Intersexuality Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This thesis approaches the work of Manuel Puig regarding the critical relationship that the Argentine author accounted for and established with the natural and cultural landscape of the pampas. Firstly, this 'uncomfortable' relationship serves the purpose of placing Puig's work within the history of Latin American narrative as a crucial turning point that unveils literary and cultural rigidities of the region. Regarding the imbrication between cinema and literature it emphasises, Puig's work would constitute a rupture with a certain canonical Latin American narrative by means of both an effective and affective political relationship set between bodies and mediascapes. I chiefly discuss and critically revisit the framework elaborated by Cuban critic Roberto González Echevarría on Latin American narrative, as well as the historical debate on culture/identity opened by D. F. Sarmiento from the nineteenth century onwards. Secondly, Puig's 'uncomfortable' relationship makes it possible to address both literary and cinematic works that underline their own discontent with traditional narratives, thus raising relevant issues of territory, landscape, the national/transnational and language/translation, and, in so doing, supporting the idea of an 'uncomfortable Latin American narrative.' The work of Colombian Andrés Caicedo and Chilean Alberto Fuguet as well as specific films of the Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai and the Argentine Lucrecia Martel are analysed. I use the general theoretical framework and my own analysis of Puig, together with the corresponding theoretical complements, in order to approach the above mentioned authors' respective works. quite ideological spaces Puig successively faces: the Italian neorealism rules he encounters in Rome as a cinema student at Cinecittà, the Argentine literary/cultural context on the verge of his literary debut and the canon of Latin American literature itself at that time. These spaces constitute literary and cultural landscapes, and, as I shall argue, Puig summarises them under a significant label: the dry pampas. From this perspective, Puig's work constitutes a privileged precedent. It enables us to understand other works/texts -either cinematic or literary-which have attempted to challenge canonical modes of representation, and in some cases even the very idea of something restrictively called 'Latin American.' The filmmakers and authors addressed here can be placed in conjunction with Puig's work, as they deal with analogous overlaps as well as with similar restrictive spaces, though raising important discontents of their own. In that sense, however, Puig's work by no means constitutes a definitive source for the authors/directors chosen, the explicit influence some of them have acknowledged notwithstanding. Their works do not replicate Puig's position, albeit they can be related to it, that is, to their own respective critical positions within their respective literary/cinematic realms. While Alberto Fuguet's work can be seen as influenced directly by Puig, it deals however with both cultural and linguistic landscapes strongly linked to Fuguet's own transnational background. The work of Colombian Andrés Caicedo appears practically in parallel to Puig's, early detaching from celebrated Latin American literature produced from the 1960s on (with the Boom generation and the context of magical realism). In a similar way, while it is possible to address the traces that Puig's work has left upon Wong Karwai's aesthetic, a film such as Happy Together (1997) raises questions (for example, in relation to hybridity and transnationalism) beyond the scope of this influence. Lucrecia Martel's La ciénaga (2001), for its part, depicts uncomfortable bodies surrounded by a landscape just opposite to Puig's dry pampas. What matters here, therefore, is not so much the influence as the discontent itself, which might be considered, as we shall see in the end, as prominently political. In an article in part devoted to explain the link between cinema and literature, the first sentence Puig writes is neither related to the literary nor to the cinematic, but to the geographical. Yet it corresponds not to an allegory resorted to in order to explain something else, for Puig's complaint has concrete coordinates. The Argentine author goes on explaining how far his provincial village was from other points of reference (Buenos Aires, the sea, the mountains), and also how he believed there was a sort of comforting oasis located in that arid town where he grew up: 'en la pantalla del cine del pueblo se to show how Sarmiento's work constitutes an Argentine and Latin American tradition that Puig both deals with and works from. It is not just a matter of how Puig disobeys certain cultural boundaries, but how these boundaries constrain both Puig's work and life, therefore, how Puig manages to destabilise Sarmiento's tradition. For our starting point is, above