that

primary relationship to the maternal body. [...] In effect, poetic language is the recovery

of the maternal body within the terms of language, one that has the potential to disrupt,

subvert, and displace the paternal law” (1999, 108). This recovery of the maternal body

within the terms of language has the potential to subvert the Symbolic order: “The

distortion of words, the repetition of words and syntagms, and hyperkinesia or stereotypy

reveal that a semiotic network – the chora – has been established, one that simultaneously

defies both verbal symbolization and the formation of a superego patterned after paternal

law and sealed by language acquisition” (1984, 152). In this sense, rupture is as central to

the chora as it is to linguistic oblivion. The infant stumbles her way into language with

her first babblings, echoing what s/he hears around her, and the poet breaks up linguistic

structures such as syntax, grammar and vocabulary in his poetic experiments.

Thus, the linguistic worlds of the poet and the infant briefly converge in oblivion,

and the semiotic helps to understand this position of both infant and poet vis-à-vis

language. Kristevan semiotic, unlike oblivion, does not consider itself to be

simultaneously before (the child) and beyond meaning (the poet). The ‘before’ and ‘after’

of the polylogical are connected to the entrance into the Symbolic: the “inaccessible

before” is “instinctual, maternal, musical” whereas the “dangerous after” is “logical

naming, castrating” (1980, 189, original emphasis). The conception of the spatio-

temporal position of oblivion is evidently theoretical. Neither is the infant ever

completely before meaning, nor can the poet completely move beyond meaning – that

would turn him into a psychotic. In psychoanalytical terms this means that, in practice,

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the semiotic cannot be completely distinguished from the Symbolic. It can, however, be

recognized in the manifold ways in which the infant’s babble is incorporated in the way

poets construct their poetic language, ‘changing vocabulary, syntax and the word itself.’

Kristeva makes an explicit connection between the semiotic, which is the

expression of pre-linguistic drive energy, and the chatter of infants. She detects

‘heterogeneousness’ in poetic language that she likens to the infant’s first linguistic

expressions:

[T]here is within poetic language [...] a heterogeneousness to meaning and signification. This heterogeneousness, detected genetically in the first echolalias of infants as rhythms and intonations anterior to the first phonemes, morphemes, lexemes and sentences; this heterogeneousness, which is later reactivated as rhythms, intonations, glossalalias in psychotic discourse [...]; heterogeneousness to signification operates through, despite, and in excess of it and produces in poetic language ‘musical’ but also nonsense effects that destroy not only accepted beliefs and significations, but, in radical experiments, syntax itself, that guarantee of thetic consciousness. (1980, 133, original emphasis)

The poet is cognizant of his undertaking, consciously creating poetic discourse that defies

syntax, grammar and vocabulary. This differentiates him from the psychotic, and posits

him structurally at the same level as the infant, where the infant’s echolalias are part of

the entrance into the Symbolic order, and the poet’s ‘echolalias’ are an attempt to evade

it. Echolalias are the infant mimicking the adult, whereas the poetic ‘echolalias’ are the

infant’s echoes in the poet’s work. Thus construed, the semiotic manifests itself in the

infant’s babble, in which Jakobson recognized the poetic qualities.26

In “Trilce XXXII” Vallejo plays with pronunciation and onomatopoeias, which

can be construed as the semiotic operating in the verses: “999 calorías / Rumbbb.... 26 Dolar explains: “For Jakobson, what does not contribute to meaning, the erratic lalangue26 on which he keeps stumbling, is then taken as the material for poetic effects; it functions as the source of repetitions, rhythms, rhymes, sound echoes, metric patterns – all the complex panoply that produces the enchantment of poetry” (Dolar 148).

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Trrraprrr rrach.... chaz / Serpentínica u del bizcochero / enjirafada al tímpano” (206).

These rolling r’s and scarcely-Spanish sounding words evoke the babbling infant trying

to speak Spanish. Worthy of note, furthermore, is that the 999 and 1000 “calorías” are

written in numbers, whereas the famous last verses “Treinta y tres trillones trescientos

treinta / y tres calorías” are fully written out, verses that according to many critics are

related to the volume’s title.27 Vallejo captures the way the baker, the “bizcochero,”

speaks graphically, multiplying letters and sounds. He moreover adjectivizes in a novel,

animalistic and suggestive way. Whereas “serpentínica” effectively describes the baker’s

undulating voice while pronouncing the vowel u, “jirafada,” clearly references the

giraffe, extending the sound in duration.

