Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism: An Analytical Approach to Space 9811914257, 9789811914256

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Java Singh

Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism An Analytical Approach to Space

Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism

Java Singh

Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism An Analytical Approach to Space

Java Singh Department of Spanish Doon University Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India

ISBN 978-981-19-1425-6 ISBN 978-981-19-1426-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1426-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

For Ravi, My mother, Neelam and My grandmothers, Lakshmi and Lalmani

Foreword

The book’s theoretical imperative, vast scope, and transnational orientation ensure its relevance to a wide audience. It is to the author’s great credit that she manages an ambitious interdisciplinary project with great command and fluidity. The author reviews the works of an excellent selection of theorists from the fields of anthropology, geography, psychology, and literary criticism to inform her argument. It works to the book’s great advantage that the selection is not confined to Anglophone theorists. Many of the ideas discussed are drawn from books and articles in Spanish that have not yet been translated into English. The book greatly benefits from the author’s ability to reference complex works available only in Spanish. The historical depth of the literature reviewed is a great strength of the book. The bibliography goes as far back as the seventeenth century and saves the book from falling prey to hyper-presentism. Multiple strands of theories, texts, concepts, regions, timehorizons, genres, and forms are held together in an easy grip of feminism. The steady feminist tone of the book also takes many minoritarian concerns into consideration, especially accentuating the unfair treatment of persons suffering from mental disorders, earth others, native Americans, transgender persons, and slum-dwellers. Dr. Singh sustains methodological control through systematic delivery, deepening discussion, bringing together threads of analysis, and applying them carefully and insistently in the close reading of the texts. While closely detailing the theoretical trajectory of the analysis, the author always has the texts in sight, and the theoretical framework is consistently informed by a core understanding of the texts. Theoretical deliberations are deftly interwoven with discussions of real-life instances, bridging the gaps that separate theory, text, and the world. The book is neatly structured into two parts—the first is primarily concerned with theory and the second with the selected texts. The conceptual framework developed in the book focusses on ‘space’ instead of ‘place,’ thus breaking through geographic limitations. Although the original location of the writer, director, scriptwriter, or cartoonist is seen as a crucial influence on their creative output, the work acquires transnational relevance when readers recognize its capacity to raise issues that resonate beyond their own originating locations. Additionally, the analytical

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approach of the book frees itself from local referentiality to highlight space as a cross-cultural construct and extends its applicability beyond any national frontiers. The selected writers come from five different countries, India, Argentina, the USA, Uruguay, and Spain. Their work has a transnational reach because it provides referential frameworks that are accessible the world over. Sumukhi Suresh’s OTT series raises concerns about body shaming and mental health. Ecological concerns and gender inequality are key themes in Manjula Padmanabhan’s science fiction. Lucrecia Martel, the Argentine filmmaker, uses a provincial setting for her films to expose the decadence of inherited privilege, successfully de-provincializing her cinematic narrative. Carol Lay’s work delves into the devastating impact of the relentless exploitation of natural resources to meet the needs of increasingly consumerist societies. Cristina Peri Rossi is an iconic figure in exile literature. Persecuted by the military dictatorship in her native Uruguay, she escaped to Spain in the 1970s. Her experiences as a gay woman who came out in the 1960s, an anti-establishment activist, and an immigrant filter into her writing. The selected creative artists speak to a global audience. The approach to analyzing space developed in the book is unique. “The Spatial Gynocritics Model” is effective in creating a critical approach that opens up meanings rather than imposing meanings from theory. The text always has primacy over theory in this book. In each chapter of Part II, the author discusses various aspects of the narratives before centring her attention on the spatial analysis. The critical strategy of the model works on the idea of taking a binocular view of the Oedipal triangle, denying legitimacy to any single perspective. The author displays great confidence in her model by testing it repeatedly and effectively on different genres and narrative forms. The model generates cross-over vocabulary and grammar that may be utilized to frame coherent readings even of texts not included in the book. The spatial gynocritic model and close-readings advanced in Part II introduce a way of thinking about texts that does not essentialize and prescribe, enabling and encouraging the reader to be intellectually nomadic. The use of diagrams, rarely found in critical analyses of texts, is ideally suited to spatial analysis. These pictorial depictions create a modular arrangement that relieves the model of any rigidity, inviting a bricolage rearrangement of its tools and devices. The diagrams also serve as mind maps that aid quick recall of the intricacies of the model developed in the book. Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism: An Analytic Approach to Space makes an important and original contribution to diffusing the boundaries among ways of reading different forms of creative representations. The book straddles several disciplines of comparative literature, comparative theory, film criticism, cartoon criticism, comedy criticism, feminist literary criticism, science fiction criticism, and spatial criticism, making it useful for scholars in all these fields. The author’s meticulous close reading–of Lucrecia Martel’s films, Sumukhi Suresh’s OTT series, Cristina Peri Rossi’s stories, Manjula Padmanabhan’s novels, and Carol Lay’s cartoon

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comics makes the book stimulating for anyone interested in developing a careful understanding of the works of these extraordinarily gifted women. Prof. Indrani Mukherjee Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi, India

Preface

The preface to a book is both an introduction to what the reader may expect to find in it and the author’s reflection on all the strands she has braided into a discernible design. It is an instantiation of “proleptic analepsis,” a flashback that contains fractals that will actualize their possibilities in the future.1 The title of the book, Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism: An Analytic Approach to Space, identifies it as an attempt at spatial criticism of literary and cultural narratives that is informed by a feminist consciousness. In addition to its commitment to feminism, the endeavour is also persuaded by the analytic lines pursued in structuralist poetics. In the preface to the 2002 edition of Structuralist Poetics, Jonathan Culler defends structuralist approaches, which focus on the “how works produce the effects [such as meanings] they have for readers” against advocates of hermeneutics, who concentrate on explicating what those ‘effects’ or ‘meanings’ may be. By bringing up the dialectics between poetics and hermeneutics, Culler revives the age-old discussion on the relative primacy of the realms of logos and lexis, res and verba, ideas and expression, meaning and rhetoric or, simply put, between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ that is crucial in assembling any critical view of literary and cultural representations. This book does not view the categories of poetics and hermeneutics as separate critical methods; instead, they are viewed as distinct tones that should constitute any in-depth commentary on texts. As both modes of reading merit attention, the book strives to understand the feminist ‘meanings’ and ‘effects’ that are evoked by the selected texts; on the other, it explicates the spatial tools, tactics, and devices that are used to convey those meanings to the reader. Without structuralist tools, such as those associated with space, the text cannot be adequately pried open for analysis, and without a hermeneutic objective, the analytic project risks becoming futile. A profound engagement with structuralist analysis is not opposed to developing an ideological commitment; in fact, structuralist approaches may equip the critic to 1 Bruce Robbins used the term in his keynote address at the XXIst conference of the Forum on Contemporary Theory, in 2018 in Puri, Odisha. The speech was titled “Diasporas and Atrocities: Cosmopolitanism Now.” Unfortunately, it has not been published, hence a citation is not possible.

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reveal hitherto obscure ideological aspects of texts. Walter Mignolo, a leading voice in postcolonial theory, started out as a structuralist. In Elements for a Theory of the Literary Text (1978), Mignolo’s articulation of various productive concepts such as axiality, figuration, and connectedness is directly derived from the fundamentals of structuralism. According to Culler, poetics “could be thought of […] as the attempt to understand what a poet or novelist must know implicitly to be able to construct the literary work.” Culler’s expectation of ‘implicit’ knowledge on the part of the novelist is key to this book. Many of the theorists, writers, and artists studied in the book demonstrate explicitly feminist stances in their works, but they also make implicit discursive connections with a diverse range of concerns such as mental health, nation formation, state-induced precarity, linguistic prejudice, and consumerism. The critic’s task is to make explicit the implicit awareness that resides in the text. In order to read the implicit discursivities, the book posits space as an essential element of ‘literary competence.’ A deep understanding of the spatial logic of literary and cultural narratives provides new ways of reading these texts, enabling ‘performativities’ that would otherwise remain unactualized. The book approaches its objectives through two distinct trajectories–building a model and applying the model–each becoming a guiding thread for the two parts of the book. Part I, comprised of five chapters, outlines the theoretical underpinnings of the book, and relying on them, proposes a model for spatial criticism. Part II, also comprised of five chapters, applies the spatial gynocritics model proposed in Part I to carry out innovative readings of selected literary and cultural narratives created by five women–Cristina Peri Rossi, Manjula Padmanabhan, Lucrecia Martel, Sumukhi Suresh, and Carol Lay. Serendipity was certainly at play in assembling this cast of creators. Cristina Peri Rossi was the first woman who made her way through the analytical sieve used in this book. She is featured on the syllabi of literature courses in various universities as a leading voice of postmodernist, post-boom Latin American, and gay literature. Peri Rossi writes in many genres, including science fiction. Research on her science fiction led this study into the field of women’s science fiction, where Manjula Padmanabhan emerged as an iconic figure from India. A talk by the cultural attaché at the Argentinian embassy in New Delhi, titled ‘Discover Argentina through its Cinema,’ occasioned an introduction to the work of Lucrecia Martel. She stood out as the only woman director in the list of ten emblematic films that was passed around during the talk. A keynote address at a conference on the fantastic in Barcelona mentioned Carol Lay’s unique blend of reality and fantasy as a forceful tool for social critique, provoking a deeper exploration of her work. The study of Lay’s cartoons involved developing an understanding of the functioning of humour. The early days of the research on humour for the present project coincided with the visible success of young female comics on OTT platforms in India. Among them, Sumukhi Suresh stood out as a path-breaking artist. The serendipitous selection may be seen as ‘el azar electivo,’ or a series of objective chance encounters that take place in the zone lying between deterministic impositions and complete free will. The five creative women studied in Part II of the book were not

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selected to comply with a pre-determined theoretical design, nor was their selection an outcome of pure chance. Their work came through on three broadly conceived criteria for text selection. Firstly, the selected group should have crafted diverse literary and cultural genres so that the model developed in Part I could be tested cross-generically; secondly, they should be representative of the Indo-American– Latin and North–contact zone that shapes the work of Indian Hispanists; and thirdly, that their work runs against the grain of the popular market sentiment of their times. Peri Rossi rejected magic realism as a literary register, refusing to ride the wave of commercial success that had been set in motion by the huge popularity of writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Isabelle Allende. Padmanabhan grounded her stories on Earth, avoiding inter-planetary explorations that were the staple of best-selling science fiction literature and high-grossing films. Martel avoided exoticizing her local settings to attract international attention. She also did not rely heavily on the recent history of national trauma inflicted on her country by the military junta that held power during the 1970s and 80s–a subject matter that ensured ready recognition for Argentinian films by the market and film festivals alike. Sumukhi Suresh created an unapologetically desirous woman without offering any excuses for her obsessions. She portrayed the large-bodied female lead of her series with a level empathy and confidence unprecedented in Indian cinema. Carol Lay created female characters that flouted the graphic conventions instituted by best-selling superhero comics on the 1970s an 80s. The women featured in Part II span three generations. Peri Rossi was born in 1942, Lay and Padmanabhan in 1952 and 1953, respectively. Lucrecia Martel in 1966 and Sumukhi Suresh in 1987. Each one brings their experiences of masculine mechanisms of control to their work–politically sanctioned human rights abuses of a military dictatorship (Peri Rossi), socially endorsed female foeticide and infanticide (Padmanabhan), culturally accepted invisibility of middle-aged and old women (Martel), market induced body regimes that foment self-hate (Suresh), and masculine appropriation of natural resources and traditional ecological knowledge systems (Lay). The use of a gendered lens by women of different generations reveals the continuity of a misogynistic element that sustains a political-social-cultural-economic sensibility that mitigates against the emancipation of women from patriarchal control. Moreover, the group of women featured in Part II displays a spatial consciousness that resonates powerfully with the theoretical foci of the book. In Part I, the theoretical levers of the book are organized into four ‘vectors’ based on their provenance from the fields of anthropology, geography, psychology, and feminist literary criticism. Real-life instances and examples from literature and cinema are used to elucidate key concepts that form part of the analytic lexicon of the book. The inter-disciplinary approach is fundamental in deriving the conceptual tools that constitute the spatial gynocritics model delineated in Part I. Chapter 1, titled ‘The Anthropology Vector,’ focusses on Victor Tuner’s extrapolation of anthropological concepts to the realm of literary and cultural criticism. This chapter considers the exploration of spatial liminality by Victor Turner as foundational to developing a deeper understanding of the processes of social change. Turner’s articulations of the Social Drama, rituals, and pilgrimage, especially, are

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extrapolated to analyze the importance of spatial locations in public manifestations of a shared sense of injustice. Some such instances that are read through a Turnerian lens are the Indian Anti-dowry Movement, protests against the ban on Jallikattu, Argentina’s Madres de la Plaza movement, and the Chilean Social Outbreak. By using different public spaces–the college campus, main streets of prominent cities, the premises around the presidential residence, and metro stations, respectively–the dissenting groups were able to gather sufficient momentum to get the authorities to redress their grievances to some extent. The locations for these expressions of dissent show that even everyday places are imbued with liminal, transformative energies. The sites of dissent function as liminal zones in which all participants, devoid of markers of status, are able to enjoy greater degrees of autonomy than in the pre-liminal and post-liminal stages. The chapter also examines the role of cultural performances and literary representations in supporting and instigating such social changes. The applicability of Turner’s conceptualization of ritual, liminality, and pilgrimage as tools for literary and cultural criticism has been demonstrated through brief commentaries on selected short stories, films, and T.V. shows. The chapter attempts to establish connections between the literary, cultural, and physical liminal spaces through the anthropological vector. Chapter 2 titled ‘The Geography Vector,’ examines the assertions of feminist geographers who have argued that modes of spatial control of women serve as mechanisms of patriarchal control. A poetics of spatial patriarchy emerges from the schema outlined by Doreen Massey and Linda McDowell, and Daphne Spain’s historic sociological study of segregated spaces for women. The elements of these poetics are utilized to articulate the topographical view of space adopted in the study. In this view, the cultural valence of a space depends on the full inventory of the compositional elements of the place where it is located. For example, an uninhabited strip of sand may appear abandoned in a superficial view, but when examined closely, it may be replete with many forms of animal life and reminders of life forms that once thrived there. This chapter explicates the topographical view as a ‘liminal’ view that stretches the studied space to reveal the significance of the interstices contained in any spatiality. Thus, space, as a building block of the narrative structure, is construed as pronominal and deictic, its significance being determined by the perspective from which it is viewed. The topographical approach is used to read Teresa de la Parra’s iconic work of feminist literature, Ifigenia, and Cristina Peri Rossi’s short story ‘The Annunciation.’ Informed by the geography vector, the spatial analysis of these narratives reveals links between territorial dispossession and emotional exploitation and the actant potency of space as an autonomous literary device. Chapter 3 forges the eponymous psychology vector from three flagstone texts of twentieth-century feminist scholarship in the field of psychology, namely, Karen Horney’s New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939), Juliet Mitchell’s ‘Women the Longest Revolution’ (1966), and Kate Millett’s The Loony Bin Trip (1990). The mirroring of women’s familial and social positions in these works is highlighted in this chapter. Some of the critical concepts articulated by these theorists are used to study reallife instances of oppression of even exceptionally gifted women to demonstrate the

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power of patriarchal tendencies. The notions of undertow, recoil, and afterwardness are explicated to understand the slow change in women’s position in society vis-à-vis men. The neurosis-inducing effect of insalubrious dependencies is examined to demonstrate that individual masochistic and narcissistic dependencies have generated a pathological social condition that is detrimental to changing patriarchal attitudes towards women. The psychological vector developed in this chapter is used to analyze the portrayal of the domestic space in selected short stories. The notion of the ‘Jocasta complex’ is developed as contrapuntal to the Oedipal complex to describe the psychological response of women to their confinement in domestic spaces. The adopted approaches generate a binocular view of the domestic space as depicted in the stories, whereby it emerges as a masochistic space. The psychological vector exposes the oppressive underbelly of superficial stances of protectiveness towards the woman and reverence towards the mother-figure. Chapter 4, ‘The Literary Vector,’ presents a brief survey of the field of feminist literary criticism before proceeding to tease out the spatial implications suggested by the conceptual schemes of selected critics. The conceptual schema of Jean Franco, Josefina Ludmer, Sara Castro-Klaren, Nattie Golubov, Rachel Falconer, and Joy Ladin are examined in detail to extricate the spatial premises that emerge from their critical articulations. The literary vector thus crafted is used to explore Antigone’s unique location in kinship structures, de-differentiated and de-sedimented views of unified solidities, visualization of localized speaking spaces, the notion of the female nomadic reader, and chrontopic extensions discernible in centrifugal narratives. The chapter explains the derivation process for the analytic devices of ‘Antigonal spatial archetypes,’ ‘liminal chronotopy,’ ‘spatial de-differentiations,’ ‘localizing the limen,’ ‘spatial de-sedimenting,’ and ‘speculative materiality of the limen.’ Chapter 5 brings together the exploratory probes and analytic formulations of the first four chapters to suggest an arrangement for the conceptual tools derived in Chap. 4 of the book. The mode of combining the tools is informed by a consciousness of Debra Castillo’s six-pronged strategy for feminist literary criticism. Castillo urges a critical reading of women’s texts that scrutinizes the play of six literary, tactical elements, namely: silencing, appropriation, surfacing, marginality, negation, and the subjunctive mood. The spatial gynocritics model that emerges from the interplay between these tactical elements and the conceptual tools for spatial analysis is a trifurcated entity whose tines are named ‘de-canonizing derivatives,’ ‘debordering derivatives,’ and ‘de-settling derivatives.’ The suggested arrangement of these perspectival tools for understanding portrayals of spaces in literary and cultural narratives is by no means meant to be prescriptive; instead, the intent in proposing a modular formation is to demonstrate possible inter-relationships among the various conceptual schemes from which the tools are derived. While taking up different genres and forms of literary and cultural narratives for discussion in Part II, it is assumed that no reader will have in-depth knowledge of the relevant critical tools and the background information for each one. Therefore, apart from undertaking the spatial analysis of the selected narrative, each chapter presents a critical overview of the selected writer or artist and, where required, explains the terminology that is specific to that form.

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Chapter 6, the opening chapter of Part II, is concerned with Cristina Peri Rossi’s postmodernist short stories. Peri Rossi is considered part of the ‘Generation of 1972,’ which includes other writers who were forced to flee out of fear of persecution at the hands of the military juntas in their native countries. Over the course of almost sixty years, she has received several awards, including the highest literary award in the Spanish language, the 2021 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, for her impressive oeuvre consisting of novels, short stories, newspaper columns, and poems. This chapter provides a background of the political scenario that pushed Peri Rossi into voluntary exile and locates her writing within the postmodernist literary turn in Latin American literature. The chapter explains why the theme of exile–literal and metaphoric–in her work has attracted extensive critical attention. In order to open up her short narratives to new readings, the portrayal of three spaces, each of which comes up in multiple stories by Peri Rossi, is examined through the spatial gynocritic model. The de-settling, de-bordering, and de-settling derivatives are used to examine the topographies of the psychiatrist’s clinic, road, and racetrack. When viewed through the model, these spaces become subversive representations, challenging normative notions of ‘madness/sanity,’ the ‘saviour/victim complex,’ and ‘sportsmanship/avariciousness,’ respectively. Chapter 7 discusses the works of Manjula Padmanabhan, a pioneer in Englishlanguage science fiction (sf) written by Indian women. Perhaps because she had no female predecessors, Padmanabhan’s work has more in common with American sf writers than with those from her own country. Delineating the common themes that have been featured in women’s sf, the chapter provides a recent history of women’s sf in the U.S. and sf writing by women in India. The chapter discusses the basics of myth criticism as the genre of sf relies extensively on traditional mythologies, reinterpreting and renovating them to create new myths. Having set the background for discussing Padmanabhan’s sf, the chapter provides a critical overview of the ‘Meiji Saga,’ comprised of Escape (2008) and The Island of Lost Girls (2015). Subsequently, these novels are taken up for detailed spatial analysis. The spatial gynocritic model reveals that the novels de-canonize ‘junctions’ as neutral places meant for transitions, reinterpreting them as sites for resistance. They also de-border the modern battlefield and the ancient Roman gladiatorial arena, demonstrating the continuance of commercial interests that turn war into a type of reality entertainment. Additionally, the literary analysis in Chap. 7 focuses on the futuristic vehicles and portable habitats depicted in the novels, probing the de-settling of any notions of the permanent home as a safe space. Chapter 8 examines the evolution of Argentinian cinema in the second half of the twentieth century and locates Lucrecia Martel among the filmmakers who gave it a new direction at the turn of the twenty-first. The characteristics of ‘New Argentine Cinema,’ which includes Martel’s cinema, are delineated to show the changes in the cinematic themes and stylistic approaches since the years of the Dirty War–a traumatic period in the country’s recent history. Martel’s oeuvre is sparse, but she has received national and international accolades for every film that she has made. The chapter concentrates on her Salta trilogy, providing justifications for viewing it as a transnational, collective bildungsroman. In addition, the chapter selects the pool

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for spatial analysis as it is featured prominently in all three films of the trilogy. When the pool is viewed through the spatial gynocritic models, it emerges as a de-settling element that unravels racial and familial hierarchies in The Swamp; in The Holy Girl, Martel uses the pool to present a de-canonized view of the home-nation; and in The Headless Woman, the liquid space becomes a site for de-bordering the perceived safety of the city and the threat of violence presented by neighbouring slums. Chapter 9 examines the coming-of-age of women comedians in India in the twenty-first century, concluding that they have successfully overcome the marginalization of women in comedy. The focus of the chapter is on the work of Sumukhi Suresh, who is the first stand-up comedian to secure a two-season deal with a major OTT platform, without succumbing to stereotypical representations of women, especially the large-bodied woman. The chapter carries out an in-depth study of the innovative re-interpretation of the feminist trope of ‘madwoman’ in her series Pushpavalli. Another mythological archetype that has been used as an analytic tool for the series is that of the trickster. Based on the analysis, the chapter posits that the series portrays a strong link between body image concerns and mental health that is especially prevalent among women. The series is viewed as a Juvenalian satire that uses dark humour to represent grave social problems such as misogyny, language-based discrimination, and marginalization of experiential knowledge systems. The spatial analysis looks at six different settings featured prominently in the series–the PG accommodation, tea stall, library, conference centre, packhouse, and the godman’s ashram–through the de-bordering, de-settling, and de-canonizing derivatives of the spatial gynocritics model. Chapter 10 discusses the fundamental tools used in the analysis of the genre of comics. It explores the outlook of four key theorists of the genre, namely Román Gubern, Will Eisner, Thierry Groensteen, and Scott McCloud, to develop an understanding of the comic as a distinctive art form. The chapter also examines the history of twentieth-century women comic artists, from North and South America, placing Carol Lay’s work among the ‘daughters of the underground.’ Over the course of forty years, Carol Lay’s depiction of female characters has undergone significant shifts. Based on the changes in the visual language and character traits as the primary criteria, the chapter classifies her extensive oeuvre into three phases–agential, capacitated, and emancipated. In the last section, the chapter carries out a spatial analysis of places of work and play, the jungle and city, and the garbage heap to unveil the hidden layers of significance in Lay’s graphic narratives. Parts I and II complement each other as theory and practice, but they can also be read separately. Every chapter, except the fifth one, attempts a substantive argument that can be accessed independently of the other chapters. Chapter 5, in which the spatial gynocritics model is assembled, makes for a coherent reading if it is read after the preceding ones. The reader is invited to read all the other chapters in any order. Dehradun, India

Java Singh

Acknowledgments

This book is based on my doctoral research at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. It would not have reached the present stage without the guidance of Prof. Indrani Mukherjee, who was my Ph.D. supervisor and continues to be my intellectual sounding board. I am grateful to her not only for sharing her formidable erudition with me but also her exceptional commitment to egalitarian values. She is a demanding, rigorous instructor who excised my errors and generously commended any insights I happened to chance upon. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with her. I am also grateful to the entire faculty at the Centre for Spanish for teaching me the Spanish language and introducing me to the cultural wealth that it carries. Dr. Meenakshi Sundriyal, with whom I did my graduate dissertation and Dr. Lipi Biswas Sen who salvaged many of my submissions from being rejected by conferences and journals, have been pillars of support. Dr. Gaurav Kumar taught me the first Spanish class that I attended, starting me off on a rewarding journey. The Forum on Cotemporary Theory, Baroda and its ‘patron saint’ Prof. Prafulla Kar share the credit for providing me a community where I presented my initial research papers and got the opportunity to interact with intellectual giants from all over the world. Prof. Catherine Boyle (King’s College, London) and Prof. Nishat Haider (Jamia Milia, New Delhi) provided constructive criticism for my doctoral research. Their observations encouraged me to cultivate and grow many ideas that were at a nascent stage in my Ph.D. dissertation. Professors Walter Mignolo (Duke University), Debra Castillo (Cornell University), Olga Bezhanova (Southern Illinois University), Elena Losada (University of Barcelona), and Claudio Paulini (Artigas Institute, Montevideo) have generously shared their feedback on my research papers, sharpening my approach and expanding my horizons. Nalini Hariharan and Alicia Semiglia have been exceptional professional associates, becoming my dear friends, in the process. Bratati Ghosh was the source of the vital input that ensured that this book did not become an endless project. On the purely personal front, I have made the most demands on Nikhil and Jay to write this book. Thank you, bears. xix

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Finally, I would like to thank Satvinder Kaur at Springer for seeing the merit in my book proposal and for sending it to reviewers–names unknown to me–who offered invaluable insights for shaping the book.

Contents

Part I

Interdisciplinary Vectors

1

The Anthropological Vector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Social Drama . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Liminality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Rites and Ritual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Communitas and Anti-structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 Pilgrimage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3 4 9 12 16 19 22 23

2

The Geographic Vector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 The Poetics of Spatial Patriarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Space and Place: Is There a Material Difference? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 A Topographical View of Literary Spatiality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Viewing Interstices by Stretching Space in Teresa de la Parra’s Ifigenia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 A View from the Interstices in Cristina Peri Rossi’s “The Annunciation” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

25 27 30 32

The Psychological Vector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Metonymic Disordered Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 The Neurotic Anxiety of Patriarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Real-Life Instances of Pathologically Masochistic Patriarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 A Binocular View of Masochistic Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Matrilineal Horror . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

49 53 55

3

36 41 46 46

57 61 68 69 69

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Contents

4

The Literary Vector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 4.1 An-Other Literary Cartography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 4.2 Jean Franco: Antigonal Archetypes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 4.3 Josefina Ludmer: De-Differentiated Oscillations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 4.4 Sara Castro-Klarén: Localized Speaking Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 4.5 Nattie Golubov: La Lectora Nómada (The Female Nomadic Reader) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 4.6 Rachel Falconer and Joy Ladin: Chronotopic Extensions . . . . . . . 100 4.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

5

The Resultant Vector: A Model for Spatial Gynocritics . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 The Machine Gun of Silence and Appropriating Gratitude . . . . . . 5.2 Surface Tension and Marginal Autonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Negative, Subjunctive Imperatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

107 109 112 116 120 121

Part II Interstitial Spatial Views 6

7

Cristina Peri Rossi’s Postmodernist Short Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Political, Social, and Sexual Exile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Delimiting Women’s Postmodernist Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Stories of the Psychiatrist’s Clinic, the Road, and the Racetrack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.1 The Psychiatrist’s Clinic Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.2 The Road Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.3 The Racetrack Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 A View Through the Spatial Gynocritics Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.1 De-settling Clinics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.2 De-bordering Roads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4.3 De-canonizing the Racetrack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Manjula Padmanabhan’s Science Fiction Novel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Women Science Fiction Writers in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 Myth and Science Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Manjula Padmanabhan’s Science Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 Precaricide, Reproduction, and Myth in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Novels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.5 A View Through the Spatial Gynocritics Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.5.1 De-canonizing Junctions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.5.2 De-bordering the Arena, Battlefield, and Playfield . . . . . 7.5.3 De-settling Vehicular Transport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

125 126 128 130 130 135 140 145 146 149 152 154 154 157 160 161 164 168 176 176 180 183

Contents

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7.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 8

9

Lucrecia Martel’s Transnational Cinema . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 Lucrecia Martel’s Salta Trilogy: A Transnational Bildüngsroman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 A View Through the Spatial Gynocritics Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.1 De-settling Class and Family by the Pool . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.2 De-canonizing the Home-Nation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2.3 De-bordering the City and the Slum Through Liquid Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

189

Sumukhi Suresh’s Satirical Comedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1 The “Madwoman” as a Feminist Trope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2 Pushpavalli as a Comic Embodiment of Madness and Trickery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3 Placing Pushpavalli Generically . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4 A View Through the Gynocritic Spatial Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4.1 De-bordering at the Paying Guest (PG) Accommodation and the Tea Stall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4.2 De-settling the Library and Conference Centre . . . . . . . . 9.4.3 De-canonizing the Temple and the Export House . . . . . . 9.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

213 215

10 Carol Lay’s Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.1 Women Artists and the Twentieth-Century American Comic . . . . 10.2 Carol Lay and the Post-underground Phase in Women’s Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.3 The Poetics of Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.4 Carol Lay’s Artistic Journey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.4.1 Phase I—Agential . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.4.2 Phase II—Capacitated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.4.3 Phase III—Emancipatory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.5 A View Through the Gynocritic Spatial Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.5.1 De-canonizing Derivatives for Places of Work and Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.5.2 De-bordering the Jungle and the City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.5.3 De-settling the Garbage Heap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

191 204 204 206 208 209 210

218 227 229 229 233 236 239 239 241 242 245 246 251 251 258 269 273 273 277 280 282 282

About the Author

Java Singh has a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature from JNU, New Delhi, and also holds an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad. She was awarded the Rafael Iruzubieta prize for being the top student in her MA (Spanish) class at JNU. She won the best paper award at the 2017 conference of the South Asian Literary Association in Philadelphia. Her short story was judged as the runner-up in a competition organized by Unisun Publications and was published in the anthology of selected stories titled Two is Company (2010). Her most recent book is Post-Humanist Nomadisms in NonOedipal Spatiality (2022), published by Vernon Press, USA. Another book ‘Gendered Ways of Transnational Un-belonging from a Comparative Literature Perspective’ (2020) was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK.

xxv

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3 Fig. 9.4 Fig. 9.5 Fig. 9.6 Fig. 9.7 Fig. 9.8 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3 Fig. 10.4 Fig. 10.5 Fig. 10.6 Fig. 10.7 Fig. 10.8 Fig. 10.9

Differentiated reactions to territorial dispossession . . . . . . . . . . The Flatlanders’ view . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . De-canonizing derivatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . De-bordering derivatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . De-settling derivatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . De-settling the clinic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . De-bordering the brothel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . De-canonizing the racetrack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . De-canonizing the junction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . De-bordering the battlefield . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . De-settling the permanent home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The de-settled pool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The de-canonized nation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The de-bordered slum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Different body shapes of the heroine and the comediennes . . . . Pushpavalli schemes to get out of a tough spot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vasu threatens to throw out Pushpavalli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . De-bordering the sites of hospitality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . De-settling the lettered city . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The grimy interiors of the packhouse at O.K. Rao Exports . . . . Pushpavalli at Guruji’s camp ashram . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . De-canonizing the sites of tradition and modernity . . . . . . . . . . Panel, gutter, and frame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Braiding across sequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Extract from Good Girls Issue #4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Extract from Good Girls Issue #1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . a Close-up of Fig. 10.4. b Close-up of a . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Extract from “The Visitation” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Comparative poses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Iconic representation of a fragile relationship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Iconic evocation of easy togetherness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

40 75 120 121 121 149 152 154 180 183 185 205 208 209 214 219 222 232 236 237 238 239 247 250 253 254 255 256 257 260 261 xxvii

xxviii

Fig. 10.10 Fig. 10.11 Fig. 10.12 Fig. 10.13 Fig. 10.14 Fig. 10.15 Fig. 10.16 Fig. 10.17 Fig. 10.18 Fig. 10.19 Fig. 10.20 Fig. 10.21 Fig. 10.22 Fig. 10.23 Fig. 10.24

List of Figures

Representation of the Limbo as an in-between liminal space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contrasting reactions from phases one and two . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Women who Run with the Skunks” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Use of incrusted frames . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Autonomy of the jungle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Visual language emphasizes eyes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cartographic documentation of the location . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Synaesthetic combinations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The office and home in phase one . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The playground in phase two . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . De-canonizing the office and playground . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Extract from “Women who Run with Skunks” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . De-bordering the jungle and city . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Iconic representation of the sense of smell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . De-settling the garbage heap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

262 263 265 268 268 269 270 272 274 275 277 279 279 280 281

Part I

Interdisciplinary Vectors

Chapter 1

The Anthropological Vector

Abstract The notion of the liminal space is key in transforming both individual and social attitudes. This chapter considers the exploration of spatial liminality by Victor Turner as foundational to developing a deeper understanding of the processes of social change. Turner’s articulations of the Social Drama, rituals, and pilgrimage, especially, are extrapolated to analyze the importance of spatial location in some instances that brought about significant changes in social attitudes such as the Indian Anti-dowry Movement, Bhanwari Devi’s case against her rapists, demonstrations against the proposed ban on Jallikattu, and Argentina’s Madres de la Plaza movement. By using different public spaces—the college campus, court of law, main streets of prominent cities, and the premises around the presidential residence, respectively— the dissenting groups were able to gather sufficient momentum to get the authorities to redress the grievances of minoritarian groups. The chapter also examines the role of cultural performances and literary representations in supporting and instigating such social changes. Thus, establishing connections between the literary, cultural, and physical liminal spaces through the anthropological vector that are relevant to developing the gynocritic model for spatial analysis attempted in this book. Keywords Liminality · Communitas · Pilgrimage · Dowry · Sexual assault The anthropological vector of the present approach to space mainly originates in Victor Tuner’s extrapolation of anthropological concepts to the realm of literary and cultural criticism. Turner’s framework, which is gridded with the conceptual tools of liminality, ritual, anti-structure, communitas, Social Drama, and pilgrimage, has proven to be a perceptive and potent sensor for opening up literary and cultural texts to new readings. Literary critics have used Turner’s foundational concepts to read biblical texts, modernist fiction, post-modernist representations, and romantic North American novels.1 Cultural critics have applied his concepts to study the dynamics of sports events, theatre, film, television, and even political scandals like the Watergate affair.2 1

Kathleen M. Ashley, ed., Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990). 2 Ibid. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 J. Singh, Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1426-3_1

3

4

1 The Anthropological Vector

Tuner’s conceptual schematization of the ritual was greatly influenced by Arnold van Gennep’s 1909 book, Rites of Passage.3 Van Gennep coined the eponymous term “rites of passage” to describe ceremonies that accompany life course transitions, including “birth, childhood, social puberty, betrothal, marriage, pregnancy, fatherhood, initiation into religious societies, and funerals” in pre-industrial tribal societies.4 By choosing to term rites that mark important life stage “rites of passage”— instead of opting for some other alternatives such as, perhaps, rites of being, rites of becoming, or rites of aging—van Gennep emphasizes the transitional processes rather than the outcomes of those processes. The spatial metaphor lies at the core of these transitional rites. The second chapter of his landmark book opens with the remark: “Territorial passages can provide a framework for the discussion of rites of passage.”5 Van Gennep chose to foreground a spatial element—the limen while categorizing rites. He identified three types of rites—separation, transition, and incorporation, referring to them also as pre-liminal, liminal, and post-liminal, respectively. It is logical that space is as central to Turner’s conceptual scheme as it was to that of van Gennep. Turner highlights that “often the indigenous word for the liminal period is […] the locative form of a noun meaning ‘seclusion site.’”6 After sustained conceptional chiselling, he establishes that an understanding of the liminal space is indispensable for unpacking the relationship between social processes and performative genres. He explains that performers in meta-social rites like carnivals and other secular festivals use quotidian spaces as their stage; their mode of occupying them or passing through them makes them noteworthy. Though a daunting body of scholarship emanates from Turner’s fecund intellectual corpus, there is still room for a closer examination of the spatial facet of each of his key constructs.

1.1 Social Drama As delineated by Turner, Social Drama is the inevitable processual form of all social transformations. It is a four-act drama in which the first three acts are termed breach, crisis, and redress, respectively. The fourth act has two mutually exclusive variants, reintegration or schism. The climax involves a dramatic culmination of various slow transformative processes that a society may have been undergoing for decades or even centuries. Turner sees a classic unfolding of the four stages in Miguel Hidalgo’s “Cry of Dolores”—a sermon pronounced in 1810 that led to Mexican independence. The breach took place behind closed doors in the Literary and Social Club of Queretaro, where Hidalgo conspired with leaders of the local militia to incite a popular rebellion; 3

Arnold van Gennep, Rites of passage (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1960). Ibid., 3. 5 Ibid., 15. 6 Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in Reader in Comparative Religion, eds. William Armand Lessa, Evon Zartman Vogt, and John Mamoru Watanabe (Bloomington: Indian UP, 1979). 4

1.1 Social Drama

5

events reached a crisis point in a public space where Hidalgo’s parishioners had gathered for Sunday mass. Subsequently, no redressive mechanisms were offered by the Mexican state or the local elites of the time. Hidalgo was defrocked, captured, and eventually executed within a year of the declaration of rebellion. Hidalgo’s execution site may be seen as the site of the schism—the separation of the protesting group from the existing socio-political structure. After Hidalgo’s death, another priest, a mestizo of mixed indigenous and Hispanic descent, assumed command of the insurgent movement. The sustained revolutionary spirit forced the local elites to part ways with the colonial administration and collaborate with indigenous militia soldiers to secure full independence for the country. Thus, Hidalgo’s declaration brought on a social change as well as a political change. As a result of the schism, the indigenous soldiers played a prominent role in the overthrow of the imperial government, freeing Mexico from centuries of colonial rule. Discontent against the colonial rulers had been slowly building up over the past century. The expressions of discontent gathered momentum in the last few months leading up to independence, playing out as a Turnerian social drama. Turner’s stages of the social drama may also be seen in the anti-dowry protests of 1979. These protests were held at numerous sites in Delhi against the murder of a local woman who was burnt to death by her husband’s family because she did not bring enough dowry. The practice of dowry has been a chronic problem in Indian society. The proclamation of the Dowry Abolition Act, 1961 did not have sufficient impact on the extractive practice. Though the act declared the giving and taking of dowry at the time of the wedding as punishable offences, it did not take cognisance of the violence and harassment related to dowry demands after the wedding had taken place. Sporadic protests against dowry-related deaths, violence, and harassment had been irrupting during the 1960s and 70s, but the protests of 1979 attracted unprecedented media attention. The breach in the social acceptance of dowry may be attributed to the discussions among various small feminist groups behind closed doors. In the 1979 case, the breach happened when a neighbour of the victim, who had seen her body go up in flames, founded a feminist organization that decided to raise public support for the issue.7 As a first step towards voicing their outrage, the group enacted a play based on the burning of the young woman in the campus premises of a prominent girls’ college in Delhi. Soon, the fervour spread through the entire city, provoking well-attended protest marches. The anti-dowry protests may be seen to represent the crisis stage of the Turnerian social drama, in which the social discontent of a significant minority is publicly demonstrated. A crisis brings forth the third stage, that of redressal, in which “certain adjustive and redressive mechanisms […] informal or formal, institutionalized or ad hoc, are swiftly brought into operation by leading or structurally representative members of the disturbed social system.”8 Aspects of this stage of social drama were visible in the supportive 7 Himanshi Nagpal, “The Historical Journey of Anti-Dowry Laws,” feminismsindia, June 21, 2017, https://feminisminindia.com/2017/06/21/historical-journey-anti-dowry-laws/. 8 Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Cornell UP, 1974), 39.

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response from the mainstream media publications calling for severe sentences for “bride burning” and dowry-related harassment.9 Such redressal mechanisms ensured that the demands of the protesting group are brought to the notice of a larger section of society. Cultural performances also served as a redressal tool. At the height of the protests in 1979, the victims’ stories inspired plays like Om Swaha, Aurat, Mulgi Zhali Ho, and Aurat aur Dharam that brought out the horror of dowry killings.10 These plays would be staged repeatedly in quotidian spaces such as street corners and dormitory houses. The performances succeeded in evoking emotional responses from audience members, especially young women who joined the protest marches in large numbers. The subsequent amendment of the anti-dowry law by the government in 1983 that made it more effective represented the final stage of reintegration, wherein the concerns of the break-away group were sufficiently accommodated within the official structures, making continued enactment of protest unnecessary. Though the practice of dowry continues in large parts of the country, the severity of the laws has acted as a deterrent.11 Cultural performances like theatre and cinema and literature serve as powerful redressal procedures. By creating powerful representations of crisis moments, literary and cultural narratives play a dynamic role in social dramas. Like the Deleuzian mime, literature, film, and theatre perform protest by giving voice to silenced topics such as eroticism, multiple sexualities, and failure of the family. A representation of the futility of the ‘female’ virtues of patience, trust, and submissiveness, may reveal that these qualities invite and sustain domination in an unjust social order. Connecting sexual repression to sexual violence may cast serious doubt on the traditional ‘virtues’ of abstinence and chastity. Showing the family imploding under the stresses of ghettoization may speak to the need for relationships beyond oedipally marked spaces. It would be difficult to imagine the women’s liberation movement without the literary contributions of Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. In Latin America, the struggles of being a woman in patriarchal societies are writ powerful in the works of writers like Diamela Eltit, Rosario Ferré, Gioconda Belli, Marta Traba, and Cristina Peri Rossi. In India, the stories of Ismat Chugtai and Amrita Pritam have shucked off the curtain of age-old social structures to reveal the exploitative mechanisms in traditional social structures purportedly instituted for the protection of women. The cinema of filmmakers like Deepa Mehta, Nandita 9 Sunil Sethi, “Bride Burning Becomes a Congizable Blood Sport,” indiatoday, July 15, 1979, https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/special-report/story/19790715-bride-burning-becomesa-cognizable-blood-sport-in-cities-like-new-delhi-822730-2014-03-03. “Burning of the Bride,” newint, November 2, 1979, https://newint.org/features/1979/11/01/bur ning-brides. 10 Malini Nair, “How a Dowry Death in Delhi gave Birth to Feminist Street Theatre in India,” Scroll, July 13, 2017, https://scroll.in/magazine/842756/how-a-dowry-death-in-delhi-gave-birth-tofeminist-street-theatre-in-india. 11 For data on dowry related deaths, legal cases, and judgements see S. Rukmini, “Dowry: What the Data Says and What it Doesn’t,” The Hindu, July 7, 2014, https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/ blogs/blog-datadelve/article6186330.ece.

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Das, Aparna Sen, Meghna Gulzar, Icíar Bollain, Isabel Coixet, and Lucrecia Martel offers an endorsement of anti-structural choices and a denunciation of submissive compliance to exploitative and restrictive norms, becoming a part of the redressal processes. After redressal comes to the final stage of the social drama, Turner discerns two alternatives at this stage—reintegration or schism. In case of reintegration, the disturbed group may find a place in an altered socio-political structure. The resolution of Argentina’s Madres de la Plaza de Mayo movement serves as an illustrative instance of reintegration. Women who had been protesting peacefully for thirty years against the disappearance of their children by the Argentinian dictatorship of the 1970s decided to end their marches when the government of the day restarted trials of the key perpetrators of The Dirty War.12 During the thirty-year protest, the women had transformed the main plaza of Buenos Aires into a site of unarmed rebellion against the authority of a military junta. The Plaza de Mayo, like Hyde Park in London, the National Mall in Washington D.C., and Rajpath in New Delhi, is located close to the heavily guarded nerve centre of power networks but is also open to the public. Instead of intimidating the crisis group, a location’s proximity to structures of power makes it the ideal protest space. The 1968 Paris protests that united students and striking workers saw attacks on police stations, the stock exchange, and other government buildings. Kirstin Ross observes that “[b]ehind their activities lay the recognition that the division between intellectual and manual labour was inseparable from the spatial projection or format of that division: the gap separating city from countryside and even the Latin Quarter from the workers’ foyers […].”13 The Latin Quarter, which houses five major universities, and several other educational institutions, was transformed from a Lyceum to a battlefield, not by invading marauders but by the residents who decided to inhabit it differently, building “more than 600 barricades by uprooting trees, street signs, and sidewalk grates.”14 The Social Drama barely lasted a month because the government agreed to wage increases for workers, and the students, who did not articulate a specific set of economic or political demands, went back to being students in what they believed was a more liberal society. When we see the peaceful Argentinian protests movement, the violent French social outburst, and other recent spontaneous and leaderless social uprisings— Occupy Wall Street in New York (2011), Nirbhaya vigils in New Delhi (2012), 12

The eight-year period of military rule in Argentina from 1976 to 1983 is referred to as La Guerra Sucia or The Dirty War. During this time, state supported death squads carried out extra-judicial arrests, torture, and murder in an arbitrary manner. It is estimated that at least 9,000 people, and possibly as many as 30,000, were “disappeared” during this period. Children of women who were pregnant at the time of their arrest were born in captivity and given away to unknown persons. An NGO called Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo launched a program for return of their grandchildren who had been kidnapped unborn by the state. As of 2018, they had traced 128 of the disappeared children. The website of the organization provides names of all identified as missing and resolved cases (https://abuelas.org.ar/idiomas/english/history.htm). 13 Kristin Ross, May’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago: UP Chicago, 2002), 93. 14 Eleanor Beardsley, “The Protests Of May 1968 Reverberate Today—And Still Divide The French,” Npr, May 29, 2018, https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/05/29/613671633/in-fra nce-the-protests-of-may-1968-reverberate-today-and-still-divide-the-french.

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pro-Jallikattu mass gatherings in Chennai (2017), street protests against the Indian Supreme Court’s Sabarimala decision (2018), the Social Outbreak in Santiago (2019), and the George Floyd marches in Minneapolis (2020)—through the lens of social drama, we can see that the crisis stage is performed close to power centres and the redressal happens inside state institutions.15 A detailed discussion on the spatial strategy of the artists, writers, and cineastes in the second part of the book explores the sites of breach, crisis, and redressal. Social Dramas are, of course, political processes involving competition for “scarce ends” such as power, prestige, dignity, and purity by using scarce resources, including territory. The Nirbhaya vigils and Geroge Floyd marches mounted pressure on the state to ensure justice, culminating in the pronouncement of death sentences for Nirbhaya’s rapists and a twenty-twoand-a-half-year sentence for George Floyd’s murderer; pro-Jallikattu mass gatherings vindicated the prestige of an ancient sport, Occupy Wall Street, and the Social Outbreak demanded a dignified life for the urban low-income working class. The outpouring against the Indian Supreme Court’s decision to allow women between the ages of ten and fifty to enter the Sabarimala Ayyappa temple was a response to what the dissenting group saw as defilement of the shrine’s purity. It is important for a literary and cultural critic to be mindful of such attempts at social transformation because literary and cultural narratives originate in social fractures. They are amorphous, aestheticized, and agonistic responses to dominant socio-political narratives. The alternative outcome in the last stage of the Social Drama could be a recognition of the schism by the disturbed group, which then locates itself outside the structure. This could be geographical—as was the predicament of the Latin American writers who spent years in exile in Europe in the aftermath of the dictatorships of the 1970s and 80s. In another form of schism, the dislocation may not go as far as a trans-border exile. Instead, the disturbed groups remain within national frontiers taking the form of conspicuous militant organizations like FARC in Colombia, the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Maoist militia of Dantewada, and the Chambal dacoits in India. There appears to be a strong positive correlation between the possibility of reintegration and what we may term the ‘distance of dissent.’ As the militia in crisis are distant from power 15

For the main events of the protests see: Michael Levitin, “The Triumph of Occupy Wall Street,” The Atlantic, June 10, 2015, https:// www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/the-triumph-of-occupy-wall-street/395408/. “Chronology of Events in the Nirbhaya Case,” thehindu, January 14, 2021, https://www.the hindu.com/news/national/chronology-of-events-in-nirbhaya-case/article30566298.ece. Amrith Lal, “Why the Cultural Argument for Jallikattu Needs a Hearing,” indianexpress, January 15, 2016, https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/in-fact-why-the-cultural-argument-for-jallik attu-needs-a-hearing/. “Sabarimala Protests: What is Happening in Kerala,” indianexpress, October 19, 2018, https:// indianexpress.com/article/india/sabarimala-temple-protest-kerala-women-entry-5408635/. Rachel Bunyan, “18 Killed as Hundreds of Thousands of Protestors Take to the Streets in Chile. Here’s What to Know,” time, October 25, 2019. Hannah Hageman and Scott Neuman, “‘I Can’t Breathe’: Peaceful Demonstrators Continue To Rally Over George Floyd’s Death,” Npr, June 3, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/869186653/ demonstrations-over-george-floyds-death-and-police-brutality-carry-on.

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centres, their connection to structural establishments can be excised. The disruptive impact of the excision is within tolerable limits for both the rebels and the rulers. The power centre allows the distant dissent group to live by its own rules so long as it does not constitute an immediate threat to the centre, and the dissenting group lessens its attacks on the power centre so long as it can exercise relative autonomy in its demarcated territory.

1.2 Liminality The Latin word for threshold is limen. Arnold van Gennep used it to name the tripartite pattern that he observed in the rites that mark life course transitions. Turner first fixated on the liminal in what may be termed his ‘declaration of liminality.’ In a 1964 article, he introduced some of his foundational notions, which he would continue to develop as a conceptual scheme over the next twenty years of his active intellectual life. His introductory explanation of why this phase of the transitional process offers the greatest affordances for studying social transformations is as below: Liminality may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions but as in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that, as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise. We are not dealing with structural contradictions when we discuss liminality but with the essentially unstructured (which is at once destructured and prestructured)16

The selected texts for the present study are “Nay” stories, which negate authoritarianism, patriarchy, misogyny, heteronormativity, minority, marginalization, hegemonic domination, and neoliberalism as individually held values or as a body of systemic practices. The denunciation is cast in liminality. The central characters in these stories or real-life Social Dramas are driven by a sense of dislocation but they lack the conviction for relocation. Their dilemmas keep them suspended on a trampoline stretched out in between structural fixities. The metaphoric trampoline is a slack, interposed meshwork on which the fictional characters jostle in unexpected, unpremeditated directions; each bounce lands them in a new interstice; each rebound carries them in a new direction. For Turner, the jostle, bounce, and rebound of the leap generate the dynamism of the liminal experience while the landing and destination are static states. Turner’s initial essay on liminality focused on the individual who finds himself sequestered in the liminal space. The term neophyte denotes all occupants of the liminal space. The tribes that he studied compared the participants in an initiation ritual—the neophytes—to embryos. Like the embryo, the neophyte was a semiformed entity whose final shape was not definitively discernible. Embryonic inbetweenness is the characteristic feature of Turner’s neophytes. They are unborn and undead; they have no rights. They are in a completely equal relationship with other neophytes. Turner defines the neophyte in a series of Derridian absences: 16

Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977), 97, emphasis mine.

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1 The Anthropological Vector A further structurally negative characteristic of transitional beings is that they have nothing. They have no status, property, insignia, secular clothing, rank, kinship, position; nothing demarcates them structurally from their fellows. Their condition is indeed the very prototype of sacred poverty. Rights over property goods and services inhere in positions in the politicojural structure. Since they do not occupy such positions, neophytes exercise no such rights. In the words of King Lear, they represent “naked unaccommodated man.”17

Neophytes simultaneously occupy and dispossess the liminal space; they inhabit the space but are unaccommodated in it. The portrayal of atomistic existence in urbanscapes by one of the selected writers, Cristina Peri Rossi, may be treated as a representation of neophytes in liminal spaces. The condition of the immigrant and the migrant best illustrates the dialectics of dispossession—the city rejects them/they reject the city; belonging eludes them/they search for unbelonging; they want to enter the new/they want to return to the old. Viewed as deprived individuals, the inhabitants seem like “mechanized dolls” from the structure’s viewpoint, but when viewed as neophytes in the liminal space, they are work-in-progress; they are inbetween “stages.” They themselves do not know, and the structure even less so, where they will emerge.18 Their unbelonging in the structure is the very basis for the communitas they occupy. The neophytes’ disassociation with the structure renders them physically visible but structurally invisible. The structural perceptions are drawn only through differences in status, property, and rank, all of which stand denied to the neophyte. Liminality cuts across gender, as it must because the corollary of the formlessness of the liminal state lies in what is left behind. In 1979, Turner articulated the idea of public liminality, which he saw as the performative mode of plural self-reflection. Public liminality was a dominant subjunctive fibre that strived for visibility in the pragmatic indicative texture of the social fabric. Though Turner discussed public liminality in the context of embodied performances like carnivals, secular festivals, and stage plays, his ideas are equally relevant to analyzing any text that operates in the subjunctive mood. Like the texts selected for this study, numerous other subversive representations have gone hand-in-hand with attitudinal transformations in societies. We know that words and images can be dangerous. A compendium of banned books brought out by Facts on File runs into four volumes. The volumes list hundreds of books that have been banned on religious, political, social, and sexual grounds.19 Twelve staffers of Charlie Hebdo were 17

Turner, The Forest, 98. Indrani Mukherjee, “Cartography of Mass City-zenry in Global Netscapes in Cristina Peri Rossi’s Short Stories ‘Los Desarraigados’ [‘The Uprooted’] and ‘La Grieta’ [‘The Crevice’],” The Postcolonialist, vol. 2, no. 1, 2014, http://postcolonialist.com/academic-dispatches/cartography-mass-cityzenry-global-netscapes-cristina-peri-rossis-short-stories-los-desaarraigados-uprooted-la-grieta/. 19 Nicolas J. Karolides, Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds, (New York: Facts on File, 1998). Dawn B. Sova, Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Sexual Grounds, (New York: Facts on File, 1998). Margaret Baid, Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Religious Grounds, (New York: Facts on File, 1998). Dawn B. Sova, Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Social Grounds, (New York: Facts on File, 1998). 18

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shot down because of a cartoon that appeared in the magazine. The lead actor of the Bollywood film Padmavat received mutilation threats for her portrayal of a fictional character in a sixteenth-century narrative poem. Thus, these cultural artifacts are as publicly liminal as a carnival. In a Turnerian mould, the present study looks at the conflation of individual and public liminality in the selected texts. The study does not concern itself with the separation and aggregation—states which are closely implicated in the pre-liminal and post-liminal structures. Instead of the settled, inherited relationships, what interests us is the fragility of “spontaneous” bonds anchored in necessarily impermanent anti-structures of the liminal realm. The dislocated groups which locate themselves in the anti-structural spaces while embodying potential danger are too small to signify a perceptible threat to the structure. We will examine whether the selected narratives are able to go into the interstices of structural contradictions between oppressor-oppressed, state-individual, majority-minority to gaze from within at “the essentially unstructured (which is at once destructured and prestructured).”20 While discussing liminality in industrial and post-industrial societies, Turner distinguished the liminoid from the liminal as a description of the transitional stage. The voluntary, personal, individuated nature of “genres of industrial leisure, the theatre, poetry, novel, ballet, film, sport, rock music, classical music, art, pop art, and so on” makes them distinguishable from the collective, obligatory, even “sacrosanct” rituals of transition practiced in preliterate tribal societies.21 For, Turner only the latter are strictly speaking liminal, the former being liminoid. For the purposes of the literary and cultural analysis undertaken here, the original term liminal is retained, as it does not obfuscate the enterprise of understanding representations of liminality through literature. Turner’s efforts made the liminal state accessible to genres, characters, places, attitudes, and the individual existence, converting it to a highly fertile seedbed for cultural criticism. Claire Drewery adroitly distinguishes liminality from both marginality and inferiority. Liminality occupies the interstitial spaces in the structure; it does not lie ignored at the fringes, nor does it lie oppressed beneath the structure. Whilst the latter two terms (marginality and inferiority) overlap subtly with liminality in various ways, they are not, however, interchangeable. Marginality, a condition of being peripheral or minor, exits at the edges of social structure, whilst inferiority implies disempowerment and is situated beneath it. Liminality differs in that it exists within the social structure itself, but in its interstices, the cracks falling between pre-existing social norms, classifications, and conventions.22 As critics, we will see how men, women, children, and animals are cast in liminal spaces in the selected texts. We will ask whether spatial belonging evades them and whether they are suspended in an unsatiated, insatiable longing for that belonging. We will examine whether liminal spaces 20

Victor Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology,” Rice Institute Pamphlet, vol. 60, no. 3, (1974): 84. 21 . Ibid. 71, 84. 22 Claire Drewery, Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), 3.

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heighten the sense of their unbelonging and whether the unbelonging is debilitating or empowering. Viewing the human and post-human elements of the narratives as co-liminars will allow us to prospect the space for redressive accommodations.

1.3 Rites and Ritual The explosion of social, political, cultural, and literary commentary that came from Turner owes its vitality in the main part to his extraction of the concept of ritual from the domain of pre-industrial, tribal societies that emphasized collective existence to the increasingly fragmented existence of the post-industrial world. He transposed the notion of rites, which are the manifest aspect of rituals, to modern societies and extended the concept of ritual to other domains of cultural expressions and socio-political phenomena. He had subconsciously recognized rites of passage in the shipwreck on Caliban’s island, in the passage from guilt to redemption in Crime and Punishment, in the journey of the Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata, in Sita’s kidnapping and rescue in the Ramayana.23 The connections between rites of passage, rituals, Social Drama, and liminality map the larger part of Tuner’s framework that is relevant to the analytical model which this book attempts to build. Turner places ritual in the context of Social Drama, viewing it, along with juridical processes, as a germinative component of Social Drama. Both components, that is, ritual and juridical processes mediate between the formed and the indeterminate states. Rites, the observable aspects of rituals, indicate the transition between states. For Turner, state and transition are irreducible compound binaries; they subsume other binaries of indicative-subjunctive, formed-indeterminate, order-void, and actuality-possibility, which can coexist but cannot merge into each other. By “state,” I mean here “a relatively fixed or stable condition” and would include in its meaning such social constancies as legal status, profession, office or calling, rank or degree. I hold it to designate also the condition of a person as determined by his culturally recognized degree of maturation as when one speaks of “the married or single state” or the “state of infancy.” The term “state” may also be applied to ecological conditions or to the physical, mental or emotional condition in which a person or group may be found at a particular time […] State, in short, is a more inclusive concept than status or office and refers to any type of stable or recurrent condition that is culturally recognized.24

Ritualistic transformations are a stage of mobility between two fixed states. Any practice which enables transition in society will carry the markers of a ritual. Turner defined ritual as “prescribed formal behaviour for occasions not given over to technological routine, having reference to beliefs in mystical beings or powers regarded as the first and final causes of all effects.”25 Though this construal of ritual may 23

Edith L. B. Turner, “From the Ndembu to Broadway-Prologue to Victor Turner, On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience,” ed Edith L. B. Turner (Tucson: UP Arizona, 1985), 167. 24 Turner, The Forest, 93. 25 Ibid., 19.

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seem to place it within the confines of religious practice, repeated applications of the concept to secular phenomena and literatures show that rituals can be practiced in numerous non-religious arenas. We can further our understanding of the interplay between Social Drama, ritual, juridical processes, and cultural narratives by revisiting the enactment of the law for the prevention of sexual harassment of (POSH) women in the workplace in India. The origins of the law lie in the rape of Bhanwari Devi, a Dalit social worker employed in a government project for women’s welfare. In 1992, five men who belonged to an ‘upper’ caste in the social hierarchy gang raped Bhanwari Devi as punishment for her advocacy against the custom of child marriage in her village. The lower court acquitted all five accused of rape three years after the trial started. A women’s NGO filed a Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court of India that claimed that Bhanwari had been sexually assaulted because of the nature of her work. In its judgment, the Supreme Court issued guidelines for the prevention of sexual harassment in the workplace. Eight years after the brutal incident, a sensitively made feature film based on the rape and its aftermath was released. After another six years, based on the guidelines issued by the Supreme Court, the legislature of the time passed the law for the prevention, prohibition, and redressal of sexual harassment of women at the workplace.26 The tragic Social Drama plays out its four stages over three years—the “breach” in established social structures occurs when an uneducated woman from a so-called ‘lower’ caste takes up employment with a government project to advocate women’s rights, the incident of gang rape brings the events to a “crisis” stage, when the local courts, by acquitting the accused, deny “redressal” to the aggrieved group. Therefore, the “reintegration” in the form of equality of the Dalit community remains elusive. Availing of Turner’s framework, we can easily see that the tragic Social Drama was a germinative ground for a set of juridical processes, but the ritual at play is more difficult to visualize. The ritual at play involves a threshold rite that pushes Bhanwari Devi into a liminal space, where she is neither part of the community of married mothers living in the safe space of their homes nor of the world of educated women activists and lawyers with whom she must now regularly interact to fight her case in court. In Bhanwari’s sudden expulsion from her home to the courts, we may identify the ritual of vidai, which is part of Hindu wedding ceremonies. Turner, making a distinction between ceremony and ritual, explains that ceremony is indicative whereas ritual is transformative; the presence of liminality distinguishes a “pure ritual” from a ceremonial or “secular ritual.” For Turner, pure ritual does not portray a dualistic, almost Manichaean, struggle between order and void, cosmos and chaos, form and indeterminacy, with the former always triumphing in the end. It is, rather, a transformative self-immolation of order as presently constituted, even sometimes a voluntary sparagmos or self-dismemberment of order, in the subjunctive depths of liminality.27 26

The Sexual Harassment Of Women At Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition And Redressal) Act, 2013, https://legislative.gov.in/sites/default/files/A2013-14.pdf. 27 Victor Turner, “Social Dramas and Stories about Them,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 1, (1980): 164.

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He provides a summary explanation of the difference by stating, “Ceremony indicates, ritual transforms.” To this, we might add an equally concise explanatory remark: ceremony ritualizes ritual. Analyzing Bhanwari Devi’s plight as the “pure ritual” of vidai allows us to see its transformative power. The Hindi word vidai means parting; it is the last rite in a wedding ceremony.28 As a ceremony or a secular ritual, it marks the passage of the individual woman from one stage of life to another; however, at a social level, it is not transformative. In fact, it is merely affirmatory of the existing social order. The pure ritual of vidai, or the rite of vidai, in which Bhanwari Devi participates, marks what Turner calls “self-immolation of order as presently constituted.” The self-immolation aspect of the ritual can only be highlighted through a counter-cultural film like Bawandar, which shows the complete transformation of the protagonist in the scene where she presents her testimony before a biased male judge.29 He allows the defence lawyer to harass her in court by asking her to recount the graphic details of her gang rape. In the scene, Bhanwari comes out as no less confident than the other women present in the court room—the university-educated social activist who hired her for the women development project, the author who has travelled from the USA to research her book based on the incident, and the sophisticated, English-speaking senior officials of the NGO who are cashing in on Bhanwari’s tragedy for their visibility. Visualizing Bhanwari Devi’s transition from the domestic state to the liminal phase spatially, throws up the court as the threshold. Even though the viewer is aware that the judgement will go against Bhanwari Devi, she has, in the audience’s view, already defeated her rapists by bringing her accusations to an institution of the state—a public forum where she can point them out as criminals. Mieke Bal, the renowned narratologist, states that “[t]he common aspects between ritual and a literary event, such as the use of condensed symbols, repetition, community, make for a relation that allows us not to equate the two but to understand the one better through insight into the other.”30 In her scheme, ritualistic interpretation of texts is possible at three levels, semantic, structural, and pragmatic. At a semantic level, symbols in a narrative become more revelatory when they are seen as constituent elements of a ritual; at a structural level, references to a ritual within the text permit its localization in the larger cultural tapestry; and finally, at a pragmatic level, the text itself functions as a ritual. Ritual is implicated in literature, the process of producing literary narratives can be seen as a ritual, and narratives may depict certain rituals. Just as rituals are not merely a repository of tradition, literature is not a mechanistic code of an external reality. Literary works are not merely analogous to reality, whether of the epoch in which they are written or of that in which they are being read. They are not homologous grafts of larger materiality into pliable 28

Vidai is treated as sad occasion where the bride’s family overtly expresses their grief at sending off their daughter. The occasion can become so sombre as to render its mood indistinguishable from a funeral. In a society where an arranged marriage is a norm, it seems paradoxical that the bride’s family should lament sending off their daughter with a man they have chosen for her. 29 Bawandar, directed by Jag Mundra (India: Eros International, 2000). 30 Turner, The Forest, 19.

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language; rather, the text itself is as material as the system with which it mediates. It has materiality, which is substantive of the “extra-discursive realm of history.”31 Bal lays the groundwork for a ritualistic understanding of texts on four premises: first, the text originates from a ritual tradition; second, one feature of the story is acknowledged as ritualistic; third, the language used itself is revelatory of social rituals; problematic details acquire integrated meaning when construed as ritual symbols, and lastly when literature and rituals are analogous in their capacity to bridge the gap between the “utterly individual” and the “utterly social.” Our earlier discussion of the film Bawandar as an instantiation of the pure and transformative ritual of vidai confirms the validity of Bal’s premises. We could recognize Bhanwari as empowered instead of oppressed by placing her in the liminal space of the ritual. Turner’s efforts brought about a marked turn in the conservative view of rituals which saw them as a mere repository of tradition, only serving the purpose of conserving the status quo. By challenging the passive, inert construct of rituals, he was able to visualize them as laden with agency. In his view, the performance of rituals acts upon society to exude new creative energies. The effect of Turner’s theory of ritual on the field of ritual studies has been to break the stranglehold of conservatism. The vast majority of definitions and theories had been functionalist, emphasizing the extent to which ritual conserves the status quo and resists change. The ritual had been portrayed by some as the most backward-looking, foot-dragging of cultural forms. Viewed as such, it was hardly capable of acting on society; rather, it was a “repository” or “reflection;” it was passive and inert. Turner painted another picture of the ritual as a cultural “agent”—energetic, subversive, creative, and socially critical.32 When aspects of literary or cultural narratives are viewed as rituals, it becomes clear that they not only reflect social realities but also impact them. That is, literature, like rituals, is not merely reflective but reflexive. Like all cultural expressions, literary narratives, too, are components of social reflexivity. Indeterminacy lies in the gaps or holes in the text, which the reader must fill in with her own imagination. The gapfilling demonstrates the reflexivity of the text because the voids engage the reader not merely as a spectator seeing reality reflected in the text but make her as integral to the creation of the image as light or the mirror itself. A work need not be explicitly reflexive like Velazquez’s painting “Las Meninas,” which portrays the artist gazing at himself while he gazes at the characters in his creation. It can emanate reflexivity implicitly in so far as the readers and viewers are involved with the processes of perception and creation. The filmic representation of the events that occurred during the three-year period of 1992 to 1995 in the film Bawandar, released in the year 2000, ignited an emotional charge, which may sustain the outrage against her sexual assault for generations, long after the facts of Bhanwari Devi’s gruesome rape had become part of jejune statistics. 31

Ashley, xi. Ronald L. Grimes, “Victor Turner’s Definition, Theory and Sense of Ritual,” in Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism, ed. Kathleen M. Ashley, (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990), 83.

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1.4 Communitas and Anti-structure The term structure, for Turner, indicates a gestalt of observable distinctions of wealth, rank, status, sexuality, power, and gender, which organize a community on the basis of inherited norms. The inbuilt tensions between structural differences produce strains in the system; as the system stretches in response to the strains, spaces for the emergence of the anti-structure or the inter-structure are created. Turner uses both these terms interchangeably; the inter-structure is anti-structural; he also acknowledges Sutton-Smith’s term “proto-structure” for the transitional stage, which may act as a “precursor of innovative normative forms.”33 Turner’s term for the incarnate form of the anti-structure, inter-structure, and proto-structure is “communitas,” which is a set of spontaneously generated relationships between the levelled and equal, total and individualized human beings.34 The communitas is a liminal group that has been separated or separates itself from the status quo. It has an in-between and, necessarily, temporary existence. As used in this study, communitas is the “spontaneous communitas.” Turner discusses three kinds of communitas: spontaneous, normative, and ideological. These are not inevitable sequential formations whose progressive mutability is unidirectional. However, there are predetermined conditions of mutation. By its definitional temporariness, spontaneous communitas, if extended, will convert into normative or ideological communitas. On the other hand, liminal communitas will emerge when there is a breach in the normative or ideological communitas. Liminal groups, unable to fit into structurally prescribed moulds, form spontaneous or existential communitas, which may mutate into ideological communitas such as Gandhi’s Harijans or reintegrate with the pre-existing order as normative communitas in tribal societies. Comparing the modalities of the three, Turner explains, “both normative and ideological communitas are already within the domain of structure, and it is the fate of all spontaneous communitas in history to undergo what most people see as a ‘decline and fall’ into structure and law.”35 All references to communitas, in the context of the selected works, unless specified as normative or ideological, denote the spontaneous communitas because the displaced individuals in the selected narratives are embodiments of the process of transition, not its outcome. Turner draws attention to two definitive attitudinal modes—self-reflection and reflexivity—in the communitas. He points out that mirrors have long been used by authors to symbolize transition between states. When Lewis Carol has Alice go through the looking glass as a passage, he is simply playing on this widely held

33

Brian Sutton-Smith, “Games of Order and Disorder,” Paper presented to Symposium on “Forms of Symbolic Inversion.“ American Anthropological Association, Toronto, December 1, 1972, qtd in Turner, “Liminal,” 60. 34 Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974, 101. 35 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti- Structure, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1969), 132.

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belief that mirrors designate the limen between worlds.36 The text and the reader, both in an individual capacity and as a societal aggregation, function like two mirrors facing each other, which generate infinite perceptions and interminable possibilities. Another way in which Turner conceives reflexive liminality is as a stage of reflection through distortion, that is a reflection induced by the operation of the “law of dissociation by varying concomitants.”37 When the neophyte in the communitas is exposed to symbols depicting familiar elements in unfamiliar combinations, having disproportionate dimensions, or in unusual colours, the sense of familiarity is startled, making the familiar grotesque. Turner discusses the figurine of the “Nursing Mother” used in puberty rituals of the Bemba tribe. The figure depicts an exaggeratedly pregnant mother carrying four infants at the same time, three on her back, one at her breast. This is a multivocal symbol that, apart from conveying to the neophyte the biological transformation and duty of care, also reinforces the tribe’s custom of abstaining from sexual intercourse until a new-born is weaned. The mirror, acting as a liminal tool, creates distortions that are necessary to engender reflexivity, which unrecognizes structural imaging directives. The hall of mirrors, a customary installation in fairs, carnivals, and amusement parks, is perhaps a continuance of the faith that distortive reflection aids reflexivity. The distended, shrunken, and emaciated images in the hall are overtly sources of mirth but covertly convey the notion of multiple of selves, none of which is more or less authentic than the others. An apt device that reveals the distorting force of the literary mirror can be found in several of Cristina Peri Rossi’s stories about the mother-son relationship, of which the story titled “Happy Birthday” is explicated here. The narrative features a nuclear family—a couple who live with their only child, a son. The father is mostly absent from the home, whereas the mother and son share a very close relationship. On the face of it, the story describes an easily recognizable ‘normal’ family. However, acting as a liminal mirror, it distorts the mother-son intimacy to reveal the fallacy of stabilizing notions on which the ‘normal’ image of the family thrives. Juliet Mitchell has pointed out that the self-contradiction immanent in the incest taboo explains why the taboo is broken far more often than would be expected, given the unanimous disapprobation on the issue. Mitchell observes that as a child, “[t]he mother, sister of father and brother you sensually cannot have are also the only people you are supposed to love.”38 In this study, I wish to insert the relationships which Mitchell leaves out in her argument. What about the son and daughter the parent “cannot have”? For the man, the son and daughter are not the “only” people he is supposed to love; on the contrary, notions like “man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart/T’is woman’s whole existence” impose an aspirational state of treating women dismissively on

36

Barbara A. Babcock, “Mud, Mirrors, and Making up Liminality and Reflexivity in Between the Acts,” in Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism, ed Kathleen M. Ashley (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990), 92. 37 Turner, The Forest, 105. 38 Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 378, emphasis mine.

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men.39 The romanticization of the sexual exploits of the likes of Don Juan and Casanova is embedded in the construct of masculinity. However, the performance of femininity and the feminine mystique is premised on the performativity of purity, which heuristically manifests in an overarching love for the child. In the myth of Oedipus, when his wife-mother, Jocasta, finds out about their filial relation, she kills herself. The patriarchal myth hands out the death penalty to the mother for harbouring sexual feelings for the person she is sanctioned to have loved the most, reinforcing the notion that pure maternal love as a chaste asexual sentiment is a foundational organizing principle of “stable” social structures. Freud’s articulation of the Oedipal complex transgresses the laws of familial organization but only temporarily because the transgression is circuited back to normalcy. As the son grows up, he rids himself of the castration anxiety by identification with the father and conquers his desire for the mother. However, the option of “growing up” is not available to the mother. Jocasta is already an adult; she bears the weight of the forbidden attraction forever. Peri Rossi writes up a guilt-free mother, harbouring a Jocasta complex, who engenders and feeds the son’s desire for her. In “Happy Birthday,” the son looks at the mother in a stereotypically Oedipal way, but as the narrator reveals the child’s thoughts, it is clear that the mother has encouraged, if not engendered, his desire for physical proximity.40 Everything that the son knows of the blissful union he shared with his mother for nine months is derived from a highly sexualized reconstruction of it. The mother tells her son, “like a little fish you moved inside me.”41 The phallic valence of the fish hardly needs pointing out but is still reinforced in the narrative in the boy’s repeated inquiries for a bed larger than his nursery bed, large enough to fit him and his mother. Convinced that his mother’s womb is a place where desires are fulfilled, the boy likens the colourfully wrapped candy in a glass jar with the mother’s recollection of his fish-like movement in the womb. The fish first comes into existence in the mother’s circular womb, in the cylindrical vagina, then in the spherical glass jar, and finally on the flat papered wall of the nursery. The womb is filled with life-sustaining amniotic fluid; the jar with crackling candy and the water on the wallpaper dilutes the hardness of the wall— the spaces where the mother and son are together are full of colour, sweetness, life itself. The first strokes of these images were painted by the mother. In the limen of the fluid-filled womb, the woman controls the image and shapes its contours. The gendering of the limen delineates the possibility of reciprocity. The boy reciprocates her protectiveness and care in full measure; whereas, with her husband located in the structure, she feels only monotony and stagnation. Freud’s Jocasta was the wallpaper on which the son directed his desire; Peri Rossi’s is a woman who revels in the possessiveness of her son, who wants him to reciprocate the way she possessed him when he was in her womb, who will not let passion drain out of her life as it has out of her marriage. 39

Baron George Gordon Byron, Don Juan: In Sixteen Cantos, (Halifax: Milner and Sowerby, 1837), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/21700/21700-h/21700-h.htm. 40 Cristina Peri Rossi, “Feliz Cumpleaños,” Cuentos Reunidos (Barcelona: Lumen, 2007). 41 Ibid., 162.

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Turner shows us the communitas as a play-space that negates the ergic-ludic divide instituted by post-agrarian societies. Ergic-ludic liminality existed in primarily agrarian societies where play was inseparable from work. Rituals followed the cyclical rhythm of the seasons—of sowing, harvest, and phases of the moon. Festivals celebrating these transitions were integrated into the work-life. The work-play fusion ended in industrial societies and the cleavage continued in post-industrial and globalized societies. The fusion has split into play versus work. Play is now congruent with leisure. The ludic, representing the chosen leisure pursuit, provides an actionable sphere for a set of shared disaffections. Hence only the ludic can afford liminality. Ludic pursuits, sports, and television, among them, can be modes for generating communitas, but when the communitas itself gets exaggerated, it could lead to “despotism, over-bureaucratisation or other modes of structural rigidification.”42 Peri Rossi’s stories “The Race” and “The Runner Stumbles” are a commentary on the nature of commercial sports. Though originating in the ludic as a diversion from regimented classroom learning in schools or desk-bound routine of the workplace, the communitas of sports gets distorted by imbibing the competitive, materialistic schoolwork ethos.

1.5 Pilgrimage The concluding section on the Anthropological Vector makes a brief commentary on Turner’s semiotics of pilgrimage. After considering various definitions of pilgrimage in several religious texts, he came to the conclusion that pilgrimage is a matter of places. He saw pilgrimages as “‘functional equivalents’ in complex cultures dominated by the major historical religions, partly of rites de passage and partly of ‘rituals of affliction’ (rites to cure illness or dispel misfortune) in preliterate, small-scale societies.”43 The pilgrim is a passenger who is making the passage through a realm that has little in common with the inherited or aspirational states.44 Pilgrimage arises in faith but also tests it; disillusionment with the object or place of worship is the defeat of faith. The traveller, by undertaking the journey, enters the blurry zone of the liminal with the conflicting attitudes of a neophyte and a believer. Turner’s analogous view of pilgrimage and rituals of affliction allows us to see mutated forms of pilgrimage in post-industrial societies that are no longer dominated by “historical religion.” In the aftermath of the loss of faith in the healing capacity of religion, the individual in a fragmented postmodern world seeks a substitute for God’s grand design wherein they can feel a connection with something grander than the humdrum routine of the family and workplace. Modern society’s enthusiasm for travel to unusual, unfamiliar destinations to get away from it all and to be with themselves is akin to the pilgrim’s “journey which is made to a shrine or sacred 42

Turner, The Ritual, 129. Turner, Dramas, 65. 44 Turner, The Forest, 94. 43

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place in the performance of a vow or for the sake of obtaining some form of divine blessing.”45 Twentieth and twenty-first-century individuals, many of whom disavow religion, bring a pilgrim’s devotion to scaling challenging peaks, trekking arduous terrains, and undertaking off-the-road car rallies in a quest of an out of the ordinary experience, perhaps even salvation from their daily lives. While discussing the notion of pilgrimage, Turner pointed out the paradoxical relationship between voluntariness and obligation. The medieval pilgrimage was enforced as an obligation upon the members of a religious order, but even that obligatory journey provided the pilgrims with greater liberty than what the normative structure allowed them. “Yet medieval pilgrimages though, generically framed by obligation and institutionalized in a great system of obligation within that frame, represented a higher level of freedom, choice, volition, structure-lessness than, did, say, the world of the manor, village, or medieval town”46 Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales emblematically showcases the potency of the pilgrimage to afford a higher level of freedom to its protagonists—the Wife of Bath, a lascivious woman, the blasphemous Miller, the lecherous Summoner, and the pilfering Shipman.47 The pilgrimage functions as a liminal zone, placing characters drawn from different social strata in a common space, establishing egalitarian relations among them. The obligatory passage allows for voluntary interactions. Ironically though, some pilgrimages that were deemed voluntary came to emit a sense of obligation. In the globalized era, marked by hypermobility, a person who has not seen the world or has not been on adventure trips is regarded as provincial. She is not part of the global village if she has never attempted a quest that may reveal new worlds and, through them, new selves to others around her. Even the fragmented society imposes the obligation of adventure and quest on the individual, likening such adventure trips to the obligatory medieval pilgrimage. The success of reality shows like Survivor, Robinson ekspeditionen, and Long Lost Family is evidence of the popularity of the theme of pilgrimage among the viewers.48 The site of the metaphoric pilgrimage in the first two shows is an unknown destination, where the small group of participants (pilgrims) is cut off from the rest of the world in their quest for discovering hidden selves by subjecting themselves to an arduous journey. Like John Bunyan’s protagonist in Pilgrim’s Progress, the viewers of these shows go on internal expeditions vicariously, as they accompany the contestants on 45

Turner, Dramas, 173. Ibid., 175. 47 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, trans. Peter Ackroyd (New York: Viking, [1392] 2009). 48 Survivor is a US reality TV show, which has run for 35 seasons, is designed as a contest among a group of strangers in an isolated location, where they have to find food, fire, and shelter without any outside help. Robinson ekspeditionen is a Danish reality show where a group of ordinary people from different backgrounds are placed on a deserted island where they must save themselves from starving, freezing, drowning and other dangers through teamwork. Long Lost Family is a reality show which aired under the same name in the UK and the USA. The show helps individuals looking for biological family members whom they have not seen in a long time. 46

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their journeys. In these shows, beating inclement weather and unexpected dangers to survive in unfamiliar territories substitutes the traditional pilgrim’s hardships in his quest for salvation. In Long Lost Family, the means to ‘salvation’ is a reunion with a long-lost family member. Here, the sacred site is the T.V. set because, in the format of the show, the reunion is documented in a way that ensures high ratings when it is publicly broadcast. Set designers rearrange the designated meeting place, which may be seen as equivalent to the pilgrims’ destination, to generate the mood of longing, expectation and convey the sense of a miraculous gratification made possible by almost divine intervention. These shows reinvest the religious paradigm of salvation, that is, deliverance from the ordinariness and the emptiness of everyday life with vitality by providing simulations of divine intervention in the form of narrow escapes from thrilling dangers or almost miraculous encounters with relatives one had lost hope of meeting. Thus, these reality shows perform the same function that Turner assigned to the pilgrimage—of committing “individuals unreservedly to the values of a particular faith in order to make not merely acceptable but glowing the hardships and unforeseen disasters of long journeys across several national frontiers.”49 One can see the relevance of the motif of pilgrimage in a piece of modern literature by analyzing the story “Wanted” by Cristina Peri Rossi. The protagonist, Ester, is a swimming coach in a girls’ college. Her life oscillates between her small apartment and the pool complex until the day she decides to fly to a far-off city to meet Claudia, the woman with whom she has fallen in love. Ester and Claudia have never met. Ester falls in love with Claudia’s photograph on an internet dating site. She pays to access the site, then pays some more to get a phone number. Ester can contact Claudia only by phone. Claudia is as inaccessible and flawless as a goddess whom Ester pursues with a devotee’s blind faith. The call lasts as long as Ester keeps topping up the payment. The narrator makes it obvious from the start that Claudia is a phone sex operator, but Ester naively believes everything she is told—Claudia tells her that she is a nurse, that she does a double shift as a security guard to earn enough money for the treatment of her ailing mother. The phone sex worker has accurately sized up Ester’s emotional need to pity others, to be of service to them. Perhaps by pitying others, Ester finds her own condition less pitiable; her pity is a self-defence mechanism. Claudia gives one excuse after another to avoid meeting Ester. One day, Ester decides to surprise Claudia by turning up at the hospital, located in another city, where she works and lives. Ester catches a flight and rents a hotel room in what she believes is Claudia’s city. She repeatedly tries to contact Claudia by phone, but it remains unanswered. The spatiality of the hotel room foreshadows the doom that awaits her: “Cars moved slowly, through the traffic, and she heard a continuous bubbling, like that of an agitated furnace. A kind of blue smoke covered the city; it’s the pollution, she thought, how can they breathe this smoke and not die.”50 The hotel room is her shelter; in the hotel, she is hopeful and expectant, but even here, she does not leave her structural position of the woman who waits. When Ester fails to find Claudia on her own, she calls into a T.V. show, Wanted, that helps people 49 50

Turner, Dramas, 15. Cristina Peri Rossi, “Se Busca,” in Habitaciones Privadas (Barcelona: Menoscuarto, 2012), 35.

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find loved ones from whom they have been separated. The show has a team that carries out an investigation on the basis of the information provided by the participant. The final encounter is supposed to take place on the T.V. set in front of an audience of millions. The show’s team agrees to help Ester with her quest. When the team is ready with their findings, Ester is invited to the T.V. set for the climactic meeting. She is asked to wait in a back room while they bring on the person for whom she has been searching. Ester gets a feeling as if she is in a fairground. The hopefulness she had felt in the seclusion of the hotel room is replaced by the discomfort of being in the public eye. The isolation of the hotel room was protective, but the isolation of the waiting room in the T.V. studio is like that of the anteroom of an operation theatre in a hospital. Ester is like a martyr awaiting her end at the sacrificial altar. The T.V. studio is her liminal space, a realm of dark, destructive possibilities because, “[l] iminality may be for many the acme of insecurity, the breakthrough of chaos into cosmos, of disorder into order, rather than the milieu of creative interhuman or transhuman satisfactions and achievements.”51 Ester’s changed situatedness signifies the paradox of pilgrimage: “what had started out as a voluntary exercise has now become an obligation from which the pilgrim cannot extricate herself.”52 The stage is set for Ester’s voluntary-obligatory martyrdom; it is difficult for the reader to decide whether her martyrdom is voluntary or obligatory. Commenting on martyrdom, Turner says that “every sacrifice requires not only a victim—in this case, a self-chosen victim—but also a sacrificer. That is, we are always dealing not with solitary individuals but with systems of social relations—we have drama, not merely soliloquy.”53 Ester’s search for her illusory love, reflected in the distorted mirror of the T.V. programme, shows up as a hunt for the deluded. The research team of the programme has already discovered that Claudia does not exist in human form; she is merely a product offered by the online sex service. They want to make a spectacle of Ester’s disappointment in front of an audience of thousands, perhaps a million. The spatiality of the studio set evokes the archetype of the Roman circus, where out-ofluck men, trained as gladiators, fought one another to death for the entertainment of the audience.

1.6 Conclusion Turner’s articulation of the Social Drama as a four-act process that develops through the stages of breach, crisis, redressal, and finally, reintegration or schism, can be used to understand the dynamics of social change brought about by informally organized, relatively leaderless protests like the anti-dowry marches of 1979, the Nirbhaya vigils of 2012, and the mass gatherings against the ban on Jallikattu in 2018. This chapter has explained that cultural performances and literary representations act as redressal 51

Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid,” 77. Turner, Dramas, 175. 53 Ibid., 69. 52

References

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mechanisms in Social Dramas, aiding the reintegration of discontented groups into society. This chapter has also discussed the key aspects of Victor Turner’s understanding of rituals as dynamic, functional, cultural performances that contradicts the traditional view that sees them as repositories of stagnant traditions. Turner’s distinction between pure rituals and ceremonies has been clarified; ceremonies are indicative, but the rites of a pure ritual are transformative. Spatiality is key to the transformative power of any ritual. The ritual site functions as a liminal zone in which all participants, devoid of any markers of status, are able to enjoy greater degrees of autonomy than in the pre-liminal and post-liminal stages. The applicability of Turner’s conceptualization of rites, ritual, liminality, and pilgrimage as tools for literary and cultural criticism has been demonstrated through brief commentaries on selected short stories, films, and T.V. shows.

