Malady and Genius , livre ebook

Malady and Genius
SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature

Charles Shepherdson, editor
Malady and Genius
SELF-SACRIFICE IN PUERTO RICAN LITERATURE
Benigno Trigo
Cover art: La escalera rota II , by Rafael Trelles. 36" x 48". 2001.
Private collection of Benigno Trigo and Kelly Oliver.
Reproduced with permission from the artist.
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S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2016 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Trigo, Benigno, author.
Title: Malady and genius : self-sacrifice in Puerto Rican literature / Benigno Trigo.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2016] | Series: SUNY series, insinuations: philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015036594 | ISBN 9781438461571 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438461595 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Puerto Rican literature—History and criticism. | Self-sacrifice in literature. | Literature and society—Puerto Rico.
Classification: LCC PQ7422 .T75 2016 | DDC 860.9/97295—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036594
Throughout time, women narrators have written for many reasons. Emily Bronte wrote to confirm the revolutionary nature of passion; Virginia Woolf wrote to exorcise her terror of madness and death; Joan Didion writes to discover what and how she thinks; Clarice Lispector discovered in her writing a reason to love and be loved. In my case, writing is simultaneously a constructive and a destructive urge, a possibility for growth and change.
—Rosario Ferré, “The Writer’s Kitchen”
Contents
L IST OF I LLUSTRATIONS
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I NTRODUCTION
Scenes of Self-Undoing: Malady and Genius of the Puerto Rican Soul
C HAPTER 1
Psyche, History, Language, and Body in Antigona Pérez by Luis Rafael Sánchez
C HAPTER 2
The Gift of Abjection: The Look of Love in René Marqués
C HAPTER 3
Vicissitudes of Perversion: From “El puertorriqueño dócil” to El capitán de los dormidos
C HAPTER 4
Zona. Carga y Descarga : Minor Literature in a Penal Colony
C HAPTER 5
Colonial Sublimations of a Noir Eros in “El Josco” and Two Detective Novels
C HAPTER 6
Shame, Repetition, and Forgiveness in Queer Latino Testimonio : Impossible Motherhood and Diario de una puta humilde
C ONCLUSION
The Scene of Self-Sacrifice in Literary Discourse: Between Perversion and Sublimation
N OTES
W ORKS C ITED
I NDEX
Illustrations
F IGURE 4.1 Zilia Sánchez. Topología erótica ( Serie las amazonas ), 1978
F IGURE 4.2 Zilia Sánchez. Nacimiento de Eros, 1971
F IGURE 4.3 Myrna Báez. Tríptico ( Retrato de América Báez ), 1972
F IGURE 4.4 Rosario Ferré et al. Zona. Carga y Descarga. 3 (1973), 11
F IGURE 4.5 Rosario Ferré et al. Zona. Carga y Descarga. 3 (1973), 6
F IGURE 4.6 Rosario Ferré et al. Zona. Carga y Descarga. 3 (1973), 7
F IGURE 4.7 Rosario Ferré et al. Zona. Carga y Descarga. 3 (1973), 22
Acknowledgments
This book is profoundly indebted to my mother, Rosario Ferré (1938–2016), and it would not have been possible without Kelly Oliver’s constant support and love.
It is published because Charles Shepherdson believed in the project, and it owes much to our conversations about literary analysis, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial studies. Since the beginning, Rubén Ríos Ávila was an enthusiastic supporter of the book. He has been a generous reader throughout the writing process, as well as a kind interlocutor over many years. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia read early versions of the introduction, and I am thankful for their advice. Arnaldo also read chapter 2 and made helpful comments. His constant support has been a great source of encouragement for me. Both Vanessa Vilches and Mara Negrón (1961–2012) were open and receptive to my ideas, and they invited me to present versions of my work at the University of Puerto Rico. Their confidence gave me the strength to persevere and finish the manuscript. Juan Duchesne went beyond the call when he had an early version of one of the chapters translated so that it could be published in a Spanish-only journal. Thank you, Juan. Without the support of these friends and family, I would not have written this book. It is also indebted to many other friends, family members, students, colleagues, and inspiring models. I wish I could acknowledge each one of them.
My sincere gratitude also goes to Myrna Báez, Zilia Sánchez, and Rafael Trelles, for allowing me to use images of their works.
This book represents my insurmountable debt to the place where I was born.
I NTRODUCTION

Scenes of Self-Undoing
MALADY AND GENIUS OF THE PUERTO RICAN SOUL
In a famous poem titled “A Julia de Burgos” from the collection Poema en veinte surcos (1938), the Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos (1914–1953) addresses herself as if she were in front of a mirror. The poem describes a self split into two grammatical persons that is composed of sets of irreconcilable opposites. At one point, Burgos describes her image as a submissive housewife, opposed to her image as master: “You in yourself have no say; everyone governs you. … Not in me, in me only my heart governs” (Burgos 1997, 3–5). The poem ends with Burgos, a torch in her hand, about to set fire to herself. “When the multitudes run rioting … against you and against everything unjust and inhuman, I will be in their midst with the torch in my hand” (ibid., 5). The threatening gesture at the end of the poem is intensely contradictory. It is on the one hand an attack against the self, even if it is an image constructed and defined by others. But the attack is also a defense against the social and cultural context that turns Burgos against herself. The gesture at the end of the poem is paradoxical, both suicidal and life-affirming. It is a scene of self-sacrifice or self-undoing that is repeated in the cultural production of Puerto Rico during the twentieth century: one hundred years lived as a nonincorporated territory of the United States.
The scene of self-sacrifice or self-undoing is as old as a painting that some have called “a synthesis … of our traditional, popular culture” (González 1983, 85). 1 Francisco Oller’s El Velorio (1893) is a monumental painting that gives the form of a baquiné (an ancient funerary ritual in the countryside of Puerto Rico) to this scene of self-sacrifice or self-undoing, which the painter condemns as “an orgy of brutish appetites under the guise of a gross superstition” (Benítez 1983, 193). The president of the Puerto Rican Union Party, Antonio R. Barceló (1868–1938), repeated the scene in his famous reaction to the infamous Tydings Bill of 1936 that offered independence to Puerto Rico under punishing terms: he cried, “Give me independence, even if we die from hunger.” The nationalist Lolita Lebrón (1919–2010) reenacted the scene during the attack on the U.S. Congress in 1954, and gave voice to it in her equally famous cry: “I didn’t come here to kill anybody; I came to die for Puerto Rico.” 2
In this book, I focus on examples of this scene that appear in representative texts from the twentieth century written during the period of cultural debates that followed the period of nationalist unrest in Puerto Rico. Most of the texts are literary and they were written between the 1960s and the 1990s, and most are authored by Puerto Ricans born and living on the island—with some exceptions, such as Mayra Montero (1952–), born in Cuba, David Caleb Acevedo (1980–), born in Puerto Rico but raised in Hartford Connecticut, and Irene Vilar (1969–), born in Puerto Rico but living in the United States. All of the texts were also written during the gradual disassembly of the welfare state in the United States, and they all represent the impact of this important economic change on the social fabric of Puerto Rico. In all, I examine eleven literary examples of the scene of self-undoing, which include the suicide at the center of the now-classic short story “El Josco,” by Abelardo Díaz Alfaro (1916–1999); the self-violence contained in two stories and one novel by René Marqués (1919–1979); the self-immolation at the center of a play by Luis Rafael Sánchez (1936–) inspired by Sophocles’s Antigone ; the imploding content and form of the influential literary journal Zona. Carga y Descarga (1972–75); the suicide of the main character in a novel by Montero; and the self-violent police novels of Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá (1946–). I end the book