In other poems Vallejo plays with the spelling and pronunciation of words, for

example in “Trilce IV,” which contains the following verses: “Tendime en son de tercera

parte, / mas la tarde –qué la bamos a hhazer– / se anilla en mi cabeza, furiosamente”

(173). He replaces the letters ‘v’ with a ‘b’ and the ‘c’ with a ‘z,’ playing with their

similar pronunciation. The doubled ‘h,’ moreover, points to a certain sluggishness,

caused by the afternoon that “se anilla en mi cabeza, furiosamente.” He thus loudly calls

attention to both the oral quality of speech, as well as to the materiality of the written

word. In “Trilce IX” he inverses the v/b interchange, notably in the first verse: “Vusco

volvvver de golpe el golpe.” (178). The poem’s tone is defiant, in the beginning at least,

but also mockingly ironic: “Fallo bolver de golpe el golpe. / No ensillaremos jamás el

27 Before Vallejo decided on the title Trilce, there were other suggested titles: Féretros, Scherzando, Solo de Aceros, and Cráneos de bronce, a title that actually went to press. See Clayton 104.

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toroso Vaveo / de egoísmo y de aquel ludir mortal / de sábana, / desque la mujer esta /

¡cuánto pesa de general!” Drooling, “vaveo,” is here an activity that, amusingly, hosts the

proud “toroso.” And the “mujer esta” is the one who prevents the “golpe” from being

returned because “¡cuánto pesa de general!” The “alma” provides for an unexpected turn

at the end of the poem: “Y hembra es el alma de la ausente. / Y hembra es el alma mía.”

Who is “la ausente”? Is the “alma” of the “yo” “hembra” because he is trying to contrast

that with “macho” and, perhaps, “machismo,” thus offering an explanation of his failure

to “bolver de golpe el golpe”? Ambiguous and polyvalent, in this poem as in others,

Trilce never lends itself for univocal interpretations.

The manipulation of the materiality of the written word in this poem may, as I

have suggested above, be read as a way of the Kristevan semiotic disrupting the

Symbolic order. But it also invites a reading of the child’s incursion not into acquiring a

mother tongue, which s/he already completed as an infant, but into learning how to read

and write. In the opening of this chapter I analyzed “Trilce XX,” in which the girl is

doing just that, on her father’s shoe. A comparison with the third poem in the posthumous

España, aparta de mí este cáliz, published in 1939 by Spanish Republican soldiers,

connects this process with its opposite, illiteracy. As the title covertly suggests, España,

aparta de mí este cáliz contains some of Vallejo’s most politically charged poetry, but he

avails himself of similar techniques as in his earlier work. In “España III” he returns to

the confusion of the letters ‘v’/‘b’: “¡Viban los compañeros / a la cabecera de su aire

escrito! / ¡Viban con esta b del buitre en las entrañas” (460). More importantly, Pedro

Rojas, the lyrical persona, writes that verse into the air. The first verses read: “Solía

escribir con su dedo grande en el aire: / ‘¡Viban los compañeros! Pedro Rojas’” (460).

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Whereas the young girl in “Trilce XX” writes a hesitating ‘s’ onto her father’s shoe “con

un poquito de saliba y tierra” (192), Pedro Rojas writes his slogan into thin air. Thus

Vallejo simultaneously calls attention to the materiality of the written word, and to its

orality. Pedro Rojas’ way of writing in the air is a way of opening up the republic of

letters to those who are illiterate, but who write history with their actions. It moreover

calls attention to an analphabetism that was widespread under the soldiers.28

With En la masmédula, his last collection of poetry, Girondo delivers his most

formally innovative work, in which he too calls attention to the materiality of the written

word, and in which he plays with sounds, lexicon and grammar to great effect. His

experimental poetics do not share Vallejo’s social commitment. Rather, he creates new

meanings by placing his neologisms in an (erotically) suggestive context, allowing the

new creations to resonate with each other. In “Mi lumía” the anaphoral “mi” (14 of the 23

verses start with “mi”), an existing first person possessive pronoun, installs calmness in a

poem that, due to its many complicated neologisms, has a rather estranging effect on the

reader. He creates a similar effect in “Tropos” with the anaphoral “qué”: “qué tú / qué

qué / qué quenas.” In “Mi lumía” the lyrical I sings the praises of “lu” – and although one

might not be able to ‘translate,’ so to speak, “lu” into regular Spanish, the numerous

repetitions transform it into a morpheme that becomes meaningful in its poetic context. In

the verses “Mi lu / mi lubidulia / mi golocidalove / mi lu tan luz tan tu que me

elucielabisma” “lu” attains an unmistakable positive charge. This is achieved first of all

by the insistent combination with “mi,” indicating an (emotional) vicinity, but also by

virtue of its many repetitions in combination with words like “luz.” While the noun 28 In The Battle for Spain (2006) Antony Beevor estimates an average illiteracy rate of 64% by the beginning of the twentieth century in Spain (9).

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“lumia” does exist and means ‘prostitute,’ by placing a written accent on the i in “lumía”

the stressed syllable shifts to the i, and the reader is invited to break the second word up,

as if it read “mi lu mía”. The title thus seems to underscore the possessiveness of the I

over “lu,” especially considering the last verses: “mi lubella lusola / mi total lu plevida /

mi toda lu / lumía”.29 The possessiveness of the lyrical subject takes a more sinister and

sexual valence when considered in regards not to “lu,” but to “lumía” – or lumia,

prostitute.