References Burning of the Bride. newint. Retrieved November 2, 1979, from https://newint.org/features/1979/ 11/01/burning-brides Chronology of events in the Nirbhaya case. The Hindu. Retrieved January 14, 2021, from https:// www.thehindu.com/news/national/chronology-of-events-in-nirbhaya-case/article30566298.ece Sabarimala protests: What is happening in Kerala. Indian Express. Retrieved October 19, 2018, from https://indianexpress.com/article/india/sabarimala-temple-protest-kerala-womenentry-5408635/ Ashley, K. M. (Ed.). (1990). Victor turner and the construction of cultural criticism. Indiana UP. Babcock, B. A. (1990). Mud, mirrors, and making up liminality and reflexivity in between the acts. In K. M. Ashley (Ed.), Victor turner and the construction of cultural criticism (pp. 86–111). Indiana UP. Baid, M. (1998). Banned books: Literature suppressed on religious grounds. Facts on File. Bawandar. (2000). Directed by Jag Mundra. Eros International. Beardsley, E. The protests of May 1968 reverberate today—And still divide the French. Npr. Retrieved May 29, 2018, from https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/05/29/613671633/infrance-the-protests-of-may-1968-reverberate-today-and-still-divide-the-french Bunyan, R. 18 killed as hundreds of thousands of protestors take to the streets in Chile. Here’s what to know. Time. Retrieved October 25, 2019, from https://time.com/5710268/chile-protests/ Byron, G. G. B. (1837). Don Juan: In sixteen cantos. Milner and Sowerby. https://www.gutenberg. org/files/21700/21700-h/21700-h.htm Chaucer, G. (2009 [1392]). The Canterbury tales (P. Ackroyd, Trans.). Viking. Drewery, C. (2011). Modernist short fiction by women: The liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf . Ashgate Publishing. Grimes, R. L. (1990). Victor Turner’s definition, theory and sense of ritual. In K. M. Ashley (Ed.), Victor Turner and the construction of cultural criticism (pp. 141–146). Indiana UP. Hageman, H., & Neuman, S. ‘I can’t breathe’: Peaceful demonstrators continue to rally over George Floyd’s death. Npr. Retrieved June 3, 2020, from https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/869186653/ demonstrations-over-george-floyds-death-and-police-brutality-carry-on Karolides, N. J., & Books, B. (1998). Literature suppressed on political grounds. Facts on File. Lal, A. Why the cultural argument for Jallikattu needs a hearing. Indian Express. Retrieved January 15, 2016, from https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/in-fact-why-the-cultural-argumentfor-jallikattu-needs-a-hearing/

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Levitin, M. The triumph of occupy wall street. The Atlantic. Retrieved June 10, 2015, from https:// www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/the-triumph-of-occupy-wall-street/395408/ Mitchell, J. (1990). Psychoanalysis and feminism. Basic Books. Mukherjee, I. (2014). Cartography of mass City-zenry in global netscapes in Cristina Peri Rossi’s short stories ‘Los Desarraigados’ [‘The Uprooted’] and ‘La Grieta’ [‘The Crevice’]. The Postcolonialist, 2(1). http://postcolonialist.com/academic-dispatches/cartography-mass-city-zenryglobal-netscapes-cristina-peri-rossis-short-stories-los-desaarraigados-uprooted-la-grieta/ Nagpal, H. The historical journey of anti-dowry laws. feminismsindia. Retrieved June 21, 2017, from https://feminisminindia.com/2017/06/21/historical-journey-anti-dowry-laws/ Nair, M. How a dowry death in Delhi gave birth to feminist street theatre in India. Scroll. Retrieved July 13, 2017, from https://scroll.in/magazine/842756/how-a-dowry-death-in-delhi-gave-birthto-feminist-street-theatre-in-india Rossi, C. P. (2007). Feliz Cumpleaños. In Cuentos Reunidos. Lumen. Rossi, C. P. (2012). Se Busca. In Habitaciones Privadas. Menoscuarto. Ross, K. (2002). May ’68 and its afterlives. UP Chicago. Rukmini, S. Dowry: What the data says and what it doesn’t. The Hindu. Retrieved July 7, 2014, from https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/blogs/blog-datadelve/article6186330.ece Sethi, S. Bride burning becomes a congizable blood sport. India Today, Retrieved July 15, 1979, from https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/special-report/story/19790715-bride-burningbecomes-a-cognizable-blood-sport-in-cities-like-new-delhi-822730-2014-03-03 Sova, D. B., & Books, B. (1998). Literature suppressed on sexual grounds. Facts on File. Sutton-Smith, B. Games of order and disorder. Paper presented to symposium on “Forms of Symbolic Inversion.” American Anthropological Association, Toronto, December 1, 1972, quoted in Turner, “Liminal to liminoid.” The sexual harassment of women at workplace (prevention, prohibition and redressal) act, 2013. https://legislative.gov.in/sites/default/files/A2013-14.pdf Turner, E. L. B. (1985). From the Ndembu to Broadway—Prologue to Victor Turner. In E. L. B. Turner (Ed.), On the edge of the bush: Anthropology as experience. UP Arizona. Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Cornell UP. Turner, V. (1974a). Dramas, fields and metaphors: Symbolic action in human society. Cornell UP. Turner, V. (1974b). Liminal to liminoid. In Play, flow, and ritual: An essay in comparative symbology (Vol. 60, No. 3, pp. 53–92). Rice Institute Pamphlet. Turner, V. (1977). The forest of symbols. Cornell UP. Turner, V. (1979). Betwixt and between: The liminal period in Rites de Passage. In W. A. Lessa, E. Z. Vogt, & J. M. Watanabe (Eds.), Reader in comparative religion. Indian UP. Turner, V. (1980). Social dramas and stories about them. Critical Inquiry, 7(1), 137–164. van Gennep, A. (1960). Rites of passage. Chicago UP.

Chapter 2

The Geographic Vector

Abstract The chapter examines the assertions of some key feminist geographers who have argued that modes of spatial control of women serve as mechanisms of patriarchal control. A poetics of spatial patriarchy emerge from the schema outlined by Doreen Massey and Linda McDowell, and Daphne Spain’s historic sociological study of segregated spaces. The elements of these poetics are utilized to articulate the topographical view of space adopted in the study. The chapter explicates the topographical view as a liminal view that stretches the studied space to reveal the significance of the interstices contained in any spatiality. In this view, the cultural valence of a space depends on the full inventory of the compositional elements of the place where it is located. For example, an uninhabited strip of sand may appear abandoned in a superficial view, but when examined closely may be replete with many forms of animal life and reminders of life forms that once thrived there. This chapter explicates the topographical view as a ‘liminal’ view that stretches the studied space to reveal the significance of the interstices contained in any spatiality. Thus, space, as a building block of the narrative structure, is construed as pronominal and deictic; its significance being determined by the perspective from which it is viewed. A topographical reading of Teresa de la Parra’s iconic work of feminist literature, Ifigenia, and Cristina Peri Rossi’s short story “The Annuciation” illustrates the use of the pronominal approach to space. Informed by the geography vector, the spatial analysis of these narratives reveals links between territorial dispossession and emotional exploitation, and the actant potency of space as an autonomous literary device. Keywords Mobility · Inadaptation · Topography · Poiesis · Beguinage The emergence of postmodernist thought and the interest in space as a focus of critical attention in the humanities coincides in the 1960s. In Foucault’s early publications from the 1960s—Madness and Civilization (1961), Birth of the Clinic (1963), and Death and the Labyrinth (1963), the materiality of space is not incidental but critical

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to his analysis of social attitudes towards alterities.1 Space as a visible embodiment of power relations was a key analytical tool for Foucault. He concentrated on panoptic heterotopias—hospitals, mental asylums, and prisons—to reveal that capillary circulation of power allows coercion to masquerade as voluntary compliance. The theorization of space gains conceptual rigour with the publication of Henri Lefebvre’s La Production de l’Espace in 1974. Lacking Foucault’s castigating overtones, though still strongly anti-capitalist, Lefebvre developed a conceptual triad for understanding the significance of social spaces. Unlike Foucault’s, Lefebvre’s heterotopias were “mutually repellent spaces”—a productive conceptual tool, along with isotopias and utopias for categorizing space.2 Lefebvre developed an understanding of space by interweaving the social perception of the space, the urban planner’s conception, and the lived experience of the users or inhabitants—“the triad of the perceived, the conceived, and the lived.”3 Drawing directly from Lefebvre’s ideas, Edward Soja mapped a schema of the first, second, and third space on the perceived-conceived-lived triad.4 He also coined the term “spatial turn” to describe the upending of the long-standing subordination of spatiality to temporality in critical thought.5 Contemporaneously, Marc Augé explicated the notion of non-spaces.6 By the mid-nineties, these theorists had forged an array of conceptual tools and schemes that afforded innovative spatial thought.

1

The publication dates refer to the originals in French. Death and the Labyrinth is Foucault’s only work of literary criticism. 2 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), 366. 3 Ibid, 39. To understand the Lefebvre’s triad, we may examine the spatiality of metro stations in New Delhi. These are perceived as a symbol of modernity, the city that has a metro network is seen at par internationally with mega cities. One may surmise that installing the metro was conceived as vanity project as it involved a humongous outlay over a long gestation period and proving its net social benefit was a complex exercise. The users’ lived experience of the metro depends on the social position of the person who uses it—a student who is optimistic about her future appreciates the comfortable ride, in contrast, a low-wage middle-age worker sees herself stuck in the boredom of repetitive commute. Perceptions of modernity are belied by the need for a separate compartment for women; conceptions of vanity collapse when one looks at the dilapidated public infrastructure outside the swank metro stations. As stated before, the lived experience depends on the social relations of the metro traveller in the larger context. 4 Edward Soja, Third Space: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996). 5 Robert Tally Jr. points out the futility of one-upmanship between space and time. Tally states that the spatial turn is not simply a victory of geography, which privileges space over history, which privileges time. Commenting on the coevality of space–time, he states, “Any lasting spatial relationship is made up of and dependent upon a series of constitutive temporal processes, just as the ability for those temporal processes to occur in the first place depends upon the structural stability of the spatial configuration that enables them.”. 6 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe, (London and New York: Verso, 1995).

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2.1 The Poetics of Spatial Patriarchy If Foucault and Lefebvre are credited with giving a spatial turn to the humanities, then Doreen Massey and Linda McDowell should receive the distinction of adding a feminist twist to it. In a seminal joint paper titled “A Woman’s Place” that predates both Soja and Augé’s publications, cited earlier, by more than a decade, Massey and McDowell highlighted the interrelationship between gender and the spatial division of labour. In subsequent books and articles, Massey and McDowell develop their gendered exploration of geography separately as well. Massey points out three mechanisms of joint control of patriarchy over spatiality and identity, which in a Foucauldian mode, simultaneously become the sites of struggle and resistance. Firstly, she explains that the symbolic meaning of spaces and places generates gendered messages. The almost instinctive word association with certain spaces shows the functioning of the first mechanism—home-reproductionnostalgia-femininity versus factory-production-utility-masculinity. Secondly, exclusion by violence from certain spaces and places as a means of subjugation points to spatiality as a direct tool for denial of agency. Thirdly, she establishes a direct link between the limitation of spatial mobility and the limitation of agency. She sees patriarchal control as a combination of control over spatial meaning, practices for spatial exclusion, and restriction of spatial mobility.7 We may think of the European universities at the start of the twentieth century as fractals of gendered exclusion. Women were not allowed to get degrees at most European universities, and many of their male tutors disparaged them while they were studying there.8 Virginia Woolf recounts that when she turned up at a college library, she was told by the porter that “ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.”9 Woolf’s account of her attempt to access a college library resonates with Massey’s observations about the patriarchal control of spatial mobility. A sociological study by Daphne Spain may be presented as historical evidence of Massey’s framework of spatial control and resistance.10 Spain, an urban planning scholar, has documented three specific institutional arrangements, one each from the middle-ages, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that became sites of empowerment for dislocated women. In the thirteenth century, Beguinages were set up on 7

Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: UP Minnesota, 1994), 179–180. Though women were allowed to attend university in the late nineteenth century, they were not eligible for a degree unitl much later. Oxford University granted the first degree to a woman in 1920, from Cambridge University in 1948. Dublin University had already been granting degrees to women since 1904. Until Oxford and Cambridge caught up, suitable qualified women called ‘steamboat ladies,’ who had studied at these universities would travel by steamboat to Dublin to get their degrees. https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PH-NEWNHAM-GOWN/1. 9 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1935), 12. 10 Daphne Spain is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, University of Virginia. She won the 2013–2015 Cavalier’s Distinguished Teaching Professorship. Her scholarship addresses the relationship between the built environment and social structure, with an emphasis on gender. 8

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the outskirts of north-European medieval towns to house what Spain terms “surplus women”—women who were left without male guardians as men were killed in large numbers in the crusades. These “surplus women” came to the cities and joined religious orders, took up nursing, and some found work in the textile industry. Even the religious women living in the beguinages did not cloister themselves; they went out to the town to teach or conducted classes in the beguinage. The second instance of surplus creation that Spain takes up occurred when the number of women with higher education increased rapidly in the United States of America towards the end of the nineteenth century. This created a “surplus” of teachers because teaching was the most easily accessible profession for women and established academic institutions could not absorb the full supply of teaching labour. Looking for work, many women with higher education chose to settle in immigrant neighbourhoods where there was a ready demand for their skills. These “settlement houses” became sites of assimilation for both women and immigrants. Linkages established inside the settlement houses became routes to integrating with the existing larger social structure. According to Spain, liminality describes the spatiality and the status of women in the beguinage in thirteenth-century France and those in immigrant settlements in the late nineteenth century the United States of America. Women known as Beguines occupied a social space somewhere between sacred and secular. Their liminal status gave Beguines independence otherwise impossible in medieval culture, just as settlement workers acquired atypical freedom for women of their era. Confusion existed about the position of both types of women. In 1274 a monk referred to the Beguines as women “whom we have no idea what to call, ordinary women or nuns because they live neither in the world nor out of it.”11

It is not a sheer coincidence that the spatial location of the beguinages and settlement houses maps congruently onto the social position of the women who inhabited these institutions. Beguinages were typically located along the edge of the medieval walled city. Settlement houses of the late 1800s were also located in suburban zones, at the margins of cities. According to Spain, these sites of voluntary segregation paradoxically became “living rooms” for interactions, political discussions, and forums for socio-economic initiatives. Spain discusses a third segregated community of the mother centres set up in Germany in the 1980s. These institutions provided childcare and also acted as a physical space for political discussion and employment exchanges for job-seeking women. These “abeyance structures” erased the boundaries between public and private spaces, counterintuitively, by setting up other boundaries. Though all three institutions denote a deliberate separation of and by women, the beguinage has the greatest congruence with Massey’s trifurcated control-resistance framework. The creation of the other two institutional mechanisms presupposes a scholastic achievement (a university degree) or a physical condition (maternity). Therefore, their dynamics are pertinent to a smaller sub-group compared to the beguinages, which are representative of a larger class of women who feel limited by domestication. Women came to beguinages even though they did not have the qualifications to 11

Daphne Spain, How Women Saved the City, (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2000), 117, emphasis mine.

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be professionally employed outside the home or the biological capacity to create a family to which they could justifiably devote their lives. The beguines congregated not because they had an ‘ability’ but because they had a deficiency—they lacked a husband, father, or brother through whom they might be accommodated in the domestic space.12 Formal education was not a route to paid employment for women in the middle-ages; hence they could only make a living in the quasi-sacred space of the beguinage. Recalling Massey’s spatial logic, we see that for the beguines, the domestic space lost the symbolic association of safety; the crusade violence extricated them from the domestic space, and as their mobility expanded, so did their identity in public spaces. Thus, their spatial re-location was an obverse to their social repositioning. In 1996, McDowell saw a need for intensifying efforts towards “spatializing feminism.” In her assessment, the joint chorus of “positionality, location, borders and margins” emanating from the “lips of every social and feminist theorist” had not evoked an adequately strong response from theoreticians of space.13 She outlines three aspects of spatializing feminism. Firstly, she suggests adopting additional post-cartesian locations that de-centre a male rational subject. Here she is affirming Dona Haraway’s assertion that “the situated view from below is likely to include a clearer perspective on the conditions of oppression” than what she termed the “view from nowhere.”14 The locational approach adds to the five feminist strategies outlined by Stuart Hall: questioning the distinction between the private and the public by declaring that the personal is political; opening up new areas of social life for scholarship and research such as child-rearing, the domestic division of labour and housework; exposing the social processes of formation of gendered subjects; criticizing the processual forms of these modalities instead of drawing attention to only their outcome—women’s patently inferior social position, and lastly demolishing the notion of homogenous mankind through sexual difference.15 Secondly, McDowell advocates “stretching space” as a technique of spatialization to reveal the in-between spaces created by what she terms “global localisms.” Here she specifically discusses how an increasingly interconnected global economy alters the sense of the self. She explains that this is equally true of people who are mobile as well as those who are geographically stable because the apparent “stability” is open to the destabilizing forces of unfamiliar “ideas and messages […] visitors and migrants […] tastes, foods, goods, and experiences to a previously unprecedented extent.”16 12

A similar situation exists in the widow houses of Vrindavan, in India. Largely, the plight of the widows continues to be pitiable but some institutions like Krishna Kutir seek to empower these women abandoned by their families. The noted filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s film Water (2005) is an emotive portrayal of the struggles of the Vrindavan widows. 13 Linda McDowell, “Spatializing Feminism,” in BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, ed. Nancy Duncan (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 27. 14 Dona Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 13. 15 Stuart Hall, “The Question of Cultural Identity,” The Polity Reader in Cultural Theory (Cambridge: Polity,1994), 125. 16 McDowell, “Spatializing,” 36.

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Stretching space would reveal the gendered impact of globalization, colonization, consumerism, virtualization, and digitization in spaces, which might appear outside the impact zone from a telescopic viewpoint. McDowell’s first two aspects of spatialization of feminism are tactical—they address the issues of the location of the theorist (where to theorize from, above/below, centre/margin?) and the scale of space (what to theorize about? Macro/micro, superficial/interstitial). The third aspect raises the strategic question of the objective. While framing her argument for a spatialized feminist theory, she agrees with other feminist theorists like Dona Haraway, Nancy Hartsock, and Nancy Fraser—that knowledge produced must be “contextual and local, various and diverse,” taking the agenda further by declaring that “it is not enough to assert and demonstrate differences.”17 According to McDowell, the call for a “different world” must be amplified by a claim that the different world must not be categorized as “inferior, as alternative or as one perspective among many, each with equal validity.”18 In the differently imaged world, a traditional view that legitimizes gender males as the rightful inhabitants of public spaces and sanctions the use of only domesticated private spaces for women should not have equal validity as a standpoint that claims equal access to existing public spaces for all genders or repositions private spaces in a public context. Moreover, the aim of spatializing feminism must be to forge alliances between various “different worlds” that smoothen racial, sexual, colonial, casteist, linguistic, communal, technological, digital, and other societal striations so that the conflation of theoretical perspectives may lead to political action.

2.2 Space and Place: Is There a Material Difference? While building upon the ideas of the spatial turn, some discussion on the distinction between space and place would be instrumental in adding depth to our spatial perspective. The difficulty of distinguishing space from place goes back to antiquity. Greek philosophy recognized three notions of spatiality—Kenon, Chora, and Topos. Kenon signified the homogenous undifferentiated void, an eternal and pervasive emptiness, for example, the space between atoms of matter. All existence took shape from this void. Chora referred to a place in becoming, and Topos indicated an achieved place. Here, we may take note of a distinct resonance of Lefebvre’s perceived-conceivedlived triad and of Soja’s first, second, and third place trialectics. The last two notions of Greek spatiality can be distinguished in terms of precedence—Chora comes first, then Topos takes shape; specificity—Chora is nebulous, Topos is discernible, and 17

Ibid., 40. Nancy Hartsock, “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women,” in Feminism/ Postmodernism, ed. L.J.Nicholson, (London: Routledge, 1990). Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Thought (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 18 McDowell, “Spatializing,” 41.

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derivativeness—Chora is the expansion in which Topos is located.19 Though Kenon always stood apart as an “emptiness” in spatiality, the frequent synonymous use of the other two terms by both Aristotle and Plato points to the difficulty of understanding them as distinct constructs. Where both terms were used together, Topos denoted a part of the Chora; Topos was also used to denote relative location—Aristotle used Chora to indicate a country and Topos to refer to a particular region within it.20 The general opinion on the modern equivalents of these ancient terms is that “place” approximates Topos and “space” approximates Chora. Extrapolating the differential characteristics of Chora and Topos identifies “space” with a sense of flow, of becoming, and marks “place” with rootedness and fixity. Some other perspectives on the space-place difference see place as nostalgic, regressive, or even reactionary and space as progressive and radical; place as the realm of the lived and space as the realm of the perceived-conceived; place of action and acting space; place as Gemeinschaft, an outcome of community-based personalized interactions and space as Gesselschaft arising out of role-based, formal interactions.21 A change in perspective can further blur the already diffused separation of space and place. Agnew illustrates this assertion with two different viewpoints of the Mediterranean—one that sees it as space, the other as place. [An older] view [sees] the Mediterranean over the long term as a grand space or spatial crossroads in exchange, trade, diffusion and connectivity between a set of grand source areas to the south, north and east, [a] recent revisionist account views the Mediterranean region as a congeries of microecologies or places separated by distinctive agricultural and social practices in which connectivity and mobility within the region is more a response to the management of environmental and social risks than the simple outcome of extra-regional initiatives.22

The first is a geographic perspective, which considers place as the setting for apparently non-spatial processes of economic exchange and cultural diffusion, whereas the latter—the topographic or phenomenological view, locates the engendering of cultural and economic exchanges in the very spatiality of the region. A broadly consensual view emerging from the discussions on space and place is that both are social constructs, and the boundaries between them are porous. For Doreen Massey, any attempt to establish boundaries or secure the “identity” of places seeks the stabilization of meaning. Invariably, the sites with stabilized meanings become sites of contestation for the marginalized groups whose oppression provides 19 Tim Cresswell, Geographic Thought: A Critical Introduction (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 19–20. 20 John A. Agnew, “Space and Place,” in Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, ed. John A. Agnew and David N. Livingstone, (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2011); Keimpe Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought (Leiden: EJ Brill, 1995). 21 Agnew, “Space and Place,” 323. Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: UP Toronto, 1994), 57; Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 39; J. Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). 22 Agnew, “Space and Place,” 317, emphasis mine.

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the foundation of stabilization. The differential experience of space is a corollary to the various interpretations of social relations by those holding different positions as part of it. Massey holds firm against impermeable boundaries.23 On the other hand, Patricia Garcia, a literary critic who has proposed a novel analytical framework for the literary fantastic, finds productive use for the space/place delineation. Garcia conceives of place as a receptacle in which the fantastic operates and space as what causes the fantastic to come into effect; in other words, a place such as a haunted house evokes fear, whereas the spaces of its dark corners provoke the reader to respond to the terror.24 This study accepts Downey’s view that “liminal spaces are those which are simultaneous space and place.”25 It also treats the physical spaces that act as the fulcrums for readings of selected texts in the book as conceptual descendants of Chora—the undifferentiated void that precedes the formation of Topos. As Chora, they represent a zone of possibilities. These fulcrum spaces may be visualized as liminal zones suggesting contingencies for the alterities that they adumbrate.

2.3 A Topographical View of Literary Spatiality A phenomenological or topographical view of space is a liminal view that allows for the coexistence of place and space, of spatial formation, de-formation, and reformation. There are two tactical processes that emerge from a topographical view of literary spaces: the first stretches space to manifest interstices, and the second locates the critic in the interstices. In this chapter, we will make effective use of these topographical tactics in unraveling the spatial politics of patriarchal control and resistance against it in two literary narratives. However, before I provide illustrative cases for the implementation of the suggested approach, I would like to lay down the grounds for space as a substantive epistemological entity for feminist literary criticism. According to Krystina Pomorska, the noted Russian literary critic, any critical method extricates general trends from the literary practice of its time.26 As women writers from the modernist era increasingly began to distance themselves from the kinds of spaces that featured in their predecessors’ texts, critics responded with new strategies for critiquing space. Suppose one accepts McDowell’s assertion that the standpoint of the theorist “makes a difference to what is being claimed,” then by the same token, locations featured in the text also make a difference to what is 23

Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 5. Patricia Garcia, Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature (London: Routledge, 2015), 33. 25 Dara Downey et al., “Locating Liminality: Space, Place and the In-between,” in Landscapes of Liminality, ed. Dara Downey et al. (Lanham: Rowman & Littelfield, 2016), 3. 26 Krystina Pomorska, Russian Formalist Theory and its Poetic Ambiance (The Hague, Mouton, 1968), quoted in Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays (Minneapolis: UP Minnesota, 1989), 32. 24

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being claimed.27 The places become agency-laden and critical, breaking prescribed frontiers when women writers, artists, and filmmakers reject ghettoized interiors and prescribed places. Peri Rossi moves the narrative onto abandoned beaches populated by armed insurgents; Carol Lay breaches the citadels of male knowledge such as laboratories; Lucrecia Martel uses a medical conference venue as a site for seduction; Manjula Padmanabhan imagines an auction house where human bodies are traded like merchandise; and Sumukhi Suresh sets the climax of her series in a factory warehouse. By choosing to draw attention to spaces that did not feature in earlier narratives, these women contest, subvert, and appropriate prescribed spatiality. Pamela Gilbert, the Albert Brick Professor of English at the University of Florida, identifies two focal points of a spatialized literary criticism.28 In one approach, the focus is on how existing, already-named places or strongly culturally embedded locations are created or (re)presented in texts. The other approach concentrates on the description of specific topographies like the city, the factory, and the home. The latter approach, which we may include in our articulation of a phenomenological view of literary space, holds that, […] one is not concerned with “actual” spaces—the space of proper nouns, so to speak (the London of Defoe, the Paris of Zola, or even Dickens’s fictional but highly specific Bleak House)—and one is more concerned with a “type” of space: the city, the factory, the home. Literary studies are interested not only in how literature reflects such understandings of space—how they operate thematically and at the level of plot and setting—but also in how literature shapes the understanding of space, how it intervenes in culture to produce new understandings.29

The present study establishes an affinity with Gilbert’s topographical approach. According to Gilbert, the challenge before new approaches to spatial readings of texts must deviate from the poetics of space—that is, its relation to plot, tone, theme, style, and character development. The diversion from the poetics of space directs the critic to examine the creational role of the text—examining how the text structures spatial experience, creates spaces and imbues them with meaning that is processed and decoded in the act of reading. The purely phenomenological approach suggests that when liberated from poetics, a spatial analysis of literature can enhance our understanding of how literature is engaged in the process of cognitive mapping. That is, how it can contribute to a better understanding of the political process of imagining spaces and forming collective identities by illuminating the ways in which space is

27

McDowell, “Spatializing,” 27. Pamela K. Gilbert has been the Albert Brick Professor at the University of Florida since 2009. She is the series editor for the SUNY Press book series Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. She is also affiliated with the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies and is a founding member of CISMaC, the Collective for the Interdisciplinary Study of Medicine and Culture. https://english. ufl.edu/pamela-gilbert/ 29 Pamela K. Gilbert, “Sex and the modern city: English Studies and the Spatial Turn,” in The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Barney Warf and Santa Arias (New York: Routledge, 2009), 105. 28

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being written about and read by different groups and individuals.30 Though Gilbert deprivileges the poetics of space, Natalia Álvarez Méndez, professor of literary theory and comparative literature at the University of Leon, finds productive use of poetics in reading spatiality. In her spatial reading of certain twentieth-century Spanish novels, she examines how space along with time, events, and characters contributes to the plot and coherence of the represented universe. She finds that a great plurality of settings within a narrative generates a semiotic recurrence that unites the multiplicities through a similar syntactical arrangement, semantic values, and pragmatic considerations. This semantic recurrence is rooted in the dialectics between diverse ambits such as: The stable space and the dynamic; the public and the private; the natural and the constructed; the referential and the fantastic; the contemplated and the imagined; the objective and the subjective; the present and the past; that of wakefulness and that of dreams, the oppressive and the satisfying; that of day and that of night; that of the countryside and that of the city, miniature and expansive; interior and exterior; outside and inside; terrestrial and celestial.31

According to Álvarez Méndez, the spatial logic of a narrative reinforces the overall syntax of the narrative by establishing a relationship among the diverse settings featured in it. Space is also endowed with “primordial semantic values,” which facilitate the re-creation and interpretation of the fictional world.32 Space carries out the pragmatic task of completing the loop of communication between the speaker-writer and the receptor-reader. By specifying this last communicative function of space, Álvarez Méndez approximates—though in a rather static, unilateral manner—the “creational role” of the text pointed out by Gilbert. Mieke Bal suggests that a typology of spatial representation can be drawn from the identification of different points of perception of a space when she says, […] places are linked to certain points of perception. These places seen in relation to their perception are called space. That point of perception may be a character, which is situated in a space, observes it, and reacts to it. An anonymous point of perception can also dominate the presentation of certain places. This distinction can result in a typology of spatial presentation.33

Though Bal does not enunciate any specific categories in the typology of spatial representations, she highlights the inherent, somewhat Derridean, différance in spatial signification while discussing the sensory impact of different representations of a room. After all, a cluttered room seems smaller, a sparsely furnished room bigger than, in fact, it is. Strangely, an empty room seems smaller again. This sensory effect does not have fixed meanings attached to it. This is culturally specific. Westerners consider emptiness a 30

Agnieszka Podpora, “Spatial Turn in Literary Research, Analysis and Reading Practices: Perspectives and Limitations,” Topos, vol. 24, no. 1, (2011): 86. 31 Natalia Álvarez Méndez, “Hacia una Teoría del Signo Espacial en la Ficción Narrativa Contemporánea,” Signa: Revista de la Asociación Española de Semiótica, no. 12, (2003): 562. 32 Ibid. 33 Bal, Narratology, 132.

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challenge: it must be filled, but how? Japanese […] see an empty room as a storage of endless possibilities.34

Despite the problematic homogenizations of “Westerners” and “Japanese,” Bal’s conclusions are valid—the same space can have different affective impacts—the same space can appear to be small or large, and the visual perception can evoke different cognitive responses: “an emptiness to be filled” or “a storage of endless possibilities.” Bal’s approach, echoing McDowell’s call for localization of theory and Haraway’s standpoint theory, has direct applicability for spatialization of literary criticism. Massey and McDowell’s evocation of a “different world” is consonant with Elaine Showalter’s focus on the semiotic differentiation of women’s writing in her landmark work, A Literature of their Own. In a subsequent article, Showalter proposed the practice of gynocritics as a “specialized critical discourse” where female critics read female works to decipher the elements of differentiated female semantics, syntax, and pragmatics.35 According to Showalter, the differentiation is necessary because the canon body of literary criticism, dominated by male critics, silences women writers by ignoring them and excludes women critics by disparaging them. In order to further the project of evolving a substantive approach to reading ‘female’ texts, Showalter postulates four models of difference: biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic, and cultural. Showalter’s four pillars are like nested Matryoshka dolls: biology within language, language within psyche, and psyche within culture. A tiny doll of space can be nested within the larger doll of culture as an approach to feminist critique. It is a widely acknowledged view that social relations are “constructed and negotiated spatially” and are embedded in the spatial organization of places.36 The common thread of space runs through the various places which constitute culture—the home, the school, the temple, the café, the workplace. A spatial view of these places shows that they lack neutrality. Their significance is inalienable from cultural perceptions. Persons with different socio-cultural coordinates may view the school as a place of learning, discipline, indoctrination, or confinement. Similarly, the workplace may evoke diverse connotations as a place of liberation, progression, harassment, or exploitation. Literary criticism is greatly enriched by responding to a writer’s innovative use of spatiality. In this context, Margaret Higonnet, Professor Emerita at the University of Connecticut, points out that, the implications of space, which intertwine physical, social, and political territories, offer particularly rich material for feminist analysis today […] New cartographies trace the ways writers inscribe gender onto the symbolic representations of space within texts, whether

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Ibid., 135. Elaine Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Critical Inquiry: Writing and Sexual Difference, Vol. 8, No. 2, (1981): 185. 36 Nancy Duncan, “(Re)placings,” in BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, ed. Nancy Duncan, (New York: Routledge, 1996), 4. 35

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Thus, this study endorses the view that space is a substantive perspective in the cultural difference demarcated by Showalter because the location of the characters along with the The spatialization of that location in a literary narrative makes a difference to what is being said. Space that emerges from the pens, keystrokes, brush strokes, and camera lenses of selected creators ceases to be an “inert and static entity on or through which cultural forces operate” and becomes more an autonomous element of material culture.38

2.4 Viewing Interstices by Stretching Space in Teresa de la Parra’s Ifigenia Teresa de la Parra (1889–1936) was a Venezuelan novelist, essayist, and a leading public intellectual of the first three decades of the twentieth century. Her vision of nationhood has been considered as vital as that of more overtly political intellectual titans from the continent like Andrés Bello, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and Manuel Gonzalez Prada. Her outlook may be considered as the most significant among the mentioned visionaries because it was perhaps the most progressive.39 De la Parra spoke extensively about a new way of doing politics, writing history, and writing in general. She advocated the practice of a “feminine way of writing,” 37

Margaret R. Higonnet, Reconfigured Spheres: Feminist Explorations of Literary Space (Minneapolis: UP Minnesota, 1994), 1. 38 Myra J. Hird, “New Feminist Sociological Directions,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 28.4, (2003): 451. 39 Nicolas Shumway, “Four Visions of Nationhood,” in A Companion to Latin American Culture and Literature, ed. Sarah Castro-Klaren (Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 303. Andrés Bello is famous for having been a tutor to Simon Bolivar, the chief architect of the Latin American independence during the nineteenth century. Bello spent twenty years in England as a diplomat for the revolutionaries to gather support and funds for the independence movement. Upon returning to the continent, he settled in Chile where he founded the main national university and served as legislator in the parliament. See Rafael Caldera’s 1977 biography Andres Bello: Philosopher, Poet, Philologist, Educator, Legislator, Statesman, for details of the polymath’s life and work. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento served as President of Argentina from 1868 to 1874. He is also credited with having written one of the most powerful novels of Latin American romanticism— Civilization and Barbarism: The Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga. In the novel, a dramatized biography of a regional strongman—a caudillo, Sarmiento criticizes the brutal dictatorship that held power at the time the novel was published. Manuel González Prada founded two literary clubs in Lima in the eighteenth century where he bitterly criticized the Peruvian political leadership and the church of the time. He blamed the “unholy trinity” of “the justice of the peace, the governor, and the priest” for their complicity in sustaining colonial power structures that obstructed the modernization of Peru. He argued for the inclusion of indigenous population in the national project.

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which she believed ought to be espoused by male writers as well.40 In a series of lectures delivered in Colombia in 1930, she highlighted the contribution of women in “the formation of the Latin American soul” throughout the course of the continent’s history. De la Parra’s approach to the female-centric issues of early twentieth-century Latin America may be compared with Jorge Luis Borges’ vision for the Argentinian writer.41 In a famous essay, Borges states, “The Argentinians, the Latin Americans, in general, are in an analogous position [to that of the Jews and the Irish]; we can address all European themes, we can address them […] with an irreverence which can only have, and has had, positive consequences.”42 De la Parra highlighted the contribution of indigenous women who played a political role in the aftermath of the conquest of Latin America, of the nuns and mystics during the colonial period, and the women who provided camouflaged support to leading freedom revolutionaries. De la Parra observed three types of relative “irreverent” positions from which women criticized or challenged the dominant social and political mores of their times. “Those from the conquest: are the sorrowful ones crucified by the clash of races. Those from the colonization: are the mystics and the dreamers. Those from the Independence: are those who inspire and make things happen.”43 The overriding concern of de la Parra’s public speeches, fiction, and non-fiction narratives was to document the struggles and achievements of women that had been hitherto side-lined. “El Diario de una Caraqueña por el Lejano Oriente” is a non-fiction account of one of her sister’s visits to China and Japan. A critic points out that in the essay, the cosmopolitan impulse […] is about recognition of not just the “exotic reality” of the Lejano Oriente (the Far East), but also the space of writing between women that, in order to surface, needs new imaginary cartographies that are premised neither upon the nation nor on an abstract universality. These dislocated spaces that do not coincide with the particular (i.e., the nation) nor the universal are the type of configuration that challenges received notions of cosmopolitanism, and that, paradoxically, originates in the cosmopolitan imagination itself.44

De la Parra’s non-fiction demonstrates the tactic of stretching space to reveal interstices. She assumes a view from below of the process of nation formation that allows her to look at Matea, Simon Bolivar’s black nurse, as an important figure in the 40

As an example of feminine writing by male writers, Teresa de la Parra cites the account of history written by the Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who was a common soldier in Hernan Cortés’ campaign against the Aztec rulers of Mexico. For de la Parra, Díaz del Castillo’s detailed account of doña Marina’s role in the campaign is an invaluable contribution to Mexican history. In contrast, she is barely mentioned in Cortés’ “male” version of the contest. 41 Luz Horne, “La Interrupción de un Banquete de Hombres Solos: Una Lectura de Teresa de la Parra como Contracanon del Ensayo Latinoamericano,” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, vol. 31, no. 61, (2005): 14. 42 Jorge Luis Borges, “El Escritor Argentino y la Tradición,” Obras Completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974), 273, emphasis mine. 43 Teresa de la Parra, Influencia de las Mujeres en la Formación del Alma Americana (Caracas: Fundarte, 1991), 29–30. 44 Gabriel Giorgi and Germán Garrido, “Dissident Cosmopolitanisms,” in The Cambridge History of Latin American Women’s Literature, eds. Ileana Rodríguez and Mónica Szurmuk, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), n.p. Kindle ebook.

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Liberator’s politics. The stretched space shows Bolivar as a child in the nursery, not only as a great soldier on the battlefield. This study carries out a similar exercise of ‘stretching the space,’ with De la Parra’s best-known work of fiction, her 1924-novel Ifigenia. The title of the novel refers to a figure from Greek mythology. Iphigenia was the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who was burned alive by her father on a pyre as a sacrifice to the gods to ensure the safety of the king’s ships bound for the conquest of Troy. The novel describes Maria Eugenia’s life from the time she returns from Paris to her native Venezuela until her marriage to a suitable man whom she does not love. Maria Eugenia comes back to the family estate after her father’s death expecting to inherit a wealthy estate. However, she is greatly disappointed to find out that her father had been cheated by her maternal uncle. As she is penniless, she is unable to marry the boy from a humble family to whom she is attracted. Instead, she chooses a prosperous suitor for whom she feels no desire. At the end of the novel, Maria Eugenia, forced to accept a loveless marriage, sees her wedding dress as a symbol of herself, “how mysterious this dress! Lying collapsed in death on the sofa. Is it a symbol of my soul without a body in the arms of Gabriel, or is it the symbol of my body without a soul in the arms of Leal?”45 Though the novel does not end in Maria Eugenia’s death—the Iphigenia of the novel stays alive—it involves a series of disillusionments and disappointments that cause a metaphoric separation of the soul and body. The novel ends where it begins—in the same room, at the same spot—at Maria Eugenia’s writing desk. At the start, Maria Eugenia recently returned from Paris after the death of her father, sits at the desk writing a long letter to her friend, pondering hopefully on future possibilities. Towards the end, she sits at the same desk writing another letter while she contemplates, with disquieting resignation, the chair where the wedding dress is lying. By stretching space, we see that De la Parra presents a series of compact snapshots of liminality emerging from interstitial spaces of normative frameworks in the interactions between Abuelita—the grandmother, Tía Clara—the aunt, and the young girl Maria Eugenia. The widowed grandmother and the spinster aunt are the two nodes across which the meshwork of social obligations stretches. Maria Eugenia’s education has made her more inclined to discuss travel, politics, and literature with her uncle rather than discussing stitching and religion with her aunt and grandmother. In the extract below, the mixed smells of jasmine, candle wax, and her aunt’s arthritis ointment heighten her sense of fastidio, that is, annoyance or irritation, as she sits in the parlour day after day with the older women. […] that which bothers me as I breathe in all these smells, distinct or combined, while I watch Grandmother and Aunt Clara stitch or hear them talk, is an inexplicable thing. For the sake of decency and tact, when I am before them, I dissimulate my annoyance, and then I chat, I smile, or I train Chispita, the wise, woolly lapdog who has already learned to sit with her two front paws folded very gracefully and who, as I have observed within this system of

45

Teresa de la Parra, Ifigenia: Teresa de la Parra Obra (Narrativa, ensayos, cartas) (Ayacucho: Biblioteca Ayacucho, [1924] 1982), 309.

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seclusion which has taken in both of us, dreams incessantly of freedom and is as bothered or more than I am by it.46

The sense of fastidio is the result of Maria Eugenia’s maladaptation to the position ascribed to her in the social structure—the family salon is the spatial representation of the existing structure where she must sit like Chispita, the lapdog “with her two front paws folded very gracefully.” Her writing desk is the liminal place-space, where she is able to envision possibilities not made available to her in the structured space of the salon. Maria Eugenia belongs to the generation of independently minded women. Yet, she is unable to visualize a life for herself in which the man is not the anchor. The world she inhabits defines a woman’s capabilities in terms of her skill in dressing well and making agreeable conversation. By juxtaposing the ‘modern’ woman with relics from the colonial period—the grandmother and the aunt, de la Parra highlights the convergences and divergences among the three generations. Just as Maria Eugenia is unable to chart out a course of her own life despite her education and international exposure, similarly, the older women fail to seek recourse to religion, mysticism, or dreams as tools of resistance and subversion through which some women of their generation articulated their discontent with social and familial impositions. De la Parra articulates her ‘feminine’ way of doing politics through this trio of women, which is not public but private. By showing their differing relative positions in the normative structure, she accomplishes the task of dismantling the monolithic construct of womanhood. Viewed from the “structural” exterior, all three women appear to be helpless victims of male subordination, but a view from within the “liminal” interior differentiates Maria Eugenia from the other two women. De la Parra uses a spatio-economic tool to individualize each woman’s position—the loss of landed property, which was theirs by law. All three women have been cheated of their inheritance. Abuelita, Maria Eugenia’s maternal grandmother, was cheated by her son. Her husband had left a generous inheritance for the whole family—his wife and their children. After his father’s demise, Eduardo, The couple’s eldest son, finagled large sums from his mother on the pretext of investing in a profitable mine, which amounted to naught. He made profitable investments of his own but refused to compensate his mother’s loss and pays her only a small monthly annuity. He also apportions similar portions to his sister Clara and niece Maria Eugenia. Tío Pancho, Maria Eugenia’s paternal uncle describes how Eduardo cheats his mother and sister while claiming to be their guardian, “he picks up a thousand; later gifts two and for these two you have to be eternally grateful: He is the protector!”.47 Eduardo Aguirre also cheated Maria Eugenia’s father, who had taken him on as a partner. He transferred the ownership of all assets to his name while his brotherin-law was away in Paris. Maria Eugenia was completely unaware of her uncle’s treachery during her father’s lifetime. She is betrayed by her real father, who was not smart enough to realize that he was being swindled, and by her symbolic father, who was shrewd but acted against her interests. She is entirely dependent on her uncle’s 46 47

Ibid., 19. Ibid., 71.

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Fig. 2.1 Differentiated reactions to territorial dispossession

beneficence to meet her expenses. Tía Clara is impoverished because she indulges her younger brother Enrique’s extravagance in gambling and handing out expensive gifts. We may sum up the differentiated modes of deception in Fig. 2.1. All three women have been fraudulently dispossessed of their landed estates, of the places which belonged to them by birthright. Their dispossession is a direct form of the spatial control of patriarchy—the second mechanism of spatial control described by Massey is at work here. The women have been “violently” excluded from their own landed property; the violence perpetrated on them is not physical but material. The reaction of each of the women to the spatial dislocation enforced upon them marks a generational transition in the female weltanschauung. In the spatiality of the salon, the structural abuts the anti-structural. As each woman enunciates her different stance, she reveals her location along the spectrum of patriarchal adaptation: Abuelita justifies her son’s decisions, Clara remains silent about her brother’s profligacy, in contrast to their passivity, Eugenia voices her resentment and anger against Eduardo’s mismanagement of the state, which has left all three women impoverished. Maria Eugenia locates herself in the liminal space, which exists in proximity with the “societas” inhabited by the older generations of women. Maria Eugenia’s response to the awareness of her impoverished state shows her trapped in destructive liminality. She refuses to accept her grandmother’s explanation that her father was a profligate who ran the farm into debt, which Eduardo paid off in return for ownership. She also recalls that her father always spoke of himself as the sole owner of the farm, and therefore, there could not have been any legal transfer of ownership, and neither had she ever known him to be extravagant in their entire time together in Paris, during his lifetime. She arrives at the conclusion that the accusation of profligacy levied on her father was baseless. Though Maria Eugenia is furious about the fraud, she never takes up the issue with the perpetrator. She only expresses her anger to her aunt, grandmother, and her father’s brother, Uncle Pancho. In the salon, a spatial metaphor for the normative structure, her attitude is defensive as she tries to reason with her grandmother. It is only in the liminal spaces of her writing desk or while driving across the poor barrios of the city with her Tío Pancho that she expresses the full measure of her wrath at the injustice done to her. Maria Eugenia’s abortive anger is no different from her annoyance at having to stay confined in the salon with her aunt and grandmother or her indignant acceptance of

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marriage to a suitable man whom she does not love. The mix of anger and resignation marks her as a liminal neophyte who is unable to submit to the existing structure but equally unable to claim a new space for herself through the anti-structure. Luz Horne, Professor of Literature at the University of San Andrés in Buenos Aires, interrogates this perpetual state of inadaptation, Inadaptation can be paraphrased by saying that it consists in being in a certain place or in a certain moment but not belonging fully in it because there remains a reference to another space and another time. That is to say, that when one is not adapted to a particular situation, it is because they retain something that impedes their belonging to that situation, that is external to it and that, however, does not impede that they remain there.48

Maria Eugenia’s inadaptation shows up in other instances as well: her initial fascination and subsequent disillusionment with her close female friends, Cristina and Mercedes. Maria Eugenia’s education, literary interests, and exposure to the sophisticated Parisian society “impede” her belonging to a provincial world where home and family set the limits for a woman’s social position. However, these restrictions do not compel her to effect a complete break, and she finally sustains her “inadaptation” within the very framework she deprecates. A view of the stretched space shows us how the relative dis/location of De la Parra’s protagonists in their domestic space reflects their varying degrees of adaptation to their social status.

2.5 A View from the Interstices in Cristina Peri Rossi’s “The Annunciation” The study takes up one more literary narrative, a short story titled “The Annunciation,” for analysis to demonstrates the potency of ‘stretching the space’ as a critical approach. The protagonist of the story is a young boy who seems engaged in a mindless game of collecting various objects on the seashore—rotten planks from a capsized vessel, colourful rocks from the seabed, pieces of glass thrown up as flotsam—and storing them with great care. He is always alone, till the day he sees a woman dressed in white, walking in from the sea towards the shore. He sees in her the Holy Virgin, whose statue he carried in a village procession. He revers the woman in white just as he had seen it being done in his village church. But his efforts at invoking the divine power of the apparition turn out to be misdirected and futile when the soldiers who have been hiding in the woods start firing at him. At this point in the story, the apparition-goddess in white, instead of offering miraculous protection to the boy, runs away in fear. The boy valiantly faces the soldiers’ bullets alone. Spatial configurations of the forest and sea mirror each other. The space inside the sea is populated with white statues, fish, and sea urchins. Abandoned decaying boats lie near the sea, seagulls fly over it, and mouldy disused fish nets lie on the sandy 48

Horne, “La Interrupción,” 17.

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shore. The sea acts as an aggressive assailant when it roars loudly and crashes its waves against the shore. The sea nurtures creatures that aid its destructive agenda, like the fish who nibble away at the submerged, white stone statues inflicting wounds on their chest. In, the forest hides the soldiers who end up firing at the boy. The liminal beach, abutting the structural spaces of the sea and the forest, is the zone for the boy’s unrelenting purposefulness, which projects a stark oppositional force to the unexplained abandonment of the space. An interstitial viewpoint reveals the boy’s confident optimism against the destructive structural forces that surround him. The spatial situation in the liminal beach is “saturated,” that is, it undergoes brisk changes in response to new information.49 Though the story seems to occur on the same strip of sand, the space experiences several radical transformations— from an abandoned space, to, at first, a child’s playground, then to a commanding arena for a monarch or a temple where powers of the Virgin may be invoked, and finally to a battlefield where the lone saviour stands against the mighty enemy. The perceptible autonomy of the seashore may be seen as an attempt to go beyond human consciousness in order to glimpse the “primary” and “sensible” qualities of space; as an attempt to transgress the “transparent cage” of finite human knowledge in order to establish a route to “the great outdoors” of “the rich elsewhere.”50 Cristina Peri Rossi, quite like Virginia Woolf, sketches a phenomenologicaltopographical portrait of the seashore. Whereas Woolf is modernist-veering-topostmodernist, Peri Rossi is clearly postmodernist, a transition which involves the transformation of logic to phenomenology, of intention into attention, of meaning into effect. Despite these transformations, continuities exist, both sweeping trends of the 20th century […] [manifest] centrality of the object, thus signalling the forthcoming interest in materialism towards the end of the century.51

Possibly the two grandest narratives of the sea, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick fail to present a topographical portrait of the sea. Instead, they use it as a geographical construct, a place through which the ‘hero’ embarks on a grand journey. Grandness, of course, would be anathema for the modernist narratives of Woolf and for the postmodernist ones of Peri Rossi; thus, the sea does not provide a domain for exercising control, marked by battle and victory; by extension, its shore is not a preparatory ground for vanquishing the adversary. Characters in Peri Rossi’s narratives, as in Woolf’s gather on the seashore imbued with the awareness of its liminality, a phase, which though potentially empowering, “also embodies less positive characteristics […] liminality is closely associated with

49

Bart Keunen, “The Chronotopic Imagination in Literature and Film: Bakhtin, Bergson and Deleuze on Forms of the Time,” in Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope Reflections, Applications, Perspectives, eds. Nele Bemong et al. (Gent: Academia Press. 2010), 44. 50 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Bloomsbury Publishing), 7. Meillassoux et al., “Speculative Realism” in Collapse Volume III, ed. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007), 423. 51 Charmaine Cadeau, “Revisiting Autonomies in the Wake of Postmodernism,” Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 31, No. 1, Fall (2007): 179.

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death, incoherence, silence, madness, and alienation.”52 Like the boy protagonist of “The Annunciation,” Virginia Woolf’s characters in The Waves never venture into the sea—they step up to it, momentarily step in but never wade through it. The feminine difference is palpable in these distinct treatments of the sea. Women writers accord privilege to the seashore as a no-man’s land between the received past and a future aspirational state. They eschew using the sea to evoke motifs of conquest, revenge, and glory, which dominate male rendered mythology, such as the crossing of the sea in the Ramayana and Odyssey and several sea-centric canonical works by male writers. Instead, the sea is portrayed as a threshold site, suitable for introspective reflections, reveries, and epiphanies. The statuesque male actualizations of the seashore and the female liminal ones each allow different visibilities of the autonomous space. Though the seaside has been a setting for introspection, dilemmas, and longing in novels like Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) and more recently in Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (2007), the treatment of it by Peri Rossi is more markedly “anti-correlationist” because the human actors in her stories are not given more visibility than the larger ensemble comprising fishnets, weeds, boats, seagulls, broken glass, and submerged statues.53 Peri Rossi’s seaside does not serve merely as a backdrop for a predominantly human drama. This study views such an anti-correlationist portrayal as markedly ‘feminist’ and holds that feminist literary criticism must engage with non-human actants in space because de-centring of the subject and provoking multiplicities dissolves gendered hierarchies. One may also see this anti-correlationist stance as a post-humanist affinity with earth-others. The actant potency of space, an integral facet of its autonomy, can be grasped effectively through the sensor of Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary chronotope, which refers to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships artistically expressed in literature.54 Bakhtin considered time as the primary axis, from where he looked at the response of space to temporal variations. For example, the chronotope of adventure is instantiated in the Greek Romance novel of the sixth century, wherein time stretches over years and decades. Yet, it has no biographical duration; it leaves no trace on the heroes, who remain enduringly virile and ageless. Space responding in proportion to expansive time unfolds over varied geographies, usually in three to five countries. The heroes are as unaffected by the changing geographies as they are by the passage of time. This chronotope of adventure dominates male narratives of the sea, where the hero is undaunted by the prodigious dangers he faces on his journey of the quest. Neither Captain Ahab’s nor Santiago’s resolve is weakened by the spatio-temporality of the novels Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea, 52

Claire Drewery, Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), 4. 53 The speculative realist philosopher Quentin Meillassoux used the term correlationist to describe any thought system in which a primordial relation is assumed between human beings and non-human “things.” Meillassoux agreed with the Kantian stance that we cannot think of things in-themselves, except through their relationship with human beings. 54 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: UP Texas, 1981).

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respectively. These very differently heroic male protagonists battle and dominate the ravages of the sea. Thus, the chronotope of adventure is not only correlationist but also andro-centric. By contrast, in the chronotope of the threshold, space is rendered autonomous by instantaneous temporality, which we may term archaeological time because it reveals “several forms of connexion, several hierarchies of importance, several networks of determination, several teleologies.”55 The multiplicity of teleologies generates such centrifugal vitality that the kairos displaces the telos: several critical, decisive moments occurring in a network of situations that communicate with each other.56 The chronotope of the threshold thus evinced is a dialogical chronotope more suited to centrifugal narratives such as Peri Rossi’s, which are not aligned to any significant plot pattern. Peri Rossi’s narratives located on the seashore are rich with the chronotope of the threshold. Not only is the seashore a natural threshold, dissolving the borders between solid land and fluid waters, it is also intuitively suggestive of transitions, of the realm of potentialities, thereby becoming the apposite space for “resurrections, renewals, epiphanies,” connected with the breaking points of life, the moment of crisis.57 Irrespective of the human actors who inhabit it, space becomes an autonomous actor at the critical junctures of life. In the threshold, the temporal experience is highly concentrated. For example, in “The Annunciation,” the protagonist responds to an accelerated salvo of stimuli that have a distinctively internal origin—the young boy’s memory and anticipation drive his perceptions. Peri Rossi gives new information about the boy’s past experiences and future anticipations, which together determine the present. She deftly diffuses the frontier between the past and the present with a simultaneous evocation of the two antithetical chronotopes. The extract below illustrates this unusual technique. The fishing boats were strewn about in the sand, abandoned. Wildflowers grew from within the spongy wood: green stalks and a white crown between sodden, splintered planks. The wood is dying slowly. It dies battered, leaning on the sand. A seagull glides in the air, wings forming a cross, chest dark, it lands slowly. It lands on a useless oar of the boat, which is plunged neck-deep in sand. Earlier, when fishermen used to go out to sea, every boat was mounted with a grand lamp, like an eye which lit up the water and the fish to the depths. A round and unlidded eye, casting a powerful and serene gaze. The fishermen cleaned it, polished it, focussed its light, and sailed by it. Now the nets hang decayed with mould and leave their menstrual blood on the sand.58

It is not accurate to call this seashore or the boats on it “abandoned” because it is well inhabited; there are boats, planks, seagulls, lamps, and nets. Fishermen are 55 Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 5. 56 Joy Ladin, “‘It was not Death’: The Poetic Career of the Chronotope,” in Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope Reflections, Applications, Perspectives, eds. Nele Bemong et al. (Gent: Academia Press, 2010), 133. 57 Bakhtin, The Dialogic, 248. 58 Cristina Peri Rossi, “La Anunciación,” in Cuentos Reunidos (Barcelona: Lumen, 2007), 166, translation and emphasis mine.

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mentioned an indicator of the past; their presence does not affect the archaeological moment. Instead, the narrative is driven by movements of non-human actors. The fishermen are part of the given synchronic history; all other elements are presented diachronically: the flowers sprout from rotting wood, the planks are dying, but the mould on them is alive, the flying seagull seeks a resting place, the oar which had found its grave in the sand is resuscitated as the bird’s perch, and perhaps the most significant image from the feminist standpoint is the frayed, decayed net, useless for catching fish, is still fertile because it is menstruating. Several alterities are realized in the ‘rich elsewhere’ of non-human spatiality. The first emergent singularity can now be glimpsed—space is reflexive. It cannot exist in a state of abandonment. The space described above, is of course, reflective of the meteorological forces of erosion, resource exhaustion, and technological obsolescence, but it is also a reflexive spongy womb enabling birth, a menstruating entity affirming its fecundity and a route for rediscovery. The space that may appear impotent when viewed superficially turns out to be potent when examined by stretching it to reveal the interstices. The use of the Spanish word acorchada to describe the wooden planks manifests another singularity—space is contestable—where competing, contradictory forces are always present. In Spanish, acorchada is an autoantonym; it can denote cork-like sponginess or a block of wood so completely desiccated that it would make the tool bounce if worked upon. When I asked Peri Rossi which sense is more appropriate to the story, she recalled that her intent was to convey the spongy cork-like quality of moistened wood.59 Now, mindful of the Barthian decapitation of the author, I choose to accept her intent only partially. Both meanings remain valid in a pluriversal reading. Privileging the potential for deferred meaning over authorial intent actualizes the transition from intention and meaning to attention and effect. Extrapolating the linguistic indeterminacy to autonomous space reveals the multi-subjective potential of space. Peri Rossi’s seashore carries its Derridean differánce within; it is always becoming. Through each becoming, it reveals a primary, autonomous space as “an infinitely productive domain of meaning where, through all sorts of condensations and displacements, new meanings, and therefore new ways of living and desiring are perpetually created.”60 Peri Rossi shows how the same space can create differentiated meanings. She alludes to the biblical title of the story “The Annunciation” by describing a worship ritual, wherein it is not the devotion of the faithful which is foregrounded but the dynamic spatiality of the temple. In order to worship the Goddess, the boy-devotee seats her on a throne with a sceptre by her side, a crown on her head, a soft carpet beneath her feet, shielded by her army; he builds a defensive balustrade to keep out the enemy. The narrative would, erroneously, appear humanistic, but on consideration of the non-human actants, space claims its autonomy. The throne and the protective wall are made of sand, the sceptre and the crown are constructed of twigs and branches, the army comprises sharp polished glass fragments. Such spatiality 59

Personal communication with the author. Levi R. Bryant, “Deterritorialization,” Larval Subjects, January 2, 2011, larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/07/02/deterritorialization/.

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evokes the chronotope of the Gothic castle with its denotive traces of legends, myths, weaponry, and hierarchical relationships but simultaneously subverts it by the antithetical chronotope of threshold marked by evanescence—the sand wall will dissolve at the first touch of waves, burying the army of glass pieces and the crown and sceptre will disintegrate in the sea wind. The contrast between the chronotope of the Gothic castle, which calibrates the space controlled by tradition, and the chronotope of the threshold, which infuses the same space with liminality, allows a glimpse at the haecceity of space as a differentiated construct. To conclude, entering the short story’s interstitial spaces enables a perspective that shows the poietic power of space—it is not a theatre where human dramas are enacted but a Deleuzian factory where new meanings are manufactured. The interstitial viewpoint evokes the autonomous singularities of spatial reflexivity, contestability, multi-subjectivity, differentiation, and liminality.

2.6 Conclusion This chapter considers Doreen Massey and Linda McDowell as the founders of the feminist spatial turn in the humanities. It focusses on Doreen Massey’s articulation of the three mechanisms of spatial control that deny women autonomy and agency, limiting their identities, and McDowell’s technique of ‘stretching space’ to activate possible meanings that would otherwise remain obscure in the interstices. Daphne Spain’s sociological study of the medieval institution of European beguinages and its equivalents in nineteen-century America and twentieth-century Germany is presented as historical evidence of Massey’s framework. The chapter also proposes that the distinction between the geographical and topographical approaches to viewing spatiality is key in analysing literary and cultural narratives. Topographical readings of Teresa de la Parra’s Ifigenia (1924) and Cristina Peri Rossi’s story “The Annunciation” (1977) show that a detailed spatial examination is central to revealing the potency of the narrative.

References Agnew, J. A. (2011). Space and place. In J. A. Agnew & D. N. Livingstone (Eds.), Handbook of geographical knowledge (pp. 316–330). Sage. Algra, K. (1995). Concepts of space in Greek thought. EJ Brill. Álvarez Méndez, N. (2003). Hacia una Teoría del Signo Espacial en la Ficción Narrativa Contemporánea. Signa: Revista de la Asociación Española de Semiótica, 12, 550–571. Augé, M. (1995). Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. Verso. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination (C. Emerson, & M. Holquist, Trans.). UP Texas. Bal, M. (1994). Narratology: Introduction to the theory of narrative. UP Toronto. Borges, J. L. (1974). El Escritor Argentino y la Tradición. Obras Completas (pp. 267–274). Emecé.

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Bryant, L. R. Deterritorialization. Larval Subjects. Retrieved January 2, 2011, from https://larval subjects.wordpress.com/2011/07/02/deterritorialization/ Cadeau, C. (2007). Revisiting autonomies in the wake of postmodernism. Journal of Modern Literature, 31(1), 177–183. Cresswell, T. (2013). Geographic thought: A critical introduction. Wiley-Blackwell. de la Parra, T. (1991). Influencia de las Mujeres en la Formación del Alma Americana. Fundarte. Downey, D., et al. (2016). Locating liminality: Space, place and the in-between. In D. Downey et al. (Eds.), Landscapes of liminality (pp. 1–26). Rowman & Littlefield. Drewery, C. (2011). Modernist short fiction by women: The liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf. Ashgate Publishing. Duncan, N. (1996). (Re)placings. In N. Duncan (Ed.), BodySpace: Destabilizing geographies of gender and sexuality (pp. 1–12). Routledge. Foucault, M. (2002). Archaeology of knowledge. Routledge. Fraser, N. (1989). Unruly practices: Power, discourse and gender in contemporary social thought. University of Minnesota Press. Garcia, P. (2015). Space and the postmodern fantastic in contemporary literature. Routledge. Gilbert, P. K. (2009). Sex and the modern city: English studies and the spatial turn. In B. Warf & S. Arias (Eds.), The spatial turn: Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp. 102–121). Routledge. Gabriel, G., & Garrido, G. (2015). Dissident cosmopolitanisms. In I. Rodríguez & M. Szurmuk (Eds.), The Cambridge history of Latin American women’s literature. Cambridge UP. Kindle. Hall, S. (1994). The question of cultural identity. In The polity reader in cultural theory (pp. 119– 125). Polity. Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature. Free Association Books. Hartsock, N. (1990). Foucault on power: A theory for women. In L. J. Nicholson (Ed.), Feminism/postmodernism (pp. 157–175). Routledge. Higonnet, M. R. (1994). Reconfigured spheres: Feminist explorations of literary space. UP Minnesota. Hird, M. J. (2003). New feminist sociological directions. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 28(4), 447–462. Horne, L. (2005). La Interrupción de un Banquete de Hombres Solos: Una Lectura de Teresa de la Parra como Contracanon del Ensayo Latinoamericano. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 31(61), 7–22. Keunen, B. (2010). The chronotopic imagination in literature and film: Bakhtin, Bergson and Deleuze on forms of the time. In N. Bemong et al. (Eds.), Bakhtin’s theory of the literary chronotope reflections, applications, perspectives (pp. 35–56). Academia Press. Ladin, J. ‘It was not death’: The poetic career of the chronotope. In N. Bemong et al. (Eds.), Bakhtin’s theory of the literary chronotope reflections, applications, perspectives (pp. 131–156). Academia Press. Malpas, J. (2006). Heidegger’s topology: Being, place, world. MIT Press. Massey, D. (1994). Space, place, and gender. UP Minnesota. McDowell, L. (1996). Spatializing feminism. In N. Duncan (Ed.), BodySpace: Destabilizing geographies of gender and sexuality (pp. 27–43). Routledge. Meillassoux, Q., et al. (2007). Speculative realism. In R. Mackay (Ed.), Collapse (Vol. III, pp. 408– 449). Urbanomic. Meillassoux, Q. After finitude (R. Brassier, Trans.). Bloomsbury Publishing. Peri Rossi, C. (2007). La Anunciación. In Cuentos Reunidos (pp. 166–183). Lumen. Podpora, A. (2011). Spatial turn in literary research, analysis and reading practices: Perspectives and limitations. Topos, 24(1), 81–90. Pomorska, K. (1989). Russian formalist theory and its poetic ambiance. The Hague, Mouton, 1968, quoted in Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and other essays. UP Minnesota. Showalter, E. (1981). Feminist criticism in the wilderness. Critical Inquiry: Writing and Sexual Difference, 8(2), 179–205.

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Shumway, N. (2008). Four visions of nationhood. In S. Castro-Klaren (Ed.), A companion to Latin American culture and literature (pp. 293–308). Blackwell Publishing. Soja, E. (1996). Third space: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Blackwell. Spain, D. (2000). How women saved the city. Minnesota UP. Woolf, V. (1935). A room of one’s own. Hogarth Press.

Chapter 3

The Psychological Vector

Abstract The three flagstone texts of twentieth-century feminist scholarship that critically drive this study’s psychological vector are Karen Horney’s New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939), Juliet Mitchell’s “Women the Longest Revolution” (1966), and Kate Millett’s The Loony Bin Trip (1990). The mirroring of women’s familial and social positions in these works is highlighted in this chapter. Some of the critical concepts articulated by these theorists are used to study real-life instances of oppression of even exceptionally gifted women to demonstrate the power of patriarchal tendencies. The notions of undertow, recoil, and afterwardsness are explicated to understand the slow change in women’s position in society vis-à-vis men. The neurosis-inducing effect of insalubrious dependencies is examined to demonstrate that individual masochistic and narcissistic dependencies have generated a pathological social condition that is detrimental to changing patriarchal attitudes towards women. The psychological vector developed in this chapter is used to analyse the portrayal of the domestic space in selected short stories. The notion of the “Jocasta complex” is developed to describe the psychological response of women to their confinement in domestic spaces. The adopted approaches generate a binocular view of the domestic space as depicted in the stories, whereby it emerges as a masochistic space. The psychological vector exposes the oppressive underbelly of superficial stances of protectiveness towards the woman and reverence towards the mother-figure. Keywords Afterwardsness · Undertow · Recoil · Masochism · Dependency

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 J. Singh, Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1426-3_3

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Karen Horney1 and Kate Millett were staunch critics of Freudian psychoanalysis, but Juliet Mitchell sees immense value in his ideas. In defending the Freudian fundamentals, she goes against the grain of 1970s second-wave feminism. While firmly grounded in the feminist camp, Mitchell contested the strident anti-Freudian declamations in the main works of first-wave and second-wave feminists alike.2 Summing up her detailed discussion of canon feminist thinkers of the 1970s, she states that even the feminists who have criticized Freud for male biases in his analysis recognize that he was accurate in his observations about the psychological characteristics of middle-class women who lived under patriarchal oppression. The main issue that American second-wave feminists had with Freudian thought was its biological determinism, its failure to admit “the reality of social causation that was staring him in the face.”3 However, they had no dispute with his observations. Mitchell’s premise is that because Freudian observation is incontestable, it is foundational for developing the feminist viewpoint on psychoanalysis. Pointing out the possibility of a feminist uptake of Freud’s ideas, she states that “His theories give us the beginnings of an explanation of the inferiorized and alternative (second sex) psychology of women under patriarchy.”4 Mitchell admits that “Undoubtedly in its surrounding attitudes there is much that is thoroughly sexist in psychoanalysis but what it is concerned with is crucial for us.”5 The biologically deterministic reading of femininity in psychoanalysis is greatly problematic for any feminist negation of determinism. However, Mitchell stays grounded in the field because [a]lthough these [Freud’s] notions produce a difficult reading of femininity for feminism, it is this difficulty which is precisely the point. Why, despite enormous social, economic, legal progress, does feminism have to keep coming back to challenge the resistance to change in the ‘gender’ status quo? Freud’s account opens up ways in which we can think about why ‘gender’ conservatism persists in the face of change; why, indeed, the other side of progress seems always to be a reaction.6 1

Karen Horney (1885–1932) was a medical practitioner and psychoanalyst. She strongly disagreed with the male biases in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. She contradicted Freud’s fundamental assertion that personality disorders were rooted in biological and instinctual impulses, arguing instead for environmental and social conditioning as the primary source of neurosis and other anxiety-related disorders. Bernard J. Paris, Karen Horney: a Psychoanalyst’s Search for Self-understanding (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Kate Millet (1934–2017) was a literary critic, feminist writer, and a strong advocate of the antipsychiatry movement in the USA. She is best known for her 1970 book of psychoanalytic literary criticism Sexual Politics. Juliet Mitchell is an Emeritus Professor at Cambridge university where she taught psychoanalysis and founded the Centre for Gender Studies. https://www.jesus.cam.ac.uk/people/professor-julietc-w-mitchell. 2 Mitchell analyses and rebuts the criticism of Freud by Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex), Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch), Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex), Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique), Kate Millett (Sexual Politics), and Eva Figes (Patriarchal Grounds). 3 Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 401. 4 Ibid., 115. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., xxxi.

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In an earlier essay, “Women: The Longest Revolution,” which predates her cogent Freudian defence, Mitchell had already presented a consummately sociological account of the factors that hinder significant change in the woman’s chronically inferior socio-political-economic position. In many of her later works, she repeatedly revisits her initial ruminations on the oppression of women, correcting what she felt had been “left out of the account” presented in “Women: The Longest Revolution.” Mitchell starts the essay by commenting on the paradoxical “condition” of women: [T]hey are not one of a number of isolable units, but half a totality: the human species. Women are essential and irreplaceable; they cannot, therefore, be exploited in the same way as other social groups can. They are fundamental to the human condition, yet in their economic, social, and political roles, they are marginal. It is precisely this combination—fundamental and marginal at one and the same time—that has been fatal to them.7

The woman’s “condition” signifies the marginal–fundamental aporia that has continually fixed her social position. Mitchell traces the contours of the woman’s condition in different historical contexts through different combinations of four elements: production, reproduction, sex(uality), and socialization of children. The concrete combination of this set of economic, biological, sociological, and anthropological processes produces distinct historical positions, which are marginally disparate but significantly similar. Despite advances in technology, which obviate the need for physical strength in production techniques, women’s marginality in production systems has remained largely unchanged. Even though medical discoveries have significantly mitigated women’s vulnerability to childbirth, reproductionbased discrimination continues. Employers are reluctant to hire women who are likely to seek maternity leave.8 Women are pressured to undergo numerous pregnancies until they conceive a male child. Female foeticide and infanticide are carried out to prevent and dispose of unwanted births. The correlation between sexual freedom and women’s freedom is positive but weak. Even when the woman is free to choose multiple sexual partners, her relative position in these relationships is not remarkably different from women of previous generations. The dynamics of advancement and progressiveness, such as the institution of anti-sexual harassment protocols in workplaces, repealing anti-abortion laws, and legal reforms that ensure fair divorce settlements for women, counter-intuitively sustain a relatively static female condition. For Mitchell, the most ironic coexistence of change and sameness can be seen in the ascribed role of the mother. Compared to the early days of industrialization, by the mid-twentieth century, the mother shouldered a greater responsibility for her child’s socialization. Even in the twenty-first century, generally, the mother is expected to be the first and critically important agent of socialization in the early years of childhood. Herein lies the quandary. If the mother keeps leaving the child to work outside the home, the mystical maternal bond would be weakened, and it would also reduce her availability to perform the emotionally 7

Juliet Mitchell, “Women: The Longest Revolution,” New Left Review, I/40 Nov/Dec (1966): 11. “Female Labour Participation in Chile: Taking leave of his Senses,” The Economist, April 16, 2011, https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2011/04/14/taking-leave-of-his-senses. 8

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expressive function in the family. On the other hand, if she stays corralled within the home, then she herself would lack exposure to those outside social conditions for which she is expected to prepare the child. The four elements—production, reproduction, sex(uality), and socialization of children that put a yoke of invariability on the woman’s condition are inseparable. Therefore, Mitchell concludes that “liberation of women can only be achieved if all four structures in which they are integrated are transformed.”9 Mitchell supplements her analysis of social causation by adding that present social realities alone do not explain the slow pace of change in the woman’s condition. She asserts that a comprehensive understanding of women’s oppression cannot be attained without a linked, thorough examination of the cultural context. According to her, women internalize oppression, independent of current social realities. The attempt to locate the repository of internalization brings Mitchell’s analysis back to a fundamental Freudian concept—the unconscious. In her approach, an analysis of the cultural and historical framework is indispensable to grasping a greater measure of unconscious processes. Mitchell identifies two internalized headwinds that push back against the drive to change—undertow and afterwardsness. Undertow is a recoil force against the drive to change—a backward movement propelled by momentum; afterwardsness stems from a past experience, the retained perception of which acts as a pre-emptive measure against forward momentum. Each derives its potency from conservatism.10 Commenting on Mitchell’s comparison of undertow to the Freudian notion of the death drive, one of her interviewers observes, “Individually and collectively generations of women succumb to the force of undertow. It is a consequence of the societal, familial assignation of women as the repositories of human conservatism. There is a drive for change but also a drive to stay put.”11 Consider the family as an example of the drive to change and stay put. The socio-economic function of the family does not stay constant, yet ideologically it has been consistently conceived of as though it were still the centre of a moving world, held together by the stationary “woman.” Even in the new kinship models such as single parenthood, same-sex parents, surrogate pregnancy, sperm-donated conception, childless couples, it is “‘women,’ in terms both of their socio-economic position in the family and of the psycho-ideological construction that predisposes them to that location, who became the ascribed repositories of that human conservatism.”12 Here, by “women,” Mitchell could be referring to the family member or any attendant who takes on the traditional responsibilities of the mother, the stay-at-home parent in a gay couple, and the surrogate mother. From the very start of her philosophical journey, Mitchell has held that the conventional familial arrangement is a primary source of exploitation of femininity in distinctly embodied forms. Revered as mothers, pampered as daughters and sisters, 9

Mitchell, “The Longest,” 29. Juliet Mitchell, “Psychoanalysis and Feminism Then and Now,” interview by Wendy Hollway and Julie Walsh, Psychoanalysis Culture & Society, Vol. 20 (2015): 123. 11 Ibid., 113. 12 Mitchell, Psychoanalysis, xix. 10

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[…] women are offered a universe of their own: the family. Like woman herself, the family appears as a natural object, but it is actually a cultural creation. There is nothing inevitable about the form or role of the family any more than there is about the character or role of women. It is the function of ideology to present these given social types as aspects of Nature itself. Both can be exalted paradoxically as ideals. The ‘true’ woman and the ‘true’ family are images of peace and plenty: in actuality, they may both be sites of violence and despair.13

The reactionary, recoiling force of undertow acts in combination with the preemptive measure of afterwardsness to counteract change. The original term for afterwardsness, “Nachträglichkeit,” indicates that at the time of occurrence, the event has no significance; “its significance comes afterwards when what happened re-happens at a time when it can have meaning. Paradigmatically: the totally unconscious sexuality of infancy is grasped through the known sexuality of puberty.”14 To understand afterwardsness in the familial context of tradition, let us consider the conventional ascription of caregiving roles to women. Numerous women take up caregiving responsibilities voluntarily; there is no visible play of coercion. Their decision is normatively disconnected from oppression. The “natural” tenderness of a woman or her “incapacity” to provide materially for the family to the same degree as the man are justifiable and innocuous reasons for her to be domesticated. These justifications are moored in the unconscious as the requisites of stability. It is only through afterwardsness that the full, or at least a greater measure of the meaning is grasped, that is, “when it happens again.” A qualified and educated woman in the 1980s may have stayed at home because her skill set had a far lower market value than her spouse’s. However, in subsequent generations, women with comparable qualifications as their spouses also end up becoming homemakers. The leaky pipeline in the workforce, where a disproportionate number of working women with the same education levels as their male counterparts drop out of formal employment to take care of the family, is an instantiation of the afterwardsness of the subconscious association of women with caregiving.15 Afterwardsness is the catalyst that activates the backward pull of the undertow, regressing the woman’s condition to the “normal.” Later in the chapter, we will examine some literary representations of the regressive tug of the undertow and the afterward impact of forgotten occurrences from a spatial perspective.

3.1 Metonymic Disordered Space Kate Millet’s magnum opus Sexual Politics (1970) was one of the six canon secondwave feminist works that Mitchell examined for a flawed understanding of Freudian principles. However, this study is not as concerned with Millet’s psychoanalytic 13

Mitchell, “The Longest,” n.p. Mitchell, “Then and now,” 123. 15 UNESCO data show that worldwide 53% of graduates are women. At the Ph.D. level, the proportion drops to 48%, and at the post-doctoral research level to 28%. https://en.unesco.org/unescosci encereport https://en.unesco.org/sites/default/files/usr2015_kakemonos_gender_en.pdf. 14

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literary criticism—the main subject matter of Sexual Politics, as with her memoir, published twenty years later. In The Loony Bin Trip (1990), Millet shifts focus from psychoanalysis to psychiatry. While psychoanalysis primarily attempts to find the source of manifest mental disorders in the unconscious, psychiatry follows an evidence-based approach to diagnosing and treating mental illness. Consequently, each discipline adopts a different line of mental therapy. A psychoanalyst would seek recourse to interpreting dreams, fantasies, and past experiences, among other techniques; a psychiatrist is a physician who prescribes medication to deal with the behavioural dimensions of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and manic depression. In the 1970s, a group of former psychiatry patients, writers, and other intellectuals of the “anti-psychiatry movement” spoke out against the conceptualization and treatment of various illnesses designated as “madness.”16 That the heyday of the anti-psychiatry movement corresponds with the strongest phase of second-wave feminism is not purely chronological. Both discourses were framed by a definite rejection of prescribed roles, normative institutions, the primacy of cognition, and of reason over sentience and intuition. The anti-psychiatry movement criticized the use of extant modes of treatment, specially psychosurgeries and psychotropic drugs that dulled the patients’ heightened sensitivities, transporting them to a vegetative state.17 Proponents of the movement sought a more reciprocal, equal relationship between doctors and patients. The Loony Bin Trip narrates Millet’s experience as a patient in a mental asylum. In the memoir, she blames her family members for confining her to a mental asylum and for labelling her as “crazy”: “They would never give in, never see a middle ground of being a little crazy (flipped out, upset, frazzled), or see crazy as a mixed state, an ambivalent affair, or that crazy was not a crime but rather a point of view and need not be locked up.”18 Millet did not altogether reject the need for medication to treat mental illnesses. She held that conditions such as Huntington’s chorea and Alzheimer’s that have an observable pathology could be correctly labelled and treated as mental diseases. However, any condition that is classified as a disease on the basis of impressionistic evidence, where socially unacceptable conduct, deportment, or manner is considered a medical symptom, is not a disease. In such instances, diagnoses of personality disorders are often based on the perception of others, not on the experience of the afflicted individual. Taking strong objection to the coercive nature of psychiatric treatment, she writes, “The afflicted is in a sense, one accused, hospitalization constituting a type of arrest […].”19 The spatial evocation of the experience of going to the asylum in Millet’s memoir provides a metonymy for what Juliet Mitchell has referred to as the woman’s condition. In 1980—the third instance of her confinement—four 16

Heather Murray, “‘My Place Was Set At The Terrible Feast’: The Meanings of the ‘AntiPsychiatry’ Movement and Responses in the United States, 1970s–1990s,” The Journal of American Culture, vol. 37, no. 1 (2014): 86–87. 17 Ibid. 18 Kate Millett, The Loony Bin Trip (Champaign: UP Illinois, 1990), 86–87. 19 Ibid.

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policemen arrive to take her to an asylum in Ireland. They grab and force her into a car, keeping the destination a secret. After some repeated questioning by Millett, they tell that they are taking her to a nunnery: […] we are headed, they say, for Our Lady of Clare. A lovely phrase. A nunnery. I laugh. “Used to be, anyway. Now it’s a rest home.” “I could use a rest home.” We all laugh. […] But when we get there, it is a barracks, a jail, a stone fortress. A gray Bastille lit by institutional police state lamps. The car hums on while one officer reconnoiters inside. My heart sinks; another betrayal. It is either a jail or a prison or, still worse, a real madhouse you will never get out of. […] The harsh light by the stone entranceway, the gray stretches of institutional pile. The silence, the hum of the motor. The malign intent of the place is clear; its detail is hazy. A barracks, a prison, the worst bin of all.

One may posit that the space in Millet’s memoir is metonymic and not metaphorical because metonymy emphasizes the semantic commonality between the signifier, that is, the nunnery, and the signified, that is, the woman’s condition. The “nunneryrest home-barrack-jail-stone fortress-Bastille-madhouse-bin” do not constitute a metaphoric frame of comparison but a metonymic stand-in for the woman’s social position determined by institutionalized confinement, such as in marriage for many women. Millet finds herself obligated to obey the order of confinement because her behaviour was seen as a threat to established conventions. This study discerns a cause–effect relationship in Millett’s spatial metonymy for purported madness and examines the selected real-life instances and literary narratives for similar portrayals of the link between spatial location and mental state.

3.2 The Neurotic Anxiety of Patriarchy The aspect of Karen Horney’s theory that is key to this study is her interrogation of the conventional understanding of masochism. The accepted definition of masochism emphasized three aspects—sexual, satisfaction, and suffering. It was generally held that masochism manifests itself in a drive for sexual satisfaction through suffering. Horney decided to leave aside the preconceived notion that the objective of masochistic striving is gaining sexual satisfaction. Instead, she proposes that the ultimate goal of masochism is gaining safety.20 She adds that such striving is not always observable. It is operative even when it is not apparent. She sees two constitutive tendencies of the masochistic character—a tendency towards self-minimizing and a tendency towards excessive dependency. Often, the masochist is ignorant of the operative processes of the self-minimizing tendencies; they are conscious only of its 20

Karen Horney, New Ways in Psychoanalysis (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1939), 248.

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consequent self-perceptions—feeling unattractive, insignificant, and worthless. She sets up masochistic dependency in sharp outlines by contrasting it with the dependencies of the other two neurotic trends—narcissistic and perfectionist. A narcissist depends on others for admiration and constant praise; a perfectionist for conformance with what he believes others expect of him. Their dependencies may be seen as less acute than the masochist’s for whom dependency is a life condition. Unlike the narcissist and the perfectionist, the masochist “feels that he is as incapable of living without the presence, benevolence, love, friendship of another person as he is incapable of living without oxygen.”21 Paradoxically, the masochist is “incapable of love, nor does he believe that the partner or anyone else can love him. What appears under the flag of devotion is actually a sheer clinging to the partner for the sake of allaying anxiety.”22 Like a stowaway who may want to breathe the open air on the deck, yet seeks the safety of his secret hiding place, the masochist seeks the security of unobtrusiveness. All three neurotic trends are means of managing anxiety by excessive dependencies, but each has a distinct operative mode. Whether dependencies generate neuroses is determined by the suppositions on which they are built. If a person sees others around them as friendly, protective, and generous, her dependence on them will not manifest as neuroses. In contrast, when a person’s perception of the world is as a vindictive, unreliable, and hostile set of relationships, they develop neurotic tendencies. Where dependencies are culturally sanctioned, they do not detract from happiness nor undermine self-confidence. In a society that considers frailty and helpless leaning as desirable feminine qualities, a woman may be quite content with her dependency. However, a man who feels dependent may hate himself for his “weakness” and equally disparage those he relies upon as his “life condition” because there is no cultural prestige in his dependency. The self-perception of weakness leads to numerous provocations of powerless rage. Therefore, hostility underlies the masochist’s relationships. They may express this hostility through self-harm inflicting behaviour or fantasies of cruelty in which they humiliate those whom they blame for their insecurities. The violence is not always defensive; it is often sadistic. Horney’s final idea that is crucial to our study is that masochism, though selfminimizing and self-deflating, may combine with grandiose ambitions, a quest for power or perfection. This would give rise to hybridized tendencies: masochist–narcissist and masochist–perfectionist, which would manifest as anxiety management mechanisms. Anxiety is also the focal point of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born. Rich identifies the presence of a collective tendency of primal repression in societies that define themselves as patrilineal. For her, patrilineality is a manufactured claim of origins because bloodlines can only be traced authentically through the mother. Any denial of this incontrovertible biological fact can only be enforced by repressive control mechanisms. A prior condition for the oppression of the other—the woman—in patriarchy is the repression of the fact that the origin of all human life is female. 21 22

Ibid., 251. Ibid.

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Explaining the paradox of self-directed repression as a necessary condition for otherdirected oppression, Rich writes: Is it simply that in looking at his mother (or any mature woman), he is reminded, somewhere beyond repression, of his existence as a mere speck, a weak, blind clot of flesh growing inside her body? Remembering a time when he was nothing, is he forced to acknowledge a time when he will no longer exist? […] Daughters may also dread being “redevoured” by their mothers; but the daughter also knows herself potentially her mother’s inheritor: she, also, may bring life out of her body.23

Rich declares that the oppressor finds it difficult to reconcile with the fact that even he was birthed by the oppressed. Agreeing with the sociologist Robert Briffault’s analysis, she views the matrilineal society as “organic.” Recalling the distinction between matrilineal and matriarchal social structures, Rich clarifies: […] matriarchy in primitive societies was not simply patriarchy with a different sex in authority […] the maternal function of gestating, bearing, nurturing, and educating children went [with] a great deal of activity and authority which is now relegated to the male sphere outside the family. Briffault’s matriarchal society is one in which female creative power is pervasive, and has organic authority, rather than one in which the woman establishes and maintains domination and control over the man, as the man over the woman in patriarchy.24

The primal repression of origins creates collective anxiety, which, according to Horney’s theory of anxiety management, would result in a neurosis tendency. Repression diminishes the self; therefore, of the three neuroses that Horney discusses, masochism would be the pathological outcome of repression. Patriarchal systems that try to control “female creative power” are masochistic structures that engender relationships replete with hostility. In many cultures, the choice of the final resting place mirrors the masochistic quest for safety in “burial, caves, and tombs and labyrinths imitating caves which represent the female body; or [in] the hollowed-out ship of death, which in the hero myths is also a cradle.”25 Linking Horney and Rich’s ideas, one may conclude that patriarchy is a masochistic tendency arising from the anxiety of female origin and that the relationship between masochism and patriarchy is pathological.

