A N AESTHETICS OF DISSIDENCE: REINALDO ARENAS AND

THE POLITICS OF REWRITING

MAUREEN SPILLANE MUROV

Reinaldo Arenas engaged in a particular form of intertextuality when he re-

wrote two nineteenth century colonial works. Fray Servando Teresa de Mier's
memoirs and Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdes. Not only were his novels, Elmundo
alucinante (1965) and La Loma del Angel (1987), notably explicit about their rela-
tionships to these earlier texts, but also Arenas boldly inserted his own first person
voice into the narratives such that his / entered into overt dialogue with Fray
Servando, Villaverde, and their works. As Ottmar Ette explained in his article
"Traicion, naturalmente," "Ambas novelas se caracterizan por una subyacente
identificacion del escritor cubano con los autores de los intertextos respectivos"
(103). In this article I explore the nature and implications of such an underlying
identification.
In 1985, Arenas wrote an article entitled "La vanguardia como reescritura de
la libertad," a version of which would become the prologue to La Loma del Angel,
in which he outlined his own ideas on the process and purpose of rewriting. It be-
comes evident that for Arenas, rewriting was a creative way to question the author-
ity of previous generations of writers while enabling the artist to rebel against both
present and past political and cultural injustices. A most important element for
Arenas was the prominent element of resistance that expresses itself through the
aesthetics of writing in general and rewriting in particular. "Todo creador es . . . un
enemigo en potencia del sistema (politico)" (8). All texts, says Arenas, have pre-
texts that become "pretexts" for later writing. Rewriting has the capacity to irrev-
erently deconstruct and enrich earlier texts: "Surge . . . como una intencion de
superar.. .desvirtuar, enriquecer... en general la parodia no se limita a desflgurar
el argumento y la escritura... (la parodia) si rechaza una concepcion preestablecida
en ese texto anterior, convirtiendolo en pretexto—texto (y pretexto) generador de
otra vision o interpretacion de la realidad" (1). According to Arenas, rewriting is
inextricably linked to the avant-garde attitude of pushing ahead and moving be-
yond previously set frontiers. Texts are not set in stone in terms of either their
content or their reception. As "una manera consciente y profunda de asumir e
interpretar el instante que vivimos" (3), rewriting engages previous writing with
the purpose of coming to terms with the present. Arenas perceives history as a
pretext in and of itself, and rewriting then becomes a rebellion against the horror
of History: "Retomando . . . la Historia como pretexto para elaborar una historia
literaria vemos en el caso de America Latina, el texto no estaria completo . . . sin
abarcarse la situacion contemporanea" (10).
Rewriting earlier texts enables writers to perform their capacity for thinking
critically, retrieving forgotten histories, and judging a culture's choices. It is, how-
ever, a gesture that goes beyond "revising" history and giving voice to silenced
134 Journal of Caribbean Literatures

perspectives. In critiquing a culture's choices as well as its depiction of those choices,

rewriting as enacted by Arenas has the capacity to actualize and invigorate the
discourse of canonized works by recognized "authors." As interesting is the fact
that for a writer like Arenas, rewriting can also function as a vehicle for construct-
ing the self. Reading Arenas's essays as well as his autobiography. Antes que
anochezca, along side his early novel. El mundo alucinante, reveals how Arenas
constructed his own identity as a dissident intellectual vis a vis the literary rela-
tionships he consciously fashioned with earlier generations of Latin American in-
tellectuals.
I use the word intellectual to define someone who, in and out ofthe realm of
fictional discourse, produces and disseminates knowledge in such a way that he or
she publicly and critically comments on political issues that impact and define his
or her culture. Literary critic Edward Said has amply discussed some functions of
intellectuals in his Representations ofthe Intellectual (1994), and broadly casts
this figure as someone whose role it is to "speak truth to power" (xvi). Intellectuals
bear responsibility for voicing dissent in the face ofthe status-quo, and have fre-
quently distinguished themselves by publicly representing, embodying, or articu-
lating messages to and for voiceless others (11). In a collection of interviews with
contemporary Latin American writers and intellectuals entitled Rebeldes y
domesticados, Raquel Angel echoes Gramsci as well as Said when she refers to
intellectuals as "creadores de conciencia para la transformacion social." Being a
social conscience is not, of course, an unproblematic role. Just as public thinkers
have fought for human rights, they have also infiicted suffering in the process of
trying to promote ideological causes at all cost.'
Arenas's writing is suspicious of political dogmatism and systems claiming a
totalizing truth, a vision underscored in the unconventional and even "revolution-
ary" formal aspects of his writing. Still, he and his intellectual protagonists are not
afraid to call attention to the truth of absolute injustice and oppression and to
question the authority and claims to truth made by Cuban and other leaders. In
fact. Arenas had to become "authoritative" in his own right in the course of his
own mission to resist oppression no matter where it came from—Cuba, Europe, or
the United States.^ I argue that it is in the act of writing—or rewriting—that he
develops and articulates the necessity ofthe voice ofthe oppositional intellectual.
Reading an author's life is no longer a popular way to approach the study ofa
given writer's body of work. Arenas himself undermines this idea by writing fic-
tion that openly appropriates and "reinvents" the biographies of established Latin
American writers. Nonetheless, in the case of Reinaldo Arenas, the ties between
his exile experience and the experiences of his socially and politically marginalized
protagonists are too many to ignore. His fiction in fact gives voice to an array of
experiences that Arenas would later re-couch in the language of autobiography
toward the end of his life. He wants readers to be highly cognizant of the
referential ity of his "liberated" fictions; his life did, after all, fundamentally shape
his imagination.
 An Aesthetics of Dissidence 135