The alliteration of the ‘l’ throughout “Mi lumía,” as well as the anaphora, imbue

the poem with musicality. Musicality takes up a prominent place in most of En la

masmédula.30 Apart from the poems already mentioned, “Aridandantemente” illustrates

this well.31 The repeated “dan” in the title already introduces musicality into the word,

and rhyme helps to further this effect: “Sigo / solo / me sigo / y en otro absorto otro

beodo lodo baldío / por neroyertos rumbos horas opio desfondes / me persigo” (224).32

Musicality is a way in which what Kristeva calls ‘heterogeneousness’ finds expression in

language, as I mention above. It also creates yet another link with the infant’s language

acquisition, which incorporates musicality in the form of nursery rhymes, for example.

29 These verses nicely illustrate the German term for ‘babble’ that Jakobson uses, “das Lallen,” itself onomatopoeic for the infant’s chatter.

30 Musicality has of course often been related to poetry. George Steiner, for example, analyzes the “interpenetration of poetry and music” (1998, 41) in “Silence and the Poet”, pp. 41-46.

31 In another poem, “Por vocación de dado,” a similar pleonasm occurs: “animamantemente me di por dar por tara por vocación de dado” (233, my emphasis).

32 For a full scale included and hidden in the poetic verse, one has to turn to Huidobro ’s Altazor, Canto IV, verses 193-199 (106) (de Costa 19).

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So far I have analyzed different poems that resonate with the Kristevan semiotic

and heterogeneousness, all of which shed light on the process of (un)learning language.

But the disruptive power of the infant’s echoes in poetic expression merits closer

scrutiny. Judith Butler has taken issue with the semiotic’s subversive power in her

groundbreaking book Gender Trouble (1990). She argues that although Kristeva ascribes

to the semiotic a capacity to subvert, the paternal, Symbolic order finally turns out to be

hegemonic (1999, 107-127):

Kristeva accepts the assumption that culture is equivalent to the Symbolic, that the Symbolic is fully subsumed under the ‘Law of the Father’ and that the only modes of nonpsychotic activity are those which participate in the Symbolic to some extent. Her strategic task then, is neither to replace the Symbolic with the semiotic nor to establish the semiotic as a rival cultural possibility, but rather to validate those experiences within the Symbolic that permit a manifestation of the borders which divide the Symbolic from the semiotic. (1999, 115-116)

The consequences of this “strategic task” are clear: “Obedient [...] to syntactical

requirements, the poetic-maternal practices of displacing the paternal law always remain

tenuously tethered to that law” (1999, 116). This tether is subject to poignant critique by

Butler, and with good reason. The political agenda of Gender Trouble is a critical

assessment of feminist theory, especially where its theorization seems to undermine

itself, as Butler argues to be the case with Kristeva. What Butler perceives as a limitation

in the subversive practice of poetry, however, neatly illustrates the practical limitations of

the theoretical conceptualization of the meeting between child and poet in oblivion.

In the theoretical place of linguistic oblivion, the poet needs no longer be tethered

to either the Symbolic or the semiotic. Through the process of ‘forgetting’ language, he

reconnects with infancy, and “re-accede[s] to infancy as history’s transcendental place of

origin” (Agamben 2007, 60). The infant, on the other hand, crawls toward the Symbolic

order as s/he ‘forgets’ her phonic plenitude and acquires a mother tongue. The

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phallogocentric limitations that act upon the Kristevan semiotic and that turn out to be

hegemonic in the long run, point to the limitations that the poet faces in his poetic praxis

to innovate the language he uses. The poet can employ language subversively, stacking

adjective on adjective, using neologisms, turning nouns into verbs or, like Vallejo does in

“Trilce XXXVI,” transforming adverbs into verbs: “¿Por ahí estás, Venus de Milo? / Tú

manqueas apenas, pululando / entrañada en los brazos plenarios / de la existencia, / de

esta existencia que todaviiza / perenne imperfección” (212, emphasis mine).

Nevertheless, Butler’s point that the poet, ultimately, remains tethered to the paternal law

rings true for most of the poetry I have analyzed so far. Vallejo’s and Girondo’s poetry

contain much linguistic innovation and experimentation, but remain, by and large, legible

within the confines of the Spanish language. A reader unfamiliar with the Spanish

language would certainly be able to appreciate the graphic layout of the opening

caligramme in Espantapájaros, but the irony of the verses that form the scarecrow’s

head, for example, would go unappreciated. Huidobro’s experimentation in Altazor: un

viaje en paracaídas provides an interesting limit case. In his long poem, the lyrical

subject gradually moves further away from the Symbolic, allowing the semiotic no longer

to punctuate, but to dictate his poetic expression. Through a disintegrative linguistic

process Huidobro moves as far away as possible from the Symbolic with Altazor, but this

is also why Altazor eventually exhausts its own discourse; it reaches its own limits.33

After the scream of Canto VII there is silence, and after the silence nothing.