3.3 Real-Life Instances of Pathologically Masochistic Patriarchy Evidence of pathological patriarchy may be seen in the lived experience of three women from different fields, cultures, and time periods: Sabina Spielrein, Annapurna 23

Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1995), 188. Ibid. 25 Ibid., 8. 24

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Devi, and Joyce Maynard, who were overshadowed by their male partners. Despite enjoying formidable acclaim in their respective areas of work, these women’s male partners felt threatened by the women’s public fame. Driven by their insecurities, they tried to press these women into oblivion. Patriarchy embroiled these couples in a narcissistic–masochistic trap. In these relationships, male narcissism evoked and fed on female masochism. The women, surrendering to their partners’ narcissistic demands, developed masochistic dependence. Despite being talented, they “voluntarily” remained in relative obscurity compared to their partners, choosing the safety of unobtrusiveness. Sabina Spielrein (1885–1942) was a younger contemporary of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Some of their foundational concepts have been traced back to Spielrein. She suggested the notion of “death instinct” to Freud and “archetypes in our collective unconscious” to Jung. Freud credited her contribution in his early publications, but in subsequent versions, his publishers removed the citation. Jung not only appropriated her intellectual property but also exploited her sexually. He had an affair with her while she, at the age of nineteen, was under his treatment. The powerful psychoanalysis establishments of Moscow and Vienna were hostile to Speilrein’s work on female sexuality, which contradicted prevalent Freudian notions about it. Her biographer Angela Sells tells us that “As the only woman in the room, Spielrein put forth images and ideas of an embodied eroticism at a time when women’s sexuality was labeled [by Freud] the ‘dark continent’ of psychology […].”26 Speilrein’s trailblazing work in the field of women’s sexuality shows that she had the self-confidence to buck the conventions in her professional field, but in her personal life, she succumbed to a masochistic dependence by allowing herself to be victimized by Carl Jung. Another instance of a woman who was subjected to voluntary obscurity is that of Annapurna Devi (1927–2018), a doyen of Indian classical music. She was married to Ravi Shankar, an internationally acclaimed sitar maestro. Annapurna Devi played the surbahar, a stringed instrument closely resembling the sitar but known to fewer connoisseurs because it is “appreciated only by those who understand the depth of music or who intuitively feel the music.”27 She and Ravi Shankar were disciples of Annapurna’s father, Allaudin Khan, a renowned sitar guru and founder of a classical musical gharana. Before devoting himself to learning the sitar, Ravi Shankar went on a tour of Europe with his brother’s dance troupe, living the life of a “dandy visiting the nightspots of Paris.” Upon his return, he accepted the ascetic demands of a disciple’s life and mastered the instrument. However, in Allaudin Khan’s opinion, Annapurna was the more gifted of the two. The duo started performing together after getting married. Their duet performances were marred by conflict. Ravi Shankar wanted to add “modern touches” to the music, and he wanted Annapurna to appear glamorous on stage. She was not comfortable dressing up flashily and wanted to stay true to 26

Angela M. Sells, Sabina Speilrien: The Woman and the Myth (New York: SUNY Press, 2017), 171. 27 Swapan Kumar Bondyopadhyay, Annapurna Devi: An Unheard Melody (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2005), Kindle.

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the musical techniques she had learned from her guru. The audience appreciated her as an accomplished musician and respected her mastery of the surbahar, which is a heavier and more difficult instrument to handle than the sitar. In 1956, Annapurna gave her last public performance. It is widely believed that Ravi Shankar elicited a vow from his wife that she would stop performing in public. Annapurna’s authorized biographer states that Ravi was justifiably jealous. And so, he elicited a vow from his wife that she would no longer play in public. There are many versions of this anecdote afloat, mostly apocryphal. Annapurna, however, told me that something worse had happened than Ravi attempting to make her take this oath. But she added that she would divulge it to none. ‘That will go with me when I go’ […].28

Without performing publicly, Annapurna continued her engagement with music as a teacher, which lasted all her life. When she was 55 years old, she and Ravi Shankar divorced. That same year, she married one of her disciples, who was 13 years younger than her. Thus, she was able to overcome the masochistic dependence that patriarchy had imposed on her only after her legal separation from her narcissistic husband. The third and final example of masochistic dependence discussed here is that of Joyce Maynard (b. 1953). While she was still in college and had not yet turned 18, her essay was featured on the cover of the New York Times magazine supplement. The essay attracted the attention of the famous writer J. D. Salinger, whose novel The Catcher in the Rye was already a part of the literary canon. Following an exchange of letters, the fifty-two-year-old literary legend and father of two started a sexual relationship with the eighteen-year-old Maynard. During the relationship, he misguided her about her first book deal, badgering her not to cash in on her fame by publishing early. While on vacation with Maynard and his children, he abruptly brought the relationship to an end, putting her in a taxi to the airport and asking her to clear her belongings from his home. After the end of the affair, she continued to publish novels. However, she was not able to complete her degree, as she had already left college at Salinger’s bidding. Recalling her mental condition at the time, she states that “Believing Salinger to be the most spiritually elevated man I would ever know, I accepted his assessment of me as unworthy.”29 Maynard is a typical case of masochistic dependence. Despite being a prodigy at eighteen, she preferred to be in the shadow of a narcissistic man. She began to rid herself of the dependency when she was forced out of the relationship. She did not discuss her relationship with Salinger publicly until she made it the subject of her 1998 novel, At Home in the World. When the novel came out, she was disparaged by several peers and noted critics. [A] former Yale classmate Alex Beam wrote that she had “hacked her way through three decades wrapped in a delusion torn from the Oliver Sacks casebook: The Woman Who Mistook Herself for Someone Interesting.” 28

Ibid. Joyce Maynard, “Was she J.D. Salinger’s predator or his prey?” September 5, 2018, https://www. nytimes.com/2018/09/05/books/review/joyce-maynard-at-home-in-the-world.html. 29

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3 The Psychological Vector […] Cynthia Ozick described her as someone “who has never been a real artist and has no real substance and has attached herself to the real artist in order to suck out his celebrity.” […] The critic Gerri Hirshey dismissed the author’s “icky, masturbatory eroticon” and “that busy Maynard mouth”30

Maureen Dowd, a Pulitzer awardee, compared Maynard to Monica Lewinsky, calling them “Leech Women.” Dowd wrote: These two highly skilled predators keep trying to extract celebrity from old love affairs that were not only brief and puerile but sexually tortured. They want to gain immortality–and big bucks–by feeding off the detritus of their triste trysts with older, famous men.31

Undeterred by the personal attacks that followed the publication of At Home in the World, Maynard went on to publish nine books after it. Providing additional evidence of her liberation from masochistic dependency, she also returned to the college, which she had quit on Salinger’s insistence, at the age of sixty-five to complete her degree. The three women discussed here were exceptionally talented in their fields; yet were either disparaged or belittled by their male partners. In the 1920s, Sabina Spielrein made pathbreaking contributions to psychoanalysis yet died impoverished and unrecognized in her hometown; in the 1950s, Annapurna Devi, though respected by her disciples, voluntarily withdrew into obscurity; in the 1990s, Joyce Maynard received vitriolic personal criticism for revealing the details of her sexual exploitation by J. D. Salinger. While Spielrein and Annapurna Devi were marginalized by a largely male establishment, Maynard was disparaged by her women peers as well. In the lives of these women, we can see the increasing stranglehold of pathological patriarchy. The disparaging tendency that once could be attributed exclusively to men became noticeable in women as well. Several of Maynard’s female peers, instead of holding Salinger responsible for harassing, controlling, and disparaging Maynard, found her culpable of immaturity, oversharing, and delusion. In order to form a binocular view of the pathology of patriarchy, we will discuss some of its literary representations. The reading of the selected stories that comes up does not merely trace the elements of psychoanalysis—undertow, afterwardsness, dependency, masochism, and involuntary confinement—along literary contours. Merely tracing these concepts in the text would be the type of simplistic reading of which Benjamin H. Ogden, a reputed psychoanalytic critic, is weary. Ogden cautions, “the critic must understand that they [psychoanalytic elements] are not stencils that can be used to rapidly recreate an idea or concept.”32 He urges the critic 30

Eren Orby, “Joyce Maynard’s Second Chances,” New Yorker, February 8, 2019, https://www. newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/joyce-maynards-second-chances. 31 Maureen Dowd, “Liberties; Leech Women in Love,” May 19, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/ 1999/05/19/opinion/liberties-leech-women-in-love.html. 32 Benjamin H. Ogden, Beyond Psychoanalytic Criticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), 121.

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not to carry out reductive readings of a text, in which, “Literature is reduced to a mirror with a desired, and entirely predictable, curvature onto which psychoanalysis can project a distortion in the hopes of getting a corrected essence. Such a reading is a projection of psychoanalysis, not a reading of literature.”33 Ogden compares the act of psychoanalytic criticism to the process by which the human eye creates an image: […] a distance of approximately three inches separates our eyes horizontally. As a result, each eye receives a slightly different two-dimensional picture of the world. […] The images in the two eyes are different, creating what is called retinal disparity. It was for a long time a mystery how this retinal disparity was overcome to create a coherent binocularity in human vision.

The mystery of creating a unified binocular vision from the two distinct images was solved in a series of studies in 1838, which showed that retinal disparity was necessary for the coming together of parallel images into three-dimensionality. Thus, with one eye on the conceptual schemes of Mitchell, Millet, and Horney and the other on the lived experiences of Spielrein, Devi, and Maynard, an attempt will be made to see how an unflattened three-dimensionality is expressed in the selected short stories.

3.4 A Binocular View of Masochistic Space The analysis of four short stories written by Cristina Peri Rossi presented here shows that looking at spatial manifestations of masochism is conducive to developing a profound understanding of patriarchal power and the resistance it inevitably provokes. Peri Rossi brings in psychoanalytic elements in her story with a deliberate consciousness of the field’s inherent patriarchy. When asked about the notable influence of psychoanalysis in her work, she answered: “psychoanalytic theory has always been a man’s thing—papa Freud, papa Lacan: a means of sustaining the heteronormative and patriarchal society. [There were] some psychoanalysts, like Karen Horney, but they were considered heretics.”34 As critics, we should be aware of the anti-psychoanalysis bias of Peri Rossi’s stories. However, this should not act as a hindrance to viewing them as stereoscopic images of the pathology of patriarchy. The first story, “Strange Circumstances,” resonates with Mitchell’s analysis of the family as a psycho-ideological construction and Millet’s sense of claustrophobia at her coercive confinement. The story starts with the description of a normal, ordinary family. Javier and Josefina have been married for ten years. They have two children, a boy of eight and a girl of five. Javier owns a textile factory. He is a successful 33

Ibid. Cristina Peri Rossi, “Yo Nunca estuve en el Armario.” Pagin12, August 21, 2009. www.pagina12. com.ar/diario/suplementos/soy/1-935-2009-08-21.html.

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businessman; his wife considers him “a solid man, without hysteria.”35 Josefina is a stay-at-home mother. The marriage goes on “without passion but with harmony.”36 One day the police inform the wife that her husband has been found dead with a plastic bag tied around his face and an orange stuffed in his mouth. The “accident” happened in a back room at his factory. So far, in the narrative, there are two spatial metaphors in dialectic opposition—the home and the factory. The home is the interior, inside, natural, organic, and private space where emotions dominate. The factory is the exterior, outside, constructed, manufactured, and professional space where reason dominates. The dialectical opposition between the home and factory creates a composite hybrid space—the back room in the factory—which is more interior, inside, and private than the home. Because, at home, he is obligated to perform the conventional roles of the husband and father, in this hybrid, personal–professional space, role-free emotions exercise a force of fatal proportions. The hybrid space, literally and metaphorically, becomes the scene of death by asphyxiation. The narrator describes its spatial affect when Josefina enters this back room to see for herself the place of death of her husband. Even before she sees his corpse, she feels. [t]he sensation of entering a forbidden place, an intimate and private space, secret. Like the cave of a strange animal, ancient and legendary and therefore dangerous. Also, she felt she was violating a tacit and unspoken agreement and asked herself whether it was appropriate for her to do so. She had access, purely by accident (as accidental as asphyxiating in a plastic bag with which one was only trying to play, to enhance pleasure) to a temple of a strange religion, to which she had not been initiated. Indeed, the small room at the back of the textile factory was a sanctuary. But, a pagan sanctuary.37

Javier’s corpse lies on the floor, covered with a white sheet. In stark contrast to the white sheet that covers his lifeless body and the transparent, colourless bag that may be seen as the murder weapon, other colourful objects that fill up the space— red silk pieces, reddish-orange fruit skin, black lace lingerie, golden belt buckles, swarthy brown whips and lashes, and shiny surgical instruments—are markers of the thrill that the man experienced in the room where he acted on his sexual preferences. The colourlessness of the plastic bag echoes the placelessness of the back room—a private, interior space located in the professional exterior façade of the factory. The red, orange, black, golden, metallic, heavy solid colours give the back room the solidity of a “temple of a strange religion,” in the words of the narrator. In contrast, the objects that display these colours, fruit, buckles, belts, scarves—ordinary, insignificant objects—convey the impression of a child’s playroom’s untidy clutter. To Josefina, it appears as if her husband was “playing” with a plastic bag just like children often do, even though they are repeatedly cautioned against it. Javier had transgressed this prohibition in his “playroom.” Her husband’s “unconventional” death evokes great tenderness in Josefina because she sees it as a child’s game gone wrong. When she removes the white sheet that 35

Cristina Peri Rossi, “Extrañas Circustancias,” in Cuentos Reunidos (Barcelona: Lumen, 2007), 673. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 765.

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covers his corpse, she sees the body of a man dressed in garter belts of black lace, a matching bra, two pins pierced into his nipples, and a whip lying beside it. The whip, the dress, and the bag, to her, seem like costumes and toys—albeit dangerous ones—which ended up killing him. Laura, Josefina’s friend, is perplexed by Josefina’s feelings of “general” tenderness in the aftermath of the event, which has been widely reported in the newspapers.38 In a normal situation, it should have been a humiliating experience for the wife. Josefina, with a new-found understanding, explains to her friend, Everybody is willing to sympathise with someone who dies of a heart attack or because his plane crashed. But if someone dies of a plastic bag tied to his neck and an orange in his mouth […], the only reaction it provokes is that it unnerves those who survive him.39

Entering the liminal, pagan space of the back room sets off Josefina’s loss of certainty regarding fixed notions about a normal family and sexuality. Her realization of her husband’s predicament before his death allows her to accept the inevitability of surrender to the “abject” as the only means of erasing the frontier between the normal and the abnormal, as both aspects are now part of her immediate reality. After the incident, she finds the son sucking on an orange one day. The image should have been traumatic for her because it is a re-enactment of what her husband had been doing in the last moments before he died. Yet, Josefina encourages her son to continue “playing” with the orange. The mother–son portrait drawn out by Peri Rossi in “Strange Circumstances” responds to Mitchell’s assertion that the mother cannot induct a child into the processes of socialization if she herself is cossetted in the enclosure of the house. As Mitchell explains, Socialization as an exceptionally delicate process requires a serene and mature socializer—a type which the frustrations of a purely familial role are not liable to produce. Exclusive maternity is often in this sense ‘counter-productive.’ The mother discharges her own frustrations and anxieties in a fixation on the child. An increased awareness of the critical importance of socialization, far from leading to a restitution of classical maternal roles, should lead to a reconsideration of them—of what makes a good socializing agent, who can genuinely provide security and stability for the child.40

It is only when Josefina breaks out of her own domestication that she decides not to impede her son’s sexual expression. She does not want repressed desire to fuel the death instinct in her son, as it has done in her husband. Josefina’s acceptance of her son’s unusual mannerism may be viewed as her escape from the pull of undertow—the recoil force against the drive to change. Unaffected by the sensationalist reporting about Javier’s suicide in the press, she believes that her husband deserves her sympathy. She refuses to view herself as an object of pity or of censure by distancing herself from the social values in which the public shock at her husband’s sexual preferences is grounded. Using Julia Kristeva’s words, one may state that as an abject being, “the more (s)he strays,” from allowing conventional notions of 38

Ibid., 681. Ibid., 679. 40 Mitchell, “The Longest,” 32. 39

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“normal” sexuality to determine her opinion of Javier, “the more (s)he is saved” from viewing herself as a victim of Javier’s deception.41 The process of her escape from the undertow of conventions is enabled by her visit to the back room in the factory, which collapses many boundaries for her, such as those between the sacred and the profane, the tragic and the playful, and the adult and the juvenile. The next story, “Everything was Going Fine,” narrates the aftermath of a broken marriage.42 The narrator is recently divorced. His wife was a brilliant engineer, the first in her class. Rather than honestly appreciating her accomplishments, he derisively recollects her scholastic achievement, signalling his own inferiority complex. What he misses most about being married are the rainy Saturdays spent together, inside the house, watching a movie, or listening to music. He recounts the break-up of his marriage to a stranger—a female nurse—who has accepted his invitation to a hotel room for a sexual liaison. Everything is going as expected until the woman asks him to call her “puta” (whore), at which moment, he suddenly loses all desire. Though he cannot have sex with her, he wants her to keep him company. At this turning point in the story, his desire for sexual release changes to a need for emotional catharsis. He speaks to her about his broken marriage, explaining that it fell apart because he could not have sex with his wife without insulting her. Instead of terms of endearment, he would abuse her verbally, calling her a slut, whore, and prostitute. Peri Rossi gives us a vivid portrait of masochistic dependency. By talking about his sexually violent past, he is assessing whether this would frighten away the nurse. Because she stays, her compassion is verified, and he can derive his “oxygen” from her. After a while, the nurse tells him that he needs a psychiatrist. The man takes her suggestion to be a sign of sympathy and concern. He views her as a suitable person for his masochistic dependency. He feels a surge of sexual appetite and satisfies it by raping the woman. At the end of the story, the man finds himself thinking of his mother, who had brought him up single-handedly. He had got into a fight at school because some students had called his mother a prostitute. When he told his mother about the fight, she admitted that she was a prostitute and was proud to be one because, unlike the father who had abandoned her before the boy was born, she took care of her child with her earnings from sex work. The story unfolds largely through dialogue in the hotel room; the man’s home appears briefly; and the final recollection of the man’s mother happens outside on the road after he leaves the hotel room. The ordinary and the normal play out in the living room where the man and his engineer wife watched films; the hotel room and the road are liminal insertions, where the normal is problematized—the normal of marriage and the normal of the mother–child relationship. The story destroys the construct of the home as a site of nostalgic, sentimental remembrance. For the man, memories of the home turn him into a sexual abuser. His mother’s declaration of pride in her profession, made in the

41 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982), 8. 42 Cristina Peri Rossi, “Todoiba bien,” in Los Amores Equivocados (Barcelona: Menoscuarto, 2015), 47.

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home, generates a hostile afterwardsness that shows its full violence decades later, converting the hotel room into a masochistic space. The third story discussed in this section, “Ulva Lactuca,” uses spatial details to depict the phenomenon of afterwardsness.43 The narrator sets the tone for the story by observing that “In our quotidian lives, there are symptoms that we do not see because they are disguised as reasonable things, and one fine day one discovers that the clues to the disaster lay therein.”44 The “reasonable things” which are “symptoms” of “disaster” in the story are a child’s feeding spoon, her high-chair, and a water-bed. At a purely surface level, the narrative is a slow-moving description of a female infant being force-fed with a metallic spoon by her father. He is persistent in his efforts, trying to tempt the child to eat by showing her attractive drawings on the plates. The mother and father are no longer living together, and the daughter lives with the father. The author avoids using names, using, instead, the pronoun “she” (ella) in an ambiguous manner, not clarifying whether it refers to the child or her mother. The deliberate confusion of the denotations suggests that in the story, both the infant and the woman are subject to patriarchal control and that, in general, the woman’s oppression starts very early in life. The ambiguity is intensified when he says, “Do not permit her to dominate you; she should obey you. Do not give in to all her whims.”45 Both the mother and the daughter resist the man’s offerings by rejecting the spaces offered to them—the mother refuses the water-bed (filled with water), and the daughter shifts about uncomfortably in her feeding chair, shutting her mouth tight against the soup-filled spoon. They are confined to the high-chair and house, respectively. The mother escaped the man’s control by leaving the house. The daughter’s continued presence in the house is perhaps an indication that the struggle against phallocentric domination continues from one generation to the next. The water-filled bed and the soup-filled spoon are semiotic representations of the semen-filled phallus. In their refusal to occupy the water-bed and the high-chair, the woman and the infant signal a visceral reaction to phallocentric subjugation. The narrator’s description of the child’s attempts to break out of her confinement would also serve perfectly as a description of the woman in her home: She did not have great freedom of movement; the chair was a cell to imprison her while she was fed. On this side and that, there were wooden bars which held her, corralled her; she tried to bite them, cut them with her teeth, claw at them, but the wood was hard, resistant; like a dog, she frayed the edges, scraped the surface. “This girl is incapable of eating soup. On the other hand, she eats up the chair,” her father commented one day in a loud voice.46 43

Cristina Peri Rossi, “Ulva Lactuca.” In Cuentos Reunidos, Barcelona: Lumen, 2007. Michael Hirst, “Toxic Seaweed Clogs French Coast.” BBC, August 11, 2009, https://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/europe/8195180.stm. The title of the story refers to an aquatic plant commonly known as sea lettuce. It is harmless while living, but when it decays on land it forms a crust under which a deadly gas is released. If one walks into the crust, one makes a hole in a reservoir of hydrogen sulphide, a very toxic gas. It can impede respiration in animals and people, killing them in less than a minute. 44 Peri Rossi, “Ulva,” 133. 45 Ibid., 136. 46 Ibid., 134.

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The high-chair holds the girl and corrals her. Androcentric structures, in addition to holding down the woman in her defined space, also separate her from others in similar positions by corralling each one individually so that they are robbed of potential collective action. The extract emphatically conveys a similarity of the girl with a trapped, domestic animal. Though her wooden cage confines her, she grasps at the bars, inserts her head in the in-between spaces, and gnaws at it to mark the chair with signs of her resistance. Just as the man cannot understand why the little girl will not open her mouth to the soup but will chew the wood of the chair, he is equally perplexed by his wife’s distaste for the water-bed, which, for him, would have become a site of his homage to her. Perplexed by her refusal to buy the water-bed, he laments, He would have rocked her there like a water goddess, like a statute submerged in water, he would have loved her like a floating virgin, a foaming vestal, surrounded by algae and lichen, he would have built her a marine sanctuary, full of shells, starfish, sea horse, molluscs and jellyfish. Surely, the ancients had a sea goddess. The ancients had gods for everything. Wasn’t Achilles’ mother an aquatic divinity?47

While fantasizing about the water-bed, the man compares his wife to “Achilles’ mother, an aquatic mother.” He cannot recall Thetis’ name, remembering her instead only as the mythological hero’s mother. For him, the woman, even a goddess, exists only through her relationships with men, in this case as the mother of a legendary hero. Peri Rossi’s indirect reference to Thetis evokes an instance of female resistance from Greek mythology. According to Ovid, the immortal sea nymph, Thetis, though promised to the mortal Peleus by the gods, was unwilling to marry him. She liked to ride in from the sea naked, on a dolphin to lie down in a cave by the shore. Peleus happened to discover her there one day while she was asleep. When his words failed to move her, he resorted to action instead and wrapped his arms around her neck; but she proceeded to transform herself, first into a bird, then into a tree, and lastly into a fearsome tigress, giving him such a fright that he let her go.48 Peri Rossi re-enacts the fate of Thetis through the little girl; when the child refuses to be fed, the father holds back her head to immobilize her and thrust the spoon into her mouth. He brought the spoon close to the girl’s face, and with two fingers, he grabbed the back of her neck. I do not want to force you. A possession without limits. The ritual gesture of abandonment. The door you will not open. She felt the grip of two large, powerful fingers. I will not harm you.49

The scene is an adaptation of the attempted strangling of Thetis. Like the seanymph, the little girl does not yield to the man’s superior physical strength. She continues to blow hard at the “semen-soup” in the spoon, splashing it all around, marking the entire space around her with the marks of her disseminated resistance. 47

Ibid., 132. Robin Hard, The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Greek Mythology (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 54. 49 Peri Rossi, “Ulva,” 136, emphasis mine. 48

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The story shows the slow build-up of afterwardsness through a seemingly trivial argument between the husband and the wife over the water-bed. The man repeatedly enacts masochistic self-deflation by claiming that he would have treated her like a goddess on the altar of the water-bed. In this context, Horney’s remark about devotion comes to mind, “under the flag of devotion is actually a sheer clinging to the partner for the sake of allaying anxiety.” Horney’s observation that devotion is merely a decoy for anxious attachment explains the paradox in many societies where the cult of the goddess thrives alongside the patriarchal domination of women. The woman as a goddess is placed on a pedestal, and any woman who is not a goddess is treated with disdain. The last story discussed in this chapter, “A Love Story,” appears to be a direct aestheticization of Horney’s articulation of dependency as the masochist’s “life condition.” The man in the story is shown climbing a mountain with a great weight on his shoulders. He needs to double over because of the steep incline. The awkward posture dislocates one of his ribs which ends up piercing him painfully in the stomach. The destruction of his capable, strong body, beginning with the dislocation of the rib, affects his whole body. He continues his uphill march with the heavy load, which he believes is the load of the woman’s life that she had handed over to him out of love. Describing the difficulty of balancing the load on his back, he says, “Sometimes, her life grazes against my shoulder blades […]”50 When he tries to break the hard crust that has formed between his load and his body, he hears her voice telling him that it is an impossible task because her “love is eternal, indissoluble, and indestructible.”51 Peri Rossi uses the spatial archetype of the mountain to trace the difficult terrain on which the man carries his load. Describing his exhaustion and discomfort, the protagonist–narrator states: Under the weight of her life, I walked hunched over. I no longer saw the sky, nor the tops of tall trees, nor the birds which cruised through the air, nor the butterflies fleeing from the day’s storm. Certainly, I sometimes felt a strong nostalgia for the clouds and the rainbow, but I got used to the stooping walk, to look at only things which walked at ground level.52

At first glance, the reader may feel that the narrator is empathizing with the man in his role as a beast of burden, pitying him for the weight of responsibilities he is forced to shoulder in the name of love. He longs for the sight of trees, birds, rainbow, and clouds yet settles for the dull sights available to him from his bent-over position as he goes about his beleaguered drudgery. A closer look shows that the narrator, through visual changes in the body-space of the man, is describing the internecine impact of dual patriarchal assignations—firstly, that the woman’s life is a burden and secondly, that man has the responsiblity to bear it.

50

Cristina Peri Rossi, “Historia de amor,” in Cuentos Reunidos (Barcelona: Lumen, 2007), 310. Ibid., 311. 52 Ibid., 310. 51

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Peri Rossi can be seen to utilize a feminine variant of the “regime of visuality,” a concept articulated by the geographers Heidi Nast and Audrey Kobayashi.53 They trace a changing regime of visuality with the onset of modernism. Extant before modernism, the “camera obscura regime” assumed a “disembodied mind’s eye” belonging to a “rationalizing, singular observer,” whose vision was undergirded by “geometric optics,” which could divide space into discrete bits.54 During modernism, the camera obscura regime gave way to a physiological way of seeing, which included non-verifiable modes of seeing such as “retinal after-images, images that remain in the eye for a short period of time after the eye is closed or a light source is removed.”55 In the physiological mode, the eye itself became the object of study. In disrupting previous, received notions of a truth situated in a disembodied mind’s eye, then, the scientific relocation of vision in a physiological eye discursively and practically severed the observer from correspondent and visually verifiable ‘truth’ in the material world. The viewing subject, decoupled from a formerly geometrically mediated and stable ‘out there,’ was now considered materially coextensive and mechanistically enmeshed with the world.56

In Peri Rossi’s regime of visuality, the male subject’s body becomes the specimen for study. As the man climbs higher, he can identify the woman’s body that he has been carrying on his back as the source of oozing fluid. The fluid of the woman’s “life,” which he believes had been weighing him down on his path of upward mobility, hardens into a scab. In the burdened journey, the woman gradually desiccates, releasing her fluids—tears, menstrual blood, sweat—which harden into scabs, callouses, and membranes. As a result, he can neither move, speak nor eat. Emaciated, to the point of death, he receives the final consolation from the woman, “I love you, I dedicated my life to you, how could you think you were not going to give me yours?”57 The masochist’s clinging dependency exacts the full price for all perceived humiliations and offences.

3.5 Matrilineal Horror The first three stories discussed in the chapter may be read as representations of masochistic dependencies that originate in a tendency that this study views as “matrilineal horror.” The coexistence of a submissive attitude towards the woman as a mother and the social obligation to treat the woman as inferior is sketched out in the stories through the use of the monstrous. The sexualized child is the “monstrous” element in the quotidian harmony of the normal family in “Strange Circumstances.” 53 Heidi J. Nast and Audrey Kobayashi. “Re-corporealizing Vision,” in BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, edited by Nancy Duncan (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 86. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 76. 56 Ibid., 79. 57 Peri Rossi, “Historia de,” 312.

References

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Javier and Josefina’s son is shown imitating his father’s mannerism by sucking on an unpeeled orange. Josefina’s decision not to check her son for this odd behaviour that resembles his dead father’s signals her acceptance of an “abnormal” sexuality that he might develop in the future. By not demanding submission to “normal” behaviour, she relaxes her maternal hold over him, perhaps liberating him from matrilineal horror as a grown-up man. The “monstrous” element in “Everything was Going Well” is the abusive language that the man uses during sexual encounters. The terms of abuse are not animalistic. Instead, he uses his mother’s profession—slut, whore, and prostitute—as forms of abuse. In the last story, “Ulva Lactuca,” the grotesque father almost strangles his infant daughter. The men in “Everything” and “Ulva” are gripped by the inevitable self-hate of matrilineal horror. They seek refuge from the horror in masochistic dependencies. We can see evidence of self-hate in the final confession from the engineer’s husband, “Perhaps it is true. Perhaps I am a chauvinist cretin who can only accept that women are inferior beings fit to be dominated.”58 These stories of matrilineal horror subvert the normally accepted construct of childhood as a protected space to one that has the potential for inflicting violence and abuse. The threat to childhood, especially male childhood, as an innocent space is located in the negation of matrilineal origins. In the selected stories, spatiality is the emphatic register for playing out masochistic inferiority. The back room lies within the factory, separated from the home. The bed where the nurse is raped and the water-bed where the wife would have been subjected to undesired sex are all spatial registers of embedded inferiority, where the man seeks to establish superiority.

3.6 Conclusion This chapter has discussed the concepts from various feminist approaches to psychology that are relevant to building the framework for spatial analysis proposed in this study. The analysis of selected short stories has shown how the concepts of undertow, afterwardsness, and masochistic and narcissistic dependencies are discernible through a close look at depictions of space. The analysis reinforces the stance that space can very often be a metonymy of oppression, violence, exploitation, and repression. A binocular view of space, such as the one developed in the chapter, can be used to examine the instantiation of masochistic–narcissistic dependencies set in motion by different spaces featured in literary and cultural narratives.

References Bondyopadhyay, S. K. (2005). Annapurna Devi: An unheard melody. Roli Books. Kindle.

58

Peri Rossi, “Todo iba,” 53.

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Dowd, M. (1999). Liberties; Leech Women in Love. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/19/opinion/ liberties-leech-women-in-love.html Hard, R. (2004). The Routledge encyclopaedia of Greek mythology. Routledge. Hirst, M. (2009). Toxic seaweed clogs French coast. BBC, August 11, 2009. https://news.bbc.co. uk/2/hi/europe/8195180.stm. Horney, K. (1939). New ways in psychoanalysis. Trubner & Co. Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror: An essay on abjection (L. S. Roudiez, Trans.). Columbia UP. Maynard, J. Was she J.D. Salinger’s predator or his prey? September 5, 2018. https://www.nytimes. com/2018/09/05/books/review/joyce-maynard-at-home-in-the-world.html. Millett, K. (1990). The loony bin trip. Mitchell, J. (2015). Psychoanalysis and feminism then and now. Interview by Wendy Hollway and Julie Walsh. Psychoanalysis Culture & Society, 20, 112–130. Mitchell, J. (1966). Women: The longest revolution. New Left Review, I/40, 11–37. Mitchell, J. (1990). Psychoanalysis and feminism. Basic Books. Murray, H. (2014). ‘My Place Was Set at The Terrible Feast’: The meanings of the ‘Anti- Psychiatry’ movement and responses in the United States, 1970s–1990s. The Journal of American Culture, 37(1), 37–51. Nast, H. J., & Kobayashi, A. (1996). Re-corporealizing vision. In N. Duncan (Ed.), BodySpace: Destabilizing geographies of gender and sexuality (pp. 75–96). Routledge. Ogden, B. H. (2018). Beyond psychoanalytic criticism. Routledge. Orby, E. (2019). Joyce Maynard’s second chances. New Yorker, February 8, 2019. https://www.new yorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/joyce-maynards-second-chances Paris, B. J. (1994). Karen Horney: A psychoanalyst’s search for self-understanding. Yale University Press. Peri Rossi, C. (2007a). Extrañas Circustancias. In Cuentos Reunidos (pp. 671–681). Lumen. Peri Rossi, C. (2007b). Historia de Amor. In Cuentos Reunidos (pp. 309–312). Lumen. Peri Rossi, C. (2007c). Ulva Lactuca. In Cuentos Reunidos (pp. 130–137). Lumen. Peri Rossi, C. (2009). Yo Nunca estuve en el Armario. Pagina12, August 21, 2009. www.pagina12. com.ar/diario/suplementos/soy/1-935-2009-08-21.html Peri Rossi, C. (2015). Todo iba bien. In Los Amores Equivocados (pp. 47–54). Menoscuarto. Rich, A. (1995). Of woman born. W.W. Norton and Company. Sells, A. M. (2017). Sabina Speilrien: The woman and the myth. SUNY Press.

Chapter 4

The Literary Vector

Abstract In his summing up of the spatial turn, as it stood in 2012, Robert Tally Jr. explained the elements of literary cartography using the concepts of Mikhail Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach, Henry Lukacs, and Fredric Jameson. There is no gainsaying the centrality of the ideas of these legendary critics to the spatial perspective. Any discussion of space would be significantly attenuated if one did not utilize the lenses of chronotope, mimesis, narrative architecture, and cognitive mapping. However, the absence of any women literary critics in Tally’s literary cartography is conspicuous to a feminist reader because there are numerous whose works that are equally vital for spatial perspectives. This chapter presents a brief survey of the field of feminist literary criticism before proceeding to tease out the spatial implications suggested by the conceptual schemes of selected critics. Additionally, the examination of Antigone’s unique position in kinship structures leads to the articulation of the notion of an antigonal position of the minoritarian subject that confronts authority without antagonism. The chapter also explores noted critics’ formulations of de-differentiated and de-sedimented views of unified solidities, visualization of localized speaking spaces, the notion of the female nomadic reader, and chronotopic extensions in centrifugal narratives to derive specific analytic devices that are, subsequently, arranged to create a model for spatial gynocritics in Chap. 5 of the book. Keywords Antigone · De-differentiation · Nomadic · Unflattening · Centrifugal

4.1 An-Other Literary Cartography The literary vector used in this study is, unsurprisingly, far more complex than the other three vectors—anthropology, psychology, and geography.1 It would be a cumbersome project to name all feminist critics whose voices have contributed to the approach developed here. In the interests of precision and brevity, the chapter will 1

Robert Tally Jr., Spatiality (London and New York: Routledge, 2012). He is an Associate Professor of English at Texas State University. He specializes in geocriticism and is the editor of the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series, which in 2020 comprised thirty-two titles. https://www. palgrave.com/gp/series/15002. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 J. Singh, Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1426-3_4

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highlight two main sources that meticulously curate distinct approaches to feminist literary criticism across three continents—Europe and the two Americas—La sarten por el mango (1983) and Sexual Textual Politics (1985).2 In the next twenty-odd years after the publication of these works, Toril Moi’s Sexual Textual Politics came to be widely used as a textbook for feminist literary criticism, going into the second edition in 2002. In contrast, new copies of La Sarten are no longer available, and second-hand versions are difficult to come by. Even though La Sarten’s focus is Latin American women’s writing and only two of its essays are available in English, the analytic perspectives afforded by it have immense cross-over value for feminist literary criticism in general.3 Sharon Keefe Ugalde, taking stock of feminist literary criticism as it stood at the end of the twentieth century, states that “the eleven essays of La sarten por el mango are […] theoretically oriented” and undertake the “process of uncovering and destroying oppressive codes and (re)constructing images that more authentically reflect womankind.”4 To some extent, Spanish-American literary criticism of this phase shares a weakness with its Anglo-American counterpart in that they view womankind and patriarchy as singular, monolithic constructs. Any writing or criticism where patriarchal ideology is treated as a “monolithic unified totality that knows no contradictions” against which “a miraculously intact ‘femaleness’ may pit its strength” is reductive.5 There are distinct modes of patriarchal oppression which evoke differentiated “female” responses: anger, sarcasm, depression, rebellion, revenge, submission, and sublimation, to name a few. Even as Cheri Register, a noted feminist critic from the 1970s, prescribes the portrayal of strong female characters in the literature, which may serve as “role models” for other women, she acknowledges that “female reality is not monolithic but has many nuances and variations.”6 Echoing Register’s observation, several essays in La sarten negate any homogeneity in women’s writing. Rosario Ferré’s remarks on the issue are especially 2

Toril Moi, Sexual Textual Politics (London and New York: Routledge, [1985] 2004). Patricia Elena Gonzalez and Eliana Ortega (eds.) La sarten por el mango: Encuentro de escritoras latinoamericanas (Río Piedra: Ediciones Huracán, 1983). Tener la sarten por el mango is an idiomatic expression in Spanish that refers to the person who is in charge. Literally, it means taking the saucepan by the handle. 3 Rosario Ferré, “The Writer’s Kitchen,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), https:// www.jstor.org/stable/3177966. Josefina Ludmer, “Tricks of the Weak,” in Feminist Perspectives of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, trans. Stephanie Mirrim (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999). 4 Sharon Keefe Ugalde, “Process, Identity, and Learning to Read: Female Writing and Feminist Criticism in Latin America Today,” Latin American Research Review 24, no. 1 (1989): 222–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2503289. Keefe Ugalde is Professor, Department of World Languages and Literatures, Texas State University. She is the author of six books and over eighty critical articles and the recipient of several awards, including Texas State’s Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarly and Creative Activity on two occasions, the 2018 Adela Zamudio Essay Prize, and the 2020 Victoria Urbano. https://www. worldlang.txstate.edu/people/faculty/ugalde.html. 5 Moi, Sexual/ Textual, 63. 6 Cheri Register, “American feminist literary criticism: a bibliographical introduction,” in Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory, ed. Josephine Donovan (Lexington: Kentucky UP, 1975).

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pertinent.7 On the one hand, Ferré emphasizes the lack of uniformity in women’s writing by stating that: The novels of Jane Austen, for example, were rational, meticulously closed, and lucid structures, diametrically opposed to the diabolical, mysterious, and passionate novels of her near contemporary, Emily Bronte. And the novels of both couldn’t be more different from the open, fragmented, and psychologically subtle novels of such modern writers as Clarisse Lispector or Elena Garro.8

On the other hand, Ferré sees some consistency in themes and attitudes across generations and continents. In her estimation, “women’s literature is […] more subversive than men’s because it often delves into forbidden zones—areas bordering on the irrational, madness, love and death—zones that our rational and utilitarian society makes it dangerous to recognize.”9 Just as diverse writing styles by different generations of women can be encompassed under the umbrella writing “women’s writing,” there are several distinct strains of literary criticism that are collectively viewed as “feminist criticism.” We may discern three distinct inflections in twentieth-century feminist literary criticism: images of women criticism, gynesis, and gynocritics. Toril Moi and Elaine Showalter both see the year 1975 as the turning point in feminist approaches to the literature. Before 1975, what Toril Moi calls the “images of women” line of criticism adopted by Kate Millet and Mary Ellmann, among others, dissected texts authored by male writers to reveal stereotypical representations of women as passive and submissive characters.10 Cherry Register’s essay on American feminist literary criticism marks the end of the “images of women” trend, while Annette Kolodny’s essay published in the same year sets the stage for studying women’s writing as a separate category. Taking note of 1975 as the watershed year, Elaine Showalter observes that: If in its origins, feminist criticism derived more from feminism than from criticism, we could argue that today [since 1975] the situation is reversed […] Since 1975, feminist criticism has taken two theoretical directions, that of the Anglo-American focus on the specificity of women’s writing, which I have called gynocritics, and that of the French exploration of the textual consequences and representations of sexual difference that Alice Jardine has named gynesis.11

Cheri Register (1945–2018) was an author and literary critic. Her most famous work is her memoir Packinghouse Daughter that describes her growing-up in working class America. The opening chapter of Packinghouse Daughter was cited as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 1996. 7 Rosario Ferré (1938–2016) is an iconic Puerto Rican writer. 8 Ferré, “The Writer’s,” 242. 9 Ibid. 10 Moi, Sexual Textual, 31. 11 Elaine Showalter, “Women’s Time, Women’s Space: Writing the History of Feminist Criticism,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol. 3, No. 1/2, Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship (SpringAutumn) (1984): 36.

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Though all Anglo-American criticism in the last quarter of the twentieth century cannot be subsumed under the umbrella of gynocritics nor all French theorists under gynesis, these terms are helpful catchwords for the two dominant trends of the time. A large body of work from Anglo-American critics in the field can be described as gynocritics, concerned with the woman as writer and producer of textual meaning. As a critical approach, it disengages the disdainful attitudes of male critics towards feminist criticism and distances itself from male theorizing. Thus, the two major works of feminist literary criticism from the post-1975 phase that focus on woman-aswriter, Showalter’s A Literature of their Own and Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert’s Madwoman in the Attic, follow the lines suggested by gynocritics. These works concentrate on women writers to discern specific characteristics of language and literary influence in their works. In contrast to gynocritics, gynesis is biased towards male theorists and male authors. Gynesis describes the approach of several French feminist critics—Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Helené Cixous, key among them—who rely on mainly Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts to articulate their notion of feminine language. These theorists play up the male–female difference in writing without being concerned about the gender of the writer. However, the dynamics between gynocritics and gynesis are not entirely oppositional. Despite the many differences and disagreements, both strands converge in their revisionist representations of mythical female figures. Helen Cixous, belonging to the gynesis tradition, titles her influential article on female writing, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” while Gubar and Gilbert, squarely placed in the gynocritic tradition, observe that “Circe, Leda, Cassandra, Medusa, Helen, and Persephone have all lately been reinvented in the images of their female creators.”12 Elaine Showalter looks unfavourably upon the gynesis critics’ “dependence on male masters.” Yet, she credits John Stuart Mill as the inspiration behind the title of her first major work, A Literature of their Own. She quotes a line from his 1869 book-length essay The Subjection of Women, which says, “If women lived in a different country from men, and had never read any of their writings, they would have a literature of their own.”13 Thus, Showalter herself is not free of male influences. She further reduces the continental gap by drawing heavily from the conceptual schemes of the French critics to develop an action plan for gynocritics. She acknowledges that “the new French feminisms have much in common with radical American feminist theories in terms of intellectual affiliations and rhetorical energies.”14 Another canonical figure who is key in delineating the prospect for gynocritics is that of Virginia Woolf. Examining the complex intertextuality between Elaine Showalter and Virginia Woolf enables us to unflatten the domain of feminist literary

12

Ibid., 30. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, And Dyer, 1869), 133, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27083/27083-h/27083-h.htm. 14 Elaine Showalter, “Feminist criticism in the wilderness,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 2, Writing and Sexual Difference. UP Chicago (1981): 249. 13

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Fig. 4.1 The Flatlanders’ view16

criticism so that we may see the folds and creases that shape it.15 A flattened view of the field would reduce it to a “single chorus,” depriving the critic of availing of the richness of the multiple points of view it contains. Nick Sousanis, a cartoonist and a noted critic, provides a graphic representation of the reductive “flat” view as in Fig. 4.1. A flat view of Showalter’s opinion of Virginia Woolf would merely see accusations of androgyny and attenuating the feminist cause in Woolf’s denials of her own femininity. However, an unflattened view reveals traces of “anxiety of authorship” and “specular miming” in the title of Showalter’s first book. Aided by these concepts, unflattening enables a deeper exploration of her assessment of Woolf as a feminist icon.17 These traces emerge from complex intertextuality between Showalter and Virginia Woolf. Even though Showalter attributes the title—A Literature of their Own—to J. S. Mill’s essay, it manifestly echoes Woolf’s hugely influential reflection on women’s writing from 1927, “A Room of One’s Own.” The resemblance is curious, given that Showalter unequivocally condemns Virginia Woolf for denying 15

Nick Sousanis, Unflattening (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). The book is based on Sousanis’ doctoral dissertation, which was written in the graphic form. It received the 2015 Lyn Ward prize for the Graphic Novel of the Year awarded by the Penn State University. 16 Ibid., 25. 17 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000). Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell UP, [1974] 1985).

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her femaleness. By accusing Woolf of repressing her anger and ambition, Showalter gives free rein to her own against the modernist icon: For the past fifty years, Virginia Woolf has dominated the imaginative territory of the English woman novelist […]. I think it is important to demystify the legend of Virginia Woolf. To borrow her own murderous imagery, a woman writer must kill the Angel in the House, that phantom of female perfection who stands in the way of freedom. […] For mid-twentiethcentury novelists, the Angel is Woolf herself.18

Showalter does not soften her tone even when commenting on Woolf’s suicide. She refers to the tragic event as “one of Bloomsbury’s representative art forms,” calling Woolf a “failure of androgyny.” Her rage appears to be symptomatic of the anxiety of authorship. Gubar and Gilbert observe that for the nineteenth-century woman novelist, the absence of predecessors created an “‘anxiety of authorship’—a radical fear that she would not be able to create, that she could never become a ‘precursor.’”19 Showalter appears to suffer from similar anxiety about Virginia Woolf. She wants to “demystify the legend of Virginia Woolf” but mimics the title of Woolf’s essay. Her mimicry may be seen as an enactment of Luce Irigaray’s paradoxical miming that attempts to undo the effects of a tradition by overperforming the tradition. Irigaray relies upon the mediaeval mystics, who were mostly women, to explain mimicry as a strategy for rebellion. These mystics overperformed religion by enactments of trances and ecstasy to gain visibility in a male-dominated religious order where they were expected to remain occluded. Showalter’s choice of the title despite her sustained criticism of Woolf and her choosing to define gynocritics with a quote from Woolf is perhaps an unintended overperformance of “femaleness” to turn attention away from male-authored texts. By the time Showalter brings her idea of gynocritics into sharper focus, some four years after publishing her doctoral thesis, her anger towards Woolf has sublimated into veneration. Though she does not go as far in her endorsement of Woolf as a feminist as another critic who finds that “Woolf’s argument for androgyny is a situational triumph, rejecting the ghettos, stating that woman’s art contains the man, contains the woman, has access to both,” Showalter declares Woolf’s linguistic politics as consummately feminist.20 She does not dilute her endorsement by any references to the “failure of androgyny” or murder of the “Angel in the house.” Rosario Ferré is another instantiation of paradoxical anxiety of authorship and specular miming featuring Virginia Woolf. In an essay that explains her motivation for writing, Rosario Ferré confronts two dictates that the feminist canon has imposed upon her: Virginia Woolf’s to write with “objectivity and distance,” and Simone de Beauvoir’s to construct “exterior realities, principally […] those of a historical and social nature,” avoiding the “interior realities” of a woman’s intuition, emotion, and irrationality.21 Recently divorced and completely disillusioned with the stabilizing 18

Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own, Princeton UP, 1977, 265. Gubar and Gilbert, 49. 20 Rachel Blau DuPleiss, “For the Etruscans,” in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 281. 21 Ferré, “The Writer’s,” 230. 19

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promise of marriage, Ferré was resolved to inculcate the gospel of Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf in her writing. She decided to adopt a style that was marked by “nothing less than an absolutely serene language, which could let the truth of the material emerge exactly as Simone and Virginia had advised.”22 Yet, when she finished the story, she realized that she had violated both tenets regarding objectivity and exteriority. She had poured out her anger in her story and miserably failed in her objective of writing in a “neutral, harmonious, distant way.”23 She had also careened away from Beauvoir’s insistence on presenting the exterior socio-historic reality. Instead of a macro-narrative of her country’s shifting socio-political landscape from a landed sugar oligarchy to an industrial, professional plutocracy that she had set out to write, she had ended up exorcizing her interior demons by writing a story about honey-filled dolls.24 Rosario Ferré, like Showalter, was charting the unexplored territory of feminizing magic realism. In the process, she, along with other women writers like Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel, was setting in motion the “Boomito,” an explosion of women’s writing against the backdrop of an exclusively male phenomenon of “Boom” that had put Latin American literature on the world stage like never before.25 In the essay, Ferré reveals her fears that by disregarding Simone de Beauvoir’s advice to avoid “womanly” themes such as love and representation of interior realities and Virginia Woolf’s to write with distanced objectivity, she may fail to be a precursor to the community of women writers. Ferré is aware that in the absence of predecessors, she must overperform femininity to be noticeable. She establishes a contrast by miming. Where Beauvoir had established a link between childbearing, immanence, and the female tendency of submissiveness, Ferré sees it as a source of distinctive creativity. Ferré resorts to biological essentialism—the fact of carrying children “within”—as a justification for the predominance of “interior experiences, experiences which have little to do with the historical, social, and political” in women’s writing. Miming Virginia Woolf’s wish to see literary representations of complicated relationships among women and her lament that “so much has been left out, unattempted,” such as lesbian attraction and professional relationships, Ferré identifies a specific lacuna in women’s writing and women’s critical appraisal of that writing. She notes that women critics have adopted diverse lines of analysis to reveal that “violence, anger, and […] disharmony with their situation” generate the “energy” that impels women to write. However, Ferré observes that none of the critics comment on the use of sexual and otherwise profane language in women’s writing. In 1927, the mere mention of same-sex attraction, a glimpse of the image of two women working together, redressed the issue for Virginia Woolf, and in 1985, Ferré wants to bring profanity centre stage. Both women point out the need to make the hidden, visible, and the silenced heard. 22

Ibid., 230. Ibid., 233. 24 Rosario Ferré, “The Youngest Doll,” in The Youngest Doll (Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1991). 25 María Rosa Olivera-Williams, “Boom-Realismo Mágico, Boom and Boomito,” in The Cambridge History of Latin American Women’s Literature, ed. Iliana Rodriguez and Monica Szurnuk (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016), Kindle e-book. 23

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A reading of Ferré’s short stories would negate her claim that interior experiences have nothing to do with the historical, social, and political circumstances. As a fiction writer, she created historically charged women protagonists who embodied a political position against gender oppression and made socially nihilistic statements like “inside every housewife, there is a prostitute, and inside every prostitute, there is a housewife.”26 Using the feminine stereotype as a subversive trope to represent female tactics of resistance and rebellion was a characteristically Boomito technique that Ferré used effectively. Thus, though she affirms that she fails to rise to her mentors’ call to write the historical, social, and political, she, in fact, meets that objective with great efficacy because she crafts new tools and techniques, for example, the use of profanity and the absence of active male characters in her stories and novels. The brief examination of the trajectory of feminist literary criticism and the fairly detailed analysis of the Showalter–Woolf–Ferré intertextuality were necessary to enunciate two premises about feminist literary criticism that are foundational to constructing the model attempted in the present study. The first, taking note of the anxiety of authorship among women writers, is that the feminist reader will need to tease out inherent feminist implications, however obscure, in the writers’ work to avail of their full theorizing potency. For example, the use of angry, profane language by Rosario Ferré should not be construed as excessive sentimentality or as an outlet for personal anguish; instead, it should be seen as a powerful collective protest against the patriarchal treatment of women. Cristina Peri Rossi’s representations of the Jocasta complex are not endorsements of sexualized motherhood, but denunciations of motherhood distorted by patriarchal control. The second premise, derived from the convergences in divergent tracts of the domain, is that a simultaneous engagement of multiple perspectives unflattens feminist literary criticism, rendering it more fertile than strict adherence to any single perspective. The analysis in this chapter focuses on six literary critics whose extensive work on women’s writing provides specific foundational concepts for constructing a theoretical framework for spatial literary criticism. Various concepts from the literary and cultural commentary of Jean Franco, Josefina Ludmer, Sara Castro Klarén, Nattie Golubov, Rachel Falconer, and Joy Ladin are assembled along the lines suggested by Debra Castillo’s six-point strategy for feminist literary criticism into a theoretical framework for “Spatial Gynocritics.”

26

Rosario Ferré, “When Women Love Men,” The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories, ed. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999).

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4.2 Jean Franco: Antigonal Archetypes Jean Franco’s An Introduction to Latin American Literature (1969) was one of the earliest attempts at literary cartography across the eighteen Spanish-speaking countries of the continent.27 The project was exceptionally forward-looking because it preceded the frenzied attention that Boom novels would bring to Latin American literature. In 1969, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude had not been translated into English. The merits of this novel that would dominate the literary imaginary the world over for the next few decades were still being debated.28 Still, Jean Franco, in a reversal of what Jorge Luis Borges had termed exteriority within interiority, mapped a hundred and fifty years of Latin American literature in her first publication.29 Franco was the first Professor of Latin American Literature in England and did not have Hispanic heritage. As a British academic, who chose to specialize in the relatively unexplored field of Latin American literature in anglophone academia, Franco represents the interiority within exteriority. Franco’s literary cartography project takes on decolonial and gendered hues with the publication of Plotting Women in 1989, where she expands her field of study to include indigenous women’s writings.30 Jean Franco urges female literary critics to develop theoretical models instead of practicing what she calls “crítica de rescate” or “rescue criticism,” that is, identifying lesser-known women writers or undervalued works of well-known women writers to rescue them from oblivion.31 Though, by no means of diminished value, the largely descriptive rescue criticism is more common than theoretical criticism, she urges for an analytical critique that can build a kind of criticism that not only draws from 27

Professor Franco has been decorated by the governments of Mexico, Chile, and Venezuela for her work on Latin American literature and has received awards from PEN and from the Latin American Studies Association for lifetime achievement. She has served as President of the Latin American Studies Association in Great Britain and of the Latin American Studies Association in the U.S. https://english.columbia.edu/content/jean-franco#:~:text=Professor% 20Jean%20Franco%20was%20the,Latin%20American%20Literature%20in%20England.&text% E2%80%89=%E2%80%89She%20has%20published%20The%20Modern,%3A%20Cruzando% 20Fronteras%20(1996). 28 Alvaro Santana-Acuña, “How One Hundred Years of Solitude became a Classic,” The Atlantic, 22 May 2017, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/05/one-hundred-yearsof-solitude-50-years-later/527118/. 29 Jorge Luis Borges, “El Escritor Argentino y la Tradición,” in Obras Completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974). 30 Jean Franco, Plotting Women Gender and Representation in Women (New York: Columbia UP, 1989). 31 Jean Franco began her career in London where she held positions at Queen Mary College, King’s College of London University, and The University of Essex through the late 1960s. She moved to Stanford University in 1972 and became a professor of Spanish at Columbia University in 1982. Franco won the 1996 PEN award for her contribution to disseminating Latin American literature in English and has been decorated by the governments of Chile and Venezuela. She has won both the Gabriela Mistral and Andrés Bello medals in recognition of her scholarly accomplishments. She is currently Professor Emerita of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. https:// muse.jhu.edu/article/2504.

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feminist theory but also contributes to it, a goal that she describes as “more ambitious” than that of “criticism of rescue.”32 Therefore, Franco sees the need for increased efforts towards creating theoretical frameworks, which are formulated by female critics for the study of women’s writing. This study’s point of departure for teasing out the theoretical implications of Franco’s work is the discussion of Antigone in a chapter from Plotting Women titled “On the Impossibility of Antigone and the Inevitability of La Malinche.”33 The original rendering of Antigone by Sophocles in his Theban plays from the fifth century BCE has inspired operas, ballets, theatre adaptations, films, novels both textual and graphic, and philosophical treatises. La Malinche is an equally potent historical personality whose literary and cultural representations have been key in the formation of Mexico’s national identity. She was an indigenous American woman who was gifted as a slave to the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1519. She became his lover and strategic advisor because she spoke several indigenous languages and was politically astute. She is considered by some as a traitor to her people because she actively aided the fall of the Aztec empire and subsequent colonization of Mexico, whereas others see her as a defiant woman who used her intelligence to rise from the position of a slave to one of respect in the imperial court. In her unique decolonizing reinterpretation, Jean Franco juxtaposes Antigone against La Malinche as laterally reversed images along the state–family axis. Antigone chooses family over the state when she illegally crosses the walled boundary to bury her brother in violation of the king’s decree. In contrast, La Malinche chooses the conqueror’s ruling establishment—the colonizing state—over her family. Therefore, in the estimation of some literary giants like Octavio Paz, she is seen as a traitor to her people because she aided Hérnan Cortés in the conquest of Mexico by becoming his translator and lover. Franco observes that the “anti-Antigone legend” of La Malinche is inevitable in the literature of a continent marked by civil wars. When the enemy is the neigbour, and vice versa, the family–state boundary is ruptured, causing dislocation of inherited positions. Thus, one can see that the Antigone archetype serves as a fertile symbol of embodied female suffering and protest. According to Judith Butler, a kinship system that affixes an individual’s position in the established social order cannot assign any position to Antigone because of the multiplicity of unconventional bonds in her familial structure. Her father, Oedipus, is also her brother as they have the same mother, Jocasta; her brothers Polynices and Eteocles are sons of her brother–father; therefore, they are also her nephews; her mother, as the mother of her father, is also her grandmother.34 “Antigone is caught in a web of relations that produce no coherent position within the kinship. She is not, strictly speaking, outside kinship or, indeed, unintelligible. Her situation can be understood, but only ‘with a certain amount of horror.’”35 The “horror” Butler 32

Jean Franco, “Apuntes Sobre la Crética Feminista y la Literatura Hispanoamericana.” Hispamerica, vol. 15, no. 45 (1986): 32. 33 Franco, Plotting Women, 129. 34 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia UP, 2000), 58. 35 Ibid.

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speaks of is not the reaction to Antigone’s tragic condition, but the horror at the erosion of the omniscience of kinship and other social norms. She cannot occupy a fixed position in the social order of the day, not because it is denied to her but because the order does not have adequate knowledge to interpret her in the social structure. Antigone (Antígona in Spanish) is somewhere in between on the spectrum that has antagonism at one extreme and acceptance at the other. Thus, we may understand La Malinche’s positions—slave, concubine, political advisor, royal consort—not as those of an anti-Antigone “legend” but as antigonal locations which are the inevitable outcome of sociological illegibility. As a slave, La Malinche was denied access to kinship networks; as a concubine, she was a tradeable commodity. Therefore, the allegation that her alliance with the enemy was a betrayal of “her” people begs the question of who “her” people were. As she had been enslaved by her people, her insertion into an alien structure, where she effectively functions as a strategic political advisor and claims a royal lineage for her son, is an emancipatory move, in which vengeance may be a means but is not the end. Another example that clarifies the notion of an antigonal stance is that of the women mystics in the mediaeval Catholic Church and the reformist women poets of the Bhakti movement in India. The women mystics in the catholic order would claim to have seen divine visions that drove them to physical ecstasy. They were often asked to write down their experiences by the male clergy. They wrote under obligation, forced by the priests to document their experience. From this antigonal position, where these celibate nuns described their encounter with God in sexual terms, they carved out a strategic feminine writing. The shift away from an antagonistic space towards the antigonal space converts the conflict with patriarchal control into a mere backdrop for the assertion of the self. In mediaeval Tamil Nadu, the woman poet Andal claimed to be the beloved of Lord Vishnu. In North India, Mirabai considered herself married to Lord Krishna. Both women wrote poetry marked with eroticism to express their divine love. Karaikkal Ammaiyar, also from Tamil Nadu, composed gothic verses in praise of Lord Shiva. As these women refused to walk the linear tract marked by the four life stages of daughter–wife–mother–widow, they had to move along zigzagging antigonal paths. Without posing any antagonizing challenge to the established order, they, however, subverted the archetype of the conventional scholarly, authoritative, grave Holy Man. The mystics and women poets performed their adulation and worship in public, with complete abandonment, in open defiance of appropriate female comportment. Still, in their antigonal locations, they elicited not only fascination but respect from society. As a final example of the antigonal subversion, Gabriela Mistral’s poem “Antigone” will be taken up for discussion. Internationally, Gabriel Mistral (1889– 1957) is best known as the winner of the 1945 Noble Prize for literature. She was the first woman to win the award for literature in the Spanish language and the first Latin American to win it. Before her, two dramatists, José Echegaray and Jacinto Benavente, from Spain had won the award. Mistral bucked the trend of literary writing as being the preserve of elite classes. She was brought up by a single mother on a seamstress’ wages. Mistral started her professional life as a schoolteacher in a small town but soon moved to Santiago, the capital city, as the principal of an elite girls’

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school. She had been publishing poetry from a young age, and the publication of her collection Desolación in 1922 established her reputation as a writer. The same year, she travelled to Mexico, at the invitation of the Mexican minister for education, where she worked on educational reforms and establishing public libraries. Mistral represents an atypical hybrid of individual marginalization and public canonization. When she won the Nobel Prize in 1945, Chile did not have universal suffrage; therefore, she was not eligible to vote in her own country. The government and local media projected her as the embodiment of mother earth, forever-giving. She was seen as replete with endless reserves of caring, despite suffering extreme sorrow in her personal life such as the suicides of her fiancé and young nephew, whom she treated as a son. Though she wrote many poems for children and poems about the beauty of her native Elqui valley, her poetry is not confined to the celebration of innocence and natural splendour. In her final poetry collection, Lagar, which was published 2 years before her death, “[t]he tone of moral security, of tender didacticism, of speaking from safety on behalf of the childlike and vulnerable, is gone.”36 She eschews the sentimental tone of her earlier poetry and the pastoral mission that had defined her public persona. The collection included a section titled “Mad Women,” which was expanded posthumously to feature twenty-six poems that have been translated to English. The titles of poems in Gabriela Mistral’s “Mad Women” read like a list of conditions that could drive a woman to madness—“The Abandoned Woman,” “The Anxious Woman,” and “The Sleepless Woman,” among others. However, Mistral’s madwomen are not tragic; instead, they are “strong, intensely human beings confronting situations to which no sane response exists.”37 The poem “Antigone” is part of this collection. Mistral concentrates on the phase of Antigone’s life, which she spends taking care of Oedipus, her blind father, in exile. Mistral’s Antígona is “a liminal being, neither the powerless daughter nor the empowered sister,” who is not selfless.38 Though she shows great tenderness towards her father, she does not see herself merely as his extension. She feels the pain of injustices done to her. Mistral shows Antigone walking on “a road of dust and gravel,” where the “frozen sky […] bites the nape” And now the wind that smells of mangers, of sweat and the snorting of cattle, is the lover that lashes my neck and injures my back with his wail.39

Though she voluntarily accompanies her father in exile, Antigone is not portrayed as uncomplainingly sacrificial. She resents the welts on her back, the bruises on her 36

Randall Couch, “Introduction,” in Mad Women: The Locas Mujeres Poems of Gabriela Mistral, trans. Randall Couch (Chicago: UP Chicago, 2008). 37 Couch, 2. 38 Catherine Boyle, “Antígona de Gabriela Mistral, y los Brotes Gemelos de la Memoria y el Olvido,” Cátedra de Artes No. 11 (2012): 22. 39 Gabriela Mistral, “Antigone,” in Mad Women: The Locas Mujeres Poems of Gabriela Mistral, trans. Randall Couch (Chicago: UP Chicago, 2008), 95.

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neck, and the foul odours that she must tolerate. Her dislocation from the palace to the manger is the spatial marker of her social dislocation. When she had gone into exile, she had been engaged to marry the son of the man who has displaced her father as the king. She remembers that “In summer they were going to marry me/my breast was going to suckle twins.” Instead of cradling new life in her arms, she has to make a bed from twigs and herbs for her dying father. Mistral subverts the conventional archetype of the empowered sister and powerless daughter by placing Antigone in a liminal zone, where she neither mounts a challenge to the sovereign authority nor does she surrender to her circumstances. Lacking in antagonism, she makes a display of her personal situation—her antigonal location—to emphasize the state’s injustices. We may see Antigone as a liminal archetype in the liminal zone between the grandeur of the palace and the squalour of the manger. Examining the spatiality of liminal archetypes reveals the techniques of subversion deployed by the writer. It draws out a fresh cognitive map for the reader, overwriting accepted cartographies. Archetypes are not engendered only in mythologies but also in geometry and topology. J. A. Laponce, the political theorist, identified four orders of spatial archetypes.40 The first-order spatial archetypes include the point and the line, which refer to the idea of a point in space and the idea of continuity in space. The bounded line generates the second-order archetypes, the square, triangle, circle, directional line, arrow, and cross. The third-order archetypes such as the pyramid, mountain, and valley are a combination of those from the second order. For differentiation of the fourth order, Laponce suggests a cultural location of the archetype—for example, dancing in a circle in tribal societies heightened the sense of unity, whereas marching in a single file indicated martial resolve. Thus, Laponce follows a sequence of unstraightening, composition, and embodiment at each level of differentiation—the line is bent to form a circle, the globe is composed of a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree rotation of a circle, and the embodied representation of a circle in a dance has cultural connotations. Laponce acknowledges the difficulty of visualizing spatial archetypes that are expressed linguistically rather than physically. Therefore, identifying the basic spatial archetypes underlying political thought is more difficult than identifying those that underlie paintings or sculptures, but it is not so difficult a task as it might appear at first. The study of language, in particular of metaphors and directional verbs, corresponds to what, for a painting, would be provided by the study of the direction of light, the balance of masses, the use of colour, and the identification of the schematic lines indicating either movement or rest. To the extent that all literature is political to some extent, we may consider Laponce’s analysis of spatial archetypes in political language as relevant for literary analysis. Laponce develops his analysis through three propositions: firstly, spatial archetypes have culturally specific “natural” meanings, secondly, any “natural” meaning is an abstract notion that can be reversed, and thirdly, the reversal has a 40 J.A. Laponce, “Spatial Archetypes and Political Perceptions,” The American Political Science Review, vol. 69, no. 1 (1975): 13.

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cost. The cost of reversing the “natural” meaning is paid by those groups in society that do not subscribe to that meaning and, therefore, affect the reversal. They spend resources—temporal, emotional, intellectual—in acquiring additional knowledge about the normal meaning and the modification apparatus—theoretical and ideological. They also use resources in dealing with the stress and friction produced by interspersing the modified space within the normal space. Following Laponce’s propositions, the spatial reading in this study will attempt to “identify the spatial archetypes” provoked by some literary representations of the liminal space and examine the costs associated with the provocation. This technique of reversing culturally specific “natural” meanings associated with a space can be understood with the help of one of Cristina Peri Rossi’s stories titled “The Museum of Useless Efforts.” The museum featured in the story is an archive of reported accounts of the failures of people. The woman in charge of the museum maintains systematic records, classified by year and theme, placing an identifying code on every file. Each file logs futile individual efforts reported in the media or brought to the knowledge of the museum curator by visitors. These efforts include those of a man who, for 10 years, tried to make his dog speak, some prostitutes who tried to find another profession, a woman who tried to make a painting, a dwarf who wanted to grow tall, and a has-been boxer who tried to reclaim his title five times. When these “efforts” are classified along gender lines, male and female patterns emerges. The male efforts reflect the “imperative” mood, the need to train other species, the ambition to stay the champion, and the difficulty of not measuring up to male dimensions. In contrast, the female efforts reflect a “subjunctive” mood that is entirely self-aspirational; the catalogued failures include a woman who wants to express herself creatively and another who wants to escape the exploitation of sex work. In terms of Mieke Bal’s spatial poetics, the spatiality of the archives emphasizes the immutability of power structures. The place where the museum now stands was once a battle fortification. It suggests that a power centre earlier sustained by the might of armies has now become a storehouse and producer of knowledge—another type of power centre. Bruno Latour classifies museums, along with libraries, universities, and publishing houses, as powerful “centres of calculation” because these institutions tell us what is associated with what; they define the nature of the relation; finally, they often express a measure of the resistance of each association to disruption. Of course, they are utterly impossible to understand without the mobilization process […] they are nevertheless the true heart of the scientific networks, more important to observe, study and interpret than facts or mechanisms because they draw all of them together inside the centres of calculation.41

Museums store and display knowledge mobilized by experts. Objects which are not put on display there are those that have been deemed worthless by the curators who make calculations in the centres. The “mobilization process” of museal exhibits is controlled by a powerful elite who act as guardians of culture. In the story, the museum’s 41

Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987), 241.

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[…] building was erected in the periphery of the city, on a barren field, full of cats and trash, where one could still find, only a little below the surface of the ground, cannonballs from an ancient war, rusty sword pommels, mule jaws worm-eaten with time…it is believed that where the museum now stands, there was a fortification, during wartime. They used heavy foundation stones, some girders and propped up the walls.42

The story reverses the conventional positionality of the museum as a power structure. The archives, located on the periphery, act as a liminal space for the museum curator and the visitor who inhabits it and for thousands of others who have been saved from oblivion because a record of their efforts exists there. The male visitor and the female curator exist in communitas, each in pursuit of their own “useless effort.” The archives offer a liberating potential to both. In recognition of the curator’s meticulous work, the director of the museum offers her a promotion. The organizational structure does not have a designation for a higher position; therefore, the director decides to call her the Vestal of the Temple. We may conclude that the traditional archetype of the vestal virgin is rendered liminal by the spatial logic of the story. The spatial archetype of the temple is a bounded square where revered icons are kept protected and sacred. Following Laponce’s fourth-order of differentiation, we can culturally locate the square of protection as a spatial representation of the need to preserve the faith in the power of divine entities. Culturally, such an edifice would be erected on a site considered auspicious by the keepers of religion. In a subversive logic, the story sets up the archives as a temple of failures, erected on a wasteland, on the debris of ancient wars. The story antigonizes the conventional archetype of the vestal virgin as an embodiment of sacred knowledge into a liminal archetype of a curator of failures of faith. The museum is also given an antigonal position that defies location by the use of the standard structural coordinates. It is a “museum”— an edifice that symbolizes cultural power, but its artefacts are “useless efforts” made by people who do not have any claim to power.

4.3 Josefina Ludmer: De-Differentiated Oscillations Josefina Ludmer (1939–2016) was a highly acclaimed Argentine literary critic. She was also a Professor of Latin American literature at Yale University for 17 years, until her retirement. Her study of the gaucho genre is considered a definitive work on the subject.43 She articulated the notion of post-autonomous literature in a 2007

42

Cristina Peri Rossi, “El museo de los esfuerzos inútiles,” in Cuentos Reunidos (Barcelona: Lumen, 2007), 66. 43 https://fas.yale.edu/book/faculty-retirement-tributes-2005/josefina-ludmer.

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essay that garnered immediate and widespread acclaim as Ludmer made it freely available on open-access digital platforms.44 However, it is Ludmer’s contribution to La Sarten that is a key input to the approach attempted in the present study. The essay titled “Tricks of the Weak” is one of two from the volume that was translated to English. The subject of the essay is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a celebrated Mexican poet and nun from the seventeenth century and the author of what this study considers to be the world’s first feminist manifesto— La respuesta a Sor Filotea. It was translated into English and entitled A Woman of Genius: The Intellectual Autobiography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Literally, the title should translate as The Answer to Sister Filotea. The original Spanish title and its literal translation indicate the provenance of the work, which was written in the form of a response to a letter. Therefore, we will refer to the work as The Answer (La Respuesta). As early as 1690, Sor Juana makes a case for women’s right to study all fields of knowledge—Logic, Rhetoric, Physics, Arithmetic, Geometry, Architecture, Law, History, and Music—hitherto forbidden to women. The Answer was the final response to a controversy churned up by Sor Juana’s display of erudition. On one occasion, Sor Juana had expressed her critical views about the sermon of a Portuguese Jesuit priest. An unknown person in the audience, fascinated to hear a woman argue a theological point of view, asked her to write the speech down for his personal record. Unknown to Sor Juana, he circulated the written criticism among the clergy, and it finally reached the Bishop of Puebla. The bishop disagreed with Sor Juana’s ideas and did not approve of her contentious tone. But, because he did not want his observations to be treated as an authoritarian rebuke from a senior member of the Church, he used a female pseudonym, Sor Filotea, to write a letter of admonishment. The Bishop of Puebla published his letter along with Sor Juana’s critical commentary, which he titled Carta Atenagonica. When her views became public, they attracted widespread censure from the clergy. The bishop then asked Sor Juana to write her autobiography so that she could explain her point of view more elaborately. The main thrust of the bishop—Sor Filotea’s letter was to reinforce the prevailing belief that certain fields of knowledge are not suitable for women, and, as a woman, Sor Juana would be better off concentrating more on reading the scripture rather than exploring its secular aspects. Sor Juana disputed this view vehemently and eloquently in her response, calling out the gender discrimination practiced by the Church. Josefina Ludmer uses the phrase “tricks of the weak” to describe Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz’s ingenious interplay of the oppositional fields of saying and knowing. The field of saying is the field of writing and publication. It is a public space subject to the 44

Josefina Ludmer, “Postautonomous Literatures,” trans. Shaj Mathew, Mitosmag, September 26, 2018. https://www.mitosmag.com/infideles/2018/9/26/postautonomous-literatures?rq=josefina% 20ludmer. Ludmer defines post-autonomous literatures as follows: “these territorial literary practices of the quotidian, are based on two (self-evident) postulates about the world today. The first is that all that is cultural and literary is economic, and all that is economic is cultural and literary. And the second postulate of these writings would be that reality (which is constituted by its changing media) is fiction and fiction is reality. […] They leave literature and enter ‘reality’ and the everyday, the reality of the everyday—the everyday being TV and the media, blogs, email, internet, etc.).”

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ordering and disciplining of those who hold positions of authority thus, and it must conform to the law of the establishment—the “Other’s” law. The field of knowing, on the other hand, is the private sphere which only responds to “my law.” To know and to say or to speak, Sor Juana demonstrates constituting opposing fields for a woman. Whenever the two coexist, they occasion resistance and punishment. “Saying that one doesn’t know, not knowing how to say, not saying what one knows, placing knowing over not saying”—this series sustains the “tricks.”45 Ludmer picks out the word “tricks” from Sor Juana’s text. In La Respuesta, Sor Juan describes how her first attempts at acquiring knowledge involved deception. As a child, she “tricked” both her teacher and her mother—embodiments of authority—to avail of reading lessons. She lied to the teacher that her mother had approved the lessons and deceived her mother by keeping silent about the reading lessons she was taking. Ludmer notes that “Silence constitutes Juana’s space of resistance vis-à-vis others’ power.”46 She speaks (a lie) to the teacher, who is a lower authority figure and stays silent before the mother, who has greater control over her. Similarly, Sor Juana suffered silently until the bishop asked her to “say” her opinions. Once she has permission, Sor Juana does not hold back, defiantly talking back to authority. In this respect, Sor Juana’s rebellion is similar to that of a homemaker who engages in politics or science without giving up her assigned place, that is, without becoming a politician or a scientist. Ludmer explains that this practice of transference and transformation reorganizes given social and cultural structures: the combination of respect and confrontation can establish another truth, another approach to science, and another subject of knowledge. To the question of why there have been no women philosophers, one can answer that women have not engaged in philosophy from the space delimited by classical philosophy but rather from other zones.47

Sor Juana’s demand that all fields of study should be made legitimate for women was rooted in respect and not confrontation. The Church placed the knowledge of scriptures at the top of the tree of knowledge. She justified her demand by stating that in order to attain the highest form of knowledge found in sacred texts, “one must climb the steps of the human sciences and arts; for how one could undertake the study of the Queen of Sciences [Theology] if first one had not come to know her servants.”48 Ludmer upends Sor Juana’s tree of knowledge, creating an inverted pyramid in which the woman’s text becomes the starting point for reading the science, philosophy, and politics embedded in it. She observes that to look at women’s writing for depictions of pain, emotions, interiority, and conventional motherhood is tautological because these qualities are already assumed as “natural” female qualities; no further insight can be gained by revisiting these aspects. To break the “circle which merely confirms the difference of the socially differentiated is to posit an inversion: that is to read 45

Ludmer, “Tricks,” 87. Ibid., 89. 47 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, A Woman of Genius: An intellectual autobiography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (Salisbury: Limerock Press, 1987), 35. 48 Ibid., 40. 46

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women’s discourse for the ways in which abstract thinking, science, and politics is filtered into it through cracks of the familiar.”49 Ludmer’s call for de-differentiation is not an attempt at a fusion of binaries. De-differentiation implies the freedom to oscillate between supposed binaries and diffuse the oppositional charge in the process—a practice exemplified in the life and writings of Sor Juana. Before she joined the convent, Sor Juana was the cynosure of the Viceroy’s court. She was regularly on display at court, and visiting dignitaries were astounded by her brilliance. Even after moving out of the royal court, she maintained her romantic relationship with the Viceroy’s wife and enjoyed the exceptional privilege of having a private library in the convent. Sor Juana occupied the palace and the convent in such a way that they turned into de-differentiated spaces for her. The process of de-differentiation articulated by Ludmer leads to a fall in traditional divisions such as public–private, realist–vanguard, and historical reality–fiction so that other territories and subjects can be distinctly seen, other temporalities and narrative configurations, other worlds that do not recognize traditional moulds. These absorb, contaminate, and de-differentiate the separated and the oppositional and trace other frontiers.50

This study posits the concept of “spatial de-differentiations” as an application of Ludmer’s de-differentiation to spatial reading, which calls for a “fall in traditional divisions.” It urges the critic to take note of “abstract thinking, science, and politics” as it filters through the “cracks of the familiar.” Utilizing this tool allows the literary critic to decipher theories from the fields of psychology, politics, philosophy, and economics embedded in the spatiality of the text. Such deciphering is not merely a decoding process; it also destabilizes the authoritarian positions built on simple differentiations such as sciences–humanities, literature–mathematics, fiction–physics, sociology–geometry, and so on. With the aid of a short story, we can see how scientific theories can filter into literary fiction. Such filtering of scientific theories into literature has been analysed in the works of canonical writers like Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lewis Carrol, and George Elliot. Tennyson is feted as the “poet of science,” and the play of Mathematics in Lewis Carrol’s works has attracted considerable attention.51 Several critics have examined Eliot’s “mobilization of terms and concepts from evolutionary and cell biology, clinical pathology, neurophysiology […]” in her fiction.52 Therefore, Ludmer’s call for de-differentiation is not one that lays down a new analytic track; she asks that de-differentiated tracks should be traversed more often by critics, especially when reviewing women’s writing. 49

Ludmer, “Tricks,” 86. Josefina Ludmer, “Territorios del presente. En la isla urbana,” Pensamiento de los Confines 15 (Dic) (2005): 103. 51 John Holmes, “The Poet of Science: How Scientists Read Their Tennyson,” Victorian Studies, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Summer 2012): 655, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/victorianstudies.54.4.655. F. Abeles, “Mathematics: Logic and Lewis Carroll,” Nature 527(2015): 302–303. https://doi. org/10.1038/527302a. 52 Ian Duncan, “George Eliot’s Science Fiction,” Representations, Vol. 125, No. 1 (Winter 2014), https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2014.125.1.15. 50

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One may see how de-differentiation may provide an unusual analytic perspective by examining the short story “The Runner Stumbles” by Cristina Peri Rossi. A detailed analysis of the story is provided in Chapter Six. At this point, the analysis uses the tool of de-differentiation to examine the mention of the theory of the variable speed of light (VSL) in the story. The narrator refers twice to VSL. The first time is when the speed of the protagonist, a champion runner, is compared with the velocity of light. The narrator states such a comparison would be meaningful only if one assumes that “light passes through space at a constant velocity.”53 At another point in the story, the narrator remarks that “the velocity of light always varies, according to the Brazilian physicist.”54 Thus, the narrator suggests that lauding the champion’s velocity is illusory. In Physics, the VSL theory is posited to explain the horizon problem, which is also known as the homogeneity problem. It attempts to understand why the universe appears the same in all directions even though light from the sun reaches different points in the universe at different times.55 As the more recent theory, VSL offers an alternative explanation to the one provided by the cosmic inflation theory, according to which the same starting matter is the reason for the apparent homogeneity of the universe. Contradicting the older theory, the VSL theory states that light travels at different velocities in a vacuum, so the same starting matter would not ensure homogeneity. According to VSL, time, space, and frequency affect the speed of light. The idea that light does not have the same speed always serves as an analogy for the contrast between the champion runner’s external and internal perceptions. Publicly, he is lauded for being “as fast as light, if light, at all, travels through space at a constant speed,” but internally, it is the stagnation of his competitive life that causes him to feel exhausted.56 Therefore, the expression “as fast as light” may be construed as an ironic description of his privately perceived stagnation. The writer questions scientific certainties by pointing out that the speed of light, assumed to be constant in numerous theoretical formulations, is not an irrefutable number but a debatable value affected by time and space. By using a complex scientific concept as a rhetorical tool to convey the protagonist’s emotional state, Peri Rossi diffuses the boundary between science and emotion, de-differentiating both domains. Science, as well as emotions, are marked by doubt and dilemma. When one combines Ludmer’s articulation of de-differentiation of previously “separated and oppositional frontiers” with Deleuze and Guattari’s articulation of “sedimenting,” it generates a conceptual tool for spatial readings: “spatial desedimenting,” through which the subversive capacity of space is revealed. Accepting Ludmer’s observation that boundaries among separated domains are permeable

53

Cristina Peri Rossi, “El corredor tropieza,” in Cuentos Reunidos (Barcelona: Lumen, 2007), 244. In the story, the scientist who developed the theory is Brazilian, however it was actually developed by a Portugese scientist, Joao Magueijo. Calling the Portugese scientist Brazilan, is perhaps Peri Rossi’s light-hearted attempt at post-colonial reappropriation. 55 Michael Fairbairn, “What is the horizon problem?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTwCdJ ftYD0&ab_channel=kingscollegelondon 56 Peri Rossi, “El corredor,” 244. 54

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allows for the possibility of shuffling any hierarchical arrangement—the key to “desedimentation.” Deleuze and Guattari use the geographic analogy of the creation of sedimentary rocks to explain the production of rigid structures. Rigidity in structures is the outcome of “phenomena constituting an overcoding […] phenomena of centring, unification, totalization, integration, hierarchization, and finalization.”57 For Deleuze and Guattari, sedimentation is the process that imposes statistical order of connections and forms on molecular units. Subsequently, it establishes functional, compact, stable structures and constructs the molar compounds in which these structures are simultaneously actualized.58 For example, a heteronormative, hierarchical, patriarchal society is a compound comprised of the molecular units of stable family sediments, hierarchical workplaces, orthodox religious institutions, purportedly representative–democratic political organizations, and other stratified configurations. As an obverse to sedimentation, this study proposes spatial de-sedimentation as the process which unsettles the statistical order of sediments. In spatial terms, the first stage of de-sedimentation would involve questioning the selection of certain places as the natural habitat of the woman (home, parlour, kitchen, and market) and the feminization of certain spaces (dream, mystic, inner, and private)—the spatial equivalents of the geographic “deposits [of] units of cyclic sediment according to a statistical order.”59 The second stage would examine any “folding” which “sets up a stable functional structure” that subordinates the female place and feminized spaces in a hierarchy where expansive, national, global spaces are masculinized and treated as privileged zones, as worthy objects of theorizing whereas small, feminized spaces within the creases of the fold remain untheorized. In short, spatial de-sedimenting would contest the selection, feminization/masculinization, and hierarchization of spaces utilizing a technique of unfolding.

4.4 Sara Castro-Klarén: Localized Speaking Spaces Sara Castro-Klarén is a Peruvian-born Professor Emeritus at the Johns Hopkins University.60 She urges that the divisions which striate the monolithic construct of womanhood must not be erased and argues that theorizing should not blur the local into the global.61 The process of keeping local differences visible counters hegemonic 57

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: UP Minnesota, 2005), 41. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 In 2017, Dr. Catro Klaren was appointed Commander of the Peruvian Order of the Sun (La Orden del Sol de Perú). This award is the highest possible distinction the Peruvian government can confer upon an individual. In 2000, she was named to the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. https://johnshopkins.academia.edu/SaraCastroKlaren 61 Sara Castro-Klaren, “The Subject Feminist Theory and Latin American Texts,” Studies in 20th Century Literature, vol. 20, no. 1 (1996).