In 1992, Reinaldo Arenas published the meticulous details of life as a dissi-

dent homosexual living in and later exiled from post-revolutionary Cuba. Unlike
his works of fantastic fiction, this work is surprisingly straightforward in its dis-
course. Interestingly, it is itself a sort of realist rewriting of his exuberant earlier
fictional discourse that clearly traces the points of contact between Arenas's re-
sentment of national politics and his earlier artistic creations. Antes que anochezca,
like his collection of essays, Necesidad de libertad, documents Arenas's testimony
regarding the position ofthe artist in society, in particular Cuban society.
Arenas describes the decade ofthe 1960s in Cuba as a highly politicized time
and, therefore, a "non-literary" moment due to the fact that the State only autho-
rized a certain type of socialist realism and strictly forbade more ambiguous and
experimental work like his own {Antes que anochezca 81). In Harnessing the In-
tellectuals, Carlos Ripoll argues that the history of literature in Cuba has always
debated the following question: should art serve ideology, or should ideas be at the
service of art? (22). Arenas repeatedly takes the position that in the final analysis,
Cuban cultural organizations such as the UNEAC or National Cuban Union of
Writers and Artists have insisted on art's service to ideology and have worked to
suppress rather than foster artistic talent.
Between 1965 and 1967, the State set up labor camps, UMAP or Unidades
Militares de Asistencia a la Produccion, where it interned anyone suspected of not
supporting the revolution. The situation for artists and intellectuals worsened after
1968, when Castro allied himself with the Eastern Block in favor ofthe repression
in Prague. As early as 1961, however, in "Conversations" at the National Library,
denunciations and self-accusations began against artists who were perceived as
deviating from the demands of a pro-Russian, antibourgeois revolution (Ripoll
24). In 1961, Castro himself also addressed a famous speech specifically to Cuban
intellectuals. It was here that he made his frequently cited statement: "dentro de la
Revolucion, todo; contra la Revolucion nada . . . porque la Revolucion tambien
tiene sus derechos . . ." (Castro, Obras escogidas 146). While what is within the
revolution and what is outside it are not overtly clear; it is clear, however, that such
a proclamation compromised individual rights to self-expression. Finally, 1961
was also the year when Jose Portuondo, a literary critic supportive ofthe Revolu-
tion, spoke at the First National Congress of Writers and Artists. Here he stated
forcefully, "What is important is that the artist, creator, critic, assimilate, make
into his own flesh and blood the experiences of this new era" (Ripoll 25).
The oppressive atmosphere ofthe Cuban State turned dissident thinkers and
writers into non-persons with no papers, no job, and no official place to live. While
this did not result in a diminishing of literature in the quantitative sense, writer
Cesar Leante acknowledged that it did lead to "the asphyxiation of literature" (Cesar
Leante qtd. in Ripoll 37). The State attacked artists and intellectuals for reasons
that had to do with both the content of their work as well as their perceived "immo-
rality." Devotion to beauty and criticism of Castro's politics were not an artist's
only crimes. Several of Cuba's best writers in the sixties, including Arenas and the
mentors he frequently cites throughout his memoirs, Lezama Lima and Virgilio
136 Journal of Caribbean Literatures

Piiiera, practiced homosexuality in an environment vehemently opposed to this

lifestyle. Homosexuality was a visible sign that they had not made Castro's anti-
bourgeois revolution part of their own fiesh and blood. Writer Jose Mario gave his
testimony in a 1969 article in Mundo Nuevo, "Allen Ginsberg en La Habana,"
where he explained that in post-revolutionary Cuba, certain kinds of literature were
only for the lazy and effeminate, and the Revolution could not tolerate this (53).
Even if one were not a practicing homosexual, just being involved with arts and
letters was often enough to be charged not only with sexual deviation, but also
with a sexual crime that merited punishment and rehabilitation.^
Arenas's autobiography speaks at length to the struggles ofthe artist/ intellec-
tual, and it is on the pages of this text where he most openly links himself and his
circumstances to those of previous generations of intellectuals. With bitterness, he
blames their ostracism, their de-facto exile, on a phenomenon that is much greater
than the Cuban Revolution. He says the people of Cuba, perhaps even the people
of all of Latin America, have not been able to tolerate dissidence or greatness, but
instead prefer to reduce everything to the norm, which is mediocrity.