33 As José Quiroga writes: “The vowels written as an open-ended closure to this poem taken one of the more radical experiments in the Spanish language to its limits” (1992, 36).

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With Altazor Huidobro complies with many of his ideas about poetry that he has

explained in manifestoes throughout the years. He proclaims on several occasions that

“[s]e debe escribir en una lengua que no sea materna” (57), because writing in a foreign

language allows the poet more critical distance, and opens up creative possibilities.34

Altazor, indeed, was originally conceived of in French, its first title being Voyage en

Parachute (Huidobro 13-14). In the “Prefacio,” moreover, he presents something like the

poetical project of Altazor. After Altazor mentions how he was born at 33,35 bid farewell

to his parents and took up his parachute, he meets the “Creador.” This figure, for his

sheer name, evokes creacionismo, Huidobro’s personal poetics. As mentioned earlier,

with creacionismo he advocates a poetry in which the separate parts, but also the poem as

a whole, form a novelty, and where words are detached from any exterior reality other

than the reality of the word itself.36 Gonzalez and Treece suggest that, with Altazor,

Huidobro abandons his earlier ideas about Romanticism and even his own creacionismo

(45). This statement, however, seems too categorical, not only in light of the role of the 34 In “Creacionismo” he writes: “Es difícil y hasta imposible traducir una poesía en la que domina la importancia de otros elementos. No podéis traducir la música de las palabras, los ritmos de los versos que varían de una lengua a otra; pero cuando la importancia del poema reside ante todo en el objeto creado, aquél no pierde en la traducción nada de su valor esencial” (Schwartz 1991, 90). And he procedes to cite a verse in Spanish, which he then translates into French and English, with equal results: “el efecto es siempre el mismo y los detalles lingüísticos secundarios” (Schwartz 1991, 91).

35 This may be a reference to Huidobro’s often-expressed belief that the ‘poets’ have not been born yet. In “Creacionismo,” first pubished in French in 1925, six years before the publication of Altazor, he writes: “lego [mi testamento poético] a los poetas del mañana, a los que serán los primeros de esta nueva especie animal, el poeta, de esta nueva especie que habrá de nacer pronto, según creo. Hay signos en el cielo” (Schwartz 1991, 95). This quotation thus seems to portend both Altazor’s condition as a poet of the “poema creado,” Altazor who literally comes falling from the sky.

36 In “Arte poética”Huidobro writes that “El poeta es un pequeño Dios” (Schwartz 1991, 72) – which further supports the idea that poetry makes up the universe in Altazor.

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Creador, but also considering the composition of the poem. Language and its expressive

possibilities lie at the heart of its project, “desligado de cualquier otra realidad que no sea

la propia” (Schwartz 1991, 87). Fernando Pérez Villalón considers the Creador derisory,

and sees the lyrical subject rebelling against the name of the father from the very

beginning: “[L]a potencia creadora del poeta, si proviene del Creador o de una rebelión

contra su autoridad, no puede ser aquí sino irrisoria: el Creador, el Padre cuyo nombre

sostiene la Ley, es un ser que carece de nombre” (153). I believe, on the other hand, that

the void out of which the Creador speaks is utterly significant, a point I will get back to.

The Creador pronounces seven short statements, like the seven Cantos the poem

comprises, that describe the “viaje en paracaídas” in an inverted way, the first statement

corresponding with the final Canto. The Creador starts with “un gran ruido” (56) and

ends with “la lengua de la boca que los hombres desviaron de su rol, haciéndola aprender

a hablar” (56). In fact, in these seven statements one discerns something like a

cosmological project, centered on the constitution of language and poetry:

« Hice un gran ruido y este ruido formó el océano y las olas del océano. « Este ruido irá siempre pegado a las olas del mar y las olas del mar irán siempre pegadas a él como los sellos en las tarjetas postales. « Después tejí un largo bramante de rayos luminosos para coser los días uno a uno; los días que tienen un oriente legítimo o reconstituído, pero indiscutible. « Después tracé la geografía de la tierra y las líneas de la mano. « Después bebí un poco de cognac (a causa de la hidrografía). « Después creé la boca y los labios de la boca, para aprisionar las sonrisas equívocas y los dientes de la boca para vigilar las groserías que nos vienen a la boca. « Creé la lengua de la boca que los hombres desviaron de su rol, haciéndola aprender a hablar... a ella, ella, la bella nadadora, desviada para siempre de su rol acuática y puramente acariciador. (56)

It is not difficult to read into these seven statements the constitution of language, the