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homogenization by exposing “specific naturalizations of the dominance metaphor.”62 An instance of specific naturalization is discussed to show that the naturalization of any marginalized position is problematic. When one says that traditional medicine systems of the Mapuche people of Araucanía, Chile, or the Kani tribe of Kerala, India, are less scientific than allopathic treatments because they do not report test data, we are generating specific naturalization of the dominance metaphor. Traditional forms of medicine develop from a “different” understanding of the human body. These systems consider the mental and the physical as inseparable from medical diagnosis, and the human being’s health as dependent on the surrounding ecosystem. The noted environmental activist Vandana Shiva remarks that traditional medicine is “based on inter-connectedness and living processes while ‘modern medicine’ is based on a mechanistic paradigm of separation, reductionism, fragmentation and on pharmaceuticals derived from the chemicals and dye industry.”63 While one system measures its success by how many ill people it “treats,” for the other, the primary objective is “healing,” that is, good health resulting from the prevention of illness. The results of allopathic treatments can be cast as numeric data, but the healing outcomes of traditional medicine are not quantifiable; therefore, data-based comparisons between the two are meaningless. Castro-Klarén’s insistence on highlighting the local is not limited to emphasizing demographic markers of belonging—such as race, gender, class, and ethnicity. Her approach demarcates local knowledges as those that can be differentiated from the mainstream current on epistemological grounds. For Castro-Klarén, local connotes a location that enables a contestatory dialogue with existing knowledge discursivities without being homogenized by them. Castro Klaren cites three completely distinct texts—a work of post-humanist feminist theory, a short story collection, and a testimonial—as textual “knowledges” that contest the dominance metaphor: Simians, Cyborgs and Women by Donna Haraway, on one end of the polar extreme, and Una pasión prohibida (A Forbidden Passion) by Cristina Peri-Rossi, and Rigoberta Menchu’s Me llamo Rigoberta Menchu y asi me nació la conciencia (I Call myself Rigoberta Menchu and so was Born my Consciousness) at the other end, provide examples of contestatory knowledges which at once risk reinscription into the ontology of the Western subject and yet subvert the existing order of discourse and power.64

To further explain the importance of geopolitically dispersed knowledges, CastroKlarén revisits a famous episode from the 1975 women’s conference sponsored by the United Nations in Mexico City.65 The conference attracted a wide-ranging class of women—educated professionals, writers, academics, prostitutes, urban activists, 62

Ibid., 290. Vandana Shiva, “2 Futures of Health, 2 Paradigms of Science,” Deccan Chronicle, February 6, 2018, https://www.deccanchronicle.com/opinion/op-ed/090218/2-futures-of-health-2-paradigmsof-science.html. 64 Castro-Klaren, “The Subject,” 290. Rigoberta Menchú, the Guatemalan Nobel Laureate, is famous worldwide as an activist for women’s and tribal rights. 65 The year 1975 was declared “International Women’s Year” and 8th of March was celebrated as International Women’s day by the United Nations for the first time at this conference. 63

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as well as factory and mineworkers from industrial towns. One of the participants, Domitila Barrios de Chúngara, had led a female resistance movement against the mine-owning public corporation in her hometown, Siglo XX, in the state of Potosí Bolivia. She was attending the conference as an activist for workers’ rights. During the conference, when a group could not come to an agreement about the agenda on a particular day, the head of a Mexican delegation, a bureaucrat, asked Domitila to “forget about the suffering of your village, about the massacres” so that they could talk, instead, woman-to-woman about “you and me.”66 Domitila responded, Madam, I have now known you for a week. Every morning you arrive in a different dress, and I don’t. Every day you arrive with [your face] made up and [your hair] coiffured like someone who has the time and money to spend at an elegant hairdresser. And I see that every evening you have a chauffeur in a car that waits for you at the gate of this establishment to take you home, and I don’t […] Madam, tell me: Do you have anything similar to my situation? Do I have anything similar to your situation? Then, of what equality are we going to talk about?67

Domitila’s response to the expensively dressed, groomed, chauffeur-driven woman is a testimonial affirmation of the ontological question that feminists have long grappled with: What is a woman? The answer to that question begins with the recognition that there are divisions within the umbrella term “woman.” However, the answer cannot be framed along a singular division of hegemonic–subaltern class conflicts embodied in the Mexican bureaucrat and the Bolivian activist. Rural/urban, bourgeois/proletarian, intelligentsia/industrial, and wealthy/poor, these binaries constitute those fractures that are discursively readable. These legible fractures hide some illegible ones that need to be probed under a magnifying lens. The sense of entitlement that led the sophisticated Mexican delegate to presume that she could direct Domitila away from her local concerns is a legible fracture, which is discursively visible. However, a probing magnifying lens is required to reveal why Domitila was unable to identify with the problems of hundreds of prostitutes present at the conference, or with the lesbian demands for the right to love another woman, or with the characterization of “man” as “hangman.”68 Such a probe must locate itself on the inside because the intra-fractures among subaltern groups are only visible from a localized viewpoint. Domitila’s testimonial titled Let Me Speak! (Si me permiten hablar) is an example of localized probing and speaking. Domitila states in her testimonial that her husband played no role in the injustices she suffered. Instead, he was a comrade-in-arms in her struggles. He took care of the children and worked in the mines, while she went out on protests and attended conferences to spread awareness of the exploitation of mineworkers in her town. Domitila had been a personal witness to a state-sanctioned massacre of mineworkers; she had faced jail time, had been tortured by the authorities, and suffered a miscarriage in the violence. Her oppression was not at the hands of 66

Domitila Barrios de Chunga’s first name is used from this point onwards for the sake of brevity. Domitila Barrios de Chunga, Si me permiten hablar, narrated to Moema Viezzer (Mexico City: Siglo xxi editores, [1977], 2013) n.p., Kindle ebook. 68 Ibid. 67

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her husband or the men of her village but was the outcome of class-based economic exploitation. Clearly, there is room for accommodating differentiated conditions of marginalization within the larger discussion of women’s issues. Therefore, the critic must remain cognizant that “the woman” is not a unipolar marginal position against “the man.” Yet, all the distinct discourses of exploitation (prostitutes, miners’ wives), exclusion (lesbians), discrimination (the urban, educated woman), and marginalization (homemakers) converge on the premise that being a woman creates additional problems. Domitila was tortured and jailed like many men in her village, but none of her fellow-miners shared her experience of the miscarriage she suffered because a soldier’s boot kicked her in the stomach. The man shares many forms of physical abuse, economic exploitation, and social oppression with the woman of the same class, but there are some that can only be experienced by a woman. Thus, though the speaking positions for differently located women do not constitute a unified chorus of indistinguishable voices, they are part of the same choir. The internal conflicts among several feminisms which separately seek to address women’s exploitation in specific contexts and the larger conflict of each differentiated group with those who subsume the issue in that of class struggle can be resolved by using the perspective provided by Gayle Rubin, At some point, Marx asked: What is a black slave? A man of the black race. He becomes a slave only in certain determined relations. We may paraphrase: What is a domesticated woman? A female of the species. One explanation (for domestication) is as good as another. A woman is a woman. She becomes a homemaker, wife, merchandize, Playboy bunny, prostitute, or human Dictaphone only in certain determined relations.69

Domitila, as a mother of seven, wife of an underpaid miner, in another set of “determined relations,” could have become the quietly suffering wife unable to do anything more than succumb to injustices done to her and her family. However, she became a speaking subject. Domitila and Sor Juana resist naturalizations of female resistance in the dominance metaphor. Domitila points out the fallacy in the urban delegate’s request and Sor Juana in the Church’s stance on women-suitable knowledges. Ludmer’s and Castro-Klarén’s speaking subjects though three-hundred years apart, working in disparate ambits, through different tools, show two points of convergence. The first convergence has to do with equating “speaking” with “replying.” Sor Juana answers her Bishop and Domitila’s responds to a question posed by the head of a delegation. In these narratives, a speaking subject necessarily mounts an accusatory reply to questions posed by authority. She not only talks back to authority but she also “interrogates” it. Olga Grau, a Chilean philosopher, remarks that “It is the silence of others that sustains, always, the word of the one who speaks […] If he is interrupted, questioned, reviled, his status as subject of power will be questioned.”70 The right to 69

Gayle Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Duke UP, 2011), 34. Olga Grau, Ver desde la mujer (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1992), 58, emphasis mine. Olga Grau (b. 1945) served as the Head of the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at the Centre for Gender Studies and Culture in Latin America (CEGECAL), University of Chile. 70

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ask questions belongs to the one in authority. Domitila claims this right by framing her answer as a set of questions: “Do you have anything similar to my situation? […] What equality are we talking about?” Sor Juana asks her persecutors—all respected members of the clergy: “Who was it who had my letter printed unbeknownst to me? Who entitled it, who bore the cost, who honoured it, it being so unworthy in itself and in its author?”71 The power to accuse is characteristic of the speaking subject. The nun in 1690 and the miner’s wife in 1975 “interrupt” the maleness of authority with female insubordination. Secondly, both critics carry out a Derridean analysis rooted in absence rather than presence by emphasizing the role of silence and lack. Ludmer sees the power of resistance in Sor Juana’s silent knowing, and Castro-Klarén lauds Domitila’s claim to power based on the lack of conventional markers of power: appropriate clothing, car, diction, and education. According to Castro–Klarén, feminists must speak as “specific intellectuals” and not “universal intellectuals.” Here, she is using the terms as postulated by Foucault, whereby specificity connotes a scientific temperament that is not beholden to any sectarian interests. This study relies upon an equivalent specificity of space in building an analytic model. Because specificity is important, every spatial element in the narrative, denoted and connoted, has conceptual significance. Moreover, because the location of knowledge is significant, the analysis must attempt to delimit the location of the limen, the base station for our analytic journey. The limen, as the threshold stage, divides two—pre-liminal and post-liminal— states. By corollary, localizing the limen signifies identifying the specific boundaries along which it is inserted and exploring the implications of this insertion. To localize is to de-homogenize. Every liminal being does not go through a uniform transitional path in the liminal space or identical transformational experiences. Through specificity, the analysis should strive to reveal the structural norm that each liminal location perforates. The choice of the story that is taken up to illustrate the technique of localizing the limen is influenced by Domitila’s position that a “man” is not always the perpetrator of oppression; sometimes, even he is the victim. “HB2” by Cristina Peri Rossi shares its title with the name of a fictitious new cancer drug mentioned in the story. At the start of the story, a conference organized by the manufacturers of HB2 is in progress. Several pneumopathy and oncology specialists are attending the event, which will showcase the drug HB2. The site of the conference is a luxury mountain resort. The social structure on display in the story is constituted by a hegemonic assembly of doctors and pharmaceutical professionals. Patients are present at the conference in the form of dehumanized charts and statistics. They are reduced to numbers in a data study, existing only as test reports and radiographic images. The conference has an official, sacred side and an unofficial, burlesque one, giving it a “typical carnivalesque character.”72 On the sacred side, doctors discuss the varying outcome of different treatment procedures, confounding instances of idiopathic conditions, and future directions for medical practice. The carnival’s burlesque facet is highlighted when the doctors 71 72

Inés de la Cruz, 20. M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Blooomington: Indiana UP, 1984), 158.

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unburden themselves from the cares of the world to enjoy carnal pleasures. Providing a satirical justification for the luxuries offered to the participants, the narrator tells us that The sessions were rather tiresome, the organizers—Johnson and James Laboratories—knew it; therefore they had put out a wide selection of compensatory options: the guests could stay the full weekend free of cost in the hotel and enjoy its various additional services (spa, sauna, jacuzzi, cold and hot water pool, chocolate baths, mud baths, hairdresser, manicurist, fax and internet service) without paying, charging all expenses to the organizers’ account. Rental of porn films in the rooms were also included.73

The extract above describes the spatiality on one side of the limen. The facilities at the hotel resemble expensive toys. The doctors, like over-indulged children, are being compensated for their hard work by being given free luxuries. They are being incentivized to do as they are told, which is to increase the sales of HB2 by prescribing it to their patients. To ensure compliance, the doctors have to be reminded that the luxuries on offer have conditions attached. That is why the narrator includes the fax and the Internet in the same list as mud baths and jacuzzi. The conference room is populated with markers of professional life like rectangular glossy paper sheets, a rectangular wallet of velvety smooth suede, the shining cartridge of a Cartier pen, and a canister with capsules of HB2. Similar oblong shapes of the pen and capsules suggest a strong link between the instrument with which the doctors will write the prescriptions and the product that will enrich them. Mirroring rectangular shapes of the advertising brochures and doctors’ wallets further heighten the nexus between pharmaceutical companies’ profits and doctors’ earnings. The more money they make, the greater their renown, and the greater the luxury of the conferences they will attend in the future. The objects are arranged to show the components in the infinity loop of power. If the doctor does not make use of all the elements, the loop will break, and he will have to exit from the structures of power. The other side of the limen comes into view when the narrative brings into focus a group of six doctors. One doctor among them, who had declined the services of the company-provided sex worker the night before, says he wants to show the others something. Unaware of his celibate night, the others joke that it might be the corpse of the prostitute from the previous night or lewd photos of his other sexual encounters. This scene places the burlesque and the sacred in sharp contrast. The mood instantly becomes sombre when the doctors hear that their colleague wants to share an X-ray with them. He asks for their prognosis about the diseased lungs displayed on the X-ray film. Everyone agrees that the X-ray shows a terminal case of lung cancer. They conclude that the patient will at best survive 3 months; therefore, he would be an ideal subject for trying out the new drug HB2. Responding to their unanimous opinion, the doctor who is displaying the X-ray reveals that it is his own. His revelation may be seen as a typical carnivalesque “gesture of debasement” that “combines a destructive theme with that of renewal on another, material bodily level.”74 The protagonist destroys the idea that medical research can 73 74

Cristina Peri Rossi, “HB2,” in Habitaciones Privadas (Barcelona: Menoscuarto, 2012), 58. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 158.

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prolong longevity for everyone and renews his self-image as a vulnerable, mortal human being. Appearing to express an impersonal medical opinion, he declares that he would not give the patient more than 24 hours; therefore, there would be no opportunity to prescribe HB2. The doctor’s announcement sounds the death knell on the carnivalesque festivities as it clearly indicates his intended suicide, within 24 hours. As soon as the fluorescent tube of the viewing board lights up the X-ray, the doctor exposes his vulnerability and loses his position of authority in the power structure. He is relocated in the plastic film on the acrylic board. When he displays the black and white image of bones separated by empty spaces and diseased tissue, the boundaries between his interior and exterior space collapse. Brought out in the open, the dull greyscale tones of the X-ray contrast the glossy paper, velvety suede, and shiny pen accessible only to successful doctors, not to dying patients. Devoid of the markers of social status, he is in the liminal space, where he has the liberty to go against the corporate directive of prescribing the new drug. He even takes the liberty of going against his profession’s norm of prolonging life for commercial reasons, no matter what its quality may be. His refusal to turn his body into a site of commercial exploitation indicates a newfound viewpoint. For the other doctors, who occupy fixed positions in the structure, the carnival offers a temporary release from boredom and conformity, but for the one who divests himself of his sacerdotal robes to become a localized speaking subject, lasting emancipation comes within reach. Like Domitila, he has nothing in common with the other doctors once he has classified himself as a patient. The X-ray photograph is the limen that puts the corporations and doctors on one side and the vulnerable patient on the other. The doctor transitions from a state of visible power to another state, where vulnerability becomes the source of his power. The X-ray is a stark representation of how he used to see his patients and now serves as a mirror of his condition. When located in the domain of the dominance metaphor, the X-ray is a confirmation of a terminal medical state; when seen as a localized speaking space, the X-ray delimits the domain of transitional stages.

4.5 Nattie Golubov: La Lectora Nómada (The Female Nomadic Reader) While discussing the notion of the nómada reader, the use of the Spanish term is retained because it genders the nomadic reader. Nattie Golubov, a Mexican feminist literary and cultural critic, reaffirms the post-structuralist feminist literary critics’ stance that literary and cultural texts not only represent the signified but also create it. Explaining the signifier–signified relationship, she observes that it is “neither causal nor casual, so that, signs should be interpreted as part of a system of conventions

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to understand the mechanism of their signification, [because] by themselves, [signifiers], do not signify.”75 A productive route to understanding the signification process is examining the relationship between signifiers. Domitila Chungara’s aforementioned testimonial memoir presents multiple, but not exhaustive, representations of the same signified—Domitila the wife of a poor miner, Domitila the mother of seven children, Domitila the activist, Domitila the delegate at an international conference, and Domitila, the author. A nomadic reading that Golubov postulates would look at the lines of connection that run through the multiple signifiers without concerning itself with the issue of which of these is the least or most authentic representation of Domitila. To develop her construct of the nómada reader, Golubov relies on two essays— one authored by the cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin and the other by Joan Scott, a literary critic. She also draws from Rosi Braidotti’s concept of the nomadic subject. At the start of her theorizing, she makes the seemingly trivial, but, in fact, perceptive observation that the feminist critic is as much a discursive product of her own context as the speaking subject of the text and its author are of their respective contexts. The feminist reader occupies a position vis-à-vis the text which could be described as a nomad’s—constantly in search of new habitats because none that she has inhabited so far offers her a permanent position. Echoing Sor Juana’s and Domitila’s “replies,” discussed earlier, Golubov’s lectora nómada poses a counter stance to Julio Cortazar’s notion of a female-reader (lectora hembra). In one of the most iconic novels of Latin American Boom literature, Rayuela (Hopscotch), Cortazar describes a female reader as “the type that doesn’t want any problems but rather solutions, or false and alien problems that will allow him to suffer comfortably seated in his chair.”76 Cortazar uses the masculine pronoun throughout the novel to refer to the female reader. Therefore, overtly he is not criticizing women, but by using the female adjective pejoratively, he is essentializing femininity as pleasure-seeking, escapist, and averse to dealing with complexity. In contrast, the female nomad reader’s subject position is neither comfortable nor sedentary. Golubov sees constant mobility and instability in the subject position she articulates; she does not adopt a fixed stance that is “entrenched in an ideological position; instead, she occupies a place of enunciation that is necessarily unstable, from where she ‘cooperates’ irreverently with the text.”77 The female nomad reader shares with the exile the sensation of not being “fully adapted” to the interpretative practices and methodological procedures of institutionalized literary criticism, and hence, she cannot return to her former condition of being the respectful reader who adheres to the “principle of cooperation.”78

75

Nattie Golubov, “La Literatura Feminista y sus Lectoras Nómadas,” Discurso, Teoría y Analísis, Num. 31, Universidad Autónoma de Mexico (2011): 51. 76 Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Pantheon books, [1963] 1987), 439. 77 Golubov, “La Literatura Feminista,” 43. 78 Ibid., 56.

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Golubov demonstrates how the nomadic feminist reader, though a product of her selfconsciousness as a feminist, can occupy multiple positions through her stereoscopic view enabled by the affordances of multiple lenses of feminist literary criticism. In sequential terms, there are two ways of tracing the narrative of feminist criticism— synchronic and diachronic. Adopting a diachronic viewpoint, Golubov sees feminist criticism as a collective linear bildungsroman, “which begins with the ingenuity of the first criticisms [, moving] to the current sophisticated theorizations.”79 As a female nomadic reader, lectora nómada, Golubov jumps from the diachronic viewpoint to a synchronic viewpoint, which marks out the highlights of each phase without linking them in an evolutionary chain. Her multiple viewpoints enable a deeper unflattened view than the one that would have been afforded by any one perspective. Drawing an analogy with Golubov’s characterization of her diachronic view as a bildungsroman, we may term the synchronic view of each phase as a roman—à– clef, a novel that needs a key to access its significance. Some of the questions that a roman-à-clef view of feminist criticism would raise are: What discursivities lead to the success of each distinct line of analysis? Despite being severely criticized subsequently by feminists, why is Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics perhaps the bestselling doctoral thesis ever? How do oppositional approaches coexist in feminist thought?80 Sustaining multiple and even conflicting positions provides the nómada reader with multiple keys, each unlocking a different reading of the text. In Golubov’s estimation, a study would occupy nomadic positions, in as much as it “transits between languages.”81 Within the context of this study, languages would refer not only to systems of writing—English and Spanish, but also to interpretative systems of disciplines like geography, anthropology, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and feminism, among others. In order to interpret literary texts, the nomad reader transits between languages, cultural artefacts, and spaces (the public and the private); she takes into consideration discursive and non-discursive processes that fix and stabilize identities and significations, she is conscious of the geopolitics of knowledge and of the situated and embodied construct of the subject.82

This study amplifies the oscillating movement between public and private spaces suggested by Golubov to accommodate multiple spatial targets. The spatial critic may take a diachronic view that traces the mutating spatiality in women’s writing as a chronological evolution from home to workplace, from the countryside to city, from the farm to office, from the salon to brothel, and from the convent to academia. The additional issue that confronts the spatial reader is the synchronous analysis of each of these locations. In the diachronic view, the literary critic could make a commentary on the transition from the farm estates in novels like María Luis Bombal’s The House of Mist (1937), written during early industrial capitalism, to the supermarkets and highrise apartment blocks of Silvina Ocampo’s short stories from the 1970s written during 79

Ibid., 52. Luce Irigaray’s poetico-theoretical readings are as critical to feminist thought as Elaine Showalter’s rejection of male masters. 81 Golubov, “La Literatura Feminista,” 54. 82 Ibid., 54. 80

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late financial/transnational capitalism, and then onward to Peri Rossi’s hotel rooms and airport waiting-lounges of the current phase of hypermobile global capitalism. In a synchronic view, the spatial feminist critic could examine how and to what extent each of these spatialities contributes to the current debate on multiple gender issues. Golubov’s insistence on including both “discursive and non-discursive processes” and the “geopolitics of knowledge” suggests the conceptual tool of “speculative materiality of the limen,” for spatial analysis. Here, two connotations of the word “materiality” are relevant—the non-discursive physicality of the limen and its discursive relationality. Using this tool would require a consideration of the physicality of the space and its relationality to the socio-cultural-economic-political context. A nomadic view shows that the materiality of the limen is a “speculative” materiality. A brief discussion of speculative materialism throws light on the idea of speculative materiality. In 2007, a group of philosophers brought together related strands of philosophical thought to articulate a branch of philosophy, which they labelled “Speculative Realism.” A fundamental concept of speculative realism was enunciated as speculative materialism. As a philosophical approach, speculative materialism contests the notion that only intra-human relationships and the human sensorial experience of any non-human entity are suitable subjects for knowledge formation. Instead, the speculative materialist approach asserts the existence of a “great outdoors” that is not relative to human perception.83 It “exists in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not.”84 Consciousness and language constitute a “transparent cage” that prevents human thought from perceiving the exteriority that lies outside the cage. The assumption that human perception is integral to the existence of a thing generates a “correlationist” bind.85 A possible way of releasing thought from the correlationist bind is to recognize that the material properties of objects, or other non-human existences, can have infinite facets. Only some of these facets or “singularities” become manifest in any human interaction. For example, different sets of singularities of wood become perceptible when a carpenter shaves it, a woodcutter chops it, a sculptor chisels it, and when it is burnt in the hearth or the funeral pyre. Given the finitude of human perception, the complete materiality or the “hacceity” of a thing can never be known to human beings. Still, one can speculate on the materiality. Thus, speculating on the materiality of the limen implies exploring its discursive and non-discursive singularities. The efficacy of the tool of “speculative materiality of the limen” can be assessed by focusing on a defensive apparatus featured in Cristina Peri Rossi’s short story “Tsunami.” The story describes the attempts of a lone woman to save her city from an impending disaster—a tsunami—about which only she has foreknowledge; in the moment of crisis, she plans to tie up the sea in a huge canvas marquee to contain the gargantuan waves that would drown her city. The coarse thickness of the canvas and the rough, jagged rope convey the difficulty of her mission. Her hands chafe when 83

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: A&C Black, 2009), 7. 84 Ibid., 6. 85 Ibid., 5.

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she tries to tie the cords, and the cloth is too voluminous for her to manage. The same adjectives—crude, coarse, and rough—used to describe the non-discursive materiality of the limen are congruent with the discursivity of various marginalized social groups. These groups include conservationists, advocates of slow-living, defenders of tribal rights, and activists against gender violence who are able to see the dangers of practices of hegemonic control not only for themselves but also for the entire society. However, to fight for their causes, which are of paramount social importance, they are equipped only with crude, coarse, rough tools which have limited impact against the widespread desire for quick and large commercial profit.

4.6 Rachel Falconer and Joy Ladin: Chronotopic Extensions Any discussion of space in the literature would be incomplete without a Bakhtinian intervention. Chronotope connotes the inherent inseparability of spatial and temporal indicators in literary narratives. Mikhail Bakhtin’s treatment of the literary, artistic chronotope, has served as a fertile seeding ground for various lines of literary and cultural criticism. Explaining the cognitive function of the chronotope, Rachel Falconer writes: Bakhtin argues that each literary genre codifies a particular worldview, which is defined, in part, by its chronotope. That is, the spatial and temporal configurations of each genre determine in large part the kinds of action a fictional character may undertake in that given world (without being iconoclastic, a realist hero cannot slay mythical beasts, and a questing knight cannot philosophize over drinks in a café).86

Falconer adds that every text does not sustain a singular chronotope. Instead, texts frequently feature the clash of spatio-temporal configurations. Therefore, she argues for a close examination of different chronotopes evoked by the text as a means of gauging its cognitive impact. In the citation provided above, Falconer’s cognitive mapping of the literary-time space aligns the café as the realm of sharing ideas, thoughts, and musings, with a truncated temporality of shared drinks in a café. In contrast, the expansive realms associated with mythic beasts evoke the long quests of adventurous knights. However, as the analysis of a story in the next paragraph will show, the same setting can evoke not only different but antithetical chronotopes. Falconer finds that analysing heterochrony—the term for the interplay of different chronotopes—“provides the ground for dialogic inter-illumination of opposing world views.”87

86

Rachel Falconer, “Heterochronic Representations Of The Fall: Bakhtin, Milton, Delillo,” in Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope Reflections, Applications, Perspectives, ed. Nele Bemong et al. (Eekhout: Academia Press, 2010), 123. 87 Ibid., 112.

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To see the interplay of different chronotopes, a story titled “The Games” by Cristina Peri Rossi is taken up for discussion.88 The narrative unfolds in different sections of a museum, which has artefacts and natural history exhibits but no visitors. A man and a woman live in the museum, and they pass their time by playing various games, including the game of hide-and-seek. The rules of the game dictate that if the hidden player is discovered, then he/she would have to suffer a punishment, however degrading, assigned by the winner. Three rounds of the game are played out in the story—in the first one, the man hides, in the other two, the woman. They play the game at night and, in the process, litter the museum with fragments of broken exhibits. Rats nibble on the leftovers of their food on the floor. During the day, they sleep on the filthy floor of the museum. The filth is the first clue to the decay of the heritage reified in the museum. On the sixteenth day, standing on the staircase, the woman declares that she is going into hiding forever, and if the man is able to discover her hiding place, she promises to give him “a secret and fabulous reward.”89 The woman’s decision to go into, possibly endless, hiding is her first act of negation of the rules of the game. Her eternal hiding generates an unexpected outcome in the game—by evading discovery, she evades punishment in perpetuity. When the morning comes, he knows he has lost. He never sees the woman again. At the ending of the story, he is able to glimpse only a flash of her face threatening him with an “equivocal, malignant, frozen, and fixed” grimace, just before it disintegrates.90 The chronotope of the Gothic castle, evoked by ancient exhibits, dominates the narrative, but there are frequent flashes of the chronotope of the threshold. Bakhtin distinguishes between the two by stating that in the chronotope of the Gothic castle, “[t]he traces of centuries and generations are arranged in […] visible form as various parts of its architecture, in furnishings, weapons, the ancestral portrait gallery, the family archives and in the particular human relationships.”91 Its antithetical chronotope of threshold is devoid of historical memory. It conveys momentary flashes of the future, and it is associated with “the breaking point of life, the moment of crisis, the decision that changes a life (or the indecisiveness that fails to change a life, the fear to step over the threshold).”92 Bakhtin mentions the “staircase, the front hall, the corridor” as suitable sites for evoking the chronotope of threshold, which is related to “falls, resurrections, renewals, [and] epiphanies.”93 In the story, this chronotope flashes when the woman, standing on the staircase, makes her declaration to hide permanently. The staircase is a typical threshold space that leads in two directions simultaneously. The Chronotope of the threshold flashes again “shining with malignant light” in her visible but undiscoverable hiding place, which combines

88

Cristina Peri Rossi, “Los Juegos,” in Los Museos Abandonados (Barcelona: Lumen, 1974). Ibid. 90 Peri Rossi, “Los Juegos,” 106. 91 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: UP Texas, 1981), 246. 92 Ibid., 248. 93 Ibid. 89

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permanence and transience.94 By going away into hiding “forever,” she has abandoned the man and moved to another secret refuge in the museum. She cannot change her interior orientation without an appropriate spatial transition. External and internal thresholds must both be crossed for any significant change. By the interplay of the two antithetical chronotopes, the story effectively converts the “games” that the man and woman play into a hunting expedition, from which the woman wants to escape. Her constant movement suggests a search for unforeseen exit routes through the thresholds located inside the Gothic castle-like museum. Operating in a similar dialectic mode, Joy Ladin, the transgender writer, academic, and activist, deterritorializes the chronotope from the field of long prose narratives where Bakhtin had rooted it and relocates it in poetic texts. The transposition from prose to prosody takes into consideration the balance of centrifugal and centripetal energies in narrative and non-narrative texts. Ladin explains the significance of the balance as follows: Literary chronotopes represent shifting balances between the centrifugal forces […] The more the balance in a given chronotope favours the centripetal, the more stable the chronotope will seem […] the more pervasively it will structure the elements of the text and the experience of reading it […] The more the balance favours the centrifugal, the more fleeting, fragmentary, phantasmal the chronotope will seem, the harder to recognize or define—and the more closely it will reflect the idiosyncratic, transitory nature of individual perception.95

Ladin cites the famous short poem of William Carlos William as an example of a poetic text infused with centrifugal energies: so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.96

In a poem that has only 16 words, every word, and every line break is loaded with a signifying charge. Only one word, “depends,” has a temporal implication because it suggests a cause–effect sequence. Ladin contests the accepted “imagist” reading of the poem, which holds that a single image structures the reader’s experience. In Ladin’s opinion, the reader does not see the scene all at once as a single image 94

Peri Rossi, “Los Juegos,” 106. Joy Ladin, “‘It was not Death’: The Poetic Career of the Chronotope,” in Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope Reflections, Applications, Perspectives, ed. Nele Bemong et al. (Eekhout: Academia Press, 2010), 131. 96 William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems (Norfolk: New Directions, 1951), 277. 95

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because enjambments interrupt a totalizing perception—even the wheel and barrow are separated into distinct spatial entities. The centrifugal force of the poem prevents closure. If the same poem were written without enjambments, its centrifugal energies would be snuffed out, and the chronotopic display would become less vibrant. Generally, in prose texts, the centripetal forces of genre, character, plot, and syntax create “functional chronotopes,” that is, chronotopes that ensure a coherent narrative. Ladin holds that narrative prose creates a centripetal environment that generates stable chronotopes whereas, “[i]n the centrifugal environment of non-narrative poetry, chronotopes flicker and flow in a series of hints, glimpses, dissolves, defining consciousness, world and values via evanescence rather than stability.” Both kinds of chronotopes—stable and evanescent—give vitality to the text. We may understand Ladin’s “evanescence” through a spatial image of a text as a potter’s wheel throwing out flecks, spattering the space around with daubs of clay, while simultaneously giving form to the idea in the potter’s hands. This simultaneity of form-shaping and fragmented spattering is evanescence. Like the clay, in centrifugal narratives and non-narrative poetry, “chronotopes flow in a series of hints, glimpses, dissolves, defining consciousness, world and values via evanescence rather than stability.”97 This study extends Ladin’s chronotopic analysis of nonnarrative poetry to the lyrical short story, which is “distinguished by its emphasis on a central recurring image or symbol, around which the narrative revolves, and from which it acquires an open and flexible meaning.”98 Such stories though not bereft of centripetal forces of character, plot, and perspective, dilute these forces. The study borrows Ladin’s idea of evanescent chronotopes and Falconer’s explication of heterochrony to craft the technique of “liminal chronotopy.” The technique so developed concentrates on the spatial dimension of the chronotope. The justification for a spatial focus is bolstered by a palimpsestic reading of Bakhtin’s theory. The title of his seminal essay, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” suggests that time is the primary analytic vector in chronotopic analysis. However, of the ten chronotopes that Bakhtin articulates, seven are named for places—road, agora, parlour, Gothic castle, pastoral, provincial town, and threshold.99 From the primacy of space in his typology of chronotopes and the absence of temporal labels, we may conclude that space is equally important in chronotopic analyses. Liminal chronotopy would assess whether the liminal space generates singular or multiple chronotopes and how they interact with temporality and, in the case of multiplicity, with one another. In “The Games,” discussed earlier, the anonymity of the characters, lack of information about their backgrounds, and the absence of plot leave it bereft of centripetal energy. The centrifugal energies of the story are made perceptible by multiple changes in spatiality that evoke the chronotopes of the 97

Ladin, 133. “The three Types of Short Story,” Commapress, https://commapress.co.uk/resources/the-threetypes-of-short-story. 99 The major chronotopes are chronotope of encounter, chronotope of the road, chronotope of the agora, chronotope of adventure, and the folkloric chronotope. The minor chronotopes are chronotope of encounter on the road, chronotope of the Gothic castle, chronotope of the provincial town, chronotope of the parlour, and the chronotope of threshold. 98

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Gothic castle and threshold in quick successions. The intermeshing of the antithetical chronotopes generates a liminal chronotope which may be called the chronotope of the refuge that spatially evokes temporary safety from danger, shelter from attack, and protection against predatory pursuit.

4.7 Conclusion The chapter has examined the conceptual schema of some feminist literary critics such as Jean Franco, Josefina Ludmer, Sara Castro-Klarén, Nattie Golubov, Rachel Falconer, and the queer theorist Joy Ladin to extricate the spatial implications of their critical articulations. The chapter applies their concepts at two levels. On the first, the ideas of these critics are used as a lens to examine selected short stories; on the second, their literary application is used to derive specific tools for spatial analysis. The derivation of the six distinct conceptual tools—antigonal archetypes, spatial de-differentiations, spatial de-sedimenting, localizing the limen, speculative materiality of the limen, and liminal chronotopy—is explained in this chapter. In the next chapter, these tools will be utilized to construct a model for spatial gynocritics.

References Abeles, F. (2015). Mathematics: Logic and Lewis Carroll. Nature, 527, 302–303. https://doi.org/ 10.1038/527302a Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). UP Texas. Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Rabelais and his world. Indiana UP. Barrios de Chunga, D. ([1977] 2013). Si me permiten hablar. Narrated to Moema Viezzer. Siglo xxi editores, n.p. Kindle. Borges, J. L. (1974). El Escritor Argentino y la Tradición. In Obras Completas (pp. 267–274). Emecé. Boyle, C. (2012). Antígona de Gabriela Mistral, y los Brotes Gemelos de la Memoria y el Olvido. Cátedra de Artes, 11, 13–30. Butler, J. (2000). Antigone’s claim kinship between life and death. Columbia UP. Castro-Klarén, S. (1996). The subject feminist theory and Latin American texts. In Studies in 20th century literature (Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 271–302). Cortázar, J. (1963). Hopscotch (G. Rabassa, Trans.). Pantheon Books. Couch, R. (2008). Introduction. In Mad women: The Locas mujeres poems of Gabriela Mistral (R. Couch, Trans.) (pp. 1–28). UP Chicago. Inés de la Cruz, S. J. (1987). A woman of genius: An intellectual autobiography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (M. S. Peden, Trans.). Limerock Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2005). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). UP Minnesota. Duncan, I. (2014). George Eliot’s science fiction. In Representations (Vol. 125, No. 1, pp. 15–39). Winter. https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2014.125.1.15 DuPleiss, R. B. (1985). For the Etruscans. In E. Showalter (Ed.), The new feminist criticism. Pantheon Books.

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Fairbairn, M. What is the horizon problem? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTwCdJftYD0& ab_channel=kingscollegelondon Falconer, R. (2010). Heterochronic representations of the fall: Bakhtin, Milton, Delillo. In N. Bemong et al. (Eds.), Bakhtin’s theory of the literary chronotope reflections, applications, perspectives. Academia Press. Ferré, R. (1986). The writer’s kitchen. Feminist Studies, 12(2 Summer), 227–242. https://www.jstor. org/stable/3177966 Ferré, R. (1991). The youngest doll. Nebraska UP. Ferré, R. (1999). When women love men. In R. Gonzalez Echevarria (Ed.), The Oxford book of Latin American short stories. Oxford UP. Franco, J. (1989). Plotting women gender and representation in women. Columbia UP. Franco, J. (1986). Apuntes Sobre la Crética Feminista y la Literatura Hispanoamericana. Hispamérica, 15(45), 31–43. Gilbert S. M., & Gubar, S. (2000). The madwoman in the attic. Yale UP. Golubov, N. (2011). La Literatura Feminista y sus Lectoras Nómadas. Discurso, Teoría y Analísis (Num. 31, pp. 37–62). Universidad Autónoma de Mexico. Gonzalez, P. E., & Ortega, E. (Eds.). (1983). La sarten por el mango: Encuentro de escritoras latinoamericanas. Ediciones Huracán. Grau, O. (1992). Ver desde la mujer. Editorial Cuarto Propio. Holmes, J. (2012). The poet of science: How scientists read their Tennyson. Victorian Studies, 54(4, Summer 2012), 655–678. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/victorianstudies.54.4.655 Irigaray, L. ([1974] 1985). Speculum of the other woman (G. C. Gill, Trans.). Cornell UP. Ladin, J. (2010). It was not death: The poetic career of the chronotope. In N. Bemong et al. (Eds.), Bakhtin’s theory of the literary chronotope reflections, applications, perspectives (pp. 131–158). Academia Press. Laponce, J. A. Spatial archetypes and political perceptions. The American Political Science Review, 69(1), 11–20. Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard UP. Ludmer, J. (1999). Tricks of the weak. In Feminist perspectives of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (S. Mirrim, Trans.). Wayne State UP. Ludmer, J. (2005). Territorios del presente. En la isla urbana. Pensamiento de los Confines, 15 (Dic), 103–110. Ludmer, J. (2018). Postautonomous literatures. Mitosmag (S. Mathew, Trans.). Meillassoux, Q. (2009). After finitude: An essay on the necessity of contingency (R. Brassier, Trans.) (p. 7). A&C Black. Mill, J. S. (1869). The subjection of women. Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer. https://www.gut enberg.org/files/27083/27083-h/27083-h.htm Mistral, G. (2008). Antigone. In R. Couch (Ed.), Mad women: The Locas mujeres poems of Gabriela Mistral. UP Chicago. Moi, T. (1985). Sexual textual politics (p. 2004). Routledge. Olivera-Williams, M. R. (2016). Boom-Realismo mágico, boom and boomito. In I. Rodriguez, M. Szurnuk (Eds.), The Cambridge history of Latin American women’s literature. Cambridge UP, Kindle. Peri Rossi, C. (1974). Los Juegos. In Los museos abandonados. Lumen. Peri Rossi, C. (2012). HB2. In Habitaciones privadas. Menoscuarto. Register, C. (1975). American feminist literary criticism: A bibliographical introduction. In J. Donovan (Ed.), Feminist literary criticism: Explorations in theory. Kentucky UP. Peri Rossi, C. (2007). El corredor tropieza. In Cuentos reunidos (pp. 244–247). Lumen. Peri Rossi, C. (2007). El museo de los esfuerzos inútiles. In Cuentos reunidos (pp. 64–70). Lumen. Rubin, G. (2011). Deviations: A Gayle Rubin reader. Duke UP.

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Santana-Acuña, A. (2017). How One hundred years of solitude became a classic. In The Atlantic. Retrieved May 22, 2017, from www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/05/one-hun dred-years-of-solitude-50-years-later/527118/ Shiva, V. (2018). 2 Futures of health, 2 paradigms of science. Deccan Chronicle. Retrieved February 6, 2018, from https://www.deccanchronicle.com/opinion/op-ed/090218/2-futures-ofhealth-2-paradigms-of-science.html Showalter, E. (1981). Feminist criticism in the wilderness. In Critical inquiry, writing and sexual difference (Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 179–205). UP Chicago. Showalter, E. (1984). Women’s time, women’s space: Writing the history of feminist criticism. In Tulsa studies in women’s literature, feminist issues in literary scholarship (spring–autumn) (Vol. 3, No. ½, pp. 29–43). Sousanis, N. (2015). Unflattening. Harvard University Press. Tally, R. J. (2012). Spatiality. Routledge. The three Types of Short Story. Commapress. https://commapress.co.uk/resources/the-three-typesof-short-story Ugalde, S. K. (1989). Process, identity, and learning to read: Female writing and feminist criticism in Latin America today. Latin American Research Review, 24(1), 222–232. Williams, W. C. (1951). The collected poems. New Directions.

Chapter 5

The Resultant Vector: A Model for Spatial Gynocritics

Abstract The critical model developed in this chapter aims to suggest an arrangement for the conceptual tools derived in Chapter Four of the book, namely, “antigonal archetypes,” “liminal chronotopy,” “de-differentiation,” “localized limens,” “desedimentation,” and “speculative materiality of the limen.” The mode of operating the tools is informed by a consciousness of Debra Castillo’s six pronged strategy for feminist literary criticism. Castillo urges a critical reading of women’s texts that scrutinizes the play of six literary, tactical elements, namely: silencing, appropriation, surfacing, marginality, negation, and the subjunctive mood. The spatial gynocritics model that emerges from the interplay between these tactical elements and the conceptual tools for spatial analysis is a tri-furcated entity whose tines are named “de-canonizing derivatives,” “de-bordering derivatives,” and “de-settling derivatives.” The suggested arrangement of these perspectival tools for understanding portrayals of spaces in literary and cultural narratives is by no means meant prescriptive; instead, the intent in proposing a modular formation is to demonstrate possible inter-relationships among the various conceptual schemes from which the tools are derived. Keywords Subjunctive · Syntax · Paradigm · Borders · Canon · Limits The six conceptual tools derived in the last chapter may be arranged as three pairs to demonstrate their linked usage. The derivatives of archetypes and chronotopes are placed in the same loop of the toolkit because the first-order concepts from which they were derived have a long history in literary criticism.1 Visualizing the “antigonal” facet of spatial archetypes involves examining representations of traditional archetypal spaces in a liminal context, and liminal chronotopy draws out the interplay of antithetical space–time configurations that are activated in the transitional limen. The tools of antigonal archetypes and liminal chronotopy aim to subvert the canon; hence they may be termed de-canonizing derivatives. 1

Archetypal literary criticism is founded on Carl Jung’s 1934 publication “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” and Mikhail Bakhtin published his seminal essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” in 1938. Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works of C. G. Jung) (Routledge, 2014), Kindle ebook. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 107 J. Singh, Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1426-3_5

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The tools in the second set, “localizing the limen” and “spatial de-differentiations,” are coupled together because both deal with issues related to frontiers, boundaries, limits, and divisive binaries. Localizing the limen implies probing the fractures and fault lines in liminal spatiality to contest homogenizing viewpoints that consider the home as a safe place, the factory as a realm of the mechanical and rational, and the brothel as a symbol of male domination. Enacting spatial de-differentiations is to do with diffusing manufactured binaries and perforating artificial compartmentalization in the context of spaces such as private–public, sacred–profane, real–imagined, and transitory–stationary. The third set, “liminal de-sedimenting” and “speculative materiality of the limen,” may be seen as archaeological and genealogical lines of analysis in the Foucauldian sense. To understand the difference between the two analytic lines, one may consider how each would examine the changing construct of insanity from mediaeval times to the present day. The archaeological method studies the modes of thinking that determine the limits of the conceivable in a given domain and period. Archaeologically, one could examine the commonalities among several fields like medicine, history, art, religion, and sociology that created the conditions for meting out the same treatment to ‘madmen’ as was deemed fit for criminals in mediaeval Europe. In that period, people who were considered mad were either expelled from cities or locked up in prison. Some were even “publicly whipped, and in the course of a kind of a game, they were chased in a mock race and driven out of the city with quarterstaff blows.”2 Gradually, the discourse of “madness” changed. In the wake of the French Revolution, there was a general protest against all forms of confinement, including that of “madmen”; by the end of the nineteenth century, “madness” began to be seen as a condition that could be treated. Though Michel Foucault argues that psychoanalysis “doubled the absolute observation of the watcher with the endless monologue of the person watched […] in a non-symmetrical reciprocity, by the new structure of language without response,” the treatment of a mentally disturbed person in the twentieth century is far better than it was a few centuries back, when they were chained, tortured, and imprisoned.3 A genealogical probe of the issue would seek to reveal the changed contingencies that enabled the humane treatment of people suffering from mental disorders and a conscious effort to include them in mainstream schools and workplaces in the same societies a few centuries later. An archaeological mode may be seen in “desedimenting the limen,” whereby the critic shuffles the syntax of existing hierarchical arrangements to reveal inherent injustices, contradictions, and paradoxes. Parallelly, the genealogically oriented tool of “speculative materiality of the limen” traces lines of flight from the non-discursive material construct of the limen in the text to discursive extrapolations. By means of this tool, the critic may speculate on the possibility of alternative paradigms suggested by the depiction of the limen in the text. In short,

2

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage, 1989), 10. 3 Ibid., 250–51.

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coupled tools of the last set de-settle established syntaxes and paradigms. Collectively, the three coupled tools enunciate de-canonized, de-bordered, and de-settled options to fossilized and static perceptions of spaces. The next task at hand is to prepare an operating manual for using the coupled tools. The manual will be loosely undergirded by the tactical framework outlined in Debra Castillo’s Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism. In her comprehensive review of selected Latin American and bi-cultural women’s works, spread across four centuries, the noted critic delineates some common literary tactics adopted by these writers. The writers studied in the book include Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—the seventeenth-century Mexican poet and Luisa Valenzuela, the Argentinian post-boom writer, whose most recent novel was published in 2012.4 These women’s shared literary tactics are a means through which they craft a strategy for exploring “concrete questions of their opposition to or complicity in the established orders and their relationships to specific social, historical, political, and legal structures […].”5 Castillo outlines “an applicable feminist strategy” for feminist literary criticism based on Latin American and first-world feminist theory, taking “[a] pinch of this, and a smidgeon of that.”6 She urges a critical reading of women’s texts that scrutinizes the play of six literary, tactical elements, namely: silencing, appropriation, surfacing, marginality, negation, and the subjunctive mood.

5.1 The Machine Gun of Silence and Appropriating Gratitude Castillo explains that a woman’s silence can serve as a “coded speech” for selfexpression, one that cannot be threatened by adversaries.7 Silence protects by concealment. Instead of “talking back,” the woman chooses to hold back speech from those who seek to control her. Patriarchy silences the woman by distancing her from the centres of power, by restricting her to specific positions in the home, workplace, and politics. But the woman’s “silent” occupation of these distant, confining places need not necessarily signify passivity or acceptance of her given personal, professional, and political situation. Explaining the ruse of silence, Catillo writes: A woman who is neither passive nor accepting may yet preserve the advantages of distance and silence for her own reasons, using distance as an advantage, using the mask of silence to slip away. Silence, once freed of the oppressive masculinist defined context of aestheticized

4

Luisa Valenzuela, La máscara sarda, el profundo secreto de Perón (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 2012). 5 Debra Castillo, Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992), 10. 6 Ibid., 36. 7 Ibid., 41.

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distance and truth and confinement and lack can be reinscribed as a subversive feminine realm.8

Castillo’s observations about a woman’s silence being a subversive realm can be extrapolated for spatial analysis. A direct spatial implication would be to read the “coded speech” of silenced spaces. Showing female characters in conventional settings of the kitchen, nursery, salon, and temple does not signify a silent acceptance of their inherited meanings on the part of the woman. The effect of the space reveals what the silence intends to convey. Some pertinent questions that interrogate the purported conventionality of spaces may be: Is the nursery a bright, happy place, or is it a dull, gloomy place where the child cries in protest? Is the child perhaps voicing the frustrations of the silent nursing mother? Is the kitchen full of the pungent aroma of peppers and sweet smells of cinnamon or suffocating, noxious smoke? The sensory effects can be further spliced: Is the pungency invigorating or miasmic? Is the sweetness intoxicating or cloying? The smoke, too, can have multiple implications— purifying, obfuscating, aggressive, or expiatory. Answers to these questions would reveal the subversion of, or conformity with, dominant normative formulations. The tactic of appropriation enables an expression of dissent without the impertinence of “talking back.” The appropriating woman speaks only when a suitable opportunity presents itself. She speaks on “their” invitation so that she is assured of being heard by “them”. Castillo uses several examples from literature to illustrate the tactic of appropriation. A prominent literary figure whom she discusses in this context is Victoria Ocampo, the founding editor of a prestigious South American literary journal that was published uninterrupted for forty years from 1931–1970.9 Victoria Ocampo exercised a formidable influence on the literary trends in the Southern Cone. Castillo sees the tactic of appropriation in the speech given by Victoria Ocampo in 1965 on the occasion of being honoured for her contribution to Argentinian literature and culture. Explaining her acceptance of the prize, she said, “I see no valid reason for accepting this Vaccaro Prize from you, gentlemen friends, except that I too have chewed stones with my woman’s gums.”10 Ocampo appropriates the dais from which she addresses the male-dominated award committee, not to display her gratitude to the jury but to make a public declaration of her solidarity with women. Victoria Ocampo was from an elite Argentinian family. Ministers, diplomats, celebrities, artists, and intellectuals were frequent guests at her family home. She had travelled extensively across Europe. While growing up, she was taught to communicate in French and English rather than in Spanish. Castillo appears to suggest two levels of appropriation through Ocampo’s example: Her “appropriation” of French and English literature for use in the Latin American context and her appropriation of her upper-class credentials for her own intellectual enterprise. Instead of marrying a suitable man and settling down, as was expected from someone of her social class, Ocampo pursued her cosmopolitan vision publicly, fervently, and tirelessly. 8

Ibid., 40. John King, Sur: estudio de la revista literaria argentina y de su papel en el desarrollo de una cultura, 1931–1970 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989). 10 Victoria Ocampo, quoted in Castillo, 45. 9

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While it may appear that Ocampo’s social class, family wealth, formidable intellectual calibre, and exceptional dynamism kept her relatively immune from patriarchal discrimination, some critics sense that she suffered from an inferiority complex. Commenting on the sources of Ocampo’s insecurity, a biographer writes: Despite her frequent displays of self-confidence, it seems likely that Victoria suffered from a basic sense of insecurity that goes back to her early rejection by the boys she played with, in her childhood, to the severe criticism of her early essays, to her own misgivings about her ability as a writer, and to growing up in a society where women were treated as second-class citizens. She also bore the indirect feeling of inferiority that came from feeling that Argentina was culturally inferior to Europe.11

Though Ocampo enjoyed many social privileges, she also had to struggle against patriarchy at both personal and professional levels. Though she realized early on in her marriage that the relationship had failed, she did not have the courage to divorce her husband because she feared her father’s disapproval. She left her husband two years after she married him, but she asked for a divorce only ten years later, after her father died. Demanding space on the table among professional writers in the Argentina of the 1920s was a challenge for any woman. Before taking her first manuscript to publishers, Ocampo chose to show it to two literary critics who were family friends. One of them “warned her that the public would be put off by her too direct, too personal style. He counselled her to adopt a veil of literary modesty.”12 The second critic made it clear that he found her choice of subject, Dante, an exalted figure of the European literary tradition, an uninvited intrusion into the male literary domain reserved for scholarly writers like himself. He advised her to choose a more personal subject, something less classical, less demanding something more suitable for a woman.13

The critics’ response typifies what any woman writer could expect to hear in those days. Undeterred by this early condemnation of her abilities, Ocampo went on to forge friendships with several intellectual giants of her time, including José Ortega y Gasset, Herman Von Keyserling, and Rabindranath Tagore. Recalling the differing ways in which she had been treated professionally by men, Ocampo says: They have helped me in my struggle, and I haven’t even always needed their physical presence. With the living and the dead, I was not only in communication but in communion. Never have so few been responsible for the pardoning of so many things done by others.14

By using the word “pardon,” Ocampo implicitly states that some men had exhibited behaviour towards her that required pardoning. In an act of appropriation, when invited to speak, Ocampo acknowledges the support of the few to denounce the antagonism of the many. Honouring the men who accepted her as an intellectual 11

Patricia Owen Steiner, ed., Victoria Ocampo: Writer, Feminist, Woman of the World (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 172. 12 Ibid., 123. 13 Ibid. 14 Ocampo, quoted in Doris Meyer, Against the Wind and the Tide (Austin: UP Texas, 1989), 91.

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precludes an irreverent tone from entering her speech, allowing her to dissent without impertinence. She amplifies her criticism of a male-dominated establishment by stating that in accepting the award, she publicly recognizes the support that she has received from various women. Gabriela Mistral, the Nobel Laureate from Chile, compared Victoria Ocampo to the “curro”—a beautiful weed that grows uncontrollably in some parts of Argentina. Ocampo and Mistral exchanged numerous letters during their enduring friendship. In one of these letters, Mistral urges Ocampo to imitate the “geometry of thorns, that look and do not touch” of the curro so that she could be a “machine gun of silence.” When the machine gun of silence fires, it releases the power of appropriation. Towards the end of the speech, Ocampo mentions her experience in prison—she was arrested in 1953 for her political views. She says that she intends to place the Vaccaro Prize medal alongside the cloth ribbon that all prisoners had to wear as a name tag. The spatial proximity of the cloth label and the medal—one handmade and ragged, the other forged by machines and shiny—brings the women who were imprisoned with her to the award ceremony and takes the award committee to the prison, levelling the hierarchy that places one over the other. Ocampo appropriates the elite podium for her fellow prisoners with whom she had “chewed stones with [her] woman’s gums.” In a literary text, a spatial critic could see how “awarded” spaces are appropriated through a paradoxical simultaneity of acceptance and denunciation. The tactics of self-chosen silencing and appropriation become operational when the woman is placed in direct confrontation with authority. Their activation is similar to the use of the de-canonizing derivates—antigonal archetypes and liminal chronotopy. Antigonal archetypes are traditional archetypes that are transformed when relocated from pre-liminal domains to the liminal space. In the pre-liminal domain, Sor Juana would be seen as a self-sacrificing nun, whereas in the liminal space of her writing desk, she becomes a dissenting proto-feminist. As a literary text, Ocampo’s speech evokes the threshold chronotope in the liminal space of the speaker’s dais. She inhabits the space in transition; standing on the dais, she is located in-between the jury, and the convicts—her present and her past coexist. At this point in her life, she had been running South America’s most prestigious literary journal for thirty-five years; she had spent time in prison, had married and divorced, and had interacted with some of the best minds of her time. The briefly flashing chronotope illuminates a lifetime of struggle, ambition, achievements, and disappointments in the presence of symbols of authority. Thus, one may assert that the use of de-canonizing derivatives should be imbued with the consciousness that women’s writing is shaped by tactical silencing and appropriation.

5.2 Surface Tension and Marginal Autonomy Julio Cortázar’s depiction of a female reader, which has been discussed earlier in the book, is deprecating. According to him, a female reader is one who reads superficially,

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seeking easy absorption and avoiding entanglement with a difficult text. Castillo contests Cortázar’s dismissal of surface reading as an inferior way of approaching a text. She builds upon Susan Noakes’—a noted feminist literary critic–explication of a normative equivalence between immoral reading and reading as a woman.15 Noakes points out that “[r]eadings that remain on the surface […] engages the reader’s desires rather than the reader’s idea.”16 It is generally thought that “ideas” are deliberative, and therefore, conducive to decorum, whereas desires are impulsive, and therefore, disruptive of decorum. Hence, Noakes notes that surface readings that engage desires are considered immoral because they rupture decorous social arrangements. A feminist counter-response to the charge of surface reading could be to deny the allegation of superficiality. However, Castillo endorses the “cultivation of superficiality,” which “confronts directly the rhetorical tradition that defines good prose as clear, straightforward, masculine, and bad taste in prose as a fondness for the excessively ornamented, and therefore effeminate.”17 As an example of the cultivation of superficiality, she cites Rosario Ferré’s use of symbols of female “frivolity”—shiny slippers, amethysts, diamonds, nail polish, and long fingernails, in the story “When Women Love Men.”18 The story features two female protagonists, Isabel la Negra, a spirited, confident black prostitute, and Isabel Lubreza, a chaste, diffident homemaker. The two women are connected through Ambrosio, who was Lubreza’s husband and la Negra’s regular client. Upon his death, he wills his house jointly to the two women. As co-owners of a valuable property, the women meet to decide how to share the inheritance and end up being attracted to each other so intensely that their personalities gradually become indistinguishable mirror images of each other. When describing Lubreza’s funereal wake, the narrator focuses on her corpse: Her body now naked and tinctured black; her sex covered only by a small triangle of amethysts, including the one the bishop once wore on his finger; her nipples trapped in nests of diamonds, fat and round like chickpeas; her feet stuffed into slippers of sparkling red rime, with twin hearts sewn on the tips; her heels still dripping a few drops of blood.19

In a mirroring strategy, the narrator goes on to describe la Negra’s funeral. Here, the focus is on the vital, aromatic, decorated body of Lubreza: […] I’ll walk up to her […], and I’ll scent my own body with Fleur de Rocaille perfume; I’ll whiten my breasts with her Chante D’Aromes powder; I’ll do my hair just like hers, spiralled in a cloud of smoke around my head; I’ll drape myself in my lamé gown and spill my silver tunic over my shoulder […] I’ll bind my throat and wrists with diamond strings […]20

15

Susan Noakes is a Professor and Chair of the French Department at the University of Minnesota. Susan J. Noakes, The Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988), 347. 17 Castillo, Talking Back, 51. 18 Rosario Ferré, “When Women Love Men,” in The Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories, edited by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999). 19 Ibid., 466. 20 Ibid. 16

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Ferré’s ostensibly superficial depiction of the women’s dress and make-up concocts a potent denunciation of racism, religious hypocrisy, class discrimination, and female oppression from which the liberating potential of female solidarity sublimates. Castillo observes that “the tension is not buried deep within the women […] but displayed prominently and unexpectedly upon the surface.”21 As in liquids, the surface tension generated by the perfume, hairstyle, shiny metallic fabric, and diamond strings, on the one hand, and sparkling slippers, amethyst G-string, diamond nipple covers, on the other, creates a resistant strength that can repel external force. The wife, who had always dressed plainly when she was a married woman, gives vent to her suppressed desires by using the same cheap powder and perfume as La Negra; she even imitates the prostitute’s hairdo. Ferré displays her feminist position by concentrating the reader’s attention on the surface of her protagonists’ bodies. In spatial terms, surfacing might imply studying those elements that are dismissed as frivolous adornments in “female” descriptions of places. These may include descriptions of colours, wall displays, curios, mementos, flowers, plants, pets, and closets. As an example, one may consider the things strewn about in the apartment in Cristina Peri Rossi’s short story “Fetishists Incorporated.” The apartment owner has a motley collection of objects—women’s patent leather black shoes, only of the left foot; bras, but not underpants; photographs of women’s squint eyes and men’s prominent Adam’s apples but not the whole face. On the surface, these collections signify an outlet for repressed sexuality, but the oddity of the collections is also a commentary on the arbitrariness of the choice of objects which are considered collectionworthy—antiques, paintings, masks, statues, sculptures, and exotic mementos. The fragmented fetish objects—only the left shoe, only the upper undergarment, only the Adam’s apple—fracture the notion of situating the part in a coherent whole to lend it intelligibility. The part as it exists on the surface can serve as an autonomous unit of interpretation. The issue of autonomy is also relevant to marginality. The connection between marginality and autonomy has an interesting parallel in Statistics. In the discipline, probabilities are categorized as joint, marginal, and conditional. The labels, joint and conditional are self-explanatory—joint probability is the probability that two or more events will occur together; conditional probability, as the name suggests, computes the likelihood of an event occurring, given that another event has already occurred. One could calculate the joint probability of sunshine and rain on the same day or the conditional probability of rain in the afternoon, given that the day started out sunny. Marginal probability differs from the other two kinds. It may be understood as an unconditional or autonomous probability. The literary significance of the computability of marginal probability is that it demonstrates the autonomy of margins—joint and conditional values depend on other events, but marginal probability has a substantive value. In mainstream representations, margins are made visible only through relationality with the centre. Therefore, there is a risk that representations of marginality will be overdetermined by referentiality to the centre either by pandering to dominant, negative stereotypes or by presenting overdetermined, 21

Castillo, Talking Back, 159.

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paternalistically sympathetic portrayals. However, marginal autonomy ensures that any misrepresentation will, eventually, be corrected. Castillo identifies writing on the margins as a characteristic feature of women’s writing. She states that a woman writer, no matter how accomplished and acknowledged, always writes from the margins, and therefore multifaceted significations of marginality are inevitable in a woman’s writing: “women naturally write from and of, if not necessarily to, the margins.”22 Women writers are closer to the marginalized condition than their male counterparts. Still, Castillo senses that they may be vulnerable to “seductions of marginality,” whereby representations of marginality are partly determined by the demands of the centre. This study argues that Castillo’s caution is somewhat unnecessary because marginal autonomy will ensure that misrepresentations are called out. Though it took a long time, Shakespeare’s Caliban eventually ceased to be a brutish savage, turning, instead, into a polysemic symbol of postcolonial resistance. Likewise, Charlotte Bronte’s Bertha—“the madwoman in the attic,” a minor character in her magnum opus—inspired one of the greatest works of feminist literary criticism. A discussion of the controversy surrounding the hugely successful novel American Dirt throws more light on the issue of marginal autonomy. Jeanine Cummins’ novel, published in 2020, spent thirty-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and its film rights were bought up even before the book was published. The novel describes a mother and son’s struggles to escape from Mexican drug cartel violence. Many critics accused Cummins of stereotyping the undocumented Mexican immigrant, and stereotypes are necessarily reductive and homogenizing. Yet, others praised it effusively. A prominent, critically acclaimed writer compared the novel to the Nobel Laureate, John Steinbeck’s, The Grapes of Wrath.23 The fact that Cummins has consistently chosen to write about marginal subjects in all her novels to date—the Pavee gypsies, the Irish during the potato famine, and the Mexican immigrant—affirms Castillo’s statement that “women naturally write of […] the margins.” Cummins’ personal experience with violence, which she describes in her memoir, is evidence that she writes “from the margins.”24 Her critics question her locus standi to write about the undocumented, Mexican immigrant issue because she does not check any of the boxes—Cummins is a US citizen by birth, without any Mexican heritage. Without having to decide in favour of one position or the other, one may see the debate as evidence of the autonomy of marginal positions. The portrayal of the undocumented Mexican immigrant stirred up an international debate; Cummins’ representation of the community was not accepted unanimously. Similarly, Cummins’ own marginality also stayed relevant to the debate. Not everyone dismissed her as unqualified to write 22

Castillo, Talking Back, 57. Lila Shapiro, “Blurbed to Death,” Vulture, January 5, 2021, https://www.vulture.com/article/ame rican-dirt-jeanine-cummins-book-controversy.html, accessed July 8, 2021. 24 Jeanine Cummins novel A Rip in Heaven: A Memoir of Murder and its Aftermath (2004) is based on a true incident–the rape and murder of her two young, female cousins. Cummins’ brother, who had accompanied the girls to the bridge where they were sexually assaulted and thrown over, was wrongly accused by the police of the crime. He was finally acquitted when the actual killers were caught. 23

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about an issue of which she had no personal experience. It is the critic’s responsibility to stay conscious of the dialectics between the woman writer’s marginal position and portrayal of marginalized populations in her works. By analogy, in spatial terms, the critic would have to weigh in on the representation of the marginality of marginal spaces. The critic’s task is to foreground any representation that appears marginal to the main idea of the novel—Bertha’s madness in Jane Eyre and Caliban’s abusive language in The Tempest are pertinent examples. The spatial critic’s task is to foreground the depictions of marginalized spatiality and especially of liminal spatiality in the narrative. An illustrative example of this approach is the analysis of the short story “Ulva Lactuca,” presented earlier in this book. The analysis takes the reader deep into the micro spaces of the home to decipher the multiple connotations of the child’s highchair, the waterbed, and the feeding spoon. Through such foregrounding, the furniture and cutlery cease to be static elements of the setting of the story. They emerge from their marginality to become potent symbols of transformative liminality. The tactics of surfacing and marginality resonate strongly with the de-bordering tools, “localizing the limen” and “spatial de-differentiation.” The women’s bodies in “When Women Love Men” are localized liminal spaces where the forbidden desires of the protagonists are expressed. The narrator localizes the liminal bodies by drawing the reader’s attention to embodied social differences based on race, skin colour, and class. The story does not homogenize the woman’s body. The author also carries out a de-differentiation along the home-brothel binary. The prostitute’s home is a grimy brothel in a seedy part of the city, where she feels empowered and free. In contrast, the wife’s home is an elegant bungalow in a posh area, where she feels repressed and confined. The women cross the spatial border that separates them and agree to convert the elegant bungalow into a brothel, where they agree to live together. Their decision diffuses the boundaries between the sanctity of the home and the profanity of the brothel.

5.3 Negative, Subjunctive Imperatives When Castillo discusses the tactic of negation, she locates it in the spatial context— negation marks a woman’s attitude towards the place she occupies. As articulated by Castillo, negation does not signify outright refusal to occupy the assigned place; that would be tantamount to defiance. Instead, negation is the refusal to occupy the assigned space in the manner dictated by the ordering mechanisms of patriarchy. The objective of confining a woman to the domestic space is to isolate her and permit her to pursue only a set of “feminine” activities that are all related to caregiving. The objective is defeated or negated when women turn domestic spaces of their home into places of creativity, conviviality, and gregariousness. By negation, “not only is the meaning of place changed, but also the meaning of what is included in that space.”25 25

Castillo, Talking Back, 55.

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Prepared with negation, food in the kitchen changes from a subservient offering to an opportunity for engaging creative faculties; house maintenance may be seen as a matter of technical competence and bringing up children as a knowledge-formation activity. Ludmer understands negation as a combination of “respect and confrontation,” which is devoid of defiance. This oxymoronic attitude can be seen to be embodied in. […] a mother or homemaker who says, “I accept my place, but as a mother or homemaker, I will engage in politics or science.” It is always possible to claim a space from which one can practice what is forbidden in others; it is always possible to annex other fields and establish other territorialities. And this practice of transference and transformation reorganizes given social and cultural structures: the combination of respect and confrontation can establish another truth, another approach to science, and another subject of knowledge.26

Castillo paraphrases Ludmer’s understanding of negation to highlight two aspects: firstly, negation is not oppositional, and secondly, negation is a means to selffulfilment. The woman enacts a “double negation—refusal of subsumption in the dominant, refusal of alienation in the marginal” to establish her claim in male-dominated territories—creativity, technology, knowledge formation—without leaving the margins. For the spatial critic, studying the tactic of double negation involves examining the manner in which fictional characters inhabit an assigned place. The mode of inhabiting can become an act of transgression when the inhabitant transforms the assigned connotations of the place without moving from her position. Jacinta Ardern is a contemporary, real-life example of such respectful negation. As the elected leader of her country, she lives in the official residence, which is furnished with all the accoutrements that her office commands. However, she became the first head of government to avail maternity leave in 2018. When her baby was three months old, she carried her to attend a session of the United Nations General Assembly. On the contrary, the first head of government who gave birth while she was in office, Benazir Bhutto, had to keep her entire pregnancy under a shroud of secrecy in 1990.27 A spatial critic would pay special attention to apparently conventional locations to investigate whether they are rendered unconventional through tactics of negation. Some pertinent questions in the cited contexts would be: Does the Prime Ministerial residence lose some of its masculine formidability because of Ardern’s decision to occupy it while she was on maternity leave? Does the UN’s General Assembly Hall become more feminized by the baby’s presence? Lastly, Castillo posits the tactic of the subjunctive mood, which she develops as an explicatory tool for the frequently expressed assessment that “women’s texts just ‘feel’ different?” After considering the dictionary definitions of the word, Castillo concludes that. 26

Josefina Ludmer, “Tricks of the Weak,” in Feminist Perspectives of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, translated by Stephanie Mirrim (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999), 93. 27 https://www.newindianexpress.com/world/2018/jun/21/remembering-pakistani-leader-benazirbhuttos-pregnancy-as-new-zealand-pm-jacinda-ardern-gives-birth-1831457.html.

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The subjunctive then has no independent existence in standard [Spanish] grammar; it is other-directed in the modes of request, subordinated in complex structures as a reaction or as a secondary action exiting only in relation to some other act. It has traditionally figured the relationship of fact to hypothetical conception, superior to inferior, master to servant, man to woman.28

In Spanish grammar, the subjunctive conjugation of a verb is used to express a wish, convey a tone of courteous address, and indicate doubt. Paradoxically, subjunctive conjugations are also used to issue commands.29 Thus, the subjunctive is a grammatical oxymoron that conveys doubt as well as directives. In the second person— plural and singular, “tú” and “vostoros”—the affirmative command does not use the subjunctive conjugation, but the negative command does. For example, “Hazlo,” which means (you) do it, does not use the subjunctive conjugation, whereas “No lo hagas” which means “(you) don’t do it,” uses the subjunctive. Similarly, “Hacedlo,” which means “(you all) do it,” does not use the subjunctive conjugation “No lo hagáis,” which means “(you all) don’t do it” uses the subjunctive. The usage of the subjunctive in issuing negative commands, that is, in forbidding, is interesting from the point of view of literary analysis. Castillo does not single it out for detailed discussion, but pushing that line leads to additional subjunctive analogies that are productive for literary criticism. This study builds upon Castillo’s assertion that writing in the subjunctive mood is “attentive to nuance and capable of taking a cue from context without losing its autonomy.”30 Any positive command issued to the woman—be a good mother, be a good daughter, be a good woman—carries implicit negative commands about what is forbidden to her, sexually, economically, socially, and culturally. Therefore, writing in the subjunctive mood not only expresses aspirations and desires, but also talks back to negative commands in the same tone— don’t tell me to not dress like that, don’t tell me to not talk like that, don’t tell me to not spend money on this, don’t tell me to not read books like those, and so on. Whereas negation places the establishment and the challenger at the same syntactical plane, “subjunction”—an efficient neologism for the subjunctive mood—generates a paradigmatic shift. Under negation, the woman cooks for the family in the kitchen, but she makes it her creative playfield. The woman changes her self-image while continuing to perform the role assigned to her. Thus, she rearranges the syntax of patriarchal control by refusing to feel controlled. Under subjunction, she might transform the home kitchen into a workplace, turning her culinary skills into an income source. She relocates the kitchen paradigmatically from the realm of the domestic and familial to the public and commercial. The subjunctive as a female mood stands differentiated from the male mood— the indicative. The subjunctive generates a possibility, and the indicative establishes veracity. The critical eye should look ahead at what is generated by the subjunctive— what aspirations are expressed in the female subjunctive mood and what assignations 28

Castillo, Talking Back, 263. The third person imperative uses the subjunctive conjugations. The second person singular “tú” and plural “vosotros” does not use the subjunctive conjugation. 30 Castillo, Talking Back, 263. 29

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are rejected. Literary representations of the two moods can be seen in two stories by Peri Rossi, “After Hours” and “Night Rain.” Both stories describe unexpected turns in the respective protagonists’ road journeys. The distinction between the female subjunctive mood and the male indicative mood shows up clearly in these stories, which may be categorized as “Road Stories.” The woman driver’s road in “Night Rain” offers an intimate space to the protagonists for casting off inhibitions, whereas the male driver’s road in “After Hours” sustains the protagonist’s misplaced quixotic chivalric mission to rescue a prostitute from exploitation. Though both stories have been written by a woman, they present differently gendered roads to the spatial critic. The woman’s road evokes the subjunctive mood, allowing the protagonists to share confidences that they have kept secret until now. In contrast, the man’s road is indicative; it serves to confirm his self-image as the knight-in-shining armour to himself. However, his image is shown to be illusory when the prostitute rejects his offer to “save her” because her sex work provides a stable income. The indicative male road in “After Hours” feeds the man’s delusional heroism, whereas, on the female subjunctive road, the accomplished but lonely thirty-eight-year-old woman steps off her self-erected pedestal to redress the lack of passion in her current sexual relationship. She acts on the attraction she feels for a nineteen-year-old girl who had hitched a ride from her on a rainy night and ends up inviting the girl to spend the night in her apartment. Guided by the awareness of negation and subjunction, the de-settling tools of de-sedimentation and speculative materiality of the limen dislodge settled syntactic and paradigmatic arrangements. De-sedimentation identifies the hierarchical layers and then sees how they are rearranged in the limen. For example, the spaces in “After Hours”—the home, the car, the road that the woman uses every day, and the office— may be seen as offering ascending degrees of fulfilment in a sedimented arrangement and descending degrees of privacy. In the office, the woman feels fulfilled because she is rewarded for her expertise as a translator; at home, she may feel like an impostor because she is in denial of her homosexuality; the car and the road allow her to transition between the roles of impostor and expert. The home offers her complete privacy; the car and the road take her to the office, where she has to be in the public eye all the time. This ordering along the fulfilment-privacy axis would become disordered in a de-sedimented view. A de-sedimented view shows that a change in the woman’s way of inhabiting the home—inviting a stranger for a sexual encounter, her unusual behaviour on the road—of giving a ride to a stranger and using her car as a space for shedding inhibitions—disrupts the fulfilment-privacy axis. The woman can seek fulfilment even in the privacy of her home. The car and the road become connections between different states of fulfilment instead of connecting disjointed personal and professional spaces. Through her negational occupation, she is as fulfilled at home as she is in the office. Speculative materiality of the limen would look at how the mobility afforded by the present material conditions—road, car, and office—may generate life in the subjunctive mood for the woman. In subjunction, she may extricate herself from the unsatisfying relationship with her current boyfriend that leaves her lonely, perhaps issuing a negative command to him that prohibits his entry into her home.

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5.4 Conclusion The tools and tactics discussed in this chapter may be represented pictorially as in Figs. 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3. Each figure the combination of tools with relevant tactics that will be used to examine different aspects of normative structures and arrangements. Diagrammatic representations permit a non-linear, modular presentation of the concepts, that creates a visual schema for several alternative permutations. The circular shapes connote the lenses that have been used to examine “Oedipal triangles” market by authority, limitations, and fixities.31 It is important to emphasize that the approaches suggested here are not mutually exclusive. Castillo indicates some of the slippages among the analytic lines she has articulated when she states, “when the surface of the marginalized is broken, its first and foremost essential form of expression is by negation.” The suggested coupling of tools and tactics facilitates a clear focus on a distinct manifestation of patriarchal binds that any feminist approach would aim to interrogate. However, no set is mutually exclusive from the other two. Thus, de-canonizing derivatives may prove to be effective tools for questioning established spatial limits. Similarly, de-settling derivatives may yield probing insights into authorized spatiality. In the next part of the book, the analysis of literary and cultural representations from different genres and geographic regions will be mindful of the broad separation of tool and probe site: Decanonizing derivatives against authorized spatiality; de-bordering derivatives against established spatial limits; and de-settling derivatives against settled spatial syntaxes and paradigms. However, it will not treat the areas delineated in Figs. 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 as water-tight compartments.

Fig. 5.1 De-canonizing derivatives 31

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (UP Minnesota, [1983] 2000), 266. Oedipal triangles are etched upon “personal and private territoriality,” connotingthe sovereign’s control over the demarcated space and compliance on the part of the subjugated.

References

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Fig. 5.2 De-bordering derivatives

Fig. 5.3 De-settling derivatives

References Castillo, D. (1992). Talking back: Toward a Latin American feminist literary criticism. Cornell UP. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2000). Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). UP Minnesota [1983]. Ferré, R. (1999). When women love men. In R. G. Echevarria (Ed.), The Oxford book of Latin American short stories (pp. 462–472). Oxford UP. Foucault, M. (1989). Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason. Vintage. Jung, C. (2014). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (Collected Works of C. G. Jung). Routledge. Kindle. King, J. (1989). Sur: estudio de la revista literaria argentina y de su papel en el desarrollo de una cultura, 1931–1970. Fondo de Cultura Económica. Ludmer, J. (1999). Tricks of the weak. In Feminist perspectives of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (S. Mirrim, Trans.). Wayne State UP.

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Noakes, S. J. (1988). The comparative perspective on literature: Approaches to theory and practice. Cornell UP. Ocampo, V. (1989). Quoted in Doris Meyer. Against the wind and the tide. UP Texas. Shapiro, L. (2021). Blurbed to death. Vulture, January 5, 2021. https://www.vulture.com/article/ american-dirt-jeanine-cummins-book-controversy.html Steiner, P. O. (Ed.). (1999). Victoria Ocampo: Writer, feminist. University of New Mexico Press. Valenzuela, L. (2012). La máscara sarda, el profundo secreto de Perón. Seix Barral.

Part II

Interstitial Spatial Views

Chapter 6

Cristina Peri Rossi’s Postmodernist Short Story

Abstract Cristina Peri Rossi is considered part of the “Generation of 1972,” which includes other Latin American writers who were forced to flee out of fear of persecution at the hands of the military juntas in their native countries. This chapter provides a background of the political scenario that pushed Peri Rossi into voluntary exile and locates her writing within the postmodernist literary turn in Latin American literature. The chapter explains why the theme of exile—literal and metaphoric—in her work has attracted extensive critical attention. In order to open up her short narratives to new readings, the portrayal of three spaces, each of which comes up in multiple stories by Peri Rossi, is examined through the spatial gynocritic model. The de-canonizing, de-bordering, and de-settling derivatives are used to examine the topographies of the psychiatrist’s clinic, road, and racetrack in Peri Rossi’s stories. When viewed through the model, these spaces become subversive representations that challenge normative notions of “madness,” the “saviour complex,” and “sportsmanship,” respectively. Keywords Confessional · Flow · Exile · Sports · Eccentricity Like many other South American countries, Uruguay experienced a period of dictatorial rule between the mid-1970s and 80s. However, unlike the dictatorships in Argentina and Chile, headed by army generals, the head of the dictatorial government in Uruguay was a civilian leader, Juan María Bordaberry. Though he was elected President through a democratic process in 1972, soon after assuming power, he dissolved the parliament and created a governing body controlled by the military. The military removed him after three years in power, but the system of civilian dictatorship lasted in the country until 1985. During Bordaberry’s rule, “one in three Uruguayans had been forced to leave the country, one in fifty had been sent to prison, and one in hundred had been tortured.”1 Political dissidents and persons with leftist sympathies were primary targets of the military-backed government.

1

Claudio Trobo, Asesinato de Estado (Buenos Aires: Colihue, [1986] 2013), quoted in “Juan María Bordaberry, de presidente electo a dictador,” El País, July 18, 2011, https://elpais.com/diario/2011/ 07/18/necrologicas/1310940002_850215.html. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 J. Singh, Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1426-3_6

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During this time, Cristina Peri Rossi was working as a journalist for a paper published by the Communist Party of Uruguay. In October 1972, she got word that the regime had issued orders for her arrest.2 She arranged to leave the country within forty-eight hours of getting the news and “reached Barcelona with ten dollars in her pocket.”3 In 1974, the Bordaberry government’s decision to suspend her Uruguayan citizenship invalidated her Spanish visa, and she had to flee once again, this time to France. Through her communist friends in Spain, she found a gay man who agreed to marry her so that she could acquire Spanish citizenship.4 Spain was still under the rule of Francisco Franco’s military regime that prohibited civil marriages; all marriages had to be performed in church. A priest with leftist leanings married Peri Rossi and the gay man, whose name she has never revealed publicly. Since acquiring Spanish citizenship, Peri Rossi has lived in Barcelona, though her Uruguayan citizenship was reinstated by the democratic government that came to power in the 1980s.

6.1 Political, Social, and Sexual Exile Peri Rossi lived as a teacher, activist, and political exile in Uruguay, as an illegal refugee in France and Germany, and as a writer and poet with double citizenship in Spain. Her first published work, a collection of short stories, Viviendo, appeared in 1963; her most recent work, La Insumisa, was released in 2020. Over the course of almost sixty years, she has amassed an impressive oeuvre consisting of novels, short stories, newspaper columns, and poems. She received her first major award in 1968 for her second publication, Los Museos Abandonados (The Abandoned Museums), was honoured with the 2019 José Donoso Iberoamerican Literature Prize awarded by the University of Talca, a top Chilean public university, and received the highest literary honour in the Spanish language, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize for 2021.5 She has also received fourteen other awards and the prestigious Guggenheim fellowship.6 In addition, her work has attracted extensive scholarship, in which the monograph by Perizad Tamara Dejbord (1994), the analysis of her poetic style by Hugo J. Verani (1994), the study of Uruguayan diaspora writing by Amy Kaminsky (1999), and 2

“Cristina Peri Rossi nueva académica correspondiente en Barcelona,” Academia Nacional de Letras, February 25, 2019, http://www.academiadeletras.gub.uy/innovaportal/v/113026/46/mec web/cristina-peri-rossi-nueva-academica-correspondiente-en-barcelona?parentid=111775. 3 Cristina Peri Rossi, “Adiós Hermano,” El Mundo, April 13, 2015, https://www.elmundo.es/cul tura/2015/04/13/552bf4c422601d0c698b4583.html. 4 Cristina Peri Rossi, Interview with Carmen Boullosa, Bomb, January 1, 2009, bombmagazine.org/ articles/cristina-perirossi/. 5 “Cristina Peri Rossi recibió Premio Iberoamericano de Letras José Donoso 2019,” University of Talca, June 8, 2020, https://www.utalca.cl/noticias/escritora-uruguaya-cristina-peri-rossi-recibe-dis tancia-el-premio-jose-donoso/. 6 “Cristina Peri Rossi Nueva Académica.” “Crisitna Peri Rossi,” John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, https://www.gf.org/fel lows/all-fellows/cristina-peri-rossi/, 1994.

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Claire Lindsay’s study of Southern Cone women writers (2003) may be highlighted as key in exploring the socio-political significance of her oeuvre. The prodigious Chilean literary critic Cedomil Goic includes Cristina Peri Rossi among Latin American writers of the “Generation of 1972.”7 The classification acquires a political flavour in the 2013 publication, titled The Generation of 1972: Latin America’s Forced Citizens.8 This fresh articulation of the category includes ten writers who were “forced to express the exposure and fragility of a life in exile.”9 All writers included in the “generation” share thematic commonalities owing to a first-hand experience of the 1970s dictatorships in Latin America. Many scholars, including Dejbord and Kaminsky, have asserted that the notion of exile in Cristina Peri Rossi’s works must be understood metaphorically as well as literally. As the daughter of a textile mill worker and school teacher, Peri Rossi experienced economic exile, then sexual exile when she came out as a homosexual during her college years, while she was living in her country of origin. Political exile followed when she was forced to flee Uruguay and then, an intellectual exile in Spain in the 1970s. Remembering her early days in Spain, Peri Rossi recalls that she felt completely dislocated in time and space. Though spatially, she was moving from the margin to the centre—from the Global South to the Global North—temporally, she felt she had regressed. When she reached Spain, the country had still not shaken off the vestiges of Franco’s regime, though the dictator was terminally ill and a democratic government was imminent. She explains her feeling of intellectual exile in an interview, When I arrived here, I was twenty-nine years old, and Spain seemed horribly backward compared to where we were from. Here, they had not read Virginia Woolf, did not know who Salinger was, and had not read Dylan Thomas […] that is to say, one’s referential world was missing […] I felt that I had travelled in space and that traveling in space I had travelled [back] in time.10

Peri Rossi’s works convey that a sense of exile is integral to any marginalized position. There is a technique of “connecting marginalities” in her work. Her description of the Equis, the transgender male protagonist of her highly regarded novel, Ship of Fools, is relevant to the struggles of any marginalized individual: As soon as Equis moves through the spaces, the differences accumulate, and he decides that the only way of understanding the distinctions of various aspects of marginality is to combine 7

Cedomil Goic, Historia De La Novela Hispanoamericana, (Valparaiso: UP Valparaiso, 1972). Goic demarcates four generations, 1927, 1942, 1957, and the last 1972. Each group spans fifteen years and the youngest member in the group is twenty-three years old in the year for which the generation is named. Nicholson and McClennen find Goic’s categorization useful despite its rigidity because it allows for exploring “literary trends as collective responses to institutional and historical pressures,” 12. 8 Brantley Nicholson and Sophia A. McClennen, The Generation of ‘72: Latin America’s Forced Global Citizens (Raleigh, NC: A Contracorriente, 2014), 3. 9 Ibid., 15. 10 Cristina Peri Rossi, “Entrevista a Cristina Peri Rossi,” interview with Gustavo San Roman. Revista Iberoamericana, Vol. LVIII, Núm. 160–161, Julio–Diciembre, (1992): 1042, https://revista-iberoa mericana.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/Iberoamericana/article/view/5090/5248.

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and connect them. By means of his constant movement, Equis remains continuously in the threshold between here and there but finally finds an eerie harmony in this liminal space. Instead of crossing nothing to go nowhere, Equis understands that the reality exists in the crossing, in the movement between spaces. In effect, finding the familiar in the nowhere.11

The understanding that “reality exists in the crossing” is a hallmark of Peri Rossi’s characters. The protagonists are usually portrayed as confined to marginal positions, but they do not accept their location as static. Though they are rarely able to break out of the margins, they convert their locations to liminal zones that offer them an “eerie harmony.”

6.2 Delimiting Women’s Postmodernist Writing Stylistically, Peri Rossi’s work aligns with that of several postmodernist writers. Jennifer Ashton identifies three key “transformations” which take place as literary texts gradually locate themselves in a postmodernist framework, “of logic into phenomenology, of intention into attention, of meaning into effect.”12 The shift from logic to phenomenology may become clearer when one analyses portrayals of the female identity by postmodernist women writers. During the postmodernist phase, the focus shifts from addressing the issue of female identity through the portrayal of the inner lives of women and their dreams and fantasies to one which represents women’s experientiality of their actual social interactions. The second shift, from intention to attention, is manifest in the difference between the “dogged tentativeness” in the attitude of modernist icons like Virginia Woolf, Victoria Ocampo, and Teresa de la Parra on the female question and the more layered approach to it by Adrienne Rich, Marta Traba, and Cristina Peri Rossi.13 The former group declared their “intention” to end the male exclusion of women by claiming a place for women in writing, politics, and academia, thus, focusing on the unjust outcomes of socio-political–economic processes. The postmodernist woman writer, instead, gives detailed “attention” to the processes that create some of those unjust outcomes. They examine the behavioural patterns which shape women’s self-perception as a by-product of how they are perceived by men. Adrienne Rich remarks on the lack of autonomy even among women, like Woolf, who came from privileged social echelons and achieved formidable recognition for their intellectual accomplishments: In rereading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own for the first time in some years, I was astonished at the sense of effort, of pains taken, of dogged tentativeness, in the tone of that essay. And I recognized that tone. I had heard it often enough, in myself and in other women. It is the tone of a woman almost in touch with her anger, who is determined not to 11

Cristina Peri Rossi, The Ship of Fools, translated by Psiche Hughes (Columbia, LA: Readers international, 1989), 19. 12 Jenifer Ashton, From Modernism to Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 176. 13 Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” College English WomenWriting and Teaching, vol. 34, no. 1, (1972): 19.