Creo que nuestros gobernantes y tambien gran parte de nuestro

pueblo y de nuestratradicion nunca han podido tolerar la grandeza
ni la disidencia; han querido reducirlo todo al nivel mas chato,
mas vulgar. Quienes no se ajustasen a esa norma de mediocridad
han sido mirados de reojo, o puestos en la picota. Jose Marti tuvo
que marcharse al exilio y aun en el fue perseguido y acosado por
gran parte de los mismos exiliados . . . El mismo Felix Varela, una
de las figuras mas importantes del siglo diecinueve cubano, tiene
que vivir en el destierro el resto de su vida. Cirilo Villaverde es
condenado a muerte en Cuba y tiene que escapar de la carcel para
salvar su vida . . . Heredia es tambien desterrado y muere a los
treinta y seis anos, moralmente destruido . . . Lezama y Pifiera
mueren tambien de una forma turbia y en absoluta censura. Si,
siempre hemos sido victimas del dictador de turno y, quizas, eso
forma parte no solo de la tradicion cubana, sino tambien de una
tradicion latinoamericana, es decir, de la herencia hispanica que
nos ha tocado padecer. (115)

Arenas places greatness and dissidence on the same plane, hinting that you cannot
have one without the other. He defines himself as a dissident thinker throughout
his autobiography and perpetually defends this aspect of his identity. In the pas-
sage above, one of many like it in his autobiography, readers notice a list of writers
whom the State has physically exiled from the Cuban nation. Arenas inserts him-
self into this exile family when he notes that "siempre hemos sido victimas del
dictador...." The quote cited above is taken from a chapter titled "Mi generacion."
In the next section ofthe chapter. Arenas discusses repeated cases of opposition
between national leaders and intellectuals. Though perhaps not explicitly. Arenas
 An Aesthetics of Dissidence 137

at least implicitly includes himself among the intellectuals who sought and en-
acted their right to freedom of expression in writing. In the wider context of his
autobiography, in which he portrays himself as a victim of a persecuting state, it is
clear that his story is the latest in a long line of sagas ofthe oppositional, thinking
individual pursued by a powerful and repressive government. For Arenas, the cre-
ative ones as well as the lovers of freedom are his culture's rebels or deviants. The
search for aesthetic freedom mirrors and becomes a metaphor for political free-
dom. Creativity is rebellion and rebellion becomes imperative and positive.

Dos actitudes, dos personalidades, parecen siempre estar en

contienda en nuestra historia: la de los incesantes rebeldes amantes
de la libertad y, por lo tanto, de la creacion y el experimento; y la
de los oportunistas y demagogos, amantes siempre del poder y,
por lo tanto, practicantes del dogma y del crimen y de las
ambiciones mas mezquinas. Esas actitudes se han repetido a lo
largo del tiempo: el general Tacon contra Heredia, Martinez Cam-
pos contra Jose Marti, Fidel Castro contra Lezama Lima o Virgilio
Pifiera; siempre la misma retorica, siempre los mismos discursos,
siempre el estruendo militar asfixiando el ritmo de la poesia de la
vida. (116)

The rebels and artists mentioned in his analysis include Heredia, Marti, Lezama,
and Pinera. On the opposite side ofthis dichotomy designed to take authority away
from Cuba's not so illustrious leaders fall Tacon, Martinez Campos, and Fidel
Castro. Dictators love power more than freedom and are not "rebels" at all, even if
they have led revolutions. In Arenas's judgement they are opportunists and they—
not Marti, Heredia, or himself for that matter—are the true criminals, the true
threat to the nation for having exiled the poets and their poetry. Lezama Lima,
Marti, Heredia, and himself (implicitly) are not deviants, but men of powerful
words and images who represent what is most beautiful about Cuba and through
that beauty, escape the repression of dictatorship: "La belleza . . . es un territorio
que se escapa al control de la policia . . . " (113).
What happened to Arenas and numerous artists of his generation in Cuba had
happened to other writers from other generations. Dictators and their regimes de-
stroy writers, if not through persecution, then through official favors or gifts. Ac-
cepting such gifts stifles creativity. Arenas asserts. He goes on to produce a list of
writers who devoted themselves to Castro and paid a price: in his estimation, the
merits of their artistic expression deteriorated. In Arenas's scheme there is another
more fruitful, if more difficult, path—a path of integrity that often means persecu-
tion and exile.
In the First Circle ofthe Inferno Virgil invites Dante to join an elite circle of
poets: "Soon after they had talked a while together, they turned to me, saluting
cordially: and having witnessed this, my master smiles, and even greater honor
then was mine, for they invited me to join their ranks. I was sixth among such
138 Journal of Carihhean Literatures