“océano y las olas del océano,” formed by the materia prima, the “ruido.” After the

inauguration of time and space, and particularly the waters (“el océano”; “las olas del

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mar”) – which should not be taken too seriously, hence the cognac – he creates the lips

and mouth, equipped with teeth to prevent “groserías” from being expressed. Finally, he

creates the tongue, the “bella nadadora,” which humans misuse, having her speak a

language. In a perfect world, according to the Creador, the tongue gently caresses these

noises without turning it into language. Throughout this chapter I have spoken about the

proximity of poet and infant regarding their process of (un)learning a mother tongue. In

Altazor the tongue is a material given, and the language that humans produce with it is

considered a deviation. According to the Creador, what Lacan calls the Symbolic order

here constitutes the aberration, whereas the aquatic, material condition of the “gran

ruido” – one may say the semiotic – takes primacy. With the poem, Altazor will attempt

to return language to its origin of “un gran ruido.” The abhorrence of using the tongue’s

expressive capabilities for speaking a language is stressed throughout the Prefacio and,

one could argue, throughout the entire poem. Federico Schopf comments: “Decisiva para

el concepto de lenguaje a que llega el poeta de Altazor es su constatación de que el uso

sistemático de la lengua – directo o figurado – impide la representación y referencia de

experiencias radicalmente nuevas” (6). That is to say, the confines of a language, in this

case Spanish and, to a lesser extent, French, do not suffice to express the ‘unsayable.’

Altazor reflects on the Creador’s words, with a series of “profundos

pensamientos” (57) about poetry and throughout the seven Cantos it will become clear

how he attempts to steer language back to the noise of its origin, and finally to silence. In

the first Canto Altazor narrates his travels in parachute, and after describing his fall, he

tells: “Cae al último abismo de silencio / Como el barco que se hunde apagando sus

luces” (63) – which he repeats, with a variation, in verse 308: “O dadme un bello

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naufragio verde / Un milagro que ilumine el fondo de nuestros mares íntimos / Como el

barco que se hunde sin apagar sus luces. / Liberado de este trágico silencio entonces / En

mi propia tempestad / Desafiaré al vacío” (71). Following my reading of the “oceáno de

ruido,” more than his parachute, this “barco” is his poetical project, the disintegration of

language, which will “hundir” with its lights blazing, fully aware of its own undertaking.

Canto II does not show the first signs of the disintegration of language, but rather

provides a lyrical intermezzo, which has caused critics a bit of bewilderment. I believe

that the main purpose of this Canto is to provide an example of the type of lyrical poetry

that Altazor is a statement against, while at the same time, through its inclusion,

recognizing the importance of this lyricism for the evolution of poetic language. Canto III

opens with the desire to break apart words: “Romper las ligaduras de las venas / los lazos

de la respiración y las cadenas” (93) which quickly turns into an exhortation: “Cortad

todas las amarras / De río mar o de montaña” (94). Altazor starts this process by turning

the meaning of words upside down: “Mañana el campo / Seguirá los galopes del caballo

// La flor se comerá a la abeja / Porque el hangar será colmena” (94). Signifier and

signified are severed, shown to be arbitrary. The lyrical I enthusiastically brings opposites

together to create truly autonomous and anti-mimetic verse.

In Canto IV Huidobro displays a remarkable way of demonstrating the autonomy

of poetic language. René de Costa comments in a note that verses 93-102 and 106-114,

with some variations, have both been published as separate poems in 1926 (102).

Curiously, the two stanzas (and previous independent poems) contain almost exactly the

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same words, but with completely different results.37 These two “poems” are connected by

the following verses: “Rosa al revés rosa otra vez y rosa rosa / Aunque no quiera el

carcelero / Río revuelto para la pesca milagrosa.” These connecting verses offer a

beautifully fitting description of how he manipulates the almost identical words of both

poems/stanzas.

With Canto V the lyrical subject proclaims his incursion in unknown territory:

“Aquí comienza el campo inexplorado” (111). And indeed, he enhances his

experimentation, particularly concerned with the naming of objects, “El pájaro puede

olvidar que es pájaro” (114), and with the silence that imposes itself more and more on

expression: “Y la voz del silencio se llena de vampiros” (115) or “Y un grito se cicatriza

en el vacío enfermo” (116). These combinations of elements perform Huidobro’s

expressed intention of creating “un hecho nuevo:” “Cuando escribo: ‘El pájaro anida en

el arco iris’, os presento un hecho nuevo, algo que jamás habéis visto, que jamás veréis y

que sin embargo os gustaría mucho ver” (Schwartz 1991, 87). After playing with the

“molinos de viento” (118-123) Altazor asserts: “Y he aquí que ahora me diluyo en

múltiples cosas” (125), which heralds the start of a series of transformations that are often

expressed by rhyme and musicality: “Empiece ya / La farandolina en la lejantaña de la

37 The first stanza counts 102 words in 10 verses, while the second stanza counts 83 words in 9 verses. Considering adjectives in different gender or number to be the same, the only differences between the two stanzas concern a few verbs (“sigue” “besan” and “volando” only appear in the first, while “endurece” only appears in the second stanza), three nouns (“ojos” “infinito” and “mirlos” in the first stanza are not repeated) and a few adjectives and propositions. The appendixes that De Costa includes in his edition support the hypothesis that these two poems/stanzas are deliberately created with the same words. Differences with the published poems and the stanzas in Altazor concern for example the form “debatía” / “debate.” The former occurs in both of the published poems, while the latter appears in both stanzas. The change from “debatía” to “debate” is thus sustained from the two poems to both stanzas.

