Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

René Prieto is Professor of Foreign Languages and Literature at Southern Methodist University. He is the author of Miguel Angel Asturias's Archaeology of Return.

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""Body of Writing" is the most advanced piece of criticism on Latin American literature available. Prieto's unique mixture of theoretical sophistication with elegance of mind and style makes him soar above today's cacophonous cackle. I know of no better critic of Latin American literature than him."--Roberto Gonzalez-Echevarria, author of "Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative"

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Body of writing

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.............................................................................................ixIntroduction................................................................................................11 Julio Cortzar's perpetual exile.........................................................................172 More than meets the I: Guillermo Cabrera Infante's La Habana para un Infante difunto.....................753 The excremental vision of Gabriel Garca Mrquez.........................................................1014 The degraded body in the work of Severo Sarduy...........................................................1355 Rewriting the body: renewal through language in the work of Rosario Castellanos..........................1736 The body of pleasure in Tununa Mercado's Canon de alcoba.................................................213Conclusion..................................................................................................240Notes.......................................................................................................255Bibliography................................................................................................275Index.......................................................................................................285

Chapter One

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Como los elatas, como San Agustn, Novalis presinti que el mundo de adentro es la ruta inevitable para llegar de verdad al mundo exterior y descubrir que los dos sern uno solo cuando la alquimia de ese viaje de un hombre nuevo. -Julio Cortzar, quoted by Fernando Ainsa

What makes Julio Cortzar's short stories perplexing and disturbing at the same time? Why is it we grasp the gist of his plots but feel befuddled by the outcome of his stories, as if taking the train but letting slip its destination? Bewildered by characters who vomit rabbits, and tigers that prowl around country estates, are we conscious, when reading "Letter to a Young Lady in Paris" or "Bestiario," of not getting to the heart of the dramas this resourceful author portrayed throughout his life?

Intuitive to the core, Cortzar seldom knew what would show up in his notepad; "Bestiary" and Hopscotch were composed in one fell swoop, for instance, as if internally dictated (Vargas Llosa, A Writer's Reality, 46). Cortzar wasn't just intuitive; he was downright possessed. From the time he started publishing, he felt the personal obsessions that haunted him stemmed "neither from a conscious nor a rational plane" but rather, "from down under ... from within" (Prego, La Fascinacin de las Palabras, 40, 38). The demands made by these obsessions were so peremptory that he felt he needed writing as much as writing needed him as a vehicle to express itself. It was a form of cleansing or, as he once told Omar Prego, a kind of "self-therapy" (182). However, since according to Cortzar poets are " 'possessed' by the magnetic forces of the collective unconscious and ... manifest in [their] writings 'archetypal themes and figures,'" he could connect with readers directly while engaging in self-therapy (Ana Hernndez del Castillo, Keats, Poe, and the Shaping of Cortzar's Mythopoesis, 4). This is why we can find his cryptic scenarios disturbing even when we are not fully conscious of their portent.

Their portent was, from the start, a private matter. By that I mean that if, by his own avowal, his writing was made up of obsessions stemming from within, the essence of Cortzar's art was, plain and simple, personal experience transformed into fiction. This is far from apparent because the biographical elements that inform his work are not at all transcriptions of daily events (as they are for, let us say, the Mario Vargas Llosa who writes Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter), but are drawn from a part of himself that was well cloistered. The concealed elements were then recast into cunning scenarios that screened the sources that inspired them. The anecdotal level of his stories is so captivating, in fact, that few readers become aware of that other, highly private level without which, as we shall see, it is impossible to understand his work.

Fortunately, like Theseus entering the labyrinth, Cortzar left a thread that can be followed to the wellspring from which his stories flow, although, because he wrote to exorcise the monsters that haunted him, the "wellspring" was more akin to a festering pool of anxiety than to a clear fountain. Cortzar manifested this anxiety through a small number of obsessive images or motifs that he labeled figuras. It is through these figuras-hands, tunnels, dark holes, breathing disorders, and a handful of animals-that we can penetrate to the primary level from which Cortzar's stories issued.

The network of figuras in any given story is so complex and mesmerizing, however, that we frequently fail to reach the embedded content that Cortzar has so artfully masked. We know he pictured dark tunnels and breathing disorders, for instance, but we don't know why. In fact, so far we don't even understand how the figuras dovetail into one another to create a symphony of perfectly orchestrated parts. Cortzar's master plan remains enigmatic because, to borrow his own words, the "point of contact in which every discordant element can finally become visible as a spoke in a wheel" is still unfathomed (Libro de Manuel, 8).

Into the labyrinth

Cortzar gave us the thread leading into his personal labyrinth in a groundbreaking interview with Evelyn Picn Garfield. "Hands have always been an obsession of mine," he told Picn in 1973, "already in the first pages I ever wrote hands play an extremely important part. I was very young when I wrote that piece I later included in Ultimo Round, I think it's called 'Estacin de la mano'" (it is actually in La vuelta al da en ochenta mundos) (Picn, Cortzar por Cortzar, 110). "Estacin de la mano" ("Station of the Hand") is the story of a man who sees a hand fly through his window one day. After befriending the hand he begins to fear it until, sensing it is no longer trusted, the hand flies away, never to return.

"Station of the Hand" was the first of many stories in which Cortzar's morbid obsession with hands and gloves was showcased. This obsession was no laughing matter. Cortzar confessed to Picn that whenever he was alone in a house and there was a pair of gloves sitting on a table, he could never go to sleep until he had planted a heavy object on top of them because he had the impression that "something was going to come and fill them" (Cortzar por Cortzar, 110-11). Startled by such bewildering disclosures, Picn urged Cortzar to elaborate. "Are you referring to hands"? She prodded, until he finally admitted: "Yes, hands; it must be linked to a trauma from my childhood, some macabre story of strangulation" (111).

Mention of strangulation in connection with disembodied hands reminded Cortzar of a film that deeply impressed him, The Hands of Orlac. As he explained to Picn, the hero of this film is a concert pianist who has to have his hands amputated after a train accident. Fortunately, he has a good friend who is a surgeon and can transplant the hands of a man who has just been sent to the...