intellects" (Dante 73). It is in this passage where Dante places himself on par with
Virgil, Homer, and Lucan and in a daring gesture identifies with previous genera-
tions of poets. Through his essays and fiction. Arenas, too, links himself to other
poets. Rewriting results not only in a chain of texts, but also in the construction of
a chain of writers, all who witness and react to oppressive regimes. As a reader of
other writers. Arenas critically positions himself as a member of a larger commu-
nity, within a tradition of dissident, critical poets in order to articulate and rein-
force his own political and artistic vision.
Just a few years before putting his name along side Virgilio Piiiera, Jose Lezama
Lima, and, of course, Cirilo Villaverde in his autobiography, Reinaldo Arenas al-
lied his identity as a writer with that of Villaverde, Vargas Llosa, and Pinera in his
rewriting of Cecilia Valdes. This bold work of fiction, however, was not the first
time Arenas explored his identity as an artist and intellectual. Decades before.
Arenas wrote El mundo alucinante, his magical fictional pastiche of the memoirs
of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier,' a Mexican intellectual with and through whom
he began to articulate aspects of his own dissident identity. Through his insertion
of the present—and specifically his inscription of himself—into this early novel.
Arenas allows readers to see the connections between a colonial history of Inqui-
sition, persecution, and failed revolutions and contemporary oppression rooted in
those same national traditions. He gives readers new perspectives on history as
well as examples of people who have found ways to resist the oppressive authority
of governments. It is first in this work of fiction that was never published in Cuba—
and only later in his autobiography—that Arenas traces a similar, fundamental
genealogical line linking himself to Fray Servando and other poets. Harold Bloom's
well-known essay The Anxiety of Influence studies the psychological anxiety that
develops when younger poets try to differentiate themselves from their already
well-established predecessors. Arenas's work points to the political necessity of
intertextual "citation" as it pertains to the creation of solidarity between different
generations of writers for the purpose of resisting, or "continuing" to resist State
authoritarianism.
Mexican friar Servando Teresa de Mier was an ardent promoter of Latin Ameri-
can independence who sought inspiration for his struggle in the ideals of the Euro-
pean Enlightenment, the American Revolution, and Aztec civilization. He was
accused, in 1794, of altering tradition and undermining Spanish authority when he
challenged the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe's miraculous 1531 appearance on
the Indian Juan Diego's cape by maintaining that she had appeared before the
Conquest on none other that Saint Thomas' cape. For this act of subversion, he
was deported and imprisoned and would spend the rest of his life trying to defend
himself and flee suspicious authorities. Reinaldo Arenas witnessed and partici-
pated in the Cuban Revolution more than one hundred fifty years later. Both men,
though initially supportive of revolution, became noticeably disillusioned with what
they saw and changed their minds. What becomes clear in this study of Arenas's
novel is that Servando's search for linguistic and political freedom parallels Arenas's
 An Aesthetics of Dissidence 139

search for these freedoms in a world where dissident ideas have everything to do
with dissident literary forms.
Although El mundo alucinante is not strictly autobiographical, it is clear that
Arenas embarks on a journey with and through Servando in order to better appre-
hend the motivations and struggles of his own nation in addition to his own role, as
an intellectual, in those struggles. In the process, he comments on and develops an
understanding of his personal motivations for writing and creating fiction rooted
in history, but critical of official or traditional historical accounts. The trials of
another Latin American intellectual like himself push him to develop a character
noted for his uncompromising rebelliousness and refusal to be contained. Rewrit-
ing Servando's memoirs allows Arenas to destabilize Servando's authority as au-
thor and national hero to a certain degree. Equally important, however, is that the
act of rewriting actually lends authority to Arenas and his own defense of creativ-
ity and freedom of expression.
The introductory material Arerias includes at the beginning of El mundo
alucinante complicates his fictional reconstruction ofthe Mexican friar's life, for
it is here that Arenas inscribes himself into the novel." In a preface, readers en-
counter a letter from Reinaldo Arenas addressed to Fray Servando and dated July,
1966. A short essay written in 1980 follows this letter in later editions. These
introductory writings as well as occasional footnotes scattered throughout the novel
allude to Servando's historical existence and the possibility that his persecution
and unfailing resistance are not purely imagined fictions.
Arenas makes clear in his letter to Servando that his work, "Mas que una novela
historica o biografica pretende ser, simplemente, una novela." Perhaps ironically,
it is actually historical and biographical even though imagination frequently inter-
venes and satirical fantasy disrupts any sort of sustained referential discourse. Arenas
informs readers that he indeed performed careful research on his character. The
problem was that like so many writers of historical fiction, he found that essays
and encyclopedia articles failed to capture Servando's nature. It is not surprising
that in the end Arenas admits that he discarded the facts. What makes Arenas's
novel stand out to this day is his assertion that he only began to write about and
understand his enigmatic national hero when he made a particularly important
discovery that he shares with Servando in his letter: "tu y yo somos la misma
persona" (19).
The affirmation stated above contains an eerie foreshadowing of events to
come in Reinaldo Arenas's life. A passage from Antes que anochezca, quoted be-
low, links Servando's story to Arenas's autobiography in ways even Arenas could
not have imagined prior to his own arrest in 1974, in Havana. He attempted to
escape, as his protagonist had done countless times, but when authorities caught
him, he spent a year in prison at El Morro followed by time in a "rehabilitative"
work camp. The interrogation-holding cell he describes in his autobiography would
recall the asphyxiating calabozos he imagined Fray Servando to have endured in
Spain:
140 Journal of Caribbean Literatures

Sin darme ninguna explicacion, me llevaron escoltado hasta una

celda de castigo . . . Aquella celda era un sitio sordido, con piso de
tierra, y donde no podia ponerme de pie porque no tenia mas de un
metro de alto .. .En El mundo alucinante yo hablaba de un fraile
que habia pasado por varias prisiones sordidas (incluyendo El
Morro). Yo, al entrar alii, decidi que en lo adelante tendria mas
cuidado con lo que escribiera, porque parecia condenado a vivir
en mi propio cuerpo lo que escribia. (222)