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appear angry, who is willing herself to be calm, detached, and even charming in a roomful of men where things have been said which are attacks on her very integrity. Virginia Woolf is addressing an audience of women, but she is acutely conscious—as she always was—of being overheard by men.14

Modernist women writers had already moved away from portrayals of the victimized woman. In their works, identifiable agents of repression—the dominating patriarch, the aggressive husband, and the demanding matriarch—do not receive pointed attention. By carrying out an exploration of the self-perception and enhanced selfawareness of the female characters, modernist writers had created more autonomous women than their realist and romanticist counterparts; however, the principal concern of the modernist woman protagonist continued to be the man. In postmodernism, the project for the autonomy of women characters made as great an advance as it had in its trajectory from realism to modernism. Aesthetically, the modernist writers’ imagery was created with a soft-focus lens—diffused borders and a dreaminess pervading the narrative. At variance with these, postmodernist texts generated gritty, fragmented images. For the modernist women writers, the city was a metaphor for refuge from tradition. In contrast, postmodernist feminist writing fractures the city lines to expose urban forms of patriarchy. The search for release from patriarchy starts afresh in the city. Public, interactive spaces replace private, solitary spaces. The bathroom, bedroom, and dressing rooms, where women indulged in modernist self-exploration, give way to the psychiatrist’s clinic, bars, and hotels as spaces of self-awareness and self-expression for women. Peri Rossi’s writing favours the surreal tone, fragmented images, urban settings, fleeting temporality, and open endings commonly found among postmodernist writers. Generically, she expresses a greater preference for the short story over the novel: “It is a genre I love, as a reader and as a writer, to which I always come back and to which I will be loyal all my life.”15 Peri Rossi’s affinity for the short story is the rare nod to her Latin American roots, which are otherwise overshadowed by her hybrid consciousness. The short story has always been a strong presence in the Latin American literary canon. Jorge Luis Borgés, perhaps the most revered writer from the continent, did not write a single novel. Peri Rossi declares that the short story is the most dynamic genre of the twentieth century: The story is the genre that has evolved the most in the twentieth century, thanks to the two most important literatures of that century: The North American and the Hispano-American. It experienced an extraordinary boom and a huge readership in South American countries, where the novel is a minor genre, compared to the story and poetry, exactly opposite to how it is in Spain, where still, with a nineteenth-century vision, the story is considered a species of the abbreviated novel. The greatest twentieth century writers in Castellano were excellent short-story writers: Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Juan Carlos Arreola, Augusto Monterroso, Juan Carlos Onetti, Gabriel García Márquez or Mario Vargas Llosa.16

14

Ibid., 20. Cristina Peri Rossi, “Foreword,” in Cuentos Reunidos (Barcelona: Lumen, 2007), 13. 16 Ibid., 14. 15

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This chapter examines a selection of stories by Peri Rossi for their portrayals of three specific urban spaces—the psychiatrist’s clinic, the road, and the sports arena.

6.3 Stories of the Psychiatrist’s Clinic, the Road, and the Racetrack 6.3.1 The Psychiatrist’s Clinic Stories As explained in Chap. 3, the process of psychiatric consultation readily aligns itself with Victor Turner’s extension of the concept of ritual. Unlike functional anthropologists, who saw in rituals only the capacity to communicate a culture’s most cherished values, Turner saw the transformative power of rituals, which are themselves transformed as they are performed and simultaneously transform the performers. In the performance of rituals, “traditional framings may have to be reframed—new bottles made for new wine.”17 Turner was certainly using “frame” to indicate the elements of the ritual such as the costume, make-up, dance, songs, and music. Turner’s “framing” also refers to the criteria for exclusion and inclusion of participants based on age, gender, skill, and other physical and demographic characteristics. However, it is productive, and not at all far-fetched, to intuit a possible spatial implication of “frame” and “reframed.” Specifications of the place of performance—indoors, outdoors, on stage, and on the street—and spatial protocol are as integral as other markers of the performance. Transliterating Turner’s exposition of the ritual performance spatially, we may extrapolate that the space which participates in the ritual undergoes and effects transgressions, that is, the space “reframes” “traditional framings.” A spatial reading of the psychiatrist’s clinic (abbreviated to the clinic here onward) in the selected stories attempts to reveal the transgressions implicit in such a ritualistic reframing. The first clinic story taken up for discussion is titled “A Delicate Consultation.”18 The story is an apt starting text for the ritualistic perspective of the clinic because it explicitly acknowledges the confessional aspect of a psychiatric consultation. In the story, Doctor Minnovis is a young psychiatrist who works in a clinic that provides exclusive services to the wealthy members of the business cooperative that owns it. In five years, the doctor has had to treat only three serious cases. Dr. Minnovis is portrayed as a well-accommodated person in the static, pre-liminal structure. Enriquez, one of his patients, suffers from depression. Enriquez is a forty-year-old, successful dairy businessman. His two children are at college, and his marriage does not present him with any problems. He, too, appears to have a determinate position 17 Victor Turner, “Social Dramas and Stories about Them,” On Narrative, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: UP Chicago, 1981), 156. 18 Cristina Peri Rossi, “Una Consulta Delicada,” in Cuentos Reunidos (Barcelona: Lumen, 2007), emphasis in the original.

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in the societas. Therefore, Dr. Minnovis is unable to identify the cause of his depression. When Enriquez finally reveals the dilemma that has been troubling him for as long as he can remember, the doctor feels that the patient has made a confession: “Mr. Enriquez had confessed (that was the right word: a painful, intimate, and almost intolerable confession) that he was harbouring a secret doubt.”19 The ritual of confession, also known as the “Sacrament of Reconciliation,” involves four elements: contrition, confession, penance or satisfaction, and absolution.20 The first three aspects are performed by the penitent and the last one by the priest. Each of these plays out in the story. Enriquez’s contrition arises in the self-doubt which he hides from everyone because he is ashamed of it; for a very long time, he has not been sure whether he is a man or a woman. Physically he is a man, but he feels like a woman; not sexually, but he has a sensation of being a woman. Unable to resolve it himself, he consults the psychiatrist, where he makes his confession. In order to absolve the patient of the “sin” under discussion—that of “doubt,” of “lack of certainty”—the doctor suggests a penance. He prescribes that Enriquez should sometimes dress as a woman, in private. The doctor believes that seeing himself in the guise of a woman might rid himself of the notion that he is a woman. “The majority of our ideas and ‘beliefs,’” explained the doctor, “are disguised desires.” “By dressing up [as a woman], I would reveal myself, though paradoxically?” asked the patient. “Don’t worry,” sighed the doctor, “Disguises are liberating, “by means of setting up a game, the tension between reality and desire is reduced.”21

Normally a disguise is worn to conceal one’s true identity, but here the disguise is recommended to the patient so that he may discover what is hidden. The patient/sinner, having been handed his penance, does not return to the psychiatrist, and readers are left in the dark about whether he achieves absolution. Troubled by Enriquez’s withdrawal from therapy, Dr. Minnovis slips into a solitary life. He gets divorced, does not answer the phone, and loses all appetite for food and sex. He had been so convinced of the success of his prescribed treatment that he had ordered a set of women’s clothes for Enriquez, which now lies unopened in his apartment. At the end of the story, the doctor decides to wear the women’s lingerie that he had ordered for his patient, thus, giving vent to his own repressed desires. The second clinic story, “Lovelys,” takes its title from the name of a pharmacy that is visible from the window of the clinic. Peri Rossi establishes the confessionalconsultation equivalence explicitly in this story as well. Before explaining his problem, the patient tells his doctor that he is making a confession: I have not spoken with anyone about the matter. Why should I? It is convenient to make this confession to you because I have paid you already. I know that you are charging me for this revelation. I would never do it free of cost; my narcissism would be hurt.22 19

Ibid., 660. David Coffey, The Sacrament of Reconciliation (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001), 83. 21 Peri Rossi, “Una Consulta,” 667. 22 Cristina Peri Rossi, “Lovelys,” in Cuentos Reunidos (Barcelona: Lumen, 2007), 97. 20

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The man’s “confession” is that he has been suffering from erectile dysfunction for the last six months, for which his physician has ruled out any physiological causes. He also discusses his fear of closed doors. During the consultation/confession, the man tells the doctor that he chose him because he has the same name as one of his neighbours. The doctor probes him for more information about the neighbour, and they find out that the common surname is not a mere coincidence; the doctor is, indeed, related to the patient’s neighbours—a school teacher and a bank manager couple, with two young children. Six months ago, the family had been dragged out of their home at night and made to disappear by a group of non-uniformed armed men. The incident was a common tragic occurrence during the Southern Cone dictatorships of the late 1970s and 80s, which saw a spate of state-sanctioned, extra-juridical abductions and executions of political dissenters. The protagonist had witnessed the incident through the window of his apartment. Obeying the commands of an armed man to stay inside, he and the other residents on the block had turned off the lights and stayed indoors. Nobody could see what was happening inside the apartment, but they could hear the sound of the armed men climbing the stairs and the woman shouting for help. The residents peeped through drawn curtains to see the woman pulled by her hair and shoved into a vehicle on the street. Her husband was almost unconscious because he had been beaten up badly, and the two children, in pyjamas, followed their parents. By obeying the order to stay inside, the residents of the building feel guilty of complicity. The man’s erectile problem, his loss of sexual function, and his potency began after the horrific event. The doctor, who bears the same name as the abducted family, is also aware of the incident, though his conversation with the patient shows that he is unwilling to admit to the knowledge. He makes vague excuses for why he has not inquired about his relatives’ whereabouts for six months. Both the doctor and the patient are complicit in their silence. It is productive to carry out a parallel discussion of the next two selected stories, “Therapy” and “Like the Magician’s Top Hat,” both from the same anthology, because the stories present gendered portrayals of mental disorders.23 The protagonist of “Therapy,” Mrs. Olson is a mature, married woman in her late forties, with the grown-up, independent children, and whose husband hardly spends any time at home with her; David from “Like the Magician’s Top Hat,” roughly the same age as Mrs. Olson, is amicably divorced and has sold off his shop of domestic electrical goods. We may infer that both protagonists have lived out their ascribed structural roles— Mrs. Olson’s presence is unnecessary for the upkeep of her home, and David also does not have any familial responsibilities. Perhaps, their self-awareness of their irrelevance is the propulsive force that pushes them to chaos. Mrs. Olson has attempted suicide, unsuccessfully, several times, through nonviolent methods; she takes an overdose of her prescription medicine for depression, 23

Cristina Peri Rossi, “Terapía,” in Habitaciones Privadas (Barcelona: Menoscuarto, 2012); Cristina Peri Rossi, “Como la Chistera de un Mago,” in Habitaciones Privadas (Barcelona: Menoscuarto, 2012).

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drinks floor cleaners and shaving lotion, and inhales gas on various occasions. She, however, fails to kill herself. After the last attempt, her family sends Mrs. Olson for a psychiatric evaluation, where she is diagnosed with a bipolar personality disorder— a manic-depressive mental disease. The diagnosis is based on her responses to a questionnaire. She is expected to provide a definite yes or no to some of the questions and select only one of the provided options in the others. She is unable to give a precise answer to any of the questions that attempt to assess her moods. Her answers are vague: “sometimes yes, sometimes no” is the import of all her answers.24 Her inability to make up her mind about her own moods is seen as a mental disorder that makes it necessary for her to be confined to a mental asylum. The story strongly echoes the experiences of Kate Millett, the literary critic, sculptor, and writer, who questioned the assumption that mental disorders should be treated at par with physical diseases. According to Millet, the mind is said to be subject to disease in the same manner as the body. But, whereas in physical medicine, there are verifiable physiological proofs in mental illness alleged socially unacceptable behaviour is taken as a symptom, even as proof, of pathology […] Diagnosis is based upon impressionistic evidence: conduct, deportment, and social manner. Such evidence is frequently imputed. Furthermore, it may not even be experienced by the afflicted party but instead may be observed by others who declare such a one afflicted.25

Mrs. Olson’s inability to give clear answers about moods and life situations and her repeated attempts at suicide are diagnosed as symptoms of bipolar personality disorder. She is confined to a mental asylum because her family declares that she can be cured of her illness there, but their behaviour demonstrates that her seclusion is more a matter of convenience for them. For Millett, who herself was sent to an asylum by her family for treating her bipolar disorder, madness was “a certain speed of thought, certain wonderful flights of ideas, and certain states of altered perception.”26 She contested the medical understanding of depression as a disease, that is, a condition that could be cured by drugs and physiological manipulations. She understood depression as an excess of feeling: Wait a moment—why call this depression?—why not call it grief? You’ve permitted your grief, even your outrage, to be converted into a disease. You have allowed your overwhelming, seemingly inexplicable grief at what has been done to you—the trauma and shame of imprisonment—to be transformed into a mysterious psychosis.27

Mrs. Olson’s playing with death is a stratagem that facilitates her exit from her home, where she feels extraneous. The reader may gauge that her intention was never to kill herself; instead, the unsuccessful suicides were part of a strategy to leave her home. She frees herself of the drug-induced stupor inflicted on her by the male doctors in the asylum with the help of a progressive female doctor. After a short period of confinement, she is able to gather self-esteem and cures herself of the “disease” of depression. 24

Peri Rossi, “Terapía,” 77. Kate Millett, The Loony-Bin Trip (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 315. 26 Ibid., 319. 27 Ibid., 313. 25

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David Thomas is Peri Rossi’s male representation of madness. Six months after selling off his shop, David, armed with a toy pistol, robs thousands of dollars from a bank. As soon as he steps out of the branch, he empties the sack full of money out onto the street and surrenders himself to the police. The court-appointed lawyer wants to take an insanity defence citing “momentary lapse of reason.”28 A team of three mental health professionals—a psychologist, a psychiatrist, and a psychoanalyst—is appointed to diagnose David’s disorder. Despite his lawyer’s insistence, David refuses to admit that he was insane when he robbed the bank or that he had committed a crime. David’s consistent statement is that he had carried out the robbery deliberately as a harmless prank to give passers-by the momentary pleasure of getting some money that they had done absolutely nothing to earn, a pleasure he himself experienced while gambling at the slot machines in a Las Vegas casino. He is diagnosed as suffering from “messianic delirium.” The gender difference is also visible in the doctors and their prescriptions—the new female director at the asylum adopts innovative approaches to stabilize Mrs. Olson’s manic attacks. Finally, she resolves Mrs. Olso’s “depression” using a stock of sweets, chocolates, and exposure to the outdoors. On the contrary, the three-strong male team, relying on traditional diagnostic methods, fails to find any solution to David’s delirium. By casting the clinic stories within the syntax of a religious confession, Peri Rossi explicitly dismisses psychoanalysis as a course of scientific treatment. Thus, she approximates Kate Millett’s anti-psychiatry stance. Both writers take the doctor/analyst off “his” pedestal of omniscience and authority. In these stories, the analysts, except the one in “Therapy,” are always male. However, there is a difference between their representations of madness. Peri Rossi writes of the madness of the ordinary mind, whereas Millett’s writings tried to claim prestige for madness by seeing a link between mental disorders and a high degree of artistic achievement. In Millet’s writings, the portrait to emerge is a sense of prestige about madness and a sense of ennui and superficiality about sanity. Millett’s writings infused the anti-psychiatry movement with both a feminist and an artistic sensibility, as she was concerned that an array of authoritarian structures, including the family and the mental hospital, was tampering with self-expression and artistry, particularly in women.29

In a similar association of madness and achievement, when Janet Frame, a renowned writer from New Zealand, received the diagnosis of schizophrenia, one of her mentors told her that he thought of her along the lines of great artists like Van Gogh, Hugo Wolf, and Robert Schumann, who were also considered to be schizophrenic.30 Recalling her mentor’s convoluted notion of greatness, Frame 28

Peri Rossi, “Como la chistera,” 90. Heather Murray, “‘My Place Was Set at The Terrible Feast’: The Meanings of the ‘AntiPsychiatry’ Movement and Responses in the United States, 1970s–1990s,” The Journal of American Culture, vol. 37, no. 1, (2014): 38. 30 Michael King, “Janet Frame,” The Guardian, January 30, 2004, www.theguardian.com/news/ 2004/jan/30/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries. 29

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remarked, “My place was set, then, at the terrible feast.”31 Peri Rossi does not offer her characters “a seat at the terrible feast” among such doyens. Instead, she questions the very diagnosis of madness by portraying mental health professionals of all types as charlatans who offer cures without having a true understanding of the patient’s condition. Patients seek out the thresholds of liminal spaces for themselves—the window, the revolving door, and the garden—and draw their doctors into the same spaces, putting into doubt the very premise of diagnosis and prescription and treatment and cure. This raises important questions like, which of the multiple selves is the “true” self? Who, indeed, is the doctor, and who is the patient? Who is “normal” and who is not? Earlier, the “patients” had very limited options available—to be a man or woman, bipolar or normal, and gambler or messiah—and this kept them on the edge of the threshold. With the breakdown of certainty, they escape the compulsion to be “male,” “unipolar,” “sane,” and “cautious” by locating themselves in the threshold. In an act of role-reversal, they vitiate structural barriers to evince confessions from their doctors, located in positions of authority.

6.3.2 The Road Stories Bakhtin constructs the chronotope of the road as a superset that includes the chronotope of the encounter and may be extended to include other time–space configurations engendered by the road like motels, gas stations, and highway eateries. In Bakhtin’s articulation, the road is not one that traverses alien worlds. In its pure form, the “road,” though in itself unfamiliar to the traveller, passes through familiar lands. In generic terms, the chronotope of the road defines the Spanish picaresque novels and Don Quixote. Though he considers the Cervantean magnum opus genre-defying, he sees a convergence with the picaresque novels in their common motifs of the perpetual quest. Commenting on Cervantes’ masterpiece, Don Quixote, and two landmark works of the picaresque genre, Bakhtin writes, The road is what determined the plots of the Spanish picaresque novel of the sixteenth century (Lazarillo and Guzmán de Alfarache). On the boundary line between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Don Quixote sets out on the road in order that he might encounter all of Spain on that road—from galley-slaves to dukes. By this time, the road had been profoundly, intensely etched by the flow of historical time, by the traces and signs of time’s passage, by markers of the era.32

A journalist leak in 2003 revealed that Janet Frame had been on the short list for the Nobel prize that year, and she died the next year. When she was 20 years old, working as a trainee teacher, she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, which kept her in mental asylums for a decade. 31 Janet Frame, quoted in Murray, 47. 32 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, (Austin: UP Texas, 1981), 244.

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The road which appears in ancient novels of travel, carrying the hero through exotic cultures and unknown landscapes, for Bakhtin, does not conform to the chronotope of “road.” The road in these narratives undergoes such massive expansion that it loses semblance with the road of the quest novel wherein it offered a slow pace–place of discovery and reflection. The travel novels, which evoke a sense of adventure and discovery of the “other,” as opposed to discovery of the self in quest novels, are strictly speaking defined by what we may succinctly term the “alien road” chronotope to avoid the more verbose, “chronotope of the road through an alien world,” employed by Bakhtin to describe this second variant. He explains the difference thus: The peculiarity of the “road” serves to distinguish these [Spanish] novels from that other line of development present in the novel of travel, represented by such novelistic types as the ancient novel of wandering, the Greek Sophist novel […] and the Baroque novel of the seventeenth century. In these novels, a function analogous to the road is played by an alien world separated from one’s own native land by sea and distance.33

On the benchmarks settled by Bakhtin, the narratives of Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) and The Motorcycle Diaries (1993) may be seen as contemporary narratives of quest that evoke the chronotope of the road, whereas The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) and Eat, Pray, Love (2006) would be considered adventure narratives linked by the alien chronotope.34 These narratives of quest carry forward the earlier metaphorical implications of the road as a means of selfexploration. By advancement through space, the traveller also moves ahead at a faster pace than biographical time, and his or her self-awareness is accelerated. The seeker– traveller ends the journey more aware of his relationship with his immediate external world as in The Motorcycle Diaries or with a deeper understanding of his value system as in Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In making their heroes more aware of their inner selves as well as of the outer realities, these narratives carry a distinct temporal connotation of ageing with being “wiser.” Like the road in the narratives of the quest, Peri Rossi’s postmodern road hybridizes the unfamiliar and the familiar, a crucial characteristic of the road chronotope, pointed out by Bakhtin: one crucial feature of the “road” [is] common to all the various types of novels we have covered: the road is always one that passes through familiar territory; and not through some exotic alien world. It is the sociohistorical heterogeneity of one’s own country that is revealed and depicted (and for this reason, if one may speak at all about the exotic here, then it can only be the social “exotic”–“slums,” “dregs,” the world of thieves).35 33

Ibid., 245. Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything (New York: Bloomsbury), 2007. Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries (New York: Harper Perennial, [1995] 2004). Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (London: Vintage, [1974] 2011), Kindle. Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar (n.p.: Penguin, [1990] 2011), Kindle. Ernesto Che Guevara and Robert Pirsig travel through expanses where they had spent their lives. The journeys of Elizabeth Gilbert and Paul Theroux, in their bestsellers, take them through an exoticized East. 35 Bakhtin, 245. 34

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However, Peri Rossi’s protagonists, instead of encountering the “social exotic,” confront the differences contained within a self which is falsely perceived to be a singular entity. In the selected stories, the roads shown are familiar ones: the everyday route to work in “The Rain at Night,” an oft-chosen route traversed by a delivery vehicle in “Ironside,” and the default getaway for a jobless fifty-year-old in “After hours.” In the road stories, the spatiality of familiarity is satirically grafted onto the chronotope of sentimental romance novels. According to Bakhtin, Don Quixote creates a parody of monsters, dangers, adventure, and courtly romance in the Chivalric novel by evoking a hybridized chronotope of the road and the chronotope of chivalric romances in a satirical manner.36 In a similar vein, Peri Rossi creates a parody of the sentimental, ever-longing, timorous, and biddable women protagonists of romance novels like those of the “novela rosa.” These had their heyday in the 1920s in Spain as “kiosk literature” and subsequently formed part of the “culture of evasion” of the Franco era.37 In these mass-produced products, the quest for the next love interest, intrigues, and betrayals are the propulsive force driving the turning points in the plot. By being “Romantic but reticent, charged with sexual tension but shrinking from explicitness, and with the inevitable happy ending(s),” they offered “escapism and entertainment.”38 Two of the road stories parody such romance narratives by giving an unexpected twist to the budding romance between the future lovers, turning it into a disillusioned, resigned, cynical “disencounter,” desencuentro. In the third story, the chivalric, quixotic man meets with as much derision as the original Don Quixote faced when he encounters Dulcinea del Toboso. Everyone around the chivalrous knight laughs at him for considering the rustic, rough farm-girl as his delicate, beautiful, courtly-love. In the three stories, the road, as a liminal zone, offers differing degrees of liberation to the travellers. In “The Rain at Night,” (hereafter abbreviated to “The Rain”) the road dislodges fixed centres in two ways—technology proves to be ineffectual against the vagaries of the weather; secondly, the reciprocity of sentiment implied in a committed relationship turns to a display of selfishness at a crucial moment. The thirty-eight-year-old protagonist works in a translation company. Her office is a two-hour commute from her home in the city. One day, she is delayed at work. By the time she leaves, the night is pitch dark, and torrential rain begins to fall, and an otherwise familiar road begins to lose its predictability, posing a threat to the woman’s rehearsed routine: She covered several kilometres in the darkness, with the help of the long-range headlights, she did not put on the music because she was scared to miss any sound that might signal danger. A curve was coming up, so she switched on the short-range lights. Now, she saw

36

Bakhtin, 165. Carlos lvarez Aragüés, “Kiosk Literature,” Encyclopedia of Contemporary Spanish Culture, edited by Eamonn Rodgers (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 283. 38 Eamonn Rodgers, “Novela Rosa,” Encyclopedia of Contemporary Spanish Culture, (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 373. 37

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a small bit of the side road, swept up by water, to the right, she could make out a tall, thin figure, which could barely stand up, buffeted by the water and the wind.39

The usual road is de-familiarized by the storm. The cautious driver, who had not even put on music lest she gets distracted, thinks nothing of stopping for an unknown figure lurking on a side road. On the road, her careful persona falls apart to reveal her openness to a new experience—an unfamiliar quest. The soaked, bedraggled figure is that of a nineteen-year-old girl. The girl brings the turmoil outside into the car. Drenched to the skin, she drips water onto the seat. Her hair is a mess, tossed about like the leaves of the trees outside. The girl had gone to a concert with her boyfriend. When they had a fight, she left in a huff. She could not call anyone for help because her mobile ran out of charge; so, she decided to hitch-hike her way to the city. The translator notices many inconsistencies in the girl’s story and concludes that the young girl is a liar, but, at the same time, the older woman finds her funny. By the time the drenched girl asks the translator to put her up for the night, the woman has decided that this girl poses a risk she does not want to take. She tries to fob her off by saying that her boyfriend might be coming over, but then he calls in with a disaster story of his own: I am in a traffic jam […] and my battery is dying. I don’t think I can get off the highway for another three or four hours. There was a chain accident or something like that. There are helicopters above, but the terrible weather is not helping. There are some dead and injured, but don’t worry, I’m fine.40

Cell phone batteries are dying all around. The girl needs a next-day pill because the condom broke when she had sex with her boyfriend a few hours back. Even with the help of helicopters, the traffic jam will not clear for hours. Technology is of no use in this chaos. The translator’s boyfriend had always acted protective around her, but on this terrible night, he does not even ask her if she is safe. After his call, the woman and the girl talk about Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, and French Cinema. At some point in the conversation, the girl squeezes the woman’s hand and gives her a warm kiss on the cheek. Now, the woman decides that she will not be alone that night. Acting against her better judgement and displaying unusual spontaneity, the translator invites the girl to spend the night in her apartment. Her monogamous, heterosexual committed relationship is threatened by a deviant turn in the road. Whereas it was the rain that obfuscated definite shapes and sharp outlines in “The Rain,” in “Ironside,” it is the afternoon dust.41 In the story, the man driving the delivery truck is taking a long route to the city to save tolls. He wants to save money because he has a family to care for—a wife and eleven-year-old twin daughters. The longer route traverses a desolate space. On the route, there are no cafés, gas stations, or motels. On his earlier trips on this route, he has never encountered pedestrians, 39

Cristina Peri Rossi, “De noche la lluvia,” Los Amores Equivocados (Barcelona: Menocuarto, 2015), 56. 40 Ibid., 65. 41 Cristina Peri Rossi, “Ironside,” in Los Amores Equivocados (Barcelona: Menoscuarto, 2015).

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but, on this trip, he sees a gaunt, angular shape, “without breasts or hips.”42 He stops to inquire about the girl, who asks to be taken to Ironside, a seedy roadside bar that doubles up as a brothel. The man knows the establishment, having used their services a few times. The girl tells him that she wants to work at Ironside as a prostitute to take care of her family—her mother has cancer, she has three younger siblings, and her father has abandoned the family. The lorry driver refuses to comply and tries to get her father’s telephone number. He says that he would rather leave her at the next police station or drop her off somewhere on the way. In any case, he refuses to take her to Ironside. Thus far, the man sticks to the socially acceptable position of the patriarch, the responsible male adult who prevents the young from wayward inclinations. They stop to have a snack—the sandwiches his wife has packed—and chat for a while. The stop effects a twist in the conventional script. When it is time to start again, she asks him for another “favour,” and he agrees. She wants him to teach her how to have sex, and after an initial reaction of shock, he complies. Later, he drops her off at the gates of the nightclub. After dropping off the girl, he ruminates about his roadside encounter. He feels relieved that his daughters live in a sheltered world and that they are unaware of the existence of places like Ironside. He ensures their safety by not allowing them to go to the disco. The eccentric road destroys the stable centrality of the dependable father in the familial structure—the “father” is seduced by the invitation of a girl only a few years older than his daughters. The third road story of a quest, “After hours,” is also about a nightclub that sells drinks and sex. In the story, the protagonist’s decrepit car breaks down near the nightclub. The driver, a fifty-something out-of-work man, cannot afford to keep his car in working condition. The reader is also informed that he is not a practical man; he often slips into artistic reveries. He fantasizes about being a knight in shining armour to a damsel in distress. He imagines that the prostitute, whom he has chosen in the nightclub, is in distress. When she tells him that her name is Nadia, first he philosophizes about her name, “Nadia or Nadie?” (nadie means nobody in Spanish), and then he mentally creates a noble lineage for her: if she is Nadia, he thinks, she must be Romanian, like Nadia Comaneci, the first gymnast to score a perfect ten at the Olympics. Romania for him represents the broken dreams of communism. The man’s fanciful imagination calls to mind Don Quixote’s for a coarse woman whom he believes to be worthy of his courtship. In Don Quixote’s imagination, there is no woman more noble and beautiful than her. He calls her Dulcinea del Toboso in a manner befitting her beauty and good name: […] two things inspire love more than any other; they are a great beauty and a good name, and these two things reach their consummation in Dulcinea, for in beauty, no one is her equal, and as for a good name, few can approach her. And to conclude, I imagine that everything I say is true, no more and no less […]43

42

Ibid., 7. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, translated by Edith Grossman (London: Vintage, [1605] 2005), 219.

43

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Peri Rossi’s twenty-first-century Quixotic idler wants to save Nadia, of golden hair and alabaster skin, of the land of Nadia Comaneci, from the ravages of sex work. He offers to marry her and take her to the land of her birth, where they would listen to the communist anthem “The International.”44 His proposal meets with an anti-climax when the bouncers at the nightclub haul him out of the room and throw him on the street, warning him to never return. He believes that they must have had microphones installed in the room to spy on clients, but the narrator suggests that it is more likely that the girl told on him because he was taking up too much of her time, causing a loss in her nightly earnings. The modern knight aspires to give the prostitute a place to belong when he himself has none. His promise to find a home for her is unrealistic and far-fetched. In any case, she has no wish to return to her homeland, and she does not wish to be “rescued.” The eccentricity of the road destroys the power of a magnetic centre, which creates an ordered field with assigned positions for all objects within its range. The chivalrous knight not only lacks the capacity to save but has no candidate who needs saving. “After hours” evokes a variation of the pure chronotope of the road discerned by Bakhtin in Don Quixote. In the pure chronotope of the road, the revealed exotic can only be the “social exotic—slums, dregs, and the world of thieves.” However, in the postmodernist parody of the chivalric romance, the knight also belongs to the same world of slums and dregs that he sets out to change.

6.3.3 The Racetrack Stories Victor Turner categorizes sports and other “genres of leisure” as “liminoid” rituals that bring together various aspects of a society’s culture in novel ways: the genres of industrial leisure, the theatre, poetry, novel, ballet, film, sport, rock music, classical music, art, pop art, and so on, play with the factors of culture, sometimes assembling them in random, grotesque, improbable, surprising, shocking, usually experimental combinations. But they do this in a much more complicated way than in the liminality of tribal initiations.45

Turner’s distinction between liminal and liminoid rituals appears insignificant on closer scrutiny. In pre-industrial, tribal, and agrarian societies, games, like all other cultural performances, were associated with religion. The Olympics in ancient Greece were part of the festival held in honour of Zeus, the Aztec game of Ullamaliztli was a ritualized enactment of the cosmos, and the Indian sport of Jallikattu is part of the festivities involved in the harvest celebrations dedicated to the Sun God.46 For 44

Peri Rossi, “After hours,” 12. Victor Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology,” Rice Institute Pamphlet, vol. 60, no. 3, (1974): 71. 46 Manuel Aguiålar-Moreno, Handbook to Life in the Aztec World (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 363. The ball court of the Aztecs mirrored the celestial ball court, citlaltlachtli. The earthbound court (tlachtli), lying on the western axis, symbolized the underworld, through which the Sun, represented 45

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Turner, anti-structural suspension of the ordinary was essential for a liminal ritual so that an alternative mode of relation, or communitas, could emerge among liminars. Contradicting the expectedly spontaneous and unstructured liminal relationships, the ritual of the organized sport even in pre-industrial societies was not simply a free association among men who shared an interest in games. Rules of participation in ancient games affirmed the societies’ structural construction. Entry was restricted on the basis of gender, caste, and lineage. The modern-day spectator sports, taking their current form in the late nineteenth century, are also affirmatory of the values of industrial capitalism. The sportsmen who can afford a greater investment in equipment, facilities, and coaches enjoy greater success than those with limited resources. The mercenary underpinnings of sports are usually kept hidden under a veneer of the ideals of sportsmanship—fair play, courtesy, and grace in losing; team sports carry the added ideal of cooperation. The camaraderie among team members, often on display in the playfield, makes them look like liminars in a communitas. Their on-field interactions are non-hierarchical, playful, and spontaneous. In addition to having a communitas-like ethos, another characteristic which sports share with liminal rituals is the sense of the ludic, that is, “of play.” Ludic interactions are completely different from “ergic” ones, the latter describing work-related individual and social behaviour. As a symbol of continued playfulness in adult life, sports provide an escape from the boredom of mundane routines. Hence, for the amateur player, they are a “ludic” pastime; but, for professional players, modern sports are a form of “ergic” pursuits that, though combining work and play, place greater importance on the work aspect. Drawing upon the marked conceptual similarities between sports and ancient rituals, cultural critic Sharon Rowe argues that the distinction between liminal and liminoid is immaterial while reading sports as a cultural phenomenon, and what Turner says of the liminal rituals is equally valid for what he terms the liminoid. If liminality is a primary means by which a society reveals itself to itself, and in so doing not only maintains a capacity to continually rejuvenate itself with new values and new relational patterns but reasserts its allegiance to the old, then a society without liminality would lack a mechanism for the self-reflection and creative self-renewal that Turner identifies as the essence of liminality. Modern industrial societies, as uniquely secular, are often thought empty of ritual, thus empty of genuinely liminal phenomena. But […] contemporary sports present this ludic essence, and thus are modern-day variants of the liminal…[Therefore] there is no need to distinguish liminal and liminoid as Turner does to distinguish modern sport from its ancient variants.47

by the ball, passed each night. The game symbolized the battle between the Sun and Moon, or the gods of youth and maturity, each vying for supremacy. As well as reflecting a symmetrical cosmology, the game of Ullamaliztli symbolized the sacrificial rite. The tlachtli in Tenochtitlan lay in front of the Great Temple’s bloodstained staircase. As shown by Codex Magliabecchiano, skulls marked the central line, and the rubber ball represented the severed head of the sacrificed prisoner. It was not uncommon that the court became a stage upon which losing players were executed. 47 Sharon Rowe, “Modern Sports: Liminal Ritual or Liminoid Leisure,” in Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, edited by Graham St. John (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 129.

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This study treats the integral concomitants of the liminal—communitas, ludic, immediacy, and spontaneity—as relevant for discussing the portrayal of contemporary sports in the stories discussed in this section. Before embarking on a critical reading of Peri Rossi’s stories of the sports arena, one more distinction must be emphasized. Modern-day organized sports fall into two broad categories, stopwatch sports and tactical sports. In stopwatch sports, the criterion of success is an externally observed number—the time taken to swim, cycle, and run a certain distance, or the distance covered by the javelin or the discus. In these sports, a participant does not need to adjust his game according to the game of their adversary. Thus, no strategizing is required at the time of performance in stopwatch sports. The second category of tactical sports involves “a more complex interplay of factors” and is, therefore, more popular as spectator sports: As interest drains away from pure physical virtuosity, other sports […] benefit: the ones in which decision-making, skill, on-field intelligence, and tactics are more inextricably bound up with success. Everyone recognises that winning in modern professional sport relies on relentless dedication, but success is more interesting when it doesn’t rely exclusively on physical optimisation […] It is a lot easier to enjoy sport as narrative drama when we are confident that the critical advantage is not chemical.48

Though tactical sports—staged in theatre-like-stadia, with competing teams, and longer viewing durations—may make for better “narrative drama,” stopwatch sports are more suited to the study of the individual’s predicament in the postmodern world of fragmented realities. Perhaps, this is the reason why Peri Rossi’s sports stories describe races. In “The Runner Stumbles,” the protagonist is a top-ranked runner who has an opportunity to break his own world record in the race depicted in the story. However, in the last lap of the race, when he is just about to reach the finishing line, he drops out of the race, shocking the spectators and his anxious coach, who is watching the race from the stands. Towards the end, with only three rounds remaining, the runner, firmly in the lead, decides to stop: And then the ecstasy of letting himself fall; the divine, sublime ecstasy of stopping, sliding gently towards the edge, the edge of the track, within a few metres of the finish, just a little before the end; slide gradually towards the ground and raise his head towards the tall trees, of the celestial sky, slow clouds, curled plumes of the branches, the leaves move, he moves his eyes upwards and takes in the cadence of the wind, the flying birds.49

The runner’s ecstasy described in the extract is the result of being in the state of flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the noted psychologist, lists sports as an activity conducive to generating “flow.” He describes the state of flow as an optimal experience, which, though not pleasurable, is intensely satisfying: Contrary to what we usually believe […] the best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times […] The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or 48 Ed Smith, “What’s the Difference between a Sportsman and an Athlete?” New Statesman, March 13, 2017, www.newstatesman.com/politics/sport/2017/03/whats-differencebetweenspor tsman-and-athlete. 49 Cristina Peri Rossi, “El corredor tropieza,” in Cuentos Reunidos (Barcelona: Lumen, 2007), 247.

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mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen […] for a swimmer; it could be trying to beat his own record; […] Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. The swimmer’s muscles might have ached during his most memorable race, his lungs might have felt like exploding, and he might have been dizzy with fatigue—yet these could have been the best moments.50

If the exhilaration of voluntarily undertaking a challenging task is innately satisfying, why does Peri Rossi’s runner opt out of it? It is as if Csikszentmihalyi’s swimmer decided to stop midstream and made his race memorable not by beating his own record but by exiting the race. Turner commented on this paradoxical nature of communitas, which though originating in a flow after a point ceases to generate the flow: […] the more spontaneously ‘equal’ people become, the more distinctively ‘themselves’ they become; the more the same they become socially, the less they find themselves to be individually. Yet when this communitas or comitas is institutionalized, the newfound idiosyncratic is legislated into yet another set of universalistic roles and statuses, whose incumbents must subordinate individuality to a rule.51

When athletes first enter the communitas of ludic sports as amateurs, they feel energized by its marked difference from the deskbound, routine jobs. It appears, at first, that they are part of a group that has a shared non-materialist value system, but the group cannot, for long, remain impervious to the influences of the structure from which it has extricated itself. The Olympics, for example, do not allow professional sportspersons to compete. In an attempt to foster human achievement undictated by commercial rationale, participation is restricted to amateurs. But the event itself is rigidly governed by commercial parameters. To compete at the level of the Olympics often involves cut-throat competition for sponsorship from private businesses for training or lobbying with governments for larger budget allocations. Expensive training facilities, specialty foods, and the help of expert coaches and physiotherapists hardly leave room for any truly amateur competition. High glamour, cult of personality, and competitive advertising of sports businesses also dilute the focus on the game itself. With its commercial underbelly exposed, the world of sports appears far from utopic. The original “ludic” facet of sports begins to dim as the “ergic” aspect becomes more prominent. The playfulness of sport cedes space to professionalism, and rational calculations edge out emotional affect. As the thrill of the sport is mechanized into the boredom of a job, each race becomes like another day at the desk, and every groove of the circular track sends the visual message of the interminability of the task. Instead of a voluntarily chosen vocation, the sport soon becomes a business that can be made more profitable by finding regulatory loopholes that may be exploited for improving performance—like the use of drugs and wearing swimsuits which can shave off a fraction of a second from the stopwatch. The sports industry spends larger and larger sums of money so that athletes can avert the fate 50 51

Ibid., 12. Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid,” 78.

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of “greyhounds and racehorses, whose speeds levelled off decades ago.”52 At this juncture, where the ludic liminal has become the ergic post-liminal, an individual ceases to be in the flow, and like the runner in Peri Rossi’s story, may decide to leave the arena. The second story of sports, “The Race,” is set on the long stretch of a cycle track cutting through green fields, woodlands, and mountains. The protagonist of the story is a top cyclist, who, unlike the runner in “The Runner Stumbles,” has not grown tired of his sport. Wanting to escape the confinement of the walled stadium, the runner seeks an escape route that allows him the pleasure of gazing up at the free-floating clouds and birds in the sky. In contrast, the cyclist, despite traversing an open track, does not look up from his front wheel because any lapse in concentration could cost him the race. He constantly reminds himself that he must not distract himself by looking at the trees and the mountain slopes. At the very outset, “The Race” highlights the illusory nature of fame. The cyclist mentions the legendary champion, Eddy Merckx, from the 1970s—who had earned the nickname Cannibal because his relentless winning streak seemed to devour all his competitors—to a woman whom he is trying to impress. He is surprised to find out that she had never heard of him. For the cyclist, there can be no greater celebrity than the legendary Merckx, but for the woman, who is a literary critic, the cycling legend’s accomplishments count for nothing. The sports stories can be viewed as metaphors for the alienation produced by the pressure to excel when pursuing excellence signifies leaving others behind. The runner’s mind cautions against stopping or slowing down as he glides towards the edges, “Careful: it is not allowed to touch the fallen runner. If he gets up on his own, he can continue running. But it is not allowed that anyone else helps him to his feet”.53 The desire to defeat the competitors is masked by the espoused Olympic spirit of “friendship, solidarity, and fair play.” Though sports have the potential to generate the exhilaration of flow, it cannot be achieved if it is bounded by what Bauman calls “procedural rationality.” In order to ensure mechanical compliance with rules and norms of competition: [e]verybody’s action must be totally impersonal; indeed, it should not be oriented to persons at all, but to the rules, which specify the procedure. This kind of action directed by a codified reason of rules is described as procedural rationality. What counts is following the procedure to the letter. What is decried and punished more than anything else is twisting the procedure to suit individual preferences or affections.54

There is a parallel set of unwritten rules, enunciated by the sports industry and guided by financial logic, that run counter-current to the ones declared by organizers to promote fair competition. True sportsmanship remains undecorated and ignored. While our collective imaginations hold an ideal vision of athletic purity and amateur 52

Smith. Peri Rossi, “El corredor,” 245. 54 Zygmunt Bauman, Alone Again: Ethics After Uncertainty (New York: Demos, 1994), 5, emphasis in the original. 53

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competition, the reality of sports since ancient times has been dictated by the rules of politics and economics.55 Peri Rossi demonstrates that when performances become completely ruled by expectations of victory and procedure-driven, the liberating power of the realm of possibilities dries up. The athletes in “The Runner Stumbles” and “The Race” appropriate the ritual of sport in their unique ways. Instead of surrendering to the ossified roles imposed on them, they reclaim the need for playfulness which had brought them to the communitas of sports in the first place. The absence of obligatory compliance to normative expectation and the voluntary element in participation is essential to sustain fulfilment, pleasure, and innovation. Commenting on the potential that liminoidal processes, like sports and entertainment, have for changing the way people relate to one another, Turner states that, to be either their [the liminoid processes’] agents or their audience is an optional activity— the absence of obligation or constraint from external norms imparts to them a pleasurable quality which enables them all the more readily to be absorbed by individual consciousnesses. Pleasure thus becomes a serious matter in the context of innovative change.56

The sports stories address the gender question by locating male protagonists in a discourse of severely constricted choices. The dislocation of the two men from the iterative circular racetrack and from the repetitive incline–decline of the mountainous terrain, respectively, is necessary to change them from mechanized, programmed performers to sentient human beings who need not surrender their emotional capacities entirely to rational calculation. The limen is located at the edge of the circular track; once the runner falls there, he is located in-between those still in the race and the audience, which includes his vigilant and anxious coach. For the cyclist, the limen is on the triangular seat, in-between the two wheels of the cycle. When he turns his eyes from the narrow strip of the wheel’s circumference to the more expanded triangle, it widens his view. Peri Rossi destroys patriarchal connotations of masculinity by placing both male champions in the subjunctive mood. The champions are unsatisfied with their measurable, recognized achievements and are full of immeasurable, unknown longing.

6.4 A View Through the Spatial Gynocritics Model It may be noticed that the protagonists of Cristina Peri Rossi’s stories and novels are more often male than female. Sometimes the stories do not feature any female characters at all, as in “A Delicate Consultation” and “The Runner Stumbles.” Peri Rossi is an uncommon feminist writer whose work is not dominated by descriptions of oppression and marginalization of women. Instead, her narrative and prosody view the repression of desire in both genders as being the core of grave and widespread 55

Rowe, 138. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974), 16. 56

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social malaise. The assumption of “masculine” modes of conduct—absolute knowledge claims, aggressive suppression of dissent, and unrelenting pursuit of individual glory—as a route to success is, for her, a manifestation of repression of desire. Peri Rossi suggests alternative modes of conduct, more feminine, through her male characters by making them question their beliefs. Her spatial logic is key to destabilizing the fixed positions that men, as the self-appointed custodians of the family, science, sexuality, and female virtue, have occupied in normative social structures.

6.4.1 De-settling Clinics In “A Delicate Consultation,” when the doctor takes the decision to unwrap the package of lingerie that has been lying unopened, he is in the glass-enclosed balcony of his apartment. It appears as if he is standing at the portal to heaven or hell— psychedelic light effects and holy crosses appear in the nightscape in a vital image of the scene of deliverance: He came out on the balcony protected by glass and saw, in the distance, the enormous neon signage of the Philips Company, rotating, in the dark sky, with its intense red and yellow. The parabolic antennae sitting atop buildings like crosses nailed to the roofs look like religious symbols of an absolutist civilization.57

Enlarging upon the ecclesiastic imagery of the confessional clinic evoked earlier in the story, the doctor “becomes” a priest at the altar with the light of the heavens shining on him and the multiple holy crosses serving as symbols of divine presence. The scene, it appears, is set for an epiphany. According to Bakhtin, thresholds are typical sites for epiphanies, and the balcony is a threshold space—neither inside nor outside, neither at ground level nor on the roof, and neither completely enclosed nor open. The sacerdotal practice of the confessional consultation has led to an unexpected outcome, “reframing” the traditional “framings” of the ritual. Enriquez’s act of confession has pushed the doctor to the threshold where he is ready for his epiphany. He unwraps the packet of lingerie that he had bought as a gift for his former patient. The doctor wears the feminine undergarments and realizes that he takes pleasure in his image reflected in the mirror. Through the cross-dressing doctor, Peri Rossi affects two inversions in the story—the sinner/patient absolves the priest/doctor of falsehood and administers the cure for debilitating doubt, without resolving his own dilemma. Thus, the narrator disrupts authoritarian fixities at multiple levels— religious, medical, and gender—appropriating the religious ritual of confession for sexual liberation, silencing medical authority, and bringing the suppressed gender performativity to the surface. In “Therapy” and “Like the Magician’s Top Hat,” a juxtaposition of the sites of manifestation of the madness of Mrs. Olson and David Thomas reveals the gendered difference in their “madness.” 57

Cristina Peri Rossi, “Una consulta delicada,” in Cuentos Reunidos (Barcelona: Lumen, 2007), 670.

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She [Mrs. Olson] took entire jars of pills prescribed for a presumed depression, drank the detergent used by the domestic for cleaning the floor, or her husband’s shaving lotion. Only once did she try it with gas, but it was a complicated operation, foul-smelling, and they discovered her halfway through it.58 The passers-by […] who were walking on the high street were surprised by an unexpected shower of green notes of hundred dollars, thrown in the air, from the revolving door of the Chase Manhattan Bank by David Thomas, ex-proprietor of a small electro-domestic shop […] David Thomas remained at the door of the bank, with the empty sack and a strange smile on his lips.59

Mrs. Olson’s fits of depression lead her to nano-spaces while seeking release— a case containing small pills, a bottle of detergent, a flask of shaving lotion, and the small gas chamber of the oven in her kitchen. By repeatedly drawing attention to domestic spaces, Peri Rossi emphasizes the source of Mrs. Olson’s madness as being her claustrophobic home environment, where she is not allowed to display her frustrations publicly. David, on the other hand, lives out his attack of madness in the open street; in front of an audience of dozens of passers-by, he stands at the revolving door of the bank. Peri Rossi puts into play the spatial archetype of the circle in both stories—cylindrical jars for round pills, round knobs on the oven, circular mouths of bottles, and the revolving door. The circle or the sphere may be seen as a magnified dot, and as such, it keeps some of the properties of the dot—a point where multi-directional lines intersect. Plato uses the perfect sphere as a symbol of androgyny, the indivisible human prototype uniting male and female elements, but perfect or not, a sphere separates inner from outer. Moreover, there could be internal schisms in the sphere, belying the outward appearance of uninterrupted superficial unity. The internal divisions within Mrs. Olson arise from the conflict between her redundant roles as a mother and as an instrument of sexual release for her husband and a nascent need for autonomy. David’s conflicts are related to the normally unquestioned acceptance of a monetary measure of happiness and his inability to see the value of money. The fact that Mrs. Olson never kills herself through the circular instruments she uses and that David Thomas feels victorious at the revolving door makes these spaces the site of the limen, which offer the decentred beings a realm of possibilities. Peri Rossi uses spatiality also to reiterate that the reason for the woman’s depression was her claustrophobia. When Mrs. Olson is admitted to the asylum, she avoids all closed spaces. Even though she is not fond of gardening, the only place where she finds solace is in the garden, in the open: There was a sewing room (which Mrs. Olson never visited), another for board games, like domino (which she visited, but she got bored there), a chapel, for the more devoted, and a small garden, whose upkeep was the inmates’ responsibility. Mr. Olson liked flowers, but she never felt like putting her hands in the soil.60

58

Peri Rossi, “Terapía,” 75. Peri Rossi, “Como la chistera,” 89. 60 Peri Rossi, “Terapía,” 80. 59

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The nature of “madness” that Peri Rossi assigns to each of the protagonists is also indicative of the gender difference—bipolar disorder for the woman and messianic delirium for the man. Even in the “diseased” state, the man has a larger purpose; his madness has an exterior orientation: he projects it on an audience of strangers, and he crashes through the doors of a guarded institution. In contrast to his daring showmanship, the woman suffers alone, largely ignored by the three people who make up her world—her husband and two children. Yet, the eventual outcome of the predicament is more hopeful for the woman than it is for the man. David is sent to an asylum where the strongest resistance he can show is to throw his medicines in the bin, but Mrs. Olson chooses to stay on in the asylum even after she is declared “normal” and recommended for release. She becomes a counsellor to other female inmates. In “Lovelys,” every time the man who has come to the clinic is forced to acknowledge the loss of control, he approaches the window. When he admits to his erectile problem, he approaches the window; when he is forced to say, “I don’t know,” to the doctor’s query about the disappeared family’s whereabouts, he addresses the window. His movement towards the window appears to be a spatial recall of the moment of his emasculation when he had silently observed his neighbour’s violent abduction through the window. The window is the limen. Its materiality is constituted by the bit of clear glass enclosed within a solid frame, covered on the inside by the flexible fabric of a curtain—a facade that enables furtive observation. Opaque, closed doors are the elements of the established solid structure, while windows make the solidity frangible. Since the night of the abduction, the man had developed a fear of closed doors. He explains to the doctor, I tell myself, it is not possible that anyone is inside; you know that the door is closed just like that. My wife says that she closes it so that the house has a more ordered look. I understand her. But the closed-door scares me immeasurably.61

The sense of order accomplished by the action of closing doors scares him because he knows that those who issue that order to close doors blind and silence witnesses to their horrific injustices. Closed doors seal off the cries of help, but the window obligates observation and makes knowing possible. The story ends with both protagonists standing at the window, facing the pharmacy across the road from the clinic as if evading the knowledge of their common guilt. In this clinic story of evasive confession, there is no contrition or penance, and therefore, no absolution. Contrasting with the opaque solidity of a closed door, the window reveals an alternative, transparent medium which perforates the boundaries, making available to him a possibility of crossing into the limen. The speculative materiality of the clinic makes it possible for it to become the site for the confessional ritual, thus, making it a liminal space conducive to transitions that lead the characters away from their ascribed and certain positions in conventional social structures. In “A Delicate Consultation,” the doctor declines to occupy a position of authority, where he must cure his patient of “abnormal” thoughts. He allows 61

Peri Rossi, “Lovely,” 99.

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Fig. 6.1 De-settling the clinic

himself to be influenced by the patient’s repressed desires. In “Therapy” and “Like the Magician’s,” the protagonists behave subjunctively, ending decades of compliant behaviour. The doctors in the clinic stories often end up assuming the patient’s condition, which they had sought to correct through treatment—Dr. Minnovis cross-dresses, the new director who stabilizes Mrs. Olson becomes an obsessive chocolate eater, and the analyst in Lovelys is compelled to recognize the impotence of his own silence. It is the patients who end up curing the doctors by allowing the doctors to reveal their camouflaged desires and suppressed fears. In the liminal space, the sinner–patient, instead of receiving absolution, provides it to the priest–doctor by acting as a catalyst for the transformation. The view of the clinic enabled by the de-settling derivatives may be presented summarily as in Fig. 6.1.

6.4.2 De-bordering Roads In order to read the road as a liminal trope, one may avail of the notion of “convertibility” of the “master trope” of liminality developed by Gustavo Pérez Firmat.62 Convertibility emphasizes the destructive potential of liminality. Though Turner largely studied the redressive role of liminal stages in modulating social order, he occasionally suggested its devastating potency: 62

Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Literature and Liminality—Festive Readings in the Hispanic Tradition (New York: Duke UP, 1986), xviii. The Cuban born Pérez Firmat is a Professor at Columbia University (as of 2017). His memoir Next Year in Cuba was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize (non-fiction) in 1995. His work on literary criticism, Life on the Hyphen, was awarded the Eugene M. Kayden University Press National Book Award for 1994 and received Honourable Mention in the Modern Language Association’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize and the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award.

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Liminality is, of course, an ambiguous state, for social structure, while it inhibits full social satisfaction, gives a measure of finiteness and security; liminality may be for many the acme of insecurity, the breakthrough of chaos into cosmos, of disorder into order, rather than the milieu of creative interhuman or transhuman satisfactions and achievements.63

Pérez Firmat makes a strident evocation of the destructive latency of liminality by establishing an analogy with carcinogenic metastasis wherein cancerous cells are transmitted from an original site to one or more sites elsewhere in the body: […] (the) peripheral components (of the liminal structure) do not abide in the margins. They occupy the periphery only transitorily while maintaining the center under constant siege. The impending return does not, however, as in Van Gennep’s conception, bring about an integrative reunification—any more than cancer’s metastasis brings about a reconciliation of the healthy and the diseased cells. On the contrary, the periphery’s convergence poses a deadly threat to the central order. In this respect, all (of my) conversions are metastatic since they aggressively repudiate stasis or immobility.64

Pérez Firmat understands liminality geometrically—he demonstrates that a position of eccentricity provides a vantage point for attacking the centre. Though liminality starts off as a centrifugal phenomenon, as dislocated, unstructured entities eject from structural positions, it can develop a “centripetal impulse” as its mobility acquires critical momentum in its “assault from the flanks” on the “verge of centrality.”65 Going back to the word’s [liminality’s] topographical roots, I use the term to designate the spatial relationship between the centre and its periphery. For my purposes, the liminal entity, whatever its nature (an individual, a group, an event, a text), is one that in a given situation takes up a position of eccentricity, one that occupies the periphery in relation to a contextually determined centre […] Defined in this fashion, more geometric, liminality is less a concept than a conceptual archetype […].66

He demonstrates that convertibility implies determining the eccentricity of the liminal entity and then showing the aspects of centrality, which it demolishes. In a conversion, the part may destroy the whole, the epigone may usurp the precursor, and a copy may rob the original of its value.67 Before one proceeds with reading the eccentricity of the road and its relations with various aspects of centrality, it is useful to recall the mathematical origins of the term. Eccentricity is a parameter of conic sections. It is a measure of how much the shape deviates from the perfect circle to which zero eccentricity is assigned. The circle, one of the cross-sections of the cone, with its single centre and closed boundaries, can be seen as a representation of Turner’s fixed, normative structures, whereas the other cross-sections represent varying degrees of eccentricity. The ellipse, with an eccentricity between zero and one, is more eccentric than the circle; the parabola, 63

Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid,” 77. Pérez Firmat, Literature and Liminality, xviii. 65 Ibid., xix. 66 Ibid., xiv. 67 Ibid., xviii, emphasis mine. 64

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which is assigned an eccentricity of one, is more eccentric than the ellipse; and the most eccentric shape is the open-ended hyperbola, with an eccentricity greater than one. The eccentricity of the road would depend on its elastic possibilities, the extent to which it will allow deviation from normative structures. Peri Rossi’s postmodernist road is a place of to-and-fro motion for the traveller/commuter between two familiar points. The road can allow only for a temporary dislocation from the two ascribed positions. In “The Rain at Night,” the road, as the daily commute route to work, has the least flexibility. In “Ironside,” the road as the delivery route for a gas supplier has greater variability because he services a different set of customers in each iteration. In “After hours,” the road, as the track for idle cruising, offers the greatest possibility for deviations as its destination is not fixed. In all three stories, the road does not “abide in the margins.” It always affects a deviation, however, slight in degree, which has the potential to pose a threat to the central order. On the well-travelled, familiar postmodernist road, a dislocating event can only happen if the traveller breaks the routine. An unplanned, unforeseen stop on the road or a detour may act like a jolt that infuses it with eccentricity. Without a break in routine, the road continues to be part of the quotidian run between two familiar points. The force of the jolt in combination with the inherent elasticity will determine the extent of eccentricity. The three road stories give us three degrees of eccentricity, each destroying a different aspect of centrality—a monogamous heteronormativity, the image of the father as the protector, and of a prostitute as a victim in need of a saviour. In each, the liminal launches a flank attack from the peripheral road to hold the centre under siege and eventually uproot it from its centrality. The potency of the destructive force of liminality is directly proportional to the spatial eccentricity established in the narrative. The road in “The Rain at Night” may be seen as the least eccentric because it is suggested that the woman’s homosexual experience is a one-night stand, and there is no indication that she will end her relationship with her boyfriend. The road in “Ironside” allows the definite destruction of the protector image of the father; therefore, it may be considered more eccentric. The road in “After hours” is the most destructive of the three because it enables a general social commentary and dismisses the idea of the male’s saviour complex as a delusion—it is not the women who need to be “saved” but the men who see paid sex as a substitute for emotional fulfilment. In two of the stories, the sex workers appear as localized limens. Neither the underage girl nor the experienced Romanian woman who work as prostitutes are presented as submissive victims. They see sex work as a way of earning a living and are unapologetic about their profession. These two stories de-differentiate the domestic space and the brothel. In “Ironside,” the protective father of two elevenyear-olds visits the brothel regularly, and in “After hours,” the communist dreamer wants to marry the Romanian prostitute. The third story, “The Rain at Night,” dedifferentiates the public and private space. The translator’s office, a public space, allows her to show her professional ability, whereas, in her apartment, a private space, she pretends to be heterosexual, hiding her latent homosexual desires. Thus, even the private space does not grant her the expected privacy to shed her inhibitions. The

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Fig. 6.2 De-bordering the brothel

road brings the marginal space of the brothel centre stage and allows hidden desires to surface. The use of de-bordering derivatives in analysing the road may be summarized as in Fig. 6.2.

6.4.3 De-canonizing the Racetrack The narrative of “The Runner Stumbles” unfolds on an iterative oval orbit of a racetrack.68 The space is alive with competing athletes participating in a ten-thousandmetre race. The track is repetitive and unvarying, all of its ten thousand metres being flat throughout.69 There is a strong evocation of exhausting monotony in the spatiality—it smells of the sweat of the runners, sounds of their strained breathing, and desperate panting fills the ambience. In contrast, the sky above is a touched-up image of the track bur from which all competitiveness has been erased. As the runner looks up, he sees, Clouds glide by the track, white runners, the clouds slide away before the finish, the moon bursts through in full daylight, the moon which had appeared silently placing itself modestly at an almost imperceptible angle to the landscape, the birds fly unstopping; they come and go, in their play, in their own tournaments […]70

68

Peri Rossi, “El Corredor.” Ibid., 245. 70 Ibid., 243. 69

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The ground and the sky above may be viewed as contrasting representations of the racetrack. On the ground, the runners are desperate to win, and in the process, they push themselves to the limit. In the celestial space, the “white runners,” possibly the clouds, but also the moon and the birds, “come and go” playfully, each performing in a tournament of one contestant. Despite his sharp focus on the terrain that lies immediately in front of his eyes, some aspect of the surrounding scenic landscape leads the runner to have amorous thoughts. When he tells himself that he should reserve his strength for the upcoming uphill climb and that he should lean to the side on the curves, his thoughts turn in a different direction, “curves, curves is a feminine word, women have curves, men have angles, between curves and angles I would prefer curves a thousand times more, curves, curves […].”71 The triangular seat of the cycle also arouses romantic thoughts: “If you like strong emotions, lean back on the triangle, the triangle of the bike, we will race like that, we will race through firs, pines, cypresses, beeches, acacias, we will wade through small rivers with little water, stone paths, abandoned villages, as abandoned as you and me.”72 The intrusion of the forest’s imagery into his thoughts shows a breach in the cyclist’s self-control. Though he appears to concentrate exclusively on the track and tries to focus solely on the rotatory motion of the wheel below his eyes, his mind wanders. He has been noticing the natural beauty around him with longing and desire. He does not attain his state of flow while cycling, perhaps because he does not enter into it with a spirit to accomplish something exceptional and challenging; he can only think of winning. His distracted longings, described in the story through his fantasies, are a way of escaping his dissatisfaction with his profession. In these reveries, the spatiality of the bicycle is transformed. The repeated spinning of the tyres fades into insignificance. Only the triangular seat is projected in relief. There is a sense of telescopic close-up, from the spread-out forests rising up on either side in the “V” of the valley to the triangle of the seat. The triangular bicycle seat merges with the pubic triangle in the destabilized gaze of the disciplined, determined cyclist in the story. The spatiality of the racetrack generates an antigonal archetype of the champion, whose success in his chosen field is also the reason for his disenchantment with the sport. The tired champion is an antigonal figure who is a victor only because he has broken free of the confining obligations. But he will be seen as a defeated athlete in normative terms for having quit the race. The liminal chronotope of the racetrack projects the seemingly interminable distance of the race against the backdrop of an ephemeral, fleetingly perceptible temporality of a racing figure. The repetitive movements along familiar tracks eventually generate sufficient momentum for liberation. The champion cyclist lives out his hidden desires silently through his fantasies, and the runner appropriates his prominence on the racetrack to declare his independence. The visualization of de-canonizing derivatives in the racetrack stories may be summarized as in Fig. 6.3. 71 72

Cristina Peri Rossi, “La carrera,” in Cuentos Reunidos (Barcelona: Lumen, 2007), 597. Ibid., 601.

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Fig. 6.3 De-canonizing the racetrack

6.5 Conclusion A spatial approach to Cristina Peri Rossi’s stories reveals the feminist praxis of destabilizing, decentring, and destroying the ascribed, inherited centres around which social arrangements are ordered. Her stories featuring the psychiatrist’s clinic, the road, and the racetrack demonstrate that she often showcases spaces “other” than domestic settings in her narratives. Her interrogation of these typically “male” spaces presents a feminist view of masculinity that unveils the facades of any fixed notions of the champion, the father, the saviour, and the healer. A spatial analysis of these stories allows the reader to re-locate these archetypes in liminal spaces to bring out their buried uncertainties and dilemmas.

References Crisitna Peri Rossi, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1994). https://www.gf.org/fel lows/all-fellows/cristina-peri-rossi/ Cristina Peri Rossi nueva académica correspondiente en Barcelona, Academia Nacional de Letras. Retrieved February 25, 2019, from http://www.academiadeletras.gub.uy/innovaportal/v/113 026/46/mecweb/cristina-peri-rossi-nueva-academica-correspondiente-en-barcelona?parentid= 111775 Cristina Peri Rossi recibió Premio Iberoamericano de Letras José Donoso 2019, University of Talca. Retrieved June 8, 2020, from https://www.utalca.cl/noticias/escritora-uruguaya-cristinaperi-rossi-recibe-distancia-el-premio-jose-donoso/ Aguiålar-Moreno, M. (2006). Handbook to life in the Aztec World. Oxford UP. Ashton, J. (2005). From modernism to postmodernism. Cambridge UP. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). UP Texas. Bauman, Z. (1994). Alone again: Ethics after uncertainty. Demos. Che Guevara, E. ([1995] 2004). The motorcycle diaries. Harper Perennial. Coffey, D. (2001). The sacrament of reconciliation. Liturgical Press.

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Chapter 7

Manjula Padmanabhan’s Science Fiction Novel

Abstract Manjula Padmanabhan is a pioneer in English-language science fiction (sf) written by Indian women. Perhaps because she had no female predecessors in India, Padmanabhan’s work shares many affinities with the works of American feminist sf writers of the 1970s. To delineate the common themes that have been featured in women’s sf, the chapter provides a recent history of women’s sf in the US and sf writing in India. The chapter discusses the basics of myth criticism as this is a productive mode for reading sf, a genre that extensively reinterprets traditional mythologies, creating new myths, in the process. The chapter provides a critical overview of Manjula Padmanabhan’s sf, selecting the “Meiji Saga,” comprised of Escape (2008) and The Island of Lost Girls (2015), for spatial analysis. The spatial gynocritic model reveals that the novels de-canonize “junctions” as neutral places meant for transitions, representing them, instead, as sites for resistance. They also de-border the modern battlefield and the Roman gladiatorial arena, demonstrating the continued presence, since ancient times, of powerful interest groups that profit from the spectacle of combat. Finally, the chapter highlights the portrayal of futuristic vehicles and portable habitats in the novel, examining how they de-settle any notions of the permanent home as a safe space. Keywords Myth criticism · Science fiction · Homo sacer · Nomads · Precariat The earliest science fiction novel by a woman writer, Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (abbreviated to The Blazing World), dates back to the year 1666. It narrates the adventures of a woman whose ship is marooned at the North Pole, from where she travels to another planet that is joined to the Earth. There she meets new species and learns to travel outside her body. Some critics would consider it to be a work of fantasy rather than science fiction because her inter-planetary journey is not “placed in a context of scientific research and is [not] given a particular rationalization, an explanation for how it has come about.”1 The transformation of lived reality effected in science fiction does 1

Adam Roberts, Science Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 5. Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, called the Blazing World, edited by Sara H. Mendelson (Peterborough: Broadview Press, [1666], 2016). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 J. Singh, Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1426-3_7

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“not ‘just happen’; it is made to happen via a machine” that is based on a technology that did not exist at the time that the work was written.2 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (1818) is widely accepted as the first work of science fiction that conforms with the technological imperative of the genre.3 Since then, numerous women writers have written science fiction (sf). Of course, not all sf by women can be considered feminist. For example, Lester del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” (1938) endorses the specularization of women by narrating a happy romance between a male scientist and a female robot whom he programs to be the perfect match for him.4 Gwyneth Jones, an awarded science fiction writer, and critic, traces the origin of feminist science fiction to the publication of Ursula K. le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969.5 According to Jones, while earlier women writers had the “same pro-feminine agenda that can be found in feminine sf today—praising and valuing women’s traditional roles, or offering the escapism of privileged women warriors, in an sf context,” they did not uncover “the genre’s ingrained sexism” nor did they challenge “male supremacy throughout time and space,” in their works.6 The ambitious project of uncovering the “genre’s ingrained sexism” was taken up by female science fiction writers in the 1970s. Science fiction is a non-mimetic genre. Though all fiction is a speculative, worldmaking exercise to some extent, non-mimetic genres such as fairy tales, fantasy narratives, surrealism, magic realism, and science fiction are defined by the new worlds they create. Through new-age technologies, the diegetic worlds of science fiction “oblige us to see how close these apparently marvellous elements are to us, to what degree they are present in our life.”7 Echoing Tzvetan Todorov’s exposition of the resemblances between the apparently marvellous and perceived reality, Ursula K. le Guin, the iconic science fiction writer, and critic, states that sf narratives are not predictive they are descriptive. They can be read as thought experiments, which “appropriate imagined scenarios to investigate reality.”8 Le Guin explains that a literary representation of even the most extraneous scientific possibility—such as Gethen, a planet populated by androgynous beings—is essentially descriptive:

In her introduction to the 2016 edition, Sara H. Mendelson states that is the first science-fiction novel to have been written and published by a woman. 2 Roberts, Science Fiction, 5. 3 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, edited by Nick Groom, (Oxoford: Oxford UP, 2018). 4 Lester del Rey, “Helen O’Loy,” in The Best of Lester del Rey (New York: Random House, 1986). 5 Ursula K. le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Ace Books, [1969] 1976). 6 Gwyneth Jones, “Feminist SF,” in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, eds. Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 485. 7 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Case Western UP, 1973), 172. 8 James Robert Brown and Yiftach Fehige, “Thought Experiments,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2019, edited by Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/ entries/thought-experiment/.

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Yes, indeed, the people in it are androgynous, but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in a millennium or so, we will all be androgynous or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thoughtexperimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting or prescribing. I am describing.9

Le Guin implicitly calls for a critical reading of science fiction that does not examine the likelihood or the morality of the fictional events. Instead, it should explore the convergences between the fictional trajectories and observed sociopolitical tendencies. Le Guin appears to be urging the critic to look beyond the bizarreness of the technological changes imagined in a work of science fiction to draw attention to the impact of those changes on various facets of human and planetary life such as the human mind, body, and sensorial perception, appropriation of natural resources, treatment of animals, familial relationships, and gender relations. When writers infuse the genre with their ideological stances, the descriptive element is alloyed with strands of aspiration for change that they consider desirable. When Le Guin, a feminist writer, “describes” the planet of Gethen, presenting it as a utopia founded on gender mutability, she expresses an aspiration for erasing gender-based binaries in the world she inhabits. Like many other feminist sf writers, her explorations of reality adumbrate modifications in the described reality that would correct injustices rooted in the traditional structuring of gender relations. Many women science fiction writers during the 1970s imagined utopic worlds in which de-gendering was a common feature. The language spoken in the fictional world in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time does not use gendered pronouns; Alice Bradley Sheldon, writing as James Tiptree Jr., depopulates the Earth of all men in “Houston, Houston, Do you Read?” freeing her imagined world of ecological degradation, wars, and paternalistic possessiveness; and Joanna Russ’s all-lesbian planet Whileaway in her novel The Female Man (1975), is governed by pacifist, and environmentalist ideology. In the 1980s, many female sf writers such as Octavia Butler and Karen Joy Fowler continued to emphasize gender in their novels, whereas others like Mary Gentle took “a feminist background for granted,” portraying men and women as equal and not offering any comment on sexual politics.10 Generally, the 1980s feminist critique of gender in women authored science fiction presented a dystopian outlook. In the absence of gender equality, the fictional worlds were shown as violent, wretched, ecologically degraded, and technologically backward. Instituted in 1991, the James Tiptree Jr. Award turned the spotlight on gender in science fiction. Awarded irrespective of the writer’s gender, it honoured works that encourage “the exploration and expansion of gender.”11 Since the 1990s, feminist sf has become increasingly intersectional with race, class, environmental, psychological, and postcolonial perspectives. The novels Ancillary Justice (2014) by Ann Leckie and The Stone Sky (2017) 9

le Guin, The Left Hand, 13. Mary Gentle, quoted in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 487. 11 https://otherwiseaward.org/. The name of the award was changed to the Otherwise Award in 2019. 10

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by N. K. Jemisin, which, in the respective years of their publication—each won both the Nebula and Hugo awards—equally prestigious honours in the field—adopt anti-racist, ecological, and feminist postures, without privileging any one over the others.12

7.1 Women Science Fiction Writers in India The first female science fiction writer from the then undivided India was Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. The protagonist of Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” (1905) envisions an oneiric world called Ladyland where women, as pacifist rulers, eschew warfare, using technology only for peaceful and conservationist purposes.13 Hossain anticipates the theme of pacifism—a dominant aspect of The Female Man (1975)— and the use of mindscapes as the primary diegetic space—as in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)—by generations.14 Despite this early start, the presence of women writers in Indian science fiction was marginal until the last decade of the twentieth century. Suparno Banerjee, in his comprehensive analysis of Indian sf, observes that only a handful of authors, such as Leela Majumdar, Enakshi Chattyopadhyay, and Bandita Phukan, established themselves in the field before the 1990s.”15 In the last decade of the twentieth century, these women were joined by several other writers who wrote sf in the vernacular languages—“Ajanta Das (Assamese), Subhashini (Kannada), Nandini Thatte (Marathi), Meghashree Dalvi (Marathi), Archana Mirajkar (Marathi and English), Sagarika Roy (Bangla) and Ankita (Bangla).”16 The first major sf work by an Indian woman writer in English is Manjula Padmabhan’s play Harvest. The play came out in print in 1997, a year after it won the inaugural Onassis prize, instituted to give recognition to new, unpublished, and unperformed plays.17 Banerjee places Padmanabhan among other contemporary women writers such as Vandana Singh, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Sukanya Datta, and Rimi

12

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice (London: Orbit, 2013). N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky (London: Orbit, 2017). Ancillary Justice also won the Arthur C. Clarke award in 2014. 13 Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, Sultana’s Dream, illustrated by Durga Bai (Chennai: Tara, [1905] 2005). 14 Joana Russ, The Female Man (Boston: Beacon, [1975] 2000). Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (New York: Fawcett, [1976] 1985). 15 Suparno Banerjee, Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History, and Hybridity (Cardiff: Wales UP, 2020), 15. 16 Ibid., 53. 17 Manula Padmanabhan, “Introduction,” in Blood and Laughter: Plays (Gurugram: Hachette, 2020), Kindle e = book.

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B. Chatterjee, whom he considers “some of the most sophisticated authors the genre has seen.”18

7.2 Myth and Science Fiction In 2012, three leading contemporary women sf writers—Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Manjula Padmanabhan, and Vandana Singh contributed to the science fiction anthology titled Breaking the Bow.19 Episodes from the Ramayana serve as underlying tropes in all the stories included in the anthology. Despite the common inspiration, the stories of Sarukkai Chabria, Padmanabhan, and Singh demonstrate three distinct modes in which science fiction engages with mythology. In their stories for the anthology, Sarrukai Chabria and Padmanabhan provide a rich reinterpretation of the mythological figure of Mandodri, who is usually marginalized in mainstream narratives, and Vandana Singh gives new shades to the male protagonist and antagonist—Ram and Ravan. The eternal spatio-temporalities of the mythic narrative and the reader’s present space–time are conflated in different ways by the three writers. Padmanabhan brings the myth into the reader’s lived reality, Sarukkari Chabria draws the reader into the mythic space–time, and Singh’s narrative carries the myth and reader to a no-man’s chrono-topos, dislocating both equally. In Padmanabhan’s “The Other Woman,” Mandodari time-travels out of the mythic Lanka. She arrives in a world where every home has multiple TV screens on which celebrity-hungry journalists vie for attention—a world familiar to the reader. Mandodari is interviewed on a popular show, where a famous TV anchor named “Basora Dutt” addresses her as “Mandy.”20 In the show, Mandy gives her own reasons for the Ram-Ravan conflict. Her version greatly varies from the one popularly accepted in the reader’s world. The familiar tone of the interviewer, Mandodari’s sensational and unverifiable revelation of what “really” happened, and her description of the grotesque practices of Lanka bring the mythic world into the viewer’s home through the TV screen, and into the reader’s world, through the book. Sarukkai Chabria chooses episodes from the section of the Ramayana titled Sundarkand for her contribution to the anthology. Part of the title of her story, “Book of Beauty,” translates to Sundarkand in Hindi.21 Ram, the hero of the epic, does not appear in Sundarkand, which narrates Hanuman’s quest to find Sita in Lanka. Hanuman uses his cosmic knowledge to shoot through “stellar interlopers, quarks and vortexes teeming with subtle silicomagnetic lifeforms.” He evades the ploy of 18

Banerjee, Indian Science, 53. Anil Menon and Vandana Singh, eds., Breaking the Bow (New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2012), Kindle. 20 Manjula Padmanabhan, “The Other Woman,” in Breaking the Bow (New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2012), Kindle. 21 Priya Sarukkai Chabria, “Book of Beauty,” in Breaking the Bow (New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2012), Kindle. 19

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Ravan’s “Psychic Emotechs” and locates Sita. Sarukkai Chabria, staying faithful to the original, features the three characters who also appear in Valmiki’s version— Hanuman, Sita, and Mandodri. Her rendition of the moment when Hanuman first sees Mandodari in the palace is similar to Valmiki’s account, where Mandodari is described as being so beautiful that Hanuman momentarily mistakes her for Sita.22 However, at variance from the original, in which the two women do not interact, the narrator of “Fragments” develops an empathetic relationship between them. In the story, even though Mandodari makes the offensive request that Sita should succumb to Ravan’s wishes to prevent the bloodshed that a war would bring, the dialogue between the two women is conducted with utmost courtesy. Sita addresses Mandodari as a “benevolent being,” and Mandori calls Sita “Daughter of the Earth.” Both women, wives of the hero and the villain, respectively, blame Valmiki, the progenitor of the Sanskrit Ramayana, which became mainstream in posterity, for being “bound by laws of men, not those of eternity.” Implicitly, they blame “the laws of men” for glorifying war and being unconcerned with the sorrow and destruction it brings: “our species will die: yours and mine,” laments Mandodari. Through detailed descriptions of Mandodri’s royal chambers, the manicured gardens, and the city’s splendour, the narrative takes the reader deep into the mythic time–space of Lanka. Singh’s “Oblivion: A Journey” is an unusual rendition of the Ramayana’s theme of quest. Rama’s exile in the forest is reinterpreted as a refugee’s struggle for survival. The hero travels from planet to planet to—avenge the destruction of his people who lived in one of the “epic world-shells, a chain of island satellites natural and artificial, that ringed the star Agni.” The villain, Hirasor—“the destroyer of worlds”—is the head of a mega-corporate entity. Hirasor seeks out the hero because he wants to get himself killed. The villain, unable to live with the memory of the terrible deeds he has done, voluntarily embraces death. Singh reverses the sequence of the conventional quest; in her story, the quest is as much the villain’s journey as that of the hero. The diegetic space resembles neither the traditional mythic space portrayed in Valmiki’s epic nor the reader’s experiential reality. Instead, it is a no-man’s space–time that shares frontiers with both. The quality that the three writers, all of whom share feminist sensibilities, draw upon to create disparate adaptations of the same myth is what Roland Barthes had referred to as a myth’s capacity for “distortion.”23 Science fiction shares many common characteristics with the genre of myth. Peter Nicholls, a noted Australian scholar of the genre, agrees with “the widely held belief that sf is itself a form of latter-day mythology, fulfilling comparable hungers in us.”24 According to him, traditional mythologies play an important role in science fiction, and the genre also creates new myths. Science fiction, like many other genres, avails 22

Bhavana Pankaj, “Who was Mandodar,” Scroll, December 8, 2019, https://scroll.in/article/946 091/who-was-mandodari-each-version-of-the-ramayana-gives-ravanas-wife-a-different-role-andstory. 23 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers, (New York: Noonday, [1957] 1991), 120. 24 Peter Nicholls, “Mythology,” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls and Graham Sleigh (London: Gollancz, updated 20 April 2021), http:// www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/mythology.

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itself of myths because, as culturally coded narratives, they simultaneously offer inroads into past traditions and rich sources for present-day ideation of alternative futures. Myths are not static; they mutate with every retelling. Roland Barthes refers to the quality of mutability as “a relation of deformation” between “the meaning” or “concept” of the myth and its “form.”25 According to Barthes, “However paradoxical it may seem, myth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear. There is no latency of the concept in relation to the form: there is no need of an unconscious in order to explain myth.”26 Barthes’ reference to the “no need of an unconscious” does not directly contradict Carl Jung’s assertion that the myth represents the collective unconscious. While the myth may represent the collective unconscious, it is certainly understood consciously. Readers, listeners, and viewers are able to perceive the myth as a secular narrative even though they may feel a religious connection to it. The popularity of books, plays, shows, and films based on myths—with differing casts, settings, scripts, and ideological orientations—demonstrates the myth’s secular appeal as well as its enigmatic hold, untarnished by millennia-old use. José Manual Losada, a leading figure in the field of myth criticism, interprets Barthes’ notion of “concept” as the immanent and absolute form of the myth, which every version or “form” of the myth approximates and transcends. The quality of transcendence allows the new text that takes in the myth to change the significance of the myth. As the writer recodes the myth through the use of new symbols, settings, and in the case of science fiction, technical know-how, they may “enrich,” “attenuate,” or “annihilate” the myth.27 Padmanabhan’s and Sarukkai Chabria’s stories in Breaking the Bow enrich the myth of Mandodri, and Singh’s does the same for the myths of Ram and Ravan. Suparno Banerjee’s critical appreciation of Singh’s story “Oblivion” sheds light on how she enriches the myth of Ram: The protagonist, metaphorically representing Rama, is turned into a pan-sexual and sexchanging entity, an antithesis to the ideal of Rama as the preserver of the patriarchal structure of heterosexual domesticity. Furthermore, women are given crucial roles in resolving the protagonist’s search for Hirasor and are not objects to be rescued.28

Ram’s portrayal as a character who is helped by women, lives the physicality of a woman, and is not always a saviour of women transcends the traditional concept of Ram without destroying it ultimately. In the story, he is the one who delivers the fatal blow to the villain, but he is unable to prevent Hirasor from destroying his world. The story redefines what it means to be Maryada Purushottam—the perfect man— suggesting the impossibility of being perfect and of always being a man. In a similarly subverting logic, Ravan is liberated from being purely evil, and he is humanized as a man who regrets the destruction caused by his relentless ambition. Offering the 25

Barthes, Mythologies, 121. Ibid., 120. 27 José Manuel Losada, “Mitocrítica y metodología,” translated by the author, in Nuevas Formas del Mito (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2015), 21. 28 Vandana Singh, “Oblivion,” in Breaking the Bow (New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2012), Kindle. 26

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ultimate contrition for dispossessing others, he sacrifices his life, allowing the hero to do justice. Singh’s flawed hero, Padmanabhan’s evocation of a post-truth world that absorbs multiple narratives without concerning to establish the veracity of any, and Sarukkai Chabria’s interrogation of the way in which male writers have portrayed war reveal the power of distortion. Their stories in Breaking the Bow show that: Mythology in sf reflects a familiar truth that in undergoing social and technological change, we do not escape the old altogether, but carry it encysted within us. The totally new is by its nature almost impossible for sf writers or anyone else to envisage. Far more commonly, they work out ancient patterns of love and death, aspiration and reconciliation in a new context.29

New and contemporary adaptations that distort ancient myths, in turn, distort the “new” as well to expose the continuity of primordial, though mutated, versions of the ancient. Through imbrications with myths, sf reveals that the heroism of the “hero,” the veracity of “truth,” and the “glory” of war are essentially unstable and manufactured constructs.

7.3 Manjula Padmanabhan’s Science Fiction As mentioned earlier, Manjula Padmanabhan is the pioneer among Indian women science fiction writers who write originally in English. Writing in English gives Padmanabhan a pan-Indian and an international reach far greater than what can be accessed by vernacular writers, even in translation. Her first work of science fiction, “A Government of India Undertaking,” appeared in her short story collection Hot Death Cold Soup in 1996. This was followed by the play Harvest in 1997. Since then, she has published two more short story collections—Kleptomania: Ten Stories (2004) and Three Virgins and Other Stories (2013). Though all stories in these collections are not science fiction, every anthology has a few that belong to the genre. Her novels include Escape (2008) and its sequel, The Island of Lost Girls (2015). She has also published her memoir Getting There (2002), two collections of plays, a book version of her comic strip Suki, and several illustrated children’s books.30 The consciousness of the gender divide came to Padmanabhan much later compared to most girls in India who experience discrimination or some form of sexual harassment quite early. In an interview about her most recent novel, which was published when she was sixty-two years old, she recalls that “I was brought up with very few restrictions. (Since) I had no awareness that there might be restrictions on my freedom; I didn’t even think of it as liberating. I had no idea that women 29

Nicholls, “Mythology.”. Manjula Padmanabhan, Hot Death Cold Soup (Reading: Garnet, 1997). Harvest (Gurugram: Hachette, [1997], 2017), Kindle. Getting There ((Gurugram: Hachette, [2002] 2020). Kindle. Kleptomania: Ten Stories (Gurugram: Penguin, 2004). Escape (Gurugram: Hachette, 2008), Kindle. Three Virgins and Other Stories (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2013). Island of Lost Girls (Gurugram: Hachette, 2015), Kindle. 30

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occupied a sort of specialised domain […].”31 When she moved back to complete her undergraduate degree at Elphinstone College in Mumbai, in the early 1970s, she found the experience stifling. She remembers that, “My mother and I were suddenly arguing about the length of my hair. There were dress codes to conform to.”32 The predominance of themes related to gender discrimination in her work partly springs from her personal experiences as a student and single working woman in Mumbai and largely on her sensitization towards gender violence in Indian society. Her explanation for the excessively pessimistic view of gender relations in her sf novels may be seen as a thought experiment of the sort that Ursula K. le Guin had described. Explaining why she tries to pose an overwhelming counter current to the view that women’s social conditions have improved, Padmanabhan states: In the ways in which gender issues are being talked of these days, we are always told that things are getting better. So my effort was to talk about supposing it isn’t better, supposing we are moving towards a new dark age. If that is so—I am not making a prediction—how do we protect ourselves? Where do we place our minds? How do we plan to survive?

In Padmanabhan’s play Harvest and her novels, the issues of protecting oneself and surviving in a hostile world are offset against a set of horrific existential circumstances that impact women and other minoritarian groups like slaves and slum dwellers as well as earth-others. For the minoritarian groups and earth-others, any protected stage in the narrative is short-lived, and their vulnerability makes them a constant target for violence. Thus, her work shares attitudinal similarities with the 1980s feminist sf writers, in whose writings, any world marked by genderbased oppression, became unsafe and dismal for all inhabitants, not just women. However, Padmanabhan distances herself from a feminist stance, stating: “I believe in the duality of human sexual identity and I truly believe in the complementarity of the gendered life, the idea that we are not complete as single entities and that a combination of opposites makes us whole.”33 In implying that feminism necessarily denies any “complementarity” between men and women, Padmanabhan is among a significant group of female gender theorists and writers, for whom, according to Toril Moi, “feminism has been turned into the unspeakable F-word.”34 The staunch American feminist Susan Faludi’s remark sums up the position of these women “Blaming a cabal of men has taken feminism about as far as it can go.”35 Though Padmanabhan locates the self-destructive, cannibalizing aspects of some applications of technology—organ harvesting, cloning, and toxic waste production—in a few powerful men, she also shows other men as victims in the power equation generated by the use of these technologies. Thus, it would be 31

Manjula Padmanabhan, “And still I Rise,” interview with Amrita Dutta, Indian Express, October 4, 2015, https://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/and-still-i-rise-why-manjula-pad manabhan-never-came-to-terms-being-the-second-sex/. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Toril Moi, “I am not a Feminist, But…: How Feminism became the F-word,” PMLA, 121.5 October (2006): 1739. 35 Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: Morrow, 1999, 605).