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montanía / El horimento bajo el firmazonte / Se embarca en la luna / Para dar la vuelta al

mundo / Empiece ya / La faranmandó mandó liná / Con su musiquí con su musicá” (125).

In the discussion of several poems of En la masmédula, I have remarked on the

musicality of the poems, and how this creates links both with what Kristeva calls

‘heterogeneousness,’ part of the semiotic, and the infant’s process of language

acquisition.38

With Canto VI, Huidobro continues to distance his poem from the Symbolic,

connecting the verses through resonating sounds, rather than the meaning of the words:

“Ala ola ole ala Aladino / El ladino Aladino Ah ladino dino la” (132). Moreover,

underscoring the material quality of the printed words, he incorporates many references

to materiality, such as “seda” and, especially, “cristal,” as in verse 30: “seda aliento

cristal seda” (132). It revisits topics seen throughout the poem, “Viento aparte /

Mandodrina y golonlina / Mandolera y ventolina / Enterradas / Las campanas /

Enterrados los olvidos / En su oreja” (135) and prepares for the final Canto. “Cristal” has

been paired with many different nouns, roughly summarized in verses 85-86: “Apoteosis

/ Que tenía cristal ojo cristal seda cristal nube,” and this Canto ends with the announced

apotheosis: “Cristal muerte” (135). It celebrates the final step in the disintegration of

language that occurs in Canto VII, simultaneously pointing to the rebirth that was

announced at the very beginning of the Prefacio. In Canto VII language has completely

disintegrated, leading up to the last, much anticipated outcry: “Ai a i ai a i i i i o ia” (138).

38 As many critics have pointed out, Huidobro here uses ‘pormanteau words,’ which find their origin in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (Hahn 5; Hey).

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After passing through the slow disintegration of language, Altazor has completely

unlearned his language and has returned to the original noise, the Creador’s “gran ruido.”

He articulates a scream and, with it, has arrived at a place that coincides with the infant’s

very first manifestation of life. I have mentioned before how Mladen Dolar, in his treatise

on the voice, posits that self-recognition may be auditory before visual. He reserves a

particular importance for the infant’s first, life-inducing scream:

The first scream may be caused by pain, by the need for food, by frustration and anxiety, but the moment the other hears it, the moment it assumes the place of its addressee, the moment the other is provoked and interpellated by it, the moment it responds to it, scream retroactively turns into appeal, it is interpreted, endowed with meaning, it is transformed into a speech addressed to the other, it assumes the first function of speech: to address the other and elicit an answer. (27)

The final vowels, or the arrangements thereof in this last scream, may bring forth

hermeneutic interpretation, which it has.39 By the end of the last Canto, Altazor stands, as

does the infant, at the fringes of linguistic oblivion. He pronounces little more than an

echo of his mother tongue, but regardless of the possible signification of the vowels that

constitute it, this seemingly meaningless scream, as Dolar suggests, is meaningful in and

of itself. It assumes a function of speech,40 and addresses an invisible Other,

interpellating the reader.41 In a diachronic approach to language, Dolar divides sounds

into pre and postlinguistic. The former “present a break in speech, a disruption in the

ascent toward meaning, an intrusion of physiology into structure” (24), where the infant’s

39 For example: Pérez Villalón (156).

40 Following Derrida, I would suggest that the utterance is meaningful also in that it signifies an example of agrammaticality (1988, 12).

41 In The Language of the Self Lacan (whose psychoanalytic work provides the theoretical framework for Dolar’s book) maintains that “there is no Word without a reply, even if it meets no more than silence, provided that it has an auditor” (1981, 9). In poetry this implied auditor is always there, as the actual or implied reader.

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echolalia’s constitute a transitory stage on the way to acquiring language. The

postlinguistic sounds, on the other hand, are constituted by the singing voice. This

paradigm of reading the voice diachronically complements the psychoanalytical reading I

have engaged with. The psychoanalytic may be read as the constitution of the synchronic,

where the semiotic undergirds both the poet’s and the infant’s expressions and babbles.