The almost premature declaration that "we"—author and protagonist—are the same
person destabilizes the traditional biographical impulse. It exposes biography as a
type of autobiography and, ultimately, as fiction. The self, and certainly in this
case, "selves," constructed through autobiography are not a transparent or
undistorted refiection of either writer's life. The "we" established in the prefatory
letter is especially important when one realizes that the novel has three narrators—
I, you, and he—and that much ofthe novel is, in fact, told in first person. Is Arenas
telling Servando's story? Is he telling his own? In what sense are the two the same?
Servando does not control the assimilation of his memoirs into Arenas's novel.
Arenas in turn does not control his novel's reception by readers, including govern-
ment censors. Arenas's statement in a later section ofthe letter, that these memoirs
in fact belong to time and not to the person who wrote them, highlights the idea
that the Fray Servando depicted on these pages is his own version ofthe man and
his deeds. Fray Servando is not represented as he represented himself nor as he
really was, but as Arenas imagined and interpreted. In his matter of fact state-
ments. Arenas engages readers here by making them acutely aware ofthe identifi-
cation that exists between the writer and his subject.
Arenas consciously refused to write history or biography; for him diachronic
representations centered on an ordered chronology failed to render a complete
picture of events. He expounds on this vision in a powerful introductory essay
entitled "Fray Servando, Victima Infatigable," which begins with a response to a
passage in Servando's memoirs that touched him. While in exile in Europe, Servando
encountered a specimen ofthe Mexican maguey plant. This plant connects him to
his homeland, but at the same time, it makes him painfully aware of his exile: "Por
largo tiempo habia tenido que trotar el fraile para, finalmente, arribar al sitio que lo
identifica y refieja: la minima planta, arrancada y transplantada a una tierra y aun
cieloextranos"(13). In a later passage. Arenas explicitly connects Servando to his
own compatriot, the Cuban poet Jose Maria Heredia who, at Niagara Falls, was
struck by the memory of the Cuban palmar. Servando and Heredia experience
exile and nostalgia together on the pages of Arenas's novel. "Aunque aun no se
habian conocido personalmente (la Historia no "certifica" si se llegaron a conocer)
Fray Servando Teresa de Mier y Jose Maria Heredia, debieron experimentar, en un
tiempo similar, la misma sensacion, la misma desolacion . . ." (13). Arenas—hav-
ing recently been exiled to the United States in the 1980 Mariel boat life when he
composed this letter—again at least implicitly allies himself with these two poets.
 An Aesthetics of Dissidence 141

playing Fray Servando to Heredia and Heredia to Fray Servando. He signals a

connection between the historical era he is living and that of the early nineteenth
century colonial Americas. Both societies exiled their thinkers, but these "think-
ers" continued to flee conformity and express their opinions.
Avoiding all simplicity. Arenas moves to take "authority" away from his pro-
tagonist by creating fiction out of his memoir and by satirizing parts of his life in
burlesque style. Nonetheless, he still clearly posits his protagonist's life as exem-
plary. In this way. Arenas honors Servando's mission and "legitimizes" his own
when he says "you and I are the same." What is also true is that just as Arenas
critiques history and biography, he simultaneously gives "authority" to his own
project, which seeks to irreverently "go outside" the lines of these genres and
abandon writing that intends to "copy," or fix, reality. Fiction writing, then, may
bear a complicated relationship to historical events, and yet it is powerful in its
capacity to revive and renew memories.
Throughout his memoirs, Servando's objective is clearly to open the eyes of
representatives of the law. Servando's ideas brought countless tortures upon him.
His critique of authority figures in both secular and ecclesiastical spheres led to
the brutalization and banishment of this intellectual body. Ironically, the historical
Servando wrote his memoirs in a "forgotten" prison cell, and in the last section of
his Manifiesto Apologetico, he refers to himself as an "enterrado politico," not
merely interned, but interred. In El mundo alucinante. Arenas depicts his protago-
nist as he begins writing his memoirs from a place of total oblivion: "Por eso
empece de nuevo a tramar la fuga . . . de aquella tan mal ventilada prision llamada
la del olvido, que bien le venia el nombre, pues mientras alii permaneci anduve
siempre sobre los esqueletos de los que en algiin tiempo fueron prisioneros. Y
sobre ellos dormia, y sobre ellos me apoyaba para escribir mis memorias . . ."
(273). The image of the act of writing supported by the dead and, more precisely,
by cadavers' remains, alludes to what Arenas does with Fray Servando's remains.
He uses them for support and as a point of departure; the remains serve as a re-
minder of his own condition as a persecuted intellectual and also as an incentive to
retell Servando's story—and thus unbury it—as if it were his own.
As the dissident body endures exile and worse, it becomes clear how writing
here is the antidote to containment and oblivion, not only for Servando, but also
for Arenas, who writes for both Servando and the "other prisoners." As Derrida
acknowledges in his essay "Plato's Pharmakon," writing is a drug in more than one
sense; it is a poison, but it can also be a cure. Even if it does not rescue all memory
from oblivion, even if memory is used as "trampoline" for fiction, writing has the
power to perpetuate existence and rebellion.
Arenas reinscribes many passages from Fray Servando's memoirs. Often, he
intensifies them, creating magical hyperbole that turns Servando into an even larger
than life character than he portrayed himself to be. Other times, however. Arenas
deserts Servando's narrative altogether, adding completely fictional adventures to
the mix. Such additions and divergences not only comment on Fray Servando and
his silences but also, more directly, on Arenas and his twentieth-century preoccu-
142 Journal of Caribbean Literatures

