Hassett, John J.

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Review Of  The Monstered Self: Narratives Of Death And Performance In Latin American Fiction  By E. González

Swarthmore College Works Spanish Faculty Works Spanish 10-1-1993 Review Of "The Monstered Self: Narratives Of Death And Performance In Latin American Fiction" By E. González John J. Hassett Swarthmore College, jhasset1@swarthmore.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-spanish  Part of the Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation John J. Hassett. (1993). "Review Of "The Monstered Self: Narratives Of Death And Performance In Latin American Fiction" By E. González". Revista De Estudios Hispanicos. Volume 27, Issue 3. 493-495. https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-spanish/52 This work is brought to you for free by Swarthmore College Libraries' Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in Spanish Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. Secci6n Bibliogrdfica 493a question raised by Gibbs herself earlier in her book when she doubts the existence of an archetype in the Sonatas as she partially quotes Seco Serrano and Maravall: “Qud tipo de ‘ideal arquetfpico’ o ‘parafso alejado’ pudi^ramos imaginar al leer las cuatro Sonatas' (17). In view of her conclusions on Valle s critical stance on the bourgeois, the answer is simple: the archetype in the SonatastesiAes in Bradomin. Even though on the surface he is an extraordinary character, in reality he is extremely deficient. In other words, what Bradomin epitomizes is not the positive in a given society, but rather he is a symbol of what is wrong with the bourgeois class when it misinterprets what the nobility should really be like.Chapters 2, 3, and 4, ever so briefly, concern themselves, one way or another, with the rhetorical discourse—the official discourse—of the oligarchy at the end of the 19th century, the “Don Juan” like characteristics and the role ofBradomln as narrator ofhis memoirs when he portrays—or imagines—himself as a Satanic figure, and the thematic and strategic importance of sexual discourse in the Sonatas. Gibbs’s views in these chapters intelligently summa­rize what critics have said about the Sonatas zx\A often shed new light on Valle s best-known novels. In dealing with Bradomin as a narrator and the role of the readers, however, it is clear that Gibbs would have achieved greater success and precision if she had availed herself of Narratology.The volume’s concluding chapter summarizes its findings. Among them, that even though the Sonatas are not directly referential with regard to a specific period in Spanish history, they do concern Spanish society early in the 20th century. All of this is expressed by Don Ram6n as he subverts aspects ofhis modernist discourse, as he parodies certain stereotypes. All in all, the final chapter reiterates Gibbs’s many contributions to the better understanding of the Sonatas, interpretations well-grounded in Spanish history.University of Colorado at Boulder Luis T. Gonzdlez-del-ValleGonzalez, Eduardo. The Monstered Self. Narratives of Death and Performance in Latin American Fiction. Durham & London: Duke UP, 1992. 275 pp.This is a challenging book for any reader but well worth the journey that Gonzdlez takes us on as he explores important literary texts from both an ethnographic and psychoanalytic perspective. Written in an extremely ellipti­cal style, these essays examine the relationship between death and transfigura­tion and reflect a firm belief that the notion of character entails a complex union between recognition and transformation. Death and change thus become an inseparable pair and constitute the nature of performance in the texts studied.494 Seccion BibliograficaAt the same time, an element of monstrosity pervades all of the stories and novels examined. For Gonzalez the monstrous finds its reflection in the image of authorial selfhood, whose masks of distortion and disfigurement embody the literary author’s unending struggle against oblivion through the creation of myth. This question of monstrous metamorphosis involves for the author the concept of performance and a kind of ethical questioning on the role of choice in human behavior. In this respect, Gonzilez examines two types of narrative plots: one that undermines a character’s moral choice and another that allows the right to choose but ultimately subjects the character to the ritual bondage of a group.The first part of the book (“Myth As Mask”) takes up how the pantextual nature of Borges’s fiction underscores the “local” and “personal” making of the human presence. Gonzalez contends that Richard Poirier’s (The Performing Self) distinction between “radical impulse” and “conservative necessity” seems to have fused in recent years into a dynamic of person-bond