Both paradigms pair well with Altazor, which traverses the entire spectrum. It

encompasses the diachronic from the singing voice in Canto I, “Porque mi voz es solo

canto y sólo puede salir en canto” (72), up until the final scream. It also resonates with

the synchronic approach in its poetic language, with its rhythm, neologisms and

musicality.

An impossible meeting in oblivion

I would like end this chapter revisiting the concept of infancy as the unsayable. To

Agamben, infancy is “experience as the transcendental limit of language” (2007, 51), and

he defines experience as “the simple difference between the human and the linguistic. The

individual as not already speaking, as having been and still being an infant – this is

experience” (50, original emphasis). Experience is thus, necessarily, a wordless

experience. This leads him to state emphatically that “The ineffable is, in reality, infancy”

(2007, 51, original emphasis).42 Poetry is one way to attempt to (re)gain access to infancy

42 As Agamben explains elsewhere, the ineffable is “vulgar” for the concept has often been misused, particularly in regards to the Shoah. He writes: “But why unsayable? Why confer on extermination the prestige of the mystical? [...] To say that Auschwitz is ‘unsayable’ or ‘incomprehensible’ is equivalent to euphemein, to adoring in silence, as one does with a god. Regardless of one’s intentions, this contributes to its glory. We,

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in order to express the unsayable. This points to one more important linkage between the

poetry discussed in this chapter and infancy, i.e. the connection between ‘experience’ and

‘experiment.’ Both words share the same etymological roots, from the Latin experientia,

a proof or trial. Through myriad approaches to formal experimentation, Huidobro,

Girondo and Vallejo find different ways to invent and create new poetic expressions in

order to express that which cannot be put into words. Said differently, through

experimentation they attempt to reach the transcendental experience, infancy.

Throughout the chapter I have indicated the many ways in which the concept of

infancy is connected with the poetry of Vallejo, Huidobro and Girondo, via the mediating

force of the figure of the infant. To Agamben, the unsayable is located at the break with

the synchronic and the diachronic.43 Or, as I have elaborated these concepts above, the

unsayable is located at the site of the poet’s and the infant’s linguistic oblivion. Infancy

as the ‘Ur-limit’ of language means that, even though Vallejo, Girondo and Huidobro

proceed ever closer towards infancy, they are unable to reach it, for the entrance into

language is irreversible; once you know, you cannot really unknow.44 The concept of

infancy is the Ur-limit of language which, in its impossibility, is constitutive of

however, ‘are not ashamed of staring into the unsayable’ – even at the risk of discovering that what evil knows of itself, we can also easily find in ourselves” (2008, 32-33, original emphasis). In The Remnants of Auschwitz he speaks of the Muselmann who cannot bear witness, which is precisely why the Muselmann makes the ultimate witness, the Ur-witness, so to speak. See Agamben 2008, especially pp. 41-87 and 137-172.

43 “[T]he origin of language must necessarily be located at a break with the continual opposition of diachronic and synchronic, historical and structural, in which it is possible to grasp as some kind of Ur-event, or Urfaktum, the unit-difference of invention and gift, human and non-human, speech and infancy” (2007, 49-50, original emphasis).

44 Even in aphasia, the aphasic might no longer be able to use language grammatically, or not at all, s/he is nonetheless already constituted in her historicity, rooted in language.

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language’s expressibility. This unsayable, this infancy, is the site of the impossible

experience of linguistic plenitude towards which poetic experimentation aims itself,

signposting poetry’s ultimate expression that can, nevertheless, not be expressed. In

Agamben’s formulation, “the unsayable [is] precisely what language must presuppose in

order to signify” (2007, 4). The infant is the embodied existence of infancy, unable to

articulate the unsayable but capable of suggesting and connoting it.

The infant as embodiment of theoretical linguistic plenitude needs to be

considered, though, in conjunction with its necessary and complementary extension:

silence. In order to do so, I would like to briefly return to the Prefacio to Altazor, to the

moment in which the lyrical I meets the Creador: “Entonces oí hablar al Creador, sin

nombre, que es un simple hueco en el vacío, hermoso como un ombligo” (56). Altazor

describes the “nombre” of the Creador as “un simple hueco en el vacío.” The Creador

hence speaks from a position of complete silence, his name an absence within

nothingness. Language here is silence, and out of this silence the Creador wills the “gran

ruido” to be.45 In Altazor, therefore, “crear” in language ultimately requires silence.

Girondo expresses a very similar idea when he writes, in “Por vocación de dado:” “verbo

que fecundó el vacío” (234).46 Even in “Trilce XX,” the girl is the absent presence who

‘speaks’ from silence, making her desire to communicate verbally known through her

attempts to spell her first letters on her father’s shoe.

45 The “hermoso ombligo” functions as as a remnant of the connection to the maternal body that is no longer there, a reminder of its lack.

46 It appears in the similar context of a creator, here referred to as “Señor”: “sin fe sin mí sin pauta sin sosías sin lastre sin máscara de espera / ni levantarme en busca del muy Señor nuestro ausente en todo caso y tiempo y modo / y sexo y verbo que fecundó el vacío” (234).