pations. If Fray Servando was a character who charged himself with the duty of
questioning and "revolutionizing" the revolutions ofhis day, then Arenas contin-
ues the charge by looking at one of nineteenth-century Latin America's revolution-
aries from new and challenging perspectives.
In his critique of revolutions, Arenas does not neglect to mention, at least
indirectly, his own role in the Cuban Revolution. One ethical preoccupation that
arises in El mundo alucinante is the role of the intellectual as perpetrator of crimes.
In his autobiography. Arenas described the euphoria that swept the island after
Castro's successful overthrow of Batista. He quickly turned to the repeated theme
of the crimes of the revolution, injustices accompanied by overwhelming enthusi-
asm. Nearly everyone, even the intellectuals, approved of the executions of Batista
supporters that took place in what were called "spectacle courts." In his portrayal
of Servando, Arenas places his protagonist in situations where he is not entirely
heroic or "just." During the euphoria following his victory and election to deputy,
his protagonist Fray Servando presides over his own type of post-revolutionary
paranoid spectacle court. The chapter titled "El comienzo" opens with Servando in
the prison of oblivion after criticizing Iturbide for betraying the people. It ends
with him, now an honored politician, addressing a boisterous crowd. As a bishop
tries to flee the scene, Servando yells, "El que huye no puede ser mas que un
traidor" (276). The text continues to describe how the crowd led by Servando
himself pursued the bishop. "El fraile . . . lo hizo descender . . . y lo lanzo a los
brazos de la muchedumbre que bramaba" (276). In the end, the crowd is said to be
devouring pieces of the bishop's flesh.
It is through Servando and his journey that Arenas writes about his experi-
ences under authoritarian governments in Cuba. El mundo alucinante serves to
integrate the Cuban Revolution and its failures into a much larger history of ques-
tionable revolutions, beginning with those for independence. More than simply a
cover for his own story, then, Servando's story is a means by which Reinaldo
Arenas amplifies his own story—Servando, not to mention Jose Maria Heredia or
Virgilio Pifiera, the writer to whom the novel is dedicated, all endured similar
fates. Writing about Servando connects Cuba to other Latin American revolution-
ary histories. Servando himself incorporated intellectual/ revolutionary figures from
Europe into his discourse—Jose Blanco White and Madame de Stael were among
the figures mentioned in Memorias who fought for change in their countries, Spain
and France. It is important to Arenas that in real life, too, Servando remained
faithful to his position as critic and that after and even during the victorious days
following the fall of Iturbide, Servando began to question the course of the new
Republican regime. With a grandiose dose of black humor, the novel mercilessly
mocks of the shortcomings of the new Mexican leadership. Arenas's narrative de-
scribes how President Guadalupe Victoria promises to protect poets, allowing them
to take refuge in the National Palace, affectionately called the "Bird Cage." In a
probable reference to Cuban leader Fidel Castro and his words "dentro de la
revolucion todo," Arenas's narrative has Guadalupe Victoria declare, "El que este
conmigo que suba" (281). The problem is that occasionally a poet would rhyme
 An Aesthetics of Dissidence 143

Victoria with "ilusoria" or "breve trayectoria," and with this, he would be silenced
at the hands ofthe president's mob.
Arenas's novel picks up on Servando's nineteenth-century perspective, but
goes further than an anti- Spanish Servando ever did in describing and sympathiz-
ing with indigenous people as it explores the various positions occupied by indig-
enous peoples in Mexico. Upper class white Creoles promoted Mexican national
independence by identifying with Nahuatl culture. This appreciation for an ideal-
ized version of Nahuatl or Aztec culture did not, however, often translate into an
appreciation for the indigenous cultures in the nineteenth century (Jara 356).
Whereas in Fray Servando's memoirs descriptions of native cultures are all but
absent, except with reference to their supposed pre-sixteenth-century Christianity,
Arenas's novel draws attention to the problem ofthe oppression of minority cul-
tures through the centuries. His is a work in touch with the history of slavery: its
colonial and nineteenth-century manifestations as well as its twentieth-century
permutations. Entire sections of Arenas's novel represent the poverty and misery
ofthe Indian community of Fray Servando's time. At the beginning ofthe novel,
Servando witnesses Indians being used as fuel to feed the fires ofthe Inquisition:
"Tambien el mantenimiento de la hoguera era un gran problema y para ello se
empleaba a un millar de indios, que debian abastecer aquellas llamas dia y noche,
sacando leiia . . . y en situaciones criticas Servian ellos mismos de combustible"
(40). There is a connection between this description of Indians as literal fuel and a
reality in which Indians may not have been burned for fuel, but in which the mis-
sion of converting indigenous cultures proceeded to further ignite the fires of a
cultural climate highly intolerant of all difference.
Although Arenas primarily concerns himself with the trials and peregrinations
of his main protagonist and intellectual "victima infatigable," he also dedicates
pages to the representation of other victims of cultural difference, without confin-
ing either Indians or "elite" intellectuals who represent them to victim status. In
other passages toward the end of the novel, the narrative descriptions question,
even decry, the idealization of an Aztec culture that had been held up at one time
by Fray Servando as the basis ofa new and authentic American society. In the final
passages ofthe novel, the friar who had presented and defended the idea ofthe
early arrival of Christianity in Mexico travels back in time to come face to face
with a scene of Aztec sacrifice. "El poeta (Heredia) y el fraile estaban maravillados
ante el espiritu religioso de aquella civilizacion. Entonces se escucho el primer
grito. Los fieles elegidos entraban en el templo, se acostaban sobre una gran piedra
. . . el sacerdote . . . les extraia el corazon . . . El fraile estaba tan desfallecido que
solo pudo mover dos dedos" (300). The novel highlights cruelties committed against
the population of Indians enslaved and marginalized by colonial authorities; but
then. Arenas goes even further and suggests an analogy between the mistreatment
of Indians during colonial times and the practice of human sacrifice carried out by
the Aztec Empire. Indians were not simply innocent or without fault. Victims of
one culture, they too were guilty of oppressing others. In these scenes. Arenas
144 Journal of Carihhean Literatures