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appropriate to say that, instead of blaming a cabal of men, the writer emphasizes the inherent dangers of a “male” way of thinking, irrespective of which gender perpetrates it, that is self-aggrandizing avaricious, and callous towards human and earth-others. Many of Padmanabhan’s science fiction narratives may be read as narratives of “precaricide.”36 The term is derived from the acclaimed gender theorist Judith Butler’s articulation of precarity as the condition of people who are not “intelligible” to state policies. Citing the example of a group of illegal immigrants in California, who assembled to publicly sing the US national anthem in Spanish, she connects performativity with state recognition. Performativity has everything to do with “who” can become produced as a recognizable subject, a subject who is living, whose life is worth sheltering, and whose life, when lost, would be worthy of mourning. Precarious life characterises such lives that do not qualify as recognizable, readable, or grievable. And in this way, precarity is the rubric that brings together women, queers, transgender people, the poor, and the stateless.37

Through their public performance, the undocumented immigrants claimed the right to have rights. They took the risk of being identified and deported because performativity was a way of reducing their precarity, which is a politically induced condition of vulnerability against which the state offers no protection. “Precaricide” is the killing of precarity, which may take two forms—one in which the precarious populations are killed and another in which they kill their own precarity. An example of the first kind of precaricide, where the precarious group is killed with impunity, is the practice of female foeticide and infanticide across social classes and regions in India. The preference for a male child is so acute that many couples kill unwanted female foetuses and the ones who do not have access to such technology murder the infant girl soon after she is born. The practice continues, despite having been declared a crime punishable by imprisonment of three to five years.38 The theme of precaricide frequently appears in Padmanabhan’s narrative prose. Both variations of precaricide can be seen in her short story “Cull,”39 where an entire community of slum dwellers is the target of a state-planned massacre. The story is a maximalist’s rendition of the ecological, human cost of excessive consumption. The narrative rests on the premise that, as societies become increasingly consumerist, high standards of living would be available for a diminishing proportion of the population. Therefore, systematic practice of culling becomes necessary to restrict access to the sharply declining resources, which include necessities like potable water and breathable air. Though “Cull” is a work of science fiction, it has a realistic setting. 36

Java Singh, “Depictions of Patient Violence through Crochet, Nail Paint and Castration in “Noir” Short-Fiction from Latin America and India,” in Papeles del crimen: Mujeres y violencia en la ficción criminal, edited by Maria Xesús Lama, Elena Losada, and Dolores Resano (Barcelona: Barcelona UP, 2020), 116. 37 Judith Butler, “Performativity, Precarity And Sexual Politics,” AIBR Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, Vol 4, No 3. September-December (2009): xiii. 38 Pre-Natal testing was declared a crime in India in 1996, when the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act came into force. 39 The analysis of “Cull” is partly reproduced from an earlier paper published in Papeles del Crimen.

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The fictional world of the “Dilli Continuum” in Cull is instantly recognizable as the capital city. The noxious, heavily polluted locality described in the story is an actual place called Bhalswa in the national capital region of New Delhi. It lies a mere thirty kilometers from the official residence of the President of India. It is the site of a sprawling garbage dump, ten-storeys-tall, that covers forty acres. From time to time, especially during summer, the dump spontaneously bursts into flames and spews noxious fumes for days together before the fire can be doused. Three hundred thousand people who live in its vicinity breathe toxic air even when the dump is not on fire. Their lives are lived in a state of constant precarity, albeit a short distance from the centre of power. No official is held accountable for the deplorable condition of human life in that locality. The fictional state in “Cull” has declared a policy for the eradication of the inhabitants of the ‘Zero Zone,’ which lies beyond the wall that separates the privileged few from the majority. Their extermination policy is an example of the first kind of precaricide. The state uses biological weapons to systematically reduce the number of claimants on the scarce resources, all of whom belong to the financially weaker sections of society. However, the homo sacer—any person whose murder does not signify a violation of the state’s penal code and who can, therefore, be killed with impunity—refuses to be culled.40 Guy Standing, the noted British economist, includes urban slum dwellers among the socio-economic class of the precariat.41 The term is a portmanteau constructed from the words precarity and proletariat. However, unlike the proletariat, which is comprised of industrial workers, the precariat “does not feel part of a solidaristic labour community”42 because they lack occupational identification with one another. They take up any job in any sector in order to survive. The survival strategies that the precariat adopts are at the core of Padmanabhan’s representation of the inhabitants of the “Zero Zone.” Basing their solidarity on their shared vulnerability, the slum dwellers turn the trajectory of destruction back on the state. They supply tins of pickled beetroot to the elite, passing them off as Russian imports. The slum dwellers contaminate the contents with the same biological weapon—a virus—that the state was spreading in the Zero Zone to cull them. The slum population uses their own toxic condition to debilitate the consumerist elite 40 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel HellerRoasen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), 82. Butler’s notion of precarity may be related to Giorgio Agamben’s characterization of the homo sacer. “Maximized vulnerability” as a “politically induced condition” leads to the identification of entire precarious groups as homo sacer. According to Agamben, homo sacer is “the person whom anyone could kill with impunity,” he further explains: “What defines the status of homo sacer is […] both the particular character of the double exclusion into which he is taken and the violence to which he finds himself exposed. This violence—the unsanctionable killing that, in his case, anyone may commit—is classifiable neither as sacrifice nor as homicide, neither as the execution of a condemnation to death nor as sacrilege.”. 41 Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2011). Standing informs us that, “the descriptive term ‘precariat’ was first used by French sociologists in the 1980s, to describe temporary or seasonal workers.”. 42 Ibid., 12.

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and defy their own precarity. Instantiating the second kind of precaricide, in which precarity is killed, they penetrate their murderers’ shells of impunity. Detailed and multiple portraits of precarity appear in Pamanabhan’s novels as well.

7.4 Precaricide, Reproduction, and Myth in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Novels Both the novels that Manjula Padmanabhan has published so far are critically acclaimed works of science fiction. She describes the two novels as “The saga of Meiji, a girl who is born into a cruel, despotic country in which all women have been destroyed, continues as she escapes into the world where she encounters more complex, more disturbing challenges.”43 The woman’s role as the gender that creates life organically, and her womb as the “natural” place of gestation, is a major theme in both novels. This position directly confronts a patriarchal social structure that traces the lineage through the male line of descent and, implicitly, locates the source of life in the male sperm rather than the female ovum. The first novel, Escape (2008), has attracted considerable scholarship. Many critics view the novels as a portrayal of a critical dystopia rather than an anti-utopia in the novel.44 Tom Moylan, a science fiction critic, coined the term in 1986 in the context of his analysis of four novels by prominent feminist writers of the 1970s: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Samuel R. Delany’s Triton (1976), and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). Explaining the difference between the two approaches to fictional world-making in science and fantasy fiction, Suparno Banerjee writes, Whereas anti-utopias are closed worlds, examining the negative impulses of humanity, ending in a despair of awareness, dystopia seeks alternatives […] the concept of “critical dystopia” [identifies] the implicit utopic or redemptive qualities of a dystopian text.45

43 Manjula Padmanabhan, “Write About Ideas,” interview with Bijal Vachharajani, Scroll, July 1, 2018, https://scroll.in/article/884639/i-write-about-ideas-and-characters-rather-than-ideologiesand-symbols-manjula-padmanabhan. 44 Swati Shrivastava, “Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape: A study of the dystopian futuristic vision through science fiction,” Vidhyayana Issue 4, (2016): 5. Basundahara Chakraborty, “No Woman’s Land: Women, Nation and Dystopia in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape,” Postscriptum, Volume V Number i January (2020): 82. V. Rositta Joseph, “Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape: Towards a Universal Feminism,” Muse India-The Literary E-Journal, Issue 46, (2012): n.p., www.museindia.com/viewarticle.asp?myr= 2012&issid=46&id=3753. B. Parvathi “Critiquing Manjula Padmanabhan’s Escape”. The Critical Endeavour, Vol. 15, No. 2, (2009): 136. Rupali Palodkar, “Ecofeminism in India: Disappearing Daughters in Padmanabhan’s Escape,” The Quest, Vol. 25, No. 1, (2011): 55. 45 Suparno Banerjee, “No Country for Women,” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 16 No. 2 (2010): 112.

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The Meiji saga presents a reversal of all-female utopias that several American science fiction writers had created. The all-male critical dystopia in which Meiji struggles to survive is the polar opposite of the utopian vision depicted in novels such as Joana Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground: Stories of Hillwomen (1980), and Nicol Griffith’s Ammonite (1993). The Indian sf pioneer’s “critical dystopia” closely resembles the depiction of women’s social position in Suzy McKee’s Walk to the End of the World (1974) and Margaret Atwoods’ fantasy novel Handmaid’s Tale (1984). In Mckee’s novel, women, referred to as “fems,” are kept like animals. In The Island of Lost Girls, a similar-sounding derogatory term “feems” is used to refer to cis-women. The transnational resonance among science fiction novels is strongly evidentiary of large intersectionality in women’s concerns across different cultures. Padmanabhan shifts the thought experiment posed in The Handmaid’s Tale, namely: What would a society where women are objectified as reproductive tools look like? to another paradigm anchored in reproduction. The thought experiment in the Meiji Saga raises the question of—What would happen in a society where men feel threatened by the reproductive capacity of women? This reading is at variance with critics who have concluded that the narrative logic suggests that women in the fictional world were exterminated because advances in technology rendered their reproductive ability unnecessary.46 This study holds that the reason for women’s annihilation in the novels is not their reproductive redundancy. Instead, their extinction is the eventual outcome of a “male” urge to control nature by substituting all organic processes—whose outcomes are always unpredictable, to some extent—with more tractable manufactured alternatives. Dystopian depictions in feminist science and fantasy fiction suggest a systemic fear of nature on the part of men and a view of the female reproductive capacity as a symbol of nature’s power. As a corollary, female characters in many of these narratives are more concerned with achieving environmental stability and putting an end to gender discrimination than with projecting power and status. In Escape, the “negative impulses” of mankind that Padmanabhan puts in a logical sequence to create her critical dystopia are commercial avarice, rapacious attitude towards the environment, and systemic sanction of femicide. In the novel, the policy of “The Change,” which eventually exterminates all women, had its roots in a callous disregard for the environment for monetary profit. The process of “The Change” is set in motion when an ambitious business house, headed by two brothers, creates sites for dumping radioactive and toxic industrial waste in an unnamed country. The business churns out huge profits in valuable foreign exchange as various countries take up the business house’s offer to dispose of their waste outside their own national frontiers. The brothers approach other wealthy families in the country to invest in their vision of a nation that would be free of poverty and hunger. However, as the wealth in the country increases, so do riots and macabre crimes prompted by economic 46

Shrivastava, 3. Gita Chandra, “Desire Unfulfilled: (Review of Escape),” Biblio: A Review of Books, Vol 13, (2008): 12.

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inequality. The toxic waste contaminates the water, and many species begin to go extinct. At first, everyone blames foreign intervention for ecological degradation. Padmanabhan assigns collective responsibility for the destruction of natural wealth. Though the process may have been started by the two brothers who made a fortune from toxic waste, the annihilation of the country was a result of collaborative linkages across the affluent class. In the novel, by the time the other rich families raise their voices against the horrendous levels of toxification, the brothers have become supremely powerful. They have used their genetic research facility to create numerous clones of themselves, who live in a fortress and call themselves the Generals. Using their cloning facilities, the Generals create an army of androids called drones who have superhuman strength and short life spans. The genetically induced brain stunting ensures that the drones are incapable of feeling any pain—physical or mental—or taking initiative. Consequently, their owners receive unquestioned obedience from them. The drones are produced in cloning factories called “droneries,” where human genetic material mixed with animal material is gestated in animal wombs. Mass reproduction by cloning results in creatures that have an excess of physical strength and are deficient in mental acumen. Recalling Jacques Derrida, one may say that the laboratory production of drones symbolizes the extermination of humanity.47 This presents a disturbing parallel to the extermination of women who are absent in the futuristic society. One aspect of extinction—of humanity—is signified by the presence of drones, and another kind—the extinction of women—by their absence. In the logic of the narrative, the presence of many technologically advanced products and services signifies the absence of environmentally sustainable solutions. In addition to the large droneries owned by the Generals, drones are also produced in small numbers by some wealthy “Estate” owners who use them as farmhands and domestic servants. Only those estates that have the approval of the Generals can survive. Anyone who denies the Generals anything they demand is cut off from accessing safe water supplies, treatments for radiation sickness, and rationed food supplies. Industrial production declines sharply as a fungus called “cement rot” spreads through the manufacturing establishments causing buildings to crumble. The economy falls to subsistence level agricultural production. Unconcerned, the Generals and a few Estate owners lead decadent lives. Drones constitute the precariat in the novel. They have no rights or security and no ability to sense the injustice being done to them. Presenting a contrast to the empowered slum dwellers of “Cull,” the drones are subjected to merciless precaricide by the Generals, and though less cruel, the mechanisms of the Estate owners are equally exploitative. In one instance, the General slashes a drone’s body to use it as live bait for catching sharks, as he wants shark meat for dinner. In the chronological sequence of the narrative, the economic decline starts when the ecological equilibrium is disrupted by the ambitions of an upstart business house; social decline follows when even the established businesses cooperate with the upstart Generals, trading off clean air and water for the sake of a luxurious lifestyle. The 47

Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham, 2008), 26.

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narrator states that the numbers of women had begun to fall a little before the Generals assumed power. The implication of the coincidental fall in women’s numbers and the increase in drone production is that now society needed fewer women because asexual reproduction of labour had become possible. The declared rationale of the Generals, as recorded in a “government” report titled “The Vermin Tribe: An Analysis” and “The Manual for Bold Soldiers,” the bedrock of the Generals’ ideology, claims that: They were agents of mortality. By eliminating them, we eliminated mortality. The drones are what the Vermin Tribe should have been: servile, dumb and deaf. They were weak. They were unfit. They were different. We took the Mother out of Nature.48

These enunciations make it clear that women were massacred because they were “different,” synonymous with nature, and refused to be “servile, dumb, and deaf.” The Generals’ hunger for complete domination makes women their rivals vis-à-vis drones. The woman’s inborn reproductive capability that cannot be taken away from her acts as a curb on the Generals’ insatiable appetite for exclusive possession. To justify their pogrom, they associate women with “mortality” instead of fertility in “The Manual” and claim superiority for the drones, who have a pre-determined life span over “natural” born individuals whose mortality is unpredictable. The oldest natural-born male in the country is twenty years old. At the time when the narrative starts, there are no women—natural or cloned—in the society. Along with banning women, the Generals have also forbidden education. Therefore, there are hardly any literate men in the country. Meiji is a girl born in this country after the massacre of women is nearly complete. Her mother, unable to contemplate raising her daughter under constant terror of extermination, immolates herself. The father and his two elder brothers decide to bring up the girl as co-parents without revealing their exact relationship to her. Meiji addresses the three brothers—Eldest, Middle, and, Youngest—as Uncle Zero, One, and Two, respectively. The fact that Uncle Two is her father is made known to Meiji only towards the end of the story, when she is in a relatively safe place, far away from the Generals’ fortress. She is also not made aware of the reason why she has been kept in hiding. She accepts spending most of her days alone indoors as normal. Padmanabhan outlines an alternative family structure that negates an exclusive association of motherhood with women. Youngest, Meji’s father, is as gentle with her as a mother may have been. The other two Uncles are portrayed as conventional “fathers”— impatient with her childish behaviour and authoritarian in their demeanour—who discipline her physically when she refuses to obey instructions and constantly berate Youngest for being gentle with her. The brothers had been administering hormone suppressants to Meiji in order to delay her puberty and to stop her from questioning them about the physical changes that would take place at that stage. When Meiji turns sixteen, they decide to smuggle her out of the country. Youngest is chosen to accompany her on the journey. The travel has to be elaborately planned because they have to cross a vast stretch of 48

Padmanabhan, Escape.

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barren land, called “The Waste,” in order to reach a city where Meiji would be less conspicuous. Though all women in that city too have been exterminated, numerous transvestites still survive. The Uncles’ plan is for Meiji to impersonate a transvestite when it would no longer be possible to hide the female contours of her body. For the journey, Meiji is dressed as a boy and introduced as Youngest’s “generate” brother to everyone they meet on the way. The journey from the brothers’ Estate to the city takes about three weeks. During this time, Meiji gets her period, her breasts begin to form, and she starts asking questions about why no one else in the country has a body like hers. Viewed from Meiji’s point of view, the novel can be read as a Bildungsroman, which concentrates on a protagonist striving to reconcile individual aspirations with the demands of social conformity. The narrative offers privileged access to the psychological development of a central character whose sense of self is in flux, paralleling personal concerns with prevailing values.49

Padmanabhan equates Meiji’s struggle against prevailing social values as a struggle for survival because those very values demand her extinction. Meiji and Youngest’s journey mirrors the mythic quest of epics where the hero’s mission takes him to unfamiliar lands where he defeats, and often slays, formidable enemies. Another mythic aspect of the novel is the evocation of the Brahma–Satarupa relationship. Brahma, the creator of the universe in Hindu mythology, forged a female form from his own body, and he called her his daughter. The girl was named, Satarupa—for having a hundred—sat—forms of beauty. She was so exquisite that he fell in love with her. Though they lived as husband and wife, they were ashamed of their relationship.50 Like Brahma, Youngest is physically attracted to his daughter. The proximity during the journey, as they travel together in cramped vehicles, makes his desire for her more pronounced. However, his sense of morality prevents him from acting on his longing. Thus, Padmanabhan’s evocation of the myth highlights the moral obligation of the father to protect his daughter from lascivious impulses, even if they are his own. Youngest protects Meiji from various animal and human predators, making sure that she reaches the city safely. In the city, he controls his possessiveness, allowing her to befriend a boy whom she finds attractive. The novel ends with Youngest telling his daughter that if they are found out by the Generals, then she will have to escape alone to a safe place. Youngest’s final act of liberating Meiji from his care, control, and supervision marks her entry into adulthood. In Padmanabhan’s second novel, The Island of Lost Girls (2015), three years have elapsed since Meiji and Youngest’s arrival in the unnamed city to which they had escaped. The events in the novel unfold in a post-apocalyptic world that has suffered a nuclear attack by eco-anarchists. The nuclear detonation has poisoned the Red Sea, and in place of the Suez Canal, which connects the Mediterranean and the Red seas, there is a deep crack. This fissure, named the Peace Gorge, cuts through the Earth’s mantle. In the aftermath of the attack, the concept of nations has disappeared. There 49 50

Sarah Graham, History of the Bildungsroman, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019), 1. Roushen Dalal, The Religions of India (Gurugram: Penguin, 2010), Kindle.

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are four territorial divisions known as enclaves that are governed by a single entity called “The Whole World Union (WWU).” All travel, trade, and communication among enclaves is prohibited. The WWU has created the Suspended City over the Peace Gorge. The city, contained within a glass enclosure, is a memorial to “the cultures and populations from the Time Before that had been lost in the detonation.” Padmanabhan presents a cynical view of war reconstruction efforts when one of her characters, who lives in the war memorial city, describes it as the “most depraved of cities, where every citizen is either a thief, a scoundrel or a murderer.” The Suspended City can be accessed only through a highly monitored transport network of transparent tubes, called the Ascensor System, which connects it to the nearest port city, fifteen hundred kilometres away. Three thousand passengers transit through the Confluenza Junction per hour, trying to get into the economic nerve centre of the enclave. Thousands of fly-sized robotic cameras buzz around to monitor their movements. Thus, it is virtually impossible for anyone to enter the city without passing through official channels. Despite the strict surveillance, Youngest tries to deliver Meiji clandestinely to an organization in the Suspended City. He cannot secure the necessary documents because the WWU has banned all travel from his country due to the genocide of women that was carried out by the Generals. Padmanabhan exposes the latent hypocrisy of WWU’s stance on the treatment of women when she reveals that in the Suspended City, erected as a peace memorial— all female children are “ritually deflowered immediately after birth.” When they grow up, the girls are segregated into two groups—feems and damaged. The exact social role of ‘feems’ is not made clear in the novel, but the reader is informed that they provide sex services to a select group of men. The damaged girls, who are in much greater number than the feems, are given shelter in several islands around the Suspended City. The islands are “artificially created environments, maintained with funds from the Whole World Union.” Each island is headed by a female Mentor, who uses budgeted funds to run the island and pay for the damaged girls whom she wants to protect from further violence. The narrator does not mention any WWU law that prohibits the mutilation of women or protects them from other forms of violence perpetrated on them. Instead, the WWU seems to consider it adequate reparation to provide funds for the resettlement of girls who “have faced the worst and most horrific forms of disfigurement, torture, and assault.” Ironically, while the WWU, representing former colonizers, stands mute in the face of gender violence in the territory it governs, it condemns the treatment of women in the Forbidden Country, which represents formerly colonized nations. Youngest is headed to the “safety” of the islands with Meiji. As he had expected, at the end of Escape, he and his daughter are found out and captured as fugitives who have committed crimes punishable by death—Youngest is guilty of protecting a woman and Meiji of being a woman. The General clone who tracks down Youngest and Meiji lays down two conditions for sparing their lives. The first condition is that Youngest undergo sex-change surgery and become the General’s concubine. The second is that Youngest should smuggle Meiji into the Suspended City, sell her to one of the “safe” islands and return to his native country. Youngest agrees to both conditions. He calls himself Yasmine after the surgery. The Generals implant tracking devices in Yasmine and Meiji’s bodies in order to know their exact location. This

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would enable the Generals to target their planned attack accordingly. Their objective is to get the attention of WWU, as they find it humiliating to be treated as outcasts by the international community. More intricately plotted than its prequel, The Island portrays gender violence against women, transvestites, and transgender persons as an omnipresent, inescapable phenomenon. The annihilation of women in Escape was perpetrated by active violence on the part of the Generals and tacit collaboration of the effete Estate owners. In The Island, they are not massacred as a matter of policy; however, disfigurement, torture, and assault, to the horrific extant of impregnation of infants, become “rites of passage” for all women. Padmanabhan’s portrayal of gender violence is excessive and exaggerated in scale, but it is grounded in reality. The 2018 Kathua rape case, in which six men kidnapped an eight-old-girl, drugged her, broke her legs, and gang-raped her, allegedly as revenge for a land dispute, is a reality.51 Genital mutilation of girls in the name of tradition is still practiced in some parts of the world.52 Acid attacks on women, often by men who feel rejected by them, are also a reality.53 In the novel, was it not for the efforts of the Mentors, the damaged girls would have been discarded by society and left to die. Thus, they are analogous to an endangered species. The trans-gendered persons referred to as “transies” in the novel are members of the precariat. As sex workers in the Suspended City, the transies routinely endure sexual assault and other forms of physical abuse from men in their line of work. The novel also features drones, the sub-human androids created in the Generals’ cloning factory, who continue to suffer precaricide at the hands of the General. As stated before, there is only a vague reference to feems in the novel, who are described as “resources of the warriors,” suggesting that, as “resources,” they too are members of the precariat. Perhaps they are among the “professional rape victims” who are brought in to reward the victorious warriors of “The Zone.” The islands inhabited only by women strongly evoke the Greek myths of the Sirens and the Nereids. The Sirens lured men to their islands with their enchanted singing and entrapped them for life, and may even have killed them—“Homer describes them as sitting in a meadow surrounded by the mouldering bodies of their victims.”54 The damaged girls’ aversion to men resembles that of the Sirens, but they are not able to avenge their horrific treatment. The Sirens were hybrid creatures whose earliest portrayals from the sixth century BCE show them as “Harpy-like creatures with the body of a bird and head of a woman.”55 Thus, like the girls whose bodies are marked with scars, their limbs 51

Shahla Khan, “No, We Can’t Stop Communalizing Asifa Bano’s Rape. Here’s Why,” feminismsindia, April 13, 2018, https://feminisminindia.com/2018/04/13/assault-asifa-bano-communal-vio lence/. 52 Eliminating Female Genital Mutilation, UN, https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/csw52/ statements_missions/Interagency_Statement_on_Eliminating_FGM.pdf. 53 Combating Acid Violence in Bangladesh, India, and Cambodia, OHCHR, https://www.ohchr.org/ documents/hrbodies/cedaw/harmfulpractices/avonglobalcenterforwomenandjustice.pdf. 54 Robin Hard, The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology, (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 496. 55 Ibid.

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replaced by prosthetics, their heads knocked out of shape by violent blows, the bird– human Sirens are “boundary creatures”: the Sirens’ bodies touch the boundaries of the avian and the human, and the girls’ of the organic and the manufactured. Donna Haraway sees boundary creatures as symbols of “monstrous and illegitimate” unities and “potent myths for resistance and recoupling.”56 Disillusioned with the prescribed “coupling” with men, the Sirens and the damaged girls recouple with nature, technology, music, and with one another in order to relocate themselves outside of patriarchal structures. The community of women on the island resembles the large family of the mythological Nereides. They were the daughters of Nereus, “a truthful, never-deceiving, wise, kindly, and helpful” sea deity.57 The Nereides were virgins who lived together underwater, “emerging from their home only to sport with the sea-beasts in the waves above or to dance on the shore.”58 However, life on the island shelters is heavily dependent on aquatic life. The community uses marine flora and fauna as food, and they use large marine animals as vehicles. The girls’ training sessions for riding whales and Draco lizards may be seen as similar to the Nereides’ sporting with the sea-beasts. Padmanabhan’s ability to suggest allusions to empowered female symbols like the Sirens and Nereides from ancient myths qualifies the islands as ambiguous utopias, where healing from sustained, systemic, and horrific violence is possible. Though women’s connection with reproduction is not mentioned as frequently in The Island of Lost Girls as in Escape, its description in the sequel is elevated to that of a mystic ritual involving one of the Mentors, the pregnant Maia. On the day of her delivery, she is surrounded by spectators wearing elaborate costumes who want to witness the “miracle of life.” As the baby passes through her cervix, The whole chamber became a single tide of shushing sound, the reed music building on the tempo, higher and higher, louder and louder until with a jolt of invisible energy such that the air and walls and floor itself shuddered and bounced, out popped a small redhead from the blossom between Maia’s legs.59

The melodramatic description of the moment of birth is mirrored by Maia’s monologue that precedes the birth. She refers to the responsibility of giving birth as a sign of “Immortal Trust” in the community and to herself as “The Sacred Bearer.” Padmanabhan is not resorting to biological essentialism in describing childbirth as a temple ritual. Instead, she is using the ritual to suggest that vestiges of patriarchy remain or have crept into the island community. Celebrating childbirth as a divine miracle implicitly revers the mother. In patriarchal societies, the respect accorded to mothers, ironically, marginalizes many women who cannot or choose not to have children. Meiji’s indifference to the ritual and her companions’ deriding her for it shows that the island is not a perfect utopia where all women are always free of negative emotions 56

Dona Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” in The Haraway Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 13. 57 Ibid., 51. 58 Ibid. 59 Padmanabhan, The Island.

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such as anger, jealousy, and conflict. And that is why the island symbolizes an achievable myth—where differences of opinion, hierarchical structures, and authoritarian leaders exist but do not endanger the women.

7.5 A View Through the Spatial Gynocritics Model The gradual temporal progression that Padmanabhan usually employs creates tension with the numerous and diverse spatial movements in her narrative. In Escape, Meiji and Youngest’s journey from their native province to the City traces a macromovement from an isolated, agrarian milieu to a bustling, urban, commercial hub. The macro-movement is split into several micro-movements such as the move from the multi-storeyed residence in the Estate to a small room in a city hotel, from an underground, cramped lifestyle to a more open-air life by the sea-shore—for Meiji, and from the luxuriant outdoors to compact city quarters—for Youngest. The sequel, The Island, follows a similar logic of representing each macro-movement through several micro-movements but in a more baroque rendition. Youngest and Meiji’s journey from the Forbidden Country to the Enclave governed by the Whole World Union signals a macro- movement. Within this macro-movement of their arrival at the port town, at least five micro-movements may be discerned—from a cage on the Cut-Throat Express to the cargo hold in the deep-water port, moving up the levels of the Confluenza Junction, passing through the crowded passages of the junction, from the slow-moving ramps and walkways to the Ascensor Bay, and boarding a travelling capsule in the rapid transport system. This combination of macro and micro-movements is particularly significant while examining Padmanabhan’s novels through the tool of de-canonizing derivatives.

7.5.1 De-canonizing Junctions “Junction” is used as a technical term in three distinct disciplines. In electronics, it denotes the contact area between regions of differing electrical properties in semiconductors; in biology, various types of inter-cellular connections are referred to as junctions; and in urban planning, junction design specifies how side streets, cycle tracks, and pedestrian pavements join with the main roads and with one another— railway junction and travel junction being extensions of the architectural term. All these terms evoke the Indo-European radical of the word “junction,” that is, “yeug.” This root is common to the Latin “iugum,” the source of words such as conjugate, jugular, and subjugate; the Greek “zugoo,” which gives zygote and azygos; the Germanic “yukam,” from which yoke is derived; and the Sanskrit “yogah,” from which the Hindi words yuga (eon), yog (summation), and yoga (union of the spirit, mind, and body) are derived.

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Three sites in Padmabhan’s novels may be seen as junctions: The Confluenza Junction and the Collectory, in The Island of Lost Girls, and The Station in Escape. The Confluenza Junction, a deep-water port, is the only point of entry that allows access to The Suspended City—the cultural and economic nerve centre of The Zone. All displaced people from the nuclear explosion described in The Island who want to avail of a resettlement process have to pass through immigration at the Confluenza Junction. The transit hub is spread across six levels. Incoming passengers arrive at level six and have to make their way up to level one, where the Ascensor Bays are located. From level one, they can travel to The Suspended City by the Ascensor system—a mass rapid transit system that packs in human beings like luggage in a cargo hold. The Confluenza Junction ostensibly offers displaced populations a route to survival though, once they reach the Suspended City, they continue to face exploitation. Confluenza provides ambitious cloners, swindlers, assassins, warriors, and hunters a path to greater success. It is also the node through which all the “damaged” girls of The Zone pass through on their way to the Suspended City, where safety continues to elude them unless Examining Officers declare them damaged enough to be rehabilitated on the islands. Padmanabhan’s description of the “commercial” activity that is promoted at Confluenza indicates the extent to which physical violence has permeated everyday lives: “advertising jingles began squawking from floating speakers: cloning services, prosthetic advice, beast management. Bright holograms flashed on and off, offering the latest in swords, spears, double-handed axes, and steel-tipped whips.”60 Numerous tiny insect-sized robotic cameras buzz around each incoming passenger. Thus, Padmanabhan shows that technology is used for extensive surveillance but not for controlling violence. “The Station” in Escape is surprisingly similar to the Confluenza Junction even though it is located in a technology deficient world. The manufacturing sector has been wiped out by a bacteria called “cement rot,” and the Generals’ policy violently prohibits the revival of any industrial activity. The trickle of commercial activity that exists is comprised of trade in food, clean water, and scrap material necessary for assembling rudimentary devices like carts and ploughs for the agrarian economy. The Station, manned by one man, is a resting place for wagon drivers and draught animals. People who want to get away from the contaminated area known as the Waste, and the General’s fortress, can hitch a ride on one of the wagons headed towards the City. The Station used to be a busy railway station, but now only a single track is in use there. The low level of economic activity makes multiple tracks unnecessary. One may visualize Padmanabhan’s macro–micro amplification technique by juxtaposing the Confluenza Junction and the Station. A behemoth bureaucracy manages Confluenza, and a single man oversees the Station. Reminders of violence are projected through loud advertising jingles and flashing video images in Confluenza, whereas silent vestiges of destruction are visible in the Station in the form of “the old schedules on the walls, the glass cases with the notices of interest to rail passengers, complete with rusted thumbtacks, and a filing cabinet full of unissued tickets and passes.”61 60 61

Padmanabhan, The Island. Pamanabhan, The Island.

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Thus, the travel junctions evoke a negative sense of “joining” in which different social groups are connected in exploitative power relations. Though the rituals of traveling give the impression of moving on by moving towards a different place, the junctions act as nodes that reveal the differential experience of connections between the subjugated and the powerful. The systemic nature of omnipresent exploitative relations is summarily captured by Padmanabhan’s depiction of the “Collectory,” which is a market junction. The Collectory is the node for a centralized trading system. All “imported” goods, including animal and human livestock, are inspected by the Examining Officers for registration and subsequent sale. Damaged girls are also registered in the Collectory’s system. Mentors who head the islands—a sort of refugee resettlement camp—bid against one another for the girls, depending on the assessment of the gravity of her condition. Padmanabhan provides a detailed description of the bid for Meiji, in which Vane outbids her fellow mentors to secure the girl for her island. The scenario resembles a slave market where several buyers assign a monetary value to the body on display. In a twisted subversive logic, on the one hand, the narrator suggests that the intended use for the “purchased” body is not to exploit it but to heal the damage it has suffered; on the other hand, the islands do not have an egalitarian society where the girls are free to choose what they want to do with their lives. Even on the islands, the girls lead a somewhat regimented life governed by obligatory rites and ceremonies. Whereas Confluenza and the Station are not ostensibly sites of exploitation, the Collectory is imbued with a strong sense of biopolitics, which sanctions the sale and purchase of the human body. All three junctions, Confluenza, the Station, and the Collectory, are also nonplaces in the sense that they are “never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten.”62 While the junctions in Padmanabhan’s critical dystopias are display points for the hegemonic power of the technologically empowered and wealthy classes, they also become sites where the subjugated may cobble together their tactics of resistance. Meiji’s three-year journey to the safety of the islands is enabled by the junctions that she passes through. At the port of departure, Youngest is a muscular, powerful man, and Meiji, a pre-pubescent child. When they reach Confluenza, Youngest is a transvestite called Yasmine, and Meiji is a dormant body encased in protective gel inside a suitcase. In the Collectory, Yasmine announces himself as the father and Meiji as the tradeable body that he must sell. As Youngest-Yasmine moves from one junction to another, his self-image also travels along a virility-emasculation axis. Meiji’s path through the junctions represents her journey from dormancy to vitality. Padmanabhan de-canonizes the spatial archetype of the junction as a neutral intersection of lines to reveal embedded relationships based on exploitation, objectification, and marginalization. At the Station, Meiji is portrayed as a marginalized, passive observer of various markers of state policy that resulted in the annihilation of women. In Confluenza, she is objectified as cargo, and her body is exploited for sale at the 62

Marg Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, translated by John Howe (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 79.

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Collectory. The junction emerges as an antigonal archetype of an intersectional space that cannot be located precisely within the power structure, nor can it be used as a site for open resistance and rebellion. The chronotope of the junction may be understood as a liminal variation of the chronotope of the agora, one of Bakhtin’s major chronotopes. Bakhtin discusses the chronotope of the agora in the context of ancient Greek biographical and autobiographical narratives. He points out that […] the important thing here is [the] chronotope in which the representation of one’s own or someone else’s life is realised either as verbal praise of a civic-political act or as an account of the self. It is precisely under the conditions of this real-life chronotope, in which one’s own or another’s life is laid bare (that is, made public), that the limits of a human image and the life it leads are illuminated in all their specificity.

The chronotope of the agora, as articulated by Bakhtin, publicly exposes the limits of human life; in contrast, its liminal variant, the chronotope of the junction, is symbolic of choices and possibilities for the human being. Bakhtin’s analysis of the biography through the chronotope of the agora provides a useful perspective for examining Padmanabhan’s bildungsromane. In order to use it as a productive device, the chronotope must be placed in the revised context of Padmanabhan’s novels. The purpose of the ancient biography was eulogistic, presenting the subject as a glorious victor who was able to transcend the limits that restrict ordinary people from achieving similar heights. Whereas the ancient biography lauded extraordinary feats, Padmanabhan’s novels highlight the minoritarian genders’ struggles against systemic humiliation and exploitation. Hence, her novels may be seen as collective biographies of the minoritarian genders that evince the chronotope of the junction. More specifically, viewed as fictionalized biographies of Meiji and Youngest, the novels manifest that the protagonists’ consciousness of the self is “first laid bared and shaped in the public square (the agora).”63 The junctions through which they pass serve as agoras in the narratives, literally bringing out hidden aspects of the self into the open. Meiji is liberated from the subterranean rooms where she grew up and then again from the chrysalis-like body case that sustains her through the journey to the Collectory. Similarly, Youngest is freed from falling in with his elder brothers’ views on raising his daughter when he decides single-handedly how to protect her from various dangers at the Station, and then again from the expectations arising out of his “male” fatherhood when, as Yasmine, he “sells” her into protection. The role of de-canonizing derivatives in analyzing the novels may be summarized as in Fig. 7.1. Padmanabhan’s junction-agoras challenge conventional depictions of them as places where competence is flaunted for publicly acknowledged glory, emerging instead as spaces for enabling the unfolding of the oppressed, hidden self. In order to smuggle Meiji through Confluenza, Youngest silences his “maleness” and his fatherhood, generating a liminal archetype of the multi-gendered parent. In the liminal zone of the junction, he protects Meiji, paradoxically, by handing her over to strangers. At the customs desk, he declares her as live cargo: human, female. When he is closer 63

Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, (Austin: UP Texas, 1981), 131.

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Fig. 7.1 De-canonizing the junction

to getting her to safety in the Collectory, he appropriates his position as a father, exercising his proprietary rights—conventionally used to control a daughter—to let Meiji slip out of his control towards safety. He convinces the examining officers of the worth of his daughter so that they assign her a suitably high valuation. The image of him breaking open the seals on the case that contains Meiji’s embalmed but alive body is equivalent to his unshackling the chains that have kept the girl under patriarchal control up to this point in her life.

7.5.2 De-bordering the Arena, Battlefield, and Playfield The Zone is portrayed as an “arena” in the ancient denotation of the word that indicated the central part of the Roman amphitheatre where gladiatorial combats were performed and public executions were carried out.64 When Youngest makes his way to Ascensor Bay, after deboarding the ferry that brought him to the Confluenza Junction, he gets his first look at the “playing fields” of the Zone. The gory images of the Zone are inescapable: “[o]n the walls, on the pillars, on every surface, Zone Warriors were talking, snarling, strutting, displaying scars, pounding their rivals. […] Bleeding, writhing in pain, dying on the sand.”65 The narrator’s reference to sand evokes two allusions—the first is the Sahara Desert, as the Zone is located on the landmass of the erstwhile continent of Africa, and the second is the Roman amphitheatre, which had a sandpit for hand-to-hand combat. Padmanabhan describes the Zone to create a deliberate confusion about whether it is a site for an extreme 64

D.L. Bomgardener, The Story of the Roman Amphitheatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 100. 65 Padmanabhan, The Island, emphasis mine.

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sport like Roman gladiatorial combats, or it is a metaphoric representation of a battlefield, where continually warring armies, like the militia in various African countries such as Sudan, Nigeria, the Republic of Congo, and Somalia fight civil wars. Reinforcing the confusion, sometimes, the participants are referred to as “warriors” and sometimes, as “players.” The narrator provides another instance of purposeful obfuscation between the two allusions when Aila, a transgender woman who accosts Youngest immediately upon his arrival to offer her services as a city guide, explains the “games” played in the Zone: “There are teams. They fight. They can win, or they can lose. They can get taken prisoners or become champions. Whatever happens, the teams go on fighting. Unless they are destroyed, but that rarely happens.” When Youngest asks for clarification whether “It’s a game, then? Not a war?” Aila replies, “Is there a difference?”.66 Vane, the island Mentor who makes the highest bid for Meiji in the Collectory, also points out that combat in the Zone is like a reality TV show wherein warlike violence is enacted for entertainment and commercial gains. In Vane’s understanding, it is difficult to gauge whether the entertainment industry has appropriated war as a spectacle, or the state machinery has turned warfare into a source of profit. Her indication, which appears to suggest that both the broadcasters and the state machinery stand to gain from the spectacle of violence, strongly mirrors the gladiator industry of ancient Rome. In those times too, the emperor tried to maximize profits from the combat: During his lifetime, Julius Caesar amassed an extensive network of gladiators and training schools. […] By so doing, Caesar wisely cut out the profits for the middlemen who supplied gladiators and wild beasts to the spectacles of prospective political candidates at Rome. A large part of Caesar’s political strategy involved the production of spectacles on the most lavish scale to boost his popularity and to ensure electoral success. […] A whole range of administrative bureaux administered by this ‘private service’ of imperial slaves (familia Caesaris) and freedmen (liberti Augusti) arose to deal with every aspect of the imperial spectacles in the arena.67

Just as there were administrative departments in ancient Rome to ensure the popularity of gladiator fights by use of appropriate costume, music, and decoration, in The Island, the wealthy and peaceable nations that decided the frontiers of the Zone ensure the continuity of wargames through aggressive publicity. The wealthy nations have a vested interest in promoting the violence in the Zone because they profit from the wargames. Thus, the Zone is part of the normative structure that mandates cannibalistic violence among men and sexual violence against women. Only men can participate as warriors in the Zone’s games; women are made available to them as “booty, trophies, and entertainment.”68 Padmanabhan portrays the Suspended City and the battlefields of the Zone as de-differentiated spaces that are governed by the same structural logic. Even though violence is manifest in the Zone and hidden in the city, life in the two spaces is not 66

Padmanabhan, The Island. Bomgardner, 23. 68 Padmanabhan, The Island. 67

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significantly different. The glass bubble that contains the Suspended City represents the fragility of the border between spectacle and routine, entertainment and brutality, and war and games. The city, too, is rife with violence, and any perception of safety is illusory. In their everyday lives, the residents of the city are saved from direct involvement in the inexorable brutality of the mainland but, as audience members, cheering or silent, they too are participants in the spectacle of war. The frangible, transparent city walls of the futuristic city are a commentary on the perceived security of urban centres in the real world. There is a trend towards greater urbanization all over the world and desperation to cross borders into developed countries to escape immiseration and violence in the home countries. Urbanization is seen as a sign of development. However, high rates of urbanization in African countries such as Gabon, Tunisia, and Guinea do not represent higher standards of living for a majority of the population. In these countries, higher urbanization only indicates a stronger concentration of wealth. Wealth is assumed to offer a higher degree of safety than it actually does. The 2018 outburst of city violence in Chile, where 88% of people live in urban areas, shows that the invisible wall that separates the metropolitan centres from the impoverished regions is a fragile one. The transparency of the wall suggests that its existence is only imaginary. People from the poor regions who eke out a precarious living in the city belie any claims of separation between the margins and the centre. In a highly surveilled world, where all aspects of human life are controlled by the dictates of the Whole World Union, the surface appearance of the Suspended City—located above the Peace Gorge, encased in glass—becomes a potent symbol of hollow tokenism. The limen where some resistance survives is located underwater at the military base established by the island owners in the Suspended City. It represents the power of an interstitial location. Vane Base, which is to serve as the launch site for an insurgence, is located in an interstice. The idea for the base came about as a result of a change in the Mentors’ pacifist stance. Tired of being bystanders to the gory battles, the mentors decide to relinquish their neutrality in the Zone’s battles. Explaining the change in the islands’ politics, Vane says, “We have always thought of ourselves as non-combatants. But by our actions, by doing nothing to oppose the horror around which we live, by being absolute pacifists, in effect, we DO support it.” The island Mentors tunnel through the crater of an extinct volcano that leads to an area on the Zone’s mainland to create Vane Base. After constructing the base on dry land, they fill the tunnels with water so that they can be navigated using amphibian Draco lizards that the Mentors have trained for combat. The lizards are manoeuvred by skilled island girls. They plan to intervene in support of the weaker “team” in a Zone battle with the intent to demonstrate the destructive potential of the giant lizards. The Mentors hope that the show of strength will bolster their negotiating position with the Whole World Union. The novel suggests that the Mentors will use the superior power of their army of damaged girls and lizards to enforce peace in the Zone. In an instantiation of localizing the limen, Vane Base empowers several marginalized groups in different ways—the Mentors become military strategists, the damaged girls become warriors, and the reptiles become combat vehicles. The functioning of

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Fig. 7.2 De-bordering the battlefield

debordering derivatives in a spatial view of the novels may be summarized as in Fig. 7.2. Padmanabhan’s critical dystopia offers only limited empowerment even in the liminal space. The Mentors’ military campaign feminizes the battlefield—manufactured swords, spears, and knives are blunted by the organic gnawing jaws of the lizard, muscular male warriors confront damaged girls, and a mammoth Whole World Union is stupefied by the surprise attack planned by a handful of pacifists. However, the abandonment of neutrality suggests that even the Mentors cannot find an alternative to violence as a means of acquiring power.

7.5.3 De-settling Vehicular Transport The contemporary nomads in the acclaimed non-fiction book Nomadland (2017) contest their description as homeless.69 Instead, they prefer to describe themselves as “houseless” because their itinerant trailers feel more like homes to them than the fixed brick and mortar structures they had lived in before taking to the road. The notion of a mobile home as a route to liberation and autonomy is emphasized in Padmanabhan’s novels through the spatiality of the specially crafted tandem cycle in Escape and of the titular islands in The Island of Lost Girls. As oil is strictly rationed in the Forbidden Country and can only be obtained with the prior approval of the Generals, Youngest cannot use a fossil fuel-powered 69

Jessica Bruder, Nomadland-Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2017).

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vehicle to make his getaway. He uses a specially designed tandem cycle, which can be easily dismantled to cross the vast expanse of the desert between the farm and the city. The tandem has four giant wheels, which, when assembled, make the vehicle twice as high as Youngest, who is described as a tall man in the novel. A massive canopy, folded using “origami techniques” to occupy minimum space, is attached to the tandem.70 The canopy is made of a material called “mirrorskin” that “uses biomimicry technology adapted from chameleons.”71 Thus, the canopy offers shelter from rain, sun, and nuclear radiation. It also acts as camouflage against detection by satellite imaging. The camouflage is so effective that it can even “conceal its own shadow from the satellite!”72 The tandem becomes Youngest and Meiji’s shelter for the three days that it takes them to cross the Great Waste until they reach the Station, from where they travel by wagon to the City. They hang hammocks from the wheels of the tandem so that they can sleep without touching the contaminated ground. Food, water, and other travel supplies are strapped to the frame of the tandem. Youngest and Meiji do not dismount it except to sleep because the “mirrorskin” protects them from being detected by the Generals. The tandem is not only a means of conveyance, but also a mobile home for them that can be dismantled and packed away when not in use. Similarly, in The Island of Lost Girls, the islands too can be dismantled and transported to new locations when danger strikes. Mentor Vane informs Yasmine that the entire island is made of detachable parts that can be taken apart and re-fitted to make new structures. She also reveals that the island is a living organism fashioned from giant crabs. The islands that serve as shelters for damaged girls and are populated only by women are Padmanabhan’s nod to ecofeminism—an ideology that advocates “some form of an environmental ethic that deals with the twin oppressions of the domination of women and nature through an ethic of care and nurture that arises out of women’s culturally constructed experiences.”73 The islands are a metonymic representation of the spirit of resistance against the unyielding rigidity of patriarchal structures that are unresponsive to changing times. In Padmanabhan’s ecofeminist ethics, the home is a sheltering space because it can be dismantled. The impermanence of a structure ensures safety. The community of damaged girls lives “symbiotically” inside and over the bodies of humongous, hybridized crabs whose parts can be separated under threat of danger and joined back when safe habitats are found. The “culturally constructed experiences” of the women from the Zone have taught them that when they stay in one place, they are subjected to abominable violence. Their evolutionary logic favours choosing the “flee” response when faced with predators. Their mobile, nomadic dwellings enable them to flee from danger, nurture them back to strength, mentally and physically, to the extent that they feel capable of challenging the WWU’s dominion. 70

Padmanabhan, Escape. Padmanabhan, Escape. 72 Ibid. 73 Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology, (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 195. 71

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Fig. 7.3 De-settling the permanent home

The mobile dwellings house small communities. In contrast to the colonizing tactic of divide-and-rule, the islands split themselves up to stay safe together. The Mentors and damaged-but-healing girls do not coalesce on a giant permanent settlement; instead, they choose to live in small communities on several floating crab islands. Their dispersed habitat appears to be innocuous; therefore, they are left out of mainstream politics of the Whole World Union. They use their organic, floating, portable homes as shelters as well as political incubators to imagine a new world order. The view from the lenses of de-settling derivates may be presented as in Fig. 7.3. Youngest’s arrival on the island may be viewed as a picturesque depiction of the tool of de-sedimentation. Hoping to meet Meiji again, he plans to reach the islands clandestinely because only women are permitted there. When he gets close to one of the islands, he is suddenly sucked into its “body” and pushed through a slimy chute where he can “smell rotting fish guts, seaweed and the sweet-sickening stench of wet, clotted blood […].” One can sense de-sedimentation at play in the swirl of a human body and marine flotsam. Youngest’s infiltration disrupts the hierarchies of two structures—the patriarchal ones represented by the WWU and the Generals and the matriarchal one that has evolved on the islands. Youngest’s mobility across genders, his constant shifting between male and female roles, mirrors the islands’ shape-shifting defence mechanism. The islands use their organic potency to negate their dependence on the Whole World Union. Though they were set up with funding from the WWU, they have become increasingly self-sufficient by harnessing organic technology. The islands were founded as refugee rehabilitation camps for girls who had no place else to go. But, in the act of negation, they refused to occupy the off-thecoast locations assigned to them in a manner in line with the WWU’s expectations. They negate their marginality by burrowing a tunnel to the mainland, from where they launch their amphibian attack. The islands are a “subjunctive” description of

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alternative social structures that forbid gender violence and endorse organic lifestyles. Thus, Padmanabhan de-settles the conventional syntax of home as a sheltered space where men provide protection to women and children. She also shifts the home shelter from the domestic paradigm to an overtly political one, where women— the Mentors and damaged girls—plan military strategy, train soldiers, and fabricate organic weapons.

7.6 Conclusion This chapter has examined the evolution of feminist science fiction (sf) since its heyday in the 1970s in the USA. The landscape of women sf writers in India has been examined, tracing international convergences with American feminist sf. Manjula Padmanabhan is identified as a pioneer in the field of India sf, written in English. The chapter provides an overview of Padmanabhan’s writing in different genres, from which her sf novels are selected as the main subject matter for analysis. The analysis uses approaches from myth criticism to examine the themes of precaricide and reproduction, which frequently appear in Padmanabhan’s writings. The chapter has carried out a close reading of the portrayal of the junction, battlefield, vehicular transport, and portable habitats in the novels through the spatial gynocritic model.

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Chapter 8

Lucrecia Martel’s Transnational Cinema

Abstract This chapter examines the evolution of Argentinian cinema in the second half of the twentieth century and locates Lucrecia Martel among filmmakers who gave it a new direction at the turn of the twenty-first century. The characteristics of New Argentine Cinema, which includes Martel’s cinema, are delineated to show the changes in the cinematic themes and stylistic approaches since the years of the Dirty War—a traumatic period in the country’s recent history. Martel’s oeuvre is sparse, but she has received national and international accolades for every film that she has made. The chapter concentrates on her Salta trilogy, providing justifications for viewing it as a transnational, collective bildungsroman. In addition, the chapter selects the pool for spatial analysis as it is featured prominently in all three films of the trilogy. Viewed through the spatial gynocritic models, the pool emerges as a de-settling element that unravels racial and familial hierarchies in The Swamp; in The Holy Girl, Martel uses it to present a de-canonized view of the home-nation; and in The Headless Woman, the pool becomes a site for de-bordering the perceived safety of the city and the threats from nearby slums. Keywords Argentina · Cinema · Bildungsroman · Emancipation · Liberation The year 1962 marks a turning point in the course of Argentine cinema. In this year, the National Institute of Cinematography, established 7 years earlier, in 1955, acquired adequate government support to function in accordance with its founding principles. The institute was founded with an objective to counteract the dominant tendency in Argentina’s cinema of the time to imitate the styles and themes of Hollywood films. The founder of the institute, the legendary filmmaker and theorist Fernando Birri, believed that cinema should be a “social documentary.” Strongly influenced by Italian neorealism, Birri advocated that Argentine cinema should evolve distinctive realistic rhetoric to capture the nation’s realities in cinematographic images. Birri’s insistence on adopting the documentary style shaped the trend of “New/Third Cinema” of 1960s Argentina and still guides the aesthetics of several contemporary Argentine filmmakers. Argentina suffered seven military coups between 1930 and 1976. The last of these, which established the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 80s, was a major influence on the Argentinian cultural imaginary of the last decades of the twentieth © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 J. Singh, Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1426-3_8

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century and continues to be a source of cultural provocation.1 This period in Argentine history is known as The Dirty War, a term used by the junta to refer to their use of “unconventional” tactics—abduction, torture, rape, and extrajudicial killings— in a “war” against a section of its own citizenry. When the dictatorship ended in 1983, the horrific extent of human rights abuses by the junta was made public. The revelations inspired a spate of films that serve as a cultural and historical record of the period. By the 1990s, the hopeful promise of democratic governments had been belied when the economy went into a tailspin. Recurring bouts of hyperinflation and sovereign indebtedness wiped out the value of savings and created severe unemployment. The twentieth-century fin-de-siècle neoliberal program held the promise of an age of agency wherein the country would benefit from stronger linkages with global financial and product markets. However, by the start of the twenty-first century, the national scenario had quickly deteriorated to an age of decadence marked by corruption and disregard for the plight of marginal classes. These social realities became the main concerns of twenty-first-century filmmakers in Argentina, who are referred to as the Nuevo Cine Argentino (NCA) or the New Argentine Cinema.2 Lucrecia Martel is part of the NCA—a group that includes filmmakers such as Anahí Berneri, Pablo Trapero, and Lisandro Alonso. As with any group of artists that brings together diverse poetics and rhetoric, the practitioners of NCA offer “heterogenous cinematic designs,” sharing “a distancing from the established aesthetics of the films of renowned Argentine cineastes of the previous decade and also with […] more commercial cinema.”3 Three key elements contribute to the “newness” of the NCA. Firstly, its filmmakers adopt a novel perspective in their criticism of the violence perpetrated by the state during the military dictatorship’s “Dirty War.” They tend “to avoid the allegorical narratives, political posturing, and denouncement of injustice that had marked the films of their predecessors” and equally refuse “to buy into

1 The protagonists of Daniel Loedel’s Haedes Argentina (2021) are two young lovers who “disappeared” because of the military junta. Loedel dedicates the novel to his half-sister who was murdered by the dictatorship in 1978. 2 The term NCA gained currency in the 1990s with the release of Historias breves (1995), Rapado (1996), and Mundo grúa (1999). The change in the country’s cinematic trend received international attention in 2001 when Argentine filmmakers marked their presence at Cannes after a thirteen-year hiatus. The festival included films by Lisandro Alonso and Lucrecia Martel. Before 2001, the last Argentinian film that was screened at Cannes had won the best director award for Fernando Solanas in 1988. This film titled Sur was set against the backdrop of the Falkland Islands’ War that had been instigated by the military dictatorship in 1982. 3 Wolfgang Bongers, Interferencias del Archivo: Cortes Estéticos y Políticos en Cine Literatura (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2016), 139.

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the ‘feel good’4 memory politics of Kirchnerism.”5 Secondly, as Geoffrey Kantaris points out, NCA is “a cultural reaction to the widespread imposition of neoliberal ‘structural adjustment’ policies with their attendant immiseration—a kind of de facto financial dictatorship.”6 While the first two distinguishing aspects of NCA represent its ideological stance against authoritarian government and neoliberalism, the third is a rhetorical shift. The politics of NCA is articulated mainly through a grammar of staccato spatial contrapositions and non-verbal soundscapes, while conventional strategies involving character, plot, and dialogue are deprioritized.

8.1 Lucrecia Martel’s Salta Trilogy: A Transnational Bildüngsroman Lucrecia Martel’s Salta trilogy, an epitome of NCA, succeeds in establishing accessible referential frameworks for transnational comprehension despite being anchored in recent Argentinian history and politics. The three films show stylistic and generic consistency when visualized as parts of an anthology. Their naturalist inflection and the collective female bildungsroman that Martel builds through them are vital to generating a transnationally accessible referential framework. Stylistically, the director links the women protagonist’s confinement to their transnationally recognizable microenvironments: disconnected rural areas and inward-looking provincial towns that have been left to decay because they do not fit into the narrative of dynamic globalization.7 These zones project plurivocal images that criticize Argentina’s authoritarian structures and its bourgeois neoliberalism while presenting the region of Salta as a microcosm of any unequal society. Martel’s transnational reach is enabled by the innovative use of the generic elements of the bildungsroman. During the formative transition from girl to woman, varying modes and degrees of sexual 4

In his inaugural address on the occasion of his election as President of Argentina in 2003, Néstor Kirchner pressed the need for staying focused on the future without going into the details of past governmental failures. He said in the speech that “There is no need to do a detailed review of our mistakes.” Under the Kirchner administration, the criminals of the “Dirty War” were brought to justice, and the government adopted a decidedly socialist outlook in its policy framework. However, for the NCA filmmakers, the improvements on the legislative, judicial, and economic fronts under Kirchernism did not make for an easy closure on the past. They did not subscribe to the idea of a monolithic feel-good narrative, instead they continued the exploration of the national trauma. 5 Maria M. Delgado and Cecilia Sosa, “Politics, Memory and Fiction(s) in Contemporary Argentine Cinema: The Kirchnerist Years.” A Companion to Latin American Cinema, edited by Maria M. Delgado, Stephen M. Hart, and Randal Johnson (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 242. 6 Geoffrey Kantaris, “From Postmodernity to Post-Identity Latin American Film after the Great Divide,” A Companion to Latin American Cinema, edited by Maria M. Delgado, Stephen M. Hart, and Randal Johnson (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 152. 7 The widespread, violent protests against the government’s economic policies in Argentina in 2001 and in Chile in 2019 show that neoliberal frameworks stretch the veneer of prosperity of a few over the misery of many. Though these demonstrations broke out in the national capitals, they speak to the precarity at large of marginal groups in the provinces and rural areas as well.

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expressions are portrayed that suggest a strong correlation between self-fulfilment and self-expression. Moreover, the indigenous working woman is counterposed with the bourgeois white woman to bring out the intersectionality of race, class, and feminism. This creates a recognizable transnational referentiality on two parameters: firstly, an intra-gender division of labour based on race, caste, provincial, or immigrant status is at the foundation of many hierarchized societies; secondly, the change in the degrees of freedom that a woman claims as she matures is also a common feature of any social structure where patriarchal attitudes are dominant. Thus, the chapter addresses an epistemological concern: can cultural representations of globally relevant issues be approached through techniques and tactics that do not obliterate the local, that do not seek recourse to universalizing tropes, and that do not homogenize regional specificities into a global monolith. The Salta trilogy draws out the global and the national from the local. Like other NCA films, Martel’s cinema recalls the national trauma caused by the years of oppression during the “Dirty War,” but her cultural imaginary is not fueled by a condemnation of the military, para-military forces, and extrajudicial militia. She brings into focus the role of the bystanders who though did not participate in the violence but, in a way, allowed its propagation by their silence, inaction, or betrayals. The bystanders’ (di)stance ensured not only their own survival but also that of the oppressive regime. Martel emphasizes their complicity by foregrounding symbols of silent acceptance of injustices such as the complaisant homemaker Tali in The Swamp (TS) and of betrayal for survival, as is the case with the young Josefina, who incriminates her best friend in The Holy Girl (HG).8 In an interview, Martel said that she is more shocked at the negation of recent history by those who were “not” involved in the repressive apparatus than at the ruthlessness of the dictatorship during that time.9 In her opinion, the motivations of a military junta that inflicted “cruelty, death and violence” are less inexplicable than the attitudes of those who did not perpetrate or witness the abuses but willingly embrace the collective and selective social amnesia about the dictatorship years.10 A powerful scene from The Headless Woman (HW) showcases Martel’s methods of recalling the human rights abuses during the “Dirty War.”11 In the film, set in contemporary Argentina, some 25 years after the end of the military dictatorship, “a clinical dissection of the mechanisms through which the operations of ‘disappearance’ were conducted, (is) refracted through the events following a hit-and-run accident.”12 The accident happens when Vero, a sophisticated, “upper-class” white woman, hits something on the road. She is not sure whether it is a boy or a dog. Without any firm evidence, she convinces herself that she has not killed a boy and 8

La Ciénaga, directed by Lucrecia Martel (Argentina: Lita Stantic Producciones, 2001). La Niña Santa, directed by Lucrecia Martel (Argentina: Lita Stantic Producciones, 2004). 9 Lucrecia Martel, “La Mala Memoria,” interview with Mariana Enriques, August 17, 2008, https:// www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/radar/9-4766-2008-08-17.html. 10 Ibid. 11 La mujer sin cabeza, directed by Lucrecia Martell (Argentina: El Deseo, 2008). 12 Delgado and Sosa, 243.

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had only hit a dog. A few days later, when she hears reports that a boy’s dead body was recovered from the location of the accident, she dismisses it as mere coincidence. Nobody knows the facts about the boy’s death, and nobody wants to find out because he is from a poor indigenous family. The boy is a hybridized symbol of the immiserated sections of Argentinian society—the marginalized indigenous population and the “disappeared” persons during the military dictatorship. Martel uses subtle clues to show the perdurance of “the terrible national id that [underlay] the repressive national superego” in the 1970s military rule and the present-day neoliberal regime in Argentina.13 The song “Soleil, Soleil” plays in the background from Vero’s car stereo as a background score just before the accident happens. The song used to be popular among “people who were not participating politically—who ignored the dictatorship.”14 Using a melody as a mnemonic, Martel subtly indicates the bystanders’ complicity in the violence. Though Vero is probably the perpetrator of the boy’s death, believing herself to be a passer-by, she deliberately distances herself from the incident. Like the disappearances during the dictatorship, the boy’s “disappearance” does not cause any inconvenience to the bourgeois section of society. A few phone calls from Vero’s family to the police and the hospital staff are all that is needed to destroy any evidence that might suggest her involvement in the incident. Neither Vero nor any of her family members are implicated in the death of the boy. Their distance from the actual crime, their race, and their social class create a contrapuntal symbolism of the dead boy. Vero and her family represent the bystanders who believed themselves to be extraneous to the violence of the dictatorship, like the white bourgeois class who are indifferent to the visible impoverishment and precarity of people in their close proximity. Martel explains in an interview that “what was important or relevant wasn’t finding out whether she actually killed somebody but her reaction to what happened.”15 By leaving the details of the boy’s death vague, Martel shows the perdurance of a collective unwillingness to acknowledge the fact of visible violence—political, social, and economic—in the society. Apart from providing an oblique musical reference to the dictatorship, the materiality of the collision metonymizes economic disparity: a car runs over a poor, indigenous boy on the road between a city and a shantytown. The road that is meant to connect the two locations, in fact, separates them, and the subaltern on the road is invisible to the class that has access to mobility. Through the song and the imagery, Martel establishes an enduring non-verbal, acoustic and spatial continuity between the bystanders to the violence of the military dictatorship in the past and the affluent classes in the economic dictatorship in the present day. As Rok Spruk points out, “Argentina has never finished the transition to open democracy under the rule of law. Even though Argentina formally transitioned to democracy in 1983, institutional breakdowns […] remain deeply embedded in the political culture”. The privileged 13

Donald Shaw, The Post-boom in Spanish American Fiction. New York: SUNY Press, 1998, 10. Lucrecia Martel, “Shadow of a Doubt,” interview with Amy Taubin, Filmcomment, July–August 2009, https://www.filmcomment.com/article/shadow-of-a-doubt-lucrecia-martel-interviewed/. 15 Ibid. 14

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economic status of the traditional elite classes continued undisturbed across the regime change. Martel’s decentred spatial strategy brings attention to the plight of the people who inhabit the margins of her country. Martel chooses “other spaces,” far from the metropolitan centre, as settings for her films. Her films are counted among those “which have utilized the rural landscape to mark questions of social marginality.”16 Martel self-identifies as a regionalist. She was surprised when a director from “a very different culture” wrote her to convey his admiration for HW, which the director declares is her “most Argentinian” film: I believe that it is my most Argentinian film, and I would even say the most Salteña [from Salta], or in any case from the North. I think it is incredible that there are foreign critics who see value in it. There was even a director from a very different culture from ours who, very moved by the film, wrote to me after Cannes […] I was surprised because I think that one can not understand it without knowing certain codes.17

In Martel’s opinion, certain regional “codes” are necessary to understand the film. She explains that for the audience in northern Argentina, the film has several pertinent local references, such as the mention of Monsignor Pérez—a bishop from Salta who had served during the military dictatorship—that would be lost on viewers elsewhere. While her doubts about whether the film would have its full impact without a grasp of the local references is a relevant concern, the political-as-personal undertone of her films ensures cross-cultural and transnational validity. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden identify three prerequisites for the emergence of transnational cinema. The first is the prevalence of a cinematic literacy that goes beyond the appreciative consumption of national or regional narratives that audiences can identify as their own; the second is accessibility to referential frameworks devoid of national and cultural peculiarities, and the third is an enhanced permeability of national borders aided by technology.18 When one seeks to examine the Salta trilogy against the second prerequisite of an absence of national and cultural peculiarities, the portrayal of race relations comes to the forefront. The racial imbalance undergirds all three films in the trilogy. Indigenous children are shown ambling aimlessly near a dangerous swamp and working odd jobs in exchange for food and clothes. Indigenous women are servants in the bourgeois households, where they are either berated constantly and accepted grudgingly or completely ignored. In Argentina, racial discrimination carries the centuries-old weight of colonial exploitation. However, in the films, the regional specificity of race-based class formations does not turn into a “cultural peculiarity.” Instead, it can be recognized as a feature

16

Sandberg, Claudia. “Maximiliano Schonfeld’s Films of the Volga Germans in Entre Ríos: About the Neoliberal Devil in Argentine Cinema.” In Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Resisting Neoliberalism? edited by Claudia Sandberg and Carolina Roca (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 244. 17 Martel, “La mala”. 18 Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 2006), 3–5.

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of other cultures as well. For example, in India, though racial discrimination is not a vestige of its colonial history, it is relatable through caste-based discrimination.19 A solipsistic global middle class20 that is “deeply integrated into global capitalism” that plays a “key role in the new liberalized economies and benefit(s) from the neoliberal transitions of the economies” is a concomitant of globalization.21 Though the characters in the Salta trilogy are drawn from provincial middle classes, they are nevertheless secondary beneficiaries of neoliberal economics. They are socially privileged by virtue of being white in a formerly colonized society and financially privileged due to their links, however tenuous, to the neoliberal economy through specialized large-scale agricultural production in TS and well-paid urban professions in HG and HW. According to various critics, the severe art movie aesthetics and the Gothic register of Martel’s cinema—also allow her films to transgress national frontiers. This study holds that there are additional aspects of her cinema that attract a transnational audience.22 The regionally coded referential frameworks of race-based class formations and privileged middle classes in Martel’s films allow for a coherent transnational crossover. The referential framework on which this study concentrates to build its argument is the trilogy’s portrayal of female sexuality in a heteronormative familial context. This line of analysis, while highlighting the transnational reach of the gender framework, does not aim to convey “that the national simply becomes displaced or negated […] in fact the national continues to exert the force of its presence even within transnational film-making practices.”23 Martel’s decidedly local flavour is not packaged as commodified and merchandise cinema that seeks to “administer comfort and illusion.”24 Merchandised cinema does not necessarily rely on a glittery star cast or on overstated theatrics to commodify the ideas it seeks to convey. Cineastes can also 19

Rina Chandran, “India’s Low-caste Dalits Rally to Demand End to ‘Unclean’ Jobs,” Reuters, August 1, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-protests-caste-idUSKCN10C2RB. The traditional Indian social structure was comprised of a hierarchical arrangement of four castes wherein the lowest was assigned tasks that were deemed “unclean” such as cleaning sewers and disposal of dead animals. Even in contemporary India, Dalits remain at the bottom of India’s social hierarchy and their struggle for integration into the narrative of development is politically charged. 20 Rachel Heiman, Carla Freeman, and Mark Liechty, eds., The Global Middle Classes: Theorizing through Ethnography (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2012). 21 Hagen Koo, “The Global Middle Class: How Is It Made, What Does It Represent?” Globalizations, Vol. 13, No. 4 (2016): 443. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2016.1143617. 22 Paul Julian Smith, “Transnational Co-productions and Female Filmmakers: The Cases of Lucrecia Martel and Isabel Coixet,” in Hispanic and Lusophone Women Filmmakers: Theory, Practice and Difference, edited by Parvati Nair, Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 13; Margaret McVeigh, “Different but the Same: Landscape and the Gothic as Transnational Story Space in Jane Campion’s Sweetie (1989) and Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga (2001).” Critical Arts, 31:5 (2017): 144. 23 Will Higbee and Song Hwee Lim, “Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies.” Transnational Cinemas, 1:1 (2010):10. 24 Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 24.

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commodify those ideas by their reification in easily relatable tropes such as selfless motherhood and innocent childhood. Merchandise strives for aesthetic perfection at the cost of complexity, and its facile imagery aligns itself with the “homogenizing imaginaries of transnational capital.”25 Cinema as merchandise cannot free itself from endorsing established conventions such as designating the home as a place of domestication and motherhood as a self-subsuming identity.26 Martel subverts the conventional notions of both home and motherhood. In TS and HG, a home is also a place of business. Helena runs the hotel where she also lives; Mecha manages—a pepper cultivation on the ranch that is also her residence. In HW, the home is both the reason and the theatre for the madness of Vero and her senile Tía Lala. Vero’s concussion from the accident causes unexpected emotional outbursts, and her bed-ridden aunt muddles the past and the present. Moreover, Martel’s films do not present a universalizing idea of motherhood. The mothers in the trilogy are complex combinations of the three archetypes identified by Gloria Anzaldúa: “Guadalupe, the virgin mother who has not abandoned us, la Chingada (Malinché), the raped mother whom we have abandoned, and la Llorona, the mother who seeks her lost children and is the combination of the other two.”27 Helena, Vero, and Mecha, as overtly sexual women, may be seen as abandoned mothers—the chingadas whose husbands and grown-up sons and daughters are distant from them. They are also the lloronas because they seek emotional connections with young children. Helena is shown sharing an ice cream with a young child in the hotel kitchen, Vero volunteers at a dental camp in a school, and Mecha is troubled by the delay in her youngest child’s surgery. Mirta, the only indigenous mother in the trilogy, is a dry, caustic martinet who is openly hostile to her daughter. The daughter Miriam responds to her mother’s harsh criticism by threatening to poison Mirta. There is nothing of the llorona in Mirta, and she is entirely the abandoned chingada. Tali represents the conventionally lauded motherhood of Guadalupe. Her pure and chaste motherhood may be equated with the nineteenth century Sarmientian civilización and contrasted with the sexualized mother with the antipodal barbarie. The chingada is barbaric because she destroys the settled idea of a “civilized,” unselfish, and asexual motherhood. Martel’s films bring the chingada–madre antinomy to the twenty-first century to dismantle it entirely. In the process, she ruptures the “domestication of perception.” Commenting on her aim to “distort” perception, Martel says that 25

Kantaris, 151. Patricia White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema (New York: Duke University Press), 2015, 187. This perfect merchandize might look like Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma that reifies the idea of nostalgic belonging in the trope of selfless motherhood. Roma, as a meticulously aesthetic representation of the male gaze, offers a stimulating counterpoint to Martel’s trilogy. Both Roma and the trilogy focalize the racial difference of the female experience, but Martel’s films do not permit an “easy crosscultural crossover of her explorations of class, race, history,” and gender (White). Cuarón chooses the chingada–madre as a viable binary, and even in the twenty-first century offers motherhood as the ultimate refuge from being the chingada. In Roma, the child protagonist’s Hispanic mother and the indigenous maid seek refuge in motherhood. Rejected by their husband and lover, respectively, the women turn into asexual devoted mothers. 27 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2007), 52. 26

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la domesticación de la percepción es el camino para el conservadurismo político. En cambio, cualquier distorsión de la percepción –ésta es mi ilusión enfermiza– lo que genera es un disturbio en el entorno y eso permite quizá, no digo siempre, otra manera de concebir la realidad. Domestication of perception is the road for conservative politics. In contrast, any distortion of that perception––this is my faint hope––this creates a disturbance in the system ant that permits, sometimes, I don’t say always, creates another way of conceiving reality.

Conflating the civilized-mother with the barbaric-chingada is as necessary for dislodging a settled position for the woman in society as for interrogating conservative political attitudes. Martel’s mothers are far removed from the majoritarian notions of motherhood as a selfless vocation that leads to salvation. As portrayed in the trilogy, motherhood, in fact, embitters the self. The rejection of majoritarian constructs is a key element of the trilogy’s transnationality. When a narrative operates with a majoritarian script, the local is merely a synecdoche for the global. In it, selfless love for the child would define and save the mother from loneliness, depression, and her own sexuality. In contrast, the local in transnational cinema is not a synecdoche for the global; it has to be read allegorically. For example, a mother engulfed in her child’s existence could be a representation of exclusion, isolation, self-deception, and even decadence. Martel enunciates a clearly minoritarian stance on motherhood in HG. In the film, a group of girls deliberates upon the topic of the divine calling. Some of the questions they raise are: how will they recognize their role in God’s plan? How will they know what their vocation is? Is the divine plan a plan for their salvation? In this context, one of the girls suggests that a mother who saves her child by sacrificing her own life is displaying her vocation. She is contradicted by the youngest girl in the group—the least tutored in gender dynamics—who declares, “But motherhood is not a vocation.”28 Martel, by exploring as many as seven maternal relationships in the trilogy, makes it clear that motherhood is not a divine vocation; it is a stage in life that women should be free to mentally outgrow just as they outgrow biological fertility with the onset of menopause. Martel’s depiction of family relationships, especially that of the woman as mother, has a naturalist register—the mother’s role is imposed upon the woman as a biological imperative, often obliterating all other aspects of her individuality. Martel distils the mothers’ sexual frustrations into troubled relationships with their daughters on the one hand and into incestuous desire for their sons, brothers, cousins, or fathers. The evocation of the women’s shrunken ambit through a realist, microscopic examination of their microenvironment suggests a naturalist register that is antithetically coded in both regional specificity and transnational expansiveness. Locating the films in the “long tail” of nineteenth-century naturalism, wherein they “re-semanticize”29 it for the twenty-first century, Spicer-Escalante argues that the “transnationality of 28

La niña santa. Juan Pablo Spicer-Escalante, “The ‘Long Tail’ Hypothesis: The Diachronic CounterMetanarrative of Hispanic Naturalism,” in Au Naturel: (Re)Reading Hispanic Naturalism, edited by J. P. Spicer-Escalante and Lara Anderson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 12. 29

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Hispanic naturalism” is indisputable. The Salta trilogy meets the naturalist requirement of high fidelity to reality by visualizing its settings microscopically. The camera moves slowly, often coming to rest in close-ups of showers and sinks in bathrooms, a noisy table fan failing to dispel the sultry February heat. It pauses upon dimly lit bedroom corners that forebode illicit sexuality, tin-roofed shanty dwellings that emblematize state negligence, and crowded market streets that offer impunity to sexual aggressors. Though these scenes are distinctly representative of a provincial Salta, contrasting it with the fast-paced metropolis of Buenos Aires, their imagery could well belong to provincial areas in distant countries too. The link between an environment marked by hopelessness, declining economic prospects, inability to participate in the hypermobility of globalized commerce, and an inward, incestual withdrawal is discernible transnationally. Martel’s documental approach heightens the naturalist tone and allows an almost unmediated interaction between the viewer and the film. Even a viewer who is unfamiliar with the film’s setting is intimately drawn into the reality portrayed on the screen. The absence of conspicuous costumes, quirky characters, and fortuitous coincidences bridges the distance between the screen text and the viewer. Martel complies with the obligation to authenticity necessary in a documentary by eschewing the use of artifice. She deliberately avoids symmetrically composed frames, and there is an untidiness in her camerawork that suits the depiction of everyday clutter in her characters’ lives. The inclusion of unusual elements in TS like naming the ranch La Mandrágora after the mandrake root, a plant with hallucinogenic and aphrodisiac properties, and the theremin in HG, a musical instrument that is played without touching, does not dilute documental verisimilitude. The dramatic defamiliarization of the ranch’s name and of the musical instrument is consistent with the film’s particular inflection: the aphrodisiac plant echoes Mecha’s unsatiated desire, and the played-but-not-touched theremin reflects Amelia’s ambiguity about her first sexual experience. Martel’s sporadic insertion of curiosities uses the “reality of drama” to invoke “the drama of reality.”30 True to naturalist conventions, the characters in Martel’s trilogy are examples of the “homo lubricus constreñido en una comunidad sometida a erróneas normas, a una moral social y sexual desautorizada por los naturalistas.”31 However, trapped in a community subjugated to moral imperatives, the women in the trilogy do not resign themselves to their condition and constantly chafe at the leash that ties them to conformity.

While the novels of nineteenth century fin-de-siècle writers attest their understanding of “determinism, heredity, and instinct in society, elements that conspired against the idealized nature of the world that the romantic generation had espoused,” the films of twentieth century fin-de-siècle NCA cineastes use the same elements to manifest the falsity of neoliberal claims of widespread betterment. 30 Ana del Sarto, “Cinema Novo and New/Third Cinema Revisited: Aesthetics, Culture and Politics,” Chasqui. Special issue on Brazilian and Spanish American Literary and Cultural Encounters. 34:1 (2005): 85. 31 Pura Fernández, Eduardo López Bago y el Naturalismo Radical: La Novela y el Mercado Literario en el Siglo XIX (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1995), 230.

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As if trying to address not only the misrepresentation of women in cinema but also their under-representation, Martel offers an extensive array of female characters. Across the entire trilogy, there are seventeen characters that merit comment in a discussion of the portrayal of female sexuality. The women in the trilogy can be subdivided into six groups based on the acknowledgement, expression, and performance of their sexuality. The groups trace the advancement of female sexuality as the woman progresses from early puberty to maturity. Due to the chronological parity within the groups, they are termed “ages.” The age of decadence is represented by the three mature women and the potential for it by three young ones. The ageing beauties—Mecha, Vero, and Helena—are portrayed by actresses who are considered visibly attractive. Mecha is played by the legendary Graciela Borges. A glamourous Mercedes Morán portrays Helena. Morán’s transformation from the perennially stressed, self-effacing housewife, Tali, in TS to the languid seductress in HG is uncanny, to say the least—it is also a signal that to this filmmaker, sexuality is crucial to vitality. Maria Onetto plays Vero. Though a highly respected theatre actress, Onetto was not well known in cinema when Martel decided to cast her as the lead in the film. Martel chose her because the character’s heightened visibility as a tall blonde woman in Salta makes Vero’s project of staying hidden abortive from the very outset. Explaining the choice of the lead actor, Martel says: Maria [Onetto] has […] a conspicuous body, which was very necessary for the film. A tall, white woman with a body that is conspicuous in a place where she is trying to erase her culpability of something [she has done]. I like the fact that the person who wants to obscure themselves perfectly is someone who cannot hide because, in Salta, a blonde woman who is so tall is not at all common.32

The characters of Vero, and also those of Helena and Mecha, parodize the “feminine to-be-looked-at-ness” of the femme fatale.33 Their visible bodies are ideal tools for seduction, yet their seductive allure remains invisible to their husbands, evoking reciprocity only in incestuous relationships. Relying on Judith Bulter’s construct, Deborah Martin affirms that these parodic performances cover a “range of disobedience” that the interpellating law produces.34 The interpellating law that these women disobey is that they must wear the veil of invisibility as wives and mothers. Instead of complying with the expectation, the femme fatales stay within family structures in “a parodic inhabiting of conformity” that produces a “slippage between the discursive command and the effects.”35 If incestual attraction may be considered a measure of decadence, then there is an incremental enhancement of decadence as the narrative of the anthology moves from the country estate in TS to a small-town hotel in HG and then to the city in HW. In the country estate, Mecha’s grown-up son curls up intimately with her like an infant, in the home-hotel, Helena sleeps in the same bed as her brother, and in 32

Martel, “La mala.” Deborah Martin, The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 56. 34 Ibid., 64. 35 Ibid., 64. 33

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the city, Vero, protected by urban anonymity, acts upon her incestuous attraction by conducting an affair with her brother-in-law. The femme-fatales expose their decadent environment by choosing incest over complete de-sexualization. The level of dissimulation increases as the narratives move from barbarie of the countryside to the civilización of the city, and so does the potency of decadence. Explaining why she sees a positive valence in decadence, Martel says that: it’s hard to think of characters being propelled by action or having a direction. What we are speaking of is decadence, in the Argentine sense of it. I think of decadence as a positive value, especially if one thinks of the previous order as confining and exclusionary. The sooner the demise of the values that organize the world, the better. That’s what we’re living through in Argentina. It’s like the triumph of decadence and, therefore, an interesting period.36

The decadent relationships constitute strategies of rebellion. Martel meant for these women to feel alive through their sexuality: “La película tiene una carga sexual, una sensualidad un poco desbordada, hasta incestuosa en algunos casos, que le da el único aspecto feliz que siento que tiene la película, porque veo que hay algo vivo.”37 While in nineteenth-century Latin American naturalismo lovers were torn apart to avoid the consummation of the incestuous relationship, in the trilogy, incest makes for a happy togetherness in the age of decadence. On the other hand, Inés, the young Josefina, and the young Vero are likely to slip into an “unhappy” decadence because they refuse to recognize the lack in their lives. Inés is the voice coach in HG. She recasts the voice modulation class as a religious group where the girls sing hymns, discuss the path to salvation, and learn how to look out for “the sign” from God. Inés’ quest for refuge in Scripture is hypocritical because she is using the garb of religiosity to hide her sexual adventures. The young Josefina abets the pretence of her own sham celibate purity. When her mother walks in on Josefina and her boyfriend while they are having sex, she distracts her mother with salacious gossip about her friend to avoid being censured for promiscuity. In the face of her insincere behaviour, her subsequent promise to Amalia that she will always take care of her seems duplicitous. The third girl trapped in “unhappy” decadence is the young Vero in TS. She is consumed by jealousy of José’s partner Mercedes. In her incestuous attraction for her brother, Vero seems to be subconsciously imitating her mother. Her story of “La Rata Africana,” the fictitious animal that eats up all the cats in a bloody feast, clearly points to José, who is the object of the sexual desires of three women. Given her mother’s hysteria, young Vero must sense that incestual attraction is self-destructive, yet she sustains it. Hypocrisy, deceit, and jealousy are the dominant emotions in the age of bitterness. The next group, comprising ostensibly stable, settled women, represents the age of stagnation. Tali from TS is a busy caregiver. She is seen cooking for her children, cheering up an ill friend, and trying to restore the balance with her calmness when Mecha and Momi—mother and daughter—get into an ugly fight. On repeated occasions, Tali is shown making plans for a journey to Bolivia to buy cheap school 36

Lucrecia Martel, “Mi Límite Es El Pudor, No Lo Que Va A Pensar El Público,” interview with Ernesto Babino, September 17, 2005. http://ernestobabino.blogspot.com/2005/09/entrevistalucrecia-martel-directora.html. 37 Ibid.

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supplies for her children, but she does not end up travelling because her husband thwarts her plans. When he buys the supplies without consulting her, he brings her planning to an abrupt end. His insidious foiling of her travel plans is a clear indication of his desire to control her. He does not allow her to step out of the domestic space, even temporarily. Tali’s expression when she sees the supplies stocked up in the back of his car reveals the depths of her disappointment. The books, pencils, crayons, and backpacks represent the broken fragments of Tali’s diligently created domestic equilibrium. As if attempting to reclaim an iota of her lost freedoms, she smokes in front of her young children, even though young Luci hates the smell. She is unconcerned with her small son holding his breath to avoid the smoke. Soon after, Luci falls to his death from a ladder that his mother had put against the patio wall. Her son’s death deals the final blow to Tali’s imagined stability. The stable woman in HG is the unnamed frumpy, gullible mother who appears to be so excited by the molestation of Amalia, her daughter’s best friend, that she does not notice that her own school-going daughter is having sex. She willingly turns her back to avoid seeing her daughter’s boyfriend as he gets dressed hurriedly. Her gesture is symbolic of her unwillingness to face the truth. It is easier for her to focus on Amalia’s molestation because it reaffirms her decision to keep her daughter safe from harm within the confines of her home. In her estimation, her domestic confinement saves her from predators like Dr. Jano. Josefina’s mother is blind to the fact that her daughter is sexually active and, therefore, by the mother’s standards, unsafe, even inside her home. The mother has a perpetual need to seek justification for her “domesticated perception.” In a conversation with her family, she talks about the “los hermanos Correa” as examples of the worst that can befall a person: Mother – […] The Correa brothers did not stop until they destroyed their mother. And look where they are! Son (sarcastically) – Where are they? Mother (confused pause) – One is divorced. Son (sarcastically) – And the other one lives in Spain, on a two-year scholarship. Mother – There you are! The other one had to leave his country.38

In Josefina’s mother’s estimation, divorce and living abroad destroy the family’s unity that is the trophy of middle-class respectability. Her despair at the Correa brothers’ circumstances portrays her discomfort with transnational displacement. Her self-image as a sexless, selfless, and desireless woman proves to be false when a naked man falls into her balcony. Josefina’s mother cannot stop staring at him in fascination. She has been sublimating her sexual deprivation into religious obsession and constant carping about her maid. She uses the racist term china to refer to her maid. Even though she finds the maid so dirty that she does not allow her to use a bathroom in the house, she cannot bring herself to dismiss her. To Josefina’s mother, the maid and physical longing are both dirty but indispensable. The stable mother in HG can sustain her stability only by obfuscating reality. 38

La niña santa.

