Body of Writing: Figuring Desire in Spanish American Literature

309 Pages·2000·1 MB·English

by  René Prieto

Body of writing
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Body of writing
i
Figuring desire in Spanish American literature
René Prieto
Duke University Press Durham and London 2000
∫ 2000 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $
Typeset in Adobe Caslon by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last
printed page of this book.
To Leps
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Contents
i
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1
Julio Cortázar’s perpetual exile 17
2
More than meets the I: Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s
La Habana para un Infante difunto 75
3
The excremental vision of Gabriel García Márquez 101
4
The degraded body in the work of Severo Sarduy 135
5
Rewriting the body: renewal through language in the
work of Rosario Castellanos 173
6
The body of pleasure in Tununa Mercado’s
Canon de alcoba 213
Conclusion 240
Notes 255
Bibliography 275
Index 285
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Acknowledgments
i
Barthes used to say reading needed to be an obsessive activity. By that he
meant it was preferable to become intimate with a handful of classics—to
read them again and again—instead of trying to keep up with all the
novelties. I want to thank him and my fellow students from his seminar
at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes for impressing upon me the need to blur
the boundary between reading and compulsion. Something astonishing
takes place after reading the same book many times: one begins to think
in tune with the author, which is another way of saying from the perspec-
tive of another. If reading is an adventure, rereading is the return journey
to the birthplace of the text. Several friends traveled with me on such a
journey by o√ering useful suggestions while Body of Writing took shape.
Among them, I wish to express my gratitude to Roberto González Eche-
varría and Gustavo Pérez-Firmat for their many valuable recommenda-
tions. I would also like to thank Aníbal González Pérez and the Carib-
bean Literature Series at the University of Texas, Austin, for inviting me
to read the very paper on La Habana para un Infante difunto that became
the starting point for this book. Like an inkblot on the page, Body of
Writing spread in unexpected directions during the many wonderful dis-
cussions that took place in and after a graduate class on Indigenismo I
taught at Emory University in 1994. My thanks go to all my students in
that class, as well as to Carlos Alonso and Karen Stolley for inviting me
to Emory.
Body of Writing would not have been completed without Jared Loew-
enstein, Ibero-American bibliographer at the University of Virginia,
who made available the remarkable collection of rare and unpublished