continues to play with the notion of history repeating itself and the impossibility of
a revolution capable of avoiding past injustices. Repetition, related to and, to an
extent, analogous to rewriting, assumes several guises: authorial repetition evi-
denced in Arenas's playing the role of Servando, textual repetition evidenced in
Arenas's incorporation of other texts—principally though not solely the memoirs
of Fray Servando, and historical repetition. History repeated itself, though with
differences, when the Indians, having been conquered and abused by the Aztecs
centuries before, were again conquered by the Spanish in the sixteenth century.
According to Arenas, history also repeated itself when during the Cuban Revolu-
tions, intellectuals were punished for challenging the State's authority, just as
Heredia and Fray Servando had been punished for their dissidence in the nine-
teenth century. Repetition is ubiquitous, and in El mundo alucinante it is the writer-
intellectual who notices and critiques these repetitions.
Living in an independent Mexico, Servando finds himself imprisoned in the
presidential palace in spite of his privileged status under the new political system.
It is at this point in the novel that he first dialogues with his contemporary Heredia,
the Cuban romantic poet living in exile in Mexico.^ As Heredia takes on the role of
Servando's interlocutor, Servando establishes ties with yet another dissident writer
and thinker. Together they journey back in time to the era prior to the Conquest. It
is Heredia who guides Servando on a journey into the past where the two witness
a horrific sacrifice. It makes sense that Heredia would serve as guide because, as a
poet he had, through his verses, introduced reader to such a cruel reality. Heredia's
1820 poem "Teocalli de Cholula," ties landscapes to specific historical events or
tragedies and in so doing connects his contemporary Servando's Mexico with a
violent past. Teocalli was, in fact, the pyramid dedicated to QuetzalcoatI, the god
whom Servando equated with Saint Thomas. In the encounters with Teocalli in the
novel as well as in the poem itself there is no allusion to Saint Thomas.

La agreste pompa
de los reyes aztecas desplegose
a mis ojos atonitos. Vei'a
entre la muchedumbre silencios
de emplumados caudillos levantarse
el despota, salvaje en rico trono,
de oro, perlas y plumas recamado;
y al son de caracoles belicosos
ir lentamente caminando al templo
la vasta procesion, de la aguardaban
sacerdotes horribles, salpicados
con sangre humana rostros y vestidos.
Con profundo estupor el pueblo esclavo
las bajas frentes en el polvo hundia,
y ni mirar a su seflor osaba,
de cuyos ojos fervidos brotaba
 An Aesthetics of Dissidence 145

la Sana del poder.®

The poem recalls the sacrifices that occurred atop a mountain in Aztec times. Heredia
compares abuses of power under Iturbide in the present with those of the past, in
which a monarch also enslaved and sacrificed their subjects.
Fray Servando finds himself in another. Both have endured exile and both
continue their search for freedom of expression. The representations of the inter-
action between Servando and a version of Virginia Woolf's Orlando and later
Servando and Heredia are related to important aspects of Arenas's project.' Servando
joins the space of honored poets and writers, and their interaction duplicates the
interaction that develops between Servando and Arenas in the margins of the novel.
In each case there is a connection between two poets who share not only the pre-
dicament ofexile but also the ability to resist through writing. In exile these intel-
lectuals find a space from which they can attempt to express what they could not
elsewhere. The drama of the individual becomes that of individuals, of a collective
group, that transcends temporal or geographic boundaries. Servando and Heredia
question each other's motives and signal each other's weaknesses. As Servando
dialogues with Heredia, it is as if Arenas were also present, playing Heredia to
Servando or Servando to Heredia, mediating their encounter. In the end, they com-
prehend each other: "Porque de todas las desgracias de la tierra, que son tantas"—
dice ahora Heredia—^"ninguna es tan terrible como la del poeta, porque no solamente
debe sufrir con mas vehemencia las calamidades, sino que debe interpretarlas"
(292).
Writing from a less than Utopian post-revolutionary Cuba, Arenas uses Fray
Servando to confront the corruption and disillusion that surround all revolutions,
not only Castro's. Arenas's Servando, a probable national hero, is, however, any-
thing but an innocent or unproblematic victim, as some would have him. What
enables Arenas to recreate himself in Servando is that Servando never ceased search-
ing for a place to call home, even if he knew he would never find it. He finds
himself constantly breaking out of jails. As he travels from Mexico to Spain, on to
France, England, the United States, Cuba, and back to Mexico, this man of soaring
visions, often performs incredible stunts, if only out of necessity, in order to es-
cape his latest captor. On more than one occasion he swims across the Atlantic; on
other occasions readers catch glimpses of a flying friar. In Bayona, where every-
thing was "tan en retiro y todo . . . tan repetido que estas repeticiones se han
convertido en leyes inalterables," (149) something unexpected happened. A terri-
fied township watched Servando, whom the city's bridge had catapulted into the
air, soar across the sky: "Y asi fue que ese atardecer, el pueblo aterrorizado de
Pamplona vio a la figura del fraile, cruzar como una centella de fango, por sobre la
ciudad"(149).
Readers literally envision an ungrounded Servando throughout El mundo
alucinante. Not only did he literally travel from place to place, but also his ideas
on how best to govern Mexico changed over the years. Arenas himself, in both his
life and his literature, strove to remain ungrounded or free from a commitment to a
146 Journal of Carihhean Literatures