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The older Josefina, the stable-stagnant woman in HW, is the polar opposite of Tali. She is also a homemaker, but she is completely self-absorbed: she is unruffled by her daughter’s chronic jaundice or her old aunt’s madness. The cocoon-like safety of her bourgeois life gives her unshakeable certainties. Even though Candita, her daughter, frequently shuts herself in her room with Cuca, her female biker friend, the mother refuses to accept her daughter’s homosexuality. She disguises her objections to her daughter’s gay friends as disapproval of their “mannish” behaviour: “machoneando con la moto.” She expresses sympathy for a friend because he has a “mannish” daughter, whom she calls “manchona de la hija.” Candita’s jaundiced frailty, her delicate body structure, and soft-spoken demeanour make her definitively “feminine” and, therefore, in her mother’s opinion, immune to homosexuality. Josefina’s claim of stability is built on a false premise. If she is forced to accept Candita’s lesbianism, her state of equilibrium will be shaken. Isabel, the indigenous maid in TS, Miriam, the indigenous cook who wants to be a masseuse in HG, and Cuca, the lesbian biker from a poor barrio in HW, represent subaltern border enclaves in the hegemonic bourgeois territory. As young, confident, and purposeful women, they constitute the age of liberation. They live on their own terms, their lack of privileges does not make them bitter, and they hold on to their dignity. Isabel leaves her job at La Mandrágora when it gets too unpleasant; Miriam openly defies her mother’s authority when she declares that her ambitions are different from the mother’s expectations, and Cuca does not bother to be polite to her girlfriend’s mother. When these subalterns talk to authority, they are not deferential. The women in the age of liberation express their sexuality confidently. Isabel rejects the advances of her employers’ son and fights him off when he tries to force himself on her during the village dance. Miriam’s ambition to become a masseuse shows that she is comfortable touching—strangers’ naked bodies, and Cuca is not discouraged by her lover’s family’s cold attitude towards her. The three youngest girls represent the age of vitality. The adulatory Momi, the jaundiced Candita, and the neurotic Amalia are alive with the spirit of exploration. These young girls acknowledge their sexuality and pursue their desires. The age of agency is embodied in the two mature women, Mercedes and Mirta. Mercedes runs a successful trading business and lives with the man she is attracted to, even though he is the son of her former lover. Mirta runs the hotel and knows that she is invaluable to the establishment. Unlike the decadent women, Mercedes and Mirta break free from social entrapment. They generate affinities with the world at large. They do not deplete their self-worth by constantly appraising their sexual appeal. The seventeen characters discussed above represent six stages in the “formation” of female sexuality. The “formation” starts in the age of vitality where, as a girlchild, the woman explores, expresses, and pursues her desire. The exploratory stage may meet with a quick end by deteriorating into the age of bitterness where she lies, deceives, and gives in to jealousy, or it may progress to an age of liberation where the woman accepts her sexuality and develops reciprocal love relationships. In the age of stagnation, the woman sustains her domestic idyll by constant self-deception. In the age of agency, the woman’s sexual satisfaction or the absence of it does not weigh in disproportionately on her self-perception. In contrast, in the age of decadence, the woman rebels against being controlled by indulging in incestuous relationships. The

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films trace two divergent trajectories in the ages of the woman: a positive progression constituted by vitality–liberation–agency and destructive negativity of bitterness– stagnation–decadence. Through the trajectory of female sexuality, Martel deftly traces the historical arc of her country over the last two centuries. The age of vitality parallels the idealist romantic conception of the nation shortly after the onset of independence in the nineteenth century. In the next century, the age of liberation resonates with the socialist promise of the early Peronist years, the age of stagnation ties in with the subsequent disillusionment with the Peronistas, and the military dictatorship years are marked by lies and deception, not unlike the age of bitterness. When the Salta trilogy is seen as part of a whole anthology, it becomes a bildungsroman of female sexuality and of the nation. In order to justify this generic categorization, three aspects merit explanation. Firstly, sexual maturation is not shown through the events in the life of a single character. Instead, it is presented as a progression through the lives of a medley of characters. Though the traditional understanding of the genre demanded a focus on individual growth, there is no longer a consensus on that aspect: “Some critics emphasize individuality and individual change of the self in the process of formation, whereas others look more at milieu, regarding the condition of the protagonist actively involved in the social world as essential.”39 Olga Bezhanova has also questioned the centrality of individuality in a bildungsroman by articulating a sub-genre of the collective bildungsroman that experiments with multiple narrative voices.40 Secondly, the bildungsroman normally follows a diachronic narrative style that demonstrates a sequence of changes in the life of the protagonist. Martel’s synchronic depiction of the various ages of the woman should be seen as an innovation in, rather than a break from, the stylistic conventions of the bildungsroman. Thirdly, one may use the term bildungsroman to refer to the Salta Trilogy, even though strictly speaking “roman” denotes a novel, given that film criticism borrows heavily from literary criticism; this may be considered one more entry in the extensive terminology that the two fields share in common. The transnational accessibility of the Salta trilogy derives from three key elements. Its structure as a collective bildungsroman that maps the sexual “formation” of the woman onto her emancipation makes it relatable to any society where patriarchy continues to limit the woman’s capability for agential action. The naturalist inflection in the narrative, manifested through the close camerawork, foregrounds transnationally recognizable micro-spaces. Finally, its coding of Argentina’s historical journey through the stages of romantic idealism, spurious populism, military rule, and economic immiseration in the grammar of female sexuality speaks to marginalized populations everywhere who are excluded from the rhetoric of neoliberal prosperity. The reason cited by Bong Joon-ho for the transnational relevance of his film Parasite in spite of its distinctive “Koreanness” is also true of the Salta trilogy. The 39

Petru Golban, A History of the Bildungsroman (Newcastle upon Tyne. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), 10. 40 Olga Bezhanova, Growing Up in an Inhospitable World: Female Bildungsroman in Spain (Illinois: AILCFH, 2014), 11.

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films evoke an emotional connection regardless of their regional specificities because “we all live in the same country called capitalism” and because the most influential province in that country is called patriarchy.

8.2 A View Through the Spatial Gynocritics Model Martel’s primary tool for evoking the link between female sexuality and the changing discourse of national malaise is her spatial strategy. Within this, it is worthwhile to take a close look at the use of watery spaces in her spatial toolkit—the swimming pool, swamp, and canal—as recurring structural devices in the trilogy. Martel uses la pileta, the swimming pool, differently in each of the films to emphasize the diverse ages of women. In the first film, The Swamp (TS), the pool is represented as a “civilized” replica of a nearby dangerous swamp; in The Holy Girl (HG), the pool is a site for sexual reveries; and in The Headless Woman (HW), the small pool, ensconced in a private club represents a contrast to the vast, exposed roadside canal on the outskirts of the city. Commenting on the use of water as a cinematic technique, Deleuze observes that “water is the most perfect environment in which movement can be extracted from the thing moved or mobility from movement itself.”41 Martel upends the mobility of water by pouring it into a concrete tank. Her “liquid perception” is muddied with dregs of rot, creating a “perception-image” suspended in colloidal murkiness.42 The spatial imagery of the swimming pool appears at critical moments in each film in the Salta trilogy in distinct ways.

8.2.1 De-settling Class and Family by the Pool In TS, in general, the “treatment of space privileges stagnation and stasis over movement or transition,” but it is the pool; specifically, that is a participatory witness to the family’s inexorable decay.43 “The swimming pool in TS takes part in social categorization and class division,” and the water also acts as the medium for a dialogue with the self.44 The closely placed shots of a swamp where a cow is sinking to her death and a dirty pool where Mecha sits drunk, barely able to hold her head upright, 41

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: UP Minnesota, 1986), 77. 42 Ibid., 76. 43 Martin, 34. 44 María Mercédez Vásquez Vásquez, “New Geographies of Class in Mexican and Brazilian Cinemas: Post Tenebras Lux and Que horas ela volta?” In Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Resisting Neoliberalism? edited by Claudia Sandberg and Carolina Roca (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 73.

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highlight the congruence between the swamp and the pool and between Mecha’s body language and the cow’s helpless submission to the suction of the bog. The water body remains a “symbol of stagnation” despite the mutation of a slushy marsh in the “barbaric” woods into a swimming pool in the “civilized” ranch.45 However, the stagnation does not represent an insurmountable obstacle to vitality for everyone. In the second pool scene, Momi, the younger daughter, dives into the pool. Momi’s submergence under the turbid pool waters covered by rotting leaves signifies her knowledge of “dirty realities ignored by others.”46 The vital girl–woman is the only one who is shown diving into the pool. The decayed woman, Mecha, and the bitter girl–woman, Vero, sit on its edge but never step in. The stable woman, Tali, goes near the pool only to get her children out of it. Thus, among the domesticated women, the greater the distance of the woman from the pool, the greater is her alienation from her sexuality. In contrast, the young indigenous maid Isabel’s distance from the pool points to her liberation from the decadence of the hegemonic class. As a maid, she comes up to the pool to replace towels, bring cool beverages, and on one occasion helps the drunken and bruised Mecha. In the film, Isabel is never shown looking longingly at the pool as a means of relieving the oppressive summer heat. For her, the pool is an extension of the languorous lethargy that envelops the whole farm estate. Thus, the pool becomes a site for de-sedimenting class and family hierarchies. In the pool scenes in The Swamp, the maid and younger daughter come across as self-assured, whereas the others appear to be trapped in metaphoric swamps of domesticity or incestual attractions. The use of the settling derivatives as analytical tools for the film may be represented diagrammatically, as in Fig. 8.1.

Fig. 8.1 The de-settled pool

45

Pedro Lange-Churión, “The Salta Trilogy: The Civilised Barbarism in Lucrecia Martel’s Films.” Contemporary Theatre Review, 22:4 (2012): 472. 46 Laura Podalsky, “Out of Depth: The Politics of Disaffected Youth and Contemporary Latin American Cinema,” in Youth Culture in Global Cinema, edited by Timothy Shary and Alexandra Seibel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 109.

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The speculative materiality of the pool allows it to be seen as a dirty tank, establishing a close resemblance with the swamp. Yet, Momi surfaces from the colloidal filth of the pool glistening with the vitality of water. She lives out her subjunctive potency by gazing lovingly at Isabel, to whom she is sexually attracted. Isabel negates occupying the space assigned to her as the ever-obedient help. She takes charge of the situation when Mecha falls on broken glass and cuts herself by the pool.

8.2.2 De-canonizing the Home-Nation Martel’s emphatic and novel use of liquid spaces is an evocation of what Zygmunt Bauman has termed “liquid modernity.”47 According to the noted Polish sociologist, modernity has been a project of liquefication from the start. To begin with, it “melted” solids like “traditional loyalties, customary rights, and obligations” and eventually “left the whole complex network of social relations unstuck.”48 In The Holy Girl (HG), the first framing of the pool is almost monochromatically blue—Helena’s swimsuit, cap, and robe, the waterproof cushions on the deck-chairs, swimming trunks of the men, and the water are all blue. The blue is contrasted with the white walls and floors of the pool area. The setting strongly evokes the blue and white colours of the Argentinian flag. The absence of any other colour turns the frame into a static photograph that reinforces the unchanging socio-economicpolitical dynamics of the nation. The resort, like the nation, is trying to survive in a changing economic scenario. The doctors who have come to attend the conference at the hotel represent the speculative investors who tried to profit from their country’s economic crisis. The doctors start their day with drinks by the pool. They seem more intent on the pursuit of pleasure than finding solutions to rare medical problems. The rapacious intent of the profiteers is embodied in Dr. Vesalio, who molests a fellow woman attendee. Despite their regional ties, the attendees lack a sense of community. Everyone present in the hotel during the conference belongs to the same province. The doctors are from nearby areas in Salta. Dr. Jano, Amalia’s molester, even attended the same school as Helena and her brother. Under the force of liquid modernity, brought on by neoliberal globalization, attenuated community links are akin to “zipped harnesses […] and their selling point is the facility with which they can be put on in the morning and taken off; in the evening.”49 The pool is a witness to the fact that the community in HG—is marked by betrayal, lasciviousness, and insincerity. Even after breaking Amalia’s confidence, her friend Josefina swims with her. The doctors leer at Helena while she does her daily laps in the pool. Dr. Jano plays at being the loyal husband and concerned father as he dries his son’s hair and chats with his wife and daughter at the poolside, although he has

47

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, [2000] 2006), 3–4. Ibid. 49 Ibid., 169. 48

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molested a girl the same age as his daughter. The pool represents the fluidity that dissolves community and family ties. The resort is also Helena’s home. In a de-canonized view, the home-nation appears as a depersonalized place of business. Helena rents out her home-resort to make a living and lives there in incestuous proximity to her brother. Thus, the home-resort emerges as an antigonal archetype that is neither entirely commercial nor purely personal. She uses her business to get intimate with Dr. Jano. She is affected by Dr. Vesalio’s predatory behaviour towards another attendee only because it might cause an early cancellation of the conference and cause bad publicity. Similarly, many Argentinians in the financial sector, unconcerned with the adverse social impact it would cause, made personal profits from speculative investments while running the economy aground. The daydreaming Amalia is shown reciting the Scripture in a trance-like state while she enjoys the sight of Dr. Jano’s body. She responds to his molestation not with horror but with a demand for sexual gratification, in the process refusing to be objectified by him. The space–time of HG may be seen as a contemporary representation of the chronotope of the non-idyllic provincial town, of some nineteenth-century novels wherein “a viscous and sticky time […] drags itself slowly through space” and Cyclicity makes itself felt with particular force; therefore, the beginnings of growth and the perpetual renewal of life are weakened, separated from the progressive forces of history and even opposed to them; thus, growth, in this context, makes life a senseless running-in-place at one historical point, at one level of historical development. We get a picture of the breakdown of provincial idealism under forces emanating from the capitalist center.50

A similar provincial cyclicity can be observed in Argentina’s economic fortunes. The country has defaulted nine times on its international debt, economic activity is paralyzed by frequent strikes, there have been repeated periods of hyperinflation, and it suffers from chronic high unemployment. Even successive democratic governments have failed to stop the continued immiseration of large sections of society. Like the fictional provincial towns that Bakhtin remarked upon, “Here there are no events, only ‘doings’ that constantly repeat themselves. Time here has no advancing historical movement; it moves rather in narrow circles.”51 Martel mirrors the nation’s problem in Helena’s resort, generating a chronotope of the provincial nation through her use of the pool as a symbol for liquid modernity that weakens community ties (Fig. 8.2). The de-canonizing tools allow the viewer to project the province’s problems onto the nation and visualize the vestiges of larger national issues in the antigonal archetype of the home-resort.

50 51

Bakhtin, 231. Ibid., 247.

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Fig. 8.2 The de-canonized nation

8.2.3 De-bordering the City and the Slum Through Liquid Spaces In HW, the pool scene contrasts the self-images of Vero and her sister Josefina. Josefina stands in the water with her shoulders and head out of it because she does not want her hair and makeup to get wet. The scene indicates that Josefina feels she can control the events around her, whereas Vero, because of the lasting shock of the recent accident, knows that the unexpected can disorder any arranged life. Unlike her stable-stagnant sister, who gets into the pool/marriage but does not get wet/satisfied, the decadent Vero seems transformed after noticing the sparkling wetness of the pool/nation from the outside. Right after the scene by the pool, she is shown driving out to the unfamiliar, poor barrio on the outskirts to give Cuca a ride home. When she returns back home after dropping off Cuca, she invites the boy who washes her car to have a snack and affectionately asks him if he needs new clothes. Vero’s engagement with the marginalized classes, whom she did not notice before, suggests hope for a way out of decadence for the nation. The massive canal, as wide as the road alongside which it runs, is another liquid space featured prominently in the film. A boy from the slums, possibly the same one who got hit by Vero’s car, drowned in the canal. The canal appears to liquefy the solid distance between the city and the slums on its outskirts marked by the metalled road. Vero’s own safety is put at risk by the accident that happens by the canal, and her upper-middle-class world is inextricably linked to the world of the slum. After the body of the drowned boy is discovered, her guilt becomes inescapable. In HW, Martel examines the changes in a woman’s social positionality under modernity’s liquefying forces. Modernity has freed the woman from the obligation to be both the fragile virgin when she is young and to be the iron anchor of the family when she is mature. However, this freedom is not synonymous with emancipation in the film. Modernity creates the desirable impact of emancipation for the younger

8.3 Conclusion

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Fig. 8.3 The de-bordered slum

woman Cuca who lives in the slums but has friends in the smart areas of the city and openly declares her lesbian sexuality. In contrast, the older woman Vero, as an affluent medical professional, has the agential freedom but not the capability to free herself from incestual bonds. After the accident, Vero is shown as behaving in a more inclusive manner towards Cuca and the young boy who does chores around her house. We may see Cuca and Vero as being located in localized limens in different areas of the city—the centre and the margins—where they experience their emancipated states to varying degrees. As a liquified mirror image of the road, the canal dedifferentiates the falsely perceived solid divisions between the city and the slum. The view enabled by the de-bordering derivatives may be presented as in Fig. 8.3. The canal is a liquid grave for the boy who was put there by a speeding city vehicle on the road. Thus, it simultaneously signifies the exploitation of the margins by the centre and the impossibility of completely effacing the human cost of that exploitation—the boy’s corpse surfaces as corporeal evidence that challenges the city’s impunity.

8.3 Conclusion The analysis focuses on Lucrecia Martel’s Salta trilogy to explore facets of the film that enable their transnational reach even though they are intricately coded in regional tropes. The place of Martel’s cinema within the New Argentinian Cinema is examined to understand how she combines her concerns about the processes of nation formation with those about female sexuality. The concept of the collective bildungsroman is used as a lens to look at the portrayal of female sexuality in the films. Consequently,

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six different “ages of formation” are visualized among the women characters in the films. These include a positive trajectory of vitality, liberation, and agency and a negative spiral of bitterness, stagnation, and decadence. The spatial analysis of the pool connects the “ages of formation” with the location of the women vis-à-vis the liquid, colloidal, and contained space.

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Martel, L. (2009, July–August). Shadow of a Doubt, interview with Amy Taubin. Filmcomment. https://www.filmcomment.com/article/shadow-of-a-doubt-lucrecia-martel-interviewed/ Martin, D. (2016). The cinema of Lucrecia Martel. Manchester University Press. McVeigh, M. (2017). Different but the same: Landscape and the gothic as transnational story space in Jane Campion’s Sweetie (1989) and Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga (2001). Critical Arts, 31(5), 142–155. Podalsky, L. (2011). Out of depth: The politics of disaffected youth and contemporary Latin American cinema. In T. Shary & A. Seibel (Eds.), Youth culture in global cinema (pp. 109–130). University of Texas Press. Roma. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. 2018; n.p.: Espectáculos Fílmicos, 2018. Netflix. Sandberg, C. (2018). Maximiliano Schonfeld’s films of the Volga Germans in Entre Ríos: About the neoliberal devil in Argentine cinema. In C. Sandberg & C. Roca (Eds.), Contemporary Latin American cinema: Resisting neoliberalism? (pp. 231–248). Palgrave Macmillan. Shaw, D. (1998). The post-boom in Spanish American fiction. SUNY Press. Smith, P. J. (2013). Transnational co-productions and female filmmakers: The cases of Lucrecia Martel and Isabel Coixet. In P. Nair & J. D. Gutiérrez-Albilla (Eds.), Hispanic and Lusophone women filmmakers: Theory, practice and difference (pp. 12–24). Manchester University Press. Spicer-Escalante, J. P. (2010). The ‘Long Tail’ hypothesis: The diachronic counter-metanarrative of hispanic naturalism. In J. P. Spicer-Escalante & L. Anderson (Eds.), Au Naturel: (Re)Reading Hispanic naturalism (pp. 11–37). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Vásquez, V., & Mercédez, M. (2018). New geographies of class in Mexican and Brazilian cinemas: Post Tenebras Lux and Que horas ela volta? In C. Sandberg & C. Roca (Eds.), Contemporary Latin American cinema: Resisting neoliberalism? (pp. 65–82). Palgrave Macmillan. White, P. (2015). Women’s cinema. Duke University Press.

Chapter 9

Sumukhi Suresh’s Satirical Comedy

Abstract This chapter discusses the marginalization of women comedians in twentieth-century films and TV Series, identifying a marked change in the year 2006. Since then, many women comedians have become extremely popular, carving out their niches, through distinctive styles and on-stage personae. They use a mix of English, Hindi, and other Indian languages, and make jokes on topics that had until then either been silenced or not been addressed from a woman’s point of view. This chapter focuses on Sumukhi Suresh, who is among the new generation of women comics who have benefitted greatly from access to and wide reach of OTT platforms. The chapter selects her OTT series Pushpavalli as the subject for critical commentary. Before embarking on its spatial analysis, a general feminist analysis of the series is attempted, in which the tropes of “madwoman” and “trickster” are discussed. The chapter also identifies the series generically as a Juvenalian satire that uses humour to raise grave social concerns. The spatial analysis looks at six different settings featured in the series through the de-bordering, de-settling, and de-canonizing derivatives of the spatial gynocritics mode. Keywords Satire · Madwoman · Trickster · Body shape · Mental health The presence of women on the Indian comedy scene has acquired tremendous and unprecedented visibility since the launch of digital platforms. Women comics barely registered a mark in cable-TV stand-up comedy series like The Great Indian Laughter Challenge, which ran from 2005 to 2008. Bharti Singh was the only woman to feature there among the thirty-five comedians who participated in the four seasons of the show. The successful sitcom series in the golden years of Doordarshan, the last phase of the state-owned broadcaster’s monopoly, and in the early years of private channels mostly featured women in supporting roles who either acted as the diegetic audience for the lead actor’s jokes or were the objects of sexist humour. The few shows that had prominent women characters presented them as stereotypical caricatures–the carping wife (Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi), the querulous daughter-in-law and the cantankerous mother-in-law (Tu Tu Main Main), or the domineering old-maid (Zabaan Sambhal Ke).1 1

Ye jo hai Zindagi, written by Sharad Joshi (n.p.: Doordarshan, 1984).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 J. Singh, Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1426-3_9

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Fig. 9.1 Different body shapes of the heroine and the comediennes2

Women comedians were even more marginalized and caricatured in films. The actress Uma Devi Khatri, better known by her stage name, Tun Tun, is widely accepted as the first female comedian in the Hindi film industry. She dominated the arena of slapstick comedy for more than four decades. Her oversized body, a key aspect of her comic presence, and her loud manner created the distorted opposite of the shapely and demure female lead (Fig. 9.1). The comic register was not a plot device; instead, it served to distract viewers from an otherwise emotionally wrought narrative. In the 1950s, Tun Tun’s body structure and her acting technique set the mould for leading female comedians of subsequent decades. Manorama from the 1960s, Preeti Ganguly from the 1970s, and Guddi Maruti from the 1980s were all large women who portrayed gauche characters on screen. In the 1990s, there were no prominent women comedians in Hindi films.

Tu-tu Main-main, created by Nirja Guleri (n.p.: DD Metro, 1994–1996). Zabaan Sambhal Ke, directed by Rajiv Mehra (n.p.: DD Metro, 1993–1994). 2 “Tun Tun,” dailyhunt, n.d., https://m.dailyhunt.in/news/india/english/bollyy-epaper-bolyy/ tun+tun+may+be+if+i+were+not+so+fat+and+obese+i+could+have+become+a+top+singer+in+ films-newsid-124945942, accessed June 29, 2021.

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The year 2006 may be seen as the commencement of a new trend in women’s comedy in India. It was the year in which Kaneez Surka became the first woman to write for a major cable-TV comedy show, Cyrus Broacha’s The Week that Wasn’t.3 Two other comedians, Radhika Vaz and Aditi Mittal, also broke into the live standup comedy scene around the same time. When recordings of their live shows were published on YouTube, the reach and popularity of these women, considered the OGs of women’s comedy in India, increased manifold. Aided by digital platforms, women in comedy broke the binds imposed by the dictates of mass media. They carved out their own niches, used a mix of English, Hindi, and other Indian languages, and made jokes on topics that had either been silenced or not been addressed from a woman’s point of view. The pressure to get married early, have children, choose gender-appropriate professions, dress modestly, and accept male authority were all topics that became content for the comedy of the OGs. The woman who marks the transition between the OGs and the more recent successes, such as Mallika Dua and Sumaira Shaikh, is Sumukhi Suresh. The OGs are around ten years older than Suresh, and Dua and Shaikh are about five years younger than her. Suresh’s comedy is less radically feminist than that of the OGs like Radhika Vaz and not as light-hearted as that of the younger comedians. After doing live shows for three years, Suresh took her comedy online on her own YouTube channel in 2016, a year before what Kavyta Kay, in her detailed study of digital Indian comedy—The New Indian Nuttahs—considers a turning point in women’s comedy.4 That was the year Aditi Mittal became the first woman to record her solo stand-up special, Things They wouldn’t Let Me Say, for Netflix in 2017. In an interesting contrast, a fourteen-episode stand-up series produced by Amazon Prime in the same year did not feature any women comedians. However, the same year, the same OTT platform commissioned the first comedy series created by a woman, Sumukhi Suresh’s Pushpavalli, which makes her a trailblazer of sorts.5

9.1 The “Madwoman” as a Feminist Trope Sumukhi Suresh treads unchartered territory in casting herself as the moderately psychotic protagonist of the OTT comedy series Pushpavalli (2017, 2020). A “mad,” “crazy,” or “deluded” woman is rarely the protagonist in literary and cultural representations. Suresh is a pioneer on several fronts: she is the first Indian female comedian to create a concept that landed her a two-season deal with a leading OTT platform; she is also the first Indian actor to portray a female stalker on screen; and the first

3 Renuka Joshi Modi, “Meet the Women on the Indian Comedy Circuit,” Vogue, April 26, 2021, https://www.vogue.in/magazine-story/meet-the-women-on-the-indian-comedy-circuit-whoare-taking-over-our-screens-and-instagram-feeds/, accessed June 29, 2021. 4 Kavyta Kay, New Indian Nuttahs (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 34. 5 Pushpavalli, Season One, created by Sumukhi Sures (n.p.: Amazon Prime, 2017).

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one to treat the theme of stalking—identified as a symptom of borderline personality disorder—humorously.6 The plot of Pushapavalli loosely resembles that of Crazy Ex-girlfriend (2015– 2019), an American comedy series.7 Pushpavalli in the eponymous series and Rebecca Bunch in the American series impulsively decide to move cities to be close to the men they are infatuated with but who do not reciprocate their feelings. These protagonists may be viewed as contemporary reinterpretations of the feminist trope of “madwomen.” In their book, Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar viewed the “madwoman” as a representation of the suppressed double of the woman writer. This understanding of the maddened double is largely based on their reading of the character of Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte’s nineteenth century novel Jane Eyre (1847). They also discuss covert indications of madness in other women writers such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginian Woolf, and Doris Lessing, whose novels are generally considered “aggressively sane.”8 Gubar and Gilbert point out that there are strong autobiographical aspects in the “madwoman” created by women writers: The madwoman in literature by women is not merely, as she might be in male literature, an antagonist or foil to the heroine. Rather, she is usually, in some sense, the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage. Indeed, much of the poetry and fiction written by women conjures up this mad creature so that female authors can come to terms with their own uniquely female feelings of fragmentation, their own keen sense of the discrepancies between what they are and what they are supposed to be.9

In Gilbert and Gubar’s view, the madwoman is a vehicle for the writers’ “anxiety and rage” and a manifestation of their rebellious spirit. Other critics such as the psychologist Phyllis Chesler and the self-avowed anti-feminist writer Emily Fox Gordon share this romanticized view of madness.10 However, for Elizabeth J. Donaldson, Professor of English at New York Tech, the romanticization of madness is problematic.11 Donaldson favours the stance that romanticized madness “offers women little possibility for true resistance or productive rebellion.”12 She argues for 6

Randy A. Sansone and Lori A. Sansone, “Fatal Attraction Syndrome: Stalking Behavior and Borderline Personality,” Psychiatry (Edgemont) 7(5) (2010): 42. 7 Crazy Ex-girlfriend, Seasons One to Four, created by Rachel Bloom (n.p.: CBS, 2015–2019). 8 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000), 77. 9 Ibid., 78. 10 Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1972), 37. Emily Fox Gordon, Mockingbird Years: A Life in and out of Therapy (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 5. Gordon, “Against Solidarity,” The American Scholar, September 5, 2017, https://theamericans cholar.org/against-solidarity/, accessed June 21, 2021. 11 Elizabeth J. Donaldson, “The corpus of the Madwoman: Towards a Feminist Disability studies Theory of Embodiment and Mental Illness.” NWSA Journal, Vol. 14, No. 3. Feminist Disability Studies (Autumn, 2002), pp 99–119. Elizabeth J. Donaldson also directs the minor in Medical Humanities at New York Tech. 12 Donaldson, 101.

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decoupling the madness-rebellion configuration in order to focus on the corporealization of madness that can be scientifically imaged. Scientific evidence procured from MRI scans of patients with schizophrenia shows enlarged brain ventricles, and PET scans show increased glucose metabolism in people affected by obsessive– compulsive disorder. This points to the fact that “madness” is a physical impairment rather than an attitudinal affliction. However, conceptualizing madness as a physical impairment should not be seen as an instantiation of biological determinism because “bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes.”13 The medical scans show up a bodily impairment, but whether that impairment results in the body being considered disabled depends on its social construal. In Donaldson’s opinion, the sequestration of Bertha Mason’s character in Jane Eyre reflects the nineteenth century practice of mechanically restraining patients in mental asylums. Bertha’s mad mind becomes a reason for her husband to restrain, isolate, and thus “disable” her body. Though Donaldson’s corporealization of madness enriches the feminist trope of madness, instead of negating it, her claim that “Gilbert and Gubar make it clear that their discussion concerns madness as a metaphor, not mental illness in the clinical sense” is tenuous. There are numerous references in The Madwoman in the Attic to the “epidemic of female illness,” including discussions about anorexia, aphasia, and amnesia.14 Moreover, the choice of the opening quotations for the chapter where Gilbert and Gubar articulate the notion of the anxiety of authorship—a foundational tool in feminist literary criticism—clearly indicates that their understanding of madness also was not purely metaphorical. Instead, it shows that the authors were cognizant of the strong link between mental illness and its bodily manifestations. They begin the chapter by quoting Silas Weir Mitchell, the nineteenth century American physician, considered the father of neurology, and Charlotte Perkins Gillman, one of his most famous patients.15 Among various other medical discoveries, Mitchell is famous for advocating “rest cures” as a treatment for a range of non-psychotic emotional disorders categorized as neurasthenia. Mitchell prescribed “rest cures” almost exclusively for women. The procedure, which could last months, involved isolation, inactivity, and massage to avert muscle atrophy resulting from the prescribed disuse.16 Charlotte Perkins Gillman, one of the women whom he confined to an extended rest cure, was a public intellectual and a prolific writer. She was the solo writer for her monthly magazine The Forerunner, which was published regularly for seven years from 1909 to 1916.17 Suffering from depression, she became 13

Donna Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinations of Self in Immune System Discourse,” in Feminist Theory and the Body – A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1999), 208. 14 Gilbert and Gubar, 58. 15 Dennis Drabelle, “The Case of S. Weir Mitchell,” The Pennsylvania Gazette, Dec (2012): 43, https://www.upenn.edu/gazette/1112/feature3_1.html, accessed June 23, 2021. 16 Diana Martin, “The Rest Cure Revisited,” The American Journal of Psychiatry, 164:5, May (2007): 737. 17 Drabelle, 43.

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Mitchell’s patient in 1887. Five years later, she would describe the stifling experience of the rest cure administered to her under Mitchell’s supervision in her highly acclaimed story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” one of the earliest literary works dealing with the issue of female mental health.18 Based on the detailed discussion of Perkins’ story and the prominent placement of Weir’s remark in The Madwoman in the Attic, one may conclude that Donaldson’s emphasis on corporealization of madness constitutes an in-depth understanding of a notion already present in Gilbert and Gubar’s work rather than a departure from their view of madness. In this book, the portrayal of Pushpavalli will be examined, keeping in mind the polysemic potency of the feminist trope of the madwoman in which madness is viewed both as the consequence and symptom of isolation brought about by exclusionary social practices that marginalize anyone does not appear to be “normal.” The trope also signifies that any understanding of depictions of madness that views it solely as an individual malaise is incomplete because the disability imposed upon the madwoman is the also outcome of social attitudes and processes that restrict her mobility, capability, and visibility.

9.2 Pushpavalli as a Comic Embodiment of Madness and Trickery Cultural representations of women suffering from mental illness are infrequent unless created by women. Gabriela Mistral’s collection of poems titled “Madwomen” (Locas Mujeres) that was part of her Lagar anthology (1954), is a rare exception to the norm of assigning secondary and often negative roles to women whose minds function differently from a “normal” mind. The protagonist of Alejandra Pizarnik’s gothic story, “The Bloody Countess” (La condesa sangriente) (1965), is also a “madwoman”—a Hungarian countess accused, without conclusive evidence, of torturing and murdering several hundred young girls in the early seventeenth century.19 In Indian cinema, the Tamil film Moondaram Pirai (1982) is one of the earliest examples of a film in which the female lead, played by the famous Sridevi, was shown as suffering from a mental illness—retrograde amnesia. Since 2005, one can find more examples of well-known actors portraying characters with mental illnesses on screen. Two films released in 2005, Black and 15 Park Avenue, featured protagonists suffering from Schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease, respectively. Since then, 18

In the story, a woman goes mad when her husband and brother, both medical doctors, insists on her spending a month in an isolated place, with only her husband and an attendant for company. They feel that the isolation will aid her recovery from a mental disorder that her husband describes as a “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency.” He addresses his wife as “a blessed little goose,” and “little girl” and repeatedly tells her that she should exercise self-control to keep her “excited fancies” in check. The husband’s attitude towards the wife replicates Mitchell’s infantilizing view of the neurasthenic women whom he treated. 19 Irma Szádeczky-Kardoss, Báthory Erzsébet igazsága (Erzsébet Báthory’s Truth), trans. Lujza Nehrebeczky (Budapest: Nesztor Kiadó, [1993] 2005).

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many top actors, male and female, have played roles of persons dealing with mental illnesses, personality, or behavioural disorders, and mental disorders. The difference between illness and disorder is clearer than the demarcating line between the two types of disorders—behavioural and mental. The International Classification of Diseases proposed by the WHO groups the disorders together in the compendium for diagnostic guidelines titled The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders.20 For the purposes of this critical study, the terms mental disorder and behavioural disorder will be used synonymously. The character of Pusphavalli demonstrates symptoms of several mental disorders. She appears to suffer from hypomania when she behaves in a reckless manner, unconcerned for her safety when she asks her flatmates to break her leg so that she can get sympathy from the man with whom she is infatuated. She frequently exhibits tendencies of histrionic personality disorder which is marked by “egocentricity, self-indulgence, continuous longing for appreciation, lack of consideration for others, feelings that are easily hurt, and persistent manipulative behaviour,” when she gets friends and acquaintances, and even her fiancée to be her unwitting accomplices. At a point in the series, she also displays anorexic behaviour when she eats only butter so that she can convince people that she is taking extreme measures to lose weight. Her habitual lying to manipulate well-meaning friends shows her as a clinically “paranoid personality” with an “excessive sensitivity to setbacks and rebuffs,” a “tendency to bear grudges persistently, and a “persistent self-referential attitude, associated particularly with excessive self-importance (Fig. 9.2).”21

Fig. 9.2 Pushpavalli schemes to get out of a tough spot

20

The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1993), https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/en/GRNBOOK.pdf, accessed June 28, 2021. 21 Ibid., 151.

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Though the series presents Pushpavalli as displaying a range of mental and behavioural disorders, no explanations are provided for her dysfunctional personality. The series is sketchy on the character’s biographical details. She is a Tamilian girl who has grown up in Bhopal. The viewers know that she is in her early twenties because they have been told that she has recently finished her degree in Food Sciences. She tells Nikhil in her first meeting that she lost her father when she was very young and that her mother did not remarry. Pushpavalli and her mother have a reciprocal relationship of emotional blackmail, but there is no antagonism between the two women. Pushpavalli has at least two good friends from her school days, Bhavna, who offers her sensible advice, and Pankaj, who gives her a job and looks out for her when she moves to Bangalore. Pushpavalli is obsessively attracted to Nikhil, a man she meets in her hometown at a conference of food producers. They meet for the first time when Nikhil, during one of the session breaks, walks up to the stall where Pushpavalli, working as a college-going volunteer, is selling fresh fruit jam for a charity organization. In the initial interaction, Pushpavalli is not portrayed as a love-struck, timid college girl. Instead, she comes across as confident and lively when she discusses the price and quality of the product she is selling: Nikhil (tasting the jam): Are there dates in this? Pushpavalli: No, figs. Nikhil: Aah, figs, that’s really good; I’ll take one bottle of this. Pushpavalli: That’s five hundred and fifty rupees. Nikhil (shocked): What! Pushpavalli: Five-fifty rupees. Nikhil: Five-fifty rupees, five hundred and fifty rupees for a bottle of jam. That’s ridiculous. Pushpavalli: Yeah, but we make it from fresh fruits, and also, we add only natural emulsifiers like agar, pectin. Nikhil: You know what, let me just give you some friendly business advice, alright. If you used plastic bottles instead of glass, your jam would be a lot cheaper, plus plastic is way safer than glass. Pushpavalli: No, glass bottles are safer than plastic. Nikhil: Really! Remind me again which one cuts you when it breaks. Pushpavalli: Glass bottles are naturally sterile, and plastic bottles, on the other hand, if you add hot liquids to it, chemicals might leach in and people might die of food poisoning unless that’s what you want. Then plastic is waaay safer than glass. Nikhil: Sure, but for people to be able to die of food poisoning, they need to be able to afford food, which they are not going to be able to do because they spend all their money on your jam in a glass bottle. Pushpavalli: You know what, actually, take this for free. Nikhil [taken aback]: NO, no, that’s not… Pushpavalli: No, really, take it. Anyway, the proceeds are going to charity. I will make a donation on behalf of a man who was really scared of glass bottles. Nikhil: Look, look, I was just trying to help you, but if you don’t want my help, I will take the jam. And pay you your five hundred and fifty rupees.

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Pushpavalli: No, we don’t want your charity, it’s OK. Nikhil [smiling]: Isn’t that the point of this stall.22

Pushpavalli forgets about Nikhil after selling him the bottle of jam. She speaks to him again only because one of the girls managing the stall with her wants his phone number but does not want to do the asking herself as she thinks it would make her look too bold. In exchange for a full-talk-time recharge of her mobile, Pushpavalli agrees to get his number for her colleague. They talk again when Nikhil sees her sipping tea by herself and asks to join her. Scenes from the day-long conference are included as two-minute flashbacks in each episode so that the viewer constantly revisits that day and gradually develops an understanding of Pushpavalli’s attraction for Nikhil. The snippets show that Pushpavalli had some reason to believe that her fondness for Nikhil is reciprocated. He seeks her out to spend time with her during the session breaks, compliments her on her wittiness, and tells her that he is surprised that she doesn’t have a boyfriend because she is “so much fun.” At the end of the conference, he tells her to look him up if she finds herself in Bangalore, where he works. The casual, friendly parting remark acts as a cue for Pushpavalli to launch her intricate plan to establish a romantic relationship with him. Bhavna, a school friend, counsels Pushpavalli against moving to Bangalore just to be close to a man she has met so briefly and hardly knows. She feels that Pushpavalli may be reading far too much into the few friendly conversations with Nikhil seeing that he is the first man to have paid Pushpavalli any attention. Pushpavalli disregards her friend’s advice and makes the move. The absence of any clear source of trauma in Pushpavalli’s life prompts a critical viewer to examine her personality more closely for possible clues about the reasons for her odd behaviour. The use of humour distracts the viewer from a serious question of Pushpavalli’s problems–pathological lying, crippling impatience, cruel insensitivity, and a tendency for self-harm. The comic register succeeds in generating an endearing image of a small town, large-bodied, dark-skinned, witty, confident, and bright girl who has fallen in love. Therefore, when Pushpavalli’s mental disorders become manifest through her behaviour, the audience is inclined to take a sympathetic view of her infractions rather than see her as malicious. Suresh’s choice of the comic register to showcase Pushpavalli’s predicaments generates sympathy by creating a relatable fictional character. The viewers would have rarely encountered anyone as obsessive as Pushpavalli, yet some strains of her compulsive behaviour strike a familiar note. Suresh’s effective emoting gets the viewers to laugh at her reckless attempts to get love rather than denounce her conduct as reprehensible. Along with sympathy, Pushpavalli gets the laughs because she strikes the right balance between identification with the viewers and a safe distance from them. They identify with her because many of them may have experienced a similar intense longing, but at the same time, they laugh with relief at not having gone over the edge like her. However, this explains only partly why Pushpavalli’s extreme measures for and repeated failures at securing Nikhil’s affections appear to 22

“Bhopal to Bangalore,” in Pushpavalli Season One (n.p.: Amazone Prime, 2017).

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Fig. 9.3 Vasu threatens to throw out Pushpavalli

be comic instead of dramatically tragic. Examining the stimuli that provoke laughter is a complex matter. The ineluctable nature of laughter makes it quite difficult to fully understand the functioning and mechanisms of humour. Laughter, like crying, is an involuntary bodily response, whether to emotional stimuli or to physical ones such as tickling. Henry Bergson identifies three principal triggers of laughter: repetition, inversion, and reciprocal interference.23 The identification of the Bergsonian techniques in Suresh’s comedy enables one to unpack the layers in her narrative. According to Bergson, repeatability triggers amusement because the frequent occurrence of an ordinary incident constitutes a strategy for mocking the rigidity of everyday life. According to Bergson, the “artificial exaggeration of a natural rigidity in things” is “the real explanation of light comedy.”24 Suresh makes use of repetition in the interactions among the Pushpavalli’s housemates who live in a “Paying Guest” (PG) accommodation run by the acerbic, miserly, and shrewd woman, Vasu. Every woman has a distinguishing quirk: Rehna is naively earnest, Pearl cusses constantly, Srishti and Tara have an insatiable appetite for scandal and real-life drama, and Vasu is shown berating the girls for the infraction of some or the other rule. The unchanging quirks of the women in the PG reflect, exaggerate, and therefore, mock the rigidities of communal living (Fig. 9.3). Bergson’s second trigger, “Inversion,” typically actualized through role reversals, draws attention to the rigid stereotyping of certain aspects of life, such as gender roles. Early on in Season One, Pushpavalli lies to her boss, Pankaj, who is also her friend 23

Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan, 1911), 89. 24 Bergson, 102.

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from their school days, that she was late to work because a man had been stalking her. The viewers know that it is, in fact, Pushpavalli who has been stalking Nikhil— an instance of inversion. Her boss’s unquestioned acceptance of her excuses and his genuine concern for her welfare points to the “rigid” assumption that the woman must be the victim and the man, the aggressor. Whereas in this instance, Pushpavalli is the aggressor—she accepted a job in the children’s library only because it was located on the same street as Nikhil’s office, she contacted a nearby tea stall owner before she reached Bangalore to spy on Nikhil, and she even got a CCTV camera installed at Nikhil’s house to monitor his movements. The contrast between the reality, in which the roles of aggressor and victim have been reversed, and Pankaj’s conventional understanding of the situation generates humour. Bergson’s third laughter trigger, “reciprocal interference of series,” comes into play when a scenario “belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time.” The comic significance of Pushpavalli’s engagement ceremony in Season Two is heightened when viewed through the lens of a “reciprocal interference of series.” The visual presentation of the engagement is like that of a wedding—a large mandap-like banquet tent has been set up for the occasion, it is decorated with orange and strings of yellow marigold, sheer pink and yellow curtains rustle behind the seating area where the couple exchange rings, plates containing flowers and fruits for the ritual are placed before them, and brass oil lamps mounted on tall stands are placed around the canopy. Pushpavalli has agreed to an engagement with Vidyuth only to keep her mother from constantly haranguing her to get married. She believes that she can also use the occasion to make Nikhil jealous. She cannot, however, invite him to the ceremony because he is angry with her for kidnapping his dog. She plots an intricate plan, which involves paying off several people, to bring Nikhil to the venue without revealing that it is her engagement ceremony. The presentation of the occasion allows for multiple interpretations. On the one hand, the engagement is a very real event for all the family members and friends who have gathered for the occasion, at the end of which Vidyuth, a personable man who finds Pushpavalli attractive, and appreciates her sense of humour, becomes her fiancée. On the other hand, for Pushpavalli, the event is only a ruse to get Nikhil’s attention. Once again, as in the techniques of repetition and inversion, the “artificial rigidity” of the ceremonial quasi-wedding is stretched to accommodate not just one but two potential grooms—Vidyuth, the real one, and Nikhil the imaginary one. The wedding ceremony, in which the carnivalesque celebrations usually go hand-in-hand with solemn rituals, is eminently suited for triggering laughter through “reciprocal interference.” Numerous filmmakers across cultures have availed of the mundanesolemn, carnal-spiritual, secular-religious duality of ritualistic occasions as a setting for humorous narratives.25 Suresh uses the viewers’ association of weddings with 25

See thewedddinbrigade.com for a list of Hindi comedy films where a wedding serves as a narrative anchor. https://blog.theweddingbrigade.com/blog/21-bollywood-wedding-movies-watchyoure-bored-wedding-planning/. Marthastewart.com lists forty Hollywood “wedding movies” all of which are comedies.

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joviality to lighten the darkness of her comedy in which Pushpavalli’s self-destructive tendencies prevent her from forming a stable relationship with the man who appears to genuinely like her, preferring instead to pursue a make-believe relationship with Nikhil. Humour relies on accepted and shared conventions. If the audience does not recognize the conventions that the comic narrative is seeking to caricature, their rupture will not create the intended impact. For example, in the case of the wedding, unless the audience accepts that the occasion signifies the start of a life-long commitment, the bride’s running away from the altar, or as in Pushpavalli’s case, using her fiancée as bait to capture the attention of the man she desires, will not appear funny. The shared conventions could be linguistic, political, cultural, and even unconscious ones. For Freud, jokes, like dreams, are linked to the unconscious. Their articulation as “a rule ready-clothed in words” is a way of bringing buried inhibitions to the surface. Thus, prior to being amused by the joke, viewers may not be consciously aware of their acceptance of the set of conventions, the subversion of which has made them laugh. Just as in dream analysis, the elements of the dream provide clues to the unconscious or subconscious, the punch lines of jokes that elicit laughter are related to some inhibitions that have been loosened up by laughter. Of course, unlike dreams, jokes are communicable to others; therefore, following Freud’s logic, they may also be seen as a mode of inter-subconscious communication. The three laughter triggers—repetition, inversion, and reciprocal interference show up as different aspects of Pushpavalli’s personality. In her repeated interactions with her flatmates, Pushpavalli is honest; she behaves in solidarity with them and uses her guile to outsmart their common antagonist, Vasu, the establishment’s owner and manager. She is manipulative with Pankaj, taking advantage of his protective emotions for her. Pushpavalli succeeds in convincing Pankaj of the stalker-victim role inversion because she knows that despite his insouciantly flippant behaviour and tough-boss image, he cares for her; he gave her the job that helped her move to Bangalore, and though she frequently reports late to work, he does not fire her. She emotionally blackmails him into doing her bidding during the engagement ceremony by making a teary-eyed declaration that after the death of her father, he is the only man she considers family. Pushpavalli’s callous use of Vidyuth’s sentiments towards her to lure Nikhil is deceptive and cruel. Suresh’s balancing of all these three personas in her protagonist is what makes Pushpavalli a madwoman. If only her cruelty had been dominant, the narrative would have become a psychological thriller; if her manipulativeness of family members and friends had been her defining quality, the series would acquire the generic characteristics of a soap opera; and if she had only behaved as a witty, resourceful member of a cohesive group of young girls, the resultant comedy would have resembled a teen sitcom. Pushpavalli is not cast in any “objective correlative,” that is, a “set of objects, a situation, a chain of events” that repeatedly evoke the same emotion.26 No one facet of her personality— sinister cruelty, selfish manipulations, and collaborative camaraderie–overpowers the others. Instead, she is the unpredictable madwoman. Furthermore, as a medley 26

T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, [1919], 1948), 145.

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of multiple binaries such as earnestness-manipulativeness, camaraderie-selfishness, and concern-cruelty, embodied in one person turns Pushpavalli into a “madwoman” who is also a “trickster.” Many mythologies include a “trickster” figure, who though immoral, does not come across as malicious. Hermes from Greek mythology, his equivalent Mercury in Roman mythology, and Loki, a god in the Norse pantheon, are famous trickster figures. Hermes is deceitful, untruthful, and “the patron of tricksters and thieves.”27 Loki has similar traits; Old-Norse literature portrays him as a “liar, trickster and thief.”28 Puck, from English folklore, is a well-known trickster figure owing to his appearance in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Hindu Mythology, Narad Muni is a trickster figure. Comparing him to Loki and Hermes, the young Indian novelist Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan writes, “[He is] a god you couldn’t trust […] He went and tattled to Kamsa, Krishna’s evil uncle, that there would soon be born a child to kill him. He persuaded King Daksha’s thousands of sons to not marry and have children and take up a life of sanyas instead.”29 The trickster is a stock character in comedy because he can violate “the most sacred of prohibitions” and transgress boundaries “that are impermeable to normal individuals.”30 The trickster’s shenanigans are accepted as benign because they are directed at those who are far more powerful than him, never at the vulnerable. The ordinary viewer may even get some satisfaction from the trickster’s chutzpah because he manages to create a chink in the otherwise impenetrable defences of the mighty. Pushpavalli’s lies, deceptions, and thievery never cause irreparable harm. She steals customer records from the library’s database as barter to get information about Nikhil’s whereabouts. She kidnaps Nikhil’s dog so that she can win his gratitude when she feigns that she has found the pet. Her intent, except in the final episode of Season Two, when she blows up the packhouse, is never to cause damage. Though, sometimes her plans go awry, resulting in more harm than she had intended. For example, when Pushpavalli asks her accomplice, the man at the tea stall called TBoi, to push Nikhil’s mother, her intent is for Mrs. Rao to only sprain her foot. The plan was for Pushpavalli to take care of Mrs. Rao while she would be resting out her mild injury and, in the process, earn Nikhil’s goodwill. However, Mrs. Rao ends up fracturing her leg during the fall and has to be taken to the hospital, where Nikhil and the beautiful doctor treating his mother get attracted to each other. Thus, the viewer’s attention gets centred on the Nikhil and the doctor’s romance, overshadowing their perception of Mrs. Rao’s discomfort, and Pushpavalli’s assault on Mrs. Rao is thus redeemed from being catastrophic. Sumukhi elevates the figure of the trickster by casting that archetype in a leading role. Hermes, Loki, and Narad were all subservient

27

Robin Hard, The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 160. 28 Jan de Vries, The Problem of Loki (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1933), 19. 29 https://www.firstpost.com/living/mythology-for-the-millennial-narada-may-be-a-trickster-buthe-deserved-better-than-a-life-of-illusions-6699521.html. 30 Andrew Stott, Comedy (New Critical Idiom, Routledge, 2005).

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to greater Gods, but Pushpavalli executes her ‘trickery’ agenda, not to play the gods against one another but to serve her own interests. Unlike the clown, another stock character in comedy, the trickster is not distinguished by his physical appearance, exaggerated bodily movements, make-up, or costume. Similarly, Pushpavalli’s large body is never the object of humour in the series. Only two characters are shown commenting on her body weight. Pushpavalli’s mother repeatedly reminds her that she would be exceedingly lucky to find a man who agrees to marry her despite the fact that she is “chubby” and “fat.” Vidyuth’s aunt also makes sarcastic remarks about Pushpavalli’s large body size. Both characters who make derisive observations about her body are mother figures. Perhaps inured by her mother’s observations, Pushpavalli appears to be entirely unselfconscious of her large body. There is no indication that her self-image is affected by her body weight until the penultimate episode of the second season of the series. At this point in the series, Nikhil is unaware of the full extent of Pushpavalli’s madness. He still does not know that she is responsible for his mother’s accident and for contaminating the water supply in his packaging plant. He also does not know that her engagement is a sham that she is going through with it only to make him jealous. He asks her, in a friendly tone, why she had hatched such complicated schemes—kidnapping his dog and deliberately breaking her leg—just to win his affections: Nikhil: Why would you pick the most complicated way to get someone to like you. Why wouldn’t you simplify it and just ask me? Pushpavalli: OK, yeah, that’s gonna work. Nikhil: No, seriously, why didn’t you ask me? Pushpavalli: Because you look like this, and I look like this. Nikhil: Look like what Li? Pushpavalli: Please don’t make me say it now.31

Pushpavalli does not enunciate what exactly “it” might be. However, the contrast between her and Nikhil’s physical attributes gives a strong indication of “it.” The audience is made aware that Pushpavalli’s large body, short height, and dark skin are at the root of her insecurities. Physically, Nikhil is Pushpavalli’s polar opposite—he is tall, slim, and light-skinned—and this makes her desire him. His physical attributes symbolize what she can never be, and therefore, the possibility of possessing him offers her the opportunity to address a fundamental lack that she has experienced all her life. Her mother’s repeated reminders about Pushpavalli’s unattractiveness reiterate the cultural discourse on beauty. Having internalized normative “beauty” standards, Pushpavalli believes that she is undesirable, unlovable, and will be unwanted because of her physical appearance. Instead of sinking into depression, Pushpavalli’s inventive mind becomes hyperactive in its effort to compensate for her lack of physical attractiveness. She does not hesitate to place herself and others in harm’s way as long as it results in being needed by the man she desires. Pushpavalli’s trickstermadwoman is not like the rebellious alter-ego of a demure female protagonist or like the maddened double of oppressed nineteenth century authors, that was the basis of 31

“Badle ki Aag,” in Pushpavalli Season Two (n.p.: Amazon Prime, 2020).

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articulating the feminist trope of the “madwoman.” In the original feminist trope, the madwoman, Bertha Mason’s physical traits—“a big woman” with “long black hair” and a loud laugh—represented defiance of the behavioural norms imposed on women of that time.32 Sumukhi Suresh’s reinterpretation of the madwoman represents an entitlement to desirability. Though Pushpavalli has been conditioned to believe that she is physically undesirable, she has also somehow learned that other qualities could compensate for her lack of “beauty.” Pushpavalli stalks Nikhil because she believes that she can convert his liking for her into a more intense sentiment. The social discourse of the “pretty woman” has failed to marginalize her entirely. Pushpavalli is the empowered madwoman who tries to secure the object of her desire through trickery because social norms deny her the direct route to seduction that is available only to conventionally beautiful women.

9.3 Placing Pushpavalli Generically Genre is not merely a matter of taxonomy. Each genre possesses different expressive capacities, and within the selection of a genre, the writer or creator can choose from various possibilities of meaning. A critic’s generic view of a literary or cultural narrative enables a perspective on those capacities that may be different from the creator’s intended activation of meanings. Reviewers have seen Pushpavalli variously as a “tragicomic relationship drama,” “comedy drama,” “dark humour,” and “refined comedy with sitcommy moments.”33 Sumukhi Suresh has described the series as autobiographical. Like the fictional character, Suresh has a degree in food science and moved cities in her early twenties to “pursue” a man she met at a food conference.34 She adds that when she started discussing the storyline of the show with others, she realized that many women had had similar experiences of “pursuing” men. However, she says that Pushpavalli is more naïve than Suresh had been at that age, and the mother’s character is more “savage” than her own mother.35 The creator points out that the tag of “dark” that has been assigned to the humour of the series is based on conventional notions of what is acceptable and what is not, especially when it comes 32

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (n.p.: Planetebook.com, [1847] n.d.), 447, https://www.planetebook. com/free-ebooks/jane-eyre.pdf, accessed January 3, 2021. 33 Karthik Kermalu, “Pushpavalli Review,” First Post, December 26, 2017. https://www.firstp ost.com/entertainment/pushpavalli-review-sumukhi-suresh-creates-a-show-you-cannot-turn-yourhead-away-from-4275645.html, accessed June 28, 2021. Sampada Sharma, “Pushpavalli Review,” Indian Express, December 27, 2017. https://indian express.com/article/entertainment/television/pushpavalli-review-sumukhi-suresh-web-series-ama zon-prime-video-5001120/, accessed June 28, 2021. Akhil Sood, “Sumukhi Suresh’s Pushpvalli,” The Hindu, December 23, 2017, https://www.the hindu.com/entertainment/movies/sumukhi-sureshs-pushpavalli-is-an-admirable-attempt-at-invert ing-a-tired-tale/article22234291.ece, accessed June 28, 2021. 34 Rajeev Masand, “Sumukhi Suresh Interview with Rajeev Masand,” YouTube Video, 23:16, March 30, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YelCFV_2aGs&ab_channel=RajeevMasand. 35 Ibid.

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to the portrayal of women: “Women should either be sati-savitiri or vamps, she can never be both. A sati-savitri can never have dark thoughts, and a vamp cannot have her redeeming moments […] keeping genders aside, any man or woman is going through these dark places, and more than dark, it’s a very honest thought.” Sumukhi Suresh’s remarks indicate that her intent was to create an honest autobiographical comedy. Explaining why the audience has drawn parallels between her fictional character and the protagonist of Fleabag, another autobiographical comedy series, Suresh remarks: “You don’t like or dislike Fleabag. You are Fleabag. Likewise, you don’t like or dislike Pushpavalli. You are Pushpavalli.”36 This study agrees with Suresh’s perception of her character’s state of mind as a representation of multiple, common insecurities among women. Body image issues, lack of sexual agency, and the pressure to get married early are shared experiences for many young women in India. Suresh’s criticism of the societal norms regarding behavioural and beauty regimes for women may be seen as a contemporary instantiation of the Juvenalian satire, which “is the satire of saeva indignatio, or savage indignation, the bitter condemnation of venal and stupid humanity.”37 Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729) is considered a classic Juvenalian satire. In the short satirical piece written as a “policy suggestion,” the author summarizes the objective of the “proposal” for “preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public.”38 Whereas Swift’s bitter tone in his satirical piece is macabre and undiluted by any light notes, Pushpavalli sugar coats the bitter pill of ubiquitous misogyny that women are expected to swallow with humour. Juan Villalobos, a noted, contemporary Mexican-Spanish writer, has commented on the difficulty of using humour to criticize deep-rooted, pernicious social problems.39 In his novels, Villalobos adopts a comic tone to describe grave social problems such as drug-related violence, homelessness, and income inequality. He observes that the literary establishment generally considers humour as an inferior way of taking up social issues—satire is considered effective only if it is bitter and dark. In his opinion, this is not a fair assessment of the capacity that humour has for highlighting social problems with as much efficacy as the serious narrative styles that receive greater critical acclaim.40 Pushpavalli demonstrates that humour is not a less efficient tool for highlighting social problems. On the contrary, her satirical humour brings out the preponderance 36

Sumukhi Suresh, “How she built Pushpavalli,” interview with Jessica Xalxo, Rolling Stone, April 2, 2020, https://rollingstoneindia.com/sumukhi-suresh-on-how-she-built-pushpavalli-a-better-sec ond-act/, accessed June 28, 2021. 37 Stott, Comedy, 105. 38 Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal and Other Short Pieces (Pennysylvania: Penn State University, [1729] 2008), 5. 39 La Vanguardia, “Giardinetto Sessions: Juan Pablo Villalobos,” YouTube Video, 24:38, April 4, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvCZNqHY52k&ab_channel=LaVanguardia. 40 Ibid.

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of toxic misogynistic thinking even in a “modern” society. Like Swift’s satire, Pushpavalli “offers no counter-argument that can either be concretely identified with the authorial position or be considered socially constructive.”41 The absence of solutions to Pushpavalli’s problems in the series points to the deep entrenchment of misogynistic thought regimes. Viewing Pushpavalli as a Juvenalian gender satire enables one to see that Pushpavalli’s madness is not a freak psychological condition; instead, her madness can be interpreted as a natural reaction to numerous, chronic, everyday expressions of misogyny that women endure routinely.

9.4 A View Through the Gynocritic Spatial Model 9.4.1 De-bordering at the Paying Guest (PG) Accommodation and the Tea Stall The PG is a uniquely Indian term for an establishment that takes in lodgers. The status of the lodger, as a paying guest, has become a synecdoche for referring to the physical structure that houses them and for the transactional arrangement between the landlord and the boarder. PG accommodations were initially popular among college students who were unable to get hostel rooms on campuses. However, excessive internal migration of young professionals to economic hubs like Pune and Bengaluru has driven up rentals, making the PG a preferred choice among newcomers to these cities. Shared accommodation in a PG costs a lot less than an independent rental, and for young working women, it promises greater safety, as they are supposedly placed under the “guardianship” of a host. The PG featured in Pushpavalli is run by Vasu, a divorced woman who possibly murdered her father-in-law in order to inherit the property from him. Vasu is a disciplinarian who scrupulously enforces curfew timings and regulates meal expenses; she brooks no arguments for delays in rent payment and summarily throws her “guests” out on the streets if they do not pay on time. She maintains an authoritarian relationship with the boarders in the PG, refusing to project herself as a caring mother figure for the young girls. She infuses the PG with an air of harsh reality—Vasu’s cynical attitude towards the girls’ problems is a reminder that they cannot expect to be treated compassionately by their “guardian” in the PG. The patriarchal mindset about misogynistic behaviour is highlighted through Vasu’s callous response when the girls are discussing the episodes of flashing that they frequently encounter: Rehna – I was on my way back, and (in Hindi) some construction work is going on in the nearby building na; I was just jogging past that, and one of the workers started flashing. [Pushpavalli’s expression shows that she is clueless about what “flashing” means]

41

Stott, Comedy, 107.

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Pearl – (In Hindi) This happens a lot, yaar. I am sitting on my desk and working, and the window cleaners are cleaning the windows from outside. I just happen to look outside, and one of them is flashing me. [Srishti expresses her fascination with a non-verbal sound] Pearl – uh, uh, they get turned on by looking at the disgust on your face. [Pushpavalli decides to look up the meaning of flashing on her mobile. The following text appears on the screen:] Flashing: meaning – A strip of metal to stop water penetrating the junction of a roof with another surface, flashings around chimneys.] Rehna – (In Hindi) Who does this! Tara – (In Hindi) I have done it once. Srishti – (In Hindi) And me, thrice. Rehna – But, isn’t that dangerous Tara and Srishti [together]: It’s thrilling Rehna – Pushpavalli, Pushpavalli. [Pushpavalli looks up from the mobile screen when Rehna addresses her. She does not get the opportunity to look at the other meanings of flashing] Rehna (in Hindi)– Pushpavalli, has this ever happened with you? Pearl (in Hindi) – We are talking about flashing. Pushpavalli – Oh, yes, yes, Actually, it was raining, then the roof was leaking, so Mom called the plumber, and then he flashed. [Vasu enters] Vasu – (in Kannada and English): Flashing, kishing, and all don’t listen to all this. Once it is happening twenty to thirty times means there is practice. Mind will not mind. [Vasu lets out a guffaw, and Pushpavalli, not sure about what Vasu means, cackles selfconsciously] […] Vasu – And girls, curfew time is not evening 9 pm, it is now evening 8 pm Pearl – Vasu, how can you be so regressive? Vasu – Oooo, ba, ba, ba regressive! In front of me and all, you are using two-two kilo words. You should have said it to the boy who flashed you. [Pearl cusses]42

The PG as a home away from home is a liminal space that allows the girls to transition from their protected childhoods to the stage where they are facing life’s challenges—such as flashing—as adult working women. It may be viewed as a contemporary version of the mediaeval beguinages, which were communal dwellings for single women who did not have any guardians.43 Bereft of family support, the beguines came to the city to earn a living. The beguinage and the PG residents share several demographic characteristics; they have paying jobs, are single and young. The girls in Vasu’s PG are in their early to mid-twenties. However, they are not homogenized representations of independent women and may be seen as 42 43

“Eagle Attack,” in Pushpavalli Season One (n.p.: Amazon Prime, 2017). See Chap. 2 for a detailed discussion of beguinages.

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localized limens. In the conversation about the misogynistic practice of flashing, the girls’ varying responses show up. Rehna, the naïve woman, feels helpless and dejected—her exasperated remark, “Who does this!” shows that no man has ever exposed himself to her before, and she had in all probability believed that it would never happen to her. Pearl, who has experienced flashing frequently, has figured out that indifference is the best response because any expression of disgust gratifies the perpetrator. Tara and Shrishti, the sensationalists, have decided to explore what it feels like to be on the other side and have found the experience of exposing themselves “thrilling.” Vasu, the martinet, recommends violence, using a hockey stick to hit the flasher in his genitals. Pushpavalli’s complete ignorance of the phenomenon, perhaps owing to her small-town upbringing, places her in the most initial stages of the novitiate in the limen. The boarders in the PG display varying degrees of emancipation. Another place that occupies a key location in the narrative is the tea stall. It is situated at equal distances from Sunny Side Up, the children’s library where Pushpavalli works, and Nikhil’s packhouse, OK Rao Exports. Everyone addresses the owner of the tea stall as T-Boi, even though he is not a boy but an adult. Suresh’s choice of a reductive and infantilizing address for the tea stall owner shows that the low-wage immigrant worker remains invisible for the educated, English speaking, middle-class. For them, his only identity is of a person who serves them tea. The linguistic divide is highlighted as a factor in the class divide. T-boi is an uneducated native Hindi speaker who has migrated to Bengaluru to get a share in the economic dynamism of the city. The rickety tea stall represents his tenuous share of the opportunity that a metropolis offers. Despite its ramshackle appearance, the tea stall resembles the nineteenth century salon, favoured by the French elite, that Bakhtin has described as a place where “not specifically random” encounters occur and where political, business, social, literary reputations are made and destroyed, careers are begun and wrecked, here in their full array (that is, brought together in one place at one time) are all the gradations of the new social hierarchy; and here, finally, there unfold forms that are concrete and visible, the supreme power of life’s new king—money.44

Visitors to the tea stall are drawn from nearby offices; hence their meetings are not a random occurrence; it is quite commonplace to run into the same people there. This provides the perfect ruse for Pushpavalli to orchestrate meetings with Nikhil and to pass them off as mere coincidences. She pays T-Boi to keep her informed of Nikhil’s whereabouts so that she can turn up at the tea stall at the same time as him. Her consultations with the T-Boi about her stalking tactics and revenge schemes also take place at the tea stall. Thus, the tea stall may be seen as a pared-down, lack-lustre version of the elite salon and the smartly outfitted modern café. These are sites where the “full array” of “the new social hierarchy” congregates–the low-wage worker and the affluent class both. Pushpavalli’s authoritative demeanour in her interactions with the T-Boi shows “gradations of the new social hierarchy.” She never adopts a friendly tone while talking to T-Boi, and often speaks to him rudely. Despite his gender, T-Boi 44

Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: UP Texas, 1981), 247.

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is as marginalized because of the lack of communicative skills in English as Pushpavalli is because of her body issues. Thus, the tea stall is a de-differentiated space, located mid-way between a library and an export house–reifications of erudition and commerce. It is literally and metaphorically equidistant from both domains. Though it is located in the same metropolitan space, it confers neither erudition nor prosperity on its owner. T-Boi is not a part of the world of the library because he is not educated, but he is an entrepreneur who runs his own business. Yet, he cannot hope to be as affluent as Nikhil, an English speaking, educated man. The PG and the tea stall are both sites of hospitality. However, in the series, there is much that goes on under the guise of hospitality. These sites of hospitality offer the perfect ruse for power relations, such as Vasu’s domineering handling of the girls and Pushpavalli’s dismissive attitude towards T-Boi. The tea stall makes T-Boi’s marginalization visible, and in the PG, the viscerally repugnant behaviour of flashing surfaces when the girls talk about it openly and reveals their marginalization. Both Pushpavalli and the flashers take the consent of the marginalized person for granted. De-bordering locations show the marginalized positions of young, working women and the non-English speaking, low-wage migrant worker. Another convergence between the de-bordering locations is that Pushpavalli is at her least deceptive in these spaces. She shares her stalking plans openly with her PG-mates and the T-Boi. She does not feel the need to hide her obsession with Nikhil in either setting. Both sites act as liminal locations offering her outlets to shed her inhibitions. The use of de-bordering derivatives in the spatial analysis of Pushpavalli may be presented grammatically as in Fig. 9.4.

Fig. 9.4 De-bordering the sites of hospitality

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9.4.2 De-settling the Library and Conference Centre Sunny Side Up, a children’s library, and the conference centre where Pushpavalli and Nikhil first meet are also key locations in the narrative. Seen through the lens of the de-settling tools of de-sedimentation and speculative materiality of the limen, these locations emerge as subversive representations of the “Lettered City.” Angel Rama, the iconic literary and cultural critic, articulated the notion of the lettered city to indicate the replication of old hierarchies in ostensibly modern urban spaces in which “order” is imposed by “order.” According to Rama, the two broad meanings of the word—a systematized arrangement and a command—are manifestations of the same authoritarian impulse. The design of the modern, “ordered” city, with separate spatial arrangements for the lettered (letrados) and the unlettered, serves to re-establish traditional and colonial hierarchies: Possession of particular varieties of language thus crystallized a social hierarchy, defining the pre-eminence of those at the top and clearly making a defensive perimeter between them and the threatening lower-classes. The defensive posture of the letrados intensified their adhesion to the linguistic norm.45

The library and the conference centre are spaces that are built by the toil of the unlettered but, once functional, are accessible only to the letrados. In Pushpavalli, these architectural emblems of hierarchical social structures are turned into sites for interrupted encounters between the letrados and the unlettered. Pushpavalli’s mother disparagingly refers to the library as a creche; her remarks generate an image of the library as a site for emotional mothering, whereas it is meant to be a place for disciplined study. Though Pushpavalli vehemently reminds her mother repeatedly that her workplace is a library and not a creche, she does not perform any library-specific functions like cataloguing, classification, indexing, or database management. Her primary responsibility is organizing events like food workshops and wildlife appreciation classes for the members, as the library appears to double up as an after-school activity centre. In the episode titled “Hai Hai Nagin,” when plans for a scheduled “animal event” featuring a chameleon fall through, Pushpavalli replaces it with one featuring a snake to serve her convoluted vested interests. Unaware that Pankaj has organized an animal event, Pushpavalli answers the phone when a manager from the animal centre calls the library: Manager: Madam, I am sorry to inform that Ranga has escaped. Pushpavalli: Who is Ranga? Manager: Ranga, Madam! Ranga, the chameleon, named after the very many colours that he changes, so I am sorry to inform you that we have to cancel the event, we can’t find him because he is the master of camouflage. Pushpavalli: Yeah, but the kids are already here, so I don’t think you can cancel the activity. Manager: I am sorry, Madam, but we have to, it is very hectic over here, with Pavi also escaping. Pushpavalli: What’s a Pavi? 45

Angel Rama, The Lettered City (New York: Duke University Press, 1996), 33.

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Manager: Pavi, Madam! Pavithra, the cheetah. There’s a nasty joke saying that they’ve eloped together, but I don’t find it funny at all because I take my job very seriously. Recently opened a snake park over here which I have to take care of. So I don’t have time to find these animals. You have to understand me, Madam. The chameleon is missing; the cheetah is missing. I have to take care of all this, Madam, [He gets nervous because Pushpavalli has gone quiet] Madam, are you there? Hello Madam, Can you hear me? Namaskara, Sunny Sidey. Hello Madam? Pushpavalli: Can you tell me what other reptiles you have? Manager: Madam, we have a tortoise, a turtle, a crocodile, a ignua. Would you like any of these other options?46

The animal centre manager is a paradoxical hybrid of the letrado and the unlettered. He is an expert in his field of knowledge, but his Kannada accented, ungrammatical English, his nervous demeanour, and mispronunciation of “iguana” as “a ingua” place him barely within the lettered city. The letrados want their children to know about wildlife because it provides an afternoon’s distraction from the subjects in their school curriculum. However, the keepers of such extra-curricular knowledge are marginalized and kept at the borders of the elite areas of the city. By making the animal centre manager an object of humour, Suresh highlights the hypocrisy of the lettered city, which is attracted by traditional knowledge systems while confining the knowledge keepers to lower positions in the hierarchy. By noticing his accent and lack of acceptable deportment, the letrados drive home the difference between the lettered and the unlettered. The contrast of the materiality of the library, with its safe, easily accessible, and conveniently packed knowledge, contrasts with the tactile, slightly risky, experiential knowledge found in the animal centre; Pushpavalli questions and de-sediments the hierarchical relationship between the two. The earnestness of the animal centre manager, reflected in his shocked response every time he senses that the celebrities of his world, “the master of camouflage” and the “pure cheetah” are unknown to the city girl, is juxtaposed against the letrados use of the animals as mere props for an afternoon’s distraction. Suresh foregrounds the liminality of the conference centre by tucking the corporate materiality of the event—podiums, overhead projectors, display screens, cables, computers, and microphones—behind closed doors and using the passageways outside the conference rooms as her stage. The temporary and easily dismantled food stall for the charity organization “Better Life Foundation” is set up in the circulation area of the conference venue.47 Pushpavalli and Nikhil meet for the first time at the stall counter, then on the flight of stairs over chai, and again at the standing tables to play the children’s game of name-place-animal-thing. The conference centre is an in-between space also because it is an office with none of the accoutrements of the office. It has the characteristics of the normative communitas, located at the extremes of the liminal stage, with its own set of “legal statutes and regulations.” A professional conference is not open to everyone who may have a passing interest in the field. Participants must prove their credentials, go through the registration process, 46

“Hai Hai Nagin,” in Pushpavalli Season Two (n.p.: Amazon Prime, 2020). The name of the stall is a nod to an earlier collaboration between Suresh and Naveen Richard, who plays the role of Pankaj in Pushpavalli.

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pay the fees, and present a paper on a pre-approved topic. But, despite its professional trappings, it provides a break from the rigours of office routine. It has some elements of the existential communitas, which offer greater degrees of freedom than the normative communitas. Interactions with other participants are not strictly official and are only guided by professional dictates. The meetings outside the closed-room sessions are only semi-formal and semi-structured. However, any assumption of a personal connection made in this commercial space would be an illusion. The motif of illusion–disillusion operates in the material spatiality of the conference centre. The chance encounter creates an illusion of the possibility of a happyever-after, but the atmosphere of officialdom inevitably leads to disillusion. The palpable chemistry between Pushpavalli and Nikihil suggests that they could be on the brink of starting a romantic relationship. However, Nikhil’s casual farewell makes it clear that for him, the friendly banter between him and Pushpavalli is not a steppingstone to a romantic relationship; it was only a pleasant distraction from the dull technical sessions at the conference. The “rules” of the conference only permit brief encounters, not permanent relationships. The quick succession of the meeting and parting at conferences is aptly described by the Spanish word desencuentro, which means the failure to meet, or a mix-up resulting from a lack of coordination, or a disagreement caused by a misunderstanding. There is no exact equivalent for desencuentro in English; therefore, one may use its literal translation “disencounter” to describe the transitory relationships that result from quasi-chance encounters. The conference centre generates the chronotope of disencounter in which compressed temporality of a day or two is paired with a confined space that must be exited after a short occupation. Thus, the speculative materiality of the conference suggests that it can be a site for making meaningful connections only if the participants are able and willing to cross the prescribed professional distance that governs all such interactions. Suresh makes the viewers conscious of the status of the conference centre as a part of the “lettered city” through the server at the conference buffet. At first, he simply declines Nikhil’s request for a salad because it is not on the menu but later, guided like a simpleton by Pushpavalli; he puts together a salad from the readily available ingredients in the kitchen. The conference centre infuses Pushpavalli with the subjunctive power of the command. Her taking charge of Nikhil’s lunch order is a first step towards acquiring agency. At the end of the conference, she makes up her mind to negate all prohibitions that have restricted her agency, deciding to pursue the man to whom she has taken a liking and who would generally be considered out of her reach because he is conventionally good-looking, while she is not. The discussion on de-settling derivatives may be summarized as in Fig. 9.5.

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Fig. 9.5 De-settling the lettered city

9.4.3 De-canonizing the Temple and the Export House The last two sites that are taken up for analysis are the export packhouse and Guruji’s ashram. Nikhil is an okra exporter whose job involves sorting, grading, cleaning, and treating the agricultural produce to meet international quality standards. Suresh riffs on his profession by naming his company (OK Ra)o after the product, okra, that he exports. Belying expectations of the smart and gleaming internationally connected workplace generally associated with Bengaluru, the tech capital of India, the packhouse is a seedy-looking establishment with mouldy walls, loose, exposed cables, and a flimsy tin signage that points visitors in the direction of the packhouse. Nikhil’s office desk, crammed with slips of papers heaped and pierced through with a steel rod to hold them together, is far from the new-age digital workspace commonly associated with Bengaluru (Fig. 9.6). The geometric shapes in the packhouse—box-like cooling chambers, cuboid cubicles, rectangular sorting tables, and angular packing boxes—conform with the canon archetype of the workplace with separated work areas for different tasks. However, the packhouse is devoid of the sheen that is expected from the offices of export companies. By selecting a grimy workspace, which uses obsolete technology, including a volatile and dangerous refrigerant called R-40. Suresh highlights the gritty underbelly of the polished end product that is exported to markets in high-income countries from low-wage regions. Pushpavalli is unfazed by the purported technical complexity of an export-oriented business. Her plan for avenging the humiliations that she has suffered for Nikhil’s sake involves contaminating his water supply so that his consignment is rejected. She is unable to forget the time when a policewoman had slapped her after yet another attempt to win Nikhil’s affection had driven her to take excessive risks. Her rage increase when she sees the CCTV footage of Nikhil embracing the

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Fig. 9.6 The grimy interiors of the packhouse at O.K. Rao Exports

doctor he is dating, and she sets out to blow up the place using R-40. Pushpavalli appropriates the unfettered access to the packhouse that Nikhil has granted her to take revenge on him. The tiny cooling chamber where she sets up the explosion is a liminal space like the hidden factory backroom in Cristina Peri Rossi’s story “Strange Circumstances.” Both sites bring out the destructive potential of liminality, urging the liminars to break all restrictive rules. In this context, one may articulate a liminal chronotope of the warehouse that has an oxymoronic spatial element—small spaces that allow free flow of suppressed frustrations; and an equally compressed, explosive temporality, in which it takes only a few moments to make an open declaration of hidden emotions. The temple is another de-canonized space in the series. Instead of the rock-solid spatiality that is usually associated with temples and other sites of religious importance, Guruji’s ashram consists of a flimsy marquee. Pushpavalli’s mother insists that her daughter visit the Guruji when he is holding his camp in Bengaluru. Suresh casts her satirical eye on the business of spirituality in which ordinary men masquerading as Godmen go from city to city like travelling salesmen peddling their blessings and dire prophecies. The interior of the makeshift temple that Guruji sets up for his performance of divinity, plastered with shiny pink satin and lit up with traditional oil lamps, resembles a typical Hindu place of worship, but on the outside, its walls are made of coarse canvas. Thus, Suresh’s depiction of the ashram may be seen as an anitgonal archetype that is unlike a traditional Hindu temple, which has one or several stone idols of designated gods and goddesses. Still, people come in here and express the same spirit of devotion towards an ordinary person that they would towards a god. Thus, Guruji’s ashram is a symbol of the self-deception practiced by

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Fig. 9.7 Pushpavalli at Guruji’s camp ashram

the masses of people who refuse to recognize that, as one of the “devotees” says, “it is all a scam.” Growing urbanization with its rewards of material well-being and an increasingly scientific and rational spirit in everyday life has strangely not diluted the need for religious faith or not-so-holy substitutes. In fact, the sense of a loss of community, the tribulations of big-city living, fear of unemployment, and lack of job security have driven a lot of people to search for anchors in faith, even though that connection may be manifestly fraudulent like the one offered by the Guruji. Pushpavalli is among those who refuse to be taken in by the Guruji’s charisma. She does not change her mind even after he declares ominously that she should return to Bhopal because she will not get what she had come to Bengaluru for. She does not argue with him, but her silence indicates her stubborn resolve to act against his advice. She does not fall in with the faux-spirituality of the ashram; when Nikhil turns up at the ashram at the same time, she avails of the opportunity to get close to him by ingratiating herself with his mother (Fig. 9.7). The ashram emerges as a place of quack therapy that offers prophecies as placebos. Thus, the ashram shifts from the paradigm of religion and spirituality so that it can be seen as an establishment governed by the logic of commerce, where crafty godmen may ply their trade. Through the packhouse, Suresh disrupts the syntax of globalized commerce, which projects all participants involved in the process as beneficiaries. She shows the exporters who base their business models on low-wage workers and low-cost, antiquated, and unsafe technology (Fig. 9.8).

9.5 Conclusion

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Fig. 9.8 De-canonizing the sites of tradition and modernity

9.5 Conclusion This chapter has examined the coming-of-age of women comedians in India in the twenty-first century, concluding that they have successfully overcome the marginalization of women in comedy. The focus of the chapter is on the work of Sumukhi Suresh who is the first stand-up comedian to secure a two-season deal with a major OTT platform. The innovative reinterpretation of the feminist trope of “madwoman” in her series Pushpavalli has been studied in-depth. Another mythological archetype that has been used as an analytic tool for the series is that of the trickster. Based on the analysis, one may conclude that the series portrays a strong link between body image concerns and mental health that is especially prevalent among women. The series is viewed as a Juvenalian satire that uses dark humour to represent grave social problems such as misogyny, language-based discrimination, and marginalization of experiential knowledge systems. The focus on the spatiality of the PG accommodation, tea stall, library, conference centre, packhouse, and the godman’s ashram builds a deeper understanding of the social commentary that Sumukhi Suresh attempts to make through Pushpavalli.

References Badle ki Aag. In Pushpavalli Season Two. n.p.: Amazon Prime, 2020. Bhopal to Bangalore. In Pushpavalli Season One. n.p.: Amazone Prime, 2017. Eagle Attack. In Pushpavalli Season One. n.p.: Amazon Prime, 2017. Hai Hai Nagin. In Pushpavalli Season Two. n.p.: Amazon Prime, 2020. Mythology for the Millenial. https://www.firstpost.com/living/mythology-for-the-millennial-nar ada-may-be-a-trickster-but-he-deserved-better-than-a-life-of-illusions-6699521.html Tun Tun. dailyhunt, n.d. https://m.dailyhunt.in/news/india/english/bollyy-epaper-bolyy/tun+tun+ may+be+if+i+were+not+so+fat+and+obese+i+could+have+become+a+top+singer+in+filmsnewsid-124945942 Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). UP Texas.

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Bergson, H. (1991). Laughter: An essay on the meaning of the comic (C. Brereton & F. Rothwell, Trans.). Macmillan. Bronte, C. Jane Eyre. n.p.: Planetebook.com [1847] n.d. Retrieved January 3, 2021, from https:// www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks/jane-eyre.pdf Chesler, P. (1972). Women and madness. Doubleday. Crazy Ex-girlfriend. Seasons One to Four. Created by Rachel Bloom. n.p.: CBS, 2015–2019. de Vries, J. (1933). The problem of Loki. Societas Scientiarum Fennica. Donaldson, E. J. (2002). The corpus of the madwoman: Towards a feminist disability studies theory of embodiment and mental illness. NWSA Journal, 14(3), 99–119 (Feminist Disability Studies. Autumn). Drabelle, D. (2012). The Case of S. Weir Mitchell. The Pennsylvania Gazette, Dec, 43. https://www. upenn.edu/gazette/1112/feature3_1.html Eliot, T. S. ([1919] 1948). Hamlet. In Selected essays. Faber and Faber. Gilbert, S. M., & Gubar, S. (2000). The madwoman in the attic. Yale UP. Gordon, E. F. (2000). Mockingbird years: A life in and out of therapy. Basic Books. Gordon, E. F. (2017, September 5). Against solidarity. The American Scholar. https://theamericans cholar.org/against-solidarity/ Haraway, D. (1999). The biopolitics of postmodern bodies: Determinations of self in immune system discourse. In Feminist theory and the body—A Reader (pp. 203–215). Routledge. Hard, R. (2004). The Routledge handbook of Greek mythology. Routledge. Kay, K. (2018). New Indian Nuttahs. Palgrave Macmillan. Kermalu, K. (2017, December 26). Pushpavalli review. First Post. https://www.firstpost.com/entert ainment/pushpavalli-review-sumukhi-suresh-creates-a-show-you-cannot-turn-your-head-awayfrom-4275645.html La Vanguardia. Giardinetto Sessions: Juan Pablo Villalobos. YouTube Video, 24:38, April 4, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvCZNqHY52k&ab_channel=LaVanguardia Martin, D. (2007, May). The rest cure revisited. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 164(5), 737–738. Masand, R. Sumukhi Suresh Interview with Rajeev Masand, YouTube Video, 23:16, March 30, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YelCFV_2aGs&ab_channel=RajeevMasand Modi, R. J. (2021). Meet the women on the Indian comedy circuit. Vogue, April 26. https://www.vogue.in/magazine-story/meet-the-women-on-the-indian-comedy-circuit-whoare-taking-over-our-screens-and-instagram-feeds/ Pushpavalli. Seasons One and Two. Created by Sumukhi Suresh. n.p.: Amazon Prime, 2017. Rama, A. (1996). The lettered city. Duke University Press. Sansone, R. A., & Sansone, L. A. (2010). Fatal attraction syndrome: Stalking behavior and borderline personality. Psychiatry (Edgemont), 7(5), 42–46. Sharma, S. (2017, December 27). Pushpavalli review. Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/ article/entertainment/television/pushpavalli-review-sumukhi-suresh-web-series-amazon-primevideo-5001120/ Sood, A. (2017, December 23). Sumukhi Suresh’s Pushpvalli. The Hindu. https://www.thehindu. com/entertainment/movies/sumukhi-sureshs-pushpavalli-is-an-admirable-attempt-at-invertinga-tired-tale/article22234291.ece Stott, A. (2005). Comedy. New Critical Idiom, Routledge. Suresh, S. (2020, April 2). How she built Pushpavalli. Interview with Jessica Xalxo, Rolling Stone. https://rollingstoneindia.com/sumukhi-suresh-on-how-she-built-pushpavalli-a-better-sec ond-act/ Swift, J. ([1729] 2008). A modest proposal and other short pieces. Penn State University. Szádeczky-Kardoss, I. ([1993] 2005). Báthory Erzsébet igazsága. Erzsébet Báthory’s Truth (L. Nehrebeczky, Trans.). Nesztor Kiadó. The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders. World Health Organization, 1993. Retrieved June 28, 2021, from https://www.who.int/classifications/icd/en/GRNBOOK.pdf Tu-tu Main-main. Created by Nirja Guleri. n.p.: DD Metro, 1994–1996. Ye jo hai Zindagi. Written by Sharad Joshi. n.p.: Doordarshan, 1984. Zabaan Sambhal Ke. Directed by Rajiv Mehra. n.p.: DD Metro, 1993–1994.