all, an autobiographical story about transits -and not just about oppositions-from province to city, from the pampas to Buenos Aires, from Argentina to Europe: 'En Buenos Aires no existía la realidad del placer. […] Tardé muy poco tiempo en descubrir que tampoco en Roma […] existía esa ansiada realidad paralela' (Puig 1985a, p. 7). Thus, in Chapter 2 I argue that even though Puig's work unfolds within Sarmiento's tradition (rejecting the pampas), it detaches from it to the extent that Puig feels, unlike Sarmiento, as uncomfortable in the pampas as at the city or at European metropolitan centres. Here the geographical aspect shows its cultural implications and its tight imbrication with those restricted realms Puig experiences and, as we shall examine, with relevant transnational and linguistic displacements involved. This set of elements define the thesis's first two chapters, providing a general context for the following two ones in my analysis of the works of Martel, Wong, Caicedo, and Fuguet. Unlike the first two ones, both Chapter 3, which focuses separately on Alberto Fuguet's and Andrés Caicedo's work, and Chapter 4, which approaches Wong Kar-wai's and Lucrecia Martel's oeuvre in consecutive sections, tend to address specific works. This is at least for a couple of reasons. First, in addressing specific works, this thesis achieves an important counterbalance to previous chapters, which are centred exclusively on Puig's work critically regarding Puig's years before his literary debut. Second, I consider that the work/films analysed stand out, respectively, as the most pertinent to be linked to the matters this thesis focuses upon. Additional theoretical definitions will be offered throughout. Considering that what is at stake is, basically, the refusal of a determined landscape, it is relevant to regard those other substitute sceneries which, in most of Puig's novels, seem to soften the sternness in every setting. Unlike the representation of nature that, as we shall see in Chapter 1, has historically dominated Latin American literature, Puig's work images of nature constitute unrooted fragments provided mainly by the cinematic imagination (mediascapes). However, these fetishised depictions taken mainly from the Hollywood archiveespecially tropical/Caribbean iconic images-are by no means neutral; they become an effective means of resisting those strenuous spaces Puig's characters often endure. This leads us to the problem of how nature is represented. If Puig's work decompresses a certain 11 overpresence of nature in Latin American narrative, as I argue in Chapter 1, it is worth understanding how this relationship is restated, how natural landscapes can take on other forms and roles. For this purpose, we need a helpful theory of the representation of nature. Nils Lindahl's Mediating Nature (2006) offers us a suitable approach that is important to define beforehand. Lindahl distinguishes three discourses of nature. First, the naturalist discourse, wherein nature is defined through a traditional distinction, 'premised on a separation between the human and non-human nature, between nature and culture ' (2006, p. 18). The second one, the culturalist discourse, considers nature as culturally defined, nature is constructed as a (meta-)discourse itself, a result of seventeenth-century Western philosophy (ibid.). The third discourse, the postmodern one, regards nature not as an objective nonhuman reality, and not as a discursive apparatus either. Nature, instead, constitutes a hybridism beyond the culture-nature separation, involving 'mutually imbricating elements, some of which are "other than human" or "more than human," and whose proverbial "sum" is something other than the "parts"' (ibid., p. 21). However, for Lindahl these discourses 2 do not suffice, as his analysis focuses not only on the nature of nature, but specially on mass-mediated nature. The difficulty arises when, despite the synthetic postmodern approach, Lindahl needs to figure out how nature has been something taught, learned, referred to, or massively reproduced, that is, something with a significant degree of autonomy from human experience. Thus, drawing on Charles Pierce's linguistics, Lindahl develops a perspective comprising three interrelated categories. Firstly, the nature of firstness, nature as pure virtuality and possibility: 'The metaphors of Eden used repeatedly to describe such a nature are appropriate in so far as they emphasize the promised and promising nature of the context' (p. 26). Secondly, nature as secondness, where it becomes 'a matter of action and reactions' (ibid.), of causalities and physical efforts which force an experience, nature 'of the ant that bites explorers, of an oil palm nut that falls into a river' (p. 27). Finally, the nature of thirdness, whereby nature becomes signs and 'all the media by means of which nature might be represented, and/or might be made to present itself: nature re/presented' (ibid.). These categories, however, never appear...