particular ideology. Dissent and dislocation are sacred. To dissent by writing an

unofficial and even irreverent history of another history—Fray Servando's—that
is already unofficial, is dangerous but also liberating and necessary. Manifesta-
tions against an oppressive government were his duty: " . . . le toca a los pueblos y
a los intelectuales, que son sus voceros, sufrir y denunciar la torpeza o la barbarie
de sus gobernantes" (18).* Fighting against the imposed voice of the state is a vital
form of flight. Arenas's rewriting of Fray Servando's memoirs is at once an act of
solidarity with previous generations of "rebels" and an instance of critique and
irreverence. It does not repeat Fray Servando's journey as he wrote it, but instead
it sees beyond the pretext, allowing Arenas to project himself onto Servando and,
in so doing, project Servando into the twentieth century.
Examining rewriting and resistance in the context of a novel consciously af-
filiated with baroque literature, it is important to point out how in some sense
Arenas's rewriting is in fact the "rewriting of a previous rewriting." After all,
Servando's text itself presents itself as a rewriting of an official history. Looking
forward. El mundo alucinante would later be rewritten in Arenas's own autobiog-
raphy. If we assume Severo Sarduy's description of baroque literature as metaphor
squared, then Arenas's novel does conform.' Nonetheless, it also surpasses ba-
roque frontiers; for while seventeenth-century baroque culture was formally so-
phisticated, it tended to be ideologically conservative.'" In El mundo alucinante,
we witness an electrifying combination of formal and political daring. Here ih-
tense, second order rewriting, or the rewriting of history squared, is employed as a
form of resistance and opposition to totalitarian ideology.

' Over the course of the last two decades, and particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall
in 1989, there has been constant focus on the failures and mistakes of intellectuals.
^ For a full sense of the ways Arenas asserted his own authority, see his collection of
essays Necesidad de tibertad. Mariet: testimonios de un intetectuat disidente.
^ The cult of virility in Cuba is fundamental to the revolution. Conducta Impropia, a 1984
documentary by Nestor Almendros and Orlando Jimenez Leal, in which Reinaldo Arenas
and many other Cuban intellectuals, artists, and dissidents discuss oppression under the
Cuban Revolution is a convincing source of information about reactions to homosexual-
ity in Cuba since 1959. Ideology was less an issue than physical appearance. A person
could be accused of being homosexual because of the style clothing they wore. In the
early sixties the government set up the UMAP. Many suspected deviants were sent to
work in these camps. Though closed in 1968, they were replaced with a similar program
under a different name, "educaci6n por trabajo." In addition, some, like Arenas, were
detained in prisons for 'threatening the integrity and stability of the nation."
'' All citations are taken from Reinaldo Arenas, El mundo atucinante (Caracas: Monte
Avila, 1982).
' Jos6 Maria Heredia (1803-1809). Throughout his life Heredia was constantly uprooted.
In 1823 he was accused of conspiring against the Spanish government in favor of the
emancipation of Cuba and went into exile. First he went to New York and then went to
live in Mexico. He would one day return to Cuba, but after only a year he went back to
 An Aesthetics of Dissidence 147

Mexico. He was a journalist, professor and a leading poet of the Romantic Movement in
Latin America. In his poetry "he searches for support in nature, in the abolition of an
abonimable past, and in the hope for a future more in keeping with the human condition"
(Roggiano, Alfredo. "]os6 Maria Heredia." Latin American Writers Series vol. I. New
York: Scribner, 1989. 138.)
'See J. Maria Heredia, Poesias, 123-128.
' In this article I focus on Fray Servando and Heredia. For a detailed study of Arenas's use
of Virgina Woolf's character Orlando in Et mundo alucinante, see Perla Rozencvaig,
Reinaldo Arenas: narrativa de transgresion.
' See "La noche oscura del alma," Box 19, Folder 18, ts., Reinaldo Arenas Papers, Firestone
Library, Princeton U., 1983, 4-20.
' See Severo Sarduy's landmark article "El barroco y el neobarroco" (167-70).
'" In his book length study entitled Cultura del barroco Jos6 Antonio Maravall discusses
the conservative aspects of seventeenth-century baroque culture. ]os6 Antonio Maravall,
Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. Trans. Terry Cochran (Minne-
apolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.)

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