Chapter 10

Carol Lay’s Comics

Abstract When Iñigo Silva released his documentary titled Cómic: Noveno Arte (1989), it put a stamp of approval on the contribution that the comic has made to the arts and baptized it the ninth art. As a distinctive artform, the comic demands an analytic lexicon for itself. The chapter discusses the key articulations proposed by prominent comic critics—Román Gubern, Will Eisner, Thierry Groensteen, and Scott McCloud—to develop a suitable lexicon. The works of Carol Lay, a prominent woman cartoonist who started drawing during the Underground years of American comics, are selected for critical analysis. The chapter attempts to classify her work into three phases as her drawing style and thematic preferences undergo significant shifts during the forty years that she has been drawing. Subsequently, the chapter carries out a spatial analysis of her work. Through the gynocritic spatial view of selected spaces in Carol Lay’s comic, the chapter provides insights into the poetics of her visual structures. The liminal comes up as an illuminating concept that reveals possibilities of transforming entrenched notions such as those about the ordered workspace, spontaneous play-space, barbaric jungle, civilized city, manicured suburban neighbourhood, and garbage pile. The comics’ feminist stance is exposited not only in the portrayal of human protagonists but also through the gendered portrayal of spaces. Keywords Underground comics · Ninth art · Capabilities · Sequential art · Parody The six classical arts include painting, sculpture, architecture, theatre–literature, music, and dance. Photography and cinema found acceptance as art forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively. When Iñigo Silva released his documentary titled Cómic: Noveno Arte (1989), it put a stamp of approval on the contribution that the comic has made to the arts and baptized it the ninth art.1 The comic, having been recognized as the ninth art form, may be considered the youngest genre of cultural representations. The genre of comics includes cartoon strips, comic books, and graphic novels. Even before the documentary was released, the genre had attracted considerable critical attention. The iconic Italian cultural theorist Umberto Eco’s 1964 essay, “The 1

Cómic: Noveno Arte, directed by Alejandro Vallejo, produced by Iñigo Silva, 1989.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 J. Singh, Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1426-3_10

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World of Charlie Brown,” and his 1971 essay “On Chinese Comics” are early examples of scholarship that comics have elicited from intellectuals. Román Gubern’s The Language of Comics (1972), Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art (1985), Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1994), and Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics (1999) are also foundational critical commentaries on the genre that point to its semiotic complexity and representational potency. Any doubts about the genre’s critical credence were laid to rest when Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus, won the Pulitzer Special Award in Letters. In 2016, March: Book Three, a graphic novel about the civil rights movement in the USA, won the prestigious National Book Award for Young People’s literature, and in 2019, Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina became the first graphic novel to be nominated for the Man Booker Prize. There are several genre-specific awards that honour the cultural wealth created by comic artists. Main among these are the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, given in thirty-one categories, the Fauve d’Or and the Grand Prix prizes, awarded at the Angoulême Comic Festival in France, and the Spanish culture ministry’s National Comic Award, which is worth twenty-thousand Euros.

10.1 Women Artists and the Twentieth-Century American Comic The credit for creating the first American comic strip—The Yellow Kid, published in 1896—goes to R.F. Outcault. But, as the twentieth century approached, women cartoonists were not far behind. Trina Robbins, an accomplished cartoonist and comic “herstorian,” states that: A year after the birth of “The Yellow Kid,” Rose O’Neill had a comic strip published in the September issue of Truth. The previous month, her contribution had been a single-panel cartoon. It is possible that O’Neill’s September 1896 comic strip was the first published comic produced by a woman.

A few years later, Rose O’Neil would go on to be immortalized for creating the “Kewpies.” Cartoon images of these cherubic infants, accompanied by Rose’s verse, were published in leading early-twentieth-century women’s magazines. O’Neil was not an exception in the industry. Other women artists—Margaret Gebbie Hays, Marjorie Organ, Kate Carew, Louise Quarles, and Grace Kasson, contemporaries of Rose O’Neil—were also regularly published and paid for their cartoon drawings. In the 1910s, Katherine Patterson Rice, the creator of the cartoon strip Flora Flirt, became popular. Until that time, though the representations of women were conformist in the depiction of women, the comic artists’ politics were staunchly feminist. Many of these women artists supported the suffragette cause through their work, and Rose O’Neill made posters for the movement. Women cartoonists were popular through the 1920s and 1930s. Fay King was a prolific artist whose work was published in three leading newspapers. Apart from King, there were various “flapper” artists, Nell Brinkley main among them, who

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enjoyed a wide readership.2 Brinkley’s work inspired many women artists, so that “[b]y the end of the 1920s and well into the 1930s, a score of talented women […] were turning out both single panels and comics featuring chic and clever flappers.”3 Thus, one can conclude that in the first half of the twentieth century, women artists had a powerful presence in the publishing industry. The number of women cartoonists peaked in the 1940s.4 However, the post-Second World War situation was far less favourable for them. The dominant genre in the 1950s was the superhero comic. Unsurprisingly, there were hardly any women creators in this testosterone-driven field. The only women artists who were able to breach the ubiquitously male citadel of superhero comics were Marie Severin and Ramona Fradon. Trina Robbins, in her “herstory” of women cartoonists, marks out three turning points in the twentieth century for women artists. These occurred in the years 1954, 1972, and 1993. The first turning point was the publication of Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Fredric Wertham in 1954. Dr. Wertham specialized in studying unconscious motivations for violent behaviour, especially among juvenile delinquents. In his opinion, comic books heightened deviancy in troubled children and impacted most children adversely, teaching them to be criminals.5 Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency largely agreed with the views expressed in Dr. Wertham’s book on the link between comics and criminal tendencies among the young. The comic industry, suffering from the subsequent backlash of negative opinion, went into a slump. The opportunities for women artists, already made scarce by superhero dominance, became even scanter. But, despite the lack of commercial avenues, women continued to draw cartoons and found acclaim in the Underground Comix movement, a countercultural wave that began in the 1960s. Though, even here, women artists had to struggle against male predominance. Lee Marrs, a leading woman artist of the Underground Comix, writes that “It was kind of like a boy’s club […] a closed club […] All the underground comics consisted of friends printing friends. They were all buddies; they didn’t even let us in.”6 The rejection of women artists by their male counterparts in Underground Comix led to the second turning point in 1972. Women artists constituted a significant stylistic and thematic segment of the movement. Some of them came together to form a collective in 1972 called Wimmen’s Comix, which published numerous remarkable

2

The word flapper is used to describe a generation of women in the USA in the 1920s who dressed and conducted themselves unconventionally—they smoked and drank alcohol in public, danced at jazz clubs, and practised a sexual freedom that shocked the older generation’s sense of moral behaviour. 3 Trina Robbins, Pretty in Ink (Seattle: Fantagraphic, 2013), 34. 4 Robbins, 152. 5 Ryan Chaloner Winton Hall and Susan Hatters Friedman, “Comic Books, Dr. Wertham, and the Villains of Forensic Psychiatry,” The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, Volume 48, Number 4, (2020): 537. 6 Lee Mars, quoted in Robbins, 128.

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works created by member artists.7 The collective shared the countercultural ethos that went against the grain of the commercially successful trends in comics in two ways: Firstly, their work did not target young readers, and secondly, they exalted an alternative lifestyle far removed from bourgeois, white-collar, and affluent settings of mainstream comics. Moreover, the portrayal of women in Wimmen’s Comix and other Comix magazines, like Pandora’s Box and Abortion Eve, differed from both that of the countercultural male artists and the market-driven superhero artists. Superhero comics extolled the masculine stereotype of an invulnerable man who could be relied upon to “rescue the world,” relegating women characters to docile roles that augmented the hero’s unquestionable powers. Misogynist tones shaded even the countercultural comics by male artists of the underground movement during the 1980s; wherein women were frequently shown as sexual objects of male fantasies.8 Ana Merino, a prominent literary critic of the genre, notes that: The discourse, which aimed to be contra cultural and mock the values of a conservative society through provocation, lacking self-awareness, resorted to old machista stereotypes in which the woman evoked sickening fascination and abhorrence and ended up being the object on which they projected their frustrations.9

In contrast, women comic artists of Underground Comix showcased women’s acutely vulnerable predicament in a chauvinistic society. Artists of the collective frequently drew and wrote about coming to terms with their traumatic experiences of abandonment, abortion, and rape. Perhaps due to these disturbing themes, they did not receive support from retailers. Comic books stores, whose client base was largely children and adolescents, ordered only a few copies of women-oriented works like Wimmin’s Comix and did not renew orders when they ran out. Consequently, these comics stayed out of easy reach of women and girl readers, and “by 1993, the situation for women in comics was dismal.”10 The final turning point in the century came in 1993 when a revolution of sorts began that addressed the distribution side of the industry. There was already a wealth of talent among women artists. They were producing exceptional work which had an audience, but they needed to find a way of channelizing their work to their potential, mostly female readers. Organizations like Friends of Lulu launched various initiatives to popularize comics among women readers. They conducted surveys to find out women’s preferences and prepared handbooks for retailers that aimed at convincing them to stock comics by women and for women. South America also produced its first major woman comic artist in the 1990s. The Argentinian Maitena Burundarena named her internationally famous cartoon 7

The year 2002 saw the publication of two major critical volumes on the underground wave: Trina Robbins’ How I became a Herstorian and Patrick Rosenkranz’ Rebel Visions, the Underground Comix Revolutionary. Rosenkranz portrays the trend as a largely masculine countercultural phenomenon. Though he mentions Trina Robbins, he does not include several noteworthy artists of the movement such as Roberta Gregory, Mary Wings, Diane Noomin, Aline Kominsky, and Doris Seda. 8 Robbins, 78. 9 Ana Merino, Diez Ensayos para pensar el cómic (León: UP León, 2017), 115. 10 Robbins, 142.

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strip after herself. Ana Merino notes that Maitena participated in the underground movement from the margins.11 Like her North American counterparts, Maitena broke with thematic conventions to create a comic whose audience was primarily mature women. Other Latin American artists who were either directly influenced by the Underground Comix movement or through Maitena’s work are Powerpaola from Ecuador, Maliki from Chile, and Sole Otero and Agustina Guerrero from Argentina. The influence of the Underground Comix movement was felt across the Americas.

10.2 Carol Lay and the Post-underground Phase in Women’s Comics In the USA, several women artists who had contributed to Wimmen’s Comix and similar publications are not considered part of the movement because they developed their distinctive styles in the 1990s, that is, in the post-underground phase. Carol Lay is a leading name among the post-underground graphic–comic writer–artists. She started drawing in the 1970s, but she acquired a distinctive style only at the start of the 1990s. Lay’s long struggle to get recognition was not unusual for women comic artists at that time. The works of many such artists are included in Diane Noomin and Aline Koominsky’s two-volume anthology titled Twisted Sisters published in 1991 and 1995, respectively. It is a compilation of leading women artists of the underground and post-underground movements. Ana Merino, a comic artist, poet, and one of the leading voices in comic criticism, refers to some of the artists included in these anthologies as “daughters of the underground.” According to Merino, Carol Lay, Phoebe Gloeckner, Debbie Dreschler, and Julie Doucet are key figures of the post-underground phase. “These four women represent the new alternative strands of the post-underground phase and consolidate the female comic artist’s position among comic authors.”12 She identifies a strong “intimist line” (línea intimista) as a common strain in their works. Three of the four definitive artists of the movement distilled their personal traumas in their works. Phoebe Gloeckner is described by a family friend, Robert Crumb, who is a famous comic artist, as “indestructible” for having survived “a childhood that would have killed many people.” Debbie Dreschler had to undergo therapy to deal with an emotional crisis. Julie Doucet suffered from epilepsy. Their experiences of an unhappy childhood, psychological disorder, and physical impairment are major themes in their comics. Their struggles with these challenges defined their work to a large extent. Carol Lay’s comic art also draws from her personal experiences, but her fictionalized worlds are not over-determined by autobiographical influence. Her prodigious narrative and artistic ability allow her to re-imagine her personal challenges as social problems. 11

Ana Merino, “El Eje Femenino,” in Presentes: Autoras de tebeo de ayer y hoy (n.p.: AECID, 2017), 34. 12 Merino, “El eje,” 29.

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10.3 The Poetics of Comics Before commencing a reading of Carol Lay’s work, it would be educative to take stock of some basic syntactic and rhetoric specificities of the genre of comics. Comics combine image and text; therefore, comic theory draws extensively from the critical lexicon of art, film, and literature. Perspective, proportion, colour, lighting, framing, literary rhetoric, and linguistic pragmatics are important inputs in comic analysis. However, unlike art, the comic is not static—it involves movement; unlike cinema in which each screen moment appears all-at-once, the page of a comic has two narrative planes—an all-at-once effect and a frame-by-frame impact of each panel; and unlike literature, the comic uses the non-verbal along with verbal language. Therefore, the fields of art, cinema, and literature do not provide a comprehensive array of tools and approaches that would enable an in-depth reading of the comic. The comic critic also needs to understand how terms unique to comics—frames, panels, gutters, word balloons, thought clouds, gridding, braiding, and lettering—affect the reader’s perception of the genre. The first step to analysing comics is to be aware of the constitutive elements that have been highlighted by critics who have attempted to craft a definition for the genre. In his 1972 work, El lenguaje de los cómics (The Language of Comics), Román Gubern defines the comic as a “narrative structure constituted by a progressive sequence of pictograms in which elements of phonetic writing may be integrated.” In 1985, Will Eisner employed a shorter definition, referring to comics as “sequential art.” Scott McCloud, while attempting to add to Eisner’s definition in his 1993 critical work Understanding Comics-The Invisible Art, concludes that Eisner’s definition captures all the essential elements of the genre. One integral part of Eisner’s definition is sequentiality, and the other is art. Sequentiality implies narrative progression, which can rarely be accomplished without verbal language, and art denotes the use of iconic language. To examine the use of iconic language, one must appreciate the difference between cartoons and comics. According to McCloud, cartoons are a picture-making style; whereas, comics are a medium that uses that style. He further states that cartooning is not just a way of drawing. It is a way of seeing; it is a way of amplification through simplification. The more cartoony an image, the more universal it becomes because it erases individual physical features.13 For example, eyes represented by just two dots could represent a wide variety of eyes of varying shapes and colours. Cartooning is the default comic style because, without it, there would be little difference between comics and photographs. To analyse sequential progression in any comic, one would find it helpful to take note of the difference between series and sequence. Thierry Groensteen makes a productive distinction between series and sequence. He observes that a series is comprised of images that show “iconic, plastic, or semantic correspondences.”14 On the other hand, different sequences are constituted by sets of images belonging 13 14

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (New York: Harper, 1994), 26. Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics (Jackson: UP Mississippi, [1999] 2007), 146.

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Fig. 10.1 Panel, gutter, and frame

to distinct semantic planes but in a syntagmatic relationship to one. Looking at an extract from one of Carol Lay’s “Story Minute” narratives shown in Fig. 10.1, one can visualize the differences between series and sequence. The frames of both panels are thin black lines. The panels are of unequal size and are separated by a gutter. In the second panel, we see that there is an incrusted frame of a photograph within the panel. Incrusted framing creates a zoom-in effect in a static image. The angular shape of the word balloon introduces an edginess in the words it contains, connoting a false note in the cheerful verbalization of “Say ‘cheese.’”. Images in the left panel of Fig. 10.1 are part of a series as they lie on the same semantic plane, that of a family visit, which usually involves eating together and taking photographs to remember the moment by. Whether one considers the second panel to be on the same semantic plane depends on what the reader brings into the pause generated by the separating gutter. The second panel shows the photograph, which the girl took in the first panel. It is shown mounted with photo corners in an album or a scrapbook. The artist leaves it to the reader to decide how much time may have elapsed between the two panels. The use of the past tense in the verbal voiceover “She was the best mother-in-law in the world” suggests that the girl has lost touch with the mother-in-law either because she is dead, or because the girl is now separated from her husband, or because she lives far away, or has simply decided never to see her again after the first meeting. If the reader decides that the image in the second panel represents an event that occurred soon after the first, then the semantic plane stays the same—both images are related to the family visit. However, if the reader interposes a longer interval between the panels, then the second panel conveys an impression generated by a sustained reflection on the relationship. In this construal, the link between the two panels is not dependent only on the family

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visit. Separated by a long temporal lapse, the panels become a sequence of two distinct events rather than images in the same series. The girl’s reflective recollection dilutes the semantic unity between the two panels without disrupting it altogether. In Fig. 10.1, the semantic connections between camera and photograph, tool and product, and cause and effect generate a notion of a series across the sequence of panels. The gutter creates multiple options for linking the panels it separates. McCloud sees the gutter as the key to the “magic and mystery” of comics. He says, Despite its unceremonious title, the gutter plays host to much of magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics. Here in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea. Nothing is seen between the two panels, but experience tells you something must be there.15

Generally, the frame locks in a scene that is played out in a single moment in time. Thus, the frame delimits not only the space of one panel from another but also the time. Moreover, the frame determines the size of the panel, indicating the duration of the moment. The longer left panel in Fig. 10.1 suggests that the meeting between the girl and the mother-in-law lasted, or appeared to last, a long time, whereas the image in the right panel lasted, perhaps, only as long as it takes to turn the page while flipping through an album. The thickness of the frame might suggest the degree of separation. The thick encrusted frame of the photograph in the left panel marks out a definitive spatio-temporal separation. Carol Lay’s cartooning of the characters amplifies specific characteristics through simplification. The only distinctive aspect of the girl’s appearance—her bobbed hair with an upward tilt at the back—evokes a breeziness in her attitude. The husband’s cartoon is so non-distinctive as to make him fade into the background, allowing the narrative to focus on the relationship between the mother-in-law and daughter-inlaw relationship. The man is shown as the inert catalyst, without whom the relationship would not have existed. The mother-in-law is “simplified” as a vampire by verbally highlighting the only quality that determines the relationship—“she was a night-person.” Her nocturnal habits make it impossible for her to interact with the “day people” so she leaves them alone, making her “the best mother-in-law in the world.” By omitting the girl from the panel and depicting an absent mother-in-law in the photograph, the artist de-personalizes the punch line. The visual logic of the concluding panel proposes that it is not only the girl in the comic who assesses the relationship on the parameter of absence—a non-interfering attitude would make any mother-in-law “the best in the world.” Furthering the discussion on the fundamentals analysing the comic, one will examine the importance of sequentiality. At least two juxtaposed panels that integrate text and image make up a comic. Creating sequentiality involves creating transitions between panels. McCloud identifies six types of transitions: moment-to-moment; action-to-action; subject-to-subject; scene-to-scene, crossing great distances and time intervals; aspect-to-aspect; and non-sequitur, which have no apparent logic. 15

McCloud, 66.

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His analysis of transitions in selected “straightforward storytelling” comics such as Hergé’s Tintin and Doyle and Decarlo’s Betty and Veronica shows a predominance of action-to-action transitions, which make up 65–70% of the total transitions; the remaining ones are either subject-to-subject or scene-to-scene transitions. The other three kinds of transitions—that typically slow down the narrative, drawing the reader into the intimacy of the moment—are completely absent. McCloud turns to the Japanese artist Osamu Tezuka’s work to find examples of moment-to-moment transitions. The American critic could have as easily found examples of different transition combinations close by had he looked at the work of Carol Lay, who uses numerous moment-to-moment and aspect-to-aspect transitions even in her “straightforward storytelling” comics. The transition between panels in Fig. 10.1 is a scene-to-scene transition because it changes the spatial and temporal setting of the narrative from the mother-in-law’s house to either the couple’s or the girl’s residence. However, in the full page-length story titled “Momster” from which the panels were extracted, out of the total of ten transitions, five are aspect-to-aspect, three are subject-to-subject, and two are scene-to-scene. Thus, the slow-moving aspect-to-aspect transitions dominate the story, and there are no action-to-action transitions—a complete contrast to the eighteen artists that McCloud studies, all of whom are men. The different proportion of fast and slow transitions in the comics of Carol Lay and those of male writers analysed by McCloud suggests that the transition pattern may be an indicator of the feminine or masculine tone of a comic. The two final aspects of the poetics of comics that are examined in this section are gridding and braiding. Thierry Groensteen describes gridding as a pre-production stage in comic writing. It precedes and influences the page layout and breakdown of the narrative into semantically coherent panels. Gridding “consists of dividing the available space into a number of units or compartments.”16 It follows that in dividing space, gridding also carries out “a primary repartition of the narrative material.”17 Whereas gridding is pre-production, braiding is crafted in the last stages of production, when the artist decides the within-panel arrangement. Braiding is a visual rhetoric tool that interrupts the linear relations among panels. The reader’s eye is expected to trace the same path as when reading a left-to-right writing system. Braiding prompts the eye to loop back unexpectedly, creating a bridge between panels at different levels. An example of this may be seen in an extract from “The Invisible City” by Carol Lay. In Fig. 10.2, the far-right panels in the two rows are not in a linear sequence, but they are connected through braiding. Together they constitute a visual rhyme. The top-right panel frames a screaming woman, shouting at her children, who are asking to be let out of a locked room. A detailed discussion of the story comes up later in the chapter. At this stage, suffice it to say that for the affluent, shouting woman, her children are like other acquisitions that she likes to possess but having the children running around the house exhausts her patience. The bottom right panel shows an unethical businessman who plans to “kidnap a little girl” so that he can sell her for 16 17

Groensteen, 144. Ibid.

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Fig. 10.2 Braiding across sequences

adoption. The doorway that acts as an incrusted frame for the body, an impatient barrage of words, and the aggressive, advancing, upright postures braid the two panels, bringing them closer than their placement in the linear sequence. Braiding results in the “semantic enrichment and a densification of the ‘text’ of the comic.”18 The braided panels in Fig. 10.2 present a layered portrait of acquisitiveness: the woman has acquired more than the permitted number of children even though she does not have the patience to care for them; the man who is already wealthy wants more money even at the cost of committing a crime. The reader senses the hint of a dance step as the woman whose back is turned to the reader appears to swing around, turning into the man facing and approaching the reader. As the eye moves back and forth, the panels create a revolving door effect. Braiding builds a narrative bridge across panels and, thus, between the semantic camps that they contain—the domestic and the commercial. Having presented the fundamentals involved in analysing comics, one may proceed with examining the thematic and stylistic shifts in Carol Lay’s artistic journey.

18

Groensteen, 147.

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10.4 Carol Lay’s Artistic Journey Carol Lay published her first story, “The Misogynist,” in the countercultural feminist magazine Wimmen’s Comix in 1972.19 The three-page short comic story introduces the theme of misogyny that Lay would continue to address throughout her oeuvre. However, over the next four decades, other themes would feature prominently in her work, and her visual language would also transform significantly. There are three broad phases in Lay’s literary–artistic journey. On the basis of Lay’s depiction of women protagonists, her work may be seen to fall into three phases—agential, capacitated, and emancipated.

10.4.1 Phase I—Agential In Carol Lay’s first comic, “The Misogynist,” all women characters are portrayed as victims. Norman Pierce, the documentary film director in the comic, murders five of his women crew members to generate sensational publicity before the screening. The women do not get justice as Norman is sentenced to only a “moderate-term in prison,” and his film, initially withdrawn in the heat of the scandal, is screened by the TV channel that commissioned it. The portrayal of women as victims in her first story is an exception among the stories from Lay’s first phase. The definitive work from this phase is the Good Girls series, in which the women protagonists show agential strength.20 However, they lack the confidence to project a visual language that would set them apart from mainstream portrayals of women as agreeable, submissive individuals. In order to be heard, they imitate, but, resisting specularization, they generate imitations that are not flattering but parodic. A parody is often the upcoming comedian’s opening choice because imitation of a well-known original easily attracts attention. Carol Lay makes a similar choice in the first phase of her work. The first volume of the Good Girls series (1987) is a parody of the dominant comic genre of the time—the Superhero comics. Like Lois Lane, from the Superman series, the comic’s protagonist, Monica Saunders, is a reporter who attracts the attention of 19

Carol Lay, “The Misogynist,” in Wimmen’s Comix #8 (Seattle: Fantagraphic Books, [1972], 2016), https://comiconlinefree.net/the-complete-wimmen-s-comix/issue-TPB_1/322. 20 Carol Lay, Good Girls Issue # 1 (Agoura: Fantagraphic Books, 1987), https://readcomiconline. li/Comic/Good-Girls/Issue-1?id=171778. Good Girls # 2 (Agoura: Fantagraphic Books, 1987), https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/GoodGirls/Issue-2?id=171779. Good Girls # 3 (Westlake Village: Fantagraphic Books, 1988), https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/ Good-Girls/Issue-3?id=171780. Good Girls # 4 (Westlake Village: Fantagraphic Books, 1989), https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/ Good-Girls/Issue-4?id=171781. Good Girls # 5 (Seatlle: Fantagraphic Books, 1991), https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/GoodGirls/Issue-5?id=171782. Good Girls # 6 (Auburn: Rip Off Press, 1991), https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Good-Girls/ Issue-6?id=171783.

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a superhero. Another character, Sandy, is a photographer like Vicki Vale from the Batman comics. The third character, who became the most prominent one in later editions of Good Girl, Irene Van de Kamp, is an orphaned heiress like Batman’s public persona, Bruce Wayne. All three characters exhibit the parodic intent of mocking the original by imitating it irreverently. The lines of their bodies follow the hourglass template prescribed by their mainstream counterparts. However, despite modelling her protagonists after the “original” by copying their professions and body shapes, Lay sets up a parodic mockery. The superhero, Stupendo Boy, and his mother, Ultra Ma, are portrayed as childlike adults who dress up in capes and leotards and make– believe that they can fly. The mother–son duo does not fight crimes in the city; instead, they write letters to the Lonelyhearts section of the local newspaper in an effort to find a mate for Stupendo Boy. The villains in Good Girls are not evil masterminds with a game plan for mass destruction; they are psychotic stalkers, mercenary suitors, and sexually aggressive, make-believe superheroes. The story of the American heiress Irene Van de Kamp, which runs across all six volumes, parodies the conventions of the romantic novel. Irene’s parents were killed in Africa when she was a child. Members of a tribe rescued her and gave her a home. She adopted their traditions and even wore a labret to shape her lips, elongating them to form hanging loops. Through a series of coincidences, Irene finds herself back home to California and in possession of a multi-million-dollar legacy.21 By putting an “ugly,” unconventional-looking woman centre stage in a romance, Carol Lay anticipates William Steig’s famous fairy tale Shrek—in which two “ugly” people fall in love—by three years. Lay’s use of parody in the first phase of her work may be read as an attempt to resist male “specularization,” which Luce Irigaray understands as the male subject’s need for “reproduction of the same” by reflection.22 This reflection is an iterative process in which the woman will be asked to be not simply pretty–too much obvious symmetry is unexciting–nor too recognizably female-the intellect might then reduce her to some concept–nor too virtuous– this might arouse reason alone and provoke nothing but a little painful respect. Poised in suspense between the faculties of the male subject, woman cannot be decided about, and her beauty serves to promote the free play of mind.23

As a result of male specularization, the woman is constantly shaping herself, trying to be the reflection that the man wants to see. However, the man’s expectations are ever-changing; he looks at the woman’s beauty only to “promote the free play of [his] mind.” If at any point, he was to “decide about” the woman, that would constrain his control of her as it would indicate his satisfaction with her beauty, femininity, and virtue. He maintains her in a subservient role by constantly shifting his expectations. In the process, the woman is unable to envision a self-generated self-image. A woman objectified in this manner does not have recourse to a female language; she can only 21

Carol Lay, “Face the Facts of Love,” in Good Girls Issue #4. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, translated by Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell UP), 27. 23 Ibid., 207. 22

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Fig. 10.3 Extract from Good Girls Issue #4

imitate the male language. If the woman somehow retains a modicum of agency, she can use the parasitic potential of mimicry to enfeeble the host. Parody is an instance of parasitic mimicry. One can see differing levels of agency in three of Lay’s comics from phase one. The Irene stories have the lowest level of agency. In these stories, Lay draws her women protagonists’ bodies as uniformly curvaceous. The women in the comics have “the tiny waist, pointy breasts, turned-up nose, perfect hair, and [always wear] high heels”—a get-up that Lay herself would deride in her 2009 graphic memoir.24 Even the labret wearing Irene Van de Kamp, whose physical “deformity” challenges the accepted notions of a love story’s heroine, has a voluptuous body. Figure 10.3 shows Irene running away from a cloud of locusts. Though she is terrified, her running is drawn more like an elegant glide against an idyllic sylvan backdrop rather than a dash to save her life in a nightmarish jungle. Irene’s body, apart from her unusual lip feature, is conventionally graceful and recognizably feminine. A higher degree of agency could have been achieved by intensifying the parodic stroke at a few appropriate points in the story. Agential levels increase in the Monica Saunders stories. The following panel in Fig. 10.4 shows Monica finding out that her friend Sandy’s stalker has secretly entered the room. The threat of sexual assault is made clear in the top-centre panel, where the man says, “Just keep quiet and do what I say… otherwise, that pretty mouth won’t stay that way.” Shaken by a heightened threat perception, Monica pushes away her wellmeaning colleague Art, who happens to be visiting, and takes charge of the situation. In later panes that follow those shown in Fig. 10.4, Monica is shown knocking out the psychotic interloper with a heavy typewriter, thereby making a strong statement of female empowerment. But the overall effect is not one of empowerment and is essentially unchanged from the one in Fig. 10.4—a soft portrayal of the reaction to 24

Carol Lay, The Big Skinny (New York: Villard, 2008), 5.

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Fig. 10.4 Extract from Good Girls Issue #1

the threat of sexual assault. Recalling Will Eisner’s proposition that “posture, gesture, and grimace” are adjectives of visual language, one can see that an imminent sexual assault is narrated using soft adjectives.25 The attacker had been following Sandy for some time, ostensibly for photography. The panels in Fig. 10.4 portray the sequence of events that take place when the stalker breaks into her apartment. When Sandy is threatened by the stalker, her hands do not make a clutching or grabbing gesture; they are placed gently on her shoulder and thigh. If one were to focus on her body neck-down as shown in Fig. 10.5a, the panel could well be showing her as posing seductively for a photograph. However, Lay captures the horror of the incident in Sandy’s face. In Fig. 10.5b, it can be seen that Sandy’s eyes are popped open in terrified shock, and her lips are parted in a gesture of disgust at the stalker’s audacity. Thus, though Sandy’s bodily gestures are complaisant, her face registers a protest against her objectification by the stalker. The contrast between Sandy’s face and body

25

Will Eisner, Comics and the sequential Art (Tamarac: Poorhouse Press, [1985], 2000), 10.

10.4 Carol Lay’s Artistic Journey Fig. 10.5 a Close-up of Fig. 10.4. b Close-up of a

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(a)

(b)

shows that in this phase, Lay was able to claim only a limited degree of agency for her female protagonists. Unlike the female film crew of “The Misogynist,” Monica and Sandy do not fall victims to aggressive and deceitful men, yet their agential freedom does not empower them sufficiently to break away from male referentiality. The quantum of agency that these working women of the 1980s have lacks the momentum to propel them out of patriarchal prescriptions of femininity in dress and demeanour. Carol Lay’s self-cartoon in “The Visitation,” published in the same issue of Good Girls that featured the Irene panels shown in Fig. 10.5, marks the transition to the next phase, where women are successful in breaking free of normative dictates.26 The transitioning comic uses humour to present a writer’s struggle against writer’s block. 26

Carol Lay, “Visitation,” in Good Girls Issue #4.

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The muse who comes to inspire her is a female clown. The cartoon Carol believes the comic muse is a phony because she can’t remember any from her knowledge of Greek mythology. However, when she opens the Encyclopedia, she sees a picture of the comic muse dancing with the other nine muses. The muse tells her, “Actually, I used to be Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, but there isn’t much call for that anymore so, I was transferred to this department.” The story does not address gender hierarchy; instead, it presents an autonomous view of the woman. The cartoon Carol has a set of problems that have nothing to do with a man. “The Visitation” is the only funny comic in the issue, and Lay’s fine, crisp strokes suit the light-heartedness of the narrative. It can be seen in Fig. 10.6 that Carol Lay draws her own body without any visible curves, and she does not choose feminine clothes for her self-cartoon. The facial expressions of the writer are also not feminine—she bares her teeth in anger, aims the “muse-bazooka” confidently at the clown, and lets out the devil inside, distorting her face with horns, snake eyes, and eye jowls. Lay’s emancipated renditions of her own cartoon persona and template portrayals of the other women characters in Good Girls echo Fay King’s self-portraits. A top cartoonist of the 1920s and 1930s, King, drew her women characters in “breezy” curves but portrayed herself as resembling the gawky Olive Oyl from the well-known comic strip Popeye.

Fig. 10.6 Extract from “The Visitation”

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Fig. 10.7 Comparative poses

Juxtaposing the figures of Irene and Carol, drawn for the same issue, in Fig. 10.7, highlights the contrasting self-images of the two fictional personae. When one compares Carol’s menacing march to her bookshelf with Irene’s placid run to escape the locusts in the jungle. In Fig. 10.7, one can see two disparate visual adjectives, one indicating constriction and the other emancipation. As can be seen in Fig. 10.7, the heiress’ perfectly poised glide through the jungle is a rehearsed, corseted posture that connotes repression, whereas the despairing writer’s clenched fists and stomping feet manifest a liberated expression of frustration. The curvaceous fluidity of Irene’s graceful posture in the face of life-threatening danger is a synecdoche for the low self-esteem of most women protagonists in the “agential” phase. Irene, Monica, and Sandy’s body languages are always coded in the prescribed grammar of femininity, irrespective of their circumstances. The comics from the agential phase would pass the first two requirements of the Bechdel–Wallace test. A film is said to pass the test if “one, it has […] at least two women in it, two, who talk to each other about, three, something besides a man.”27 In contrast, the visual language seen in Fig. 10.6 is confident in its refusal to mimic accepted conventions for portraying the female body. The sharp lines, button eyes, de-eroticized female body, and playful ambience of “The Visitation” would become more pronounced in Lay’s second phase. 27

Alison Bechdel, “The Rule,” Dykes to Watch Out for, 1985, https://dykestowatchoutfor.com/wpcontent/uploads/2014/05/The-Rule-cleaned-up.jpg.

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10.4.2 Phase II—Capacitated A five-part series titled “The Thing under the Futon” commissioned by The LA Weekly in 1990 marks the beginning of Lay’s second phase, which comprises more than three hundred single-page-length strips collectively titled Story Minute, three booklength narratives—Now, Endsville, Sweet Sue, and Invisible City—and a hundredodd stand-alone page-length strips.28 Madame Asgar, one of Lay’s most memorable characters—a scientist in Invisible City, a magic potion seller in Sweet Sue, and a fortune teller in the shorter narratives—was created during this phase. This study sees the portrayal of women protagonists in this phase as capacitated individuals as against merely agential in phase one. They are financially self-sufficient, independent-minded, and indifferent about their attractiveness. These qualities keep them beyond the reach of male specularization of femininity, virtue, and beauty. This ability to be free from the calibration pressures of male specularization is here referred to as being capacitated. The nuanced difference between agency and capacitation may be understood in terms of kinetic activation of potential qualities. The idea of capacitation is in line with the capabilities approach to human welfare. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum explain the notion of capability with reference to freedom of choice: The life that a person leads can be seen as a combination of various doings and beings, which can be generically called functionings. These functionings vary from such elementary matters as being well nourished and disease-free to more complex doings or beings, such as having self-respect, preserving human dignity, taking part in the life of the community, and so on. The capability of a person refers to the various alternative combinations of functionings, any one of which (any combination, that is) the person can choose to have. In this sense, the capability of a person corresponds to the freedom that a person has to lead one kind of life or another.29

Sen and Nussbaum stress the importance of choice as a measure of human welfare. A higher capability implies a choice of “alternative combinations” in critical as well as everyday decisions. The notion of capability assumes agency and adds to it the availability of several alternatives and the freedom to choose from them as the indicator of human welfare. Women protagonists of Lay’s phase-one comics enjoyed agential freedom—they worked in the same professions as men or, as in the case of Irene, had enough wealth that made them financially independent. They did not accept victimization passively, yet their alternatives were limited. For example, to feel appreciated, Irene could not think of any options other than marrying a suitable man. The capacitated woman shown in phase two advances further towards emancipation through an active demonstration of her agential confidence. Activated confidence enables her to call out misogyny, forego relationships where she feels she is being “calibrated,” and seek affinities other than romantic relationships, where she feels fulfilled. 28 29

“About,” n.d., carollay, https://www.carollay.com/about. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, eds., The Quality of Life (Oxford: OUP, 1993), 3.

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Stylistically, the drawings of this phase feature what Lay refers to as “big teeth.”30 The colour palette is bold, the lines are crisp, and women’s body shapes are diverse. Thematically, the stories of the second phase expand to include themes like income inequality, consumerism, hedonism, competitiveness, technology dependence, and ecological degradation. The rhetoric of satirical humour is the dominant narrative register of the visual and verbal language. Phase two’s page layouts show greater uniformity and miniaturization than phase one; their greater intricacy demands greater deliberation on the part of the reader. It is worthwhile to read Lay’s phase-two works along the axes of innovation and invention. This bi-axial reading, focusing on the continuities and disruptions in the portrayal of women protagonists, presents a revealing map of the woman’s socio-economic repositioning in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Lay’s advance along the innovation axis can be seen at play in two protagonists from the second phase, who resonate with the two protagonists of phase one. To begin the discussion of innovation, one may recall Monica Saunder, the female protagonist of the “Stupendo Boy” story, which was a parody of the superhero genre. The superhero in the story shared an unusually close relationship with his mother. The mother–son relationship creates a resonant note between Monica Saunders and Jill Bailey, the protagonist of Now, Endsville. Jill’s boyfriend, Steve Baum, and his mother, Mrs. Baum, are thrill addicts. Like their phase-one counterparts, Stupendo Boy and Ultra Ma, they would not think twice about jumping off a high-rise. Jill Bailey and Steve Baum meet one day after she storms out of her psychiatrist’s clinic. Jill is furious with her therapist because she has been told that her taste in men is “somewhat immature.” As she stomps out of the high-rise, fists and teeth clenched, shoulders hunched up like a tiger about to lunge at its prey, a man swings down before her. He narrowly misses hitting her and lands safely upside down with a bungee cord tied to his ankles. On his second plunge, he saves Jill from being run over by lifting her off the pavement. Distracted by seeing the bungee jumper, Jill had not seen the approaching vehicle. Thus, though Jill is shown as a damsel in distress, it is also conveyed that the reason she was in danger was the man who appears to “rescue” her. He is in a position to rescue her only because it was he who put her in harm’s way in the first place. The artist’s repeated use of the metaphor of height in the narrative emphasizes the riskiness of their relationship. On their very first date, the couple goes skydiving. After that, in several consecutive scene-to-scene transitions, they are shown rafting the rapids in Colorado, diving from a cliff in Acapulco, jet boarding on a steep road in San Francisco, leaping off a ski ramp in the Swiss Alps, running a lava race in Hawaii, wing-walking in an unnamed location, and plumbing the ocean depths in the shark-infested waters around the island of Palau. The artist uses an intricate braiding technique that highlights the inherent instability of the relationship. In the panels of Fig. 10.8 that follow, Lay emphasizes the fragility of Steve and Jill’s relationship by using thin, broken motion lines in the background of their 30 Carol Lay, “Letter to readers,” gocomics, April 11, 2015, https://www.gocomics.com/lay-lines/ 2015/04/11.

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Fig. 10.8 Iconic representation of a fragile relationship

adventures. Criss-crossed hatches mark the ground where Jill lands after skydiving and the zip ribbons that signal motion in the cliff-dive resemble broken ladders and sharply pointed lean pillars that hold up the ski ramp in the Alps look barely strong enough to bear the pace of the relationship. The feeling of being on edge is echoed by the black and white contrast of the mountain peaks and conifer trees (Fig. 10.8). Steve tells Jill about his adrenaline addiction the very first time they meet: “It makes me feel alive to flirt with death,” he says. Jill also enjoys the excitation these experiences bring, but she’s in a dilemma. She wonders, “Is he that great, or am I that nuts.” Perhaps, both assessments are true. Steve comes very close to the description of the ideal man that she had given to her therapist: “Tall, sexy built, sandy hair, adventurous, good-looking, athletic with blue eyes, white teeth, and a red convertible.” By her standards, Steve is “that great,” but his obsessive quest for adventure drives her “nuts.” Yet, she hangs on to the relationship till he takes her to “the most dangerous place” of all—his mother’s house. Mrs. Baum is as fiercely adventurous as her son. However, unlike Steve, who seeks excitement outdoors, Mrs. Baum gets all her thrills inside the home. She has installed a trap door for unwanted visitors, keeps a snake for a pet, and serves the deadly Japanese delicacy, blowfish, as an appetizer. Jills put up with Mrs. Baum’s eccentricities politely until she asks Jill to play “Russian Roulette” with a revolver. In the “game,” one of the six chambers is loaded with a bullet, then the cylinder is given a spin so that none of the “players” knows which chamber is loaded. The players take turns at squeezing the trigger. The one who gets an empty chamber is the winner, and the one who gets the loaded one is “it.” Jill’s need for adrenaline does not match Mrs. Baum’s so she refuses to play the game. Her nerves already frayed with the evening’s experiences, Jill shouts back when Mrs. Baum mocks her for not having the guts: “No. Just no more patience for this neurotic, thrill-seeking nonsense. I’ve had it.” At this point in the story, Mrs. Baum announces that she has been insulted, and Steve immediately demonstrates his loyalty to his mother by declaring, “She’s not my girlfriend anymore.” Steve and Jill break up that evening. In an anti-climax, a few days after the break-up, the adventurous Steve has an accident. He slips into the bathtub, cracks his skull, and goes into a coma. Mrs.

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Baum blames Jill for the accident. Jill accepts the blame because before they met, Steve used to only take showers. Jill had introduced him to the pleasures of soaking in a bathtub. Dr. Otto, Jill’s therapist, confirms Jill’s culpability in Steve’s accident. Her response to Jill, “Yes, his switch from showers to baths reveals a reversion to childhood behaviour,” implies that Steve would have been safe had he not reverted to childhood behaviour after meeting Jill. The therapist wants to profit from Jill’s guilt. She tells Jill that there is a way of rescuing Steve’s consciousness and assuaging her guilt. “Evolving Doors” is an “ultra-high-tech service” that helps clients answer their “questions about life-afterdeath with a hands-on approach to their metaphysical problems.” The ultra-high-tech device is the “Lanski Launching Chair.” The apparatus is used to send the patient into the Limbo Room—a stage between life and death—where they exist in spirit form and can meet other spirits. Jill decides to go into the Limbo to find Steve’s spirit so that she can ask it to re-enter Steve’s body. In the liminal zone, Jill meets her dead parents and an affable man called Dexter Punt. Dexter is in Limbo because his wife tried to murder him to claim his life insurance payout. However, she was unsuccessful. Having been hit on the head with a heavy pan, Dexter too lies in a coma in the same hospital as Steve Baum. Jill asks Dexter to accompany her on her search for Steve’s spirit. As they wander together, Jill and Dexter discover that they enjoy each other’s company. In Fig. 10.9 that follows, Lay draws a gently undulating dreamscape, using curves and spheres—curling tendrils, rounded pebbles, and loosely wound spirals— to convey the smoothness of Jill and Dexter’s relationship vis-à-vis the jagged lines of Fig. 10.7. Jill finally finds Steve’s spirit standing over his body in the hospital room, trying to strangle Steve’s body. When she tries to stop him, the spirit tells her that the neardeath experience was the biggest rush his body had ever experienced and that he wanted the body to die “so that he can sample the rush to the next level.” Steve’s mother is also in Limbo because, impatient with Steve’s prolonged coma, she had shot herself. Mrs. Baum’s spirit grudgingly acknowledges Jill’s show of “guts” in coming to death’s edge to rescue Steve’s spirit. She asks Steve to consider getting back with Jill but Jill is enraged at their cavalier attitude to life. She makes up her

Fig. 10.9 Iconic evocation of easy togetherness

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Fig. 10.10 Representation of the Limbo as an in-between liminal space

mind against Steve and decides to meet Dexter in the real world. When she is brought out of the Limbo by the Evolving Doors scientists, she goes to the hospital to look for Dexter. She patiently waits by his bed for three months for him to recover from his coma. Post-recovery, they get married and spend forty years together. They die together in a plane crash. “On their fortieth anniversary, their plane goes down. They alone among all the passengers are completely calm.” The final frame of the novel is an example of long braiding. The metaphor of height that had connoted the fragility of Jill’s relationship with Steve is brought alive again as a sign of eternal togetherness in her relationship with Dexter. The Limbo, where Jill and Dexter find love, is a well-projected liminal zone. Its in-betweenness is highlighted in the narrative by multiple depictions of it being the site of an out-of-body experience. The spirit is in-between Jill’s alive body and her comatose state that imitates death. To enter the liminal space of the Limbo, the spirit must go out of Jill’s body (Fig. 10.10). Lay uses a different colour palette and patterns when she draws the Limbo and the living world. There are pleasing waves, colour splashes, and gardens with red roses in the Limbo, which are never used in the depictions of the living world. Jill’s entry into and exit from the Limbo is marked by a golden glow that stands out against a black background, whereas the Evolving Doors lab in the real world is coloured an unassuming lilac. The black and yellow contrast conveys a forceful transition out of reality. Jill’s feet turn into ghostly whisps in the Limbo, communicating a heightened perception of fluidity. The liminal Limbo, like any frontier zone, has multiple boundaries. It borders the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the experienced and the intuited, the scientific and the spiritual, and the doctored and the unadulterated. The Limbo sequence in Now, Endsville is the most effective visual confirmation of Ana Merino’s remark that Lay’s “metaphysics of the ordinary that transforms itself in an oneiric world is full of winks to the female legacy but is capable of conducting a dialogue with and integrating all readers.”31 Merino sees a capacity for integrating all readers, even those who are not avowedly feminist, as key to the cartoonist’s instant appeal. 31

Merino, “El eje,” 32.

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Fig. 10.11 Contrasting reactions from phases one and two

In phase two, Lay recasts Stupendo Boy’s delusional faith in his superpower of flying as Steve Baum’s faith in his ability to survive even the riskiest adventure. All of Steve’s attempts at extreme thrill-seeking, except for the subway ride, imitate flying. For both characters, the masculine way of flying, without any safeguards, gets them killed. Mrs. Baum and Ultra Ma’s deaths are similar. Mrs. Baum refuses the opportunity to return from Limbo to the world of the living because she and Steve want to experience the ultimate rush that death brings. Ultra Ma jumps off the fifth floor of a building after her son in a huff because Monica tells her not to as she cannot fly. Both mothers, obsessively attached to their sons, die to be with them. The progressiveness in the “female condition” is highlighted through Monica and Jill’s differing attitudes when they are faced with the news of the deaths of their respective mothers and sons. Figure 10.11 has two sets of panels, one each from “Ms. Lonelyhearts” and Now, Endsville, in which the protagonists’ reactions to the deaths can be seen. In the top-row panels of Fig. 10.11, Monica is shown trying to save Ultra Ma even though, earlier on in the story, the older woman had instructed her son to be “be aggressive” towards the girl. Compliantly, Stupendo Boy had grabbed Monica, causing the girl to shout out, “Kidnap! Rape! Murder!” Her forgiving attitude, demonstrated by the comforting smile in the middle panel in the top sequence, casts her as an angel. On the other hand, in the bottom-row panels of Fig. 10.11, Jill clamps her hands across her chest self-assuredly and lets the mother and son hear the full force of her anger. The visual grammar of each panel reinforces the protagonists’ moods. Both sequences use aspect-to-aspect transitions, which provide different perspectives of the same scene. The same kind of aspect-to-aspect transition is used to different ends. In the first sequence, the panels gradually close up on Monica’s face, and in the second, there is a sudden change from long-shot to close up and vice versa. In the

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final measure, Monica retains the docile attitude of sympathy, reproducing Stupendo Boy’s image of her but Jill represents the capacitated woman who refuses to be calibrated according to male directives, whether they are issued by the man to whom she is attracted or his mother. A brief discussion of another instance of innovative reinterpretation of a character from Lay’s phase one reveals the full extent of the artist’s confidence in presenting a more authentic woman in phase two. When all the gloss and glamour of Irene Van de Kamp’s wealth is peeled away, the result is the unnamed protagonist of “Women who Run with Skunks,” a Story Minute comic. There are several similarities between Irene and the protagonist of “Women who”: the Skunk-woman is abandoned as an infant, and Irene was orphaned as a child. Both are given shelter by “natives.” In an attempt to fit in, Skunk-woman rubs skunk-odour on her body, and Irene dresses up in designer gowns for soirees. Yet, they fail in achieving the desired objective of securing men who love them. However, their romantic relationships end differently. Irene settles for a blind man who finds her acceptable because he cannot see her “ugliness.” The Skunk-woman does not settle; she leaves her abusive partner, learns to protect herself, and returns to live with the friendly skunks. As the story is a Story Minute short, it has been reproduced in full in Fig. 10.12. It may be noticed in the penultimate panel of Fig. 10.12 that when the Skunkwoman returns to the forest, she is armed with a protective device called “Mace”—a popular 1960s brand of incapacitant spray. Incapacitant sprays are also used by the police as a weapon. A guidance manual for their use describes the effects of the spray: CS [2-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile] is a peripheral sensory irritant. In most cases, spraying will result in the subject’s eyes being forced shut, a burning sensation on the skin around the eyes and face when inhaled their breathing may be affected. In most cases, this action will be sufficient to render a subject incapable of continuing the attack. The effects may be instantaneous or can be delayed up to 20 seconds.32

The chemical compound CS is the active ingredient of tear gas. Brands like Mace market it in aerosol cans as self-defence equipment for women. The box of aerosol cans that the Skunk-woman is shown carrying contains deadly weapons. Her carefree smile belies a steely resolution to respond to violence with violence. As a capacitated woman, she knows how to incapacitate an assailant. Carol Lay’s innovative reinterpretation of characters in phase two demonstrates her exceptional skill at amplification through simplified miniatures. Lay creates capacitated characters through the distinct techniques of innovation and invention. This study considers Skunk-woman and Jill Bailey as examples of innovation and Madame Asgar, her most subversive and complex character, as an instance of ingenious invention. Visually, the character is as pared down as Jill. Madame Asgar’s only distinctive cartoon marker is a decorative comb that she wears 32

Guidance for the use of Incapacitant Spray, May, 2019, Association of Chief Police Officer of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, https://www.npcc.police.uk/documents/FoI%20publ ication/Disclosure%20Logs/Uniformed%20Operations%20FOI/2013/003%2013%20Att%2014% 20of%2015%20Guidance%20on%20the%20use%20of%20Incapacitant%20Spray.pdf.

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Fig. 10.12 “Women who Run with the Skunks”

like a crown, placed centrally in front of a large bun. The reader’s attention is drawn to the character’s head to amplify the significance of Madame Asgar’s mental faculties. Madame Asgar is featured in both book-length narratives from 1992. In Sweet Sue, she is a minor character—a vendor of magic potions that are used as quick fixes for emotional problems. In Invisible City, she is cast as the hero—a world-renowned

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scientist whose “methods are taught in major universities, although, she keeps her best secrets to herself.”33 She develops an anti-cancer medication to cure her cat and then files a patent for it. She is not motivated by money, but she has a robust sense of self-worth. The villain of the story, Madame Asgar’s antagonist, is named Harry Genius. He is a “baby-broker who has earned a fortune.” In the fictional world of the story, “birthrights”—the permits issued by the government for having a child—are rationed. The World Government allows each woman to have only one child. Birthrights are fungible permits, which can be traded across international borders. Mr. Genius pays poor women to give up their rights to have a child and sells these rights at a profit to his affluent clients who want more than the one permitted child. On the last deal, it took him months to find a woman who was willing to sell her birthrights so that his clients, a wealthy couple, could have an “extra” child. Birthrights are so expensive that Mr. Genius was able to fund the entire cost of setting up his business by selling the birthrights of his infertile wife. Recently, the price of birthrights has shot up because of an unfavourable movement in exchange rates. The commercially astute Mr. Genius assesses that “It’s not only hard to find that many broads willing to give up their rights to have their only child…But now only the super-super rich can afford to have extra kids.” To keep the dollars flowing in, Mr. Genius hits upon a new business idea. On the advice of his deputy, the meek Tony, he decides to license the plant life in “that South American rain forest” he owns to pharmaceutical companies for research. He is keen on hiring Madame Asgar as a scientist in his new enterprise so that he can make huge profits from her medical discoveries. When they meet, she does not hide her dislike for him. She is a crabby woman who deals with Harry perfunctorily, setting non-negotiable terms for her contract. She agrees to work with him only because she wants to invent new potions for which she needs ingredients from the rainforest. She is astute enough to realize Genius will try to cheat on the terms of the contract but also confident enough to know that she can outwit him. With her magic cures, secret knowledge, crown-comb, large hoop earrings, and uncanny ability to “see” despite being blind, Madame Asgar has many characteristics in common with the conventional witch archetype. However, with her indifference to money and desire to conserve the world, protect the vulnerable, and make the greedy suffer consequences for their avarice, Madame Asgar also subverts that archetype. Carol Lay had been a pioneer in casting Irene, an “ugly,” woman as her heroine in phase one. Similarly, in phase two, she pioneers the casting of an old, dour witch as the hero of her story.34 Harry Genius, Tony, and Madame Asgar travel to a South American city. Harry Genius has his office, residence, and laboratory in a treehouse because the country’s 33

Caorl Lay, Invisible City (Northampton: Kitchen Sink, 1993), n.p. The witch would not receive a sympathetic portrayal in mainstream culture until two decades after The Invisible City was published. The 2014 Disney feature film, Maleficient, portrays the witch from Sleeping Beauty as a woman who seeks revenge from the man who had abandoned and mutilated her.

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laws do not permit any construction on the ground level. The Yaweseeya tribe lives in the surrounding area. They wander about the jungle freely because they are able to make themselves invisible. Madame Asgar instantly strikes a chord with them. Expressing her admiration for their minimalist lifestyle, she says, Their needs are so simple—It’s no wonder nobody knows they exist. Their belief that the earth mother “cloaks” them because she likes the way they live makes a lot of sense. And they’re pretty advanced in their knowledge of potions, too. I bet they could teach me as much as I could teach them.

Madame Asgar respects the Yaweseeya for their knowledge and their values, but for Harry, they are merely a natural resource that can be monetized. He wants to kidnap a Yaweseeya child to put her for sale on the “birthright” market. Desperate to make quick returns, he persuades his clients to take the child without proper permits. The new parents try to smuggle the girl into the USA. Harry convinces them that nobody will find out about the child if they keep her drugged during the journey. Because she is invisible and would be drugged, she would not be heard or seen. Their plans go awry when the child soils her diaper during the flight. Her adoptive-kidnapper mother accidentally pricks her with a pin while changing her diaper. The pain breaks the child’s drugged stupor. As she lets out an angry wail, she becomes visible. The couple is ignorant of the fact that the Yaweseeya people lose their invisibility when they are angry or in pain. When the child becomes visible, the couple is accused of violating the draconian population laws of the fictional world. Along with Harry, they are sentenced to serve long prison terms. The guilty couple becomes fugitives, and Harry serves out his sentence under house arrest in the rainforest. Madame Asgar rescues the little girl—making her invisible by calming her—and takes her back to her family. Invisible City is a complexly plotted story that demands sophisticated visual language. Carol Lay’s use of frames merits close observation for its formal variety and polysemic flexibility. In Fig. 10.13, one can see three types of incrusted frames—the ladder, the overcoat clad backs of two people in the airport, and two suitcases. Lay makes polysemic use of the ladder. As an inset, in the top-left panel, it does not confine all of Madame Asgar. As she climbs up to the treehouse, her bag, her pet’s cage, and the hand holding them spill out of the frame, indicating her free spirit. The significance of the spillover becomes apparent when the reader looks at Harry Genius climbing down the same ladder. Only his elbow exceeds the frame of the inset. As he clasps the ladder with both hands, it clasps him back, tightly restricting him. The visual language rings with a prophetic tone, foretelling that this villain will not escape his just desserts. The lower panels bring out Madame Asgar’s feeling of claustrophobia in the city—and her resolve to fight—as she stands hemmed in by two taller people. In the lower right panel, where she is shown framed by her suitcase and pet cage, she resembles an actor on stage, walking away from the audience—another prophetic statement about her permanent departure from the city. At the end of the story, Harry, unable to live off the land, dies of starvation in the jungle; Madame Asgar becomes a Shaman and takes on the little girl who had been kidnapped as an apprentice; and the Yawaseeya’s way of life is unchanged. The story

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Fig. 10.13 Use of incrusted frames

is a homage to the healing power of nature and a condemnation of the masculine drive to destroy it for profit. In the final panels of the story, three of which are shown in Fig. 10.14, Lay allows nature to dominate the narrative. When Madame Asgar joins the Yaweseeya people, she becomes invisible like them. The play of outlines and silhouette shapes in the first panel of Fig. 10.14 makes the human beings almost indistinguishable from the vegetation that surrounds them. In the middle panel, one sees Jack, the tomcat, living freely outside his cage. The

Fig. 10.14 Autonomy of the jungle

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final panel is like a reverse ekphrasis of McCloud’s remark about composition in comics, which states that: In comics, composition follows a very different set of rules than in most graphic arts […] If the composition of a single panel is truly perfect, doesn’t that imply that it can or even should stand alone? The natural world creates great beauty every day, yet the only rules of composition it follows are those of function and chance. Comics at their best should do no less.35

In conformity with McCloud’s standards for comics “at their best,” the last panel Invisible City “stands alone.” If a reader were to see only the last panel, they would be able to appreciate that the theme of the story is nature’s struggle to preserve itself. Lay’s fascination with nature and her concern about the environment become key elements of her visual language in phase III.

10.4.3 Phase III—Emancipatory Carol Lay’s Murderville comics and her graphic memoir, The Big Skinny, make up the current phase of her work. As of 2021, there were five Murderville comics: One That Got Away, A Farewell to Armories, Knit One, Art Attack, and Tourist Season.36 There are two significant changes in this phase. Firstly, Lay develops a fresh cartooning style for the characters and settings; secondly, she presents different, complex antagonists in every comic. The change in the visual language of the third phase is as dramatic as it was between her first two phases. There is greater use of what Lay terms “visual shorthand”—flattened canopies and sharply marked tree trunks replace the lush, individually marked leaves of Invisible City. As far as the facial features go, Lay moves away from “big teeth” to large, heavy-lidded eyes for the female characters and kohl-lined eyes framed by straight, thick eyebrows for the hero Leo Scazzo (Fig. 10.15). Fig. 10.15 Visual language emphasizes eyes

© 2013 Carol Lay

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McCloud, 115. Lay, Carol. Murderville: A Farewell to Armories. n.p.: Waylay, 2013. Kindle. Murderville: A Farewell. n.p.: Waylay, 2013. Kindle. Murderville: Art Attack. n.p.: Waylay, 2015–2016. Kindle. Murderville: Knit One. n.p.: Waylay, 2015. Kindle. Murderville: Tourist season. n.p.: Waylay, 2016. Kindle.

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Fig. 10.16 Cartographic documentation of the location

The stories are aptly named for the town in which they are set because their strongest impact is through their spatiality. Lay relies on synaesthesia to make spaces the dominant feature of the Murderville comics. According to McCloud, “Expressionism and synaesthetics are distortive by their nature. If strong enough their effects can obscure their subjects.”37 Lay’s treatment of space in her phase-three comics evokes strong synaesthesia that sidelines the subjects. While phase-two comics were character-driven, in phase three, the characters are cast in a supporting role to the synaesthetic place. For example, in Fig. 10.16a, which appears later in the chapter, the human figures are dominated by the tall ceilings and the baroque display of items in the armoury, where weapons of all sorts are sold. These human figures appear to be miniatures that have no greater visual presence than the knives, swords, and guns on display.

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McCloud, 209.

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In another shift in visual language, the artist locates the setting cartographically, for the first time in her oeuvre as seen in Fig. 10.16. Lay sets Murderville in rural Maine, in the northeastern part of the USA. In the first comic, the town is located on the mainland. From the second comic onwards, Lay shifts the town to an island off the coast of Maine. The stories revolve around the events in the life of the Scazzo family comprising Leo and Antonia and their three children—the sixteen-year-old Isabella and pre-school-aged twins. Leo is a former member of the mafia who lives in Murderville under a witness protection programme. Leo and Antonia are a happily married couple who put their family first. The town is described as a place where “life is cheap, and murder is lucrative.” However, life in the town is, in fact, idyllic. The town council members make all decisions by consensus, children are safe to play outdoors, and the locals live as a friendly community. Violence comes to town only when an outsider arrives. However, this violence, instead of being macabre, is a source of dark humour in the narrative. In the first story, Vito Scapula—the mob boss against whom Leo testified—applies for a residency; in the second, a femme fatale arms seller sets up shop in the town, in Art Attack, a blackmailing painter tries to ply his trade; and in the last story of the series, Tourist Season, a mob of “snob” vacationers from the neighbouring island of Snobunquit descends upon the town. The villains are either killed or forced out of the town. Thus, the common theme that runs through the series is that of the locals’ struggle to protect their land and way of life from outsiders. Within the larger theme, Lay sets up an ambitiously diverse repertoire of sub-themes: wasteful lifestyles of the “snobs,” systemic indifference to gun violence, the splendour of natural beauty, and pretentiousness of “high art.” Despite the presence of gun-wielding mobsters, the impact of villainous violence in the Murderville comics is far less devastating than that of Harry Geinus’ avaricious crimes and Mrs. Baum’s psychotic aggressiveness. In Murderville, conflicts range from those arising out of teenage jealousy to more complex issues such as the ethics of property acquisition and adverse effects of tourism. Perhaps the most subtle and insidious villainy is the one perpetrated by the painter Villus Stickley in Art Attack. He is a wily man who senses the suppressed insecurities of Murderville residents and uses this knowledge to blackmail them. The comic is a meta-narrative—a story about the nature of art told by an artist. It is certainly the most semiotically dense comic book of the series. Each of the paintings made by Villus Stickley has a distinctive style. In it, Lay also presents her second witch-like character, Anya, the fraud fortune teller, who is the polar opposite of Madame Asgar. In Lay’s third phase, plot, character, and dialogue all are secondary elements. The most significant shift in this phase that merits analysis is the effective use of spatial depictions to evoke dark humour through synaesthesia. Figure 10.17, which follows, shows a selection of panels that demonstrates Lay’s synaesthetics. Figure 10.17a is perhaps Lay’s most intricate drawing of an interior setting. There are javelins, spears, lances, bows, arrows, shotguns, scimitars, knives—navaja, dirk, bowie, and trench, rifles, shotguns, revolvers, and a guillotine. The panel is a smorgasbord of shapes and textures. While the eye traces the diverse contours of the weapons, one can almost feel their sharp edges and grooves. The fire positioned between the

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Fig. 10.17 Synaesthetic combinations38

firearms display case and the knives arranged on the table appear to almost give off the scent of gunpowder. The panel evokes triple synaesthesia of sight, touch, and smell. In Fig. 10.17b, the rapid squeeze of the gas pedal is conveyed through the verbalized icon “STOMP,” and the car movement is indicated orally through “ZOOM, SCREECH,” as is the body’s movement, through “ZING.” Sounds and movement combine the senses of sight and hearing to generate an audio-visual synaesthesia that lends humour to the depiction of the villain’s death. The panel in Fig. 10.17c combines touch and sound through the depiction of the seated woman’s shivering body, her vaporous breath, and chattering teeth. The panel shown in Fig. 10.17d draws the reader’s eyes to the red neck of the whisky bottle, which stands out against the other muted colours. The taste of whiskey on the man’s lips turns unpleasant; his 38

(a). Carol Lay, Murderville: A Farewell to Armories (n.p.: Waylay, 2013), 4. (b). Ibid., 40. (c). Carol Lay, Murderville: Art Attack (n.p.: Waylay, 2015–2016), 14–15. (d). Carol Lay, Murderville: A Farewell (n.p.: Waylay, 2013), 11, (e). Carol Lay, Murderville: Tourist season (n.p.: Waylay, 2016), 20.

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reaction is mirrored by the horror in his eyes when he realizes that he is about to hit the large elk that is standing on the road at full speed. The last panel, Fig. 10.17e, conveys smell and touch simultaneously. The reeking heap of garbage, with objects of all sorts, is a graphic critique of rampant overconsumption and use-and-throw mindsets in affluent societies. The panel is deliberately made to look, smell, and feel noxious. The olfactory-tactile synaesthesia, when perceived along with the verbal accompaniment, “I miss the days when they just dropped a bag at a time,” is a satirical criticism of excessive consumerism. The understated, humorous tone continues in Lay’s memoir The Big Skinny, though the comic is aesthetically different from the Murderville series and her works from phase two. Published five years before the Murderville series, it has a strong visual resemblance with her earlier autobiographical comic “The Visitation.” The memoir describes Lay’s challenge with excess body weight. She debunks prevalent food myths, rejects all fad diets, and, most importantly, approaches being overweight as a mental health problem. The visual detail and diversity prevent the memoir from being viewed as a self-indulgent self-care manual. Its dominant impression is of an introspective reflection on how the family, lovers, and peers shape one’s sense of self-worth. Finally, the cartoon Carol frees herself from their constraining assessments and sets up her own standards, displaying an emancipatory attitude towards her body. The women characters in this phase may be seen as emancipatory because they appear to be free to address macro-issues related to residence permits, waste disposal, crime, and the value of art.

10.5 A View Through the Gynocritic Spatial Model This section uses the gynocritic model of analysing spatiality to examine the treatment of space in selected comics from Carol Lay’s extensive body of work. It may be recalled that the model had demarcated three broad areas of exploration—authorized spatiality, established spatial limits, and settled spatial syntaxes and paradigms.

10.5.1 De-canonizing Derivatives for Places of Work and Play One can use the first set of coupled tools of antigonal archetypes and liminal chronotopy to examine the sites of the workplace in “Ms. Lonelyhearts” and the play–space in Now, Endsville, respectively. The archetype of an organizational workplace is that of rigid structures, where functionaries work towards a common objective, often without concern for their personal fulfilment. The spatial separation of tasks through a geometric arrangement of workers, be it an assembly line, a grid of desks, or a hive of cubicles, is a representation of the logic of fragmented parts adding up to a coherent whole. To the generations that started work during the COVID era, when work from

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Fig. 10.18 The office and home in phase one

home has broken the rigid syntax of the office, these arrangements may seem part of a nostalgic past. Nevertheless, similarities remain. The two-dimensional grid of virtual meetings imitates the compartmentalization of the pre-virtual spaces. Figure 10.18 shows Monica Saunders, the writer of the LA Junk News’ “Ms. Lonelyhearts” column, in Lay’s comic of the same name. Panels in (a) and (b) of Fig. 10.18 use vertical and horizontal lines, meeting in right-angled corners. The separator window in the editor’s office, the window blinds behind the editor in (a) and the half-glass door, the notices on the tackboard, and the bevelled rectangle on the dado in (b) convey the traditional archetype of the office. The books on the shelf, the shelf itself, and the window blinds use repeated parallel lines. The straight, iterating lines evoke the conventional archetype of the office—a disciplined place with linear relationships. In (a), Monica is shown in a coquettish pose, intentionally misunderstanding the editor’s use of the word “moniker” as a mispronunciation of her name. She is using the strategy of silencing. Monica, who is being interviewed to write a lonely-hearts column, hides her expertise as a serious writer. Once she secures the Ms. Lonelyhearts desk, she appropriates her position to step out for field investigation, where she meets the mentally deranged Stupendo Boy and Ultra Ma. When asked to “speak,” she brings unexpected attention to the Ms. Lonelyhearts desk, normally a marginalized section in the newspaper.

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The editor’s desk marks his hierarchical superiority. The closed door of his office separates him from those on the lower rungs of the organization. The editor’s mohawk and leather jacket are mere tokens of defiance. They do not reduce the rigidity of the archetypal office. Despite his attempts to cultivate a no-care attitude, the editor has to peddle his ware in the market like any other profit-seeking corporate manager. To indicate his insignificance in the larger discourse of commercial logic, Lay draws him in silhouette in (b). The smoke rising from his cigar, which is his most visible aspect in the panel, becomes a metonymy for the fugacity of the gossip-press. Conversely, Monica’s work desk at home is drawn at a slant; the rectangular inner frame of the window looks onto palm trees and the open sky. Her typewriter is sidelined in favour of her hand-written journal. The home office becomes a liminal archetype, where Monica practises her profession differently from how she approaches it inside the newspaper office. Her home workspace is an antigonal archetype because the traditional newspaper office cannot fit it into its organizational structure. In the home workspace, she uses her skill to write for herself instead of catering to a gossip-hungry audience, and she puts aside the pre-structured fonts of the typewriter to shape her words by hand. Another instance of de-canonization may be seen in the portraits of the play-space in Now, Endsville. The panels in Fig. 10.7, featured earlier in the chapter, show that playfulness is the determining fibre of Jill and Steve’s romance. Figure 10.19 shows some other venues where they date. Jill and Steve’s dating venues have the spatiality of a play-space where they participate in games. While playing games, they are more caught up in the thrill of the events rather than sentiments of togetherness. In emphasizing the adventure

Fig. 10.19 The playground in phase two

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of romance, Now, Endsville shares some elements of the ancient Greek novel of adventure, in which lovers meet and part numerous times over an expansive and varied geography, sometimes stretching across as many as five countries. The spatiality of the adventure romance must be elastic because according to Bakhtin, In order for the adventure to develop, it needs space and plenty of it […] The world of these romances is large and diverse. But this size and diversity is utterly abstract. For a shipwreck, one must have a sea, but which particular sea (in the geographical and historical sense) makes no difference at all. […] All adventures in the Greek romance are thus governed by an interchangeability of space, what happens in Babylon could just as well happen in Egypt or Byzantium and vice versa. Therefore, the world of the Greek romance is an alien world […] Its heroes are there for the first time; they have no organic ties or relationships with it.39

Providing a definition of the adventure chronotope, Bakhtin states that it is characterized by “the reversibility of moments in a temporal sequence, and by their interchangeability in space.”40 In the canon of Greek romance, the adventure chronotope serves to heighten the role of chance in the lovers’ meeting. In the de-canonized chronotope, the chance is not relevant because the lovers, Jill and Steve, are never parted. Their adventurous encounters are planned. Thus, the “adventure” is, in fact, routine. Viewed liminally, the chronotope of adventure becomes the chronotope of “games” similar to the one evoked by Cristina Peri Rossi’s story “The Games,” discussed in Chapter Four. The liminal chronotope of adventure–games reveals that Jill and Steve’s exhilaration does not come from togetherness but from other stimuli— in Steve’s case, his adrenaline rush, and in Jill’s case, her need to find a man who fits her “ideal” mate template. Initially, Jill silently agrees to participate in the dangerous games, but when she is “invited” to play the most dangerous game of all by her prospective mother-in-law, she appropriates her position as a guest in the house to speak out her mind. The authorized spatiality of the play-space allows for a makebelieve world that can be regularly accessed to break the boredom of regimentation. However, viewed liminally as the zone between fantasy and reality, the play-space acquires the potential to reveal whether the gap is bridgeable or not. The analysis of authorized spatiality in the selected comics may be represented diagrammatically, as in Fig. 10.20.

39

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: UP Texas, 1981), 99–101. 40 Ibid.

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Fig. 10.20 De-canonizing the office and playground

10.5.2 De-bordering the Jungle and the City This section demonstrates the use of the second toolset comprising localizing the limen and spatial de-differentiation to probe Lay’s portrayal of the jungle. The jungle features in “Face the Facts of Love,” the first Irene Van der Kamp comic, The Invisible City, and the Story Minute short “Women who Run with Skunks.” At the outset, it must be pointed out that locating the jungle in Africa and Latin American runs the risk of reinforcing the civilization–barbarity binary, wherein the Global North is seen as civilized and the Global South as barbaric. However, Lay progressively averts any accusation of “barbarizing” the jungle as her portrayals become increasingly nonbinary. Lay cartoons the jungle differently in each of the comics. “Face the Facts” presents an ethnographic view of the Bongodian tribe that is expectedly reductive. Alfredo Fernández Bravo, an independent researcher with CONICET (The National Council for Scientific and Technical Research), observes that, In most cases, ethnography barely permeates the studied culture, and although travellers declare that their aim is to know the culture as it is, they tend to corroborate their prejudices and confirm myths and preconceived notions, often without any direct connection to the observed reality.41

As a result of ethnocentric accounts, a distorted representation of reality surfaces in cultural and literary representations, Irene Van de Kamp’s story appears to repeat 41

Álvaro Fernández Bravo, “Los relatos de viaje en América Latina,” in Explora: Ciencias Sociales (n.p.: Ministry of Education Argentina, n.d.). Dr. Fernández Bravo obtained his Masters from University of Buenos Aires and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. His most recent book, El museo vacío: acumulación primitiva, patrimonio cultura e identidades colectivas, Argentina y Brasil, 1880–1945, published in 2016, was awarded the national award for the anthropological essay by the Ministry of Culture of Argentina. https:// udesa.edu.ar/departamento-de-humanidades/profesores/alvaro-fernandez-bravo.

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the motif of rescue found in Edgar Rice Burrough’s 1912-novel Tarzan of the Apes. In the novel, the English aristocrat couple is killed in the jungles of Africa, and their son is brought up by apes. When he grows up, he is rescued once again, this time by a group of travellers who take him to the USA. Irene is also rescued twice in a similar sequence. Africa’s portrayal as the continent of the noble savage is imposed on Africa in both narratives. It must be remembered that comics work through a process of distortion. The comic presents an impressionistic account of observed or imagined events. Distortion is a given in comics. What merits analysis is the effect that it creates. Irene’s life with the Bongodians is quickly narrated in a dozen panels. The panels show dancers in grass skirts, a witch doctor in an elaborate costume, and tribeswomen wearing labrets. Once Irene leaves Africa, there are no more panels that show that she has any memory of the days she spent there. The only reminder of Africa is her modified lip, which in America, where she lives as an adult, is seen as a repugnant distortion. The character of Irene is denied a liminal transition, and she moves from one structural arrangement to another. Therefore, the issue of localizing the limen is not pertinent to the analysis of the jungle in the Irene stories. There is no spatial de-differentiation in the Irene comics between the jungle and the city. A sharp line divides the two worlds. The Amazon jungle in The Invisible City is a liminal zone for Madame Asgar, Tony, the villain’s meek assistant, and the Yaweseeya tribe. The conflict between the exploitation and conservation of natural resources and traditional knowledge systems is played out in the jungle. The artist draws vivid portraits of the jungle. She uses a complementary colour palette to connote its tranquillity and the occasional burst of warm colours such as orange and yellow to indicate its vitality. The diversity of the jungle can be seen even in the black and white drawings through the differently shaped plants and trees. The jungle and the city are shown as equally dynamic spaces. Each of the three minoritarian groups embodied in the characters of Tony, Madame Asgar, and the Yawaseeya—the oppressed functionary, the old blind woman, and the secluded tribe, respectively—represent the localized limens in the story. The Yaweseeya refuse to be tamed. They regularly get into Harry Genius’ kitchen and rob food. As they are invisible, people believe that the house and the jungle are haunted places. The fear of the unseeable discourages visitors from coming to the jungle, leaving the Yawaseeya in peace. Tony’s compliance with his boss comes to an end when Harry Genius fires at the Yawaseeya. Tony tries to snatch the gun from his boss and declares that he is quitting his job. The Yawasseya, in an example of autonomy of the marginal, retain sovereignty in the jungle. Harry Genius’s office in the treehouse may be viewed as a de-differentiated space. Madame Asgar sets up her lab there; the Yawaseeya treat the kitchen as their own. Both places become scenes of magic—for the scientist to make unprecedented discoveries and for the tribespeople to create a haunted aura. The idea of surfacing is enacted literally by the kidnapped child in the plane journey. The couple who had bought her from Harry Genius failed to smuggle her into the USA because she wails out her presence to the neighbouring passengers. Embodied by her, the jungle spills into the city. Refusing to be confined by civilizational shaping mechanisms, the girl

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Fig. 10.21 Extract from “Women who Run with Skunks”

finds Madame Asgar, who takes her back to the jungle. Whereas in “Face the Facts,” Irene was rescued from the jungle, in The Invisible City, the child is rescued from the city. The jungle–city hierarchy collapses entirely in “Women who Run with Skunks.” An extract from the story shown earlier in Fig. 10.11 is reproduced here to draw attention to Lay’s spatial braiding technique in the story. The verbal strip has been removed from the panel to sharpen the focus on the pictorial aspect (Fig. 10.21). The woman in the story is equally unacceptable both to the jungle animals and the village residents. The difference in the expression of their disapproval is shown in the first and third panels. The animals, appalled by the woman’s monstrous hybridity—a body that looks human but smells like a skunk—run away from her. The animals do not attack her, but the outraged villagers chase her away with clubs. The woman, as she sits at the edge of the jungle looking down on the village huts, is in a liminal space, poised for a transition. The violent treatment that she meets with in the village makes her self-reliant. She exits the limen to live on her own terms in the jungle. The analysis of established limits in the selected comics may be represented diagrammatically as in Fig. 10.22.

Fig. 10.22 De-bordering the jungle and city

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10.5.3 De-settling the Garbage Heap To take up the final aspect of the model, one may look at the syntaxes and paradigms de-settled by the garbage heap in two of Lay’s comics. The settled syntax for garbage is that it is synonymous with waste, attracts vermin and pests, and its appropriate place is out of sight. Paradigmatically, garbage is not in the same domain as posh urban settlements as well as the sylvan, pastoral idylls. Carol Lay’s fecund imagination treats garbage as a key plot device in two comics, The Thing under the Futon and Tourist Season.42 Garbage becomes conspicuous by its absence in The Thing Under the Futon. In the comic, when the Mayhews smell a pleasant fragrance coming from under their futon, they try to find its source. It appears that a reptilian creature secretly goes about cleaning their house. Once it is done cleaning, it compacts all filth into lavender-scented balls. Lay decides to focus on the smell of the garbage compacted into aromatic balls. As can be seen in Fig. 10.23, the artist uses four different icons to “draw” the smell. In the first panel, two icons draw out the scent of the lavender balls—a wafting wave and sharp narrow arrowheads that appear to be positioned accusingly. This panel comes up towards the beginning of the story when the Mayhews have not decided whether “The Thing” is an ill-intentioned parasite or a harmless house pest. In the second panel, when Mr. Mayhew becomes addicted to the smell of the lavender balls, the aroma is shown to emanate in a tighter wave than in the first panel. In the next panel, the lavender balls are being sold as artisanal products. Now, their smell is represented by multiple weak curls. It appears that the balls are losing their potency. In the last panel, the foulness of the smell from the toxic waste bottle—that eventually kills the futon-thing—is shown by thick, irregular, and black squiggle, and icons usually used to denote expletives. In an unusual visual logic that imitates affirmation by negation, garbage in the story is depicted through its absence. Such a depiction disrupts the syntax of garbage-as-foul and changes its paradigmatic relationship to a well-kept house. The layered arrangement of a planned neighbourhood is desedimented so that garbage is un-buried and unearthed. The family begins to miss the

Fig. 10.23 Iconic representation of the sense of smell 42

Carol Lay, That Thing under the Futon, GoComics, [1990] January 26, 2015 https://www.goc omics.com/lay-lines/2015/01/26.

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futon-thing when it disappears. They are not sure that it is dead, so, hoping to lure the futon-thing back to the house, they put garbage heaps around their property. Garbage comes out into the open, out of tightly sealed cans and landfills to be displayed as bait for the futon-thing. In Tourist Season, garbage is turned into a weapon. The transformation is not achieved through recycling. In an instance of speculative materiality of the limen, the same material qualities that make garbage useless and discardable turn it into an offensive asset. The garbage heap yields the weapon of choice in a combat operation against the adversary. A battle takes place between the slobs and the snobs. The “snobs” of the elite island of Snobunquit refer to Murderville residents as “slobs.” Snobs had never set foot on Murderville until the day when Portia Huxley, the daughter of Snobunquit’s mayor, is unable to resist a challenging ski-slope that she views from the air. Until then, the snobs had used Murderville as a dumping ground, literally. They frequently hovered over the island in their drones loaded with garbage, spitefully aiming the foul-smelling waste at Murderville residents. The enemies come face-to-face when Patricia arrives; other snobs also follow her. Soon the island is crammed with luxury-loving tourists. The increased commercial activity creates a real-estate bubble, pushes up prices, and increases the garbage on the island. To reclaim their way of life, Murderville residents start putting garbage in the Snobs’ hotel rooms and luggage. They also launch a garbage air-attack against the Snobs. Murderville residents take control of drones that the Snobs left behind to carry heaps of garbage to Snobunquit and dump it on the residents. The analysis of settled syntaxes and paradigms in the selected comics may be represented diagrammatically as in Fig. 10.24. The garbage heap is the liminal space where the tradeoff between immediate gains and environmental degradations

Fig. 10.24 De-settling the garbage heap

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becomes too obvious to ignore. In a subjunctive mode, it issues the command to stop the Snobs’ takeover of Murderville.

10.6 Conclusion The gynocritic spatial view of selected spaces in Carol Lay’s comic provides insights into the poetics of her visual structures. The liminal comes up as an illuminating concept that reveals possibilities of transforming entrenched notions such as those about the ordered workspace, spontaneous play-space, barbaric jungle, civilized city, manicured suburban neighbourhood, and garbage pile. The comics’ feminist stance is exposited not only in the portrayal of human protagonists but also through the gendered portrayal of spaces. For example, using the garbage as a weapon does not evoke the feminine but certainly suggests an alternative to the masculine firearm. This chapter has explored the fundamental tools used in the analysis of the genre of comics. It has discussed the outlook of four key theorists of the genre, namely Román Gubern, Will Eisner, Thierry Groensteen, and Scott McCloud. The chapter has examined the history of twentieth-century women comic artists from North and South America, placing Carol Lay’s work among the “daughters of the underground.” Over the course of forty years, Carol Lay’s depiction of female characters undergoes significant shifts. The chapter has classified her extensive oeuvre into three phases, agential, capacitated, and emancipated, using changes in the visual language and character traits as the primary criteria. In the last section, the chapter carries out a spatial analysis of places of work and play, the jungle and city, and the garbage heap to unveil the hidden layers of significance in Lay’s graphic narratives.

References About. (n.d.). Carollay. https://www.carollay.com/about Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination (C. Emerson, & M. Holquist, Trans.). UP Texas. Bechdel, A. (1985). The Rule. Dykes to watch out for. https://dykestowatchoutfor.com/wp-content/ uploads/2014/05/The-Rule-cleaned-up.jpg Cómic: Noveno Arte. Directed by Alejandro Vallejo. Produced by Iñigo Silva, 1989. Eisner, W. (1985). Comics and the sequential art (p. 2000). Poorhouse Press. Fernández Bravo, Á. (n.d.). Los relatos de viaje en América Latina. In Explora: Ciencias Sociales. Ministry of Education Argentina. Groensteen, T. ([1999] 2007). The system of comics. UP Mississippi. Guidance for the use of Incapacitant Spray. (2019). Association of Chief Police Officer of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. https://www.npcc.police.uk/documents/FoI%20publication/Dis closure%20Logs/Uniformed%20Operations%20FOI/2013/003%2013%20Att%2014%20of% 2015%20Guidance%20on%20the%20use%20of%20Incapacitant%20Spray.pdf Hall, R. C. W., & Friedman, S. H. (2020). Comic books, Dr. Wertham, and the Villains of forensic psychiatry. The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 48(4), 536–544. https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Good-Girls/Issue-6?id=171783

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Irigaray, L. Speculum of the other woman (G. C. Gill, Trans.). Cornell UP. Lay, C. Face the facts of love. In Good girls Issue # 4. https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/GoodGirls/Issue-4?id=171781 Lay, C. Visitation. In Good girls Issue # 4. https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Good-Girls/Issue-4? id=171781 Lay, C. ([1972] 2016). The misogynist. In Wimmen’s comix # 8. Fantagraphic Books. https://com iconlinefree.net/the-complete-wimmen-s-comix/issue-TPB_1/322 Lay, C. (1987a). Good girls issue # 1. Fantagraphic Books. https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/GoodGirls/Issue-1?id=171778 Lay, C. (1987b). Good girls # 2. Fantagraphic Books. https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Good-Girls/ Issue-2?id=171779 Lay, C. (1988). Good girls # 3. Fantagraphic Books. https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Good-Girls/ Issue-3?id=171780 Lay, C. (1989). Good girls # 4. Fantagraphic Books. https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Good-Girls/ Issue-4?id=171781 Lay, C. ([1990] 2015). That thing under the Futon, GoComics. https://www.gocomics.com/laylines/2015/01/26 Lay, C. (1991a). Good girls # 5. Fantagraphic Books. https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Good-Girls/ Issue-5?id=171782 Lay, C. (1991b). Good girls # 6. Rip Off Press. Lay, C. (1993). Invisible city. Kitchen Sink. Lay, C. (2008). The big skinny. Villard. Lay, C. (2013a) Murderville: A farewell to armories. Waylay. Kindle. Lay, C. (2013b). Murderville: A farewell. Waylay. Kindle. Lay, C. (2015a) Letter to readers. Gocomics. Retrieved April 11, 2015, from https://www.gocomics. com/lay-lines/2015/04/11 Lay, Carol. (2015b). Murderville: Knit one. Waylay. Kindle. Lay, C. (2015–2016). Murderville: Art attack. Waylay. Kindle. Lay, C. (2016). Murderville: Tourist season. Waylay. Kindle. McCloud, S. (1994). Understanding comics. Harper. Merino, A. (2017a). El Eje Femenino. In Presentes: Autoras de tebeo de ayer y hoy. AECID. Merino, A. (2017b). Diez Ensayos para pensar el cómic. UP León. Robbins, T. (2013). Pretty in ink. Fantagraphic. Sen, A., & Nussbaum, M. (Eds.). (1993). The quality of life. OUP.