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To be sure, silence is a particularly eloquent part of poetry. In Steiner’s phrase:

“Ideally each poet should have his own language, singular to his expressive need; given

the social, conventionalized nature of human speech, such language can only be silence”

(49).47 After the scream in Altazor, precisely, the poet falls silent. Moreover, silence has

already been imbued with special importance within the poem, since the noun “silencio”

appears insistently in the poetic discourse, especially in Cantos I and V.48 Girondo too

closes the last verse of the last poem of last collection of poetry, “Cansancio” (263), with

silence: “del harto tenso extenso entrenamiento al engusanamiento / y al silencio.” It is

telling that this particular poem closes En la masmédula, a collection in which the

innovation and partial disintegration of language form the center of the poetical project.

With “Cansancio” he gives the last word to silence.

Infancy as the Ur-limit of language is dense with seeming contradiction; it is the

place of linguistic plenitude and of silence, the transcendental experience that allows the

subject to ground in historicity. The figure of the infant, as historical and biological

being, facilitates the uneasy transition from silent plenitude into speech. Neither silent nor

speaking a language, s/he babbles, mimics, and echoes those around her, she ‘forgets’ her

unlimited linguistic capacities and crawls her way out of the mirror stage and into the

Symbolic order. I earlier mention a quotation by George Steiner in which Dante

compares his art to the “inarticulate babblings of an unweaned child” (1998, 41). I have 47 Some poets have famously decided to give up poetry; Steiner cites Friedrich Hölderlin and Arthur Rimbaud, but also Mrs. Bickle, who takes her silence most seriously by refusing to write at all (Steiner 49).

48 These are the verses in which “silencio” appears (the numbers correspond to the verse, Canto and page, respectively): 20, I, 62; 55, I, 63; 309, I, 71; 350, I, 72; 498, I, 77; 528, I, 78; 550, I, 79; 634, I, 82; 651, I, 82; 682, I, 83; 43, II, 86; 66, IV, 101; 63, V, 113; 130, V, 115; 145, V, 115; 168, V, 116; and 203, V, 117.

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explained how the oceanic feeling of the unweaned child relates to a search of expression

of plenitude, and to a Kristevan interpretation of the semiotic. Equally suggestive is the

way Steiner continues this passage: “The circle is complete: at its furthest reach, where it

borders on light, the language of men becomes inarticulate as is that of the infant before

he masters words” (1998, 41). To conclude, I offer a reflection on the possibility of what

Steiner seems to be implying here, i.e. a moment in which the poet and the infant meet.

The poetic echolalias function as the remnants of the infant’s indispensable

linguistic oblivion that allows languages to be, while also designating the poet’s willful

oblivion in his move towards the Ur-limit. Altazor provides a powerful example of this.

In Canto I we read: “Yo tú él nosotros vosotros ellos / Ayer hoy mañana / Pasto en las

fauces del insaciable olvido” (69). The first two verses are constituted of shifters, which

for their meaning depend entirely upon the position of the speaking subject. The shifters,

incidentally, are acquired during the very last part of the infantile language acquisition

process.49 The Real Adademia Española defines the “fauces” of the third verse as

follows: “Parte posterior de la boca de los mamíferos, que se extiende desde el velo del

paladar hasta el principio del esófago.”50 That is to say that the words that last enter the

linguistic consciousness of children are here, in the beginning of the first Canto of

Altazor, the first to go, ferociously ‘eaten’ by oblivion. Again, a similar process is

expressed in Girondo’s “Destino” (253): “Y para acá o allá / y desde aquí otra vez / y

vuelta a ir de vuelta y sin aliento / y del principio o término del precipicio íntimo / hasta

el extremo o medio o resurrecto resto de éste o aquello o de lo opuesto / y aquí tampoco

49 See Kristeva 1980, 288-291.

50 http://rae.es/rae.html

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está.” Although the shifters in this poem are not literally devoured by oblivion, there

seems to be no consensus of what “aquí” or “acá” refers to.

Pushing and pulling, innovating language and enriching it with the expressions of

the prelinguistic drive energy, poet and infant both operate from the margins of language.

Daniel Heller-Roazen reminds us that echolalias, bordering between remembrance and

oblivion, between sensible speech and nonsensical sounds, “guarded the memory of the

indistinct and immemorial babble that, in being lost, allowed all languages to be” (12). It

is in the indistinct region of speech, in which memory and oblivion coexist, but do not

coincide, that the poet and infant can finally meet. In oblivion the tension between the

concept of infancy and the figure of the infant is not cancelled, but rather suspended. In

this brief moment in which the tension between infancy and historicity is held in

abeyance, poetic expressions emerge; the poet unknows his language, and meets the

infant in her phonic plenitude.

217

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