SARDUY AND THE VISUAL TEXT

Roberto Gonz~Uez Echevarria

Of the Latin American writers who emerged in the sixties, none was more
radically and tenaciously experimental than Severo Sarduy. Within the inter-
national context to which they rightly belonged, Cortazar, Garcfa Marquez,
Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, Donoso, Cabrera Infante and others were heirs to a
modern tradition that I can sketch simply by mentioning a few names: James,
Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Woolf, Dos Passos, Faulkner. The experiments of the
Latin American novel of the sixties - which came to be known as the Boom -
are predictable to some extent: stream of consciousness, disappearance of the
omniscient author, unreliable narrators, fragmentation of the plot, extreme
self-reflexiveness that shows the making of the text and its condition as
artifact, intertextual games, collage, pastiche, sexually audacious themes, the
incorporation of cinematic techniques, and so forth. It would be unfair not to
recognize the refinement which Latin American writers added to all these
devices, techniques and themes, and the indisputably original achievements
made possible by the combination of several or all of these narrative methods
in novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Hopscotch, The Green House,
The Obscene Bird of Night, Terra Nostra, and Three Trapped Tigers. It is
remarkable, perhaps instructive, that after so much debate over the so-called
"novela del lenguaje" (novel of language) - many really political controver-
sies -language has emerged unharmed and even more vigorous from so much
experimentation. One can perhaps conclude that in the texts of the Boom,
language was more an object of cult and celebration than of real questioning.
In this Sarduy differs radically from the writers of the Boom, as he himself
made clear in a notorious footnote in Cobra, which reads:

Tarado lector: si aun con estas pistas, groseras como postes no has comprendido que
se trata de una metamorfosis del pintor del capftulo anterior ... abandona esta
novela y dedicate al templete 0 a leer las del Boom que son mucho mas claras.
(Sarduy 1972: 66)

Moronic reader: if even with these clues, thick as posts, you have not understood
that we're dealing with a metamorphosis of the painter of the preceding chapter ...
abandon this novel and devote yourself to screwing or to reading the novels of the
Boom, which are much easier. (Sarduy 1975: 42)
92 Roberto Gonzalez Echevarrfa

Despite their apparent irreverence when they were published, many, if not all,
the important novels of the Boom were built upon the two most solid props of
contemporary Latin American literary discourse: 1) the coherence of the self,
even that of the author's, while engaged in a most anxious self-deconstruction;
2) and cultural identity, despite its being represented as shattered and in a state
of flux. Artemio Cruz agonizes in the labyrinth of his solitude; Olivera suffers
his Argentinean passion in the streets of Paris and Buenos Aires; the three
trapped tigers explore their jiving in those of Havana. (I play here, of course,
on the titles of three well-known essays that attempt to define Argentine,
Mexican, and Cuban cultures: Octavio Paz's El laberinto de la soledad,
Eduardo Mallea's Historia de una pasi6n argentina, and lorge Manach's
Indagaci6n del choteo.) In From Cuba With A Song (De donde son los
cantantes), that mock epic of the search for origins - and, to a certain extent,
the repudiation of Or{genes - Sarduy lays bare the various narratives and
stories that constitute the discourse of identity in the Cuban case. The novel
takes apart and dramatizes that discourse's mechanisms of construction. For
instance, the characters, who in previous fiction would have been endowed
with a given gender, are now transvestites, and the zeal to ground Cuban
identity in atavistic Spanish or African cultural retentions is shown to be a
fetish to ward off the hegemony of a kitsch that has its source in popular
culture, particularly that of mass-media. The characters move from one story
to another, search for the self in a self-service restaurant (may I help myself to
a little dasein?), worship a rotting image of Christ, and shake up the archive
of Cuban commonplaces like an enormous maraca. The sound one hears is
made up of echoes of Martf's poetry, commercial jingles, political speeches,
and the daily prattle that constitutes the little edifying foundation of being. The
characters are the discourse of identity caught in the process of being
de-authorized.
Elsewhere (Gonzlilez Echevarrfa 1972, 1985, 1986), I traced Sarduy's
sinuous itinerary after his lacerating exercise of cultural asceticism (better yet,
with an eye for etymology, through the exercise of purging all cultural
discourse) that is From Cuba with a Song. Since I believe that writers'
itineraries tend to be manifold, divergent, parallel, asymptotic, conflicting,
labyrinthine, and that, like everyone else, writers are inhabited by various
selves - hypostasis and simulations, poses, and simulacra - this time I will
follow another one of Sarduy's courses.
What distinguishes Sarduy from the writers of the Boom is his passion for
painting and for painting's ties to writing - in other words, the scriptural in
painting and the painterly in writing. I could begin with the following
oversimplification: the paradoxes, deceptions, and perplexities of writing lead
Sarduy to painting, to the fetish for the visual text. What better way of