tendencies, investing the notions of character and personality with ever­growing credibility. In pursuing this belief, he looks at early Borges plots, together with texts by Walter Benjamin, H. G. Wells, Vargas Llosa, as well as Borges’s own pantheistic image of Walt Whitman.This initial section of the study embraces themes that will echo throughout the rest of the book. In starting with texts from Benjamin and Borges, Gonzdlez shows how the storyteller functions as a privileged mediator between stories of narrative and the theory of narrative or between allusion and biographic desire. Benjamin’s and Borges’s protagonists are seen as trapped between the desire to attain personal aesthetic honor and their perception of social conflict through their fascination with ritual and the power of the dead. In both writers each imaginary storyteller creates a space in which the author perceives a conflict between the individual and group solidarity. The end result is a blurring of the conventional lines that separate essay from story and for Gonzilez the essayist becomes a character in his own analytic fictions. In his commentary on Vargas Llosa’s El hablador Gonzilez compares the life of the Peruvian author’s storyteller with Aesop’s raconteur in Aesopica.The second part of the book (“Pastoral and Dark Romance”) reexam­ines two persistent themes: the dangers of storytelling as individual (self) creation and the ritualistic nature of storytelling when viewed in its association with sacrifice and suicide. Gonz4lez examines 1) how Julio Cortazar’s “Cefalea” embodies a plot based on unpredictable shifts of pronoun identity in which individuals who exist in pronoun form come into conflict with beings situated outside the order of grammar, and 2) how “Silvia,” “Los venenos” and “Final del juego” represent typical cortazarian modes of the fantastic set within traditional pastoral conventions that are evoked and obliterated. The remain-Secci6n Bibliogrdfica 495ing pages of this section offer an illuminating analysis of “Bestiario” in which this process of pastoral progression becomes an incestuous attack against primal innocence and of “Las armas secretas” in which an obsession with fantasy culminates in an aesthetic of suicide.Part Three (“The Confessional Self’) is a fascinating biographic reading of Augusto Roa Bastos’s Vo el Supremo. Gonzdlez begins by tracing the figure of the divided son from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, through the rituals of parthenogenesis and through the voices of Paraguay’s native myths and chronicles. Myth plays a very complex role for Gonzalez in Roa Bastos’s novel. Its function is viewed first on a performative level as voice (the semantic, melodic impact of Guarani upon Spanish) and gesture (the actions of characters which suggest a process of ritual ceremony). And finally it is also treated in the context of a performing space that dwells within individual consciousness.Throughout his commentary Gonzdlez shows convincingly how the characters in all of these texts either enter a labyrinthine space peopled by tribal ancestors or abandon such space in search of a remote realm that imagined ancestors may still inhabit. Whatever the personal choice involved here, the character, according to Gonzdlez, moves from a class mediated social order into a primitive one based on notions of kinship, ritual and solidarity.Swarthmore College John J. HassettMandrell, James. Don Juan and the Point of Honor: Seduction, Patriarchal Society, and Literary Traditions. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1992.This is an engaging, innovative and rich piece of criticism, a mirror in whose reflection we behold not only Don Juan but ourselves, those seduced by the Don Juan phenomenon. Producers and consumers of the burlador’s-wzys are presented as accomplices in, not merely spectators of, the social and cultural structures he incarnates. Mandrell presents Don Juan as a voice of the self­preserving force of the western patriarchy that, although transforming itself across time, never abandons its objective of dominance.The first chapter, “Meaning and the Critical Myth of Don Juan,” is an exchange with critics, notably Maurice Molho, in which Mandrell indicates how use of the term “myth” in reference to Don Juan mistakenly implies that there is something eternally representative of human nature in this character, thereby endowing him with dimensions that supersede those of a legend or a theme. He proposes that Don Juan, meaning the character as well as what people have made of him, is more rightly called a mythology. Chapter one

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Review Of The Monstered Self: Narratives Of Death And Performance In Latin American Fiction By E. González

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